The road to Senate reform starts in Quebec
by Conrad Black https://www.conradmblack.com/887/the-road-to-senate-reform-starts-in-quebec
Justin Trudeau took a promising step this week when he severed his party's senators from the Liberal caucus, relieved them of their duties as party fund-raisers (though none of them is exactly a marquee name on that circuit), and called for a non-partisan Senate. This is one of the first sensible initiatives taken in regard to the Senate, and from one of the only two people in any position to take one (the prime minister being the other). This is vastly more helpful than these endless and rather mindless calls for a "triple-E" (equal, elected and effective) Senate, the cry of regional federalists. That ambition for the triple-E Senate would require rewriting the Constitution, which is simply not possible in Canada. In terms of the powers of the bicameral federal legislature, we have had essentially the same constitutional arrangements since 1867, altered only by the enhancement of Canada's sovereignty in excusing us from the duty not to be legislatively "repugnant" to the British Parliament in the Statute of Westminster in 1931, elimination of appeals to the judicial committee of the Privy Council in 1949, and the patriation of the amending formula and promulgation of the Charter of Rights in 1981 (albeit without the concurrence of Quebec). In the same 147 years, our distinguished co-mother country France has had an empire, three republics, a monochromatic "state," two provisional regimes, a widely recognized and ultimately legitimized government in exile, and a Nazi occupation, all with different constitutions. Germany has had a mass of principalities and kingdoms, an empire, a republic, a totalitarian Nazi dictatorship, a four-power hostile military occupation, a federal republic and a Communist dictatorship, and a united, democratic, federal republic. Even Great Britain endured the secession of most of Ireland and a radical reduction in the power of the appointive and hereditary upper house, and the United States released a third of its people from military government after a terrible civil war, and changed the identity of the electorate of the U.S. Senate from the state legislatures to the whole voting populations of each state. Canada is wallowing in comparative stability, to the point of sclerosis, as the terrible problems over patriation and the Meech Lake accord demonstrated. In these circumstances, to expect the House of Commons to surrender powers to the Senate is nonsense, and to expect serious people to go through the travails and caprices of running for election in order to have the limited powers of a Canadian senator, is also nonsense. That erases two of the E's, but it still leaves the possibility of "effectiveness," and here Mr. Trudeau has taken an imaginative step. The triple-E people are seeking a federal system that will enliven the concept of the equality of regions; as the United States has two senators from every state, regardless of population, from California's 38-million to Wyoming's 576,000, while the states' delegations in the House of Representatives is by population and they range from California's 43 to Wyoming's one. It was intended that there would be a combination of the two systems in the Senate of Canada, as the distribution of senators is neither equal nor demographically proportionate; and in the various reform proposals put forth in the intense constitutional negotiations between the Quebec referendum of 1980 and the Charlottetown accord referendum of 1992, it was suggested that the provinces name the senators and that there be something closer to equal regional representation in the Red Chamber. Since it is extremely difficult to effect any substantive change to the Canadian Constitution, none of it has occurred, though several variations of reform, from the federal government and the provinces, and from the Trudeau and Mulroney governments, were thoughtful and had merit.
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