As our moderator Michael McAteer noted at the start, the new republican option in Canada that we’re trying to help open up for discussion tonight is a broad tent. It brings together people of different backgrounds, interests, and convictions. It also, I think, points to a variety of ultimate possibilities. In my brief remarks I want to emphasize just how broad the tent could become.

As I do this, I want to stress as well my allegiance to the narrower common ground that those of us who helped plan this meeting have agreed to. Exactly because the tent is so broad, it is important to focus strategically on a very specific objective that everyone can share. Right now we are just talking about replacing Canada’s present British monarchy with our own Canadian head of state. A republic in this sense just means any non-monarchical system of government.

The historian Michael Bliss noted in the Ottawa Citizen recently, in the midst of commenting on the official launch of the Citizens for a Canadian Republic organization, that the key practical question raised by this narrow and focused objective is exactly how the Canadian head of state who replaces the monarch will be selected or chosen.

Here again I want to express my support for our, as it were, current official forum position that there are various possible options for choosing a new head of state. (You can see several of them already at work in the present constitutions of India, Germany, Ireland, and France.) As matters stand, just which of these options will work best in our particular Canadian circumstances is a subject for further discussion and debate. We hope this forum will just be the first of many, in all parts of the country, that will help advance the debate, over a number of years ahead.

Having said all this, in a traditional Canadian spirit of compromise and accommodation, I’d now like to offer my personal more in-your-face contribution to getting the debate started, by, as I’ve said, emphasizing the broader and even somewhat more radical side of the options that now seem possible.

There are two particular broader options I want to highlight quickly — both of which are discussed in my recent short book on the subject, Is Canada Trapped in a Time Warp?

The first is choosing the new head of state by popular election — or selection by all eligible voters in the current Canadian federal electorate. My book in fact proposes that we simply replace the British monarch as head of state with a popularly elected governor general.

I know there are some among my fellow speakers tonight who feel that this would be somewhat too broad and radical an option. They would prefer a selection method that is, so to speak, less disturbing for our present government institutions in Ottawa.

They may well prove right in the end, and that’s just democratic politics. Meanwhile, what we all agree on is that the selection method finally adopted is something to be decided by the people of Canada, in a popular referendum.

For the moment I just want to say a few things about what strike me as the advantages of a popularly elected governor general, or otherwise-named Canadian head of state. I think it is very important, for instance, for the public official who will replace the monarch to be accepted as altogether legitimate, by all the citizens of our present Canadian democracy.

The most legitimate and widely accepted head of state we can have, I’d suggest, is one chosen by all the people of Canada.

A popularly elected governor general would inevitably have somewhat more practical political power than any kind of merely appointed or indirectly elected figure. And this would present at least a bit of a challenge to our current government institutions in Ottawa.

My own feeling about this is that our current institutions in Ottawa could in fact stand a bit of a challenge. And, perhaps more importantly, the current working example of the office of the president of Ireland shows that you can have a popularly elected head of state in a parliamentary system of government whose practical powers are really very modest indeed, and do very little in fact to challenge the ordinary operations of the government of the day.

The second broader option I want to stress is that even the narrowest definition of the new republican cause might also serve as a doorway to some more effective attack on the broader constitutional swamp in which our country has been somewhat absent-mindedly mired, since the failure of the national referendum on the Charlottetown Accord in 1992.

Happily enough, I really haven’t time here to get into the details of this at all. I’ll just very quickly say that it seems to me there remain three or perhaps four broad constitutional issues that we really ought to resolve in Canada at some point over the next few decades.

The first is aboriginal rights, land claims, and all that. The second is of course the perennial Canadian question of the role of predominantly French-speaking Quebec in our federal system. And the third and perhaps fourth raise the arcane but nonetheless practically important subjects of Senate reform and broader parliamentary and democratic reform, including some measure of proportional representation in our electoral system.

It seems to me that the narrowly focused constitutional issue of replacing the present British monarchy with a Canadian head of state can help set the stage for a much more healthy and successful attack on these other issues than we have managed so far. Some of my fellow speakers are I know just not interested in these other constitutional issues at all. My plea is only that we do not neglect their potential altogether, for those in all parts of the country who do remain concerned.

I just have one very last point that I’d like to make.

Last week Tom Freda and I spent some time at a television station in London, Ontario, debating the new republican option in Canada with two worthy opponents. One of them seemed to say she thought that the great practical effort of replacing the present British monarch with an altogether Canadian head of state might make some sense, if it did in fact lead to a more constructive attack on our other continuing constitutional problems. But if it didn’t it would only be a very small matter of limited symbolic significance — and not really worth the effort required.

I definitely do prefer the broader doorway-to-bigger-things scenario myself. But I want to end my short talk tonight by emphasizing what seems to me the quite vast importance of achieving even the limited republican objective of an altogether Canadian head of state — at some point over the next number of years, or, shall we say, the next decade or so.

I am, for instance, old enough to remember some remarks by the former Ontario premier John Robarts, at the time of the first Parti Quebecois victory in a Quebec provincial election, in 1976. As Canadians, Robarts said then, we had never quite made up our minds on whether we wanted to have a real country in Canada. With the Parti Quebecois in office in Quebec, we would have to at last.

A little more than 25 years later, my own feeling is that, miraculously enough, we have still yet to accomplish this particular important task. At bottom this failure remains, it seems to me, our biggest and most serious constitutional problem in Canada today.

The most recent "9/11" events in North America seem to me as well to be making it increasingly more urgent that we come up with a solution to the problem soon enough. Replacing the monarch with a Canadian head of state, in a popular referendum, fills the bill very well. Through this action we the people of Canada will be telling the world — and of course especially that very friendly part of it immediately to the south of us (and perhaps even more importantly, ourselves) — that we have indeed made up our minds at last.

As I was trying to explain my feelings about all this to a charming young lady who helped arrange our recent television debate in London, Ontario, she said something like: you mean abolishing the monarchy would be "an act of empowerment for the people of Canada."

This seems to me exactly the right summary of the most important part of the argument I’m concerned to make here tonight. As I listen to the national and international news today, my growing feeling is that we the people of Canada stand in greater and greater need of some act of empowerment of just this sort. Saying YES to the republican option, I’d submit, is the best way of getting it now even remotely in sight.