Juno News - December 06, 2019Bureaucrats worried Jack and Jill STI poem not “inclusive” enough
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
175.88869
Summary
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, but they forgot something they need. Should have wrapped it up. Oh my, now both have an STI. And the tweet was deleted a few hours later.
Transcript
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Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. You've heard that poem your entire life.
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It's one of the most familiar poems that exists in the English language. But for government,
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it's not enough just to let sleeping dogs lie. They had to make it about STIs. But they couldn't
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even do that in a way that didn't overcomplicate it, fill it with political correctness, and make
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it so that it eventually had to get pulled from circulation. This is what happened back in the
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fall when Health Canada decided on Random Acts of Poetry Day to put out a little modified and not
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safe for work version of the Jack and Jill poem. This is what Health Canada tweeted.
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Jack and Jill did the deed, but they forgot something they need. Should have wrapped it up. Oh my. Now
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both have an STI. Now it wasn't long after that that the tweet was deleted. We'll get to the reason why
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in just a moment. But this tweet actually took nine bureaucrats to come together and approve it,
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and there were still concerns that it wasn't inclusive enough. For example, when you translate
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it to French, it doesn't rhyme and it doesn't have the same effect. So that was seen to have been a
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problem. They had to create a French alternative about Paul et Pauline. Another concern is that Jack
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and Jill is just a standard heterosexual couple. That wasn't going to be inclusive enough. Someone
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suggested they instead make it about Jack and Max, even though Jack and Max is not the one that went
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up to fetch the pail of water that everyone knows, thus defeating the purpose of this STI version of
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the poem. There was a compromise that someone tried to put in there. They made their own poem that was
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about a same-sex couple that never made it into circulation. Here was that one. Jack and John did the
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deed. Jack had a drip he didn't heed. Should have wrapped it up. Oh my, now they both have an STI.
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Now that is some raunchy stuff coming from Health Canada. That one never made it through.
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I don't know what it means that Jack had a drip he didn't heed, and you know what? I'm okay not
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knowing for the time being. But this is what it took. At one point, the tweet was put out to a panel
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of eight bureaucrats as someone demanded a scientific assessment. They wanted to know if this was going to
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be something that could get approval as scientifically and factually accurate so that they could put this
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tweet into the pipeline for receiving approval, development of images, translation, and scheduling.
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This is all for a tweet. Nine people going over a 24-word poem. This is how government decides it's
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going to do things. Now this all comes from an access to information package from Health Canada. It was
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procured by lawyer and prolific tweeter Kevin Wiener, who is kind enough to share it with me.
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163 pages of documents, mostly emails, going over the Twitter schedule for Health Canada,
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and back and forth on this tweet. How to make it more inclusive. At one point, they're resigned to
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accept that they can't do it in French. They can't do it with a same-sex couple. So one bureaucrat from
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Health Canada promises they will endeavor to do more inclusive poems in the future. But none of them,
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in the course of investigating this, saw that Jack and Jill were traditionally siblings. So the fact
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that Jack gave Jill an STI is problematic for a number of reasons. The tweet was pulled about an
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hour after it was posted. A chain of emails came through Health Canada, wondering what to do about
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it, how to respond to media inquiries. The Privy Council got involved, which is the bureaucratic arm of
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the Prime Minister's office. And at one point, Health Canada promised that it would have no more poems
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until after the federal election. This was just a few weeks before Canadians went to the polls.
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But yes, the most complicated 24-word poem in the history of the English language, apparently,
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and only an hour until it was gone. Or I guess we should say gonorrhea. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.