Government officials are already talking it up with sympathetic journalists as "the grand Canadian project to kick off the new millennium." It is pitched as "the breaking of the last colonial bond," a "landmark achievement" that would "provide the country with a fantastic burst of momentum and pride." Indeed, it is a "historic inevitability," a matter of "reaching full independence" and "severing the remaining British tie." Well, isn't that special? To celebrate the next millennium, we will destroy all traces of the last -- a great collective act of historical vandalism to close out the century. Let's all just pause on the threshold, turn, and give the finger to the past.

Let other countries build things to mark the event. We will tear things down. Come Canadians! Tous ensemble! Toss your heritage upon the fire! Hurry! Only 12 months to the millennium! We must burn as much as we can before then.

It is a depressing prospect, our politics, between an opposition that would dismantle the national government and a Liberal party that wants only to defile it. If in fact it even understands it. What on earth has putting the boots to Elizabeth II to do with breaking colonial bonds? She is not the Queen of England, and thus of Canada. She is not the Queen of English Canadians. She is the Queen of Canada, and of all Canadians. The bond between nations under the Crown is not colonial, but fraternal. It no more advances our independence to abolish the monarchy than it would to abolish the Department of Finance. It is the foundation of Canadian government, one of the three branches -- Crown, Commons and Senate -- represented in the phrase "the Crown in Parliament." As if it needed saying, we are already sovereign in every respect, having severed the last colonial tie in 1982 with patriation of the power to amend our constitution. It was coincident, indeed, with that great act of national affirmation that the Crown was formally entrenched at the heart of Canadian constitutional law, unalterable without the consent of Parliament and all 10 provinces.

We kept the Crown not out of nostalgia or anglophilia, but because it is useful. The monarchy is not some soap opera for soggy teenagers. No quaint anachronism or colonial relic, it is a marvellous constitutional instrument, the best that has yet been devised for reconciling the power of the state with the sovereignty of the people. As The Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy often reminds us, the American constitution, born of rupture with the British system, in fact froze it in place. The presidential model, adopted in mimicry of the powerful monarchy with which the revolutionaries were familiar, represents a case of arrested constitutional development, circa 1776. The countries that grew up under the Crown, by contrast, benefited from another century of constitutional evolution in favour of today's limited monarchy.

The Queen is more than the personification of the state, she is the humanization of it. As much as the constraints upon her once absolute power say ours is a government of laws and not of men, her very humanity, and her all-too-human family, remind us that government is also about men: about real people and their concerns, not bloodless abstractions like "the state." Focus of allegiance, symbol of unity, vessel of sovereignty, the monarchy is all these things. But mostly it is a statement about us.

A nation that calls itself a kingdom is a nation with a sense of gravitas, with a future and a past and an equal ease with either. In the descent of kings it traces its own glorious passage through the generations. A monarchy is something to live up to, and to wonder at. It is not fed to us in predigested chunks of reason. You either get it or you don't.

That is what fuels the abolitionist's rage. It isn't that the Crown is demeaning or outmoded. It is that it is beyond him. It makes him uneasy. It dares him to think of his country in poetic terms, as a people and a place whose story has some meaning beyond the merely explicable, and he can't. So instead he drags it down to his own banal level, where he has dragged everything else: to Ottawa, land of cell-phones and acronyms.

A kingdom is a place fit for a great people. But Canada? There is no such place. We are a nation that denies it is a nation, eager to obliterate anything that might remind us of what we were or what we can be, the people of the endless now.

What remains of our symbols of nationhood? The flag? In most countries, a flag is chosen for what it represents. Ours was chosen explicitly for what it does not: not Britishness, certainly, but not anything else, either -- just a splotch of Liberal red drawn from a tree that doesn't grow in much of the country. The anthem? It, too, is a mere toy, to be rewritten every few years in line with the prejudices of the day.

The same vandalism has been visited upon our institutions of government. The Commons, robbed of real power, is a mere afternoon annoyance to the cabinet. The Senate is a national joke, a sinecure for party hacks and bagmen. And now this. It isn't as if successive governments have not already done their best to belittle and degrade the monarchy, an attitude the journalist Peter Brimelow immortally described as that of "the urchin, secretly urinating on some shrub in the hope that it will die." If the Liberals have their way, the head of state would become just another patronage post, like -- well, like the governor-general has become. Why not? If the prime minister can make his former press secretary governor-general, why should he not choose the president, or whatever the new head of state will be called? I hear Andre Ouellet needs a job.

I've got a better idea. As long as we're looking for something to do, let's abolish patronage for the millennium. But no, we can't do that, can we? That's a cherished national institution.