The King's Speech, and other symbols

National Observer

28-05-2025

Just before noon on Tuesday, parliament's sergeant-at-arms entered the House of Commons. 'Mr. Speaker,' he announced, 'a message from His Majesty the King.'
'Admit the messenger,' replied Francis Scarpaleggia, the Speaker of the House.
It was a rare old ritual to observe. But normalcy quickly returned to the House as the federal cabinet and a few dozen of their fellow parliamentarians rose, chatting freely among themselves. They were following the usher outside, to walk two hundred metres down Wellington Street to the Senate building, joking about how few of them would actually fit inside the red chamber where King Charles III sat waiting to do what he'd come for.
'We just have to walk by the cameras so it looks like we're going,' I heard one MP explain to another.
Twenty minutes later, the King began reading his speech.
**
There's no small irony to the act of calling in your King to remind a belligerent neighbor of your sovereignty. Thanks, it practically screams, but we already have a tyrant. Sometimes, however, contradiction sheds its own kind of light.
Canada has followed many of its abstract and symbolic traditions in this past week. But in times such as these, symbols and abstractions are tangible reminders of how our society functions, writes Arno Kopecky.
For one thing, the British royals are no longer tyrants. Whatever else you may feel about them, their history, or their current wealth, they've been utterly defanged. The King has no authority over Canadian policy or law; he doesn't tell us what to say or do, but quite the opposite: aside from a few personal words of appreciation for Canada, the words he read out from the Senate chamber on Tuesday were the words he was given to read. By Canada's prime minister. That's progress.
As the speech reminded us off the top, however, all progress is fragile. 'When my dear late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, opened a new Canadian Parliament in 1957, the Second World War remained a fresh, painful memory,' the King said. 'The Cold War was intensifying. Freedom and democracy was under threat.' Today is similar, the King – or rather, Mark Carney through the King – went on. 'The world is a more dangerous and uncertain place than at any point since the Second World War. Canada is facing challenges that are unprecedented in our lifetimes.'
Between the platitudes and soaring rhetoric, Canadians got a glimpse of Carney's plan. No real surprises, though – anyone who's been paying attention to what he has been saying for the past 80 days could have written a first draft of this throne speech themselves.
Break down provincial barriers to domestic trade; expedite industry, from clean energy to fossil fuels; double the rate of housing construction (and make it affordable). 'Climate change' got exactly two mentions – again, not terribly surprising. Then again, 'President Trump' wasn't mentioned at all. Carney seems to appreciate the value of leaving certain things unsaid.
Essentially, the whole speech was subtext. Not what was said, but the person who said it. As with everything this week, the symbol spoke louder than words.
Symbolism has long been the royals' public language. Well before his current visit, King Charles began voicing his support for Canada entirely in symbols: In March, as Trump's 51 st -state talk ramped up, the King showed up to inspect an aircraft carrier wearing a set of Canadian medals. Then he planted a maple tree at Buckingham Palace, and chose a Canadian chair to sit on during a Commonwealth Service. These things (and others like them) didn't happen by accident.
But symbols have value for everyday Canadians too — a value that's heightened in times like these when the fabric of society starts fraying.
This became clear the day before the Throne Speech. On Monday morning, while the King was still in the air, another ritual was acted out in the House of Commons: Prime Minister Carney and Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer pretended to drag Scarpaleggia, who'd just been elected Speaker, to his new chair, which the latter pretended not to want.
That tradition has its roots in the Middle Ages, just like all the ceremonies played out in Ottawa this week. The position of Speaker of the House was originally created as an office for commoners to air their grievances to the King of England. It was a dangerous job. Between 1394 and 1535, seven Speakers were beheaded (and many more imprisoned) by their Kings for being the bearers of bad news.
Today, instead of risking death or imprisonment, Speakers get a $99K top-up to their MP's salary. And instead of sharing bad news from the people, the Speaker's main task is to police parliamentarians' speech during Question Period. That job has grown nearly impossible over the past decade. As each of the five contenders for Speaker emphasized in their brief speeches early Monday morning, Question Period has devolved into the verbal equivalent of a food fight before the electorate's eyes. 'We can't have a truly meaningful exchange of ideas without an orderly rules-based House of Commons,' Scarpaleggia said in his pitch for the job. 'There's nothing wrong with a clean, even board-rattling polemical body-check in the corners… the problem is when sticks go high.'
This prompted a chorus of 'what about elbows' from the Conservative side of the House; Scarpalaggia looked up and assured them, 'no, the elbows are for others!' Then he carried on: 'Canadians want to see sticks on the ice, and it's the responsibility of the Speaker to make this so.'
'Debates should be passionate, they should be lively,' Scheer said. 'It is normal that members get enthusiastic and fiery.' Instead of encouraging the new Speaker to uphold the rules of civil discourse, Scheer advised him to let the mud fly. 'When the stakes are so high, often the best thing you can do is allow the players to play a little bit.'
That was it for Monday's session. Even as the leaders spoke, the King and Queen of Canada were descending into Ottawa. Scarpallegia wouldn't be tested until the King read the Throne speech.
**
That's why, two hours after watching Scarpallegia pretend he didn't want the job he'd just applied for, I found myself standing in a century-old forest outside Rideau Hall.
Over 150 trees have been planted by royals, presidents, prime ministers and world leaders of every stripe on these grounds. This tradition is Canadian and relatively new – it only dates back to the red oak Prince Arthur planted here in 1906. Since then, everyone from Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela to Haile Selassie, Robert Mugabe and Charles De Gaulle have planted trees here.
To stroll through these woods is to walk through literal, living history. JFK reportedly threw out his back when he and Jacqueline Kennedy planted their two red oaks in 1961, but these days the groundskeepers do all the work. In fact, the blue beech King Charles was 'planting' was already in the ground by the time the sovereign arrived; all that remained was for him to add a few silver spadefuls of earth from a small mound piled beside the trunk (a blend, I was told, from all 13 Canadian provinces and territories).
It was just one more pile of symbolism in a two-day royal visit that added up to a mountain of ceremony. All of it intended to deliver a single pointed message.
**
Our laws, our institutions, our relationships with each other and our neighbors — these are all imaginary constructs. So is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We make them real by choosing to believe in them. That can go the other way, too. Maybe Alberta doesn't belong in Canada after all; maybe the 49 th parallel doesn't matter. Those are just arbitrary lines on a map, after all.
But we've built a concrete nation on the foundation of those invented lines, together with countless other abstractions. Most of the time, we don't even notice them, any more than we notice how clean water comes out of the taps. Until someone comes along and realizes that the only thing holding it all together is our collective imagination; that a person with enough power can simply ignore make-believe things such as laws, treaties, or election results.
When that happens, symbols such as tame kings and reluctant Speakers stop being abstractions. Illuminated by crisis, they become tangible reminders that society, like any game, only works when enough people play by the rules.
An hour before the King's plane touched down on Monday, Carney reached beyond Britain and the Middle Ages to emphasize how ceremony can help protect Canada. 'This house has rules,' he said. 'It has traditions. And it's in those traditions that our Athenian democracy is founded. Yes, we are Athens,' he added, and then, unable to hold back a grin, he finished, ' they are Rome. On va triompher.'