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The Senate is the appendix of Confederation: a largely inert organ, like the appendix, whose original purpose is lost to time, but which on occasion can grow inflamed — with pus, or its own self-importance, as the case may be — at which point it becomes dangerous.

Just how dangerous we saw most recently in the case of Bill C-14, the assisted suicide bill, a matter many senators plainly felt was too important to be decided by the people we elect for the purpose. But this was hardly the first such episode: free trade, the GST, abortion, climate change, on all of these and more the Senate has declared itself entitled to substitute its own judgment for that of mere MPs, or threatened to.

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That such incidents seem to have been arriving with greater frequency may be only my impression. That they are likely to in the future is the fear of a good many observers. For if the absence of a democratic mandate has not always been enough to deter senators from overreaching, the odium in which they were generally held by the public may have helped to stay their palsied hands. Even hacks and bagmen have their limits. Whereas the “independent, merit-based” appointees under Justin Trudeau’s new dispensation, untouched by partisanship or patronage, may be persuaded they have earned the right.