Alberta's unlikely defender

This, after all, is the man who fought a well-meaning but doomed "Green Shift" campaign in the 2008 election where he argued in favour of a national carbon tax. This is a politician who has a dog named Kyoto.

When Dion arrived in Alberta on Wednesday he was about as far from home as he could get for a Montreal-based, francophone, academic, Liberal MP and still be on planet Earth.

However, Dion didn't seem intimidated. In fact, he had all the confidence of a man who not only believes in his cause but who sees himself as the defender of Alberta's interests.

For Dion, the federal government's plans for Senate elections are not only unconstitutional, they would actually place Alberta at a disadvantage.

The government's proposals bypass the Constitution and set up a system where the provinces would hold elections for senators. Dion argues that having senators go through the process of an election would create a power struggle between the House of Commons and the Senate. Senators, flush with the power of the ballot box, would no longer defer to the elected Commons as they now normally do.

That would be a serious problem for Alberta because the province has only six senators. Ontario and Quebec each have 24. Harper's proposal does nothing to address the distribution of seats in the Senate. That would require a constitutional amendment.

It is not difficult to imagine senators throwing their considerable weight around to the detriment of under-represented provinces. You would have 48 elected senators from Ontario and Quebec potentially stomping all over the six elected senators from Alberta.

For the same reason, the Senate would be at odds with the Commons. And there'd be no referee.

"We would not have any disputes resolution mechanism between the two elected chambers," Dion says of Harper's plan. "We would import into Canada the difficulties you have in the U.S. and in Mexico. It means Alberta and British Columbia would have no other choice but to ask for the reopening of the Constitution to protect their people."

Alberta and B.C. would want to reopen the Constitution because that's the only way to change the regional makeup of the Senate to give the West more representation and Central Canada less. But the moment you do that you'd be opening a Pandora's box of constitutional changes and amendments on all sorts of issues.

"It is legitimate today to propose reforms that might include term limits or Senate elections," says Dion. "But that must not be done through a process that excludes the provinces."

Dion is not alone in his argument, even in Alberta.

His opposition to Harper's plans is identical to that of former premier Don Getty, who led Alberta's fight for Senate reform during the fruitless constitutional talks between the premiers and then-prime minister Brian Mulroney in the early 1990s. Getty's goal was a Triple-E Senate, one that would be equal, elected and effective. But it could only have been achieved through a constitutional amendment.

There is more than a small measure of irony here having a Quebec-based Liberal defending the rights of Alberta. And there's a twinkle of mischief in Dion's eyes as he does it.

He also takes great pleasure in showing up Harper over another of the government's proposals for democratic reform: adding 30 new seats to the House of Commons - 20 for Ontario, six each for Alberta and British Columbia and three for Quebec.

Dion points to a Hansard transcript from Nov. 25, 1994 where three Reform party MPs - one of them a rookie named Stephen Harper - issued a report arguing against enlarging the Commons.

"A smaller House offers considerable cost savings, less government and fewer politicians - and clearly this is what Canadians want," said Harper's report. "All indications are that Canadians want spending cuts starting at the top, and would not consider fewer MPs a sacrifice. Fewer MPs offer the immediate advantage of reducing parliamentary costs."

Dion, it should be noted, is not arguing against all democratic reforms."We do need to rebalance the House's seat allocation to address the needs of the provinces with strong population growth," he says. "But we can do that without raising the total number of MPs."

For a few moments Dion doesn't sound like a Quebec-based Liberal academic; he sounds more like an Alberta-based Reformer from 17 years ago.