Origins
Reform of the Senate has been a debated issue in Canada since the institution was formed at Confederation in 1867, carrying on discussions around the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada since the 1830s. In September 1885, at a Liberal Party of Canada convention in Toronto, a policy resolution was put forward to reform the Canadian Senate on an elective basis; a policy that was adopted, but never implemented. The little debate that followed in the decades thereafter focused on reform of the appointment process or abolition.
It was not until the premiership of Pierre Trudeau that the idea of a Triple-E Senate first attracted mainstream attention, after the Liberal dominated federal parliament passed legislation establishing the National Energy Program (NEP) in the wake of the energy crisis of the 1970s. Though it was welcome in the populous eastern provinces, the NEP was unpopular in the western region – especially oil-rich Alberta – where populists felt the western provinces had been excluded from debate on the energy program, and looked towards the United States with the belief that, had Canada's Senate been more like its American counterpart, senators from the four western provinces could have forced the Senate to drop the program, or at least allow for significant amendments to it.
This idea of electing senators to a house made up of equally distributed seats and which could exercise its considerable power over legislation passed by the House of Commons soon became a cause célèbre among Western activists, with one Alberta farmer – Bert Brown – even using his tractor to cut "Triple E Senate or else" into his neighbour's barley field. By 1987, the Legislative Assembly of Alberta had passed the Alberta Senatorial Selection Act, and the first senatorial election was held on 16 October 1989. Stanley Waters, a member of the western-based, right-wing Reform Party, was the winner of that election, and, under pressure from the Reform Party and the Premier of Alberta, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney agreed to advise the Governor General to appoint the Alberta nominee to the Senate; Waters was sworn in as a senator on 11 June 1990.
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