Despite much officially sanctioned mourning, most Canadians reacted to the death of Queen Elizabeth II with ambivalence. Muted as this response may have been, its emotional scale dwarfed anything elicited by the coronation of Charles III. Today, the British monarchy is a withered husk, the stuff of middlebrow Netflix dramas and condemnatory exposés featuring its own former members. The jig is up, even if the institution officially remains, and whatever legitimacy the institution may have once enjoyed is palpably a thing of the past.

Even before the death of the queen, Canadians’ bond with their formal head of state was less than intimate. Polled by the Dominion Institute in 2009, a full three-quarters didn’t even realize the title belonged to her to begin with, a clear reflection of the monarchy’s effective nonexistence in Canadian civic life. Over the past decade or so, public support for the maintenance of ties has waned still further, and the latest data suggests no slowing of the trend. On the eve of Charles’ coronation, a survey from the Angus Reid Institute found that a mere 28 percent of Canadians have a favorable view of him, while a full 60 percent don’t want to recognize him as king. Just over half, meanwhile, don’t want their country to remain a constitutional monarchy.

Compared to Australia or Barbados (which declared itself a republic in 2021), Canada has not hosted a strong republican current since the nineteenth century, though dissent against the monarchy has been a sporadic feature of its political landscape. Thanks to Quebec nationalism, the monarchy has tended to be less popular in French Canada, where members of the province’s national assembly have sometimes refused to take the constitutionally mandated loyalty oaths and, in 1976, premier René Lévesque protested the queen’s participation in the Montreal Olympics.