This is hardly accidental. It has been the deliberate policy of successive federal governments of both stripes, who have done their best to belittle and diminish the monarchy—“like the urchin,” in the journalist Peter Brimelow’s immortal phrase, “secretly urinating on some shrub in the hope that it will die.” The Queen’s recent honouring of Jean Chrétien was more than a little ironic in this regard, given that the most Chrétien ever offered in the way of a public show of allegiance was the bland observation that, well, you know, it was the system we have. In most countries loyalty to the head of state—that is, to the existing constitutional order—is the first duty of citizens. Here it is a kind of rebellion, the obsession of a radical fringe group dismissively referred to as “monarchists.”
But it is not only that. If we are honest, even we monarchists must acknowledge that there is something flawed in the institution itself. If the Queen, her heirs and successors have all but disappeared from Canadian public consciousness, it may be because they are hardly ever here. Once, when Canadians felt themselves an integral part of the British Empire, it might have been possible for the Queen to remain in her present position of absentee landlord. Not so today. We can remind people all we like that she is legally Queen of Canada, not Queen of England-thus-of-Canada, but they won’t feel it. And the more that modernizers like Charles attempt to make the monarchy more relevant, by diving into issues of everyday life in Britain, the more remote he will seem to Canadians.
The problem is not the monarchy, as such. It is its delegated status. There’s an outdated colonial relic in our constitutional firmament, but it isn’t the monarchy. It’s the Governor General. If the monarchy is to be a lived reality in Canada and not merely a constitutional principle, if it is to fulfill its traditional role as a focus of allegiance—symbol, as the poet Ted Hughes has said, of the “spiritual unity of the tribe”—it can no longer fob us off with former speech writers and mid-level CBC journalists, the stuff of recent governor general appointments. We need the real thing.
At one point, years ago, it was suggested that Prince Andrew should take it upon himself to cross the pond and start a new wing of the dynasty. It’s probably getting a little late for him. But . . . well, what about Prince Harry? We know the role that William will play, once his grandmother and father have passed on, in which service he is already being trained. But Harry is looking forward to a lifetime of feckless indulgence. Doubtless that has its charms, but if he’d like to perform some more useful role, reviving the monarchy in its largest dominion would be a good life’s work.
Imagine not just a King of Canada, but a Canadian King: living here, raising a family here, his children speaking in Canadian accents, in both official languages. Perhaps Harry will take some convincing, giving up London for Ottawa. But if he cares about the remarkable institution into which he was born, he should be prevailed upon to take one for the team.
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