Meanwhile, news continues about a mid-30s couple currently trying to escape family turmoil in Britain to Canada with their child. They are self-sponsored, through fawningly welcomed by British Columbia’s mesmerized New Democrat premier. Their friends and family are carrying on as before. Overcoming personal confusion, they are seeking an alternate life.

Hassan Khaled’s dilemma is that although earning enough money working full-time to support his family in Bracebridge, it’s not enough to sponsor his other refugee family members. Prince Harry’s dilemma is whether he can maintain the indulged life he’s accustomed to on a meagre $5 million yearly stipend from his dad.

Nobody’s escape to Canada is ever the same because conditions propelling exit from a land of birth are infinitely diverse.

In fact, for any parallel with Prince Harry, the closest comparison is how British’s upper classes have always used remote colonies to export and forget about their societal problems. Criminals went to penal colony Australia. Orphans and dissolute sons of privilege were salted away in Canada.

The profligate sons of upper crust British families who’d gambled themselves into debt, or repeatedly got housemaids pregnant, or were too fond of their companion in the bottle, got handed a one-way ticket across the Atlantic and the address of a person (usually a lawyer) to contact upon arrival.

The lawyer received this discarded offspring of nobility, helped him settle into accommodation, got him acquainted with a few folk, and remitted his monthly stipend from trust funds provided by the family in Britain. That’s why these upper class emigrants in our communities were dubbed “remittance men.”

They were interesting characters, but invariably short of money. If alcoholism or gambling caused their demise, it hadn’t been cured but exported with him to Canada so the family could sail on without social disgrace. The desperate chaps still needed money for bar tabs or gambling debts.

A lawyer I knew took his charge to get warm clothes the first November, including a tan camel hair winter coat. A week later, the chagrined lawyer watched the expensive coat going past his office window on the back of a local, already pawned off for ready cash. A royal son of the House of Windsor will also remain true to form, detrimentally reliant on payments from dad, a king in waiting.

Welcome to Canada, Hassan Khaled.