Dangerous path

If the road to ruin is paved with good intentions, a number of well-meaning but misguided government and court decisions have put the Senate on a road to somewhere forbidding indeed.

Unrestrained senators now hold even government confidence bills hostage, like the federal budget bill. It’s ironic that this is what came of the Harper Conservatives’ popular and laudable promise to reform or abolish the Senate. The Conservatives (to their detriment) sought the Supreme Court’s opinion, specifically on whether Ottawa or the provinces could hold consultative processes to make senatorial appointments more democratic.

The court’s opinion came as a highly disappointing shock. Without exaggeration, it likely condemned Canadians to living with an undemocratic but powerful institution for the next 150 years, if not longer.

The court said Ottawa wasn’t authorized to unilaterally introduce consultative elections because this would give senators a mandate inconsistent with the Senate’s role as a “complementary legislative chamber of sober second thought.”

Understandably, Harper abandoned his ambitions.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals thought to renew the tarnished institution by dumping Liberal senators from their caucus and instituting a more inclusive selection process for supposedly “independent” senators. Unshackled from the burdens of party allegiance, senators are now reimagining their role. As former Conservative senator Stephen Greene noted in these pages, senators are recognizing “the Senate as a whole has a responsibility to act as a check — or be the opposition, if you will — to the partisan excesses of a government that has a majority in the House.”

The change might offer some benefits. The House has increasingly come under the thumb of the executive in passing decades, becoming an impoverished version of the chamber it’s meant to be. Parliamentary committees fail to give bills the scrutiny they deserve because the PMO controls who sits on committees. Spending decisions are also automatically green-lit if committees fail to review them. The Senate can serve as a last line of meaningful review. But there is no longer any consensus on where the Senate’s powers end. Senators can (and seem increasingly inclined to) delay, amend or block bills — a dangerous usurpation of the powers of the people’s elected representatives.

Every attempt to preserve the best of the Senate has backfired. Harper’s reform attempts produced a constitutional death sentence for any reform attempts. The Supreme Court wished to prevent an unaccountable, unelected Senate from overpowering the House, but now it can do just that. Trudeau aimed to restore credibility to a tarnished institution, but we now have new reasons to distrust it. The prime minister is the only one who can reverse the latest missteps, by rethinking his own mistaken attempts at reform. Returning the Senate to where it was a couple of years ago is hardly a fix, but putting the upper chamber back in its place is better than letting it continue down the path it’s on now.