Peddling the medal
Brace for flurry of Coronation medal awards this month
Media stories about a royal medal have been popping up on news and social-media platforms in Canada lately. Expect more before the end of this month.
March 31 is the deadline for presentation ceremonies for the King Charles III Coronation Medal. Some 30,000 have been minted, destined for the chests of Canadians who have made a significant contribution to the country.
The Trudeau government was quick to announce the medals program days before the May 6, 2023 coronation of the new king, but was slow to deliver. The official program rolled out a year later, and now is cresting.
Canada’s numismatic tribute to King Charles’ coronation is dwarfed by that of the United Kingdom, which has issued more than 400,000 of their own medals bearing the same name. A few of the British versions have made their way to Canadians, including RCMP equestrians, who travelled to the British celebrations almost two years ago.
Both versions are minted using a “nickel-silver” alloy, a misleading name if ever there was. There’s not a scrap of silver in the medal, just copper, nickel and zinc, with a layer of lacquer to keep it shiny.
But there is a big difference in imagery: Canada’s medal does not include an effigy of Queen Camilla, while Britain’s version prominently features the royal couple.
The Monarchist League of Canada has suggested the matter of Camilla’s image was a sticking point, because our cabinet chose to exclude her image though King Charles had to sign off on the final design. The league conjectured that Canada’s no-Camilla decision stalled the approval process.
Canada’s Criminal Code long contained a section (49) making it illegal to “alarm” the monarch, a quaint prohibition that can be traced back to 1842. No one has ever been prosecuted for the offence in Canada, and it was wiped off the books in 2018. We’ll likely never know whether the King was alarmed by a medal design that excluded his Queen. In any case, it’s no longer a crime.
Was King Charles’ silence about Trump’s territorial claims on Canada the result of his annoyance over a medal design that snubbed his wife? He did later wear the emblems of the Order of Canada, Order of Military Merit and Canadian Forces Decoration on his uniform in public, which some have suggested was in solidarity with Canada. All of this is fodder for professional royal watchers, moreso thanks to the complete absence of hard evidence.
Recipients of Canada’s coronation medals have not been vetted by a central committee that examines credentials. The award process is much looser, and involves quotas.
Some 4,000 have been allocated to the military, where medals are coveted, with the vast majority destined for non-commissioned members of lower ranks. Another 1,000 are set aside for federal public servants. See this internal memorandum from Privy Council Office (obtained through access-to-information) for details on the allocation of some 15 medals to bureaucrats, for example:
Each member of Parliament and each senator has been allotted 20 medals for people in their communities. The prime minister gets 100, and the speakers of the two chambers of Parliament have 30 each. Every premier in the provinces and territories is allotted 50; and so on. The government of Canada has also identified more than 100 “partner” organizations who can award the 7,150 medals reserved for them.
Ordinary members of the public are not permitted to make nominations. And only people alive at the time of the 2023 coronation are eligible to receive them, even if they have since died.
Organizations make their own selections, though are urged to be “inclusive” and to consider “individuals belonging to groups that have been historically under-represented.” (The Governor General currently has a project to make the Order of Canada more inclusive as well.) The names of recipients and their nominators will be posted in a public-facing database. A 100-word-maximum summary of each winner’s achievements must be sent to the Governor General’s office, though these will not be published.
The last mass-produced medal available to Canadians was the Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, with 60,000 struck in 2012, under the Harper government. Only two other awards are more numerous than the jubilee medal, the Governor General’s Academic Medal (109,718) and the Exemplary Service Medal (235,173).
With the addition of 30,000 coronation medals – now Canada’s 14th honour category – the number of individual awards registered in the Governor General’s honours database has topped more than half a million. That’s the equivalent of one award for every 68 persons in Canada 15 years of age or older.