A Complex Correction

The LA Times has done me the favor of cor­rect­ing my some­what innacu­rate descrip­tion of how a Prime Min­is­ter comes to power in Canada:

A Nov. 25 com­men­tary incor­rectly stated how the prime min­is­ter is selected in Canada. Under the Cana­dian Con­sti­tu­tion, the gov­er­nor gen­eral — the per­sonal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the reign­ing monarch of the Com­mon­wealth Realm — appoints as prime min­is­ter the leader of the polit­i­cal party that has the most seats in the House of Com­mons, the lower house of Canada’s Parliament.

Thanks, but I’m still not sure I under­stand this com­pletely yet. So the Con­ser­v­a­tives got the most seats in the House of Com­mons? I thought we had a ‘Minor­ity Gov­ern­ment’, where Par­lia­ment could over­ride any of Harper’s ini­tia­tives (kind of like the some­what ten­u­ous major­ity that the US Democ­rats have in Con­gress, which was, of course, the sub­ject of that Op. Ed.). The Gov­er­nor Gen­eral is “per­sonal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the reign­ing monarch of the Com­mon­wealth Realm”? Does that mean the Queen? I don’t believe that Her High­ness Queen Eliz­a­beth chose Michaëlle Jean to be her rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Who did, then? My fel­low Cana­dian blog­gers, help me out here…

In my Lifetime

I was born in 1960. That puts me very near the end of the Baby boom (my brother actu­ally arrived at the very last ‘offi­cial’ year of it). The fact that this par­tic­u­lar year is grad­u­ally becom­ing ‘a long time ago’ took another step today when I saw a humor­ous image from some­one mus­ing about what Google would have looked like as a ser­vice in 1960, given the tech­nol­ogy avail­able at the time. Holy Inter­nets, Bat­man! I know I was a new­born then, but you’d think there were cov­ered wag­ons cross­ing the Great Plains and the pocket cal­cu­la­tor hadn’t even been invented yet. Well, actu­ally that sec­ond one is true.
Gotta love that response time to queries. I won­der if you had to include a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Extra-Extra Politeness

I’ve noted in pre­vi­ous post­ings (at least I think I have…) that since we’ve moved here, we’ve noticed a dis­tinct level of polite­ness that is quite dif­fer­ent from the typ­i­cal pub­lic con­duct we saw in Boston. It may be a West Coast ver­sus East Coast thing, or per­haps (as many oth­ers have pointed out) a Cana­dian ver­sus US thing. It could also be due to the fact that Boston is well-known as the rud­est city in Amer­ica (par­tic­u­larly with regard to dri­vers). I’m not sure, as if all rea­sons are cor­rect, per­haps we expe­ri­enced a triple-whammy increase (Boston to not-Boston, East to West, US to Canada) in politeness.

Last year, we weren’t out as much around Christ­mas and New Years. We were both not employed yet, and per­haps not as bold as one even­tu­ally gets when it comes to ven­tur­ing out in bad weather. There­fore, we didn’t get to expe­ri­ence the truly aston­ish­ing behav­ior that is Christ­mas Sea­son Best Behav­ior West-Coast Cana­dian Polite­ness.

I can’t recount any par­tic­u­larly mem­o­rable exam­ples of this, but I am con­stantly see­ing strangers hold­ing doors for one another, nod­ding and wish­ing each other well, cars wait­ing while pedes­tri­ans cross, and hardly honk­ing their horns when some­one is hold­ing up traf­fic. The tellers at the bank are extremely cour­te­ous. The sole excep­tion was a rather curt fel­low who took my photo for some Immi­gra­tion paper­work at the mall today. Still, he wasn’t rude; just not up to the triple (or now, quadruple)-level polite­ness of every­one else.

I won­der if there’s a drop-off in the pub­lic cour­tesy quo­tient in mid-January. Does the Feb­ru­ary Valen­tines Day build-up change this, or is this hol­i­day only intended to be a mod­i­fier of behav­ior between couples?

Celebrity Person/Building Watch

I was tick­led to see that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (oth­er­wise known as Brangelina) paid a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, Falling­wa­ter, which we had vis­ited years ago. They even got a pic­ture taken not too far from where we went as well (although in Decem­ber it is snow-covered). Appar­ently, Mr. Pitt knows some­thing about archi­tec­ture, and had read about the house in one of his col­lege courses. I won­der if this means that they might com­mis­sion some archi­tect to build some­thing really great? What if that became a new fad amongst the Hol­ly­wood elite? After all, they are the new royalty.

The Vancouver Sun and Reaffirming Gay Marriage

The Van­cou­ver Sun picked up the Op Ed yes­ter­day. I guess it made sense, since it was a local who wrote the piece. One fun thing about that is that some­one at my office sent me a link to it (you can only read it online if some­one does that), and along with a more-or-less exact visual ren­der­ing of the page, they also include a sound file with a syn­thetic speech read­ing of it. I cap­tured the file to disk and could post it here, if anyone’s inter­ested (just let me know). The com­puter voice was not that of Stephen Hawk­ing or one of the Mac OS voices one often hears. Instead, it was a fairly real­is­tic female voice, and it even pro­nounced my last name, as well as ‘Mara Lias­son’ cor­rectly! The paper must have it mainly for their blind read­er­ship, but it is impres­sive, all the same. It’s a pity that the Sun requires that you pay a sub­scrip­tion to read (or have read to you) the whole paper online.

Another Rea­son to Stay
Remem­ber how I came to the con­clu­sion that the entire polit­i­cal spec­trum here was gen­er­ally to the left of the coun­try to the south of us? It was proven once again today, when the Par­lia­ment voted down a motion by some Con­ser­v­a­tives to reopen the debate on Gay Mar­riage in Canada. Even sev­eral con­ser­v­a­tives who were on the los­ing side said ‘It’s over, let’s move on.’ Stephen Harper, with a stone face, told the cam­eras: “We made a promise to do this, and we ful­filled that promise.” He stopped short of say­ing: ‘See, I told you this wasn’t doing either you Reli­gious Con­ser­v­a­tives or me any good.’, but he may have been think­ing that. It wasn’t his best day.

It was a stark con­trast to the 7 states in the mid-term elec­tion that actu­ally made it unlaw­ful: Col­orado, Idaho, South Car­olina, South Dakota, Ten­nessee, Vir­ginia, and Wis­con­sin. Only Ari­zona voted down their bal­lot initiative.

While we were proud to live in the only state that made gay mar­riage legal in the US (Mass­a­chu­setts), it’s even bet­ter to be liv­ing in a coun­try that clearly agrees with us, with no apolo­gies or pock­ets here where it’s illegal.