The senate in its current form is ineffective, but in theory an elected senate being regionally representative rather than representation by population would constrain the ability of the larger provinces to drive the ship. I believe there are several on this site that bemoan Ontario’s ability to run the country for its benefit and an effective upper house would counterbalance that.
Is your proposal one similar to the US, where each state has 2 Senators, regardless of its population? This would only continue to benefit those provinces, such as PEI, that already is 'over-represented' in the H of C. Others, NB, NS and NL possibly could be in similar situations.
Giving PEI two senators would be a 50% reduction. And since no province can have fewer seats in the HoC than the Senate, it would also cut their HoC representation in half.
And somehow NB and NS each have 10
I wouldn’t change the distribution of senators, I would merely make them elected. Presumably an elected Senate would exercise the authority the constitution gives it. Abolishing the senate outright would ensure that power forever remains in Ontario.
You could make the same argument for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, they also have relatively tiny population. Relative to Ontario, every province is tiny, perhaps one could make an argument to do away with provinces altogether.
like Alberta tried to do?
And the members that are there are clustered because they know there are fixed camera points.
This.
If you are looking for national sclerosis, having no subnational layer between the federal government and municipalities (unless you want to toss them too), that would be the way to do it.
I've often seen the Swiss model cited as an example of this, but have no idea how it functions. Direct democracy is great, so long as everyone has direct access, and I'm not so sure everyone does in a country like ours. I remember back in the spring spending several hours creating both a Service Canada and CRA accounts for myself and the missus. I had to do it because apparently the ones I had previously created were no longer valid. Today, it took me about 15 minutes just to sign into my CRA account. I'm no techy but get that a site that is potentially used by about 27Mn voters, and not accessible to anybody else, needs layers of security and complexity that will have many people just throwing their hands up and say screw it.
Honestly I think most would rather jump in a wood chipper. Its a weird identitarian thing at this point. Which is odd considering a lot of the old head farmers at least in the Eastern prairies are hard NDP in the CCF vein and kinda homeless since Jack Layton passed.
Winnipeg governing the prairies as God intended 150 years ago. Excellent.
