There are a number of quite complicated issues mixed up in your questions there. Excuse me if I just focus on a couple of them, perhaps.
There's the issue of why the bill doesn't deal specifically with the Prime Minister's role and discretion in recommending nominees. I think the Prime Minister is left out of this bill because the Prime Minister is not mentioned in law with respect to Senate appointments to begin with. In order to keep this bill arguably constitutional, the less said about the Prime Minister the better. From a drafting point of view, I would suspect that's why the Prime Minister is not mentioned and why there is no discussion about the Prime Minister's requirement, or not, to recommend nominees who haven't been elected.
In the second set of questions, you asked about the role of representation of a senator with respect to his or her province and how that differs from one province to another. You mentioned the specific and particular role of representation that Quebec senators have because they represent one of 24 specific districts within the province. That particularity poses great difficulties for the drafting of this bill, on the one hand, and also questions about how this bill has come to be proposed and this change suggested without the agreement of the provincial government, particularly your interest, the Province of Quebec.
I've been trying to think how to draft a change to this bill that would accommodate the specific district representation of Quebec senators. I'm not sure how it can be done. The simplest would be to change the section of the bill that talks about the qualification for being a candidate, just to say that candidates should be qualified under section 26 of the Constitution Act, 1867, and then just say that if you're qualified under that, you're qualified under this.
But that doesn't get over the particular problem of districting in Quebec, because one could be qualified to represent one district in Quebec but that may not be the district in which a vacancy can appear. However, it may be a practical solution, because my understanding is that appointments to the Senate from Quebec often involve senators purchasing property in a district they have had no specific tie to beforehand. So it may be sufficient to say that you are qualified under section 26 as it is now, you're qualified to represent one district, but if you're appointed to represent another district and you hurry off and buy some real estate in that district, you're qualified.
So I think from a technical point of view, an amendment is in fact needed to ensure that candidates in the Senate elections are qualified to sit in the Senate. Right now, you can run in this election and not be qualified to sit in the Senate. In making those changes, we can correct that particular problem for Quebec.
The final political issue is that this change is being suggested and proposed without the agreement of the Province of Quebec. In fact, the Province of Quebec has stated quite clearly that they are opposed to this bill, and Bill C-19 as well.
I think that is wrong constitutionally. I think an agreement was made in 1982 that didn't include the Quebec government at the time, but the rest of the provincial governments agreed that if substantive changes were made to the Senate, they should be done with the agreement of provincial governments. So this is one reason I believe the government is proceeding with the wrong process to achieve what may otherwise be an admirable goal.