Everyone had his own candidate for Governor General. Keith Spicer was an early favorite. Financial Post editor John Godfrey plumped for David Culver. The polls made Pierre Trudeau the people's choice. Various Tory has-beens, from Flora MacDonald to Richard Hatfield to Joe Clark, popped up.

It is safe to say the name Ramon Hnatyshyn headed few, if any, of these lists. The appointment of the former Justice minister has excited more than a little caterwauling over his alleged lack of ''stature.'' So distraught was the Globe & Mail's Michael Valpy that one of his buddies in the Canadian Nationalist fraternity - Pierre Berton, perhaps - failed to get the call he accused the Prime Minister of having ''deep-sixed the monarchy.''

This is rather a lot to lay at the feet of poor Hnatyshyn. His appointment is no worse than the last two, and probably better. Hnatyshyn isn't to blame for the sorry state of the monarchy in Canada, and a better man in Rideau Hall wouldn't change matters. In fact, now that we've completed the cycle - NDP, Liberal, Tory - it's time we looked seriously at abolishing the office. Not the Crown: the Governor General.

MONARCHY IN TROUBLE

There is no denying the monarchy is in trouble in Canada, wrongly regarded as a symbol of colonial domination by those who pause to give it any thought at all. Years of deliberate neglect have left the Crown at the very back of the national consciousness. Ottawa's attitude to the monarchy has for years been, in the journalist Peter Brimelow's memorable phrase, ''like that of the urchin secretly urinating on some shrub in the hope that it will die.''

In the current issue of Saturday Night magazine, George Galt points out the paradox that the more relevant Prince Charles succeeds in making the monarchy in Britain, the less relevant it becomes to Canada. The more he involves himself in the daily life and problems of Britain, the more he becomes of Britain, and not of all the nations under the crown. So the monarchy will come to seem more and more to Canadians a foreign relic.

This is a shame. The monarchy is a remarkable constitutional instrument which we should be much the poorer for losing. The Crown is not some infantile soap opera for insufferable anglophiles. It is the wellspring of nationhood. In its rightful place, it commands a sense of collective connection, ''the mystic reverence, the religious allegiance . . . that no legislature can manufacture in any people,'' as Walter Bagehot wrote.

The Crown, in the words of Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, is the ''symbol of the spiritual unity of the tribe.'' Monarchy - allegiance - makes of us a tribe, no matter our several attributes or origins.

The enduring place of so undemocratic an institution stands as an ironic comment on the imperfections of democracy, even as its lost power tells of democracy's hard-won triumph. The Crown represents both continuity and change, the unique achievement of British parliamentary democracy. As a constitutional monarchy, it recalls that our government is of laws, not of men; as the personification of the state, it reminds us government is still, in the end, about men, not abstract ideals.

But all of this is lost so long as the Queen remains a distant sovereign, living in a foreign land. Only when Canadians see their future kings and queens grow up among them, going to Canadian schools, canoeing on Canadian lakes, speaking with Canadian accents (in both official languages), only then will they again embrace the monarchy.

It's not the concept of monarchy that's outdated. It's the concept of a Governor General, a second-stringer for Her Majesty. We have patriated the Constitution. Surely patriation of the Crown ought to follow.

Obviously neither the Queen nor Prince Charles is going to decamp to Ottawa. But Galt is too hasty in dismissing the clear solution: At Elizabeth's death, bring Andrew over to start a Canadian dynasty.

To save the Crown, we must de-Anglicize it, without robbing it of its history. Transplanting the Crown into Canadian soil would preserve the historical continuity that is the monarchy's strength, while imparting a distinctively New World spin.

Let's make the Duke of York, and his heirs, Prince of Canada. The Duke has a long association with this country going back to his school days. And there's ample precedent. If Wales can have a prince, why not Canada?