The smoke from the States has been very thick for the last couple of days. The sun has been almost completely blocked and everything has a weird yellow tinge. It has been even worse than the huge forest fires here in BC a couple of years ago. Goodness knows what it is like further south.
After some weeks of inaccurate weather forecasts this summer, it was reported that Covid is affecting weather forecasts. Commercial flights gather weather data, so fewer flights = less information = greater inaccuracy. It still takes me off guard. Like today:
Me: it looks like it's going to rain
Forecast: no, it's just going to be cloudy
Me: but really, I think it's going to rain
Forecast: no, you don't know what you're talking about, it's just going to be cloudy
It rains.
Me: Forecast, wtf
Forecast: oh yeah, it rained
A friend in Freddy was giving off on Facebook today that she had to put on socks, a sweater and a coat - not items I'd usually associate with mid-September there.
Here in Edinburgh it's still crop-trousers weather (for the moment anyway).
A friend in Freddy was giving off on Facebook today that she had to put on socks, a sweater and a coat - not items I'd usually associate with mid-September there.
Here in Edinburgh it's still crop-trousers weather (for the moment anyway).
Cool here as well. I actually turned on the heat this afternoon though I think that was more about spending too much time in front of a computer and not enough time moving around.
Great to hear her singing it as a female narrator. The song is obviously about a brothel, not a gambling den. (How often do you hear weepy lamentations about men getting "ruined" gambling?)
I think the 1984 Canadian election was the first one I ever followed with a mature understanding of political ideology, and 1988 was the first I ever participated in as a volunteer(NDP).
Gotta say, the idea that Turner at one time had been "Canada's answer to Camelot", or whatever, was probably a pretty foreign one to my generation. There was definitely something a little shopworn about the guy by the early 80s.
And who can ever forget...
"I had no option."
A classic illustration of "If you're explaining, you're losing."
Turner as the new PM had made a bunch of patronage appointments for the outgoing PM, for which he was mercilessly attacked by the opposition leader Mulroney. About all anyone can remember about the '84 debates is Turner saying "I had no option", and Mulroney thundering back "You had an option, sir!"
The Liberals were nuked to smithereens in that election, and Mulroney went on to indulge in patronage appointments as bad as anything his predecessors ever did.
We must have read the same obit re Camelot - at least by the time the 1980s rolled around that was not the image that came to mind.
He seems to have been a very competent Minister whose ambition perhaps exceeded his capabilities when it came to wanting to be PM. A bit like Paul Martin, come to think of it.
I ran into John Turner at a party at his club once, long after he had left politics. I found him quite congenial. Just one of those cocktail conversations, no map to the buried bodies.
Everybody knows: Sir Charles Tupper, the Obstetrician and Apothecary of Amherst.
I ran into Mr Turner during my occasional impressments into State Ceremonial, the last of Mme Jean's enthronement, where I wheeled him about in his chair-- too many years of track at UBC did in his joints. He was cheerful and engaging, his only complaint being that he now had to take taxis rather than the Saint Clair streetcar, which ran quite close to his home. He confided that, with refugees driving cabs, the intellectual level of conversation had risen greatly.
Rumour has it that the romance with Princess Margaret was kiboshed on the grounds that he was Roman Catholic. A mutual friend felt that he was perhaps the last representative of the observant Vatican II anglophone generation.
Rumour has it that the romance with Princess Margaret was kiboshed on the grounds that he was Roman Catholic. A mutual friend felt that he was perhaps the last representative of the observant Vatican II anglophone generation.
Well, Joe Clark is RC as well, and old enough to have experienced the changes wrought by V2 while still in his formative years. I don't precisely know how obervant he was, though. As a Conservative from the prairies, establishment Catholicism was probably less a part of his image than it would been for a Bay Street lawyer with transatlantic family and education connections.
Rumour has it that the romance with Princess Margaret was kiboshed on the grounds that he was Roman Catholic. A mutual friend felt that he was perhaps the last representative of the observant Vatican II anglophone generation.
Well, Joe Clark is RC as well, and old enough to have experienced the changes wrought by V2 while still in his formative years. I don't precisely know how obervant he was, though. As a Conservative from the prairies, establishment Catholicism was probably less a part of his image than it would been for a Bay Street lawyer with transatlantic family and education connections.
Progressive Conservative. Not Conservative. The progressives are gone. Joe described the Conservatives as "almost adolescent", noting that the over-controlling, centralized manner of
government has destroyed the civil service, its morale, while true believers think that business (they are mostly white men) should run everything.
Turner's Catholicism was likely considered by the Toronto establishment to be a socially acceptable bit of eccentricity, much like his Liberal affiliation. As well as being a regular lector at Holy Rosary, a friend of mine would see him at early morning masses fairly regularly in the late 1990s. Hugh Winsor's article https://theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-obituary-john-turner-pm-for-79-days-was-old-liberalisms-darling/ in today's Mope and Wail makes references to his having considered the priesthood.
Bay Street lawyers are typically Anglican, UCC, or Presbyterian, with relatively few RCs among them. We have forgotten how important the Protestant/RC divide was in Toronto and how the Orange Order was a force in politics until the 1960s. Until the turn of the century, law firms were known as Protestant firms or Catholic firms or Jewish firms-- I have a good friend in Toronto who was the first RC as a partner in her company in the 1980s, and joking references were made about fish on Fridays.
Toronto establishment culture has shifted dramatically in the past quarter-century, and now any overt religious affiliation will be seen to be eccentric, and pilgrimages to the Shrine of the Martyrs at Penetanguishene indistinguishable from trips to Mecca. Not that anyone's going anywhere these days.
Thanks for posting that obit. I was struck by this passage:
When he announced a few months later that he was bowing out of politics, his departure marked, in the words of prominent authors Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson, “the demise of the old Liberalism and some might say, the old Canada. … John Turner was virtually the last man standing who still believed in the Liberal alliance that Mackenzie King put together, Louis St. Laurent refined, Lester Pearson extended and Pierre Trudeau ostensibly destroyed.”
People overestimate the importance of the word "progressive" in "Progressive Conservative". The party never actually took on that name until 1942, when John Bracken, a former Progressive, won the leadership and the name was added at his request.
Historically, the Progressives were opposed to the National Policy of MacDonald, which is also the same policy that Mulroney and Harper were later accused of abandoning.
It's the true that the PCs under Mulroney and later the Cons under Harper were well to the right of the pre-83 PCs, but that happened to consernvative parties all over the world, regardless of their name. The Mike Harris gang in Ontario were still called "PC". Didn't do much to check the rightward dtift of their policies.
Yeah, I know about the religious culture of Ontario. My phrasing might have been a bit off.
Turner's Catholicism, in the culture of Bay Street, would be seen as significant precisely because of the history of conflict between the orange establishment and the papist gate-crashers. Whereas I don't think Joe Clark would have faced the same sort of issues as a Catholic starting his career in late 50s/early 60s Alberta.
To be sure, there was bigotry in Alberta during that era(as there is now). According to the story, one of the reasons the Social Credit Party split up in the mid-60s was because Ernest Manning tried to veto Real Caoutte as leader, privately telling Caoutte that western Socreds would never accept a French Catholic as leader. But even there, I think it was probably the "French" thing that tipped the balance, not Catholicism per se. (And Manning was probably only refering to Socred voters.)
And of course, the prairies in the 1920s had the KKK, who in that incarnation were basically a poor man's Orange Hall. But if Joe Clark, as a white guy with a waspy name, had gone to work for an Edmonton financial firm in the early 60s, I doubt his religion would have warranted much mention.
I can think of two things that the obituarist might have meant about the old "Liberal alliance" supposedly wrecked by PET.
A. It means the old Liberal coalition of Quebec and western Canada. The problem with that reading, however, is that the western flank of that coalition was pretty much gone by the time Pearson came around. Trudeau did manage to finish off Quebec, however.
B. The writer is speaking of the ideological alliance between the Liberal Party and business, which Turner as a right-wing Liberal certainly epitomized, and which was widely viewed as having been severed by the supposedly socialist Trudeau(*).
That would seem to be more consistent with the record. Granted, Turner as party leader in 1988 ran a left-wing campaign, against the free-trade agreement, but that was always viewed as a rather out-of-character position, foisted upon him as a last-hurrah for Trudeau-style economic nationalism, combined with the need to be seen as against whatever the Tories were doing. Liberals from Chretien onward have been pro-free trade, albeit quietly so.
(*) In reality, PET was more of a typical postwar Keynesian, and one who enjoyed the distinction of having once told a group of unemployed people to "get off your ass and do an honest day's work". But, that's not the received narrative.
@stetson Prairie Catholicism really deserves its own thread (even if only two, possibly three, shipmates might read it).
I have always found interesting but not surprising that Turner, who was ideologically on the Pearsonite bolshie side of the party, was perceived to be a right-winger. Stylistically and socially comfortable with the Mad Men and their Bay Street seniors, everyone seemed to think that he shared their views. He didn't push back in a way which would offend them-- an acquaintance was present at a cigar-soaked meal when he was challenged vigorously on official bilingualism (a source of fury and bitter grumbling among many until the 1990s) and joked his way around the topic so as to keep peace at the table, which simply left his interlocutors with the impression that he agreed with them. His Trudeau-critical newsletters didn't help-- and he was not uncomfortable with his homies' misapprehension.
During the the Liberal 1984 leadership wars, his own campaign was riven with tussles between the virulent Pinstripe-Days-Are-Here-Again brigade and the party reformers. Platform preparing meetings needed to have the blood and entrails be hosed down before the next day's session.
Another factor might have been that he looked upon many issues through a set of 1960s lenses, and offered solutions in the language of that period. When one is not current (or "woke" as those who write about the young people would say), one can be deemed to be conservative.
A literary friend said that he would have suited well to be a tortured Catholic gentleman hero in a novel by Cardinal Newman. After some years, I am coming to see his perspective.
My understanding is that Turner's conservativism was largely fiscal, but on that score he was fairly hawkish. I would assume that he supported bilingualism and probably multiculturalism from the early 70s onward, because those were very much part of the Liberal brand. You couldn't really be in the party at the federal level and not support those things. (Well, okay, Jack Horner, but that was some weirdo floor-crossing stuff.)
And your friend's literary conceptualization of Turner as some sort of Tractarian hero-martyr kinda underscores my point about Turner's Catholicism being informed by an "establishment" ethos: almost no one in Alberta would characterize a politician's faith in such a historically literate manner, even if the politician did fit the bill. ( And this in a province that actually hosts a theology school named after old John Henry Cardinal.)
Having been raised in eastern Ontario, I would never confuse Establishment with anything historically literate or even historically aware, but perhaps that's a cynical and effete Anglican talking.
Turner had good French in his high school days and had been accepted as a doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne, so his bilingualism was early in the day, and more than political. His pronunciation always sounded clunky to me, however, and Brian Mulroney's colloquial and streetwise French had a more authentic air to it.
So, JT has requested air time for tomorrow evening. I'm up for a bit of idle speculation. We already have tomorrow's throne speech tomorrow afternoon. He wouldn't have to have air time to call an election (which I think is off the table, anyway, since he called the two byelections, and he wouldn't drop the writ until a confidence vote). Something to do with Covid probably wouldn't qualify. I'll put a pint on the GG's mess. Thoughts? Speculation? Virtual pint?
A friend in Freddy was giving off on Facebook today that she had to put on socks, a sweater and a coat - not items I'd usually associate with mid-September there.
Here in Edinburgh it's still crop-trousers weather (for the moment anyway).
Down here in southern Ontario the main crop seems to be soy beans this year, with not as much corn as usual. I haven't seen any fields of trousers at all yet, but I'm not sure when they are usually harvested.
Are the allegations Ms. Payette still enough of a live issue to justify the PM addressing the nation(and thus increasing the among of news space given to them)? Sincere question, not rhetorical, but I was under the impression that people weren't paying much attention to that anymore.
The story got new legs yesterday when it was reported that she resigned from the Montreal Science Centre after complaints about her verbal harassment and creating a toxic environment, and was sort of 'discontinued' from the Canadian Olympic Committee for her imperial style, reducing one underling to tears over a tardy driver's late arrival, forcing her to breathe in the pollution of Rio de Janeiro. It appears that neither the Science Centre nor the COC were asked by Trudeau's office for letters of reference.
Since my initial posting on this, it is now rumoured that Trudeau's address tomorrow evening will be about C-19, after all.
I was about to post to say that Covid would have been my guess. The public health folks seem to be deeply alarmed at the direction the numbers are taking.
I can well understand their concern, as we may be seeing the beginning of 'the second wave' earlier than expected. If that's the case, that leaves space on the calendar for a third wave.
Are the allegations Ms. Payette still enough of a live issue to justify the PM addressing the nation(and thus increasing the among of news space given to them)? Sincere question, not rhetorical, but I was under the impression that people weren't paying much attention to that anymore.
The CBC is pushing the issue, with coverage of staff disappointed at what they believe is the PM's strong support of her. Oddly enough, I read his "at this time" meaning that she should have the painters touch up her old flat in Montréal as she might need it again soon. However, I did not see his extra TV time as having anything to do with that-- Covid-19 is a live issue and getting much more important as the numbers climb.
John Turner's state funeral will be held tomorrow at Saint Michael's Basilica in Toronto, family and their invitees only, along with my former colleagues down the hallway from State Ceremonial. No lying in state (the chapelle ardente) nor any procession.
Your Covid numbers are rising too? We've just been issued with new (and to my mind, rather bizarre) rules over here:
Work from home if you can (people were told in August to go back to their offices or possibly face the sack)
Pubs and restaurants to stay open, but close at 10 p.m. (as if the virus only comes out at night)
Schools and universities to stay open, but no-one to visit even their family in another house (although up to six people can meet in the pubs and restaurants)
That does sound extremely strange. We've never been encouraged to be back to the office as a general routine - it can be done at my workplace, but only for specific reasons and with permission. I was in the office for a few days a few weeks ago for unavoidable face-to-face meetings and the downtown core was deserted.
Our pubs and restaurants have opened for dining in (and are still open) but we haven't taken advantage of them except for a sidewalk patio brunch a few weekends ago. Now that we are getting cooler weather and rising numbers I think their future may not look so good for a while.
AIUI the Liberal/Business Alliance was really the work of CD Howe, Minister of Everything by day, bagman by evening and more resulted from the Second World War than anything else.
By business, we should say manufacturing, mining and transportation. Liquor companies and brewers were already heavy donors to any government.*
*Fun Fact: When visiting Ottawa in 1948, Joey Smallwood was given a list of prime Libetal donors to use for his Confederatipn campaign by one of CD Howe's assistants. They were all distillers and brewers. CD Howe had told them to give generously. That's what paid for the Confederation campaign in Newfoundland.
In case you missed the federal gov't stuff today: JT says
-the second wave is here and could be worse than the first
-get the flu shot
-download the COVID-19 app
-wear a mask
-don't get together for Thanksgiving because there's a chance to save Christmas
Without intending to do it, I've gone just over two weeks without direct human contact, save for one trip to the supermarket. Aside from the Ship™ and my usual webinar/salon, I didn't speak to anyone until Church on Sunday and a walk with a friend and his dog on Monday. Taking a vacation from humanity has been quite refreshing. Just in time for the next lockdown, as I was becoming more optimistic about job postings...
...
-don't get together for Thanksgiving because there's a chance to save Christmas
Lucky you - we're being told that our current restrictions might last for six months.
I'm not sure I believe it though - Johnson's such a "good-time" PM he'll probably ease everything off in December so that the gammons his supporters will think he's actually giving them Christmas.
AIUI the Liberal/Business Alliance was really the work of CD Howe, Minister of Everything by day, bagman by evening and more resulted from the Second World War than anything else.
By business, we should say manufacturing, mining and transportation. Liquor companies and brewers were already heavy donors to any government.
Well, at least as far back as Laurier, the Liberals were pro-reciprocity and continentalist, which nowadays are seen as pro-business positions.
Though of course in Laurier's day, big business in Canada tended toward protectionism, with free-trade finding its biggest support among farmers and their agrarian allies.
Quite true. I was thinking of the Dollar-A-Year Men, whom CD Howe co-opted into the Liberal Party. It left the legacy that the business class in Canada oriented to the Liberal Party until the 1970's, and the Conservatives were deprived of those whom they saw as their natural allies, much to their chagrin.
The observation is that business and the Liberal Party captured each other.
The NDP did have Pearson's ear, it being a minority and all, but he didn't move the old Socialist Meter much himself.
I am just old enough to remember the fuming froth in the 1965 campaign in Stormont-Dundas, where canvassers pled electors to vote Conservative, as Pearson was a noted Marxist from his university days overseas.
Discussing Mr Turner: In internal party discourse, not really hyperbole. Outside, decidedly. Parties, as I have noted in the past, are much like churches, with their own language, level of discourse, and specific insanities.
I think there was some right-wing insinuation that Pearson was a co-conspirator of Herbert Norman, the Canadian diplomat who commited suicide during the Suez Crisis and was allegedly a Soviet spy.
Believe it or not, I actually remember this stuff being debated in the media as late as the mid-80s. There was apparently enough interest in the subject to justify the publication of two books, advancing duelling theories about Norman's loyalties.
Comments
Me: it looks like it's going to rain
Forecast: no, it's just going to be cloudy
Me: but really, I think it's going to rain
Forecast: no, you don't know what you're talking about, it's just going to be cloudy
It rains.
Me: Forecast, wtf
Forecast: oh yeah, it rained
Gee, thanks.
Here in Edinburgh it's still crop-trousers weather (for the moment anyway).
Story:
https://thestarphoenix.com/news/local-news/former-saskatoon-disc-jockey-finds-long-lost-tapes-of-joni-mitchells-first-recording-session
Recording:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4wWR3ZkyyGY
Cool here as well. I actually turned on the heat this afternoon though I think that was more about spending too much time in front of a computer and not enough time moving around.
Great to hear her singing it as a female narrator. The song is obviously about a brothel, not a gambling den. (How often do you hear weepy lamentations about men getting "ruined" gambling?)
I think the 1984 Canadian election was the first one I ever followed with a mature understanding of political ideology, and 1988 was the first I ever participated in as a volunteer(NDP).
Gotta say, the idea that Turner at one time had been "Canada's answer to Camelot", or whatever, was probably a pretty foreign one to my generation. There was definitely something a little shopworn about the guy by the early 80s.
And who can ever forget...
"I had no option."
Turner as the new PM had made a bunch of patronage appointments for the outgoing PM, for which he was mercilessly attacked by the opposition leader Mulroney. About all anyone can remember about the '84 debates is Turner saying "I had no option", and Mulroney thundering back "You had an option, sir!"
The Liberals were nuked to smithereens in that election, and Mulroney went on to indulge in patronage appointments as bad as anything his predecessors ever did.
He seems to have been a very competent Minister whose ambition perhaps exceeded his capabilities when it came to wanting to be PM. A bit like Paul Martin, come to think of it.
I ran into Mr Turner during my occasional impressments into State Ceremonial, the last of Mme Jean's enthronement, where I wheeled him about in his chair-- too many years of track at UBC did in his joints. He was cheerful and engaging, his only complaint being that he now had to take taxis rather than the Saint Clair streetcar, which ran quite close to his home. He confided that, with refugees driving cabs, the intellectual level of conversation had risen greatly.
Rumour has it that the romance with Princess Margaret was kiboshed on the grounds that he was Roman Catholic. A mutual friend felt that he was perhaps the last representative of the observant Vatican II anglophone generation.
Sir John Thompson. Converted for marriage.
Well, Joe Clark is RC as well, and old enough to have experienced the changes wrought by V2 while still in his formative years. I don't precisely know how obervant he was, though. As a Conservative from the prairies, establishment Catholicism was probably less a part of his image than it would been for a Bay Street lawyer with transatlantic family and education connections.
Progressive Conservative. Not Conservative. The progressives are gone. Joe described the Conservatives as "almost adolescent", noting that the over-controlling, centralized manner of
government has destroyed the civil service, its morale, while true believers think that business (they are mostly white men) should run everything.
Bay Street lawyers are typically Anglican, UCC, or Presbyterian, with relatively few RCs among them. We have forgotten how important the Protestant/RC divide was in Toronto and how the Orange Order was a force in politics until the 1960s. Until the turn of the century, law firms were known as Protestant firms or Catholic firms or Jewish firms-- I have a good friend in Toronto who was the first RC as a partner in her company in the 1980s, and joking references were made about fish on Fridays.
Toronto establishment culture has shifted dramatically in the past quarter-century, and now any overt religious affiliation will be seen to be eccentric, and pilgrimages to the Shrine of the Martyrs at Penetanguishene indistinguishable from trips to Mecca. Not that anyone's going anywhere these days.
Can anyone elucidate?
People overestimate the importance of the word "progressive" in "Progressive Conservative". The party never actually took on that name until 1942, when John Bracken, a former Progressive, won the leadership and the name was added at his request.
Historically, the Progressives were opposed to the National Policy of MacDonald, which is also the same policy that Mulroney and Harper were later accused of abandoning.
It's the true that the PCs under Mulroney and later the Cons under Harper were well to the right of the pre-83 PCs, but that happened to consernvative parties all over the world, regardless of their name. The Mike Harris gang in Ontario were still called "PC". Didn't do much to check the rightward dtift of their policies.
Yeah, I know about the religious culture of Ontario. My phrasing might have been a bit off.
Turner's Catholicism, in the culture of Bay Street, would be seen as significant precisely because of the history of conflict between the orange establishment and the papist gate-crashers. Whereas I don't think Joe Clark would have faced the same sort of issues as a Catholic starting his career in late 50s/early 60s Alberta.
To be sure, there was bigotry in Alberta during that era(as there is now). According to the story, one of the reasons the Social Credit Party split up in the mid-60s was because Ernest Manning tried to veto Real Caoutte as leader, privately telling Caoutte that western Socreds would never accept a French Catholic as leader. But even there, I think it was probably the "French" thing that tipped the balance, not Catholicism per se. (And Manning was probably only refering to Socred voters.)
And of course, the prairies in the 1920s had the KKK, who in that incarnation were basically a poor man's Orange Hall. But if Joe Clark, as a white guy with a waspy name, had gone to work for an Edmonton financial firm in the early 60s, I doubt his religion would have warranted much mention.
I can think of two things that the obituarist might have meant about the old "Liberal alliance" supposedly wrecked by PET.
A. It means the old Liberal coalition of Quebec and western Canada. The problem with that reading, however, is that the western flank of that coalition was pretty much gone by the time Pearson came around. Trudeau did manage to finish off Quebec, however.
B. The writer is speaking of the ideological alliance between the Liberal Party and business, which Turner as a right-wing Liberal certainly epitomized, and which was widely viewed as having been severed by the supposedly socialist Trudeau(*).
That would seem to be more consistent with the record. Granted, Turner as party leader in 1988 ran a left-wing campaign, against the free-trade agreement, but that was always viewed as a rather out-of-character position, foisted upon him as a last-hurrah for Trudeau-style economic nationalism, combined with the need to be seen as against whatever the Tories were doing. Liberals from Chretien onward have been pro-free trade, albeit quietly so.
(*) In reality, PET was more of a typical postwar Keynesian, and one who enjoyed the distinction of having once told a group of unemployed people to "get off your ass and do an honest day's work". But, that's not the received narrative.
I have always found interesting but not surprising that Turner, who was ideologically on the Pearsonite bolshie side of the party, was perceived to be a right-winger. Stylistically and socially comfortable with the Mad Men and their Bay Street seniors, everyone seemed to think that he shared their views. He didn't push back in a way which would offend them-- an acquaintance was present at a cigar-soaked meal when he was challenged vigorously on official bilingualism (a source of fury and bitter grumbling among many until the 1990s) and joked his way around the topic so as to keep peace at the table, which simply left his interlocutors with the impression that he agreed with them. His Trudeau-critical newsletters didn't help-- and he was not uncomfortable with his homies' misapprehension.
During the the Liberal 1984 leadership wars, his own campaign was riven with tussles between the virulent Pinstripe-Days-Are-Here-Again brigade and the party reformers. Platform preparing meetings needed to have the blood and entrails be hosed down before the next day's session.
Another factor might have been that he looked upon many issues through a set of 1960s lenses, and offered solutions in the language of that period. When one is not current (or "woke" as those who write about the young people would say), one can be deemed to be conservative.
A literary friend said that he would have suited well to be a tortured Catholic gentleman hero in a novel by Cardinal Newman. After some years, I am coming to see his perspective.
My understanding is that Turner's conservativism was largely fiscal, but on that score he was fairly hawkish. I would assume that he supported bilingualism and probably multiculturalism from the early 70s onward, because those were very much part of the Liberal brand. You couldn't really be in the party at the federal level and not support those things. (Well, okay, Jack Horner, but that was some weirdo floor-crossing stuff.)
And your friend's literary conceptualization of Turner as some sort of Tractarian hero-martyr kinda underscores my point about Turner's Catholicism being informed by an "establishment" ethos: almost no one in Alberta would characterize a politician's faith in such a historically literate manner, even if the politician did fit the bill. ( And this in a province that actually hosts a theology school named after old John Henry Cardinal.)
Turner had good French in his high school days and had been accepted as a doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne, so his bilingualism was early in the day, and more than political. His pronunciation always sounded clunky to me, however, and Brian Mulroney's colloquial and streetwise French had a more authentic air to it.
Down here in southern Ontario the main crop seems to be soy beans this year, with not as much corn as usual. I haven't seen any fields of trousers at all yet, but I'm not sure when they are usually harvested.
Are the allegations Ms. Payette still enough of a live issue to justify the PM addressing the nation(and thus increasing the among of news space given to them)? Sincere question, not rhetorical, but I was under the impression that people weren't paying much attention to that anymore.
Since my initial posting on this, it is now rumoured that Trudeau's address tomorrow evening will be about C-19, after all.
The CBC is pushing the issue, with coverage of staff disappointed at what they believe is the PM's strong support of her. Oddly enough, I read his "at this time" meaning that she should have the painters touch up her old flat in Montréal as she might need it again soon. However, I did not see his extra TV time as having anything to do with that-- Covid-19 is a live issue and getting much more important as the numbers climb.
John Turner's state funeral will be held tomorrow at Saint Michael's Basilica in Toronto, family and their invitees only, along with my former colleagues down the hallway from State Ceremonial. No lying in state (the chapelle ardente) nor any procession.
You really couldn't make it up.
Our pubs and restaurants have opened for dining in (and are still open) but we haven't taken advantage of them except for a sidewalk patio brunch a few weekends ago. Now that we are getting cooler weather and rising numbers I think their future may not look so good for a while.
By business, we should say manufacturing, mining and transportation. Liquor companies and brewers were already heavy donors to any government.*
*Fun Fact: When visiting Ottawa in 1948, Joey Smallwood was given a list of prime Libetal donors to use for his Confederatipn campaign by one of CD Howe's assistants. They were all distillers and brewers. CD Howe had told them to give generously. That's what paid for the Confederation campaign in Newfoundland.
-the second wave is here and could be worse than the first
-get the flu shot
-download the COVID-19 app
-wear a mask
-don't get together for Thanksgiving because there's a chance to save Christmas
I'm not sure I believe it though - Johnson's such a "good-time" PM he'll probably ease everything off in December so that the gammons his supporters will think he's actually giving them Christmas.
Pearsonite Bolshie?!? Hyperbole, surely.
The NDP did have Pearson's ear, it being a minority and all, but he didn't move the old Socialist Meter much himself.
Well, at least as far back as Laurier, the Liberals were pro-reciprocity and continentalist, which nowadays are seen as pro-business positions.
Though of course in Laurier's day, big business in Canada tended toward protectionism, with free-trade finding its biggest support among farmers and their agrarian allies.
The observation is that business and the Liberal Party captured each other.
I am just old enough to remember the fuming froth in the 1965 campaign in Stormont-Dundas, where canvassers pled electors to vote Conservative, as Pearson was a noted Marxist from his university days overseas.
Discussing Mr Turner: In internal party discourse, not really hyperbole. Outside, decidedly. Parties, as I have noted in the past, are much like churches, with their own language, level of discourse, and specific insanities.
Believe it or not, I actually remember this stuff being debated in the media as late as the mid-80s. There was apparently enough interest in the subject to justify the publication of two books, advancing duelling theories about Norman's loyalties.