Mr. Speaker, as it is a multipartite question, I will approach it this way.
It is clear that good work has come out of the Senate in the past. A recent report about poverty in Canada comes to mind; many worthy recommendations came out of that report.
As my colleague for Vancouver Kingsway said in answering a very similar question previously, this is not an issue of whether the Senate ever does good work or whether senators have worthy opinions on matters of great importance to Canadians.
Like so many issues, this issue is reducible to simple issues. At the beginning of my speech, I spoke to some fundamental principles. That is what we are wrestling with. The fundamental principles are that we have a chamber here in our parliamentary institutions that is undemocratic. It has the power to block legislation. We have seen that happen with some very worthy representation that this elected House passed on to the Senate.
In response, I would say that at times the appropriate approach is to reduce matters to fundamental principles. If we look at an issue in those terms, it often becomes starkly simple. The starkly simple fact is that the upper chamber, the Senate, is not a democratic institution and should therefore be abolished.