The Senate

For once I agree with Stéphane Dion: the question is not light but complex. I am referring of course to Senate reform. We are told the writing is on the wall for the Senate and that most Canadians would favour its abolition. It is an expensive institution from another age with no clear output of benefit to the country. Its members are aged and a Senate post is a goody conferred on party faithful. So we should reform and why not abolish... Thus, a complex emotion-laden issue.

I am tempted to think of an analogy with complex numbers in mathematics. Part of the expression is imaginary - it's about what the Senate might do - and one can perform operations without ever leaving the imaginary realm - the very existence of the Senate is a a guard-rail to break-down of various sorts in Parliament. This harbours back to the historical conception of the institution. Without going into the offensive dribble such higher houses have generated from their own members: keeping the Parliamentary Riff-Raff in check, as it were, this division of powers could be functional at a time when the two houses did indeed contain members from different segments of society, in fact represented different interests, the established and the emergent.

The American Constitution, devised on a more egalitarian mind-set of the late 18th century, used the notion of a higher house of more worldly individuals and assigned that house to overlook external affairs and the conduct of war. It effectively circumvented the notion of class to define function.

Someone would have to pay me a great deal of money to say what led to the creation of the Canadian Senate. But on the question of reform, let me say this: Firstly, I fully appreciate the notion that a Parliament - any Parliament - needs a countervailing force, a check, a fall-back. Because things can go wrong, the very mechanical workings of the institution can lead to impasse: essentially what Stéphane Dion argued was happening when he legislated on the clarity question.

Secondly, in an age supposedly of information, Canada could use a serious venue for debate and interest on various questions. Our Senate is gloriously silent, we hear about climate change from Al Gore, it takes an American Senator to go to a gay bar, we pay through the nose for heating oil but we are told the Loonie is strong enough to vacation in Cuba. Should we all move to Cuba? I would like the Senate to perform as a thinking institution. Put them on television, I say.

I wouldn't be surprised if Stéphane Dion changed his mind and got on the abolition band-wagon. Who would be there to question it. A polling-firm called me last night - it was in the middle of my beloved "Two and a Half Men" - and I was a little bemused when a lovely Asiatic woman's voice asked me if I was planning to vote for the Conservatives. I answered I didn't follow politics at all, not altogether true but I was busy. Is this the new voting? I hope not.