Fear of a democratic Senate
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 are longtime proponents of democratic reform, in the tradition of the Reform party. 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.
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 are longtime proponents of democratic reform, in the tradition of the Reform party. 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.
3/18/2006
