NDP launches new campaign to abolish the Senate

The recent Senate expense scandal seems to have buoyed the NDP into relaunching their 'abolish the senate' campaign with renewed vim and vigour.

On Wednesday morning, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair held court in front of the Senate chambers announcing "Roll up the red carpet" petition:

"We’re going to stop trying to find excuses for keeping a bunch of party hacks, bagmen, political operatives and defeated candidates sitting in appeal of the decisions of the duly elected mmebers of the House of Commons," Mulcair said according to Maclean’s.

The website where the petition is housed is very well done and should be effective in getting thousands of signatures. It includes the following captions:

[ Related: Prime Minister Harper says he’s “frustrated” and “sorry” about Senate scandal ]

It's easy to understand what Mulcair is doing: Build on the collective anger against the senate and be the only party in the next election to run with a platform to abolish the red chamber.

But abolishing the Senate is much easier said than done.

The Conservative government has asked to seek clarification from the Supreme Court on "what is required to reform the Senate and what is required to abolish the Senate."

According to many constitutional academics, abolishing the Senate would almost certainly require 7 out of 10 provinces, representing 50 per cent of the total population, to agree and there's a good chance that it would require unanimous consent of all the provinces.

You'd have to think that some of the smaller provinces, which are over-represented in the upper chamber, would block that.

Mulcair would also be opening up a constitutional can of worms.

"[A push for abolition would] become very quickly part of a larger constitutional reform package, and that would ultimately lead into the decay and destruction of recent efforts to reform the constitution," Ned Franks, a constitutional expert at Queen’s University, told the National Post.

"They just are not profitable. You wind up pitting group against group."

[ Related: NDP launch the ‘Senate Hall of Shame’ ]

For his part, Mulcair says that he's going to travel the country and talk with the public and meet with provincial leaders to get them on board.

"One of the things that you have to do if you actually want to make this happen is you’ve got, one, to get the public on side because once you have public support, there’s nothing more important in a democracy than having the public on side, that’s what this program is about. The other thing that you have to do is you have to talk to the provinces and territories," Mulcair said.

"As I continue to travel across Canada in the coming months, every time I do I’m going to be meeting with government leaders and I’m going to be meeting with opposition leaders, we’re going to be talking about this, they’ll share their opinions as well."

It will be interesting to hear what response he gets from his meetings with Quebec's Parti Québécois premier Pauline Marois.

(Photo courtesy of the Canadian Press)

Are you a politics junkie?
Follow @politicalpoints on Twitter!