Mr. Speaker, I am glad to enter into the debate. I have enjoyed the two previous speeches. I learned a little bit and much of what I heard was easy to agree with.
Reform of the Senate has been a goal and objective of most political parties that come to this place. I was doing some reading prior to coming here tonight. As early as 1919 the Liberal Party had Senate reform as part of its platform. Prime Minister Mackenzie King was in power. With our own party and its founding convention in 1933 the CCF was adamant that Senate reform would be a real priority. Again when the NDP was formed in 1960 that found its way into the priorities of our political platform.
The flaw I find in the bill we are debating is that we would not see any serious reform. Even if it may be achievable to put in place an elected Senate through this piece of legislation, it would not be the triple E Senate the member's party is usually promoting.
The equal side of the triple E is where the real barrier is. Even though we may institutionalize or help to formalize the institution through the democratic process of voting senators in, if we do not have the other aspects of Senate reform, we have not made things any better at all. To this day, after all the constitutional wrangling and all the best laid plans of political parties coming and going, no one has managed to implement true Senate reform, especially in terms of equalization of representation.
The member for Winnipeg South is quite right that we came very close in the Charlottetown accord. That is one of the reasons I was happy to work for the Charlottetown accord. I went to the five meetings across the country as an ordinary Canadian. I learned a great deal and I was very enthusiastic about the opportunities Canadians had within their reach with the Charlottetown accord, a real reformed triple E Senate. That I could have supported.
We have chucked that away. We chose not to avail ourselves of that opportunity. It is no longer there for us. I do not have any optimism that we will see it back in the national forum in my lifetime. Most Canadians would rather poke themselves in the eye with a stick than go through another process like the Charlottetown accord and all the constitutional wrangling and frankly, I am one of them.
The Reform Party member from Nanaimo cited a number of polls and surveys that they have done which indicate broad support for an elected Senate. I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of those polls. What we did not hear was that some of those polls gave a number of options: Do you want an elected Senate? Would you rather see an abolished Senate? Would you rather leave the Senate exactly the way it is?
There was an interesting trend in the most recent and the largest nationwide poll which was the Angus Reid poll in April. The real trend to watch on the graph in that survey is the growing support for abolition. From the polls in 1987, 1989 and now in 1998 the number of people who want an elected Senate is almost equal to those who want the Senate abolished. Forty-five per cent say they would like an elected Senate. I believe most of those voters are really thinking of a triple E Senate, not just elected. In a scientific poll across the country, 41% now say abolish, abolish, abolish. That is the camp I am in and I am happy to promote that position on behalf of our party.
We find that the current situation cannot be fixed. Some things are irretrievably broken. Tampering and fooling around with it in a minor way is not going to give us the satisfaction we need. We believe the abolition of the Senate could actually become the next unity issue, just as the Charlottetown accord was supposed to pull the country together finally and let us get passed the differences we have. I think the abolition of the Senate will become the single one issue we can all agree on and move forward together on in a very united front.
The Angus Reid survey shows much higher levels of support for abolition in the province of Quebec than in the rest of Canada. The figure is 57% or 59% for abolition. The member from the Bloc who just spoke points to a petition that was recently circulated in that province. He was talking about the last parliament.
Last summer a petition was circulated broadly across Canada. I know one member of the Bloc took a copy of this petition and got 11,000 signatures. I believe that is the figure. We have not seen the tally yet. Again, that was done in the course of a couple of weeks. I will read some of the preamble from the petition.
This is what Canadians are signing in droves across the country and presumably this is what they believe: “We the undersigned”—etcetera—“that the Senate of Canada is an undemocratic institution composed of non-elected members who are unaccountable to the people; and that the Senate costs taxpayers some $50 million per year;”—another sore point certainly—“and that the Senate is redundant, given the roles played by the supreme court and the provinces in protecting minority rights and providing regional representation; and that the Senate undermines the role of MPs in the House of Commons; and that there is a need to modernize our parliamentary institutions; therefore, your petitioners call upon parliament to undertake measures aimed at the abolition of the Senate”.
The petition is getting a lot of support right across the country. There is multiparty support. An NDP MP and a Liberal MP put this petition together. We have quotes from a Reform MP saying he would like to abolish the Senate. We have members from the PCs saying that Reform would have to modify some of its policies on the united alternative, one being its position on the Senate. We have the Reform Party quoted in articles saying that would be something it would be willing to do. It would be willing to back off its position on the Senate in order to allow the united alternative to go forward. I would be happy to share the quotes with the member from the Reform Party.
We find that no single issue has galvanized Canadians quite as much as this one lately. It is a very tangible, visceral issue. Although I am not going to dwell on this, isolated cases of abuse have brought the issue to the forefront.
I am the first one to recognize that there are many fine people in the Senate of Canada doing valuable work right across the country. I have had the pleasure to meet a few since I have been here. I do not think those fine people would stop doing the fine work they do if they were no longer senators. I know they got to be senators because they were fully engaged and seized of these issues. They are not going to drop them because they are no longer housed in that building.
Frankly, with the $50 million we would save, who is to say that the Prime Minister or the government of the day would not make people special emissaries on certain issues.
There is one senator I had the pleasure of working with on the child labour issue. She is a champion of social justice in that regard. Who is to say that if she no longer sat as a senator that the Prime Minister would not put her in charge of a task force on child labour and be our representative overseas at the international forums.
That is all within the realm of possibility. Canadians would see that as money well spent because we would not have the same issue of the undemocratic and in fact a barrier to democracy that exists on the other side.
I would like to spend just one minute on the numbers. The province of Manitoba was cited in the Reform Party's speech. The actual figures in the province of Manitoba according to the Angus Reid poll as of April 1998 were that 45% said to reform the Senate and 41% said to get rid of it. We were exactly on the national average for getting rid of it and we were one or two points higher in terms of reforming it. Those are the real numbers. It was not 87% want an elected Senate and it is intellectually dishonest to craft the figures in that way.