TORONTO – The newly-formed REPUBLIC NOW says it fully supports the Winnipeg MP who says it’s time for Canada to consider severing ties with the British monarchy and suggests his private member’s motion to strike her out of the citizenship oath is a small first step.
“Mr. Martin’s views on Canada’s link with the British Crown are fully in sync with REPUBLIC NOW’s manifesto” says Ashok Charles, the organization’s national director. “Our recently adopted constitution calls for the replacement of a non-resident British monarch with a Canadian-born head of state and encourages debate on the establishment of a Canadian Republic.
“We agree with Mr. Martin that it’s ‘fundamentally wrong and bizarre’ that new Canadians are forced to swear loyalty to ‘some colonial vestigial appendage from the House of Windsor’ rather than to Canada, Mr Charles says”
He noted that Australia, having replaced any reference to the monarchy in its citizenship oath, now only requires a pledge of loyalty to Australia by its new citizens. The successful outcome to an on-going legal case to strike the monarchy from Canada’s oath of allegiance could, he says, result in Canada emulating Australia’s action.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice case between three applicants and the Attorney General of Canada is scheduled for July 12, at Osgoode Hall. The three applicants are: Michael McAteer, a retired Toronto Star journalist; Simone E.A. Topey, who works for the Black Action Defence Committee; and Dror Bar-Natan, professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto.
Last June, the Ontario Superior Court dismissed a motion by the Federal Government to block the current legal case brought by the late Charles Roach and three others. Mr. Roach, a Toronto lawyer and human rights activist, came to Canada in 1955 from Trinidad and Tobago. He refused to take an oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth and speared-headed a number of legal cases arguing that such an oath would violate his human rights.