Canadian politics

saggio

The Council of the Federation makes the Senate unnecessary.

And it pains me to say that, since I'm generally in favour of an elected Senate.

Also: new thread time?

hippofant

It's not the ex-illiteracy that bothers me. It's the fact that being non-illiterate for four years is not nearly enough exposure to the legalese jargon that's going to pass by his desk. BUT in general that's true for most of our politicians, and quite frankly, I'm a bit of a Stalinist in my insistence that there should be some sort of fucking test before politicians get elected.


Anyways, re. senate reform - requiring a 2/3 vote might just leave the Senate empty, like with our immigration review panels and the federal circuit courts in the States. If you can't win - you might as well leave it empty. We avoid this trap with positions like the US Supreme Court, because they're too high-profile to leave empty, and instead moderates are appointed just to fill the seat - which is far from bad. Just not sure those seats wouldn't end up empty.

And look, there are two options for Senate reform - either we reduce them in purpose, such that they represent a really expensive rubber-stamping body - or we increase their purpose, and introduce another chokepoint to legislation. There really is no alternative to these two unpleasant options; it's just a matter of how you like your government, not fairness, or equity, or whatever.

Gnome-Interruptus

Senjutsu wrote: »

Gnome-Interruptus wrote: »

If more parties were interested in senate reform, I'm sure there would be some better options available. If the CPC is the only group seriously pushing for it, then the reform is going to have a strong CPC slant / bias.

In the 12 years that I've been looking at Senate Reform, I've never seen a reason why appointed for life by PM is a better system than an elected position with fixed terms. Also, I never understood why both chambers need to be balanced by population.

And if reform cannot be done under the current rules, I dont see why we cant change the rules. Other countries in Europe draft new constitutions when flaws in their old ones make things unworkable.

Any proposal which involves dividing the Senate up into equally measures, like Harper's 10 per province, is nothing more than a mechanism to give the far right minority elements in the prairie provinces (where the far right rural vote already exerts an over-sized amount of power due to grossly unequal riding distributions) an undue amount of influence in national politics.

Any proposal which involves both electing the Senate and giving the Senate any real power is a disaster in the making, as it gives Senators who currently have little incentive to do anything and thus are essentially a mostly-harmless relic and safety net to maybe catch the odd bit of extremist legislation, incentive to do little if anything other than pander to their constituents by becoming far more activist, radically reshaping the power politics in Canada in essentially unpredictable ways. I do not believe that the system is nearly so broken that it merits risking this "fix".

Combine both moves, the so-called "triple-e" senate, and you have the ultimate recipe for fucking lunacy. Powerful prairie voting blocks will continually dominate the Senate's business, making the minority western right bigot vote one of the most influential in the country.

Good bye sane country, hello Conservative back-bencher's wet dream.

Edit: I mean, honestly. The oh-so-broken current Senate system saved us from an Abortion ban in '91. There's a reason that conservatives got really hot for Senate reform after that. Every reform measure they float is a thinly veiled power grab for the western conservative power-base. The next time they're in a position to push through their regressive social horseshit, they don't want the house of sober-second though giving their actions a second thought.

Are you actually afraid of people from the prairie provinces? Or do you think that the general populations of Ontario & Quebec are that much more liberal and are incapable of failing?

I'm trying to understand where this position of western provinces = bad is coming from. I know they vote Conservative, and you dont like that. But I think when talking about giving provinces equal voices in the federal government, we could aspire to something grander than partisan politics and muzzling the voices of 25% of the provinces.

Elki