The Alberta Legislature's Five-Decade-Old Hamburger
Yep, that is a thing...
There are a lot of weird pieces of the past that you can find from around Canada, but one of the weirdest might just be a hamburger, preserved in resin, in the Alberta Legislature.
That hamburger has been part of the Legislative Library there for over 50 years, and how it got there is a story unto itself.
It was back on March 27, 1969 when Clarence Copithorne, an Independent MLA (he joined the Progressive Conservatives in 1970), spoke up about the poor quality of the food in the Legislature Cafeteria.
Copithorne was the MLA for Banff-Cochrane and during a debate he stood up and stated,
“When talking about supply, one thing they should supply us with right upstairs is good nourishment at noon.”
He then pulled out a sorry-looking hamburger from the cafeteria and said,
“The honourable ministers can ask themselves why they can’t do something about this.”
The hamburger was given to the Legislative Pages, who would give it to the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly, N.H. MacDonald. It was an official document, in a way, and MacDonald added the hamburger to the record by preserving it in resin.
A note on the hamburger stated that Sessional Paper 301 was tabled in the Legislative Assembly on March 27, 1969 and was certified as an original document.
The burger was given back to Copithorne after it was catalogued. He took it home and there it remained. Copithorne died in 1979, and his son found the hamburger in 2008 (some sources say 2006) in the garage. It was given to the Legislature Library soon after it was found.
This wasn’t the only piece of food tabled as an official document. In 1978, the students of Hairy Hill School baked a loaf of bread and that was tabled by an MLA that year. The bread is long gone and all that remains is the piece of paper identifying it.
There is also a piece of light-rail transit track, an unopened can of golden caviar and an old bag of dirt.
You won’t see anything like this added to the Legislative Library again. In 2002, the rules were changed to only allow paper-based items to be tabled in the Legislature.