"If, in 50 more years, we wish our descendants to celebrate Canada’s 200th anniversary, then we must be all we can be in the world today, and we must shoulder a bigger load, in a world that will require it of us.”
See that? There's an 'if' there at the start of the sentence. As opposed to, oh, maybe just after the first comma. Which would have made celebration conditional, not the country. Perhaps there might've been incorporated some sentence construction using the ever so promising and hopeful ' when'.
Now, some might put this little bit 'if-off' as just an oversight on the part of the speechwriter. If so, then the speechwriter ought to be sh!t-canned for supplanting the optimistic 'when' (i.e, leadership) for - the point of Well's post - the conditional 'if' (a shrug).
Lest this observation be pooh-poohed as so much pedantic nitpicking (here, as opposed to Wells) it's worthwhile to recall that, apparently, we are to believe *nothing* gets by this guy, So, Wells' question is totally germane and ought be pursued. Because, on the basis of this grammatical nicety, one gets the impression that Harper doesn't a) plan for the 'millennial changes shaking our times', or b) give a sh!t.
Neither is the stuff of greatness. And coming from the guy who articulated thusly...
"Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion."
...it's a cause to wonder, at the very least, what is this guy thinking?
