It is an ex-reference.

It has ceased to be.

Days after a CBC News story highlighted Canada’s judicial love affair with Monty Python, a B.C. judge has removed all references to the British comedy troupe’s iconic “dead parrot” sketch from a recent class-action certification decision in B.C.

When it was first published on Monday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ward Branch’s ruling in Krishnan vs. Jamieson Laboratories et al began with a wholesale rendering of the 1969 BBC television skit in which an irate Mr. Praline confronts a shifty shop owner over the purchase of a Norweigian Blue parrot that appears to have “shuffled off its mortal coil.”