Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to join my colleagues from other parties in the House today in marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker.
When John George Diefenbaker was elected Prime Minister of Canada I was six years old. Mr. Diefenbaker was 62 years old and had already been in Parliament for 17 years. Yet I had the honour, however briefly, of being a colleague of his when I like him was elected to the 31st Parliament of Canada on May 22, 1979.
I remember walking into the parliamentary dining room and seeing Dief in the alcove to the left where Prime Ministers like to eat and feeling like I was now in authentic parliamentary company.
It should be repeated of John Diefenbaker often that not unlike other parliamentary legends, some of whom are still with us today such as Mr. Knowles, he loved Parliament and all that it stood for. He understood Parliament. He knew it to be a place where different ideas and different idealists clash with each other and have it out with each other. The sanitized corporate boardroom view of Parliament which we see encouraged in some quarters today was not for John Diefenbaker.
While we are talking about corporate boardrooms it is also appropriate to note that in my judgment John Diefenbaker was probably one of the last Prime Ministers of the country who served for any length of time, who was not at home in the company of the Canadian corporate elite. His politics though not socialist were populist and he was certainly more at home on Main Street than on Bay Street. That is why he was able, much to the distress of my party on occasion, to win ridings that otherwise should have been NDP.
He was progressive for his time and for his party on human rights issues, on the equality of women, on social programs, on aboriginal issues, on South Africa and on other such issues. One recalls with fondness his opposition to capital punishment, for instance. Most of all, though I concur with many of the critical analyses offered of his prime ministership, I remember Mr. Diefenbaker as a Canadian, an unhyphenated Canadian, who had a vision of Canada that far exceeded the banal images of the marketplace so commonplace in our way of speaking today.
It was a vision of an independent Canada, a Canada that did not take its orders or its agenda from Washington, a Canada that determined its own way in the world and its own way of doing things. It was this independence that George Grant lamented the loss of when he wrote a "Lament for a Nation" after the fall of the Diefenbaker government and the acceptance of nuclear weapons by the government that followed.
John Diefenbaker struck a chord in the hearts of many Canadians. It was not long after the election of 1979-three months actually-that his funeral train wound its way across the Canadian landscape. It was the last trip on the hustings for a man who loved politics, who loved Canada, who loved political life and who always said that next to the ministry he regarded politics as the highest calling.
Finally, on a personal note, my exposure to John Diefenbaker came long before my election to Parliament or the few occasions on which I had an opportunity to discuss issues with him as a young person interested in politics, because I did have that opportunity. Some members may also know that I play the pipes. As a piper I had the task of piping him into the hall at a number of events in Winnipeg over the years. I remember one in particular at the Rossmere Curling Club when I could barely make it through the crowd to the front for the crush of people reaching out to shake hands with their Chief.
Dief was fond of the phrase "in my day and generation". I am grateful that in my day and generation, however briefly, I had the opportunity to see that great Canadian in action. We should all hope when our day and generation are judged we will be able to say, however differently and however varied our ways of doing so might be, that we too served Canada with the loyalty and the love of this great country that John Diefenbaker demonstrated. May it always be said of us, as he said of himself, that though we might be on the wrong side from time to time, may we never find ourselves on the side of wrong.