One of Alberta’s “senators in waiting” is grumbling about the current Senate appointment process, believing that the people of Alberta “have spoken” when they chose his name from a list to one day fill a Senate seat for that province. The problem, of course, is that the Supreme Court declared that whole process – which was a bit of a farce from its very inception – unconstitutional. If one wants Senate elections, they need a constitutional amendment with the seven-provinces-representing-fifty-percent-of-the-population amending formula. And don’t give me the “but it’s a non-binding election” line either, as Justice Cromwell very rightly pushed back during the Senate Reference hearings, “why not hold a consultative auction then? Is that any less valid?” The thing with the excuse for Senate elections as they have existed in this country so far is that they don’t actually provide any form of accountability is because they are for a non-renewable term. With an election, the re-election is where the accountability comes in. Anyone can get elected, no matter how terrible – we’ve seen untold number of examples of this in the past, and with the process that Alberta put into place, most of their Senate “elections” were just names on a ballot – most of the time, there was little advertising, there were no televised debates, and generally only one party participated as the Liberals boycotted the process and the NDP had no interest seeing as they want the Senate abolished anyway. At least when you have MPs who more or less accidentally get elected, you can judge them the next time around to see whether they did a good job or not (and we got a taste of this with the demise of many of those NDP MPs who got elected in the “Orange Wave” in 2011). Complicating the process in the Alberta conception of Senate “consultative elections” was the notion that they were based on provincial party nominations which don’t necessarily correspond to the federal parties that Senators caucus in (or at least used to until a couple of years ago), and what would one’s platform be anyway? It’s pretty hard to make legislative promises as a Senator, and promising transparency in spending is a sideshow compared to the actual legislative duties that they are expected to perform. And if memory serves, none of the “elected” Senators that Harper appointed have put forward any bills in the Senate either. One of them is also now concern trolling about the new “independent” senators as not being accountable to a party caucus, which makes one wonder why the big fuss about electing a Senator if one simply expects them to follow party lines despite the fact that the place was created with institutional independence for the very sake of pushing back against the government. Nevertheless, the Conservatives’ democratic reform critic has decried the new Senate appointments process as an “insult to Alberta” (erm, what part of unconstitutional don’t you understand?) and now we get these demands that the results of this sham election be considered regardless of the process or the Supreme Court’s judgment. The Senate was not designed to simply create 105 new backbenchers for the Commons. It would be nice if people stopped insisting as though that were the case, which is precisely what these “elections” have given us.

Good reads:

• The Liberals held a caucus meeting yesterday in advance of today’s resumption of Parliament. First order of business seems to be speed up infrastructure spending.
• Harit Sajjan says that there will be an announcement “soon” regarding the pullout of the CF-18s.
• Scott Brison is promising that he’ll repeal the Conservatives’ changes to public service sick leave as soon as possible, but those “savings” are still on the books.
• The Military Ombudsman is sounding the alarm about the gong show that is the Joint Personnel Support Unit for injured soldiers.
• Here’s an interview with Rob Oliphant, the MP co-chairing the special committee on assisted dying legislation.
• Huffington Post got a glimpse of the big NDP call-in with the party president about what went wrong in the last election.
• Aaron Wherry offers up the post-Davos write-up.
• My op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen asks where MPs plan to make up for lost hours if they get rid of Friday sittings.

Odds and ends:

Here’s the Maclean’s write-up of the situation in La Loche, Saskatchewan, after the shooting there.

Peter MacKay is joining the Toronto office of a major American law firm.

Yesterday marked a hundred years since women won the right to vote in Manitoba.