Reforms Are Need In Canadas Government :: essays research papers

clear ups Are Need In Canadas giving medicationCanada is a country whos in store(predicate) is in question. Serious political issues haverecently overshadowed economic concerns. Constitutional debate over unity andQuebecs future in the country is in the meaning of every Canadian today.Continuing conflicts concerning Aboriginal self-determination and treatment arereaching the boiling point. How can Canada expect to pull herself out of thisseemingly mystifying pit? Are Canadians looking at the right people to lay theirblame? In the 1992 Referendum, "The Charlottetown Accord" addressed all of theseissues, giving Canadians the opportunity to at long last let the dead horse be - butoh, if it were that simple. A red faced Brian Mulroney pontificated that a voteagainst the accord would be one against Canada. Canadians would essentially beexpressing the desire for Quebec to remain excluded from the constitution. Howcould the Right-Honorable Mulroney expect anyone to vote on a document thatcontained so much more than simply the issue of Quebec sovereignty? Ironically,hidden deep within "The Charlottetown Accord," was the opportunity for Canadiansto make a difference to change the way the government ran, giving less power tothe politicians and more to the people. This was the issue of Senate Reform.Why is Senate Reform such an important issue? An argument could be made that apolitical body, which has survived over one hundred years in Canada, must manifestly work, or it would have already been reformed. This is simply not true,and this becomes apparent when analyzing the current Canadian Senate.In its inception, the Senate was designed to play an important role in theGovernment of Canada, representing various regions of the federation. Quebec,Ontario, the maritimes and the west were allotted twenty-four Senators each.Considered to be the heart of the federal system, the Senate was to be a crucialbalancing mechanism between Upper and glare Canada (Mallory pg. 247). It wasimportant for there to be equal representation, and not representation bypopulation. Senators were to be appointed, in order to ensure that the House wasindependent and had the freedom to sour on its own. As well, Senators had to beseen as a conservative restraint on the young, the impressionable, and theimpulsive in the House of Commons (Van Loon and Whittington pg. 625). Theytherefore had to be over thirty years old and own property exceeding fourthousand dollars in the province they represented. This idea was called secondsober thought. As this independent, intelligent body, the Senates mainfunction wasto ensure that all power did not come from one source.