Canadian Citizenship Test

Yes. Oaths taken by subjects to the sovereign are a far later development for the obvious reason that it was taken for granted that persons living within the dominions of a monarch owe him loyalty and allegiance according to the natural order of things. There is no question of allegiance to a piece of land or a political or social ideology; loyalty is owed to a person in a personal relationship. For this reason, actual oaths on the part of subjects to a monarch began precisely on this personal principle at the time of the religious controversies of the Reformation. In 1534 Henry VIII wanted to ensure that his subjects would add to the loyalty they already owed him naturally the acceptance also of his supremacy over the Church and of his arrangements for the succession in spite of his unorthodox marital relationships, and he had Parliament create such oaths. In 1562 Elizabeth I required members of the House of Commons to swear to her spiritual as well as temporal supremacy, the origin of the oath taken by members of parliament today. To this James I in 1609 added an oath of allegiance, expressly requiring members of Parliament to swear that the Pope had no power to depose him. By the reign of William and Mary in 1689, this allegiance was expressed in the now familiar words, “I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to King William and Queen Mary”, and the oaths of allegiance and supremacy were required of electors as well as of members of Parliament. But as time went on, the controversial requirement of allegiance to the Sovereign in his claimed religious capacity changed. Oaths originally intended under William and Mary and the House of Hanover to guarantee loyalty to the persons of those sovereigns and to destroy support for Catholic claimants to the Throne have now become, since the nineteenth century, affirmations of our earthly allegiance and loyalty to our lawful Sovereign. Catholic emancipation in Britain in 1829 for example (achieved far earlier in Canada) relieved Catholic electors and members of Parliament from acknowledging the Monarch’s spiritual supremacy and required them only to deny any civil jurisdiction to the Pope. In 1868, this parliamentary oath was shorn of all references to the Queen’s spiritual supremacy, the Pope and the defence of the succession as fixed by the Act of Settlement, 1700, and became simply, “I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, her heirs and successors according to law”, the first part of which had already been included as the parliamentary oath in the British North America Act of the year before. The oath was then required of persons being naturalised as the Queen’s subjects according to the 1870 amendment of the Naturalisation Act of 1841, and it has always served as the oath for those becoming the Queen’s subjects under Canadian jurisdiction. With the addition of the Queen’s particularly Canadian title, Queen of Canada, it is the oath of allegiance taken today in all circumstances apart from the parliamentary oath and it forms part of the oath of citizenship. It is fundamental to citizenship precisely because citizenship or nationality, in the Canadian tradition that we have maintained in North America (after our American cousins abandoned their allegiance to a living person and replaced it with allegiance to an abstract legal person, the State, or even worse, merely to a written document), is not loyalty to geography or to amendable and shifting legal documents, but membership of a great family under its head, our Queen.