If there is this difficulty about swearing to the country, why do people keep on suggesting we do it?
Some advocates are republicans and simply wish to eliminate the Queen from the oath in an attempt to turn the country into a republic. The current government of Australia has abolished the oath for its new citizens altogether for precisely this reason. It has substituted a “pledge” that is fuzzy and really commits the person making it to nothing at all. Australia’s action is being cited as an example by advocates of republican change in Canada. Other people not only wish to change Canada’s political institutions but wish to freeze their social vision of Canada and impose it on all Canadians by adding references to the environment and transient political ideas to the oath and describing such secular values as “sacred”, confusing politics with religion. Some like the idea of loyalty to Canada and do not realise the legal implications involved. They think of an oath, not as a legal contract or as words we say to God, but simply as a public relations exercise. However, to reduce the oath to a shallow and insincere public relations statement will not strengthen Canada in the least. And some undoubtedly know exactly what the changes would mean and see change as a way to control the people when they become difficult by establishing a more totalitarian (i.e. all-embracing) oath to replace our limited one. They really wish to create an ideology of Canadianism. Such an ideology would pretend that Canada is a living person and endow it with the fictitious characteristics of a superhuman being. We have all seen the American “talking flag” on TV. That is the same kind of thing. People who want an ideology of Canadianism do not like the Queen because she gets in the way by always bringing us back to the realisation that Canada is not a superhuman entity but just millions of individual people like Her Majesty and like the rest of us with a history of living together in a community. Official national ideologies are bad things. Wherever they have prevailed in this century it has been at terrible cost because they do not tolerate minority views. Even the more benign kind such as “Americanism” have a dismal record. Ideologies are insatiable. They require an enemy: some imagined foreign, ethnic or racial threat to feed their fires. You can be sure that if an official Canadian ideology is adopted beginning with such things as the proposed new citizenship oath, it will lead directly and inexorably to a “committee on un-Canadian activities” in Ottawa.