John Fraser - The Secret of the Crown: Canadas Affair With Royalty

THE SECRET OF THE CROWN

Canadas Affair with Royalty

John Fraser

Copyright 2012 John Fraser

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the authors rights.

This edition published in 2012 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fraser, John, 1944
The secret of the crown : Canadas affair
with royalty / John Fraser.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 978-1-77089-055-8
1. MonarchyCanadaHistory. 2. RoyalistsCanada
History. 3. Great BritainKings 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

T HIS 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 dont 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 countrys 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 Chrtien 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 couldnt 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 didnt 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 Queens Canadian realm vanished: the crown icons disappeared from mailboxes and government offices; the word royal was removed from the branches of our armed services; 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 (Romo 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) doesnt 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 wasnt 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 (its better today because it has new orders and new civil servants who are actually civil), or the Prime Ministers Office, or even the Rideau Hall office of the governor general.