Tomorrow, Canadians will be glad to have the King on their side

Telegraph

4 days ago

Tomorrow the King opens the Canadian parliament in Ottawa. Who would ever have thought this would be an exciting moment? Canada – and monarchical speeches – are notoriously placid. Yet exciting it is and, I think, is intended to be.
When Mark Carney replaced Justin Trudeau as prime minister of Canada in March, Buckingham Palace laid on an unprecedented piece of theatre in London. Mr Carney was sworn in there by the King. His Majesty also presented his Black Rod of the Canadian Senate with something referred to as the ceremonial sword of Canada, an object of which no one had previously heard.
All this – culminating in today's speech – is designed to assert Canadian sovereignty.
For many years, that very notion decayed because the external threats to Canada seemed so minimal. Canadians agonised about internal questions like Québéc separatism and the rights of indigenous peoples. To many, the monarchy seemed marginal; to some, even offensive. The woke Mr Trudeau made a point of removing an official portrait of the then monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, and sticking up a couple of Québécois paintings instead.
But countries think harder about themselves when threatened. Now that threat looms, in the substantial form of Donald Trump. He calls for Canada to become the 51st state of the Union; he enjoyed labelling the outgoing prime minister 'governor Trudeau'. His proposals sound like one of those 'usurpations' of which the American Declaration of Independence complained.
The perverse political effect of Trumpery was that his threat deprived the Canadian Conservatives of their expected election victory. Mr Carney, though a full-throated Davos man and ardent Remainer when governor of the Bank of England, was able to keep the Liberal Party in power. The great disdainer of Britain's sovereignty suddenly became the righteous defender of Canada's, thanks to Trump.
Why does the monarchy matter in this? Because when countries are challenged from outside, their legitimacy is put in question. Mr Trump does this, deliberately and disgracefully, in his suggestion that Volodymyr Zelensky is not the legitimate president of Ukraine, citing the fact that Zelensky has postponed elections during the war with Russia. He has not spoken so boldly about Canada, but the implied disrespect is there.
Who better than the King, whose role and character Mr Trump admires, to administer an implied rebuke?
When the King's Speech is made in the British Parliament, it is a strictly constitutional event. The King simply reads out the Government's legislative programme. In the Canadian case, the tradition is different. The King is free, within careful limits, to give some thoughts of his own. I am sure he will not be so foolish as to attack the President today. His standing derives partly from his good relations with Mr Trump, symbolised by the royal invitation, eagerly accepted, to pay a state visit to Britain. More important and lasting is the plain constitutional fact that he is King of Canada.
Since the failure of the United States to win Canada in the 1812 war, it has been a settled thing (leaving aside the question of Alaska) that the entire North American landmass is occupied by only two entities – the nation that threw off British colonial rule by revolution and its northern neighbour which remained loyal to the British Crown even after gaining full independence. It needs repeating that this peaceful coexistence has been immensely beneficial to both parties.
Trust is reaffirmed in practice by the 'Five Eyes', the intimate intelligence alliance, forged out of victory in 1945, between the United States and four monarchies under the same King – Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The King is the best spokesman and symbol of all this. And in these strange times, where America itself is part of the global turmoil, it will make sense for the strong ties between the four other nations to strengthen.
There are potential pitfalls, however. Earlier this month, Joseph Nye died. He was the political scientist who invented the useful concept of 'soft power'. He defined it as 'the ability to get what one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment'. Nye was right, but recent British governments have become so excited by soft power that they forget it is the handmaid of hard power, not the substitute for it.
Countries in the 'Global South', for example, have become increasingly irritated by Britain's tendency to tell them to improve their attitude to LGBT rights. Such nations like to say that China gives them investment whereas all Britain gives them is a lecture.
The fiasco of the Chagos islands handover is a textbook case of how soft power can make hard power trickle away into the sand.
In the case of our monarchy, there is a particular issue here – the difference between the monarch as King of Canada, Australia etc and – which is the origin of his authority – as King of the United Kingdom. There is the potential for a clash if, say, Canada, wants the King to do something which might not accord with British interests.
So far, so good, however. A soft-power answer can help to turn away some of Trump's hard-power wrath.
As the BBC Today programme reported the Canadian story yesterday, it kept saying that his Ottawa speech was 'the first time the monarch has done this for 68 years'. Not so, Elizabeth II spoke from the Canadian throne twice, in 1957 and 1977.
Surely the collective memory of the Corporation which declares 'Nation shall speak peace unto nation', should have been able dredge up that fact.