Another Canada Day has come and gone, with the first fireworks display in Ottawa since the pandemic.
But the fireworks weren’t held on Parliament Hill, but in a roughish park of town nearby called LeBreton Flats where almost everyone wants a new Ottawa Senator hockey rink to be built.
The club has been purchased by another billionaire, this time from Toronto, who wants a rink there as well, so let the civic battle begin for it has the buildup to be a doozy.
This has nothing to do with Canada Day, of course, if only for the fireworks anecdote but everything to do with the general state of affairs across the political board.
“Wherever our flag flies, it’s recognized as a symbol of democracy, of freedom and of hope,” Trudeau said in a statement released on Canada Day.
He said Canada offers a promise of a life in an open and welcoming society, but also one “where we acknowledge historical wrongs and learn from the past in order to build a better future for everyone.”
Sorry, but we have a prime minister in Trudeau who is trying to make our country unrecognizable by taking all measures of wind out of its sails, beginning with the naïve condemnation of historic figures and then tearing down their statues.
No greater an insult among them, of course, is the scatter-brained reaction to Sir John A. Macdonald’s involvement in the fledgling residential schools to have him “cancelled.”
It seems odd to defend him as Canada’s first prime minister who, during his tenure, had a railway built across the nation, even cutting it through the Rockies, in order to create this very nation.
His name should forever be honoured, not tattered.
And then there is Egerton Ryerson, his statue tarred and vandalized (with its head cut) off because of his alleged involvement in the residential schools when the schools predated his era in history. Critics were so quick to condemn that Ryerson University, without a groundswell of support, got weak in the spine and changed its name to a sterile Toronto Metropolitan University.
The closure crowd was having its heyday.
What hasn’t hit yet is the behemoths of Meta and Google coming through with their intent to not share Canadian news on its streaming in protest of Trudeau’s legislation intended to make the big tech duo pay for that very news.
The irony, of course, is that Meta and Google are responsible for all but killing the newspaper game to the point that two thin papers are now needed to cover the floor of the proverbial birdcage.
And it shouldn’t be thus.
Thanks to the Trudeau Liberals and the leftists who yank its chain we now have a passport totally lacking inspiration.
As the Western Standard’s Nigel Hannaford so nicely put it, “That is, this Canada Day, as the Liberal government tries to erase national memories and symbols with new anodyne passports devoid of inspiration, renamed roads and institutions and more seriously yet, a suite of new laws that undercuts the very values which the symbols represent and always made Canada a ‘good’ country, let us indeed honour those who came before. For, they created a country that people wanted to come to, not to flee from.”
Amen to that.
Instead, the new passport’s visa pages depict sketches of Canada throughout the seasons, such as birds at a feeder, an Indigenous kayaker, narwhals with tusks breaching the water and a man raking leaves into a wheelbarrow in front of a home.
But no Vimy Ridge. But no Terry Fox
No real Canada.
