Mr. Speaker, first I would like to say that I am pleased to rise to present the Bloc Québécois's position on Senate reform.
The Prime Minister is definitely single-minded; he is taking another run at it. Under the cover of increasing the Senate's legitimacy, he is proposing two important changes to the Senate: limiting senators' tenure to nine years and allowing them to be elected by the provinces.
Before explaining my party's position, I would like to point out some of the dangers to democracy lurking in this reform bill. First, electing senators is not such an easy business. That is where the reform proposed by the Prime Minister becomes dangerous. According to the bill, the provinces would be responsible for organizing these elections, which means that implementing the bill would depend entirely on the provinces' goodwill. Most provinces are not interested or are downright hostile to this change that is being made without their consent. The Prime Minister has done nothing to win the co-operation of the provinces in this attempt to reform the Senate, and his inflexibility may result, in the end, in the appointment of some senators who are elected and others who are not.
We would end up with a legislative assembly whose democratic legitimacy would vary, unless the Prime Minister decides to leave some seats vacant. No elections in some provinces, elections in others. This would also be detrimental to the representation of certain provinces. There is another problem: the term limits would not apply to senators appointed before 2008, which would create a double standard. Ultimately, if all senators were elected, and in the absence of true reform, the fundamental problem would remain the same.
With the government's proposal, the election of senators would change the balance of power in Parliament and certainly also between the provinces and with Quebec. The Senate has broad powers that it has practically always used with a certain amount of restraint, out of respect for the House of Commons. Once elected, however, it could use its new legitimacy to stand up to MPs. The exception could become the rule, if the membership of the two houses were different.
The Conservatives' bill brushes this danger aside. So the Conservative government is proposing to reform the Senate with Bill C-7 and to reform the House of Commons with Bill C-20, which would weaken Quebec's position within federal political institutions. So it is doublespeak. On the one hand, the government is saying that it wants to prevent political manipulation by appointing senators for partisan reasons. And on the other hand, as we have seen over the past few months and the past few years, the job of senator has increasingly become a political reward given by the Prime Minister largely to his friends. The Senate as an institution is less and less useful to democracy.
The Bloc Québécois is in favour of abolishing the Senate. But let us remember that Quebec's traditional position is that any change to the Senate must be made with the consent of the provinces, especially Quebec. The Canadian Constitution is a federal constitution. There are therefore very good reasons for ensuring that a change in the essential characteristics of the Senate should not be made by Parliament alone, but rather should be subject to a constitutional process involving Quebec and the provinces.
As far back as the late 1970s, the Supreme Court of Canada looked at the power of Parliament to unilaterally change the constitutional provisions dealing with the Senate. In 1980, the court ruled that decisions regarding major changes, like the ones the Conservatives are proposing today, that affect the fundamental features of the Senate cannot be taken unilaterally. Changes to the powers of the Senate—the method of selecting senators, the number of senators to which a province is entitled, or the residency qualifications of senators—can be made only in consultation with Quebec and the provinces. Furthermore, in 2007, Benoît Pelletier, the former Quebec minister of Canadian intergovernmental affairs who is well known in the field, reiterated Quebec's traditional position, and I quote:
The Government of Quebec believes that this institution does not fall exclusively under federal jurisdiction. Given that the Senate is a crucial part of the Canadian federal compromise, it is clear to us that...the Senate can be neither reformed nor abolished without Quebec's consent.
The same day, in the National Assembly of Quebec, a resolution was adopted, a unanimous motion that read as follows:
That the National Assembly of Québec reaffirm to the Federal Government and to the Parliament of Canada that no modification to the Canadian Senate may be carried out without the consent of the Government of Québec and the National Assembly.
With the unanimous support of the National Assembly of Quebec, the Government of Quebec therefore requested the withdrawal and/or suspension of the various bills that had been introduced over time by the Conservative government with a view to Senate reform.
This position by the Government of Quebec is not new. It is an historical position. Following the unilateral patriation of the Constitution in 1982, successive Quebec governments, be they sovereignist or more federalist, all agreed on one basic premise: they did not want to discuss Senate reform before the Meech Lake accord was ratified, as Robert Bourassa said in 1989.
A little later, in 1992, Gil Rémillard said that Quebec's signing of an agreement involving Senate reform would depend on the outcome of negotiations on three important things: the idea of a distinct society, the division of power and limiting the federal spending power.
Finally, on November 7, 2007, the National Assembly of Quebec unanimously adopted the motion I mentioned earlier in my speech.
As for the people of Quebec, a fairly recent poll from March 2010 clearly shows that the majority of Quebeckers do not give any value to the Senate in its current form and that a larger proportion of them are in favour of abolishing it completely.
Here are a few figures to be more specific. Only 8% of respondents from Quebec believe that the Senate plays an important role and that the Senate appointment system works well. In addition, 22% of Quebeckers would prefer to have elected senators, while 43% would like the Senate abolished completely.
Not only is this bill unwanted, but it is undesirable.
For all these reasons, the Bloc Québécois will vote against the bill introduced by the government and, as members know, it would ideally like the Senate abolished.
