Royal family’s symbolism matters

The monarchy is a dull constant, a quality that’s good for democracy

The more things change in Canada, the more Canada’s feelings about the monarchy stay the same.

Canadians love the monarchy. Canadians hate the monarchy. Canadians feel these feelings at the same time, and over time, these feelings are felt in the same way. Certainly neither feeling goes away. They, much like the monarchy, are just there.

It is not that we all have a love-hate relationship with the royals — it is that roughly an equal number of us love them as hate them. For many years, the question of whether Canadians support the monarchy has been answered yes and no in approximately equal measure. As many of us are willing to tolerate the cost of the royals’ existence to governments and buyers of commemorative royal plates as would prefer not to host them or their representatives.

But let us pause here. To “host” them. To host is to entertain someone as a guest. To some, this seems an odd description of our relationship to the monarch. We are a host that is required to ask our guest for her assent if we wish to turn our own bills into our own laws; in turn, she is a guest in whom executive authority in Canada, our country but her realm, is vested.

Now it is true that the Queen’s powers are mostly ceremonial. But ceremony is not nothing. Nor is ceremony necessarily all: Many scholars wondered whether the Queen’s representative, the Governor- General, would deny Stephen Harper a request to prorogue Parliament in December 2008

— the fact that she didn’t withhold a political reprieve is less interesting than the fact that she might have and less interesting than the fact that he even had to ask.

But to the complaint that we very nearly appear to be the royals’ guests more than they ours, a retort: What hosts they are!

They invite us to have viewing parties for their weddings before the sun comes up in our time zones. They allow us to debate whether Kate is imitating Diana more than Meghan is imitating Kate. They invite us to know what we believe anyway: If celebrities aren’t themselves Gods, some are at least chosen by Him.

But I think their most important function is to remind us that dull can be nice. They smile, wave, get married and give speeches on subjects that no one expects them to know much about. These are all nice things.

There are all sorts of uncomfortable reasons why the royals are dull, of course, dull even accounting for Charles’ recorded attempts at something vaguely approximating phone sex, and Fergie’s topless meetings with her financial adviser, and Meghan’s father’s continuation of the family acting vocation under the coaching of paparazzi. One imagines it is easier to be generally pleasant and polite when you live in a palace and everyone wants an invitation to your party. Dullness is a luxury.

Dullness is a luxury that democracies know well and prize highly, though, when democracies are healthy. Power transfers are largely a matter of paperwork, not bloodshed. Judges stick to their lane and politicians to theirs. Citizens worry more about their taxes than their constitution. This is dull. This is beautiful.

The monarchy is loved, then, for being above the fray, just as the monarchy is hated for being above the fray. When liberalism ascends, we love and hate the monarchy. When neo-fascism surges, we love and hate the monarchy. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo — through even movements that should make it look more like an absurd anachronism than something to be either despised or adored, still we love it and we hate it.

The only constant in the world may be change, but the only change in the monarchy is the kind that keeps things constant. The monarchy takes a commoner in here, a racialized minority in there, but these are allowances, not revolutions. It does not evolve with the times; it shifts just enough that the times won’t turn on it. Just enough to make us say that we’re 50-50 on it.