OTTAWA — Ontario is poised to join Quebec in a constitutional showdown with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his plans for Senate reform.

Quebec has already served notice that it is preparing to challenge Harper’s go-it-alone approach to changing the Senate — arguing that he can’t change a basic institution of Parliament without the support of the provinces.

And on Tuesday, as legislation was unveiled in Ottawa to change the term limits and selection of senators, Ontario’s Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Monique Smith took that same view, saying that a legal challenge is among the options being weighed by her province.

“We do believe it requires provincial consent to move forward,” Smith told the Star after the Senate-reform bill was introduced.

If the federal Conservative government continues to argue that the Senate can be changed without that provincial consent, “we would look at our options at that point,” Smith said. A legal challenge is among the options on the table, she confirmed.

Such a battle would pit Harper’s majority government against Canada’s two largest provinces and threaten to open up the kind of constitutional quagmire that swallowed up the last Conservative majority government in Canada in the 1980s and early 1990s.

It also could be a sign of a new frontier opening up in opposition to Harper’s Conservatives.

Harper’s main headaches were caused by his federal political rivals when he had minority control in Ottawa from 2006 to the recent election. But with a majority in Parliament, easily able to pass his legislation, Harper may be forced to look increasingly to the provinces for potential obstacles to his plans.

Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae, a former Ontario premier, agrees that Harper is out on a constitutional limb in trying to change the Senate without provincial consent.

“Look, the Senate is a child of the Constitution of Canada. It doesn’t belong to Stephen Harper,” Rae said. “It’s all nonsensical. The Senate, if there’s going to be reform, it has to start with the provinces and the federal government sitting down and trying to get to an answer. And that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

Constitutional expert Ned Franks also calls the new legislation “dead in the water.”

“That one is sure to get shot down by the Supreme Court because that’s a substantial reform and that can’t be done without the consent of the provinces,” Franks told the Star’s Richard J. Brennan this week.

Ontario is now officially in favour of abolishing the Senate — a position also championed by the NDP opposition in Parliament, as well as several provinces such as Manitoba and Nova Scotia.

“If the government is going to insist on reforming the Senate, we think it should be abolished,” Smith said, echoing Premier Dalton McGuinty’s recent declarations on that same score.

The Senate-reform legislation introduced Tuesday treads cautiously around changing the upper chamber, whose members are currently appointed by prime ministers to serve until the age of 75.

Rather than calling for elections outright, for instance, which would require a constitutional amendment, the bill instead “supports” provinces in holding “consultations” with voters on who should be appointed to the Senate. Some provinces, such as Alberta, have been moving toward Senate elections in recent years.

It also limits Senate terms to nine years — not just for new appointees, but for anyone named after 2008. Harper has appointed all senators since he came to power in 2006.

It’s the first time that a change like this has been attempted retroactively in the Senate. When mandatory retirement was introduced in the 1960s, for instance, it applied only to new senators, not the appointees who had previously been named to the Senate for life.

There have already been hints that some of Harper’s Senate appointees are balking at the changes in this bill — notably in a letter from Senator Bert Brown that leaked out last week, which referred to a shower of complaints in a meeting of Conservative senators. And it remains to be seen whether some of these senators might want to mount their own legal challenges against the retroactive changes to the terms of their appointments.

Roughly 20 of Harper’s appointees are currently entitled to sit in the chamber longer than the nine years set out in the new legislation, though the PMO has said they were all appointed on condition that they support Conservative efforts on Senate reform.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Patrick Brazeau, for instance, is legally entitled to sit in the chamber until 2049, when he turns 75. But if this Senate-reform legislation passes within the year, he would have to leave the chamber roughly 30 years earlier, around 2021. Fabian Manning, who left the Senate to run in the last election and was reappointed after he was defeated on May 2, is legally allowed to stay in the red chamber until 2039. But he too would have to leave in 2021 if the new bill passes.

NDP leader Jack Layton said Tuesday that the proposed reforms just reinforce his party’s view that the Senate should be abolished. Just before the last election, the NDP introduced a bill to hold a nationwide referendum on scrapping the Senate.

“They are going to create a monster here, because you will have at the end of the day … an elected body that may or may not be elected, that the Prime Minister may or may not accept the recommendations that come out of an election,” Layton said. “It’s going to be one ugly scene and throughout that generation, we will spend $100 million a year feeding this beast which will by and large stand in the way of democracy in this country … It’s a disaster for Canadian democracy, all wrapped up in the guise of Senate reform.”

Read more about: