In the role of Opposition, political parties are often committed to fundamental reform of government. For instance, consider the NDP/Green Party position on electoral reform, the Reform Party position on Senate reform or, looking further back, the Progressive Conservative position on the evils of political patronage. However, when the Opposition party becomes federal government, reform is trumped by political necessity.

The prime minister’s appointment of 18 new Senators to the upper house on December 22 of last year acts as a case in point.

The Reform Party was built on the populist slogan, “The West wants in.” The notion of Western alienation or inequality was (and is) bolstered by the disproportionate distribution of seats in the House of Commons. Alberta, with its dismal representation of 28 seats and its grip on much of Canada’s potential resource wealth, wanted a greater voice at the federal level.

Stephen Harper, who was the chief policy officer for Reform, believed that the best way to achieve prominence, in addition to parliamentary representation, was to reform the Senate. He took up the Triple-E approach: Equal, elected and effective.

I gather that it was difficult for a younger Harper to imagine a competent government paying heed to an institution that seems corrupt and blatantly patriarchal. The distribution of Senate seats is unfair (all the Western provinces combined have the same number of seats as Quebec); there are no fixed terms other than a retirement age of 75; Senate appointments are made based on patronage and party loyalty; and with an annual salary of $130,000 (in addition to a cushy pension), even the most principled appointees are unable to resist the siren song. It is clear that the upper house requires equality and the accountability that comes with elections.

What is unclear is whether an equal and elected Senate is necessarily an effective one. Why, for instance, does the Senate only delay the passage of bills, never halting them outright?

Most Canadians don’t know what the Senate does and, further, why it is so stultifying and useless. It is the prime minister’s responsibility, if he hopes to ever bring about any meaningful reform, to show the Canadian public how, through reform, the Senate can be effective. Harper seems more and more unable to do that.

When the prime minister entered office in 2006 he swiftly set about the work of fulfilling election promises. By the end of the year he had reached Senate reform, tabling what he called the Senate Appointment Consultations Act on December 13, 2006.

The bill was intended to allow Canadians the ability to vote for candidates to fill Senate vacancies in their province. Votes would be held in conjunction with each federal election and the results would serve as non-binding recommendations as to who the prime minister should appoint. This was in order to avoid the fear of full-scale constitutional reform, which a complete overhaul of the Senate would require. The bill was defeated in Parliament, as was a motion to give senators fixed term limits of eight years.

In 2007, the governments of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador, publicly stated that any changes to the selection of senators would require provincial consent, in the same manner as a constitutional amendment.

On May 28 of this year, Democratic Reform minister Steven Fletcher tabled the Senate term limits bill in the Senate, another motion to limit Senate terms to eight years, which has the support of Harper’s 18 recently-appointed partisans. Considering that the Liberals still hold a Senate majority, however, it is unlikely that Fletcher’s bill will pass. And even if it does, it can not only be overturned by another government but it will take over a decade to fully implement with the term limits only applicable to new senators.

With all these obstacles barricading the path to democratic reform, why exactly would Harper make the hypocritical gesture of appointing 18 senators last year?

“Our government will continue to push for a more democratic, accountable and effective Senate,” he said in a CTV interview last December. “If Senate vacancies are to be filled, however, they should be filled by the government that Canadians elected rather than by a coalition that no one voted for.”

Our prime minister is widely considered a masterful strategist. The Conservatives can spend millions on attack ads that present little political risk but it looks increasingly bad when the prime minister cannot invest similar funds in the maintenance of his ideals. It is distinctly possible that Harper has been swayed by pressure within his party, but if he truly wants Senate reform he needs only to communicate it’s necessity to the Canadian public and to stop undermining that necessity with shortsighted political maneuvers.

Ethan Cabel is a University of Winnipeg student.

Published in Volume 63, Number 28 of The Uniter (June 18, 2009)