Canada celebrates Platinum Jubilee in style
Canadians across the country organized parties, donned traditional British garb and planted trees over the weekend as they joined the world in celebrating the Queen's Platinum Jubilee marking her 70 years on the throne.
The Canadian festivities were more muted affairs compared with the boisterous, four-day party that took place in London in honour of the occasion.
But Canadian fans still found ways to mark the historic milestone — a first for a British ruler — in their own ways.
Alula Hilawe, a tour guide for the Town of Sackville, N.B., said he helped set up the town's Jubilee celebration tea service at the Marshlands Inn, the very place where the queen stayed when she visited in 1984.
Plenty of attendees were old enough to recall that royal visit and shared their experience meeting the queen, Hilawe said.
Saskatoon resident Tracy Pytlowany said the jubilee lunches people held across the U.K. inspired her to host a lunch of her own.
The Saturday — afternoon affair included sandwiches, British-inspired gin-based cocktails and British beers that Pytlowany said she managed to find from scouring the liquor stores.
Though she had made a very light request for the party's dress code, Pytlowany said her friends decided to take their attire much further and were “super participatory.”
A friend's husband, who is Scottish, came in a full kilt, while other men showed up sporting bow ties, Pytlowany said.
“Everybody was wearing a hat of some kind, whether it was something they got at Value Village — like mine was, and I decorated it — or it was some fascinator that they had from a wedding they were in.”
Peter Maharaj, president of the Canadian Indo Caribbean Organization of Ottawa, said the group held a local celebration in honour of the queen over the weekend and described her as the “heart of the Commonwealth.”
About 300 people attended, enjoying a buffet of tandoori and butter chicken and watching performances that included The Sons of Scotland Pipe Band, Bollywood dancers and a singer who delivered a rendition of God Save The Queen.
“The place was rocking, believe me. Everybody was dancing to all the different types of music,” he said.
The event was a hybrid celebration for the queen as well as a recognition of Indian Arrival Day, a public holiday in Trinidad and Tobago which commemorates the arrival of Indians to the Caribbean to work as indentured servants, said Maharaj.
“It gave us a good reason to add it, since we are a large part of the British Commonwealth and British heritage,” he said.
A spokesperson for Rideau Hall issued a statement on Sunday saying the Governor General's official residence had been the backdrop for several Jubilee festivities, including The Canadian Heraldic Authority creating Canada's own unique emblem for the milestone.
The City of Toronto said it planted 70 large trees, one for each year of the queen's reign, throughout Rowntree Mills Park, attended by Mayor John Tory and Ontario Lieut. Gov. Elizabeth Dowdeswell.