Earlier this week the
National Post ran an informative, if quite wrong-headed, series on the ever popular subject of Senate reform. The series was too long to reproduce here but Andrew Coyne’s
response is not. Here it is, from today’s
Post, reproduced here under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act.
Fear of a democratic Senate
Andrew Coyne
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Before this week's series on Senate reform -- only in your soar-away National Post -- I had been under the impression that reform of the Senate was a desirable thing. At any rate I had thought that it was a desired thing -- that somewhere in this favoured land at least a few Canadians thought the present House of the Timeservers should be replaced with something less disgraceful, namely a house elected by universal suffrage, as I understand is often the practice in democracies. I had understood that there were differences of opinion on this great and weighty issue, and that while many believed a reformed Senate was needed to offer some counterweight to the power of the more populous regions, many others disagreed.
How wrong I was. Not content with the daily diet of front-page stories explaining all the many dozens of ways Senate reform simply Could Not Be Done, the Post also put its readers through a strenuous regimen of op-ed pieces exhorting that it Should Not Be Done. Two were explicitly anti-reform, differing only on the comparatively trivial question of whether it should be kept as is or done away with altogether. The third, by my friend Lorne Gunter, was ostensibly pro-reform, but with one caveat: that by reform, he did not actually mean reform. Under the Gunter plan, senators, instead of being appointed by the prime minister, would be appointed by the premiers. The provinces would then control one-and-a-half levels of government: their own, in the usual fashion, and the feds' by remote control.
So I can only conclude that no one in this country actually favours Senate reform, much as no one thinks there should be any serious check on the prime minister's power to appoint Supreme Court judges, or that Parliament should be required to abide by the rights it enshrined in the Charter, without recourse to the notwithstanding override -- issues on which the same consensus of the great and good has lately pronounced, always on the side of the status quo. The democratic deficit? No such thing. Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Still, there is the little matter of a government having been elected on a platform promising, among other things, to begin the process of Senate reform. Which makes the opposition of the learned Gunter and fellow travellers such as Gordon Gibson, also quoted in the Post series, so intriguing. Both are from the West. Both support the Conservative party, and were supporters of the Reform party before it -- a party that arose in large part to address the democratic failings of the federal government, the Senate before all. And both are now skeptical of Senate reform, at least on the democratic model, on the grounds that -- I confess this had not occurred to me as an objection -- it would make the federal government more democratic.
This is how tightly provincialism has gripped some sections of the conservative movement: They would prefer an undemocratic, and hence illegitimate, federal government, rather than suffer any power to arise that might rival that of the provinces. "Were the central government to achieve the legitimacy of genuine, directly elected regional representation in a reformed Senate," Mr. Gibson warns, "the balance would be upset. Power would follow the new legitimacy."
Mr. Gunter goes further. "The centralization of authority in Washington," he notes with alarm, "can be traced to the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which mandated the election of senators directly by the people of their states. Prior to that, senators were elected to six-year terms by their state legislatures...
"Not surprisingly, senators were highly attentive to the will of their state representatives. But after the 17th Amendment, senators quickly learned to approve all sorts of new federal spending and regulations and laws to please the voters back home... The same will happen here if senators become federal players rather than provincial representatives."
Gracious. Senators focused on "pleasing the voters" rather than jumping to the commands of their provincial patrons. A Senate filled with "federal players" rather than "provincial representatives." A reminder: He means this as an objection.
But of course this is precisely the argument in favour of reform: not only that it is unseemly, in a democracy, to be governed by any but those the people elect, but that the presence of such a house of ill repute in our national capital has served to discredit the federal government itself. Nor is this resolved by abolition: The pressures for regional representation do not go away just because the Senate does. In the absence of a legitimate upper house, that role has been played by the provincial premiers, who have no constitutional standing whatever to intrude themselves into federal matters.
I can understand why the premiers would be so fearful of Senate reform: Their own role would be diminished accordingly. But it is an oddity to see others make the same case against it -- not that it wouldn't work, but that it would.
© National Post 2006
I want to use this as a springboard to suggest that it is not just
Senate Reform which is required, we, Canada, need to introduce some form of
representative democracy with a few fairly basic principles such as, just for example,
one person : one vote in
elected legislatures.
I understand that many Canadians believe we have a liberal, democratic,
representative democracy; I also understand that many Canadian believe in Santa and the tooth fairy. All those myths, Santa slides down the chimney, Canada is a representative democracy, the tooth fairy leaves money are equally well founded.
Consider, just for example,
one person : one vote. A voter in Cardigan PEI had, in the 2006 general election, a
vote worth about 3 times that cast by a voter in Calgary-Nose Hill or over 2.5 times that cast by a voter in Chatham Essex-Kent in Ontario. Remember, we are not talking about very small populations in our vast, remote Arctic lands – Cardigan is a lot like Chatham Essex Kent except that it has way, way less than half the population but the same political ‘value’ in Ottawa.
There is a reason why PEI votes are so valuable: PEI has four Senate seats and, according to our Constitution, no province may have fewer MPs than it has Senators. To change that particular provision of the Constitution requires the
unanimous consent of the national parliament and all ten provincial legislatures.
One of the reasons so many people oppose Senate reform is that they perceive that a Constitutional amendment would be required and they agree, amongst themselves, that meaningful Constitutional reform regarding the
nature of the state (including parliamentary representation) is impossible under the 1982 Constitution.
So, should we give up, quit,
cut and run?
No!
Meaningful democratic reform: creating a fairly modern
representative, secular, liberal democracy, is possible.
First we need to recognize that, except for a very, very few special ridings in the Yukon and High Arctic we
need –
URGENTLY need – real representative democracy which will be based on the idea that for 95+% of Canadians one person’s vote will be worth roughly the same as any other person’s vote – say plus or minus 20%. There is, in my opinion, a simple and, relatively, cheap and easy way to do this, without amending the Constitution: increase the number of MPs to about 1,000. This requires serious,
apolitical rebalancing of seats within provinces – a Toronto Centre vote is ‘worth’ 1.5 times more an Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing vote within Ontario. We should settle for one MP for about every 25,000 to 35,000 residents or every 25,000 registered
electors. That means PEI needs 4 MPs, just as it has today, and just as it is Constitutionally
required to have. Alberta needs 91, that’s 3.25 times its current allotment of 28 and Ontario needs a whopping 335, 3.1 times its current 106 – that’s more MPs for Ontario than there are seats in today’s HoC just to provide Ontario with
equal representation.
Now, I can hear the screams already:
There are already too many of those overpaid, pampered bums. We can’t afford more!
Yes we can. Let’s say that each MP ‘costs’ about $1,000,000 per year – salary, benefits, staff, parliamentary library, etc, etc – that’s probably a bit high, but that’s OK. So we spend as much as $300 million now – about of 0.2% of the budget. Could we not:
• Triple the number of MPs;
• Increase the parliamentary staff by, say, only 60%, increasing the staff budgets to, say, only $300 million, therefore;
• Reform how MPs work, how they are supported (fewer staff for each), how committees are managed, and, and, and … because so many MPs will require new ways of working; and
• Cut their salaries and staffs, a bit, so that we spend, let’s say $750,000 per MP and thus spend ½ of 1% of the budget on
democracy?
Is ½ of 1% of the national budget really too much for a functioning democracy?
We can reform the Senate, too. I have explained, here: http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/25692/post-218220.html#msg218220 here: http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/25692/post-200811.html#msg200811 and here: http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/25692/post-200450.html#msg200450 how
I think our Prime Minister should go about it. My proposal would institutionalize an existing measure of inequality. Alberta has 2.9 million voters and only six senators, Nova Scotia has only 750,000 electors but it gets 10 senators – that’s a 5:1 disparity. Only Québec is
fairly represented I the Senate of Canada – it has a bit less than 25% of the senators for a bit less than 25% of the population. Atlantic Canada is grossly over represented and Canada West of the Ottawa River is grossly underrepresented.
We
should have a equal Senate – because it should represent the equal partners in the federation: the provinces. That, too, requires
unanimous agreement and is, consequently, probably a practical impossibility. It may have to be sufficient, for now, to make the Senate elected, which may take 20 years to accomplish, completely. An elected Senate will make itself
effective: one of the reasons the
National Post authors opposed democracy! Equality might have to wait for political maturity in Canada, maybe that will be a 22nd century phenomenon.
Edit: typos
