Mr. Speaker, that is one of the prime dangers of the bill. Up until now the senators in the other chamber have at least acknowledged that they do not have any democratic legitimacy. Therefore, they do committee work, study bills they hold up, but they would never, up until the current Conservative government of course, actually defeat a bill passed by the House of Commons. However, one of the dangers of the bill is that if they were elected, would they feel they then have the legitimacy to strike down legislation passed in this chamber?
We have not even begun to speak about the regional inequities in the Senate. The composition of the Senate is frozen, in many cases, from 1867. We have tiny provinces that have more seats than provinces 20 times their population; for example, Prince Edward Island compared to British Columbia. It is fundamentally undemocratic to have a handful of people with the same weight as provinces that have many times the population. This is another problem we face. To give democratic legitimacy to a chamber that is horrifically imbalanced from a regional and population point of view is a democratic time bomb. That has not been thought through.
One of the reasons we are not seeing members of the government stand up on the bill is because I think they know this. Many of them were Reform members and I give them credit when, in the 1980s, they stood up against the Senate. They were appalled at the misuse of the Senate by the previous Liberal governments and wanted it to be reformed in a sincere and democratic manner. If that were to happen, it might be a different story, but that is not what the bill does.
There is only one answer: save $100 million, make our government more efficient, leaner, more democratic, and get rid of an anachronism that made sense in the 1800s, but makes no sense in a modern democratic nation in the 21st century.