Reimagining the Canadian Senate

The recent discussion over Canada's Senate has tended to be a rather sterile exchange about whether it should be abolished or elected. Neither is the correct answer.

The fathers of Confederation created the Senate as a gesture of federalist representation and provincial rights, inspired to some degree by the United States Senate; and as a gesture toward an elevated (though not ennobled) house, borrowing something from the British House of Lords. In other words, it was rather haphazardly conceived to address a pastiche of concerns, and could never reasonably have been expected to accomplish any of them fully. Senate exponents generally have been reduced to rather tired pieties about "a sober second thought." That has some validity, but as a raison d'être, it underachieves on what a House of Parliament in this vital country could accomplish.

As the United States was founded by a group of colonies that had achieved their independence by recourse to war, joining into one federal country, there was the challenge of uniting the demographic weight of the different affiliating states to reflect their relative populations, with the need to recognize that they were coming together as autonomous jurisdictions whose equal sovereignty had to be reflected also. The result was a bicameral scheme, comprising the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The former is composed of districts that are adjusted after each census with all having approximately equal numbers of voters (as the U.S. population has grown, the size of these districts has grown to about 750,000, or seven times the average Canadian or British Parliamentary constituency). The latter is composed of two senators from each state regardless of population. These senators were elected by state legislatures prior to 1913, when, by constitutional amendment, selection was changed to direct election. But even before this change, there were often popular elections in practice, as prominent candidates campaigned for state legislators who were pledged, in turn, to vote for them as U.S. senators. The most famous such race was that between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in Illinois in 1858.

The British House of Lords, by contrast, is the ancient perch of the nobility, and was a hereditary chamber until fairly recently. The notion that nobility was a state that, once achieved, was permanent in a family as long as it procreated, has vanished and been replaced by a concept of meritocracy. People are named to the House of Lords because they are deemed to be figures of distinguished stature. Thus there are the former defense chiefs and senior politicians, the heads of the great corporations and universities and labour unions, writers such as P.D. James, musical figures such as the late Yehudi Menuhin and Andrew Lloyd Weber, leading ecclesiastics, including the principal Anglican bishops and the chief rabbi, distinguished historians and other academics such as Hugh Thomas and Asa Briggs, and Robert Skidelsky, and leaders from the learned professions such as the architect Norman Foster and some of the country's leading barristers and scientists, practically everyone an accomplished person in some field. The debates of the House of Lords on serious subjects are the highest quality deliberations of any legislative forum in the world (as I know from having participated in them). And they are also excruciatingly courteously conducted and have none of the barnyard noises and other forms of infantilism of most elected chambers. The members of the House of Lords are unpaid, unless they play a specific official role, and are not bound to any sort of geographically defined constituency.

To the extent the Canadian Senate was modeled on the House of Lords, it was rolled back from a life appointment to an obligatory retirement at 75. Both the French and the British tried half-heartedly to entrench a system of nobility in colonial Canada, but the Seigneurial system was really just a method of tenant-farming with an obligation to clear the land and an option to buy it for the tenant, a commercial arrangement that was self-limiting in time. And British ideas for the institutionalization of a Canadian nobility in the Constitution Act of 1791, sponsored by Lord Grenville, the foreign secretary, were discarded at the suggestion of Lord Dorchester (Sir Guy Carleton), chief author of the Quebec Act (1774) and twice governor of Quebec, who said that any such arrangement would be inimical to the egalitarian and relatively informal nature of Canadians, French and English-speaking alike.

The current hostility that the perceived conduct of some senators has caused toward the Senate is unjust, as public annoyance should properly be directed against the individual senators without impugning the chamber itself. What we should do is remake the Senate with a defined purpose that is clearer and more feasible than the original, hurried arrangements.

The suggestions for modification at the time of the Meech Lake discussions in the early 1990s had some merit, as it was proposed to have some of the senators appointed by the provinces. This partly simulated the original American concept, whereby senators were to some extent representatives to the national government from the local interests each represented. (This is the system in Germany, where the upper house of the legislature, the Bundesrat, is composed of members named by the constituent states of Germany.)