Mr. Speaker, it is with great sadness that I rise today to pay tribute to my former colleague, Father Bob Ogle, the NDP MP for Saskatoon East from 1979 to 1984. I had the privilege of being elected at the same time as Bob. We were rookie MPs together in this House, although he was a fair bit older than me. We became good friends and that friendship extended beyond the time when he had to leave this parliament. As a matter of fact, I had occasion to visit him in January in Saskatoon, just a couple of months before his death. I was very glad to be able to visit him at that time.
As has already been stated, he had a long struggle with cancer and with other illnesses. If my memory serves me right, it was shortly after the 1984 election that he was given something in the nature of six months to live. Bob, even when he was health critic for the NDP, used to say that he was not all that fond of doctors. After the diagnosis he used to say that he was going to try to live as long as he could to prove them wrong. I must say that he proved them wrong time and time again by living until April 1, 1998, with all the illnesses that beset him.
Much of the biographical material on Father Bob has already been covered by the secretary of state, but I just want to note a couple of things. He left this House not because he was defeated, but because he was obedient. At that time the Pope made a ruling, to use speakership language rather than ecclesiastical language, that priests could no longer run for or seek elected office. I think at the time the Pope was trying to deal, for better or for worse, with priests who were running for office in the United States and throughout Latin America, but Bob was caught in that net, if you like.
There was never any doubt in his mind as to what he would do. He was a priest first and if he was ordered by the Pope not to run again then that was his first obligation, given his vows, and he did not seek re-election in 1984, something which a great many of us regretted. We felt at that time that the House of Commons lost a great member of parliament and a great servant of the Canadian people.
But Bob never looked back. He went on to try to deal with the issues that were of concern to him in another way. It has already been mentioned that he had a passion for trying to develop the Canadian media in a way that made them more sensitive to developmental problems in the third world. He went to an awful lot of effort to try to set up a series of sitcoms that would reflect the problems people experienced in the developing world. He undertook a number of other endeavours in that respect.
I saw Bob, of course, not just as a fellow New Democrat, but also as a fellow Christian who was influenced by liberation theology and by the effect that the global economy and global capitalism was having on the poor in the third world. Bob was inspired by that and by his experience in Brazil where he saw what was actually happening to people. He came back here to embrace a political tradition that he thought was the most faithful to what he had learned there and what he had learned as a Roman Catholic priest. He applied that without fear or favour, even when it came to the NDP.
I would be remiss if I did not say this, and I think Bob would want me to say it, even though it might not make some people happy. Throughout his life he considered himself to be pro-life. He considered himself to be a foe of the enemies of life wherever he found them, whether he found them in Brazil, whether he found them in global capitalism, whether he found them in nuclear weapons or whether he found them in the phenomenon of abortion. He would often get up in this House and say that he was in favour of life and that caused him to take a view which he saw as consistently pro-life, being against nuclear weapons, being against an economic system that ground the faces of the poor, to use a biblical expression, and being against capital punishment.
We lost a great member of parliament in 1984 and we lost an even greater Canadian this spring when Father Bob finally succumbed to his illnesses.
On behalf of my colleagues I would like to extend our sympathy to his family and in particular to his sister, Mary Lou, whom I knew and who was a great support to him over the years. He will be greatly missed.