The Sesqui Awaits

In today's National Post there is an editorial asking Canadians to start planning for the country's 150th birthday in 2017. It's hard not to think: uh...it's a little early, no? Two thousand seventeen is eight years away and most of us have trouble planning next week. Surely we have time. After all, it took less time to win the Second World War or put a man on the moon. But I digress.

Truth is these types of national celebrations/initiatives/whatever you want to call them can take a lot of time to get up and running. And eight years is the precedent. As the article points out, initial planning for Canada's legendary 1967 Centennial began as early as 1959. However, I'm not sure Prime Minister Diefenbaker deserves as much credit as he is given in the Post article. I'll have to hit the books in more detail to confirm, but according to one source, Canadian icon Pierre Berton no less, the real credit for the initial idea should go to the Canadian Citizenship Council, a small group of non-profit organizations like the Royal Architectural Society and the YMCA, who got together, found common interest a Centennial project and began lobbying the government to do something. According to Bert, Dief wasn't too enthusiastic at first and didn't get the Feds involved until 1961. But that's splitting hairs and I digress, again.

The point here is that the non-profit community played a major role in beginning the discussion in 1967 and it looks like that might be happening again. After all, the author of the Post article was Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the non-profit Dominion Institute.

So even though 2017 feels like a long way away, I applaud Rudyard and the Post for the article today and second the sentiment. Non-profits unite. The Sesqui awaits and it is indeed time to start thinking about what we can do.