Laying the groundwork for Canadian autonomy

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/02/2023 (978 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Netflix series The Crown has not been kind to King Charles III. In the four previous seasons, as Prince of Wales, he has been frequently portrayed as an awkward, out-of-step royal who shamelessly married Diana when he was in love with Camilla, his current wife.

His portrayal has not fared much better in season 5, The Crown’s final season. In the first episode (spoiler alert), he meets with British prime minister John Major and suggests his mother, Queen Elizabeth, should abdicate so he can assume the crown (decades before he actually did).

If this scene seems preposterous, it is — because according to the real John Major, it never happened. That scene, said the former PM, is “a barrel-load of nonsense.”

Watching such behind-the-scenes melodrama — and this includes the Harry and Meghan documentary series about their ordeal, also on Netflix, and Harry’s revealing memoir, Spare — might be entertaining, but King Charles and the rest of the Royal Family remain integral to Canada.

Upon the queen’s death, when Charles became King, he also became Canada’s head of state.

Recent polls indicate that close to 50 per cent of Canadians support severing our centuries-long ties to the monarchy. Those anti-monarchy sentiments are prevalent in many other Commonwealth countries, particularly in Australia, where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, an avowed republican, has floated the idea of holding a referendum on the issue.

A hundred years ago, such talk would have been regarded in Winnipeg and elsewhere in Canada — with the possible exception of parts of Quebec — as outright blasphemy. A majority of Winnipeggers were then, and for the next five decades, proud of our links to the monarchy and consciously thought of themselves as British subjects.

It was ingrained in the city’s government, schools and culture. And non-British and Scottish (and some Irish) immigrants were expected to assimilate this identity and heritage. Moreover, the British Empire’s terrible treatment of Indigenous people and its controversial colonial policies across the world were generally not topics for debate.

When the First World War started in 1914, nearly all of Canada rallied to the mother country’s side. That included former prime minister Wilfrid Laurier, then the leader of the opposition, who said Canada’s answer to this call of duty must be: “Ready, aye, ready!’”

The new prime minister in 1921, William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had become leader of the Liberal party two years earlier and who would serve on and off as prime minister until his retirement in 1948, shared this patriotic love for Britain.

Yet like his immediate predecessor, Robert Borden of the Conservative party, he believed Canadian sacrifices in the bloody battles of the Great War had earned Canada a certain degree of autonomy in the governing of its own affairs and, most significantly, in its participation in world affairs.

For King, a cautious plodder, this required a fine balancing act, between not upsetting loyal pro-British English Canadians and appeasing his many French-Canadian supporters in Quebec. To this end, he urged the British to stop treating Canada and the other dominions (as the Commonwealth countries were then called) “as adolescent nations” (in historian Michael Bliss’s words), and accord them the respect they deserved.

As might be expected, the British saw this issue differently and resisted any change that would diminish their power. Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary from 1919 to 1924 and a former viceroy of India, expected Canada and the other dominions to salute and obediently follow British rule.

Nonetheless, in March 1923, the British reluctantly relented and permitted Canada to negotiate and sign, on its own, a fishing treaty with the United States. Then, seven months later, at the imperial conference held in London, King took up the cause of autonomy more vigorously (at least for him).

His chief advisers at the gathering were Oscar Skelton from Queen’s University, who was to become the undersecretary of external affairs, and John W. Dafoe, the Free Press’s editor — who, at the cajoling of Sir Clifford Sifton, the newspaper’s owner, had warily agreed to accompany King as well.

Both Skelton and Dafoe urged King to resist any idea of a centralized imperial foreign policy — set by the British alone — and to push the concept of dominion autonomy.

He agreed, and did so in his own unique style. “Our attitude is not one of unconditional isolation, nor is it one of unconditional intervention,” he declared in classic example of the ambiguity for which he is famous.

King was proud of his performance at the 1923 conference, and his worth as a political leader did improve, even in the opinion of a tough critic such as Dafoe. In truth, the 1923 meetings did not produce any earth-shattering changes, but it did lay the groundwork for another key imperial conference three years later.

Eventually, these conferences resulted in the Statute of Westminster in 1931, an act of the British Parliament that confirmed Canada as a self-governing dominion — yet one that supported Britain when the country needed it most with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.