Essay On Canadian Senate

The Senate plays a key role in tandem with the House of Commons, in the operation of Canada’s government, some people think that the Senate should be abolished; however without the Senate, “The right to bear arms” could become true for Canada. The Senate should be reformed; abolishing or keeping the Senate at its current state would be unjust. The current Senate is not elected, effective, nor equal.

Canada’s parliamentary system is designed to preclude the formation of absolute power. Critics and followers of Canadian politics argue that the Prime Minister of Canada stands alone from the rest of the government. The powers vested in the prime minister, along with the persistent media attention given to the position,

The electoral system in Canada is also known as a “first past the post” system. “First past the post” means the candidate with the highest number of votes wins the congressional seat, whereas the other candidates with a lower number of votes don’t get any representation. There are many cons to this system that will be highlighted throughout this essay. I will argue that the electoral system requires reform due to the discrepancies between the percentage of popular votes and the number of seats won. Canada’s electoral system has many problems and is not seen as fully democratic since it has provided poor representation for both candidates that win and lose. Candidates can win seats with less than 50% of votes, meaning that even if the majority of the nation, or province did not vote for the candidate they still win the election as they consume the highest number of votes among the parties. FPTP allows two people in different ridings to get the same number of votes with the outcome of one winner since the distribution of votes and seats are unequal. The system can also encourage strategic voting such as not voting for whom you think is the best fit but voting for the candidate that seems most likely to win in order to beat candidate you dislike. FPTP leads to an imbalance of power and has the potential for corruption.

Many modern democracies have a bicameral legislature which is a body of government that consist of two legislative chambers. The bicameral legislature provides representation for both, the citizens of the country and the state legislature on a federal level. The Canadian parliament has two chambers, the lower chamber which is an elected House of Commons and the upper chamber which is the non-elected Senate. The Canadian Senate is assumed to be a “sober second thought” [3] on government legislation which is a phrase that describes the Senate’s role in promoting and defending regional interest. There has been an immense amount of the public outcry regarding the Senate after spending scandal that occurred during the recent election period. A question that has induced discussion in parliament is whether the Canadian Senate should be reformed or not? This issue divides the population in half because of differing views. Some political parties want the abolition of the Senate to occur while other parties would like to have an elected Senate because provinces are not represented equally. A method of deciding the faith of the current Senate, the functions of the Senate and objectives of Senate reform should be defined. The assumptions about the purpose of the Senate, problems of the current Senate, the goal of Senate reform and the method of achieving the reform may help provide a consensus on how the Senate should be reformed.

Party policy are extremely import for legislators follow. First of all they should not be in the party if they do not believe the party policies, and they should be in a different party. Policies in parties are so there can not people fight in party for their ideas. There also is the problem if the people who vote you in have really similar interests and that make it easier to vote your intrest even if they bad as this quote explains, “representative interest conflict which arises when Members share personal interests, for example in farming, fishing

Changing the Electoral System Canada’s friendly neighbor to the South, the US, has an electoral system that is composed of 3 separate elections, one of them deciding the head of state. The president elected by the people and he or she is the determining person of the country’s political system. In the US runs like a majority system” In Canada, however, elections are held slightly differently. Citizens vote for a Member of Parliament in a 308-seat house and candidates win not by a majority, unlike in the US, but by a plurality. This means that a candidate can actually win by simply having more votes than the other candidates. This method of representative democracy, in general, does not cause too much controversy in a global scope but has

Electoral Reform in Canada The issue of electoral reform has become more important than ever in Canada in recent years as the general public has come to realize that our current first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system, formally known as single-member plurality (SMP) has produced majority governments of questionable legitimacy. Of the major democracies in the world, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom are the only countries that still have SMP systems in place. Interestingly enough, there has been enormous political tension and division in the last few years in these countries, culminating with the election results in Canada and the USA this year that polarized both countries. In the last year we have seen

The issues are compelling, the future of Quebec in Canada, and the future of our Senate seem like urgent issues that require immediate attention. Looks can be deceiving though, and the case for both of these issues are not as strong as they seem at first glance. First we are going to look at Quebec’s place in the constitutional family, to show why getting their signature is simply a

David C. Docherty’s scholarly journal responds to the continual controversy and debate of the usefulness of the Canadian senate in 2002. Docherty’s article does an amazing job at analyzing the current Canadian senate and argues that the senate is a failing Canadian institution because of two democratic deficiencies: the undemocratic nature of senator selection and the inability of senators to represent provinces properly (45). These two features of why the senate is a failing Canadian institution can be compared to how Rand Dyck defines democracy in Canadian Politics: Critical Approaches. Docherty looks at several previous senate reforms and answers the question of why these senate reforms failed, in doing so Docherty lays down a framework for a possible successful senate reform but acknowledges the obstacles. Docherty does a very good job at accessing the problem of the senate, accessing the problem of previous reforms, and suggesting a plausible type of reform for the senate. This provides the reader with the knowledge of why the Canadian senate is a failing institution but also the possible solutions of how the senate can be reformed in order to maximize its democratic potential. Although, Docherty fails to provide an exact reform that needs to be taken, he just draws upon other failures and hypothesis that this may be the right solution for reform. Rand Dyck’s chapter 11 fills in the missing gap of reform that needs to be taken by drawing upon one of the best attempts at

In this section, I will briefly discuss the effects of Trudeau’s Senate reforms and argue that reform is better than abolishment.

Today, Ontario and Quebec have maintained their 24 member senatorial status. The four Western provinces have 6 members each. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick both have 10 seats. Prince Edward Island was given 4 out of the original 24 Maritime senators. Together, Newfoundland and Labrador have a total of 6 members. Finally, Nunavut, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories stand in the equation with 1 senator apiece. Along with the Senate`s original intentions, the principle of equality between the provinces is evidently lost. The Senate primarily fails because it was formerly created to balance out the representation by population which lies in the House of Commons however currently only seems to reinforce it. In fact, Canada’s central provinces, Ontario and Quebec, account for 60 percent of the seats in the House of Commons and almost half of the seats in the Senate at 46 percent.5 The inadequacy of regional representation is emphasized as the Canada West Foundation clearly states: “Canada is the only democratic federal system in the world in which the regions with the largest populations dominate both houses of the national legislature.“6 With an unelected Senate that no longer fulfills its role of equal regional representation and a House of Commons grounded on the representation of provinces proportional to their population, the legitimacy of Parliament has become a

Western Alienation Western alienation is defined as a “political ideology” or regional discontent, this is rooted with the dissatisfaction of western provinces in the federal government by representation. This essay will examine the causes of western alienation in Canada by examining 3 main causes: Inter-state federalism, the senate and the

For decades, Canadians have been defending their right to have a fair and open electoral system. Since its creation in 1867, Canada has been proud to call itself a true democratic country, but today there would be many people who disagree with this statement. The Canadian electoral system, which uses First Past The Post (FPTP), has come under scrutiny for not being as fair as it claims to be. Over the past couple of decades, many countries have switched their system to Proportional Representation (PR) or some form of it. Based on successful results in other nations, Canada’s current FPTP system should change to Mixed Member Proportional (MMP), which is a form of Proportional Representation, as it will allow for more fair elections. The intent of this paper is to outline how an electoral reform from First Past the Post to Proportional Representation or Mixed-Member Proportional, will lead to more confidence in the government, more accurate seat-vote percentage, and better overall representation of the population.

Voters are not the only people who benefit from the practice of party discipline. The practice is also fundamentally important for the stability of the Canadian government. Being a pluralist country means there are groups (political parties) of differing ideologies that represent

FPP is a simple system that for the average citizen is easy to understand and it provides electorates with fast results. However, simplicity and fast results are being enjoyed at the expense of democracy. The system’s ability to generate phony majority governments represents a major blow to Canadian democracy. In Canada’s case, it is the lack of proportionality that allows this to happen . Canada’s current voting system “has been producing majority governments with less than 50% of the popular vote” since the 1940’s. . Only in the Canadian voting system “parties can turn minority of votes into majority of seats.” When parties rule against the will of the majority of the population, democratic values are clearly undermined; therefore, Canada must