By Vittorio Hernandez - AHN News Writer
Ontario, Canada (AHN) - Almost six thousand emailed responses favoring the retention of the Lord's Prayer in Ontario's Legislature's opening ceremony is not convincing enough for Premier Dalton McGuinty to change his mind.
He is still determined to remove the Pater Noster, even if one of those opposed to his move is his mother, a staunch Roman Catholic.
McGuinty cited the need to have a prayer that reflects the diversity of Ontario as his rationale for setting aside the Our Father. "This is not an easy thing for my mother," he admitted to the Canadian Press.
"But it's been said that our job is to represent the future to the present. We continue to change as province, as a society in terms of our make-up and our cultures and our faith," McGuinty explained.
The 5,700 emailed response caused a temporary crash of the province's website. As an interim measures, Ontarians jammed the province's hotline when the portal was offline.
A Conservative MP, who is also Jewish, admonished McGuinty to listen to popular sentiments. "I said the Lord's Prayer for 11 years of my life, every day of the week going to Protestant school... It didn't change me," MP Peter Shurman told the Canadian Press.
Shurman added that soldiers assigned to Iraq called the Pater Noster an IED or an improvised explosive device. Aware of the public outrage he faces, McGuinty is open to keeping it if the Our Father and another prayer would be used.
"One of the possibilities that keeps coming up, again and again, is that we both keep the Lord's Prayer and add another prayer on top of that which is rotated. I'm confident we will come up with something that is in keeping with our values here," the Ontario premier said.