Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 26/5/2015 (1944 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

If anyone had forgotten, recent revelations from Sen. Mike Duffy's ongoing trial for bribery and improper expense claims have reminded us of the parlous state of Canada's Senate. Duffy's trial, as well as the auditor general's comprehensive review of all senators' expenses due in early June, will produce an ample harvest of similar reminders stretching well into the summer.

With a federal election quickly approaching, this steady drip of embarrassing revelations may make that most boring of subjects -- Senate reform -- an important election issue. Unfortunately, if past patterns repeat themselves, not only will our political leaders fail to debate Senate reform in any meaningful way, they will also fail to engage in a much more important conversation that has been spectacularly missing to date: what function do we want the Senate to perform?

Everyone agrees the Senate does not work well and too often serves as a source of acute embarrassment. Almost everyone agrees the Senate needs significant reform. Given this wide agreement, it is unsurprising we do not lack for reform proposals.

Conversely, one thing on which there is no clear agreement is the Senate's purpose. This is a big problem because trying to reform the Senate without knowing what we want it to do is a lot like trying to determine which clothes to pack before deciding whether to head for vacation on a tropical island or at an ice hotel.

Certainly there are plenty of tired old slogans kicking around purporting to encapsulate some functional vision for the red chamber: "sober second thought" or "regional representation." But when was the last time we thought carefully about whether these functions are even useful anymore?

Indeed, given the Senate is now almost 150 years old, wouldn't it be a bit surprising if these ideas didn't need a little updating? It's worth remembering, for instance, that one of the Senate's original functions -- at least as far as the fathers of Confederation were concerned -- was to provide a check on the power of 'the mob' (or as we like to call them today, voters) and their unruly elected representatives by providing some dependable aristocratic oversight. The fact that we are a bit surer about the value of democracy these days highlights why some changes in the upper chamber might just be in order.

Different reform proposals are inextricably grounded in vastly different understandings of how the country should be governed. Thus, while any debate about Senate reform will be informed by what is politically possible, a much more important focus for discussion is the more basic question of whether the vision for Canada that any particular reform will serve to advance is a vision that is desirable.

Take the idea of a Senate of esteemed and independently appointed experts, a regularly mooted in the press. While such a body might sound nice in our current hyper-partisan context, a Senate-of-experts doesn't make a lot of sense if the purpose of the Senate is to act as a regional check on the impetuous enthusiasms of the less geographically balanced House of Commons. How could senators claim any legitimacy in this role if the criteria on which they were appointed focused primarily on scientific, cultural, or professional expertise rather than a strong connection to, and political mandate from, a particular geographical community? This tension between expertise and representativeness is just one of many similar trade-offs, the resolution of which ought to be the first step in the debate on Senate reform, rather than the afterthought it currently seems to be.

Given the Senate's enormous, albeit largely dormant, power, any reform of it needs to be carefully considered and ultimately backed by widespread support. This was the basic intuition behind the Supreme Court's April 2014 determination that any reform of the Senate needed to follow the demanding procedure required for reforming the constitution.

In its arguments before the court, the government basically suggested the work required to build such significant support was just too hard to be a reasonable prerequisite for reform. This argument essentially suggests we live in a broken country unable to work together to solve a difficult common problem. It's an argument I totally reject.

Canadians need to figure out what it is we want the Senate to do. Only then will debates about the best means for achieving this result really become useful, because it is only then that we'll have criteria against which to measure these proposals and a means to motivate the necessary support. That discussion might trigger some big arguments, but it can be a rare and exciting opportunity to significantly improve our politics. It's an opportunity we should seize.

Former Winnipegger Michael Crawford Urban is a visiting fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto.