Winston Churchill's address to the Canadian Parliament of 30 December 1941 was made in Ottawa, shortly after the United States had joined the Allies in World War II (on account of the Pearl Harbor attack). The Canadian Senate was also in attendance. It is sometimes referred to by its most noted passage, "Some chicken! Some neck!"
Winston Churchill had sailed from England to the United States less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attack, leaving London on 12 December 1941 and arriving in America on 22 December. There he stayed for the next four weeks, mostly conferring with President Roosevelt and forming a strong personal bond as well. On 26 December 1941 he addressed the United States Congress with a speech titled "What kind of a people do they think we are?", which drew thunderous applause from the American lawmakers.
Churchill took a short side trip to Canada, where twenty thousand people filled the streets around Ottawa's Union Station to greet him. Thousands more cheered him as he rode to Rideau Hall.
Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King had suggested that Churchill speak at the Château Laurier, but Churchill preferred the Canadian House of Commons, where he addressed the Canadian Parliament and Senate.
The speech was filmed, and broadcast nationwide, and drew much interest and enthusiasm. The speech lasted for 37 minutes, with much defiant and stirring oratory:
Later came the passage with the famous phrase:
"Some chicken!" elicited mild laughter from the assembled dignitaries, while "Some neck!" brought forth loud peals of laughter. (The phrase was perhaps a form of ; Robert and Susan Cockcroft described it as transforming, rather than rejecting, the original insult, an example of a persuasive rhetorical device they call the similarity model of argument.)
Churchill, who spoke French, included a short passage in that language (at the suggestion of Mackenzie King):
which translates to
Churchill ended the speech with:
According to Stanley Weintraub, the enthusiastic approval of Churchill's speech by both Francophone and Anglophone lawmakers also served to defuse the internal Canadian issue caused by the Free French Capture of Saint Pierre and Miquelon against the orders of the Royal Canadian Navy just days earlier.
Shortly after Churchill left the stage, Yousuf Karsh took the famous photograph The Roaring Lion (in the photograph, a bit of the speech may be seen poking out of Churchill's left jacket pocket).