Road to Senate reform takes strange twists

Preston Manning tried 23 years ago and that went nowhere. Will Thomas Mulcair fare better in his quest to abolish the Red Chamber?

Exactly 23 years ago this week, a stranger came to Ottawa to make a public plea for a new Senate.

His name was Preston Manning, leader of the Reform Party, and he marched into the Foreign Affairs building to talk to reporters covering the non-stop consti- tutional negotiations.

It was June 10, 1992 — Manning’s birthday, as it happened — and he stepped into the glare of camera lights in the lobby to remind the negotiators that the West would be happy with nothing less than a totally new, Triple-E Senate, one that was elected, equal and effective.

Funny how things turned out. Manning’s old adviser, Stephen Harper, is now prime Minister, neck-deep in a Senate scandal that stretches all the way from Parliament Hill expense accounts to RCMP investigations and an Ottawa courtroom where Harper’s own appointee, Mike Duffy, is on trial.

Oh, and that Triple-E Senate that Manning demanded? The negotiators did come up with a brand-new Senate about a month later, which was sealed into a pan-Canadian deal called the Charlottetown Accord by the end of summer.

But Manning, prodded by Harper, opted to oppose the accord in a national refer- endum that fall, which killed the deal, including the shiny new Senate — not to mention the prospect of future constitutional negotiations from then until today.

The irony is not lost on former Liberal leader Bob Rae, who was the premier of Ontario in 1992 and one of the politicians sitting around the constitutional table at the Pearson building that day when Manning made his appearance.

Rae, in fact, had spent part of that week huddled in a hotel room with fellow New Democrat negotiators from B.C. and Saskatchewan, sketching out a plan for a totally overhauled Senate.

“Ten provinces agreed with the federal government on the need for a comprehensive plan of Senate reform, but it was rejected by, of all people, the Reform Party,” Rae wrote to me in a message this week. “And now they’re left with the irony that an ‘unelected, unaccountable Senate’ is their baby, with its partisanship, and its expense scandal.”

Manning and Harper weren’t the only opponents, it should be said. Liberals had some serious No voices as well. A former prime minister named Pierre Trudeau helped galvanize the national opposition to the accord as well in the fall of1992, and his eldest son, Justin Trudeau, now leader of the Liberal Party, wrote in his biography last year that the Charlottetown fight was his first real foray into political engagement, when he was a 20-year-old student at McGill University.

Why are we revisiting this ancient history? Well, the collision of political forces in June of 1992 helps explain some of the mess today in the Senate and how solving it is not as easy as anyone is proposing.

First, the Senate was not designed to be a mere ornament or patronage haven. Its purpose is to serve as a balance to the House of Commons, where big provinces hold the sway of power. The Commons is based on representation by population; the Senate is representation by region. Several provinces, including Quebec, but also the Atlantic provinces, bristle at the prospect of losing the principle of regional representation in Parliament.

As well, the Senate was supposed to be the chamber of “sober second thought” for legislation, and even its harshest critics have had to concede that senators have done their job on that score through the years — giving Brian Mulroney a tough time on holding up passage of the GST and defeating a proposed abortion bill, for instance, or catching mistakes in Harper’s hastily passed, massive omnibus bills in recent years.

Could we function without a Senate? Probably. The Council of the Federation, created by the provinces and premiers, now reflects regional balance in the country, but it doesn’t have the power to hold up or amend measures passed by the Commons.

Most Canadians may have forgotten that we once had a new Senate within our grasp — which would have been composed of 62 elected senators, six from each province and one each from the territories. (Nunavut, a third territory formed after 1992 presumably would have put the senator count to 63.)

First Nations would have had their own senators too, in addition to the 62 or 63 proposed, as well as self-government.

It’s highly unlikely that Harper regrets his old opposition to Charlottetown, not being the kind of politician overly tied to past policy positions.

Still, he must know he would have been better off with that Senate than the shattered, scandal-plagued institution currently dragging down his party and his govern-

Manning was prodded by Stephen Harper to oppose the Charlottetown Accord, which would have given us a new Senate

ment.

He wouldn’t have been able to make some of his sketchier appointments (see Mike Duffy, above) and the whole institution would have been a lot leaner and more accountable than the one we have today. Some may argue, as an aside, that Charlottetown might have gone some way down the road to reconciliation with First Nations, another big shadow hanging over the Conservative government in these months leading up to the election.

Politics, however, rarely dwells on what might have been.

The only legacy of Charlottetown, in the end, was a national aversion to opening up the Constitution, which the current New Democratic Party leader, Thomas Mulcair, now seems to believe is possible to achieve the aim of abolishing the Senate altogether.

“Look, we’re going to get rid of it,” Mulcair told reporters in Ottawa this week. “That’s our goal, and we’re going to work hard and it requires unanimity of the provinces. We’ll start with a mandate from the Canadian voting public, and we’ll take that mandate across the country.”

Had Mulcair been one of the Charlottetown negotiators, he might have experienced a bit of a 23-year-old flashback of his own this week when Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard immediately threw cold water on any proposal to abolish the Red Chamber.

“I repeat that it would be contrary to the political interest of Quebec to abolish it,” he said. “We will oppose this proposal.”

It took weeks and weeks of negotiations to get Quebec aboard the Triple-E Senate proposal in 1992, and Couillard seems to be signalling that the province won’t be revisiting that history.

Moreover, we might also want to remember the lesson of Charlottetown when it comes to yet another proposal out there for fixing the Senate — a national referendum on abolishing it. A political proposal, put to the people with a simple yes or no question: what could possibly go wrong?

All this said, Mulcair may be correct — that past misadventures are no reason to be defeatist about fixing the Senate.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, a new convert to the abolition cause, said on Twit- ter this week: “It is 2015. Canada really does not need an unelected unaccountable Senate. Let’s save the $90 million per year.”

It is indeed 2015, not 1992. Neither Harper, nor Trudeau for that matter, are likely to regret or revisit their stand on a reformed Senate that might have spared us the mess we’re witnessing today.

But a backward glance of 23 years can be a cautionary tale on how to go forward — the Charlottetown legacy warns us that opening up the Constitution and holding referendums may create even bigger problems than those they’re intended to solve. Susan Delacourt can be reached at sdelacourt@bell.net. Her first book, United We Fall, was about how the Charlottetown Accord was negotiated and defeated.