The Senate and the People of Canada--A Counterintuitive Approach to Reform of the Senate of Canada.

• Author: Stilborn, Jack
• Position: Book review

The Senate and the People of Canada--A Counterintuitive Approach to Reform of the Senate of Canada, James T. McHugh, Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017, 296 p.

James McHugh's addition to the parliamentary bookshelf is extremely ambitious in scope. It undertakes to provide a comprehensive survey and assessment of historical, philosophical, methodological, constitutional, institutional and political considerations relevant to Senate reform--and that's just in Part I. In Part II, McHugh proposes a Senate closely modelled on the British House of Lords. He provides draft constitutional amendments that would accomplish this along with detailed supportive argument. Part III examines non-constitutional options and recent history, including the Trudeau reforms of 2016, and concludes by calling for reform that would enable Canada's appointed upper House to achieve its full potential.

The wide-ranging survey of potentially relevant ideas and approaches provided in Part I is necessarily limited in its elaboration of individual topics. However, McHugh deserves gratitude for the prodigious research reflected in this section. It is evident throughout the text and in 386 footnotes, most of which provide useful references to other resources. There are also a number of worthwhile extensions of the Senate reform discourse. These include information, often ignored, on the pre-Confederation colonial upper houses and assumptions subsequently embodied in the Senate. The history of the early Senate is also well documented and very informative. However, McHugh's reliance on speeches by senators invoking the 'national interest' as evidence of an institutional role as the guardian of the public interest against the ravages of self-interested occupants of the elected House may not be entirely free of selection bias.

Other elements of Part I are less successful. These include the survey of the standard canon of Western political thinkers, Plato through to Hegel (but no Marx), much of which is of little demonstrated use in thinking about Senate reform options. It relies on summary descriptions that may associate labels such as "conservative" or "communitarian" with upper chambers in general, or types of upper chamber, but do not provide substantive arguments that could offer convincing reasons for reform choices.

Furthermore, much of Part I is poorly edited. Virtually every mention of the theme of the book, and there are many, is embellished with a reminder that it...