The Senate sounds like a dumb, anachronistic idea when someone explains it to you, but it actually does a lot of great work.
The problem with the Senate is that the senators are appointed by prime ministers, and they serve as senators until they either die or reach 75 years of age.
That doesn't sound fair. It sounds like senators are unaccountable pigs at the trough. They never need to stand for election. They never have to worry about the wishes of their constituents. They get to do whatever they want, whether the people agree with them or not.
But there's much more to it.
Chantal Hebert, the brilliant Toronto Star columnist, wrote about the red chamber in her book French Kiss: Stephen Harper's Blind Date with Quebec.
"In the past decade, the Senate has been a beehive of policy activity. Much of its work has been at the leading edge of the national policy debate. It has waded in where MPs feared to tread; and on some of the key issues it has been well ahead of the Commons."
Hebert then listed some of the work that came from our senators: they looked into assisted suicide, they produced a comprehensive report that recommended the legalization of marijuana, they took the lead on investigating the federal role in medicare, they studied media convergence, and they studied in more depth than the Commons the policy adjustments that will need to be made in light of the demographic shock of the near future, when nearly everyone will be old.
Hebert writes: "The real question is why the bulk of leading-edge strategic policy-thinking being done by politicians on Parliament Hill is done at the initiative of the non-elected Senate, rather than the House of Commons.
"The answer is depressingly simple. Even though MPs would like to be more than legislative short-order cooks, they and their parties, especially when they are in government, often fear the heat of the kitchen so desperately that observers wonder why they went into public life in the first place."
As if Hebert's observations weren't enough to make one question the wisdom of electing the Senate, last week I came across this in Chretien's memoirs, My Years as Prime Minister:
"At first blush...an elected Senate might seem like a desirable improvement over a Senate whose members are appointed by the prime minister and remain in office until the age of seventy-five. But suppose the House of Commons has a Liberal majority and the Senate has a Conservative majority, both elected by the voters of Canada. Which one is the legitimate representative of the will of the people? Which one should prevail in a dispute? Should the senators be elected at the same time as the MPs, and for how long? What powers should they have? Should the existing composition of the Senate be altered by a constitutional amendment?"
Those are all great questions, and they should probably all be considered, in detail, before anyone starts throwing around ideas about what the future holds. Oh, right, it's too late for that.
Supplementary reading:
Vancouver Sun: The only way to fix the Red Chamber is to shut it down
Calgary Sun columnist Licia Corbella: Senate balancing act
CTV: Layton calls for referendum on abolishing Senate
National Post editorial board: The future of Canada's Senate