We’ve finally got it. We’ve had about nine or 10 of them available to us each year – one in January, another two in the spring, a bunch each summer, a feast-oriented one in the fall and a couple around Christmas. But now, as re-elected Premier Dalton McGuinty told us last Thursday morning, we’ve finally got a statutory holiday in the dead of winter.
“This is a small thing, but it’s important,” he said. “I think (Family Day is) a powerful recognition of our priorities.”
In fact, you can mark it on your calendar right now. Family Day is exactly four months from today – Feb. 18, 2008. McGuinty promised it during the election campaign. It was approved via an order in council, signed by members of the provincial cabinet and is now official. And, did you notice, in response to those “broken promises” campaign ads, political cartoonist Patrick Corrigan didn’t miss a beat. His take shows McGuinty standing in front of a calendar with Feb. 18 circled and annotated “Thank-you John Tory Day” and McGuinty saying: “See! I can keep a promise.”
Whether you like the idea of a holiday in February or not, you have to admit the introduction of a three-day weekend between the New Year’s Day holiday and the first spring break around Good Friday, can’t be all bad. During that stretch of long February nights, frigid mornings trying to get a reluctant car started and/or debilitating hours spent piling snowdrift upon snowdrift, I’m sure we have all pleaded for some relief sometime. Now we’ve got it – a winter holiday. But, of course, it didn’t take the nay-sayers long to react.
Some cried foul. All those right-of-centre, fiscally conservative think-tanks claim the holiday will bankrupt the province and the country. They call the introduction of another official statutory holiday each calendar year, a rip-off of employers, shareholders and taxpayers. They say the government already wastes enough, why give the civil service another excuse to fleece the public? I believe that’s a bit over the top.
Incidentally, there are also those who lambasted the Ontario government for making Family Day a stat holiday when Remembrance Day still isn’t. I happen to think Nov. 11 should not be a holiday, but prefer to make it mandatory for all Canadians to stop whatever they’re doing before midday and attend Remembrance Day observances.
Family Day, by the way, is not McGuinty’s invention. Alberta and Saskatchewan have observed Family Day on the third Monday in February for a while, and so has Manitoba, but they call it Louis Riel Day. As far as I know, no other jurisdictions in the country have such things, although the Northwest Territories has Aboriginal Day, Nunavut has Nunavut Day, and Yukon has Discovery Day. Presumably those could be celebrations of family. Meanwhile, all provincial jurisdictions have periodic civic holidays (Ontario’s is the first weekend in August) to fatten up the summer. So there’s really no shortage of holidays.
There is, however, a shortage of quality family time. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it hundreds of times every week. People just can’t seem to find the space and time in their lives to assign a little down time with a spouse and children. The trick, of course, is to keep it family time and not allow it to become hijacked into yet another shopping orgy. I mean, I can see it the promotions now: “Spend Family Day together…at the mall,” or “The family that shops together, stays together.” If we could keep just one holiday away from the world’s sales and marketing geniuses, it would be a blessing.
“There is nothing more valuable to families than time together,” the premier said during his post-election announcement.
It’s unfortunate that not everybody believes that. I, for one, plan to take the next four months to think long and hard about that new mid-winter holiday. I plan to take advantage of it, that’s for sure, but I plan to make my family the beneficiary.
I do have a compromise suggestion for all those anti-statutory holiday campaigners. If you believe so strongly in preventing the addition of another day off to people who don’t deserve it, try this on for size. Given Ontario’s atrocious record for getting out the vote, I’d like to suggest (since we now have accurate census records), that anybody who did not vote in last Wednesday’s provincial election, obviously doesn’t care about democratic franchise.
If you did not vote, you do not holiday.