Advocates of Senate reform (particularly direct election of Canadian Senators) have taken to citing Australia's Senate as evidence that elected and democratically legitimate Senates are compatible with well run societies (here, here and here). They should desist, unless they are prepared to advocate for an actual Australian model Senate, which is quite different from the one they are proposing for Canada.
Australia's Senate is Elected by Proportional Representation
This is almost certainly the most important difference. Canadian Senate reformers are advocating Senators be elected by Province in the same manner we elect House members - first past the post. How that would play out in multi-party Canada is unclear, though likely it would continue to allow a plurality support party to win a majority of Senate seats. I fail to see how two Houses of Parliament elected by the same system improve Canadian democracy.
Australia's Senate has Limited Powers
Australia's Senate is not allowed to originate or (this is key) amend Supply bills. This means the Government's budget bills (from the House of Commons) are take-it-or-leave-it propositions. The US Senate is supposedly prevented from originating such bills, but with the power to amend them, this limitation proves essentially useless. The US Senate, when it wants to pass such a bill, just takes any old House bill already passed that chamber, and "amends" it by stripping its contents and substituting a new bill. Canada's Constitution has a US style provision and I expect it would be equally ineffectual without an Australian style limitation on amendment powers to money bills.
Australia's House has Powers to Override the Senate
For brevity's sake get the details here, but briefly the Prime Minister has some ability in extreme circumstances of the Senate blocking something, to force full elections of the entire Parliament and if that still doesn't get a Senate willing to pass whatever bill, the PM can initiate a joint sitting where House and Senate members get 1 vote each, and the much greater number of House members will probably cause the measure to prevail. The first power (double dissolution) has been used six times already, and the joint sitting power was needed only once, to bring in Australia's system of universal health care during the 1970s.
The regular need for these override powers even given the extremity of causing an additional full national election campaign to do it should caution Senate reformers as to the general obstructionist nature of Senates that have the power to behave that way. In a Canada that had the Senate our reformers are pushing, could national universal health care have come to be?
Still, even these limited powers and capacity for override did not prevent the Australian 1975 Constitutional Crisis where the Senate was blocking supply to the government, and the Governor-General decided he was therefore required to dismiss the Prime Minister (who still had confidence of the House) and force new elections. A person on Twitter asked me if one crisis means their entire system is unworthy, and my answer is "maybe" - it depends how bad the crisis is, or could have been. That crisis was not only about the role of the Senate, but the unelected Governor-General dismissing a Prime Minister but we would be foolish not to observe that incident and ensure it could not happen in our system.
It would be an exaggeration to say Australia is some kind of failure. It's a prosperous country and ahead of Canada in a number of developmental areas. Yet it's clear that their Senate is nothing like the one reformers are pushing for Canada so we really can't draw much on their experience, and even then they have had significant troubles with their model. I maintain my belief that the most sensible reform is abolition of the chamber, but if reform must be, I would vastly prefer the Australian model of a more democratically elected Senate, with limited legislative powers and which can be overridden at need to the model being pushed for Canada.
Showing posts with label Senate reform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Senate reform. Show all posts
Monday, February 18, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
The Sensible Path: Abolish the Senate
Calls for reform represent a stealth effort to foist a radical new form of government on an unsuspecting Canadian public.
Aside from the cost (about $90 million per year) and the recent scandals about residency and private life criminal behaviour, the real threat the Senate poses is that it has (mostly) equal formal constitutional powers to the House of Commons. The only thing that keeps them from acting like a co-equal chamber of our national legislature is that they know they lack public support and legitimacy to do so. What if that changed?
That is what Harper's attempts to reform the Senate by ordinary legislation rather were intended to do. He was trying to build a critical mass of quasi-elected Senators, who ran in provincially administered optional elections and then were appointed by Ottawa to the chamber. They would feel they, individually, had democratic "mandates" to govern - legislate, block or amend House bills. Once they started to do this, and had enough of them to do so, the public would probably object to this "unelected" chamber interfering in the elected House's business, and would likely demand full elections for the whole thing. After that, Senate reform toward something like the "triple E" (elected, effective, "equal") model long pushed by western conservatives would be off and running.
Fortunately, Harper appears to have had second thoughts and may abandon the plan. Very smart person Chantal Hebert (not snark) thinks abolition of the Senate may be near critical mass. Here's hoping.
Why Not Reform The Senate?
Why should we abolish it rather than "reform" it? Isn't reform the more mild solution and abolition is radical? Actually, it is the reverse. Reforming the senate in any way which empowers it to govern and legislate is actually far more radical than simply eradicating it. Canada has governed for 145 years with the second chamber acting as a powerless rubber stamp that may as well have not existed. Reforming it to create a second, potent, elected house of Parliament would be far more radical than simply formalizing the Senate's non-power by eliminating it. Down the abolition route, we pretty much know the outcome since we have 145 years of not worrying what the Senate thinks about things. Down the "reform" route we have no certainty about the outcome since it would be something entirely new to our mode of government. That is unleashing a radical experiment on an unsuspecting public.
So reverse the onus: Why reform the Senate? If your problem with the Senate is a bunch of do-nothing, highly paid appointed party hacks and loyalists, than isn't the obvious answer to just get rid of them? What is an "elected" and "effective" Senate supposed to accomplish, aside from providing a way to kick out Senators who cheat on expenses or commit personal crimes? Abolishing would solve both problems without the major side-effects of creating a whole new chamber of powerful politicians.
When you push this way, what you find is that Senate reformers actually have a substantive agenda for government reform, one that has almost nothing to do with the widespread complaints and outrage at Senate misbehaviour. They want a radically changed federal government, one which is more likely to govern the way they want, and less likely to do things they don't like. This is about changing the nature of Canadian governance to favour right wing interests and ideology. That is decidedly radical and should not be confused for the milquetoast term "reform." A Triple-E Senate isn't a trivial change, it would be an entirely new system of government and one completely A-historical to our history and government evolution.
But, the House of Commons is Broken!
A common impetus for reforming the Senate is a litany of potential complaints about the actions of the House of Commons. Again, if your problem is with the House than the obvious answer is to reform the House. Whatever your problem with the House, why is adding 105 more elected politicians in the Senate supposed to fix that? Reforming the House can take various forms, depending on the problem you may wish to solve, but if that is your complaint, attacking the problem directly seems to self-evidently the first thing to try. Even better, reforming the House does not require radical experiments in wholly new forms of government.
An "Elected, Effective" Senate Ends Responsible Government
Going back in our history, a long battle was fought to bring responsible government to Canada, even before Confederation. What does it mean? The fundamental principle at stake is that the public should know who is responsible for the governing decisions affecting their lives and be able to punish or reward them electorally for it. This underlies our whole system of government. A Parliament is elected, the biggest party forms a government and we get to rate their actions good and bad. Now throw in a separately elected Senate, which may or may not have the same party composition as the House, and whose members are not required to follow instructions from the Prime Minister. They will block important government priorities, change other bills, and add in their own priorities for the House to consider. They will horse-trade, bluster and the end result will be policies that do not match what the sitting government intended to do or maybe even wanted.
In the US, this is often described as part of their "checks and balances" system of government. No one source of power can take significant action without approval of one or more other sources of power. It also means US voters can never be sure who to credit or blame for the actual policies enacted by Washington. Anyone following US politics will still find debate over who to credit for balancing the US budget in the 1990s. Was it Bill Clinton? Or was it the majority Republican Congress? Who knows? Both had essential roles in it happening and we can't access alternative dimensions of reality where Dole wins the '96 election or Democrats retake Congress to address counterfactuals. That's just one example and one where most observers agree something "good" happened. Try to figure out who to blame for the repeal of the New Deal era Glass-Steagall act in 1999, or for the PATRIOT act or the recent debt-ceiling crises (multiple) and you'll see the drawbacks of checks and balances in a divided US government.
That system has certain merits (I do not favour it) but at least in their defence one can say their founders set about to create such a system. Our model is not designed for this at all. It would be some kind of horrendous accidental after-thought, stapled on ad-hoc. We would not end up with a true "checks and balances" system but something like the worst of both worlds.
An "Equal" Senate would be Horrendously Unequal
An "equal" Senate means each province would have the same number of Senators. Ontario has more people than British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island combined, yet those approximately 12 million people would have seven times the Senate representation that Ontario's nearly 13 million people would have under such a system. This is preposterous. This is the same absurd system the United States has where Wyoming's 500,000 or so people have the same two Senators that California's 37 million people have.
Yes, people in rural and remote regions deserve representation. This they already have both in the House and further Provinces have a number of guaranteed powers in the Constitution, including the necessity that at least 7 of them would approve of most types of constitutional reform (so say, Ontario and Quebec, with a majority of Canada's people can't change the Constitution alone).
A Triple-E Senate is a recipe for parochial NIMBYism where the will of the majority would be regularly stymied on just routine day-to-day governance, never mind major (and rare) constitutional reforms.
In the US this system is already a disaster (where the Senate is known as the "place good bills go to die") where there are 50 states and no one state comes near the proportion of the total population that Ontario or Quebec do for Canada. California is slightly over 10% of the total population, and it is the most populous state. In Canada this type of system would be far more egregiously unfair.
Sober Second Thought
The track record of upper chambers as places where wild and radical bills from the more democratic lower houses are halted is actually quite thin. Proponents of such ideas should be challenged to provide examples of really stupid populist ideas that were stopped by upper chambers. In the US, the Senate failed to stop the Authorization for force in Iraq, the PATRIOT act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the bankruptcy reform bill, the FISA telecom retroactive immunity bill, the Bush tax cuts (two rounds) and the $700B bailout of the banks (TARP). The US Senate did block all kinds of good and useful things like watering down aid to State and local governments in the Stimulus (leading to millions of police, firefighters and teachers being laid off), the cap-and-trade bill, the public option for Obama's health care reform (and nearly scuttled the whole bill), and in 2010 - over 290 bills that passed the House under Democratic control. In the past, the Senate was infamous for blocking civil rights and voting rights legislation and even laws against lynching black people.
It's not just the US. We can look at Australia which has an elected and powerful Senate. If Australia's Senate worked like triple-E radicals want Canada's to work, it would never have gotten universal health care passed in the 70s. Doing so required a special provision of the Australian Senate where a full "double dissolution" election of both bodies is called, and then (after the Senate still blocked the bill), the House is able to force a joint session of parliament where bills can be passed on majority vote (and the far greater number of House members means they can usually overwhelm Senate opposition). Triple-E proponents suggest no such mechanism for Canada to by-pass a dead end Senate blocking the business of the nation.
The Australian Senate also partly caused Australia's infamous constitutional crisis when its Governor General preemptively dismissed the sitting Prime Minister despite his having the confidence of the House. The Governor-General's reasoning was that the Prime Minister had been unable to get the budget passed by the Senate, which (he argued) meant that the government lacked "supply" (referring to money to run the actual government) and thus new elections were required. This was a very novel interpretation of Parliamentary unwritten constitutional duties of Governors-General and highly controversial among the population of the day. But to this day the question is not fully resolved, and if a Canadian Senate was blocking supply to a sitting government, could a Canadian Governor-General do the same? Or would we have something like the US in the 90s where the House Republicans under Speaker Gingrich blocked supply and forced a federal government shutdown (several, actually)?
Blocking Repeal of Bad Laws
The companion to the Senate's supposed ability to block "bad" laws is that it also blocks the repeal or amendment of bad laws. Basically you can only believe the Senate will be "wise" in what laws it passes, blocks or amends if you believe Senators will be wiser than House members. For elected Senators, I can't see why that would plausibly be so.
Around the World
The vast majority of governments do not have upper chambers. One count finds 115 unicameral governments to 64 bicameral governments. The list of countries without Senates includes such obvious governing disasters as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, New Zealand and South Korea. Of the 64 that have Senates, it is worth note that many of them have what I call "crippled" Senates - that is, Senates which are not co-equal with the lower House. Canada is obviously one such, since our Senate has no democratic legitimacy, the UK has formally hobbled the House of Lords, and in many cases (Japan, Germany, France, Australia) the constitution provides means for the House to somehow override the Senate with varying degrees of difficulty.
This is far from a comprehensive evidence review, but then, that onus should not be on me. Those who want an active and elected Canadian Senate acting as co-equal to the House of Commons should have the onus to show the benefits this will bring, and the harms it will avoid. Electing them to resolve their expense and residency failings is simply overkill. You can't "reform" a body that has no current useful purpose without identifying what purpose it really should be serving and ensure your reforms actually give the group a reasonable shot to do that.
Aside from the cost (about $90 million per year) and the recent scandals about residency and private life criminal behaviour, the real threat the Senate poses is that it has (mostly) equal formal constitutional powers to the House of Commons. The only thing that keeps them from acting like a co-equal chamber of our national legislature is that they know they lack public support and legitimacy to do so. What if that changed?
That is what Harper's attempts to reform the Senate by ordinary legislation rather were intended to do. He was trying to build a critical mass of quasi-elected Senators, who ran in provincially administered optional elections and then were appointed by Ottawa to the chamber. They would feel they, individually, had democratic "mandates" to govern - legislate, block or amend House bills. Once they started to do this, and had enough of them to do so, the public would probably object to this "unelected" chamber interfering in the elected House's business, and would likely demand full elections for the whole thing. After that, Senate reform toward something like the "triple E" (elected, effective, "equal") model long pushed by western conservatives would be off and running.
Fortunately, Harper appears to have had second thoughts and may abandon the plan. Very smart person Chantal Hebert (not snark) thinks abolition of the Senate may be near critical mass. Here's hoping.
Why Not Reform The Senate?
Why should we abolish it rather than "reform" it? Isn't reform the more mild solution and abolition is radical? Actually, it is the reverse. Reforming the senate in any way which empowers it to govern and legislate is actually far more radical than simply eradicating it. Canada has governed for 145 years with the second chamber acting as a powerless rubber stamp that may as well have not existed. Reforming it to create a second, potent, elected house of Parliament would be far more radical than simply formalizing the Senate's non-power by eliminating it. Down the abolition route, we pretty much know the outcome since we have 145 years of not worrying what the Senate thinks about things. Down the "reform" route we have no certainty about the outcome since it would be something entirely new to our mode of government. That is unleashing a radical experiment on an unsuspecting public.
So reverse the onus: Why reform the Senate? If your problem with the Senate is a bunch of do-nothing, highly paid appointed party hacks and loyalists, than isn't the obvious answer to just get rid of them? What is an "elected" and "effective" Senate supposed to accomplish, aside from providing a way to kick out Senators who cheat on expenses or commit personal crimes? Abolishing would solve both problems without the major side-effects of creating a whole new chamber of powerful politicians.
When you push this way, what you find is that Senate reformers actually have a substantive agenda for government reform, one that has almost nothing to do with the widespread complaints and outrage at Senate misbehaviour. They want a radically changed federal government, one which is more likely to govern the way they want, and less likely to do things they don't like. This is about changing the nature of Canadian governance to favour right wing interests and ideology. That is decidedly radical and should not be confused for the milquetoast term "reform." A Triple-E Senate isn't a trivial change, it would be an entirely new system of government and one completely A-historical to our history and government evolution.
But, the House of Commons is Broken!
A common impetus for reforming the Senate is a litany of potential complaints about the actions of the House of Commons. Again, if your problem is with the House than the obvious answer is to reform the House. Whatever your problem with the House, why is adding 105 more elected politicians in the Senate supposed to fix that? Reforming the House can take various forms, depending on the problem you may wish to solve, but if that is your complaint, attacking the problem directly seems to self-evidently the first thing to try. Even better, reforming the House does not require radical experiments in wholly new forms of government.
An "Elected, Effective" Senate Ends Responsible Government
Going back in our history, a long battle was fought to bring responsible government to Canada, even before Confederation. What does it mean? The fundamental principle at stake is that the public should know who is responsible for the governing decisions affecting their lives and be able to punish or reward them electorally for it. This underlies our whole system of government. A Parliament is elected, the biggest party forms a government and we get to rate their actions good and bad. Now throw in a separately elected Senate, which may or may not have the same party composition as the House, and whose members are not required to follow instructions from the Prime Minister. They will block important government priorities, change other bills, and add in their own priorities for the House to consider. They will horse-trade, bluster and the end result will be policies that do not match what the sitting government intended to do or maybe even wanted.
In the US, this is often described as part of their "checks and balances" system of government. No one source of power can take significant action without approval of one or more other sources of power. It also means US voters can never be sure who to credit or blame for the actual policies enacted by Washington. Anyone following US politics will still find debate over who to credit for balancing the US budget in the 1990s. Was it Bill Clinton? Or was it the majority Republican Congress? Who knows? Both had essential roles in it happening and we can't access alternative dimensions of reality where Dole wins the '96 election or Democrats retake Congress to address counterfactuals. That's just one example and one where most observers agree something "good" happened. Try to figure out who to blame for the repeal of the New Deal era Glass-Steagall act in 1999, or for the PATRIOT act or the recent debt-ceiling crises (multiple) and you'll see the drawbacks of checks and balances in a divided US government.
That system has certain merits (I do not favour it) but at least in their defence one can say their founders set about to create such a system. Our model is not designed for this at all. It would be some kind of horrendous accidental after-thought, stapled on ad-hoc. We would not end up with a true "checks and balances" system but something like the worst of both worlds.
An "Equal" Senate would be Horrendously Unequal
An "equal" Senate means each province would have the same number of Senators. Ontario has more people than British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island combined, yet those approximately 12 million people would have seven times the Senate representation that Ontario's nearly 13 million people would have under such a system. This is preposterous. This is the same absurd system the United States has where Wyoming's 500,000 or so people have the same two Senators that California's 37 million people have.
Yes, people in rural and remote regions deserve representation. This they already have both in the House and further Provinces have a number of guaranteed powers in the Constitution, including the necessity that at least 7 of them would approve of most types of constitutional reform (so say, Ontario and Quebec, with a majority of Canada's people can't change the Constitution alone).
A Triple-E Senate is a recipe for parochial NIMBYism where the will of the majority would be regularly stymied on just routine day-to-day governance, never mind major (and rare) constitutional reforms.
In the US this system is already a disaster (where the Senate is known as the "place good bills go to die") where there are 50 states and no one state comes near the proportion of the total population that Ontario or Quebec do for Canada. California is slightly over 10% of the total population, and it is the most populous state. In Canada this type of system would be far more egregiously unfair.
Sober Second Thought
The track record of upper chambers as places where wild and radical bills from the more democratic lower houses are halted is actually quite thin. Proponents of such ideas should be challenged to provide examples of really stupid populist ideas that were stopped by upper chambers. In the US, the Senate failed to stop the Authorization for force in Iraq, the PATRIOT act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the bankruptcy reform bill, the FISA telecom retroactive immunity bill, the Bush tax cuts (two rounds) and the $700B bailout of the banks (TARP). The US Senate did block all kinds of good and useful things like watering down aid to State and local governments in the Stimulus (leading to millions of police, firefighters and teachers being laid off), the cap-and-trade bill, the public option for Obama's health care reform (and nearly scuttled the whole bill), and in 2010 - over 290 bills that passed the House under Democratic control. In the past, the Senate was infamous for blocking civil rights and voting rights legislation and even laws against lynching black people.
It's not just the US. We can look at Australia which has an elected and powerful Senate. If Australia's Senate worked like triple-E radicals want Canada's to work, it would never have gotten universal health care passed in the 70s. Doing so required a special provision of the Australian Senate where a full "double dissolution" election of both bodies is called, and then (after the Senate still blocked the bill), the House is able to force a joint session of parliament where bills can be passed on majority vote (and the far greater number of House members means they can usually overwhelm Senate opposition). Triple-E proponents suggest no such mechanism for Canada to by-pass a dead end Senate blocking the business of the nation.
The Australian Senate also partly caused Australia's infamous constitutional crisis when its Governor General preemptively dismissed the sitting Prime Minister despite his having the confidence of the House. The Governor-General's reasoning was that the Prime Minister had been unable to get the budget passed by the Senate, which (he argued) meant that the government lacked "supply" (referring to money to run the actual government) and thus new elections were required. This was a very novel interpretation of Parliamentary unwritten constitutional duties of Governors-General and highly controversial among the population of the day. But to this day the question is not fully resolved, and if a Canadian Senate was blocking supply to a sitting government, could a Canadian Governor-General do the same? Or would we have something like the US in the 90s where the House Republicans under Speaker Gingrich blocked supply and forced a federal government shutdown (several, actually)?
Blocking Repeal of Bad Laws
The companion to the Senate's supposed ability to block "bad" laws is that it also blocks the repeal or amendment of bad laws. Basically you can only believe the Senate will be "wise" in what laws it passes, blocks or amends if you believe Senators will be wiser than House members. For elected Senators, I can't see why that would plausibly be so.
Around the World
The vast majority of governments do not have upper chambers. One count finds 115 unicameral governments to 64 bicameral governments. The list of countries without Senates includes such obvious governing disasters as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, New Zealand and South Korea. Of the 64 that have Senates, it is worth note that many of them have what I call "crippled" Senates - that is, Senates which are not co-equal with the lower House. Canada is obviously one such, since our Senate has no democratic legitimacy, the UK has formally hobbled the House of Lords, and in many cases (Japan, Germany, France, Australia) the constitution provides means for the House to somehow override the Senate with varying degrees of difficulty.
This is far from a comprehensive evidence review, but then, that onus should not be on me. Those who want an active and elected Canadian Senate acting as co-equal to the House of Commons should have the onus to show the benefits this will bring, and the harms it will avoid. Electing them to resolve their expense and residency failings is simply overkill. You can't "reform" a body that has no current useful purpose without identifying what purpose it really should be serving and ensure your reforms actually give the group a reasonable shot to do that.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Canadian Senate Reform On Hiatus
Or possibly even dead:
Anyway, this is a huge relief. I wrote about Harper's plans last year and explained what's wrong with appointing "elected" Senators:
In this respect a triple-e Senate would be worse than the US system because at least in the US, the sitting President always has the largest direct democratic mandate (larger than any Senators at least). In Canada, it's theoretically possible for a Senator from Ontario or Quebec to have more votes than the ruling party got combined. In 2011, the Tories got 5.8 million votes total. Ontario has 9 million registered voters (5.5M actually showed up) and Quebec has 6M. It's not terribly likely, it would take some universally beloved figure to get that kind of support, but that the theoretical possibility even exists is reason enough to worry about cutting loose our 105 Senators to preen about the national stage without accountability to their parties.
Just eliminate the Senate. If it must exist, hobble it severely like the UK House of Lords. Make it responsible for issuing pointless proclamations, ratifying what goes on stamps and coins, and correcting spelling mistakes in legislation. Anything more makes Canada into a very bad copy of the US, with the worst features of both the Parliamentary and Presidential-Congressional systems. Neither orderly division of powers nor Responsible Government.
Under the guise of a projected Supreme Court reference on Senate reform, Prime Minister Stephen Harper may be about to bury his party’s grand plan until at least the next federal election and, possibly, for all time.For American readers, Canada's system allows the Government to ask the Supreme Court "Do you think this would be constitutional?" in advance of actually passing a bill or taking some action. For Canadian readers, the US system doesn't allow this for reasons that as a non-lawyer I don't claim to understand.
Anyway, this is a huge relief. I wrote about Harper's plans last year and explained what's wrong with appointing "elected" Senators:
Currently, only Alberta has held its own unrecognized Senate elections, and Harper actually did appoint one of Alberta's "elected" Senators. A couple other provinces out west are considering holding elections too. This is exactly what Harper is hoping for. If even 3 or 4 provinces start electing Senators, that could be enough to fundamentally change the nature of the Senate as an institution. Once you have a mass of "elected" Senators in the body, operating under term limits, they're going to start trying to legislate, amend bills and defeat bills. They won't feel constrained by the chamber's lack of democratic legitimacy, because they'll claim they were elected.My take was that this was a way to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of Senate reform by fostering a democratic legitimacy crisis in the Red Chamber. I went on in that piece to note that while one of the typical Western beefs with Ottawa is being underrepresented in the House of Commons (which is mostly false) in the Senate the four Western provinces actually are dramatically under weight by their population. So it surprised me that Harper's lot were willing to empower the chamber that empowers Quebec and the Atlantic so much to their expense. As it turns out, they're not actually willing to do that, back to Hebert:
What will the Senators who never won elections do? Some will join in the crusades of the elected peers, and others will try and stand aside, but the result will be a mess. What happens when the partially elected Senate defeats a House bill? The public reaction will almost certainly be in favour of electing the rest of them. However it plays out, the result will be to break the strong traditional prohibition on the Senate playing an activist role. Once this gets going, there won't be any way to stop it.
They (rightly) worry that giving the Senate the enhanced legitimacy of an elected house without making it more reflective of the demographics of the country only stands to enshrine Western Canada’s democratic deficit in Parliament.So I was wrong by underestimating the simple regional zero sum cynicism of conservativism. Well, I can live with that. I can also live with this bad Senate reform thing not happening. I'm glad Harper and co are chickening out, because I think their plan would have worked. Making political offices elected is one of those magic button solutions that voters leap at as a panacea to resolve whatever problems exist with corruption, indolence or incompetence in some government function. A few months of political wrangling where some half-elected Senate started mucking with House business would very quickly bring numbers up in favour of some variation of a triple-e senate plan. This really struck me as very similar to how the US 17th Amendment (requiring direct election of Senators) was passed. Actually, Hebert suggests another pretty basic reason Harper is backing away from empowering the Senate, he can't really control Conservative Senators:
“To the extent that the Senate becomes a more influential body — and that’s uncertain — but to the extent that it does, it would shift power into Atlantic Canada and away from the West,” [Canada West Foundation leader Roger] Gibbins explained in an interview earlier this year
The prime minister might well need backing from the Court to convince some of his own appointees to live up to their initial commitment to give up their Senate seats before they reach the current mandatory retirement age of 75.This didn't occur to me last year, but it makes perfect sense. Harper might be able to kick Senators out of the Conservative party and probably out of the Conservative Senate caucus, but if they have very lengthy terms and get to run for re-election as well established incumbents in province-wide elections, they'd make dangerous opponents to him. House members fear their party leaders because almost no House members have enough notoriety to win re-election on their own name as an independent candidate. Being kicked out of the party is to face almost certain defeat at the next election. A Senator who wins a big population province is potentially getting several million votes. S/he might be able to swing a Lieberman and stymie the party leadership. Comparatively, the Prime Minister will only have one riding's worth of voters, a few tens of thousands of votes directly for him/her. I can well imagine some Alberta Senator rejecting Harper's demands and claiming a stronger mandate to represent the wishes of Alberta Conservatives than Harper.
In this respect a triple-e Senate would be worse than the US system because at least in the US, the sitting President always has the largest direct democratic mandate (larger than any Senators at least). In Canada, it's theoretically possible for a Senator from Ontario or Quebec to have more votes than the ruling party got combined. In 2011, the Tories got 5.8 million votes total. Ontario has 9 million registered voters (5.5M actually showed up) and Quebec has 6M. It's not terribly likely, it would take some universally beloved figure to get that kind of support, but that the theoretical possibility even exists is reason enough to worry about cutting loose our 105 Senators to preen about the national stage without accountability to their parties.
Just eliminate the Senate. If it must exist, hobble it severely like the UK House of Lords. Make it responsible for issuing pointless proclamations, ratifying what goes on stamps and coins, and correcting spelling mistakes in legislation. Anything more makes Canada into a very bad copy of the US, with the worst features of both the Parliamentary and Presidential-Congressional systems. Neither orderly division of powers nor Responsible Government.
Friday, June 24, 2011
What is Canadian Senate Reform really about?
This week, Stephen Harper's government introduced its first post-majority stab at substantively reforming the Senate of Canada. Going off media reports of the bill, it is an attempt to alter the nature of the Senate while not requiring a Constitutional amendment. There is already talk of constitutional challenges to the bill by the Provinces, but putting that issue aside, I'd like to explore what the bill is supposed to do, and address what Harper hopes to get out of it.
The most important thing to understand about the Senate of Canada up to this point is that it is formally equal to the House of Commons in most aspects of its Constitutional powers, and yet lacks legitimacy to actually act like a real legislative body and has for most of its days acted as a rubber stamp to the initiatives of the government of the day. This lack of legitimacy is attributed to the fact that Senators are appointed by the Governor-General on advice of the Prime Minister, and thus Senators have no independent mandate to actually defeat bills from the House of Commons, nor alter its legislation in any significant way.
By and large, this system has worked fairly well for Canada. The only big complaint about it is that the Senate became largely a patronage reward system where party hacks and fundraisers could draw a pretty decent government salary and enjoy the trappings of being a Parliamentarian without having to do the whole messy "run for office" thing. A number of Senators have become infamous in the media for lack of attendance and other misbehaviour, which has made reforming the Senate a popular issue for many.
So what does this bill do? Two things:
What will the Senators who never won elections do? Some will join in the crusades of the elected peers, and others will try and stand aside, but the result will be a mess. What happens when the partially elected Senate defeats a House bill? The public reaction will almost certainly be in favour of electing the rest of them. However it plays out, the result will be to break the strong traditional prohibition on the Senate playing an activist role. Once this gets going, there won't be any way to stop it.
Now here's the question: Why would Stephen Harper, and the Reform/Alliance western conservative base he represents want to empower the Senate? One of the traditional complaints of Albertans is that they are "left out" and they claim "the West wants in" because of the purported underrepresentation of the West in Ottawa. Let's take a look:
(chart source: wikipedia with Senate columns added by me)
It is true that Alberta and BC are slightly underrepresented by population in the House of Commons. But so is Ontario. Quebec is slightly overrepresented, but hardly anything dramatic.
As the "West" includes Manitoba (MB) and Saskatchewan (SK) in the usual understanding of the term, overall the four western provinces have 31% of the population, and 29.8% of the House seats. This is the grand "left out" claim? The four provinces have less population than Ontario, and are proportionally better represented.
Now look at the Senate. Owing to some silly history, the breakdown of the Senate is particularly antiquated and the founders broke Canada into four regions, and gave each region 24 Senators. So Ontario and Quebec got 24 each, the West got 24, and the maritimes got 24. This has left the Senate in a particularly egregious state of misallocated represenation. What doesn't make sense to me, is that the West is far more underrepresented in the Senate than in the House. There the four western provinces have 22.86% of the seats. In particular why Alberta would want to empower a body that almost cuts their influence in half versus the House is tres strange no?
It is true that the old Reform party mantra on the Senate would be to make it "triple-e" which is effective, elected and equal*. Harper's bill could potentially achieve the first two (after a fashion) but has no provision for the third? What's up with that?
The only rationale that makes sense to me is one of pure ideology. Senates, all else being equal tend to be biased toward conservative politics. It's harder to get elected to the Senate, it's more prestigious, the terms are longer, and consequently Senators tend to be older, whiter, less female and richer. All of which makes one more conservative. Harper isn't trying to solve Alberta's federal under-represenation problem, he's trying to stack the deck of the Canadian system in a way that improves the outcomes for conservative ideologues. If nothing else, adding an empowered Senate just adds a veto-point to government, which means that every bill is just that much harder to pass. Every barrier you add, means some percentage of legislation will not make it into law, no matter how you compose that barrier.
I have written before of this basic asymmetry of interests that is too often ignored in simplistic analyses of "liberals versus conservatives" battling for the neutral levers of government. Conservatives, at the end of the day, are usually far more happy to just have the government do nothing. They generally represent the interests of the rich, comfortable and powerful. Such people don't need anything from government. They'll take it if they can get it, but they don't need it to pursue their interests. Such people are also by definition a minority and have much to fear from government interfering in their ability to draw undue rents from the less powerful. Knowing nothing else about the issues or system, in this calculus Conservatives would prefer a government that is harder to operate than one that is easier to use to effect change.
I know a lot of Canadians detest the idea of a bunch of pampered hacks drawing government salaries until 75 for no expectation of work. This, I think, is the core of the popularity of electing the Senate. But that's no reason to empower our Senate to interfere in the business of governing. If you don't like the hacks, the solution is simple, abolish the senate like the NDP have been saying for years. Canada hasn't needed the Senate for much up to now, what exactly is electing the Senate supposed to solve? If you resent what they cost now, just wait until they feel democratically empowered to govern.
It's important to understand this, because on the basis of the age-old western complaints, Harper's bill makes very little sense. He may hope that a rebalancing of the Senators could come down the road, but that for sure would require a constitutional amendment. The current allocation of Senators could end up being permanent. PEI has 9 times the number of Senators their population would otherwise justify. Think they're going to give up 3 Senators without a fight?
* -I detest the idea of allocating identical Senate seats to each province "equal" - I see no reason to replicate the worst aspects of the American system, where the 500,000 people of Wyoming elect the same 2 Senators that the 37,000,000 people of Califnoria get to. That's about as un-equal as you can get.
The most important thing to understand about the Senate of Canada up to this point is that it is formally equal to the House of Commons in most aspects of its Constitutional powers, and yet lacks legitimacy to actually act like a real legislative body and has for most of its days acted as a rubber stamp to the initiatives of the government of the day. This lack of legitimacy is attributed to the fact that Senators are appointed by the Governor-General on advice of the Prime Minister, and thus Senators have no independent mandate to actually defeat bills from the House of Commons, nor alter its legislation in any significant way.
By and large, this system has worked fairly well for Canada. The only big complaint about it is that the Senate became largely a patronage reward system where party hacks and fundraisers could draw a pretty decent government salary and enjoy the trappings of being a Parliamentarian without having to do the whole messy "run for office" thing. A number of Senators have become infamous in the media for lack of attendance and other misbehaviour, which has made reforming the Senate a popular issue for many.
So what does this bill do? Two things:
- Term limits. Currently Senators are appointed and can stay in office until age 75. This bill would set a 9 year, single term limit.
- Optional provincial elections. The bill sets up a stronger legal mechanism for Provinces to voluntarily elect Senate candidates, who would be appointed by the PM when vacancies occur.
What will the Senators who never won elections do? Some will join in the crusades of the elected peers, and others will try and stand aside, but the result will be a mess. What happens when the partially elected Senate defeats a House bill? The public reaction will almost certainly be in favour of electing the rest of them. However it plays out, the result will be to break the strong traditional prohibition on the Senate playing an activist role. Once this gets going, there won't be any way to stop it.
Now here's the question: Why would Stephen Harper, and the Reform/Alliance western conservative base he represents want to empower the Senate? One of the traditional complaints of Albertans is that they are "left out" and they claim "the West wants in" because of the purported underrepresentation of the West in Ottawa. Let's take a look:
| Province | Pop | % of pop | House Seats | % of House | Senate Seats | % of Senate | Ratio to pop |
| ON | 13210667 | 38.70% | 106 | 34.40% | 24 | 22.86% | 0.59 |
| QC | 7907375 | 23.20% | 75 | 24.40% | 24 | 22.86% | 0.99 |
| BC | 4530960 | 13.30% | 36 | 11.70% | 6 | 5.71% | 0.43 |
| AB | 3720946 | 10.90% | 28 | 9.10% | 6 | 5.71% | 0.52 |
| MB | 1235412 | 3.70% | 14 | 4.50% | 6 | 5.71% | 1.54 |
| SK | 1045622 | 3.10% | 14 | 4.50% | 6 | 5.71% | 1.84 |
| NS | 942506 | 2.80% | 11 | 3.60% | 10 | 9.52% | 3.4 |
| NB | 751755 | 2.30% | 10 | 3.20% | 10 | 9.52% | 4.14 |
| NL | 509739 | 1.50% | 7 | 2.30% | 6 | 5.71% | 3.81 |
| PE | 142266 | 0.40% | 4 | 1.30% | 4 | 3.81% | 9.52 |
| NT | 43759 | 0.10% | 1 | 0.30% | 1 | 0.95% | 9.52 |
| YT | 34525 | 0.10% | 1 | 0.30% | 1 | 0.95% | 9.52 |
| NU | 33220 | 0.10% | 1 | 0.30% | 1 | 0.95% | 9.52 |
| Canada | 34108752 | 100.00% | 308 | 100.00% | 105 | 100.00% | 1 |
It is true that Alberta and BC are slightly underrepresented by population in the House of Commons. But so is Ontario. Quebec is slightly overrepresented, but hardly anything dramatic.
As the "West" includes Manitoba (MB) and Saskatchewan (SK) in the usual understanding of the term, overall the four western provinces have 31% of the population, and 29.8% of the House seats. This is the grand "left out" claim? The four provinces have less population than Ontario, and are proportionally better represented.
Now look at the Senate. Owing to some silly history, the breakdown of the Senate is particularly antiquated and the founders broke Canada into four regions, and gave each region 24 Senators. So Ontario and Quebec got 24 each, the West got 24, and the maritimes got 24. This has left the Senate in a particularly egregious state of misallocated represenation. What doesn't make sense to me, is that the West is far more underrepresented in the Senate than in the House. There the four western provinces have 22.86% of the seats. In particular why Alberta would want to empower a body that almost cuts their influence in half versus the House is tres strange no?
It is true that the old Reform party mantra on the Senate would be to make it "triple-e" which is effective, elected and equal*. Harper's bill could potentially achieve the first two (after a fashion) but has no provision for the third? What's up with that?
The only rationale that makes sense to me is one of pure ideology. Senates, all else being equal tend to be biased toward conservative politics. It's harder to get elected to the Senate, it's more prestigious, the terms are longer, and consequently Senators tend to be older, whiter, less female and richer. All of which makes one more conservative. Harper isn't trying to solve Alberta's federal under-represenation problem, he's trying to stack the deck of the Canadian system in a way that improves the outcomes for conservative ideologues. If nothing else, adding an empowered Senate just adds a veto-point to government, which means that every bill is just that much harder to pass. Every barrier you add, means some percentage of legislation will not make it into law, no matter how you compose that barrier.
I have written before of this basic asymmetry of interests that is too often ignored in simplistic analyses of "liberals versus conservatives" battling for the neutral levers of government. Conservatives, at the end of the day, are usually far more happy to just have the government do nothing. They generally represent the interests of the rich, comfortable and powerful. Such people don't need anything from government. They'll take it if they can get it, but they don't need it to pursue their interests. Such people are also by definition a minority and have much to fear from government interfering in their ability to draw undue rents from the less powerful. Knowing nothing else about the issues or system, in this calculus Conservatives would prefer a government that is harder to operate than one that is easier to use to effect change.
I know a lot of Canadians detest the idea of a bunch of pampered hacks drawing government salaries until 75 for no expectation of work. This, I think, is the core of the popularity of electing the Senate. But that's no reason to empower our Senate to interfere in the business of governing. If you don't like the hacks, the solution is simple, abolish the senate like the NDP have been saying for years. Canada hasn't needed the Senate for much up to now, what exactly is electing the Senate supposed to solve? If you resent what they cost now, just wait until they feel democratically empowered to govern.
It's important to understand this, because on the basis of the age-old western complaints, Harper's bill makes very little sense. He may hope that a rebalancing of the Senators could come down the road, but that for sure would require a constitutional amendment. The current allocation of Senators could end up being permanent. PEI has 9 times the number of Senators their population would otherwise justify. Think they're going to give up 3 Senators without a fight?
* -I detest the idea of allocating identical Senate seats to each province "equal" - I see no reason to replicate the worst aspects of the American system, where the 500,000 people of Wyoming elect the same 2 Senators that the 37,000,000 people of Califnoria get to. That's about as un-equal as you can get.
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