Bill 55 Senatorial Amendment Act
Ms Blakeman:
Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. In January of 1992 I was one of the people that was selected from many across Canada to participate in one of the five Shaping Canada constitutional forums that were sponsored by the then Progressive Conservative federal government. I attended the conference in Calgary which was charged with exploring alternatives for institutions, including the Senate.
The five conferences were the federal-provincial division of powers, which was held in Halifax; the Senate, which was held in Calgary; the economic union, held in Montreal; the distinct society, the Canada clause, and the Charter, which was in Toronto; and a concluding conference in Ontario. I had actually wanted to attend one of the other ones, but now many years later I am actually very grateful that I was able to attend the one on the Senate because I think that more than anything it has continued to stay alive.
When I’d gone back and looked at some of the proposals that we were examining at the time, one of the examples in front of me, an article written by David Elkins from a magazine called The Network, which was a newsletter of the Network on the Constitution, talks about Australia having a triple-E Senate that was elected, equal, and effective and had been since the country’s official creation in 1901 and about what experiences we could draw from that.
But the method of electing the Senators was incredibly important, and what was put before us was that the first past the post system used for a senatorial election is not effective. All it does, actually, is entrench a particular kind of partisanship, and it very much affects the kinds of interests that get represented, and that ultimately affects the functioning of the Senate. So the single transferable vote was the preferred method there.
What’s written in here is that the moral is that if you favour quick, decisive action by government, then abolish the Senate. But if you value compromise enough to endure the conflicts between House and Senate which this new legitimacy will bring, then reform the Senate [partly] by making it elected. We look at: what are the key elements of this?
One of my frustrations with this government’s approach toward the Senate is in choosing simply one piece of Senate reform. It entrenches a whole series of things that are really quite unpalatable and which I find it surprising the government would be supportive of. In fact, it entrenches these very things by simply taking the system that is in place and electing members over top of that. What we need to look at is a whole package of things.
I spent five days in Calgary in 1992 looking at what this package needs to contain. It needs to look, particularly, at the distribution of the number of Senate seats. It needs to look at the process to change, which is the constitutional amending formula. It needs to look at the equality of the Senate. What is the purpose of the Senate seats? We have Members of Parliament who are elected on a geographic basis to represent the interests of the people that live in a geographic boundary.
The idea of the Senate seats was always meant to work with a much larger constituency or issue base or interest base. Originally it started out with a sort of regional flavour to it, but if we are going to reform the Senate, it brought into play a number of other, more modern concepts that were open for us.
When I look at Bill 55, the government’s bill to open up their Senate bill again – and, really, all it’s doing is extending the dates so that they don’t have to deal with this right now – I’m disappointed because I’ve always seen Senate reform as a huge opportunity for which there is no uptake right now. That’s disappointing because there are lots of possibilities that we could work with in Canada to help refresh our democracy and to possibly do some pretty interesting things.
The current amending formula that was being worked with at that time – it’s actually still in place – was unanimous consent for the provisions referred to in section 41, the consent of Parliament for certain provisions relating to the national government, consent of the provincial Legislature for those provisions relating to the provinces, and consent of Parliament and the provinces relating to provisions applicable to more than one province, et cetera, et cetera.
The Meech Lake accord would have made two changes. The unanimous support of Parliament and the Legislative Assemblies of all the provinces would have been required for amendment of a number of additional matters such as Senate reform and the creation of new provinces, which currently require the consent of Parliament and two-thirds of the Legislative Assemblies for amendment. Compensation would have been provided to a province opting out of any amendment transferring provincial legislative power to the Parliament. None of this is simple stuff. It all requires a fair amount of hard work.
What were the pieces that we were looking at? Well, number one was that the Senate should not replicate the patterns of representation that were already present in the House of Commons. Another point of real contention was whether the Senate would be allowed to deal with what’s called money bills. We deal with that issue in this Assembly because, essentially, a private member’s bill, which covers anyone that’s not in Executive Council and not a minister – we can’t bring forward any private bill that has anything to do with money. Essentially, the question was around the Senate: would a money bill category be immune from Senate scrutiny?
Really, when you look at it, money bills account for between one-half and three quarters of the House of Commons business, so not allowing the Senate to consider money bills actually gave them not very much to be dealing with. That was another big piece of what we were looking at. Those powers came into play in a number of ways. We were looking at Senate powers regarding normal legislation, regarding money bills, on ratifying appointments, on constitutional amendments, on the role of language and culture legislation. Could the Senate introduce money bills, never mind commenting on them but actually introduce a money bill, and could the Senate defeat the government? Those were the issues that we were contemplating.
Where it really started to come home to me was when we looked at what would be entrenched. When I hear the talk about a triple-E Senate, which was very big at the time, what really frustrated me was that I looked at where we were, and I thought: boy, if this is all we did, all we do is entrench an unfairness to my province; why on earth would we willingly do that? Here’s the distribution that we have: P.E.I. has four Senate seats, Newfoundland has six, New Brunswick has 10, Nova Scotia has 10, Saskatchewan has six, Manitoba has six, Alberta has six, B.C. has six, Quebec has 24, and Ontario has 24. If we just went with what’s in front of us with the government’s proposal for electing Senators, we’re forever entrenched with six Senators. Why on earth would we do that to ourselves?
A big piece of senatorial reform, which is the larger picture, is trying to figure out what should be the distribution of seats. We spent a long time on this. We looked at all kinds of possible distributions. The elected and effective, the triple-E Senate that you hear people talk about, would have basically assigned 10 seats to every single province, so we would have had P.E.I. having 10 seats and Alberta having 10 seats. Well, make that one work for me. Or if you came from Ontario or Quebec or B.C., imagine how you’d feel knowing that you had 10 seats, so did Alberta, and so did P.E.I. I don’t believe that the idea of absolute, equal seats as a distribution was a very realistic or helpful way of looking at Senate reform considering all the other possibilities.
You know, folks, this information is available from me if you want to see it. But there were all kinds of possibilities that were considered, going from sort of six seats each for everybody except for Quebec and Ontario, who got 10, to a sort of six, 12, 18, and 24 formula, that moved from the smallest to the largest with that allocation, or one that had six for P.E.I., 12 for everybody except for 24 for Quebec and Ontario. You can see that there are all kinds of possibilities, depending on how you’re trying to sort that out.
If you start with the idea that you’re expecting Senators to not represent people on a geographic basis, that you’re trying to get them to represent either on regional issues – or what I was interested in was representation from other constituency groups. One of the other things that we kept looking at was a certain number of the seats that were set aside and designated for aboriginal representation. I’m pretty sure we were looking at 5 per cent. Of course, the discussion that went along with that is, “Okay; if it’s 5 per cent for aboriginals and that’s representative of their population base in Canada at the time, we should be saying 50 per cent for women,” which, of course, I was very much in favour of.
You also start to work in some of those other mixes like new Canadians or representation from particular cultural groups that are heavily invested in Alberta. You could be very creative and imaginative. This is a huge opportunity to bring other voices into our chambers of decision, to have those voices represented at the table or at the Senate desk to be able to comment on the legislation that was proceeding through those two Houses. To me, I saw it as a huge opportunity to engage more of our population in this and to have those voices amplified and represented in the House. I was really excited by this concept, and clearly I still am. But you’re not going to get that until you deal with how the seats are distributed, and just saying 10, 10, 10 across the board doesn’t work, as far as I’m concerned.
While I was in favour of elected Senates – fine by me – you have to deal with a system that is not a first past the post system, or you just entrench everything. If you’re going to elect, you need to look at your electoral system. You absolutely have to deal with how the Senate seat distribution goes. In order to do that, you must change the amending formula for the Constitution about who gets to weigh in on this. There was quite a good formula that was looked at. I think it was a 7-50, so it had seven of the provinces representing 50 per cent of the population. The idea was that you couldn’t just have Ontario and Quebec gang up together and amend the Constitution and leave everybody else out. It had to be seven provinces representing 50 per cent of the population, which I thought was a pretty good formula. I was willing to sign on to that one. Clearly, I still am.
The scope of the Senate power, which I talked about earlier. Would they be able to comment or debate on money bills? Could they even introduce money bills? Could they be involved in ratification of appointments and that kind of thing? What would be the scope of what they did? There were lots of possibilities here, but the triple-E just didn’t do that. Triple-E is really the most basic approach to senatorial reform and, forgive me for saying, the one with the least amount of flair and creativity to it. Canada is a creative country. We are an innovative country. I’d like to see more innovation brought to this debate than that triple-E.
This is the one that I’m referring to, the one that was developed by McCormick, Manning, and Gibson in their book Regional Representation and then reiterated by Alberta’s select committee on senatorial reform in 1985. “Strict equality of the provinces in the form of identical numbers of Senators . . . The Senate should represent . . . populations . . . purely and single-mindedly.”
[Ms Blakeman’s speaking time expired]
I’m out of time.
[Ms Blakeman’s speaking time expired]
I’m out of time.
The Deputy Speaker:
Hon. Member for Edmonton-Riverview, we have five minutes for questions.
Dr. Taft:
Yes. I was absolutely intrigued by the member’s comments, and I’m wondering if she had anything else to say.
The Deputy Speaker:
The hon. Member for Edmonton-Centre.
Ms Blakeman:
Well, clearly I did, so thank you for that. I was just talking about the triple-E Senate. I wanted to close off on that because I think it was the most basic approach to senatorial reform. It just looked at absolute, identical numbers of Senators. It looked at an election but did not comment on any kind of electoral reform, so it would end up using a first past the post system. In fact, we have had, I think, one set or two sets of senatorial elections in Alberta, and that’s exactly what they did. They just dumped it onto the municipalities and said: go ahead and run it exactly the same way. We had no innovation there.
For the scope of it they actually moved back a step because once again it was to be done on an absolute representation of the provincial population. The criticism that was brought forward during the debates that I attended was in the way it would be applied to the ratios. I’ve already pointed out the differences between Ontario, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island. Really, that’s brought home by the fact that there are probably a dozen Ontario municipalities that have more population than Prince Edward Island in its entirety. We have to have buy-in from the population when we do things like this, and that kind of ratio just does not get buy-in. It becomes laughable to people.
I think there’s great possibility in senatorial reform. There’s lots to talk about inside of all those categories that I outlined for you. It was a very exciting opportunity to go and spend five days with a diversity of people from across the country talking about Senate reform. I’m disappointed that it never went any further because I think it should, but I don’t see that creativity or anything else involved in the bill that’s before us.
Thank you.
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