The Throne Speech and Canadian Sovereignty

I realize that I’ve landed myself in territory I’ve generally stayed away from: Canada and the monarchy. Not straightforward, lots of nuance and very legitimately two sides. So rather than continue to navigate the choppy waters of social media, I shall share some thoughts here.

All of this was of course provoked by the fact that somewhat to my own surprise I had quite a strong reaction to the news that King Charles has been invited to Canada in three weeks’ time to deliver our new government’s Throne Speech. When there were rumours of that possibility a few days ago I dismissed it as nonsense.  I thought it was a bad call both strategically and as a matter of principle.  And I naively thought it would go nowhere. But that was not to be so. The King has been invited. And the King is coming.

It is being portrayed as a strong demonstration of Canada’s sovereignty, a pushback assumedly against Donald Trump’s endless assertions that we would be better off as the 51st state. I see that argument, but nonetheless for me it conveys exactly the opposite message.  And I feel that, rather unexpectedly, quite strongly.

First, though, let me get the elephant out of the way. Do I want to see the monarchy abolished?

Full disclaimer and a short diversion: as a young boy I was rather monarchist starstruck. That all traces back to the summer of 1973 when, eleven years old, I was part of the Little Guys troupe with the Young Canadians, singing and dancing at the evening grandstand show at the Calgary Stampede. One night that summer, the Queen and Prince Philip were in attendance (on a Canadian tour as I recall marking the 100th anniversary of the RCMP).  They came onto the stage after the show and stopped along the way for various conversations with us, the performers. 

Among others, the Queen stopped in front of me (perhaps my flaming red hair caught her attention) and I nervously did my best to answer her questions, certain I would get the protocol -- particularly when to use majesty, ma’am or your highness -- all wrong. She assured me she had enjoyed the show thoroughly and asked me how long I had been singing and dancing. I imagine the whole exchange was less than two minutes long.  Didn’t leave much of an impression with her, though, as a decade later, I spent a summer mixing drinks and serving food in a hotel bar/restaurant just a block away from Buckingham Palace, and never got a request to pop by and entertain her again (good thing as my singing voice had not survived puberty).  Thus ended my brush with royalty.

Back to the elephant. If I was able to go back to 1867 and reinvent and reimagine Canada, I would have almost certainly opted for something other than the monarchy. But here we are 150+  years later, and our entire parliamentary and legislative system is built around it. To undo that would clearly be a constitutional bridge too far. And for all its deeply offensive, sexist, racist and classist underpinnings, the model of a constitutional monarchy has been relatively stable.

Where I land today, therefore, is being a strong supporter of the Crown, as an institution, and of there being individuals appointed to roles that embody and represent the Crown in our democracy.

I would certainly prefer if we did not look to individuals who over the centuries have been born or married into the Crown, not earned it, or who seized it through violence or deceit; and who have consistently refused to take accountability for the grievous harms they have inflicted, across the “Empire”.

That is why I am more comfortable, inspired and feel better represented by Mary Simon as my Crown, than Charles R. 

I am certainly no proponent of an elected Crown, one more office to become nastily politicized (yes I know that Governor General and Lieutenant Governor appointments are political, but not divisively so, generally).

And I am very conscious of how central the Crown is to treaties, obligations and relationships with Indigenous Peoples in Canada. We simply cannot walk away from that.

I suppose my vision of the Crown in today’s Canada would be to hear as little as possible from Buckingham Palace, and certainly to move away from the pomp and circumstance of official visits and functions to and for the realm.  Maybe a bit more “out of sight, out of mind”.  And to instead fully and truly lift up and embrace the Crown’s representatives in Canada who are, after all, from here, from among us, and truly do represent us collectively as that Crown.

But what of the question that is in front of us, who best to sit on the Throne in the Senate Chamber and read out that speech on May 27th? If this is all about puffing our chest with pride and gratitude that King Charles has come calling to do so, does that strategically or as a matter of principle trumpet our sovereignty? Are we robustly sovereign when we have to call in a foreign sovereign from across the sea to demonstrate that sovereignty to someone who wants to strip it away; someone whose own country was founded in rejecting that very same sovereign nearly 250 years ago? 

Not in my mind. Instead it says we are sufficiently timid about our sovereignty that we have to look outside the country for someone to bolster it (yes someone whose role is entrenched in our constitution and steeped in our history, but still, from outside the country). 

And that we do so when we have, for the first time in our history, a representative of the Crown who is Indigenous, an Inuit woman whose people’s authority to assert and demonstrate sovereignty in these lands could not be greater. Yet we expect her to take a back seat to a white man from England.

What says “we are not you” to Donald Trump with greater pride and conviction: a Governor General who begins the Throne Speech with words in Inuktitut that have echoed for thousands of years in these lands, or a King whose favour and approval Donald Trump desperately craves?

I get the arguments that this may show him that we have strong and longstanding connections to other countries that set us apart from the 50 states he would have us join, and that he therefore messes with us at his peril. The King, after all, has our back. But I can also readily see him saying, Canada is so much not a nation on its own terms that it has to look back 150+ years into history and reach across the Atlantic Ocean to find someone to state the country’s case. He would say it is just a matter of Canada trading one foreign king for another, which we know is his deluded sense of self. (And yikes, why am I in any way trying to assign logic to the man.)

I’m not saying abolish the monarchy or disown the King. And I do embrace the place and importance of the Crown in Canada’s constitutional framework and relationship with Indigenous Peoples.  I’m just disappointed at our choice of who, as representative of the Crown, we are asking to give expression to and of our sovereignty at this critical juncture.