Don’t talk about the Senate
What say we just ignore it and get on with the practice and analysis of actual politics?
What if we just agreed not to mention the Senate for awhile? Just agreed among ourselves — we chattering classes and our editors and producers — not to say anything about it for a few years … let the chamber do its work, such as it is, without comment; let the Canadian people consult the official record of its various proceedings if they should wish; but just stop talking out loud about, or referring to, the possibility of changing it. Since, y’know, there isn’t any.
The existence of the Senate has become this terrible, excruciating provocation, even those of us who have relatively little objection to something Senate-like being part of Canada’s Constitution. It is stressful for everyone and probably unhealthy. What say we just ignore it and get on with the practice and analysis of actual politics?
Not gonna happen, I suppose. The intolerable odiousness of the Senate is a widely shared perception that has an odd way of confirming itself. When the federal auditor general released a shock-horror list of illicit expense claims last week, most everybody howled and gnashed their teeth over all that frivolous spending. A visit to a curling club’s anniversary party! A Valentine’s Day ball! The nerve of these people!
A few of the items were certainly bad — the ones involving outright fictions, or spending acknowledged to be solely in the pursuit of personal interests. A close look at the auditor general’s report, however, shows that in many cases Senators were carelessly under-documenting trips that might otherwise have been totally lawful — assuming they could have shown they talked to at least one person about public business. In others, Senators spent money within contestable grey areas — see, for example, Sen. Joseph Day’s travel claims in the “corporate interest” of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards for youth volunteering.
If your premise is that the Senate is illegitimate because it is “undemocratic,” then all of this is infuriating — but in that case, that old maxim applies: “The real scandal is not what’s illegal, but what’s legal.” Your true objection is to the very existence of a set of unelected legislators who have broad freedom, as practitioners of “sober second thought” and representatives of regional and minority interests in Confederation, to travel and consult and inquire on the taxpayer’s dime. It is the valid expenses, which outweigh the technically invalid ones by many orders of magnitude, that you don’t like. So why do we pretend? Why thump the pages of a report?
It is part of the original design of Parliament that a set of people dubbed “senators” should exist and enjoy the benefit of public resources. By design, it is perhaps especially important that they should travel a lot between Ottawa and their “home.” And by design, the Senate chamber controls its own spending, or else the House of Commons would have the power to destroy it.
The Senate originally sprang from the same impulses that now make ultra-worthy reformers advocate for an independent information commissioner or an independent parliamentary budget office. Such reformers often complain, indeed, that these unelected appointees do not receive enough of our money. The Senate does some genuine work of the same nature as those offices; it analyzes legislation, often more intelligently and carefully than the Commons, from standpoints other than that of vulgar popularity. Indeed, if you went back in time and told the Fathers of Confederation about those constitutional outgrowths, they would probably ask why they were needed when they had given us a Senate.
All right: this design doesn’t work really well. Everyone, including broad supporters of the Senate, seems to agree on that. But it is curious that an unelected Supreme Court should be asked by an elected government about the legality of Senate reform by means of consul- tative elections; and that this court, finding no bar to such reform in the explicit text of the Constitution, should nonetheless argue that elections go against our forefathers’ noble intentions in creating a Senate. The blame for this then falls upon the elected government when it finds itself at a dead end — while the court enjoys untrammelled prestige, to say nothing of a largely unscrutinized budget. Democrazy!
The most remarkable sign of our characteristic madness about the Senate came in the recent CTV interview in which Thomas Mulcair looked square into the lens of a camera and claimed he had “never met a single person in any province” who supports “maintaining” the Senate. I do not suppose one can show that this was literally a lie, but wouldn’t reform or abolition of the Senate be pretty easy if it were true?
Even Mulcair admits that it would be hard — but he insists that it is possible, if only the right wizard incantations are uttered and a good strong batch of eye of newt is found. And he, too, grows more popular with each passing day. But then, it cannot be denied that the Conservatives came to power partly on the strength of magical thinking about Senate renovation. No one in sight is free of this original sin.