Lack of accountability not only issue
For reasons which most voters can understand, Canada's unelected Senate has long been referred to as "a taskless thanks."

It's not entirely fair, since our well-paid (and usually wealthy) senators do perform some tasks, but their lack of electoral legitimacy is the biggest impediment to them being a truly useful adjunct to Canada's parliamentary system.

And now comes word - finally - that Saskatchewan has decided to join Alberta and draft a bill which would allow the people of the province to elect their senate representatives in the future.

As things stand, Alberta is the only province with that system. But because the Constitution gives the prime minister the authority to appoint senators, even Albertans can't directly elect their senators. That means their senatorial "election" is really a referendum and it is still left up to the prime minister to actually name the senator.

The disadvantage of leaving the system like this - which will also apply in Saskatchewan's case - is that the senators, technically, will not be directly elected. The advantage, however, is that if the prime minister uses is power to appoint the person the electorate chose in their referendum, then voters will defacto elect the senators and - this is the best part - we won't have to get bogged down in an endless debate about changing the constitution to allow for direct elections.

That's how Alberta's Bert Brown got to be a senator. He was "elected" in Alberta referendums in 1998 and 2004 but wasn't appointed to the Senate until 2007.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has been pushing the Senate reform card forever, has encouraged Brown to tour provincial capitals since January trying to convince the premiers that an elected senate would be a lot more useful - and certainly more democratic - than our current system of rewarding partisan hacks for services either rendered in the past or expected in the future, or both.

Brown, obviously pleased with Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall's decision to follow Alberta's lead, was quoted by the Globe and Mail predicting that "once one more province comes on side, inevitably they will al come on side. The provinces need to make some kind of a decision in the next 18 months. It can't go on forever. It's obvious. Either the Senate will have no seats at all or (Harper will) give up and say, 'Okay. Appoint them all.' There's basically the only two options he could possibly have."

The reason Brown says that is that Harper, who has long opposed appointed senators, has allowed vacancies to grow in an effort to put pressure on the provinces to institute an electoral system. As a result, there are now 14 vacancies in the 105-seat Chamber - Harper vows to only appoint senators when the situation is critical - and some people believe it will be almost one-third vacant by the end of next year if things continue as they are, a situation which could led to lawsuits against Ottawa over - if you can believe this? - "lack of representation" in the Senate.

The Liberals - who have spent a good part of Canada's history appointing their fellow partisans to the Senate - are so opposed to the notion of electing senators - it's apparently far too democratic for their tastes - that their senate Liberals have pushed a bill, soon to be voted upon, to force the prime minister to fill appointments within six months of a vacancy.

Harper's Tories have already introduce two pieces of legislation - both of which have met with firm Liberal opposition - to set up the system of provincial referendums and to limit an appointment for a maximum of eight years.

It should be noted that the American Senate began as an appointed body system and only became an elected body - and therefore democratically legitimate - when a few states decided to hold their own referendum in the same way that Alberta now does.

The lack of electoral accountability, of course, is not the only shortcoming in our current senate. One reason why the West is so strong on Senate reform is that since the system was devised in 1867, long before the West was settled, they get the short end of the stick. How? Well, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, for example, have 10 senators each, while Alberta and B.C. have six. Go figure.

But those injustices are tougher to fix than the simple expedient of each province introducing a senate referendum.

Which makes us ask, of course, why Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty hasn't joined in.