Picture it: A Quebec politician offends Canadians
You might not believe this, but a Quebec politician has caused outrage amongst Canadians. I’ll give you a moment to collect yourself.
Premier Pauline Marois congratulated the Canadian men’s hockey team for winning the gold medal at the Sochi Olympics but in her statement failed to mention one thing: the name of her country.
The statement read, “My sincerest congratulations to the men’s hockey team, who won the gold medal at the Sochi Winter Olympics.”
Naturally, people have jumped on that saying there is nothing patriotic about her statement and that she is ashamed of Canada. If you followed the action on Twitter you know that there were many trending topics, most of which included something like GoCanadaGo, CANvsSWE, CanadaGold, etc.
I should point out that days earlier, Marois acknowledged the “Canadian women’s hockey team” for its win, also gold, in Russia.
So really it begs the questions: Is she sexist? Is she anti-Canadian? Did she think people would know she was talking about Canada since the story dominated headlines?
I can’t really offer up any thoughts because I don’t know a thing about Marois, though I do think the arguments are a little unjustified based solely on the omission of the country’s name.
It started making me think of all the tweets and messages I was posting if Canada was mentioned in every single frickin’ one of them and I don’t know if it was. Does that make me a Canada hater? Not really. Well, it shouldn’t, anyway.
Maybe she left out Canada because the message would have otherwise been a direct copy and paste of her previous message only swapping out the genders. Who knows?
The argument in Quebec also notes that in early February the premier commented about how many athletes from the province were competing in Russia, again, not mentioning anything about Canada as a whole implying that the athlete wins were about Quebec and not the country.
At the end of the day, a Quebecer is a Canadian just like a Manitoban is one. You can say it’s about your city or town or province but at the end of the day the Olympics is about your nation. One Canadian province isn’t going to change that.