Skip to main content

Trudeau Shuffles the Deck

Have you seen the new cabinet? It’s looking nice enough. A lot more variety than before, smaller more compatible, I think it’s going to work very well in my sitting room. But enough about that….did you hear recently elected Prime Minister Trudeau has is assembled his…group of people who help him govern? …I can’t remember the actual name just now. It’ll come to me…
                Trudeau’s made a pledge to fill his collection of executive government officials with diversity. Fifty percent of them are going to be women and there’s going to be plenty of ethnic, regional, and age and experience variety. That’s great! It’s so wonderful that the best people for these ministerial jobs also happen to conveniently fit into a visibly diverse whole. The Liberal Party’s not the kind of party to possibly have more capable, knowledgeable, or experienced men than women or women than men for these sorts of high ranking positions. They’re not the party that might have someone who’s studied law all his life, has multiple degrees and years of experience at the provincial and federal levels; ideal qualifications for Justice Minister perhaps. Instead they have an enthusiastic thirty-four year old Hispanic man for that role.
                Trudeau’s entire government is diverse as he’s eager to prove, with Members of Parliament coming from all walks of life. Where the previous Harper government consisted of a lot of businessmen, bankers, and card-carrying members of the Gold Counters Club, this new government consists of teachers, lawyers, journalists, statesmen, doctors, merchants, judges, juries, executioners, carpenters, astronauts, actors, small business owners, lion tamers, caretakers, songwriters, butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers, folks from the navy, infantry, cavalry, Huey, Duey, and Lewie, miners and minors, unemployed psych majors, Spiderman, Megatron, Sherlock Holmes, that mad scientist guy from Game of Thrones, a bear, and at least one magician.
Regardless of how perfect this is, I think Trudeau should definitely be careful. Some crazy people might not think filling your 28-member governing troupe with just the best looking most progressive faces is a smart idea. It’s unconventional, but perhaps appointing people who are right for the job would work. I mean just look at Harper’s troupe of the last number of years. For example he had John Baird and then Peter Kent as Minister of the Environment, neither of whom knew or cared anything for it, and likely had to take a short seminar to find out what climate change is. I can understand the recommendation not to go repeating those mistakes just for the sake of looking modern and diverse.
But I’m sure it’ll be just fine. When has a minister not knowing what they’re doing steered us wrong before? Everyone in Trudeau’s circle will be both qualified and diversely representational in their gender, race, religious, age, sexuality, et al to show to the world how much better we are (especially compared to the ocean of white male faces in the American Congress and British Parliament). I’m sure we’re all going to be comfortable and satisfied with the new Trudeau cupboard- I knew it’d come to me eventually!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
1 comment
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
14 comments
Read more