Maybe the Queen of Canada’s effigy looks at us through her peripheral vision — but I wouldn’t even call that a one-eyed stare.
I normally don’t bother responding any longer to these obligatory anti-monarchist op-eds that tend to appear each July, if only because the republican arguments remain constantly inaccurate — almost like a political science equivalent of Newton’s Laws. Most republican op-eds and essays these days adhere to the same formulaic tropes, like vague appeals to an over-arching historical dialectic or teleology, and refusal to acknowledge how the Crown of Canada has evolved since the 19th century. They’ve become boring to read.
From 2011 to 2014, I wrote about a dozen blog entries on the subject of anti-monarchism, and I’ve covered all of their core arguments therein. In particular, I’d point readers to my response to Paul Heinbecker from July 2014. (July is their favourite month). As I’ve demonstrated and documented in depth in these previous posts, prominent republicans like Paul Heinbecker and Duff Conacher present mendacious or outright deceptive and false assertions as truth and can’t (or choose not to) get the basic facts right. One can make a normative case for republicanism or present proposals on precisely how the Dominion of Canada could become the First Federal Republic of Canada. I suspect that republicans can’t or don’t get the facts right because they care more about normative propositions than how the current system in fact works. Why would they waste time learning about a constitution that they want to mutilate or destroy outright?
