I live in a state of permanent regret that I wasn’t around to witness the 1897 review of the Royal Navy and ships from the world’s fleets held for Queen Victoria as part of her Diamond Jubilee. What a sight that would have been!
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And what a glorious mood!! From being a beleaguered nation on the fringes of Europe, Britain had risen to world supremacy, ushering in an era of relative peace and serenity, spawning nations like Canada and Australia which have gone on to become some of the planet’s finest places. (You might have been seen things differently if you were a Zulu or Frustrated Frenchman, or an envious German, or a snotty Yankee, but generally it was a time of great progress.)
It was the time of splendid isolation (for us), of relentless progress and improvement, of hope and optimism. All watched over by Queen Victoria, who in 1897 celebrated her Diamond Jubilee.
Of course it all went rather badly just a couple of years later, with the ugly Boer War erupting, then Germany becoming a serious threat, with Britain (and therefore us) having to ally with the French and enter the First World War. Then there was the depression, the rise of Hitler and Stalin, the Second World War, the liquidation of the empire, the rusting-out of British industry, and the death of Amy Winehouse. A century of decay and decline. That’s the one I experienced a lot of.
It’s been much nicer over here in Canada for us all, as our remnant of the empire has become one of the hottest countries on the planet. A writer at the Globe and Mail was recently lobbying for us to try to become a 100 million person country in the next decades, and wouldn’t that be grand! We’ve got enough land to become an empire in our own right, without having to go outside our borders. That’s what we are anyway, to a great degree. A small population lording over a vast realm. (We just need to keep the next 60 million Canadians off all the farmland. We can’t afford to lose that.)
But it’s a glorious time here, and that’s combined with another Diamond Jubilee, this one with the Queen most of us have known fall all our lives.
There she is with mom and dad.
What a different Canada it is to the one that witnessed her ascension to the throne in 1952. There are many ways to describe the difference.
Here – and finally this is the bit of this blather that has some semi-relevance for you, the reader – is how Canada is different from the beginning of the second Elizabethan era in economic statistics compiled by the Bank of Montreal:
Notice the federal tax level is virtually identical? I suppose that doesn’t take into account the GST and other things, but remarkably similar. How about currency exchange rate? That’s the point I was trying to make in my last blog post. Or the university tuition numbers? On the right is about double what I paid in the 1980s and early 1990s. On the left is what they pay in Quebec now, from what I hear.
Notice how close the rise of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the price of gold has been. So which one is overpriced?
Lots of interesting stuff there for us to ponder, as we revel in this Diamond Jubilee, another of which is something none of us will likely be around to celebrate.
