Happy Empire Day

 

This year, unusually, the 24th of May falls on the 24th of May.

It is a day hallowed to all Canadians, although few remember why we celebrate. It is Queen Victoria’s Birthday. In one sense Canada’s founder, this woman presided over the greatest empire the world has ever known for an unprecedentedly long time, as though she were as certain a feature of the cosmos as the North Pole. Little Alexandrina Victoria Hanover was born on May 24, 1819, as the first steamship was crossing the Atlantic. She died in 1901, just before the world went to hell.

Traditionally, her birthday was one of Canada’s two “national” days. This is Empire Day, on which we celebrated our birthright as British subjects, paired with Dominion Day on July 1st, on which we celebrated ourselves as Canadian citizens.

It remains important, even though the sun has long set, as the traditional start of the cottaging season, bookended now with Labour Day in September. One had to get outside for a barbeque or a picnic on this Monday, damn the weather. I can remember years with coats and mittens and picnic sandwiches cruelly cold. It is not easy to eat a picnic sandwich in mittens.

The evening ended gloriously with fireworks, from Hands or Brock, bought in some shop on the main street that specialized in them seasonally. The finale always had to be the Burning Schoolhouse, to celebrate the coming end to the school year. You would stuff in all the duds in hopes of getting something spectacular, but most often, and perhaps most satisfyingly, it generally ended in a slow, quiet burn.

No more pencils, no more books… and the glorious summer stretching before us, on which the sun barely set.

Happy birthday, Queen Victoria; reminding us of a time when the world still made sense.

Happy Empire Day!

Queen Victoria,
My father and all his tobacco loved you,
I love you too in all your forms,
The slim and lovely virgin floating among German beer,
The mean governess of the huge pink maps,
The solitary mourner of a prince. 

Queen Victoria,
I am cold and rainy,
I am dirty as a glass roof in a train station,
I feel like an empty cast iron exhibition,
I want ornaments on everything,
Because my love, she gone with other boys. 

Queen Victoria,
I'm not much nourished by modern love,
Will you come into my life
With your sorrow and your black carriages,
And your perfect
Memories. 

Queen Victoria,
The Twentieth Century belongs to you and me.
Let us be two severe giants not less lonely for our partnership,
Who discolor test tubes in the halls of Science,
Who turn up unwelcome at every World's Fair,
Heavy with proverbs and corrections,
Confusing the star-dazed tourists
With our incomparable sense of loss.

 -- Leonard Cohen

Happy Empire Day!

In celebration of the occasion, and the semi-royal wedding, I had a piece published today in the Globe Post, a Yankee publication. A defense of the Canadian monarchy. You might enjoy it.

Victoria Day

Victoria, age 4

Apparently, a group of Canadian celebrities has marked Victoria Day this year with a petition asking that the name be changed to Victoria and First Peoples Day.

The suggestion is, frankly, obscene. Victoria Day is, in fact, our oldest holiday as Canadians, and our original national day. It has been celebrated annually, and officially, in Canada since at least 1845. It is common, in a monarchy, for the monarch’s birthday to be the national day. “Canada Day,” on the other hand, has been celebrated annually only since 1927. Unique traditions have grown up around Victoria Day: The Burning Schoolhouse to end the fireworks display, 21-gun salutes, the first outdoor meal of the season, the week for planting your garden seedlings, maple cookies to honour sugaring-off time. Such a celebration of spring is perfectly fitting for a hard-winter land: “Mon pays, c’est l’hiver.” The traditions of Canada Day are weak by comparison.

Queen Victoria, self-portrait, age 35

Why, other than cultural suicide, would we want to muck around with this? Is Canadian unity so very strong that it needs to be watered down or it might become too powerful? Are our panzer legions poised to invade North Dakota? Why does a national celebration need to be reduced to an ethnic one?

Nor is it as if “First Peoples” are underrepresented in our modern consciousness. They’re just the first ethnicity anyone can think of, and opponents of Victoria Day can grab for. There is already a National Aboriginals Day, June 21. So the point and result of the proposal seems to be to eliminate Victoria Day, not to introduce a First Peoples Day.

Of course, this is all of a piece. We have already taken the wrecking ball to “The Maple Leaf Forever,” often altered the words to “O Canada,” renamed Dominion Day; there has been a longstanding push to recast Remembrance Day as some sort of “Peace Day.” When the current government sought to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, a large contingent complained that it was a purely local event, important only to Ontario.

Kind of like saying World War I was important only to Flanders.

Queen Victoria, amused.

This is really the remains of a colonial, that is, colonized, mind-set. We persist in believing that nothing Canadian can be important or worthwhile. And let’s be clear: Victoria Day is a purely Canadian holiday. They know nothing of it in England or Australia.

To be fair, there is one other obvious possible objection to Victoria Day: that it honours the monarchy. Some may object to monarchy as an institution, on the grounds that it violates the principle of human equality. I have great sympathy for that argument. However, the promoters of Victoria and First Peoples Day do not make it, and do not seem to endorse it. For their proposal actually moves in the opposite direction. The “First Peoples” of Canada, as the name implies, already have special privileges not accorded to all citizens; this proposal would add to them. Monarchy, on the other hand, can be fairly argued to be perfectly compatible with human equality in practice: witness the Scandinavian countries, Holland, Spain, the UK. Theory aside, Europe’s earliest and most successful democracies have been monarchies.

I expect a few might also argue that Victoria Day is already an ethnic celebration, an Anglo thing. If it were, I would have no interest in it; I am Irish-Canadian. But Elizabeth is the Queen of Canada, entirely apart from being Queen of Britain (not England) and fourteen other nations. And Victoria—Victoria was not herself English; she was ethnically German, raised as a German by a German mother and a German governess. When she was Queen of Canada, and our first head of state, she was also Queen of Ireland, Empress of India, etc., etc., and, through her progeny, the “grandmother of Europe.” A suitable symbol, in fact, for a multi-ethnic nation like Canada.

In any case, she is an undeniable part of our history, and our Canadian consciousness, and it is immoral to seek to alter history. To do so is to lie. As our de facto national poet, the very non-Anglo Leonard Cohen, has written, "Queen Victoria--my father and all his tobacco smoke loved you..."

Happy Victoria Day. Go forth and be amused.