Trudeau’s ‘coronation gift’ is just lip service to the monarchy

Cynically dressed up as a coronation-related gift to the Canadian nation, just days after the coronation, the country’s leader Justin Trudeau has unveiled a Royal Crown of Canada.  

Not a physical gold and jewelled crown, mind you, but a virtual crown, designed to replace St Edward’s crown – the very crown placed on the King’s head a week ago – on Canada’s coat of arms, official documents, and armed forces and Mountie badges and insignia. 

This new Canadian crown replaces the crosses and fleur-de-lys of St Edward’s Crown with stylised maple leaves. The rim is festooned by blue wavy line intended to symbolise native Canadians’ kinship with the sea and sky. At its apex, the orb and Maltese cross of St Edward’s Crown are replaced by an equally stylised snowflake that’s meant to denote Canada’s place as a snowbound northern realm. 

And the arrows in the new crown’s ermine base point Trudeau left rather than the traditional right.

These changes are deliberate and political. Trudeau wants to replace British and French monarchical symbols in the Crown with recognisably Canadian maple leaves. But he ignores the truth that both those symbols have religious significance for their respective traditions. Instead, Trudeau wants secular symbolism for his concept of a multi-faith Canada, with homage paid to the nation’s indigenous peoples, rather than the virtual wearer of his virtual crown, the King of Canada.

According to the Canadian Governor-General’s website, ‘Its design was approved in April 2023 by His Majesty The King on the advice of the Prime Minister of Canada’. It’s hard to conceive the King approved this new crown unquestioningly, but he was constitutionally bound to do so. That Trudeau asked him to do so in conjunction with his religious anointing and crowning, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, highlights both his dignity and Trudeau’s tactlessness.

In Canada, the design has already become known as the Trudeau crown, with Canadian wags saying it’s highly appropriate a Trudeau crown has a snowflake at its head. But Trudeau’s pointed secularisation of the monarchy’s most sacred symbol – its religious significance central to the ritual and purpose of the very coronation that he attended last week – is a subtle but unmistakable challenge to the established tradition of monarchy in the country that was Elizabeth II’s favourite realm outside the United Kingdom. 

Trudeau is paying lip service to the monarchy Canada shares with Britain and the King’s other realms, while effacing one of its most sacred symbols. As we are seeing in Caribbean realms like Jamaica, with their leaders wanting to sever ties imminently, without official support, the monarchy will wither and eventually die outside Britain. The Crown’s two leading realms, Canada and Australia, are crucial to its survival, but political support in either country now goes nowhere beyond lip service.

It’s one thing to hope that sufficient popular support for the monarchy, combined with the indifference of many more, will ensure the Crown’s survival in realms including Australia and Canada. But political leaders like Trudeau, with the symbolism of this unnecessary change for which there was no debate or evidence of any popular demand, set the national tone.

Trudeau’s woke new crown – his crowning achievement, one might say – reflects how even in the major realms the winds are blowing ever colder for the King, and the monarchy itself.