Mr. Kirby retires at the end of October, at the age of 65 — a decade before mandatory retirement — giving up a salary of more than $122,700 a year.

Mr. Kirby is an example of how an appointed Senate was meant to work — providing a place for talented Canadians to contribute to law-making and public debate, without having to worry about the messy business of getting re-elected.

For one thing, he acknowledges he’s not necessarily the sort of fellow who would have been able to get elected in the first place. And he says the most significant achievement of his 22 years in the Senate — its influential 2002 report on health reform — would not have been possible if Canada had an elected Senate.

"I’m going to make the point that if the people on the committee had had to stand for re-election, there’s no way you could have got that report out — because we were highly controversial, because we said some things that had to be said," Mr. Kirby said in an interview last week in his Parliament Hill office.

"The report, which was produced for a fraction of the cost of the much-heralded Romanow report, has been at least as influential. One of the key ideas — a national wait times guarantee — is one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s five key promises to Canadians, although one the government now appears to be trying to pretend it hadn’t made."

This spring, the Senate committee Mr. Kirby chairs released another major report, this one on Canada’s mental health system, and Mr. Kirby sat back and decided his work was through.

"I’ve now spent six years — three years on health care, three years on mental health," he says. "All our health-care proposals are now very active in terms of driving the agenda and our mental health one, in the long run, will have equal impact. So I sort of asked myself did I want to start a big new policy statement. I said it’s a wonderful note to leave on, because you leave thinking you’ve really accomplished something."

He is not alone in thinking that. Following the announcement of his retirement, the Toronto Star, National Post and Globe and Mail all lauded his accomplishments.

Many on Parliament Hill would do almost anything to get into the Senate, a world of luxurious perks and great money for only as much work, basically, as you want to do. When Mr. Kirby announced he was leaving, his colleagues in the upper chamber immediately suspected either a grave illness in the family or that he had lined up a lucrative private-sector gig.

"If I wanted to make money, I’d stay where I am, which, A, pays reasonably well and, B, increases my pension and gives me all kinds of benefits."

He already sits on many corporate boards, and he will continue to do that — but he does not plan to run a company or take on a heavier business workload.

Last year, Mr. Kirby spent so much time travelling across the country for meetings and speeches on health care that he graduated to Air Canada’s Super Elite class, meaning he flew more than 100,000 miles.

"If you care about it, you do it anyway," he said. "If you can do something to help the people with mental illness, why should the fact that you might be a little tired stop you? So you do it."

He does plan to spend more time visiting his five children and five grandchildren, and he’ll spend more time with his wife, Roberta, on the golf course and in their townhouse on the Rideau River in Ottawa.

Mr. Kirby is among the least political politicians in Ottawa. He has been a Liberal since the 1970s but in recent years has drifted away from any partisan role. This week, an Atlantic Liberal MP joked that if a reporter wanted to ask Mr. Kirby a tough question, he should ask him where the Atlantic Liberal caucus meets.

Mr. Kirby laughs at the story. "I stopped going to the caucus stuff a while ago," he says. "I mean, really, I just became a policy-type guy, and stopped doing the political stuff."

"All the work we’ve done in health care is non-partisan," he says. "Look, the Liberals didn’t like it at all because it challenged all their old myths. I have not for decades done anything terribly partisan. I mean, I’m really an applied problem-solver."

In 1965, Mr. Kirby earned a PhD in applied mathematics from Northwestern University in Chicago for work that he did designing an early computer program — using punch cards — to manage a complicated trucking system.

Mr. Kirby says it’s sad that Mr. Regan, who had a successful career at the provincial and federal level, will be remembered for his unsuccessful prosecution for sex crimes. "Whenever you say Regan’s name, that’s what comes to mind."

But Mr. Kirby says he doesn’t know anything about what happened back then. "I never saw anything that made that valid," he said. "Certainly the rumours were around all the time. I had no first-hand experience. I wasn’t involved in the court case."

After working for Mr. Regan, Mr. Kirby went back to Dal and afterward to Ottawa to work for then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau. His greatest triumph there was his behind-the-scenes work negotiating the repatriation of the Constitution, the high point of Mr. Trudeau’s career.

On Mr. Kirby’s office wall, there’s a photo of Queen Elizabeth II signing the document, with Mr. Kirby beaming in the background. Mr. Kirby is disapproving of Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff’s recent promise to open constitutional talks in the hopes of finally getting Quebec to sign on to the deal. He says such promises lead to a quagmire and play into the hands of Quebec separatists.

"You really need to have a very pragmatic attitude on the constitutional question and he’s the only one who raised it, and what he suggested just isn’t going to work," he says. "I wouldn’t go anywhere near that."

After that, Mr. Kirby was behind a federal bailout and reorganization of the East Coast fishery, reducing the number of large processors to two from 11. Criticized by some for failing to deal with the problem of overcapacity, the shakeup saved an industry in crisis from bankruptcy and saved the jobs of 40,000 workers, says Mr. Kirby.

"We also said you’ve got to find a way to take people out of the business," he says. "Our proposal was to allow them to sell their quotas. Our view was that you give people a bonus to get out, to allow them to sell it, and secondly, you then allow individuals to accumulate a big enough quota that they can actually make a living at it. The tradable quota was the one piece they didn’t do."

In 1984, as Mr. Trudeau was leaving, he put Mr. Kirby in the Senate. There, Mr. Kirby produced his health report; it ruffled feathers on the left by proposing that government make way for private delivery of health care, which would weaken health unions and make it cheaper to deliver services.

Critics pointed to Mr. Kirby’s seat on the board of Extendicare, a private nursing home company, and accused him of a conflict of interest. He says he refused to give up his gig at Extendicare because he didn’t want to knuckle under to critics who refused to debate his ideas.

Mr. Kirby pulls no punches on health care. On Roy Romanow’s health report: "I think it was a waste of public money and it set the cause of reform back because you had a lot people pointing to his report as if it were a truly objective piece of research, which it wasn’t.

"I parted company with Romanow right near the beginning of his report. He makes the statement: Health care is not a business, it’s a moral enterprise. The answer is bullshit. Health care is about providing a service to all Canadians, free of charge, as efficiently as you can do it."

On Paul Martin’s $41-billion health deal with the provinces: "It was crystal-clear; having made it clear that he wanted a deal and clear that he wanted a deal before an election, Martin couldn’t walk away from the table. The minute you can’t walk away from the table, you know you’re going to lose. And to put in $41 billion over 10 years with no strings attached. . . . As we said in our report in 2002, if the feds put any more money in, they’ve got to do it to buy change. They didn’t buy change."

On accusations that Tory Health Minister Tony Clement has so far failed to deliver on the Conservative promise to establish a national wait time guarantee, one of the Tories’ five priorities: "It’s the toughest one by a country mile. You’ve got to remember, the feds don’t deliver health services. So the federal power on the wait times issue is partly persuasion, partly maybe money, partly providing information on how to do things. So of the five priorities, Clement’s was the only one that had to be done with somebody else. So it’s sort of not terribly surprising that he hasn’t. Come on. The guy’s only had six or seven months at it. It’s not easy."

"Mr. Martin made the mistake of saying everything was a priority, and if everything is a priority then nothing’s a priority," he said. "And he seemed to have difficulty saying no to people or interest groups or the provinces. And thus far, Prime Minister Harper seems to be prepared to say no to people. To that extent he’s shown some of the leadership that is important for prime ministers to show."

Mr. Harper has yet to face a real crisis, so it’s far too soon to judge what kind of prime minister he will be but so far, so good, Mr. Kirby says.

"I think he’s done better in his first six months than anyone I can think of in a minority situation, going back to (Lester) Pearson," he says. "It’s a hard job to learn to do. I think he’s done, frankly, a better job than most people expected. I think he came in with low public expectations, which is a big help, as opposed to Mr. Martin, who came in with huge public expectations, which he did not fulfil."

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