OTTAWA — Two senators have launched a campaign to rectify the under-representation of western provinces in Canada's upper house.
Jack Austin and Lowell Murray served notice Thursday of their intention to introduce a resolution to amend the Constitution to significantly increase the number of western seats, particularly for British Columbia.
Under the proposal, B.C.'s Senate seats would double to 12, Alberta would get 10 and Manitoba and Saskatchewan would each get seven.
“The number of senators assigned is roughly in line with the population of B.C. and the Prairie provinces,” Mr. Austin said in an explanatory letter to B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell's deputy minister.
Currently the four western provinces have only six seats each in the chamber of sober second thought.
Westerners have long complained that their provinces, with populations ranging from about a million in Saskatchewan to about 4 million in B.C., are grossly under-represented compared to the Atlantic provinces.
Despite considerably smaller populations of less than a million, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia each have 10 Senate seats and Newfoundland and Labrador has six. Tiny Prince Edward Island, with a population of less than 150,000, has four.
Ontario and Quebec each have 24 seats.
Neither the Liberal Mr. Austin nor Mr. Murray — and Independent who calls himself a Progressive Conservative — could be reached for comment.
Mr. Austin is a British Columbian who served as Liberal leader in the Senate under Paul Martin's government. Mr. Murray, a Nova Scotian, was once Brian Mulroney's constitutional point man but refused to sign on to the merger of the old PCs with the Canadian Alliance to create the new Conservative party.
The proposed constitutional amendment would require the approval of Parliament — meaning it has to pass both the Senate and the Commons — and the legislatures of at least seven provinces representing 50 per cent of the country's population.
Whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government will support the amendment is unclear. But in the letter to Campbell's deputy Austin said the Liberal-dominated Senate is onside.
“Senator Murray and I believe that we have the support of most B.C. and western senators and, indeed, a majority in the Senate itself,” he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Canadian Press.
Austin urged the Campbell government to introduce a resolution to approve the change during the next sitting of the B.C. legislature.
Mr. Harper has promised to introduce a system for electing senators by the next federal election. As a first step, his government has introduced a constitutional amendment of its own that would limit the terms of senators to eight years. Senators, who are currently appointed by the prime minister, now sit until age 75.
The government says its amendment would require the approval of only the two houses of Parliament to take effect.
The Austin-Murray amendment would be tougher to implement, but it would resolve one of the prime objections to electing senators.
Many critics have argued that the current under-representation of Western Canada would become a far more serious problem in an elected upper house, where democratically chosen senators would have more legitimacy and would thus be less reticent about wielding their considerable legislative powers.
