Byline: Luisa Damato

Has anybody seen my senator?

For the first time, I've noticed how removed we are from Parliament's place of sober second thought.

The Canadian Senate has always seemed to me to be a pretty useless thing, like government's equivalent of the appendix. But suddenly it has found itself in the spotlight. That's because of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's controversial omnibus crime bill, which will put a lot more people in jail. It easily passed through the House of Commons thanks to the Conservative majority there. Now the only way to stop the bill is if the Senate rejects it.

Some liberal-minded men and women, the kind of people who believe there are too many people locked up in jail as it is, are lobbying the upper house. One organization is asking people to contact their senators and urge them to block the Harper bill. But finding that senator is not as easy as you might think.

I'm aware of my MP and MPP because I see them around all the time. Just last Saturday my MP was outside the grocery store, cheerfully shaming me into giving some money to the Salvation Army. (In my defence, I was in a hurry and pretending not to see them.)

Of course, I know the local mayors and the councillors and the regional chair, and the Ontario premier and the prime minister of Canada.

Naturally, I also know the Governor General, who lives near Heidelberg when he's not at Rideau Hall and is therefore practically a neighbour. But my senator? He's not in the phone book, and I haven't got a clue. Nor am I alone in my ignorance. "I have no idea who the senators are from Ontario," said historian Ken McLaughlin. And if McLaughlin, with his keen interest in politics and detailed knowledge of local history, doesn't know, who does?

So I called the office of Kitchener-Waterloo MP Peter Braid. "Who's my senator?" I asked the staffer who answered. She wasn't sure, so she put me on hold while she found out. After a few minutes, she sent me a link to the Canadian Parliament website, where I found a list of senators from Ontario. Most were from Toronto and Ottawa, with just a handful from places like St. Marys, Simcoe and Burlington. None were from Waterloo Region. And the only phone numbers listed for them are in Ottawa.

I realized that if I wanted to talk to a senator from my area, I might have a very long wait. The last senator from this area, William Daum Euler, died 50 years ago, in 1961. Clearly, there's been no rush to find a replacement.

Euler's life was so long ago, he seems to have grown up in the history books. He was a boyhood friend of William Lyon Mackenzie King. He became mayor of Kitchener nearly 100 years ago, when it was still called Berlin. He understood his local constituents, and stood with them against conscription.

Euler was a popular politician who was elected "time after time after time," McLaughlin said. He was the first chancellor of Waterloo Lutheran University, before it was renamed Wilfrid Laurier. He became a senator in 1940 and held the post until his death in 1961.

Since those glory days, we've had nobody and nothing around here from the Senate. Not so much as a pamphlet at your front door to tell you what they could do for you.

It's ludicrous, really. We pay for two levels of federal government, two sets of well-heeled federal politicians - but we only get to communicate with one. We can't imagine a world that's different, so it never occurs to us to complain.

Would the Americans put up with this? Not even for a moment.

Harper has promised to reform the Senate and gradually bring democracy to it. I look forward to that and hope he keeps his promise. But, meanwhile, inertia reigns. Somehow Canadians expect the Senate to be undemocratic, unwieldy and unresponsive, so it gets away with being all those things. In time, it could be a vibrant and healthy check on the power of the ruling federal party and its leader. But I'm not holding my breath.

ldamato@therecord.com

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