Secret Of The Crown

THE SECRET OF THE CROWN

Canada’s Affair with Royalty

John Fraser

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fraser, John, 1944–
The secret of the crown : Canada’s affair
with royalty / John Fraser.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 978-1-77089-055-8
1. Monarchy—Canada—History. 2. Royalists—Canada—
History. 3. Great Britain—Kings and rulers. I. Title.
FC246.M6F73 2012 320.471 C2011-904021-2

Jacket design: Alysia Shewchuk

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

FOR FRIENDSHIP AND INSPIRATION,

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

Michael Valpy
Journalist, Socialist, Monarchist

and

Michael Bliss
Historian, Conservative, Republican

and in grateful memory to Georges and Pauline Vanier

Prologue

Why Secret?

“I would like to affirm before you tonight that wherever the future may take us, my admiration and affection for Canada and Canadians everywhere is, and will always remain, clear, strong and sure.”

— The Queen, in Quebec during the Golden Jubilee of her Accession to the throne, 2002

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT THE Crown in Canada. As a study or polemic, it is both personal and selective. It is not a history any more than it is a constitutional treatise, although history and the constitution are crucial ingredients in the tale. Instead, it is an attempt to confirm to those who believe in the Crown in Canada why they are wise to hold on to that belief, and it is also an attempt to explain to those who “don’t get it” why there are good reasons not to sacrifice the Crown on an altar of national or patriotic logic based on some aspects of contemporary (and transient) sentiment. If my account of the institution cannot win them over, so be it, but I want to say right at the beginning to such readers: thank you for hearing me out. On the other hand, it is not a book for those who see the Queen and the Royal Family as “parasites” or as hopelessly chipped heirlooms from a forgotten era. I leave them happily with their fantasies and their ignorance of our country’s history and traditions.

That said, no one is more surprised to be writing such a book than myself. To write confidently any sort of positive book on the role of the monarchy in Canada a few years ago would have been almost unthinkable. Out of sheer brazen affection for the institution, the deed could have been done, but a publisher would have been hard to find. Even if such a book had seen the light of day outside of a specialty press, there was also the problem that close colleagues would have looked at me as if I had gone completely mad. (Some still will!) Like many friends of the Canadian Crown, I felt cowed by a certain kind of peer disapprobation.

Only once did I sneak my constrained admiration into hardcover. It was in another book, called Eminent Canadians, in which current Canadians of note were paired with their historic antecedents: Jean Chrétien with Wilfrid Laurier, for example; and the then editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail, William Thorsell, with the redoubtable founder of the Globe, George Brown. In the last section, I wrote about Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, as Canadians. In vain, as it turned out. Reviewers passed over the section lightly, as one might sweetly tolerate a child with an overheated imagination. Others dismissed the effort as either weird or whimsical.

That was a big lesson for me on how far down the road to dismantling the role of the Crown in Canada we had progressed. The whole notion of the Crown seemed not so much in jeopardy as in steady, inexorable decline, and for the life of me I couldn’t see how the slide could be stopped. For the most part, the self-proclaimed cognoscenti in political life and the chattering classes — the “commentariat” — had given up on it. My colleague and friend Michael Valpy of the Globe and Mail, to whom, along with the eminent Canadian historian Michael Bliss, this book is dedicated, was the most notable exception, but even he would agree that his fortitude in defence of the Crown over the years came at some considerable cost, both emotionally and professionally, particularly when colleagues didn’t take him seriously. Believe me, he was serious, and a lot braver than I was. Our enemy was not hatred, but indifference buttressed by spurts of mockery.

Since the 1960s, successive administrations of the Canadian government had surreptitiously or sometimes even openly encouraged people to forget or snort at the Royal Family. Quietly, progressively, and often stealthily, the traditional symbols of the Queen’s Canadian realm vanished: the crown icons disappeared from mailboxes and government offices; the word “royal” was removed from the branches of our armed services;1 portraits of the Queen were removed from government offices, embassies, and other missions abroad,2 followed by their disappearance from the country’s classrooms, where many teachers reinforced the negativity by equating the Crown to our colonial past while never outlining its careful post-colonial evolution; although her profile remained on the coinage, the Sovereign’s image was replaced on most of our stamps and paper currency, save for the $20 bill;3 the Queen was rarely asked to come and preside over an opening of Parliament anymore, and when she did get invited here it was often to preside only at some further diminution of her role and status. The ludicrously named federal “Department of Canadian Heritage” was given control over the image of the Canadian Royal Family and systematically downgraded it in order to build up the notion that the appointed governor general of Canada was the real head of state. Soon enough, the governors general began to believe it and even declare it, denying the mystical remnants of potency remaining in the office after a succession of banal political appointments, from the dull-witted (Ed Schreyer) to the sweetly benighted (Roméo LeBlanc).

This gradual attrition was working. By the time the twentieth century had turned into the twenty-first, the federal establishment of the country had us well down the road to an undeclared republic. As Michael Bliss often enough said, “It (the monarchy) doesn’t mean anything to most young Canadians. It will die a natural death at the same time as the dwindling band of oldsters who still support it die off too.” This line had a certain seemingly evident logic to it, but it annoyed me enormously because it wasn’t something that had to happen. Canadians were too good-natured to understand some of the incremental deviousness and stealth of a bureaucracy like that at the Department of Canadian Heritage (it’s better today because it has new orders and new civil servants who are actually civil), or the Prime Minister’s Office, or even the Rideau Hall office of the governor general.

In truth, I always preferred the straightforward honesty of republican advocates like Bliss, Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, or the Canadian cabinet minister John Manley, who openly called for the end of the monarchy in this country. (Although Manley surely merited the Boor of the Year Award in 2002 for pontificating publicly about his particular distaste for the monarchy on the eve of escorting the Queen as her minister-in-attendance on a royal tour.) Boorishness aside, these republican sympathizers openly make their points, many of which are cogent in a certain context. Still, it always amazes me that they never fully take in what they are throwing away, concentrating as they do on the alleged absurdities, with hardly a nod at the reality.

Clearly, though, they were also resonating with a significant part of the population, and the defence of the Crown was left to an ad hoc group of provincial lieutenant governors’ offices (notably those of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland) and small organizations like the Monarchist League of Canada or the Friends of the Canadian Crown, which worked valiantly to rally the cause and sound alarms, but also sometimes — and inadvertently — made the republican case through arch-fussiness about small details while overlooking the main points.

As the Blisses or Simpsons rarely failed to point out, there was a timely logic about it all. The Globe and Mail, for example, once such a staunch believer in the constitutional monarchy, came out editorially in favour of establishing a Republic of Canada once the Queen dies.4 There was residual respect everywhere for the aging Queen, and not many Canadians wanted her discomforted. The self-evident fact that she had done such a good job for over half a century, justifying her role time and again in the Canadian scheme of things, somehow was ignored or dismissed out of hand. Logic collapsed: Queen Elizabeth has done a great job for Canada; therefore let’s make sure there is no monarchy when she dies.

The lynchpin in this strategy of waiting till the Sovereign was dead — admittedly somewhat haunted for republicans by the alarming spectacle of longevity amongst the women of the House of Windsor (the Queen, in her mid-eighties, still has a way to go to surpass her mother, who made it to over one hundred) — was the much-espoused ridiculousness of her heir, the Prince of Wales, ever becoming “King of Canada.” Inevitably, the more polite faction amongst republicans would conclude their arguments, either seriously or satirically, by evoking the “absurdity” of Prince Charles. His “jug-ears” often had a role to play in the argument, as well as his inappropriate behaviour in talking out loud about what, in his opinion, was wrong in the world. And then there were his “bizarre” causes, from alternative medicine to decrying the evil inherent in most modern architecture.

The assumption that the heir is unsuitable still resonates and, in debate, seems to make the republican point more strongly than arguments such as Canada’s being a mature country with no need of kings and queens, or having an inherent majesty in its own history and geography that makes kings and queens superfluous, or — most simply — of being an independent nation, a place of opportunity where hereditary rights are nonsensical, unfair, and wholly unnecessary. Nope! Forget all that. Did you hear what Prince Charles said to Camilla on his cellphone?

We enjoy embracing the gossip and forgetting the reality. There’s a wee problem, though. Even amongst intelligent and coherent republicans, only the vaguest of concepts exist of how to get rid of the monarchy, even if the day should come when there is a collective will to do so. That’s because constitutionally there really isn’t an easy way, short of parliamentary fiat. Thanks to the constitutional arrangements worked out back in 1981–82 between the provinces and the Liberal administration of Pierre Trudeau, there would have to be total unanimity among the provinces for Canada to become a republic. So technically it can be done, but it is hugely unlikely to happen.

At the very least, even if all the English-speaking legislatures agreed to go along with the idea (and just imagining the government of Newfoundland or Prince Edward Island or Saskatchewan or Nova Scotia consenting is a real stretch), the one province where it is assumed that the strongest anti-monarchical feelings exist — Quebec — would inevitably move to block such a move. It’s so easy to predict, I wonder why people don’t get it. The reason why? Because any change of the constitutional status quo that does not deal with issues more pertinent to the Canadian relationship with Quebec — such as aboriginal legal and land settlements or spiralling shared costs on health care — will always be defeated by a Quebec administration. So ask yourself this: what federal government in the foreseeable future is going to tackle the issue of Quebec before the issue of the monarchy?5 Or, if you prefer it the other way around, what federal government is going to tackle the issue of the monarchy before settling the constitutional anomalies that persist in its relationship with Quebec? Take your choice: they are both self-answering questions.

On top of all that, look at the useful Australian experience. In 1999, the government of Australia held a referendum on the future of their version of a monarchy (same cast, different locale). Despite polling that clearly showed the majority of Australians felt it was time to sever links to the Crown, the referendum showed otherwise. Why? Sudden angst over leaving the mother-monarch? Not at all. Australians suddenly woke up to the fact that their prime minister, or any prime minister of the day, was going to be given additional powers to determine a redefined head of state, and this was seen as undermining and diminishing regional authority. It also turned out that sticking with the system already in place seemed a safer bet than branching out, and that one of the central reasons for preserving the Crown is to make sure that there is some sort of check on the growing power of the Prime Minister’s Office.

Still, “better the devil known than unknown” is not exactly a rallying cry that resonates “a mari usque ad mare,”6 and if the Crown is to survive in Canada — and not just survive but also thrive — we have to do better than that. I had always believed that the two strongest arguments for retention of the Crown were: it exists and it works. I still believe only fools start tinkering around with things that work, but I have sadly come to realize that there is no accounting for fools: sometimes, they even get elected and cause great damage.

And then, just recently, a sequence of events has led directly to The Secret of the Crown. Against all odds, and thanks to a minority government that was not hell-bent on diminishing the role of the Crown, “adjustments” (i.e., staff changes) were made at the Department of Canadian Heritage, resulting in the Queen and Prince Philip’s hugely successful tour of the country, highlighted by a superb Canada Day celebration on Parliament Hill. That was on July 1, 2010.

Shortly afterwards, I got involved in a caper that saw me debating the monarchy with a dear friend and Massey College colleague, the aforementioned and outstanding Canadian historian Michael Bliss. For reasons that still mystify me, but which I respect, he is a passionate republican, and because of that I was vaguely worried about losing my cool and rupturing the close friendship my wife and I have with him and his wife, a friendship that goes all the way back to the 1960s, when he was my wife’s history teacher at Lawrence Park Collegiate in north Toronto.

The debate was the first of four on historical Canadian themes, and they were all designed to be instantly provocative, at least in the way the organizers touted them. One debated the notion that Canada was right to hang the iconic Métis leader Louis Riel in 1885; another attacked multiculturalism; a third posited that Pierre Trudeau was the worst prime minister in our history. Bliss and I were to debate the role of the Crown on a resolution that it was high time to wind down the monarchy in Canada and put the Royal Family in metaphorical tumbrils. The setting was the grand concourse of the Royal Ontario Museum and nearly a thousand people turned up. That was the first shock. Much as I used to despair about the role of the Crown in Canada, I worried more about the lethargic decency of Canadians. People didn’t seem to hate the Crown or the Royal Family; they just didn’t care to do anything to support it. This lethargy was now reinforced with a couple of generations of willfully induced ignorance.

To my amazement, just the announcement of the debate started creating real buzz, and when I arrived at the Royal Ontario Museum in the heart of Toronto, still known as the Queen City, I was truly shocked. This was one lively crowd. As the debate unfolded, Bliss and I went at it, relatively politely, and in the end I won by about a sixty-to-forty vote. However, Bliss won the waverers7 and he was particularly strong at the end of the debate, when he played the Prince Charles gambit. We both emerged from the exercise fairly pleased with ourselves, but I was left with a profoundly nagging feeling that I had let my side down.

I admire Professor Bliss’s passion. I always have, and that passion is what has sustained him through the writing of so many wonderful books on Canadian history. I felt that I had a similar passion for my side of the debate, as did many Canadians, but I never showed it. I never fought our corner openly, I always worried about being mocked, I was shy to the point of negligence and thus complicit, in my own special way, to the diminution of the Crown. So another reason for this book is an attempt to remedy that fault of inhibition in myself.

Like many defenders of the Crown, I had “educated” myself not to make too much of a fuss, for fear that it might bring the whole fragile edifice tumbling down. I should have had more faith in our cause because, as it turns out, it has far more supporters than I imagined. Not only that, but once you got people to think beyond the scandale du jour (say, who was sucking Fergie’s toes, or who her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, was courting) and take a serious look at the issue of a constitutional monarchy set in the northern half of North America, you could make a reasonable or even a very good case for it, and I was grateful for the chance to try.

And then, in short order, there was the huge success of the royal wedding between Prince William and Catherine Middleton, and almost immediately afterwards it was announced that their first tour as a married couple would be to Canada, “the senior of Her Majesty’s realms.”

And glimmering in the immediate distance was the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth herself — only the second such celebration of a sixty-year reign in Canadian history — and a chance to celebrate one of the most extraordinary human beings of our own time, and the time of our parents and grandparents, and the time of our children and grandchildren. A woman whose father was held in the arms of Queen Victoria and who, in all likelihood, will hold in her own arms a great-grandchild who, with loyalty and luck, will also be a sovereign of Canada.8 That’s a picture to wait for, because it will embody a stretch of our history from the early nineteenth century to quite possibly the beginning of the twenty-second century.

So here lies the main goal this book hopes to accomplish: to show that we are part of a lucky continuum that gives definition and continuity to our beloved country and puts us in a very special historical pathway that has protected us constitutionally over such a long period of time. That continuum, the Canadian Crown, also has the power, if we let it, to reign in our imaginations as well. The royal and viceregal individuals involved in this centuries-old tale are fun to write and speculate about, but they are not nearly as important as the reality they represent. It is at the heart of the great secret of the Crown in Canada today: we are what we choose to be, and we are a country mature enough to carry our history forward with us, not abandon it; to correct mistakes from the past; and to build upon what has been useful to us.

This is a destiny that will always be challenging Canadians. When we say “God Bless the Queen,” we are really saying “God Bless Us.” We are also saying “God Bless Canada.”

John Fraser

Split Rock Island, Georgian Bay

Massey College, Toronto

Labour Day, 2011