Apolitical Staples

Will Dion whip his BC MPs to vote against this idea? I can’t see it. The Liberals don’t care about Alberta, but they do care about BC ridings. They aren’t going to write off the province that gets the worse deal in Canada with regards to electoral representation. Senate/Electoral reform always resonants in BC. In the past, they have supported elections for Senators plus the Charlottetown referendum.

This will pass the HofC.

All the opposition parties are in awkward positions.

The Bloc obviously supports referendums. How can they argue for another referendum for Quebec, but none for the RofC?

The NDP supported referendums on Charlottetown and the BC Electoral Reform referendum. They are now going to oppose a plebiscite on Senate Reform? Doubt it.

If any one one of the 3 oppostion parties caves in on this issue, the plebiscite legislation passes with dissident Liberal MP support. Dion will never whip his BC MPs on this one.

So you’re confronted with the fact that a branch of the federal government is an expensive and quite useless nuisance.

You see two possible solutions:

1) Get rid of it and save the country money.

2) Turn the relatively small nuisance into a vast, powerful and extremely expensive nuisance.

Option (2) sounds like a great way to accelerate the growth of government. Which would decrease the time until the Canadian government collapses under its own weight and is consigned to the dustbins of history - probably to be replaced with smaller, more accountable and less insufferably pretentious entities. I like it! But just give me a couple of more years to increase my portfolio of foreign investments, okay? I want to have a nice, comfortable seat as I watch the Canadian political parties burn through their inheritance in record time.

If the Liberals are as supportive of the idea of Senate reform as they say, then why not table a plan towards that goal? If Harper’s plan sucks as bad as they say, put forth a better one. Otherwise, they support the status quo, just like Harper says.

However, all this talk of change might be a bit pointless, since I’m not sure if I see Harper’s bill ever seeing the light of day. For one thing, there are too many arguments against it for Liberals senators to pass up a chance at killing it over and over and over again. For another, Harper might need a majority in the House to pass it there, a goal that doesn’t appear as easy as it was a few months ago.

This is such a stupid “reform” idea, I suspect all the opposition parties will have no trouble defending themselves if the oppose it. The question is, how will Harper defend cementing the numerical status quo in the Senate which favours PEI against Alberta and BC? How will Harper explain it to the Ontario and Quebec governments which both have come out against the idea of unilateral reform of the Senate?

Regarding regional imbalance, it already exists. Harper is changing the most important flaw of the Senate: its undemocratic nature. Frankly, I believe that once you change that, the rest will eventually fall into place.

Regarding McGuinty and Charest, I don’t think it matters. Since Harper has decided to table federal legislation to hold plebiscites run by Elections Canada, all McGuinty and Charest can do is watch. The provincial governments are cut out of the process. At least that’s my understanding of the bill.

Of course, that’s assuming this bill will eventually pass Parliament, which is a significant enough of a hurdle in itself.

The senate is a great candidate for abolition or for proportional representation within provinces. The status quo is a piece of crap.

The House of Lords looks like a democratic masterpiece these days in comparison - but then the HoL couldn’t hold up animal cruelty bills like the Senate did because Tony Blair has the Parliament Acts.

Getting the ball rolling is important. Progressives are well aware of the value of continuous incremental changes; those who object are very worried.

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