Prime Minister Carney. Now what?

How it started. How it's going.

Compare this image by Minas Panagiotakis for Getty Images (from the Toronto Star) with one from The Hill Times of Justin Trudeau and an earlier cabinet (see below). The change in framing is not accidental.

For a holiday Monday in Newfoundland and Labrador, here’s a little federal political piece, mostly in point form for those who cannot handle the long form stuff.

Before we begin, let’s quickly explain the holiday for the Mainlanders and the locals who don't know.

In the 1960s through to the early ‘90s, there were lots of provincial government and shops-closing holidays that had been around for a long while and reflected the deep religious divisions that used to characterise Newfoundland and Labrador society. There was a March holiday for St. Patrick’s Day and one to balance the religions in July for Orangeman’s Day, to celebrate the victory of the English Protestants over the Irish Roman Catholics in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. There was also St. George’s Day in April, effectively another Protestant English holiday but when people of Irish descent only make up 30% of the population despite all the fake leprechaun, more-Irish-than-Ireland tourism marketing horseshit, there were always gonna be way more English, Protestant holidays in a place where they made up 60% of the people.

Anyway, the government did away with all those religious holidays for the public but didn’t have the political stones to chop them out of the collective agreements so the government still shuts down a few times a year on days when everyone else works. Same thing with “Discovery Day”, by the way, which stopped being a provincial holiday in the early 1990s. Anything you’ve heard since is the creation of another pile of myths.

So, anyway, in Newfoundland and Labrador, there are a bunch of days when some people work and some people take the day off and it is as close to random as not, even within government itself. Some of the holidays got renamed, like at Generic University, where there’s a March Holiday and a July Holiday still. But it’s still the day of green beer and all the fake Irishness you can muster.

Now back to the story…

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