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Queen or Country? Does it Matter? Understanding a Crucial Issue In a precursor to the League's various position papers on the Oath of Canadian Citizenship, Queen Or Country: Does It Matter poses, then answers, commonly-asked questions about the history of Oaths in a Monarchy, and why maintaining allegiance to the Sovereign is a vital expression of Canadian national identity. The article first appeared in this form in an issue of MONARCHY CANADA circulated in April, 1995.
Question 1: What formal commitment do individuals make when they become Canadian citizens? Answer: They take the Canadian Citizenship Oath. The Citizenship Oath is as follows: "I [name of person] swear" [or "affirm"] "that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, according to law and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen". Or in French: "Je jure" [ou "dclare solennellement"] "que je serai fidle et que je porterai sincre allgeance Sa Majest la Reine Elizabeth Deux, Reine du Canada, ses hritiers et ses successeurs en conformit de la loi et que j'observerai fidlement les lois du Canada et remplirai mes devoirs de citoyen canadien". Question 2: To what does the Citizenship Oath really bind those who take it? Answer: To three things. First, the individuals who take it commit themselves to fidelity to the head of our country, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II -- the person in whom, in accordance with the Constitution, the Government of Canada and the Command in Chief of the Canadian Forces are vested; who is one of the three parts of the Parliament of Canada; in whose name the law is administered; and who personifies the history of Canada in which her family for five hundred years have been a creative force. (But such individuals are not swearing loyalty to the government policies of the day.) Secondly, they are promising to observe the laws of the country, (but not necessarily to support or advance them if their conscience tells them otherwise). Finally, they state that they will be good citizens of Canada. Question 3: When was the present Canadian Citizenship Oath created? Answer: It was introduced by the Liberal Government of Mr Pierre Trudeau in 1976 and came into effect in 1977. Question 4: What did immigrants to Canada promise before that? Answer: Canadian citizenship was created in 1947. Before that people in the independent countries of the Commonwealth and Empire were simply subjects of the King. In 1950 this unity was broken when India became a republic. About the same time individual states of the Commonwealth began to create separate citizenship for their countries. Canada did so in 1947. Prior to 1947 immigrants to Canada simply took the Oath of Allegiance to become Canadians. The Oath of Allegiance is "I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors, according to law". From 1947 to 1977 they took the Oath of Allegiance for Purposes of Citizenship, an adaptation of the Oath of Allegiance provided in the Citizenship Act of 1947. It was "I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors, according to law, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen". Question 5: What was done to the Oath of Allegiance for Purposes of Citizenship in 1976? Answer: Some people thought that because we have a shared monarchy it should be made clear to new citizens that the loyalty they were promising was to the Queen of Canada not to the Queen of Jamaica, the Queen of New Zealand or the Queen of the United Kingdom, and therefore the words "Queen of Canada" were inserted after the Queen's name. The oath was also officially named the Canadian Citizenship Oath at that time. Question 6: Then the existing Citizenship Oath is a compromise? Answer: Yes. The traditional profession of allegiance to the Monarch continues and the character of Canada as a constitutional monarchy is thereby acknowledged. At the same time, the name of the country is introduced three times into the oath and this is done in a way consistent with Canada's status as a monarchy -- i.e. in a monarchy the state is personified, not treated as an abstraction or a corporation. That is not a bad compromise. It produced an excellent oath which is as relevant and contemporary in 1995 as it was twenty years ago. Question 7: What has changed? Answer: The Canadian public were justly outraged by the sight of Bloc Qubecois Separatists taking the MPs' oath to the Queen at the beginning of the present Parliament with the apparent intention of breaking it. Some people naively think that if we had oaths to "Canada" instead of to the Queen, this would not have happened. They imagine the BQ MPs might have decided not to take their seats if they had to swear loyalty to "Canada". The answer to that is of course quite simple. A number of MPs in the present and previous Parliaments have been open republicans. The fact that they had to swear true allegiance to the Queen whom they wished to eliminate did not deter them for a second from taking the oath and assuming their seats. Justifying to one's conscience the breaking of a more undefined oath to "Canada" would be even easier than doing it with the present one. Question 8: What is the present situation? Answer: Shortly after the present Parliament was opened, the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration of the House of Commons set about examining changes to the Canadian Citizenship Act. After holding hearings it proposed the following as a new Canadian Citizenship Oath: "I pledge full allegiance to Canada and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, and swear to faithfully obey the laws and fulfil my duties as a citizen." This proposed oath inserted a new "pledge" (note the American terminology) to "Canada", demoted the Queen of Canada to second place and eliminated the words "her heirs and successors according to law" - the commitment new citizens make to the succession to the Canadian Crown. The Hon. Sergio Marchi, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, apparently influenced by republican civil servants, has proposed a further step and eliminated the Queen altogether from a new declaration of citizenship. He commissioned ten Canadian writers to decide what nearly 30 million Canadians believe in. According to some reports the writers were explicitly told not to refer to the Monarchy. This declaration is "I am a citizen of Canada, and I make this commitment: to uphold our laws and freedoms; to respect our people in their diversity; to work for our common well-being, and to safeguard and honour this ancient northern land." Question 9: What is the official position of the Chrtien Government? Answer: The Government has not yet officially sanctioned either of the two proposals but is obviously considering doing so and will soon announce a decision. Question 10: Where did the idea of taking an oath to show one's loyalty originate? Answer: In the common law tradition, in which Canadian law is rooted, the only oath people took at one time was an oath to tell the truth in court. But the oath which lies at the foundation of all modern oaths of allegiance is not an oath of us the people at all, it is the oath of the monarch himself, taken at his coronation, to govern his people well. This oath was in origin the Church's attempt to ensure that the King would defend and advance the orthodox Catholic faith, guarantee the rights of the Church, and do justice to and preserve peace among his people, and can be traced back to the coronation of Anglo-Saxon kings. We have, for example, just such an oath sworn by Ethelred the Unready in 978. This practice continued throughout the Middle Ages and beyond the Reformation. In 1689, as a result of the supplanting of James II by William III and Mary II, a promise to maintain the Protestant religion established by law was added. And in 1937, as a result of the Kings accession in 1931 from being merely the King of the United Kingdom and its dependencies to being the King of several realms individually, George VI swore (as did his daughter, our present Sovereign, in 1953) to govern the peoples of all his realms, which were named individually, according to their respective laws and customs. Question 11: And the oath of allegiance grew out of this? Answer: Yes. Oaths taken by subjects to the sovereign are a far later development for the obvious reason that it was taken for granted that persons living within the dominions of a monarch owe him loyalty and allegiance according to the natural order of things. There is no question of allegiance to a piece of land or a political or social ideology; loyalty is owed to a person in a personal relationship. For this reason, actual oaths on the part of subjects to a monarch began precisely on this personal principle at the time of the religious controversies of the Reformation. In 1534 Henry VIII wanted to ensure that his subjects would add to the loyalty they already owed him naturally the acceptance also of his supremacy over the Church and of his arrangements for the succession in spite of his unorthodox marital relationships, and he had Parliament create such oaths. In 1562 Elizabeth I required members of the House of Commons to swear to her spiritual as well as temporal supremacy, the origin of the oath taken by members of parliament today. To this James I in 1609 added an oath of allegiance, expressly requiring members of Parliament to swear that the Pope had no power to depose him. By the reign of William and Mary in 1689, this allegiance was expressed in the now familiar words, "I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to King William and Queen Mary", and the oaths of allegiance and supremacy were required of electors as well as of members of Parliament. But as time went on, the controversial requirement of allegiance to the Sovereign in his claimed religious capacity changed. Oaths originally intended under William and Mary and the House of Hanover to guarantee loyalty to the persons of those sovereigns and to destroy support for Catholic claimants to the Throne have now become, since the nineteenth century, affirmations of our earthly allegiance and loyalty to our lawful Sovereign. Catholic emancipation in Britain in 1829 for example (achieved far earlier in Canada) relieved Catholic electors and members of Parliament from acknowledging the Monarch's spiritual supremacy and required them only to deny any civil jurisdiction to the Pope. In 1868, this parliamentary oath was shorn of all references to the Queen's spiritual supremacy, the Pope and the defence of the succession as fixed by the Act of Settlement, 1700, and became simply, "I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, her heirs and successors according to law", the first part of which had already been included as the parliamentary oath in the British North America Act of the year before. The oath was then required of persons being naturalised as the Queen's subjects according to the 1870 amendment of the Naturalisation Act of 1841, and it has always served as the oath for those becoming the Queen's subjects under Canadian jurisdiction. With the addition of the Queen's particularly Canadian title, Queen of Canada, it is the oath of allegiance taken today in all circumstances apart from the parliamentary oath and it forms part of the oath of citizenship. It is fundamental to citizenship precisely because citizenship or nationality, in the Canadian tradition that we have maintained in North America (after our American cousins abandoned their allegiance to a living person and replaced it with allegiance to an abstract legal person, the State, or even worse, merely to a written document), is not loyalty to geography or to amendable and shifting legal documents, but membership of a great family under its head, our Queen. Question 12: This means that the Queen's Coronation Oath is central to the whole question of oaths? Answer: Yes. We take oaths of parliamentary loyalty, of general allegiance, or of citizenship to our Sovereign, the head of our national family, because she has first taken an oath of loyalty to us, her people. The oath of citizenship is a reciprocal oath because it is really only one half of the relationship between subject and sovereign, the other half being the Queen's oath to her subjects. Canada itself, except through its personification in the Queen, cannot take an oath to its people so an oath to Canada is a one-way imposition that improperly restricts the freedom of Canadians. Question 13: Do you really think most Canadians understand this? Answer: Very few probably are aware of it. There is certainly no mention of this important fact in any material preparing new Canadians for citizenship even though it is essential for a proper understanding of oaths in this country and the oath which the applicant for citizenship will take. Given the fact that the government and school systems of Canada have played down the Monarchy ever since the 1960s, native-born Canadians on the whole probably do not fully grasp this either. Question 14: Is it too difficult to expect people to understand? Answer: It is not nearly as complex as the intricacies of our federal system, which every Canadian must understand or at least deal with. However, changing the oath would have a real impact whether Canadians understand it or not. Question 15: Don't you think it's a good idea to take an oath to your country? Answer: The problem with taking an oath to "Canada" or to any country is knowing exactly what you are swearing to. What is "Canada"? Is it the rocks and trees? Is it the land? Is it the people? Is it the government? Or is it someone elses vision which you do not believe in? When we swear to the Queen of Canada we know exactly whom we are swearing to - the person in our Constitution who is the source of legal authority in Canada. If we swear to "Canada" undefined, we are most likely swearing to some idea in our own minds. Oaths however have to be legally enforceable. They cannot be enforceable if they are made to vague and undefined abstractions, or even worse, in such a situation, their enforcement would restrict legitimate freedom. New Canadians coming from less democratic countries are likely to interpret an oath to an undefined "Canada" as an oath to the government of the day -- the very last thing we should want. Question 16: Would swearing an oath to "Canada" rather than to "the Queen of Canada" not just bring us in line with the practice of other countries? Answer: Almost no country in the world asks new citizens to swear an oath to the country. Republics for the most part require an oath be made to the constitution because the constitution is at least definable in law. Monarchies like Spain and Thailand have oaths to the King. Some countries require no oath or declaration at all from prospective citizens. France since the time of the French Revolution has had 2 kingdoms, 2 empires and 5 republics, and presumably there is not sufficient agreement about what should be in such an oath for it to have an oath of any kind. Even if that were not so, the idea should not be to make Canada like some other country but to have new citizens accept the unique character and heritage of Canada that are the source of everything that has made this country such a desirable place in which to live. Question 17: Is there any danger to Canadians in a new oath or is it just a matter of traditions and symbols? Answer: Oaths are not pious statements of goodwill. They are legally binding commitments with punishments for failure to live up to them. They should therefore be precise and limited. Poets should have no role in preparing an oath because poetry is inherently subjective and open to interpretation whereas the law must be objectively clear. Our current oath meets these tests: (1) loyalty is to the personification of the state -- to the Queen who has previously taken an oath to govern the people properly (this limits the commitment of the people); (2) the laws of the country must be observed but no one opposed to them is required to uphold or support the laws; and (3) duty must be done. Oaths to the country or to presumed social values are attempts to impose ideological uniformity on Canadians and a threat to human rights and freedom. Question 18: If there is this difficulty about swearing to the country, why do people keep on suggesting we do it? Answer: Some advocates are republicans and simply wish to eliminate the Queen from the oath in an attempt to turn the country into a republic. The current government of Australia has abolished the oath for its new citizens altogether for precisely this reason. It has substituted a "pledge" that is fuzzy and really commits the person making it to nothing at all. Australia's action is being cited as an example by advocates of republican change in Canada. Other people not only wish to change Canada's political institutions but wish to freeze their social vision of Canada and impose it on all Canadians by adding references to the environment and transient political ideas to the oath and describing such secular values as "sacred", confusing politics with religion. Some like the idea of loyalty to Canada and do not realise the legal implications involved. They think of an oath, not as a legal contract or as words we say to God, but simply as a public relations exercise. However, to reduce the oath to a shallow and insincere public relations statement will not strengthen Canada in the least. And some undoubtedly know exactly what the changes would mean and see change as a way to control the people when they become difficult by establishing a more totalitarian (i.e. all-embracing) oath to replace our limited one. They really wish to create an ideology of Canadianism. Such an ideology would pretend that Canada is a living person and endow it with the fictitious characteristics of a superhuman being. We have all seen the American "talking flag" on TV. That is the same kind of thing. People who want an ideology of Canadianism do not like the Queen because she gets in the way by always bringing us back to the realisation that Canada is not a superhuman entity but just millions of individual people like Her Majesty and like the rest of us with a history of living together in a community. Official national ideologies are bad things. Wherever they have prevailed in this century it has been at terrible cost because they do not tolerate minority views. Even the more benign kind such as "Americanism" have a dismal record. Ideologies are insatiable. They require an enemy: some imagined foreign, ethnic or racial threat to feed their fires. You can be sure that if an official Canadian ideology is adopted beginning with such things as the proposed new citizenship oath, it will lead directly and inexorably to a "committee on un-Canadian activities" in Ottawa. Question 19: What is the solution? Answer: There is nothing wrong with the present Canadian Citizenship Oath. It should be kept unaltered. Mr Chrtien has repeatedly stated his resolve not to get involved in divisive constitutional change. In 1982 the Monarchy was entrenched in the Constitution and the unanimous agreement of Ottawa and all the provinces is required before it can be changed. Even if it is in the power of Ottawa to alter the Canadian Citizenship Oath on its own along the lines suggested by Mr Marchi, this would be a violation of the spirit of the 1982 entrenchment. Additional Articles
A sampling of coverage of this issue from Canadian Monarchist News available via this link. Other items appear in the Canadian Monarchist News section of this web site. |
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