This is a very personally gratifying event
After about five days, Blair phoned me back and said that Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Jean Pelletier, had advised the private secretary to Queen Elizabeth, Robert Fellowes, that Chrétien was rejecting the Foreign Affairs department’s opinion and that Canadian law required him to oppose my appointment to the House of Lords. Pelletier was referring to the Nickle Resolution of 1919 that was a non-binding request that Canadian residents not be given British or foreign honours.
The issue was not justiciable in the United Kingdom, as my membership in the House of Lords was not disputed in that country. My legal advice in Canada was that as a Canadian citizen I had the right to receive an honour in another country where I was resident and also a citizen for services deemed to have been rendered in that country and that I had an unanswerable argument in Canadian courts establishing that right. I took legal action accordingly.
By this time, I was more concerned with thwarting Chrétien’s preposterous claims to extraterritoriality and the cowardice of the Canadian judiciary than I was with becoming a British baron, and it was in those circumstances that I renounced my Canadian citizenship, with the implacable stated intention to resume my Canadian citizenship as soon as I could.
Predictably, I was widely pilloried in Canada, by Chrétien and others, as a turncoat and a social climber. Only about 10 percent of the peers now are hereditary lords .
As for Jean Chrétien, our relations were excellent for many years, and he acted as maliciously as he did because he objected to comments made in this newspaper when I was its publisher, about the controversy over the golf course and related matters in his constituency . He had no objections to receiving the great distinction of the Order of Merit from her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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