Franklin my dear, we do give a damn
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/09/2014 (4054 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper was like a five-year-old on Christmas morning Tuesday as he got to do what he, and many prime ministers before him, have wanted to do.
He got to announce that one of the longest historical mysteries in Canada had been solved.
"This is a day of very good news," he began, seated at a table in a boardroom in Ottawa. "And that is that we have found one of the two Franklin ships."
There was applause around the table, and as Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq sat beaming beside him, Harper did something he doesn’t often do, at least in public.
He beamed with happiness.
For a man often described as emotionless and robotic, it was one of the biggest displays of happiness I’ve seen on him outside of the nights of his electoral victories in 2006, 2008 and 2011. Even some people as politically opposed to Harper as one can get made note of how nice it was to see that.
Headlines around the world triumphed the achievement, the find of the two ships from the Sir John Franklin expedition in the 1840s which ended when the two ships were trapped in ice in the northwest passage. Franklin and his 128 crew members all perished. Neither they, nor their ships, have ever been found, although people have been looking for nearly two centuries.
It was, until Tuesday, Canada’s oldest cold case, a story which fascinated school kids in history class and with which, for some reason, our current prime minister has been obsessed. Just a few weeks ago he was on a ship in the Arctic looking for the Franklin, something he has done many times before on his annual August tours of the Arctic.
There are the skeptics of course, who criticize the search for the lost Franklin ships as a money waster, a show of symbolism for which Parks Canada is paying dearly amid cutbacks to national parks and conservation programs.
Surely Harper’s political foes were rolling their eyes as he claimed the technology which found the ship is helping Canada assert its sovereignty in the Arctic.
Yes the debate will rage as to whether this means anything at all in that endeavour.
But for one moment Tuesday Canadians got to see something in their prime minister that no sweater-vest advertisement or carefully posed family Christmas photo has ever been able to produce.
Pure, unadulterated glee.
