Christopher R. Friedrichs is Professor Emeritus of History at UBC. He wrote the following on the evening of November 11, 2022.
Earlier
today I watched the broadcast of the Remembrance Day ceremony in
Ottawa. As usual it was interesting and in many ways impressive, except
when the Deputy Chaplain-General of the Canadian Armed Forces prayed that
strength be given to "our sovereign, Charles the Second, King of
Canada..." She was a mere 337 years out of date.
And in fact Charles II never was king of Canada. But he did sign the charter of
the Hudson's Bay Company, so he made a much greater difference to the
history of Canada than is likely to be made by Charles the Third.
The Governor-General was there, of course, but the Prime Minister
was in Asia on business. The wreath from the Government of Canada was
placed not by the Deputy Prime Minister, as one might expect in the Prime Minister's
absence, but by Trudeau's wife. It is an interesting sign of the
firstladyfication of the prime minister's spouse.
There is another theory aside from creeping republicanizing. This year Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, attended the Remembrance Day ceremonies at the University of Toronto, not her alma mater, mind you, yet it was that of John McCrea, author of “In Flanders Fields”. It also appears that the St. George campus of the University of Toronto falls within the boundaries of Freeland’s riding of “University-Rosedale”. Perhaps Freeland was shuffled off to Toronto instead of Ottawa for Remembrance Day, so as to not appear in conflict with the Prime Minister’s wife, Sophie Trudeau. But the other possibility is that that the Prime Minister wanted to take personal responsibility for Remembrance Day given that he – and his family – had been absent and holidaying in Tofino, B.C., on 30 September, 2021, on the occasion of the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day of “Indigenous Remembrance” which he and the governing Liberals had created. Stung by widespread criticism at the time, maybe the Trudeaus are still trying to make amends.
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