Where caution goes too far

This is more of a rant than my typical more academic approach.


At some point politicians and citizens need to be able to say enough is enough and stand up to their government and demand an election.

For me this happened years ago when Harper decided to "save" $0.10 per Canadian, but scraping the Charter challenge fund, which helped regular Canadians afford the cost of taking legislation to court for violating the constitution.  Trudeau considered this absolutely vital to making the Constitution a safeguard for the people.  But the Liberals and the opposition squabbled little over this and it was destroyed without much of a fight.

Implications of an Elected Senate

Since his election in 2005 Harper has been pushing to reform the Senate. As witnessed in his 2006 and 2010 senate reform bills he wants senators to be elected and have a term limit of about 8 years. By doing this Harper says he hopes to bring accountability and legitimacy to the Senate.

There are a number of problems with his plan.

1. He can't change these things without a constitutional amendment

The Constitution Act 1982 §42 (1)(b) states:

(1) An amendment to the Constitution of Canada in relation to the following matters may be made only in accordance with subsection 38(1):

(b) the powers of the Senate and the method of selecting Senators;

This means that if Harper wants Senators to be elected or to have an 8 year term limit, he needs to get the approval of Parliament, the Senate, and at least 7 provincial legislatures who have a total of at least 50% of the population. The CPC has argued that the election part of this can be circumvented since, the PM will simply appoint whoever wins the elections. But lets not fool ourselves, even if I accept this method it's facially still a change to method of selecting Senators.