More amendments to C-14 in the Senate, and the very real threat from senators that they would rather veto a bad law (such as the bill as originally drafted) than let it pass and have to head back to the courts, is prompting everyone to consider themselves an expert on the Senate and how to reform it. After days of clutched pearls by pundits and the odd bit of praise (such as Martin Patriquin’s grudging admission that the Senate is a necessary evil), we’re also starting to get some pretty bizarre pieces out there, like one from iPolitics, where they got a mining company CEO to weigh in on reforming the chamber.
No, seriously.
Apparently, according to this “expert,” Trudeau has gotten it all wrong by creating a situation with “no enforceable rule,” and apparently we’ve never had a situation in the past 149 years where bills bounced back-and-forth between the chambers. Err, except that there have never been real levers by which a Prime Minister could control the chamber, only sentiment on the part of senators in his or her caucus, and we’ve had plenty of situations where bills went back-and-forth, including to having conferences between chambers (a situation which is unwieldy in the current configuration of the Senate). And while Trudeau has made mistakes, he is not to blame for the Senate’s actual constitutional powers, which are currently being demonstrated.
But wait – there’s more!™
Our CEO “expert” says that the solution is not Triple E (thankfully), but rather to reduce senators’ term limits to 12 years, to give provinces a veto on their nominees to represent them, and to ensure that a nomination panel ensures that “a new Senate is younger, more representative and better qualified for the work by credentials and life experience.”
Term limits are a solution in search of a problem because they reduce institutional independence. The problem, identified in the Ontario factum to the Supreme Court reference, is that a senator nearing their term limit can start to curry favour with the government in hopes of a post-Senatorial appointment to a tribunal or diplomatic posting. By ensuring that their end date is age 75, it scuppers those plans and keeps Senators from sucking up. Provincial vetoes? Well, senators are not there to represent provincial governments. They are not even technically representing provinces, but rather regions, and their representation tends to be for minority communities, be they linguistic, ethnic or even religious, which was the express purpose for why the Senate was built in the way that it was. And demands for a younger Senate clash with the desire to get accomplished Canadians to serve in its ranks toward the end of their careers so that they can draw on their decades of experience, and if you look at some of the qualifications of our current senators, they are on the whole a very accomplished group indeed (some exceptions apply).
So rather than get some CEO to bloviate without any actual institutional knowledge or awareness, perhaps we should all brush up on our civic literacy and learn about the chamber as it currently exists before start weighing in on how to fix something that is not actually fundamentally broken.
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