Barbados this week chose to shake itself loose from its colonial past and become a republic, with no formal allegiance to the British crown. Good for them! Here are five good reasons why Canada should do the same, and as soon as possible.

1) King Charlie? Chuckie? Chuckles? We all admire Queen Elizabeth II. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard any serious and sustained negative commentary about the queen. Yes, there were rumours that she was at odds with Princess Di, and with Megan Markle, but in general, I think Canadians admire the current occupant of the throne.

But will that admiration survive the unhappy day that Queen Elizabeth passes away and we are asked to swear allegiance to Charles, the current Prince of Wales? I, for one, will not stand proudly and profess my loyalty to the man who wishes to come back in a new life as a pair of Camilla’s knickers.

Queen Camilla? Princess Camilla? ‘Nuff said.

What we must conclude, when we delve into personalities like this, is that we infuse all kinds of nonsense into the term Royal, or Royalty. Beyond “privileged”, being a member of the royalty doesn’t automatically confer anything. The nobles aren’t automatically born with elements of character or integrity, leadership or virtue. Just ask the noble Prince “I like ‘em young” Andrew. So, if leadership isn’t an inherited characteristic, why would we consider following Prince Charles just because he had the good luck to be born into the family of Windsor?

2) Monarchies – A Dying Breed

According to that peerless information source, Wikipedia, there are 44 monarchies in the world, and that includes the somewhat anomalous realm of the Vatican. Of those 44 monarchies, only seven including the Vatican, are absolute. The remainder are Commonwealth countries and other Constitutional monarchies. That means that in the system of government of the vast majority of countries in the world, the monarch has very little actual governing power.

We’ve been chipping away at the powers of the monarch since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Isn’t it time we stuck a fork in the whole notion of monarchy and declared it “Done”?

3) It Isn’t Who We Are

Here’s a shocker for you. At least 50% of Canadians have, by virtue of their race or ethnic background, no reason at all to feel loyalty to a British monarch. Only about 50% of Canadians are identified as being of either Canadian or English origin. And of the 32% who identify as Canadian, some solid fraction is presumably of French-Canadian origin.

French Canadians? Those would be the people who lost at the Plains of Abraham. The ones who cheered Charles De Gaulle when he shouted Vive Le Quebec Libre. The ones who have already voted twice about whether or not to leave Canada. If we really want French Canadians to feel like they are fully vested participants in this country, wouldn’t it be wise to stop rubbing their noses in the legacy of British colonial power?

Scottish and Irish ancestry account for about 27% of the country (2016 census data). Ireland, after a bloody revolution and a century of “the Troubles” has finally come to an uneasy peace with England. But it’s doubtful that Irish ancestry implies any affinity to an English crown. Similarly, Scotland has an active separatist movement, with 44% of Scots voting for complete partition from the UK as recently as 2014. If those mother countries are questioning their loyalty to the house of Windsor, why should we not?

Our First Nations people don’t have much to thank the British for. Immigrants from India and China don’t have much to thank the British for. Indeed, immigrants generally, are here not because they want to be part of a dying British empire, but because they want to be part of a polyglot community working together to live in peace and prosperity in this wonderful country. If we don’t, collectively, look or feel or think like descendants of the British, beholden to them for our beginnings and culture, then we have no reason to profess loyalty to their monarch.

4) It’s damned expensive

The Monarchist League of Canada, a slavishly loyal support group for the monarchy, reports that in 2017-2018, the cost of the monarchy was $62,438,557. They then go on to report how little that is on a per capita basis, and what wonderful work the Governor General and provincial Lieutenants Governor are doing for that money. The Business Insider reports that if a Royal party deigns to visit Canada, it costs us approximately $137,500 per day for the pleasure of watching them receive curtseys from children on the evening news.

$62 Million! Well the monarchist league can report that it’s less than $2 per person if they want. Personally, I’d rather spend that money on drinking water for the Indigenous people.

5) We could prevent Justin Trudeau from Choosing another Julie Payette.

I have opined for some time now that we don’t need the office of the Governor General. I’ve been informed that I’m wrong – that we need a notional head of government to legitimize the work of the Federal Parliament and the provincial legislatures.

I personally think that’s a nonsense argument. The notional head of government, the GG, is chosen (sometimes with little care, prudence or visible selection criteria, (see Julie Payette)) by the actual, elected head of government, the Prime Minister. The validity of that choice springs from the fact of his or her election. If your election legitimizes the selection of the notional head of government, then you didn’t need that head of government to legitimize your other acts as the leader of Canada’s constitutional government.

Would we like to have an elected President, or an elected Governor General (who represents no-one except the Canadian people)? I suppose I could go along with that, especially if we assigned some actual work and purpose to that President. I’m not sure honestly what that work would be though. We don’t need, for example, to have the Governor General dissolving Parliament and establishing the date of the next election. That could be done by the PM issuing a formal proclamation through the Speaker of the House, or through the office of the Clerk of the Privy Council. If we want more checks and balances, we could require a recorded vote of the Cabinet. We could even force the PM to move a dissolution of Parliament in the House of Commons, which would allow minority parties to either accept the election, or possibly be forced into a coalition to keep the sitting alive.

My preference would be to assign any thorny question that might, theoretically, have to be resolved by the Governor General in today’s world, to the Supreme Court of Canada. But it doesn’t much matter what your preferred method is. The bottom line is that there is a mechanism. This can work. It is possible to get out from under the shadow of King Charles. The world is full of democratic republics. Establish a committee to study the question and recommend a Constitutional change. Sure, it then requires a certain amount of debate and political maneuvering to get it done without entering into deeper waters of other constitutional changes that interest groups (like the Bloc Quebecois) might want. But it can be done. And it should be done now, lest Queen Elizabeth have the bad taste to die on us before we’re ready.

Good for you Barbados. Canada – we should follow suit.

Let’s have a survey here. Send me a comment. Do you agree with my conclusion, or not?