A Brief Comment from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper
In its October 16th Throne Speech, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives made a brief reference to the need for Senate reform.
Never mind Senate reform. Empty the chamber out, please!
Senate reform, as in shifting from an appointed Senate to an elected one, for example? Please spare us.
Now may be the best opportunity that we, the Canadian people, have had since the confederation of this great nation to press our federal representatives to table and vote in favour of a motion to abolish the Senate.
Without regurgitating the allegations around the expense claims of Harper Senate appointees Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau, the controversy that has ensued and shows no sign of going away any time soon offers a perfect opportunity to abolish this useless chamber of unelected, partisan hacks once and for all.
I have challenged readers to name a few valuable things Canada’s Senate has contributed to the country within the last four or five years and so far no one has responded with even one.
So let’s at long last close the barn doors on this hog farm and use the tens-of-millions we’d save each year to support health care and help cover the high costs of post-secondary education for our young people.
Abolishing the Senate should be a campaign that even people on the conservative side of the spectrum can support. Contact your MP, and urge all of your friends and associates to do the same, and press him or her to jump aboard the abolish the Senate train.
Make it clear to your MP that Canada would be better off if the so-called “red chamber” was cleared of these political hacks and was turned into a gallery for celebrating the work of people who have contributed to our country’s art and culture.
(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)
Niagara At Large 
Sorry Doug, I won’t spare you from the revamp rhetoric. The problem that I see with abolishing the Senate is that doing so gives whoever is Prime Minister in future the ability to become even more of a dictator than leaders of the past 20 years have been (or tried to be).
People like Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien Steven Harper etc require some sort of tempering authority or they will completely run amok and impose their “vision” of Canada on everyone else.
If we abolish the Senate, then we must also abolish the House Of Commons and come up with a completely new political system. And don’t anyone dare suggest to me that the American system is better! The Americans are in even worse shape politically than Canadians!
In my personal opinion, we do need political reform in Canada – the Senate should not be used as a “reward” for party hacks and bagmen. We must change our system to put the power in the hands of the people — not in the hands of the businesses that contribute to the campaign war chests of the political parties. We must make the politicians much more accountable to those who elect them. And we must reduce the ability of any individual party leader to force others to kowtow.
But before we can do very much of that, we must find a way to change our electoral system so that voters have a means to force their local MP to listen to what the constituents want – even if it goes against their party leader.
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The current PM is running amok anyway so the Senate, which is loaded with partisan political cronies, is no deterrent. It’s a waste of money. Our efforts would be better spent changing our first past the post idiotic electoral system which is ridiculously unfair.
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Elect senators and give them real political clout.
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To Linda: we appear to be somewhat in agreement on the need for electoral reform. The proposal that I outlined some time ago here on NAL would retain the “first past the post” system, largely because none of the alternate proposals I have seen provide any improvement.
The way things stand right now, if we abolish the Senate, things will only get worse as far as PMs running amok.
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Further to my comment to Linda:
Here is the item I submitted in July of 2012.
At the time, Linda also posted some excellent comments!
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