Mr. Speaker, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to rise today to speak on behalf of the official opposition and the good people of Vancouver Kingsway regarding C-7, An Act respecting the selection of senators and amending the Constitution Act, 1867 in respect of Senate term limits.
Before I proceed, for Canadians watching, I am one of the men that has a moustache in honour of movember, which is a time when we remember the very real effects of prostate cancer and encourage men across the country to not only get checked but to raise funds to help defeat this disease that has not only taken the lives of many men, but is something that afflicted the past leader of the NDP, the Hon. Jack Layton.
When we talk about the Senate, it conjures up a number of concepts in the minds of most Canadians. Unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable, political patronage and elitist are words that have been cemented in the minds of Canadians whenever they think of the Senate of Canada.
Modern democratic nations do not have representative chambers that are unelected. Modern democratic nations do not have representational chambers that are regionally imbalanced and unequal, with the principle of representation by population being completely ignored and frozen in a time two centuries past. Modern democratic nations do not have representative chambers where a ruling head of state hand-picks legislators who are the head's fundraisers, failed candidates and partisan supporters.
Modern democratic nations do not have representative chambers where people are appointed for life or until they are 75 years old, while the people who senators supposedly represent have no means to remove them. Modern democratic nations do not have representative chambers where the members spend their time campaigning for the ruling party on the public dime on the taxpayer-funded purse. They do not have chambers where unelected, patronage appointed members block legislation passed by a democratically elected chamber.
Modern democracies do not have chambers that restrict membership to those who own property, in the case of Canada $4,000 in land, and are closed to Canadians who do not. In fact, that is why Canada stands almost alone in the world among modern democratic nations with an anachronism from the past, a sordid past, a shameful history and a dubious future. That is why every province in Canada that had such a body abolished it in 1968.
I want to mention a few facts about the issue of abolishing the Senate.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter have openly called for the abolition of the Senate. The premier of my province, British Columbia, Premier Christy Clark, has said that the Senate no longer plays a useful role in Confederation. Manitoba maintains its position of Senate abolition, although it has plans in place for the contingency that Senate elections are required should this bill be passed. Quebec has called this legislation unconstitutional and has said that it will launch a provincial court appeal if the bill proceeds without the consultation of provinces, which have not occurred to date. So far the bill is opposed by premiers of provinces representing the vast majority of Canadians.
In terms of what Canadians think, public support for a referendum on the Senate is growing. An Angus Reid survey from July, just some months ago, showed 71% of Canadians were in favour of holding a referendum to decide the future of the Senate. Members of the Conservative government stand in the House virtually every day and say that they have received a strong mandate from the Canadian public. They received 39% of the vote in the last election and 61% of Canadians did not support them. They consider 39% of the Canadian public to be a strong mandate. I hope members of the Conservative government recognize that when 71% of Canadians support a referendum on the Senate that is an even stronger mandate.
Thirty-six per cent of Canadians support the abolition of the Senate right now and that is without any kind of public education campaign or national discourse or dialogue, which I am sure would elevate that number to well over 50% very quickly. There have been 13 attempts to reform the Senate since 1900 and all of them have failed.
I want to outline what the bill would do.
The bill would restrict all senators appointed to the Senate after October 14, 2008, to a single nine-year term. It purports to give provinces and territories the opportunity to choose to hold elections at their cost and to determine which names will be submitted to the Prime Minister for his consideration. The bill clearly states that the Prime Minister is not required to appoint anyone so-called elected by the provinces. The bill would not make it mandatory that the Prime Minister would appoint a person so elected. In other words, it does not actually change the way senators are currently appointed, which is that the Prime Minister is free to appoint whomever he or she chooses.
Bill C-7 appears from the outset to be a rather vague and once again confused legislation, which is clumsily attempting to pursue a number of objectives without any clear focus. The reforms outlined in the bill continue the undemocratic nature of the Senate and do not provide, in any way, what Canada needs as a modern democratic nation.
I will go through some of the major flaws in the bill.
When I said that the government had been a little bit confused, previous Conservative bills called for federally-regulated electoral processes. This one calls for provincially-regulated electoral processes. Another bill the Conservatives tabled called for eight-year term limits. This one has nine-year term limits.
The Conservatives have not properly consulted with the provinces about whether they agree with the content of the bill. When the bill was first introduced in June, Conservative senators, even those appointed by the current Prime Minister, pushed back against any plans for Senate term limits, even those who were supposedly appointed after giving their word that they would respect term limits.
The bill would retain the fundamental flaw that senators would remain unaccountable to the Canadian people. By only being allowed to serve one term, senators would never have to face the public to account for the promises they made to get elected or the decisions that they took in the previous nine years. Then they would get a pension for life after they left office. So much for fiscal accountability from the Conservatives.
Having an elected Senate would fundamentally change the nature of politics in Canada. It would create a two-tier Senate where those who were elected likely would feel that they would have more legitimacy. Later in my speech I will talk more about where we run into conflicts with the role and authority of the provinces to speak on behalf of the people in those provinces versus the senators.
Since the Senate has virtually the same powers as the House, an elected Senate would give greater legitimacy for the Senate to introduce legislation or oppose bills sent from the House of Commons. We very well could end up with the same kind of gridlock that we see in the United States, and I will talk about that in a few minutes as well.
The safest, the most conservative approach to the Senate is to abolish it. We know how the House of Commons works, but we have no idea what would happen with an elected Senate.
Let us reflect on the history and role of the Senate which originated in the British parliamentary system as the House of Lords. For hundreds of years the so-called upper chamber has been a symbol of nobility and power in place to prevent the commoners in the lower house from affecting the privileged lives of those who enjoy more than their fair share of the product of the nation. Indeed, our own Prime Minister has described the Senate as “a relic of the 19th century”, echoing my view that its presence continues to give merit to an outdated concept.
During the last election, Jack Layton said that something had changed with the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister used to talk about being democratically accountable. He used to talk about things like the Senate being something that had no business opposing or blocking legislation from the House of Commons, where senators who were appointed had no business being patronage appointments.
The Prime Minister has stuffed the Senate with his political friends and with failed candidates. He either allowed or required the unelected senators to block environmental legislation passed democratically in the House of Commons after three readings. It is funny how things change when someone is in power.
The bill would do nothing to address the wider issues around the Senate, that its relevance and role comes from a shameful past of elitism and distrust of the ability of the common people to govern themselves. How else do we explain a requirement that to hold a Senate seat, one must own land? What does that say in 2011, in modern Canada, to all the millions of Canadians who rent or who do not own land? Is it that they are not fit to pass legislation in the Senate of our country? The government does nothing to change that rule.
I said that these reforms were not what Canada needs. This is an important message which must be conveyed to Canadians across the country. We have a tendency in this modern era to hear the word “reform” and automatically assume that this must be a good thing, something that we should greet with open arms. However, just because something represents reform does not necessarily make it good reform. Bill C-7 is not good reform. It represents reform that will make Canada's democracy far less efficient, much less predictable and is much more radical than the government will admit.
By describing the bill as radical, the government has presented it as an evolution of our democratic principles. However, the truth is these reforms would dramatically change the way in which our Parliament operates.
Bill C-7 is being discussed as simply a method of increasing democratic legitimacy in our system, but in reality it would not do that. In fact, it risks imperilling the very democratic premise it purports to improve. It would result in a complete change in the way our Parliament operates, with a significantly stronger and more active upper chamber. This will undoubtedly create challenges, some of which will undermine the efficiency and effectiveness of government.
By electing the Senate as well as the House of Commons, we will create two parliamentary bodies that both may claim to have a mandate to govern. This is a very dangerous situation for Canada to be in. Parliament would lose the clarity that it currently has regarding where ultimate authority lies, in the democratically elected representatives in the House of Commons.
The importance of clarity in this area is illustrated by events from the last Parliament when my NDP colleague tabled Bill C-311, which was a climate change accountability act. The bill went through all three readings in debate in the House of Commons, went through democratic votes and passed. The bill was then referred to the Senate where the Conservative majority in the Senate, who are not elected by anybody, who are not accountable to anybody, who sit in that chamber for $135,000 a year until they are 75 years of age, voted to kill that legislation. That is not democratic; it is autocratic.
The 2006 Conservative Party platform stated that, “An unelected Senate should not be able to block the will of the elected House in the 21st century”. What kind of hypocrisy is that? The Conservative Party went to the people of the country five years ago and said that its position was the Senate, which is unelected, should not block any parliamentary legislation that had been passed by the House of Commons. Five years later the government caused its Conservative senators to do exactly that. That is not undemocratic. That is hypocritical and unethical. It was a lie and that is wrong.
On these grounds, the actions of the Senate, on those two occasions, were unwarranted and unacceptable. It is our current system that allows us to draw this conclusion. It is clear that in a parliamentary democracy, ultimate authority must lie with the elected chamber and not with the appointed one.
Again, the fact is this bill would muddy those waters. If these reforms were implemented, then the Senate would have every right to throw out a bill that had already passed through the House of Commons as the senators, at least those who had been elected, would have an equal democratic mandate to the members in this place, or may very well claim so.
No clearer indication can be given about the dangers of this kind of system than what we have seen recently in the United States. With the house of representatives and the senate there having equal democratic mandates and being controlled by two separate parties, the world financial markets were almost brought to their knees. Once again, a piece of legislation concerning the debt limit in the United States was raised and the bill to borrow more money to keep the economy going had to be passed. The U.S. Congress had passed similar legislation many times before without a hitch, but on that occasion, the well-being of the American people was firmly put to one side as the two parties battled it out to achieve their own partisan goals.
This is what the bill risks here. Had one of those two political institutions had the clear authority over the other any chance of this kind of situation developing would be non-existent.
That has been the history of the House of Commons and Senate up to now. The Senate, being unelected, has always by convention refused to exercise its de jure powers and instead restricted itself only to holding up legislation, but never to blocking it, until the Conservative government of this Prime Minister came into being.
I would like to raise the issue of the makeup of the Senate going forward if the reform outlined in the bill were implemented. These changes would result in a completely incoherent upper chamber with two tiers of senators. Some would be subject to term limits for nine years and be elected, others would be appointed and could serve until age 75. What kind of message does this send to Canadians, or people all over the world about the reputation of our democratic processes? How can a parliamentary institution operate when one member has a fresh mandate from the electorate, while the person sitting next that member has been there for 25 years with no input from those who his or her decisions affect?
The divisive nature of the reforms also mean that there is a conflict set up between the provinces and the Senate. Which body would truly speak on behalf of the people of that province? I would argue that it is the provincial governments of the country set up by our Constitution that have a legitimate democratic mandate to speak for the people of those provinces, not the Senate, or senators from those provinces, many of whom do not even live in those provinces and have only a very tangential relationship with those provinces.
I know I am running out of time so I want to talk about a couple of quick facts that I think are important; one is money. The Conservative government that has given us a massive $610 billion debt and the largest deficits in Canadian history still wants to maintain a chamber that costs Canadian taxpayers over $100 million per year and is undemocratic.
We could abolish the Senate, as the New Democrats have suggested, and save the taxpayers $100 million a year with absolutely not one iota of deleterious affect on the democratic health of our nation. We could make our government more efficient and more effective. We could be quicker. I have heard members opposite talk about the slow rate with which it passes legislation. They are frustrated by how long it takes to get legislation passed.
By abolishing the Senate we could dispense with three readings and committee study, and speed up legislation, which is what Canadians want in this country, according to the Conservatives.
Why do the Conservatives not abolish the Senate? Why do they tinker around the edges? Why do they continue to take a fundamentally flawed and undemocratic chamber and continue to make it a flawed and undemocratic chamber? It makes no sense.
I want to talk briefly about the people of Vancouver Kingsway. I come from a riding where David Emerson was elected as a Liberal and two weeks later crossed the floor to sit as a Conservative. The people of Vancouver Kingsway rose up like few citizens, or few ridings, in this country have ever done. They loudly expressed their commitment to democracy in this country because what Mr. Emerson did was a betrayal of democracy.
Here, we are talking about a chamber that is stuffed with failed Conservative candidates, like Yonah Martin, Josée Verner, Fabian Manning, people who ran in elections, placed themselves before the people of the country for their democratic mandate and were rejected, then find themselves appointed by the Prime Minister to the Senate and serve as legislators, even though the people of this country said they did not want to give them their trust or a mandate to do so. That is outrageous. That is an outrage in a democracy, when former fundraisers and failed Conservative candidates end up in the Senate. The Liberals were no better. They did the exact same thing when they were in power.
It is time that people in this country follow the New Democratic lead and abolish the Senate. That is the only responsible, reasonable, democratic measure that can be taken in this country, and I urge all members of the House to do so.
