Adler appointment shows need for elected Senate

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This article was published 30/08/2024 (582 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently raised eyebrows with his appointment of longtime broadcaster Charles Adler to the Senate.

Adler has been on the air for a very long time and so, upon hearing of his appointment, I wondered whether past comments he had made would be dredged up for criticism. Sure enough, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs unearthed some comments from Adler in which he, among other things, called Indigenous leaders “uncivilized boneheads,” comments that sparked a complaint to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council in 1999.

We live in an age where candidates for public office often must apologize for past intemperate comments, especially on social media where those comments are memorialized forever, just waiting for an enterprising journalist or opposition researcher to dig them up. Candidates must grapple with this reality.

But for those who take umbrage with Adler’s comments, there is the added insult that there is essentially nothing that can be done to hold him accountable for them. It’s not like Adler must campaign for the role of senator and so must come to terms with his past comments. He’s been appointed and will serve until he’s 75, whether Manitobans like it or not.

At least with our elected leaders, there is always an opportunity to throw the bums out at the next election. Ultimately, we have the tools to hold politicians accountable. But we also have the tools to hold ourselves accountable. Sometimes, we elect people who are not exactly the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. The hope is that citizens in democracies learn from this.

But none of this is true for our senators, who are effectively appointed by the prime minister. The Senate, contrary to what many Canadians think, holds powers that are almost equal to those of the House of Commons, even if senators are often reluctant to use them to their full potential. Despite this, Manitobans have no say whatsoever over the senators who will exercise those powers.

And this is the biggest problem with the Senate: that in a modern democracy, important legislative actors are still appointed with no democratic input whatsoever.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper, to his credit, tried to address this problem but he encountered resistance from the courts.

In 2013, the Harper government presented a series of questions regarding the constitutional validity to the Supreme Court. In its Reference Re Senate Reform, the Supreme Court ruled that national consultative senate elections could not be created and run unilaterally by the federal government and that this constitutional change to Senate appointments would require the approval of seven provinces with at least 50 per cent of Canada’s population. Unwilling to open up the constitution, Harper abandoned the idea.

(The court also, incidentally, found that Senate abolition would require the approval of both the federal government and the approval of all 10 provinces, making it all but impossible in the current environment.)

But the court did not rule out the possibility of non-binding provincial senate elections, in which Senate nominees are elected by the people and then submitted to the prime minister for appointment when there is a vacancy for the province. It is, of course, up to the prime minister whether or not to appoint the democratically selected Senate nominee. But the election itself would place democratic pressure on the prime minister to give in to the will of the people.

Alberta has held senate elections since the 1980s, and a significant number of the Senate nominees selected by Albertans have been subsequently appointed by the prime minister. These senators have a direct democratic line of accountability to Albertan voters.

Under the modern Alberta Senate Election Act, these consultative elections are held in conjunction with municipal elections in Alberta. In the most recent senate election in 2021, front-runner Pam Davidson scored an eye-popping 383,243 votes. That’s far more than any elected member of Parliament including Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre has ever collected in their ridings, and is precisely 383,243 more than Adler received.

It’s a wonder that other provinces, including Manitoba, haven’t similarly taken steps to electing their own senate nominees. In Manitoba, the provincial government could easily specify a made-in-Manitoba method for electing senate nominees. In doing so, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs could be involved in both designing and running these elections. Doing so would ensure Manitoba was doing its part to inject democratic legitimacy into the Senate, and ensure that the diversity and complexity of Manitoba society was properly represented in the upper house.

Royce Koop is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba and academic director of the Centre for Social Science Research and Policy.