Reforms Are Need In Canadas Government :: essays research papers

Reforms Are Need In Canadas GovernmentCanada is a country whos future is in question. Serious political issues haverecently overshadowed scotch concerns. Constitutional debate over unity andQuebecs future in the country is in the amount of money of every Canadian today.Continuing conflicts concerning Aboriginal self-determination and preaching arereaching the boiling point. How can Canada expect to pull herself out of thisseemingly bottomless pit? Are Canadians looking at the right state to lay theirblame? In the 1992 Referendum, "The Charlottetown Accord" addressed all of theseissues, giving Canadians the opportunity to finally 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 s o 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 lurch 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 do that apolitical body, which has survived over one hundred years in Canada, mustobviously work, or it would have already been reformed. This is simply non true,and this becomes unmistakable 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 Lower Canada (Mallory pg. 247). It w asimportant for there to be equal example, and not representation bypopulation. Senators were to be appointed, in order to ensure that the House wasindependent and had the freedom to act on its own. As well, Senators had to beseen as a orthodox 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 blank space exceeding fourthousand dollars in the province they represented. This idea was called secondsober thought. As this independent, intellectual body, the Senates mainfunction wasto ensure that all power did not come from one source.