Senate reform: Abandon hope all ye who enter here
By Brian Lee Crowley
Columnist Lorne Gunter and the National Post editorial board are making a valiant effort to resuscitate Triple E Senate reform in the face of Jack Layton’s revival of the NDP’s traditional policy of simple abolition. None of them has the right answer.
So what’s all the fuss about Senate reform? Twenty-five years ago, the last-but-one natural resource boom in Alberta was brought to a crashing halt by Ottawa’s ham-fisted National Energy Program. The result was a firestorm of western alienation and anger. Despairing of being able to influence Liberal policies, the West rallied first to Brian Mulroney’s Tories and later to the Reform Party. In addition, Alberta became a hotbed of schemes to tinker with Canada’s political structure with the objective of making future NEPs impossible. The Triple-E Senate (equal, elected, effective) was the best known.
But, ironically, Senate reform putting all the provinces on an equal footing would today give extra power, not to the New West, but to the Old East. In a EEE Senate, for example, equalization-receiving provinces would hold a strong majority, making serious reform even less likely and creating a new parliamentary power base arguing for transfers from an increasingly wealthy West. That is the opposite of why Alberta became Senate reform’s great champion.
In any case, Alberta and the West now have an ally they did not have back in the NEP days: Washington. The Americans are thrilled to have such massive energy resources on their doorstep and would adamantly oppose any policy that might put a damper on their development.
Senate reform is chiefly in the interests of small provinces, not large ones. BC figured this out long ago, joining Ontario and Quebec in the ranks of the sceptics. Alberta is now a big province economically and demographically with growing political clout, as Calgarian Stephen Harper demonstrates. Quebec wants no part of equality with tiny provinces in a powerful elected body, but can be wooed by respecting the federal-provincial division of powers, reining in Ottawa’s recent enthusiasm for dabbling in areas of provincial jurisdiction. That suits Alberta and BC too. And we already have a perfectly respectable Canadian-grown institution whose members are elected and where provinces are equal and effective. It is called first ministers meetings.
Senate reform is a second-best strategy for people who think they can’t win political power. Alberta and the West are now political winners, not losers. Moreover, if you are a government whose main power base is in the West, why take on something as politically unpopular and uncertain of success as constitutional reform when a reformed Senate would make your own life hell if you are in government in Ottawa? And if you elect Senators without amending the constitution, as the current government is so unwisely doing, you leave in place the huge imbalance in numbers of Senators among the provinces, the Senate’s theoretically huge legislative power, and lifetime tenure for Senators (which, pace Mr. Harper, it is not clear Ottawa can change without provincial consent).
That would be the worst of all possible worlds: a powerful Senate with little responsibility and no accountability, since both of those things flow, not from your first election, but your second, when you can be held to account for your use of power. An elected Senate in these circumstances would be on under the one man, one vote, one time rule. Since senators would be chosen until age 75 by a one-time election, there would be no accountability and no responsibility, but the Senate would kid itself that it had a democratic mandate equal to that of the Commons. It would be disastrous. The constitutional battle royal that would be unleashed by any attempt to follow Jack Layton’s plan would be equally unappetising and almost certain to fail.
Would a Triple E Senate be an improvement over what we’ve got? Undoubtedly. Can we get there from here? I don’t see how. Given the obstacles to success, is it a rational issue on which to lavish scarce national political capital and attention? No. Time to move on.
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- Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun & Hill Times: The Great Myth of Senate Reform June 11, 2012 – MLI’s Brian Lee Crowley’s latest Hill Times column on Senate reform has...
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I agree in principle with most of this analysis and have recently drawn a similar conclusion myself. I favour reform of the Senate into an elected chamber as well, I and used to subscribe to the Reform Party/the Charlottetown Accord’s strict Triple-E model, while acknowledging that achieving unanimous or even substantial provincial consent on amending the constitution would prove a practical impossibility. I reject David E. Smith’s argument that “the tripartite Crown-in-Parliament acts as an original and powerful disincentive” to Senate reform because the Commonwealth of Australia operates on the same Crown-in-Parliament — the Crown, the Senate, and the House — on which Canada does. While I favour the two Es of “effectiveness” and “election”, I am also no longer convinced that equal provincial representation is normatively desirable, in addition to its virtual constitutional impossibility.
From the literature that I’ve read, most scholars who advocate reform of the Senate (particularly with respect to the Triple-E proposal) look at the Senate in isolation without considering its relationship to the House of Commons, or more broadly, its role in Westminster parliamentarism. This criticism applies to Watts in particular. Namely, without the proper constitutional safeguards, an elected Senate might feel emboldened to block supply, or any other bill that the government deems a matter of confidence, in an attempt to embarrass or even defeat a government. Any constitutional amendment must make absolutely clear that the government derives its authority to govern ONLY from the House, and the Senate would not wield an absolute veto over any confidence measure. (This concern is not merely theoretical, because the Constitutional Crisis of 1975 in Australia, in which the Governor-General dismissed the Prime Minster, started in the Senate when a Liberal-National majority there refused to pass the budget of a Labor government that enjoyed a majority in the House.)
I believe that Senators should be elected to renewable terms of six years like in Australia, but that the powers of the Senate (which are currently almost identical to those of House, with the exception that money bills must originate in the lower chamber) should be curtailed and limited to a suspensive veto on confidence matters. Otherwise our Westminster system — premised on providing a balance between liberty and efficiency — would take on the characteristics of American congressional deadlock and cease to be truly Westminster in nature. The larger provinces should receive more seats in the senate, though the current seat distribution is irrational and should be re-balanced. Ultimately, any proposal for reform of the Senate must carefully consider the principles of democracy, federalism, AND parliamentarism.