Mr. Speaker, part of the preamble to Bill C-7 states:
--Parliament wishes to maintain the essential characteristics of the Senate within Canada’s parliamentary democracy as a chamber of independent, sober second thought--
I am going to focus on the word “independent” for a minute. Everybody knows that the Senate is anything but independent. Both the Liberal and Conservative parties have House leaders and whips in that House and many senators attend party caucus meetings. To many Canadians, the Senate appears simply to be a extension of this House, an extension of the government controlled by the parties, and largely there to ensure that controversial bills get lost in the system. Partisanship clearly works against this objective of the Senate to be a chamber of sober second thought and these reforms would only serve to make this situation worse.
My hon. colleague brings up a classic example. We do not have to reach back in history 40 or 50 years. We can reach back to the last 24 months to see an example where the Senate was not acting independently but acted on the behest of the government of the day to kill a piece of legislation that it did not like but could not command the majority support of the democratically elected members of Parliament. What we saw on that day, with regard to climate change, was the death of democracy in Canada. That is regrettable and undemocratic.