An American Primer on the Royal Family

Some of our American readers don’t quite comprehend the curious relationship of the British Royal Family on many Canadians, so here’s an explainer.  Please forgive us for oversimplifying.

Canada is a different country than the US, therefore we have a different history.  We share the same pissed off Mongols who walked a land bridge across the Bering Straight, looked around and said “Eff that, we’re going home.  Where’s the bridge back?  Awww Shit!”  These would be our First Nations/Aboriginal peoples.  Those would be the folks who met the boat carrying our ancestors and kept them from starving to death.

For the longest time we were a French colony or a British colony, depending on where you lived.  After a couple of wars, the Brits won and around 1710, many of the French who lost were kicked out.  Parenthetically, Cajuns down Louisiana way?  They’re Canadians, more correctly Acadians, who left for the nearest French colony, which happened to be in Louisiana.

We had a British King, but since the King couldn’t really (or didn’t want to) come over to sign various laws, he would appoint a representative called a Governor-General every few years.  The G-G would ensure taxes got paid, laws were upheld and things more or less moved along. 

After your Revolutionary War, where you put the boots to the whole British King concept, a lot of the folks who didn’t buy into the Republic went North.  Up here, they were called Loyalists, while down your way, they were called ‘assholes’, followed by “Goode Friggin’ Riddances!”

We kept up the colony thing until 1867, when there were enough of us around to ask for our own country, technically a Dominion, called Canada.  Since Britain didn’t actually care about us, they went along with the joke.

We kept a lot of the mechanisms of the British Parliament, in that we have a Prime Minister who is a sitting, elected, Member of Parliament and our own version of the House of Lords from the UK, that we call a Senate.  Senators are not elected up here, in keeping with the House of Lords idea of the Chamber of Sober Second Thought being appointed by the Prime Minister in the name of the Crown.  Our Senators are as useless as tits on a brick, just like the House of Lords in Britain.

The Statute of Westminster in 1931 cut a lot of the colony ties, in that we could do more or less what we wanted, including fighting in wars.  It finished up with the Canada Act of 1982 when we got our own home-grown constitution.  Your Kennedy Family is absolutely nothing like the Royal Family:  Not even in the same time zone.

Our British traditions and history only partly explain the Royal Family ties with Canada.  Since 1952, when Queen Betty the Deuce took over the family business, either her, her sisters or her kids have been to Canada about nine hundred and fifty thousand times.  Canada, at least from the perspective of the Royal Family, is a safe gig; easy peasie time.  We don’t make them eat sheep’s eyeballs or sit through bum-numbing hours of “native” dancers in fur and feathers doing “traditional” dances celebrating harvesting the pilchards.  From a Royal perspective, a Canada trip is simple, the food is safe, the hotels are clean and the peasants are content to wave back with all five fingers.  Ask Dubya about our penchant to wave at certain foreign heads of state with only one finger.

Despite the affinity, Canadians don’t look to the Queen or to Britain for our politics or foreign policy.  We do share the concept of a parliamentary democracy, but Canada is nowhere  near the nanny state the UK currently is:  We’re a nice hybrid of the tradition of Peace, Order and Good Government and some of the worst excesses of our Republican neighbours to the south.

Which still doesn’t fully explain why Canada is smitten with the Royals and the upcoming nuptials of William and Kate.

Think of the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena.  There’s miles of chicken wire strung over trailers and tractors, marching bands, clowns and enough roses to make California smell like an Old Age Home.  Millions of people watch it with a fervor bordering on mania to see what?  Parade floats honouring the Philippine Pineapple Importer’s Association? Does the acronym WTF come to mind?

That’s what the Royal Family is to Canada.  It is a parade float, full of beauty, tradition and millenary arts signifying nothing but pleasant enough to watch for a day or two.  Will Canadians be setting their alarm clocks for 0200 on Friday, so they can dress up and watch Bill and Katy get hitched? 

And they’ll enjoy every minute.