Politics: Canada: First elected Senator in Canada's history to take seat in Ottawa

In a burst of Conservative political and policy creativity, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper is appointing to the country's all-appointees Senate a man who was first elected by the voters of the Province of Alberta to represent them in that body. Already in previous legislation tagged Bill C-43, the government had introduced draft legislation for an elected Senate. Because his is a minority govt facing 3 opposition parties, the Liberals being the largest opposing block in the Commons, the legislation has not done well. Except educationally. The Libs have a vice grip on the Upper Chamber, all appointees for life, but now this stacked "Red Chamber" will be welcoming a man apppointed because he had been elected to that august vestige of pride, privilege, and patronage. Here's the govt's press statement (Apr18,2k7):

Prime Minister Harper announces intention to appoint Alberta Senator-in-waiting Bert Brown

18 April 2007
Ottawa, Ontario

Prime Minister Stephen Harper today announced that in keeping with the principles of Bill C-43, the proposed law that would enable Canadians to vote for Senators, Canada’s New Government intends to appoint Alberta Senator-in-waiting Bert Brown to replace retiring Alberta Senator Dan Hays.

“The retirement of Senator Hays, after nearly a quarter-century of service to Canada, creates the first opportunity for our government to appoint a Senator who has been endorsed by Canadian voters,” Prime Minister Harper said. “No Canadian has done as much to advance the cause of Senate reform as Bert Brown. He has been a tireless advocate for democratization of the Upper House for over two decades. He ran in three Alberta Senate elections and is the only Canadian to be elected twice as a Senator-in-waiting. In short, he is a perfect role model for elected Senators, and today’s announcement demonstrates that our Government is serious about moving forward on Senate reform.”

Mr. Brown, 69, is a Calgary-area zoning and property development consultant. Over 300,000 Albertans voted for him in the province’s 2004 Senate election, when he ran under the banner of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party.

Prime Minister Harper reiterated that his government’s long-term goal is to see all Canadian Senators elected. “I call on the Opposition parties to join us in democratizing the Red Chamber by passing Bill C-43,” the Prime Minister said. “Canadians recognize that the time is long overdue for the Senate to attain democratic legitimacy.”

Update/Corrections:
To correct my headline and opening paragraph above, I quote (with a few stylistic changes and interspersed comment) from Maisonneuve email newsletter (Apr19,2k7):

CBC's National, CTV News, Globe and Mail, Toronto's Star (not available online), the National Post (not available online), and Ottawa's Citizen all go inside [ie, deny frontpage coverage to] with Stephen Harper’s latest gesture aimed at changing the Senate. This time, he’s taking another page from the Brian Mulroney playbook and appointing Albertan Bert Brown to the Senate. Brown has run in three Alberta senate contests, which are of uncertain legitimacy—the five newspapers among the Big Seven each put the term “elected” in scare quotes in this context. [I note that Montreal's Le Devoir also uses scare quotes around the French word "elu" ("elected")--which latter usages are not cases of scare quotes, but instead a semantic-indicator for dictionary-like citation of a word or a concept. - P] The province has included a senatorial ballot in every provincial election since 1989, in an attempt to goad successive prime ministers into tempering their unilateral ability to appoint senators, with some kind of public consultation. Only Progressive Conservatives and independents have offered themselves as candidates, which doesn’t exactly reinforce the democratic bona fides of the exercise. The quaint term “senators-in-waiting” is typically applied to the winners of these plebiscites, which suggests that they spend their time tittering coquettishly behind fans and feeding chocolates to the Queen before being called to the Red Chamber.

No titterer, Brown came to prominence in the early 1980s after plowing “EEE SENATE—OR ELSE!” into a neighbour’s barley field to demonstrate his support for an “elected, effective, and equal” upper chamber—a popular position in western provinces during the constitutional debates of the time. He is the first senator-in-waiting to actually be appointed since 1990, the last being Reform Party stalwart Stan Waters. Appointed by Mulroney, Waters spent a year in the upper house before dying in office. The Globe reports that members of the opposition and other provincial premiers are wary of this kind of improvised half-measure, which has lead to the curious spectacle of a Liberal leader of the opposition intoning his commitment to Senate reform while a Conservative Prime Minister appoints an old friend and political ally."

Maisonneuve's all-too-typical snobbish sneering aside (contrarily, I would praise the Albertans for the humour in their phrase "Senator-in-waiting") etc, I do stand corrected on mistakenly claiming Bert Brown was the first. So, Brown's appointment was not unprecedented after all. The Harper action is thus less creative but more legitimated, and further legitimates former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's action. The fact that other parties didn't put up candidates shows their extreme partisanship and regressive visions for Canadian democracy, it doesn't de-legitimate a precedent-setting (Mulroney) and a precedent-confirming (Harper) recognition of Alberta's constituitonally legitimate law and election of Senators-in-waiting. If and when a second province follows suit to greater democracy, a broader constituency of Canadians will start hailing the need for a triple E Senate. But an even wider reform is also in the making: proportional representation. A Senator should be voted into offfice by the electors of his province on the basis of proportional representation (with perhaps two rounds of voting).

Yes, we can even learn on occasion something from an Oscar-Wilde sneering style of journalism.