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

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like my colleague, who is very close to the people in his riding, to say a few words about what he is hearing back home about this bill or the Senate in general. The government can no longer hide the fact that it appoints its friends, former candidates and whomever it wants to the Senate. It is starting to become embarrassing. Apparently, the Conservatives' solution is to propose making senators elected members. Are they going to consult anyone? We are not so sure. Sometimes they say it is not necessary to consult experts and scientists. Sometimes they also say there is no need for wide-scale consultation since they already have police officers or their father is a farmer. What comments has the hon. member for Compton—Stanstead heard people in his riding make about this topic?

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Pierrefonds—Dollard for her question.

In my riding, people are very attached to Canada's Parliament. The Compton—Stanstead and Eastern Townships area of my riding is made up of wonderful anglophone towns. People are wondering why we are wasting so much money on a chamber that, for all intents and purposes, is useless. A tremendous amount of resources are given to us to correct the wording of legislation. My constituents say that if we abolish the Senate, our work will finally be legitimate and that we are the elected members and it is up to us to get this work done.

[Isabelle Morin, NDP, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his speech, which focused a great deal on dialogue and discussion.

He also spoke about Canadian democratic values. We live in a very democratic country and we should be very proud of that. During the last election, the Conservative candidate in a neighbouring riding was not elected. Then, the day after the election, he was appointed as a senator. Many people in my riding asked me questions about that. I would like to know what the hon. member thinks of the process for selecting senators. How does he think it should be changed?

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for that question.

The schedule of the bill contains all kinds of processes and procedures for selecting senators that the provinces must follow in order to propose Senate candidates. However, the Prime Minister has no obligation to respect their choices. This is a process that will once again cost millions of dollars to implement but will not be legitimate because the Prime Minister is in no way obliged to follow this procedure. The government is imposing a procedure but does not even want to follow it. I really do not understand the idea behind this bill.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his comments.

One of the arguments that we have heard about the Senate pertains to how it was conceived. I think one of the reasons, in theory, that the Senate exists is to represent the different regions more fairly, given that some provinces are bigger than others.

Recently, we debated Bill C-10. Despite the very clear will of the Quebec National Assembly and Quebeckers, one senator became the government's puppet to a certain extent. He said that Quebeckers and the National Assembly were wrong not to support the bill. So, clearly, the Senate does not really represent the regions. Would the hon. member care to comment further on this issue?

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Madam Speaker, I have an enormous amount of respect for the individuals in the Senate. They are all noble individuals who have led fantastic lives, but this is just a reward they have been given. These people have no legitimate reason for being in those seats. Although their suggestions to the government are very noble, we will first have to make them appropriately legitimate through an election; otherwise it shows no respect for democracy.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, my first thought, as I came into the chamber today to enter into the debate on the bill, was that here we go again, tinkering with an outdated, obsolete vestige of colonialism, something that is unworthy in its makeup and in the institution itself of any legitimate western democracy.

We are wasting the time of Parliament debating, tinkering with the Senate when, as per the policy of the NDP since the 1930s, the Senate should be abolished. It has outlived any usefulness and now it is just an instrument of abuse, pure, political and partisan pork.

There has never been a prime minister who has so abused the Senate and taken partisan advantage as the current Prime Minister, with 32 appointments. After being the one who agreed that the Senate was an outdated and obsolete institution, he has been stacking the Senate for purely partisan reasons.

Let me give an example of this. The president of the Conservative Party, the campaign manager of the Conservative Party, the chief fundraiser of the Conservative Party, the director of communications for the Conservative Party, the entire Conservative war room is now sitting in the Senate, pulling down $130,000 a year of taxpayers money, with staff, travel privileges and resources.

Who was the campaign manager in the last provincial election in my home province of Manitoba? The Conservative Senator from Manitoba, and I do not know if I am allowed to use his name. The former president of the Conservative Party was power shooted into Manitoba on the taxpayer nickel to work full time in partisan activities. He never has to stand for an election because he is there for life to act as an agent of the Conservative Party, not as the chamber of sober second thought, and is salaried, staffed and paid for in a direct subsidy by the taxpayers of Canada. It is appalling and it is atrocious. The senate should be abolished. It is a disgrace that we are using up time in our chamber to even re-arrange the deckchairs on that ridiculous institution.

There must be some old Reformers who have a hard time looking at themselves in the mirror, considering the things they used to say about the Senate. Now they are one. They have become what they used to most criticize. They have tossed overboard every principle on which they were founded in the interest of political expediency. They have been jettisoned over side. It is a disgrace.

Even as we speak, the Senate is sabotaging the Canadian Wheat Board bill with extra sittings. Because the courts have ruled against it, and it is against the rule of law, it is, lickety split, ramming this through. How could the Senate, in all good conscience, pass a bill that the courts have ruled against? It is one of its very functions, or used to be at least, to catch and correct any time that this chamber somehow passes a law that offends the Charter of Rights, the Constitution or the rule of law. That bill offends the rule of law, yet those senators are ramming it through.

It is possible that the Governor General, at least, will refuse to grant royal assent to a bill that the courts have struck down. As another vestige of colonialism, we have to ask permission of the Crown. When there is a runaway freight train of political expediency, like the current gang, like a bunch of six-year-old bullies who take advantage of their power to ram things through and run roughshod over everything that is good and decent about our parliamentary democracy, without even taking into account the rule of law, maybe those guys, if they are worth anything, will intercept the bill at the Senate stage, as will the Governor General at that stage, so the Conservatives cannot ram that bill through.

The other thing I want to speak about, in the brief time that we have, is this. It offends me to the core of my being that we end up having to deal with bills that originate in the Senate. In fact, those bills have primacy over the work of the chamber to which we members of Parliament have been elected.

We wait and wait our turn patiently to have our private members' bills heard. If our bill is lucky enough to get on the order of precedence, maybe we will be able to fulfill a dream of having our particular hobby horse heard in the House of Commons. The unelected chamber, senators generate bills, never mind reviewing legislation that we put together, and their bills come to this chamber and go to the top of the list, bumping the bills of members of Parliament. It is appalling. It makes my blood boil just thinking of it. I cannot believe there are people who call themselves democrats on that side of the House who put up with this ridiculous, almost embarrassing situation.

What Conservatives have proposed in the interests of democratic reform actually causes such a mess it will be pandemonium. There will be two and three different tiers of senators. We would have the elected senators and the senators who are there for life. Which ones have primacy then? Which ones have more weight? If we ever did go to a fully elected Senate, would that be the upper chamber? Would that be the senior chamber and how would the political dynamics work?

Every province in the federation of Canada wrestled with this issue and every province came to the same conclusion. They abolished their upper chamber and ensured there was adequate representation within the structure of their legislatures. We do not need a Senate.

There is an old joke about the radical diet. If one wants to lose 40 pounds of ugly fat, just cut off one's head. In this case, we could lose $200 million of utter waste just by chopping off the head of the Senate and eliminating it. We would keep the building. The chamber itself is a lovely place. I have no problem with the chamber. It is an architectural delight and it should be preserved and maintained, but the maintenance budget of the Senate chamber might be a couple of grand a year. The maintenance budget of each one of those political appointees, and I use that word in the politest way I could phrase it, costs us a fortune.

In actual fact, senators are hacks, flacks and bagmen and I do not just accuse the Conservatives. I am thinking of the most famous Liberal bagman in Manitoba who wound up in the Senate, and I will not mention his name. The most infamous Conservative bagman went right into the Senate so he could continue his partisan fundraising paid for by the taxpayer. While there, they were the architects of the biggest political election fraud in the history of Canada. Charged, tried, convicted, found guilty and they are sitting in the chamber as we speak, scheming their next election tricks.

I wish somebody watched these debates. If people only knew what we put up with by the other chamber, they would be appalled and would demand true reform in the form of abolishing that wasteful, archaic, outdated, obsolete relic of colonialism, that last vestige of colonialism that we wear around our necks like an albatross. It is like having an anchor dragging behind a boat, having the Canadian Senate as an obstacle to democracy. Senators do not enhance democracy. They sabotage and undermine democracy. Twice in the history of Canada—

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The member for Winnipeg Centre is in violation of Standing Order 18. It says that:

No member shall speak disrespectfully of the Sovereign, nor of any of the Royal Family, nor of the Governor General or the person administering the Government of Canada; nor use offensive words against either House, or against any Member thereof. No Member may reflect upon any vote of the House...

The member has really slandered senators and the other chamber and I ask that you call him to order.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

I thank the member for citing the order and he is quite right. I did not hear the last comment that was made, however, there are 30 seconds left.

The hon. member will take note and ensure that all his comments are respectful. Certainly the debate is about the Senate so there is some latitude to express opinions or facts as the members see it, however, while maintaining a tone of respect.

The hon. member for Winnipeg Centre.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, the senators are wading into and are actively engaged in partisan politics. It offends me that they are allowed to be members of boards of directors. They are not only sabotaging bills that come through the House, such as the climate change bill, they are sitting on the boards of directors of the big oil companies and sabotaging the climate change bill.

How can a senator be allowed to sit on a board of directors when it is a clear conflict of interest for any of us to do it? Some senators sit on 10 or 12 boards. It is appalling. It is another good reason to abolish the Senate.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his, as usual, entertaining remarks.

I will first make a comment and then ask a brief question.

The hon. member noted that Senate bills can get precedence in many situations in the House. However, he failed to mention that he and his party voted against a motion brought by the member for Beauce, who is now the Minister of State for Small Business, to change that. Perhaps the hon. member should not criticize issues that he was previously on the other side of. It would be more appropriate that he remember how he voted before he talks about issues.

The Conservative Party and its predecessor parties have believed in Senate reform. The hon. member's party would prefer abolition.

If the best proposals from each side were put forward before the Canadian population in a referendum, a plebiscite or the like, and if Senate reform were chosen for a democratically elected regional Senate, would the hon. member then support the election?

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, before I share one of the most appalling things that the Senate has done to date, which is the only time in Canadian history that we know the Senate has done this, I will tell the member a secret that not many people know. I used to be in favour of the Senate. I used to be about the only New Democrat in the country who was not in favour of abolishing it. I even sat with the current Conservative Prime Minister when he introduced the first bill to reform the Senate. Since then, I have realized how wrong I was and how right my party is.

What has turned me into an anti-Senate activist are the stunts that the Conservatives have pulled. Two bills that were passed democratically by this chamber were killed by the Senate. I wish the country could hear this. One is the climate change bill, the only environmental bill passed since 2006 when the Conservatives took power. It passed all stages in the House and was killed by the Senate without a single day of debate or a single witness being heard. The other bill that it arbitrarily, unilaterally killed without debate was the bill that would have made generic drugs available to Africa to fight the HIV-AIDS and tuberculosis pandemics.

Can members believe the bills that the Senate chose to intervene and squash with its undemocratic, unelected, obsolete vestige of colonialism? It is appalling.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Madam Speaker, once again, I would like to commend my colleague for Winnipeg-Centre. I greatly admire his very colourful choice of words from time to time. We really appreciate it on this side of the House.

I would like my colleague to speak more about the amount of money that could be saved if we abolished the Senate, as proposed by the NDP. What could be done with that money and how would abolishing the Senate be useful for the Canadian economy?

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, Canadians should remind us that we are broke. We borrow money every year just to make payroll, to pay our bills and to keep the Government of Canada running. We are in a severe deficit situation. We should be looking under every rock and turning over every stone to find efficiencies and ways to save money.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in the other chamber, not to augment, complement and enhance democracy but to sabotage and undermine democracy and to thwart the democratic will of this chamber.

A great deal of the money that we spend in the Senate is to fly senators around the world like a bunch of Harlem Globetrotters. Have members ever seen a parliamentary junket where every Senate position was not filled? We take a pass on most trips that we are offered. Senators never turn down a trip. They gallivant around the world like some high-flying globe-trotting emissary of Canada, which is of no material benefit or value to us. It is a waste of money. It is a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars that could be better spent enhancing our democracy instead of sabotaging it.

[Matthew Dubé, NDP, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Madam Speaker, like my colleagues who rose before me, I am very proud to speak to this bill, which interests me greatly. We care about our democracy, which is what is at stake here today, as my colleague from Winnipeg Centre so eloquently pointed out.

A lot is being said about the purpose of the Senate, and what it seeks to achieve. I was a political science student, so I will take this opportunity to provide an overview of the governing bodies of other nations, particularly the United States. Their experience, as it compares to ours, serves as a justification as to why the Senate must be abolished.

One of the things that the Founding Fathers said about the Senate in the United States was that it was important to have a division in government to protect against the tyranny of the majority. Like us, they have a system where the person with the majority of votes is elected. And yet, we know all too well from our experience here in Canada that there is a percentage of the population that votes for other parties. This is the case in the current Parliament, where 60% of Canadians voted for parties other than the governing party. The principle is, therefore, that with a Senate, the executive—the President, in the case of the United States—and the Supreme Court, it becomes possible to protect against what is known as the tyranny of the majority.

In the United States, they determined that the best way of using the Senate in this instance was to provide regional protection. We are well aware of our history here in Canada and the same principle applies. Essentially, the Senate was created to protect the distinctive features of the regions. Of course, certain provinces are huge, such as Ontario—not necessarily in terms of land mass, but population—contrary to territories or provinces such as Prince Edward Island, which may be smaller, but which, like any other province or territory, are entitled to be democratically protected, in the sense that the opinions of their people are expressed through elected representatives—in an ideal world of course.

The same thing is apparent here. It was true of the United States, where the states, which vary enormously as far as size is concerned—in terms of both population and land mass—each had two senators. And yet the United States learned something far quicker than we did. Unless I am mistaken, it was in the 1950s that the U.S. decided that in order to benefit from this equitable regional representation, and to fulfill the mandate of the Senate, senators had to be elected. The U.S. moved forward by overhauling the constitution, which led to an elected Senate. That was 60 years ago and, of course, we are terrible laggards in this area.

The difference, however, with Canada is that in the United States it was the governors of the states who appointed senators and not the President. The comparison can therefore be drawn with Canada, where the Prime Minister appoints senators, which is very different. How do you achieve regional representation when the Prime Minister of the federal government chooses the senators? It is quite difficult and, in some ways, is a conflict of interest.

So we see that this is the first lesson that has not been learned, and this is something that is still going on today in spite of the intentions of this Prime Minister, who stated that he would never appoint senators. And yet we have people who were defeated in elections who have been appointed to the Senate. This is a huge problem. They are talking about electing senators; they say it will be democratic, that they will respect democracy. It is one thing not to elect senators, but what is worse is to appoint someone whom the public refused to elect. Appointing someone who was not elected is a problem, but it is a more serious problem when the people have said no to those representatives. They have flatly refused to be represented by those individuals, and yet they are appointed nonetheless, and they expect that those individuals will provide the same representation as a person who was elected. That is essentially very illogical logic.

I recall a Liberal member who was just saying that we had a very simplistic position.

I take that as a compliment, because what we are saying is very simple: abolish the Senate. There is nothing complicated about that. There is no point in embarking on debates about very complex bills with huge flaws, like the main flaw that allows the Prime Minister to choose not to appoint elected senators, which is completely contrary to what is supposed to be the nub of this bill. Our position is very simple, and I agree that it is a simplistic proposal, but in the positive sense of the word. It is a solution that will enable us to solve all these problems of patronage and lack of representation, particularly as they relate to the various regions, once and for all.

I also want to talk about a few points that have already been raised by my colleagues, but I want to say more about Bill C-311 in particular, which my colleague from Winnipeg Centre and other colleagues have addressed, and which deals with climate change. We introduced an opposition motion concerning climate change earlier this week. It refers to the withdrawal from Kyoto and this government's lack of vision in that regard. In fact, this House, by a vote of all parties, had passed a bill that was going to strengthen our principles and our fundamental values in that regard, so we could take concrete action on climate change. But that bill was killed by the Senate. The very problematic thing here is that we are not just talking about a bill passed by the House of Commons, a chamber composed of elected representatives, we are also talking about a bill that many ordinary people worked hard to get passed.

I was an activist at the time myself and I worked hard to communicate with members of Parliament about the importance of that bill, and I was by no means alone. People from all across the country worked to make members of Parliament understand the inherent merits of that bill. The organization was very successful because the House passed the bill. The Senate, unfortunately, disregarding the will of the people entirely and with no justification, killed the bill. That is one of the basic problems that Bill C-7, which we have before us today, is not going to solve. The problem will be solved by abolishing the Senate. It is not complicated.

I am going to make an important connection with a debate we had earlier this week on democratic representation. The connection is important because we are talking about democracy again. I am referring to Bill C-20, which deals with redistributing the seats in this House. We know that the Liberal Party's concern was about the costs that would be incurred. But I spoke on the bill and I raised the same point today. Let us talk about reducing costs and about how to pay for that bill so that we can have more democratically elected representation. I repeat once more: it is not complicated. Let us abolish the Senate; we will save millions of dollars that we can use to pay not only for better representation for all provinces, Quebec included, but representation that will take its place in this elected House.

Since I am running out of time, I will conclude my remarks by saying that the Senate was conceived as a way to represent and protect the unique regional features of our country. I can state, specifically as a representative of Quebec, a province that is very aware of the importance of protecting those unique features, such as our language and culture, that I have seen no evidence, especially in recent years, that the Senate is doing its job of protecting that uniqueness. That is one more reason for abolishing it, and one more reason for us, as true elected members of this House, to protect the unique features of our various regions with our actions and our legislation.