“What,” I asked, “is the purpose of the Senate?” I well remember his reply. Pick, as he was universally known, drew himself up to his full height of 5 foot 6 or so and said to me with his nasal twang: “Young man, the Senate is a humane garbage disposal.” More kindly, he went on to explain that cabinet deadwood had to be cleared out for new timber, and a Senate post was a sort of golden parachute.

But there is much more to the Senate than that, as I came to learn over years in politics and especially while researching and writing the report Challenges in Senate Reform in 2004. There have been and are excellent senators. The Red Chamber has tackled so many difficult issues that elected politicians dared not touch – early discussion of marijuana legalization and real reform to medicare, for example.

It has forced elections when prime ministers arguably moved too quickly – as in the case of the 1988 free-trade election. Current abortion law (or lack thereof) is a Senate creation. When John Diefenbaker arbitrarily fired Bank of Canada governor James Coyne, the Senate called the prime minister to account. And Brian Mulroney could only get his reviled Goods and Services Tax through Parliament by stacking the Senate (as the Constitution allowed him to do) with temporary appointments. But it is in committees, caucus and the back rooms where most of the work is done. For better or for worse – mostly for better – the Senate has had a profound if mostly unseen impact on Canadian governance.

This is exactly as the framers of our Constitution intended. They wanted an upper house, common to virtually all federations like Canada, to be influential but not dominant. We do not have in Canada the deadlocks that are so common south of the border, where there are two elected chambers. And the framers wanted an upper house that would be more thoughtful, less partisan and less moved by the popular emotion of the day. They got both those things.

Today many would-be Senate reformers really want to attack two of the evils of our federation, namely insufficient oversight of an all-powerful Prime Minister by the people’s representatives and sometimes inadequate regional representation. They see the Senate as the best and easiest place to achieve these worthy goals, but it is neither.

They have the wrong target. The Senate is effectively impossible to reform properly – i.e., changing the number of seats per province – and merely making it elected would be a disaster. Election would confer democratic legitimacy. And then the overwhelming numerical dominance of Quebec and the Atlantic provinces would turn the Senate into a one-way conveyor belt of money from the richer parts of Canada. Plus, a “democratic” Senate would feel empowered to block the House, yielding blackmail and/or deadlock.

Compare the two chambers. The Senate costs about one penny per day per Canadian, the House about four times as much. The Senate does better committee work by far. House committees are nothing but an extension of Commons warfare, so apparent in the silliness of Question Period. The Senate is less partisan.

The place to reform is the House. Prime Minister Stephen Harper can make it happen because at the moment, through iron party discipline, he controls everything in the Commons. This newspaper has just completed a series detailing various reforms. These would empower MPs (and therefore those of us who elect them), give genuine representation and constrain the Prime Minister. No bad thing.

Mr. Harper, you want reform? Forget the Senate. (Except to make better appointments.) Reform the House. Failure to do so suggests more than a whiff of doubletalk.

ggibson@bc-home.com

Published February 23, 2013

http://www.samaracanada.com/

In today’s Redesigning Parliament post, professor and author Maxwell A. Cameron says it’s time to enforce/create rules that remove power from the Prime Minister’s Office and ensure it stays in the hands of individual MPs.

How might we redesign parliament for the 21st century?  We can begin by asking what we expect or want from parliament.  My own view is that parliamentary government is not well understood and, therefore, it might be wise to elucidate the principles and aims that are already inherent in our institution, and then see if we can make them work better.

The essence of our system of government is captured by the phrase “parliamentary supremacy.”  Today, however, parliament is anything but supreme.

Parliamentary supremacy is the idea that parliament is the source of all legislation.  Where our system and presidentialism differ is that the executive branch is selected by the parliament.  In principle, this means that the executive is embedded within a larger and more important collegial body.  But over time the tail has come to wag the dog.  Power has gradually been concentrated—first in the cabinet, and now, increasingly, in the office of the Prime Minister.  The main source of this inversion of power is the modern political party.

Today, parliament is a pathetic semblance of its former self.  It is an electoral college that chooses the government, which then governs with scarcely any concern for parliamentary debate or procedure.  MPs are well-trained yes men and women who do what their party leaders tell them.  They have little say over committee assignments, few free votes, and, what is worse, they devote precious little effort to legislation.

The inversion of power has come about because parties—which are increasingly PR firms devoted to permanent campaigns for office—control MPs from the moment they are nominated until the day they retire from public life.   MPs are more accountable to their party leaders than to the voters.  And voters are fed up.

So, if our aim is to restore parliament to some semblance of its former glory, what kinds of measure might we adopt?   To restore the supremacy of parliament would require the empowerment of ordinary MPs.  There are many measures that could move us in this direction.  They include more free votes, more opportunities for ordinary MPs to submit legislation, more power in the hands of MPs to decide committee assignments and distribute other perks, more power to select the cabinet and remove the leader, and more influence in decisions like prorogation.

The corollary would be less power in the hands of the Prime Minister.  Less power to use confidence votes to discipline the house and caucus, restrictions on the power to dissolve the house, elimination of the routine use of time limits to shut down debate, tough rules to stop the abuse of omnibus laws, less influence over perks, assignments, and appointments, and less control over nominations.

The bottom line: parliamentary supremacy, the cornerstone of our system, demands that we clip the wings of the office of the Prime Minister.  The alternative is a slide toward elective autocracy.

Maxwell A. Cameron is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UBC. He is the author of Democracy and Authoritarianism in Peru (St. Martin’s 1994), and co-author of The Making of NAFTA: How the Deal Was Done (Cornell, 2000). Between March and June 2006, Cameron served as political advisor to Lloyd Axworthy, Chief of the Electoral Observation Mission of the Organization of American States in Peru. In 2011 he convened a public conversation at UBC on “Why don’t (more) good people enter politics?”