Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Harper's monarchist tail (click to view)
Date: August 18, 2011
As longtime readers of this site know, I'm quite fond of talking about the British monarchy — specifically Canada's absurd constitutional ties to it. Those same readers will also know that this is an issue I often have to fight to get my fellow Canadians much interested in, as the topic of Canada's royal relationship very rarely makes headlines in this country.
For the last couple of days, however, Canada has been discussing little else.
The spark, odd as it was, was an announcement on Monday that the Harper administration plans to rename the three divisons of the Canadian armed forces, the Land Force Command, Maritime Command, and Air Command, into the "Canadian Army," the "Royal Canadian Navy," and the "Royal Canadian Air Force." While the new "Canadian Army" title doesn't seem to have bothered anyone, it's the latter two, with their "royal" cyphers, that have provoked considerable controversy.
Both of the new names are actually not new at all, but rather callbacks to historic divisions of the Canadian armed forces. The original Royal Canadian Navy was founded in 1910, originally to assist in the defence of the British Empire, which was having some fiscal problems at the time and wanted the colonies to chip in a bit more. The Royal Canadian Air Force, in turn, was founded in 1924, again, partly as an effort to bring a degree of more localized control (and funding) to imperial defense. In those days, Canada did not yet have the ability to make foreign policy decisions independently from the United Kingdom. As one PM of the era famously quipped, when Britain decided to go to war, the Canadian answer could only be "ready, aye, ready!"
Canada gained foreign policy independence in 1931 with the passage of the Statute of Westminster, though during World War II a lot of Canadian forces (especially those in the Air Force) still remained quite integrated with the British.
In 1968, under the government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson, the RCAF and RCN were merged out of existence, and combined into the single, unified "Canadian Armed Forces" we have today. The terms "Command" were substituted for army, navy, and air force, in order to reflect that the three divisions now operated under a shared command structure, and no longer operated as sovereign institutions, while the "royals" were ditched to reflect Canada's now considerably robust post-war independence from the Empire.
It was a move typical of the highly bureaucratizing, nationalistic spirit that motivated much of Canada's political activity in the 1950s and 60s, and did not occur to universal applause. But the sore feelings passed, and for the last 43 years this style of military, and the names associated with it, have simply been all Canada has known.
Until now! In restoring the original titles (though not, it should be noted, the sovereign command structures) defence minister Peter Mackay declared that his government was finally righting a "historic wrong." The post-'68 names, he said, had undermined Canada's "history" and displeased a generation of veterans, whom he was now pleased to honour with this important symbolic reversal.
And while it's true some World War II-era veterans' groups had been nostalgically pushing for a restoration of the royal names, an equally loud lobby was Canada's always vocal monarchist community, who make a predictable career out of opposing the removal of words like "royal" from
anything, in any context. Since Harper's name change didn't accompany anything else the military wanted (such as increased funding or expanded veterans' benefits), it's been concluded that this is ultimately a gesture more about appeasing the latter community than the former.
The Canadian press has had a lot of fun in recent years attempting to document the strength of monarchist lobbying on the Harper regime, making great fanfare of some of the prime minister's gentle sops to the royalist cause, such as his foreign minister's
installation of a giant portrait of Elizabeth II in the lobby of the Foreign Affairs Department, and a famous "you're-not-our-head-of-state"
smackdown of former Governor General Michalle Jean.
Personally, I've long been critical of the Harper-as-ultramonarchist narrative, for reasons I explain in greater depth on an
essay I wrote for the Mace on the subject. To briefly summarize, when you examine his record, one doesn't come across much hard evidence that Harper is dramatically
that much more of a monarchist than any past prime minister, all of whom have generally been quite pro-Queen to one degree or another. Instead, to my naive eyes at least, Harper's record seemed to be a fairly moderate mix of formal politeness and the occasional moment of snarkniness — a sentiment rather far removed from the gushy, weepy, Anglophila of someone like the very reactionary former Tory PM John Diefenbaker, to whom he is occasionally compared.
This "royal" re-branding thus marks Harper's most provocatively, unambiguously monarchist gesture to date, and has ratcheted up the fear that maybe the Prime Minister is more serious about pushing Canada in a more neo-colonial cultural direction than previously thought. It's certainly given me pause to revisit some of my earlier conclusions.
What's next, the people ask? The restoration of knighthoods? English lords as governor general? Bringing back the
Red Ensign? I guess everything's on the table now.
***
There was huge media interest in this story and in my capacity as a professional republican I was summoned for a couple of TV and radio interviews in response. Here's two of the best: me on
CTV News and me on
Sun TV.
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