George Wallace said:
I could ask what the Organization des Francophonie has done for us too? Or for that fact the UN?
Not much. None of these organizations based off some sort of heritage or tradition are really effective for the reason that the more removed from current realities they become, the less utility they offer. We are better off being served by more informal groupings with states that have the same background and same goals (The ABCA comes to mind). One should always be careful to ensure that Dogma doesn't replace Tradition.
Why should we have our own Queen/King here in Canada?
Why should we have a King/Queen period? You are a citizen within a representative democracy - the thought of being a subject to some "greater" being and their offspring should conflict with that notion.
Why should that be an elected position?
Don't you want some sort of say in who you want to represent you as your Head-of-State? Or are you going to be content with King Charles III merely because of who his mother is?
We have an elected Parliament, with an Upper House of "Appointed Lords" in the Senate (Perhaps soon to become elected too). We have 'Appointed' Lt Governors and the Governor General, all approved by the Monarch as their representative.
Yes. So we're almost there with regards to fully maturing as a completely democratic entity.
If you compare our hierarchy with that of other nations, it is unique. "The Buck Stops Here!" type of problem doesn't arise here, in that Parliament is responsible to a Monarch for the governance of Canada. All Acts of Parliament have to be passed again by the Senate to become law, after they have received Royal Assent. Now, Royal Assent is just a formality in most cases, but I suppose in an extreme case it could be withheld.
Not really,
de facto power lies within our Legislative body because they are the only ones that are truly accountable to the
body politic - most others lie somewhere between cushy patronage and political shills. Lets bring the other half of our Executive Branch back into political utility.
When one wants to lay blame for the failings of our government, where does the buck really stop?
Us. So lets have a Constitutional arrangement that reflects that. We don't need a foreign King to "wear" our sovereignty, we're more then capable of appointing someone to watch over it on our behalf.
Infanteer, I find it unusual that you want to get rid of the Monarchy, and then replace it with our own 'elected' monarchy, as opposed to simply doing away with it altogether. That would remove the top tier of all our Federal and Provincial Governments, and lay the blame for any screwups firmly on our own laps.
I don't know how it reduce the top tier of all our Federal and Provincial governments?
I am not proposing to merely replace the monarchy with one of our own. Parliamentary Democracy is much more complicated then you make it out to be. It supposes that sovereignty is embodied in the Crown that the Monarch wears and that the sovereign is responsible for preserving and protecting our sovereignty. This is why I put the famous
Leviathan image up in my proposal. The loyalty to this body is supposed to supercede partisan political games that exist in Parliament.
However, the modern liberal democratic order means that having our sovereignty in the hands of an unelected, unaccountable, inherited monarchical body (let alone a foreign one) is unacceptable. The outcome: the monarchy really means nothing in a political, constitutional sense. The Queen looks nice on the 20 dollar bill and the Governor-General can wave and do a bang-up job representing us in Finland but in reality, the constitutional arrangement of our
inherited tradition of Parliamentary Democracy has gone askew, leaving a system in which the checks-and-balances to curb abuse of power by one branch of the Government have been left at the wayside. The result; the Prime Minister rules by fiat and the "Loyal Opposition" serves no real role at all execept to act as a bunch of howling monkies in Parliament (I guess you could almost stick the rest of the House of Commons there as well - nothing really goes beyond Cabinet).
The options to fix this are three-fold:
1) Maintain the current set-up, which only means that our constitutional arrangement becomes more and more obscure every year.
2) Get rid of the monarchy and move to a Republican model. Such a radical transformation in Constitutional tradition does not sit well with many who reflect on the 300 years of British legal, cultural, and constitutional heritage that Canada has.
3) In the great effort of compromise, move to a system that repatriates our Head-of-State as an acceptable and effective agent of Constitutional duties and responsibilities while at the same time seeking to preserve our tradition of Parliamentary Democracy which advocates loyalty to something above the political body.
Read my proposal carefully, you'll see that my general purpose is
not to repatriate the monarchy, but rather the realign our constitutional arrangement into something that should satisfy both the Parliamentary traditionalists and the liberal democrats.
Cheers,
Infanteer