Whatever power senators may have on paper, they have no legitimate basis on which to defeat a bill that has been duly passed by the people’s elected representatives. It should not need explaining, but apparently it does: you earn the right to pass or defeat laws in a democracy by winning a mandate from the people. Regardless of one’s views on the bill, it is surely intolerable that the Senate should take it upon itself to decide its fate. Most of the 81,389 people who voted in the Liberal leadership race are not even traceable, let alone in a position to express their views.īut leave that to one side.
They are not: indeed, caucus is the only body to which the leader, once elected, can be held to account. We might share his outrage, if we accepted his premise: that MPs are “mere” specks in the democratic firmament, bits of dust trailing in the leader’s wake. Wells refers happen to be people, unlike him, who have been elected, collectively representing scores of thousands of Canadians. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. “I wonder what the 81,389 people who put him there would think about this piece of ‘democratic reform.’” “In the case of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, who received a staggering 81,389 votes in the Liberal leadership contest in 2013, 20 per cent of his caucus, a mere eight people, could trigger a review and, shockingly, 19 people could overthrow him,” the senator wrote. This is, Wells contended, an untenable affront to the party members who elected those leaders. In a remarkable piece in the National Post last week, Conservative Senator David Wells complained chiefly of the provision whereby 20 per cent of the members of a party caucus could initiate a vote on whether to sack their leader, with a majority required to send him or her packing. Andrew Coyne: The fix is in - Senate will quietly allow popular Reform Act to die.
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