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The throne speech in Ottawa on Dec. 5 was a thoroughly depressing occasion. The attempt at solemnity failed. The Senate chamber was much too crowded; the audience looked like humanoid sardines; too many of the people in colourful ceremonial costume were implausible, bulged in their clothing, and emphasized the anachronistic aspect of the whole occasion. The Governor General was gracious and amicable and delivered the address unexceptionably, but dressed in black, she looked like the female clergy at a Hutterite funeral. Only one of the men in the three-cornered hats was passably bilingual. If there had been one unscheduled act of accidental slapstick, it would have been a Monty Python episode. Commentators compared it to corresponding occasions in London and Washington. In neither place is the chamber overcrowded; the language is not absurdly antiquarian; and the chief of state who delivers the address (the queen or president of the U.S.) does 98 per cent of the verbalizing and enters and departs in state, not as a cog in an inelegant procession of mysteriously over-costumed functionaries.

If there had been one unscheduled act of accidental slapstick, it would have been a Monty Python episode

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These were mere sounds and appearances, however. The text of the speech was very disquieting. It was a dreary succession of spending promises punctuated by recurrences to the call to war on climate change, and in international affairs, a prostration of this country before the United Nations. In policy terms, almost every sentence of the address was a disaster. It continues to be assumed that the climate is changing wildly outside historic cyclical fluctuations, a proposition for which there is scant evidence, that the cause is anthropogenic emissions (i.e. by humans) and that the result will be the swift deterioration and destruction of life itself if radical measures are not taken. We don’t know anything beyond the fact that there seems to be some change afoot. The scientific community is very divided and confesses to be seriously under-endowed with methods for measuring climate change. Ocean temperatures are variously and randomly calculated at different depths and by different types of equipment; the results vary widely and are ambiguous. The past 30 years of dire predictions from the alarmists, especially the scientifically illiterate ones like Al Gore and the Prince of Wales, have proved to be outright piffle.