Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise to speak to the motion. The heart of this motion is a cry from parliamentarians for accountability and transparency, as I said in my earlier remarks, for a body that has been defiant in its refusal to be accountable to the Canadian people.
When we talk about democratic reform in the Senate and where to take the upper House, we have to look back at the roots. It is not as if the Senate ever went wrong somewhere along the way. The Senate was founded on fundamentally wrong principles.
If we look back 141 years, when Canada was a fledgling community and it was still very much under the colonial influence of mother England, the belief in England was that commoners could not be allowed to have too much control. There had to be someone of peerage and title above them who could temper the vote of the common people. That belief was similar in Canada at the point the Senate was developed.
The difference in Canada was it did not have a history of the peerage system. It had the swamps of cronyism. The belief then was we had to put in a body that could be chosen from the backrooms of political parties, the hacks, the friends, the pals and the bagmen, to limit the ability of elected members who represented the common people.
One of the great myths and mistruths of what the Senate perpetuates today is that the Senate represents the rights of minorities. John A. Macdonald, as a founding father, said that we needed the Senate to be there for minorities. We will hear this from senators all the time, but they never say the second part of Sir John A. Macdonald's statement. He said, “We need a body to represent the rights of minorities”, because there will always be more poor people than rich people. That is why the Senate was put in place. It was not there to represent minorities as we understand it today. It was to represent the minority view of the rich so there could be a counterbalance to democratic voice.
Ever since then, we have been on the wrong path. The problem with democratic reform of the Senate is we have a body that simply will not allow itself to be reformed. I can understand my colleagues in the Conservative Party. They are certainly making attempts to find a way to reform and work through this Gordian knot of self-interest, but, at the end of the day, I believe the latest attempts will fail like all other attempts have failed. The fact is nobody, in 141 years, has asked the Canadian people what they think.
Many things have changed since 1867 in terms of representation and counterbalance to the weight of Parliament. Provincial governments have much stronger responsibilities. The number one relationship most Canadians have with government would be with their provincial government, not so much the federal government. The relationship between the provincial and federal governments has changed dramatically.
Then there are the courts. When we talk about the role of defending minorities, I have yet to see the Senate play any role. Yet the courts are clearly playing a very strong role as a counterweight to Parliament.
We have four levels of government right now. Do we need another level of unaccountable, unelected people who simply refuse to meet the most basic requirements?
So the folks back home will have a bit of a sense of what we are paying for, we are talking about the money we are spending year after year on an unelected, unaccountable group of senators who can sit in the Senate until their 75. Whether they show up or do not show up, whether they work or they do not work, they are there in perpetuity, maybe because some of them flipped pancakes for the Liberal Party for 30 years and were considered perfect people to be sober second thoughts for the democratic voice of the House.
Last year the Senate sat 62 fewer days than the House of Commons. Many senators missed at least a third of a session. Where else can people miss work day after day and still receive a paycheque? In the Senate. Senators do not have to worry about constituencies. When MPs are not in Parliament, they have to go back to meet their constituents and work for them. Senators do not have to do that.
That is nothing to disparage. There are very good senators and less good senators. but the difference is, at the end of the day, members of Parliament, whether lazy, brilliant, good or bad, have to go back to their people. They have to get the seal of approval from the people, and some great members of Parliament have lost their seats over the years. Senators do not have to do that.
Since 1993, the gross pay of senators has increased 70%. Senators get paid for working 30% fewer days than members of Parliament. Senators are allowed to miss 21 days without a penalty and this does not include the times that they are out working for the party during elections.
In my riding we talk about the senator is there for regional interests. I have the great Frank Mahovlich, I say great because he was number 27 and from Schumacher. The only times I get to see Frank in my riding is during elections, when he comes up to try to have me defeated. I do not know if he is on the Senate dime or not.
I will not mention the former Montreal Canadien who the Liberals brought up as well to have me defeated. The press asked me why, in the middle of elections, the Liberals were bringing up hockey players. I said that whenever their campaign started to go south, they were clearly had to rely on hockey players. I said that if the press ever saw them bringing Kenny "The Rat" Linseman into Timmins—James Bay in the middle of an election, it would know I was in trouble. I expect the next time I will see Frank is probably in the next election.
However, this is the big issue and this is where we have to be serious. Senators have phenomenal conflict of interest guidelines that allow them latitudes that would never be allowed even at the lowest municipal level or school board level. For example, they can sit as the heads of a board of directors of major corporations and still vote on issues in which they have a pecuniary interest. This is simply appalling in the 21st century. It is not accountability.
Senators are sitting on the boards of income trusts and telecommunication companies, where these issues are being debated and being brought forward to the Senate. This is not the kind of democracy and accountability that Canadians expect.
There is a whole list of senators, such as the hon. Michael Meighen who sits as a director and trustee on 25 different companies and trusts. He still gets paid, he still comes in and he is supposed to discharge the business of the country. That is perfectly okay when people are senators because they do not have to disclose their financial interests. They can participate in closed camera sessions, as senators, and as long as they tell their pals in the Senate that they have a pecuniary interest, they can participate in the vote.
As I said earlier, I was a rural school board trustee and we were not allowed to discuss any contract that had to do with hiring or firing of anyone, whether it was custodial or teachers, at a school board in Ontario. If any of us had a relative anywhere in the province of Ontario working in any school board in any capacity, we were not even allowed to talk about the contracts. These are the rules in place for small town school board trustees, yet senators sit on private health consortiums and talk about the future of health care. Whenever the Liberal Party gets whatever private member's bill on income trusts through the House, we will have senators who represent income trusts voting on that.
I do not think that passes the smell test for accountability and transparency in the 21st century. Therefore, we have a real problem. We have a body that simply refuses to reform itself.
Our colleagues in the Conservative Party would like to find other ways to do it, but we all have to deal with the fact that we have a very large mountain that is so high we cannot get over it, it is so low we cannot get under it and it is so wide we cannot get around it. It is the constitutional limitations on our ability to actually reform that.
The response of the New Democratic Party is quite simple. After 141 years of cronyism and patronage, we say put the question to the Canadian people. Why not let the Canadian people say what they think should be the future? That would certainly guide provincial leaders, if we saw a clear movement to say we have had enough of this, we do not need this in a 21st century democracy. I think it would actually impel our provincial leaders to come together and then move forward to the real steps of reform.
As much as I understand where the Conservatives are coming from on trying to reform this bunch, at the end of the day, we will end up in court. At the end of the day, we will have a Senate simply refusing to grow up and take responsibility as accountable citizens. The reality is they are not accountable because they are appointed. Always at the end of the day, they are friends of the party. In the 21st century we have to move toward a better standard of democratic involvement.