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The Senate is unelected, unaccountable, unrepresentative, secretive, unethical and undemocratic — and a waste of your money.  Many senators have their jobs only because they are a friend of, or did favours for, a Prime Minister, and they have their job (with you paying their salary) until age 75 even if they do little or nothing.

Shutting down the Senate is the easiest, least costly, and best solution – much better than continuing the attempts to clean up the Senate that have all failed for the past 145 years.  Everything the Senate does can be done by reforming the House of Commons to add more seats from the regions, and by freeing and empowering MPs, and opposition parties (See details here and here)

Join with Canadians across the country and send a strong message to key politicians that you want them to stop playing games and immediately take action to shut down the Senate!

Please send your letter now using the form on this page, and please help spread the word by Liking and Tweeting this page.

Download and print the “Senate Scandal is the tip of the iceberg” sign by clicking here and put it up everywhere

Key Information

The many past spending and ethics scandals involving Canadian senators are likely just the tip of a huge iceberg of Senate scandals that are being covered up by the secretive Senate – a closed club that you have to have money and own property to join, whose members almost always protect each other from disclosure and accountability.

There is debate around whether to reform or abolish the Senate. The Supreme Court has ruled that reforming the Senate requires changes to Canada’s Constitution. As a result, shutting down the Senate is no more difficult than reforming it as both require constitutional amendments.

Surveys show that Canadians are unhappy with the Senate.  The best way to solve this problem is to shut down the Senate.  The many reasons for shutting down the Senate, and why a shut down is easier, less costly, and causes fewer problems than any possible reforms, are as follows:

1. The Senate is redundant:  The Senate does some good studies, but the Senate has not produced any report that contains anything significantly different than reports produced by privately funded independent think-tanks, NGOs, political parties, House of Commons Committees, the Library of Parliament etc.
2. The Senate is unnecessary:  The Senate is supposed to provide balanced regional representation, but that can be achieved by shutting down the Senate and adding seats to the House of Commons from the regions.  If you believe in the federation of Canada, representation in the House will never match population exactly (it never has and never will), so there is no real problem with adding seats from the regions to ensure the balance that the Senate is, in part, aimed at achieving.
3. The Senate is illegitimate and will remain inefficient:  Currently many senators are in their position for no other reason than they did favours for a prime minister.  Electing senators bit by bit over several years, if not decades, will cause a two-tier Senate, and eventually will give the Senate democratic legitimacy which means it will justifiably be able to cause legislative gridlock by blocking bills passed in the House of Commons.
4. The Senate is undemocratic and unaccountable in many other ways:  Even if changes are made to have elected senators, or have them serve fixed terms, the Senate will still be undemocratic with a secretive Board of Internal Economy; very weak expense rules that senators enforce themselves; weak penalties for violators (except sometimes when scandals are revealed); a lapdog Senate Ethics Officer under the control of a committee of senators; a requirement to have money and property to be a senator; and who knows what other problems that the Senate has been covering up, and failing to clean up, for almost 160 years.

If the Senate is not abolished then, at the very least, a fully independent committee should be established to do a public, merit-based search for no more than 1-3 fully qualified candidates for each Senate seat, and then an all-party committee should, by consensus, make the final choice of each senator, to ensure senators are expert and independent-minded. As well, the spending rules for senators should be much more restrictive, and the Auditor General should be regularly auditing Senate expenses. In addition, the Senate Ethics Officer should be chosen by a fully independent committee (the same as the process for choosing senators) and given full powers to enforce the Senate Ethics Code (including imposing penalties for violations) without needing approval for any enforcement action from any Senate committee. As well, the Senate should change its own rules to restrict it from delaying a bill passed by the House of Commons for more than 6 months (the UK House of Lords has had this restriction since 1911), and the requirement to have money and property to be a senator should be removed.

Please send your letter now calling on politicians to shut down the unaccountable, unethical, undemocratic and wasteful Senate!

Please also help keep this campaign running until the Senate is shut down by contributing $10-$20 a month here.  Democracy Watch is not funded by the government or businesses — we only accept money from people like you!

Thank you for your support!