Printed in: Heraldry in Canada/L'Héraldique au Canada. (The Royal Heraldry Society of Canada/La Société Royale Héraldique du Canada) vol. XXXVII, no. 2a (Summer/Été 2003) pp. 19-25. ISSN 0441-6619
Imagine a copyright registration clerk telling a citizen, “I’m sorry, madam, but in order for us to maintain a certain romantic mystique about copyrights and to justify our status as part of the vice-regal household you must prove that you are worthy of the honour of registering your copyright, that you have somehow contributed to society. Of course, our registrations are purely honorary. They can’t be enforced.”
It seems a bit harsh, but that is exactly what the Canadian Heraldic Authority has been doing for the last fifteen years in exercising the royal discretionary power to grant armorial bearings. The assumptions behind this are so deeply ingrained in the English-speaking world that most people do not even know that there are alternatives.
Armorial bearings began as a form of martial identification. Medieval knights drew designs on their shields to distinguish themselves one from another while covered from head to toe in armour. However, in largely illiterate societies, the clergy, merchants, peasants and tradesmen could not resist adopting such useful insignia to identify themselves and their institutions. Anyone could legally assume arms in the Middle Ages.
Beginning in the 16th century, monarchs began asserting control over this practice, and just as noble titles and knighthood evolved from concrete military commitments into honours, so did armorial bearings granted by monarchs evolve from warrior ID into a kind of graphical honorific.
British monarchs succeeded in regulating both bourgeois and noble arms by extending the honorific armorial franchise to the quasi-noble class the English call the gentry. Many continental monarchs were far less generous.
Generally denied honorific arms from the monarch, large numbers of French and German bourgeoisie continued to assume arms, which came to be known as Burgerwappen or “citizen arms.” This tradition lives on in these countries, where informally assumed coats of arms now enjoy legal protection. France and Germany have no distinct, government authorities regulating personal arms. A coat of arms belongs to the family who first adopted it, and people continue to invent their own coats of arms today. Conflicts are resolved by the courts.
South Africa and Spain have taken the citizen arms tradition one step further by setting up registration authorities. People are still allowed to adopt arms without formalities, but in order for them to be enforced they must be certified or registered, like a copyright or a trademark.
Ireland and the Belgian region of Flanders grant arms as a right to any applicant with a relevant connection to the jurisdiction, such as citizenship or residency.
Neither Flanders, France, Germany, Ireland, South Africa nor Spain defines armorial bearings as honours. Some of these places consider arms to be an accessory to a family’s surname; others treat them as a form of intellectual property. The Flemish, Irish and South African heraldic authorities are all located within normal government ministries related to culture. Spanish arms are recorded by the justice ministry.
The citizen arms tradition treats coats of arms like family names. Everyone can have one and pass it on to their children, but the very fact that anyone can have one means that no social distinction is involved. Citizen arms confer no more distinction than does the mere fact that someone has a surname.
Honorific arms are very much like noble titles. Not everyone is allowed to have one, but those who do (have one) pass it on to their heirs, passing social distinction from generation to generation.
It is entirely proper for Canada to restrict signs of office and lifetime honours, like the insignia of the Order of Canada and the prime ministerial canton. But coats of arms are hereditary, and hereditary honours are based on the assumption that outstanding achievement or qualities run in families. This concept reinforces class distinctions and weakens social mobility, since children are judged at least partly by who their ancestors were.
The Canadian honours system was built on the rejection of hereditary nobility and other titular honours, like knighthoods. Citizens are admitted to the Order of Canada based on their perceived individual merit, not who their forebears were. Children inheriting honorific coats of arms from their ancestors is a departure from this meritocratic principle, seemingly out of place in the Canadian national honours system.
Heredity aside, it is not clear that Canadian arms really are honours. According to the CHA’s Website, its primary objective is "to ensure that all Canadians who wish to use heraldry will have access to it." This stretches the concept of arms as honours to the breaking point since an honour ceases to be an honour if it is granted to all. Honours recognize outstanding achievements or qualities. In general, the fewer people honoured, the more prestigious the honour.
Since the royal discretionary power to grant armorial bearings is traditionally part of the monarch’s role as fons honorum or “fountain of honour,” the source of the CHA’s authority seems to be in direct conflict with its primary objective. Are Canadian arms vice-regal marks of social distinction, available only to Canada's equivalent of the English gentry, or are they available to any citizen with an interest in heraldry and a couple of thousand dollars to spend?
The core purpose of a modern heraldic authority is to keep people from stepping on each other’s armorial identities. Widespread participation is essential since people in a free society cannot be prevented from using foreign or assumed arms unless they violate enforceable rights of legally recognized armigers. The more arms recorded, the more conflicts avoided or resolved. Functionally, it makes no sense to turn away applicants; but the CHA presumably turns away not only the “unworthy” but all non-citizens as well. By custom, the monarch only honours her or his subjects.
Many countries prohibit dual citizenship, and immigrants from those countries can lose important property rights and even pension benefits if they become Canadian citizens, effectively barring them for life from applying for a CHA grant. And, paradoxically, only Canadian citizens are allowed to register foreign arms, leaving the CHA unaware of immigrants’ arms until at least three and a half years after their arrival. This sets up a situation in which the CHA could unknowingly grant arms that conflict with the arms of an immigrant already in the country.
N.B.: About a year and a half after this article was published the CHA began registering the arms of and granting arms to permanent residents of Canada.
The Burgerwappen tradition de-emphasizes the distinction between citizen and non-citizen. Heraldic jurisdiction is seen as territorial. Anyone with a need to protect their arms in a place can register them there. Some countries open it up to anyone at all.
This has created a problem in South Africa only because the government subsidizes the creation and registration of arms. Americans, including this author, have swamped the Bureau of Heraldry with applications, creating a large and costly backlog.
The Canadian Heraldic Authority, by contrast, operates on a cost recovery basis. If Canada redefined arms as cultural or intellectual property it could begin designing and registering arms for Americans and other foreigners. Why get an expensive honorary devisal from England or wait years for South Africa to work through its backlog if Canada has a flexible and fully staffed office ready to create real arms for anyone?
With certificates in both English and French, the CHA could attract applications from all over the world. This would cost the Canadian government nothing but would create work and therefore employment for more Canadian heraldic artists and administrators.
It would also make the CHA more accountable. Because it currently exercises a discretionary power of the monarch, the CHA’s actions are not subject to judicial review, nor is it responsible to parliament. It is not even covered by the Access to Information Act.
Some say that this puts it above politics and contributes to the romantic mystique of heraldry. It is also an excellent way to make the authority seem unapproachable, arbitrary and opaque.
To say nothing of toothless. As in England, there is no court in Canada empowered to hear a complaint that an unauthorized person is usurping the arms of another.
A provision of the Trade-marks Act does prevent anyone else from registering a federal trade-mark that would conflict with a CHA grant, but that does not mean that grants automatically enjoy trade-mark protection. Essentially, it creates a blank space, but it does not fill it. Armigers must follow the normal trade-mark registration procedure in order to register their arms as an enforceable trade-mark.
Besides, copyright and trade-mark registration are ill suited to the purpose of protecting the arms of entities not engaged in commerce. Armorial bearings combine aspects of both trade-marks and works of visual art, but they are also a kind of performance art, like a play or a piece of choreography, since it is the blazon that defines the work, not individual depictions or "performances."
The Lord Lyon can fine anyone who usurps arms in Scotland, but this authority derives from legislation passed in a country where most people have no problem with titular honours or nobles inheriting seats in the upper house of the legislature.
Who among us wants to go before a parliamentary committee and argue that people should be fined for disrespecting a bourgeois honour awarded by an unaccountable vice-regal office based on inherently arbitrary and opaque criteria to people who nominate themselves and pay thousands of dollars for the privilege? The argument for enforcement powers would be much easier to make if Canada transformed the CHA into a Flemish- or South African-style heraldic registration bureau by passing legislation to redefine arms as cultural or intellectual property.
Fancy letters patent, an entry in the Public Register of Arms, Flags and Badges of Canada, even world class artwork and heraldic counsel, these are not enough to convince many Canadians to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a grant of arms. For many, Canadian arms will not be “real” until they are enforceable, like in Flanders, France, Germany, Scotland and South Africa.
In 2001 a pure laine québécoise family association assumed arms. They were not even aware of the CHA's existence at the time, but even now they see no reason to seek a grant. The copyright registration they already have offers them more legal protection, and they would not want the design process subjected to seemingly arbitrary rules. They see their arms as nothing more than a family symbol, and some nationalist or republican members of the family might object to a vice-regal honour.
An Anglican monarchist living in Westmount declines to register his three-hundred-year-old French arms with the CHA. They are already legally enforceable in France, but the original grant papers were destroyed long ago. He says that a CHA grant would be a waste of money and snobbish.
This author, a landed immigrant, decides to register arms in South Africa because he objects to the concept of arms as honours. Besides, he is not eligible for a CHA grant, and in any case it would be no more enforceable in Canada than the South African registration. If he becomes a Canadian citizen he can apply to register the much less expensive South African arms with the CHA for free, that is, if this article and his republican political views do not render him “unworthy.”
Granting armorial bearings as a hereditary honour is a departure from the Canadian national honours system's founding principle of individual merit. Even setting aside the hereditary nature of arms, the British-style definition of arms as honours conflicts with the primary objective of the Canadian Heraldic Authority, which is "to ensure that all Canadians who wish to use heraldry will have access to it."
A fellow member of the Commonwealth, South Africa, has brought together the strengths of both the continental European Burgerwappen tradition and British heraldic regulation. South African arms are available to all without pretence, and they are both duly recorded and enforceable.
The royal reserve power to grant armorial bearings is traditionally part of the monarch's role as fons honorum. Invoking this power may have been easier than passing a South African-style heraldry act here in Canada, but it has left the CHA unable to fulfill some of the most basic functions of a modern heraldic regulatory body, hindering participation, accountability and enforcement. Worst of all, it perpetuates the idea that heraldry is elitist and snobbish.
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