Ontario MLA Bob Runciman (left) and federal Senator Bert Brown held a press conference on Parliament Hill on Monday, November 2, 2009, to urge members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly to support Runciman’s private member’s bill, the Senators’ Selection Act, when it comes up for a free vote on second reading on Thursday, November 5.

QUEEN’S PARK, TORONTO. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2009. Believe it or not, at least for a few brief moments the Legislative Assembly in Canada’s most populous province of Ontario will be the centre of the Canadian Senate reform movement usually identified with Canada’s most oil-rich province of Alberta.

After two earlier false starts, Ontario MLA Bob Runciman’s “private member’s bill, the Senators’ Selection Act … comes up for a free vote on second reading” today. It “calls for Senate nominees in Ontario to be elected, with their names then submitted to the federal government as persons who may fill vacancies in the Senate of Canada. Elections could be held in conjunction with provincial or municipal elections or in a separate election. The bill is modelled on Alberta’s Senatorial Selection Act, used to elect Sen. [Bert] Brown, who remains the only elected member of the federal Senate” in Ottawa.

Mr. Runciman has held the eastern Ontario riding of Leeds-Grenville for the Progressive Conservatives at Queen’s Park since 1981, and is seen by many of his colleagues as at least one of the deans of the current Ontario Legislative Assembly. He “has long been a supporter of an elected senate” in Ottawa. And he has “said Premier Dalton McGuinty has assured him” that today’s vote on his Senators’ Selection bill “will be a free one …  McGuinty, said Runciman, has told him he is still pondering his own opinion on the measure … Adoption of the bill on second reading Thursday would at least allow it to proceed to hearings at the committee level.”

The big stumbling block for Ontario in all endless discussions on federal Senate reform, of course, has been the number of Senators each province would have in a reformed Senate. And concerns of this sort have helped prompt Premier McGuinty to stress in the past that Senate reform is not a subject in which his province has much interest. A mere proposal to elect potential appointees to Ontario’s current allocation of 24 Senate seats, however, is not necessarily something that a Liberal premier or any other politician in the province might feel obliged to oppose on principle. It nonetheless probably remains unlikely that Mr. Runciman’s private member’s will pass on second reading today. But what a refreshing change it would be if it did, in both Ontario and the country at large, from coast to coast to coast.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 5, 4:20 PM ET. Alas, as noted as “probably … unlikely” above, Mr. Runciman’s bill has just been defeated, by a vote of 29-7. It is a great shame – both that no Liberal or NDP private members had the imagination to vote for this interesting and, for the moment, harmless enough proposal, and even that so few members of Mr. Runciman’s own party turned out to support him. He himself deserves some credit for trying to improve east-west relations in the country, in a rare mood of high-minded public spirit.