The monarchy a useful anachronism

The return to Canada of Prince Charles provides an opportunity to look again at the institutional eccentricity of the Canadian monarchy. It has received completely inadequate attention, here and in Australia and New Zealand, for its novelty. These are all among the most successful and promising countries in the world, and no other serious countries in history have had a non-residential monarchy.

Mercifully, Canada has graduated from the adolescent self-consciousness of an insecure country preoccupied with the symbolism of national sovereignty, and concerned that a British royal family which comes among us fairly disparately and randomly, includes our chief of state. But it has not quite reached the point of appreciating the endearing originality of this system.

Of course it’s an anachronism, but most Canadians would now say that there is nothing wrong with that. But most would also decline to subscribe themselves as committed monarchists. The old Quebec reservations about the monarchy were attached to ancient and discredited nonsense about French Canadians being drafted to fight the battles of an empire that had gained rulership of them by force.

In fact, they were abandoned by sticky-fingered French colonists who preferred retention of Guadeloupe and Martinique to Voltaire’s notorious “few acres of snow” in Quebec, and who took everything with them when they fled except the roofs off their seigneurial manors. Only the clergy remained behind to preserve the French language. The French Canadians and the greatest of the British governors, Sir Guy Carleton, (Lord Dorchester), struck one of the most brilliant bargains of British Colonial history, the Quebec Act of 1774.

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