The Lord’s Day this week, the last Sunday in Epiphanytide by
the old Kalendar, was the sixth of February in the civil calendar, and the
seventieth anniversary of the death of King George VI and the accession of his
daughter Queen Elizabeth II to the throne.
She had already surpassed Queen Victoria to become the longest reigning
monarch in the entire history of the British Crown, its English and Scottish
predecessors, and thus it goes without saying in the history of the Canadian
Crown and the Crowns of the other Commonwealth Realms. This marks yet another milestone as she has
become the first monarch to attain a Platinum Jubilee. Congratulations to Her Majesty! Long may her reign over us continue to last!
As might be expected, the best remarks on the occasion from
one of Her Majesty’s Canadian subjects were those of David Warren, the former Ottawa Citizen columnist and former
editor of The Idler, who was years
ago driven out of polite journalism after its complete and total takeover by
the forces of what is now called “wokeness”.
He wrote:
Her subjects are blessed, and have for so long been
blessed, with a fine and adequate ruler. She has seen them through an
incomparable ring of years and changes.
Not every nation of the British heritage deserves such
a monarch, and indeed many have broken the royal connexion in displays of
tawdry narcissism. Members of her own family have also failed her, and the
governments over which she has presided have been a constant source of
embarrassment. Yet Her Majesty, and the late beloved Prince Philip, have borne
all these modern indignities with grace and extraordinary patience.
Amen! As there is
little if anything that could be said to add to such remarks I shall move on to
address a question that has risen in connection with the occasion. There has been some discussion about how to
mark and celebrate the anniversary Stephen K.
Roney addressed this early last month:
And what has Canada
planned to mark this epochal event? Apparently, an ice sculpture on Sparks
Street Mall for Ottawa’s Winterlude.
That almost sounds
like an insult. As though her reign was written on water.
We can do better.
Moreover, if the spring and summer of 2022 marks the end of a dread pandemic,
we could all use a big party.
The federal government
may have no time for the Queen, but it she is popular in much of Canada―in
large part because the monarchy is the one thing that, historically,
distinguishes us from the USA.
Although this was not my reason for quoting Roney, the last
line deserves emphasis. The monarchy is
what has historically distinguished Canada from the USA. Lefties in recent years would have us believe
that it is our welfare state and especially our “single payer” health care
system. The former, however, was
established in imitation of American innovations (in the late 1930s the
Canadian government brought in a social security net in imitation of FDR’s “New
Deal” in the USA, in the l960’s and 1970s, they expanded it in imitation of
LBJ’s “Great Society”). The latter, a
system inferior to both the pre-Obamacare American system and the public system
with free private competition of the UK and the Scandinavian countries, ought
to be our national embarrassment, is too recent to historically distinguish us
from the USA, and could eventually be adopted by the USA. The monarchy is also what has historically
united Canadians. It is the single
element of the Canadian heritage that unites the three traditional and historical
Canadas. English Canada was born out of
the United Empire Loyalists. French
Canada remained loyal because the Crown had guaranteed its language, religion,
and culture on the eve of the American Revolution. The Crown is the other signatory in each of
the Indian treaties. It is very
appropriate, therefore, that new Canadians have to swear an oath of loyalty to
the Queen and her heirs to become Canadian citizens. By doing so, they are joined to the
historical, traditional, Canada by her one unifying factor, a factor the place
of which cannot be taken by anything else.
Mr. Roney is right that an ice sculpture is an insufficient tribute.
My own humble suggestion is that Her Majesty’s Platinum
Jubilee be celebrated with a new edition of a book that was first published
early in her reign and which has been out of print for years. The book I refer to is Freedom Wears a Crown. Its
author was John C. Farthing, the son of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing who
served as the Anglican Bishop of Montreal from 1909 to 1939 (this is not a case
of senior and junior – the son’s middle initial stood for Colborne). Farthing was an academic man, who studied
first at McGill – interrupting his studies there to fight in the First World
War - then at New College, Oxford, before returning to McGill as faculty to lecture
in the Political Science and Economics department chaired by Stephen
Leacock. Later, after a ten-year
hiatus from academe spent in philosophical reflection, he would teach younger
scholars at the Bishop’s College prep school in Quebec.
Farthing began writing the work for which he would be
remembered at a time when the world had been radically shaken up by the two
World Wars and had realigned itself into two camps of nations – the one led by
the United States of America, the other by the Soviet Union – which were
engaged in what James Burnham called a “Struggle for the World”. This conflict is known as the Cold War
because the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers – a legacy of the Second
World War – made a direct “hot war” between them an unthinkable option. This was the world situation when the young
Elizabeth acceded the throne, and the situation to which Farthing spoke. The two sides of the conflict represented
rival political and economic ideals. The
United States represented capitalist republicanism, the Soviet Union
represented socialist totalitarian democracy.
Farthing in his book reminded Canada – and the other realms of the
British family of nations – that her and their heritage was an alternative to
these. It was also, he argued, a
superior alternative to these, because it was not drawn up on paper by some
armchair philosopher or political scientist, but had emerged naturally and
organically, from the thousands of years of human experience and wisdom that
had forged and tested it. This
heritage was that of the Westminster System of Sovereign Crown-in-Parliament.
Farthing did more than just argue that the Westminster
System was better at guaranteeing personal freedom – he distinguished between
this and “individual liberty” - than American capitalist republicanism and
better at securing the common good than the Soviet system. He also discussed in detail how this heritage
had been threatened in the famous constitutional crisis known as the King-Byng
Affair of almost a century ago. It was
not, however, as students who are taught what Donald Creighton dubbed the “Authorized
Version” – the Liberal theory of Canadian history – learn, the Governor
General, Lord Byng whose actions posed the threat, but those of Liberal Prime
Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
King had asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament at a time
when it had taken a recess before voting on whether to censure his less than a
year old government because of a corruption scandal. By refusing, the Governor General exercised
in his vice-regal capacity the reserve powers of the Crown to prevent the Prime
Minister from evading his accountability to Parliament. The Governor General reminded King that he
had remained in office after the last Dominion election under unusual
circumstances – he had not won the plurality of seats, that had gone to Arthur
Meighan’s Conservatives, but with the additional support of the Progressives,
had been allowed to continue in government on the stipulation that Parliament
would not be dissolved until after Meighan had been given a chance to form an
alternative government. King resigned,
Meighan was given the chance, his government was immediately brought down in a
confidence vote, automatically dissolving Parliament, and in the ensuing
Dominion election King lied to the Canadian public, presenting himself as the
champion of Canadian sovereignty over her domestic affairs, and the Governor
General as having acted inappropriately and at the behest of the Imperial
government in London. In fact, as King’s
letter of resignation to Byng demonstrates, King had asked Byng to consult with
London before making his decision and had been told that there was no need
because his constitutional duty was clear – a Prime Minister was not to be
granted a dissolution under such circumstances. The Canadian public accepted King’s story,
however, and returned him a majority government. By his success in deceiving the public,
Farthing argued, King and his Liberals had undermined in practice the Crown’s
reserve powers, and in doing so had undermined the accountability of the Prime
Minister and his Cabinet to both Crown and Parliament, a dangerous step towards the
subversion of the Westminster System and the turning of Prime Minister in
Cabinet into a form of elected dictatorship.
Farthing’s understanding of this
historical event – that Lord Byng was in the right and Mackenzie King in the
wrong - is clearly borne out against the “Authorized Version” by the historical
paperwork, as noted above. It had previously been championed by Eugene
Forsey, who had studied at McGill with Farthing under Leacock, and joined the
latter’s department as faculty the year that Farthing departed, in his doctoral
dissertation which was published in 1943 under the title The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British
Commonwealth, another book that might be considered for re-issue in honour
of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Farthing’s interpretation of the larger
significance over the event has been borne out by subsequent history in which
Prime Ministers – especially Liberal Prime Ministers, and especially Liberal
Prime Ministers from the far left of the Liberal Party, whether it be the
Marxist far left of the ‘60s and ‘70s, or the “woke” far left of today – have tended
to treat their office as that of an elected dictator.
When Farthing died in 1954, two years into the reign of Her
Majesty, his manuscript required editing.
His friend Judith Robinson, a well-known Toronto investigative
journalist and author during the middle decades of the Twentieth Century,
polished off the manuscript which was published in 1957 by Toronto’s Kingswood
House.
Farthing’s book has been out of print for quite some time
and younger generations of Canadians are largely unfamiliar with the case for
why the institution of monarchy is the most important symbol of our
freedom. Freedom stands and falls with
traditional institutions, especially monarchy.
The freest countries in history, with one or two exceptions, have been monarchies. Totalitarian police states have been
republics. Farthing’s book was a great
contribution to the explanation of why this is the case. What better time to
bring out a new edition of his book than now, when we are celebrating a
record-setting milestone in Her Majesty’s reign at the end of two years of
suffering under a particularly arrogant elected dictatorship of the type he
warned us about, one that has treated our constitutionally protected freedoms
as if they were the Prime Minister’s to take away from us as he sees fit? Had our elected leaders – Prime Minister and
provincial premiers – and their health officers, followed the example of Her
Majesty in her address to the Commonwealth of almost two years ago and adopted
the tone she set – one of encouragement, endurance, and sympathy – instead of
the tone of scolding, nagging, bossing, bullying, condescending and
scapegoating they have employed for the last two years – they would not be
facing the protest demonstrations from fed-up truckers and other Canadians all
across the Dominion that we have been seeing for the past two weeks.
Happy anniversary Your Majesty!
God Save the Queen!
Hear, hear!
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