RANDALL WHITE, “CANADA’S CAPITAL REGION FROM FOUR HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES WEST”. SATURDAY, MAY 3, 2025. I should make two (or maybe three) things clear up front.

First, I am a (somewhat cranky?) 80- year-old man who was born in Canada. I have lived here all my life, with brief exceptions for travel abroad. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, with enthusiasms somewhat different from the 2020s and 2030s. Inevitably I will not be around to enjoy and/or endure much more of any longer term Canadian future.

Second, I did vote for the candidate of the Carney Liberals in my local electoral district on April 28, 2025. Early on in my history as a now well-seasoned participant in federal and provincial elections I voted New Democrat. Then I started voting Liberal on some occasions, New Democrat on others. Most recently I have mostly voted Liberal. And — to finally put my money where my mouth is — in this 2025 campaign I donated $100 to the Liberal Party of Canada.

I should no doubt also note that for more than a few years I have somewhat actively supported the broad political view that the ultimate destiny of the 1867 confederation in Canada is a Canadian parliamentary democratic republic, broadly on the model already pioneered by such fellow former self-governing British dominions as Ireland and India.

With all this relevant background duly noted, I want to make clear my massive, heartfelt protest over the news that “King Charles to travel to Canada, deliver throne speech … Visit will mark the 1st time a monarch has delivered the throne speech since 1977.”

Or to cite what newly elected PM Carney has himself posted on Twitter/X: “Later this month, Canada will have the privilege of welcoming Their Majesties The King and Queen to Canada — where His Majesty King Charles III will deliver Canada’s speech from the throne … This historic honour matches the weight of our times.”

I was pleased to see that Peter Donolo, former communications director for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, was on CBC TV yesterday, adroitly articulating the case against asking a British monarch to read a Canadian throne speech in the 2020s — a colonialist practice last indulged in by the (still quite monarchist) capital-city establishment in Ottawa some 48 years ago.

I was especially struck by Mr. Donolo’s argument that the decision to ask Charles III to read the Canadian throne speech in 2025 betrays something of a broadly political tin ear. PM Carney does not seem to have considered the conclusion drawn by others inside and outside Canada. Having a “foreign monarch” (as opposed to a domestically appointed Canadian governor general) read a speech defining current public policy just undercuts the otherwise admirable “Canada Strong” slogan of the Carney Liberals.

Alexander Panetta, Washington-based correspondent for CBC News, has similarly posted on Twitter/X : “King Charles will open Canada’s Parliament on May 27, Carney announces. First time this happens in decades, apparently intended as a message of Canada’s distinct sovereignty.” Others, that is, may see having a head of state who lives more than 5,000 kilometers away from your capital city in another country as a strange kind of independent nationhood.

Prime Minister Carney himself did seem to understand all this only a very short time ago, when he urged that Canada did not need anyone else to stand up for Canada in the face of President Trump’s wild attacks on the sovereignty of the USA’s friendly northern neighbour. Canada can stand up for itself.

Or as I have recently much more modestly urged myself, stressing obsolete official rhetoric about the British monarch in Canada (based on legislation passed by the British parliament in the 19th century, when only property-qualified men could vote) is in the 21st century “taken as a sign of weakness by political opponents of Canada … That King Charles III who lives, works, and worships in the United Kingdom, is still somehow Canada’s official ‘head of state’ can suggest to some minds … that Canada is a place which is used to and even likes being colonized.”

The Canadian people are increasingly of a broadly similar view to mine and many others here, I believe. I am a particular fan of a report by pollster David Coletto : “2 in 3 Canadians would vote to eliminate the monarchy in Canada” (Abacus Data, May 4, 2023).

At the same time, I do agree that the monarchy is of virtually no serious practical consequence in Canada today. I continue to believe, as I have also noted elsewhere recently, that Mark Carney “is exactly the right federal leader for Canada right now.”

I think his substantive policy agenda is still strong. And I certainly support him as the voice of the Canadian people without reservation, as he meets with President Trump this coming week.

Yet for many of us who have just voted for him, I suspect, PM Carney’s symbolic snafu on the monarchy and the throne speech in Canada’s “free and democratic society” of the 2020s has, as Peter Donolo has also nicely put it, taken the wind out of the sails that earlier drove our enthusiasm over what Mark Carney can do for Canada and its long-term future.

Alas this now seems to me to have greater patriotic limits than I thought just a few days ago, right after the April 28 election.

(PS : Congratulations to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the Australian Labor Party’s “landslide election win” in today’s election down under — in another of Canada’s fellow former self-governing dominions of the British empire, that has now evolved into a Commonwealth of “56 independent and equal countries … home to 2.7 billion people”)