By finally passing the Reform Act — a private member’s bill intended to make the House of Commons more democratic — the Senate has averted a full-blown constitutional crisis. But the Reform Act was just one of several pieces of legislation still threatened by the Senate’s stalling act.
There is, for example, Bill C-377, Conservative MP Russ Hiebert’s private member’s bill, which would require unions to make their finances more transparent. It has been stuck on the Senate order paper since December 2012. There is Bill C-290, which would legalize single-event sports betting, still in Senate limbo more than 1,200 days after it passed unanimously in the House.
And then there is Bill C-518, the Protecting Taxpayers from Convicted Politicians Act, which would disqualify MPs and senators convicted of particular crimes — for example, fiddling their expenses — from their parliamentary pensions. The Commons passed this bill in February, by a vote of 258-13. We can’t imagine why senators would not be similarly enthused.
The fate of these bills is instructive, for any who imagine that the upper house feels somehow constrained by its unelected status from obstructing legislation passed by the Commons. To be sure, it does not often defeat such bills outright, though the occasions on which it has are hardly insignificant, from abortion to the Kyoto climate change treaty.
But the number of bills that have died by the Senate’s pocket veto — killed, that is, not by any overt act of the Senate but by a Parliamentary session having expired without a vote having taken place — must be in the hundreds. It would be a useful research exercise to go through how many of these were deliberately delayed in the upper house for such purpose, and what their subject matter was.
So the issue is still with us, and must be resolved. It cannot be tolerated, in a democracy, that a chamber without a democratic mandate should have the power to amend or defeat legislation passed by the people’s elected representatives. It has been more than 100 years since the Parliament Act was passed in the United Kingdom, restricting the House of Lords to a suspensive veto only, as is now the case for the Senate with regard to constitutional amendments. While similar legislation here would require a constitutional amendment, it is within the Senate’s power to reform itself in this regard.
As the political scientist Andrew Heard has argued in these pages, the Senate could amend its own rules to similar effect, for example to provide that a bill shall be deemed to have passed if the Senate does not pass it within six months, or 30 days for a money bill. It would be a nervy Senate that refused to make such amendments, if so instructed by the Commons.
The coming election campaign would be a good opportunity for the political parties to tell us where they stand on this idea. In the meantime, the Senate should extend its sitting long enough to pass the legislation still before it.
National Post