Of Cabbages and Kings

Ask a Canadian or American 12-year-old with a modicum of history the difference between our counties. You’ll get something like “America got rid of the King in 1776, and Canada didn’t.”

That’s mythology. The truth is something else.

The United States kept the King and the growing web of restraints imposed on him in Britain. Americans codified this in a system of checks and balances.

Canadians let the King go over time. The Sovereign’s face still appears on coins, the $20 bill and a few postage stamps. The monarchy is a metaphor for a faded generation

What we reject, we draw back to us. What we cling to, we ultimately push away.

Americans reinvented monarchy in the Presidency. A bystander at the first inauguration said to a countryman, “I fear we have deposed George III and elected George I.”

The US constitution of 1787 reflects Britain’s 1776 system of government: two houses of parliament, the lower house elected, an independent judiciary, and a king who sometimes meddled in government, and sometimes lectured it like a benign schoolmaster.

Both systems continued to evolve. The King became an Emperor in the four terms of the Roosevelt presidency, and the Emperor was found to be without clothes in the Bush one.

But the written Constitution the US adopted froze the 1776 kingship in time. Britain’s kingship continued to devolve power to Parliament, Cabinet and the Prime Minister.

Canadians, who started out on their own in 1867, clung to Britain’s monarchy for three generations. In so doing they drained it of power to truly influence their lives, as the image of an absent lover becomes a placebo for relationship with a flesh and blood human being.

Canada’s early involvement in two world wars had less to do with principle than attachment to a parent: hence the slogan “For King and country.” While focused on an overseas symbol, Canada was developing a homegrown Prime Ministership unparalleled in the free world.

William Lyon Mackenzie King who served as PM for a record 20 years, managed to do an end run around the Governor General. With only a minority of seats in Parliament, he outfoxed a much more eloquent opposition leader with more seats than he had.

He introduced a system by which fellow ministers gave the PM a signed undated letter of resignation when they entered Cabinet, and so could be dismissed by him at any time.

Canada’s head of government is no longer “Her Majesty’s first minister” who can be removed by revolt in Cabinet or caucus, and whose British counterpart moves out of Downing Street the morning after an electoral defeat.

Canada’s Prime Minister is more powerful within the Canadian government than the US President is within the American one. He has no written checks and balances to limit him because his office is not written down to begin with.

The Canadian Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is not a branch of government. It is the brain that controls the whole. Judges are appointed here. So are Canada’s senators.

The lower House of Parliament is controlled by the Prime Minister even in a minority government. The timing of calling elections is his, so long as the largely ceremonial Head of State does not resist. (By the way, the PM nominates her too.)

Most third world dictators would not turn up their noses at the power here. A Canadian PM does not have to veto bills he does not agree with. Under the Parliamentary system which he controls, a bill he opposes will never pass the legislature.

Yet the Queen still serves a purpose in the Canadian pantheon. She is the rock star a PM parachutes in every few years to draw a bigger crowd than His Ordinariness could ever command.

PM Pierre Trudeau, no great monarchist, imported her in to sign his new 1982 constitution. Premier Ralph Klein (“King Ralph” to partisans) featured her in Alberta’s 2005 centenary.

Americans have an elected King they look to when times are tough. Canadians no longer have a king, but they do have a Queen.

There’s a difference, and one that has shaped the paths of our two countries. Tomorrow we’ll find out how.