The Canadian Monarchy

More attention needs to be on the part that Monarchies have played regarding the evolution of Canadian democracy. Many Canadians tend to forget the importance of the Crown, though they are not to blame as it is a subject hardly heard of or spoken about in school curricula and media outlets. For five centuries, the Crown has been a symbol of strength in Canada. With an extremely stable and responsible government, the Crown’s involvement is disregarded and forgotten. According to many polls, majority of the Canadians who are aware of the Canadian Monarchy wish to abolish it completely and would rather have a head of state from within Canada but, “Monarchy advocates argue for its continued relevance in parliamentary function and as a symbol of
The Crown “serves as the concept of the state in Canada and the Canadian state is the legal person called Her Majesty in Right of Canada (Lagassé, 2013)”, which is why everyone working within the parliament have to swear allegiance to the Queen. Canada’s head of state the sovereign, has executive power which means the authority to implement the laws, as well as legislative power. The difference between the Crown and the Monarch according to Mintz, et al. (2015), is the Crown is just a symbol of what belongs to the Canadian public, the body that prosecutes cases, and as government acting as a trustee. The Monarch refers to the actual person, who at this point is Queen Elizabeth. The Crown holds importance because “it was under the umbrella of the crown- it was thanks to the flexible, adaptable, evolving system of constitutional monarchy- that democratic government eventually prevailed in nineteenth-century ( Michael Jackson,
It provides legal foundations for the structure of government an ministerial accountability. It also protects rule of law and rights and freedoms, as it was based on that principle. That is what democracy is, so the Crown protecting that crucial part of democracy makes it stronger rather than undermining it. Historically, the Crown celebrates British heritage which implemented parliamentary democracy in the first place. It also represents the common interests of the people which is another key feature in any democracy. The crown affects everything in one’s day-to-day life from how people are employed, to property holding, to court cases, all of this is