Senate reform

One of my favourite translation tools uses the Hansard as its corpus. I type in a word or phrase and it shows me every sentence in the Hansard that contains that word or phrase, along with each sentence's equivalent in the other language.

In the House of Commons Hansard, I can identify which party the speaker of any given sentence belongs to about 75% of the time, because of how much party politics seeps into every utterance. In the Senate Hansard, I've only been able to identify party affiliation a handful of times.

This is why I think we need to be very careful about any move towards Senate reform. In the House of Commons they are constantly playing politics. There is constant awareness of the party line and the need to be electable next election. There is rhetoric, there is pandering, there is showmanship, there is jockeying for soundbites.

There isn't nearly as much of this in the Senate. It is, like they say in the motto, sober. It is dull and sensible. Because they don't need to be electable they don't need to play the games, and our parliamentary system is better for it.

Any attempts at Senate reform should take this into consideration and make sure that the new Senate structure continues to have these advantages.