RANDALL WHITE, CANADIAN REPUBLIC NOTEBOOK. TORONTO. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2026. In my wider universe focused on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario, in the Great Lakes region of North America, three particular public events have marked the first full week of October 2026 — (1) Youth (and other) protests in France, Brazil, and beyond ; (2) 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Canadian/Icelandic writer Anne Carson ; and (3) “Injunction filed to force incoming PQ government [in Quebec] to take oath to King.”

(1) Youth (and other) protests in France, Brazil, and beyond

Even in the 2020s the France that gave the wider world the French revolution in the late 18th century, and then the 1848 springtime of the peoples and the 1871 Paris Commune, can suddenly reappear, alive again.

See, eg : “URGENT: Police are clashing with protesters in Place de la Bastille in Paris” ; “IT’S TOTAL WAR AT BASTILLE! VERY HEAVY POLICE CHARGE AFTER NUMEROUS PROJECTILE THROWS” ; and “FRENCH STUDENT: ‘More resources for education. Our demand is institutional … A breakaway left. We want to change the system.’”

As has often happened in the past again, the French example has inspired or at least parallelled similar mass protests elsewhere. In the early autumn of 2026 see eg : “Hundreds of students, inspired in part by student unrest in neighboring France, took to the streets of the eastern Belgian city of Liège … Belgian students clash with police over tuition hikes” ; and “LONDON | Solidarity with the high school student movement … Rally at the French embassy … ”

And then there’s : “From Athens, Greek students and pupils send their support to the mobilization of youth in France! Same fight, same demand: a public education, free and accessible to all” ; and “HISTORIC MOBILIZATION IN RÍO DE JANEIRO: THOUSANDS OF STUDENTS FLOOD THE STREETS IN SUPPORT OF LULA … Thousands of students marched with chants in defense of public education and democracy.”

(2) 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Canadian/Icelandic writer Anne Carson

As also noted recently, the “Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and professor of Classics” Anne was first noticed on this website in L. Frank Bunting’s “Taking time out from current madness to consider one woman’s brilliant writing more than 2500 years ago.” (From back in March 2019, during Donald Trump’s first wild and crazy term as US president.)

Now, among others no doubt, I was impressed that Anne Carson has this just past week been named winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. See eg : “Canadian Anne Carson awarded Nobel Prize in Literature … Carson, 76, has previously won several prestigious literary prizes” ; and “Anne Carson wins Nobel Prize in Literature … Carson is a celebrated poet and essayist who earned three degrees at the University of Toronto.”

For some quick first impression of Anne Carson’s writing the New Yorker magazine has posted a short Carson poem on Twitter/X and no doubt elsewhere as well. It begins with “It’s good to be neuter,/I want to have meaningless legs.” At the same time, as a mark of the complexity of Ms Carson’s thought, the second-last line is “Drink all the sex there is.”

A final somewhat intriguing ingredient in the current Anne Carson story is that while (as Bunting has explained) she was born in Toronto and “grew up in various parts of Ontario. (Her father worked for a bank, and was frequently transferred.),” Ms Carson currently lives in Iceland. And both Canada and Iceland have claimed the new Nobel Prize winner as their own! On the other hand, Canadian foreign minister Anita Anand has also just noted that “Canada is home to the largest Icelandic community outside Iceland, reflecting generations of friendship between our peoples.”

(3) “Injunction filed to force incoming PQ government [in Quebec] to take oath to King”

As already noted elsewhere on this site, I personally like and applaud the new Parti Québécois minority government in Quebec’s enthusiasm for abolishing the old colonial monarchy in Quebec (and in my own case in the rest of Canada too).

See eg “Newly-elected premier takes first shot at abolishing the monarchy in Quebec” and “Injunction filed to force incoming PQ government to take oath to King.”

As already noted as well, I do think Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s keeness to do away with the current office of lieutenant governor in Quebec is misplaced.

He would be better served by adopting the now vanquished CAQ government’s draft legislation on renaming the office ‘Officer of Quebec’.

As other parliamentary democratic republics elsewhere have shown (such as Iceland eg), our kind of democracy works best with some form of separate ceremonial head of state.

Meanwhile, I do not think it would be wise for Canadian courts to simply grant an injunction to (try to?) force the incoming PQ government to take the constitutional oath to the King, that does quite foolishly still exist in Canadian law.

Opinion polls do show that nothing remotely close to a majority of the Canadian people who vote in elections, coast to coast to coast, seriously believe in and support the monarchy in Canada today.

And aggressively enforcing this particular branch of the current technically correct but largely obsolete rule of Canadian symbolic law will not seriously help build a strong Canada for the future.