Throne Speech Liveblog: Charles Comes To Canada

Let’s Have Some Fun

There’s a Throne Speech today, which means I should probably give a shit what’s said in it and cover the consequences of it. I assume you can all feel the rippling enthusiasm I have for it, especially since we flew in Chucky Windsor to give the fucking thing. (I am pro-Monarchy, or at least anti-Actually Doing Anything To Amend The Constitution, but this is not a safe space for Charles the human being.)

I’ll have thoughts on the legislative priorities, what makes the speech, what doesn’t, live reaction to me hearing Charles’ voice for the first time, and whatever else is worthwhile. Updates will be every 5 minutes or so during the speech. Consider being a paid subscriber as well - my work will always remain free but the booze it’ll take to survive listening to Chuck isn’t.

Fair warning, I also forgot to sleep last night so the chance of unhinged takes is up 25%. That said, I’m in a far less burn the world down mood than I was at the Cabinet Shuffle so I should be less pissed at Carney today.

Recap - I’ll start this with something that’s actually genuinely good - hearing the King do a land acknowledgement almost has to be something that matters, and it is the kind of thing that can be important and useful. I am anti-symbolism, but I know it matters more to Indigenous peoples who aren’t destroyed by cynicism like I am, so it seems good.

The rest of it was a wild waste of time. The idea that any of this was important, that we sent strong signals with this, as FPC is saying on CBC, is ludicrous. If we were truly a confident country, we wouldn’t need to call in a foreign resident to pinch hit for us. This ludicrous idea is offensive to me as a Canadian, and this cheapens Canada to the colonial outpost I thought we grew past.

The speech was shit - a bland restating of the platform with nothing new promised or mentioned - but all of the symbolism makes it worse. I have never felt less Canadian than during this farce. It is shameful, disgraceful, and everyone claiming that this is a great day for Canadian patriotism should stop fucking speaking for all Canadians.

I weep for my country today. I thought we were more than this.

11:45 AM - No Rosie, not everybody would want to meet Charles. Not everybody.

11:39 AM - Do we have a Designated Survivor for Throne Speeches like the Americans do for State Of The Union speeches? Do we choose someone or are we not self-important enough to indulge that?

11:36 AM - That was a complete waste of fucking time. We got precisely nothing from that, truly the most “it could have been an email” Throne Speech ever.

How much money did we waste flying him in for this?

11:33 AM - Lots of mentions of Indigenous peoples, which is very interesting given the deliverer of the speech.

Nothing new on the immigration or public sector fronts, though hearing a septuagenarian talking about AI is funny.

11:30 AM - I must have missed during the campaign that we’re hiring 1000 new RCMP officers, but that’s good. Maybe they’ll stop sucking ass now.

11:27 AM - they’re really just making Charles read Carney’s stump speech? Why did I agree to liveblog this?

Oh, on the housing front there was something - they want to bring boost supply to “bring housing costs down”, which isn’t a promise to lower market housing prices but I think is a decent signal to Carney’s answer on the great prices debate.

11:20 AM - We’ve at least hit the policy section, though right now it’s just the stump speech. (Also who is requiring $800 in dental work a year on average?)

11:17 AM - if we were such a fucking confident country your ass would still be in London, Chuck.

11:16 AM - This is actually fucking painful. The way Charles talks about Canada as this distant cousin that he’s got to do a briefing on before a wedding is just so grating. Whoever wrote this speech, burning this much time on this nonsense - it’s a miss. Get to the fucking priorities.

11:11 AM - this is such a fucking farce. “Every time I come to Canada more of it seeps into me”, but I’m not supposed to call him a foreign monarch. Get him the fuck out of this country and never let him back in. (I’ll stop bitching about him soon, I promise.)

11:06 AM - we’re just about to begin, we’re almost done the pomp and circumstance.

11:04 AM - the CBC is filling time right now with Kremlinology about the politics of bringing Charles here, and while I’m sure they’re correct, it is absolutely fucking absurd. Why the fuck does Charles showing up matter a single fuck to anything actually significant?

10:58 AM - I do like some of the traditions about this. The fact that MPs can’t actually enter the Senate properly, the fact they need to get permission to do all of this, it’s all quaint.

That said, oh he’s an ugly fucker.

Intro - Stop Babying Quebec

This has been, and I’m sure will be till the day I die, a recurring theme of my content, but I’m going to need the English media to do a better job of talking about Quebec. The decision of Bloc MPs to skip the Speech From The Throne is being spun by the Bloc as some sort of statement about Quebec and Quebecers and their contempt for the Monarchy, but to the extent that it matters (and I really doubt it does in any meaningful way), I don’t think it plays the way they want them to.

Quebecers get a reputation, especially in English Canada, as being in lots of ways unserious, focused on symbolism and airquotes “lesser” issues. The argument that arts funding cuts kept the Bloc alive in 2008 as opposed to broader economic management is the kind of thing that caused this, as does the fact that dying provincial governments always attempt to leverage the culture wars. But, that latter point unfairly maligns Quebecers, because almost uniformly they don’t let it work. It’s not even really true that arts funding was that important in 2008, it was much more so the fact that every other option was shit. Harper’s Conservatives weren’t sufficiently trusted on social issues yet and Dion was Dion (and even he gained seats on Martin in Quebec!).

Pauline Marois running on the Charter of Values in 2014 didn’t work because Quebecers didn’t let culture war nonsense get in the way of turfing a government with no clear economic agenda, no accomplishments in their time in office, or general reason to exist. The fact that Legault tried to cripple McGill, Concordia, and Bishop’s for political purposes and his polls got worse not better is a sign they weren’t going to fall for his distractions.

The tendency to assume that Quebecers are the tiny children having keys dangled in front of them is a nice fiction for English Canada to indulge that makes ignoring Quebecers’ interests and opinions on serious matters easier. Quebecers might not love Charles - Lord knows nobody should - but the idea they’ll love performative nonsense is laughable. It’s the kind of thing that if we said this about Albertans would be dismissed as culturally insensitive from Laurentian elites.

Quebecers are smart enough to judge the Throne Speech on the merits of what’s said and what’s promised. The Bloc’s claims about what Quebecers feel are not always true, for the same reason that any politician or party should not be taken seriously - they’re actors in this game, not unbiased truth tellers. We should keep that in mind and stop indulging the idea that Quebecers only care about the small stuff. They don’t. They’re serious people, and it’s time we treat them like serious people.