Democratic reform

The position

The approach was incrementalist by design. Fundamental reform of the Senate requires a constitutional amendment and the provincial agreement to go with it, and that agreement did not exist. So rather than wait for it, the government pursued what it believed could be done within federal jurisdiction: fix the length of a senator’s term, encourage provinces to elect the people they wanted appointed, apply the same ethics rules to both chambers, and tighten the rules on political money. Each step was modest alone. Together they were meant to build the case for larger change later.

The programme

Six bills carry his name as sponsor. Two dealt with the Senate directly. The Senate Ethics Act would have abolished the separate office of Senate Ethics Officer and put both chambers under the same Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. The Constitution Act, 2010 would have limited senators appointed after it came into force to a single non-renewable eight-year term.

Two dealt with the mechanics of voting: the Expanded Voting Opportunities Act and, in the following session, the Increasing Voter Participation Act, both proposing two additional advance polling days including a Sunday on which every ordinary poll in the country would open. One dealt with the House itself: the Democratic Representation Act would have replaced the seat-readjustment formula with one based on a maximum average riding size, adding seats in the fast-growing provinces without any province losing any. One dealt with money: the Political Loans Accountability Act would have required uniform disclosure of political loans, banned union and corporate lending, and capped what an individual could lend or guarantee.

Alongside these he carried the government’s Senate elections file. The Senatorial Selection Act proposed a voluntary framework, modelled on Alberta’s, encouraging provinces to hold elections for Senate nominees whom the Prime Minister would be required to consider. It was introduced in the Senate and sponsored there by Senator Marjory LeBreton; he was the responsible minister and its public face rather than its sponsor of record.

He also had a democracy promotion file, announcing an independent advisory panel in June 2009 on the creation of a non-partisan Canadian agency to promote democracy abroad, chaired by Thomas Axworthy, and tabling its report in the House that December.

What became of it

Two outcomes deserve stating plainly, because they are what the programme actually amounted to.

The representation formula became law

Bill C-12 died at dissolution, but the file did not. His successor as minister, Tim Uppal, introduced a revised bill that became the Fair Representation Act in December 2011, and the formula in force today descends from the one C-12 proposed.

What carried over is the architecture. A province’s seats are set by dividing its population by a fixed figure and rounding any fraction up. The senatorial floor and the 1985 grandfather clause are both retained, so no province loses seats. That figure rises at each decennial readjustment in step with population growth, which is what allows provinces growing faster than the country as a whole to gain seats over time rather than waiting for a political decision. And the House was enlarged by thirty seats, from 308 to 338. All of that was in C-12.

Two things changed. C-12 set its divisor at 108,000, the average riding population in 2008; the Act used an updated electoral quotient of 111,166, described in its preamble as the average population of the electoral districts on 1 July 2001. And the Act added a representation rule that C-12 did not contain, protecting any province whose share of seats would otherwise fall below its share of the population. Quebec was the only province to qualify, and gained three seats, from 75 to 78. Under C-12 as drafted, Quebec would have stayed at 75. Asked in the Senate why the C-12 model had not simply been followed, Uppal identified that rule as the principal difference, while saying the two bills “both solve the same problem” of the underrepresentation of the fastest growing provinces.

The formula has since been amended again. The Preserving Provincial Representation in the House of Commons Act, in 2022, replaced the 1985 baseline in the grandfather clause with the seat counts of the 43rd Parliament, and the House now sits at 343 seats. The method of allocation, however, is still the one C-12 set out.

The Senate files produced a constitutional ruling

The government’s position was that term limits and consultative elections could be enacted by Parliament acting alone. In Reference re Senate Reform, 2014 SCC 32, decided after he had left the portfolio, the Supreme Court held otherwise: both would require the general amending procedure, the agreement of Parliament and at least seven provinces representing half the population of Canada, and outright abolition would require unanimity. The bills he carried tested a boundary, and the Court then drew it.

Manitoba, 2016 to 2019

The theme did not stop when he left Ottawa. Elected to the Manitoba Legislature in 2016 as a Progressive Conservative, he was removed from the government caucus on 30 June 2017, sat as an independent, and from September 2018 led the Manitoba Party. He spent the rest of the Legislature arguing the same case from the other side of it: that a member’s duty runs to constituents first, and that the rules of a chamber should not exist mainly to serve two front benches.

The argument had a practical edge because he was living it. Independent members, he told the House, had no committee rights worth the name, no guaranteed question in Question Period, no seconder, no route to table a document, and no place at the table when the rules governing all of that were written. He raised it as a grievance, repeatedly as matters of privilege, and in a speech on the rules committee report in October 2018 that is his fullest statement of the case. He proposed remedies rather than only complaints: a time limit on matters of privilege of the kind the House of Commons has, a stopped clock during Question Period, and election of the Deputy Chairperson of Committees of the Whole by secret ballot.

He also took the question to court. In August 2017 he brought a Charter application against section 52.3.1 of The Legislative Assembly Act, Manitoba’s ban on floor crossing, arguing that it prevented him from representing his constituents to full advantage. The Court of Queen’s Bench dismissed it in June 2018, holding that a court should not become the adjudicator of policy within the sole purview of the legislature. The Legislature repealed the ban itself that year through Bill 4. He spoke in that debate and abstained on the vote.

The bills

Five of his provincial private member’s bills belong to this theme, and he reintroduced most of them session after session.

The largest was a complete replacement for Manitoba’s conflict of interest law, a thirty-five page bill modelled on Saskatchewan’s. It would have created a Conflict of Interest Commissioner as an officer of the Assembly, required public disclosure statements, restricted the outside interests of Cabinet and Treasury Board members, and empowered the Commissioner to recommend that a member be reprimanded, fined, suspended, or have their seat declared vacant. He introduced it three times. On 17 May 2018 it was defeated at second reading by 13 votes to 32, which is the furthest any bill of his reached in the Manitoba Legislature. He also moved two resolutions on the same subject, neither of which came to a vote.

The others: a bill to cut the Legislature from 57 seats to 49, reintroduced later proposing 39; a bill to reduce the annual individual political contribution limit from $5,000 to $1,575, matching the federal figure, after the government had raised it; and the Indigenous Representation and Related Amendments Act, which would have created four Indigenous electoral divisions on the New Zealand model, with every elector free to choose which roll to vote on regardless of heritage, and with members for those divisions deemed to belong to a recognised party.

One that became law

His bill to restore Queen’s Counsel appointments in Manitoba was introduced three times and never voted on. In 2018 the government brought forward its own bill to the same effect, which became The Queen’s Counsel Act in June that year. Speaking on it at second reading he noted the resemblance to his own and said he was glad of it. It is the one instance in his provincial record where a measure he had proposed reached the statute book, carried by someone else.

In Steven Fletcher’s words

These citations are as complete as the record now allows. More will be added as they are found, and these pages change as the facts do. Where a source is a recollection rather than a document, it is identified as such.