What is required to make a Royal Visit to Canada entertaining enough for the sake of mass media? Well, a documentary airing next week speculates about what happens to the throne after the Queen is dead — as if they haven’t already given that enough thought to keep Prince Charles at bay. The domestic edition of HELLO! magazine has been milking this one for three years — keeping son Prince William’s sweetie Kate Middleton’s lucky face beaming regularly from the checkout counter, even when they split up for a spell —so it was no wonder that Canadians confessed to being apathetic about Prince Charles. Rosie DiManno, trying to make a case for a Toronto Star columnist watching replacement-wife the Duchess of Cornwall in action, files a dispatch detailing how sparse the crowds were in Newfoundland: “I mean, if the royals can’t draw flies in Union Jack Cupids, this is going to be a long, lonesome and embarrassing haul from coast-to-coast, albeit with huge chunks left out in the prairies middle.” Mercifully, she gets to sleep in her own bed tonight, as the entourage arrives at Pearson International Airport at 2:40 p.m. where they will do royal things — like cutting the ribbon on the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair — before departing for Victoria, B.C. on Friday afternoon. Yesterday in St. John’s, the 60-year-old Prince learned that there’s no escape from social media experts: Joe Coffey, the young co-founder of Upstream Marketing, pressed his business card into a receptive royal palm: “So, if we get a hit on our website from England we’ll know who it is.”




