Her Majesty The Queen, about to visit Australia

[Peter Crowe]

According to the Canadian Government, when I asked them last year, The official name of Canada is "The Dominion of Canada"

Regards

Chas

What you say is true of Canada, and was true of New Zealand but their government prefer to let it fall in to disuse. In any event the term Dominion wasn't universal. Australia and the Bahamas are 'Commonwealths', and India (1947-1950), and South Africa (c.1910-1961) were 'Unions'. Ireland was the Irish Free State from 1921 until 1937 when it changed it's name to simply Ireland (Eire), and pretty much wrote the King-Emperor out of it's Constitution although it did not formally become a republic and leave the Commonwealth until 1949. It's official English language name is still Ireland but it is often referred to as the Republic of Ireland in the UK (to avoid confusion with Northern Ireland).

It was normal for my grandfather's generation to refer to the 'Self Governing Dominions of the Empire', but as each country has it's own Independent Crown (stemming from the Statute of Westminster 1931) the term Dominion denotes subject status to the United Kingdom, which is no longer the case.