While Sir Keir Starmer has been making use of King Charles III to get closer to Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is using the monarch to repel him.
Carney won the Canadian election by rejecting Trump’s suggestion his nation become America’s 51st US state. Trump’s tariffs also jeopardised Canada’s economy, since the US is its biggest trading partner. Carney is using the willing King to make a point.
Carney’s recent White House meeting with Trump included a firm declaration of Canada’s independence, a sentiment the King’s address, drafted by the Canadian government, will likely reiterate. The Queen will also be sworn into the Canadian Privy Council in a brief ceremony.
While you might expect Canadians to be ambivalent at best about the monarchy, two recent polls suggested feelings are warming towards the British throne.
Canada has, let’s say, a mixed attitude to the monarchy. Carney is a Liberal politician. His predecessor, Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, famously replaced the late Queen’s portrait with two artworks from a Quebec painter. The symbolic gesture undid his Conservative predecessor’s 2011 decision to put Elizabeth’s portrait on the wall. That itself had caused a row as Canadians saw it out of touch with its move towards independence, even as it remains within the Commonwealth.
If you’re a fan of symbolic messaging, the King has been signalling his support for Canada like a lighthouse. When he visited aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, he sported a set of Canadian medals. In February Canada’s 60th anniversary of its maple leaf flag might usually have gone unremarked, but the King sent a warm message praising the nation’s resilience, pride, and compassion.
Carney is himself an Anglophile; he met his British wife playing ice hockey at Oxford University in the 1990s. The Canadian premier’s second stop on his European tour after winning office was to see Starmer and the King in London.
square CANADA The King is walking a diplomatic tightrope between Trump and Canada
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On Monday, as the 76-year-old monarch, still undergoing treatment for an undisclosed cancer, arrives with Camilla, he will hold a meeting with Carney.
Consecutive UK governments, like most former colonial powers, have rejected calls for reparations. Starmer has ruled out apologising for the UK’s historic role but said he was open to engage with leaders who want to discuss it. In October the King said Commonwealth members should pursue “creative ways to right the inequalities that endure”.
Red faces could be saved by combing Trump opening another golf course in Scotland with hosting the President at Balmoral. The castle, set in 50,000 acres with its own golf course, is splendidly far from any noisy protests that could mar his visit but provides a sufficiently grand backdrop for photos.
Sometimes like the Canadian trip, diplomacy can be lighthouse-bright. When the US President visits the UK this year, discretion may be the better part of valour.
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