Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Tupper

Tupper’s line is the sound of a political door being shut softly, then bolted. “Idle” does the heavy lifting: it pre-labels debate as not merely wrong but unserious, the pastime of people who don’t grasp the hour. The sentence is engineered to compress options. By the time he arrives at “within our power and duty,” the listener is already being told that the only respectable posture is acceptance, not scrutiny. It’s a classic statesman’s move: translate a contested choice into an administrative inevitability.

The context matters because “Remedial Bill” signals a specific kind of Canadian crisis-politics: emergency legislation offered as a patch for a grievance that’s already inflamed, most famously around the Manitoba Schools Question of the 1890s. In that arena, Parliament wasn’t just debating policy; it was adjudicating identity, minority rights, and federal authority. Tupper’s phrasing leans into urgency to outrun the moral complexity. “Prepare a Bill better” is floated only to be dismissed, implying that perfectionism is a luxury Canada cannot afford, and that delay itself is a form of dereliction.

The subtext is discipline. Tupper isn’t arguing the merits of the bill so much as policing the boundaries of legitimate conversation. If you question whether you “could” do better, you’re cast as someone questioning duty itself. That’s why the line works rhetorically: it turns dissent into procrastination, and political judgment into a test of character under pressure.