Institutional reform is hard,
especially in cautious places like Canada. It shouldn’t, also, be obstructed by
misleading and self-serving jargon.
The Canadian Senate and hundreds of
Crown Corporations have learned to survive the winds of change by embracing the
terms of their opponents.
The Crown, it seems, doesn’t run Crown
Corporations anymore.
Instead, "public shareholders" own "commercial
corporations," state-owned enterprises that, in most cases, were conceived and
launched in the public sphere. This terminology provides the appearance of
private-sector virtues. A private corporate culture making money for all the
people, you say? What’s the problem?
The Senate’s vulnerability is more
severe. It wasn’t set up to provide services that were unavailable in the
market place. Rather, it was created explicitly to frustrate popular democracy.
It exists in opposition to the way the Americans decided to organize on this
continent. That’s why prime ministers since 1867—not provinces or citizens in
the provinces—have been free to appoint to the Senate whomever they want.
However, despite his high tolerance for
the word "royal," Stephen Harper is philosophically an American democrat. His
desire to appoint only Senators who’ve won province-wide elections has been
realized only in Alberta and remains a distant threat almost everywhere else.
Nevertheless, senators who like the status quo have found a way to confuse the
issue and help delay popular change.
In an opinion piece on Canadian energy
policy in the National Post
this morning, Daniel Lang was reported to “represent Yukon” in the Senate.
The National
Post poorly serves its own editorial sympathies and its readers by adopting
this conceit.
Lang’s heart may be in the North.
However, his Senate appointment reflects the good judgment or otherwise of the prime minister and no one else. So far, only the people of Alberta have had a
chance to send a "representative" of theirs to the prime minister for
appointment to the Senate.
Other senators have no honest right to
claim to "represent" other constituencies or provinces in the country, whatever
their personal sentiments and attachments. They answer to their own consciences
and a handshake with a prime minister.
I go to see everyday a few web sites and websites to read posts, except this webpage presents feature based articles.
ReplyDeletemy blog :: wash
I do not drop a ton of comments, but i did a few searching and wound up
ReplyDeletehere "Canadian Senators don't 'represent' me, sorry".
And I actually do have some questions for you if it's allright. Could it be simply me or does it seem like a few of the responses appear like they are coming from brain dead people? :-P And, if you are writing on additional online social sites, I would like to follow everything fresh you have to post. Could you list of all of all your communal pages like your linkedin profile, Facebook page or twitter feed?
My page :: 77924