Mr. Speaker, perhaps the hon. member who just inquired about the inclusion of the Royal Style and Titles Act in the bill will find my speech, which is on that very subject, to be helpful.
I thought I would start my remarks today by explaining, for the benefit of anyone who does not already know this, what an omnibus bill is and where such bills got their name. In the 19th century, the ancestors of today's diesel and electric municipal buses were horse-drawn coaches, typically with benches along both sides of the interior and sometimes with an exterior staircase to a further set of seats on the roof. They were typically crowded, uncomfortable and hot, and people with nothing in common were forced to sit or stand side by side and sometimes on each other's laps.
As a result of the endless comedic possibilities afforded by the numerous random and uncomfortably close encounters across otherwise impenetrable barriers of age, gender and social class that were created every day in the crowded interiors of rush-hour omnibuses, and even more on the overstuffed rooftop seats, omnibuses became a favourite subject for contemporary painters and cartoonists. Anyone who does a Google search for “omnibus” and “painting” will see what I mean.
It should come as no surprise, then, that when Victorians were searching for a word to describe enormous pieces of legislation that crammed many unrelated subjects into a single bill, the jostling and smelly omnibuses of their cities came to their minds. Today, more than a century has passed since the term “omnibus” has been replaced, at least when referring to means of transport, with the contraction “bus”, but the word “omnibus” survives, robust as ever, as a term for describing vast, multiheaded bills.
To say that Bill C-47, the budget implementation act, is an omnibus bill is to make an understatement. The bill is 681 clauses long, and if printed it runs to hundreds of pages. It is a bill that would make Marcel Proust green with envy. It is to legislation what Wagner's Ring cycle is to opera and what Gormenghast castle is to domestic architecture. It is what the SS Great Eastern was to shipping when it was launched in 1858: six times larger than any other vessel then afloat, and propelled forward by a bizarre combination of propeller, sails and two colossal paddle wheels.
Lost in the middle of this vast, ramshackle legislative edifice is clause 510, which would enact the royal style and titles act, 2023. It reads as follows:
The Parliament of Canada assents to the issue by His Majesty of His Royal Proclamation under the Great Seal of Canada establishing for Canada the following Royal Style and Titles:
Charles the Third, by the Grace of God King of Canada and His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth.
This provision really ought to have been enacted on its own as a stand-alone bill, as it involves no expenditure of public funds and therefore truly has no relationship whatsoever to the budget. If it had been enacted in such a manner, the debates in this place would have provided a record of the government's rationale for the royal style and titles act, 2023. The responses of the various opposition parties would have provided some useful feedback as to how the rest of us feel. However, since that is not to be, I thought I would make a few comments outlining my own observations on this matter.
The first thing to note is His Majesty's current title, which would be changed by this enactment. Currently, the king is titled “Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith”. The new, shorter title would eliminate the reference to the United Kingdom and would remove the title “Defender of the Faith”.
I note that the current title was adopted in 1953 by the Parliament of Canada shortly after the accession to the throne of Her late Majesty, our much-loved Queen Elizabeth II. At the time, the goal was to have a title as close as possible to the one in use in the U.K. With that goal in mind, titles similar to the one that is still in use in Canada were adopted by parliaments throughout the Commonwealth. However, since that time, most Commonwealth realms have chosen to drop the reference to the United Kingdom and to eliminate the title “Defender of the Faith”.
In Australia, for example, the King is “King Charles the Third, by Grace of God King of Australia and his other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth”. To take another country whose name starts with “A”, in Antigua and Barbuda he is “Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Antigua and Barbuda and of His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth”. In Australia, this style dates to 1973. In Antigua and Barbuda, the title dates to 1982. In the Solomon Islands, the title was altered to something similar in 2013, and so on. Similar titles are used in over a dozen other independent Commonwealth countries.
Canada is merely bringing its title into conformity with the ones used in most of the other Commonwealth realms. In doing so, I think we keep with the spirit of the 1952 Commonwealth heads of government conference, at which assembled prime ministers agreed that there should be a non-binding but sincere effort to maintain a relatively uniform style for the monarch's titles in each of the different realms.
In Australia in 1973, the goal of removing the reference to the United Kingdom was to make it clear that the Queen's role as monarch was no longer simply a historical artifact of that country's colonial past and was most certainly not due to Australia retaining a subordinate relationship to Britain. Rather, her constitutional role was a consequence of her direct relationship with the Australian people, a relationship that was confirmed in a referendum 26 years later, when a majority of Australians in every one of the country's six states voted against becoming a republic.
This seems like a reasonable goal for Canada as well. Constitutionally speaking, we would remain a monarchy even if Britain chose to become a republic, and it is odd that our head of state does not have a title that reflects this reality. As a historical side note, it is worth observing that in the 1650s, when England did briefly become a republic under Oliver Cromwell, Newfoundland, which was then the only part of Canada under British rule, refused to abandon the Crown. David Kirke, Newfoundland's proprietary governor, was captured by a force sent from the American colonies and was forcibly repatriated to England, where he died in prison for his monarchist sentiments.
Now let me turn to the subject of the title “Defender of the Faith”.
Famously, this title was given to King Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 in honour of the king's defence of the seven sacraments against the challenge that had been made four years earlier, when Martin Luther had published his 95 theses. A few years later, Henry too broke with the pope when he was unable to obtain a divorce, but he kept the title.
“Defender of the Faith” is a title that might be viewed by some people as being appropriate for the U.K., where the King is the nominal head of the established church, but there is no established church in Canada. Thanks to the efforts of two generations of pre-Confederation reformers, the last traces of an established church in this country were abolished by an act of the Parliament of the Province of Canada in 1854. From 1854 onward, even though our successive kings and queens have retained the title “Defender of the Faith”, it is solely because we were using the same titles used in the United Kingdom.
Ninety-nine years after the abolition of the established church, in 1953, the title was then adopted by statute for reasons I have already discussed. However, “Defender of the Faith” was by then an anachronism, and it was already controversial. Its departure from the King's title is welcome.
I note that the King himself is not enamoured of this title. The title "Defender of the Faith" implies a kind of religious uniformity that is out of step with our times. Frankly, state-sponsored religious uniformity was pretty undesirable in King Henry VIII's time too when viewed from our vantage point. In the 1500s, dissenting Christians were persecuted across Europe, the Inquisition was burning heretics at the stake in Spain and Jews were banned from living in England. In today's world, where the U.K., just as much as Canada, is home to robust communities of Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists, there is no such thing as “the faith”. It is worth noting that the current British Prime Minister is a Hindu.
It is for this reason that when he was still Prince of Wales, His Majesty speculated that a better title would be “Defender of Faith”, and I can also see merit in the title “Defender of all Faiths”. However, newfangled and novel titles would be inappropriate to include in a statute that is stuffed into a vast omnibus bill, with little opportunity for the kind of public discussion that would be needed to establish their legitimacy. Simply dropping the title seems the best solution of all.
My conclusion, therefore, is this: I will be voting against Bill C-47, but I do support the Royal Style and Titles Act, in clause 510.
