Mr. Speaker, it is a real pleasure to address this topic. I certainly concur with my Bloc colleagues that there is a very distasteful feature to having the Senate in its current form have a hand in deciding our electoral system.
Some members have said that the Senate has had nothing to do with our electoral process. I think they are wrong. Many of the people who are in our Senate today are there because they had a very direct hand in our electoral process.
They were excellent at raising and collecting money for parties. They ran very effective election campaigns for key people who would have had trouble winning without their assistance. There was a payoff from the electoral system for good work done for the party.
It was also suggested in the House that the Senate is the only appointed place that has anything to do with our electoral system. I remind members opposite that the current Supreme Court of Canada, armed with a new philosophy of judicial activism, has made major decisions about electoral law that have outraged the public. Ninety-five per cent of the public was totally outraged that a prisoner serving a life sentence would have the right to vote in an election. Perhaps prisoners would be able to run for election if we carried it far enough.
The government of the day decided it would not use a safeguard that is in our constitution, the notwithstanding clause. To say that appointed people have nothing to do with this is a little off base.
Much of the debate in the House since I have been here has centred on one issue: the concentration of power into one person's hands or one office. Everyone has heard Lord Acton's famous statement about corruption and how it can corrupt. I have heard some good speeches in the House in the last while. It is too bad they had to be misinterpreted for political purposes. People have pointed out historical experiences where Lord Acton's dictum could be shown to be true.
People in Canada assume those sorts of things cannot happen here. I do not want them to happen here either but we would be off base to ignore the lessons of history. We should be implementing safeguards to make sure we do not have that sort of concentration of power.
An individual for whom I have a lot of respect, Gordon Robertson, served under four prime ministers and was Clerk of the Privy Council. I think members opposite would be quite familiar with Mr. Robertson. He is a highly respected person. Mr. Robertson is very concerned about what has happened to parliament and about the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's office. He has stated that we have an elected dictatorship and that the cabinet has become nothing but a focus group for the Prime Minister's office.
Given those statements, I find strange some of the comments my NDP colleagues have made about the Senate. Their comments are out of sync with this place. If I understand my NDP colleagues, and they have supporters on the Liberal side, they want to abolish the Senate. They say that an elected Senate with regional representation would be good for the country but that Ontario and Quebec would not accept it. They say that it would take a constitutional amendment to change the Senate.
Did it ever occur to them that it would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate? If we must go through the exercise we should do the right thing and not the wrong thing. Abolishing the Senate in its present form would only give the Prime Minister one more power card. It would complete the picture.
There are two very good reasons we should have an elected, independent and powerful Senate. First, it could deal with the issue we are confronted with in the House: the concentration of power into one person's hands. Concentration of power leads to abuse of power. There are no checks or balances in our system to effectively deal with it. That is the dilemma. Everyone is looking at the issue and asking what mechanisms we have to deal with wrongdoing, and there are none.
What a powerful, elected and independent Senate would do first and foremost is put in the system a badly needed check and balance, a counterbalance to the concentration of power.
I am surprised my colleague in the NDP does not recognize that an elected Senate that fairly represents the regions would go a long way toward alleviating the regionalism, alienation and fragmentation in the country. It would make people in all regions feel they had a powerful and effective voice in the federal government. Many of the folks in various regions of the country, believe it or not, do not believe they have any say or input into the system. They do not have connections to the Prime Minister's Office and they are left out of the equation.
I will address certain other matters that were said in the House. Somebody mentioned that the Charlottetown accord had a provision for an elected Senate and implied that the public had rejected the Charlottetown accord because of that provision. I think that is wrong. The Charlottetown accord, had it been any longer, would have been competing with War and Peace for length.
Under the accord one province, and I am surprised the province did not support the referendum, could have vetoed anything that affected culture. Culture to me is a mile wide and a mile deep. It probably deals with everything we do as parliamentarians. That proposal would have given one province a loaded gun. Some 58 things were open for further negotiation and discussion.