Stompity

[trouble]

Dear Halifax:

I hate you and everything you stand for.

No love,

Me.

At least the liquor store was open since apparently no place else in the city is.

PS: I want Katie & Emmy to come home now. And Ginny! to get here. And Don to wake up. And a pony and free coffee forever.

Comments

[trouble]

Halifax, bless it, still has lots of closed shops every Sunday. They only recently repealed the Sunday Closing Laws, to much controversy because the general public voted against repealing them and the City did it anyway.

[silveradept]

Ah, sounds rather, ah... conservative, in the kind of "Everyone should be in church on Sunday and nowhere else" kind of way.

[scruloose]

Well, I voted against repealing the Sunday Closing law, but my reasoning had nothing to do with any conservative "Sunday is for church" mentality. I just thought it was cool that there was a guaranteed day off every week for people working crappy retail jobs. And a pretty high likelihood that their friends and loved ones would be off on the same day.

That, and I'm very against consumer culture and have limited patience for the notion that being denied shopping one day out of seven is some sort of major hardship.

[trouble]

That's great, for people who work Monday to Friday jobs. Saturday can be running around day, I guess, unless you practice a religion that doesn't allow for Saturday to be running around day. And it ignores that in Halifax smaller businesses were still open, and smaller businesses do shift work, too.

If it were about allowing a guaranteed day of, it could be Saturday. Mandating that everyone must observe Sunday Closing Laws is imposing Christian religious tradition on folks.

[scruloose]

These are good points. The two practical advantages I saw in the Sunday Closing law were that it gave the same day off to everyone who it covered (which, admittedly, did not include small corner stores etc), and that it was already in place and so didn't require arduous and unlikely-to-succeed campaigning to change the labour protection laws. Hell, the majority voted in a "binding" referendum to maintain the status quo and the arrogant Tory government just ignored it.

[trouble]

Yeah, that last bit is the bit that irritates the heck outta me. It's the same thing they did in Western Australia. There's been either two or three referendum that have clearly indicated that the general public does not want to go over to Daylight Savings Time (I think they were 70 or 80% against), and yet, they decided to do it "for a three year trial run" anyway because of business concerns.