By Miss Kubelik
We cats hope you had a lovely Coronation weekend. That Derby thing that also happened yesterday was problematic, but maybe the doings in London were, too. We saw lots of angry tweets about Camilla replacing Diana, who's been dead for 25 years. And in spite of the Crown's efforts to be inclusive, it's hard to argue with Black Twitter that anything starring the Windsors is the whitest thing you'll ever see.
But nice things happened, too. For example, Canada issued this stamp, its first to feature Charles. It's a flattering image — his ears and nose don't look quite so big, and his eyes seem less beady. But we wonder what kind of market there will be for it, especially in Quebec, where — putting the Diana stans to shame — they're still steaming about losing that Plains of Abraham battle to the British in 1759. The feeling's intensified since the last English monarch was crowned. Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 brought hundreds of thousands of Montrealers out for a big parade, if you can believe it. Not so much this time.
Nevertheless, it appears that the True North is stuck with Charles for the foreseeable future. Canada, say the experts, "cannot become a republic without a constitutional amendment, and the Canadian Constitution is the world’s most difficult to amend." Throwing off the monarchy would require unanimous approval of both houses of Parliament and all 10 provinces. "We have never successfully used this impossible procedure," constitutional scholar Richard Albert helpfully reminds everyone.
So Canadians will probably do what they did with Charles's mum — lick stamps and use currency with his image, without much notice or thought. And savor the fact that their country consistently lands in the top five most-admired nations in the world. We cats PURR.
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