Harper's Senate gambit

The initial response to Stephen Harper’s Senate reform gambit was one of bewilderment. That’s it? An eight-year term limit? And the current inmates of the Red Chamber are, you should pardon the term, grandfathered? Huh?

Was this a wave of the white flag, some wondered, a sign that the Prime Minister had all but abandoned the pursuit? Or was it, as a Globe and Mail editorial pronounced, little more than a disconnected policy fragment, “piecemeal fiddling” in place of genuine reform?

Others asked why he’d even bothered this far, since as everyone knows Senate reform is impossible. The premiers, even in the Western provinces, would never agree, knowing that a revived and legitimate Senate would displace them in their self-appointed role of spokesmen for regional interests. Certainly Quebec would not, on the sacred and immutable grounds that Quebec never agrees to anything.

So any attempt to elect senators -- the promised next course, after the term-limit appetizer -- would fail for lack of provincial support. Worse, it might succeed: Mr. Harper might be able to rig up some scheme for electing senators without the premiers’ say-so, but any change to the current distribution of seats would inarguably require a constitutional amendment. So all he would get for his pains would be a friskier version of the current upper house, a Double- rather than a Triple-E: elected, effective, but far from equal.

Now, all of this may well be true. It could be that Mr. Harper is stumbling around blindly, obliged to offer up some sort of token reform to his supporters but with neither the ability nor the inclination to do much more than that. Or it may be that he has a plan.

What might the Prime Minister be up to? Let’s start by accepting one of the premises of his critics: that Senate reform is impossible. That is, reform in the full-blown, big-bang sense of the word, where all of the problems -- powers, distribution, means of selection -- are solved simultaneously in a way that is acceptable to every part of the country (the de facto amending formula, even if seven-and-50 is all that is required on paper). Not going to happen.

But the Prime Minister may have a different game in mind. The big-bang, Globe-style model of Senate reform is essentially a static one. You have an unreformed Senate, until you have a fully reformed one. Mr. Harper, by contrast, would appear to prefer a dynamic approach: once you start the process, in however small a way, you set in motion further changes, a chain reaction that, if it can be contained and channeled in the right direction, may lead in the end to the desired outcome. It’s risky, but Mr. Harper is nothing if not a risk-taker.

In a static game, everyone knows their own interests and strategies, and can guess each other’s. So the outcome of any attempt to change the system is predictable, and because it is predictable, defaults to the status quo: the same balance of forces that produced the present equilibrium tends also to lock it in place. In a dynamic game, the political calculations become much harder to predict.

For Mr. Harper, the most important thing off the top is to destabilize the status quo, which is to say to delegitimize it. How’s that? Isn’t the Senate already illegitimate? Yes, but not in a way that rouses people to action. We have all learned over the years to quiescently shrug at the indignity, in a supposedly mature democracy, of an unelected upper house -- one reason why we have such a cynical political culture. However scandalous, it was familiar.

But now suppose we inject a number of elected senators into the mix -- shiny new elected senators, sitting alongside tired old appointed hacks. I’m not just talking about the seven current vacancies. Of the 98 sitting senators, exactly half were born in 1939 or earlier, which means by 2014, just eight years from now, when all of those 49 have reached the mandatory retirement age of 75, a majority of the Senate could be elected.

Of the 49, further, just 14 are Conservatives. It is conceivable that a good number of the remainder, many of them from places like Alberta and Quebec, could be replaced by Conservatives at election -- enough, perhaps, to give the Conservatives a majority, both of the elected senators and of the Senate as a whole.

What happens then? Would there be pressure on the remaining appointed senators, notably in the West, to resign? Could the unelected holdouts exercise the same powers as their democratically elected counterparts, or would the elected senators form a sort of house-within-the-house? And would it be as accepted then, with a half-reformed Senate, that it could be maintained in that state indefinitely? Or would the beneficiaries of the status quo begin to see it in their interest to strike a deal?

That, perhaps, is what Mr. Harper is up to.