Quote:
....."I was asked to go upstairs to talk to the leader and I was informed I had to make a choice. If I went to the dinner, I'd have to leave caucus. And I said, 'Well, I want to do both," Greene said in an interview outside the chamber.
"But for some reason, just because I accepted a dinner reservation from the Prime Minister of Canada ... it was too much for the Conservative caucus.
"I'm a Conservative; I was Preston Manning's chief of staff a long time ago ... and I'm Maxime Bernier's Nova Scotia campaign chair. I'm a Conservative, and I always have been, and this won't stop me from being a Conservative," he said.
Trudeau and Peter Harder, the government's representative in the Senate, had invited all senators who introduced government legislation in the upper chamber to a dinner Tuesday night to thank them for their efforts.
Greene is the only Conservative to sponsor a government bill during this parliamentary session.
He helped usher through Bill S-4, a rather innocuous piece of legislation that enacted a double taxation agreement with Taiwan and Israel. Greene said he sponsored a nearly identical bill on a similar matter during the Harper years.
....'Treasonous'
"I was amazed, I was disappointed, I was crushed a little bit. The words betrayal and treason and treasonous were also used," Greene said of Smith's ultimatum.
Greene said he offered to give the Conservative leadership a "bird's-eye view" of what happened at the dinner meeting, and report back to his fellow Tories, but was rebuffed.
"I would go to dinner with any prime minister who invited me," he said. "This whole situation is beyond silly. Would my Senate leadership not want me to attend such a dinner so that I can report back on what the Liberals' plans are for the Senate? It makes no sense."
Greene said he will now sit as an "Independent Reform senator," a name he crafted this afternoon with his office staff. He will sit on the other side of the chamber now alongside other members of the Independent Senators Group and Liberal Senators.
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/politics/co ... -1.4118106Spiteful petty little men