What if the government of Canada tried to do away with one of the fundamental tenets of democracy? What if the media paid little or no attention to the story? Even worse, what is the only hope for a reprieve lay with a collection of party hacks and bagmen in the Senate?

Incredible? Yes. But true. Believe it or not, the Senate did come to the rescue of democracy, saving Canadians from a government prepared to see the current electoral map -based on 1981 census data - stay in place.

The story begins in February 1994, just a few months after the Liberals' election victory. The government benches were rife with rookies, many of whom senior party organizers had never expected to see in office. Chretien was riding a wave of unprecedented popularity. He had yet to introduce any legislation of consequence, and his most remarkable accomplishment to date was cancelling contracts signed by the previous government: expensive military helicopters and the Pearson Airport deal.

But on February 15, Elections Canada unveiled the proposed changes to the federal ridings, as mandated by the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. Ontario would get four new seats, B.C. two, and of the existing 295 seats, 264 would be redrawn -- a typical readjustment by any standard. The changes would take effect on January 16, 1997. It was the third time the ridings had been redrawn since the act was passed 30 years earlier, and veteran MPS were blasé, regarding it as an unavoidable minor inconvenience.

But the rookies, particularly those from southern Ontario, were worried about the possibility of Reform Party candidates taking advantage of the creation of six new ridings. Of the 98 Ontario Liberals then sitting in the Commons, 93 would see their ridings redrawn. Apparently, as former Liberal MP turned independent Senator Marcel Prud'homme sarcastically remarked, they hadn't yet learned how to trade campaign managers across riding boundaries.

Chretien's response was to introduce Bill C-18 an Act to Suspend the Electoral Boundaries Readjustmerit Act of 1964. In effect, the Liberals had decided electoral reform could wait until after the next election. It was greeted, literally, with cheers from the backbenchers assembled at a caucus meeting in Parliament Hill's Centre Block. So happy were they that other Grits, like Vancouver rookie Ted McWhinney, made no attempt to hide their surprise-

"There's a huge backlash from the new members," he observed. "They fought one election and they don't want to do it again on entirely new boundaries, or fight each other for nominations."

Another B.C. newcomer, Anna Terrana, had different thoughts; she was "troubled" by the implications of the bill. B.C. would gain two seats under the new riding order, after all, and she saw no reason to postpone those additional seats until after the next election.

While House Leader Herb Gray was insisting the bill was written to reform an out-of-date redistribution process, Toronto's John Nunziata, a marginalized Liberal and former member of the Rat Pack, was telling anyone who asked that it had nothing to do with improving redistribution and everything to do with mollifying frightened rookie MPs.

"People were looking at how they were affected personally," he told Norm Ovenden of the Edmonton Journal. "That's where the pressure came from. Their personal kingdoms were being eroded or in some cases obliterated."

The Liberals' frankness can be attributed in part to the weakness of the opposition on the issue. The Bloc Québecois was vowing not to run another federal campaign and cared nothing about future ridings. The Reform Party did object to the bill, but, in the absence of a curious press gallery and without the ability to do anything more than delay a vote, their protests were little more than bluster. C-18 passed through the House a month later, thanks to Chretien's first (but not last) use of closure, which cut off debate.

The next step, however, confronted the Liberals with a more serious obstacle. In the Commons, the lack of public concern worked to the government's advantage, but in the Senate it proved a major drawback.

The Conservatives were eager to undermine the Chrétien covernment, as long as it didn't mean antagonizing the public. Many were still smarting from the previous summer's public relations disaster, when they were forced to reverse a decision to increase their housing allowance by $6,000. Bill C-18, they concluded, was the perfect target: there were serious constitutional issues at stake, and the Senate could claim it was defending the democratic principle of "one person, one vote.". It was a chance to regain lost pride. Led by the scholarly Gérald Beaudoin, who chaired the Senate's Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, Tory senators found a long list of experts and former electoral boundary commissioners to denounce postponing redistribution as an affront to democracy. They pointed out that Section 51 of the Constitution calls for a redistribution of federal ridings after each decennial census. The bill would kill two years of work by the existing commissions, turn the update clock back to zero and freeze it there for two years while Parliament canw up with a new riding update law Without the h& bution would take effect in 1997.

Because the process takes two-and-a-half years to complete, new ridings wouldn't be ready until late 1998 -- after the next expected election. If C-18 passed, the next election would be fought using the old ridings based on population data gathered in 1981. Already, ridings such as York North in metropolitan Toronto are home to more than 250,000 people, while others have fewer than 30,000. The formula laid down in the Constitution calls for an average of about 100,000. Beaudoin, known in Parliament as a "pit bull" on points of law, says the Senate had a "constitutional obligation" to fight the bill. "We were defending the principles of democracy."

The Tory majority in the Senate voted to amend the bill to ensure the $4 million worth of work by the existing commissions wasn't undone and reduced the suspension period to six months.

Reaction from the Chretien government was predictable outrage about the unelected Senate "meddling" in MPs' affairs. But in the end, they compromised: the commissions would remain intact, with the freeze shortened to nine months, beginning after the release of the riding commissions' reports in the fall -- sufficient to ensure that the ridings would not be scuttled. C-18 received the Senate's blessing on June 15. Equality of votes had been restored, and, for a while, it looked like the tawdry tale had come to an end.

But the Liberals had another card to play. A few weeks later, the Commons' Procedure and House Affairs Committee, led by Kingston Liberal Peter Milliken, opened hearings on the drafting of replacement riding update legislation. It was clear from the beginning that the committee's work was little more than a side-show to the true Liberal strategy.

The government charged Milliken with examining four possible "improvements" to the law: a cap on the number of seats in the House; the method of selecting the electoral commission members; the rules governing the drawing of boundaries; and the involvement of MPs in the process.

The first item was a non-starter, since the number of seats is governed by formulas laid down in the Constitution, and not even Chrétien was prepared to open that can of worms.

The second, commission membership, also turned out to be a bogus issue. Each province has a three-member panel, the chair of which is chosen by the chief justice of the province, while the other two commissioners are appointed by the Speaker of the Commons. No one had any complaints about the process, and all the Milliken committee could do was suggest that the positions be advertised, a meaningless gesture, since the tiny pool of experts from which membership is invariably drawn hardly needs to be alerted to the job openings.

The boundary-drawing rules also escaped serious revision. Only the fourth subject proved useful: MPs would no longer have their own set of hearings to complain about proposed riding boundaries, a provision universally derided as a vestige of the days of the gerrymander.

The only other significant elements to emerge from the committee were a recommendation that MPs have a veto over the Speaker's appointments, and the creation of a partial riding update after each off-year census (those held in years ending in a "6" in addition to the existing system, which follows censuses carried out in years ending in a "1"). Both these measures were attacked in the Senate on constitutional grounds.

Lack of content notwithstanding, the government turned the Milliken report into Bill C-69, which, like its predecessor, passed the Commons with barely a ripple. Most members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery continued to assume that the public was far less interested in the story than were their MPs.

Unfortunately for the Liberals, C-69 suffered the same fate in the Senate as C-18. Beaudoin and the constitutional experts denounced the bill. Their main criticism was that it included an immediate repeal of the existing riding update process, again setting the clock back to zero and guaranteeing that the next election would be fought using the old boundaries. The Conservatives were having none of it. They stalled the bill for months, narrowly outvoting Liberal senators more than once. It finally died in early February when Chrétien prorogued Parliament. Though any bill can be revived, House Leader Herb Gray hinted that, as C-69 was in the Senate, resurrecting it would be "complicated" - parliamentary code for "very unlikely."

Tory Senator Lowell Murray, government leader in the Senate for the Mulroney years and a 30-year backroom veteran on the Hill, says he was surprised by the Liberals' willingness to tamper with the democratic process. But it makes sense when you consider the composition of their caucus. Back in early February 1994, backbenchers were being asked to swallow a legislative agenda that many found less than palatable. There was recognition of homosexual rights, gun control and more cuts to unemployment insurance. Perhaps, says Murray, Chrétien decided to offer them their old ridings in exchange for their acquiescence on less popular matters.

Basically, says Nunziata, that's exactly what happened. Of course, Nunziata is quick to point out that the Tory senators would never have turned electoral boundaries into a crusade if they hadn't recently been stung by their party's worst election defeat in history.

Murray concedes that partisan politics did play a role, more with C-69 than with C-18. But the latter, he says, raised questions of principle that transcended party lines. Not everyone in the Senate wanted to risk the wrath of the public over something as arcane as riding redistribution. After all, says Murray, "there has to be a good reason if the Senate is going to exercise powers it shouldn't have."

The reason proved strong enough to convince the rest of the Tory senators over the last two years to devote their time and energy to blocking the two election reform bills. By the time the Liberals achieved a tenuous one-seat majority in the Upper House (through the suspicious resignation in late January of Tory Senator John Sylvain and his replacement by Liberal MP Shirley Maheu), Conservative strategists were preparing to pull out all the stops to prevent C-69 from passing.

Then the bill died. As far as Murray, Beaudoin and their colleagues were concerned, the Senate had done its part. But the story may not he over. Rumours are circulating that Chrétien may call an election as soon as this fall, before the new ridings take effect in January 1997. If that happens, he will have won -- and the Senate will have lost -- the battle to save Canadian democracy.