Abolishing the Monarchy is a media fetish only

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Sept 22

RE: The monarchy, Canada, and the future.  Spectator editorial 20 Sept 22.

In the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death and funeral, only the media are talking about replacing the monarchy.  The CBC can’t help bringing it up, and now the Spectator.  But no one else is.  And the reason is that most people recognize that Canada has the best form of government possible, a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch is largely absent.  Winston Churchill once said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others.

But inveighing on replacing the monarchy gave the Spectator editors a chance to reveal how absolutely ignorant of history they are.  And call into question their capacity to reason at all.  For example, the claim that Queen Elizabeth “represented an empire that in its history ruled over and exploited countries around the globe.  That this exploitation came in the form of violence racism, slavery, raiding natural resources, and robbing local economies.”  Not even the second Boer War meets these criteria, and this is the British Empire we’re talking about, not the Russian Empire.  The Left has its QAnon too, apparently.

Let’s talk about enslavement.  Britain abolished slavery in 1833, used the Royal Navy to suppress the slave trade, and, as Douglas Murray notes, paid a heavy price in reparations to do so.  Get credit for it?  No.

Indigenous relations with the Crown begins in 1763 with the Royal Proclamation, a most liberal document.  British North America, Canada, engaged in genocide of Indigenous?  Not even Murray Sinclair claims that.  Name dates and places of the massacres, please, or shut up liar!

Black people were enslaved in the colonies of British North America?  Another popular lie from the fever swamps of progressivism.  Dates and places, please, or stop your slander of Canada.  Upper Canada abolished slavery in 1793.

Canada’s distancing itself from London began in 1922, not 1965.  Canada signed the Treaty of Versailles as a separate belligerent power, and the Statute of Westminster, 1931, recognized Canada as a completely independent country.  There was the Letters Patent of 1947.  All the big stuff happened before the Spec editors were born, and so they don’t know of it.

After concluding that its goal is impossible of realization, the Spec decides that better to hold the monarchy accountable for the past.  Accountable for what?  Cabinet government had taken hold in Westminster by 1763, and all the decisions were made by elected officials. (The British cabinet thought it outrageous that King George III would issue the Royal Proclamation of 1763 without their advice to do so.)

What’s worse: failing history or failing reason?

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As a technical matter, Blacks were enslaved in Africa, and sold as slaves on slave markets in the new world.  Hence, as a matter of grammar as well as history, Black people couldn’t have been enslaved in BNA.  the Spec was horrible today, even for them.