[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]

By all accounts, King Charles III’s recent major address in Ottawa was meant to be a rebuke to Donald Trump and all his taunts about Canada becoming a 51st state if it had to depend on money from the U.S. in order to survive. Yet when Charles finally delivered his highly anticipated address, he ended up undercutting Canadian sovereignty more than supporting it.

Letting Trump have it was the whole point of Charles’ trip: AP reported last Friday that Charles was “coming to Canada to deliver a message: Canada is a sovereign nation distinct from the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated suggestion that the U.S. annex its northern neighbor prompted new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to invite Charles to give the speech from the throne on Tuesday where he will lay out the Canadian government’s agenda when Parliament reopens.”

Yeah, this was really a great idea from the beginning: show Orange Man Bad that you’re a sovereign state by reminding the world that you’re a part of an international conglomeration of former British colonies under the sovereignty of the English king. But when he actually spoke on Tuesday, Charles made it even worse.

The monarch started out well enough, offering some boilerplate about how “we witness Canadians coming together in a renewed sense of national pride, unity and hope.” Right after mentioning Canada’s national pride and unity, however, Charles sharply reversed course, saying: “I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation. While continuing to deepen my own understanding, it is my great hope that in each of your communities, and collectively as a country, a path is found toward truth and reconciliation, in both word and deed.”

Message: Charles is woke. And it really isn’t significantly deeper than that for Charles himself, but the implications of what he said went far beyond what he likely intended. Charles was just affirming that he was a standard-issue 21st-century leftist, full of guilt for colonialism and likely for white supremacy as well, despite never actually having indulged in either one.

Charles was paying what he likely thought to be meaningless lip service to the fashionable notions of the day, one of which is that people of European descent are illegitimate occupiers of land that is rightly owned by brown people, who are sinless victims, sacrificially bearing the sins of the white man. The fact that those brown people themselves violently seized the land from others is of no concern to those who purvey this particular mythology.

The king, however, is not some leftist college professor standing in a sparsely filled auditorium to give a lecture on racism to bored and thoroughly indoctrinated blue-haired students. When he makes a declaration of sovereignty, it matters, and his land acknowledgment before the Canadian parliament was exactly that. The ostensible sovereign of the land was actually saying that he was not the sovereign and that the land belonged to the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people.

Now, if Canada, or at least the land where the parliament building in Ottawa is located, is really the “unceded territory” of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people, was Charles renouncing Canada’s claim to it? Does he intend to compel the Canadians to vacate it and present it back to the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people? Will he call for and oversee the establishment of an Algonquin Anishinaabeg government for the tribe’s supposed land in Canada? Will he supervise the transfer of power from the Ottawa government to the duly chosen representatives of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people?

He will, of course, do none of those things, and none of them will happen. Charles’ statement was not meant to be anything more than a reminder that the Canadian people, and the parliamentarians in particular, need to adopt a stance of apologetic subservience to the native people, and grant them economic and other favors wherever possible.

Charles’ words, however, were bitterly ironic in the context of a speech that was supposed to be a rebuke to Trump’s challenge to Canadian sovereignty. If Trump really wants Canada to become the 51st state, maybe he should start negotiations with the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people rather than talking with Mark Carney. Charles’ words, in any case, demonstrate anew the irresponsibility and illogic of leftist intellectual fads and dogmas.