Never mind the fact that Benjamin Franklin was right to that having two equally matched houses makes as much sense as tying two equally matched horses to either end of a buggy and having them both pull. The name of Britain’s two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, should tell you something about way we have a senate in the first place. The purpose of having a House of Lords was to check and balance out the will of common people. One of the main purposes of the Canadian senate and the US senate, which were both modeled after the British system, was to do the same.

Now granted, the class based nature of the senate has long since been forgotten though and we are left with a corpse destined to provide regional representation. Some believe and you seem to implicitly hold such a position that the regions need more say and an “effective” and “elected” senate is the best way of achieving such a balance between population centers in Eastern Canada and the rest of us. The problem is two fold. First such an argument rests on a false contrast; seats in the House of Commons are supposed to be assigned on a rep by pop basis, but in actuality that is not the case. For example, PEI has a population of 135,851 and has 4 MPs and people in the riding of Oak Ridges Markham has a population of 169, 642 obviously only has 1 MP. In other words, a vote in Oak Ridges Markham has less the 5th the value of a vote cast in Charlottetown. The second reason is that comparing province to province is a perverse misnomer. It is comparing apples to oranges. What one should be comparing is the political resources of people in any two ridings. When one does this it is abundantly clear that people in Canada’s urban centers in particular are getting the short end of the stick and that people living in the less populous regions of the country already have far more clout on a per person basis by virtue of the fact that the provincial and territorial jurisdictions in which they are a member or far less populous. Indeed, PEI and its population of 135,851 and 4 MPs, as a province, has revenue streams available to it that are simply not available to Oak Ridges Markham and its population of 169, 642 and 1 MP. Oak Ridges Markham does not get Federal transfer payments for one. Empowering an X number of PEI senators to represent the interests of 135,851 people while only the equal number of Ontario Senators to represent the interests of 12.1 million Ontarians, as would happen if Canada adopted the intellectual abortion known as a Triple E senate, simply adds insult to injury. It is also grossly undemocratic.

Every parliamentary system has some form of Senate, and for good reason. I agree the Senate needs reform. More urgent is reform of our electoral system. Why has the NDP quietly dropped this as an issue?

On this issue, the NDP has managed to get the Conservatives to come to them. It’s no small feat, and represents a historic modernization of our democracy.

How are any of the issues we care about advanced by maintaining a $80 million Senate stacked with Liberal and Tory partisans who split their time between Ottawa and corporate boardrooms?

Short answer: it’s not. Thanks to Jack Layton and the NDP, Canadians will get the final word on the money-wasting Senate.

As I have said on my blog today about this, Canadians are able to handle more than one issue at a time, and there will never be a perfect time to confront Senate reform. By the way, lets not forget that this has been a policy for the CCF/NDP since 1932, so it’s not like Jack just pulled this out of the air.

Um, what are you talking about? Labour had been in power for a big chunk of the 20th century. Blair helped bring the party out of its post Thatcherite slump, but he was no Moses.

Yep, you’re right. Thanks. -CT