The 150!Canada conference is in Ottawa this week. No not *that *Canada 150 conference…

What is the 150!Canada conference?

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It’s the first big meeting to begin planning the 150th celebration of Canadian Confederation. It’s an opportunity for public servants, business leaders, social innovators, and artists to gather in Ottawa and spend two days thinking about how we will celebrate the next great year in Canadian history. 2017 still seems far away. But the spirit of our Sesquicentennial starts in Spring 2010.

About

150!Canada is a new initiative from the Institute for the Public Administration of Canada to imagine, plan and celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017.

The Canada 150 conference is a “non-partisan” conference of Canadians organized by Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals:

This website is part of a national conversation about our country’s future.

We’re coming up on a rendezvous with destiny—in 2017, we’ll celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday.

What will we be celebrating that year? What kind of Canada do we want in 2017? And what do we have to do, today and tomorrow, to get there?

We need the next generation of bold ideas, to take our country forward.

So did the Liberals take the idea for their conference from somewhere? When was this idea conceived? A page from the Government of Canada (that’s the “Harper government” to its friends in the Liberal Party) website suggests that this idea was hatched long before Michael Ignatieff decided to unveil anything in the “vision” department for* Canada at 150*: