The King and Queen of Canada, Charles III and Camilla, arrived in Ottawa on Monday and the King will deliver a Speech from the Throne to the Senate on Tuesday.
An official visit to Canada at the suggestion of the country’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney — said to have been called by Carney as an assertion of sovereignty amid jokes and jibes by President Trump about a 51st state in North America — by King Charles III is underway.
While King Charles III is best known to most as the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and that is his title when there, he is equally the King of 14 other Commonwealth Realms worldwide. When he is in any of those given countries including Canada, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand he is first and foremost the King of that realm at that time.
The King of Canada will give a Speech from the Throne to Parliament on Tuesday. While the speech is given in the language of the first-person, just The King’s Speech when it is given in the British Parliament, it is actually written by the government. Because the Prime Minister is constitutionally the chief advisor to the King and acts in his name, whatever is the policy of the government of the day is taken to be the position of the King, hence the Canadian government writing the speech on his behalf.
It will outline the government priorities for Prime Minister Mark Carney for the coming Parliament.
Because the Ottawa Parliament — a series of magnificent gothic revival buildings — are presently undergoing a major years-long renovation, the chamber where the address will be given will be in the temporary Senate, Ottawa’s former central railway station. The imposing classical building was closed in the 1960s and converted into the Government Conference Centre until it was taken over in 2018 to act as a temporary Senate house.
The actual Senate chamber itself is in a former railway waiting room.
The trip to Canada is by the invitation of the Prime Minister, who may be leveraging U.S. President Trump’s well-known fondness for the British monarchy in general, King Charles III, and his late mother Queen Elizabeth II to gently push back on 51st State talk. Paradoxically, Trump’s occasional dings on Canada appears to have succeeded in jump-starting Canadian patriotic feeling, dormant if not dead for half a century.
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