What is the purpose of the Canadian monarchy? There are a thousand and one ways to approach this question, but first let us underline the obvious: the monarchy allows Canada to distinguish itself from the United States. And that is saying something: maintaining both the geographic and symbolic border with its American neighbor has been one of the main existential concerns of the Canadian state since its creation.
If the United States was born in the revolution, Canadian nationalist mythologies were notably built in “loyalism”. If the Americans waged a long and bloody war of independence against England, the Canadian political class instead obtained, little by little, autonomy from London. After the First World War, Canada developed a separate existence from the British Empire in foreign policy. After World War II, the Privy Council in London ceased to be the highest court in Canadian law. And in 1982, the Constitution was repatriated.
The more Canada’s self-contained existence solidified, the more the monarchy and its imperial symbols receded into daily life. Today, only elders from other provinces still remember the injunctions to sing God Save the Queen (and even, for the older ones, The King) at school. From the 1960s, the O Canada took a prominent place. At the same time, the new Canadian flag also replaced the Union Jack.
Except that when we compare ourselves to the other countries of the Commonwealth, we see how Canada remains particularly conservative — or, let’s say, still and always loyalist. In Africa and Asia, no former British colony retained the king or queen as head of state upon independence.
In the West Indies, Barbados elected to become a republic last year. Guyana, in South America, did the same in 1970. Several states in the region have also been lobbying the British Crown for several years to obtain compensation for colonization and slavery. Faced with the lack of progress on these demands, the republican movements are gaining momentum.
In Australia, a first referendum to make the country a republic was narrowly lost in 1999, and republicanism remains a strong political movement. In New Zealand, we did not attack the monarchy as such, but we distanced ourselves from the British institutional legacy: a system of proportional representation inspired by the German formula has been in place since 1993, and we already had abolished the Senate in the 1950s.
All of these other countries have not had to define their national identity for the sake of contrast with the United States. If King Charles III were to become a particularly unpopular figure in the coming years, it should come as no surprise that Canada is among the last of the Commonwealth realms to begin serious reflection on its governance.
In addition to helping to establish a distinct national identity, the Canadian monarchy also performs the same function that it performs around the world. Distract. Capture the light. Putting a human face, which we want to be as admirable as possible, on the state and its workings.
While we are in the middle of the election campaign in Quebec, many are exasperated that we talk so much about the monarchy when climate change, the challenge of the century, does not wait for the end of the media eclipse caused by the death of Queen Elizabeth II to continue to wreak havoc. Some wonder why the latest IPCC report, which basically announced that we had until 2025 to prevent the consequences of climate change from becoming irreversible, was not entitled to its own special programs for days and days. .
We are sorry that the monarchy can overshadow climate change. We forget that the monarchy, in a certain sense, is the very cause of climate change. To the extent, of course, that the competition between European monarchies has been the breeding ground for a capitalist, colonialist, imperialist expansion that has shaped human economies until today.
The British monarchy has become rich and powerful, because it represents an empire that has polluted and plundered the Earth to its ends. This same monarchy, still today, attaches an image imbued with nostalgia, grace, glamour and nobility on a booty accumulated by pollution and pillage. It is therefore no coincidence that the monarchy distracts us from the fate of the world: this is one of its main functions.
When the monarchy falls, the states that still believe in its imperialism and its boundless appetite for the resources of the world replace it with different symbols, certainly, but which fulfill the same function. If the United States or France control their vassal states in the name of the flag, of God or of the Republic rather than of a king, what does that change, exactly, for the conquered? If Russia hasn’t been the imperial Russia of the tsars for more than a century, but continues to invade its neighbors, what does that mean? What doesn’t that mean?
Allow me therefore to end with questions for all those who have respect for the mourning of the royal family and the political figure that was Elizabeth II while remaining critical of the monarchy as an imperialist symbol. Are you against the symbol of imperialism — and colonialism, and capitalist expansionism — or against its reality? Would you like the powerful of this world to appropriate the wealth and pollute the planet in the name of the people rather than in the name of the king? Or do you want this grabbing to end?
Do we really question the monarchy, in the end, if we still adhere to what it has allowed?