Lèse majesté from the Left.
Decades ago when I was a grade school student in Ajax, we were forced every morning to sing “God Save the Queen” while standing at attention in front of the Union Jack. Then, in unison, we would pledge allegiance to the Queen of England.
So you pledged allegiance to someone who doesn't exist? There is no Queen of England. The title and country have not existed since 1707. Perhaps this is something your Ajax schoolmasters forgot to mention, or you might have missed in your fit of juvenile rage. You were actually swearing allegiance to the Queen of Canada. That might seem a technical detail to the republicans, yet as with so much of life the deliberative devil is in the constitutional details.
It is a Canadian monarchy headed by someone who is also monarch of another fifteen countries. Certainly, Bob, you are not against multilateralism? Heck the Crown was pioneering multilateralism well before your school boy days in arcadian Ajax. Luckily for friend Bob these dark days would soon pass:
But within a few years Canada had its own flag, its own official anthem — and a new sense that we were a modern, vibrant and independent nation, confident enough in ourselves and our future to toss aside outdated symbols of British colonialism.
Hurrah! Away the bleak clouds fled! The brave new dawn emerged shorn of the outdated symbols of that nasty British colonialism. Tossing aside centuries of positive tradition as easily as most men discard old clothing. Between Bob's pledging days and modern Canada stretch nearly half a century of history. That bright new post-British dawn is looking a bit tarnished.
If Canadian history, or at least that bit we should take seriously, only began when Mike Pearson displaced that Tory reactionary Diefenbaker, that narrows the definition of being Canadian. Those who believe that pre-1963 Canada was a place, for all its imperfections, worthy of esteem and warm recollection are unpersons in Bob's Canada. The world began when he did and will end the moment he and the other Lefty boomers die. Upon such shallowness are small civilizations built.
Friend Bob, we would call him Mr Hepburn but that's probably his father's name, goes onto dreg up CN President Donald Gordon's decision to name a Montreal hotel after Queen Elizabeth. This simple business decision provoked protests in Quebec, not the hardest of feats then or now. The regal naming was supposedly a horribly reactionary thing to do, akin to Minister Mackay's restoration of the royal honour. Why was it anyone's business but the CN board what the hotel was named? Quebec nationalists talk a good game about preserving culture and tradition, but only their own. Say anything kindly about les anglais and your arraigned as an imperialist.
Not content with having their own staff attack the royal restoration, the Toronto Star located Paul Hellyer. Yes, the Paul Hellyer. While better known today for his fascination with UFOs and his crusade against fractional reserve banking, both scourges of the modern world, for a time in the mid-1960s the individual in question was a VIP. In fact Mr Hellyer, he's from a different generation than Friend Bob so we'll mister him, was once the Minister of National Defence. More than this he was the minister who unified the armed services and dropped their royal status in 1968.
Naturally, Mr. Hellyer is not amused with the restoration. Horrible thing. Bad for the country. What are things coming to these days. One moment you are walking around in Trudeaupia and the next minute the monarchists have snuck back over the wall. His main objection seems to be that the royal upgrade will cause administrative triplication.
I guess no one pointed out that this is a symbolic not administrative change. Nor does he recall how thoroughly loathed he was in the military forty years ago. For something that was such a "noble experiment" how come it was despised by practically everyone in uniform? Like with most utopians the problem for Mr Hellyer is the people and not his theories.
Having run out of former politicians, the MSM started to hunt down professional historians to denounce the restoration. Luckily for them they got Jack Granatstein, one of the country's leading military historians. The professor takes us back to that great watershed moment, the Suez Crisis:
The British, French, and Israelis had invaded Egypt, and Canada was to provide an infantry battalion for the peacekeeping force. But, the Egyptians protested, the Canadians wore British-style uniforms and carried British-pattern weapons, had the Union Jack in the corner of their flag, and the regiment selected for service was the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada. How, Cairo asked quite sensibly, could Egyptian soldiers and civilians differentiate them from the imperialist invaders? That was a good question, and Canada made its way into UNEF only because Egypt came to agree that Canada could provide the logistic troops that the UN force needed to function.
From time to time politicians in Canada get attacked for appeasing certain immigrant groups. It seems the professor is proud of the fact that Mike Pearson went one step further, he appeased the Egyptians in Egypt, long before any of them had even bothered coming to Canada. Who says the Liberals aren't proactive in their pandering?
Do pause to consider the madness of that moment. Nasser, a dangerous megalomaniac had seized one of the world's vital choke points. The British, French and Israelis attempted to reverse the seizure, albeit in a clumsy and underhanded manner. The sensible approach, which President Eisenhower sadly realized only after he left office, was to have supported the overthrow of Nasser and the retaking of the canal.
If Anglo-French control was no longer viable, then the canal could have been placed under an international board. Confronted with a second rate Mussolini, however, Ike and Mike decided the best approach was to sabotage their wartime ally and encourage the Arab world to defy the West. It was easily the dumbest foreign policy mistake of the last sixty years.
For the post-Pearson-Trudeau Establishment the Suez Crisis was a meta-moment of Trudeaupia, a foretaste of what would happen after that crank Diefenbaker had been sent packing. Here was valiant little Canada standing up against Mother England in the name of international law. A proud moment of national independence, which happened to fit very well into the plans of the Eisenhower Administration. Ike used Canada's position as leverage against the British.
No more were we lapdogs of the British Empire! Now we were taking orders from Washington! That's the funny thing about many Canadian nationalists, they insist on wanting to make us less British but somehow wind up making us more American in the process. What else would be the result of declaring a Canadian republic?
The royal restoration isn't a colonial throwback. It's recognition that Canada's identity lies in preserving elements of our past. A vital part of that past is the monarchy.
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