This article first appeared in the Toronto Sun Newspaper Chain. It is now FREE for reprinting

Preston Manning says it’s time to get rid of the Senate.

The founder of the Reform Party says it would be good to see Albertans send a strong message to Ottawa during the referendum in October.

“The Canadian Senate is an ineffective and useless chamber,” Manning told the Canadian Taxpayers Federation during an interview on Juno News. “Even people who support reform will vote ‘get rid of it.’”

This is a seismic shift in the business-as-expensively-usual politics and policy around the Senate in Ottawa.

Manning is the grandfather of the movement to reform the Senate, to make it elected, equal and accountable.

When he declared “The West wants in,” Manning inspired an entire cohort of mostly young people from the West to follow him to Ottawa, to work as staff and serve as members of Parliament.

Reforming the Senate was one of their goals.

But it didn’t work.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper, an acolyte of Manning’s, was blocked from making the Senate democratic, even though Harper was prime minister and he was leading a majority government.

When the people of Alberta elected folks they wanted to see in the Senate, Harper was blocked from appointing them by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The former leader of the New Democrats, Thomas Mulcair, railed against the unelected Senate and he vowed to keep fighting to abolish it.

“We are in favour of Senate abolition,” Mulcair told reporters as the auditor general’s condemnatory report on senators’ spending was posted.

Before Mulcair, the late leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, also called for the Senate to be scrapped, calling it “outdated and obsolete, a 19th-century institution that has no place in a modern democracy in the 21st century.”

Under newly-minted leader, Avi Lewis, the NDP still says we need to get rid of the Senate, stating, “the Senate is an archaic institution that violates the most basic principles of democratic government.”

The founder of the Reform Party, the former Conservative prime minister and the NDP are all singing from the same song sheet: The unelected, unaccountable, expensive Senate is terrible, and it shouldn’t exist in Canada.

So why are hardworking everyday taxpayers watching their money gushing down the drain to keep funding the Senate?

The Senate is costing taxpayers more than $140 million this year.

Former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall realized trying to reform the Senate was pointless back in 2013 and he called for it to be abolished instead.

Since 2013, it has cost taxpayers more than $1.5 billion.

Without a single Canadian ever voting for any of them.

Back bench senators, with no so-called additional responsibilities imposed upon their schedules, are paid more than $192,000 per year.

The speaker of the Senate blew nearly a million dollars over the last three years, globetrotting with her entourage to places such as Brazil, Ireland, Spain, Japan, Romania, New Zealand and Benin.

While in Benin, Senate Speaker François Gagnon, learned about the “sacred forest of voodoo culture.”

Gagnon told Senate Magazine (yes that exists and taxpayers pay for it) that she and her spouse enjoy travelling.

The speaker is paid more than $260,000 per year, along with other perks, so she could scratch her itch to jet-set by spending her own money.

Better yet: Let’s scrap the entire Senate instead.

That way, no party bag men, former broadcasters, hacks, insufferable activists or partisan potted plants will be inhabiting the Senate, pointlessly, at taxpayers’ expense.

Getting rid of the Senate would make things more affordable and more democratic, and heaven knows, Canadians need more of both.

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