America's Hat Also Has a Stupid Senate

Looks like you dirty Yankees aren't the only ones with a phenomenally screwy legislative process:

The Senate is working quickly through many of the bills that were passed by the House of Commons in recent weeks but one controversial piece of legislation seems to be stalled.

Bill C-311, drafted by NDP MP Bruce Hyer, would require the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. It was supported in the Senate by Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell and has been read twice but has since been adjourned in the name of Conservative Senator Richard Neufeld. The legislation cannot move forward until he speaks to it.... Mr. Neufeld said on Wednesday that there has been no organized effort to keep the bill from being passed into law. If it is not addressed before the Senate rises, probably next week, it can always be raised in the fall, he said. “Our chamber has been pretty busy,” said Mr. Neufeld.

But the Liberals say they fear that the Conservatives are stalling until they obtain an absolute majority of Senate seats and can unilaterally kill the legislation - something that is likely to occur in November.

And Mr. Hyer said he has been told by Conservatives that the government has decreed that the bill cannot be passed into law.

“There are a number of Conservative senators who I have met with, who I am not going to identify, who are very sympathetic,” he said, “but they say they are getting tremendous pressure - they are being whipped.”

And guess what? It's been lazing around Ottawa since 2006!

The Climate Change Accountability Act was originally tabled in October 2006 in the Canadian House of Commons as Bill C-377 by Jack Layton, Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. It passed 3rd reading in that House with the support of caucuses of the Liberal Party of Canada, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP (the Conservative Party of Canada, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, voted against it). However, due to the 2008 Canadian federal election ending the parliamentary session prematurely, the bill did not achieve royal assent despite reaching the Senate. C-377 therefore died when the election was called.

The parallels here between the 110th Congress and our situation are obvious enough that I don't need to draw them out, but here's the kicker: we don't actually vote for our senators.

The Senate consists of 105 members appointed by the Governor General on the advice of the prime minister.[1] Seats are assigned on a regional basis, with each of the four major regions receiving 24 seats, and the remainder of the available seats being assigned to smaller regions. The four major regions are: Ontario, Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and the Western provinces. The seats for Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut are assigned apart from these regional divisions. Senators may serve until they reach the age of 75.

I just want to make two little points towards the end of this quote-heavy post. One, when the Conservatives were out of power, all that I ever heard from my friends and their parents and, well, random dudes in restaurants wearing suits and cowboy hats, was that a Triple E Senate was a necessity to keep Canada from eventually breaking apart. The three Es stand for Elected, Equal, and Effective, as the Tories were weary of a senate stuffed full of liberals gumming up the works and, in their own little way, filibustering. Now that they're in power, and have been there long enough to have moved a number of people into the Senate, obviously they're not keen. Two, this bill is basically only demanding that Canada get to work on meeting the framework it has already agreed to in the United Nations. It isn't radical or overbearing or anything, it's had a series of readings, and it's already four years too late. Good god.