Stuck in traffic on Jubilee

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/06/2022 (363 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Has anyone else spent an inordinate amount of time stuck in traffic on Jubilee Street lately?

If you have, it probably isn’t anything entirely new; the street is regularly congested during rush hour, but it will be worse for the duration of this summer, and next. After years of patchwork and filled potholes, it was long overdue for the full-scale renewal it is finally getting.

Improvements to sidewalk and cycling infrastructure are also part of the project. Not since the Park Line street car — the first electric street car to operate in Canada — began running down Osborne to its terminus at Jubilee will the neighbourhood’s transportation network be as “modern.”

That was way back in 1891, and Route 125, the collector road today known as Jubilee Avenu—, had not yet been so named in commemoration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

Coincidentally, it has been 125 years since then, and her great-great granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, is also celebrating a Jubilee — her platinum — signifying 70 years on the throne as the sovereign of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations.

Is it now time to upgrade the name of the street itself?

‘Monarchists’ from the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada have expressed their dismay at what they have called “lacklustre” and “embarrassing” Platinum Jubilee plans. They say the shortage of ceremony is an insult to the Queen’s legacy.

Of course, she would have been unable to attend at her advanced age, even under travel conditions befitting of a Queen.

In her stead, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla visited Canada for three days. They began their tour in Newfoundland where they attended a ceremony in memory of the thousands who died in residential schools, then moved on to Ottawa, and finally visited the Northwest Territories.

The tour wrapped up on May 19, just a few days before Victoria Day — a holiday initially celebrated on Victoria’s own birthday but which Wikipedia now says is considered the official birthday of Canada’s sovereign.

This year, the holiday fell on the one-year anniversary of the announcement that potential unmarked graves had been discovered at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops B.C.

There were calls for an official apology. It seems like a missed opportunity by organizers and by the heir-apparent himself.

Maybe, like the street named to commemorate his great-great-great grandmother, he needs to take more than a patchwork approach to modernizing the institution he will sooner or later represent, and to renew support of it among Canadians.

Or maybe Canadians don’t really care when they feel like there are far more pressing things on their minds, like how much it’s costing them to be stuck in traffic, given the price of gasoline.