Posted by Ian McKechnie on July 14, 2011, 9:56 pm, in reply to "Re: The perils of appeasement"
Message modified by board administrator July 14, 2011, 10:01 pm
Can't we have it both ways, though?
The royal tour of 1939 was supposed to reinforce the idea that George VI was just as much the King of Canada as he was the King of Britain. By almost all accounts, the tour succeeded in doing just that. Unfortunately, the cultural and constitutional significance of this tour has been overshadowed by the notion that it was merely a British publicity stunt, designed to entice Canadian support for Britain during what was to become the Second World War. Sure, that was part of it, but there was much more to the tour as far as "Canada's evolution as a country" is concerned. The problem here, noted Prof. Frank MacKinnon in The Crown In Canada, is not that the Crown is a foreign symbol, but that it is a shared symbol, and "...we have either not recognized the fact or we have allowed doctrinaires to obscure it."
I'm sure that republicans would love to see a beaver-loving, doughnut-munching, hockey-playing "hoser" installed as our head of state, simply because such an individual would conform to all of the right Canadian stereotypes and thus reinforce the idea that they are in fact the "purely Canadian" figurehead of which republicans clamour. In this respect, our existing system prevents us from adopting a tacky hybrid of homogeneous Canadianism at one extreme and overly-politicized parliamentary republicanism at the other.
Responses