That Senate reform bill: alive in the water

In a recent dead-tree Maclean’s I gave a little preview of the constitutional issues that the government’s piecemeal Senate reform effort, now launched, will raise if it is brought before a court. Readers may not be aware that the nature of Senate elections was discussed very recently in the Senate itself—in March, when a Senatorial Selection Act (S-8) was briefly debated there. The provisions of that bill have now been incorporated into a schedule to House of Commons Bill C-7.

Today’s Star has a piece from Susan Delacourt in which scholarly all-rounder Ned Franks calls Senate elections “dead in the water” and “sure to get shot down by the Supreme Court”. I don’t want to call this a misrepresentation of the expert consensus, nor to challenge the stature of Ned Franks, but it seems to me that few other opponents of Senate elections are as confident as these quotes suggest. As I wrote, it is not clear exactly how much change Parliament is free to make to constitutional arrangements by statute alone. The Constitution Act text says that the 7/50 amending formula has to be followed before “the powers of the Senate and the method of selecting Senators” are changed. But under C-7, Senators are explicitly still appointed by the Governor-General as before. (“Senators to be appointed for a province or territory should be chosen from a list of Senate nominees submitted by the government of the province or territory.”)

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Source: Macleans