Trudeau's Senate appointments a promising start, says Graham Steele

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made two bold moves on Senate reform.

Before the election, he told Liberal senators they were no longer part of the Liberal caucus.

Then a couple of weeks ago, he made his first round of Senate appointments. The seven appointments were startlingly good.

Suddenly there was a glimpse of what the Senate was originally intended to be, and could be still — a chamber of respected elders.

Half of Nova Scotia's Senate membership is going to turn over before the end of 2017. If the prime minister stays the course, Nova Scotia could see a mini-revolution in its Senate contingent.

Vanished tomorrow

If the Senate vanished tomorrow, I doubt anyone would notice.

Let me be clear about my bias: I have long believed the Senate should be abolished. The prime minister's positive moves don't change that view.

But since changing the constitution to abolish the Senate appears well-nigh impossible, Plan B is to make the best of it.

Unfortunately, successive prime ministers have pretty much made the worst of the Senate.

I doubt there are more than 100 Nova Scotians who could name all eight of our senators.

Each of them could safely walk down Spring Garden Road on a busy day and not risk being recognized by other than family and friends.

I'm not saying that our senators literally do nothing. If you give anyone a comfortable salary, and free travel, and an office and a staff, then papers will be pushed and files will be compiled.

Practically invisible

But if Nova Scotia's senators had any impact on issues affecting the province, I never saw it. On public policy, they're practically invisible.

The root of the Senate's problems are that senators represent nothing and nobody. The absence of democratic legitimacy is fatal.

Our elected politicians — MPs, MLAs, municipal councillors — generally work hard at staying connected to their communities and the people that voted for them. It's what they do.

Elected representatives must, by necessity, work together on behalf of their common constituents. That doesn't hold for unelected senators.

In some vague sense, the senators do represent their home province. But that's mostly a fiction. Exhibit A: Duffy.

Patronage prize

Being a senator is pretty sweet: the job pays $142,400 per year and runs to age 75.

That's intended to make the senators independent of worldly cares and impervious to partisan pressures. Instead, it has had precisely the opposite effect.

The protections and comfort of the job has made it the most highly sought-after patronage prize available.

Competition for an appointment is fierce among partisans, each of whom trumpets their loyalty and service to the governing party.

As a result, the chamber is stuffed with people notable chiefly for their party connections: organizers, fundraisers, insiders.

Independent? Hardly. The Duffy affair revealed that the Senate leadership was utterly subservient to the wishes of the prime minister.

Punching above our weight

In theory, the Senate should be where Nova Scotia goes to get things done.

Because of numbers fixed at Confederation, Nova Scotia has 10 Senate seats, out of a total of 105.  That's really punching above our weight.

The Maritime provinces have 24 seats, exactly the same as Ontario, Quebec and the four western provinces.

Compare that to the House of Commons, where Nova Scotia has 11 seats out of 338. That's closer to our share of the national population.

But with the historic partisanship of the Red Chamber, and the lack of democratic legitimacy, we've ended up with much less impact in the Senate than the numbers would suggest.

Five seats to be filled

There are currently two vacancies in Nova Scotia's Senate contingent.

In addition, two senators, Jim Cowan and Willie Moore, must retire by next January and another, Kelvin Ogilvie, must retire before the end of 2017.

That leaves five of Nova Scotia's 10 Senate seats to be filled in less than two years.

The appointments made by the Trudeau government on March 18 are a promising start. It will be very interesting indeed to see who gets appointed next from Nova Scotia.

After trying for almost 150 years, we should probably give up looking for a Senate that makes sense.

But surely Nova Scotia can still hope for a Senate that makes a difference, and the prime minister's early moves are promising.