Sarah Boesveld - For those who make their work studying Canadian symbolism, the signs couldn’t be more obvious. Over the past three months, the Harper government has ramped up its monarchist tendencies, at first relishing in its role as hosts to Will and Kate on their first official trip, and then making swift symbolic changes as it settles into its new status as a majority government.
Earlier this summer, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird replaced modern paintings at his department’s headquarters with a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen. In mid-August, the Prime Minister’s Office re-instated the word ‘Royal’ before the titles of the Canadian air force and navy. And this week, the government ordered all foreign officials to hang portraits of Queen Elizabeth II in Canada’s embassies, consulates and high commissions abroad.
While the government says the picture hanging is a matter of conformity with other Commonwealth nations, some academics see these moves as steps in a broader mandate to rebrand Canada’s national identity.
“It’s a very deliberate and calculated effort to re-shape Canadian symbolism, Canadian nationalism and Canadian values back to a certain conception of conservative Canada that has very strong roots in Diefenbaker-era Canada where ties to the monarchy, to tradition, to the British world are very important,” said Matthew Hayday, an associate professor of Canadian political history at the University of Guelph, who has studied symbolism in Canada specifically in Canada Day celebrations.
Canada’s conservatives have long loved the Crown because it plays to the ideas of tradition and respect for authority —namely, the authority of the British empire, he said.
“There’s a certain amount of nostalgia as well for a period where Canada was part of a broader British empire,” said Prof. Hayday, and the mandate plays to a “specific subset” of the conservatives’ Canadian voter base who have watched as multiculturalism and bilingualism, in their view, overshadowed any nods to Canada’s British heritage.
After Stephen Harper’s Conservatives beat out Paul Martin’s Liberals in 2006, there was a noted shift in the way the new prime minister wanted Canada to think of itself, said Michael Jackson, Saskatchewan’s former chief of protocol and a research fellow at the University of Regina.
“Pre-Harper, the government seemed lukewarm about the monarchy, with people like [Liberal cabinet minister] John Manley calling for Canada to be a republic,” he said from his home in Regina. Since the 1980s, Rideau Hall was pushing to make the Governor General Canada’s head of state first, representative of the Queen second.
The government’s move to invite the Queen to the 90th anniversary for the battle of Vimy Ridge in France in 2007 — Michaelle Jean stayed home — was a clear sign to Rideau Hall that Mr. Harper felt the Governor General was not the head of state, it was Her Majesty. The federal government was spooked by separatists and so did not invite the Queen to the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec, but that didn’t stop Prince Charles and Camilla from coming to visit the next year. The Queen returned for Canada Day in 2010 and the Royal couple followed this summer.
Meanwhile in 2008, Jason Kenney, then minister of Canadian Heritage, published the Crown of Maples educational booklet on the monarchy, a book that had languished on the backburner for 15 years, Dr. Jackson said. Then Mr. Kenney unveiled the new citizenship guide in 2009, revealing a mandate for new Canadians with the Queen front and centre.
“It’s not like Back to the Future, it’s not a retro-grade colonial step,” Dr. Jackson said of all these Crown-friendly maneouvres. “I think renewing historic traditions is what makes a country what it is.”
And of course, not everyone is pleased with the Conservatives’ vision of a more royal Canada.
“The Harper government is operating very much like a regime mounting an ideological crusade to rebrand the country,” Ian McKay and Jamie Swift argue in their forthcoming book Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in a Fearful Age, due out in spring 2012.
Canada made a lot of gains since 1945 —there was medicare, security for trade unions and a less racially exclusive concept of Canadian citizenship, Prof. McKay, who teaches the history of Canadian left-wing movements at Queen’s University, wrote in an email to the National Post. But the “New Warriors,” as he and his co-author put it, have been calling for the dismantling of these instituitions because they interfere with values such as a Puritan work ethic and respect for authority.
“Monarchical symbols fit right into this ideological program. They invite us back to the era of the ‘Dominion of Canada,’ a land integrated into the British Empire and upholding the myth of the “White Man’s Burden” around the world,” he said, adding that the new citizenship guide is a clear signal.
“Attaching “royal” to this or that institution might seem like a small detail —and in a sense it is. But when these moves are placed in their overall context, as part of a determined campaign to rebrand Canada and conscript its history to fulfil a far-right-wing agenda, then their real significance emerges.”
Some don’t agree that the government is conspiring to change national identity in Canadians’ minds by trying to re-emphasize the Crown.
“I don’t see this as a conservative plot to undo the symbols and institutions of liberal Canada,” said Rudyard Griffiths, co-founder of the Dominion Institute. “I just think of it more as a natural evoluition of a party and a leader looking for some way to show and to prove their nationalist bona fides.”
In some people’s eyes, the royal symbolism might betray the fact that the Harper government is in fact endorsing some pretty novel ideas in governance, said Jim Farney, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Regina who studies conservatism in Canada.
“If you look at the symbolism, you’ve got these two big monarchist symbols,” he said, referring to the portraits and the military name changes. “And at the same time they’re pushing through Senate reform, so I think it’s clearly a matter of symbol more than substance.”
He allowed that it might be seen as something of a ‘‘de-Trudeauification’’ of Canada, but he sees it as more simple than that. Instead, he said, “They’re trying to re-emphasize and remind people that this is a part of the Canadian fabric.”
At least for now, quipped Prof. Hayday from the University of Guelph, Mr. Harper is probably smart to get the portraits of the Queen up while she’s still a familiar face and institution on the throne.
“I wonder if Canadians would necessarily be so thrilled if it was a bunch of portrats of Charles being put up,” he said.