Charles and Camilla Bring a Message to Canada This Week

Their first visit as reigning King and Queen Consort echoes the twenty-six-day Canadian tour in 1939 by Charles’s grandparents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

King Charles III and Queen Camilla leaving a reception at Canada House in London ahead of their overnight visit to Canada this week, May 20, 2025

Canada is “not for sale, won’t be for sale, ever,” said Mark Carney shortly after his election as prime minister in March 2025. He was responding to repeated statements by President Donald Trump that the United States should acquire Canada as its 51^st state. On both sides of the border, it is generally agreed that Trump’s flapdoodle proposal could never come to pass for all sorts of legal, cultural, political, and practical reasons.

Nevertheless, a long-planned visit to Ottawa by seventy-six-year-old King Charles III and seventy-seven-year-old Queen Camilla this week has taken on new significance. The King’s first “Speech from the Throne” opening the 45^th Parliament of Canada on Tuesday is meant to underline his status as King of Canada and Canada’s Head of State. He is, in the words of the Canadian government, “the personal embodiment of the Crown in Canada,” even as the country has governed itself as an independent constitutional monarchy since 1867—initially with some British oversight—and as a fully autonomous nation since 1931. Like the other fourteen “realms” around the world that recognize the British monarch as head of state, Canada chooses that status voluntarily.

“Soft power with significant impact”

Charles and Camilla will also undertake engagements to reinforce Canada’s distinctive national identity, meeting a diverse array of individuals and organizations. His presence in Canada has been described by British officials as walking a “diplomatic tightrope” and exerting “soft power with significant impact.” They recognize that Donald Trump reveres the British monarchy and has expressed admiration for Charles, especially after the King invited the President to Britain for a state visit sometime later this year or early in 2026. By emphasizing the British monarch’s particular constitutional role in Canada, Charles might help silence the fanciful demands for what Trump has described as a “wonderful marriage” with the United States.

This week’s appearance by Charles and Camilla in Ottawa will mark their first time in Canada as monarch and consort, and his twentieth since he traveled to Ottawa and Manitoba in 1970. The royal couple will also be the second reigning king and queen to visit Canada. The first were his grandparents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who spent twenty-six days in 1939 traveling 10,000 miles by train between the East and West coasts, across plains, rivers, woodlands, and mountains, with stops in all ten provinces. At the time, he was forty-three, and she was thirty-eight, and they made the arduous tour two-and-a-half years into his reign.

Charles and Camilla will be in Canada scarcely twenty-four hours, although on previous trips he typically stayed anywhere from four days to nearly three weeks. Queen Elizabeth II, his mother, visited twenty-two times, journeying for forty-five days in 1959 on a grand tour of all the provinces plus the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

“Transatlantic Triumph”

But his grandparents’ tour in May and June 1939 has never been matched in its global significance. In George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy, I wrote about it in a chapter titled “Transatlantic Triumph.” With the Second World War looming, I devoted even more pages to their mid-trip four-day visit to the United States. It was no ordinary detour, since it sealed a friendship between the King and President Roosevelt and launched the “Special Relationship” between Britain and the U.S. that proved crucial to winning the war.

“Royals Extra” gives me the opportunity now to revisit the Canadian tour, which was consequential in its own way. I’m happy to share new insights from correspondence and diaries as well as some photographs that haven’t been seen in nearly ninety years.

Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret wave goodbye with handkerchiefs as their parents sail away from Portsmouth Harbour on the ocean liner Empress of Australia, while their grandmother Queen Mary and other royal family members look on, May 6, 1939