Quebec moves to end Canadian elected officials’ oath to King Charles
Quebec’s premier, François Legault, said that his government would introduce legislation next week to end elected officials’ required oath to Britain’s King Charles, as pressure mounts in the Canadian province to cut such ties with the monarchy.
Fresh legislation from the governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) follows a separate bill introduced on Thursday by the left-leaning Québec Solidaire party that would allow elected officials to just take an oath to the people of Quebec.
“It is, I think, a relic from the past,” Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a co-spokesperson for Québec Solidaire, said about the oath to King Charles.
“I think there is strong support in Quebec to modernize our institutions, to make sure that the representatives of the people are not forced in 2022 to swear an oath to a foreign king.”
It comes after the death of Queen Elizabeth in September revived debate among Canadians on whether the country should continue with the decades-old system of British monarchy.
Canada is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, made up mostly of former British empire countries that have, or have had, the British monarch as head of state.
Yet in recent opinion polls, Canadians have expressed minimal attachment to the British monarchy, especially in mostly French-speaking Quebec, said Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies.
A 13 September Leger poll of North American attitudes toward the British monarchy showed 87% of Quebecers said they had no personal attachment, roughly on par with Americans and compared with 71% in British Columbia and 73% in Ontario.
Charles, 73, automatically became king of the United Kingdom and the head of state of 14 other countries, including Canada, when his mother, Queen Elizabeth, died on 8 September.
While there have been earlier calls for change in the province, the queen’s death, combined with pressure from Québec Solidaire and the Parti Québécois (PQ), two political parties that back Quebec’s independence from Canada, raised the profile of opposition to the oath.
On Thursday, the PQ’s three elected members who have not taken the oath tried unsuccessfully to enter the legislature.