Prince Charles leaves a roundtable event with business leaders in Ottawa, during the Canadian royal tour, Wednesday, May 18, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang Standing among windswept Canadian flags on a platform in Iqaluit in 2017, Prince Charles recalled his first official visit to Canada’s North nearly half a century earlier. “I have never forgotten the warmth of the welcome from the Inuit people, who made me feel immediately at home, as indeed I have done with all Canadians on my subsequent visits,” said Vasilikos, who won a standing ovation from the crowd. in the capital of Nunavut. an attempt to stop an Inuktitut greeting. With the death of Queen Elizabeth II announced Thursday, King Charles III, as he is now known, is poised to take over as Canada’s new head of state and forge a new relationship with the country. In trips to Canada as a prince, he has emphasized a connection to Canada that spans decades, including nineteen official visits, family trips and short stops during his military service. Most recently, Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, traveled to Canada in May as part of the Queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations. The three-day tour focused on climate change, literacy and reconciliation efforts with indigenous peoples. The jubilee tour started in St. John’s, NL, with a formal moment of reflection on residential school deaths and concluded in the North with a meeting with First Nations chiefs on climate change. Prince Charles said he was deeply moved by conversations with survivors who bravely shared their experiences in residential schools. “I want to acknowledge their suffering and say how much our hearts go out to them and their families,” he said during the visit, which some saw as a step forward in Crown-Indigenous relations. But a royal expert says the new king nonetheless faces a daunting challenge in settling into a country that has grown suspicious of the monarchy and into a role that has become so inextricably linked to his mother in the minds of many Canadians. His relationship with Canada dates back to his first official visit in 1970, which included a tour of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories with other members of the royal family. On his most recent visits, he is accompanied by Camilla, whose distant Canadian origins he mentioned. “Every time I come to Canada … a little bit more of Canada enters my bloodstream – and from there straight into my heart,” he told a crowd in Newfoundland in 2009. These official visits often included the photo shoots and official ceremonies that the Canadian public has come to expect from royals – such as Prince Charles feeding a polar bear named Hudson in Winnipeg, testing DJ equipment in Toronto, playing street hockey in New Brunswick and watching countless artistic performances and military ceremonies. Between the grandeur and grandeur, there were events that hinted at a deeper relationship. Over the years, Prince Charles’ visits to Canada have often included events and discussions focused on climate change – an area in which he has become increasingly outspoken. In November 2021, Prince Charles urged world leaders gathered at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland to put themselves on a “war footing” to reduce emissions. While Prince Charles’ speech at the climate conference made headlines, he has been delivering the same message for decades, including in Canada in 2009 when he described climate change as a “threat to all humanity”. “We are at a defining moment for our civilization,” he told the crowd in Newfoundland. “Unless we can all, both individually and collectively, take the actions we now know are necessary, the future will be very bleak indeed.” He highlighted the issue once again during a 2017 stop in Nunavut, when he warned that global warming was “bringing rapid and damaging changes to the Arctic way of life” that had long sustained the Inuit people. Prince Charles has made several visits to Canada’s north, where he was so moved by the “incomparable beauty” of the northern lights on a visit to Whitehorse that he said he tried to capture them in a painting. More recently, he has taken a particular interest in efforts to preserve Inuit language and culture, including issuing an invitation to a group of Inuit to travel to Wales in 2016 to discuss efforts to standardize the writing system for Inuktitut. He is president of Prince’s Trust Canada, a charity focused on “preparing youth and members of the military and veteran community for the changing world of work, supporting sustainable solutions for a green recovery and empowering our people and partners to collectively efforts,” according to its website. The first-born son of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip was born in 1948 at Buckingham Palace and was named heir at the age of three when his mother assumed the throne. After graduating from university in 1970, he trained as a military pilot, which included a stint at a Canadian Forces Base in Gagetown, NB where he trained “on a training ground in the middle of nowhere,” he would later say. Toronto-based historian and royal expert Carolyn Harris believes that despite a long and seemingly genuine connection to Canada, the King will have his work cut out for him when it comes to gaining acceptance as a monarch. His approval ratings were consistently lower than those of the Queen, who was widely respected even by those who disapprove of the monarchy. As a prince, he had to recover from the blow to his image in the 1990s following the messy public break-up of his marriage to his first wife Diana and her death a few years later, as well as rumors of a more recent rift with his youngest son, Harry. And while his reputation has rebounded somewhat since the Diana era, the fact remains that he has spent most of his life as king in waiting. “One of the challenges that Charles has faced throughout his life is that he is often overshadowed by other members of his family: firstly by his parents, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, and then by his first wife Diana, Princess of Wales. said Harris. More recently, Charles’ sons William and Harry and their spouses have attracted more attention. Harris said that unlike his famous mother, who became Queen at a young age, Charles has been given more opportunities to pursue his own interests, including some that were initially considered eccentric but have since become mainstream. His early interest in issues such as organic farming and sustainable development likely earned the pin-striped suit-wearing heir to an hereditary crown a reputation as a man ahead of his time. But it has also faced criticism for a huge carbon footprint involving frequent private jet flights. “When he became interested in these causes, they were considered quite niche, and now he is considered to have been ahead of the curve,” Harris said. While he has been a more outspoken champion of some causes than his more private mother, Harris believes the pending royal transition is likely to be more about continuity than change. In recent years, the then-prince and other members of the royal family have gradually taken on a greater share of the queen’s duties – a move Harris believes was made to emphasize a smooth transition between the generations. Some recent polls have shown that support for the royal family is waning in Canada. Opposition is strongest in Quebec, where the kings have faced protests, and it will be a difficult task to convince the public to change that view, despite the king’s very good command of French. Harris believes the King is likely to try to establish his reign early, possibly through a royal tour, but that the decision in recent years to reduce the number of working royals means Canadians will see less of him than before — at least closely . While he won’t be feeding as many polar bears, Harris believes the King will continue the trend he started during the COVID-19 pandemic and keep in touch with Canadians via video conference.
