Carr to be the LPP's candidate. Croll handily won a seat in the House of Commons of Canada, becoming Spadina's Member of Parliament (MP) and Tory Toronto's sole Liberal MP. He was re-elected in the 1949 and 1953 elections. Despite being regarded as one of the most talented Liberal MPs and, until 1950, the only Liberal MP from Toronto, Croll was never summoned to the Canadian Cabinet where he would have become the first Jewish federal cabinet minister. Instead, he was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 1955, becoming Canada's first Jewish senator. Croll was the author of the influential 1971 "Report of the Special Senate Committee on Poverty" which began with the words "the poor do not choose poverty. It is at once their affliction and our national shame. The children of the poor (and there are many) are the most helpless victims of all, and find even less hope in a society where welfare systems from the very beginning destroys their chances of a better life." The report moved the Trudeau government to triple family allowances in 1973 and institute the Child Tax Credit in 1978. Aside from his work on poverty, he was also responsible for Senate reports on aging. In 1990 in recognition of his contributions, he was sworn into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, an honour usually given only to federal cabinet ministers. He remained an active senator until his death, even taking his seat in the "Red Chamber" a few hours before his death. He died of heart failure in the Château Laurier Hotel, a few hours after attending an afternoon senate session on June 11, 1991. At the time, he was the oldest serving senator, as he was appointed at a time when appointments to the senate were for life. In his honour, the Senator David A. Croll Apartments, a seniors' residence in Toronto was named after him. The irony is that the building was originally the focus of Toronto's late 1960s youth counterculture, infamous Rochdale College, built by Campus Co-operative Student Residences (Campus Co-op) in 1968 as a student co-operative residence. The building was selected, as a pilot project, for installing Canada's first rooftop combined heat and power system. Archives There is a David Arnold Croll fonds at Library and Archives Canada. References External links Croll at Canadian Encyclopedia 1900 births 1991 deaths Lawyers in Ontario Canadian people of Russian-Jewish