Honourable senators, I will invoke the one-question-per-round rule. “But, chair, I have just a small, half question. It will be quick.”

“No. I said only one question. I will put you down for the second round.”

This is the signature line of our Social Affairs Committee chair, my chair on SOCI for most of the eight years I have been in the Senate, Senator Kelvin K. Ogilvie.

We were nominated and sworn in together with seven other colleagues that Tuesday, September 15, 2009. Little did we know the kind of journey we were all about to embark upon. That day, the first day of Senate after the summer, the nine of us were sitting around a table in the Francophonie Room, all of us telling our personal stories, waiting.

As each person’s name was called and they left the room, supposedly for the procession into chamber, someone said, “What if we just disappear into ‘nowhereness’ like Alice in Wonderland?” Well, some would say that there are days on the Hill that feel much like Alice going down the rabbit hole.

Seriously, though, it has been a remarkable eight years, senator. Of course, there are the ready public certainties, especially your hailed leadership in science and technology. As chair of Social Affairs, you have steered the committee through four major studies and a review of the health accord. If I might, I will single out the pharma study — a three-year study of the state of prescription pharmaceuticals in Canada — as an example of the groundbreaking work you led.

As for myself, senator, I have learned so much from you. You are a man of great intellect, wit, compassion, human decency and integrity. You have been a trustworthy friend, advising with the invaluable, unvarnished truth.

Senator, it is remarkable that you retire on November 6, 2017, the sesquicentennial anniversary of the first meeting of the Senate of Canada, and that your own celebration marks fully half those 150 years.

And now, senator, as you return full time to your beloved Fundy Bay, and you walk deep in your evergreen forest on the mountain or ride one of your moving machines to clean snow or ice from the roads, you might have one of those moments when a memory from the vast stock of these eight years in the Red Chamber will come to mind and you will smile, I hope.

Senator, I wish you and your wife, Roleen, wonderful times ahead now as you spend more time by the Bay and visit with your children and grandchildren. All the best as you get on with the next chapter.