No king in Dawson City
Recently, the world had a little giggle over the oddity that is the "Canadian" monarchy from this story. (It seemed to get rather less coverage in Canada, judging by search links.) This is The Guardian's lead on the story:
The council of a town in Canada’s Yukon territory has been locked for weeks in bureaucratic standstill after its members refused to swear a mandatory oath of allegiance to King Charles ....
I'm all in favour of Canadians declining to swear allegiance to foreign monarchs and I do support using Canada's constitutional power to rid itself of the whole thing. But I'm less keen on the reason why the Dawson City councillors have taken this stand at this time. They are doing it:
citing the crown’s tarnished relations with Indigenous peoples in the region.
I can understand councillors' wish to stand in solidarity with the one indigenous member of the council, who first raised this concern. They mean well, no doubt.
But, you know, for more than a century and a half, deep back into Queen Victoria's reign at least, kings and queens have been purely figureheads in Canadian governance. All that has been done to indigenous peoples and their rights and titles was done by Canadian governments and officials accountable to Canadian parliaments themselves accountable to Canadian voters.
I'm not enthusiastic for this effort to blame Canada's own failings on oblivious and disempowered foreigners long since (and quite properly) stripped of any real policy-making ability. Let's stop swearing allegiance to Charles for good reasons, and take responsibility for our own problems at the same time. In Canada the "Crown" is really us. The Dawsonians and all of us should swear allegiance to us.
