Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-10.
The first part of the debate started yesterday. We have had a very interesting debate. The minister was here and participated in the debate yesterday. We welcome that. It is the second time this week that we have had ministers from the government in attendance, and I think that is a very positive sign.
This is actually the fourth time that the government has tried to bring in this type of a bill to limit Senate terms, and I think this time could be the lucky time. I must tell the President of the Treasury Board that it all depends on several things, such as whether the government tries to engineer another election or whether it prorogues Parliament. That is why the bill did not make as far as it could have the last two times. Perhaps the first time around there were some other forces that scuttled his bill, but certainly the last two times it was self-inflicted.
As our critic, the member for Hamilton Centre, pointed out yesterday, we have no problem with this bill and with this concept. For many years now our party has been solidly on the record as being in favour of the abolition of the Senate. At this point in our history, I think many of us believe that incrementalism may in fact be the answer here. If we can chisel away at this structure a little bit at the time, we might get it into a better form than it is. For that reason, we think this is a positive step.
Eight years seems like a fairly long time for Senators to serve. Under an ideal structure, if we were to be electing Senators, we would more than likely want to be electing them on a five year cycle, like the members of the House, and maybe in alternate years so we did not have a total and complete transfer of political power in the country in one election cycle. We could build it like it is done in the United States over a two year cycle.
That is not what we are dealing with here because we have the constitutional requirements of the country. The government has nibbled around the problem sufficiently to be able to confidently propose this particular bill with the knowledge that this will in fact be constitutional, regardless of what the Liberals keep referring to, that they want to send it off to the Supreme Court. That would buy them another 10 or 20 years.
The fact is the government is on pretty solid grounds to make this particular incremental change to the Senate. What is exciting about the whole process at the end of the day is that some of the provinces are electing their own Senators. I believe Alberta has been electing their own Senators, but Saskatchewan and now Manitoba are planning to follow suit.
I do have the November 2009 report from the Manitoba all-party special committee on Senate reform. The President of the Treasury Board understands how Manitoba has worked in a minority government. He was there for that period. He knows that under the former Filman government and under the Doer government for the last 10 years, Manitoba's solution to many very controversial problems has been to resolve it through an all-party process.
We did that with the smoking in public places issue, which I believe was actually an issue introduced by one of the Conservative backbenchers at the time in opposition. We dealt with this issue very effectively during Meech Lake as well.
I once again encourage the government to look at a model that has worked in the past in other provinces.
What the legislative committee came up with was fairly interesting because it consulted broadly in the process. The mandate of the committee referred to the fact that the federal government would be moving forward with Senate reform and in response Manitoba would establish an all-party committee to ask Manitobans how senators should be elected.
The federal government asked the provinces to consult and asked for input on Senate selection. The all-party process on consultations reflected Manitoba legislation passed in 2006 and I will get to that fairly soon.
It is timely to move forward because the legislation to create an eight year term limit for senators was introduced recently in Parliament.
For the public who are watching, the fact that we are simply limiting Senate terms is not being done entirely in isolation. There are other things being done across the country.
The act to establish the committee was also set out in that particular mandate. The committee considered matters relating to the election of senators from Manitoba, the manner in which an election of senators should be conducted, including whether senators should be elected using proportional representation or any other type of voting. Therefore, we did not prejudge the situation and limit it to one option. We left it wide open and ensured that the election of senators would result in better representation for all the regions of Manitoba.
Once again, it was chosen by a fairly large all-party committee. There was a seven person subcommittee that was set up as well. It had public meetings all over Manitoba, in Brandon, Carman, Dauphin, Flin Flon, Norway House, Russell, St. Laurent, Steinbach and Winnipeg. It advertised these meetings on websites rather broadly actually. At the end of the day there were 51 presentations at the public hearings. There were 31 written submissions sent.
As I indicated before, on June 13, 2006, Bill 22, the election reform act was approved by all parties in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly. The act stated that if it was not to be abolished, the Senate should consist of democratically elected members rather than members appointed by a process involving patronage appointments.
The Manitoba Senate was abolished in 1875 and a single legislative assembly has served the province well since then. I have never heard anyone in Manitoba ever asking me to bring back the Senate. As a matter of fact, I have never heard of anyone in my constituency, over 23 years as a provincial MLA, even knowing there was a Senate in Manitoba. It disappeared in 1875. It has been long forgotten and no one is concerned about it. So we would not want to be entertaining ideas of reconstituting a Senate in Manitoba. We have to deal with the one we have right now. That is the problem.
There was a clear consensus that evolved out of this particular process. The recommendations were that if the federal government moved forward on its commitments, elections would be held in the province of Manitoba to elect nominees to the Senate and forwarded to Ottawa. Elections would be administered through Elections Canada with the cost being the responsibility of the federal government. The method of voting would be first past the post.
That is controversial even in my own caucus. There are a number of people who are very strong supporters of proportional representation and there are some valid arguments for that proposal as well, but the Manitoba all-party committee, after hearing presentations, after discussing the whole issue of PR and other methods, decided that it would prefer the first past the post.
There should be a regional representation among Manitoba's allotment of six Senate seats. The committee took the six Senate seats for Manitoba and applied three to Winnipeg, which has actually more than 50% of the population, two in southern Manitoba, and one in the north.
Elections would be held in each of the regions. The persons with the most votes in each region would be placed on the list of nominees that would be submitted to the prime minister. Once again, the current proposal of an eight year term limit by the federal government is in keeping with what was heard from the presenters.
Regardless of my views on whether eight years is enough or not enough, the committee in Manitoba certainly was endorsing the eight year option. I understand that the Liberals are looking at a 12 year or 15 year option and it seems to me that they are probably just grasping at straws in this case. I actually feel the Liberals will maybe for the wrong reasons change their minds on this bill and support it as well because they are losing influence in the Senate.
The Conservatives are now, I believe, in a majority situation, not by much, but fairly close. Even when Liberals, on their good days, look at the Senate situation, they too will recognize there are some serious problems in appointing people on a lifetime basis.
Our critic, the member for Hamilton Centre, dealt with this issue brilliantly yesterday and for those who were here to hear his speech, it was certainly one for the ages. It was an excellent speech. He had the House rocking. He looked at the preamble of the bill and read it:
WHEREAS Parliament wishes to maintain the essential characteristics of the Senate within Canada’s parliamentary democracy as a chamber of independent, sober second thought.
He went on to detail the history of the Senate and how it is such a joke, that people would view this body as a chamber of independence. He pointed out that the government has a leader in the Senate. There are caucus meetings in the Senate. The senators participate and agree on strategies in the Senate. Even so, the Senate is loaded with political operatives. It is blatantly obvious that senators do not even try to hide the fact.
When John Turner was running against Brian Mulroney, Brian Mulroney was able to change the debate and flow of the election by attacking him for going along with the final Trudeau Senate appointments, which were just blatantly patronage appointments. I do not have the list of the recent Conservative appointments, but they are not any different than the Liberal appointments. We have a senator from Manitoba who was the national president or national director of the PC Party and guess what, he is one of the appointments to the Senate.
As was pointed out by one of the speakers yesterday, basically the entire Conservative national campaign team, including fundraisers and the whole gang, have been appointed to the Senate. The only difference from Liberal days is that they are there for eight years as opposed to, as the Minister of State for Democratic Reform pointed out, a maximum of 45 years, up until age 75. So there are eight year appointments in place.
In the Senate, as we speak, there could be a campaign committee strategy session of the Conservative Party of Canada over there because the players have all moved from the party over to the Senate. So the senators are travelling around the country, totally unaccountable, as the member for Hamilton Centre pointed out yesterday. They do not have public meetings.
I remember appearing before a Senate committee a number of years ago in Manitoba. So I know the Senate is active and that it does have hearings on issues. It has bills, like we do, and it deals with the process. However, from a public point of view, rarely do we see senators in the media dealing with issues. We do not see them having public meetings on issues or leading any sort of political discourse in this country. The result is that the public becomes very cynical.
If we were to ask people in Manitoba to name their senators, I do not think they could, other than Senator Carstairs who they know because she was the Liberal leader who took the party from obscurity to prominence in 1988 for a two-year period and then took it back to non-prominence. However, she is in the Senate and she might register on a poll asking people who their Manitoba senators are. However, I guarantee members that without mentioning the names of the senators, literally nobody will know who their senators are. Clearly, that is not even healthy for the senators. I can imagine how desolate it must be for them to be appointed to a body for 20 or 30 years and find out that nobody knows who they are and nobody cares and they do not really do anything. I have not talked to any senators about it but they must have some questions about this role themselves.
I know there have been initiatives in the Senate in the past to make themselves more relevant in the process but I do not think the public will ever agree that the Senate is in a position to reform itself. As dedicated as some of the senators might be to cause reforms to occur to their own structure, there is a believability gap there. The public will not believe that the Senate, at the end of the day, will make any fundamental break with the past. That is what the hunger is for out there in the population.
I draw members attention back to what some members of the Conservative backbench members might refer to as the “good old days” when Preston Manning was leading the charge about 20 years ago. I refer members to the triple-E Senate where the Reform Party wanted an elected Senate, an equal Senate and an effective Senate. It did make a lot of waves and had a lot of support right across the country, but particularly in western Canada where the concept started, for the idea.
I think it was during that period of time when people started to think that the idea of abolition was not the only answer. Up until that period, I think it was either a choice of living with what was there or, if we did not like it, to simply change the party in power so it would appoint a new brand of senator. However, they were either red ones or they were blue ones. Abolition was the only option at that time for people who wanted to do something with the Senate.
It was only when the triple-E people came in with their idea that a number of people who were only interested in opposition at that point started to change their attention to the triple-E idea as a different option. However, then they found that would not fly either because of the constitutional implications in the concept.
That is where we sit with this. I recognize that the government is moving ahead in a tentative fashion because it cannot push those constitutional bounds. It is also trying to do this because it has been frustrated for four years. It has not been able to get its legislative agenda through the Senate and this is one way for the government to try to clear the roadblock and enable it to function. The problem is that if the government does not get these reforms now it may get comfortable with the system the way it is and then change will stop.
