What has changed?
The Canadian public were justly outraged by the sight of Bloc Qubecois Separatists taking the MPs’ oath to the Queen at the beginning of the present Parliament with the apparent intention of breaking it. Some people naively think that if we had oaths to “Canada” instead of to the Queen, this would not have happened. They imagine the BQ MPs might have decided not to take their seats if they had to swear loyalty to “Canada”. The answer to that is of course quite simple. A number of MPs in the present and previous Parliaments have been open republicans. The fact that they had to swear true allegiance to the Queen whom they wished to eliminate did not deter them for a second from taking the oath and assuming their seats. Justifying to one’s conscience the breaking of a more undefined oath to “Canada” would be even easier than doing it with the present one.