Stephen Harper's Senate Reform

It is not too often I have anything good to say about Stephen Harper, but I do applaud him for looking into senate reform. Although my ideas for senate reform are probably much different than his, I do believe the status quo is unacceptable. I also applaud Jack Austin's efforts to see that Western Canada has more seats in the senate and support Stephane Dion's idea of 6-8 year limits for senators. I however, am disappointed some Liberals have condemned senate reform as bad since it is too American, because we need a Liberal dominated senate to block Tory legislation when Canadians accidentally elect a Tory government, or because it will make it harder to make government larger (I by the way believe government needs to be smaller not larger). I am totally against the idea of either blindly supporting or blindly opposing an idea simply because it is American, instead we should look at each issue on a case by case basis. Leave the blind Pro-Americanism to the Tories and blind Anti-Americanism to the NDP. I also am a believer in democracy and whether I agree or disagree with a party, I think if a party runs on a certain platform and is elected, they should be able to implement it. If voters dislike it, they can turf them at the next election.

My preference for senate reform is to simply abolish the senate or at the very least make it only an advisory board with no powers since they do some good reports. Our provincial legislatures function just fine without an upper house so why do we need one federally. And for those who comment we need it for regional balance, I would like to point out that just as a person in St. John's has different interests than a person in Vancouver, a person in Fort St. John also has different interests than a person in Vancouver, which is why we have constituent representatives to represent them. However, if we must have an elected senate, I propose we adopt the Australian as opposed to American model. Under the Australian model senators are elected by proportional representation so the House of Commons would be elected the same way it is now, but the senate would be elected based on proportional representation. This would achieve many of the goals of a Triple E senate since this would mean Toronto would have Tory senators and Alberta would have Liberal senators therefore any policy that unfairly targeted one region would likely run into opposition in the caucus. At the same time this would avoid the idea of some votes being worth more than others. Under a triple E senate, a voter in Prince Edward Island's vote is worth 100x as much as a voter from Ontario, which I see as undemocratic in a representative democracy. I realize the dangers here is we would have consistent minority governments, but I believe our problem with minority governments goes more to the attitude of the parties than it does to them being dysfunctional. In Germany, they have had stable coalitions for many years and there isn't the same adversarial attitude between parties as there is here in Canada. In fact opposing parties will often co-operate for the good of the nation rather than just blindly opposing their opponent to score cheap political points. However, I am not so optimistic that either the Tories or Liberals would ever be willing to work together for the good of the country.

Finally any senate reform would involve constitutional changes, which can be quite messy. I believe the solution to this is any senate reform should be put to a national referendum whereby it would require 50% + 1 support in 7 of the 10 provinces with at least 50% of the population, thereby bypassing the messy negotiations, but still ensuring all regions are heard. I also believe the current distribution of seats is totally unfair. I think Paul Martin was right when he said British Columbia should have more seats than New Brunswick and therefore believe electing senators under the current distribution, would make Western Alienation worse, not better since the West is even more under-represented in the Senate than House of Commons.