Roundup: On official birthdays

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It should not be unexpected that on Victoria Day, you would get some usual trite releases by the Prime Minister and the Governor General about the importance of Canada’s relationship with the monarchy, and so on. We got them. What we also got was a bunch of ignorant backlash.

Immediately a bunch of geniuses started to tweet back that it was celebrating Queen Victoria’s birthday, not Queen Elizabeth’s, and that Harper was an idiot, and so on. Err, except that those people were the ones in the wrong because since 1957, it was decided that the Official Birthday of the Canadian Sovereign would be Victoria Day, not the April birthday of the current Queen of Canada, Elizabeth II, nor the same official birthday as the Queen of the United Kingdom, which is in June. It’s like we have our own monarchy or something! Also, it has to do with the distinction between the legal person of the Queen of the Canada, and her natural person.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/600350515633979393

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/600350878269313025

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/600354856294047744

Suffice to say, it’s a pretty sad statement as to the current state of civic literacy in Canada that this basic celebration of our Head of State has been completely lost to your average person. Granted, the PM’s tweet could have been better phrased, such as “official birthday” instead of “officially celebrate,” but still, the point stands. It’s time to take this basic education more seriously, Canada. Yesterday was pretty embarrassing.

https://twitter.com/lopinformation/status/600334009944645633

Good reads:

  • More NDP MPs are railing about the Senate because of the single-sports betting bill, but the write-up here neglects to mention it faced a stacked committee in the Commons and due diligence wasn’t followed.
  • Part of that Senate privilege claim with their trying to keep a report out of Mike Duffy’s lawyer’s hands has to do with their right to hold in camera meetings.
  • The fact that the Royal Canadian Navy was scouring eBay for parts for our now defunct supply ships shows how badly the government has botched naval procurement.
  • Poilievre’s egregiously partisan videos shows the need for clearer guidelines as to what civil servants should be allowed to do.
  • One public service union wants a contract that guarantees scientists won’t be muzzled, without apparently understanding how broadly that can be interpreted and how that might interfere with public servants’ oaths.
  • Kady O’Malley has questions about the non-consortium debate process.

Odds and ends:

What? Stephen Harper had his worst QP attendance rate since 2006? You don’t say!

Evergreen story: There remains a wide variation in Immigration and Refugee Board decisions.

Survey data confirms that the election results in Alberta were about anger and desire for change, not a newfound love of the NDP.

https://twitter.com/pmlagasse/status/600466561925779456

One thought on “Roundup: On official birthdays”

  1. People are so enraged, they’ll find any reason to call Harper an idiot. I have other names I call him, but I won’t post them here. 😉

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