Canada to change rules of Royal succession; Prince William and Kate Middleton due in July

Britain's Prince William (L) and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge visit Cambridge, central England November 28, 2012. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

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OTTAWA - If Kate and Will have a baby girl this summer, Canada is ready to let her wear the Maple Crown, QMI Agency has learned.

Heritage Minister James Moore has called a press conference in Ottawa Thursday and, according to sources providing information on condition of confidentiality, he is expected to speak to Canada's plans to officially change the rules for Royal succession.

If so, Moore would be following up on commitments made at the 2011 Commonwealth Summit in Perth, Australia, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and other leaders of realms over which Queen Elizabeth II reigns.

In Perth, Harper, Cameron and the 13 other leaders of Her Majesty's "realms" agreed they would take steps to change the 300-year-old rules of succession which favour male heirs over females.

"Put simply, if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a little girl, that girl would one day be our queen," Cameron told reporters in Perth in 2011.

Under the current rules, if Kate and Will have a girl -- she is due in July -- and then later have a boy, the boy would be ahead of his older sister in line for the throne.

The proposed rule change would simply order the line of succession according to age and ignore gender.

And don't think these changes are incidental. Had those been the rules for succession 120 years ago, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany might very well have been King of Canada and Great Britain during the First World War.

The rule changes, which have the Queen's blessing, would also allow the monarch to marry a Roman Catholic, something currently forbidden under the 1601 law of succession.

Canada is free to make any decisions it wants on the rules for the line of succession. However, if Canada changed its rules and the U.K. or another realm did not, Canada could find itself with one monarch and the U.K. another.

To avoid that, leaders at the 2011 Commonwealth Summit in Perth agreed to co-ordinate changes to each country's rules.

And the agreement of Canada and the other realms is required before the changes are put before the British House of Commons. Canada is one of a handful of realms where agreement to the changes must come in the form of legislation.

"There was unanimous agreement that these changes recognized the equality of women and Catholics," Harper said in Perth. "These are obvious modernizations."

A third change Canada agreed to in Perth was to remove a requirement that descendants of a monarch need the monarch's permission to marry.

Cameron's office had noted that, had these changes been in place in 1509, for example, Margaret Tudor would have ascended to the throne following Henry VII, rather than her younger brother. Her younger brother, though, did take the throne and became Henry VIII, most famous for breaking with the Church of Rome in 1533 and establishing the Church of England.

Perhaps even more interesting, had the new rules been in effect in 1901, Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Victoria, would have become Queen Victoria II in January of that year, rather then her younger brother who became Edward VII.

Princess Victoria died seven months after her mother and, had she been queen, the succession would have gone to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and he would have been King of Britain during the First World War.

Are you excited that Kate Middleton is pregnant?

Source: http://www.winnipegsun.com/2013/01/30/canada-to-change-rules-of-royal-succession-prince-william-and-kate-middleton-due-in-july

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