The Canadian Senate: No place for angels

In my latest column for the Ottawa Citizen I explain why it is pure fantasy to think that “getting the politics out of Senate appointments” will fix the Senate. James Madison explained 200 years ago in the Federalist Papers that if human beings were angels, we wouldn’t need to worry about checks and balances and well-designed institututions. But since people are fallible, we need to design institutions to compensate. That’s why we need to fix the Senate, not the appointments process.