Truth in "Royal" advertising

Newsflash: Canada is a monarchy! As the Harper government re-establishes the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy and explains the move in terms of celebrating the country's and its military's proud history, it's almost easy to forget that, right now, Canada is under Crown sovereignty. It's not for nothing, after all, that our naval ships have continued to bear the designation "Her Majesty's Canadian Ship" through the past decades of unified Forces and of the "Naval Command." But it's easy to not think about what the letters mean in the HMCS abbreviation.
To the extent that people get excited about the "Royal" change, you would think that the political battle lines would be easy to predict: the broadly republican Canadian Left and the Québécois nationalists would be against, while more conservative sorts would applaud - or at the most not care very much. The change is also bound to be popular within the (now ex-)Forces and among veterans who have been clamoring for this ever since the late 1960s. But then you get Jack Granatstein, of all people, to rail against the return of the RCAF and the RCN as "abject colonialism" (see The Globe and Mail's advertising of his live online discusion of the issue at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/royal-ruckus-is-military-name-change-worthwhile/article2132133/).
Granatstein is conservative, pro-military, and a historian. Given that trifecta, what's not to like about the return to the military's "Royal" past? Ah, but Granatstein is also a Canadian nationalist, who came of professional age precisely in the years of royal erasure, starting in the late 1960s. Canadian nationalism is very good at forgetting inconvenient realities - starting with the unsettled three-way relation between Quebec, indigenous peoples, and Canada. The country's continuing ties to British monarchy are also something that we like to forget about, except when (supposedly) cute young royals come to visit our rugged northern shores. As this summer's visit by William and Catherine showed abundantly, it was just lovely to be able to claim them as, somehow, our own - and we did fly them around on soon-to-be-RCAF-redesignated planes.
So, Granatstein's apparent pique points to a tension in the politics of the Harper government's celebration of our past and its royalist particulars. Yes, it aims to boost  conservative strands of Canadian nationalism, and it might succeed at least to some extent. In this sense, it is oriented not to the past at all, but rather to a particular Canada of the future: the conservative Canada that Harper aims to make, bit by stealthy bit. But, given the diverse origins of contemporary Canada's population, Quebec's continuing indifference (at the least) to Britain's monarchy, and decades of trying to forget our (also) continuing ties to the Crown, there exists the possibility of some republican backlash... even from some unexpected quarters.
Myself, I might be a little bit perverse but I'm all for the "Royal" change - under the heading of truth in advertising. I'm all about looking at the Canada of now: let's face the actually existing facts of "abject colonialism" in our daily and political-constitutional lives, and we'll see what happens.