RANDALL WHITE, TORONTO. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2026. An opinion piece by Shannon Gormley in this past Sunday’s Toronto Star urged that “Buckingham Palace may be embroiled in scandal, but Canadians have never needed the monarchy more.”

While acknowledging the gravity of this view in present circumstances (and the force of Ms Gormley’s writing), I couldn’t disagree more.

What the current challenge to the Canadian future suggests, I think, is the importance of grounding democracy in Canada today in the Canadian people.

They are the real source of our parliamentary democratic government’s legitimacy and authority in the 2020s.

(1) “British monarchy has next to no practical significance in 21st century Canada”

I would guess that Canada’s current (and I think good or even excellent) PM Mark Carney does not share my altogether negative view of the (British) monarchy in Canada today.

Yet for the sake of the more crucial struggles in defence of the country he has now taken on, I am happy to overlook this flaw in the apparent Carneyesque philosophy, for the time being!

That I can do this so easily no doubt reflects the practical insignificance of the monarchy in the true north strong and free nowadays — going on some 159 years after the old British North America Act created the present 1867 confederation in Canada.

Strictly as a monarchy (as opposed to a gratuitous theoretical shell for Canada’s “Westminster” parliamentary government), the British monarchy has next to no practical significance in 21st century Canada.

(2) “Recent polling … indicates substantial, fluctuating desire to end the connection”

Some will say, why bother debating an issue with so little practical significance, especially at a time when apparently deeper questions about Canada are in the air.

I nonetheless think the monarchy in Canada could be very usefully debated in the age of the Trumpian Republican gospel, among what the Mohawk princess Pauline Johnson, or Tekahionwake, long ago called “the Yankee to the south of us who must south of us remain.”

The strongest argument against even the mere theoretical symbolism of the “constitutional monarchy” in Canada today is that it does not have any commanding support from the great majority of current Canadian citizens.

The height of recent numbers of this sort is no doubt a mid -2023 Abacus opinion poll showing that “2 in 3 Canadians would vote to eliminate the monarchy in Canada.” As Goggle AI reports today : “Recent polling does not consistently show a two-thirds majority against the monarchy, but indicates substantial, fluctuating desire to end the connection.”

(3) “What really prompts great majority of Canadians today to obey their governments is the hard fact that they are all elected by the Canadian people”

PM Carney\s accession to office in early 2025 was accompanied by some sense that President Trump (like PM Carney) was impressed by the monarchy in the UK — and in this context the British monarchy could help protect Canadian sovereignty.

Yet without serious support from even a bare or slight majority of the Canadian people, the monarchy cannot seriously defend Canadian sovereignty. In many minds the British monarchy just stands for some continuing colonial status of the Canadian confederation in the 2020s.

As an Alberta critic of current Canadian government and politics has (mistakenly but still influentially enough?) recently urged, eg : “Canada is literally owned by the UK. It’s NOT an actual country.” (And if this were even slightly true, it could bolster US interests who want, as it were, to replace the UK as Canada’s new colonial master in the 21st century.)

In the end what really prompts the great majority of Canadians today to obey their Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal governments is the hard fact that they are all elected by the Canadian people, in what the Constitution Act 1982 calls the “free and democratic society” in Canada today.

(4) “Now’s the time to start serious debate about moving to a Westminster parliamentary democratic republic in Canada”

Abolishing the monarchy in Canada is similarly a simple enough institutional reform. The path to be followed has already been defined by such other former fellow “British dominions” as Ireland or India.

(And the directly or indirectly elected ceremonial heads of state in new Westminster parliamentary democratic republics like Ireland or India are paralleled outside the modern Commonwealth of Nations by such post WWII parliamentary democracies as Iceland and Germany.)

I’d urge that now’s the time to start some kind of serious debate and discussion about moving to one or the other form of Westminster parliamentary democratic republic in Canada.

PM Carney may not be interested in this kind of reform right now. But he does not have to be a part of the democratic debate and discussion at this stage. And in the longer run he will no doubt support whatever the democratic majority in Canada finally wants.