Australia ’ s Senate and Senate Reform in Canada Professor Howard

When Canada’s current political system was established in 1867, the Fathers of Confederation took pains to make Canada’s federal government conform as closely as possible to British practiceand to diverge as sharply as possible from the supposedly failed political system of the United States. As Britain was a unitary state and Canada was a federation like the United States, this proved a formidable assignment. John A. Macdonald and his colleagues did their best. For one thing, they patterned their federal Senate after the British House of Lords. The chamber’s members were to be appointed for life by the Governor General in Council (that is, by the prime minister), each ‘region’ of Canada (Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, and the West) would receive twenty-four senators, and the Senate was to provide a House of Lords-style ‘sober second thought’ (Macdonald’s term) to House of Commons-passed legislation. The Senate enjoys a legislative veto, but not because the Fathers of Confederation considered scrutiny and review desirable for their own sake. They believed no such thing. Instead, the Senate was intended to protect wealthy Canadians from potentially ‘unwise’ legislation passed by an unpredictable people’s chamber. The Senate still retains its original structure with only minor modifications.