So what say you - "Louis Riel Day?"

New February Holiday Perfect Time For Province To Honour The Founder of Manitoba
Get Riel
thisprovince

By Bartley Kives
Winnipeg Free Press
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Page F2

Thanks to the bravery and ambition of a stubborn weirdo who was prone to delusions of religious grandeur, every single Manitoban in now living in the Riel World.

Naturally , I'm talking about Louis Riel, the charismatic kook who founded this province, a man who was hanged by the feds for treason in 1885 but has long since been rehabilitated as a national hero.

Thanks to 122 years of hindsight, Canadians no longer view Riel as a murderous meglomaniac, but an upstanding and incorruptible statesman who just so happened to believe he was on a mission from God.

In modern pop culture, murderous megalomaniacs wind up on T-shirts and get treated like rock stars, which is now the crimes of cold-blooded ideologues like Che Guevara and bloodthirsty sadists like Charles Manson get whitewashed over the decades.

Louis Riel's fuzzy face does appear on some T-shirts, and he even looks a little like Guevara and Manson. But the man who founded Manitoba was not quite as fond of killing.

During the Red River Resistance in 1870, the Metis leader did make the mistake of ordering the execution of the racist settler Thomas Scott.

But all accounts of the 1885 Northwest Rebellion in Saskatchewan suggest Riel refused to take up arms against the Canadian government and actually thwarted the guerrilla tactics of his general, Gabriel Dumont.

Controversial both during his life and long after his death, Louis Riel was easily the most important Manitoban who ever lived. And while that may seem obvious to any casual student of Canadian history, it seems like the obvious needs to be stated right about now.

In case you've been too busy playing World of Warcraft to follow current events, you might have missed the recent announcementj of a new holiday heading to Manitoba.

Beginning in 2008, Manitobans will get to sleep in and watch mindless daytime television on the third Monday in February, the NDP government announced nine days ago.

Incredibly, the provincial government managed to get bullied into this new holiday by an unholy alliance of FM radio DJs and opposition MLAs, two acronyms who normally don't occupy the same universe. But Gary Doer's bizarre act of capitulation is not the inspiration for this week's rant - genuine political analysis is best left for the Comment section of this newspaper.

Even more incredibly, the NDP government announced it was going to enlist the help of Manitobans to name our new holiday - as if there could be any other logical choice besides Louis Riel Day.

Could any government be so ignorant of history and bereft of imagination that it would have to hold what amounts to a contest to avoid making what any Grade 5 student would deem to be an obvious choice?

Don't answer that question just jet because the jury's still out.

If Manitoba names its new holiday in honour of anything but Manitoba's founder, then we don't deserve to exist let alone enjoy another day off. And that's not just hyperbole.

The Metis-led Red River Resistance wasn't simply a land struggle between Franco-Manitoban Catholics and Anglo-Ontarian Protestants. It was also a decisive skirmish between the fledgling Canadian nation and an expansionist U.S. that would have only been too happy to expand north of the 49th parallel.

When Louis Riel petitioned Ottawa to admit Manitoba into Confederation, he also effectively kept us out of the United States.

The province needs to remember that Louis Riel is the man who made it possible for a supposedly socialist political party to take power in this idiosyncratic corner of the planet in the first place. If Manitoba ended up part of the Unitee States, social democrats could never have gotten elected and never would have had the chance to declare a new holiday.

Now, just in case you were wondering, I do not support the idea of Louis Riel Day out of any cultural or genetic loyalty. I barely know how to order poutine in French ("Je voudrais manager cholesterol?") and I do not have the honour of claiming any aboriginal descent.

Pedigree-wise, I'm merely an Eastern European Jew whose ancestors found their way to Canada from the Moldavian region of Romania and a part of Poland that now belongs to bleak, beleagured Belarus. There weren't many of my people in the Red River Settlement when Riel inspired a bunch of dairy farmers and bison hunters to take over Fort Garry.

I just know in my Semitic gut that honouring the man who made this province possible is the only credible reason to have a new holiday.

It's either Riel, or Winnie The Pooh - because nothing says Manitoba like a northern Ontario black bear that was shipped off to Europe during the First World War and then languished in a London zoo.

Do the right thing. Convince your local MLA to lean to Louis. In other words, it's time for the entire province to get Riel.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca