Sober second thought: ur doin it wrong

As I've blogged about before, my experience with the Senate (like my experience with the House of Commons) comes in one-sentence slices from the Hansard. I have tools where I enter a word or phrase and it searches the Hansard (and other sources, but I like the Hansard best for many things) for every occurrence of that word or phrase, and shows every sentence where it occurs alongside the translation for that sentence. It's a good way to get a quick sense of the scope of an expression's meaning and some ideas for how to translate it. I can expand any sentence to see the whole context whenever I want; sometimes I do it for translation purposes, sometimes just because I'm curious about WTF led a person to utter that particular bizarre sentence. I'll admit I never actually followed a bill all the way through from start to finish, but I have glimpsed thousands of little slices of Senate and House of Commons life, like if you had CPAC on in the background all the time instead of CP24.

From this vantage point, I developed a sense that the Senate is in fact a chamber of sober second thought. It has always looked less partisan to me (I can very rarely tell the party affiliation of the speaker in the Senate Hansard, but I can almost always tell in the House of Commons Hansard), more measured and controlled and dignified, and more concerned with getting the legislation right than with scoring political points.

Because of this impression, I haven't supported Senate reform. I was concerned that having senators run for election would make them more likely to play partisan politics like their Commons counterparts, which would eliminate any value they add. I strongly believed that their unelected nature and lifetime appointments gave them the safety net they needed to stay above the political fray and speak truth to power.

This is why I was absolutely shocked today to see that the Senate passed the budget bill without amendment. I was shocked not only that they passed a budget bill containing all kinds of things that are outside the scope of a budget bill, but also that the vote basically came down to bums in seats and party lines. If that's what we wanted, we wouldn't need a Senate! The House of Commons already does that!

This omnibus bill was precisely the sort of excessive political whim that the Senate was created to protect Canadians from. Regardless of how you feel about its component parts, splitting it up and voting on the component parts separately would have been the right thing to do. If they aren't going to take advantage of the security provided by their lifetime appointments to rise above the fray, look beyond party lines, and give Canadians sober second thought, then we quite simply have no use for a Senate.