Adventures with Royalty

Canada has a King. The USA has a wannabee king.

In twenty-four hours we relearned something about ourselves and our history. Even Andrew Coyne a leading columnist who is often critical of anything the government does, notes that the royal visit has given us a move away from the old definition of Dominion of Canada to Kingdom of Canada.

Americans do not get that. CNN’s commentator, Dana Bash talked about Canada as still part of the British Empire – when there has not been any such empire for a long time. Americans love the Royals in the same way that they move movie stars – as celebrities. Unless some of us read Hello among the magazines at the hairdresser, we pay less attention to the royals until we find them useful. In the last couple of days, we did. The US king could not find anything better to do after watching the Speech from the Throne than offer a bribe. Shouldn’t Americans find something wrong with that? Didn’t they impeach somebody for that once upon a time?

My first memory of the royals goes back to 1939. I am three years old and have been taken to the train station and am sitting on my father’s shoulders. A huge crowd is there. I see a man and a woman a long way away at the back of the paused train and everyone is shouting and waving. The drama of the scene with no understanding of its significance is still there. Some thirty years later, my oldest son is in a play at the National Arts Centre - James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark with the scene, “When the King came to Stratford.” The local citizens are all lined up and cheering in exactly the same way when the royal train approaches – but by accident, does not stop.

And then there were the Little Princesses, a tell-all book about Elizabeth and Margaret which we read and imagined ourselves in their roles. We cut out printed paper dolls with all kinds of fancy clothes – royal robes, tiaras. Do paper dolls still exist? When did they die?

The Royal Family faded into a Canadian background, but emerged now and then with royal weddings, baptisms and visits – and funerals. I was within feet of the Queen Mum toward the end of the last century, when she dedicated a plaque to Canadian composer, Healey Willan. He was our church organist for many decades and the only non-British composer at that point to compose a work for a royal wedding. She was also in town for the horse races as well and asked to stop on the drive to have a look at the new CN Tower. When told that they were getting behind schedule, she remarked. “Don’t worry, they can’t start anything until I get there.”

The children of Queen Elizabeth grew up like many of their contemporaries, with missteps and failed marriages. A young Prince Charles seemed to be perpetually in waiting. Over time, though he has seemed to suit the moment. Making a transatlantic journey in the midst of weekly Cancer treatment is no small commitment.

 We enjoyed watching carefully staged activities – a hastily created farmer’s market rather than the ByWard Market to allow lots of space for exposure to more people, with handshakes and chats. Canadians, new and old travelled great distances to be able to see him. A few Americans travelled in as well. The new prime minister never looked so happy about it all.

So where are we now?

·       We think your president gets more ridiculous by the day. That would matter a lot less if you had not given him extraordinary power to wreck your world and a wider one. What made it possible for you to be so unwilling to question that? You did have the courage to impeach him twice not so long ago.

·       We have a new sense of national identity – less than perfect because many of our young and middle aged, like yours, have not studied their own history. For older ones like me, we have absorbed our constitutional monarchy without knowing it, but it has re-emerged in a clever way.

·       We are in for interesting times here with a minority government that has nevertheless made an impact and got us all interested in politics again. We hope for more civility with a new speaker of the House of Parliament.

·       We leave you to work on all those problems at home – retribution, lack of respect for the rule of law, cutting at the heart of preeminence in education, corruption, cronyism, oligarchy. We are watching CNN and even PBS less. While we generally support the latter, Canadians cannot be expected to bail it out since we did not elect the president who wants to demolish it. We hope you are up to all of this.