By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 14, 1997; Page A32

When it was established along with the rest of the country in 1867, the Canadian Senate was designed as a hybrid between Britain's hereditary House of Lords and the equal state representation provided by the U.S. Congress's upper chamber. Appointed to their posts for life, members had to own property and were expected to balance the populist House of Commons with the "sober second thought" befitting landed nobility.

Or, as Cicero put it in a phrase hung on the Senate wall, "to oppose the fickleness of the multitudes."

These days, however, it isn't just Canada's 104 senators who are having second thoughts. With one of the chamber's members on extended vacation in Mexico and rampant absenteeism on the part of about two dozen others, Canadians are wondering whether it is the Senate itself that is proving fickle.

"It was meant to be something between the House of Lords and the American elected Senate – a kind of Canadian compromise," said University of Toronto historian Michael Bliss. "The result is that it worked better than neither. . . . The dilemma is that we cannot figure out how to change it."

"It's the Valhalla of fallen political warriors," said Rob Anders, a Reform Party member of Parliament. "Although I am not sure that is appropriate because to go to Valhalla you have to have an amount of honor."

The current anxiety focuses on Andrew Thompson, an Ontario politician and former House of Commons member named to the Senate by then-Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in the 1960s.

True to its reputation as a clubhouse where strength of character is the only restraint, the Senate did not keep attendance records back then. But in recent years, after the public and media decided that even honorable men need watching, it became apparent that Thompson and a good many other senators did their sober thinking elsewhere.

According to reviews of Senate records published in several Canadian papers recently, Thompson attended fewer than 3 percent of Senate sessions over the last decade. He continues to draw his approximately $60,000 annual salary but spends much of the year at his home in La Paz, Mexico.

During his rare appearances on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, he signed papers saying that he was still conducting Senate business and offered a medical excuse for his absence – documents required for his paychecks to keep flowing. One of his assistants explained in interviews published here that Thompson has a condition that affects his immune system and would be aggravated by the Canadian winter.

That might have been sufficient in a more forgiving era, but no longer. Canadian journalists tracked Thompson down at his Mexican home, and pictures started trickling back of his substantial villa and his leisurely walks in the sun.

Last month, Prime Minister Jean Chretien booted him from the Liberal caucus, and his colleagues are moving to strip him of his office space, his research expenses and his secretary's salary.

None of those steps affect his membership, however; that can't be revoked. He must retire in two years when he turns 75 – a change from the lifetime appointment that existed until the 1960s – but until then he is untouchable.

Thompson is by no means the only truant. According to Senate records published recently by the Globe and Mail daily newspaper, about a quarter of Canada's senators missed at least 40 percent of the chamber's sessions.

In an acknowledgment that attendance is a problem, conservative Ontario Sen. Marjory LeBreton and three others have been appointed to a special committee to study how the Senate can police itself more effectively. They might, for example, tighten attendance rules that currently excuse senators for virtually any reason – from corporate board meetings to charitable functions. Essentially, if a member does not feel like traveling to Ottawa, he or she can stay home – or fly to Mexico – with impunity.

"It flies in the face of everything that is good and decent," LeBreton said.

There are those who feel the Canadian Senate is beyond redemption.

Designed around a rough regional apportionment system based on the way Canada looked 130 years ago, the Senate is a remnant of the days when the maritime provinces were still economically significant, the western ones were not, and Ontario and Quebec could easily hoard power. In today's Canada, it gives neither the regional balance that reflects the way the country has developed, nor the equal province-by-province apportionment that might be used to protect smaller jurisdictions.

As a result, Ontario and Quebec retain 24 senators each, for example, while British Columbia only has six. Regionally, the huge Western provinces combined have 24 senators – the same as the three tiny Atlantic jurisdictions of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Newfoundland, the outlier that didn't join the confederation until 1949, was given six senators of its own when it became part of the club.

Politically, the Senate's modern purpose is also unclear. As is the case with the U.S. Senate, it is ostensibly equal to the lower house, with the power to initiate legislation, amend laws that the other chamber has passed and kill bills it does not like. Because of its appointed character, however, it rarely exercises that authority out of concern that, Cicero notwithstanding, the popular will expressed through the House of Commons should be respected. There are regular proposals for change. The Reform Party, for example, has proposed an elected Senate with an equal number of members from each province, an adaptation of the U.S. model. The Progressive Conservative Party has proposed 10-year limits on Senate terms.

But none of these suggestions has taken hold, partly because most reform proposals would require Quebec to give up some representation, a sensitive issue given the feeling among French-speaking separatists there that they already are getting a raw deal in their relations with English-speaking Canada.

The result is an identity crisis that leaves each senator to decide, one by one, whether to become an activist legislator, a regional defender, a ceremonial figurehead or a business executive with a nice extra income and public pension on the side. Or even an expatriate in Mexico.

"A lot of good people have sat in the Senate," said historian Bliss. "So have a lot of awful political hacks."