The Canadian Senate: Protecting the Rights of the Rich Minority

Macdonald hard-wired some powerful champions of property into the BNA Act. His sympathies were Burkean ones. Edmund Burke had argued, in the late eighteenth century, that large landed proprietors were a kind of political ballast that protected small proprietors who would otherwise be too weak to protect themselves from a predatory state. During the Confederation debates, Macdonald advocated an appointed upper house on grounds that "we must protect the rights of minorities, and the rich are always fewer in number than the poor." Members must be at least thirty years of age and own $4,000 of real property--an astronomically high qualification.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 39.