Alberta Premier Jason Kenney trowelled it on a bit, perhaps as befits expectations in a provincial capital, but he generally managed a reasonably dignified performance as he said farewell to Queen Elizabeth on the steps of the Alberta Legislature yesterday.
At only 600 words almost on the button, if my transcription of his remarks is accurate, it was remarkably concise by Mr. Kenney’s usual rambling standards of public speaking. He also managed to keep his typical bombast in check.
Perhaps the premier was tired after spending 36 hours sitting on airplanes and standing in lineups to make a very public pilgrimage to London for the Queen’s lying in state.
Most likely the speech was put together by a professional speechwriter. Still, given some of its flourishes, it wouldn’t be a complete surprise to learn that this was a eulogy Mr. Kenney composed in his head at 14 when he imagined he would be going to London for the Queen’s funeral instead of having to be back in Edmonton before a damp crowd of a couple of hundred souls on the steps of a provincial Legislature.
Accepting that the Queen acted with “goodness and dignity” is a sentiment most of us can sign on with under the circumstances, even if many of the rest of Mr. Kenney’s remarks seem on close examination to be a little over the top.
Thankfully, the premier managed to remember that memorial orations are best kept short, and he stuck to the script – although he didn’t quite manage to come in under Abraham Lincoln’s famously economical 239 words at Gettysburg.
If the crowds at yesterday’s ceremony in Edmonton didn’t compare with those in London, the monarchy isn’t a big part of most Canadians’ lives any more, except perhaps as a source of salacious gossip. Anyway, Mr. Kenney’s government made sure this wasn’t a day off in Alberta and urged employers instead to allow their employees merely a moment of respectful silence at their workstations.
The Royal Artillery fired off its guns 96 times to mark each year of the Queen’s life.
And the Royal Artillery Band, based in Edmonton, played such funereal favourites as Abide With Me and even a snippet of Vera Lynn’s 1939 hit We’ll Meet Again (don’t know where, don’t know when), which will be familiar to anyone who’s watched the apocalyptic final moments of Dr. Strangelove. Ms. Lynn died in 2020 at 103.
Given the circumstances, we can forgive Mr. Kenney for calling the Queen’s 70-year reign “the Elizabethan Era,” even though that one’s already taken.
There was a time some might have disapproved of a quote by the Pope being used to describe the Defender of the Faith, but this is a moment in history both secular and ecumenical. So why not?
It certainly wasn’t as shocking to Canadian Conservative sensibilities and paleoconservative media commentators as, say, a prime minister being caught on camera singing Queen hits on the eve of the Queen’s funeral!
And Mr. Kenney did not, to his credit and notwithstanding his religious convictions, call for the Queen to be proclaimed a saint – as someone actually did in the pages of the Globe and Mail yesterday!
As for his use of the phrase “Our Sovereign Lady the Queen,” one instinctively feels it should be followed by the words, “and the accused at bar.”
But Mr. Kenney was quite right to note that in Alberta the Queen will long be remembered in schools, in roadways, in mountains, and “in the newly renamed Queen Elizabeth the Second Building behind us” – as was predicted by the political blogger Dave Cournoyer two days before the government’s announcement that the provincially owned Federal Building would be at last be given a less confusing name.
Lieutenant Governor Salma Lakhani, Speaker Nathan Cooper, and NDP MLA Nicole Goehring, the previous government’s military liaison, also delivered short remarks.
Presumably he was in business class both ways on Air Canada allowing for a flat bed to consider his succour of his departed monarch as opposed to whatever his pride and joy, the Albertan, Westjet, could offer out of that most inconvenient of airports, Gatwick.
He couldn’t resist another trip without public exposure.
What’s he going to do for the coronation when his own has expired?
Well I suppose if Kenney wanted better attendance today, he should have made it a more public holiday, but this isn’t the first time he has worked at cross purposes with himself. Of course due to his own work flexibility, he was able to dash off to London while most of the rest of us had to toil away on Monday. As generally the case in Kenneyworld, some are more privileged than others.
I recall the words new Elizabethan era being used in some coverage of her coronation. Perhaps his writers or the speaker missed the word new as an economical but important modification to distinguish her from the previous ruler of the same name.
I had perhaps thought the old Federal building would eventually be named after Lougheed by his one of his several successor Conservatives. Of course, Kenney’s feelings about Lougheed seemed at best ambivalent and sometimes mixed. Perhaps Redford was eventually planning to get around to it before she was unexpectedly deposed. In any event, Kenney has seemed to be a more consistent admirer of the late Queen. However, I suspect the nickname Sky Palace will stick regardless, so Kenney’s successors may still want to be very careful in how they use that building that interestingly also played a role in Kenney’s demise. It may take more than a last minute name change to rehabilitate its reputation.
I doubt making it a 1x public holiday would have made any real difference in size. Debating whether having a public holiday or not is such a trivial matter. Just as trivial as anyone criticizing Trudeau for singing Bohemian Rhapsody.
what’s with the soldier and his helmet half covering the nose and eyes? Doesn’t look comfortable or practical
It’s a ceremonial helmet asked on a design dating back to a time when cold steel, not supersonic flying lead, was the greatest threat to a soldier on the battlefield.
Offered in Mr. Kenney’s September 19th facebook is a message to the late Queen: Thank you for everything. No credit seems to have been offered to Paddington Bear.
Jimmy: Nothing for Paddington? Shocking! If this omission were Justin Trudeau’s, you can count on it that CTV and the Globe and Mail would be all over it. DJC
Meh.
Well, even after falling off the redeye from Heathrow and struggling through a number of airports to make it back to “The Chuk” in time for an event he clearly didn’t want to be at, Kenney did manage to look somewhat less disheveled at the memorial for ER II in Alberta. Of course, nothing beats filing past the real thing, so Kenney did get to fulfill one of his lil boy dreams. Whoever said position doesn’t have benefits never lived the life of Jason Kenney.
Jason Kenney forgot to get a sovereign’s sceptre and orb. If he had a sceptre as his symbol of power and the orb to remind me everyone that he was chosen by God, perhaps we’d all be more inclined to believe the great oracle Ron Orr.
“I also believe he is the leader God raised up for these times even though I don’t like these times any more than you do,” the man in charge of women once said.
Turns out God’s guy on the right is not even as popular as these unpopular times. A sceptre and orb could have been just the ticket for generations of Kenneys to lead this province of ungrateful heathens forevermore. No one questions the orb. There is only one problem, that being the line of succession. I guess crown jewels are better left to the British after all.
This has been a strange news week for me. Not to rain on anyone’s funeral or throw shade at anyone who sees this as a big deal, but it is beyond puzzling to me that the death of a monarch matters in 2022. As an egalitarian, I find the very concept of monarchy morally offensive (I totally get that I’m alone on an island with that sentiment and that’s fine). As a Canadian I find it bemusing and ridiculous that our head of state is the powerless figurehead of a different state (I think I’m less alone here). I understand how this happened, just not why it is still happening. There are important events in the world taking place, and all this time and energy consumed honouring a celebrity seems strange, wasteful, and disingenuous. And the idea that JT singing a song made the news at all is absurd to me, the guy has been in power for a decade and no matter what your political affiliation, you can make substantive complaints about the guy, why weaken your position grasping at straws?
I often feel like a stranger in a strange land in my home country. All the words Canadians say make perfect sense, but when I parse them as sentences I’m left thinking “I don’t think some of those words mean what you think they mean.”
I think the Queen would have loved Trudeau’s karaoke of Bohemian Rhapsody far more than the dour side eye of our former premier! Maybe Jason wants this for his funeral! https://youtu.be/HgzGwKwLmgM It goes without saying maybe, that his event will be surrounded with as much pomp and circumstance as her Majesty’s was! s/
Oh by the way. If I were Prime Minister of Canada with the third seat after the USA, and France at the funeral? I would have karaoke’d this: https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M