(http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/12/11/harper-senate.html)
So, today our glorious Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that he will fill the 18 remaining Senate seats before Christmas, pretty obviously as a last attempt at keeping his Conservative presence deep within the Houses. This is coming just a week after he petitioned the Governer General to prorogue Parliament until January 27th so as to avoid a motion of no confidence, deciding that he and his government deserved to bring down a budget before being defeated.
Liberals and New Democrats alike have been questioning why Harper seems to think he has the moral authority to make such Senate appointments after his actions over the past few weeks. I am one of them. This Prime Minister has lost the confidence of the House of Commons, he has wiped his feet on Canada's democratic institutions and thumbed his nose at Canadian workers all across this country. With this proposed Senate appointing, Stephen Harper has also backpeddled yet again on one of his election promises, and one of the Reform roots of the Conservative Party, and that is striving towards democratic reform in the Senate - meaning that Senators would be elected and no longer appointed by the PM. Thus, showing his power hungry roots, the Right-Honourable Prime Minister strikes again.
The Senate is Canada's 'Upper House' of Parliament, meaning their job, although not exclusively, is to give legislation that originates in the Commons a 'sober second glance', and then pass them. Because they are an appointed and not elected body, they rarely vote down legislation that the elected Commons has already passed. They also contribute to the works of Government by forming commitees. Each Province is allocated a set number of Senators, which is distributed not by population, oh no thats much too democratic, but by historical population it would seem. Out of 105 Senate seats, the average representation by One Senator is 301 075 Canadians. (1) Each of the regions of Canada - Ontario, Quèbec, the Maritimes, and Western Canada - are each given 24 Senators. In British Columbia there are 6 Senators that represent ~4 million Canadians, breaking down to 685 581 citizens per Senate seat- compare that with Nova Scotia who is allocated 10 seats in the Senate, representing just under 1 million, breaking down to 91 346 per Senator.
The NDP has created a rather funny and interesting look into some of the members of the Senate, it can be found here at SenateHallofFame.ca. It shows the almost inherent uselessness of this unelected Upper House, as well as the appointees that sit there.
This particular appointment of 18 new Senators is going to cost Canadian taxpayers somewhere in and around $6 million just within the first year, or so the Grit and New Democrat spin doctors would tell you. The math breaks down below, but one must also leave room for the Senator's budgetary needs - i.e. assistants, transportation, etc, etc. (2) The main issue here is that with all of Stephen Harper's decrying of the Opposition's resistance to his party funding cuts to 'save the tax payers money' - he is willing to basically toss out $6 million in the first year of this crisis, probably to people who do very, very well without their cushy buck '25 a year salary from the Canadian taxpayer.
But aside from the monetary issue at hand here, the most disturbing - and telling - part of this development in Politickal Canada is that Stephen Harper is Prime Minister at this point only because he thinks that he deserves to be. His 'mandate to govern' means nothing without the explicit support of a majority of Canada's representatives in the Commons - and that he does not have. He silenced the elected body of Canada in order to continue to govern and bring down a budget for the sole reason that he thought he should be granted the chance to do so. He now wants to continue to act as Prime Minister, even after shutting down the very elected body that grants him those luxuries.
I do agree with Mr. Harper that the Senate should be an elected body with more proportional representation within it, but failing that outcome I say we abolish the Senate and leave the real work to those who are elected by the people.
This a statistic from the NDP.ca RSS feed:
The total cost of the Senate is $90,232,000 in 2008-2009 - an increase of 49 million since 1993 - even with a historic number of vacancies. Each Senator costs approximately $336,979 a year. (3)
$90.2 million dollars a year! That is 3 times the amount that the $1.95/vote party funding costs each year. If Harper was truly serious about helping the economy survive throughout these uncertain times, he would start by pruning the current Parliamentary system and disposing of the wasteful spending that we are throwing away in places like the Senate and, dare I say, the Guv'nah General's post. But that seems to be some fodder for another post that I may write soon on the Canadian Republic...
- The Senate Chamber on Centre Block, Parliament Hill, Ottawa.
References:
(1) - Senate of Canada @ Wikipedia.org
(2) - 125 800 x 18 = 2 264 400 (+ budget) (figures from NDP's S.H.F)
(3) - NDP News Feed @ NDP.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment