World Enough and Time

Not answering for james_nicoll, but I'd say that the role of the Governor General is vague to a lot of Canadians because it tends to disappear into the background until something like this crops up. She does the official stuff of dissolving and undissolving parliaments, but it's usually easy to see that as a sort of official rubber-stamping. It's only when something extraordinary crops up (like this event) that her role seems something other than window-dressing.

It isn't that your friend's quick summation was wrong or insulting, more that it was misleading - colonial implications are, at best, a rather embarrassing memory.