An Elected Senate: Is It Really As Good An Idea As It Sounds?

With moves in Alberta and Saskatchewan to enable the provinces to hold elections for Senate nominees there has been increasing coverage of the Stephen Harper backed plan to reform the Canadian Senate. On the surface, the arguments in favour of Senate reform look good - staging elections will make the Senate more accountable, more democratic and it will prevent political party domination of an outgoing government on the incoming one - but dig a little deeper and the logic behind it becomes ever more elusive.

How, for example, will electing a Senate make it more accountable? The belief that elections directly lead to accountability is a popular one in Canada: if the person who is elected fails to do his or her job constituents can remove that official in the next elections, so the thinking goes. Limited terms and frequent elections are believed to be means to end corruption and increase accountability. Few who are not involved with government realize, however, what the effect of elections is on the ability to govern responsibly. Leaders who live in constant fear of losing their jobs in the next elections have a hard time focusing on long-term strategy. Indeed, if media coverage of politics is any indication the most important concern for any elected representative is, in fact, the next elections be they in 2 months or 2 years. The very reason why senators had been appointed for such lengthy terms was to ensure that at least someone in the government was focused on the issues as opposed to elections. Thus, making the Senate an elected body might not bring about the accountability being touted.

Considering issues of accountability, the role the Senate plays in providing criticism of the government (anygovernment, red, blue, orange or green) is often forgotten. The Senate committees might just be the only bodies putting forth the sort of biting analysis we need. Elected officials certainly don’t want the system to be seen as faulty it could cost them the next elections; the bureaucrats, whose advancement is determined by their perceived efficiency, don’t want much public criticism of the system which they effectively run. The only body that is currently offering any insights into the shortcomings of government is the Senate - just consider the committee reports on Airport Security and Aid in Africa.   

On the assumption that electing the Senate will make it more democratic, the question begs, do elections alone create democracy? In a party-based political system many Canadians already feel that elections aren’t really providing them with much of a say. In an informal survey International Perspectives conducted in October 2007, 52% of respondents said they felt their voices weren’t being heard in a party-based electoral system.  Much of the problem stems from the allegiance elected representatives must pledge to the party to which they belong; to many Canadians it would appear that politicians have more loyalty to the political party that supported their candidacies than to the constituents who voted for them. Although senators have political affiliations the job security afforded by the current terms of appointment ensures that senators who disagree with the party’s approach to an issue can push back - I’m not so sure that elected senators would be so independent. Thus, although the idea of elections conjures notions of democracy, the inherent problems with our current system suggest that an elected Senate might not be any more or less democratic than the existing one.

Canadians are easily (perhaps too easily) excited whenever mention is made at how much money is spent by government. The spending of tax payer dollars is the perfect sound bite to incite public support for change of a system: elected governments love to use the “wanton-waste-of-your-money” messaging against the sometimes uncooperative permanent bureaucracy; opposition parties love to use it against ruling parties; and, now, supporters of Senate reform are using it against the British-modelled institution. I hope that Canadians are able to look past the usual tools for leading the masses in desired directions, thinking past the carrots. It just might be that an institution like the Senate, as bizarre as it may seem to our Liberazi lenses, is the only thing with at least some public interest left.

This entry was posted on May 21 2008 at 16:47 and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.