When my friend Christopher Mario was on his death bed, his family asked him what he would like at his memorial service. He told them that what he really wanted was to have someone read a selection of letters of sympathy from various celebrities.

At the top of his list was King Charles III.

When his sister-in-law Jennifer asked how on earth they were supposed to get a letter from the King, Chris had an answer: “Ask Paula. Paula will take care of it.”

Now, you might assume that Chris believed I was a little more connected to the Royal Family than I actually am. I am afraid that simply sitting in this chamber while the King delivered the Throne Speech doesn’t constitute a formal introduction.

However, knowing and loving Chris as I did, I think this was more likely his final attempt to prank me — the final joke between us.

I first met Christopher precisely 39 years ago at Stanford University. He was from Princeton, New Jersey. I was from Edmonton, Alberta. We were both taking our master’s degrees in communication in Palo Alto, California. We came from very different worlds, but we clicked immediately, bonding over a love for Jane Austen, fashionable sweaters, heritage architecture and good food. We shared a dark, twisty sense of humour, a love of history and a passion for politics, though our politics were wildly different.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan was President, and George Bush, the elder, was Vice-President. Christopher was one of their biggest fans. I was not.

In 1986, I believed that Daniel Noriega and the Sandinistas would save Nicaragua. Christopher did not. We had different views on Margaret Thatcher, Oliver North, the Iran-Contra Affair and public health care — it didn’t matter. He became my best friend at Stanford University, though I suspect quite a few of us in the class thought that he was our best friend.

He was so generous, so hospitable, so charismatic, so smart, so funny and so endlessly curious about everything. He had a magnetism that transcended ideology — or geography — and an aesthetic taste that was unerring.

Arguing with Chris made me smarter — and more open-minded — and taught me the lifelong lesson that deep friendship can overcome profound political difference. I’m not entirely sure what arguing with me did for Christopher, but I do know that I infected him with a lifelong love of Canada.

He made his first trips to this country for weddings, first for the marriage of our classmate Eileen, who got married in Calgary the summer after we graduated, and a few years later, he came to Edmonton for my wedding.

The day after, my father pranked Chris by presenting him, in a grand public ceremony, with what had to have been the ugliest painting in the world — an enormous canvas that showed Betsy Ross presenting the original American flag to George Washington. My father presented it with a grand speech about the importance of Canadian-American relations. The artist was so terrible that both these American icons looked as ugly as gargoyles. I must tell you, it was a truly awful painting. Where and why my father had come by it, I’m really not sure. My dad presented this monstrosity completely deadpan, and it took Chris a rather long time to realize that it was a joke and not a reflection of my father’s artistic taste. I believe Chris left the huge painting behind in a washroom at the Edmonton International Airport, where I’m sure it deeply confused the folks who found it.

All our pranks couldn’t extinguish Chris’s curiosity about Canada. He travelled the world, but he came back to Edmonton repeatedly, taking in the Edmonton Heritage Festival in one year and the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival in another. He visited me in Toronto when I lived there, and he travelled on his own to Vancouver and Winnipeg. Just a few years ago, when my daughter was taking a degree in Classics and Theatre Studies at McGill University, he came to Montreal in the dead of a very cold winter to see a production of the ancient Roman comedy Pseudolus, which my daughter had translated from Latin and staged at the MainLine Theatre. And in 2018 — seven years ago this month — he flew to Ottawa to watch me be sworn in as a senator in the old Senate Chamber in Centre Block.

As a lover of history and heritage buildings, he was delighted by the neo-Gothic absurdity of our Parliament Buildings, with their towers and gargoyles and casement windows, and he gloried in the pomp and circumstance of our swearing-in ceremony.

He was a political junkie who obsessed over American and British politics, but thanks to my wicked influence, he became fascinated by Canada’s politics too, following our Senate debates more closely, I fear, than most Canadians. I think I was his favourite senator, but I’m not entirely sure. He had a tremendous admiration for Senator Housakos.

The last time I saw Christopher in person was about a year and a half ago when I travelled to Washington, D.C. to meet with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Chris insisted that I stay at his beautiful home in Washington rather than a hotel, and he greeted me with his usual ebullient hospitality and biting wit.

But it was clear to me that he was very unwell. For years, he had been using alcohol to tame the demons he had tried to keep hidden from the world and from all of us, but by the time I saw him, his addiction had all but overwhelmed him. He was already dealing with severe cirrhosis, and shortly after our visit, he was diagnosed with bile duct cancer, a deadly cancer linked to alcohol abuse.

I think I knew even then that this would be our last visit. Maybe that’s why we stayed up late each night, talking and talking, remembering all our past adventures and debating politics, as we always did.

He was not a natural fan of Donald Trump. He was more a Jeb Bush kind of Republican, but at that point, as a Trump re-election looked all but certain, he took a wicked glee in teasing me about what a Trump return to the White House might mean.

As I mourn my dear American friend, I can’t ignore the metaphor right under my nose. Here was a man who had every gift: genius, charm, talent, taste and the affluence to enjoy them all. He had family and friends who adored him, and yet he could not prevent himself from following a path of self-destruction while pushing away many of those who tried to save him.

I think that’s how many Canadians feel about America right now. How long have we been charmed — enthralled, even — by America’s talent and generosity, by all its rich gifts? America, for generations, was so much cooler than Canada, so much more affluent than Canada. It was a dreamland, an aspiration and a source of political and cultural inspiration. We vacationed in Hawaii and Las Vegas, Phoenix and Florida. We shopped in New York and Los Angeles and Seattle. We studied at Stanford and Harvard and Columbia. We read The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. We loved American fashion, American film, American music, American television and, perhaps most of all, the mythos of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave and the cradle of modern democracy.

Watching Trump’s America demolish that legacy, watching American democracy light itself on fire and watching legendary American papers declaw and debase themselves has not just broken our hearts — it has shaken our certainties. It isn’t just that we’re mad about tariffs designed to trash the Canadian economy or about Trump’s asinine annexation threats — we’re truly mourning the loss of a friend who seems hell-bent on self-destruction, drunk on hatred and division.

When King Charles III was here for the Speech from the Throne in May, we were all briefed on proper etiquette. We were told not to clap, indeed, not to react in any way to any part of the royal remarks. But when our King made his comments about Canada remaining the true North, strong and free, we threw protocol to the winds and rose as one in a spontaneous standing ovation. At that point, I think we were moved by the imminence of the Trump government’s threats to our economy and sovereignty.

But in truth, in the months since the Throne Speech, the Trump regime’s threats to the American people and the Constitution of the United States seem even more dire than its threats toward us. Today, with masked, secret police snatching people — including American citizens — right off the streets, with the President ordering troops into American cities and with all those much-vaunted democratic checks and balances failing, Canadians can only look on in horror, feeling helpless, wondering how on earth our friend came to this pass.

Even as I make this analogy, I know Christopher would probably snort in scorn and tell me I am overreacting or seeing parallels where none exist, or he would taunt me for my sober Canadian self-righteousness. But as I stand here today, I feel I’m grieving not only for a friend I loved but also for the country he loved.

On October 16, Christopher Mario’s family will be holding his memorial: a three-hour cruise aboard a yacht with the mourners dressed in Hawaiian shirts. That was what the guest of honour requested, insouciant right to the very end.

Christopher, my friend, I couldn’t get the King of Canada to write that letter of condolence to your family, but today, standing in this Senate Chamber, right where King Charles delivered his Throne Speech, I offer my condolences to all who loved you and were part of your life: your beautiful daughter Millie; her other father, Jim; your partner Christian; your brothers Greg and Jeremy; and all your nieces, nephews, cousins, sisters-in-law and friends. I hope I can offer you the condolences of my Senate colleagues too. Thank you for the all the joy and grace you brought to life and to our friendship. How I wish I could have one more argument with you.

My Senate friends and colleagues, thank you for allowing me this time to share this story.

Thank you. Hiy hiy.