I bet you didn’t even know we had a white power holiday. Well, we did! October 14-20, European History Month. A month to celebrate Europeans! Real Europeans. You know.
It is both the bad news and the good news at the same time that city officials also didn’t know we had a white supremacist holiday week. And it is decidedly good news that, now that they’ve found out, they’ve committed to cancelling it. But there are two things I want to draw attention to in CKOM’s story!
They Mayor’s office, assuming it was meant to celebrate the contributions of European civilizations to Canada, granted the request.
“I thought this was very much an innocuous request to have a proclamation,” Fougere explained in an interview Tuesday.
The request was made by the Nationalist Party Of Canada. What the Mayor didn’t realize, at least not until News Talk Radio informed him, is that the Nationalist Party is a white supremacy group.
Okay, first, it actually explains how this holiday came into being that nobody at City Hall connected the white supremacist movement to a group calling itself The Nationalist Party. I don’t even know how to joke about that! The premise is the punchline. Also:
“We were hoodwinked on that one,” Fougere admitted.
And apparently nobody’s told the mayor that, you know, probably don’t invoke the mental imagery of hoods when referring to white supremacists.
All racist-ribbing aside, it’s obviously good that the city’s going ahead and rescinding the proclamation, and though Fougere told CKOM he’s taking full responsibility for it, that’s probably an unnecessary gesture. Unless a greasy-haired, pale (and probably non-Aryan) man pressed the request directly into Fougere’s hand from his own clammy, creepily agile hand directly preceding a council meeting, a few people at City Hall had to totally blank on what “European History Month” means.
