Hot Tubbin' For...GGCLC: Parliament Hill, Rideau Hall and Preparing for the Presentation

So after a whirlwind tour of Eastern Ontario we head to the Ottawa Marriott, our home base for the next 4 days. Inside the hotel, it feels like it did in Halifax. Everyone is back from their study tours from around the country and the feeling is electric and exhausted. We have a couple of hours before we have to meet downstairs to head to Parliament Hill for dinner.

The Peace Tower at twilight...
Ah, hotel - I have a view of the tops of the Parliament buildings and the river. A far cry from the windowless shoe box in Halifax. It's really nice to relax , sleep in a real bed and stay in one place for a few consecutive days.

 Downstairs I meet up with O2 - wowee! What a fancy group of people! You can tell we're all happy to have new clothes meet us in Ottawa since we've been wearing the same clothes for the past 8 days. The men are in suits and the ladies are all dressed up, hair and make-up done. It's a beautiful night and we're excited to walk to Parliament Hill to go to dinner with the whole conference delegation. This is a very Canadian moment - walking through downtown Ottawa on the way to the Hill. We walk into the building and it's incredible. After a long security check we head into a large room where we pick up the required glass of wine and are greeted by both the Speaker of the House and the Speaker of the Senate.
Speaker of the House - Hon. Andrew Scheer, MP (Sask)

 We gather again for the requisite group photo (as all groups did) and it's time to get to dinner. We are having dinner in grand foyer followed up by a tour of the Senate chamber. We are treated to a roast chicken dinner which is a nice change for O@ as our tour diet was pretty heavy on red meat. During dinner they do the draw for the order of our final presentations - We are drawn second-to-last. 
O2  - wine in hand and ready for dinner!
Not the best photo...but still...very cool.
After a nice dinner it's a tour of the Senate and the Parliamentary Library.  I end up sitting next to Annette Verschuren - the Conference chair and we chat about our tour whilst sitting in Senator Romeo Dallaire's chair! She asks about the most memorable part of the study tour and for me it wasn't one place or stop - it was the opportunity to share opinions and perspectives on such a variety of issues in the eastern Ontario region. 
A little tomfoolery on the Senate chamber.
Once we're finished in the Senate it's a quick tour of the Library and then back to the hotel for a good night's sleep before the hours of work ahead of us for our final presentation.

 The next morning we head to the Ottawa Convention Centre. We are assigned a board room in the front part of the building and hunker down. Thank goodness we are a group of ridiculously organized high-achievers because our outline is already finished and our small groups gather and we start in on our presentation. I will post the final presentation later  - so I will skip those details for now...first we have to go and get ready for our reception at Rideau Hall and dinner afterwards. We end up making a reservation at a....steak house because we haven't eaten enough beef. Haha. No it was easiest for us to get all of us there. 
Here they come! 
Once at Rideau Hall, the GG welcomes us to his home. It's a beautiful residence, again so full of history it's nice that we can tour the property and enjoy some jazz outside. Thanks to the pushing of one of my tourmates, I get to have my photo taken with the GG! He was a lovely man - very bright and very interested in each of us. It was nice that he didn't rush it, he wanted to shake each of our hands and ask us a question.

Governor General David Johnston, me, Annette Verschuren
It's a beautiful evening so we take advantage of the photo taking opportunities and ham it up for the cameras.
O2 at Rideau Hall
In front of Rideau Hall - half posed half candid
Once it's back on the bus we head to our steak house. Turns out that the Executive Director of the Conference and the GGCLC staff join us and we have a delicious dinner with lots of laughs and lots of fun. It's a relaxing evening spent with great people and we have a doozy of a day ahead of us as we inch closer to our final presentation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflections : 2017 CUPE National Convention

Image
The 2017 CUPE National Convention took place in Toronto, October 2-6. Every 2 years CUPE members from across Canada gather to set the course of the national union for the next two years. Prior to the opening of convention, each sector meets for a couple of hours to get caught up with the goings on across the country.  As co-chair of the CUPE National Library Workers' Committee I was happy to wish the convention a happy "Canadian Library Month." I decided to use the signs created by National to profile and introduce people to our members who work in libraries. Throughout the week I got to know our library workers and allies about what their work/library means to them and I invite y'all to take a look. :) Highlights: Equality Forum: Art as Resistance Against Precarity One of the best experiences in the labour movement I had was at the 2016 Summer Institute for Union Women where each session we had featured a local spoken word artist. Art allows history to breat
Read more

2019 BCNDP Convention - Women's Rights Committee Convention

Image
BCNDP Women's Rights Committee Convention We started our BCNDP convention experience off by attending the Women's Rights Committee (WRC) convention which occurs prior to the opening plenary.  We were fortunate to have Rhiannon Bennett, from Delta, give the territorial acknowledgement. She started off by holding up a purse and a scarf, and acknowledged that both of which belonged to Maurine Karagianis. She asked "is it enough to acknowledge these items of Maurine's if I have them, for her to access the economy ?" Nope. We, the NDP need to do better - it's not about shame or guilt, but about acknowledging the privilege of what we've been given. She talked to us about the resilience of indigenous peoples and how they've been able to save their languages in the face of being being jailed for speaking their languages, having needles poked into their tongues in residential school, and other horrific things. Rhiannon brought humour and heart to her te
Read more

Labor Notes Comes to Town: Vancouver Trouble Makers School!

Image
"Where I come from we are not called troublemakers or shit disturbers, we are human rights defenders. When we stir some shit it's for the working class!" Chris Sorio, Migrante BC So in April 2018 I went to Chicago and attended the Labor Notes Conference for the first time and it changed my life. It was the first time I had gone to a conference so big, so unapologetically socialist, so full of a class analysis, focusing on organizing, on movement building, on workers' power! To put the "movement" back in the labour movement! It was not about which position you held in the union, it was about the collective working together to fight against the right and the boss and workers to take ownership of their unions. I wrote extensively about it on this blog - here , here , here  and the session with the West Virginia Teachers got their own post . It was at that conference I met a ton of awesome activists from BC. The Vancouver crew met at the Canada caucus a
Read more