Word: parliament
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...precisely 3 p.m., on Ottawa's Parliament Hill, a sleek maroon phaeton rolled up the curving drive. Several thousand sweltering spectators patted their hands in gentle applause. The car stopped at the great center doorway of the Parliament Building and out stepped Alexander Frederick Augustus William Alfred George Cambridge, first Earl of Athlone, and his wife, the Princess Alice. Athlone. for five years the representative in Canada of his nephew George VI, was on his way to perform for the last time the most impressive of a Canadian Governor General's functions-the formal opening of a session...
...Governor General ascended the thrones. After members of the House of Commons, summoned from down the hall, had crowded in, the Governor General began to read a speech -first in English (20 minutes), then all over again in halting French (half an hour). Then Canada's 20th Parliament, after the first really ritualistic opening in six years, got down to routine business...
Some of the legislation that it forecast was expected and routine. Parliament would be asked to approve the bright new United Nations Charter. It would be expected to pass bills to speed the country's return to peacetime life, to create peacetime jobs, to solve the Dominion's housing shortage. There would be legislation authorizing Canada's participation in international monetary agreements. A Veterans' Charter, something like the U.S.'s "G.I. Bill of Rights," would be created. But to Canadians the most interesting legislation in prospect involved the creation of a Canadian nationality and adoption...
Canada's flag will probably be the Red Ensign.* Usage has made it the Dominion's unofficial flag; it was flown from the Parliament Building's Peace Tower on V-E and V-J day. And if Mr. King has his way (which is almost certain in a House of Commons consisting of 126 Liberals against 119 members in opposition), soon Canadians would no longer have to identify themselves in legal matters as British subjects; they would be simply Canadians...
...without a Country. Belgium's tall, balding, repudiated King Leopold III was winding up an enforced St. Wolfgang vacation which had really been no vacation at all-just a parade of visiting politicians and prelates exhorting him to return to, or keep out of Belgium. But the Belgian Parliament had decided that he should not come home to Brussels. Last week the Swiss Government gave him permission to move into Switzerland, probably to his late father's chateau on Lake Lucerne. It was from there that he had set out ten years ago on the fatal motor tour...