SPECIAL FROM THE DEMOCRATIC DESKTOP OF CITIZEN X, ON THE EDGE OF THE CANADIAN SHIELD IN BUCKHORN, ON. K0L 0C1. 28 MAY 2022. There was a time when I thought of the Globe and Mail as Canada’s newspaper of record..

Then a retired engineer I knew who had worked on the Avro Arrow cancelled his longstanding subscription to the Globe. He said it had become too right wing politically for a real newspaper of record. Living in the GTA (aka Big Smoke), he subscribed to the Toronto Star instead.

My grandparents’ Toronto house where I lived until age 11 (long before I moved up here to the Kawartha exurbs) preferred the old Telegram (and before 1936, I was told, the old Mail and Empire). My grandfather apparently felt that the Toronto Daily Star of his day was a “red” newspaper. Yet in his last few decades my father, who was still taking the Telegram when we moved to a new house of our own in the suburbs, also finally subscribed to the Toronto Star.

I was still reading the Globe and Mail more or less as a newspaper of record back when my own kids were younger. I can remember them reporting on the subject to their grandparents. But like the retired engineer, by the time my kids were in their late teens or early 20s, I was also growing estranged from what was then I think still calling itself “Canada’s National Newspaper.”

I should acknowledge that I have all due respect for the hard fact that, according to one “List of the top 10 Canadian newspapers by circulation … Updated July 2021,” The Globe and Mail — “In print for 170 years” — is currently at the top, in the Number 1 spot, etc.

I should confess as well that I am an I-think-inadvertent part of the problem old newspapers seem to be confronting virtually everywhere, in the face of the new information technology.

I used to live in a house that sometimes seemed engulfed by newspapers (and magazines). I live in a much more at least orderly looking house now, with a much smaller overall consumption of paper products.

I no longer lean on even the pay-walled websites of the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail online. I rely on the still free reporting available on the CBC News and CTV News sites (to present them in alphabetical order). Then again, there is a vast assortment of tailor-to-taste online reportage and opinion in such places as Twitter …

All of which is just a very long preface to my personal reporting that I (accidentally) found a Globe and Mail editorial on May 26, 2022 altogether appalling, and certainly unworthy of and completely inappropriate for any serious Canadian newspaper of record.

It blithely opines : “Canada’s monarchy is here to stay. Embrace it … For those interested in making Queen Elizabeth II the last Queen of Canada, we have bad news for you: It’s almost impossible.”

Moreover, this opinion is offered in the wake of two recent polls from the Angus Reid Institute — in November 2021 and April 2022. These polls have suggested that although Queen Elizabeth II remains widely admired, a full two-thirds majority of Canadians do not support carrying on with the monarchy under King Charles, after his 96-year-old mother unhappily passes on.

My own opinions on this issue are much closer to those of my counterweights friend, colleague, and policy advisor Randall White, who also on May 26, 2022 offered this advice in a Loonie Politics column : “Visit of Prince Charles and Camilla should remind us that we will finally have to explore Canada’s constitutional future again.”

To me, the Globe and Mail editorial edict that “Canada’s monarchy is here to stay. Embrace it” (because it’s allegedly “almost impossible” to end it) summarizes almost everything that is wrong with Canada today.

In the real world modern Canada is what the Constitution Act, 1982 calls “a free and democratic society.” And to believe in the future of the remarkable diverse Canadian people — from the Indigenous First Nations to the latest new citizens (and everyone in between) — is to believe that in the end We Shall Overcome all obstacles in the way of fulfilling this destiny.

No newspaper worth listening to would advise that our Canadian democracy today must somehow “embrace” continuing with the old colonial monarchy because it’s just “here to stay,” as a result of various arcane rules flowing from the old colonial history — when two-thirds of the Canadian people already want this old colonial history to end.

What kind of legacy is that to pass on to our children and grandchildren and the many new migrants to Canada’s growing free and democratic society, who are coming from around the global village to enjoy the practical blessings of just this kind of free and democratic human experience?

In the current rising struggle between what the political scientist Franz Neumann called The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, back in the 1950s, the Globe and Mail has now effectively placed itself on the side of the latter option! What other conclusion is there?