Canadian taxpayers are jumping for joy in the streets. For once they all agree that the Senate of Canada is spending their tax dollars on a worthy project that will bring untold benefit to themselves and to generations yet unborn.

"What! The Senate deserves encomiums? You have got to be kidding."

No, there is no joking here. Our much maligned Senate, the chamber of sober second thought, for once has grabbed the imagination of all true Canadians with a display of wisdom that boggles the mind, sets hearts aflame with patriotism (never mind that someone once defined patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel"), and raises a banner in defence of the indefensible to which all right-minded citizens will flock, and flock, eager to show their devotion, proud to demonstrate their support, and willing to lay down their lives to protect their Senate from the churlish, the ungrateful, the uninformed, the unlettered, the un, un, unutterable rapscallions and the duped, deceived, dunces who have been led to believe that the Senate of Canada is an undemocratic institution whose members are appointed by one person, and one person only.

For a mere pittance the sober thinking members of the Red Chamber have funded the research that went into a book that should become required reading for every citizen of this great country, the literate and illiterate alike.

Its title alone is worth every cent "Protecting Canadian Democracy: The Senate You Never Knew".

Protecting Canadian Democracy. Could anything be more apt? Whoever came up with that as a title for a book on the Canadian Senate deserves the highest honour that the Order of Canada can bestow. It is a gem. A nonpareil. Nothing can quite equal it.

The $50,000 in taxpayers' money that our S.T.Ss. (sober thinking Senators) spent directly on funding the book is worth every cent for the title alone.

But that is not all that Canadian taxpayers spent on such a nobly inspired product. The Canadian Centre for Management Development, a creation of the federal government, out of its magnanimity gave another $40,000 to the cause, in this case to help pay for translation and publication costs.

Who could cavil at such expense for protecting democracy by the unelected Senate of Canada?

Lest that latter phrase may be contested, let it be known that a number of honourable Senators distilled their thinking into various chapters of the book, and one in particular has plainly admitted, in his own words:

"None of us is in the Senate by right, nor have we been chosen by the electors."

Such lucidity of expression deserves commendation.

The protection of Canadian democracy by an unelected group of honourable Senators must give the Canadian electorate at large cause for thanks. As long as honourable Senators not of their choosing in free, democratic elections such as are the bane of democracies the world over, as long as those honourable Senators spend their tax dollars so wisely on such non self-serving good works, they can sleep soundly.

S.T.Ss. and the C.C.M.D. deservedly merit the hosannas of the multitudes for their largesse. "A chicken in every pot" was once an American election slogan. A copy of "Protecting Canadian Democracy" in every household may well displace "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix". Hogwarts should pay attention. The transmutation of dross into gold has been achieved, not by alchemists, not by incantations, but by a spellbinding production of sober thinking unelected Canadian Senators.

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