The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Close your eyes and imagine that it is October of 2014 and irate voters have just booted the entire Flin Flon city council out of office. Got it? Okay, now imagine this new mayor and council going about their business by engaging in debates, introducing bylaws and entertaining questions from the public. In a room nearby, however, the defeated mayor and council continue to meet regularly. Incredibly, you learn that these folks still have the final say over anything the new council attempts _ and will for years to come. Does this scenario sound outrageous? Undemocratic? An abomination to your freedom? It most certainly does. But this is essentially what is happening now at the national level because of the Senate. Which is why Churchill MP Niki Ashton is absolutely correct to call for the abolition of the antiquated upper chamber. In January of 2006, Canadian voters disposed of the scandal-plagued Liberals in favour of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Tories. But because the Liberals had been in power for the previous 13 years, they were able to accumulate a strong majority in the Senate. And because the unelected Senate can tweak or outright kill any bill approved by elected MPs, the Liberals maintained ultimate control over the national legislative agenda. It took a full four years before the Conservatives _ the party that kept winning elections while Liberals lost them _ achieved a plurality in the Senate. And it very nearly took five years for the Tories to amass an absolute majority in the upper chamber. By that point, in December 2010, the Liberals had lost two consecutive elections. They had not won an election in over six years and their last majority win was a decade behind them. But elections be damned, the Grits STILL clung to power, at the very least on paper, because of the Senate. The situation will be equally shameful when the Conservatives eventually lose to the Liberals or Ashton's NDP. True words During a visit to Flin Flon earlier this summer, Ashton brought some harsh but true words about the Senate. Calling it 'an undemocratic institution that is rife with corruption,' she agreed that spending scandals involving Senators have fueled Canadians' desire to do away with the upper chamber. Supporters often claim that Canada needs the Senate as a chamber of 'sober second thought' before laws green-lit by an elected Parliament are enacted. The implication being that us yokels are just too gosh darn stewpid to get our elections right the first time. I wonder what the reaction would have been like in the U.S. if George W. Bush had maintained a veto over anything Barack Obama did during the latter's inaugural term. My guess: riots that would have made Chicago and L.A. look like Cairo and Damascus. But here in Canada, for far too long, we have happily allowed losing parties to sign off _ or perhaps not _ on what the winners decide to do. The old saying is simply that 'the voters are always right,' not 'the voters are kind of right but can't be fully trusted to do the right thing.' Ashton supports full abolition of the Senate, even if that means pulling the plug on the millions of taxpayer bucks dumped into this preposterous, offensive institution each year. All northern Manitobans who care about democracy should get behind their MP on that one. Local Angle runs Fridays.
