QUESTIONS PARENTS NEED TO ASK

How To Tell If Your Child is a Canadian Senator: Eighteen Questions Every
Parent Needs To Ask

1) Does he disappear for long stretches of time and return to the province
with no explanation of what he did during his absence?

2) Does he stare vacantly into space, without speaking? Has he ever
described one of these spells as a pause "for sober second thought"?

3) Does he always seem to be short of money? Even though his pay and pension
are three or four times richer than what you have or anticipate, is his own
paycheque or retirement benefits regularly boosted by ridiculous and wholly
unjustified amounts?

4) Has he started hanging out with an unusual crowd -- the hacks, flacks,
hangers-on, bum-smooches and party bosses of his once-active life in
day-to-day political survival?

5) Is he lacking in confidence or constitutional justification? And maybe
for good reason, being unelected and all, a parliamentary freeloader? Is he
- -- how to put this? -- a neezer, or a gerd, or a geezer-nerd? Is he so
desperate to fit in with what he sees as the with-it federal crowd that he
would behave as shamelessly as this week when one of his little Senate
committees recommended that marijuana be made legal in Canada for anybody
older than 16 and that, of course, the pot be taxed like nobody's business?

6) What was THAT all about?

7) And that's not to mention TV's political commentators -- were they
huffing the hemp, or what? Did the noted political observers actually say
that the Senate committee's historic call for relaxed cannabis laws was
evidence that the political clout of the baby boom had finally extended to
all corners of the Canadian power structure?

8) Baby boomers?

9) Canadian senators are baby boomers ?

10) Babies of which boom? The Klondike gold boom?

11) Whatever became of the good old days, anyway? Remember how it used to be
that members of the Senate would wake up from a year of monumentally boring
and astronomically expensive hearings to recommend nothing more
controversial than another whopper pay hike for themselves, on the grounds
that it would be their first increase since way back at Question 3? Remember
how we'd think: "Another raise? What are they smoking?" and how it would
turn out that what the senator smoked was a $28 Cuban cigar from a meeting
with a president of a big bank or union?

12) So now what are the senators smoking?

13) You think?

14) Dude! Really?

15) Wouldn't a fellow get himself into quite a peck of trouble, though, by
suggesting -- which he isn't -- that the Senate is beholden to the pro-dope
lobby, specifically that its membership is aligned mainly with Chretien's
camp, and what's more, that it smokes pot, and way too much of it -- that
the upper chamber in Ottawa has more in common with the typical basement in
Regina than merely those Canadian flags as drapery? Are these not the same
people, after all, who a few months ago noodled up the idea of an "Official
Canadian Horse"? How could that bill before Parliament have been anything
but pharmaceutically inspired?

16) Can't be, though, right? Isn't there some rule, some maximum age
restriction? Isn't there a notice posted four feet high on a wall somewhere
that says, "The beltline of your trousers must be lower than your breasts to
toot the doobie"?

17) As a supplementary, Mister Speaker, can the government assure the
Canadian taxpayer that the cafeteria at which the senators enjoy subsidized
dining is not -- repeat, NOT -- an all-you-can-eat affair?

18) Did you ever think, parents, that it would come to this, that the
Canadian Senate would be the rebel, and that we'd be the establishment, da
man, the ones urging caution? Did you ever feel so old as you did this week?