Another obvious flaw is its size. “With 781 members entitled to vote, the Lords enjoys the dubious title of the world’s largest legislative chamber outside China,” The New York Times noted Saturday. (The National People’s Congress, whose stamp is only slightly more rubbery than the Lords’, seats a whopping 2,987 delegates.) Some of its members rarely participate in Lords business but enjoy its privileges nonetheless. According to The Telegraph, 20 peers claimed over £1.6 million in expenses without voting or contributing to debates.

Despite these problems, nobody quite knows what should be done with the House of Lords. Major reforms first began in 1911, when a constitutional crisis ended the Lords’ power to veto Commons legislation. Tony Blair’s government stripped most of the hereditary nobles of their seats in 1999, thereby giving non-hereditary “life peers” like Sewel control of the chamber. Until 2009, the House of Lords also acted as the de facto supreme court of the United Kingdom before Parliament established an actual SCOTUK. Further reforms largely stalled under the Cameron government, except for a 2014 bill that allowed for Lords members to resign, retire, or be removed for criminal behavior.

Most of the British electorate agrees that something should be done about the Lords. A 2012 Ipsos-MORI poll found that 79 percent of British voters supported “the idea of House of Lords reform.” But everyone has a different opinion on what “the idea” should be in practice. In the most recent set of election manifestos, Labour proposed replacing the Lords with an elected “Senate of the Nations and Regions” to address regional and democratic concerns. Liberal Democrats suggested a smaller, partly elective second chamber. The Scottish National Party called for full abolition. The Conservatives, who won an outright majority, simply noted that an elected House of Lords was “not a priority” for the current government.

Things aren’t much better across the Atlantic in Canada’s Senate. A 2012 investigation into parliamentary expenses implicated four senators for improper claims, three of whom received criminal charges. After the revelations became public, Harper’s then-chief of staff Nigel Wright gave Senator Mike Duffy a $90,000 personal check to help cover the expenses. Duffy is currently on trial for bribery and fraud in relation to the expenses, and the scandal now threatens Harper and the Conservatives’ re-election campaign.

Compared with Britain’s House of Lords, the Canadian Senate has all of the scandal but none of the grandeur or history. It has a regionalist element like its American counterpart: 105 seats are allocated to specific provinces, with Quebec and Ontario each holding 24 seats. Senators are appointed to those seats by the Canadian prime minister and serve until the mandatory retirement age of 75. Unlike the Lords, the Senate can block legislation, not merely delay it.