Mr. Speaker, I would also like to pay tribute today to the late Senator Manning and on behalf of my colleagues in the NDP caucus express our sincere condolences to our colleague in the House, the member for Calgary Southwest, who was proud to call this distinguished politician, distinguished Albertan and distinguished Canadian his father.
It is interesting to note that the late Mr. Manning was born and raised in Saskatchewan near Rosetown. Had he not heard the call of Bible Bill Aberhart over the radio and enrolled in his school in Calgary at a young age, heaven knows what might have happened to his political consciousness had he stayed in that area. It was, after all, an area represented for many years by another distinguished Christian gentleman by the name Mr. J. Coldwell.
I say this by way of wanting to point out that many in the CCF and in the Social Credit had more in common than the fact they grew out of the dirty thirties. What they had in common, though they disagreed over implementation, was the insight attributed to former Alberta Premier Manning in a biography done of him that religion is something that should not just be taken down from the shelf on Sundays; that you cannot divorce spiritual values from the things of every day life and that therefore it is impossible finally not to mix religion and politics.
We in the political sphere are making spiritual judgments all the time and we would all do well to be instructed in that by honouring the life and memory of great Canadians like Ernest Manning who, like others of his day and generation, on the left and on the right, saw the reality of God as a decisive factor in their political deliberations.