Canadian titles debate

The Canadian titles debate has been ongoing since the adoption of the Nickle Resolution in 1919. This resolution marked the earliest attempt to establish a Canadian government policy requesting the Sovereign not to grant knighthoods, baronetcies, and peerages to Canadians, and set the precedent for later policies restricting Canadians from accepting titles from foreign countries. Dissatisfaction with the British honours system led to the creation of the Order of Canada in 1967.

The Nickle Resolution

The Nickle Resolution was a motion brought forward by William Folger Nickle in the Canadian House of Commons. Nickle was chairman of a special committee of the House of Commons that had been formed to look at the question of honours. There had been controversy during World War I about the large number of Canadians being recommended for knighthoods and the qualifications of recipients. Nickle alleged that the practice was inconsistent with democratic values and successfully moved a resolution through the House to end the practice of appointing Canadians to knighthoods and peerages. As a result of the committee's deliberations, Nickle moved that an address be made to King George V, requesting that His Majesty no longer grant "any title of honour or titular distinction... save such appellations as are of a professional or vocational character or which appertain to an office", and that all hereditary titles held by Canadians become extinct upon the death of the incumbent. The motion was carried by the House of Commons.

Nickle's detractors charged him with being motivated more by spite and chagrin over his failed attempt to obtain a knighthood for his father-in-law, Daniel Gordon, the principal of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

"Canadians" in the above context refers to British subjects "domiciled or ordinarily resident" in Canada. A complete legal definition of Canadian citizenship did not exist until the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect in 1947.

Although the Nickle Resolution was adopted by the House of Commons, the address to the King was never sent. Nor was it advanced to the Senate, where it was expected to be defeated, as it touched on a constitutional matter outside the competence of the House of Commons. As a resolution rather than an Act of Parliament or Order in Council, the Nickle Resolution would not have been legally binding on the government anyway. However, it established a policy precedent which has had a varying degree of enforcement.

The Nickle Resolution was passed in a nation that was deeply divided due, in part, to the Conscription Crisis of 1917. The end of the war saw a burgeoning working class movement that resulted in actions such as the Winnipeg General Strike. The conferring of knighthoods and peerages, with their connotations of aristocracy, were inconsistent with demands for class equality. The sacrifices of World War I were seen by some as the crucible in which a national Canadian identity was created, distinct from the "Britishness" that had previously predominated in English Canada.

The Nickle Resolution came about in answer to a controversy about the sale of honours, particularly those that involve the use of a title, because of their greater day-to-day public visibility. At the time, the Canadian public was disturbed by the revelation that third parties were using their influence to obtain prime ministerial recommendation for titles, for a fee.^[1] This practice did not only affect Canadian subjects of the King; it potentially affected all British subjects. The outright sale of honours was distasteful to most Canadians. The buying of honours was one way in which war profiteers sought to gain respectability and recognition within society.

Enforcement of the restrictions on the inheritance of titles seems never to have been attempted. Canadian citizens may inherit and use British titular honours, as is reflected in the Canadian Almanac and Directory ^[2]. One surviving Canadian titular honour, that of le baron de Longueuil, dating from 1700, was recognized by the British in the Treaty of Paris, 1763. This treaty provision was later exercised in 1880 when the title was confirmed by Queen Victoria (see Burke's Peerage and Baronetage under "Old Canadian Title"). The title survives today in the person of Dr Michael Grant, 12th Baron de Longueuil (b. 1947), a descendant of the 1st Baron. On 10 May 2004, the city of Longueuil, Quebec was granted arms by the Canadian Heraldic Authority based on the arms granted by King Louis XIV in 1668 to the father of the 1st Baron de Longueuil.

After the resolution

Continentalist and nationalist forces in Canada's political life grew in strength through the 1920s. The governments led by William Lyon Mackenzie King insisted on an end to imperial practices such as the British government appointing dominion Governors-General, and demanded recognition in practice of Britain's equality to the dominions — seen in such agreements as the Balfour Declaration of 1926 that recognized the autonomy of the dominions.

The Nickle Resolution was recognized as policy during King's tenure as Prime Minister and was entrenched in government practice by the time King retired in 1948. Successive Canadian governments pursued an unwritten policy, reflective of the Nickle Resolution, whereby they did not recommend more than a handful of non-titular honours.

In February 1929 a debate was held on the question of titular honours in the House of Commons, specifically to put to the House the question of whether the Nickle Resolution ought to be reconsidered. This motion was defeated by the Liberal majority on 14 February 1929.

"If we are to have no titles, titular distinctions or honours in Canada, let us hold to the principle and have none, let us abolish them altogether; but if the sovereigns or heads of other countries are to be permitted to bestow honours on Canadians, for my part I think we owe it to our own sovereign to give him that prerogative before all others." Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, House of Commons, 12 Feb 1929.

Granting of honours resumed

On 30 January 1934, Prime Minister Bennett said, when speaking about the Nickle Resolution and the shelf-life of Canadian parliamentary resolutions (Canadian Hansard):

"It has been a matter of passing comment, as pointed out by an eminent lawyer not long ago, that a resolution of a House of Commons which has long since ceased to be, could not bind future parliaments and future Houses of Commons."

"The power of a mere resolution by this house, if acceded to, would create such a condition that no principle which secures life or liberty would be safe. That is what Judge Coleridge pointed out."

Moreover, as a matter touching the royal prerogative, R. B. Bennett had already reported to the House of Commons the previous year, on 17 May 1933 (Hansard, p. 5126) that the Nickle Resolution was of no force or of null effect, stating:

"... it being the considered view of His Majesty's government in Canada that the motion, with respect to honours, adopted on the 22nd day of May, 1919, by a majority vote of the members of the Commons House only of the thirteenth parliament (which was dissolved on the 4th day of October, 1921) is not binding upon His Majesty or His Majesty's government in Canada or the seventeenth parliament of Canada."

On 30 January 1934, in speaking about his responsibility as Prime Minister to advise the King as the King's first minister, and about his own advice to the King that as prime minister he wished to continue the custom of advising His Majesty to bestow royal honours on His Majesty's Canadian subjects (which Conservative and Liberal administrations had chosen not to exercise for almost 15 years), Prime Minister Bennett said:

"The action [of recommending (or choosing not to recommend) people for titular honours] is that of the Prime Minister; he must assume the responsibility, and the responsibility too for advising the Crown that the resolution passed by the House of Commons was without validity, force, or effect, with respect to the Sovereign's prerogative. That seems to me to be reasonably clear."

To these official statements of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett can be added what he wrote in a 1934 letter to J.R. MacNicol, MP when he stated his view that:

"So long as I remain a citizen of the British Empire and a loyal subject of the King, I do not propose to do otherwise than assume the prerogative rights of the Sovereign to recognize the services of his subjects."

Moreover, as Bennett stated to Parliament about the Nickle Resolution (see Hansard):

"That was as ineffective in law as it is possible for any group of words to be. It was not only ineffective, but I am sorry to say, it was an affront to the Sovereign himself. Every constitutional lawyer, or anyone who has taken the trouble to study this matter realizes that that is what was done."

R.B. Bennett's government submitted honours lists to the King every year from 1933 onward, recommending that various prominent Canadians receive knighthoods, including the Chief Justice of Canada, Sir Lyman Poore Duff, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Commissioner Sir James Howden MacBrien, Sir Frederick Banting, the discoverer of insulin, and Sir Ernest MacMillan, composer and conductor.

When a vote was called on 14 March 1934, on a private member's (Humphrey Mitchell, Labour, East Hamilton) resolution to require the prime minister to cease making recommendations to the King for titles, this renewed Nickle-like Resolution was defeated 113 to 94. The Canadian House of Commons, by this vote, refused to reaffirm or reinstate the Nickle Resolution or its attempts to prevent the Prime Minister's involvement in the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of granting titles to Canadians. This is the last time that the lower house of Parliament ever voted on the issue.

Mackenzie King reaffirms ban

When William Lyon Mackenzie King returned to power in 1935, he ignored the precedent set by Bennett's government, and resumed the former policy. The no-honours policy of successive Canadian governments has been in effect ever since. However, no attempt was made to forbid the use of the titular honours by those who had been granted them by the King at Bennett's recommendation.

In 1941, Bennett was elevated to the British House of Lords, as "1st Viscount Bennett, of Mickleham in the county of Surrey, Hopewell in the province of New Brunswick, and Calgary in the province of Alberta". This was a reflection of British policy at the time of conferring viscountcies on retired dominion prime ministers, if recommended. Retiring British prime ministers were normally offered earldoms.

Modern policy

In 1968, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson's government published "Regulations respecting the acceptance and wearing by Canadians of Commonwealth and foreign orders, decorations and medals".

These policies were again affirmed in 1988 when the government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney published "Policy Respecting the Awarding of an Order, Decoration or Medal by a Commonwealth or Foreign Government".

Conrad Black vs Jean Chrétien

Main article: Black v. Chrétien

The best-known modern application of the Nickle Resolution occurred when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien used it to prevent Canadian publishing mogul Conrad Black from becoming a British life peer. Chrétien held that, in spite of the fact that the British government was honouring Black as a British citizen, and that Black then held dual citizenship of Canada and Britain (allowed since 1977), he as prime minister of Canada had the right to keep Black from becoming a British life peer because he was also a Canadian citizen.

Exceptions and anomalies

Even in the immediate aftermath of the Nickle Resolution adoption in 1921, titular honours were granted to subjects of the King who remained residents of Canada, and such honours were passed on to their legal inheritors. The Nickle Resolution was not an effective instrument to establish Canada's desire to end the granting of titular honours to Canadians. It would take later Prime Ministers to do that.

The prime minister at the time of the resolution, Sir Robert Laird Borden, GCMG had been knighted in 1914, five years before the adoption of the resolution.

Canadian steel magnate, Sir James Hamet Dunn was created a baronet by King George V on 13 January 1921, and his son Sir Philip Dunn, 2nd Baronet, inherited his father's baronetcy. At the time, the same parliament that had adopted the Nickle Resolution was still in session. It follows that such a resolution, had it had any binding nature, would have been in effect at least until the dissolution of the 13th parliament on 14 October 1921.

The Government of Canada made no objection when, near the end of the Second World War, British prime minister, Winston Churchill, recommended that the King bestow a knighthood on Sir William Stephenson. Churchill described the honour he sought from the King for Stephenson as "one dear to my heart", such was Churchill's sense of gratitude for Stephenson's wartime intelligence work. Years later, Sir William was given Canada's highest honour in being made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1979.

Also honoured with knighthood following the Nickle Resolution was Sir Frederick Banting, the Canadian medical doctor who co-won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery of insulin. This knighthood was awarded by King George V in 1934.

Another significant example of government indecision over the matter of titular honours involves former Canadian governor general Vincent Massey. While on a visit to Canada in August 1954, Prince Philip told Massey the Queen wished to make him a Knight of the Garter. The most senior of the Realm's orders of chivalry, Massey would have been the first non-Briton to receive the Garter. Then-prime minister Louis St. Laurent was cool to the proposal, but agreed to take the matter under advisement. Shortly after coming to power in 1957, John Diefenbaker was initially receptive, but ultimately changed his mind and so informed the Queen in 1960. Just weeks later, Her Majesty honoured Massey with the more rare [but non-titular] Royal Victorian Chain.^[3]

A different example was that of Sir Edwin Leather, KCMG, KCVO, LLD, the Toronto-born Governor of Bermuda. He arrived in Britain with the Canadian Army in 1940, and stayed on after World War II to become a Conservative Member of Parliament. After the murder of Sir Richard Sharples, the Bermudian viceroy, Sir Edwin was appointed to the vacant colonial governorship at the recommendation of the government of British Prime Minister Edward Heath. When Sir Edwin was knighted in 1962, since he had not lived in Canada since 1940, he was not made to renounce his citizenship in his native country.

In addition to this extraterritorial anomaly, even today the Governor General of Canada is actively involved in the creation of knights and dames via one of the recognized orders (see Order of Merit) within the Canadian honours system. His or Her Excellency presides over the Canadian branch of the Order of St John and confers knighthoods and damehoods on some of its members in ceremonies at which the Governor General performs the act of investing new recipients with their honour. Persons so honoured are, however, officially prohibited from publicly employing the usual knightly accolade of "Sir" or "Dame" followed by their personal and family names, and the claim is made that the honour of knighthood or damehood is conferred without the Queen or Her Governor General's concession of any appellative accolade, thus avoiding the bestowal of any titular honour.

During the premiership of Tony Blair at least two persons holding dual Canadian and British citizenship were granted titular honours by the Crown before the Black peerage issue, which brought the matter to the Canadian prime minister's attention.

In February 2004, the Department of International Trade announced the impending visit to Sydney of Sir Terry Matthews, with a press release that included the following passage: "Sir Terry is the Chairman of Mitel Networks.... In 1994, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours, 2001."

On 2 November 1999, Canadian Senator Anne Cools brought to the Senate of Canada's notice the discrepancy in policy on Orders for English Canadians, and Orders for French Canadians:

"Honourable senators, the sovereign of France, the President, conferred the Ordre Royale de la Légion d'Honneur on Quebecer Robert Gagnon just two weeks ago, and on Premier René Lévesque in 1977, while he was Premier of Quebec. No doubt Premier Lévesque would have frowned on any anglophone premier being knighted "Sir" by the Queen of Canada."

In addition, on 4 November 1999, she brought to the Senate's notice the fact that in the first decade alone after the Nickle Resolution was debated, there were:

"many distinguished Canadians who have received 646 orders and distinctions from foreign non-British, non-Canadian sovereigns between 1919 and February 1929."

Statistics are not available on the total numbers of titular and non-titular honours conferred on Canadians throughout their country's history.

Some Canadian title holders do not employ their British- or French-derived titles in Canada. One such example being Kenneth Thomson who from his father's death in 1976 until his own death in 2006 held the hereditary peerage Baron Thomson of Fleet. Thomson once stated in an interview "In London I'm Lord Thomson, in Toronto I'm Ken. I have two sets of Christmas cards and two sets of stationery. You might say I'm having my cake and eating it too. I'm honouring a promise to my father by being Lord Thomson, and at the same time I can just be Ken," ^[4] It is noteworthy that not employing his title in Canada was his personal choice, rather than the result of any government legislation.

Other Commonwealth countries

Australia is another Commonwealth Realm that at present does not confer titular honours on its citizens, except where those honours are conferred personally by the Sovereign, though this occurred after the creation of the Order of Australia, which initially included grades that awarded knighthoods and damehoods. Additionally, even once the Commonwealth of Australia government had ceased making recommendations for the Australian quota of the British honours list, the governments of the various states of the Australian federation were free to do so, and notably in the case of the State of Queensland, continued to do so for some years.

Commonwealth countries such as the United Kingdom, Jamaica and Papua New Guinea still confer titular honours, however in recent years the latter two have generally opted to bestow National orders of similar standing offering Order of the National Hero of Jamaica and Order of the Logohu as new alternatives which come with their own styles of "Right Excellent" and "Chief" or "Grand Chief" respectively. There have been reports in the British press of the sale of honours to Britons making large financial contributions to Tony Blair's Labour Party coffers, thus raising the hackles of egalitarians in his own party. Peerage watchers and historians note that such a scandal about the sale of honours occurred in the 1930s in the famous Maundy Gregory affair.

The New Zealand government bestows titular honours on its citizens. However between 2000-2008 the Knighting of individuals was temporarily discontinued under Helen Clark with the two higher grades of the Order were replaced with postnominals to indicate membership, to make this Order more like the one-grade Order of New Zealand. However in March 2009 John Key requested to Elizabeth II that the Order be resumed at the pre-2000 grades and granting of Knighthoods was continued. As in Australia, Her Majesty continues to make titular awards in the Royal Victorian Order, the Order of the Thistle and the Order of the Garter, since these Orders are within the Sovereign's prerogative. New Zealanders who received New Zealand's former titular honours prior to 2000 may continue to employ them and those New Zealanders who received the equivocal postnominals between 2000-2008 were allowed to exchange them for the restored titles if they so chose. ^[5].

Antigua and Barbuda created its own honours system in 1998 with its two highest orders, the Order of the National Hero and the Order of the Nation bestowing titular honours.

See also

• Baronetcies conferred on the recommendation of Canadian governments
• Political culture of Canada
• Monarchy of Canada
• Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925
• Orders, decorations, and medals of Canada
• Canadian order of precedence (decorations and medals)

References

1. ^ Christopher McCreery, The Order of Canada: Its origins, history and development University of Toronto Press, Toronto Canada, 2005, ISBN : 0 80203 9405 pg. 45
2. ^ Canadian Almanac & Directory 2008 (161st Edition), Grey House Publishing, ISBN 978-1-59237-220-1
3. ^ Bissell, Claude (1986). The Imperial Canadian: Vincent Massey in Office. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 263–268. ISBN 0-8020-5656-3. 
4. ^ "This page is available to GlobePlus subscribers". Theglobeandmail.com. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060612.wthomobit0612/BNStory/Front. Retrieved 2010-06-18. 
5. ^ "Titles of Dames, Knights to be restored - Key - Politics - NZ Herald News". Nzherald.co.nz. 2009-03-08. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10560600. Retrieved 2010-06-18. 

Bibliography

• McCreery, Christopher (2005). The Order of Canada: Its Origins, History and Development. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-3940-5 Contains a full discussion of Canadian government policy towards titular honours.
• The Rule of Law and the Justiciability of Prerogative Powers: A Comment on Black v. Chrétien (pdf)
• Senator Anne C. Cools' webpages detailing the applicability of the Nickle Resolution during R.B. Bennett's time and afterward