Looking for other photos from Montreal or Toronto launches of Rogue Stimulus I found:
Kinda close…
The snowmen salute Parliament.
According to CPAC
The Speech from the Throne is almost always delivered mid-afternoon. But the October 2007 address was held at 6:35pm ET. Amidst heightened election speculation, critics accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives of reducing the opposition’s ability to respond before that night’s newscasts and newspaper deadlines.
I hadn’t realized that the Governnor General acts as a figurehead not just for the Queen but the government as well in this regard. The same page says,
The government writes the speech, which MPs debate for up to six days after returning to the Commons. The process begins with a motion by two government backbenchers to consider an Address in Reply: a short statement of thanks to the Governor General for providing the speech.
This year the Speech from the Throne is scheduled to begin at 2:30 pm.
Here are the main points of promises.
But cut back a few days to the Parliamentary pause…on the Hill, Rogue Stimulus launch…
Getting going with Caesura for the new Caesar by Mike Buckthought and mic getting set up by MC/editor Stephen Brockwell.
Nathan Hauch and Claudia Radmore Coutu reading “newsflashes to the PM” and “prorogatio imperii” respectively.
Jamie Hawes poem “the Right Tie for the Grey Clerk at Parliament Hill” included the lines,
Can we get away with this?
Will a shock of warm silk below his chin
Keep their minds from the debt, the war.
Laura Farina asked as her poem and answered her stab at What did he Do on His Winter vacation?
He took off his wingtips, wiggled his toes.
he discontinued his long-distance plan.
He watched YouTube videos of sunsets.
Like its particular take on seeing him as an everyday human trying to work out this mess of life.
I liked How Ridings Swing by Jonathan Bennett and O Stephen Harper by Jonathan Ball. Tongue in cheek as much as cheekiness. Bennett takes the tone of everyman and like pot knows kettle, watching with detachment of rhetoric, and a sort of laid back savviness the spectacles, the grandstanding of speeches
with good local bits so you can see
yourself kind of in the greater thing, and feel
really connected to the economy or maybe
Afghanistan or Obama. Do you not find
we say the word actually an awful lot lately?
I like how he mentions Tim’s because everyone
has that in common
Tara Azzopardi, a visual artist gave another appealing take written from the issues of the grateful worker of the Tar Sands. From that perspective, life, holding on, at least it’s no worse.
Adam Dickinson‘s Parliamentary Plastique. Rather fun, in ideas and in mouth, and hard to excerpt with the way it accumulates, but I’ll give you a sampler,
He tried to keep it moving, amorphous and crystalline, nylons running
with leaks, acrylic accounting and covalent committees
covertly dispersing available light, but it all became rigid
at room temperature
He had no choice but to gum, melt or craze it – his epoxy, his prosthesis
a Plexiglass house with a picture in every room
melted and cooled, melted and cooled,
made to fracture easily,
predictably,
without trying
More on launches prorogue rallies. Greg Santos in Montreal, in Toronto, Sandra Alland from Scotland, Mark Dunn from Ottawa and Gary Barwin in Toronto who will soon be in Ottawa for an AB reading.
P.S. Another place I’m online: I’m pesbo @ twitter