[UPDATED FEBRUARY 14, 16]. According to a Canadian Press report by the estimable Joan Bryden yesterday, Justin Trudeau has now come out as an opponent of any major democratic reform of the unreformed Senate of Canada. (The CP report appeared in at least two places on the net : ”Forget Senate reform and just appoint […]
Somehow it seems right to be thinking about Senate reform in Canada in the dead of summer. Like almost everything else this time of year in the true north strong and free, it seems quite agreeable (to some of us at any rate) but not entirely serious. (It will not last, etc, etc.) What is […]
It says a lot about the ongoing problems of Senate reform in Canada that the main source for news on the latest wrinkle in Bert Brown’s “Triple E” Senate concept is the Edmonton Journal. (And what we’re talking about here, I should make clear, is not PM Harper’s two “step by step” and non-constitutional reform […]
Last Tuesday, June 21, 2011, the new Harper majority government’s Bill C7, the Senate Reform Act, had its first reading – not all that long, as it turned out, before the new 41st Parliament of Canada (following “the longest filibuster in Canadian history over back-to-work legislation”) – ran for the exits and the annual summer […]
Senate reform has been in the Canadian news again this past week. And – even with the new Harper Conservative majority in the elected “lower house” of Parliament –Â the sceptical bottom line is don’t hold your breath. Jeffrey Simpson concluded his latest shot in this dark forest with: “The Senate can’t be unilaterally abolished […]
[UPDATED]. The Globe and Mail’s online poll on “Is the Conservative Party committed to reforming the Senate?” (38% Yes and 62% No, as of today) could be read as suggesting that only those who voted for Mr. Harper’s party on May 2 still believe in its public commitments on this front. Yet according to John […]
Ever since the 1980s the modern quest to at last reform The Unreformed Senate of Canada has had its main base in Western Canada (with a brief variation on the theme from Clyde Wells in Newfoundland, in the last days of the Meech Lake Accord). Now in minority PMÂ Harper’s strange spring of 2010, there […]
