John Fraser is the master emeritus of Massey College and the president of the newly launched Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada.
Today, Elizabeth Dowdeswell and her two young nephews will climb into a horse-drawn carriage and make a ceremonial trip to the main entrance of the Ontario provincial legislature. The boys will then be able to see their redoubtable aunt – one of Canada's most outstanding public servants and a former under secretary general of the United Nations – become the 29th lieutenant-governor of the most populous province in the country. In that role, she will represent the Queen in Ontario as the executive "partner" of the Crown in our own distinctive federal system.
How Elizabeth Dowdeswell got to ride in that ceremonial carriage is more than a curious tale, at least to those who care about how we govern ourselves in Canada, where there is a mixture of elected and appointed leaders. That's because her journey came about as a result of a quiet evolutionary change where the prime minister now mandates consulting committees to recommend viceregal candidates to his office.
It is a positive development, but I would think that because I agreed to assist in the process which explains why we were all in the Privy Council Office in Ottawa last January – a first for me – with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the chair, the five of us on the first-ever Ontario committee to come up with a short list of names to submit to Mr. Harper for consideration as the province's next lieutenant governor to succeed David Onley, who steps down when Ms. Dowdeswell takes her oath of office.
In addition to the Prime Minister, the Canadian Secretary to the Queen and four members of the search committee, a surprising number of his top officials were present. That blew my mind. I believe in the role of the Crown in our system – an evolving, mature role that takes in our history and constitutional complexities but also recognizes Canadian leadership. These appointments have not always been treated with such care. There has been a story going the rounds for a number of years, for example, that is much repeated and hopefully apocryphal, that a previous prime minister had chosen a governor-general based on who his secretary had seen on television one night.
This time, Mr. Harper was continuing a recent and underreported system he and officials in his office have been developing for helping him to decide who would make good and appropriate viceregal figures under Canada's constitutional arrangements. He used the system to choose Governor-General David Johnston and the current lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland and Labrador. As someone who believes in evolutionary parliamentary democracy, I was very pleased to be of temporary assistance.
Mr. Harper's own views on the Crown are different than most people think. He is not at all a romantic monarchist, although he is surrounded by such. Like most Canadians, he operated in the middle ground between zealots pro and con on the issue of monarchy. He candidly admitted it in a letter in 2012 he sent to me after the publication of The Secret of the Crown: Canada's Affair With Royalty, which I wrote the year before:
"Until fairly recently in my life," he wrote, "I was a rather passive and uncommitted supporter of the status quo on the issue of the Canadian Crown. Over the past decade, however, I have had a privileged vantage point from which to observe the many and profound strengths of the institution. I have likewise seen the likely alternatives about which I have become quite alarmed."
Typically with Mr. Harper, when he supports something, he brings a methodical thoroughness to the business. So now, quietly, Canada has upgraded the role of Canadian Secretary to the Queen and made it a full time position. At the moment, it is manned by a redoubtable Cape Bretoner and the former Black Rod of the Senate, Kevin MacLeod, and it is this office which organizes the new system for selecting a short list of outstanding Canadian citizens to be considered for the viceregal posts in the country.
It works this way. Under the leadership of Mr. MacLeod and two permanent members of a viceregal committee (the outstanding Canadian historian, academic administrator and Jesuit priest, Père Jacques Monet, of Montreal, and the former Rideau Herald, Robert Watt, of Vancouver), I and a distinguished civil servant in Ottawa, Kay Stanley, were asked to take on the short-term role of Ontario "advisers." In different provinces there will be different local advisers.
The five us had a commissioning telephone conference call with the Prime Minister last November. The criteria Mr. Harper gave us was both sensible and perhaps obvious. We should aim for end-of-career high achievers, both men and women; the nominees we chose should believe in our system of governance, including respect for the Crown; whoever we recommend should understand the dimensions of the viceregal role, both its inspirational and celebratory side, as well as the constitutional constraints and opportunities.
Initially, we were asked to keep our assignments "confidential" but it was argued that this was virtually impossible and also counter-productive. Under the guidance of Mr. MacLeod, we were asked to consult broadly across the province. What an adventure this all turned out to be as we surveyed or visited a large swath of leading citizens, community organizations, New Canadian friendship groups, churches and synagogues and mosques, schools and colleges – any institution that might have an interest in the business and would put up with us. The single most common reaction was a great deal of surprise at being consulted followed by pleasure that such a system was actually functioning. It also produced a bit of dark humour:
"You really want my opinion on who should be the next lieutenant governor?" a jokester in Kingston asked me. "Yes sir, I do." I should have known the nature of his answer from his sly smile. "Take my father-in-law, please. He's driving us all crazy."
The commission gave Kay Stanley and myself, as well as the permanent members of the committee, amazing opportunities to talk about the role of the Crown in modern Canada. The most fun I had came when I was at a high school class just outside Toronto where I got more than 60 nominations from a combined Grade 11 and 12 class led by an inspiring teacher who used me and my mandate as a civics lesson. Many of the suggested nominations were both appropriate and wonderful. There were also nominations for Tim Horton and Barack Obama. I was able to explain why neither would get the nod, but the student who pushed the late Tim Horton was convinced this would produce free doughnuts on Victoria Day.
When we came together two months later in Ottawa, nothing had really prepared us for the degree of seriousness of how this business was handled. Mr. Harper kept us in the Privy Council office for nearly two hours. Two hours! Each of the five nominated candidates was gone over very thoroughly by the Prime Minister himself and he asked probing and sometimes quite sensitive questions on everyone and also the communities they came from and the work that they had done that had made them so fitting for high office.
He also wanted to review the process we had all gone through and asked us a lot of questions about the responses we got from those who were consulted. There was also an important discussion about one of the most neglected issues in viceregal appointments – the mostly thankless demands placed on the spouse of an appointee for which there is no remuneration and not much satisfaction. Over the years, there have been a number of viceregal marriages that have gone into default.
At the end, he gave each of us a thank you present. It was the second edition of a book his father had co-authored on Canadian regimental badges and flags. The first edition was out of print and I gathered this second edition was an act of filial piety. Seeing his shyness and pride in presenting these books to us, as well as regaling us on of his father's collecting obsessions with regimental insignia was an eye-opener to a Stephen Harper I had not ever seen reported.
So, in mid-January, we left him with the names and extensive profiles of really remarkable Canadians and Ontarians. As we now know, he ended up choosing Ms. Dowdeswell. We committee members found out about it at precisely the same time the public did – when the official press announcement from the PM's office at the end of last June, many months after our meeting. The delay was, I learned, because the Prime Minister wanted to keep the experienced Mr. Onley in office throughout the subsequent Ontario election campaign. Many knowledgeable observers were predicting a minority administration and these are periods of high intensity for viceregal figures under our system.
So that is why Elizabeth Dowdeswell gets to ride in the provincial landau. She is a remarkable person who came to Canada as an immigrant, who has served in hugely demanding positions inside government, in the private world and academe. There's another committee already working on the next Manitoba lieutenant-governor and so it will go right across the country under this new system, a quietly successful evolutionary improvement to the way we have been doing it for over a century.