The Prince who may be King of Canada
Prince William is engaged and the citizens are agog. After all the royal kerfuffles of recent years, people are once again ready to enthrone another fairy prince and princess, it seems. In Britain, this is entirely understandable.
But in contemporary Canada it seems irrational for the citizenry to be so taken up with Wills and Kate. Why on earth must we insist on our claim to be reigned over, however powerlessly, by the heirs of the reigning monarch of our former colonizer?
Yet we "English Canadians" (and what a vague and dated term that is!) are still in many ways the children of what only a couple of generations ago we called our mother country. Such powerful and longstanding historic ties are not easily forgotten.
Primogeniture: the right to the throne of the monarch's firstborn. My father, who was descended from Scandinavians, used to ridicule this notion. Mom loved the Queen and Dad enjoyed needling her by making anti-royalist remarks.
Born in Newfoundland, Mom was thirty-two when she married my father in 1944 and emigrated from the British colony of Newfoundland to Canada. It would be another five years before Newfy became a Canadian province. Mom left her colony but not her Queen.
Today's multicultural Canada is a very different place from the one Mom immigrated to, but we're still a monarchy. With Queen Elizabeth, we share long history and great affection, even in Quebec, though to a lesser extent there. But what about her heirs?
But in contemporary Canada it seems irrational for the citizenry to be so taken up with Wills and Kate. Why on earth must we insist on our claim to be reigned over, however powerlessly, by the heirs of the reigning monarch of our former colonizer?
Yet we "English Canadians" (and what a vague and dated term that is!) are still in many ways the children of what only a couple of generations ago we called our mother country. Such powerful and longstanding historic ties are not easily forgotten.
Primogeniture: the right to the throne of the monarch's firstborn. My father, who was descended from Scandinavians, used to ridicule this notion. Mom loved the Queen and Dad enjoyed needling her by making anti-royalist remarks.
Born in Newfoundland, Mom was thirty-two when she married my father in 1944 and emigrated from the British colony of Newfoundland to Canada. It would be another five years before Newfy became a Canadian province. Mom left her colony but not her Queen.
Today's multicultural Canada is a very different place from the one Mom immigrated to, but we're still a monarchy. With Queen Elizabeth, we share long history and great affection, even in Quebec, though to a lesser extent there. But what about her heirs?