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editorial

A grateful nation thanks the government of Canada for building a nice-looking hockey rink on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to celebrate our country's 150th birthday. A grateful nation is not so sure about the rules, though.

No sticks. No pucks. No games of tag. No figuring skating. No yelling. Just skating around in circles, like a cabinet minister repeating a talking point in Question Period, but without the heckling.

This is fun designed by committee and filtered through the legal department of Heritage Canada, where lawyers obliged the minister to warn Canadians that the ice surface "might be slippery," and that Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada is not held liable if you fall and bruise your bum.

It raises the perplexing question of whether our government is familiar with the people it purports to represent. Canada is not some Hans Christian Andersen idyll, where people wearing baggy pants and large scarves skate leisurely with their hands behind their backs. Well, sometimes Canadians do that.

But in this country, the highest purpose of a patch of frozen, non-fishable water is to serve as a venue for a game of shinny, or as a place for youngsters to imagine that the dangles they are practising are causing breathless NHL scouts to call head office and say, "You gotta see this kid!"

When that patch of ice is a fully formed hockey rink, with boards and rounded corners and bleachers, and it is paid for by taxpayers, and it is located on Parliament Hill in the shadow of the Peace Tower, it practically becomes a moral requirement to make it available for late-night games of pickup hockey and Sunday morning one-on-ones.

What could be a better celebration of the game we invented than to let citizens fire snap shots up where the socks and underwear go at 10:15 p.m. on a Friday night, under the lights of Parliament?

Instead, other than one pee-wee tournament after Christmas, Canadians will skate in weary circles in 40-minute time slots allotted through a complicated online system not dissimilar to booking a table at a trendy, hard-to-get-into Toronto restaurant.

The Heritage Minister, Mélanie Joly, has agreed to keep the $5-million rink open past its original deadline of early January. It will now be available through February, or "during the winter," as unelected Canadians refer to the months during which outdoor rinks are supposed to be open.

Perhaps Ms. Joly could also be persuaded to set aside ice time for pickup games and the odd double axel. If you're going to celebrate Canada, do it right.

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