In Deference to Islam, U.S. Secretary of State Dons Headscarf, while that of Canadian Governor-General Michaëlle Jean is Conspicuous in its Absence

In the clash of civilisations between Islam and “the West”, there are Churchills and there are Chamberlains. A recent New York Times front-page photo shows U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton donning a headscarf on her recent visit to Pakistan. But Michaëlle Jean, Canada’s Governor-General (and thus that country’s highest-ranking official after the Queen), recent journeyed to the “Af-Pak” region herself. Photos released by Rideau Hall show Her Excellency breezily taking questions from girls in an Afghan school build with Canadian development funds. The photos show a woman who appears free, confident, and easily engaged by her interactions with those around her. The contrast with Secretary Clinton couldn’t be greater.

The advice si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more, traditionally attributed to no less a sage than St. Ambrose, is sound counsel indeed, but one can’t help but wonder if in this circumstance the Governor-General’s way is the more appropriate one. How rare it is that we find Western leaders with enough self-assurance not to pander deferentially towards a culture alien to our own. Secretary of State Clinton, in her headscarf, broadcasts the signal that she is following an agenda set by others, whereas Governor-General Jean chooses to set the agenda herself — fitting for the viceroy of one of the most stable countries in the world, that enjoys an enviable constitutional longevity.

Still, the Governor-General’s head did not remain bare for the entirety of her visit to Afghanistan. Her Excellency is Colonel-of-the-Regiment of the three units of Canada’s household guard, and, donning the military beret, Madame Jean visited a memorial to the soldiers of her country who have given their lives in the endless conflict in Afghanistan. After the proper solemnities were observed, the Governor-General took a few moments to meet with some of the Canadian soldiers who stood guard during the ceremony.

WHAT DO THESE three coats of arms, their representations produced for the 1910 coronation, have in common? The first thing that might come to the mind of most of the heraldically-inclined is that all three are the arms of British dominions; from left to right, of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Aside from this commonality, however, each of these three arms have been superseded.

The Australian arms above were granted in 1908, and superseded by a new grant in 1912, though the old arms survived on the Australian sixpenny piece as late as 1963. The kangaroo and emu were retained as the shield’s supporters in the new grant of arms which remains in use today.

The Confederation of Canada took place in 1867, but no arms were granted to the dominion so it used a shield with the arms of its four original provinces — Ontario, Québec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick — quartered. As the remaining colonies of British North America were admitted to Canada as provinces, their arms were added to the unofficial dominion arms, which became quite cumbersome as the number of provinces grew. A better-designed coat of arms was officially granted in 1921, and modified only slightly a number of times since then.

South Africa‘s heraldic achievement, meanwhile, was divided into quarters, each quarter representing one of the Union’s four provinces: the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State. While South Africa is (like Scotland, England, Ireland, and Canada) one of the few countries to have an official heraldic authority — the Buro vir Heraldiek in Pretoria — the country’s new arms were designed by a graphic designer with little knowledge of the rules & traditions of heraldry. As a result, the design produced is unattractive and very unpopular, unlike the new South African national flag, introduced in 1994, which was designed by the State Herald, Frederick Brownell, which enjoys wide popularity and universal acceptance.

The current arms of Australia, Canada, and South Africa are represented below.

The Emperor & Empress of Japan in the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, on a recent visit to British Columbia.

Through an interesting post by Joseph Bottum on the First Things blog, I discover that R. R. Reno posted all three of the songs I elaborated upon in my June 2007 post “We’ve Lost More Than We’ll Ever Know”, though (so far as I can tell) he arrived at the same three without stumbling across my entry on them. I always read First Things in New York (it’s one of my favourites, and simply a must-read), but it’s sadly not available in South Africa (bar actually scraping one’s pennies together for a subscription) so I’ll just have to wade through friends’ archives when I return to the Empire State. (Or does the Society Library have a subscription? And if not, why not?).

While it has a reputation among some Catholics as being a bit too liberal & democratist, I suspect the whiff of Americanism one finds in the pages of First Things is akin to the aroma of tobacco in an old bar: the smell lingers but that doesn’t mean anyone’s actually still smoking. Nonetheless, they often feature top-notch articles and writing that are of interest to Catholics & other traditionalists.

This stamp was designed by Jorge Peral, the artistic director of the Canadian Bank Note Company, for Canada Post to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Quebec.

The Walrus is Canada’s general-interest magazine, a sort of New Yorker for the Great White North. Founded just a few years back in 2003, it has taken many of its visual cues from The New Yorker and the result has been a very handsome monthly and a surprisingly interesting one. That’s not to say that it’s a very interesting magazine (like The Spectator), but one which surprises with the occasional article of note. Canada’s intelligentsia is notoriously boring and liberal; they tend to sneer at the neighbouring United States while simultaneously attacking long-held Canadian traditions. For some reason, Canadian intellectuals have yet to comprehend that making Canada less British doesn’t make it more Canadian but instead more American because it is precisely Canada’s Britishness that distinguishes the Great Dominion from the republic to the south.

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On returning from America

I have spent the past two weeks in the United States, not working but travelling on my own account, revisiting some favourite places and coming up for air. It remains an exhilarating and beautiful place, wrongly sneered at by too many British people who simply haven’t experienced enough of it to know how good it can be, and how much worse off we would be if it weren’t there. But it is also a foreign country, not some kind of special friend – but a foreign country to which we have unique access because we speak a similar language. Only fluent French or German speakers could ever know as much about those countries as any British visitor can swiftly learn about the USA – if he wants to.

Rather than re-immerse myself in the small-scale squalor of British politics, which seems even less appealing or interesting than it was when I set out, I thought I would muse a little on what an English person experiences in the great republic, and what it means (or might mean) for us.

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Our friend Mr. Bruce Patterson, who is St-Laurent Herald up in the Canadian Heraldic Authority, was kind enough to send along this rendering of the arms of the Hon. Paul Comtois from Beddoe’s Canadian Heraldry. As Bruce points out, the garbs probably refer to Comtois’s agricultural background, and the miner’s pick in the crest alludes to his ministerial portfolio. The motto is “Be frank & honest”.

Farmer, Politician, Hero, Saint

FROM TIME TO TIME there are men in history whose heroism runs so counter to the spirit of the age that the arbiters of passing fashion must simply ignore him rather than run the risk of acknowledging his embarrassing greatness and goodness. God has graced the New World with many of His saints, some of whom — Rose of Lima, Martin de Porres, Mother Seton — have already been raised to the altar, others — Fulton Sheen, Fr. Solanus Casey — are certainly on their way. Yet more remain unsung and almost forgotten: Paul Comtois (1895–1966), Lieutenant-Governor of Québec until his heroic death, is just one of these saints.

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Nothing ever happens in New York, or at least nothing when compared to Edinburgh, London, or Paris; this is my perpetual complaint. But when it rains, it pours, and so it was last night. Not only was it press day, the busiest day of the month-long cycle of creating each issue of The New Criterion, but then the evening beheld both “A Festive Evening Celebrating the Mission of the von Hildebrand Project” at the University Club and “The Reception and Dinner to Present the Medal for Heraldic Achievement” at the Racquet & Tennis Club. The simultaneous events were organized by the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project and the Committee on Heraldry of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society, respectively.

A rarely-assembled fun crowd was promised at the von Hildebrand event, but nor was the presentation of the G&B’s medal a common occurrence (there have been only three awarded to date) so I simply resolved that I would do my best to attend both. (more…)

Opposition parties unite to elect new President of the Assembly

François Gendron, the longest-serving member of Quebec’s National Assembly, has been elected Speaker against the will of the province’s prime minister, Jean Charest. The ADQ (conservative, autonomist) and PQ (social-democratic, pro-independence) are opposition parties but combined have more seats than the Libéral (center-left/center-right) minority government Mr. Charest leads. Action democratique du Québec and the Parti Québécois united to select Mr. Gendron without consulting Mr. Charest, which the premier described as a “breach of confidence” that was the result of “subterfuge”. The vote took place by secret ballot, and it was only in the hours before that the opposition parties withdrew their respective candidates in favour of a united ticket for Gendron.

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October 21 was chosen as the Feast of the Blessed Emperor Charles not because it is the date of his death — which is 1 April 1922 — but rather to commemorate the marriage (photo, below) between Archduke Charles of Austria (as he was then) and Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma in 1911. While Charles died a mere thirty-four years of age, Zita lived on to ninety-six before passing away in 1989 (when I myself was four).

Not very long ago I was in Quebec City, which was where the Empress Zita and the Imperial Family spent their exile during the Second World War. The Hapsburgs, dispossessed first by the Socialists and then by the Nazis, were then so poor they had to collect dandelions from which to make a soup, but they took poverty in their stride. Passing a grassy bit near the Chateau Frontenac, I wondered “Did Crown Prince Otto once pluck weeds from this plot to feed his hungry mother and siblings?”

Also in that ancient Canadian city is La Citadelle, that great hunk of stone and earthworks, perhaps the oldest operational military installation in the New World. There we were lucky enough to be granted access to the tomb of the greatest Canadian, Major General the Rt. Hon. Georges-Philéas Vanier, Governor-General of Canada from 1959 until his death in 1967. General Vanier and his wife had such a reputation for Christian charity and piety that the Vatican is collecting evidence towards their eventual recognition as saints. Their son is Jean Vanier, the founder of the famous l’Arche communities that care for the handicapped and the disabled. I wonder if the Hapsburgs and the Vaniers ever crossed paths in wartime Quebec…

A splendid afternoon is the best way to describe it. Last Sunday up in St-Augustin-de-Mirabel it was the annual hunter trials of the Montreal Hunt Club – the oldest hunt in the New World. Club treasurer Annette Laroche suggested swinging by the Club sometime and as it happens a good friend had just moved to Montreal. So when Raymond Côté (seen in the previous post jumping on the beautiful white mare Frimousse) sent an invite to the hunter trials, I knew it’d be foolish not to take the opportunity to visit the beautiful land of Quebec for the first time in many years.

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Adjoined to the ancient Cathedral Basilica of Notre-Dame in Quebec City is the Petit Séminaire. The Séminaire de Québec was founded in 1663 by the Blessed François Laval to train priests for the Vicariate Apostolic of New France, and the Petit Séminaire, its secondary school, was founded just five years later to teach both colonial French and native Indian youths. Among the school’s former pupils are four prime ministers of Québec, two lieutenant-governors (as the Queen’s viceregal representative in the province is known), and many other writers, politicians, and important figures of history. The Petit Séminaire survives today as a private Catholic secondary school.

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I will be off in Quebec for a few days.

The ceremonial Changing of the Guard takes place at Rideau Hall, Canada’s viceregal palace, and Parliament Hill during the warmer months of the year. I recall with great fondness a summer trip to Ottawa when I was but a little boy and watching the Changing of the Guard on the green in front of the splendidly gothic parliament buildings. I instantly wanted to become a Canadian soldier, and pondered how many chocolate bars I could hide in the bearskin cap of a red-tunic’d guardsman. (Needless to say, I have not become a Canadian soldier, but Sa Majesté need only call and I would be at her service).

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WHAT BETTER WAY to celebrate this, the feast of St. John the Baptist and the national day of Quebec, than to bring you news of the reëstablishment of the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean. The site in the town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu was first put to a military use in 1666 when the French soldiers of the Carignan-Salières Regiment. The Collège militaire royal, however, was only founded in 1952 when it was inaugurated by the Rt. Hon. Vincent Massey, CC, CH, GCStJ, CD, PC as a classical college to increase the number of French-speaking officers in the Army, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force.

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Over in Great Britain, the House of Commons recently passed the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which, among other things, keeps the time limit on abortions at twenty-four weeks (in spite a hope that it would be lowered), authorizes the creation of “savior siblings (brothers and sisters deliberately created in a lab solely for their organs to be harvested for use by the already-born), and allows for the creation of animal-human hybrids. The British human rights activist James Mawdsley, famously jailed for over a year by the military junta in Burma, has asked opponents of the HFE Bill to sign a petition to Queen Elizabeth II imploring her to withhold the royal assent necessary for the Bill to become law.

Under the British constitution, a bill only becomes a law when it has received the assent of all three components of the British Parliament: the Commons, the Lords, and the Crown. The last time the Crown withheld consent was in 1708 when Queen Anne refused to sign the Scottish Militia Bill. Since that time, it has been an unspoken convention that should the Crown object to a piece of legislation, it should privately inform its ministers before the legislation is voted upon in order for it to be withdrawn, thus preventing the scandal of the Crown and the Commons appearing to be in disagreement. Despite this convention, however, the Crown still has the right to withhold consent, but merely neglects to exercise that right.

While the Crown has faded to near-irrelevance in the everyday workings of the British government, this was certainly not always the case, and the Crown has intervened in politics several times since Queen Anne’s refusal of assent in 1708. What follows are but a few twentieth-century examples.

In 1925, William Mackenzie King was Prime Minister of Canada with 99 Liberal MPs to the Conservative opposition’s 116. He was able to do this by forming a minority government with the support of the 24 MPs of the Progressive Party. A year later, Liberal MPs were implicated in a bribery scandal and so the Progressives having withdrawn their support for the minority government. As parliament debated a motion to censure the MPs involved, the Prime Minister asked Lord Byng, the Governor-General of Canada (and thus the direct representative of the Crown), to dissolve parliament and call a general election.

Lord Byng did not want it to appear that the Crown was allowing parliament to be dissolved in order to prevent the censure of government MPs and so used the royal prerogative and refused to call an election. The Conservatives, as the largest party in parliament (Lord Byng argued), should have a chance at forming a government instead. The Governor-General invited Arthur Meighen, leader of the Conservatives, to form a government instead, and Meighen agreed. This, in turn, infuriated not only the Liberals but also the Progressives, throwing the middle-man back into the Liberal camp. Meighen put his government up to a vote of confidence, lost it by one vote, and so resigned and asked the Governor-General to dissolve parliament and call an election, which Lord Byng duly did.

“I have to await the verdict of history to prove my having adopted a wrong course,” Lord Byng wrote, “and this I do with an easy conscience that, right or wrong, I have acted in the interests of Canada and implicated no one else in my decision.”

In 1931, when the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald submitted his resignation to the King, George V took the unprecedented step of asking MacDonald to form a national government with the support of Conservatives and Liberal Members of Parliament. MacDonald lasted as Prime Minister until 1935, but Great Britain would not be governed by a single-party government again until 1945.

More recently, the Crown controversially intervened in Australian politics in 1975. Gough Whitlam’s Labor government commanded a majority in the House of Representatives but the opposition coalition of the Liberals and the National Country Party held sway in the Senate. It is traditional in Westminster-style systems that if a money supply bill fails to pass, the government falls with it. The Senate refused to vote on the annual Budget, in hopes of provoking Whitlam into calling a new election. Whitlam stubbornly refused, and the impasse grew as the weeks passed and, with no budget approved, it looked like the government of Australia would not be able to meet its financial obligations for the year.

Finally, the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, used the royal prerogative to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister, asked the opposition leader Malcolm Fraser to take the job. Fraser formed a caretaker government solely to pass the appropriations bill then immediately called a new election which his own Liberal/National Country coalition won handily.

Such royal interventions, however, are not limited to the English-speaking world. Belgium’s King Baudouin I, a Charismatic Catholic and friend of Francisco Franco, famously refused to give assent to a bill liberalizing the kingdom’s abortion laws. The Prime Minister, Wilfred Martens, simply had the King declared temporarily unable to reign and the Government signed the Bill in place of the King (as is provided in the Belgian Constitution). Two days later, the Government declared the King able to reign once more, and all was back to normal (except for the unborn children killed thereafter, of course).

One of the great benefits of a monarchy is this: that the Crown act as a source of authority, free from democratic accountability, who is capable of blocking any egregious acts which the government of the day may attempt. The HFE Bill is the perfect example of a bill the Crown ought to reject, for the benefit of all the kingdom, most especially the unborn. Yet we can reasonably assume that Elizabeth II will grant her assent to this travesty of law nonetheless, as the current occupant of the throne has (ironically) so thoroughly and woefully imbibed the democratic spirit that she knows not how to fulfill her purpose and duty as Queen. (It is important to note that in neither the King-Byng affair nor the Whitlam-Kerr affair was the Governor General acting on the orders of the actual person who was the Crown at the time, but rather on their dutiful instinct as the local incarnation thereof). It is disappointing to those who are unflinching in their attempts to defend the British Monarchy that the British Monarchy insists on participating in, and sometimes urging on, the very sort of wickedness which we look to the Crown to protect us from. Alas, so far we have looked in vain.

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