Senator Cotter: The metaphor begins in the back row of where the senators were seated in the other place. Seven of us were more or less at the back, and one of the senators — I can’t mention their name, but let me just say I was seated directly behind and near a distinguished psychiatrist from Nova Scotia. This senator, I think in an attempt to honour Senator Wells’ early work sponsoring a private member’s bill on single sport event betting, proposed that we conduct a round of betting on how long President Biden’s speech would be. I think we each contributed about a million dollars to the betting, and we asked the most trusted member of our little group of seven, Senator Clement, to hold the money. To give you an idea of how much trust we had, we insisted on not one but two timekeepers to keep the honesty more or less intact. It was a close call, but the winner was Senator Loffreda.

On reflection, I thought this was a metaphor for life, particularly for this topic. With apologies to Senator Loffreda, the metaphor is, “The bankers always win.”