From time to time I break ranks with mainstream conservatives. But whether it be social policy, economic policy, or any mixture thereof, I accept that there will always be a great deal of divergence of opinion within the conservative camp, and I will not necessarily always be on the same side of an issue as some of my contemporaries. For the most part such divergences don't bother me. Live and let live, and all that.
In contemporary Canada, however, there is one issue which I simply cannot stand to see any sane conservative support, and that's the continued presence of the British monarchy in our nation's constitution.
The fact that Canada still recognizes the Queen of England as our head of state embarrasses and disgusts me to no end. Every time I hear the term "crown counsel" or "crown land" I cringe. I find it offensive that my father was forced to take an oath of loyalty to the British monarch before he could work as a federal bureaucrat and that reciting this same oath is also the first act we ask of our nation's new immigrants. I hate seeing the Governor General prance around with her dopey medals — not to mention the fact that she still has political power. I hate the Queen's face on our coins and the culture of our military, which still teaches our soldiers to worship a foreign monarch they will likely never meet. But most of all I hate how so many of my fellow conservatives in Canada eagerly line up to defend all this absurdity.
That being said, I recognize the reality that monarchism and conservatism are not doomed to be forever united in Canadian politics. There are already many conservative republicans such as myself, and I don't doubt that there will be more and more as the years progress. Many conservatives today are quite openly starting to question the continued existence of an un-elected royal family in the context of 21st Century Canada, and thus challenge traditional "conservative" views on the subject.
The monarchy in Canada is not some obscure, esoteric issue as many would allege. I believe it is in fact a key issue that serves as a relevant piece of a much larger debate over the future of Canada and the modern Canadian identity. The monarchy issue will not remain on the back burner forever, and the sooner Canadians address this reality the easier it will be to avoid an awkward and ill-informed debate when the national discussion finally begins.
The Tories vs. the Neo-Cons
In contemporary Canada members of Conservative Party face a challenge. They must decide whether they are still content to be tied to the nostalgic, paternalistic, Anglophilic Tory tradition personified by the Diefenbaker regime (and to a lesser extent its self-proclaimed "Red Tory" heirs), or a modern, individualistic strand of conservatism personified by the Reform/Alliance spirit of Manning and Harper.
The modern Conservatives are a party that celebrates individual merit and believes every citizen is, and should be, born equal with an equal shot at achieving greatness and success in life. Race, religion, class, and gender should all be irrelevant factors in determining a person's merit. Only an individual's own intelligence, skills, desires, and efforts can determine his fate in life, and not arbitrary policies of discrimination manufactured by society, the state or anyone else. Contrast that conservative logic with the logic of the monarchy: being a Head of State is too important to be left to a lowly common-person. Only a descendent of a completely arbitrarily hereditary "royal bloodline" can ever be entrusted with this important task. The Head of State must neither desire nor chose the job, he will be given it by virtue of his birth order and gender within this racially, religiously, and financially exclusive family. Once enthroned, he will remain in office until his death, regardless of his actions or conduct.
Charming as Queen Elizabeth might be, she will one day die and be replaced by a man who has quite openly stated his belief that people should not try to rise above their intended social status, and instead stay put in the position they're born into. The monarchy seems to have little in common with the values of modern Canadian conservatives. In fact, by all measurable standards the rules of the institution are in direct opposition to everything conservatives are supposed to stand for. Yet even today, many Conservatives (both small-c and big-c alike) see support for the monarchy as a "natural" position.
Part of this is due to the fact (or at least the assumption) that many of Canada's leading anti-monarchist crusaders can be found in the Liberal Party. If the Liberals seem to be leading towards a republic, the knee-jerk conservative reaction is to sympathize with the monarchy, and assume creating a republic is the simply the latest crazy left-wing socialistic Liberal scheme to further entrench the Trudeapian New World Order. Like all knee-jerk positions this argument is based more on emotion than reason. While the Liberals are likely to, and no doubt will, campaign for the abolition of the monarchy with touchy-feely rhetoric about eliminating "legacies of colonialism" and celebrating a "new future" for the country, politically-correct slogans will not alone define the debate. The eventual referendum will be on the monarchy, not on the merits of whatever Liberal PR campaign they wage against it.
Establishing a Canadian head of state for Canada is a choice which is logical, democratic, and consistent with the values most modern conservatives profess to stand for. Conservatives should not allow anti-Liberal resentment to cloud their judgement on this issue, or they could easily find themselves on the embarrassingly wrong side of history.
The Culture Wars
Conservatives will likewise have to come to terms with the fact that Canadian monarchism is often at odds with other aspects of their agenda, notably the defeat of leftist cultural hegemony in Canada and institutionalized anti-Americanism. They'll have to realize that monarchist views alone do not a conservative make, and in many cases support for the monarchy is actually a tool employed by the hysterical left-wing "nationalist" set.
Most of today's conservatives have long since abandoned the traditional John Diefenbaker/Joe Clark/Elsie Wayne Tory mantra which lauds the importance of fighting back American "influences" and "American culture" within Canada. Aware that modern day Canadian "culture" is overwhelmingly defined by a small group of left-wing elites in Toronto, and is neither distinctly Canadian nor nationally attractive, the battle to stop American books, music, and TV shows from dominating the Canadian marketplace no longer seems worth fighting. Tearing down absurd tariffs and allowing fair competition between Canadian and American industries is considered more honorable by today's conservatives than devoting large quantities of taxpayer dollars to prop up unpopular, second-rate artists and poets through various "culture" bureaucracies. In short, the faith in free-markets has won in the battle against Canadian protectionism. We now have free trade with the United States, and closer economic co-operation than ever before. Canadian conservatives are now the party in open advocacy of closer business relations, security partnerships, and foreign policy ties with the Americans.
The monarchy by contrast represents a holdover from "old" Toryism, and an era in which conservatives rallied against the "latent republicanism" of their political opponents in a heavily labored attempt to keep their North American nation firmly in the colonial cultural mindset, with preserved "British" values. This mentality did not survive the 50's, and it seems fair to say that most of Canada's contemporary conservatives feel a far greater affinity towards our neighbors to the south than our former masters across the sea. Observe the culture, behavior, and lifestyle of a typical Canadian and it is obvious that we have become North Americans through and through. Our British roots have all but eroded after decades of political sovereignty, diverse immigration, and economic globalization. We now have our own identity.
To be sure, our colonial and semi-colonial past was not without merit. The battle of Vimy Ridge for example, now recognized as one of the proudest moments of Canadian military heroism, was fought by Canadian forces under the colonial command of the United Kingdom. Similarly, the only reason Canada eagerly sprung into World War II before the United States was because of our intense emotional attachment to the British Empire to which we (although by then sovereign in the realm of military matters) were still very much a part of. The argument that the modern Liberals have been trying to erase our history and replace it with a Trudeauvian hodge-podge of bland multi-culturalism, pacifism, and left-wing politics is not without a basis in reality. In recent years the Liberal strategy has been to create a national myth of Canada as a permanently left-wing northern state, in which patriotic Canadian values can be permanently defined as whatever ideas appear in the Liberal party platform. To them, Canadian history began in 1968 and any events prior to that are irrelevant, as they don't fit the contemporary script. When faced with this very real phenomenon, many Canadian conservatives in turn resort to their own form of revisionism, excessively glamorizing the Canadian history that the Liberals are seeking to repress. This in turn leads to a knee-jerk defense of the monarchy, with it being seen as one of the few lingering remnants of a Canadian history that has otherwise been permanently airbrushed from the national consciousness.
But other than Canada's proud service in the two World Wars, what part of Canada's past are we supposed to be celebrating? What lost legacy of our nation's forgotten history should we mourn? Much of Canada's early history was dominated by attitudes of staunch and illogical anti-Americanism among political elites, an often mindless and undemocratic allegiance to the British Empire at the expense of Canada's own interests, and an economic legacy of failure due to blatantly anti-market protectionism and massive state intervention. Surely little for today's conservatives to take much pride in.
It likewise can't be argued that Canada possesses any sort of proud tradition of government. There was no Canadian Jefferson or Washington, and the institutions of government which our founders created can hardly be said to evoke much national pride or respect. On the contrary, our constitution has been regarded as a severely flawed document practically since conception, and we've spent the better part of 150 years struggling over how to best fix its most glaring deficiencies. Canadian federalism likewise remains as disputed and distrusted as ever, with all contemporary talk of it centering around reform and change, rather than a return to some idyllic standard of the past.
The parts of Canadian history most admired by today's conservatives include events such as the rugged entrepreneurship of early Canadian business, the resourceful settlement and exploration of the Western provinces, the skillful invention of modern technologies, and the brave sacrifices made in times of hardship. The Canadians whose spirits are celebrated are the working people who built this country and its wealth, and not the corrupt politicians and aristocrats who have saddled it with a legacy of unresolved problems. The monarchy is an icon of this latter class, and not the former. It is a political institution which represents the worst elements of our authoritarian, top-down system of government while simultaneously offering little symbolic significance to the values of individualism that are most deserving of praise.
If Canadians in general and Canadian conservatives in particular have rejected the old, Anglophilic Anti-American political culture of Macdonald and Diefenbaker as a tired and distasteful relic, then what part of our "great past" are we exactly celebrating by continuing to cling to the monarchy? Interestingly enough, for all the conservative talk about the Liberals "erasing" Canada's history, it is actually the Canadian left who are the most eager to embrace the values of the past that the rest of Canadian society has moved away from.
Consider for example the devoted and unapologetic monarchism of noted America-bashers like Sheila Copps or David Orchard. To them, the monarchy must be defended at all costs for it represents a final front in the battle against the "Americanization" of Canada. These sort of leftists embrace a culture in which clinging to absurd relics of the past allows them to avoid dealing with the realities of today. Disgusted by the contemporary integration of North American economics and culture, they comfort themselves by vocally celebrating "patriotic" events like the 1812 War and shedding tears over "tragedies" like the Avro Arrow episode. The irony in all this of course is the fact that these kind of events were once proud moments of Tory history, yet now they are gleefully embraced by the left. This evolutionary process largely explains the odd phenomenon of Canada's so-called "Red Tories." Here we have men and women who are for all practical intents and purposes ideologically indistinguishable from the Liberals, yet because of their monarchism and Anti-Americanism, they still feel obligated to refer to themselves as "conservatives." Red Tories are considered a joke by most serious conservatives, as they realize the "conservative" credentials of the Red Tories are based on 50-year-old standards thoroughly irrelevant to contemporary Canadian politics.
The monarchy in today's Canada is thus just as much- if not more- of a left-wing institution than a monument to conservatism.
The Establishment View
Many otherwise brilliant Canadian conservative writers and pundits are reduced to babbling incoherence when the topic of the monarchy comes up. Take for example the National Post's Andrew Coyne, a hawkish pro-Bush, anti-Liberal neoconservative whose popular columns and blog entries have made him one of Canada's leading voices from the right. In a 2002 column on the monarchy Coyne had this to say:
The Crown is not some colonial pantomime. It is the rock on which the country stands, the foundation of our legal and political order. It is in the first line of the Constitution, the 1867 one, in which is expressed Confederation's raison d'etre: that the provinces should be "federally united into One Dominion under the Crown."
His tune has remained constant. Back in 1998 he elaborated further:
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 marvelous constitutional instrument, the best that has yet been devised for reconciling the power of the state with the sovereignty of the people. [...]
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.
It's too bad that a man who has offered so much honest criticism of the Senate, the PMO, and other corrupt and outdated institutions of the Canadian government can simultaneously turn gushy and nostalgic when it comes to an institution as profoundly antiquated and dopey as the British monarchy. In this day and age, for example, no one seriously believes the Senate functions as a house of "sober second thought" or that the Prime Minister governs as the "first among equals" in a strong cabinet. Why then, is this sort of flowery rhetoric accepted as truth when spoken about the monarchy? The fact that conservatives can criticize every clause in the Canadian constitution one day, then proceed to declare how the monarchy is the proudest keystone of our ingenious system of government the next is bizarrely inconsistent, to put it mildly.
No one in 21st century Canada believes that the monarchy is the centerpoint of Canadian citizenship or nationhood. Polling data suggests that less than 10% of Canadians are even aware Canada is still a constitutional monarchy to begin with, so to assume this piece of our constitution forms some universial rallyingpoint of our national identity is really little more than polite monarchist fiction. We are not living in feudal times, and modern citizens seem perfectly capable of grasping a "bloodless abstraction" like democracy and constitutional government. Western civilization has evolved far beyond the point where nationalism is defined solely as allegiance to the leader, and indeed, today most citizens take pride in the knowledge that their state is formed on the basis of abstract rights and constitutional arrangements that remain constant over time. If we need a reminder that our government is "about men" as Coyne writes, then surely we already have enough squabbling and opportunistic politicians to serve that purpose.
"Symbols of unity" and "vessels of sovereignty" are fine, sure. That's why we have a flag, a coat of arms, a national anthem, Mounties, hockey, maple syrup, and a whole host of other postcard-ready emblems. Corny though they may be, these are symbols of Canada, universally recognized- and most importantly of all- distinctly Canadian. Coyne deserves credit for at least being well aware of this last point. He accepts the Queen is not distinctly Canadian, and in turn attempts to make the case for "repatriating" the monarchy upon her death. In other words, young Prince Harry should be imported into Canada to form a new homegrown Canadian dynasty.
Ignoring for a moment the somewhat disgustingly dehumanizing nature of this proposal (uh, he does realize we are talking about a human being here, and not just some imperial seed-bearer to be charted around the globe for our constitutional amusement) such an argument quickly makes all previous defense of the monarchy fall apart. Either the monarchy is a symbol of Canadian nationalism or it isn't. It's either a proud link to Canada's past, or an outdated relic. It cannot hover somewhere in limbo. If we have to constantly "update" and modernize the monarchy and make political adjustments to ensure its continued relevance to future generations then the monarchy is not a symbol of unity or stability at all. Underneath much of the royalist rhetoric is an uncomfortable truth: the defense of the monarchy is really more of a defense of the person of Queen Elizabeth II and her role as monarch than it is about any sort of long-term political principle.
To the extent that the Queen can be regarded as "popular" in Canada, such popularity comes from the fact she is simply an easily recognizable celebrity, who has been elevated in status through the modern British tabloid culture. As an individual, the Queen is still largely a mysterious figure, who grants no interviews and is tightly controlled by her handlers in virtually all circumstances save the occasional unscripted photo-op. The Queen is really just a neutral figure. That she does her job with dignity and dedication cannot be denied, but neither can it be denied that most other knowledge of her is based on little more than idle speculation, royalist propaganda, or uninformed gossip. It's worth asking, however, if anyone honestly expects this elaborate system of handlers and arm's-length public relations to survive the Queen's reign. We already know far more about Prince Charles and his sons than many would likely care to, and as such, they will come to the throne without the benefit of the bubble of mystery that has protected their predecessor.
Queen Elizabeth was born before the era of the mass media and tabloid culture, and it is very likely that whatever restraint, glamour, and dignity the monarchy currently possesses will die with her.
Princes Harry and William, for example are children of the Internet and MTV generation. Ask the average teenager if he would be willing to devote his entire adult life to cutting ribbons and shaking hands with politicians in exchange for sacrificing every element of his personal freedom and safety. Ask him if he is prepared to surrender his ability to choose his own wife, career, home, and religion in the name of some vague constitutional principle. The answer will be predictable. In the coming post-Elizabeth decades, the British monarchy will face enormous challenges in continuing to sustain its antiquated Victorian subculture of unthinking, class-based notions of "duty" in the midst of a modern, globalized world dominated by free spirits and individualism. Abdication could easily become the norm, creating all-new constitutional problems.
Monarchist rhetoric often possesses a sort of fatalistic utopianism about the British monarchy, assuming that because it has existed in some form for over 600 years, it is therefore destined to survive until time immortal. Among those in Britain who have analyzed its future seriously, many have speculated the British monarchy may not even survive this century, let alone dozens more. Such a decision would have unknown consequences for Canada. Unless we are willing to take off our blinders and address the issue in our own nation Britain could once again be deciding our political future for us.
The debate over what, if anything, should replace the monarchy in Canada is a whole other complicated political discussion which I will not get into here. It is a serious topic of constitutional debate and all Canadian republicans must be prepared to address it. As long as the status of the current system remains uncertain however, such discussions will inevitably take a backseat.
The Future
To date, Canada has not yet had a serious national debate on the monarchy, but one will come inevitably, as it has already come to Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, and most of the other surviving Commonwealth realms. Before that time comes, Canada's conservatives must re-evaluate their current stance on the monarchy with the following issues in mind:
> The Anglophilic Tory traditions of the past have been all but replaced. The new conservative political culture of Canada holds fundamental principles of individualism that are very difficult to reconcile with the logic of monarchy.
> Canadian monarchism is increasingly the domain of left-wingers who use the issue as an outlet to express their underlying feelings of anti-Americanism or cultural protectionism.
> Most contemporary monarchist arguments hold little credibility with the public and are inconsistent with many other contemporary conservative arguments for political and constitutional reform.
> Queen Elizabeth will not reign forever and the subsequent reigns of her successors will likely raise serious questions regarding the fundamental legitimacy, stability, and longevity of the monarchy, which are presently taken for granted. Such concerns will affect not only Canada, but also Britain itself, making the need for a Canadian republic all the more pressing.
When Canada votes on abolishing the monarchy it will represent a profound and important shift in our concept of nationalism, sovereignty, and democracy. It is not an issue to be dismissed as trivial, and deserves a serious assessment by all Canadians, especially those on the right.