Some Senate reforms could still be pursued: Senator Segal
In a shocking turn of events today, I agree with a Conservative senator! The Honourable Senator Hugh Segal C.M. (Kingston-Frontenac-Leeds, Ontario) has said that there are still reforms to the Senate that Parliament could pursue without necessarily seeking the consent of the provinces. He advises that we need only look to the House of Lords — the Upper House of the United Kingdom Parliament — to find ways to improve the operations of the Senate.
Some ideas that could be pursued include (a) establishing a commission to nominate candidates to be recommended for appointment to the Senate, to ensure that areas of expertise such as law, science, business, and others, are properly represented by experts in the Upper House; and (b) not allowing any single political party to have an overall majority of seats in the Senate. These are reforms that could be pursued easily.
I hope the Government looks for constructive and reasonable reforms, now that the Supreme Court of Canada has pretty clearly told the Prime Minister that he cannot move ahead with the radical reforms he's proposed without genuinely engaging with the provinces.
The Senate has the authority to defeat budget bills; a bill to starve the Upper House of funding would likely never pass and, even if it did, I can smell the constitutional challenge from here (i.e., Parliament attempting abolition-by-bankruptcy instead of going through the unanimous-consent amending formula).
It is also doubtful that the Prime Minister could simply stop recommending names to the Governor General for appointment to the Senate, as a workaround solution. This would place the Governor General in the untenable position of acting without ministerial advice to meet the role's obligations under the Constitution Act, 1867 (where the word “shall” is used to describe the Governor General's duty to appoint senators).
