Good people can be found nearly anywhere, even in the Canadian Senate, and Joyce Fairbairn is certainly one of those.
Like many Albertans who know Joyce, I'm disgusted and sickened to see her descent into Alzheimer's disease become a public circus.
Liberal leadership in the Senate allowed Fairbairn to vote on bills and approve expenses for at least three months after she was diagnosed with dementia and declared legally incompetent.
That exposed Fairbairn to legitimate news stories, but also to appalling ridicule and invasion of privacy.
And none of it is her fault; it's the Senate's.
Fairbairn, 72, is incompetent through severe cognitive illness. She couldn't possibly know she should stop working and voting. That decision had to be made for her. It wasn't.
Liberal incompetence in this matter is shocking, but blame for the blunder spreads right across the Senate floor.
Fairbairn's illness was widely known. The Senate itself, including Conservatives, needed to ease her aside, gently and humanely, many months ago.
It's a measure of the body's growing disconnection that nobody saw the danger to Fairbairn, and the institution itself, in allowing her to continue.
Really, how stupid do you have to be to miss the cosmic sick joke inherent in the news that a serving senator was declared mentally incompetent, and then allowed to continue?
There may have been a fear of hurting Fairbairn; she's a popular and likable soul. But inaction has ended up wounding her far more.
It would not be easy to make her stop working, mind you. Fairbairn has always been extraordinarily diligent.
She probably makes more public appearances in a given year than any group of 20 senators.
On sa国际传媒 Day she attended festivities in her native Lethbridge, appearing on the platform but not speaking.
She was out and about during the spring provincial election campaign.
Her speeches, always a bit windy, became almost open-ended in recent years. It was surely a sign that something was seriously wrong. I've always admired Joyce. She's one of sa国际传媒's rarest political birds - a southern Alberta Liberal senator who, like Bud Olson and Dan Hays, worked hard for the province.
When Pierre Trudeau named her to the Senate in 1984, there were only two Liberal MPs west of Winnipeg. Her job then, and later when Jean Chr脙漏tien was prime minister, was to fight for the province within the dominant Liberal circle of Ontario and Quebec.
It was a tough job that Fairbairn always took seriously. Plenty of federal funding landed in Alberta because of her quiet efforts.
Under Chr脙漏tien, she was government leader in the Senate and therefore a cabinet minister. She had special responsibility for literacy, a cause she fervently advocates to this day. She's also been chairwoman of the Canadian Paralympic Foundation.
Joyce Fairbairn has never been caught up in a scandal. She's never collected her Senate salary by the seaside in Mexico. She never married anybody 45 years her junior and had a family spat on an airplane.
Rather, she's one of the old-school politicians who always believed she was in public life to give, not to take.
To see her leave this way, stripped of dignity and privacy, apparently unable to speak for herself, is sad beyond words.
