"...I don’t think Canada’s British origins are anything to be ashamed of. The permanent political, ethical and cultural ideals that motivate and bind most of us are products of Britain, no matter how few Canadians can be personally described that way. We have drawn from the British well of ideals continually, not having bricked it up in 1776, which is one reason we have, to take an obvious example, the British invention called “socialized medicine.”
I have never heard any Canadian suggest that this is an imperialist relic of which we ought to be ashamed, and whose abandonment is a moral imperative. Republicans prefer to heckle the Queen’s family and dwell on various crimes committed in the past by our monarchs’ various British ministers.
But are we to believe that getting rid of the Queen, perhaps by some extraconstitutional subterfuge, would actually cleanse Canada of the inexcusable taint of Britishness?
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