THE QUEEN IN CANADA
Warm crowds greeted the monarch wherever she went, making the
Jubilee tour a triumph
IT'S 1959 at the rail station in Galt, Ont., and a boy not quite four waits an
eternity to get a glimpse of a woman waving from a train. She is the Queen. It's
her third visit to Canada, her second since her coronation in 1953. She's wearing
a checked dress, he's sure of it all these years later. He thinks her beautiful, like
Dale Evans, who is the cowgirl of his hero Roy Rogers, and who is also partial to
red gingham, and to horses.
It's Sunday Oct. 6, 2002, outside Christ Church Cathedral on the Victoria leg of
her 12-day tour. Queen Elizabeth II is still making memories on this, her 21st
Canadian visit. She's a grandmother of 76 years of age, celebrating, tolerating,
surviving her 50th anniversary as Queen and -- John Manley notwithstanding -- a
half century as Canada's head of state. The little boy has aged some, too. He,
among other members of the media, ransacks his vocabulary for the right colour
to describe today's coat and hat. Spawning salmon? Dusty rose? "Coral," decree
those with fashion sense.
At her side is the Anglican bishop of B.C., Right Rev. Barry Jenks, who carries a
staff and wears on his head a peaked mitre. The two resemble living chess pieces
in mid-move: bishop to queen, to car. The rules of the game -- laid out months
ago with the precision of a military campaign -- call for a quick getaway to a
luncheon at the Fairmont Empress hotel. As in chess, however, the Queen goes
where she will. She heads to the barricades. She chats and smiles and gathers
flowers -- a pattern she follows throughout the tour, spending far more time at
the task than Canadian organizers could have dared to hope. She is abetted at
times by her 81-year-old husband, the Duke of Edinburgh -- as spry and
subversive as ever -- who sets about freeing children from barriers so they can
scamper to greet her.
It's a small enough thing, her unplanned walkabout in Victoria, yet it warms the
noonday chill for hundreds of people, among them Christine Woolcott, who is 62,
and Katie Holness, who is eight. In the 10 seconds it takes for her to gather in
Katie's bouquet, carefully selected from a local grocery, Elizabeth leaves a shy
Grade 3 girl feeling that her dahlias were indeed fit for a queen. Nearby,
Woolcott, "a dyed-in-the-wool Constitutional Monarchist," stammers "Your
Majesty" as the Queen glides past. She had more to say, Woolcott later admits,
but "my words disappeared."
INDIVIDUALLY, there is little substance to such memories and yet, collectively,
they endure. Every stop, every word, adds a page to the national scrapbook, a
fragment to a shared remembrance. "You are constantly redefining your national
identity, what it means to be Canadian," the Queen says at a luncheon in
Vancouver, "something of particular importance to my family." For more than 50
years, she's piled memory upon memory, relentlessly building a case that the
monarchy -- with all its idiosyncrasies, anachronism and dysfunction -- remains a
relevant part of that identity.
And so Iqaluit is now blessed with a newly paved Queen Elizabeth II Way -- royal
visits, like elections, being a boon to the asphalt industry. Expect a jump in
membership of the Manitoba corgi association after the Queen stopped on a
Winnipeg street to lavish attention on her favourite breed of dog. Some 335 sq.
km of central Ontario wilderness now bear the name Queen Elizabeth II
Wildlands Provincial Park. How silly would that look in a republic?
At each stop, the accompanying British media -- rather like corgis, actually -pray that royalty, or the hand of fate, will toss them a bone. Something,
anything, beyond the relentless barrage of flowers, cute children and unveilings.
Thus, Nunavut, in the breathless reportage of the BBC, is embraced as "one of
the remotest corners of the Queen's realm." Second, perhaps, only to "frigid"
Winnipeg, where a broken-down boat on the Red River becomes an infinitely
superior story to the dreary prospect of the Queen viewing in St. Boniface a
plaque she'd unveiled in 1984. Yup, still there. In the Toronto area, the news for
the British media is Canadian journalists themselves, criticizing the local events.
Still, barring disaster, or the trampling of a corgi between this writing and the
Queen's departure for home from Ottawa on Oct. 15, this tour is defined by the
slightly zany dropping of the Royal Rubber at a Sunday night hockey game in
Vancouver.
"We need it," a relieved Alan Hamilton, correspondent for the Times, says of the
puck drop, a rare creative flash on the agenda. "I mean, 76-year-old woman in
hat exits car, enters church, just doesn't do," he says, peering at the ice from
the press box high inside General Motors Place. "Do you call this a pitch," he
asks, "or a rink?" The game's fine points may have eluded him, but the story
Hamilton files to his London paper captures its essence in a perfect opening
paragraph: "As Canada's head of state, the Queen is obliged to observe that
country's established religion. So they took her to an ice hockey game."
Later that night, former hockey great and CBC legend Howie Meeker bursts into
a news conference squealing "Ya-hoo." He pronounces his walk down the ice with
the Queen, and his visit to the royal box, "the biggest thing that's ever happened
in my life" -- until an innate sense of self-preservation causes him to downgrade
the event to "second-best," after his marriage. Wayne Gretzky and Cassie
Campbell, captain of the gold-winning Olympic women's hockey team, are almost
as effusive about their centre-ice brush with royalty. Premier Gordon Campbell,
in a brief moment of weakness, hints at the underlying absurdity of an event
that, after all, has a conclusion as inevitable as gravity. "The puck went right
from her hand down to the ice," he notes. "It was perfect." And so perfectly
bloodless was the game, under Her Majesty's watchful gaze, that a Vancouver
radio sportscaster would later complain: "Both teams played like they were
queens."
It was left, oddly enough, to John Manley, the blandly earnest deputy prime
minister and finance minister, to come closest this tour to earning a game
misconduct. His comment, the day of the Queen's arrival in Canada, that he'd
prefer "an entirely Canadian institution" replace the monarchy after the Queen's
reign, was another welcome bone for media on both sides of the pond.
Manley, in advance of his weekend role as the Queen's escort in the national
capital, offered an apology of sorts for becoming "a distraction from her visit."
Yet, he persisted in expressing a concern that must unsettle all but the most
blinkered monarchist. "It is possible to concurrently have a great deal of respect
for Queen Elizabeth and also to wonder about the future of the institution after
her reign ends."
That nagging worry may be one reason why the Queen shows little inclination to
surrender the throne to her son and heir, Prince Charles. For more than 50 years
she has cultivated memories here and in other corners of a shrinking realm. If
she looks fondly upon each bouquet during this Golden Jubilee tour, it is because
she realizes better than most there is nothing innately perennial about the
monarchy.
THE ROYAL MOTORCADE departs the Victoria cathedral, leaving Christine
Woolcott to savour the memory. "I think the monarchy represents a very
cohesive force," she says. Consider this crowd, she points out: "I didn't know a
soul here and now it seems I have all these friends." She turns with a start to
find she's all but alone. "Oh," she cries, "they've all left me. They've all gone!"
That's the question in a nutshell, isn't it? Will the crowds still be there when
Elizabeth is gone?
Our Queen
Some highlights of her 21 official visits to Canada.
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1957 During a four-day visit, her first tour as monarch, Elizabeth wore her
coronation gown to open Parliament.
1867 In front of Canada's 100th birthday cake on Parliament Hill.
1970 Elizabeth with her daughter Anne, on Cornwallis Island during a tour
of the Arctic with princess Philip and Charles.
1976 Together for the first time outside Britain, the royal family were at
the Montreal Olympics while Anne competed.
1997 The Prime Minister bows to the Queen in St. John's, Nfld.
By KEN MACQUEEN
Source: Maclean's, 10/21/2002, Vol. 115 Issue 42, p20, 5p