Let's abolish the senate

 

And why a referendum? According to Segal, the Senate is "democratically completely illegitimate." A referendum would embrace "the rather democratic notion that governments work for the people... as opposed to the other way round."

 

Intriguingly, Segal says that if he does finesse a referendum on the Senate's future, he'll immediately campaign against abolition. He believes senators should be elected, so he'll pitch that the "reform" box be checked off on the ballot.  

Of course, the brick wall in front of him is that it's all but impossible to abolish the Senate, no matter the voters say about it. The constitution mandates that every province would have to agree to an amendment on fundamentally changing the Senate. Quebec for sure would refuse, and likely other provinces as well.

 

But Segal thinks that if the referendum tally was 50 plus 1 nationally in favour of, let's say, abolition, and if the same 50 plus 1 held true in every province, then it would be a bit gauche for a province to blatantly ignore the will of the people and run to the courts. Discussions about the Senate, he says, have always been an "elite game" played by premiers, senate reformers and judges. Why not have the Senate introduce a referendum on its future? After all, he says, "we work for a group called the taxpayers."

 

Senator Segal says he'll re-introduce his motion on a referendum "soon," just to have it on the books. He won't push the motion any further though, until Stephen Harper follows through with his senate reform proposals, which might be introduced first in the Senate itself and which Segal can't imagine why he wouldn't support.

 

Harper campaigned on senate reform, but he's said in the past that if reform fails, he'd be for abolition. And so, if a province launches a court challenge to attempt to block reform, Segal's plan is to have his referendum proposal in his back pocket. "It's a belts and suspenders approach so that democracy has a role."

 

The notion of an elected Senate doesn't sit well with Ned Franks, a constitutional expert at Queen's University.

He worries about the almost unbridled power the Senate possesses: the only curb is that the Senate can't kill money bills. An elected, feeling-its-oats Senate might want to flex its muscle.

 

For Franks "the whole discussion is a waste of time." He believes the Senate is the most talked about political institution, but all that chatter is like "medieval discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

 

Franks does like senators. They're "smarter and meaner" on committees he sometimes appears before, and, he says, they're generally better educated and more experienced in just about everything than MPs. And "they're incomparably less partisan." Still, he'd vote for abolition over reform.

"What constituencies are not represented?" Franks asks, meaning none. Provinces, he  points out, rely on provincial-federal negotiations to deal with the federal government, and no provincial government would allow a senator to fulfill that role now.

There's one more thing on Senator Segal's to-do list this session. He has to once again sign an affidavit proving that he owns property worth at least $4,000. It's a quaint and funny tradition dating back to the 19th century, but that amount adjusted to today's dollars would mean only millionaires could sit in the Senate, which was the original intention. This wouldn't change much if senators had to run for election, especially for terms lasting 8 to even 12 years. One senator says she couldn't afford to run for the Senate.