Yes, Mr. Speaker, I was here when there was that fracas in the Senate over the GST. I well remember these Liberals when they sat on this side of the House and said that they would scrap, kill and abolish the GST. I was the only one here who remembers that little promise and it simply did not happen. They have not been able to do it.
I said that Brian Mulroney was shamed into putting Stan Waters into the Senate. Now to be shamed into something does not necessarily mean that one has to have a look of shame on one's face. Stan Waters certainly remembered the call. He received the call from the Prime Minister saying that he would be putting him into the Senate because he had to honour that election.
My colleague says that Stan Waters won a popularity contest. Let it be known, although I do not have the numbers on top of my head, but I think he received 275,000 votes which is a darn sight more than any one of us have ever received in a single election in this House. It was no popularity context.
My friend also said that it was a fraud by Alberta. This is a provincial government with some legitimacy in this country. It has provincial rights. It put in provincial legislation called the senatorial selection act. It is as simple as that. For some guy from Ontario to stand up and say: "This is a fraud in Alberta", it is not proper. We do not need to change the Constitution to let this happen. The political will of the government in power is all that is necessary.
A full blown Senate amendment could be passed and this party has that ready to go if the day comes. However, anyone who has the political will to say that this is important, like the Liberals had in 1992, as I thought, at their biennial convention to say that "be it resolved that we are going to go ahead and have an elected Senate", I wonder what happened to the hon. member's memory.
He may follow the Prime Minister in saying: "You voted against the Charlottetown accord. Because the Charlottetown accord was defeated you people gave up an elected Senate". That is not true. There was so much gobbledegook in the Charlottetown accord that an elected Senate was only one part of it. An elected Senate was only one of the six or seven major issues in the accord but it would
not be an effective Senate because it was going to be counterbalanced by the number of people in the House of Commons.
My friend from Kingston and the Islands knows a lot more about all these technicalities than I do, but I am smart enough to figure out that it was not a true triple E Senate. The Charlottetown accord went down in flames across the country for various reasons but it was not because my party was against Senate reform. We want true, fair Senate reform.
My province of Alberta was the one that started a legitimate process. This was not a fraud. It was not a popularity contest. It was something that was absolutely legitimate and we are demanding that it be legitimized again. We do not have somebody dictate from the House of Commons what is going to happen over there. As the Prime Minister said so clearly not once but twice as I reiterated earlier on May 9: "I will name a senator who I will choose and who will represent my party". There is no shame there and there certainly should be.