Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak about Bill C-7 today.
The Senate was never originally intended to be a career for the prime minister's cronies. In debate on the bill today, many of my colleagues have brought up great points about the government's Senate reform legislation. They have discussed how the so-called election of senators would still leave Senate appointments up to the Prime Minister as he sees fit. The Prime Minister would be under no obligation to follow voters' wishes or to follow any convention at all.
This is important, because our current Prime Minister has shown no hesitation in ignoring our parliamentary conventions when it suits him politically, and we still have no answer to the question of what is to stop the Prime Minister, or any future prime minister, from ignoring non-binding elections.
Members have also brought up the fact that these optional elections would not go to the root of the matter. They would not make senators any more accountable than they are today. Senators would be appointed to a non-renewable nine-year term and would never have to face the electorate more than once.They would not be accountable for anything they did or did not do while in office.
As well, NDP members have touched on the fact that under Bill C-7, anyone who wants to be a senator would have to be chosen by a political party. This leaves little or no room for independent candidates or committed Canadians who do not have political affiliations. These points about the bill are all very valid, and I thank my fellow NDP members for them.
I would like to especially focus on one basic unavoidable fact, which is that any real reform of the upper chamber would require constitutional change. All members in the House should know that. The government knows it, and anyone who has studied the history of Confederation and of our Constitution in high school knows it. The Prime Minister certainly knows it.
Reforming the Senate would require amending the Constitution with the approval of seven out of 10 provinces representing the majority of Canadians. That means Bill C-7 is nothing but a colossal red herring. It may pass in the House and it may even pass in the Senate, but as soon as it is challenged in court by any province--and provinces are already lining up to mount legal challenges--it will be struck down as unconstitutional. Our high school history students could have told us that.
The Prime Minister thinks he can pass this totally symbolic legislation to finally reform our dysfunctional upper chamber, thereby fulfilling a long-term promise to his supporters, and when it is struck down the very next day, he thinks he will be able to throw up his hands, cry crocodile tears and say he tried, and no one will be the wiser.
However, Canadians are not stupid. Bill C-7 is nothing more than a massive waste of time and a waste of taxpayers' money. The only ones who will benefit from this exercise are constitutional lawyers, who will get rich on the taxpayer's dime arguing both sides in court for years. At the end of the day, no real reform will have been done.
Maybe that would suit our Prime Minister just fine, because, as we all know, he now has majority control of the Senate; 39% of the votes cast for the House gave him over 55% of the seats, and he has 100% control in both houses. He has it because he broke his own long-term promise never to appoint an unelected senator. Do members remember that?
Instead, he has appointed more unelected and unelectable party bagmen, Conservative fundraisers and political insiders to the upper chamber than any other prime minister in the history of Canada. He has traded his purported principles for power. Now the other place does his bidding, so would it really be in his best interests to change that situation?
A stranglehold on the Senate, both in numbers and through the use of the whip, is just another way an unprecedented amount of power has been concentrated in the office and the person of one man. The current Prime Minister has fallen a long way from his touted reform ideals.
I would like to add a personal note. Members in this House will know that I, of all people, have special reason to be unhappy with the Senate. After introducing and shepherding the country's only federal climate change legislation, Bill C-311, through all stages in this House in the last Parliament, the Senate was ordered to kill that important legislation before hearing any witnesses, before studying it in committee, before having full debate, or even any debate, on its merits.
This is the first and only time in Canadian history that a bill was summarily killed by the Senate just like that, when political appointees snuffed out important legislation passed by this elected House without even giving it the consideration it was due.
It is hard for me or for anyone to see how killing legislation before it is even studied can be considered sober second thought, as the purpose of the Senate has been alleged to be. If this continues, the red chamber is in danger of becoming the single best advocate for its own abolition.
However, I am under no illusion that it will be a long time before we abolish or reform that dysfunctional chamber. It is with no disrespect to the people who work in that place that I say the upper chamber is dysfunctional. I have had the pleasure of working with some of the very hard-working and knowledgeable senators, senators who are committed to making Canada better; however, they are constrained by our system itself and by our Prime Minister, as are we in this chamber, which could also use some reforms.
That brings me to my final point. Any true reform of our democratic institutions in this country will take much more than just smokescreens and red herrings.
Unfortunately Bill C-7 distracts everyone from real reforms that could be made today, improvements that would not even require constitutional amendments. I am talking about reforming the way this chamber, and potentially that chamber, is elected. A system of electing either of our chambers by proportional representation would finally make every vote count. There would be no more wasted votes, no more pitting one region of the country against another. More women and more minorities would be elected. A fairer and more accurate reflection of the will of Canadians in our elected Parliament would take place. It would be a real democracy, as practised by the vast majority of our world's elected governments.
However, that is something many politicians here, including government members, are desperate to avoid doing anything about, so they and the Prime Minister will do anything, including distractions like Bill C-7, to turn attention away from much more effective reforms that could be accomplished much more easily. It makes me think that the government is not really interested in changing things in our Senate at all.
