I thought of my late father often last week as I followed Elizabeth II on her Golden Jubilee tour around the country. Part of this was because my dad was an ardent monarchist, though not the earnest sort who joins the Monarchist League or the like. His regard for and connection to the Crown was quiet and personal, born in his service in the Royal Canadian Air Force and the time he spent stationed in England during the Second World War and the reign of King George VI.
Whenever I headed off to cover a royal event — then working for other newspapers, I did a couple of Canadian tours and covered, from a fixed position on a statue in The Mall, the wedding of Prince Charles to Diana in London — he would grin, and growl the same thing: “When you see the Queen, tell her that your father worked for her father.”
And part of it was because, from time to time, usually when the federal Liberals did something particularly odious, my dad would rue aloud the non-existent tradition of political assassination in this country.
Note to the literal-minded and anyone from The Toronto Star who has accidentally picked up the National Post: He wasn’t ever really going to shoot anyone, with the possible exception of Pierre Trudeau, whom he both loathed and admired, the way you do a worthy opponent. So far as I know, the only gun my dad ever fired in his life was a BB gun, and he certainly never owned any weapons outside of a Luftwaffe dagger and an old Irish shillelagh, with which he armed himself only before he had ascertained that the great noise on our front porch in the wee hours was in fact coming from Bliss Brown, our next-door neighbour in my hometown of Noranda, Que., who sometimes, when he had a few too many, would forget which door was his and would attempt to break down ours.
But, like my father, I felt the dearth of that darker tradition acutely last week as, in the self-serving hands of the federal government organizers of Her Majesty’s travels, I watched as various ministers of the Crown greeted and then glommed on to the Queen as she made her way from the new territory of Nunavut to British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario, and now to New Brunswick before winding up in Ottawa, where she will be led about by none other than Deputy Prime Minister John Manley.
Were my father alive, it would have been Mr. Manley’s blood he’d be after. As for me, it’s a tossup who occupies the number one ranking — Mr. Manley or the ubiquitous Heritage Minister, Sheila Copps.
The point, I suppose, is that the monarchy is an acquired, or perhaps more properly, an inherited taste. Beyond those of my father’s generation, those who have it, in this country, in the main hail from other Commonwealth countries, or from mother England herself; or they come from families with a military background; or they have miraculously learned their Canadian history outside of the various provincial curricula which emphasize uniformly the narrow post-Second World War view of Canada as noble peacekeeping-cum-diplomatic power.
There are a surprising number of such Canadians yet about, as evidenced by the crowds that greeted her everywhere and who occasionally were able to get, over the plethora of Liberal-connected pols who got the prime viewing positions almost everywhere, an actual glimpse of the Queen.
They are not the wankers, either, that Mr. Manley and his ilk would have you believe.
The most startling email I received during the tour came from a colleague at a Vancouver newspaper, who wrote, unbidden: “. . . this week’s stuff on the Queen . . . bleeeech. You are no doubt aware roughly half of Canadians don’t want the monarchy. I guess out on the hustings, you’re seeing only the celebrity watchers. Pity.”
To my knowledge, mind, not once did she get off her ass or out of her office to see for herself. Pity, for if she had she would have found very few folks in search of celebrities. That arena, and I grant you it is pathetic, was the late Diana’s purview, not the Queen’s.
In Victoria, for instance, at the Christ Church Cathedral where the Queen and Prince Philip said Sunday prayers, one of those waiting for her was Shirley Armstrong, who had come from the town of Creston near the border with Alberta.
To the astonishment of the handful of us who interviewed her, Mrs. Armstrong described this day as “the highlight of my life.”
The highlight, or one of them?
"The highlight,” she repeated. We walked away, feeling a little smug.
"That’s sad,” someone said, and indeed it appeared to be so: Mrs. Armstrong is a woman of a certain age, and I wondered if perhaps she was what used to be called a spinster, without much else in her life. So I returned to inquire, and learned that she was retired from a long-held job at a resource centre for the mentally challenged; that she was married; that she had three grown children, and that by her side was a beloved great-niece. She had, in fact, a richer life than most of those who had felt pity for her. And it was these solid values of her own life — family, responsibility and duty — that Mrs. Armstrong most admired about the Queen.
It is instructive to consider how the Queen is regarded by those in my business who know her best, the royal photographers and writers who trail her around from country to country on these visits — the self-described “creme de la scum” of the press. They are a naturally irreverent lot; being British, they also tend to the profane and bitterly funny. Yet, over the years, I think it’s fair to say that almost to a man, they have come to rather like both the woman, and the institution.
The proper question, for Canadians, is who and what on Earth would replace the monarchy? Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson is an immensely personable woman with a genuine common touch, lovely one-on-one with people, and a perfect foil for the reserve and dignity of the Queen.
But when push comes to shove, as it did last fall when she sent off the troops to the war on terrorism, Ms. Clarkson sounded for all the world like any other member of the government that appointed her, urging the members of the Canadian Forces who were heading off to war not to hate, but to remain ambassadors for the grand Liberal experiment of “a multicultural, immigrant, aboriginal and bilingual community” — hardly the ringing sort of address the Queen delivered to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Hamilton this week.
Do Canadians trust these people, none of whom — not Jean Chretien, not Ms. Copps, not Ms. Clarkson, not Mr. Manley — can even find a capable speech writer to come up with a better alternative? Do Canadians have confidence that Mr. Chretien, or his equivalent from any of the other federal parties, has the imagination to come up with the “uniquely Canadian institution” casually tossed off by Mr. Manley, let alone the integrity to do it without yielding to partisan politics?
Thus, one half of the equation centres on the monarchy itself, which has proven itself again on this tour a valuable and apolitical creation with genuine connections to a remarkable number of Canadians. The other lies with the federal political landscape and its unbearably shallow talent pool.
So I thought of my father often, torn between the same extremes that governed him: outright pleasure at the sight of the Queen and her evident importance to so many of my countrymen; fantasies of a grassy knoll for one or another of her Liberal escorts. My father worked for hers, on the one hand. And my father would have had them in his sights, on the other. It’s as good a definition of Canadian as any other.