Happy Pride and Canada Day

Happy Pride and Canada Day!!! ALL enjoy the long weekend and be safe.:)

Toronto's PRIDE festivities are on now. Ontario has its first female Premier(like a Governor for the US peeps) Katharine Wynne. She is also a married lesbian. Today she was at the PRIDE run and made a speech.

"Wynne, who is openly gay, addressed a large crowd of runners afterwards, speaking about the importance of pride and protecting LGBTQ rights.“I think that the point of pride is that we need to continue to be vigilant,” she said. “We have come a long way, you know, 10 years since same sex marriage in this country was legalized, but the fact is that our rights and our privileges are precious and we have to guard them.”

Wynne also thanked the crowd for participating in the run and said she looks forward to marching in this year’s Pride Parade on Sunday.

Wynne has said that she participates in the Pride and Remembrance Run every year with her wife Jane Rounthwaite."


http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013...pride_run.html


Happy Canada Day ....Birthday to my fellow Canucks!
Have a drink on our first Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald on Monday, July 1. He'd like that ..lol

from an opinion piece in the Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/06/28/yes_to_nationalism_on_canada_day_no_to_jingoism_wa lkom.html


... citizenship involves more than the possession of convenient travel documents. It is, at base, a commitment to a place. In a world where there were no countries, such commitments might be superfluous. Twitter notwithstanding, we do not live in that world.


What does it mean to be Canadian? The liberal left has it right at one level when it talks about shared values of tolerance, social solidarity and inclusion. Those are our aims. They express what most of us hope Canada can be.


And in that sense, national programs such as medicare are true expressions of what we aspire to as Canadians. Roy Romanow, the former Saskatchewan premier, made that point more than a decade ago. He was right.


But where conservatives are correct is that being Canadian also involves an acceptance of shared history. Canada’s history is complicated. It includes rapaciousness. But it also includes great achievements.


...here the Conservative government is off base, however, is in it attempts to refocus history solely on Canada’s military successes in war.
....
But not everything is war. And not all wars in which Canadians took part were necessarily virtuous. To think otherwise is to veer into jingoism, where our team is always right simply because it is our team and the other guys (whoever they are) are always scumbags.


That is how the Harper government portrayed the war in Afghanistan. Recent hearings into the study of history by the Conservative-dominated Commons heritage committee suggest that this is how the government plans to approach the past in general.


The fact that the government is cutting back the ability of Library and Archives Canada to collect material for original research also does not bode well for real history.


Let us hope that in the end jingoism fails and history wins. Canada has a rich and complex past, one that involves wars and statesmen but that also includes seamstresses and hod carriers, Inuit hunters and African slaves, land speculators and immigrant labourers.


And we can be justly proud of our country without straying into xenophobia. Being a nationalist doesn’t mean you have to be a moron.

it was a good day today ... I'm looking forward to the Parade tomorrow :)