I am reupping this annual missive to the Canadian May Long weekend for several reasons.
One – I am tired and need to be a reposter for a bit but I know you all like this annual reminder about Canada’s greatest holiday after the Annual Poutine & Maple Syrup Festival.
Two – I’m in Phoenix for the weekend getting ready to drive back to Cowtown and I need to spend all my spare minutes being a lizard sunning on a rock.
Plus I’m so tired of the Iran war that I am plumb out of ideas.
May Long. The best weekend of the year for us Canadians. Any number of reasons. Primarily it is the first long weekend of the year where we aren’t typically house bound. Secondly, because of history.
What history you ask? Well let me edumacate you.
We used to call it Victoria Day in honour of the birthday of Queen Victoria who ruled the Commonwealth for what, 250 years prior to Queen Elizabeth the Second and Chuckles the first and just after the 1500 year reign of Queen Elizabeth the First. I’m sure there was someone else in there, I seem to recall a few Georges, maybe Charles the Waiter. But I digress. Victoria Day. She was important.
Except in Quebec, where antipathy to the monarchy has always necessitated a need to celebrate a different day so it became rebranded there as Dollard Day (not to be confused with Dollar Days at Zellers, a defunct department store which has now been reborn as a hip and retro-styled nouveau Dollar Store, complete with 1950s style cafeterias serving mashed potatoes and ham), a celebration created by Lionel Groulx in the early 20th century to honour a dude named Adam Dollard Des Ormeaux, a French settler and explorer who ambushed and massacred the Iroquois just west of Ville Marie, which ultimately became Montreal. Oh, and he died in the battle.
Recognizing that celebrating this “martyr” was not consistent with, well, sensitivity to First Nations, the Quebec Government rebranded it as the much less nationalistic and provocatively named Fête nationale des Patriotes or National Patriot’s Day, celebrated exclusively in the “nation” of Quebec. While the “patriots” they celebrate are the precursors to the constitutionalists who collectively sought to bring about freedom from British Imperial rule, the true champion is Louis-Joseph Papineau who ultimately led an armed rebellion in 1837/8 (ironically the first year of the reign of, you guessed it – Queen Victoria). So as always, it is about Victoria.
And yes, everyone in this weird story is a Metro station or neighbourhood in Montreal, even Victoria.
Nascent Alberta separatists should take note. When in doubt, find martyrs to the cause that you can name transit stations after. If you can actually find a transit station.
At any rate, I digress. Here in the world at large, our collective memories have faded and as political erectness has become the flavour of the day, the whole thing morphed into “The May Long Weekend” and “the weekend after all Canadian teams have been eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs (except Montreal – Go Habs Go!” before eventually simply being branded as “May Long” which of course is Canadian shorthand for busting out the grill, going camping, planting flowers and gardening, leaving work early and otherwise whiling away the days on a patio/deck/whatever enjoying the first warm and sunny weekend of the transition to summer.
Oops – I know and almost forgot. Victoria Day, as it was, was first to be celebrated on May the 24th which of course was her birthdate. So initially it was the May 24th holiday, then May 24th Long Weekend which Canadians replaced in the vernacular as May Two-four because as anyone who has ever met a Canadian knows, a two-four is a Canadian flat of beer and the traditional house-warming gift or party contribution from any true red-blooded Canadian. None of those nonsense 15 or 18-packs you see in the US. 24 beers or Take off, eh?
Anyway, first outdoor long weekend of the year. 24 Molson Ex, sunshine, camping, biking…
Ahh, I can feel it now (slowly turns his chair and looks out the window – oh yeah, rain). That’s right, I almost forgot. Cold and damp. At least it’s not snowing. Because that also happens a lot.
Yup, that’s how it works here in Calgary. The odds of having garbage weather on this particular weekend are extraordinarily high. So much so that people count on it. In fact, we laugh uproariously at those poor suckers from Toronto and Vancouver who have moved to Calgary in search of affordable houses and have gotten fooled by the last few weekend’s incredible weather and planted annuals that will more than likely die a frosty death as you pound your 24 in the basement.
To be honest, the weather for this particular Canadian weekend is in fact so predictably unpredictable that any government worth its salt would likely have a cabinet post or ministry to deal with it. Maybe I need to bring it up with my old pal Mark Carney, but he might be busy these days, selling out the environment or so I’ve been reliably informed.
I mean good lord can we just get a frigging pipeline already? The separatist grifters and their survey-monkey results are at the gate.
Come on Mark, do you really want to be the Prime minister that saw Canada split into ridiculously unmanageable economic basket cases? Run by the sideshow clowns that the UCP has encouraged to get this whole shitteroo going?
I understand that Mark and Danielle have cobbled together some form of grand bargain MOU update that attempts to put more certainty around pipelines and how important they are to Alberta, carbon taxes and how important they are to the PMO and a sense of urgency which should be important to all of us. That feels to me like a pretty potent weapon in the battle against separatism and a good way for the Federal government to show some love to the province. Or I could be wrong – the bar keeps shifting.
To be 100% honest with you all, I haven’t read the details yet. I’m away for the long weekend and I’m getting side-eyed even now for writing this little bit. So, like the Liberals, I’m going to kick the can down the road and maybe do a deeper dive next week when I’m actually at my desk and can write this with a monitor big enough to see all my typos.
And since I’m apparently filling space by running down some of the stuff of note that has happened this week in crazy times, it is worth noting that the war in Iran has still not officially ended. The strait of Hormuz is still closed. The nuclear material has still not been recovered. And Iran maintains the ability to enrich uranium while definitely not experiencing regime change.
Earlier today I read that Mr Trump said recovering the material was just for show and that he didn’t care if Hormuz was closed. Sounds like a tactical resetting of terms is underway which can only mean one thing. Watch out Cuba.
And I guess Taiwan. Since the USA just had a state visit to China that accomplished nothing except to underscore that China wants the US to abandon Taiwan. In exchange they will buy lots of “stuff”, like Texas oil that has a 99% import tax – like are we even serious about any of this? But China did the math and they have determined that their Taiwan ambitions will be easier to fulfill with Trump in charge, given his transactional nature.
Accompanying Trump on this trip was a veritable rogue’s gallery of industry and finance titans in an attempt to show American dominance but which felt more like one of those deal rooms I see at M&A conferences where companies are given 20 minutes to present their deal to a bunch of bored private equity funds, attract little interest, get bargain basement valuation offers and generally leave with less than they wanted and nothing they needed. Sounds skeptical I know. But that’s the Canadian in me. We are nothing if not manic about seeing through the silver lining to get at the moth-eaten bits.
It comes from all the disappointing weather we get on long weekends. See what I did there?
Have a great May long everyone, except Kevin O’Leary. Canada’s most embarrassing export. Did anyone catch that video where he got justifiably ripped to shreds by a couple of 20-something anti data centre ladies from Utah that he thought were Chinese Communist Party agents?
It was gold I tell ya, gold! It’s my personal May Long Treat.
Kevin O’Leary Video
