CALGARY – Whatever happened to Canadian senate reform as an election issue?
Whatever happened to the Reform party passion to change the Senate as a way to give the West more power in Ottawa?
In 1993, in the aftermath of a raft of Conservative senate appointments to get the Goods and Services Tax through Parliament, senate reform was a major election issue in Western Canada and the Reform party led the charge for an elected, equal and effective upper house.
In the campaign of 1997, there has been barely a word.
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From Manitoba to Alberta, local Reform candidates say they have not been pushing the issue.
“It really just hasn’t come up,” said Saskatchewan candidate Roy Bailey, trying to win the Souris-Moose Mountain seat.
Other candidates echo that sentiment.
“It’s true that it has really slipped out of the political debate,” concedes retiring Reform MP Ray Speaker, of Lethbridge, who has been helping the Reform campaign in southern Alberta. “We are still committed to it but I think the attention span for voters is less than two years, so the interest of almost four years ago has not been sustained.”
He said Reform strategists decided to campaign on issues that have caught the public attention, rather than squander precious campaign time trying to revive voter interest in promises of senate reform.
Alberta Liberal senator Nick Taylor has a different take on the Reform decision to drop senate reform as a hot button issue.
“Reform has been running a very negative campaign,” he said one afternoon last week while campaigning for the Liberal candidate in Lethbridge. “Talking about senate reform might be just too positive for them.”
Both Taylor and Speaker note irony in the fact that senate reform has fallen off the election agenda, because the unelected Senate has become even more activist and obstructionist to the will of the elected House of Commons during the past three years.
The performance of appointed Conservatives in challenging the elected Liberals on several high-profile issues would have been fodder for triple E Senate reformers in 1993.
“Let’s face it,” said Speaker. “The senate became the Conservative caucus and what power they could not get from the election, they held from past appointments. They used the Senate as a way to play out the Tory political agenda.”
The lack of profile for the Senate in the election also is ironic because two of the four major parties contesting the campaign in English Canada say they support senate reform.
Even the Liberals soon will come around, Taylor predicted.
Bert Brown, a Kathyrn, Alta. farmer and longtime senate reform activist, said the issue is sleeping, rather than dead.
Once the election is over and the issue of Quebec independence is raised again in a referendum, Canadians will be looking for ways to reform the federation to satisfy regional discontent, he said.
“I really believe the issue will resurface dramatically a year after the election,” he said.
“Reform has not been raising it because the media and the politicians have decided there are other issues. But it will be back.”
Brown is part of a national network lobbying for a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.
