Note that if you want a government job in a state of the realm, you’ll generally have to swear an oath of allegiance to Her Majesty.
Wrong. Check the Constitution. They are states. Specifically, they are states with a republican (form, not party) government.
BTW, isn’t Elizabeth the Queen of the United Kingdom, not the Queen of England?
Most of what I was going to say has already been covered, but I will add an obligatory Wikipedia Link.
Commonwealth citizens can work without a work permit, under a UK Ancestory visa, provided they had at least one British-born grandparent.
http://www.kdla.ky.gov/resources/KYCommonwealth.htm
http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/pahist/symbols.asp?secid=31
http://www.sec.state.ma.us/cis/cismaf/mf1a.htm
The Master speaks: Why is Virginia (and MA and PA and KY0 called a Commonwealth? :
Interesting - thanks for this - did not know that. (However, considering how few Canadian citizens could likely meet this test nowadays, it’s not likely to be the primary reason for staying in the Commonwealth.)
Doesn’t matter what they call themselves–the Constitution calls them States & that’s what counts.
Loyalty to a person is a less complicated phenomenon than loyalty to an abstraction.
God save the Queen.
Support protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
See?
Tris
True - I think it’s much more commonly used by Aussies.
And by all accounts, we do it very commonly. 
Hmmph! Tell me that again next time I spend 90 minutes standing in the “Australian Passports Only” queue behind all the bloody immigrants who think that marking “permanent migrant” on the landing card entitles them to jam up the “fast track citizens” line! :mad:
Yeah, bloody well taking all our low-paid shite-hours bar work, clogging up all the rat-infested damp hovels in Earls Court…send 'em home, that’s what I say
This is minutia. It has absolutely no legal or practical significance whatsoever. They use “commonwealth” in their names, but as a matter of law, they are states.
You can even “mislabel” official documents as, for example, “State of Pennsylvania,” and no one will blink twice. The Commonwealth of Virginia has a Virginia State Corporation Commission and a Virginia State University and a Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Why isn’t it the Virginia Commonwealth Corporation Commission? Because nobody cares. Because the “commonwealth” in “Commonwealth of Virginia” is an inconsequential alternative to the word “state.”
Or is it just that ‘state’ is an inconsequential alternative to the word ‘commonwealth’?
Ask the U.S. Constitution.
Which describes three commonwealths as ‘states’, yes…which proves what? That the constitution overrules all self-definition within the laws of Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania?
The US Constitution calls the federated states that make up the US “states”. The US Constitution is the supreme law of the US, no other law is allowed to contradict it. Some of the federated states in the US call themselves “commonwealths”. So it follows that “commonwealth” is simply a synonym of “state”. The US Constitution does not define what a commonwealth is, so it must be this word that is the inconsequential alternative.
Of course, all this doesn’t have that much relevance, since equivalence between two concepts is a reflexive property.