Riggio: Payette’s Resignation Offers Canada an Opportunity to Break from the British Empire
Photo Credit: (University of Toronto/Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
Another transition is in store for Canada, the imminent need to replace our Governor-General, the representative of the Queen, Canada’s Head of State. It marks the first time that the Governor-General of Canada has been forced out of office due to professional misconduct. Canadians should use this moment to reconsider the role of the Governor General.
Do we truly need, as a country and as citizens, this institutional heritage of Canada’s past as Britain’s overseas colony? We progressives must stand against the economic and socio-political heritage of empire. Though we still argue over how best to remedy it, progressive Canadians understand that the Canadian state was originally designed to dispossess and subordinate Indigenous peoples.
Yet the principal institutions of the Canadian state remained directly tied to the political traditions of the former British Empire. Constitutionally, Canada remains a dominion of the United Kingdom. We may have patriated our constitution from the British parliament, but the British Crown remains Canada’s Head of State.
Today, as we look at the downfall of the Governor-General, Julie Payette, who abused the nature of her office, we should consider whether we still even need this institution in its current form. I hold that we do not.
A Governor General Who Abused the Power of Her Office
Let’s briefly catalogue former Governor-General Payette’s abuses and misdemeanors. In July 2020, news broke that Julie Payette and her assistant Assunta di Lorenzo were almost constantly aggressive, demeaning, cruel, and verbally abusive toward staff.
Initially, Prime Minister Trudeau defended Payette, but subsequent investigations from the CBC as well as other Canadian news organizations only uncovered more evidence corroborating the accusations of workplace violence and hostility. This included testimony about her abusive behaviour from staff who had worked for her at the Montreal Science Centre and the Canadian Olympic Committee.
I included the breaking staff abuse scandal in my last year’s round-up of Trudeau’s turbulent summer that also saw the revelations of bid rigging for contracts in COVID-19 relief plans, and the resignation of Finance Minister Bill Morneau. As part of that summer’s public relations blitz to clean up his reputation, Trudeau hired a management consulting firm to review the allegations about Payette and Di Lorenzo. The has not yet been made public, but reportedly confirms everything alleged last summer, and, indeed, much worse.
So Trudeau successfully forced her to step down. Payette’s own public statement of resignation reads as a disgusting act of gaslighting that did all but directly assign blame for her own workplace bullying to the staff she spent three years victimizing.
The Governor General‘s Haughtiness
As the CBC’s Aaron Wherry described, the blame for this mess does ultimately lie at Trudeau’s feet. Trudeau’s first years in government found him enjoying a majority government, combined with the Liberal Party’s traditional brand of elitist self-entitlement, with a greasy layer of charisma and social media savvy to boot. His choice of Payette was a return to recent form for the Canadian government, treating the role of the Governor-General’s office as mere ceremony and public relations.
Her own actions, even from the earliest days of her tenure, expressed this same arrogance. Payette’s most egregious single act of misconduct actually happened in June 2018, when she refused to sign a bill into law in time to prevent its death, despite it having passed both the House of Commons and Senate. It had passed the Senate in an extended session, and Payette refused to return from her vacation until the head of Canada’s civil service lobbied her in a personal phone call.
Payette considered her vacation more important than the primary duty of her office, as the constitution of Canada plainly lays out. Payette had already massively reduced the day-to-day work of the Governor-General’s office. She simply refused to assume most public appearances outside of Parliament and cut her office’s involvement with Canadian charities to almost nothing. At no point, apparently, did it cross her mind that her personal desires and preferences were less important than the demands of the office of the Crown’s representative in Canada.
While Payette’s attitude is unforgivable, it is unfortunately understandable. The Liberal Party’s public relations apparatus has, over the last three decades, reduced the public dignity of the Governor-General’s office to mere ceremonial and marketing functions. That previous Liberal governments appointed two Governors-General with more knowledge of television production than constitutional law has only hammered home this public perception of the office’s irrelevance.
What To Do With the Representative of Canada’s Head of State?
However much I want to blame the elitist and anti-democratic culture of Canada’s Liberal Party for the indignities to which the office of the Governor-General have sunk, the office’s superfluous character is built into the constitutional framework. In Wherry’s analysis, he accurately described the Governor-General as Canada’s “nominal head of state.”
Like many other former British colonies around the world, we keep this unnecessary tie to the British Empire. In so doing, we keep our country in fealty to a planetary machine of violent military dispossession that ran for centuries, invented most forms of modern racism, and cemented many of the global economic inequalities that hold billions of people in poverty today. If we want Canada to become a country governed by the principle of justice, we should break from this inheritance forever, and remake our constitution as the Republic of Canada.
Canada becoming a republic would lend an inherent dignity to the office of the person who signs our Acts of Parliament into law, than it possesses now. The Governor-General, for the Dominion of Canada, is a mere representative of the British Crown, an anachronism by modern standards.
The Real Danger of Subordination to the British Crown
An illustration of the current absurdity: If Payette had refused to resign, Prime Minister Trudeau would have had to ask Queen Elizabeth to dismiss her, illustrative of the subordination of governance to a foreign country. In the context of the current problem of egotism and human resources management as evident in Payette’s time in office, the situation points to the redundance of the office of the Governor General. It in no way points to a certain constitutional sovereignty.
Consider this example from another Commonwealth country, Australia. Since becoming Prime Minister in 1972, Gough Whitlam drew the Australian back from pushing the Cold War. He diminished Australian Special Forces support for US operations in Vietnam, and began making diplomatic moves to join or at least support the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization of world governments pledging relative neutrality in US-Soviet hostilities.
After Whitlam threatened to expel an intelligence operations base shared by MI6 and the CIA in Australian territory, the British and American intelligence services, military, and diplomatic corps began spying on Cabinet meetings and figuring out ways to promote a change in government.
In 1975, the Australian Governor-General was Sir John Kerr, a supporter of Australian involvement in Vietnam and other anti-communist military activity. He was also a leader in several international diplomatic organizations that the CIA regularly used for intelligence gathering and espionage. After the heads of MI6 and the CIA told Kerr that Prime Minister Whitlam was about to reveal to Cabinet that their base was spying on them, Kerr withdrew Royal support for the Labour minority government. He forced Whitlam’s resignation and enabled the opposition Liberal Party to form a government.
What Can Canadians Learn From Other Commonwealth Republican Movements?
British interference in Australia’s government caused a fierce backlash, and a strong boost to the movement to remake Australia’s constitution as an entirely independent republic. The involvement of British and US intelligence agencies in conversations with Kerr about dismissing the government would not become public for some years. But many Australians were enraged that the supposedly ceremonial post of Governor-General allowed for such naked partisan jockeying.
Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s 1983 tour of Australia, as depicted recently on a particularly soapy episode of Netflix’s The Crown, was a last-ditch public relations campaign on behalf of the Crown to short-circuit the republican movement there. To this day, making Australia a republic remains part of the Labour Party platform, has been in the Green Party’s platform from its start, and receives support from many conservative Australians as well.
It seems that all that keeps the monarchy in place in Australia is that there is yet no consensus anywhere in the country’s politics as to what the office of their Head of State would be in a republican form. In the country’s 1999 referendum on whether to keep the UK’s monarch as their head of state, Australians voted against the republican option, despite nearly two-thirds of the population desiring an Australian republic. he republican option remains on the table, albeit something of a leap into the unknown.
When the people of a country are asked to change a fundamental aspect of their constitution, it is very important to have a clear, relatively straightforward vision of what that change would entail. But in the 1999 vote, republicans had no definite framework for what Australia’s Head of State would be or how the office would operate. Australians were asked to leave a govering framework they were familiar with, but not presented with a path forward other than the assurance that they would figure it out later.
A wave of republican reform could be coming to Caribbean nations this decade, the first such wave since the 1970s. Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced plans for a referendum to become a republic, and he has long advocated shedding the British Crown as an institution. Barbados has taken a different route. Instead of a referendum, their government announced in its Throne Speech last September that it would become a republic by November 2021. The Barbadian people elected a Parliament.They aim to become a republic, and they will pass the necessary constitutional reforms in order to achieve it.
An Indigenous Obstacle to a Canadian Republic
As Barbados demonstrates, a government open and democratic in its processes and discussions can manage a constitutional transition from being a dominion of a monarchial empire to becoming a fully sovereign republic. For the past several years, about half of Canadians already support ending our connection to the British Crown, so it is not that wild a proposition. Of course, there are complications and considerations.
Many Canadians have lingering memories of how the failed accords to settle Quebec’s constitutional status provided impetus to that province’s independence movement. So much of our country is loath to open constitutional questions again. But a republican move would not necessarily impact on Quebec’s status. At any rate, a majority of Quebecers support abolishing ties to the Crown.
Transition to a Republic of Canada might however have the effect of the government of Canada further undermining historical treaties signed with the Indigenous nations of Canada under the Crown. The basis of Indigenous claims to sovereignty under international law today rests upon the integrity of the treaties that many Indigenous nations inside modern Canada signed with the British Crown long before 1867.
One could argue that a republican constitution would end any obligations Canada might have to honour long-standing Dominion treaties. That is one major legal conflict that any Canadian republican movement would have to settle, and one point that could rally Indigenous nations to oppose the movement to Canada becoming a republic.
A Modest Proposal for a Canadian Republic
All possible legal and constitutional structures for a democratic state require an institutional power outside of Parliament that ratifies the Parliament’s acts into law. This is to keep the foundation of the law itself free from the partisanship of the assembly that formally represents the whole population. The structure and control of state institutions must rest with Parliament, the nexus of political action as regards the law. But the fact of those institutions’ authority must have its conditions outside of Parliament, so that parliamentarians or their partisans can’t consider themselves beyond the reach of the law.
The authority of the state flows from the office of the Head of State, but that office must be apolitical. Constitutions that empower their Presidents either render Parliament a mere appendage of the President’s office, as often happens in France, or a permanent roadblock to governance, as has been seen recently in the United States.
Canada has concentrated the power of governance in Parliament for so long that a republican constitution that gave full power to the Head of State is practically unachievable. Our courtside seats to the spectacle of American political turmoil makes the creation of a President of Canada a practical impossibility.
If any former colony of the British Empire can provide Canada with a solid model for the future of the office of the Head of State’s, it is India. Their Head of State is the President of India, with similar powers of ratifying the laws Parliament passes, similar ceremonial functions, settling disputes among parties in Parliament to maintain the continuity of the government, and most importantly, maintain a relative political neutrality.
To select their President, the lower and upper houses of India’s Parliament assemble a joint committee. The process remains democratically transparent, since it is a public committee of elected representatives (Canada would, of course, require Senate reform to complete a full democratic buy-in on House-Senate cooperation here). In fact, the Indian process is quite similar to the Commons committee that Stephen Harper’s government struck a decade ago to vet and select the Governor-General. Trudeau and the Cabinet are currently considering stronger vetting processes for the next Governor-General.
Head of State of a Canadian Republic, With All Attendant Dignity
In India, the President is often drawn from among well-known politicians, often linked to ruling parties, near the end of their political careers. So close to the end that only one of their former Presidents, Pratibha Patil, is still alive, and she is 86 years old. There is precedence in Canada for similar reverence and respect for the role.
Harper selected David Johnston as Governor-General in 2010 because he was one of the top constitutional law scholars in Canada, and had a prestigious career as law professor and university president. The first Governor-General Jean Chrétien selected in 1995 was longtime Liberal Party parliamentarian Roméo LeBlanc, who had served more than two decades in the House of Commons and Senate. Governors-General Ramon John Hnytashyn, Jeanne Sauvé, and Roland Michener, were likewise long-serving federal parliamentarians. Ed Schreyer had been the New Democratic Premier of Manitoba. Jules Léger and Vincent Massey had served decades as ambassadors. Georges Vanier built a distinguished career in the Canadian military and as a diplomat. All the previous Governors-General had been British, and so served the Crown instead of Canada.
Julie Payette disgraced the office of Governor General. Let us consider the possibility of a country where the dignity of our Head of State can never be taken for granted. Most important, let’s make Canada a country where the authority of the Head of State does not issue from the British Crown but rather from the Parliament of the Republic of Canada.
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