Wherein my late grandfather predicted the current state of Canadian politics over 50 years ago

One of my grandmother's treasured possessions back in the old country was her family crest from her family of origin. It had been handed down for generations since before memory. You see, my grandparents lived in an area of what is now Poland that had, for as long as anyone could remember, been passed back and forth from one oppressor to another, and the family crest reminded them of where they really came from and who they really were, regardless of who the occupying force of the day was.

I was recently trying to google up a picture of the family crest so we could make a new one for my grandmother to put on her wall, and I stumbled upon an interesting factoid. It seems that the presence of a family crest likely means that we are the descendants of szlachta, a long-defunct type of nobility. Our noble ancestors would have been deposed in the late 18th century by the conquering empire of the day, but if we could just figure out how to trace our genealogy back another 100 years past where we've got it now, we'll likely turn up noble lineage dating back as early as the 1300s. Kind of cool, although obviously doesn't apply to us any more after generations of war and oppression. My grandparents were raised on farms and worked in factories to support their children, my parents were the first generation in living memory to scramble their way up to white collar, and my generation is hanging onto that white collar by our fingernails.

When my grandparents decided to pack up their worldly possessions and get on a boat for Canada, my grandfather insisted that my grandmother had to leave the family crest behind. For reasons that none of us understood, he thought that having the crest among their possessions might be frowned upon, or even get them turned out of Canada.

My grandfather passed away nearly 12 years ago. But it turns out he was a very prescient man.