Peter Stockland: For Quebec, There Are Other Oaths of Allegiance That Would Work Better

Parti Quebecois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon speaks to National Assembly sergeant-at-arms Veronique Michel, who prevented the three PQ MNA’s from taking their seats in the legislature because they refused to pledge allegiance to the King when they were sworn in, in Quebec City on Dec. 1, 2022. The Canadian Press/Jacques Boissinot

Commentary

My long-ago introduction to the Chicken Oath gives hope Quebec’s National Assembly will pluck up its courage and unanimously scrap swearing loyalty to the British monarch.

Premier François Legault has promised legislation this week to that end, meaning it might fly through the legislature on a wing and prayer to become law before MNAs head home for Christmas turkey and trimmings. The catalyst among the pigeons was the blockage of three Parti Quebecois members from taking their seats to do their democratic duty simply because they refused to pledge allegiance to a 73-year-old newbie king who got the job from his rigor mortis mum.

Both the opposition PQ and Québec solidaire have pressured the premier to let democratic representatives swear their oath to the people of Quebec. As QS co-spokesperson Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois put it: “There is strong support in Quebec to modernize our institutions, to make sure that the representatives of the people are not forced in 2022 to swear an oath to a foreign king.”

Frenzied monarchists will leap to their silk stocking feet and point out, technically correctly, Charles III is not, whatever else his many failings, a “foreign” king. He is Canada’s head of State. The necessary and sufficient rhetorical response is: “Still? Why?” Alternatively: “Can’t we fix that? And, hey, what’s taking so long, eh?”

A second point on which Nadeau-Dubois erred effectively makes the last point. He called the monarchy a “relic” of the distant past  with no place in contemporary life. But as the brilliant Irish writer Fintan O’Toole noted in The New York Review of Books, it’s less a “relic” than a running ruse. It owes as much to the authentic past as cattle stealing does: the pilferers will always be with us. In fact, O’Toole said, the dream-a-scheme vision of the hereditary “Royal Family” was recognized 150 years ago as corruption foisted upon history by a collectivity of arriviste throne thieves.

“Even in the 19th century, a monarchist like (journalist Walter) Bagehot was realistic enough to acknowledge that the English had severed the veins carrying the Royal blood ... when they overthrew James II in 1688. After 1688, the primary claim of the monarchy was not the sacredness of its blue blood but the imperative of a Protestant succession,” O’Toole wrote after Queen Elizbeth II’s interminable interment.

The regal jiggery-pokery of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor succession, he noted, is exposed by knowing Betty Windsor, her usually affectionate nickname, died as a public figure decades before her physical death last September. In person, she was a vivid, articulate, amusing Energizer Bunny of a human being. As Queen, O’Toole says, she exemplified the “morbidity of monarchy ... Elizabeth II had been playing dead most of her life. ... If (her) winking and miming was (her) living body, the dead one was encountered, over the decades, by thousands of guests who had to sit beside her (at lunch).”

Ironically, like the first King Charles beheaded in 1649, Betty was a body wholly detached, by the very obligations of sovereignty, from the body politic.

If there remain, to borrow the immortal words of Philip Larkin, “ruin bibbers (so) randy for antique” that they need to swear loyalty to this faux anti-democratic tomfoolery and, worse, to Charles III’s mummery version of it, well, God bless. Let them. Preferably in private, allowing the rest of us to get on with our lives in the Republic of Reality.

But there is no earthly reason any of us should be compelled to pretend to believe in the fantasy as the price of political participation. The Chicken Oath cracked that egg, as I discovered long ago while covering a small town inquest. One of the key witnesses refused to swear an oath on the Bible. The coroner, already having dealt with a juror who could not sit on certain days for religious reasons, was thrown into flummox.

Fortunately, a research-savvy clerk—decades before the advent of Google—saved the proceedings by unearthing the precedent of an oath administered primarily to Chinese residents of B.C. in the mid-19th century. Since it was almost comically meaningless to demand they swear on a religious book in which they did not believe, they were allowed to sign their names on a piece of paper, after which a rooster’s head was chopped off outside the courthouse and the oath burned. Alternatives included holding a hand over a candle or smashing saucers while pledging to tell the truth. By 1888, according to the Courthouse Libraries BC website, legislation had passed letting witness oaths take any form that bound the swearer’s conscience.

Such bespoke oath-making strikes me as just the ticket for multicultural, “diversity-is-our-strength” Canada, especially if we are to ever cease feathering the British royal family’s nest. Personally, I would not swear an oath to the “people of Quebec” on a bet, but would happily adapt the glorious Fenian oath from the days when the chickens were coming home to roost for Ireland’s British Empire oppressors:  “I, in the presence of Almighty God, do solemnly swear allegiance to the Canadian Republic ... and will do my very utmost, at every risk, while life lasts, to defend its independence and integrity. So help me God! Amen.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.