The polling firm Ipsos did a year-end survey for Global News to find out how Canadians feel about the monarchy. Colby Cosh looks at the weak attraction of the republican option:
If you’re a serious monarchist you are of two minds about this sort of thing. You recognize the necessity of occasionally taking the pulse of the institution, just as a human of great age will have their vital signs measured from time to time. You also know that to present the Canadian monarchy to the public as a free choice, a fashion we can discard when it suits us, has the effect of encouraging republican fantasies.
Republicanism is a pathology, a reflection of insecurity and ignorance. In the past it was fostered by newspapermen who had served for a spell in Washington (or Moscow or Tokyo), and who were used to being asked why the hell we have a “foreign” Queen on our money and whatnot. The educations of these men had often involved nothing more than early saturation in great quantities of ink and booze, and many were incapable of a half-decent answer grounded in global history.
So our press elite consisted of men who had suffered chronic humiliation by their big brothers, the Americans. The psychic dissolution of the Empire in the postwar period left us unable to regard Americans the way we once had as a matter of course — as errant, troubled children. Our journalistic teachers thus embraced, as a defence mechanism, the idea that Canada’s thousand-year-old inner constitution was “immature” or less than “adult.”
[…]
The pathological nature of Canadian republicanism is apparent from the Ipsos poll itself. Respondents were asked to indicate whether they agree or disagree with the statement “When Queen Elizabeth’s reign ends, Canada should end its formal ties to the British monarchy.” Fifty-three percent of the sample agreed; the figure was 73 per cent within Quebec, 46 per cent elsewhere.
But why would the death of the Queen be considered an appropriate moment for constitutional revision? Ipsos’s republican push-pollsters do not even have the guts to say out loud what they are talking about. Even as they contemplate a Canadian republic as something to be perpetrated like a theft, when the right distraction happens along, they instinctively avoid lèse-majesté. They know people like the Queen: their own poll finds that 81 per cent of Canadians think she has done a good job (leaving us to wonder what hallucinated grievances the other 19 per cent might have).
Pathological nature of Cdn republicanism? Isn’t that a bit strong? How about “the lameness of much Cdn republicanism?”
I wouldn’t put all opponents of the monarchy in the same bag. People of certain backgrounds or certain experiences have a sentimental attachment to the monarchy that may grow out of perceived benefits in the past (in some cases rather far in the past). Others remember the influence of the monarchy in a darker light. It may be silly but I bristle whenever I come across a monument to Canadian participation in the South African War. And I wonder how many people in Rupert’s Land are still miffed by Prince Rupert’s great land robbery. (When I think of land robberies, I start sliding over into a sour contemplation of Jonathon Dayton whose participation in the American Revolution seems to have consisted of signing the Declaration and making a bundle on land sales in the American Old Northwest Territory. But I digress.)
Back to Cdn republicanism: doesn’t it seem very likely that no matter what the new constitution actually said, the new Cdn monarch …er president would end up imitating the monarch…er president next store? In a matter of minutes?
Comment by Steven Muhlberger — December 31, 2016 @ 10:02
Filter out the absolute bias of the losers on the Plains of Abraham and we have a country that is still happy with a parliamentary democracy. Every poll in Canada has to be reviewed with the knowledge that there are regional biases that will skew the results when they are sampled. Over sample one area if you want to publish a desired result. Polls are becoming less and less reliable in my opinion, and therefore should be shunned and ignored.
Comment by Dwayne — December 31, 2016 @ 22:49