Yuan Yi Zhu is a research fellow at the University of Oxford.
A week ago David Johnston, the former governor general of Canada, bowed to the inevitable and resigned as “special rapporteur” into Chinese political interference in Canada.
After it became clear that no one in the country, with the exception of Justin Trudeau, wanted him to continue in office, not even hiring the country’s most high-profile “crisis communications” firm could save him.
Whether he was doomed by his decades-long friendship with the Trudeau family or the high-handed way he answered his critics – the more he was accused of bias by the Opposition, the more he insisted he had a moral duty to carry on – it is hard to not feel at least a scintilla of sympathy for a man who went from being an exceptionally popular ex-viceroy to a minor figure of hate in Canadian politics.
But Johnston’s plight is not unique to him. Monarchs work until they die. But their representatives to Canada, who are meant to substitute for the absentee head of state, do not. What is a former governor general, not quite ex-head of state, but almost that, supposed to do to keep busy in retirement?
The problem did not exist when Canada imported governors-generals from the ranks of the British peerage who were in need of a gap year. Once their term of office expired, they would say their farewells, leave, and never come back.
The arrangement suited everyone, but particularly Canadian politicians, who were happy to bow to some aristocratic potentate, but certainly not to one of their fellow countrymen.
Not until 1921 did anyone think that it would be good to appoint a person with any sort of connection to Canada (Lord Byng of Vimy had commanded the Canadian Corps during the First World War, though he had never set foot in the country), and even then the experiment was not renewed for three decades.
When Canada began to appoint Canadian-born governors general in 1952, it chose an heir to a tractor fortune with the manners of an Edwardian duke (which is what Vincent Massey was, spiritually at least), followed by a Quebec major-general who would have made for a fine courtier at Versailles.
Then, prime ministers began to realise that they could choose, within reason, anyone for the post, and began to do so. Homegrown aristocrats were replaced by a string of second- and third-tier political has-beens.
The strong suspicion was that they were chosen because the prime minister of the day (which in those days was generally one Pierre Trudeau) did not want to be upstaged. Later, former politicians were replaced by former journalists, as the Crown’s prestige plummeted even further.
Ed Schreyer exemplified the dilemma of this new class of ex-viceroys. A total non-entity, he was 43 when he became governor general, and 48 when he stepped down. Not being able to return to political life, he was sent to Australia as high commissioner before coming home and faffing around. He then decided to try to return to politics anyway, and was soundly trounced at the 2006 federal election.
It is hard to know what was worse for the governor general’s position: that he returned to partisan politics, or that he could not even manage to get elected.
Michaëlle Jean, a similarly youthful former governor general, faced the same sort of dilemma. Having done a stint as UN special envoy for some good cause or other, she managed (to much grumbling) to strongarm a Conservative government into nominating her for the headship of the Francophonie.
Four years later, she tried to get a second term. But by then Ottawa’s goodwill had run out (she was both a liberal and a Liberal appointee; the-then government was Tory; and she had incurred some questionable expenses), and she had to move out of her Parisian townhouse. Her most recent job as non-partisan grandee was as head of the Haitian football federation.
Johnston is merely the latest manifestation of this niche, yet real problem. Having been governor general, all he could do was to sit around and be paraded as A Great Canadian. To chair a high-profile inquiry must have seemed like an enviable post-retirement hobby to shake things up.
But he forgot that he was not an ex-monarch, but merely an ex-substitute. He expected the deference that he received as governor general to continue, not realising that by accepting the poisoned chalice of ‘special rapporteur’, he had reverted to being simply another Ottawa hack among all the others.