Senate

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There have been rumours that the Conservative majority in the Senate could block Prime Minister Trudeau’s plan reform the unpopular Anti-Terrorism Act of 2015 (“the Act”), known to most as Bill C-51. In an October 26, 2015 article by the Ottawa Citizen’s Ian MacLeod, the Conservative majority in Canada’s Upper House mentioned their plans to act with reason, common sense, and good faith to prevent any changes to the act that would make the majority of Canadians “uncomfortable.”

The subtext being that our Senate, consisting of 47 Conservatives, 29 (technically former) Liberals and 7 Independents, would be more than happy to save Trudeau from having to honour his election promise to reform the Act, an act that is perceived by many as prioritizing Islamo and Xenophobia over Charter rights in the name of national security.

Trudeau’s proposed amendments include the following:

  • The creation of an all-party joint committee of the House of Commons and Senate responsible for monitoring all activities of any government organisations such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the RCMP, responsible for enforcing Canada’s anti-terrorism laws.
  • New legislation forbidding CSIS from violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Under the Act and articles 12.1 (3) and 21.1 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, CSIS can violate the Charter to take measures to reduce a threat to national security if they get a warrant from a federal judge.
  • Clearer definitions of things like “terrorist propaganda,” currently defined under the Act as “any writing, sign, visible representation or audio recording that advocates or promotes the commission of terrorism offences in general… or counsels the commission of a terrorism offence.”
  • Ensuring that lawful protests and advocacy aren’t dubbed terrorist threats under national security law.
  • Requiring a mandatory review of the Act every three years.

These reforms, for the most part, seem to be what the country has been calling for: a reasonable approach to national security. The question is: can the Senate block a bill that would reform the Act and start the implementation of these promised changes?

In theory, yes, the Senate can. In practice, it’s not bloody likely. In order to fully understand this, we need to look at the Senate itself.

The Senate, also known as the Upper House, consists of members appointed by the Governor General of Canada on the advice of the Prime Minister. It was created as a house of “sober second thought,” protecting our country from the tyranny of the masses as represented by the elected members of the House of Commons.

The Canadian Senate chambre (image: Johnath / flickr, Creative Commons)
The Canadian Senate chambre (image: Johnath / flickr, Creative Commons)

In order for a bill to pass, it must go through the House of Commons (the House). After introduction, multiple readings, discussion, and debate, the House votes on the bill. If the bill passes, it goes to the Senate, which in turn does its share of debating, discussing, and voting. If the Senate passes the bill, it goes to the Governor General, who puts his final stamp, known as the Royal Assent on it, thus turning the bill into law.

In the beginning, no one had any problems with the Senate determining the life or death of legislation. As people became more educated and realised the magnitude of their democratic rights, the Senate’s popularity waned and with it, the legitimacy of its right to kill a bill.

Canadians are very aware that they have no say in who ends up in the Senate beyond voting for the Prime Minister who appoints Senators through the Governor General. As a result, the Senate has in turn evolved so that most laws are now given the Senate’s consent whether a majority of Senators agree with the law or not.

The Senate is HUGELY unpopular, especially in light of last March’s auditors’ report, the results of which displayed gross expenditures so scandalous HBO’s John Oliver did a three and a half minute segment on it on Last Week Tonight. The NDP has been pushing for the Senate’s abolition for years, while others have been demanding that if it’s not abolished, it should at least become an elected body like the House.

Given the Senate’s unpopularity, it is highly unlikely they will block attempts to reform C-51. The last time they blocked controversial legislation was when they killed Brian Mulroney’s attempt to re-criminalize abortion in 1990.

The Senate’s very existence is hanging on by a thread. It’s more likely that our Senators’ plans to act with reason, common sense, and good faith in the face of the proposed amendments to the Act are really just words of wisdom for our new Prime Minister.

NewsPolitics

Monday’s by-election results in four ridings (or mini-election) were not particularly memorable. But, as a federal political wonk, I have no choice but to scrutinize them to see if they have any augurs, good or bad, for the three major political players (please note that I am deliberately excluding the Green Party and Bloc from this analysis) in 2015’s Federal election.

As the old joke goes, the results of elections are never as important as what the political spin-doctors working for the winners make them out to be. Nor are they as insignificant as those working for the losers would have you believe.

First, let’s look at the winners. There can be no doubt that Justin Trudeau has plenty to crow about after his party not only maintained their strongholds in Bourassa and Toronto Centre, despite hard-fought NDP campaigns in both, but also came within 400 votes of stealing what had been previously regarded as one of the bluest riding in the country, Brandon-Souris, Manitoba.

The fact that they had a strong candidate with Tory roots (Rolf Dinsdale) certainly helped. But it’s clear that the Liberals benefited from a massive protest vote in the election most likely from both NDP (the Dipper candidate had finished second in 2011) and Conservative voters, many of whom appear to be pissed over Harper’s ongoing senate scandal. This coupled with the surprising results in Provencher (where they also finished second) seems to indicate that whatever political baggage Trudeau the Younger’s name once carried with it in Western Canada, and his tendency to alienate Western Canadians voters with various verbal blunders, is becoming less of a burden for the Liberals.

freeland mcquaig buttons

NDP strategists, on the other hand, have little to brag about after their party failed to increase its seat total in the House of Commons. While many dippers may be genuinely upset over Trudeau’s seriously tacky appropriation of Jack Layton’s now legendary deathbed address to his fellow Canadians, more cynical politicos will probably tell you that the party’s outrage over the victory speech quote probably had something to do with their desire to shift the focus of the media away from some fairly dismal election night results.

Bourassa may never have truly been within reach for the NDP (after all, it did belong to our new Mayor Denis ‘trade Deharnais’ Coderre for the better part of the last 16 years), but they definitely expected a closer contest in the Montreal North riding where they witnessed a huge growth in their vote share last time around with an unknown candidate and hardly any electioneering. Better news came out of Toronto Centre where star candidate Linda McQuaig did a bang-up job of challenging her Liberal rival, Christy Freeland, and came a close second in the final tally. Should she choose to return in 2011 after the riding is split into three, with the Rosedale (one of the wealthiest in neighbourhoods in Canada) portion forming a new separate riding, she would most likely win it.

The biggest losers though, arguably, were the Harper Tories. Not only did their fortress in Manitoba come under formidable siege from the Grits, but they suffered a historic defeat in Toronto Centre, with their worst finish in history, and a terrible showing in Bourassa.

The conventional political wisdom about by-elections is that they are won or lost based your ability to motivate the base. This is surely bad news for Conservatives in the next Federal election. In Brandon (a quintessentially western rural riding if ever there was one) , where the party used to be able to count on overwhelming support, their voters seem to have either stayed away from the polls in droves, or worse, voted Liberal.

Prime Minister Harper must now face the music: his political shenanigans involving the Senate are starting to take their toll on his party.

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Last week’s RCMP bombshell dump revealed a few things about the private e-mails of PMO staff and their counterparts in the Senate. For the dozen or so Harper administration staffers, lawyers and spin doctors, the documents give the Canadian public a rare glimpse of the way that the ultra-secretive Harper government operates in a major political crisis.

Though they do not vindicate the Prime Minister or corroborate his wildly implausible story of being completely unaware of what his chief of staff, Nigel Wright, was doing in his attempts to contain the damage being done to the Prime Minister’s brand by Senator and former Harper bagman Mike Duffy’s various acts of fraud. They do not provide the smoking gun type of evidence that would expose the Prime Minister as the mastermind behind botched efforts to put the corruption scandal to bed.

This doesn’t mean Harper’s out of the woods yet. On the contrary, the now infamous Wright quote that his boss was “good to go,” with respect to negotiations he was having involving both the PM’s lawyer Benjamin Perrin & Duffy’s lawyer Allison Payne on the conditions that would be acceptable to all parties concerned, would suggest that there is definitely some fire to go with all the smoke coming out of the Prime Minister’s office at the moment.

While it may still be true (though this would not excuse Harper’s ignorance of the situation) that the Prime Minister had no clue that his right hand man at the time was cutting a $90 000 personal cheque to silence an embarrassing Senator and in the process committing a crime under federal law, it seems that Harper at least knew about the first proposed solution Wright made to pay, out of Conservative Party funds, Duff-man 32K in order to reimburse him for the amount that was being demanded by the Senate Rules committee for illegally claimed expenses related to his secondary residence in PEI. This idea was eventually nixed by President of the party and Senator appointed by Harper in 2009, Irving Gerstein, forcing Wright to find an alternative to, in his words, “close out” an increasingly irksome problem and Senator (Duffy).

Duff-man may be proclaiming his innocence from the bully pulpit, but the documents released by the RCMP make it clear that he was not simply the victim of bad accounting and a vindictive Prime Minister more than happy to throw him and his other former Senate cronies under the bus. In fact, it’s almost hard not to sympathize with Wright who appears to have become rather impatient with the Senator and his lawyer’s constant haggling with the PMO over the terms of his bail out.

More to the point, Duff-man appears to have hatched a cover story involving taking out a line of credit from the bank with the intention of duping the media and public into believing that the this, rather than the cheque from Wright, would be used to repay the Senate. Incidentally, I love Duffy’s cynical insistence on inserting “PEI-isms” into the media lines he was given to deliver.

It’s not all bad news for the government. It appears that at least one staffer, Chris Montgomery, working for then Government leader in the Senate and Cabinet Minister Senator Marjory Lebreton (remember her infamous lashing out at the media over reporting on the scandal as “Liberal elites and their media lickspittles”) tried in vain to prevent the Prime Minister and his minions from imposing their will on the damning Senate Committee report that would have denounced Duffy and his colleagues for their financial recklessness with the tax payer’s money. For this display of integrity, Montgomery earned the scorn of Harper lackey Patrick Rogers who is quoted in the e-mail as saying “This is epic. Montgomery is the problem.”

Indeed, defending the independence of the Senate and democratic institutions against the meddling of the executive is regarded by Harper and his staff as an unforgivable sin.

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To say that Harper has a Senate problem is rather like saying that Walter White, from the hugely popular TV show Breaking Bad, has a crystal-meth problem. That is to say, that it understates the severity of the situation to a ridiculous degree. The Federal Conservatives and the Prime Minister, in particular, have been in full crisis mode since the Members of Parliament returned from their extended summer recess last week.

Their problems are caused by two separate but intertwined issues. Both touch on the legitimacy of the unelected, unaccountable and scandal-prone institution that is occasionally referred to as the upper-house of sober second thought.

The first has to do with the growing uproar of fraudulent expense claims made by three Harper appointees (read cronies) and one Chretien era Liberal (Mac Harb) who has since retired. The second problem is on account of a half-assed bill ( C-7) that is designed to reform the Senate by introducing two measures that might make the body slightly less undemocratic by allowing willing provinces to elect their Senators and limit their term in office to nine years. The latter may be overshadowed by the sexier Duffy-gate (apologies for the lazy Watergate reference) but is arguably more important, constitutionally speaking.

wallin-duffy

Duffy, Wallin and, to a lesser extent, Brazeau have all pushed back against Harper’s attempts to throw them under the bus, mainly from the Senate floor or in the media. First the “Honourable” Mike Duffy lashed out at his former political masters with a series of shocking revelations about how personally involved Harper was in the damage control strategy that appears to have been cooked up by his then Chief of Staff Nigel Wright.

The Prime Minister vehemently denies this charge, suggesting instead that he had no knowledge of the $90 000 bailout for Duffy arranged by his former lawyer Benjamin Perrin and Mr. Wright. Harper also claims that he never read Mr. Duffy the riot act nor did he threaten to expel him from the caucus if he didn’t resign first. Duffman only left the party because Harper’s former staffer Ray Novak and former Senate majority leader Ms. LeBreton leaned on him and let him know he’d get the boot if he didn’t fall on his own sword publicly.

Senator Pam Wallin also refuses to go out like a punk. She alleges that former Tory colleagues, senators LeBreton and Carolyn Stewart Olsen, acting on behalf of the PM, orchestrated a campaign of leaks and the Senate Internal Economy Committee report (the body tasked with investigating Wallin’s expenses) was designed to tarnish her good name and intimidate her into complying with Harper’s wishes. She has since resigned from Conservative caucus but denies any fraud, claiming that she made an honest mistake in filing her expense claims. Wallin’s only crime: in her words, she was simply being an “activist senator” (note: the term activist mean something completely different in the over-privileged world of the Senate).

In the meantime, Harper’s feeble attempt at Senate reform appears to be going down the tubes. Last year, the Charest government submitted a reference to the Quebec Court of Appeals (the highest court in the province) in response to the Federal government’s attempts to change the Senate through the back door (a.k.a Bill C-7). Last Thursday, the Quebec court ruled Harper’s move unconstitutional.

The gist of the Court’s legal smack down is that the Feds are obliged to consult the provinces on a matter as important this and cannot make a substantive change to the constitution by means of a simple federal statute. Finally, any such process would be subject to the dreaded 7/50 formula found in section 38 (1) (B) which requires seven provinces representing at least 50 % of the Federation to ratify any proposed changes.

As the court said in its opinion, “they (the Feds) cannot circumvent it on the pretext that the constitutional amending process is complex or demanding.” This may not be the kibosh on Harpers plans, but when the Supreme Court of Canada hears the matter in Mid-November, the Quebec decision will definitely carry a lot of weight, and make it even harder for the justices to find in favour of the Federal government’s position.

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This post originally appeared on QuietMike.org, republished with permission from the author

The main promises Stephen Harper made during his 2006 campaign were to reform Canada’s Senate and make our government more accountable. So far, mission failed.

Harper said at the time that if Senate reform failed, it should be dismantled. Back then, Harper’s vision of the senate completely Americanized our upper chamber.

Harper wanted to see an elected senate with a maximum term limit of eight years. This would no doubt have led to the same partisan stalemates we see in Washington.

Harper’s initial stab at senate reform was shot down by the Liberals in the Senate who dominated the chamber when the Conservatives first came to power. However, shortly after their majority win in 2011 they introduced bill C-7, also known as the Senate Reform Act. The bill would limit Senators to a nine-year term and would allow the provinces to hold elections to choose their representatives.

senators1

Instead of passing the bill through parliament which hasn’t even been debated in 15 months, the Conservative government asked the Supreme Court of Canada to look at the constitutional requirements for five possible options for Senate reform:

• Fixed-term Senate appointments

• Repealing the property qualifications required to become a senator

• A system in which the federal government consults the provinces, but still appoints senators at a national level

• A system in which the provinces choose their own senators

• Abolishing the Senate altogether

The Canadian Senate was created with the intention of having a “place of sober second thought” before bills become law. Unfortunately some politicians serving in the senate, past and present, have come to respect the upper chamber as a place of second income.

There are so many problems with our senate the least of which are the senate expense scandals. Whether we keep the status quo by appointing our senators or we choose to elect them, the senate has no business in a parliamentary democracy.

We presently appoint our senators which is anti-democratic to begin with. We elect our members of parliament to the House of Commons to write our laws and table our budgets. It’s ridiculous to think the people we elect can be overruled by those who were not.

But what is the alternative, an American style election for senators that could grind parliament to a halt just the same? Let’s not forget to mention the added cost of holding the elections in the first place. Those of you who think this works need only look south of the border.

Even the notion of limiting the number of years a senator can serve is counterproductive and could cost the tax payers more money in pensions. Our MPs and Prime Minister can serve as long as the population chooses to keep them in office, if it isn’t broken, why fix it, right?

The senate is and has always been an elitist institution. Elected or not, there has been a law in place for the last 145 years that stipulates that a senator must own $4000 worth of land. It isn’t much compared to 1867, but if you rent your home, you cannot sit in the senate.

Canadian-Senate-Cartoon (1)

The senate is broken and in my opinion beyond repair, it doesn’t work, it costs too much money and it gets in the way of governing the country. I’m not the only one who believes this historically useless establishment should go the way of the Dodo. Over 40% of Canadians now feel the senate should meet its end, although the number might be fueled a little by the expense scandals.

Some of the most successful parliamentary democracies in the world do not have an upper chamber or a senate including every Scandinavian country (Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark). Advancement thrives in these progressive countries because there is no second House to obstruct it. Why do we need to be different?

There are those in Canada who insist on defending the Senate because they care about our history and about Canada’s links to the British parliament (which were severed decades ago). Quite frankly, the Canadian senate is as useful to the Canadian people as the Queen of England, but at least the Queen only costs us the salary of one Governor General.