Red chamber sliding into irrelevance
Status as watchdog has eroded: expert
Canadian senators put on suits and show up to work. They hold question periods. They vote, give speeches, argue and deliver lengthy commemorations to dead colleagues.
But while they certainly look busy for their $142,400 base annual salary, it’s safe to say that lately, the Upper Chamber hasn’t really been doing anything of consequence.
“The Senate hasn’t really been playing much of a role as a watchdog,” said David Mitchell, president of the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum.
Shrouded by scandal and reviled by virtually the entire House of Commons, the Conser vative-dominated Senate has lately had almost no effect on new legislation — aside from delays.
It’s not clear that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s informal siege against the Upper Chamber — he announced Friday he would be making no new appointments to it — will have any immediate deleterious effects.
There are few aspects of modern Canadian law that bear the fingerprint of the Red Chamber (even though Canadian legislation can theoretically be introduced in either chamber of Parliament).
A notable exception, however, would be the lack of any Criminal Code legislation related to abortion, which the Senate blocked in 1989.
According to Mitchell, however, there was a time when the Canadian Senate could be said to have been a body shaping the “direction of public policy and public opinion.”
Senators — free from the ungentlemanly partisanship of the House of Commons — dutifully checked legislation for errors and oversights. Senate committees released thoughtful reports that were received with the same gravity that modern Ottawa now gives to an Auditor Generals’ report.
“The Senate banking committee did some great work that had an extraordinary impact on Bay Street and public policy in Canada; we haven’t seen too much like that lately,” said Mitchell.
Gordon Barnhart, a former Saskatchewan lieutenantgovernor, served as Senate clerk from 1989 to 1994. According to Barnhart, Canada’s estrangement from its Senate started during the goods and services tax debate.
In 1990, a Liberal majority in the Senate threatened to block Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s attempt to pass GST legislation. In response, Mulroney invoked a rare clause to stack the chamber with eight extra senators — and gain an instant Progressive Conservative majority.
“I think it changed the Senate for the worse, and I think it changed the relationship between the Senate and the House of Commons,” he said.
Now, virtually every party has begun to see the Senate as an annoying speed bump to royal assent.
Although individual MPs occasionally canvass the Red Chamber to block a piece of unpopular legislation, such actions are usually decried as undemocratic.
The most dramatic recent exercise of senatorial power came in 2013, when a revolt by Conservative senators gutted a union transparency bill.
The effort — which senators boasted at the time was a prime example of “sober second thought” — only delayed the bill two years. The unamended law passed last month.
Outside the times when the Senate is sitting, meanwhile, little is known of what the members are doing. Unlike MPs, most senators do not publish details of their public appearances or constituency work.
In 2013, CTV canvassed the then-99 members of the Red Chamber to ask them their senatorial duties when not in Ottawa. More than half — 59 members in all — either ignored the request or refused to provide information.
“I am not in the habit of releasing my plans in advance and don’t plan to start,” Senator Mike Duffy, a former CTV employee, told the network at the time.
Ned Franks, a constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Queen’s University, says there is no lack of talent in the Senate and “could be used much better.”
Similar to Britain’s House of Lords, he suggests that senators be selected by an independent committee, thus preventing the chamber from being stacked with patronage appointments. This is also the view of National Post founder Conrad Black, also a Canadian-born member of the House of Lords.
In public writings, Black has said that if Canada simply put better senators in its Upper Chamber, we could reap the benefits of an institution free from the “barnyard noises and other forms of infantilism of most elected chambers.”