True or False

"I'm sorry to see her go. She was a great friend and a great parliamentarian ... but the time had come for her to take care of herself."
"All of that was perfectly normal. It's not as if there was no procedure in place to deal with the situation. What happened was that somebody commented publicly on her situation which was completely inappropriate. ...blown up out of proportion. She's a private person and her view was that she didn't want to talk about her private affairs in public.
"One of the frustrations that I had was that there were people talking about it...who frankly didn't know what they were talking about.
"The whole affair might spark the Senate to do a larger study on how the country should handle mental illness in an aging workforce."
Senator James Cowan, Senate of Canada

This is not a game. This is a real problem. Someone appointed to sit in the Red Chamber as Senator Joyce Fairbairn was, is expected to be there to conduct the business that has been assigned to the Senate. If she was in no condition to do so, it was wrong for her to be there. Even more wrong for her to vote on matters of national interest when her condition made it questionable to put it kindly that she understood completely what she was voting for.

Senator Fairbairn, diagnosed with Alzheimer's some time earlier, was declared by her geriatric psychiatrist to be mentally inadequate to the tasks that would be set before her in the Senate. Although Senator Cowan may speak about personal issues, issues such as the inability to address one's own appropriate responses to important matters having influence on how the nation operates are vital to appointees being in full possession of their mental faculties.

In August of last year Senator Fairbairn's niece, Patricia McCullagh wrote to Senate officials apprising them of the fact that her aunt had been declared legally incompetent six months earlier, in February of 2012. Despite which, the Senator appeared in the Red Chamber and voted on issues on a number of occasions. Furthermore, to emphasize the degree to which Senator Fairbairn's ability to comport herself had plunged, Ms. McCullah alerted the Senate that her aunt had received 24-hour care for over a year, as her condition deteriorated.

Senator Cowan may very well miss the person he once knew and respected, and he may indeed feel grief at her condition, but his support of her continued appearance in the Senate under the condition of her dreadfully failing health and inability to comprehend, shines no light of intelligent reasoning on himself. What was 'blown  up out of proportion' was her political party's insistence that she had a perfect right to remain in the Senate and was perfectly capable of conducting herself in a manner to do justice to her position as a Senator.

That was false when the situation became public knowledge, and it remains false, despite Senator Cowan's protestations to the contrary. What is true is that there should have been responsible oversight to identify the problem before it became public knowledge. Senator Fairbairn in all fairness should have been thanked for her excellent work of the past in the Senate, and compassionately ushered out of the Red Chamber, to the end-of-life care that she has earned and so clearly requires.