It’s an honour to rise today as the member for Ottawa Centre, remembering the life of Richard Patten. Friends who are present here, friends who are watching this from home—I agree with the member from Nepean. This was a giant figure in our community. I regret to say I never knew him very well personally—

He was someone whose presence certainly lives on—serving as MPP for Ottawa Centre from 1987 to 1990, serving again from 1995 to 2007.

I could, as the member from Nepean did—and I will just list it briefly for the record—talk about the fact that this is the politician who helped save the Aberdeen Pavilion from the wrecking ball. If you ever get the chance to see it at Lansdowne Market, look at it; it’s a beautiful structure.

This is the politician who helped drive the fundraising structure by being the president of the CHEO Foundation for our children’s hospital, which, as current CEO Alex Munter tells me, has made an enormous difference today.

But when I think about Richard Patten—as the member for Ottawa Centre previous to me, Yasir Naqvi, told me recently—I think about this gentleman as a citizen of the world. What does it mean to be a citizen of the world? Well, Oxfam, a charity with which many of us are familiar, calls a citizen of the world “someone who is aware of and understands the wider world—and their place in it.” As a citizen of the world, “they take an active role in their community and work with others to make our planet”—not just their city, their province or their country—a “more peaceful, sustainable and fairer” place. Why do I think about that with the life of Richard Patten? With what I was inspired to read based upon some leads that luckily were furnished to me by a family member, Sheila Laursen, who worked for the Montreal YMCA and whose friends Scott Haldane, Sol Kasimer and Bill Pigott worked with Richard Patten, I think about someone who was an accomplished athlete, who spent an entire summer in the late 1970s teaching physical health and education to Palestinian refugees in Syria, in Lebanon, in Jordan and in Gaza, and after that experience went on to continue to talk about the plight of the Palestinian people. It is difficult to talk about that plight today. Politicians are afraid sometimes to talk about the suffering of the Palestinian people, who live in open-air prisons, who suffer some of the most egregious human rights abuses every single day. It is dangerous to do that now, but Richard Patten did this in the late 1980s. And he went on to live in Guyana for two years and talk about the suffering of the Guyanese people.

He worked in friendship with Indigenous communities across this country, not through a charity model or a pity model, but a respect model, nation to nation, thinking about how he, through his dense connections, could use the platform of a politician or the platform of a major community organization like the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario to pay it forward and to help others who are fighting hard to make ends meet.

Why do we become a global citizen? I think people decide to become a global citizen in politics because they look beyond their city, their riding, their province, their country, and they see the world for what it is: a world in which eight people—eight people—today collectively own as much as the poorest half of the whole world, 3.5 billion people; a world in which the poorest billion on this planet account for 1% of global consumption but the richest billion account for 72% of global consumption.

Article 13 of the United Nations charter of human rights says that everyone has the right to leave their country. But what we know is that 3% of people around the world actually live outside of their country of origin, and we have spent decades putting up borders and obstacles to stop people from enriching other societies with their talents.

Thankfully, it is part of the Canadian story that we have tried to create a place that is welcoming, that says to people from around the world, “Come here, build your dream here, help us make a better place here.” I would like to think that the inspiration for that ideal comes from the Indigenous peoples who shepherded and walked over this land for generations, who themselves were welcoming.

That’s what I think of when I think of a giant like Richard Patten—someone who was a global citizen, someone who worked hard for his city, and someone who said that it’s not enough to work for your riding and we have to use the resources and the skills we have to make our world a better place.

Thank you so much to friends who are here and to friends watching for all of your work and for lending Richard to us.