Watching Oprah Winfrey’s incendiary sit-down this past weekend with Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan Markle, who stepped down from the British royal family in 2020 and moved to Southern California, I soon found my thoughts drifting back to Canada in the early months of 2009. Stephen Harper, the country’s right-wing prime minister, had just suspended parliament to avoid a motion of no-confidence that would surely have ousted him from office and ended his career. The move, permitted by the unelected governor general, was more or less a naked power grab, amounting to an arbitrary suspension of representative democracy by executive fiat. Officially, of course, the governor general was acting on the advice of experts. Unofficially, as many observers implicitly understood, she lacked any real legitimacy to thwart Harper’s ambition.

Among other things, the whole episode revealed a serious weakness in Canada’s constitutional design, in which an appointed figurehead serves as viceregal representative for the British monarchy — an arrangement which in practice gives the prime minister of a majority government near untrammeled executive authority. It also underscored the deep ambivalence many Canadians feel toward their own ruling institutions.

According to one poll conducted by the Dominion Institute in 2009, a full three-quarters of Canadians couldn’t even identify the governor general as Canada’s de facto head of state. While some pundits might be inclined to brush off such a finding as a regretful instance of civic ignorance, popular comedian Rick Mercer had it right in his reaction to the poll: