It's simple. Give the man his hat, and show him the door.

This has actually gone to court?!

The government's practice of requiring new Canadian citizens to swear an oath to an 'offshore queen,' even if they do it with just 'a wink and a nod,' may well violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an Ontario judge said yesterday.[*]

[...]

Charles Roach, 73, who was born a British subject in Trinidad and Tobago and is now a permanent Canadian resident ... argues that the mandatory oath violates the Charter's freedom of conscience provision.

Um, there's a pretty obvious problem with this, isn't there? I mean a really, staggeringly, blatantly, ball-bashingly obvious problem with this.

Canada is a constitutional monarchy, right? So the Queen is the Canadian head of state, right? It is, then, upon her office that the rule of law stands and from which it extends, right? And the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is contingent upon, first and foremost, a recognition of the "supremacy of God and the rule of law." Right?

Right?!

So how does Mr. Roach and his crack team of lawyers figure that he is entitled to Charter Rights without accepting their conditions? That is: how does Mr. Roach figure that he is protected by rights that, of their very essence, he rejects?

I mean, isn't this like asking your waitress for a bowl of cereal without the imposition of the grain, please!? ... In fact, sorry, that's not quite right. Isn't it like asking for a bowl of cereal--without the imposition of the grain please!--while standing outside of the diner?

At best it seems to me that this is not a problem that a Canadian court of law is within its jurisdiction to resolve. (At worst, obviously, one assumes there's some cause for a possible countersuit here. But whatever.) In the meantime the matter's a simple one: Mr. Roach really doesn't want to be a Canadian. So he isn't one. Fait accompli.

Oh, and if I can just be allowed to point out the, again, agonizingly obvious problem with Mr. Roach's own distillation of the matter (namely):

I feel that we [blacks] were colonized as a people by the British throne, and we were enslaved as a people by the British throne and, to me, taking an oath to the monarch of Great Britain, without any disrespect to the Queen herself as a person, is like asking a Holocaust survivor to take an oath to a descendant of Hitler.

Interesting analogy, Chuck. But a shamefully false one. (Honestly: shame!) Firstly: it wouldn't be "like asking a Holocaust survivor" so much as it would be like asking the descendant of a Holocaust survivor "to take an oath to a descendant of Hitler." You were never a slave after all, fella. Secondly: so what' s wrong with that? I mean, yeah sure, if this imagined descendant of Hitler maintained his ancestor's nasty views, than your point might have some merit. But if he rejected them? ... This is a strange society you envision where the sins of the father are visited upon the son. Indeed, where they are visited upon the son's son, and upon the son's son's son, and upon the son's son's son's--etc.

This is a kind of discrimination, isn't it? A kind of hate speech? Oh, never mind!

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* Has anyone informed Joseph Brean that 'a wink and a nod' is not 'a wink and a nod' if you say it? Or is Mr. Brean--naughty Mr. Brean--under the impression that he's having a little wink and a nod with us? Oh, I get it. Aren't we clever little iconoclasts!