This Victoria Day, remember who we are
Queen Victoria, Canada’s first queen and second-longest-reigning monarch, was recognized affectionately because the Mother of Confederation, the namesake of two provincial capitals, and the monarch whose title is highest used to bestow the navy honor in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Despite being the explanation for the May lengthy weekend in most provinces throughout Canada, not one of the aforementioned traits or recognitions now seem like synonymous with what has change into colloquially often called ‘May Two-Four’ or ‘the May lengthy’.
Rather, this yearly vacation, which regularly falls halfway between Easter and Canada Day, has change into related to the extra mundane — the unofficial opening of summer time, the cottage-opening weekend, fireworks, and beer. All fulfilling, little question, however somewhat sterile stand-ins for the true rationale of a vacation that pre-dates Confederation and is uniquely Canadian.
The Sovereign’s birthday has been celebrated in Canada for the reason that reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). 24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday, was initially declared a vacation by the Legislature of the Province of Canada in 1845.
The vacation continued uninterrupted after Confederation in 1867. Upon the loss of life of Queen Victoria in 1901, Parliament acknowledged the vacation by way of laws and gave it its title. Further laws in 1952 standardized the vacation to the Monday previous 25 May.
The Queen’s 63-year reign, now appreciated because the Victorian period, undergirded Canada’s evolution from colony to nation whereas additionally backstopping Britain’s imperial hegemony and transformation by way of the Industrial Revolution.
Fittingly, Queen Victoria has extra locations and options named after her in Canada than every other historic determine — Victoria, British Columbia; Regina, Saskatchewan; Victoria Island within the Canadian Arctic, Canada’s second-largest island; Queen Street in Toronto; Victoria College on the University of Toronto. The Royal Canadian Regiment nonetheless wears Queen Victoria’s royal cypher (VRI, Victoria Regina Imperatrix), to call however a couple of.
The symbols and namesakes are not the product of an unwarranted mythology. Queen Victoria performed a pivotal position within the basis of Canada and in shaping the home establishments and traditions we now take as a right.
Not solely did Queen Victoria assent to Confederation and designate Ottawa because the capital, however she additionally helped to unite the colonial factions that may emerge as Canada. Upon Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837, revolts broke out within the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, and civilian militias shaped in opposition to the native administrative elites.
In response, and in a spirit of reconciliation, Queen Victoria granted amnesties to the rebels in each colonies after which tasked the Governor General of the day, John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, with investigating the rebel.
John Lambton produced what turned often called the Durham Report, which most prominently beneficial the unification of Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada and the introduction of accountable authorities. While the unification of Upper and Lower Canada promptly occurred in 1841, accountable authorities was solely later adopted by way of Confederation in 1867.
It was additionally Queen Victoria who was the signing monarch for a lot of the Numbered Treaties, which acknowledged the Indigenous nations of what’s now northern Ontario and the Prairies. These treaties established nation-to-nation relations, offered constitutional ensures, and facilitated the largely cold westward growth of Canadian sovereignty.
It isn’t any marvel that the central tower of Canada’s first Parliament constructing was named the Victoria Tower, in a city which a British MP referred to sarcastically as ‘Westminster within the wilderness.’
While Queen Victoria might not have been concerned within the day-to-day affairs that solid Canada within the method of the Fathers of Confederation, she nonetheless carried the load of the Crown and stewarded the Empire that finally bequeathed what we know at this time as Canada.
The Canada which Queen Victoria set in movement has drifted from its roots and waned in its delight, however such cultural decline is a alternative. Our heritage, traditions, and shared identification needn’t be subjugated to a pseudo-culture that produces atomization and social lethargy within the title of liberty and consumption.
Edmund Burke is usually referred to as upon by these on the precise within the title of generational equity, to decrease debt ranges, and to boost accountable and sovereign policy-making. However, Burke’s ‘Primeval Contract of the everlasting society’, which emphasizes the inherent linkage between the lifeless, the residing, and people but to be born, is of biggest significance in the case of our cultural inheritance.
As we collectively change into extra indifferent from our historical past, we undertake a place of cultural rent-seeking during which we solely draw down on the riches of our inheritance, leaving much less and fewer to be handed on.
A rustic that doesn’t know itself can’t have a good time itself. The shift from celebrating Victoria Day to May Two-Four is emblematic of a nation that has change into collectively deracinated. We have gone from celebrating the grandeur of the Empire that bequeathed this nation to us to an individuated, consumer-driven ritual devoid of any which means. Rather than giving honor and reward, we now simply take a second’s reprieve from the doldrums of recent life, with no reference to what Canada was or what it has change into.
If Queen Victoria is the Mother of Confederation, then we are collectively her youngsters, estranged or in any other case. True matriarchs deserve their due honor and reward; Queen Victoria isn’t any exception.
Alex MacDonald works for Counsel Public Affairs. He previously labored within the United Nations, the Government of Alberta, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and in non-public business.
