Conservative Canuck wrote:Canada needs to move to a pure republican system of government.
That is the last thing Canada needs. It would be the ultimate completion of Pierre Trudeau's vision.
The idea that a republican form of government is superior or more conducive to personal liberty than a monarchy is a false idea. The British/Canadian system of parliamentary monarchy, as it developed over more than a millenium of history, embodies the mixed constitution Aristotle recommended (a constitution that combines the best elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) like no other system developed or instituted elsewhere. Our parliamentary monarchy tradition, has gone hand in glove, with the prescriptive rights of Englishmen, the common law tradition, and the other elements that made the English tradition uniquely libertarian centuries prior to the Enlightenment and the birth of "classical liberalism".
The man most responsible for the subversion of this tradition of liberty in Canada, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, wanted Canada to become a republic.
American conservatives are republicans because that is America's tradition. The recommendation that a monarchy become a republic, is not a conservative suggestion, however. Conservatism, by nature, leans towards monarchy. It is the heir of Toryism, which stood for the institutions of monarchy and the church. 18th Century, Irish statesman Edmund Burke is considered to be the first modern conservative. His conservative credentials, arise primarily out of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which condemned the French Revolution and defended the institution of the British monarchy, and his remarks upon the death of Marie Antoinette. Russell Kirk, who more than anyone else provided the philosophical framework for the revival of conservatism in post-WWII America (the revival that lead eventually to the Reagan administration), began his most famous work on Anglo-American conservative thought, with Burke, and ended it with T. S. Eliot, an American ex-patriot, who relocated to the UK, and described himself as a royalist in politics, a classicist in literature, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.
We do not need to look with envy on the Americans. They introduced the Communist measures of the progressive income tax and the central bank before we did, as they introduced the New Deal welfare state before we introduced our equivalent. They also introduced liberal immigration before we did, and yes, political correctness before we did. Their republican government did not prevent their Supreme Court from banning school prayer and Bible reading, ordering the Ten Commandments to be removed from courthouses, and forcing abortion on all states. "Affirmative Action", i.e., the hypocritical policy of de jure discrimination against whites, in the name of combating "racism", is practiced everywhere in the West now, and is even written into our constitution thanks to Trudeau, but it bears a "Made in the USA" stamp on it. Leftists in Europe and Canada have gone beyond the United States in their insane programs, but frequently, perhaps more often than not, they have been building on a foundation laid in the United States.
We have every reason to be proud of our parliamentary monarchy tradition. Let American conservatives restore their classical republicanism in the United States, while we recover the rights of Englishmen and our Common Law liberties within the framework of our British/Canadian tradition.
