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The Queen, to most Canadians, is particularly precious as "something we have that the Americans don't have." Explained a businessman: "We Canadians need a symbol to rally round." And he added tartly: "On the U.S. scene there is a vacuum. After all, you can't rally round the country's most prominent golfer."
In an almost desperate effort to differentiate from the U.S., Canada proliferates Queen's highways, Queen's Counsels, Queen's Own Rifles, and all manner of "Royal" establishments. The Crown appears on mailboxes and military insignia, the Queen's portrait on ashtrays, saucers, and brooches, as well as on coins and paper money. No one smokes at a.banquet until a toast has been drunk to the Queen.
Leading the Way. The Commonwealth idea is a means of letting colonies grow into nations, and among British colonies of the igth century Canada led the way to nationhood. After the American Revolution, an estimated 40,000 Loyalist refugees fled the hated republicanism of the new United States and found refuge in Canada—an influx of British stock to an area until then mostly populated by French habitants. In 1837 a brace of piddling rebellions—one led by French-Canadian Louis Papineau, the other by British-Canadian William Lyon Mackenzie—startled London and led to the establishment of "responsible government," with the Canadian colonies handling their own internal affairs through the adoption of the British Cabinet system.
By the time of the confederation of the provinces in 1867, Canada was largely self-governing, though still under London's Colonial Office. With the dawn of the 20th century the larger white British colonies became dominions, and in 1917 an Imperial War Conference passed a resolution calling for "full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations." Canada tried its fledgling national wings by joining the League of Nations in 1919.
By 1926 the term British Commonwealth* had been loosely in use for decades, and Britain's Arthur James Balfour, World War I Foreign Secretary, undertook to define it—with help from Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King (William Lyon Mackenzie's grandson). Lord Balfour's report called the Commonwealth "autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another," and united "by a common allegiance to the Crown," as head of the Commonwealth. The 1931 Statute of Westminster removed from Britain the right to withhold consent to laws passed by Dominion Parliaments.
Feeling its widening independence, Canada asked the King to stop conferring hereditary titles on its citizens, because "it seemed alien to the life of Canada."† Today, a Canadian who hopes to be ennobled must live in Britain, as does Ontario-born Lord Beaverbrook. Canada began to issue passports, changed "subjects" to "citizens," stopped sending appeals from its Supreme Court to Britain's Privy Council.