The Queen's Representative and Sacred Events of the Nation

First, I don't have much use for the monarchy. When I moved up here, the whole "monarchy thing" baffled me. More than that, it appalled me--kowtowing to people who seemed to have no social utility at all and milk the taxpayers to support their lifestyles. It seemed positively bizarre to me the first time I tuned in to hear the Prime Minister's speech from the throne, only to discover that the Governor General was going to deliver the speech by reading it outloud. What's the deal? Did the PM forget his glasses?

I will admit the that British monachy, along with its various franchises, delivers pomp better than anyone, and they do provide some distracting salacious news now and then when their behaviors are less than regal. But these hardly justify the line item expense in the national budget. One could easily consider them nothing more than the national vestigial organ of the empire. Should the monarchy go on the operating table immediately (they do get to hop the queue, after all) and be excised from the body of the nation?

I think not. After years of living in a land where a presence called the Governor General abides, I've come to believe there is a meaningful purpose for sustaining this role of the Queen's representative in Canada. Tempting though it may be, I'm not going to focus on those rare moments--and one Canada just had--when the Governor General actually has real power in deciding the fate of the government. What's needed to justify the role is a reason for the largely ceremonial and symbolic activities that take up most of the position--commemorations, funerals, celebrations.

It's easy to dismiss the position as all fluff and puffery, or to use a more American idiom, as all sizzle and no steak. To do that, however, is to underestimate the significance of those moments in national life that require invoking realms of feeling to deep for policy to hold, during times when a nation experiences itself, despite its wide and mighty differences, as a single community bound together by history and tragedy.

In my American childhood, it was always the President who spoke to those moments. LBJ spoke to the nation about Civil Rights, Ford commemorated the Bicentennial, Reagan eulogized the astronauts of the shuttle Challenger. The President, elected to run the country and enact laws and policies, was also the holder of the sacred, the high priest to the nation's aching soul. It is why the U.S. Presidency seems to be an office designed for a God-King more than a politician.

In Canada, it is entirely different. It struck me, fairly early on after moving up here, that the PM is--get this--a regular person...whose job is in politics. Deference to the position is far less. Not only does the nation not vote for him directly, he doesn't have to carry the symbolic weight of the nation. He can be a policy guy, he can set direction, and when that direction results in deaths, another person holds and symbolizes the nation's grief. The office of Prime Minister is not imbued with the immense historical weight given to the office of the President; the trappings of the office of Prime Minister are relatively benign; Sussex Ave and the White House are symbolically not in the same ballpark.

Why does this difference matter? Because in Canada the sacred occassions of state need not be compromised by the taint of policy. When George W. Bush attends a military funeral for soldiers killed in Iraq, his policy decisions are directly linked to those dead sons and daughters of the Republic. Depending on one's feelings towards those policies, the President can be an inappropriate presence in honouring the dead. To be blunt, would you want to have the man ultimately responsible for your son's death to attend his funeral? And so the office of the Governer General allows the sacred affairs of the nation to not be contaminated by politicians and their policies, however inspired or daft.

This leads me to the relatively subdued nature of political rhetoric in Canada, but that's for a later post...