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…
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.
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?
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 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.
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