Reflections on the path to Senate reform.

• Author: Joyal, Serge

In a speech to the Senate in 1982 Eugene Forsey noted that "almost from the morrow of Confederation, there has been talk of Senate reform, so much so that when, in 1925, Prime Minister Mackenzie King put into his election platform a characteristically vague promise on the subject, Arthur Meighen, the Conservative leader, commented scornfully: `So that old bird is to be provided with wooden wings and told to fly again!'"

This article looks at the question of Senate Reform and suggests how reform can best be approached over the next few years.

Scarcely seven years after Confederation, the Senate of Canada was already the target of criticism and calls for its reform. On April 12, 1874 the House of Commons considered the following resolution by David Mills, subsequently Minister of Justice and Member of the Supreme Court:

"That the present mode of constituting the Senate is inconsistent with the Federal principle in our system of government, makes the Senate alike independent of the people, and of the Crown, and is in other material respects defective, and our Constitution ought to be so amended as to confer upon each Province the power of selecting its own Senators, and of defining the mode of their election."(l)

Mr. Mills, though among the first, would certainly not be the last Canadian to call for reform of the Senate. Indeed, in the 118 years that followed his motion(2), the Senate became the lightning rod for the discontents and growing pains of Canadian federalism. To some extent Senate reform has come to represent a panacea to the difficulties first of building, and then of sustaining, a vast and disparate federation.

Federalism, by its very nature, embodies an element of tension between the opposing forces of unity on the one hand, and demands for regional recognition or "diversities", on the other.(3) In the case of Canadian federalism, this tension has been a defining feature of Canadian national politics. A reformed Senate is perceived as the singular federal institution through which that defining tension might be exorcised, or at least assuaged -- the improbable fulcrum across which regional antagonisms and federal-provincial aggravations might be weighed and resolved.

And yet, despite all the proposals for Senate reform, there has been very little consensus as to what that institution should be and, what if anything, it should do. In fairness, the question of the constitution and powers of second chambers is not an easy one.

How to constitute a Second Chamber based on any direct form of responsibility which, at the same time, would contain the `checks and balances' which even the most democratic nations consider necessary to give stability and continuity to popular government has been the Gordian knot of the world's statesmen.(4)

Canada's situation is not unique. "The reality is that, whatever the reason, senate reform is a perennial item on the political agenda of parliamentary democracies ..."(5) The Senate of France is presently the focus of a reform proposal(6), and in the United Kingdom the reform of the House of Lords is the object of a study by a Royal Commission.

There has, however, been one enduring and consistent element of the Senate reform `movement'? the assumption that effective, meaningful reform of the Senate would require a constitutional amendment. This has been the prevailing and unquestioned wisdom. Add to the absence of consensus, the extreme difficulty of amending the Canadian Constitution, and we see immediately why the Senate has remained fundamentally unaltered since 1867. Despite endless criticism, repeated historical calls for reform and even abolition, there have been only two significant changes to the constitutional provisions for the Senate: the establishment of a retirement age in 1965; and the qualification of the requirement for the consent of the Senate under the constitutional amending formula adopted in 1982. Indeed, we might say that the existing Senate was validated as recently as 1982, when the chance for constitutional change was not pursued.

In the past thirty years alone, there have been at least 26 proposals for Senate reform. Each of these ended in...