When Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced he’d stop appointing people to the senate, there was briefly a sigh of relief, because he was clearly bad at doing it. The majority of the high profile senators in the expense scandal were appointed under his watch. Following that, one realized that he actually doesn’t have much interest in doing any reforms to the senate at all, it’s a move for appearances sake that is also the easy way out.
Here’s the issue, like it or not you need all the provinces on board if you’re throwing the senate away. In order to make a real impact on the operation senate, he would have to start working with every province to either get rid of it altogether – which requires everyone’s support – or do substantial reforms – which still requires most provinces. That’s fine, it’s how massive changes to the constitution should work, and if you can’t get the people on board you probably shouldn’t be making big changes to the constitution of your country.
The senate is unpopular at the moment, so in the run up to the 2015 election Harper is trying to position himself as taking a hard line, convince people that he’s going to do something about the senate. That he’s doing this by actually doing nothing about the senate is a bold play, similar to a teenager watching their little sister by leaving them in a different room with a TV and no other supervision, then demanding some kind of credit for how responsible they are being.
The tactic is illegal, discarding the senate through atrophy is still discarding the senate, and that requires going through the provinces, something which Harper clearly knows. It’s not the loophole he thinks it is, because everyone knows what he’s trying to do. Given that the senate is unpopular, it probably would be possible to get sweeping reforms through going to the provinces, but that’s hard, and Harper is much more concerned with setting himself up for the next election than he is about actually doing anything that requires real work.
It’s a case of ignoring what people want whether or not they actually agree with him. If everyone wants to get rid of the senate, that’s fine, pose the question to the Canadian people and it’s gone. If people want something akin to the senate but maybe a bit less prone to abusing their expense account, that’s fine, go to them and you can make it happen. Both of those alternatives would require a great deal of work, but with that work you would at least be doing properly and in a manner that is supported by Canadian law. By taking the lazy way out, it’s an insult to everyone. It’s an insult to the constitution, which outlines how we do these things, it’s an insult to the Supreme Court, which also clearly outlined the rules, and it’s an insult to the people of this country, who by law should be consulted.
Canada is not a dictatorship, whatever Harper might want, and this is part of the reason why provincial support is a necessary part of making massive changes to the way the country is run. To try to do a runaround in order to avoid this is the cowardly play by someone who doesn’t actually have any interest in the people of the country that elected him. Even those who agree with senate reform should be offended by this middle finger to the people.
