I recall a college history professor once saying that Richard Coeur de Lion is remembered as one of Britain’s greatest monarchs mostly because he spent a little less than six months of his ten-year reign in Britain. His brother John, who ruled as regent as Richard gallivanted across Europe, slaughtered infidels on crusade, and composed sophomoric poetry in the Provencal language, was left to run things, and so got blamed for the inevitable excesses of medieval royal government. The king-as-abstraction was “Good King Richard.”
The reality is certainly more complex than that, of course, but I cannot help thinking that my affection for Queen Elizabeth II, who died today at the age of 96, and for the Canadian Monarchy might have a lot to do with the fact that Her Majesty lived at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and only made occasional visits to my home country, where she was the Head of State for for 70 years, to open Parliament, “troop the colour,” and wave sweetly to her people.
Few of my American friends – and, to be sure, Canadians as well – fully grasp the fact that Her Majesty was not merely the Queen of the United Kingdom, and thus the Sovereign of Canada by default, but was in fact the Queen in Right of Canada under Canadian law. Part III, Section 9 of the Canadian Constitution declares that “Executive Government and Authority of and over Canada” is invested in the Queen. The Monarchy is a Canadian monarchy; so, even if Great Britain had suddenly become a republic, Elizabeth Windsor would have remained the Queen of Canada.
And this is not merely a legacy of Canada’s colonial past, either. Until 1982, the Constitution of Canada was the British North America Act, legislation adopted by Westminster in 1867, when Great Britain decided that it was time for us to get our own place and support ourselves. To be honest, adolescent Canada (the British North American colonies of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island) had become a money-pit for the British and our independence was as much a case of us being thrown, kicking and screaming no less, out of the UK as it was a question of national self-determination.
I have often thought that this goes a long way to explaining some of the complexities of Canadian culture, even the obsessiveness with which Canadians have spent the last 155 years asking if there really is a Canadian culture.
Some 40 years ago, then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the much-more-gifted father of our current PM, successfully repatriated the Canadian Constitution, so that it would exist in Canadian law as the Constitution Act, and not as a legislative instrument of another country (Britain) in whose Parliament we have no representation. Despite the snit thrown by Quebec’s nationalist provincial government at the time, it was an epochal moment in Canadian history, marking, in some ways, our real independence.
The framers of the Constitution of Canada introduced a number of innovations in 1982, the most important of which is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one of the most expansive and inclusive statements of political, civil, and human rights in the world. It is far from perfect, but if you wonder why Canada seems to have been spared much (thought not all) of the racist and white nationalist strife so common in the US these days, it has a lot to do with that. I can assure you that it is not because we are such nice people without a long and nasty history of racism and oppression. Canadian history is chock-a-block with atrocities, and a good many of us are thoroughly unpleasant; recall, for example, that Jordan Peterson is Canadian.
Yet, we somehow adopted a statement of rights that legally restrains many (though not all) of our worst impulses, and contains language like this:
(1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
(2) Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
While the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was the biggest innovation introduced in the Constitution Act of 1982, its framers included a fairly lengthy list of changes, from a clear amending formula, to a statement of Indigenous rights (which, to be fair, Canadian governments have tended to observe in neglect). The thinking at the time was, “well, since we’re here, we should fix a few things.”
The Canadian Monarchy, however, was not something that anyone seriously considered “fixing.” Sure, there have been republican organizations throughout Canadian history, and there were a few scattered republican voices around the time of the repatriation of the Constitution, but it didn’t amount to much at all. From what I can tell, in fact, Citizens for a Canadian Republic is much a much tinier organization than the tiny Monarchist League of Canada, and has only been around since 2022. It is hard to find a Canadian who has strong feelings either way – I even remember once, when a reporter asked René Lévesque about his opinion of the Monarchy, the Quebec independence leader answered with his characteristic shrug.
Part of the reason for that is that the Canadian Monarchy just sort of works, and like a car part or bodily organ that keeps quietly humming along, you rarely think of it when it does. Sure, gallstones are agonizing, but until we get them, does anyone really put much energy into thinking about where bile comes from, or how the gall bladder works? So Her Majesty appears on our money and stamps, and makes occasional visits to cut ribbons and wave, and no one is really bothered by it.
A big part of that is because the Canadian Monarchy is already something of a republican institution. Canadian constitutional theory and practice are based on the same theory of Parliamentary Supremacy as Britain’s, but they are reinforced by a series of legal and procedural precedents since the King-Byng crisis of 1926. Since that time, the Canadian Crown, in the form of the the Queen’s viceroy, has been firmly under the control of Parliament. The elected Prime Minister appoints the Governor General, who acts on behalf of the Sovereign in her absence, and neither they, nor the Queen herself, can really refuse to execute the will of Parliament.
In effect, in Canadian law and practice, the monarchy is created, controlled, and directed by the people through their elected representatives.
It is not correct to say, however, that the Monarch is a mere figurehead; the constitutional relationship between Crown and Commons is, in fact, much more complex and subtle. The Prime Minister cannot simply enact laws passed by Parliament at will; the Canadian legislative process is long and, to be blunt, somewhat labored, and requires the government to explain itself, twice to the Parliamentary (Her Majesty’s Loyal) Opposition, then to the unelected Senate, whose 105 members are appointed to lengthy terms by the current and previous governments to provide a “sober second thought,” and then finally to the Governor General. The Senate can even send legislation back to the House of Commons for amendment and reconsideration.
It is, to be honest, an extraordinarily inefficient process, but its inefficiencies are what makes it work so effectively; it makes clear that government is not merely a machine, but a complex network of relationships and responsibilities between people, communities, and regions that, at its best, produces great transparency and, in forcing the government to make its case over and over again, finally to the Sovereign – who does not actually have the power to say now – demands clarity and a well-thought-out case. It does embody feudal obligations, like those enumerated in the Magna Carta that King John was forced to sign, but also more modern ideas of sovereignty rooted in the Glorious Revolution and the Enlightenment.
The Crown has no actual power, yet it contains vast meaning. In constitutional theory, it is not a single person, but the Sovereign of the nation, and it stands outside of partisanship and politics. That is particularly true in Canada, where the person of the Queen was rarely present, and where precedent and law limited her power and the power of her viceroys. Moreover, there is a paradox built into the Canadian Monarchy, where the democratically-elected government must seek the approval of the Governor General, which it appoints, who represents the Sovereign people, in whose name they cannot deny their approval.
In the absence of a resident monarch, the Canadian monarchy is, in effect, the abstraction of an abstraction, of an abstraction. To be blunt: It is absurd. It is a theatrical production with no real function beyond the symbolic, evoking a long-obsolete system of hereditary privilege and power (which it no longer actually has) that does what exactly? It is a head-scratcher, yet it does a great deal. Moreover, its absurdity goes a long way to explaining why (in Canada, at least) it works and why, despite everything, I remain attached to it.
A symbolic office of power based a paradox cannot, for example, assume autocratic power. By rights, an elected head of state – a president – should ensure far more democratic republican rule than a monarch whose claim to the office rests on their descent from a distaff branch of a medieval hereditary monarchy. Yet, as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and any number of other presidents of our recent and not-so-recent acquaintance have demonstrated so effectively, that is not necessarily the case. An elected president is, often enough, a political president, and thus not the embodiment of the Sovereign people but the agent of a faction of it.
Yet, democracy demands the legitimacy conferred by the sovereign outside of the political process itself, and this is what the Canadian monarchy does. Seven of the top-15 countries on the Economist Magazine’s Democracy Index are monarchies, in fact. When American liberals and progressives point to their favorite global models of functioning, humane, democratic societies, they invariably gesture toward places like Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and even Canada. All are monarchies. All, strangely enough, work.
This is not to say that a monarchy is necessary to build and maintain a democratic society, or that all monarchies are democratic societies. The heads-of-state of countries like Finland, Iceland, and Ireland – often mentioned in the same breath as the Nordic and Commonwealth monarchies – are elected presidents, not kings and queens. Yet, these too are purely symbolic offices, with as much, and as little real power as a constitutional monarch. What seems to makes for truly democratic, or republican executive power is not how the officeholder is chosen, but the extent to which it stands apart from politics and how it embodies the abstract ideal of the Sovereign.
In concrete terms, I can only suspect that Queen Elizabeth could be as unpleasant as any 96-year-old upper-class British matron could be. I cannot doubt that, living in the lap of luxury, isolated from the plebs, she harbored the typical bigotries and prejudices of her class. Yet, for all of this, I never doubted her humanity, particularly when I tuned into the Christmas Message every year. She loved her family and, I could always sense, she regarded her people in Britain and the Commonwealth realms as family – as paternalistic as that might have been. And she was always there, on the job, doing her duty even when she disapproved of it, representing something outside of politics on our money and stamps, and marking us Canadians as part of a community apart from our neighbors to the south and our former masters across the sea. She was my queen.
I remember watching the television coverage of the quadcentenary of John Cabot’s voyage to North America in St. John’s, Newfoundland – at the easternmost tip of my homeland. Her Majesty, in a teal coat and hat, was greeted a group of Newfoundland dog breeders, including my beloved aunt Margot. One of the dogs (it might have been my aunt’s dog Tuck) jumped up to lick the Queen of Canada in the face… and she smiled. It was a moment of high slapstick comedy that embodied, in a brief moment, the profound, rich, meaningful absurdity of the Canadian Monarchy, and the impossible, Rube Goldberg nature of Canada’s postmodern nationhood that really should not work, yet somehow – despite our history, our baggage, and our shortcomings – still mostly manages to function. It needs work, to be sure, but it can be repaired and tuned-up.
I cannot imagine what happens next, after the grand old lady’s funeral, and the installation of the new monarch. I am appalled by the intersection of the Crown, as a symbolic constitutional institution, and 21st century celebrity celebrity culture, though that might just be a function of my revulsion for celebrity influencers and reality television. I find the Royal Family’s wealth nauseating, and I would dearly love to see all but the reigning monarch and their immediate family struck from the list in the style of the Nordic “bicycle monarchies.” I have little confidence in the next generations’ ability to approach the symbolic theatre of embodying the Sovereign with the dignity, and occasional humor, that Elizabeth II brought to the role.
But I am willing to be surprised. I can only hope that King Charles, if that is the regnal name he chooses, will bear the crown, orb, and sceptre with the sense of duty that his late mother demonstrated, and which the absurdity of the the Canadian Monarchy so dearly deserves.
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Image: Her majesty Queen Elizabeth II opens the Canadian Parliament and delivers the Speech From the Throne on 8 October 1977. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, with rose, is in the background.