Mr. Speaker, while the hon. member is engaged in giving the House a history lesson he might be well advised to include in his remarks the fact that long before Claude Ryan in 1980, or long before they asked the
first question in a poll in 1944, the predecessor of the NDP, the CCF, was calling for the abolition of the Senate since 1933.
This is the longstanding position of our party with respect to the Senate and the effrontery over the decades at having an appointed body in the centre of our democratic decision making process. I have certainly found it very difficult on occasion to explain Canadian senators when I have been in other countries with them. They tend to be treated as if they are American senators. Everybody sort of oohs and ahs when they hear that someone is a senator. We have to take them aside and explain that they are not like American senators who get elected every six years, that these people are appointed for life and are thereafter untouchable except by the good Lord himself. It is something that most banana republics would not tolerate, the idea of having a body like this one appointed basically for life or until age 75.
I wanted to say that we agree with the notion that the Senate should be abolished. It is certainly something that has been on the Canadian political table for a long time, long before the Bloc Quebecois came along. We have been open in recent years as to how the Senate might be reinvented on a more democratic basis to deal with some of the political problems that the country has experienced, and we continue to be open to that.
As for the existing Senate, that appointed body, we continually take the same offence at it that we have historically taken. We therefore agree with the thrust of the motion to do away with the current Senate.