{"id":36791,"date":"2016-12-31T02:00:31","date_gmt":"2016-12-31T07:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36791"},"modified":"2016-12-30T09:53:19","modified_gmt":"2016-12-30T14:53:19","slug":"canadian-republicanism-is-a-pathology-a-reflection-of-insecurity-and-ignorance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/12\/31\/canadian-republicanism-is-a-pathology-a-reflection-of-insecurity-and-ignorance\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;[Canadian] Republicanism is a pathology, a reflection of insecurity and ignorance&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The polling firm Ipsos did a year-end survey for Global News to find out how Canadians feel about the monarchy. <a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalpost.com\/full-comment\/colby-cosh-canadian-republicanism-is-a-pathology-but-it-wont-survive-past-the-next-coronation\" target=\"_blank\">Colby Cosh<\/a> looks at the weak attraction of the republican option:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cforeign\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2014 as errant, troubled children. Our journalistic teachers thus embraced, as a defence mechanism, the idea that Canada\u2019s thousand-year-old inner constitution was \u201cimmature\u201d or less than \u201cadult.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cWhen Queen Elizabeth\u2019s reign ends, Canada should end its formal ties to the British monarchy.\u201d Fifty-three percent of the sample agreed; the figure was 73 per cent within Quebec, 46 per cent elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p>But why would the death of the Queen be considered an appropriate moment for constitutional revision? Ipsos\u2019s 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 <em>l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9<\/em>. 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).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019re a serious monarchist you are of two minds about this sort of thing. You recognize the necessity of occasionally taking the pulse [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[396,289,517],"class_list":["post-36791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","tag-monarchy","tag-polls","tag-republican"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9zp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36792,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36791\/revisions\/36792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}