Bill C-7 (Historical)

Senate Reform Act

An Act respecting the selection of senators and amending the Constitution Act, 1867 in respect of Senate term limits

Part 1 of this enactment establishes a framework for electing nominees for Senate appointments from the provinces and territories. The following principles apply to the selection process:
(a) the Prime Minister, in recommending Senate nominees to the Governor General for a province or territory, would be required to consider names from a list of nominees submitted by the provincial or territorial government; and
(b) the list of nominees would be determined by an election held in accordance with provincial or territorial laws enacted to implement the framework.
Part 2 alters the tenure of senators who are summoned after October 14, 2008.

Senate Reform Act

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I have had the opportunity to tour the province of Manitoba on a Senate reform committee. It was a committee that was dominated by the New Democratic Party and what we heard time and again was that there is great potential value to a reformed Senate, that we do not have to abolish the Senate, and that there is great value in terms of reforming it.

My NDP colleague in the front row made reference to Michael Kirby's mental health report. I could talk about Sharon Carstairs' palliative care. There are a number of examples that are there where the Senate has provided fine work which has been accepted by provincial jurisdictions and been acknowledged outside of the House, outside of Parliament Hill.

Does the member not recognize that adding value to the Senate is achievable if the political will were there? To abolish it is to wipe out the opportunity to get some gains that we would not be able to achieve, that only an appointed Senate can, such as looking for senators with an expertise to contribute to the many works that could still be done. Yes to reform, but does it have to be abolished?

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a conceptual response for my hon. colleague and a practical one.

The practical one is that, of course, we do not need a Senate. If we were to abolish it, there would be absolutely zero effect on the quality of legislation or study of social issues in this country. The practical evidence is that every single province in the country that had a Senate has abolished it.

For my hon. colleague's question to have logic would be to suggest that every single province in Canada is no longer capable of producing intelligent policy in different areas because they do not have a Senate. I think that is wrong. I think every province in this country is producing policy in all sorts of areas and they do that through democratically elected people.

Second, on the conceptual front, there is no question that sometimes despots can do good work. There is no question that sometimes autocrats can provide a good study. However, the question here is whether or not the people in the Senate have a democratic mandate to engage in the work that they are doing.

The New Democratic Party believes in democracy. Government legislation and comment on public policy should be made by people who are elected by and accountable to the Canadian public. The fact that an unelected person can sit in the chamber for 35 years and once in a while produce a good report is beside the point.

Of course, my hon. colleague comes from the Liberal Party, which spent decades filling the Senate with its party faithful, bag people and failed candidates, and so I do not expect him to agree with the New Democratic position on that score.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, rather ironically this is a government piece of legislation, yet I do not see too many Conservative members rising to ask questions or comment on what they call an important piece of legislation.

I do not think anyone in this room has anything against the individuals in the Senate. However, although it would never happen in my lifetime, if the Senate were truly independent of government, with no party caucuses, no party labels, and if we were to have experts in various fields with various backgrounds, we might have had a different reaction from the NDP.

The reality is that the bill would not make the Senate independent of the government, it would make it more dependent. Basically the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party could lose their government tomorrow, but if they stack the Senate with all of their people for x number of years, they would still have control over legislation, and that is simply wrong.

I would like my hon. colleague to elaborate on that, please.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is one of the prime dangers of the bill. Up until now the senators in the other chamber have at least acknowledged that they do not have any democratic legitimacy. Therefore, they do committee work, study bills they hold up, but they would never, up until the current Conservative government of course, actually defeat a bill passed by the House of Commons. However, one of the dangers of the bill is that if they were elected, would they feel they then have the legitimacy to strike down legislation passed in this chamber?

We have not even begun to speak about the regional inequities in the Senate. The composition of the Senate is frozen, in many cases, from 1867. We have tiny provinces that have more seats than provinces 20 times their population; for example, Prince Edward Island compared to British Columbia. It is fundamentally undemocratic to have a handful of people with the same weight as provinces that have many times the population. This is another problem we face. To give democratic legitimacy to a chamber that is horrifically imbalanced from a regional and population point of view is a democratic time bomb. That has not been thought through.

One of the reasons we are not seeing members of the government stand up on the bill is because I think they know this. Many of them were Reform members and I give them credit when, in the 1980s, they stood up against the Senate. They were appalled at the misuse of the Senate by the previous Liberal governments and wanted it to be reformed in a sincere and democratic manner. If that were to happen, it might be a different story, but that is not what the bill does.

There is only one answer: save $100 million, make our government more efficient, leaner, more democratic, and get rid of an anachronism that made sense in the 1800s, but makes no sense in a modern democratic nation in the 21st century.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-7, an act respecting the selection of senators and amending the Constitution Act, 1867 in respect of Senate term limits.

Before I continue, I will take a moment to speak to the issue of movember. Members probably see this sorry scruff on my face. It is an effort to encourage all men to take good care of their health and get their prostate checked out. My father died just over 18 years ago from prostate cancer. He did not live to see his son become an MP. He did not live to see his grandchildren. I am sure all members would agree that these are things that are worth living to see. I would urge, in the most strenuous terms possible, all men to suffer the indignities and get themselves checked out.

I will get back to Bill C-7. It strikes me as strange to have to speak in this chamber to issues so fundamental to our political life in this country that we cherish as a democracy. These issues I am talking about are democracy itself and accountability.

I had the pleasure of studying political theory In university. I had no idea at that time that it would be so relevant to the job of being a member of Parliament. Many people did ask me what the heck I was studying that stuff for, but here we are and I have the opportunity now to speak in this chamber about matters so fundamental that they are matters of political theory.

The government talks so much about Canadian values inside and outside this chamber that one would think there was almost violent agreement on what these things actually are. However, here we are in the House talking about the issue of democracy and a bill that is, frankly, fundamentally undemocratic.

As recently as 2006, our Prime Minister described the Senate as a relic of the 19th century. I would suggest that the Senate, in some important sense, takes us back much farther than the 19th century. It takes us back to a time when democracy in any form and however limited was much distrusted. It takes us back to a time when a ruling class was concerned about losing its social and economic status by way of decisions made by representatives of the people. It takes us back to a time when certain parts of our society were considered to be incapable of and unsuited for making the important decisions of a nation.

What is clear is that this skepticism of democracy is not just an historical tradition. It does not just find expression in our Senate of the 19th century. It is alive today and finds expression in the Conservative government in this 21st century in the form of the bill before us today, Bill C-7. The ancient tradition of distrusting the people survives in the Conservatives.

Bill C-7 clings to the security of a second unelected chamber where progressive legislation, such as the climate change accountability bill and the drugs to Africa bill, legislation that may have moved this country forward in the interests of all its citizens, as well as citizens around the world, can be defeated by the supposed superior wisdom of the present government's, and previous governments, hand-picked, unelected, self-selected watchdogs, not of, but watchdogs against, democracy.

The only thing the bill confirms is the Conservative government's determination to hang onto the reins of power by way of patronage. I would point to the fairly recent, widely-distributed and very instructive letter from a Conservative senator in which he wrote, in part:

Every Senator in this caucus needs to decide where their loyalty should be and must be. The answer is simple; our loyalty is to the man who brought us here, the man who has wanted Senate reform since he entered politics, the [Prime Minister].

With this, we are a long way from the justifications most frequently offered for the existence of this anti-democratic institution. One of those justifications is independence. However, as we have seen, by virtue of that quote, and by virtue of the conduct of this chamber and those in it for well over a century, that it is hardly an independent chamber.

Other justifications have been equally persistent. I refer, in part, to the notion that the Senate is to provide our parliamentary institutions with regional representation. Yet, none of us have ever seen regional interests coalesce and operate to trump partisanship born of patronage in the Senate chamber. In fact, the bill would do nothing to advance or facilitate the emergence of regional interests or expressions in the Senate.

The government is unwilling to surrender its control over Senate appointments, as evidenced by the provision that permits the Prime Minister to reject the outcomes of Senate elections held at the provincial or territorial level; that is to say, the bill would allow the Prime Minister the ability to overrule the democratic will of the regions of this country.

This anti-democratic institution has also survived, cloaked in the justification of a second sober thought and yet all of us in this chamber were sent to this place on the basis of, at least in part, our sobriety of thought.

Therefore, on precisely what democratic principle does one confer in one person elected to this so-called lower chamber the power to overrule the democratic will of Canadians as expressed, at least potentially, in the Senate election and to decide who is wise enough to evaluate and overrule decisions made in this House of Commons?

Further, how grossly exaggerated must one's sense of one's self be to overthrow the results of an election in favour of one's own opinion and judgment, or to believe that he or she is so much wiser than the collective in this chamber so that he or she must appoint a senator to watch over us? Or, is it not that kind of hubris but simply a blatant disregard and disrespect for democracy that underlies the bill?

Whatever it is, it is clear that this bill would, both in practice and in theory, not only continue the unfortunate tradition of relocating power away from the elected representatives of Canadians and, therefore, the Canadian citizenry itself to an unelected body, but would locate that power in the single person of the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister, like the rest of us in this chamber, submitted himself directly to the judgment of the electorate in but one of 308 ridings. Beyond that, the Prime Minister can claim to have won directly only the confidence of the membership of his own political party as expressed through that party's internal leadership processes. However, that is a far cry from winning the confidence of all Canadians to exercise the kind of power over the rest of us directly elected members of this chamber that the bill would continue to provide to that position.

It has been argued that the bill would move us away from the undemocratic tradition by permitting provincial and territorial elections of a senator. Notably, however, such elections to a federal institution are to be financed by the province or territory. Notably, too, this would not provide the right of the citizens of that province or territory to elect a person to the Senate.

Senators would, under the bill, remain appointed, as the government clings, white knuckles on the reins of power, to its fear of losing control to the will of the people.

This skepticism of democracy is also evident in the very curious nine year term limit imposed on senators. The bill itself provides no rationale for such a length of terms. However, what this seemingly random term does do is effectively frustrate the ability of Canadians to hold senators accountable for their decisions and actions. What is more, with a one year term limit, a senator would never have to answer to voters for decisions he or she made or did not make.

Accountability is a key principle, a foundation of democratic institutions. This chamber is a democratic institution not just because we were elected to this House but because we, should we wish to continue in this position, are held, through the electoral process, to account for our decisions and actions while in this position.

This term, as lengthy as it is, also serves to frustrate the will of this chamber and, in doing so, the will of Canadians. It would provide the government of the day the opportunity to reach into the legislative bodies of this country long after it has lost its own mandate.

Finally, there are a number of questions of critical constitutional importance that are raised but not answered by Bill C-7. What kind of institution is being created in the Senate when some are elected while others will be appointed? Do some of these senators have more authority by virtue of being representatives of the electorate or are all considered to be equal? If the Senate gets filled with elected representatives, what is their relationship and relative authority to those of us in this chamber? Do they retain the same roles that justify those appointed directly, i.e. regional representation, independent sober second thought, et cetera, or is this a new role that they assume as elected representatives? Where there are differences between chambers, how are these resolved in favour of which chamber, or do we anticipate gridlock?

It is long past time for this country to shed the undemocratic traditions of another age, another time. It is time for the parties that have ruled this country to let go of the illogic and, frankly, hypocrisy that the people are good enough to elect us but that only one of us is good enough to appoint someone to watch over us.

It is time to let go of its skepticism of the wisdom of Canadians. It is time for Canada to embrace democracy by abolishing the Senate and allowing those of us sent to this place by the people of Canada to do what they have asked of us and to be turfed out of this place should we fail to do so or should we fail to do so to their standards.

[Alexandrine Latendresse, NDP, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague very much. He is very hard-working and, as we saw from his speech, very intelligent as well. He understands the issues at stake here quite well.

The government boasts that with this bill reforming the Senate the public would be represented more democratically and more accurately. But, according to the existing Senate rules, no one under the age of 30 can become a senator.

Does my colleague think that this kind of limit and the fact that no one under the age of 30 can sit in the other chamber are signs of better democratic legitimacy? There is something I do not understand there, and I would like to hear what my colleague has to say.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will answer that question from my colleague right next door to me in English, if I might. I am trying to learn French from my colleague but we are not quite there yet.

I appreciate the question about youth and those of us in the New Democratic caucus. Some of us at least feel very old relative to some of our colleagues. However, the wonderful thing about democracy is that the will of the people sends to this chamber those who they believe are best able to represent their views in the House.

The bill, should it be amended, should certainly provide the opportunity for all Canadians to send whoever they feel best fit to represent them in the upper chamber.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I have a fairly straightforward question.

If a majority of Canadians wanted to see the Senate retained, but changed so that there would be more value to it, what would the position of the New Democratic Party then be? Would it still oppose and want to abolish it, even if a majority of Canadians wanted to retain it?

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the question is of a hypothetical nature, but it is the position of the New Democrats that the fate of the Senate should be put by way of referendum to the Canadian people. As we respect the views of Canadians and the principles of democracy, we would obviously abide by the perspective of all Canadians in a referendum on this matter.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my question is surprisingly similar to that just put by the hon. member for Winnipeg North.

This is a complicated matter. It is not as simple as saying that we do not like the Senate, so we should end it.

We have constitutional issues embedded in how it is structured, and I share the view of the member for Beaches—East York and his caucus that there are significant problems with Bill C-7 as put forward by the government.

Having worked with the Senate over the years, I have seen the Senate take its own initiative and do some very good work, and we have seen examples here this morning. For instance, I point to the decision to not put bovine growth hormone into our milk. That was a done deal until the Senate committee, under Senators Mira Spivak and Eugene Whelan, subpoenaed scientists from Health Canada who were being muzzled and in that way made it possible for the information to get out.

Would the best way forward not be to have a real public consultation on the fundamental problems within our democracy, including the extreme power of the Prime Minister's Office, the lack of sufficient role for individual members of Parliament, the proper balance between the House of Commons and the Senate and the question of whether the Senate should survive or not?

How does the hon. member feel about taking this to the people before we make it legislation?

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as it is a multipartite question, I will approach it this way.

It is clear that good work has come out of the Senate in the past. A recent report about poverty in Canada comes to mind; many worthy recommendations came out of that report.

As my colleague for Vancouver Kingsway said in answering a very similar question previously, this is not an issue of whether the Senate ever does good work or whether senators have worthy opinions on matters of great importance to Canadians.

Like so many issues, this issue is reducible to simple issues. At the beginning of my speech, I spoke to some fundamental principles. That is what we are wrestling with. The fundamental principles are that we have a chamber here in our parliamentary institutions that is undemocratic. It has the power to block legislation. We have seen that happen with some very worthy representation that this elected House passed on to the Senate.

In response, I would say that at times the appropriate approach is to reduce matters to fundamental principles. If we look at an issue in those terms, it often becomes starkly simple. The starkly simple fact is that the upper chamber, the Senate, is not a democratic institution and should therefore be abolished.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, correct me if I am wrong. The government introduced legislation stating that the provinces have to pay for Senate elections and that the provinces have to hold Senate elections. By the way, if only 40% of people vote for MPs, imagine how few people would vote for a senator. Then the Prime Minister can say that the elected senator is not wanted. Only a Conservative can come up with a plan like that. The government is putting forward federal legislation stating that the provinces have to pay for an elected Senate, but when they do elect a senator, the Prime Minister can then refuse their choice.

I would like my hon. colleague to elaborate a bit more on that.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure what elaboration can follow. It is that simple. I spoke about this fundamental skepticism of democracy that is betrayed in the bill: it talks about an elected Senate, but as I said, the government seems to be hanging onto the reins of power with white knuckles; it is not letting go of this. While the provinces and territories may go through the process at their expense and take this issue and democracy seriously, the government is not surrendering authority to the people and to the provinces to elect members of the upper chamber. Under this bill, it is still an appointed Senate.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, on a point that I started to develop, I want to raise the question of who is going to be representative of the provinces.

Currently we elect premiers, cabinets and governments in every province and territory, but the Senate was set up originally as a body to supposedly represent regional concerns. If we were to elect senators from a province such as Prince Edward Island, does the member think this situation could create an unacceptable conflict in terms of who would have the democratic mandate to speak for the people of that province? Would it be the elected senators from that province, or would it be the elected provincial government of that province?

I would also like to ask what my colleague thinks about the judgment of the Prime Minister. Under the bill he would still get to appoint senators; we know the Prime Minister has appointed a number of failed Conservative candidates, so we have some clear examples of the kind of judgment that the Prime Minister exhibits when considering who is appointed to the Senate.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I spoke earlier about reducing things to fundamental principles and about simplifying matters, but that question and the previous question make it clear that in trying to amend our Constitution and in trying to change the makeup of the Senate and the process of becoming a senator, one runs into some very complex issues.

One of them is raised by my colleague in his question, which is that we could end up with senators elected from a province who might take positions in conflict with provincial representatives of that province. As well, how elected members of the Senate would resolve differences with elected members of this chamber from that province is certainly unclear. We would be creating a very complicated system, potentially with duelling elected members, so the issue is to abolish the Senate and do away with those complexities entirely.