Michael's essay - Why the Senate will never be abolished

The late (and I would argue) great Larry Zolf used to campaign shamelessly to get into the Senate. He even wrote jokes for Pierre Elliott Trudeau's remarks at the annual Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner. Zolf called the Senate a "taskless thanks".  Mike Duffy, another journalist, lobbied for the same thing and was luckier than Zolf; he made it. Though how lucky that was will be decided in an Ottawa courtroom, where his endless corruption trial continued this week.

A journalist of long ago, Grattan O'Leary, said this about the Senate: "A senatorship isn't a job. It's a title. Also a blessing, a stroke of good fate; something like drawing to a royal straight flush in the biggest pot of the evening." He wrote that in 1942. Loyal Tory that he was, a few decades later he was appointed Senator by John Diefenbaker. The late Liberal Eugene Whelan, he of the green cowboy hat, was promoted to paradise in 1996. Said he of the Senate: "It's a wonderful club. And they pay you well to be a member."

For as far back as memory reaches, the Red Chamber has been a luxury rest home for every variety of clapped out, political water carrier and bag man trenchering down in the Canadian Grill of the Chateau Laurier or wandering the moldy halls of the old Rideau Club. With all the recent and ancient scandals, the cry has again gone up, this time with increased vigour, to dismantle the place brick by brick. Canadians and MPs are shocked and outraged, taking little comfort in the fact that at least half of the Senators are not being chased by cops and auditors. 

It seems that every bi-cameral legislature is having trouble with its Upper Chamber these days. The obstructionist elements in the US Senate are notorious. The House of Lords in the UK has been called everything from a joke to "the Bermuda Triangle of British Politics." The Lords, in fact, has 850 peers of what The Economist calls "superfluous bodies."

The idea of a senior chamber, as I understand it, is to bring a second opinion, a "sober second thought" as we say in Canada, to counter the power of the rank partisanship in the Other Place. Because of all the scandals, many people are calling for the abolition of the Senate; chief among them, Tom Mulcair, Leader of the Opposition. Abolition is not going to happen because abolition, under our Constitution, can't happen. 

Errol Mendes, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Ottawa and a leading expert on the Senate, points out that the provinces, especially Quebec, and the Maritimes, would never agree to abolition. The problem, he says, is not with the institution but with the people in it. Unless and until the appointment process changes radically, the Upper House will remain  a retirement home for the comfortable few.