It was so very kind of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to take a little of his time from feting Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee. After all, it was Her Majesty’s time in the sun. (Or, since this was London, it was her time in the rain.) Why Mr. Harper was there seemed vague until he explained that Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier attended Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee 115 years ago and Mr. Harper could do no less. This was all while being interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Peter Mansbridge.
We lost count of the number of times that Mr. Harper told the CBC news reader that the world economy is fragile. That was the key word of the evening: ‘fragile.’ The word also applied to the health of the Queen’s Consort, the Duke of Edinburgh. At 91, the old Duke was watching most of the Diamond Jubilee spectacle from a hospital bed because of enduring the chill off the Thames during the great flotilla.
After gushing appropriately over the Diamond Jubilee events, the Prime Minister and the news reader switched to the more mundane. “The world economy is fragile,” Mr. Harper informed us. He shared with the CBC viewers back home that whilst the Canadian economy remains strong—and well managed, under his regime—there are warning signals from the European community. Mind you, the economist in Mr. Harper did not see the Greek elections as a particular watershed in world economics. He delivered a (luckily brief) discourse on the stability of the Euro currency and its weakness in not being backed by a single national government. He felt that the Canadian dollar was in particularly good shape but believed Canada might get caught in the spatter if the poop hits the fan in Europe.
But as part of his much-promoted, multi-faceted ‘Economic Action Plan’ Mr. Harper and his government are ready to put the Canadian taxpayers’ money to work to stem the tide of recession. He assured Canadians that he will leave no street unpaved, nor Conservative MP without oversized cheques, to stem the tide of economic disaster.
With the world economy in such good hands, the news reader and the prime minister returned to the subject of the Queen, God Bless Her.
But our favourite part of the whole Diamond Jubilee was the wonderful fireworks after the concert down in the Mall.
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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