Why is Canada still a constitutional monarchy?

[- Groucho -]

Originally posted by DinoDoc


Our government doesn't own ever square inch of the US and this is the second thread that you've mentioned that the Canadian government "owning" all of Canada. I was merely curious why the Canadian people have granted thier government such powers.

Nobody granted the Queen these powers. Her ancestors took them, and then in an ultimately losing bid to hang onto power, they whittled them away to nothing. It worked like this ...

At one time there was a tough son of a b!tch who was so feared he could do whatever he wanted. He wanted to call himself king and say "everything is mine and I'll do what I damn well please with it". So he did. Of course, he wasn't so tough that he could enforce his will without help and help he had in the form of a bunch of nasty, blood thirsty sidekicks. His main cronies got to call themselves Dukes. Their flunkies were Earls and so on down to the serfs. Who fed everyone. And cleaned up.

Eventually, the king's descendants weren't tough enough to keep themselves at the top of the heap. The Dukes and Earls forced the king to sign a piece of paper agreeing to constrain some of his powers. They were still his powers, but he agreed to only exercise them in certain ways (the alternate was a war he didn't think he could win, so he signed). This trend continued. The Dukes and Earls got some of their own when the merchant classes started to get enough power to threaten the ex-cronies power base. Thus was born the House of Lords / House of Commons system. The king, Dukes and Earls "decided" to listen to these new bodies' advice on a whole host of things for the same reason the king had earlier - the alternative was a fight they didn't know they could win.

What they started "advising" the King to do was to delegate a lot of his power to them. It was still his power, but he "let" them decide how to exercise it. Again, the alternate for the king was to try to stop them. By this point, that just wasn't in the cards the king had left to play. The same thing eventually happened to the merchants and after a few more iterations it got to the point that every adult in the entire system had a say in advising the king.

This was a slow process, and in the beginning a lot of what people said to the king was actually advice. But eventually, through the centuries, the king had less and less ability to say no. Until we get to today and Queen Elizabeth II who has really no ability to say no left at all.

So we end up with a situation where the person who has legal sovereignity is really just a conduit for the will of the people. And it isn't really that bad. Think of it as a system that evolved over time to ensure that everyone who is effected by the exercise of power got a say in how that power is exercised (or in other words, a method of keeping society away from a situation where the king gets strung up from a lamp-post by pissed off serfs).

Now all this seems obvious and trite. But the weird thing is, it is the basis of Canadian law.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Your government does, in the final analysis, own every square inch of land in the US, every single trinket contained therein and every person in it.

Legally, the government would have to go to court to declare emminent domain and pay fair market value for the property it wanted to exercise direct, as opposed to indirect, control over.

Echinda: From your description, it sounds like it is time for Canada to grow up and become an independent nation.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Asher

Nonsense.
The last time the G-G tried to exercise power there was such an uproar that you might as well have kicked the King in the nads.

He can't do anything. At all. Theoretical means nothing when in the real world he'd be booed and ignored.

When was that?

The GG does have the legal power and if the GG did call an election it would be upheld by the courts.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Tingkai
When was that?

The GG does have the legal power and if the GG did call an election it would be upheld by the courts.

IIRC, it was in the 1930s. I can't recall the specific details because my brain's been fried over the past two years.

[Tingkai]

I don't know anything about that. Any general information? Did the GG say he was going to call an election and then retracted his statement due to public pressure or was it the courts ruled he could not?

[Asher]

IIRC (which I may not be), the Governor General was going to appoint a new Prime Minister, but the public became so enraged they backed off and curled into the fetal position, and they haven't used their power since.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Legally, the government would have to go to court to declare emminent domain and pay fair market value for the property it wanted to exercise direct, as opposed to indirect, control over

No, it wouldn't. It could alter the constitution till it was able to exercise eminent domain without payment. Note that the courts are an element of the government.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
No, it wouldn't. It could alter the constitution till it was able to exercise eminent domain without payment. Note that the courts are an element of the government.

I fail to see such an ammendment would get past the states, who are more directly influence by the wishes of thier people.

[KrazyHorse]

That's because under the American system the states are part of the federal government where the amendment process is concerned. Distributed sovereignty doesn't mean that it can't be exercised or that it doesn't exist; it just provides more hurdles to jump over.

[Asher]

So let me summarize the reasons for not becoming a republic as cited in this thread: