There will be no pirouettes to mock the Queen when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stops over in London to meet the Queen on his way to the Malta meeting of the Commonwealth nations. Justin Trudeau might be as ambivalent towards the Royals as his father was before him but he has no interest in rocking the constitutional boat in Canada. While Canada needs to rid the halls of Ottawa of the cloying smell of long dead Royals, it is not going to be done by Justin Trudeau in his first mandate.
Maybe it is easier for someone with Scots ancestry, such as your writer, to say screw the Royals. Canada does not need them. It is nothing personal. That false surge of Royal worship under the late and unlamented Harper regime was disquieting. It was nothing more than pandering to a small Canadian demographic of royalists. If we are lucky the Monarchist League will die off with time.
Nobody should be entitled to win the lottery at birth and expect a life of indulgence and false pageantry. The Royals might do wonders for Brit tourism but Canadians have been getting the dirty end of that stick for almost 150 years. We are neither fish nor fowl. We are a monarchy without a monarch. We are a democracy without the cheering. We are a country ruled by elites but with nobody to look up to. We are free but we act servile.
Those of us who love this country fret for her. Our freedoms are fragile. Our military is small while our land is large. Our neighbours to the south and over the polar icecap are powerful. We are but a buffer.
And yet the battle flag of the Maple Leaf is the rallying point, not the Brit Ensign. Let the Brits fight for Queen and country; we are world citizens in Canada. We come together in this land from the countries of the world. We owe no allegiance to old or far away roots.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, more than anyone else fused the nature of Canada. He took the stoicism of the Brits with the joie de vive of the Quebecois to open Canada to tremendous growth through the 20th Century.
What Pierre Trudeau saw some sixty years later were the anachronisms of the old Brit traditions in a burgeoning, boisterous and modern Canada. His pirouette in London behind the Queen was never for the Queen. It was for his fellow Canadians. Maybe Justin should learn to pirouette.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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