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Queen Elizabeth: Continuity Counts
Tuesday, October 15, 2002
I have traveled to some very remote places. One of the most remote places I have ever ventured was called St. Martin's Island, Bangladesh. It is the most southern place in Bangladesh, just off the coast of Myanmmar. I spent a couple days there in January 2000.If you want to go, you really have to want to get there. There are no luxury excursions, only slippery gangplanks and rickety boats. I made the trip with three chickens and a bunch of locals on an old fishing tub. It wasn't until it started creaking and crashing into the twenty foot swells of the Indian ocean, that I thought I made a mistake. But before you knew it, I was jumping overboard wading ashore to one of the most remote places in South Asia.
Even there, you needed money. In St. Martin's there is a small row of shops selling a few trinkets. The unit of currency is called the Taka. For one US dollar, you get about 33 Taka. It's a strange looking note, about half the size of a Canadian five dollar bill with some Bangladeshi landmarks pictured on it. Everybody carries a wad of them. They were very hard for me to get used to.
Not so in some other countries I have visited. In an earlier time, I visited New Zealand and Australia. After exiting the airplane, I walked straight to a bank. After a few minutes of waiting, I was handed several NZ dollars. As I stuffed them into my wallet, there she was. Queen Elizabeth proudly smiling on the front of these dollars. A little bit of familiarity goes a long ways. You also didn't need a wad of them to buy anything.
Clearly though, Queen Elizabeth's time on the front of much of the world's currency will be coming to an end. She's a great queen and a great lady and she even has some great genes. Her mother lived until she was 101. So maybe I'm jumping the gun a bit when I muse that her time might be coming to an end. Regardless, someday we're going to wake up and Queen Elizabeth will only be a memory. Time marches on.
How will Canada react to this? If you look closely our currency has moved away from the Queen on every other side. We even have Deputy Prime Minister John Manley musing openly that after Queen Elizabeth is gone, she should be replaced with some "Canadian equivalent." Clearly, Manley couldn't get himself elected to the Monarchist League. The pitiful part of his flawed diatribe was that it came when Queen Elizabeth was touring Canada. Manley might as well have greeted her in Ottawa with stupid stamped on his forehead.
Surely, stupidity and timing aside, there might be some sympathy for the Manley position. The "royals" certainly haven't endured themselves to their subjects over the last few years. Prince Charles has embarrassed himself more than once with his failed marriage to the late Princess Diana and his dalliance with Camila Parker Bowles. When you add the tabloid press into the mix, every whiff of royal scandal is front page news around the world. So when Manley makes the simple statement about change, maybe he's not that far out of line.
But there are no flys on Queen Elizabeth. She has been free of personal scandal during her 50 year reign. Sure, she has had a myriad of problems with her royal kids, but she has remained above it all to remain a fabulous head of state for our country. Anybody who follows her will have a very hard time matching her sterling record.
The monarchy is also important because it is part of our history. Continuity counts. It surely differentiates Canadians from our American friends to the south. I always find it a bit ridiculous how the Americans treat Queen Elizabeth. She is a celebrity with almost no peer when she goes to the United States. But she is ours and that is something that truly distinguishes us from the Americans. Their head of state is George "Dubya" Bush. Who would you choose if there was a choice?
Queen Elizabeth wins hands down. She is a source of inspiration in a world that needs some ritual and consistency. And she is Queen of the British Commonwealth. So from St. Martin's Island, Bangladesh, to Wallaceburg, Ontario, she still has a role to play. The hard part will come when her reign finally comes to an end. But until then, God Save the Queen.
Philip Shaw, farms 830 acres near Dresden, Ontario. He holds a Masters of Agricultural Economics and Business Degree from the University of Guelph and is a well-known commentator on agricultural issues in print, on radio and over satellite in Canada and the United States. In the Chatham-Kent Times, Phil will use his frank and forthright writing style to address political and economic issues from the local to the international stage. He is a keen observer of political life at all levels, reads widely and has travelled the world to gather fodder for his column. See what's At Issue this week.
