For the Senate, it’s too little, too late

Let’s not be fooled: it’s great that bill C-377 – a severely botched piece of legislation that the Conservatives had been pushing for months – has had the breaks put on it in the Senate today. The Senate also passed the NDP’s excellent bill on bilingual Officers of Parliament.

But a couple of good votes aren’t enough to make up for the fact that the Senate is fundamentally undemocratic – nor make up for senators’ recent ethical blunders, and possible criminal wrong doing.

In addition to getting entangled in one scandal after another, senators have systematically approved dozens of bad Conservative laws – including the gutting of the Navigable Waters Act, and a badly flawed and discredited law on crime. And of course they have rubber stamped budget after budget that failed to create jobs or help Canadians.

And we also must not forget the deplorable role senators played in 2010, when they torpedoed the NDP’s bill on climate change – which had been adopted by the House of Commons.

Apologists for this archaic and outdated institution will cling to a brief flash of conscience on bill C-377, and try to use that to justify wasting over ninety million dollars a years on an undemocratic body. But the reality is, provinces pass laws without a Senate, just as most democratic countries around the world survive without an unelected upper chamber.

For the NDP, the Senate continues to be unethical, unelected, unaccountable and non-essential – and we believe Canadians deserve better.