To the Editor,
Re: What’s relevance of ‘our’ monarchy? Guest Comment, July 14.
What can you say about Mark Rushton’s column? Maybe, how quintessentially Canadian?
In what other country would we approve of the casual manner with which politicians play fast and loose with constitutional law?
Witness the fourth estate gleefully pander to our collective ignorance of both law and history, and collect a paycheque doing so?
ER II is Canada’s Head of State. She is the Queen of Canada. The Governor General and several Lieutenants Generals represent the Queen’s authority in her absence.
The U.K. (by way of the Parliament at Westminster) severed its ties – as the colonial power – on Dec. 11, 1931 (Statute of Westminster, anyone?).
If not for the bickering between federal and provincial politicians between the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the above mentioned act, the Trudeau government would have had no opportunity to ‘repatriate’ the constitution.
And, yet, given the continued bickering between federal and provincial politicians, the chances are somewhere between slim and none that Canada’s constitution will be changed – unless, of course, we’re happy witnessing politicians who have invested themselves with inordinate amounts of power, play fast and loose with constitutional law; the laws that are supposed to constrain their behaviour – and in that way protect us.
Yes, where else but in Canada would the media be happy to witness political expedience taking precedence over constitutional law?
Even when that political expediency smacks of opportunistic whimsey.
But if we’re happy giving our approbations to Ottawa’s ‘finest’ when next they address the constitution, surely we must be equally rapturous when political expediency is the word of the day in a taxing statute.
So, in the presence of a fourth estate that is anything but a watchdog over the several governments in and of Canada, mightn’t we best be rather careful of what we wish for?
And of what others might wish for us?
So who might have any higher, political expectations of a nation that celebrates its colonial amalgamation as Canada Day, while ignoring its independence day?
And pays journalists who can’t remember the lessons of Grade 7 social studies.
David S. Dunaway
South Wellington