Senate As Jury Duty?

With our politicians rumbling once again about "Senate Reform" - or if you are Jack Layton - abolition, it's not a bad idea to consider the question of what form should a revised senate take.

This proposal is mildly intriguing, as it proposes constituting the Senate through an arbitrary (and hence apolitical) means similar to that of forming a jury for a criminal trial.

Perhaps that isn't entirely a bad idea, after all we do elect our MPs in the House of Commons (and theoretically, politicians are just "guys off the street", right?), so why wouldn't a "jury duty" approach work?

As a selection process it sounds only marginally less messy than an election, and subject to a variety of manipulations.

The more critical problems that arise come out of the subtleties of both law and politics. Unlike a jury trial, where the judge provides a certain amount of guidance to the jurors in understanding the applicable bits of law, I'm not at all sure who would be able to provide that guidance to the "Jury Senate", especially when the Senate has to be able to parse through not just legalities, but also the smoke-and-mirrors that politicians routinely use.

The next point of issue would be that such a process remains subject to criticism as "undemocratic", with substantially less accountability than is present in the current system. Without spending a significant amount of time addressing the role and powers of the Senate in the parliamentary processes, I don't see how this would actually work.

I also suspect that continuity could be a huge problem. One of the intended reasons for the Senate is to have a body in the legislative process that is persistent across multiple sittings of the House of Commons - providing a degree of continuity to the process - and hopefully some sanity compared to the fractious nature of debate in the House of Commons. Even if you replaced a third or a half of the Senate each year, there is still a great deal of challenge around people learning the legislative game in Ottawa, and learning to balance the imperatives of legislation against the practicalities of law.

A poorly educated oversight body could easily be more damaging than the current Senate is capable of being.

Lastly, I think the notion of viewing the Senate as a form of "jury" is a gross misrepresentation of the role. Such a mischaracterization means that there is a substantial risk that a lot of the "selected jurors" would be burnt out very quickly by the political process in Ottawa. Politics, like management is not easy work, nor is it the kind of work that everyone is well suited to.