King Charles is following an important royal tradition – keeping Canada out of America’s hands

Charles travelled all the way to Ottawa to open the 45th Canadian parliament and address a packed Senate from his throne. His time and effort were not wasted. The new King, modestly dressed in a lounge suit, speaking in English and French, didn’t mince his words in a country where the sovereign has some wriggle room with the script.

Pertinently, he reminded his audience that the monarchy “represents stability and continuity from the past to present. As it should, it stands proudly as a symbol of Canada today, in all her richness and dynamism.”

The extensive meet-and-greets, the lengthy bilingual speech, the transatlantic travel... it can’t have been easy for the monarch. That 76-year-old Charles is still undergoing cancer treatment after 14 months is a reminder that his time is precious. Powerful, then, that Charles has spent 24 of those precious hours in Canada, where a little bit more of the country “seeped” into the elderly King’s “bloodstream”.

According to Canada’s new premier Mark Carney, the spectacle was a “historic honour” that “matches the weight of our times”, or, in layman’s terms, it is a “visit which clearly underscores the sovereignty of our country”.

Like his monarch, the anglophile leader found words to match the moment, with Charles’s arrival in Ottawa another victory for this accomplished Bank of England governor turned premier.

Back in Britain, Donald Trump’s bullish heft has won the American president an invitation to a second state visit, but only as a guest. This week’s performative Anglo-Canadian love-in is a reminder that Charles is Canada’s monarch. No amount of brouhaha can erase that royal truism. Until recently, many Canadians had felt at best equivocal about their foreign monarch. Not any more.

Trump’s clumsy language has both helped to clinch Carney’s liberal premiership and emboldened Canada’s King Charles. Beyond America’s northern border, the pair have seamlessly combined forces to weaponise their advantage in unique Canadian style: maple syrup, the Mounties’ red serge uniforms, understated glee, and a reminder of a really special relationship.

Charles might be a relatively new monarch, but the House of Windsor has form when it comes to prioritising Canada, as the King reminded the Senate today. His mother’s 1957 address to the country’s parliament has been cited frequently. Likewise her speech in 1977.

Less attention is given to the late Queen’s first visit with Philip, when they were Duchess and Duke of Edinburgh, in 1951. This was the first time the future monarch – representing her ailing father, George VI – had flown in an aeroplane (which was still regarded as a high-risk activity). But it was worth it to win hearts and minds in Canada.

Much more recently, Princess Anne gave a rare pre-coronation interview in 2023 to the Canadian state broadcaster, CBC. She was asked about the monarchy’s relevance in the face of increasing dissent. The Princess Royal could scarcely disguise her contempt, insisting it was not a conversation she would normally have, before underlining the notion that “the monarchy provides the constitution with a degree of long-term stability that is actually quite hard to come by any other way”.

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Those words have never proved more pertinent, which explains why Charles repeated some of them today in a country whose enduring royal roots have long preserved its unique identity in the face of aggressive American overtures.

Lest we forget, Trump is hardly original. America has intermittently expressed a desire to grab land across its northern border. As early as 1775-6, it was less 51st state, more “14th colony” when Thomas Jefferson visualised an independent America covering “the whole northern, if not the southern continent” and sent in the Continental Army to seize Montreal and Quebec. But Canadians had other ideas, and sided with the British to rebuff the American force.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, a chief US aim was to get Britain to hand over Canada – an ambition that was ultimately abandoned in the service of securing independence and peace. Given his newfound enmity with his former “friend” Vladimir Putin, (Trump wrote on Truth Social that the Russian leader was “CRAZY” and exhibiting behaviour that might lead to “the downfall of Russia”), the American president might want to revisit his language regarding his nearest neighbour and most loyal ally.

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To retain its position as the world’s pre-eminent power, the US requires security and cooperation at home. Forget talk of Canada becoming a 51st American state: Trump has some serious sucking up to do in his own back yard. And if Carney is too smooth a package to countenance, surely Britain’s wise old King will have better luck talking America’s kidult president back into the room.

Like all gaudy wannabe-authoritarians, Trump can’t resist a bit of old-school royal magic. The only temporal power to which the president could conceivably bend his knee is that of the King. He is younger than Trump, but frailer, and represents something much older – a shared history, a bond that has endured the triangulation of Canadian-American-British relations. This is Charles’s hour, and Canada’s, too. But perhaps the biggest winner is the institution of the monarchy.

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Besieged in recent times by the forces of progress and diversity – particularly in Canada, where broadsides from Prince Harry have been loudly heard (the errant prince brought his Invictus Games here twice, sought refuge in Vancouver in 2020, and his wife made her name filming Suits in Toronto) – the crown really needed this fillip.

When Carney orchestrated Charles’s historic stopover, he was careful not only to embolden his own country’s sovereignty but also to underscore the “vitality of our constitutional monarchy”. A reminder that the best relationships are mutually beneficial ones. Small wonder Charles made the effort to cross the Atlantic.

Less than three years after our late, great Queen Elizabeth died – and mainly, thanks to the 47th American president – constitutional monarchy has never been more relevant. Princess Anne will be relieved that it is not a question she will have to endure again soon.

Tessa Dunlop is the author of new book ‘Lest We Forget: War and Peace in 100 British Monuments’