Don Martin says you can stop worrying about the national anthem. Or, put another way, Don Martin says the government would prefer you stop worrying about what it might want to do to the national anthem.
After facing a blitzkrieg of backlash to a minor Throne Speech afterthought, which proposed a single line change to eliminate a gender reference in the anthem’s lyrics, a senior cabinet minister confides the notion will be quickly and quietly dusty-shelved, never to see the light of actual committee study … influential officials are reassuring Conservative MPs that the kerfuffle will be allowed to fade away — and never to return to the agenda, even as a suggestion for further study.
And now the Prime Minister’s Office officially calls the whole thing off. The time expired between the Governor General committing this promise to the record and the arrival of this note from Mr. Harper’s press secretary would seem to be approximately 49 hours in total.
And now Senator Nancy Ruth, with whom this idea is said to have originated, says that ”if there’s been such backlash, then this is another example, for me, of hatred against women.”
