Mr. Speaker, on the weekend the Leader of the Opposition released to the press the text of the speech he just made today condemning Senate patronage appointments.
A story in this morning's Ottawa Citizen told us that the member for Calgary Southwest was to quote from Oliver Cromwell “Ye have grown odious to the whole nation—are yourselves become the greatest grievance”. That kind of thing.
My picture appears among the 10 who are the target of the member's 17th century rhetoric and I would like to set the record straight. I am the commoner, not the senator. Thus I am sensitive to the context of Cromwell's remarks which the member called “one of the hotest speeches of denunciation ever made in parliament”. What Cromwell was in the process of doing was abolishing parliament. The speech that the Leader of the Opposition saw fit to celebrate today was the maiden speech of England's first and only dictator.
It is not the Senate that is the danger to democracy around here. It is the Leader of the Opposition.