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This article was published 27/3/2015 (2004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

No one could fault Canadians for thinking the sky had suddenly fallen on Senate reform last April. "Did the Supreme Court just kill Senate reform?" asked a columnist for Maclean's magazine, and his answer was an unequivocal "yes."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper agreed, blaming the court for slamming the door on his government's attempt to "elect" senators and limit their terms in office. Following the court's ruling, Harper announced the federal government would cease its attempts to renovate the upper house.

But it seems the prime minister has not in fact given up on reshaping the Senate. Harper is undertaking a covert demolition of the red chamber. Delivered a smack-down by the court, told it cannot unilaterally achieve its vision for Senate reform, the government is engaging in abolition by stealth.

The prime minister has stopped appointing senators. The last appointment was made two years ago, and there are now 18 vacancies. Harper says he is in no hurry to fill the empty seats. So, if the Conservative Party wins another majority government and holds power until Oct. 21, 2019, another 27 senators will have reached the mandatory age of retirement. And if the three suspended senators are given the boot, there will be at least 48 empty seats in a 105-member chamber. In a few short years, half of the Senate will have withered away.

Starving the Senate in this manner is a sneaky way of doing an end run around the Constitution. The Supreme Court's opinion was unequivocal: The federal government must have the agreement of all 10 provinces to abolish the Senate. But the PM doesn't want to talk to the premiers about constitutional reform, and he certainly doesn't want to put the Senate in the intense media spotlight that would undoubtedly shine on constitutional talks about vanquishing the upper house. After all, the upcoming trials of the malfeasant senators will cause the government enough embarrassment.

A slow and silent dismemberment of the chamber is the Harper government's way of making the problem go away.

Why should we care that the PM is furtively "disappearing" the Senate? After all, as public-opinion polls conducted in the wake of the Senate expenses scandal showed, fully half of Canadians were so disgusted by the bad behaviour of a few senators they wanted to scrap the institution entirely.

But most people don't know what senators do on a daily basis, nor can they identify the role of the Senate in the Canadian parliamentary system. If they understood how Parliament works, Canadians would be deeply concerned about the extreme concentration of power in the Prime Minister's Office.

The type of careful legislative oversight the Senate is designed to provide is crucial given the fusion of powers in the executive branch. Given the Harper government's flagrant disregard of judicial oversight, any limited checks and balances offered by the Senate are welcome. Indeed, the Senate may prove to be an important bulwark against Bill C-51, the profoundly scary anti-terrorism act.

Fortunately for Canadians, abolition by stealth is unconstitutional. Although retired Conservative senator Hugh Segal believes the prime minister has no obligation to name senators as long as the upper house meets its quorum of 15 members, provincial governments and legal scholars beg to differ.

Making appointments is not an option, but a duty, argues constitutional expert Emmett Macfarlane. The premier of P.E.I. has urged the prime minister to fill his province's vacant seats, and a Vancouver lawyer filed an application in the Federal Court to contest the government's inaction.

That the PM's refusal to appoint senators has received little media scrutiny is dismaying, albeit unsurprising; surreptitious abolition is not nearly as dramatic as the spectacle offered by the coming Duffy trial. More astounding is the support for Harper's tactics from purported champions of democracy.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, once a vocal proponent of Senate reform, feels "atrophy is not a bad end game for the Senate." The New Democratic Party also seems to be onside: "We could just let the thing die on the vine -- just wither away, name no one else to the Senate," NDP Leader Tom Mulcair told the CBC.

This would be a mistake. Canada desperately needs a national dialogue on the fate of the Senate. Yet abolition by stealth seems expressly designed to avoid this conversation and to divert attention from the rapidly declining health of parliamentary democracy in Canada. It's an underhanded way of denying Canadians a meaningful voice in the design and operation of our governing institutions.





Linda Trimble is a political science professor at the University of Alberta.