Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill S-228, An Act to amend the Constitution Act, 1867 (property qualifications of Senators).

I vividly remember the day three years ago when I got that message from Ottawa asking me to provide proof that I was qualified to be a senator, that I owned $4,000 worth of real property.

As it happens, I was on holiday outside the country and I had to scramble to pull together all the necessary documentation to prove I owned my house. I needed to provide a land title certificate from the Alberta Land Titles Office. I needed to provide a property tax assessment from the City of Edmonton. I needed a copy of my mortgage agreement with my bank and a copy of my Alberta driver’s licence to prove that my official legal address matched the address on all those other documents, all to prove that I actually lived in the house that I owned.

I was lucky. I did indeed own the little house where I lived. While my lawyer and I hustled to round up all the necessary documentation as quickly as possible, I wondered, why exactly was a $4,000 property requirement still a thing?

Since I speak to a lot of school groups about the Senate, and they often ask me that same question, I set out to find an answer. Here’s some of what I tell students when they ask me.

To understand the origin of the property qualification, it’s necessary to understand just how tumultuous a time the sixties actually were. I don’t mean the 1960s; I mean the 1860s.

It was a decade of seismic shifts in political power, a decade that saw the Russian Empire free its serfs and the United States abolish slavery. It was a decade when Mexico threw off its French imperial occupiers and executed its French emperor, Maximilian I; a decade when Spain deposed its Queen Isabella in its Glorious Revolution; a decade where Italy became a free and united nation, thanks to the revolutionary leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Of course, 1867 was the year Karl Marx published Das Kapital. It was the year of the Fenian Uprising in Ireland. And it was the year the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli signed the second Reform Act, which enfranchised a million new British voters, including thousands of urban working men, effectively doubling the number of British men who had the right to vote.

It was against that backdrop that the British North America Act was written and that Canada became a country, which is essential to understanding why we have a Senate in the first place and why one of the key qualifications to be a senator was that you owned a significant amount of land.

Now, $4,000 isn’t a lot of money now, but back then it was roughly the equivalent of owning a $1 million worth of property.

In a time of social upheaval and worldwide worker revolts, in a time when elites were rightly nervous about their futures, it’s no wonder the architects of Canada’s Confederation were keen to set up a form of government that would protect the interests of the landed and the wealthy.

Canada, after all, could have had a unicameral system of government, as our provinces do, with only a single House of Commons. Instead, the powers that be opted for a bicameral system, with an upper chamber modelled on the British House of Lords, which safeguarded the rights of the hereditary landed gentry. Except, of course, the four Canadian colonies that made up that embryo Canada didn’t have dukes or barons or earls. We had no hereditary nobility here at all except a few odd remittance men.

Since we couldn’t have a House of Lords, it was decided we should have a Senate, an upper body named for the Senate of ancient Rome.

Who would our senators be? Well, the Latin root for “Senate” is “senex,” meaning old man, so our senators would be older men.

Senators in ancient Rome were appointed, not elected. They were also supposed to be men of outstanding character, imbued with Roman civil virtues. They were meant to be men of gravitas, dignitas, humanitas.

In the days of the Roman Republic, they also had to be rich or at least independently wealthy since Roman senators served unpaid. It was the first Roman Emperor Augustus who added a property qualification. Augustus decreed that no man could sit in the Senate unless he owned property worth 1,200,000 sesterces.

It’s probably foolish to try to translate that into contemporary currency, but some who have tried, nonetheless, translate 1 million sesterces into roughly $1 million, though I’d take that with a grain of salt — a fitting expression, since the words “salary” and “salt” come from the same Latin root.

To return to 1867, it’s fair to say that the original architects of our bicameral Parliament expressly intended our Senate to mirror its Roman namesake, to the extent that appointed Canadian senators would represent the interests of the wealthy and the landed. Sure enough, when the first 72 senators were called to sit in Canada’s first Parliament, they were a collection of wealthy seigneurs and shipping barons, bankers and gentlemen farmers, men of wealth and property. To judge by their photos, you might well assume that ownership of an enormous pair of side whiskers or a giant moustache was also a requirement for the job — a more ornate collection Victorian facial fuzz you could never hope to see.

My friends, it is not 1867 anymore. Victoria isn’t on the throne and neither is the Emperor Augustus. Our Constitution is a living tree, capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits. It is in a continuous process of evolution.

That’s what Lord Sankey, the British Lord Chancellor, wrote in 1929 when he ruled, in the Persons Case, that Canadian women were entitled to sit in the Canadian Senate. It was a radical change to the qualification rules, and it was five formidable, flawed, unyielding Alberta women — Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy — who fought that fight and forever changed the make-up of the Senate.

The first woman, Cairine Wilson, was appointed to our Senate in 1930. While it took a long time, we are now at effective gender parity in this chamber.

Yes, there is indeed a precedent to change the qualifications to sit in the Senate. In 2022, it is anachronistic — bordering on offensive — to think of this chamber as a defender of the rights of rich property owners.

Senator Patterson has already done an excellent job of outlining the ways the property ownership provisions discriminate against the residents of Nunavut, where much land is held in common, and against people who live on First Nation reserves or in Métis settlements.

In 2022, when anyone can apply to be a senator, it should surely be unconscionable to have a system designed to discriminate against Indigenous peoples in this way.

It’s not only First Nations, Métis and Inuit Canadians who may be precluded from applying to be senators under the current rules. Given the stratospheric property prices in Vancouver and Toronto, property ownership in some of Canada’s largest cities may soon be out of the reach of a generation. If we become a society where even the most accomplished urbanites are primarily renters, not owners, we could disqualify all kinds of talented Canadians from Senate service.

Let me quote the words of a truly great senator from Edmonton, the delightful Tommy Banks, of blessed memory. This is from a speech he gave to the Senate on this issue in January 2009. Banks joked that:

There was perhaps an apocryphal story that one senator‑to‑be sought to qualify by having bought a cemetery plot, which was seen to be not entirely in order.

Then he added:

There have been instances in the past in which persons considering appointment to the Senate have actually bought the garage of someone else. That is a fact.

This is a preposterous requirement. It is antediluvian and it has no place in the requirements for being named to this place in the 21st century. . . .

To which I say, hear, hear.

That said, it will not be simple to get Senator Patterson’s amendment adopted. Yes, the Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that such an amendment could be made unilaterally by the federal Parliament without the agreement of the provinces.

However, I should point out that Quebec is in a unique situation. It’s the only province in which senators are assigned to a specific division of the province and are required to own property in that division. According to the Supreme Court’s reasoning, we can’t really do this if the Government of Quebec hasn’t agreed.

I don’t see any real reason why Quebec would oppose this, given that these sections are so archaic that they don’t even include the northern half of the province. I, of course, can’t speak for Quebec, but until Quebec is consulted and agrees, I think it will be hard for us to move forward.

That said, I want to thank Senator Patterson for continuing the work of my Edmonton predecessor, Senator Banks. It is time to find a way to extinguish a property requirement, which could certainly be seen as classist if not racist, and to ensure that no otherwise qualified candidate is prevented from applying for a position in the Senate simply because they aren’t “landed.”

And if we are worried that we are breaking with tradition and disrespecting our history, well, let me quote the words of another Roman Emperor, the Emperor Claudius.

In AD 48, Claudius shocked the Roman Senate by deciding to appoint senators from Gaul, what is today the territory we call France. Many senators were appalled at the idea of appointing these French barbarians from the provinces into the Senate of Rome.

According to the Annals of Tacitus, the Emperor had this response to these Roman hidebound folks, said the emperor:

Everything, senators, which we now credit as ancient and established, was once new: plebeian magistrates followed patricians; magistrates from Latium followed plebeians; magistrates from all the other races of Italy after the Latins. This thing, too, will become the custom, and what today we defend by means of precedents will be a precedent itself.

Honourable senators, if our namesake institution could adapt to the times and allow into the Senate new and worthy members who didn’t meet the old-fashioned qualifications, well, I think we should be able to do the same.

When in Rome, as they say, do as the Romans.

Thank you, hiy hiy and gratias.

I think there is consideration, because I think it is important that we live in the provinces that we represent.

And I spoke to one constitutional law professor, Eric Adams, who is Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta. I asked him if I should be concerned that eliminating the property requirement might make it easier for people not to live where they say that they do.

His question to me was, “Does the property requirement actually make them live where they say that they do?” And I had to say that, no, it didn’t, and he told me that if it is not actually a safeguard now, getting rid of it won’t functionally make any difference.

As far as the other constitutional questions, you know, I have been pretending to know something about the law these last couple of speeches. But this place is filled with actual constitutional law experts who could answer that question better than I.

Thank you very much, Senator Simons, for your very interesting speech and history lesson. You suggested that we wait for the situation in Quebec to be addressed, but maybe what we could do is include a clause at the end of Senator Patterson’s bill stating that the constitutional amendment proposed in the bill would take effect only when Quebec adopts a similar motion for senators from Quebec. This way, we could get the system set up, and as soon as the Government of Quebec says yes, we could make the change.

That might be a good idea. That request could be addressed to Senator Patterson, or maybe you want to move a motion in amendment yourself.