This week has had a comfortable symmetry. It began with a speech no one was supposed to hear and ended with one no one wanted to. The second, what we still call the speech from the throne, is a spiritless anachronism, an outdated piece of parliamentary liturgy. It may not be against the law for a speech from the throne to be interesting, in any way memorable for phrase or thought, but it is evidently the conviction of those who plaster these verbal gum wads together that it is.
Additionally they are a most curious feat of ventriloquism. The figure reading the speech (the Governor General) is not there in her own person but as an avatar or stand-in for the Queen. The words issuing from the Royal lips are understood by the stale conventions of this piece of theatricality to be of Her Majesty’s own manufacture. (Which is a libel in itself. No queen, and certainly not our long-serving one, could be as bland, flat and turgid as the prose of a throne speech would make her out to be. Charles maybe, but not Her Majesty, Elizabeth II.)
In reality the thing is constructed by the “communications shop” of the Prime Minister’s Office, probably supported by outcalls to a few Giller Prize runners-up or someone working at the Walrus (a local magazine). There you have it: the whole bloated affair is a fantasy of thinnest stagecraft. A woman impersonating another woman reading words we pretend are her own that the world knows are the produce of high-priced hirelings and (possibly) a few freelancers.
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See Also:
(1) The Trudeau government’s high noon moment with Beijing
(2) Saskatchewan government seeks more immigration powers for province, like those in Quebec
(3) Throne speech shows Trudeau learned nothing in election
(4) I’ll pay my taxes the way Trudeau funds the military
(5) Tittering Trudeau shows just how low our smug and infantile leaders have sunk
