I think there are probably very few places in the country where people know who their senators are. It's the nature of the institution right now, because there is no democratic element. In fact, it's probably in the more remote regions where people are more likely to know who their senators are, because they're well-known local figures. Certainly I could walk down the streets of Toronto, I'm sure, and ask a hundred people to name me a senator who was from Toronto, and I'd have a tough time getting one person to provide me an accurate answer.
From that perspective, I think it's a reflection or manifestation of the remoteness of the institution if people don't even know who represents them in the Senate. We have here parliamentarians, people who are very actively engaged in passing laws, telling us they don't know who represents them in the Senate today. Of course, in Quebec people do represent Senate constituencies; it's different from the rest of the country. But that, I think, is a profound indication of the problem.
There are a bunch of folks in the Senate, and even the most engaged, active, interested people in the political process don't know they're there. Yet senators have more power. There are far fewer of them than there are members in the House of Commons, but the body has the same power as the House of Commons, essentially. Each senator is more powerful than any member of Parliament, yet they're not accountable.
I think the connection to the people of the province, the level of representation, the familiarity, the likelihood that individuals will be sensitive to the concerns of the area they represent, all of those will be enhanced and increased if you have a system in place, as we are suggesting under Bill C-19, where people are actually asked who they want to have representing them in the Senate.