Camilla is Princess of Wales. Although she opts to be known as Duchess of Cornwall - presumably from respect for Diana.
I also don’t get the hate for Charles. Honestly, what’s he done? He seems quite a nice old man to me, and genuinely seems to be concerned for the welfare of the countryside, the environment and deprived communities in the UK. He’ll make a fine King.
I think too many people have seen [UK] House of Cards Part II: To Play the King where a leftie King challenges the right-wing PM. That’s not going to happen.
Although that was one of the sub-texts to Edward’s abdication and why he didn’t have a lot of support in Parliament: earlier comments when he was Prince of Wales suggested he might want to be active in politics.
It’s a real question mark, and is working its way through the courts.
On the one hand, as you mention, it takes unanimous federal-provincial consent to amend the “office of the Queen”: Constitution Act, 1982, s. 41. Some argue that includes the law governing succession, so unanimous consent is required.
Others take a more limited view of s. 41, and argue that “office of the Queen” means the powers of the position under the Constitution, but doesn’t apply to who holds the office. By this view, the federal Parliament can consent to changes to the line of succession made by the UK Parliament, using the combined powers of the preamble to the Statute of Westminster and the pogg power in s. 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867.
It’s come up in relation to the recent change to the law of succession to make it gender-neutral. The Quebec Court of Appeal is hearing an appeal from a decision of the Quebec Superior Court, which upheld the federal law ratifying the gender-neutral change to the succession law.
But the British Parliament has passed a law to change the succession, to make it gender-neutral: strict primogeniture, rather than male-favouring primogeniture.
The British only passed that law following extensive consultations with the Commonwealth realms which retain Her Majesty as their head of state, as required by the Statute of Westminster.
The other argument against an abdication I’ve read is that a certain segment of the population would be happy to establish a republic and might take the opportunity to push for it.
Probably there would be voices raising the issue, but as far as the parliamentarians go, inertia will always win out. There would be too many legal and administrative loose ends left to be sorted out, which would all be a massive distraction from whatever else they had planned to do.
In any case, HM would never formally abdicate (it appears to be as much a religious thing for her as the political calculation of any potential for damaging personal or institutional images), but if it ever came to that, there would be a carefully-planned smooth handover with more than an eye to the tabloid reactions to the next in line - and at the moment, those are hardly hostile.
I don’t get the hate either. Just the fact that people think the laws of succession should be changed because they don’t like somebody pout baffles me. The Queen’s response (if she ever lowered herself to give one) should be “thank you for your opinion. Now, STFU and GBTW.”
Democracy is responsible for this belief that you get to change the course of world history because of popular opinion. Sorry dudes, not when it comes to the workings of a monarchy operating within established parliamentary bounds.
More centrally, the popular conceit that democracy means “I get what I want” is laughably wrong-headed. Is there any true democracy in the world? Almost every functional “democratic” government is a representative democracy of some type, where every voter has a say in who gets chosen to represent them in law-making, and then everyone abides by the chosen laws as decided by the majority of those representatives. Double indirection, and some people are still shocked and dismayed that democracy isn’t handing them exactly what they want.
Political naiveté is so prevalent it shocks the imagination.
I disagree. Those of us who live
In constitutional monarchies could use the democratic process to change it, if large numbers of us were so inclined.
For instance, Australia had a referendum on going republican, which the people rejected. The Jamaican government has suggests they might go republican.
However, here in Canada at least, there’s no popular movement to dump the monarchy.
There’s about 20-25% of the population who have republican leanings
That might change with Charles in charge, of course, but the younger generation are well-liked, so I don’t see any change in my lifetime. Prince George might turn out to be a mad tyrant, right enough, but that’s 50 years down the line.
An idiot, basically. If you type the word “prat” into a very popular search engine then you can get a definition of the word at the top of the search results.
Someone probably not as bright as they think they are, inclined to unconventional ideas, behaviours and obsessions as well as misjudgements, but more maladroit than offensive.
“Prat”? [King Charles, eg, according to upthread poster, who I will wager is not of the American persuasion]