Be thankful for calming influence of the monarchy

Season 4 of The Crown should remind Canadians why we still have the monarchy. And why we should be grateful for it.

Binge-watching this bit of Netflix fiction based on a real family was more than fun. My contention we should be grateful for their existence has nothing to do with the Windsors themselves, but the pomp and pageantry embodied in the royals' presence. Caught as Canada is between the United States and the United Kingdom, with one led by a monarch-in-his-own-mind and the other by the real thing, the series should remind us why we still retain the hereditary constitutional monarchy.

I don't give a fig for the Queen, or her heirs and successors or the ragtag band of junior royals who take up space. Blame my late Irish-born mother for those feelings. What she would say about the current Prince of Wales isn't repeatable. Let's just say she believed the entire Royal Family to be, in Monty Python's words, upper-class twits.

Nonetheless, she married a Canadian, thus becoming a subject to the British monarchy. But they lived across the ocean and she didn't have to spend much time thinking about any oath to a sovereign. (In fact, marrying before the citizen-by-marriage law was changed meant she never had to swear allegiance to anyone. I, on the other hand, having been born in England, was the only one in the family who had to apply for a Canadian citizenship certificate.)

Personally, I argue our constitutional monarchy saves us from the worst aspects of republicanism — the need for pomp and circumstance in everyday life, if only to keep bright our secret love of pageantry. In a CBC radio interview this week, former U.S. president Barack Obama said he didn't miss “the pomp of the presidency.”

We don't think about that aspect of American politics — that when the head of state is the head of government, all of the bowing and scraping and forelock-tugging has to go somewhere. In Canada, we keep most of it in another country. Those Canadians who believe (and tell pollsters) that we should break ties with the monarchy and become a republic haven't thought all that through.

In a sense, the trappings and grandeur of the royals, all those castles and servants, all that velvet furniture, Old Masters, tapestries and, of course, the jewels are partly ours to enjoy. We get to goggle without ever having to replace the current owners with elected politicians. Somebody has to wear the robe of honour or the Order of the Garter or what-have-you. But without the royals, we'd have to designate a replacement.

( Which we do, of course, in our federally appointed governors general and lieutenant-governors. Still, we bow and curtsy to none of them.)

Canadians are never required to stand when a politician enters a room. I remember being stunned when a group of American journalists automatically stood when the vice-president entered a conference room into which we had been herded (literally) prior to

The Entrance. This wasn't done out of politeness, but in acknowledgment that the second-most-powerful man in their country had just graced the room with his presence. He had been preceded by Secret Service agents and, if memory serves me right, a sniffer dog. (That last memory could be confused with an RCMP security detail and its bomb-sniffing dog having swept through the Calgary Herald building prior to a visit by a campaigning prime minister.)

We get it right in this country.

We don't actually need a king or queen; we're quite capable of conducting our own affairs without interference. But consider our southern neighbours. That particular fervid republic has replaced a stolid monarchy with rule by moneyed elites who then assume all the trappings of a ruler. Money, not heredity or qualifications or good intentions, buys the American presidency.

As bizarre as their electoral system seems, as time-consuming and tedious as it must be to have to vote for minor sheriffs and judges, the plight of the American citizen is a wake-up call. We should treasure the monarchy for what it removes from our concern, rather than anything it does for us other than the occasional visit. When the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau said about Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition that once off the environs of Parliament they aren't Honourable Members but “nobodies,” he should have been thanked rather than criticized.

Once out of office, we let our politicians get on with their lives unencumbered by noblesse oblige.