Canada is a constitutional monarchy. The Queen or King are titular heads of state but their powers are limited and mostly ceremonial as we know. I don’t waste my time fretting about whether we should or should not have the monarchy because if we wanted to ditch it, it would take the unanimous consent of all ten provinces and, as we know with any country-wide issue, good luck with that. However, and this will sound loopy, according to a Carleton university professor, thanks to a series of tiny loopholes in Canadian law, it’s technically possible that Canada could crown Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as King and Queen of Canada. The professor says that according to the federal government’s interpretation of royal succession in Canada, we could accomplish that with a simple parliamentary statute. He says our constitution is clear that executive authority is “vested in the Queen” but it doesn’t specify who that Queen must be. There’s nothing in Canadian law that says our monarch has to be the same person as the monarch of the U.K. We could keep the “vested in the Queen” part and simply change the rules of who that person will be with a section 44 constitutional amendment. Now federal government lawyers would argue that our very existence is tied up in the notion the British monarch has to be our head of state plus the Supreme Court could squish the idea plus we’d have to get Prince Harry to agree to become the King of Canada requiring him to abandon his family. But Harry or not, “King of Canada” has a certain ring to it, don’t you think? And, come to think of it, one of these days we will actually have one.
That’s Coffeetalk. I’m Vic Dubois.