Check It Out: The definition of irony
By Joan Janzen
The definition of irony is - a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects. For example, it would be ironic if a movie about The Flat Earth Society would win a Golden Globe award.
This bit of trivia also serves as an illustration of irony. William Eno, known as the Father of Traffic Safety, invented the stop sign, crosswalk, traffic circle, one-way street, and taxi stand, but never learned how to drive. Yet another illustration is a tree planted in Los Angeles in 2002 in memory of Beatles guitarist George Harrison. The tree later died after being infested by beetles.
There’s been a few examples of irony right here in Canada. True North reported the Liberal cabinet spending $160,000 on a three-day retreat to PEI to discuss the affordability problem in Canada and the escalating cost of living in our country.
We’re not sure what solutions materialized from the discussion, but recently disclosed documents revealed the breakdown of expenditures. According to an article by Cosmin Dzsurdza from True North, the Privy Council Office (PCO), which manages the federal cabinet’s affairs, listed expenditures of $88,930.01 for hotel accommodations and $20.733.45 for meals and incidentals. Individual room charges ranged from $1,200 to $3,200, while an additional $7,689.65 was spent on miscellaneous transportation and $1,169 for an Airbnb rental.
In the article Dzsurdza wrote, the government response stated, “PCO does not have this information for attendees from other departments,” who are among the 49 individuals who attended the retreat, paid for by your tax dollars.
True North recently discovered yet another ironic turn of events. Andrew Lawton observed that while the Canadian Human Rights Commission has been quiet on weeks of rampant anti-Semitic hate and calls for violence against Jews and Israelis (a concerning form of freedom of expression), its commissars published a paper titled “Discussion Paper on Religious Intolerance.”
While Lawton observed he found only one tweet from the Human Rights Commission addressing concerns of anti-semitism and Islamophobia in Canada during the last month, the commission has put out dozens of tweets concerning other groups.
In the paper, the commission claims that because “statutory holidays related to Christianity are the only Canadian statutory holidays linked to religious holy days,” they are therefore discriminatory.
“It is so revealing that they’re silent on this explicit hate we see every day but find the real culprit to be Christmas,” Lawton said on his online show. “They argue that this is the case because non-Christians may need to request special accommodations to observe their holy days and other times of the year where their religion requires them to abstain from work.”
Lawton reasoned that people of other religions have the right to have their holy holiday off. “If we’re being really technical, non-Christians get more holidays than Christians because they get the traditional stat holidays off as well as getting the holidays off they are entitled to,” he reasoned.
Lawton considered the idea they are pushing to be fundamentally flawed since this is a predominantly cultural holiday, and there are many people who don’t believe in the Christian holiday yet celebrate Christmas.
Meanwhile, an article by The Epoch Times noted the UN agency (UNESCO) has released a 59-page report this month, which includes the imposition of global policies designed to stop the spread of various forms of speech. The agency aims to create an “Internet of Trust” by targeting what they deem to be “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” and “hate speech”.
The definition of trust is a “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of someone or something.” In this case, everyone on the globe is expected to trust UNESCO to determine what is misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech.