OTTAWA – It might be called The Greening of the Senate.
Next month, former agriculture minister Eugene Whelan will cart his trademark green stetson across the street to Parliament Hill to be sworn in as a senator.
“You’d better believe I’ll wear that hat,” Whelan said in an Aug. 9 interview from a cottage on a remote Northern Ontario island. “It comes with me.”
The man who as an MP once proposed senate abolition returns to Parliament a dozen years after he resigned from a 22-year career as a Member of Parliament.
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For more than 11 of those years, he served as agriculture minister.
This stint will be shorter. In two years and 11 months, he will reach Senate retirement age of 75.
In the meantime, Whelan joins his MP daughter Susan as the first father-daughter combination in the history of Canadian Parliament.
He was appointed to the Senate Aug. 8 by his old friend and Liberal campaign colleague prime minister Jean ChrŽtien.
“Jean called me on the cell phone,” said Whelan. “He said he wanted to be sure I would take it before he announced it. I guess there’s some concern about me in Ottawa.”
The two go back a long way.
When the unilingual ChrŽtien arrived as a Parliament Hill rookie in 1963, the southern Ontario farmer with the earthy language and plaid suits already had one four-month session of Parliament under his belt.
They became friends and Whelan says he taught the young francophone lawyer his second language.
“He speaks bad English because he learned it from me,” Whelan joked in his autobiography.
Soon, the prime minister may be hearing some of Whelan’s unique brand of English being used to criticize a Liberal government.
Since ChrŽtien took power almost three years ago and launched a campaign of deficit-cutting, free trade and deregulation, Whelan has become increasingly critical of the government’s direction.
He said last week he will give voice to some of those concerns in caucus. “I will be letting them know what we built and what we shouldn’t destroy.”
Whelan’s appointment came in for criticism from Bri-tish Columbia Reform MP Jim Abbott, who said in an interview the former minister was demeaning a life of good public service by accepting an unelected patronage appointment. “I think his reputation has been debased.”
Whelan was unimpressed.
“It will give me a platform to straighten out some of those Reform positions on farmers,” he said.
