Mr. Speaker, I rise on behalf of all my NDP colleagues in adding our sincere condolences to the family of Mark MacGuigan.
I had the pleasure of serving in this House with Mr. MacGuigan from 1979 to 1984 and I remember him well.
We pay tribute this day to a distinguished career in the public service, a distinguished career in academia, which was recognized earlier by the Liberal member who spoke of his selection to head up the University of Windsor law school, a distinguished career in Parliament as a backbencher and as a minister, and a distinguished career after Parliament on the judiciary.
I want to remember him in particular as someone who self-consciously wrestled as a person of faith with the many difficult questions that people of religious orientation have to deal with in politics. He had to deal as a Roman Catholic with various difficult issues having to do with abortion and divorce.
I understand he wrote a book on these subjects and how to deal with these very difficult topics in a pluralistic society. I did not know about that book until I read about it in one of the obituaries. I now look forward to reading it because it seems to me that he was wrestling, with his considerable intellectual powers, with very difficult questions which all of us need to address.
This is one of the aspects of parliamentary life that sometimes goes unnoticed in the back and forth and the rough and tumble of this place. We sometimes miss the fact that many of us, and in this case Mark MacGuigan, wrestle at a competent and deep intellectual level with a lot of difficult issues. We pay tribute to someone who was willing to do that, to do it in the public domain and to offer his life as a service to Canada.