Mr. Speaker, I compliment members opposite for the thoughtful contributions they have made in their several ways to the debate on this subject.
It is axiomatic today that the Constitutional legitimacy of a legislative chamber comes from election and only from election, although there may be argument whether the election in the case of the upper House should be by indirect or direct process.
Nevertheless, legitimacy comes from election. There is therefore a standing anachronism in a body that exercises legislative powers under the Constitution virtually equal to those of the House of Commons but which no longer can claim constitutional legitimacy.
Granted the evolution of thinking on democratic constitutionalism since the mid-19th century, our problem always is that since the reforms of 1982, we are in a much more rigid constitutional system than we were before. For all intents and purposes, it is impossible to change the Constitution.
We have seen this in the recent experiments in the late-1980s with Meech and Charlottetown irrespective of the substantive merits or the contestable merits, depending on one's point of view, of those proposals. The thing emerging is how difficult it is to change the Constitution.
I was impressed with the address by the hon. member for Bellechasse and the research he had done very thoughtfully on the origins of the modern House of Lords dating back to Mr. Asquith's Parliament Act, 1911, which replaced the complete veto of the House of Lords by a suspensive of veto of two years, knocked down in 1949 to virtually nothing.
One of the interesting things is the House of Lords has a high quality of debate that comes from the fact that its powers have been whittled away. It has accepted that. Members devote time when they debate to issues of substance that the lower House is too busy to be occupied with.
The problem I see in our country is that although we pride ourselves on receiving our institutions from Great Britain, we tend to apply them much more mechanically and with less sense of humour than the British themselves. One can become more British than the British. One of the interesting things we have not picked up from the Parliament in Westminster is the concepts of self-restraint of an unelected house which were at the core of the thrust of Prime Minister Asquith in 1911 and which really explain the Parliament Act of 1911 and the subsequent amendment of 1949.
There is a principle of conventional law of Parliament concerning an unelected upper House, granted there may be nothing it can do itself even if it wants to end its non-elected status. There is the principle of constitutional self-restraint in relation to measures currently voted by the lower House and passed on.
I regret the interminable delays we have seen in this Parliament the Senate apply to measures adopted by the lower House but I also agree with the hon. member for Bellechasse that it is a violation of the constitutional conventions that this has been so.
What I regret is that perhaps there has not been more attention in this House to exercising the machinery already in place for resolving conflicts between the two Houses and a conflict that comes from a really colourable studying of measures passed by the lower House on the pretence or the assertion that more time is needed to reflection.
This amounts in my view to a rejection effectively of measures passed by the lower House. I regret therefore that one did not pursue the machinery already available under our constitutional system to explore jointly between the Speaker of the Commons and the President of the Senate the issue of whether the privileges of the House of Commons as understood in a contemporary sense were being fully respected.
I say that with some regret and I put forward the suggestion that in the future this House should be more vigilant in assuring a prompt follow-up by the Senate to measures passed by the lower House where they have been fully debated. That is to say, either reject and take the political consequences of that as an unelected upper House or pass or send back to the House with suggestions for change that the House reserves primary powers to consider and in its own good judgment as an elected body to reject those measures.
I note the comments, again a very thoughtful case, by the member for Kootenay East. This generation of Canadians has a rendezvous with the Constitution Act. Eventually and perhaps not too far away we will have to do something about fundamental reform of institutions.
The five region conception of Canada, which is very dear to electors in my home province, was recognized by the Prime Minister in December by the grant of the regional veto to British Columbia and in measure the regional veto to the three prairie provinces. It is an important step forward.
The principle of an elected upper House is again, I think, very clear. It is also intimately related to other changes in institutional structures, the nature of the court, the nature of judicial legislation and the nature of the supreme court which now de facto and not necessarily with its own will is becoming a constitutional court very much like the European courts and the United States Supreme Court in the sort of responsibilities it has been asked to exercise.
We have before us in the House at this very time measures that in Europe would be decided by a constitutional court that are ending up with the House of Commons and Parliament. It may well be that the best approach to institutional change is to consider all the institutions together in the light of this larger optic, the evolution of democratic constitutionalism of which the respect of a non-elected upper House or an elected lower House is one of the core principles.