Has King Charles gone nuts on his Canada trip?

I like King Charles. I visited him at Windsor Castle recently as Mrs. Miller picked up a gong. The castle has been beautifully restored. It is full of treasures, looted from the Empire. There were no refreshments, only a porcelain water bowl for the service dog of one of the honorees.

The King was charming, looking a little the worse for wear, perhaps. He graciously laughed at Mrs. M’s joke. He’s a thoughtful guy. A little odd, which is no bad thing. But he seems to have gone completely nuts on his trip to Canada this week, where he opened Parliament with the most modern of empty gestures.

The King’s land acknowledgement will have pleased the Canadian blob. But it only reinforces the impression that he’s drunk the woke Kool-Aid

“I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. This land acknowledgment is a recognition of shared history as a nation,” he declared from the throne.

Undiluted woo-woo. It would have been hard not to accept the new government’s invitation, and he obviously had no choice but to outline the government’s program, but did he have to prostrate himself like this?

Charles was wheeled out to provide a photo opportunity for Mark Carney, who is desperately attempting to hold together Canada against the supposed existential threat of Donald Trump annexing it as the 51st state.

The King’s land acknowledgment will have pleased the Canadian blob. But it only reinforces the impression that he’s drunk the woke Kool-Aid. And would he have dared to utter similarly empty words in the Mother of Parliaments, given that his own family directly profited from taxes, tributes and trade monopolies in colonies?

Land acknowledgments, now de rigueur in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and of course on American college campuses, are rote recitations that signal moral superiority as a substitute for tangible action. The statement is a feel-good ritual, not a commitment to change.

They are also ahistorical. New Zealand politicians diligently recite land acknowledgements to the Maori, who were themselves colonizers who exterminated the indigenous population. Acknowledging one group as “original” ignores these dynamics, creating a static, romanticized narrative, freezing history at the moment of colonial contact.

And if land is “stolen,” as land acknowledgments imply, why do institutions continue to occupy it? Philosopher Anthony Appiah points out the contradiction: acknowledging theft while benefiting from it is like apologizing for eating someone’s lunch while still holding the sandwich.

Returning all land to supposedly indigenous groups is logistically and politically impossible. In Canada, unresolved land claims languish in courts for decades, unaffected by royal recitations.

With due respect, let me clue Charles in. He was used by Carney in his salvo against Donald Trump. The notion that Trump is going to annex Canada is deranged. Why would the President want to take over a country that is already falling apart?

I was born in Saskatchewan, the Siberia of Canada, bigger than France, with the population of Buffalo, New York, and winter temperatures of -40 degrees.

When I was in Calgary in next-door Alberta not long ago I had lunch at the elite Ranchman’s Club and the chatter was seditious. The talk was of Wexit – the exit of Western Canada from the bloodsucking east.

Canada is a nation in name only. It is impossible to overstate the contempt of western Canada for the Liberal party, which believes that taxes on carbon will change the weather and that boys can be girls.

The uber-woke Liberals got back into power harvesting votes in Quebec and Ontario that they bought with western Canada’s money. And we have a lot of money.

Saskatchewan has vast cereal production, huge reserves of oil that the green Liberals won’t let us extract, but 40 percent of the world’s potash, a lot of coal, uranium, some gold and rare earths. Add in Alberta, Canada’s richest province, and you get more oil plus the Rocky Mountains, skiing and bears.

Woke doesn’t cut it in the west. We like guns and pickup trucks. I was in my hometown of Weyburn a while ago and visited the amazing heritage village documenting the settlement of Saskatchewan. These were tough men and women. The mayor showed me around – a professional courtesy as I was an elected councilman in France at the time. Not very diverse, here, I noted, not much evidence of immigration. “We don’t even want to live here,” he replied.

Should the Americans arrive to liberate us, internal resistance is likely to be minimal. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police post in Moose Jaw couldn’t defend Saskatchewan against the Salvation Army. Although an American invasion is unlikely to happen. Trump would be insane to think about annexing all of Canada. It’s more likely that he’s joking.

In the east, Ontario is the number one place America doesn’t want. It’s a lost cause, a province completely captured by pointy-headed progressives. Fourth graders are taken by their teachers to Palestine solidarity demos. Yonge Street in Toronto looks like a portal to hell with zoned-out dopers decorating the sidewalks in a miasma of cannabis fumes. That Ontario’s voters overwhelmingly chose the Liberals once more is perhaps not astonishing because this is the party that legalized marijuana and the consequence is a population of dopers.

Québec is nothing but trouble, obsessed with Francophonie, and if admitted as an American state, would demand that hot dogs be renamed chiens chauds. Many of the Quebécois harbor the delusion they are French, though they are incomprehensible to actual French people. So let them join France.

British Columbia on the west coast is overrun with Chinese money and looks like a cadet version of Hong Kong. Downtown Vancouver is the fentanyl capital of North America and it looks west not south. The second language is Chinese. Mr. President, you don’t want them.

Whether it is annexed, or simply falls apart, Canada is simply not credible as a standalone country. It is utterly fractured, completely incapable of contributing anything material to the defense of North America, its institutions completely captured by a blob grown fat on Tim Horton’s donuts. Hence its current obsession with land acknowledgments.

For a laugh, with a little help from my friends, I have produced a land acknowledgment for my village in France, on land successively occupied by Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and, within living memory, the Germans, and now colonized by the Dutch, Swedes, British and Irish. Should his majesty ever visit us here, perhaps to open the reunion of the municipal council, here’s my script.

We, the enlightened participants in this wine-tasting, solemnly acknowledge that we’re standing (or slouching) on land that’s been through prehistoric menhir-building, Greek grape-stomping and the genocide of the Cathars. We bow to those who roamed here before the Romans showed up. In the spirit of doing absolutely nothing, we pledge to keep sipping local wine, Googling who lived here in 500 BCE, and maybe tweeting about decolonization, if we get enough likes.