Stuck in a Colonial Mentality

The journalist Peter Brimelow once summed up the attitude of successive governments towards the monarchy as that of "the urchin, secretly urinating on some shrub in the hope that it will die." Those immortal words could easily be extended from the ruling class to unteachable elites like Anthony Westell, whose years of wisdom appear to have escaped him, when he openly belittles the ancient monarchical link as symbolically nothing more than the "last colonial tie" that should be severed at the earliest opportunity. I suppose we should be thankful that the urchin has finally come out from under his shrub.

As Andrew Coyne once remarked, the Queen is not some colonial pantomime; rather, the Crown is the very foundation of our government and constitutional system. But more than that it dares us to rise above argued abstractions and to think of our country in more poetic terms, as a people and a place whose five hundred year-old story has some meaning beyond the merely explicable. I know this is a concept that my Kiwi brethren, Lewis Tedious Holden, of New Zealand republican movement fame, finds incomprehensible, so I invite him and others to read an excerpt of what the author meant when he wrote it back in 1998. (The vandals latest victim: The Queen)

What on earth has putting the boots to Elizabeth II to do with breaking colonial bonds? She is not the Queen of England, and thus of Canada. She is not the Queen of English Canadians. She is the Queen of Canada, and of all Canadians. The bond between nations under the Crown is not colonial, but fraternal. It no more advances our independence to abolish the monarchy than it would to abolish the Department of Finance. It is the foundation of Canadian government, one of the three branches -- Crown, Commons and Senate -- represented in the phrase "the Crown in Parliament." As if it needed saying, we are already sovereign in every respect, having severed the last colonial tie in 1982 with patriation of the power to amend our constitution. It was coincident, indeed, with that great act of national affirmation that the Crown was formally entrenched at the heart of Canadian constitutional law, unalterable without the consent of Parliament and all 10 provinces.

We kept the Crown not out of nostalgia or anglophilia, but because it is useful. The monarchy is not some soap opera for soggy teenagers. No quaint anachronism or colonial relic, it is a marvellous constitutional instrument, the best that has yet been devised for reconciling the power of the state with the sovereignty of the people. As The Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy often reminds us, the American constitution, born of rupture with the British system, in fact froze it in place. The presidential model, adopted in mimicry of the powerful monarchy with which the revolutionaries were familiar, represents a case of arrested constitutional development, circa 1776. The countries that grew up under the Crown, by contrast, benefited from another century of constitutional evolution in favour of today's limited monarchy.

The Queen is more than the personification of the state, she is the humanization of it. As much as the constraints upon her once absolute power say ours is a government of laws and not of men, her very humanity, and her all-too-human family, remind us that government is also about men: about real people and their concerns, not bloodless abstractions like "the state." Focus of allegiance, symbol of unity, vessel of sovereignty, the monarchy is all these things. But mostly it is a statement about us.

A nation that calls itself a kingdom is a nation with a sense of gravitas, with a future and a past and an equal ease with either. In the descent of kings it traces its own glorious passage through the generations. A monarchy is something to live up to, and to wonder at. It is not fed to us in predigested chunks of reason. You either get it or you don't.

That is what fuels the abolitionist's rage. It isn't that the Crown is demeaning or outmoded. It is that it is beyond him. It makes him uneasy. It dares him to think of his country in poetic terms, as a people and a place whose story has some meaning beyond the merely explicable, and he can't. So instead he drags it down to his own banal level...

Wonderful words, those, and a far cry from those permanently stuck in a colonial mentality. That is not to deny, however, that there are vestiges of colonialism still kicking about that we could set our minds to abolishing. I hear patronage is alive and well, for example. Perhaps we could leave the Queen alone and... - no wait, what am I thinking - we all know, and as Mr. Coyne concludes, "that's a cherished national institution."