Québec City 1775

On New Year's Eve 235 years ago His Britannic Majesty's Québec City stood off against the rebels.

As we go on into the new decade, Happy New Year!

Read More »»

Christmas of 1915

Daniel O'Donell sings of Christmas in 1915:

The same song by Celtic Thunder:

More at Wilson Revolution Unplugged...

Read More »»

Queen's Christmas Speech 2010

Read More »»

Messiah

Read More »»

Ignorance Leads to Apathy

Yes, ma'am they are indifferent:

Even with a posh royal wedding in the works, most Canadians aren't mad about the monarchy.

An exclusive Leger Marketing poll for QMI Agency reveals more than half of Canadians couldn't care less about the royals - including 26% who would like a divorce from the British monarchy. The survey finds females more likely than males to swoon over the royals, with just 19% of women calling for cut ties compared to 30% of men.

Leger VP Dave Scholz said the numbers reflect a waning sense of relevancy among a deeply divided public when it comes to the monarchy.

It's not so much that the monarchy is irrelevant, it's that Canadians know nothing about it. Canadian students are taught the wonders of multiculturalism, bilingualism and the obscure customs of very obscure tribes, but practically nothing about their head of state.

The Jacobins who have been running Canada since the 1960s reasoned, correctly it seems, that trying to directly challenging traditional Canadian institutions (like the monarchy) would backfire. Australian Republicans tried for decades to hold a referendum on the monarchy, only to lose it. Their Canadian counterparts are far more subtle.

Stop teaching children about the monarchy, the common law and the principles that under grid our parliamentary system, and as adults they will never think to consider these institutions "relevant." It's a slow motion cultural coup that has gone, mostly, unnoticed for two generations.

Read More »»

Reinterment of the French Bourbons

Of the many barbarous acts committed during the orgy of destruction that was the French revolution, the desecration of the Royal Sepulchre in the Basilica of Saint Denis was one of the most heinous (after, perhaps, the mass murder of a fair portion of the populace). Dozens of tombs were opened, their occupents removed and transferred to two nearby mass graves where they were covered with lime in an attempt to dissolve them.


Now, thanks to the miracles of modern science, a full reinterment of the Bourbon and Valois kings may be possible:

19 November 2010

Multidisciplinary medical identification of a French king’s head (Henri IV)
Philippe Charlier and a multidisciplinary team explain how they confirmed an embalmed head to be that of the French king Henry IV using a combination of anthropological, paleopathological, radiological, forensic, and genetic techniques

Since the desecration of the French kings’ graves in the basilica of Saint-Denis by the revolutionaries in 1793, few remains of these mummified bodies have been preserved and identified. After a multidisciplinary analysis, we confirmed that an embalmed head reputed to be that of the French king Henri IV and conserved in successive private collections did indeed belong to that monarch.

...
Conclusion:
Now positively identified according to the most rigorous arguments of any forensic anthropology examination, the French king’s head will be reinterred in the royal basilica of Saint-Denis after a solemn funeral ceremony. Similar methods could be used to identify all the other kings’ and queens’ skeletons lying in the mass grave of the basilica, so that they can be returned to their original tombs

Henri IV


Vive le Roi!

Read More »»

A Most Welcome Development: Order of Merit receives official status and is ranked superior to the Order of Canada

Here's the latest revelation from the Young Fogey. We posted about this more than a year ago when former Prime Minister Jean Chretien was awarded the honour, that there was no official recognition for the order anywhere in the modern Canadian honours system.

It is delightful enough that the Government of Canada is finally recognizing the Order of Merit, but doubly so with the decision to rank it ahead of the Order of Canada and behind the Victoria Cross. The Order of Merit, limited to just 24 citizens from across the Commonwealth, and bestowed in the personal gift of the Sovereign, is a much more exclusive honour than the highest ranking level of the Order of Canada, which has no limitations whatsoever. So this is a long overdue and welcome change.

I think the Queen is a very clever lady, and may have known or was advised that the best way to fill this conspicuous gap, was to appoint a Canadian to this very prestigious order in order to attract the official recognition it deserves.

Read More »»

Royal Canadian Navy Poll!

There is an online survey over at Shipping Reporter that asks for visitors to choose between the status quo, Maritime Command, or changing the name to Royal Canadian Navy or just Canadian Navy.

As of now, the RCN has the lead with 56.1%, followed by CN at 31.7% and Maritime Command at 12.2%.

Please head over to have your voices heard immediately. Here it is:

http://www.shippingreporter.com/featured/maritime-command-royal-canadian-navy-or-canadian-navy

Thank you

Read More »»

The Canadian navy wants Royal back, but the Admirals don't

Follow our Campaign here.

In the age of Wikileaks why would you even attempt to tell citizen-sailors they can't have an opinion on something like this? Very unfair and hypocritical of the admirals who believe they alone are entitled to a voice on this one. Admiral McFurious:

By ALTHIA RAJ, Parliamentary Bureau
Last Updated: December 9, 2010 5:23pm

OTTAWA — The head of Canada’s navy warned all naval personnel to keep their personal opinions to themselves after a junior officer was caught e-mailing a senator about Maritime Command’s proposed name change.

Vice-Admiral Dean McFadden sent sailors and naval officers a stern memo Wednesday after the chain of command was informed that the junior naval officer was also using his department of national defence e-mail account to encourage colleagues with similar opinions to e-mail the senator.

“It is neither appropriate nor helpful for any individual member of the command to respond to solicitation for your opinion," McFadden wrote. "As a private individual, you can have any opinion you wish; as members of the service you neither advocate for a personal view nor encourage your compatriots to do so."

Liberal Sen. Joseph Day has been encouraging serving naval personnel to e-mail him their preference for changing the naval force's name from Maritime Command to the Royal Canadian Navy, as he prefers, or, as another Liberal senator suggests, to Canadian Navy.

"I have received hundreds of e-mails from junior officers and non-commissioned officers, virtually all the messages I received were in support of R.C.N.," he told QMI Agency Thursday.

Day believes Maritime Command is trying to "surreptitiously" change its name to Canadian Navy "without it being the law" and the latest move by the navy could shut up dissenting opinions.

The Senate committee on national security and defence is deliberating a motion to encourage Defence Minister Peter MacKay to change the name Maritime Command to Canadian Navy.

althia.raj@sunmedia.ca

Let us first understand who is really feeling the heat here - not the junior naval officer in question, but the head of the navy himself who is losing control of the situation he so badly is trying to control.

All these CF admirals who don't give one whiff for the old RCN, are using their commanding position to chill the ranks into submission, not because of established rules for solicitation, but because most of the rank and file would apparently prefer the RCN contrary to testimony provided by the admirals themselves, who for some truly mystifying reason do not want to go back to the Royal honour, and are clearly very distraught about where this might be going. Boo hoo, how tragic.

For example, Admiral Mifflin breathlessly testified on November 15th to the Senate Committee that he had not met one person in favour of the RCN (not one!), to which Senator Plett responded: well, you just met one! We of course know of five thousand, one hundred and thirty-six on our badly advertised petition, but the admiral didn't know of a single one, as laughable and ridiculous that sounds, that's what he said.

Had the junior officer in question been for CN, Admiral McFadden's response would have been different you can be sure ("I have completed my poll on the issue, Minister, and he wants CN"). These admirals are clearly in cahoots with one another, and are using their position to control the discussion at the Naval Officers Association, the Navy League of Canada, and perhaps even the Dominion Executive of the Royal Canadian Legion, and wherever else they sip their Chardonnay nowadays. We are winning the battle here, and they don't like it one bit.

Read More »»

Bertie's Speech

An unlikely monarch and an unlikely movie:

Firth is among the most inward of actors, able to communicate a puzzled discomfort with a simple shift of his eyes; and in the role of Bertie—as Logue insists on calling him—he shows us a man walled in by the starchy imperiousness in which he’s been trained (“You’re the first ordinary Englishman I’ve spoken to,” he awkwardly tells his new therapist), and straining to free himself in search of help. Firth’s ability to project a fully detailed character through the scrim of Albert’s disability—a strangling knot of glottal chaos—is a marvel of concentrated skill.

Carter is also fine as Bertie’s affectionate wife, officially a commoner herself, who can play the game of royal deportment and also set it aside when necessary. (“It’s ‘Your Majesty’ the first time,” she tells Logue’s flustered wife (Jennifer Ehle) with muted amusement, “then ‘Ma’am’ after that.”)

But Bertie made himself - with the help of his formidable Queen - a very fine King.

Read More »»

A Royal Name Game

Following the fleet:

Canada’s navy has told former sailors to shut up about changing the naval forces’ name back to Royal Canadian Navy, a senior officer testified Monday.

“The navy has sort of said to the Naval Officers' Association of Canada: Do not push it. We have bigger fish to fry and we do not want to get everybody upset about something that we can live without,” retired Cmdr. Chris Thain, president of the Winnipeg branch of the Naval Officers Association of Canada, told a Senate committee.

Canada’s navy is officially called Maritime Command.

Nothing stirs the blood quite like "Maritime Command."A cold, military bureaucratic bit of terminological exactitude. Like calling your mother "parental unit one." One wonders a what and a where about these bigger fish. Surely men with destroyers should not be concerned about fish, however big. Perhaps the problem is with the mammals located in Ottawa.

All large organizations, even ones that do useful things like the military, are bureaucracies. A bureaucrat is accountable to the system he inhabits, not whomever the system is intended to serve. The paper-shuffler yearns not to shuffle paper, but to rule those who shuffle it. To reach that lofty perch he must conform to the attitudes and views of his masters. In turn he will expect similar obedience from his subordinates. At a basic level it's the only way a large organization could work, without degenerating into anarchy. The problem emerges when the cogs forget they are also human beings, living in something greater than a bureaucratic mechanism.

The current crop of officers in the Canadian Forces is now two generations removed from Hellyerification. Those officers who opposed this "reform" of our military were sacked, or found their careers stalled. No minister of the crown wants to hear his subordinates tell him: "No, Minister." In other departments subterfuge - a la Sir Humphrey Appleby - is used to thwart ministers. Soldiers, sailors and airmen are a simple lot. Talking out of both sides of your mouth is poor military leadership. It is, of course, an essential attribute of a modern politician.

The politicians appoint - whatever the official promotion workflow - the generals, who appoint the colonels and so on down the line. The new and improved Hellyerized Canadian Forces had very little place for customs and traditions, the rites of passage and confirmation that create regimental identities. Away went the distinctive service uniforms, replaced by a drab olive green, for a time even the system of ranks was changed. Ship captains were called Colonels-at-Sea. While the uniforms and the ranks came back, the Royal part of the name has yet to.

To men who risk life and limb, these tangible bits of their identity were taken away, out of some zealous desire for administrative conformity. The greatest victim of these modernizing jacobins was the monarchy. The dropping of the terms "Royal" from the navy and air force was a not so subtle way of cutting Canada off from its past. Whereas other nations try to build traditions, as a way of strengthening a sense of national identity, the Canada of the 1960s decided to do away with as many traditions as possible. The quest for modernity took the form of a systematic amnesia. Now the amnesiacs who run Canada, and the military, are trying to prevent us from recovering one small, but important bit of what was lost.

Read More »»

Farewell, I Will Return

"Gladstone's" post below is a nice segway for me to report that I will be going on what may turn out to be an extended hiatus. As readers may be aware, I started a petition back in 2007 (co-sponsored with my friend, Gregory Benton) to restore the Royal designation to the Canadian navy and air force, and the issue is currently front-burner news in the Canadian Senate. I had the honour last week to present our 384 page petition to Senator Plett, who happily tabled it before the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence on Monday, which is currently holding hearings on a motion from Senator Rompkey recommending that Canadian Forces Maritime Command be officially changed to "Canadian Navy". The good Senator doesn't seem to be aware that CN is our national railway, and evidently didn't bank on the possibility that other Senators might want the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) back instead. Our campaign is doing well, but I have to admit it has become not just a healthy obsession, but a very time-consuming one too, and there is no end in sight to the work that needs to be done. Although there are numerous Senators in favour of bringing back the RCN, there is by no means any assurance that such a return is likely, and the Senate is probably pretty evenly split on the issue. We definitely want to avoid any "CN" compromise, since if such a compromise succeeded, it will be next to impossible to restore the Royal designation, as the country will have moved on. It has only become an issue because everyone is finally united on the fact that "Maritime Command" is a terrible name for a nation's navy, and one that will never resonate with the Canadian public, even though they tried mightily for forty years to make it work. Paul Hellyer was truly a misguided soul, and the nation is still reeling from his destructive actions as Defence Minister in 1968. The proof is in the pudding - everything that was taken away by him, has since been restored - except the final step - the name of the navy itself.

In any event, I won't be far - feel free to follow our campaign here in the weeks and months ahead. I pray I will return soon enough to declare before you all that our navy and air force can announce with pride to the nation: ‘I once was lost but now I’m found!’

Yours aye,

Read More »»