Downtown Orillia Street Festival and Sale, 2012.

Dr. Dave Town from Orillia, Ontario offered an intriguing comment on my recent post about Senate reform,  “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?” (And I believe he is the same person I have now intriguingly discovered on the “gossip-stew of the internet” : successful chiropractor by day, public-spirited  local activist after hours, medal-winning swimmer, close reader of Canadian history, and published local historian.)

Dr. Town complained that my post, while “thorough and thought provoking …didn’t address my biggest question about senate reform —  the reasons people say we need senate reform in the first place … I can see the need to tweak it, mostly to tighten up spending oversights and slightly re-distribute the seating arrangement due to growth in the west over 100 years, but abolish? Radically re-align? Elect? I just don’t see the need. Maybe you need a post on that topic.”

Stephen Leacock (centre) during a fly fishing excursion with May "Fitz" Shaw and Francis Page Hett, Orillia, Ontario, 1933. (Photo by Olive Hett Seale 1933).

In my own fresh Canadian Senate reforming spirit of trying to pay more attention to what others  are saying, I am taking up Dr. Town’s challenge, as best I can. And his position on the issue, I think it’s worth stressing, isn’t just something that he is thinking about all by himself  in Orillia, Ontario (also btw an old haunt of the humourist and political scientist, Stephen Leacock, 1869–1944 — a fresh biography of whom, by Margaret Macmillan, appeared just a few years back).

As Aaron Wherry urged on the Maclean’s website several days ago: “If you believe that there needs to be a second chamber (I don’t) or that the odds of abolishing the Senate are too long (I refuse to give in to such defeatism), there is a case to be made that an appointed and thus less-legitimate Senate is preferable to an elected and thus democratically empowered Senate. I’m not convinced by any of the arguments for maintaining a Senate, but if you insist on having one, you’ve actually got to decide what sort of Parliament you want. And those who favour an elected Senate have some important questions to answer in terms of how they imagine the House and the Senate will interact …   You now at least have three options to choose from. Stephen Harper wants an elected Senate. Justin Trudeau wants an appointed Senate, but wants to change the way senators are appointed. And Thomas Mulcair wants to abolish the Senate.”(Italics added.)

Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, January 4, 2013. David Kawai/Postmedia News.

I also want to urge myself, right up front, that, as polling analyst Éric Grenier has recently pointed out: “Opinions about what should be done with the Senate have shifted back and forth for decades, but polls suggest Canadians are becoming less and less accepting of the current process for nominating [ie appointing] senators. Support for abolishing the Senate is creeping upwards, and the recent scandals seem unlikely to reverse the trend … Electing senators is the overwhelming choice for the kind of reform that should take place, and support for it has grown. Angus-Reid has found that support for ‘allowing Canadians to directly elect their senators’ has gone from 60 or 63 per cent in 2008 to around 70 per cent in the last few years.”

At the same time again, the “tweak-appointed” position Dave Town is pointing to, as it were, does seem to me similar enough to the Senate reform position apparently advocated by Justin Trudeau, new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. And if I were Stephen Harper — whose current parliamentary majority in Ottawa depends quite a lot on the same Ontario-beyond-Toronto regions frequented by Dr.Town — I’d be starting to wonder, a little at least, about just what is going on in the Ontario countryside (and other such places elsewhere, across the land).

AND NOW, ONCE AGAIN, HERE IS FOR FAR MORE THAN ANYONE EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE REASONS PEOPLE SAY WE NEED SENATE REFORM IN THE FIRST PLACE … (and/or just quickly scroll through and/or ignore) …

1. Democracy means never having to say you’re sorry, etc, etc …

Senators and Order of Canada recipients Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy resign from Conservative caucus over Senate expense-claim scandal. Ian Hamilton’s Daily Drawings.

The first thing to say about “the reasons people say we need senate reform in the first place,” it seems to me, is that reasons of this sort in political debates are ultimately just opinions. You or I may have good or bad reasons for our political opinions, but in the end they are just opinions all the same. And the principle that we are all entitled to our own political opinions is a crucial hallmark of any working real-world democracy.

Similarly, far too many years of arguing about political opinions has convinced me that the process of trying to change such things is not exactly rational. I can tell you what I think my reasons for my opinions are. But my experience has most often been that this is not all that likely to change your opinions. (Just as I am not all that likely to change my opinions if you tell me your reasons for your different opinions.)

I happen to believe that the present unreformed Senate of Canada stands in need of quite major change. And I have believed this for many years — long before the recent Duffy-Wallin-etc Senate expense scandals (which, I agree, are not all that appalling in any broader scheme of utterly outrageous and appalling political scandals).

Pierre Trudeau looks on as Elizabeth II signs Canada’s Constitution Act, 1982.

To me the question of the present unreformed Senate of Canada today is similar to the  question of the British monarchy in Canada today. Both, I feel, are relics of the 19th century colonial era in our history — and are no longer relevant or appropriate in what our Constitution Act, 1982 alludes to as the “free and democratic society” we enjoy in the Canada of the 21st century.

The crux of my feelings here  — or my reasons for saying we need senate reform in the first place — is democracy. The Canadian confederation of 1867 was the first self-governing dominion of the British empire, and not exactly a democracy (as various historians I have read have underlined). But Canada has evolved over the subsequent 146 years. We are no longer a mere dominion of the British empire (which has itself been transformed into the modern Commonwealth of Nations). And we have very much become an independent sovereign (parliamentary) democracy in our own right.

Tim Uppal, Minister of State for Democratic Reform.

The general argument, I think, has been nicely enough summarized on the University of Calgary Faculty of Law Blog : “The present Conservative government criticizes the Senate as being an antiquated and undemocratic institution … Prime Minister Stephen Harper has gone so far as to require all of his Senate nominees to pledge support for his Senate reform agenda …When the [current] Senate Reform Act was introduced in June 2011 Tim Uppal, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, said that the purpose of the Act is to make the Senate ‘more democratic, accountable, and representative of Canadians’ …  Ultimately, reforming the Senate is about resolving its democratic deficit.”

I do not support many or even any other Harper government policies. But I do support this one. (Even if I am not always or lately ever sure that Stephen Harper himself does!) To me, no merely appointed Senate — no matter how impressively the appointments are made, or by whom — can be a seriously credible and legitimate legislative body in the kind of free and democratic society we enjoy in Canada today.

Democratic refugees from Hitler’s Germany in America : Left to right — Franz and Inge Neumann, Golde and Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert and Sophie Marcuse, ca. 1937.

I can also appreciate that other Canadians still do believe some kind of appointed Senate can even serve some kind of democratic purposes in Canada today. But I do not see this myself.

As already noted, there is, I think, ultimately no strictly reasoned way of resolving this kind of conflict.  Philosophically, I like the position taken by the political and legal theorist Franz Neumann, in his late 1950s essay collection on The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: “What [John Stuart] Mill… says so impressively is … that the truth can arise only from the competition of opinions … that it can thus never be a matter of tolerating other views, but that the truth is discoverable only through the clash of different opinions.”

Practically, we finally resolve clashing opinions in a democracy (or we at least ought to) by letting the majority of the active citizenry decide. And in principle I like Senator Hugh Segal’s proposal for a referendum on the fate of the unreformed Senate of Canada.

2. In between the lines of  “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?”

Orillia Hockey Team, 1897.

I do think it is broadly correct that my earlier  post about Senate reform in the true north,  “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?,” tended to assume rather than explain the case for major Senate reform (and/or abolition) in Canada today.

But I also think that various ingredients of this case did appear in between or otherwise around the lines. And it may help flesh out my attempt here to explain the reasons people say we need senate reform in the first place to quickly review these arguments between the lines :

* I noted myself : “As matters stand, The Unreformed Senate of Canada (itself the title of a book first published in the 1920s) is still what alleged Senate reformer Stephen Harper nicely called it in a Vancouver speech  more than seven years ago : ‘a relic of the 19th century.’ It desperately needs to be brought into the present (or, others would say, just abolished altogether).”

* I similarly alluded to a parallel passage from Jesse Kline’s National Post article : “Real Senate reform … would turn an anachronism into an asset for Canada.”

Ontario Liberal luminary Gregory Sorbara, talking to the press as provincial Minister of Finance, 2007.

* I alluded to Gregory Sorbara’s “formula for an independent, non-partisan Senate,” appointed  by “a 20-member Senate Appointments Committee (SAC) made up of respected members of the Order of Canada.” And I then commented : “this kind of Senate reform proposal strikes me as essentially anti-democratic. It just perpetuates the elitist, quasi-aristocratic style of the original 1867 Senate of Canada, which was far too inspired by the British House of Lords. I think there is a growing consensus among the people of Canada today that if the Senate is not going to be democratically elected, it ought to be abolished.”

* I wrote: “The original 1867 Senate of Canada, it might be said, had two major purposes. The first was to serve as a kind of quasi-aristocratic chamber of ‘sober second thought’ : a check, as it were, on the more hasty democratic impulses of the popularly elected Canadian House of Commons — more or less after the fashion of the House of Lords in the old Mother Country. The second was ‘regional representation’ beyond mere population numbers, in a geographically vast federation — more or less on the model of the adjacent United States Senate.” What I might have added here (but didn’t) is that, in my view, the first of these original purposes is no longer relevant in what the Constitution Act, 1982 calls the “free and democratic society” we enjoy in Canada today. To me effective regional representation in a geographically vast federation of diverse provinces is the main purpose of a Canadian Senate in the 21st century. (And for an up-to-date second purpose see the last item in this section below, on a recent Saskatoon Star Phoenix Senate reform editorial.)

* I quoted a recent apt complaint from an editorial in the Hants Journal in Nova Scotia : “Currently, new Senate members are appointed by whoever is in power. This time, it’s the Conservatives, and they’ve stacked the Senate with party faithful.”

Democracy in trouble ... even in Canada.

* I quoted what strikes me as an especially apt passage from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix’s May 22, 2013 Senate reform editorial : “Mr. Harper has also demonstrated why Canada needs an effective and democratic check on executive power … In a report issued this month by the Washington-based Transatlantic Academy, entitled Democracy in Trouble, political scientists David Cameron and Robert Vipond compare how two of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies —  Canada and the United States —  have stumbled into difficulty. In the case of America it’s because of partisan-orchestrated stagnation, while in Canada it is the effect on the electorate of the ‘friendly dictatorship’ with all the power emanating from the PMO.” And I should add myself that I do not think any kind of merely appointed Senate could act as a credible and effective check on the overweening power of the friendly PMO dictatorship (any more than the present appointed Senate can seriously perform this kind of important function).

3. Harold Innis’s case from the 1940s

Harold Innis with the Fourth Battery of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Western Europe during the First World War, 1916.

At the risk of altogether boring to death any who have made it this far in what yet again seems to be evolving into yet another far too long “miniature long-winded dissertation on why Canadian Senate reform remains crucial, despite all the arguments against it,” I want to allude to some remarks about the unreformed Senate of Canada from the writings of “Canada’s first and perhaps only genuine intellectual,” Harold Adams Innis.

Born on a family farm in Southwestern Ontario in 1894 (and dead in Toronto all too early in 1952), Innis was the godfather of Alberta-born Marshall McLuhan. He was also the first Canadian born chairman of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto (1937–1952), the first Canadian President of the American Economic Association, and the author of what still strikes me as the single most interesting (and important) book on Canadian history (The Fur Trade in Canada : An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, first published in1930 and still in print).

Harold Innis, researching the fur trade on the Peace River, 1924.

Whatever else might be said about him (and he has more than a few critics), Harold Innis, I think, has probed the depths of the Canadian experience deeper than anyone else, before or since. Along the way, he had a few things to say about what he called “that unique institution,” the Senate of Canada. Without wanting to get into any great detail on the subject right now, I think his more or less random observations on the Senate, and the related issue of Canadian regionalism, add up to a quite sophisticated case for major Senate reform.

Here are eight quotations of this sort from Chairman Innis, so to speak. They are taken from two of his later essays from the 1940s, “Great Britain, the United States and Canada” and “Decentralization and Democracy.” These essays were re-published in Essays in Canadian Economic History (edited by Mary Q. Innis, 1956), and, more recently, Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change (edited by Daniel Drache, 1995) :

* “Our constitution has proved inadequate in the face of the demands made upon it. The Senate, that unique institution, has lent itself to political manipulation …  Politicians have before them as their reward for activity an appointment to the Senate for life …” [My note: This was changed to retirement at 75 in 1965, or as the Harper government explains:“Senators were originally appointed to the Senate ‘for Life’, but that was changed unilaterally by Parliament through an amendment to section 29 of the Constitution Act, 1867 ... that created the current mandatory retirement provision for senators attaining the age of 75 years.”]

Harold Innis (l), Hans Seyle (c), and Alf Earling Porsild (r) on a visit to the Soviet Union, just after the end of the Second World War in 1945.

* “The Senate … provides … a support to party organizations throughout Canada. A federal party organizer can be appointed to the Senate and the cost for secretarial services charged to services to the country…”

* “A senatorship is also a reward for journalists who have been active in the party’s interest and who will presumably continue active after their appointment …”

* “A senator stands as a guard over the party’s interest and is expected to be continually alert to the improvement of the party’s position in the region from which he is appointed. The entrenched position of the party in the Senate contributes to inflexible government, makes political instruments less sensitive to economic demands, and possibly contributes to the rise of new provincial parties …”

* “Provincialism has paralleled the new industrialism … Confederation as an instrument of steam power has been compelled to face the implications of hydro-electric power and petroleum …  Strains on the political structure have been evident on all sides as problems of adjustment have become more acute …”

* “The Senate … was created in a period with limited political capacity and little effort has been made to adjust its membership to the increase in talent available. Necessities of party organization have made it a pasture for old party war horses …  With limitations of the Senate the strain on the courts has not been lessened …”

* “The complex problems of regionalization in the recent development of Canada render the political structure obsolete and necessitate concentration on the problem of machinery by which interests can become more vocal and their demands be met more efficiently … serious attention should be given to the problem of revising political machinery so that democracy can work out solutions to modern problems …”

* “The dangers of an obsolescent political structure cannot be avoided by patchwork solutions … Each region has its conditions of equilibrium in relation to the rest of Canada and to the rest of the world …”

4.  Last thoughts

I have a few final thoughts — and/or final quotations :

(1) A passion for democracy, as noted earlier, lies at the crux of my own belief that the present unreformed Senate of Canada stands in need of quite major change. Yet I also agree that it is important not to romanticize or be naive about such passions.

Ed Dorn in action.

One of the most sensible things I have read lately on this front comes from the late great poet of the American West, Ed Dorn: “I take democracy very seriously, but on the other hand, it’s a form of government that you have to change your mind about a lot because its form is protean, and its instinct, essentially, comes from a mob psychology. Unlike an adherent to a dogmatic position like Marxism, about which there is very little to change your mind, a democrat is liable to change his mind a lot. So none of these concerns and principles ever leave my mind much, but I vary my attitude according to the angles of perspective I’m able to get on them. Democracy literally has to be cracked on the head all the time to keep it in good condition. But all other forms are more or less sudden death.”

Or, if you like, I think the kind of at least more or less major reform I tried to point to in “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?” would do Canada a lot of good. But nothing in the real world of politics is even close to perfect. (Or, as Bland Bill Davis once said about the home province of both myself and Dave Town : “The people of Ontario have never been spoiled by too much perfection in government.”)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks to his caucus on Parliament Hill in the midst of growing scandal over senators' expenses and the abrupt departure of his chief of staff. He told party members he's "unhappy" with the situation. Later in the day he flew to South America.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand.

Almost a quarter of a century after my book on the subject, I remain somewhat sceptical at best about the realistic prospects for even some modest brand of Senate reform in Canada. I refuse to give up hope altogether, but …

(2) I have been impressed by another recent Senate reform article in the Saskatoon Star Phoneix, this time by John D. Whyte, “a policy fellow at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School at the University of Regina.” It makes a number of apt concluding points for my purposes here : “A well-functioning second chamber represents an essential constitutional structure for Canada. Nevertheless, an unelected Senate is an anomaly in a modern democratic nation, and reform is necessary …  Some raise an alarm over the idea of an elected Senate on the ground that it would gain too much political legitimacy and frustrate the capacity of the Commons to enact laws. This overstates the risk … First, the Senate’s moral compass and, hence, its boundary of legitimacy, will be to check excesses in the government’s legislative agenda, not take over the legislative program …  Second, if senators are elected, it is difficult to see their democratic deficit in making legislative decisions. Third, other countries’ constitutions … stipulate mechanisms for overriding upper chamber decisions in significant instances.”

Aaron Wherry, that is to say, recently urged on the Maclean’s website :“I’m not convinced by any of the arguments for maintaining a Senate, but if you insist on having one, you’ve actually got to decide what sort of Parliament you want. And those who favour an elected Senate have some important questions to answer in terms of how they imagine the House and the Senate will interact.” I think, however, that he’s just showing he hasn’t done quite enough research yet.

NDP leader Tom Mulcair speaks with the media in the Foyer of the Senate following caucus meetings on Parliament Hill Wednesday May 22, 2013 in Ottawa. (Adrian Wyld/THE CANADIAN PRESS).

The example of the US Senate and House of Representatives next door, I agree, is a bit troubling. But it is finally not relevant for us in Canada, because we have a rather different British-style or “Westminister” parliamentary form of democracy. The elected Senate that our fellow former British dominion and continuing parliamentary democracy in Australia has lived with quite successfully for some 112 years is the example we should be concentrating on.

As I argued in my earlier post : “Canada’s fellow parliamentary democracy of Australia already has a procedure for dealing with intermittent conflict between its ‘upper’ Senate and its ‘lower’ House of Representatives. And Canada may want to take some useful instruction from that source.”  The Senate reform proposal in our own 1992 Charlottetown Accord also addressed the problem Aaron Wherry is so worried about. And Canadian Senate reformers of the 21st century might want to have a second look at that as well.

* * * *

Monument of Samuel de Champlain in Couchiching Beach Park Park, Orillia, Ontario. Image courtesy of Ken Jarvis Photography.

Two very final quick thoughts … First,  as far as I’m concerned, there is no point at all in carrying on with any kind of merely appointed Senate of Canada today. I agree with those who feel that if we cannot find the resources within ourselves to create an effective, elected Senate that more adequately represents our current regional geography, then we should just abolish the thing. (And if that really is impossible, then we should just stop talking about the “Red Chamber” in Ottawa altogether, and stop giving it more money than it needs to survive on an austere diet of day-old bread and tap water.)

As an absolutely very final thought, no matter how many vain words I and others try to throw at the subject, Chantal  Hébert at the Toronto Star is probably right when she urges that “Even Senate scandal will fade before next election …  Two years from now, there will likely be little or no external trace of the beating the federal government is enduring now …” As the summer barbecue season of 2013 comes into view, we are probably a little closer to the kind of elected, effective, and regionally representative (EERR?) Senate of Canada I would like to see myself. But we still have many, many, many kilometres to go before we rest.

Randall White, a former Ontario public servant who now works as an independent public policy consultant, is the author of a number of books on Canadian history and politics, including Voice of Region : The Long Journey to Senate Reform in Canada.

In case you have forgotten, the North West Mounted Police were established by the Canadian federal government on May 23, 1873, to maintain law and order in the old Northwest Territories, which then included what are now northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Yukon.  According to one apparently half-true legend: “In 1873, a gang of American wolf hunters murdered 23 Assiniboine in the Cypress Hills [in present-day Saskatchewan and Alberta] after an argument about stolen horses. In response, Canada established the North West Mounted Police.”

The original Canadian Mounties went on to establish their legendary prowess in always getting their man (or at least sometimes woman too, it would seem) in what is now Western (and northern) Canada. By the late 19th century the legend was reaching beyond Canada’s borders. As explained on the relevant Wikipedia site:  “During the Second Boer War [1899–1902], members of the North-West Mounted Police were given leaves of absence to fight with the 2nd Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles (CMR) and Lord Strathcona’s Horse. The force raised the Canadian Mounted Rifles, mostly from NWMP members, for service in South Africa. For the CMR’s distinguished service there, King Edward VII honoured the NWMP.” And so the Mounties’ official name became Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP) on June 24, 1904.

North West Mounted Police at Dawson in the Yukon, 1898. Stuart Taylor Wood Collection / National Archives of Canada / C-042755.

From here, as they say, the rest is history. Or more exactly (and officially) : “In February 1920, the Mounted Police absorbed the Dominion Police, which had carried out federal policing in eastern Canada. Headquarters was moved from Regina to Ottawa and the Force became responsible for enforcement of federal laws from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In keeping with its new role, it was renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

* * * *

Twenty years after the original Mountie name had faded into the past,  it was revived by Hollywood, in a Cecil B. DeMille 1940 movie  North West Mounted Police, “starring Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll and Paulette Goddard …  the picture was filmed on location in the Canadian Rockies.” It “tells the story of a Texas Ranger who joins forces with the North West Mounted Police to put down a rebellion [Canada’s North West or Second Riel Rebellion of 1885, in fact, in the suppression of which the real-world NWMP actually did play some part]. The supporting cast features Preston Foster, Robert Preston, George Bancroft, Akim Tamiroff, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Robert Ryan.”

More recently, of course, the Mounties have become a more controversial organization in Canada, although official steps have been taken to try to address the various controversies involved. (The counterweights editors looked into this story some four years ago now, in “Are the Mounties getting too many men who don’t need to be got?”)

North West Mounted Police Band at Fort MacLeod in what is now Alberta. 1890.

I for one am nonetheless happy to join Google Canada in commemorating the first-generation Canadian prairie romance of the original North West Mounted Police, from 1873 to 1904. And, having just this morning received an email which began: “We interrupt all the excitement of watching Stephen Harper self-destruct” (assuming this is not just a little too much wishful thinking, of course), I have a proposal for any and/or all of the current opposition parties in the Canadian House of Commons of 2013. (And btw, let me just say in passing, kudos as well to the author of “Hugh Segal: An elected Senate is the only answer” in today’s National Post, which is not a newspaper I usually consult, or otherwise pay attention to.)

Officers of the "B" Division, July 1900.Photographer: Goetzman. Library and Archives Canada, PA-202188.

In the coming great race to succeed the current self-destructing prime minister and his new but still just far too old-fashioned Conservative Party of Canada (again, assuming that this actually is what has begun with the bizarre Canadian Senate scandal apparently haunting Ottawa right now), I promise that, in the still rather far away Canadian federal election of 2015, I will vote for any party which includes in its written platform a promise to restore the original 1873 name of the Canadian Mounties — as the first step in a real present-day thorough-going reform of this once cherished Canadian institution.

Paulette Goddard in North West Mounted Police movie, 1940.

Some will say, of course, that “North West Mounted Police” does not fit a police force whose mandate nowadays stretches from the Atlantic to the Arctic to the Pacific oceans. I have two quick answers here. First, Canada itself, from coast to coast to coast, is a country in the North West of the global village, that we all live in today, like it or not. Second, if you absolutely cannot get your head around this thought, I will settle for just dropping the prefix “Royal” from the present name of the organization (to give, that is, the at least much more free and democratic name of Canadian Mounted Police — paid for, after all, by the hard-earned tax dollars of the Canadian people, and not by any member of the offshore royal family, in the United Kingdom across the seas).

Finally I should note that I live in the rest of Canada outside Quebec, and the Bloc Quebecois does not usually run candidates in the riding where my house is located. Yet if the Bloc both does run a candidate in my riding in 2015, and puts a proposal as outlined above in its written platform (and, I should add I guess, if no other opposition party does the same), I will even vote for such a new pan-Canadian Bloc Quebecois. (Even if it includes in its platform another proposal — to make the ghost of M. Louis Riel an honourary colonel of the North West [and/or Canadian] Mounted Police at last.)

Lawrence Lesssig in flight.

One thing about life in the global village nowadays is that the subtleties of political debate keep getting lost in the demands of 140-characters-or-less, and similar rules elsewhere. (And if you think things were always that way, try reading a 19th century newspaper.)

A case in point glows brightly in this past Wednesday’s Washington Post WONKBLOG, which deals with burning questions submitted by readers. The question in this case — “Is Lawrence Lessig right?” — is answered by the estimable Ezra Klein, who we follow on twitter, etc.

At a mere 80 words, Klein’s answer is admirably concise (as well as politely promotional) : “In general, yes. Specifically? I think Lessig errs in seeing money as the primary ill in American politics. I’d argue that our worst problems are driven by the catalytic interaction of party polarization and a political system designed for consensus. That said, money in politics is a big problem, Lessig’s written the very best book on the subject, and so yes, Lawrence Lessig is right, and people should listen to him. You can read my review of his book here.”

Ezra Klein.

If you click on the here, here, you will arrive at Ezra Klein’s review of two books —  Jack Abramoff’s Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption from America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist, and Lawrence Lessig‘s Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It — in the March 22, 2012 issue of the New York Review of Books. And if you actually read this review (which weighs in at 4800 words), you will almost certainly come away with a rather different impression of Ezra Klein’s evaluation of Lawrence Lessig than you took from Wednesday’s WONKBLOG.

Two faces of Ezra Klein on Lawrence Lessing ????

“Almost certainly” are of course strong words (well, more or less). Yet several of us at this location have now taken the test, and we all seem to agree. Ezra Klein’s evaluation of Lawrence Lessig’s current “We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim” campaign sounds considerably more positive in the April 24, 2013 Washington Post WONKBLOG (80 words) than it does in the March 22, 2012 issue of the New York Review of Books (4800 words).

It is true enough that when you go back to the WONKBLOG evaluation a second time, you are reminded that  Klein does begin with : “I think Lessig errs in seeing money as the primary ill in American politics. I’d argue that our worst problems are driven by the catalytic interaction of party polarization and a political system designed for consensus.”

On the other hand, Ezra Klein does end his WONKBLOG 80 words with: “That said, money in politics is a big problem, Lessig’s written the very best book on the subject, and so yes, Lawrence Lessig is right, and people should listen to him.” And, so far as we can see, there is no such ultimate almost ringing endorsement in the New York Review of Books piece

(What Klein does say in his 4800 word review, eg, is that Lessig is making “two separate points … One is that the rise of money is behind the decline in trust in government. The other is that money empowers ideologues and alienates the middle. Neither claim stands up to scrutiny.”  And: “Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to get the money out of politics … But it’s not clear that any set of campaign finance reforms or anti-lobbyist regulations would restore trust in government or ratchet down partisan polarization. Such policies, if they worked, would likely have more modest effects …  as big a problem as money is in politics … it is not the only one, and it is probably not even the worst one.”)

The medium is the message ??

You could say that one kind of rational part of the difference here is that in his WONKBLOG evaluation Ezra Klein is responding to readers’ questions that almost certainly flow from Lawrence Lessig’s new 18-minute TED talk, “We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim” — released on the Internet just a few weeks ago, on April 3, 2013.

Here at counterweights we have all seen this latest Lessig TED talk now — and marvelled at the communication skills it displays. None of us, alas, have yet actually read Lessig’s latest book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (the subject of Ezra Klein’s piece in the New York Review of Books last year).

The substantive message is no doubt broadly the same. Yet in another sense (and as a famous Canadian once prophesied), “the medium is the message.” It may just be (and we could certainly understand if it is) that the TED talk is just that much more impressive because of the medium. And so Ezra Klein, who has almost certainly now seen the new TED talk himself, is somewhat more positive in his evaluation of this version of Lawrence Lessig’s current money-is-the-root-of-all-evil-in-the-US-Congress campaign, than he was when he had just read the book.

One thing we think the Lessig TED talk does brilliantly is clarify the way in which the increasing domination of money in US Congressional elections — or of what Lessig calls the Lesters or the funders in his 18-minute talk — dysfunctionally narrows the range of policy options presented to We the People in general elections. The tiny minority of big funders act as “in the words of the X Files shape shifters,” while freshman Congressmen (and women) are advised to “lean to the green.” (And, Lessig stresses, green in this case does not mean the environment).

Health care in the United States and Canada

Our commentary here does not have any of the Lessig virtues in “We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim.” And we must quickly bring it to an end. The last thing we want to comment quickly on, being Canadians as we are and cannot escape, is just what if anything Lawrence Lessig’s kind of analysis has to do with Canada.

It is at least a commonplace of current Canadian political thought that we do not really have the same kind of problem with money in politics as our American brothers and sisters — for the unhappy (or happy, depending on your point of view) but quite simple reason that there is just nowhere near as much money in Canada as there is in the United States.

It may be true as well that we have had some sensible campaign finance reform (or at least had until Stephen Harper came along). Thus Rick Salutin has recently written that Jean Chretien in his 10 years as Prime Minister of Canada  “accomplished exactly one thing: a negative. He avoided the Iraq War. (His electoral finance reform got dismantled by Stephen Harper.)”

Just this past Monday the Nanaimo Daily News (and no doubt other parts of the canada.com network) rather more helpfully explained :“In 2004, Jean Chrétien’s Liberal administration introduced a ban on business and labour donations. Of course, that deprived both parties of the funds needed to run a campaign … To make up the difference, a political subsidy was created. Parties were guaranteed $2.04 from the public purse for each vote they received … The federal Conservative government is now in the process of phasing out this subsidy. But the question remains: How are the lost corporate and union donations to be made up?”

We won’t try to answer this last question. (And note that there are possible public subsidies for presidential but not congressional campaigns in the United States: here is Wikipedia on the current state of the art, in Canada and the United States.) Presumably, however, Lessig would say that Mr. Harper’s decision to phase out this public subsidy in Canada is not a helpful move.

One very final thought does occur to us here. We adopted universal public health care in Canada back in the late 1960s — long before any of the current debates about money in politics anywhere got under way. (And at about the same time that the more partial but still impressive Medicare and Medicaid programs began in the USA.) It does strike us, however, that the lack of our kind of universal public health care option in the recent US debate that ended with Obamacare” (which no one really likes), is probably a good example of the kind of problem  Lessig is pointing to. And in the very end we would just second Ezra Klein’s latest short message: “Lawrence Lessig is right, and people should listen to him.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and wife Laureen depart Ottawa on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, on route to London for Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. CP Sean Kilpatrick.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 2013. GANATSEKWYAGON, ONTARIO, CANADA. Today marks the funeral of the fabled Iron Lady back in the old imperial metropolis across the sea. And according to Matthew Coutts at the Daily Brew :”Canadian Conservative leaders including Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be in attendance when Margaret Thatcher, the woman some consider the mother of Canadian conservatism, is laid to rest … Harper left Ottawa for London on Tuesday along with his wife Laureen and former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney.”

Coutts also notes : “Maclean’s suggested on Tuesday that Thatcher was ‘the Big Kahuna of Canadian conservatism.’” In this age of the global village — which I agree is noble in many ways — it may seem parochial to point out just how much this underlines the traditional abject neo-colonialism of Canadian conservatism. But I think this is still something worth pointing out. As Bertie Wooster long ago observed: “it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.”

Say whatever else you like. If you at all seriously believe in Canada and its future, the kind of Canadian conservatism that sees Margaret Thatcher as “the mother of Canadian conservatism” desperately needs to be hit in the head with Bertie Wooster’s bit of lead piping — several times, at least. And this may help account for the quite astounding recent “Forum Research poll, the first conducted since the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was elected party leader on Sunday,”which “has the Liberals at 43% and the Conservatives at 30%. That amount of support would give the Liberals a solid majority government.”

It may help elucidate the point here to point out that April 17, 2013 is also the 31st anniversary of :”This Day in History: April 17, 1982 …  On this day in 1982, Canada finally severed ties to its colonial past and became fully independent from Britain with the signing of the Constitution Act by Queen Elizabeth and prime minister Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa.” Neither the Mulroney nor (perhaps especially) the Harper Conservatives have ever quite accepted what is now properly known as the Constitution Act, 1982 as the decisive moment in modern Canadian history that many among the rest of us believe it is!

* * * *

Like others who feel the way I do, I understand that the land of the Canadian Conservatives (and conservatives) who believe the latest happenings in the old mother country are the main markers for progress has fairly deep roots in at least one side of the Canadian past. A book about Toronto in the 1920s that I have on my shelves shows an ad from the December 1921 Canadian federal election. It is headed “Canada for the Canadians.” And it urges that if “Canada’s destiny”is “to be that of a great free nation within the British Empire group of nations,” then “Canada Needs Meighen.” (Ie, Arthur Meighen — the Conservative candidate for prime minister, as it were.)

Yet this particular election was won not by Arthur Meighen but by the new Liberal leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King — grandson of the leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, and the very self-conscious legatee of modern Canada’s first French Canadian prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier. (Whose deep attachment to “sunny ways” the new Liberal leader of 2013, Justin Trudeau, almost seems to be trying to revive.)

Nowadays, in the early 21st century, the great problem with the traditional Canadian conservative view of “Canada for the Canadians” is of course that the “British Empire” has disappeared. And the one great achievement of Pierre Trudeau (Justin’s father) is that he had at least the beginnings of an answer to the Empire’s disappearance for the future of Canada. We the great huddled mass of ordinary Canadian people may never have altogether grasped just what Pierre Trudeau was talking about. But enough of us dimly appreciated his vision of a post-colonial Canada with a future that made sense to keep him in office, for most of the time from 1968 to 1984.

Apparently, Stephen Harper and his government, whatever its other virtues, really does not understand this. That may finally be the best explanation for the quite remarkable rise of Justin Trudeau in the opinion polls of late 2012 and early 2013. Margaret Thatcher and her view of the world may or may not have been a great boon for the United Kingdom of the 1980s. But it had and still has very little to do with Canada today and its future. PM Harper and his acolytes, it seems increasingly clear, are trapped back in the 1950s, or the 1920s, or even the 1890s of the Boer War and “The old man, the old flag, and the old policy” (or words to that effect). That just may be the Achilles’ heel which Justin Trudeau is an increasingly strong position to exploit. (Or not, of course, of course. It is far too early, etc, etc. But already some of the signs are intriguing. And to say that Margaret Thatcher is “the mother of Canadian conservatism”just betrays the fundamental bankruptcy of the phenomenon in question. You can fool some of the people all of the time. And all of the people some of the time. But even in Canada, etc, etc, etc.)

Social democrat partisans will stress that this past weekend did not belong to M. Trudeau alone  — even if he did win his Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership by a landslide. Some of us are annoyed (if far from surprised) that the New Democratic Party of Canada policy convention in Montreal could not bring itself to seriously consider the “Resolution on a Parliamentary Republic of Canada … Submitted by Chicoutimi-Le Fjord.”  From the standpoint of the party’s own immediate interests, it was no doubt more important to ensure that “NDP convention focuses on plan to take on Stephen Harper in next election.”

In fact, it seems that the New Democrats’ and the Conservatives’ initial criticisms of the new Liberal leader are rather similar. The Conservatives’ immediate reaction was that “Justin Trudeau may have a famous last name, but in a time of global economic uncertainty, he doesn’t have the judgment or experience to be prime minister.”   And, as another headline put the point: “NDP MPs at Montreal convention hear that they will counter possible Liberal resurgence following … election of Justin Trudeau as party leader with substance and experience — meaning NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair.”

In fact again, if two recent opinion polls can be believed, what looks like a Liberal resurgence for the moment has already begun. A Nanos poll conducted April 4 to 8 “has the Liberals in first place at 35.4 %. The Conservatives are …  at 31.3% and the NDP …  at 23.6%.”  According to a somewhat different Forum poll conducted April 2 : “The numbers show 33% of respondents would vote for the Liberal Party under outgoing leader Bob Rae, compared to 29% for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. The Official Opposition NDP garners 25% support, while the Greens trail far behind at 6% …  when respondents are asked to picture Trudeau as the leader … the Liberals win 40% support to the Conservatives 28%.”

UPDATE APRIL 16: This just in,  as reported in the Toronto Sun: “Canada’s new Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, would lead his party to a crushing election victory if a vote were held now, according to a poll released on Tuesday that put Liberal support substantially higher than other recent surveys have shown … The Forum Research poll, the first conducted since the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was elected party leader on Sunday, has the Liberals at 43% and the Conservatives at 30% That amount of support would give the Liberals a solid majority government …  The Forum numbers would have been enough for the Liberals to win 170 of the 308 seats in the [Canadian] House of Commons …”

Can the magic touch last?

The most significant point in all this no doubt is that there will not be another Canadian federal election for more than two years, in 2015. A week is a long time in politics, etc, etc. As hard to remember as it may be now, there were similar bumps in Liberal opinion poll support when both Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff became Liberal leader. And Justin Trudeau does remain a largely unknown political commodity — even if : his “thin resumé could be an asset” ; or “Mulroney, Day and the business community: Justin Trudeau earns praise from unlikely sources” ; or “Trudeau has the magic touch: Anne McLellan … he also has what it takes to win in Alberta.”

You might wonder as well just how much better it will be for Canadian democracy if the Harper Conservatives who won a majority of seats in the Canadian House of Commons with just under 40% of the cross-Canada vote are replaced by the Trudeau II Liberals, who win a majority of seats with just under (or even just over) 40% of the cross-Canada vote.

Even on the most optimistic political arithmetic suggested by any of the polls extant, the only real chance for a government actually supported by a democratic majority of Canadians still lies in some form of Liberal-NDP or NDP-Liberal co-operation. (Even if neither Nathan Cullen nor Joyce Murray finally won their party leadership races.  There can still be co-operation after a 2015 vote that gives one or the other progressive party a minority government.)

You can of course say that we haven’t in fact had many governments supported by a democratic majority of actual Canadian voters, going back for many years now. But that nonetheless does seem to be an increasingly important part of the democratic malaise currently haunting the land in the early 21st century. (And in the past, more than a few policies of Liberal governments that didn’t quite have a majority of the popular vote did qualify for majority support when the NDP vote was added — in a world where, some would argue at any rate, New Democrats were just “Liberals in a hurry.”)

One optimistic thing about the current scene for the new Trudeau II Liberals is that even Conservative supporters among the punditocracy seem to be acknowledging a certain ”Harper weariness” in the air. Similarly, something about Justin Trudeau — something almost impossible to specify, perhaps — appears to inspire at least large numbers of people to feel better about their country and where it is going, and so forth. Whatever else he may or may not do, Mr. Harper does not really inspire even his own  part of the electorate. (And neither, more than a few might argue, does Mr. Mulcair. This argument may prove wrong in the end. “Tom Mulcair” may suddenly start grabbing the mass imagination, in the midst of an election campaign, say. But that has not happened yet.)

Justin Trudeau’s kind of “magic touch” can always vanish almost overnight, no doubt. But the new Conservative attack ads saying he is “in way over his head” seem a little weary in their own right. And one thing almost all the recent polls do appear to show is a significant enough slide in Harper Conservative support since the 2011 election.  (Oh and btw, this also just in: “Analysis: Canadians losing faith in economic ‘miracle’.”) Jean Chretien may have been quite wrong when he said yesterday that  “today marks the beginning of the end of this Conservative government.” But you don’t have to be a strident supporter of either the Liberals or the New Democrats to think, at least for the moment right now, that he may finally prove to be quite right.

Even those who are quite convinced that Justin Trudeau is no intellectual match for his father, and/or that he lacks substance or any kind of serious qualifications as a student of public policy, seem to concede, when they meet him first hand, that he definitely has the undefinable “charisma,” which the great early 20th century German social scientist Max Weber saw as the magic potion of modern democratic politics.

At the moment, no doubt, just what this means for the larger Canadian future is impossible to judge.  On the one hand, we have “Justin Trudeau writes ‘Just watch me’ when asked if he can beat Stephen Harper” and “Canadian voters may be experiencing seven-year itch with Tories: Hébert.” And there is the frequent perception that, while NDP federal leader Thomas Mulcair has done well in the Canadian House of Commons in the so-called nation’s capital, he has not yet seriously mobilized any progressive constituency beyond the banks of the Ottawa River.

On the other hand, there are the names Stephane Dion and Michaerl Ignatieff. Just sticking to personal opinions, we liked both federal Liberal leaders in their time. But neither proved capable of doing anything seriously worthwhile for the broader Canadian future, or for the narrower self-interests of the Liberal Party. And it is still too easy to imagine that Justin Trudeau’s charismatic magic of spring 2013 will finally reduce to the Dion-Ignatieff model in the fall of 2015.

On the other hand again, there is also the vague prospect that Mr.Mulcair and Mr.Trudeau together will somehow finally conspire (or even coalesce) to give the continuing progressive majority in Canada the voice it ought to have in Ottawa, from coast to coast to coast.

Cynics will stress that both M.Mulcair and M.Trudeau have lately been saying progressive co-operation of this sort will just never happen — “lips that touch liquor will never touch mine.”  But other cynics will note that Stephen Harper once said, eg, that he would never appoint any non-elected person to the unreformed Senate of Canada. In the real world of Canadian politics, history shows that almost anything can happen, despite what leading politicians may say before the results of the next election are clear. And that may even be the most encouraging thing about the current undeniable charisma of Justin Trudeau (and his oh-so-charming wife, Ms Sophie Gregoire). The charismatic M. Trudeau and the substantial M. Mulcair may finally prove able to do things together, that neither can do on his own!

Stockwell Day, back in the day — the new Conservative Party’s Justin Trudeau, in an earlier era (or not)?

Sometimes, when not much seems to be happening on the current political scene, you can catch glimpses of a more fascinating long-term future in the minor events of the day.

The headline on Andy Radia’s recent interview with the now retired Stockwell Day, in the wilds of BC, may qualify under this heading, despite all current scepticism in opposite directions : “Yahoo! Exclusive: A Liberal-NDP alliance is inevitable, Stockwell Day predicts.”

Another seemingly drab headline of today that just might qualify for a brighter long-term future, I think, is this past Friday’s “Senate reform could weaken minority language representation, rights groups say.”  The long and short here is summarized in the article’s first sentence : “The country’s largest organization representing French-language communities across Canada fears current proposals for an elected Senate could harm representation for minority language rights, and is hoping the Supreme Court of Canada will hear their concerns.”

Marie-France Kenny, présidente de la Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne (FCFA) du Canada.

It is worth underlining, I think as well, that Marie-France Kenny, president of the Federation of Francophone and Acadian communities of Canada, is NOT arguing for abolition of the unreformed Senate of Canada we have today: “If we abolish the Senate, we lose representation of minorities … Having the counterweight of the Senate in terms of representation of Francophones makes sense.”  And : “We’re not saying we’re against reforms per se, what we’re saying is that in any reforms we look at . . . we should ensure (fair) representation.”

I am someone who has been (almost insanely, I agree, it does often seem) interested in Canadian Senate reform, ever since writing a book on the subject almost a quarter of a century ago, at a publisher’s suggestion. And these recent comments from the Federation of Francophone and Acadian communities of Canada have struck a soft spot, in the armoured vests we Senate reformers have grown accustomed to wearing over the years, as a matter of safety first.

Senator Mike Duffy holds up his glass during the Maritime Energy Association's annual dinner in Halifax earlier this year. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Devaan Ingraham.

Marie-France Kenny, that is to say, does point to what has increasingly seemed to me a key current reality about the apparently insanely quixotic subject of reforming the unreformed Senate of Canada at last. No matter how many times Pamela Walin and/or Mike Duffy (or anyone else) may or may not make dubious expense claims, the debate on reform won’t even start to get serious, until we start talking seriously about just what representation in a reformed Senate ought to involve. It goes without saying (much more) that a reformed federal Senate has to be democratically elected, and that there have to be reasonable term limits for senators. The key question is just what or who should reformed senators be representing — that isn’t already taken account of by the principle of representation by population in the Canadian House of Commons?

Geography as a first principle

Current Chairman of the Rajya Sabha in India, Hamid Ansari.

The main answer to this question that I have long been convinced by — as a self-confessed Senate reformer — is geography. Geographically vast democratic “federations” like Canada (or Australia or the United States or India, as opposed to geographically compact “unitary states” like France or England or Japan) need to have some adequate democratic representation for less populated stretches of important geography in their federal institutions — along with democratic representation by population (where every adult person gets one vote) .

It is for this reason that both the United States and Australia have important democratically elected Senates, and India has a parallel body known as the Rajya Sabha (as opposed to the Lok Sabha, comparable to the Canadian House of Commons).

During my earliest career as a Senate reformer I at least took very seriously the original modern Western Canadian demand (as it were, with special reference to the mid 1980s provincial government of Alberta) for a so-called “Triple E” Senate in Canada (elected, effective, and equal), modelled on the US and Australian experience. In this case each legal or regional sovereign unit in the federal system — states in Australia and the US, provinces in Canada — has equal representation in the federal Senate.

Farah Nasser at cp24 TV in Toronto — one among many faces of Canada today.

Subsequent experience and reflection, however,  has persuaded me that “equal provincial representation” in a reformed Senate is an unworkable formula in the unique circumstances of Canada. And here, I think, two key Canadian peculiarities stand out. The first is the role of Quebec  — which has never quite been “a province like the others,” as a result of its continuing francophone majority. (And this status has now been confirmed, one might reasonably enough argue, by the Canadian House of Commons’ late November 2006 recognition that the Quebecois constitute a nation within a united Canada!) The second is a somewhat unusually extreme tendency in Canada for population to be concentrated in a minority of “big”provinces.

Supplementary cultural representation formulas

Keeping the unreformed Senate of Canada clean — in one sense at least.

To get right down to essentials without further adieu, for a number of years now I have been in favour of a reformed Senate of Canada representation formula that gives special representation to our country’s vast geography, while at the same time recognizing the unique circumstances of francophone Quebec, and the unusual concentration of population in the largest provinces.

This gives (in my particular twisted vision at any rate) a provincial allocation of elected or reformed Senate of Canada seats as follows: Quebec – 12; British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario – 6 each ; all other provinces – 3 each ; and three territories – 1 each.

From the blog “Buckdog — Fresh Winds From The Prairies,” in a Thursday, August 27, 2009 article entitled “Harper Names Nine New Tory Porkers To Senate.”

Pondering the current arguments being presented to the Supreme Court of Canada by Marie-France Kenny, president of the Federation of Francophone and Acadian communities of Canada, and others like her, I have remembered that I earlier also wanted to accommodate minority cultural, as it were, as well as majority geographic interests in any reformed Senate scheme of representation.

Without getting into a lot more detail at this juncture, I want to add  two strands of what might be called minority cultural as well majority geographic representation to my own list of key current representation formulas. The first is an additional three-member delegation representing officially linguistic minorities — say two senators for francophone Canadians outside Quebec and one senator for anglophones inside Quebec?

Nalini Sharma and Mika Midolo at cp24 TV in Toronto — more faces of Canada today that we are so lucky to have on display, even if they will never be members of the Senate of Canada, reformed or unreformed, etc, etc.

The second item here is an additional three-member delegation representing what sections 25 and 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 call the aboriginal peoples of Canada.

In both cases the senators involved would be elected, with suitable term limits and so forth. And in both cases there are important questions about just who qualifies as entitled to vote for either the linguistic or aboriginal minority three-person delegations.

Having thought about such matters for quite a few years as well, I feel there are several possible practical approaches to this kind of problem. And, by way of celebrating the annual North American cultural holiday of the Irish, who finally figured out how to turn a (nowadays rather oxymoronic) British parliamentary democratic monarchy  into an Irish parliamentary democratic republic (and in a way that would also inspire India a generation later), that is mercifully all I have to say on any branch of this or any other subject right now.

(And, on a strictly local note in Canada’s current biggest city region, may none of the green beer you may or may not drink  today with such Irish folk heroes as Gurdeep Ahluwalia, Nathan Downer, Melissa Grelo, Jamie Gutfreund, Pooja Handa, Rena Heer, Jee Yun Lee, George Lagogianes, Mika Midolo, Farah Nasser, Ann Rohmer, Nalini Sharma, Katie Simpson, Cam Woolley, and Karman Wong, etc, etc, etc, etc, make you terminally or even otherwise ill! Just remember : NOW’S THE TIME TO START THINKING SERIOUSLY ABOUT REFORMING THE SENATE OF CANADA’S REPRESENTATION FORMULA, BELIEVE IT OR NOT! And I at least will raise a moderate glass of Irish whiskey to that.)

The latest news is that “Stephen Harper's hockey book will be available at a bookstore near you just in time for Christmas” 2013. Will he have more time to promote it then?

This past Thursday Steve Paikin wrote a short “Inside Agenda Blog” on the TV Ontario website called “Why Stephen Harper May Step Down This Summer.”  The Huffington Post repeated the item in its Politics Canada section.

On Friday Andy Radia on the Yahoo Canada site wrote that “Steve Paiken — a journalist for TV Ontario — has written a provocative column that’s getting some buzz in the #cdnpoli world this week … In his article posted on the TVO website, Paiken wonders aloud if Prime Minister Stephen Harper might retire this summer.” (Yes Mr. Paikin’s name is spelled incorrectly here, but that is the spelling Mr. Radia used!)

According to Andy Radia, Liberal insider Warren Kinsella thinks Steve Paikin’s suggestion that Harper might step down voluntarily, so to speak, as early as the summer of 2013, is “ridiculous. Why quit when your opposition is split, and you’re going to win?” And Conservative consultant Gerry Nicholls says: “Anything is possible, but I would be totally shocked if Harper stepped down before 2015.”

Reactions of this sort leave we non-insiders and non-consultants far away from Ottawa wondering why someone as savvy and seasoned as Steve Paikin has raised the prospect in the first place. But you don’t have to look too hard for at least some half-answers here.

To start with, there are the recent opinion polls garnering such headlines as “Poll suggests Harper Conservatives are at their lowest mark since 2009” and “Trudeau would win next Canadian election for Liberals, poll shows.”

And then it may well be that Justin Trudeau himself is becoming a bit unnerved by the extent to which his father’s mere name has become a kind of mindless magnet, for a growing share of Canadians who are suddenly finding and/or always have found the Harper Conservatives wanting. But PM Harper’s Freudian slip in the House this past Thursday, when he alluded to the young M. Trudeau as “the minister, uh, the member from Papineau” — and “ then called Trudeau the ‘minister’ from Papineau a second time” — suggests that Mr. Harper himself is starting to get a bit rattled by the new Trudeaumania Jr, which sometimes seems the most fascinating landscape on a rather lacklustre Canadian federal political scene these days.

* * * *

Of course, the always interesting Chantal Hébert, in no less liberal (and Liberal) a place than the Toronto Star, also has a point in “Justin Trudeau’s lacklustre reception outside Ontario, BC should worry Liberals …  Liberal leadership front-runner Justin Trudeau is causing excitement in Ontario and BC, but in few other places.”

PM Harper has breakfast with cat Stanley, January 2013.

Ontario and BC, however, are absolutely crucial to the majority government that Stephen Harper finally won in 2011. If they are straying from the one true faith, then the new conservative (and Conservative) dispensation in Canada that Preston Manning still likes to fantasize about probably is in some serious enough trouble.

From here, it is only another short hop, step, and jump to another new wave of grief in the Alberta-based Canadian resource economy, that has clearly enough had a lot to do with Mr. Harper’s ability to turn a less than 40% plurality of the cross-Canada popular vote into an ultimate parliamentary majority in Ottawa.  And for some apt recent commentary on this side of the twisted picture, see: “Alberta’s oil woes mean trouble ahead for Canada: Walkom …  The Canadian economy has been kept alive by the resource boom. It could be ending” (also in the Toronto Star), and “Alberta budget gets a failing grade from almost everybody.”

The wisest observations in all this, no doubt, are that it is still well over two years before the next Canadian federal election, that, as Warren Kinsella has stressed, Mr. Harper’s progressive (Liberal-NDP) “opposition is split,” and that being Prime Minister of Canada is pretty clearly Stephen Harper’s favourite job in all the world.

There are also those who say the big question is just who would replace Mr. Harper as the new more plausible leader of his new Conservative Party of Canada? And the suggestion that Jason Kenney is the chosen heir is easy enough to greet with considerable mirth.

At the same time, one of Stephen Harper’s strongest claims on the Canadian political tradition is that he just may be some ultimate Conservative answer to the record longevity of the Liberal leader William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada 1921–1926, 1926–1930, 1935–1948. And, if anything, in a number of respects Jason Kenney (grandson of famed Canadian swing band leader, the Western Gentleman Mart Kenney, who once ran a musical ranch in the Toronto exurbs), looks even more like Mackenzie King — “a more subtly accurate, a more flexibly adjustable Gallup poll of Canadian public opinion than statisticians will ever be able to devise … the representative Canadian, the typical Canadian, the essential Canadian, the ideal Canadian, the Canadian as he exists in the kind of God.”  (And we should stress that we don’t think either Stephen Harper or Jason Kenney seriously qualifies for these words on Mackenzie King from the ancient Canadian historian Frank Underhill — only that Mr. Kenney may finally come at least a little closer than Mr. Harper! Maybe … or maybe not??)

Stompin’ Tom Connors, in his signature hat, accepting his Best Country Male Artist honours in 1973. He would win six Junos in the seventies. Credit: Plum Communications Inc.

Like many others in the true north, strong and free, I was saddened to hear that Stompin’ Tom Connors passed away, at the age of 77, on Wednesday, March 6,  2013.

I can’t pretend to be any great fan of Stompin’ Tom’s, or any kind of expert on his life and times. All I can do by way of broad commemoration is point to : the obituaries in the Toronto Star (“Canadian country icon Stompin’ Tom Connors, 1936-2013”) and on the CTV website (“Stompin’ Tom Connors dies at 77”) ; the Wikipedia entry for “Charles Thomas “Stompin’ Tom” Connors, OC” (even if it does say that he “died at age 77 in his home in Peterborough, Ontario,” while the Toronto Star reports that “Connors died Wednesday among friends and family members at his home in Halton Hills, Ont”) ; and (last but by no means least) the video “Surrey resident Deanna Davidson’s parrot Aztek sings Stompin’ Tom Connor’s ‘Hockey Night Tonight’ in honour of the Canadian legend’s death,”on the website of the Vancouver Province.

Yet, like many others again perhaps, Stompin’ Tom also means something more specific to me. He stands for some strand in the collective Canadian experience of the past half century that somehow touched me more directly, and for which I can work up considerable deep nostalgia (or foolish obsolete sentiment or worse?).

Three pillars of Canadian music: Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, and Stompin’ Tom Connors at the 1973 Juno Awards. Credit: Plum Communications Inc.

The marvels of the world wide web in 2013 have allowed me to put a more precise finger on what I think I am thinking about. Only a few moments of googling “Stompin’Tom Connors and David Crombie,” that is to say, have turned up a Wikipedia entry on “Juno Awards of 1973.” It reads, in part : “The Juno Awards of 1973, representing Canadian music industry achievements of the previous year, were awarded on 12 March 1973 [just short of 40 years from Stompin’ Tom’s sad death] in Toronto at a ceremony at the Inn on the Park’s Centennial ballroom …  David Crombie, Toronto’s mayor at that time, presented the Best Male Vocalist award [ahem, actually Best Country Male Artist, according to a list further down the page] to Stompin’ Tom Connors. Gordon Lightfoot also made his first personal appearance at the Junos [and he in fact won for Best Male Vocalist]… Taped excerpts from the awards were broadcast on a special edition of CBC Radio’s ‘The Entertainers’ on 23 March 1973.”

* * * *

David Crombie, Mayor of Toronto (centre), at the Juno Awards, 1973.

This moment almost 40 years ago stands for, in my experience of growing up in Canada, an all too short time when many things seemed possible that subsequently proved not bloody likely, at best. The career of Stompin’ Tom was a kind of trace variable for all this — in some degree at least. Its apogee came in 1974, when he “had a mini-series running on CBC Television in which he met and exchanged with folks from all across Canada. The series called ‘Stompin’ Tom’s Canada’ … ran for 26 episodes of 30 minutes each.” Then, as I can remember someone aptly saying at a much different reunion lunch I attended a few years later, 1975 marked a great watershed, that brought the universe back to a less hopeful reality. And, as the Wikipedia entry on Stompin’ Tom himself explains : “As the 1970s progressed, he retired to his farm in Norval, near Georgetown, Ontario, to protest the lack of support given to Canadian stories by the policies of the Federal government … “

I can’t say that I was or still am vastly disappointed by the difficulties of Stompin’ Tom Connors’s career after the mid 1970s. In the first place, I’d agree that he stood for a somewhat over-aggressive and parochial Canadian nationalist sentiment, that, in our better moments, we have grown beyond. Moreover, insofar as he did touch on something worth perpetuating in the growth of a more broad-minded and democratic Canadian patriotism since the 1960s, interest in his career has recurrently revived.  Thus, eg: “In 1986, Tim Vesely and Dave Bidini of Rheostatics crashed his 50th birthday party and published an article about it in a Toronto newspaper, initiating a resurgence of public and record label interest in his work which resulted in the release in 1988 of Fiddle and Song, his first new album since 1977.”

Even now, in the early 21st century, when we seem in so many ways so far away from the spirit of the late 1960s and early1970s when Stompin’ Tom came of age, the CTV website is reporting that on the sad occasion of his death, “Prime Minister Stephen Harper tweeted late Wednesday that Canada had lost a ‘true Canadian original,’ and referencing The Hockey Song, wrote: ‘You played the best game that could be played.’”

David Crombie cleans out his Mayor of Toronto office on his departure in 1978 — also the year that Stompin’s Tom gave back his Juno awards, to protest the lack of support given to Canadian stories by the policies of the Federal government.

History, as a great (and even conservative) poet elsewhere proclaimed more than 90 years ago, has many cunning passages. Stompin’ Tom, I would have guessed at any rate, stood for many true Canadian things that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has actually tried to do away with. A case in point is the Canadian international peacekeeping tradition identified with the Lester Pearson who was prime minister just as  Stompin’ Tom was getting started. And the note on which I’d like to leave this small tribute to the things Stompin’ Tom Connors stood up for that were and still are worth continuing to stand up for is his song about the “Blue Berets”of Canada’s UN peacekeeping forces. The Canadian  variation on John Wayne and Johnny Cash rolled into one, that is to say (again), actually believed in the United Nations, in a way that is still worth believing in. And if you want to leave this more specific tribute here in real style click on — and listen to —  the You Tube version of ”Stompin Tom Connors —  Blue Berets.”

MP Justin Trudeau and Senator Patrick Brazeau box for the "Fight For the Cure" cancer charity in Ottawa Canada March 31 2012. Mr.Trudeau won.

[UPDATED FEBRUARY 14, 16]. According to a Canadian Press report by the estimable Joan Bryden yesterday, Justin Trudeau has now come out as an opponent of any major democratic reform of the unreformed Senate of Canada.

(The CP report appeared in at least two places on the net : ”Forget Senate reform and just appoint better senators, Justin Trudeau says after Patrick Brazeau scandal” and “Trudeau says appoint better senators, forget reforming upper chamber.”)

The young Mr. Trudeau’s reported remarks here bear some striking similarity to recently expressed views of the current Liberal leader in the Senate, James Cowan, as reported in a February 10 Postmedia News piece by Jordan Press, “Sen. James Cowan warns of what could happen with Senate reform in Canada.”

In both cases the underlying Canadian political philosophy might be charitably (if also inelegantly) described as 19th century High Tory democro-sceptic elitism. This philosophy was arguably not without some virtues in the 19th century, but it has become just foolish at best in our own early 21st century “free and democratic society” (as the Constitution Act, 1982 masterminded by Justin Trudeaus’s father nicely puts the essential point).

Senator James Cowan, Liberal leader in the Senate, a lawyer appointed by Prime Minister Paul Martin in 2005 as a Senator from Nova Scotia.

It is an understatement of almost vast magnitude to say that, like some other ordinary voters who still entertain progressive hopes for the Canadian future, we are disappointed to hear Justin Trudeau’s ”Forget Senate reform and just appoint better senators” message. It finally does make us wonder whether he really is a person who can provide the kind of lean-forward leadership the country stands in great need of at the moment.

(And for some recent commentary of at least vaguely similar bent see : “Canadians growing ever wearier of Senate shenanigans, poll suggests”; “Will the Senate be an election issue in 2015?”; and “Canada’s senate: Like winning the lottery, only less honest.” And click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below for VALENTINE’S DAY AND OTHER UPDATES, FEBRUARY 14, 16, 2013. )

Does Justin Trudeau look a little better if you read between the lines?

Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie Gregoire meet up after the March 31.2012 boxing match with Senator Patrick Brazeau. A charming couple, but is that enough? Photo by Gio Vanni.

Foolishly or otherwise, there still does seem to us one shred of hope — or straw to grasp at — in one ambiguous sentence from Joan Bryden’s February 12 CP report : “Trudeau turned thumbs down on electing senators, without first changing the gross under-representation of western provinces or establishing a deadlock breaking mechanism between two elected parliamentary chambers.”

We certainly agree that both these matters require attention in any ultimate scheme of much-needed democratic reform of the unreformed Senate of Canada. We have nonetheless supported Mr. Harper’s step-by-step electoral reform plan (as in his government’s current Bill C-7), because it at least gets the crucial reform ball rolling, at long last — and (even more importantly) puts pressure on our federal and provincial political systems to follow through on practically addressing the key issues of provincial representation and parliamentary deadlock that Mr. Trudeau raises.

For what we see as progressive, lean-forward views on these issues, already at least raised on this site, eg, see: “One dim light in the dark forest of Canadian Senate reform .. at least Jean Charest’s Quebec is NOT “objecting to modernizing the Senate”?” ; “Another miniature long-winded dissertation on why Canadian Senate reform remains crucial, despite all the arguments against it!” ; “What if Canadian Senate reform also became a way of recognizing Québécois nation in a united Canada?”; and “Why even Bert Brown’s new “Triple E” Senate reform plan for Canada still won’t work.”

We are of course not suggesting that Justin Trudeau actually delve into these particular troubled waters at this exact moment in time, in any of these particular ways.

But if he really has some serious practical vision for a Canadian future that can deal effectively with the all too many institutional problems the country faces, he ought to be able to do better than resurrect a very old-school and profoundly conservative and even anti-democratic theory of the unreformed Senate of Canada — that few Canadians outside a few bars and/or restaurants in Ottawa and the surviving anglo neighbourhoods of Montreal take seriously any longer.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Olivia Chow, widow of former NDP leader Jack Layton, talk at the newly opened Jack Layton park in the town of Hudson, Que., Saturday, June 23, 2012. (Graham Hughes / THE CANADIAN PRESS).

Senate reform is one of the few issues where the Harper Government has actually tried to do something sensible about the future of what the late great Harold Innis long ago called ”Canadian institutions.”  How refreshing it would be if Mr.Harper’s opponents (or nowadays even Mr. Harper himself, it all so often seems) would recognize this, and add their own variations on the theme to some broader forward momentum. (And then, many would argue and we would agree, even from a much more sordid angle, one of the most ancient and effective political strategies, at all times and places in the global village, is to steal boldly and creatively from your intellectual enemy!)

VALENTINE’S DAY AND OTHER UPDATES, FEBRUARY 14, 16, 2013: It may be that love (romantic love even) is exactly what the dark quest for Senate reform in Canada needs right now.  But if that’s the case, it’s just not happening in two columns from the February 13, 2013 Globe and Mail — “Why would we want an elected Senate?” by the eminent dean of Ottawa pundits Jeffrey Simpson, and “A Senate still searching for sober second thought” by the lovely Lysiane Gagnon of Montreal.

Both these columns offer variations on the themes of Justin Trudeau and Senator James Cowan, as discussed above. A somewhat parallel column of Mr. Simpson’s from about a year and a half ago was discussed on this site in “Another miniature long-winded dissertation on why Canadian Senate reform remains crucial, despite all the arguments against it!” — also alluded to above.

The counterweights author of this particular “miniature long-winded dissertation” urged that : “Over the next generation or so, Canada will have to either become what no less an authority than Conrad Black recently called ‘a serious country’ or give up altogether (or, more exactly perhaps, become part of some new United States of North America?).”  In our view finally getting it together on some credible version of  Senate reform, in what the Constitution Act, 1982 calls the “free and democratic society” of Canada today, is one key ingredient in becoming a serious country at last.

From this point of view, what both Mr. Simpson and Ms Gagnon are ultimately saying in their latest musings on the prospects of  reforming the unreformed Senate finally boils down to a jaded (if in some ways also wise enough) assertion that — for a variety of thorny historical and other reasons — Canada can never really be a serious country. And who knows? This may even ultimately prove to be a  sad but true political judgment.

Yet located, as most of us on this site are, some distance from Ottawa and anglo Montreal, we still don’t quite see the inevitability of Canada’s inevitable non-seriousness. We’re not quite ready to give up altogether on the dark quest for real  Senate reform in Pierre  Elliott Trudeau’s free and democratic Canada of the early 21st century.

Well yes they say it’s apparently all over now, but while it lasted the romance between the other Justin from Canada and the lovely Ms Gomez from the Lone Star State was no less than adorable. And maybe we will finally get real Senate reform in Canada when they get back together. Hope springs eternal etc, etc ...

We think that there are more than a few Canadians out there who agree with us — in all their colourful and vast diversity. And we’re   happy enough that the world wide web is giving us the opportunity to say such things, as loudly as we can manage (which is of course not very loud, but … ). Time will tell, and  Mr. Simpson and Ms Gagnon could even be proved right in the very end, etc, etc, etc. But we don’t think that the rest of us absolutely have to take their world-weary views as the gospel truth just yet. The late great Canadian economic historian (and first Canadian president of the American Economic Association) Harold Innis summarized  the essential case for Senate reform in modern Canada in two essays from as long ago as the 1940s. It is time we at least tried to pick up his still flickering torch, as challenging as it no doubt may be: “The complex problems of regionalization in the recent development of Canada render the political structure obsolete and necessitate concentration on the problem of machinery by which interests can become more vocal and their demands be met more efficiently … Our constitution has proved inadequate in the face of the demands made upon it. The Senate, that unique institution, has lent itself to political manipulation …   serious attention should be given to the problem of revising political machinery so that democracy can work out solutions to modern problems.”