Patrick Moreau is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and The prose of Alain Grandbois, or reading and rereading The Travels of Marco Polo (Note bene, 2019).
Of the dead, as a famous Latin phrase says, nothing should be said, except good. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. Of the late Queen Elizabeth II, everyone agrees to say that she has, throughout her life, admirably fulfilled her role as sovereign. His death may, however, be an opportunity to wonder about the monarchy in general, as well as its future. Here in Canada, it also offers the opportunity to think about the Canadian monarchy.
If many Canadians are in fact unaware of the monarchical nature of the Canadian political system, and consequently of the identity of the head of their state (as evidenced by the responses of the vast majority of my students over more than twenty years), the person of the British sovereign is nevertheless omnipresent in the Canadian political system, and plays a non-negligible role there.
It is not for nothing that we speak in Canada of “Crown lands” or, in the courts, of “Crown attorneys”, who are called, federally and provincially, governors general and lieutenant-governors, or that ministers, federal civil servants, soldiers, judges, new citizens take an oath of allegiance to their sovereign. It is this same sovereign who convenes, prorogues and dissolves the various Parliaments, and who must grant his sanction so that the legislative projects voted by them really have the force of law.
We agree on the fact that all these powers are today essentially symbolic and that, consequently, all this may seem trivial (even if one wonders what would happen if the sovereign or his representative, the governor general, refused , for example, to grant its sanction to a law, the case not being constitutionally provided for). The fact remains that this monarchical character of Canada raises the question, which is absolutely fundamental in any political regime, of the nature of power. What is the source of sovereignty? Where does it come from? In other words: who is sovereign?
Canada being a constitutional monarchy, the answer to this question is not a mystery. It is thus stipulated on the Heritage Canada website that “the Crown holds the power to govern, but entrusts it to the government, which assumes it in the name and for the good of the population. The Crown reminds the government of the day that the source of power remains elsewhere and that it has responsibility for it only for a limited time. »
And further on, we can read that it is “the Queen” (and henceforth “the King”) who is “the living incarnation of the Crown”. It is therefore clearly stated that power in Canada does not belong to the Canadian people, but to the sovereign, who himself owes this power only to God, whose preamble to the Canadian Constitution of 1982 recognizes the “supremacy “. Strictly speaking, the Canadian political regime is therefore not a democracy (etymologically, a regime where power, and therefore sovereignty, belongs to the people). Democracy and monarchy obviously excluding each other.
Does this have concrete political consequences? To this question, I would tend to answer “yes”, because it would be extremely strange if the political regime under which we live did not have one. Thus, our voting system, a first-past-the-post system, which leads to such a distortion between the result of the vote and the votes actually cast by the voters, would no doubt be less tolerable, even appear downright scandalous, if the people was sovereign.
Similarly, we can better understand the visceral rejection of secularism by the federal government and a good majority of the Canadian population if we know that Charles III was proclaimed king in the following terms: “By the Grace of God King of the Kingdom Kingdom, Canada and its other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. Finally, one can wonder whether post-1982 Canada would have had the same ease in practicing state multiculturalism and promoting communitarianism if it were a democracy in which the sovereign people must necessarily, in one way or on the other, to presuppose, and if possible, to experience its unity.
In short, the question of the political regime cannot in any case be trivial. One of its fundamental issues is, among other things, whether the people (and therefore each of us) is sovereign or has a sovereign. Let us add that a subject people is subject to a constitution, charters, etc., which have been granted to them, but which they have neither written nor even voted on.
While a people who are sovereign are supposedly animated, in the words of Pericles, by “the confidence specific to freedom” which gives them the courage to defend their convictions and to transform the political regime in their image, since “the source of power does not reside elsewhere”, but that he holds it in his hands.