Triple-E Senate

Categories: Canadian political movements | Constitution of Canada

A topic of great debate in Canada, the Triple-E Senate, standing for elected, equal, and effective, is a plan proposed to reform the current Canadian Senate. It calls for elected senators, equal representation of all provinces, and effective powers for the Senate to counter the House of Commons. A Senate having these characteristics within the Westminster System would closely resemble the Australian Senate which has had these characteristics since Federation.

History

Although Senate reform had been an issue in Canada since its confederation in 1867, up until the 1980s the debate had centred on how senators should be appointed.

The idea of the Triple-E Senate was first brought to mainstream attention after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau implemented the National Energy Program in the wake of the energy crises of the 1970s. This program was very unpopular in western Canada, especially in oil-rich Alberta, and the ruling Liberal Party lost almost all of its support in the West. The Liberal Party however was still very popular in Ontario and Quebec, which had many more seats in the House of Commons than the West due to the concentration of Canada's population in central Canada. The Senate, whose members are selected by the prime minister, was also controlled by the Liberal Party, and thus Westerners were effectively powerless to fight the National Energy Program.

Western populists, outraged by their exclusion from the decision on the National Energy Program looked south towards the United States and began to believe that perhaps if Canada's Senate had been more like its American counterpart, the federal government would not have been able to pass its controversial plan, at least not without compromise. They believed that like the American Senate, the Canadian Senate should be elected with seats distributed equally amongst the provinces, and that it should have power instead of just acting as a rubber stamp on legislation passed by the House of Commons. They felt that if these circumstances had been in place during the National Energy Program debate that the senators from the four Western provinces could have forced the Senate to drop the program, or pressure the senators from the six other provinces into making significant amendments to it.

During the debate over the ultimately failed Charlottetown Accord, Westerners managed to pressure the federal government into including Senate reform into the proposed constitutional reform package. The proposed reform fell short of the Triple-E Senate in that although it would have made the Senate elected and equal, it would have reduced its constitutional powers. This did not satisfy many in the West, and the Charlottetown Accord was defeated in the four Western provinces in the national referendum held in 1992 and ultimately did not pass.

In wake of the failed Charlottetown Accord, the ruling Progressive Conservative Party was reduced to only two seats in the House of Commons in the 1993 federal election. The majority of seats in the West, particularly in British Columbia and Alberta, went to the western-based, right-wing Reform Party. The Reform Party and its leader Preston Manning became the most vocal advocates of the Triple-E Senate, as did its successor the Canadian Alliance. The Conservative Party of Canada's 2005 Policy Declaration supports an elected Senate and an equal number of Senators per province but does not endorse Triple-E.