Forget the gilded carriages. Right now, the British Monarchy is a high-risk asset that’s suffered a catastrophic security breach.

Last week, on his 66th birthday, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor didn’t get a cake; he got a visit from the police. Following the release of unredacted USA Department of Justice “Epstein files,” the former Prince – already stripped of the “His Royal Highness” style – was arrested on suspicion of Misconduct in Public Office. The allegation is straight out of a political drama: while serving as United Kingdom trade envoy, Andrew reportedly forwarded confidential briefings on Afghan resource deposits – uranium, gold, iridium, oil, and gas – to the deceased and formerly convicted pedophile child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

This is the ultimate Succession-like season finale. We’re witnessing the first senior Royal arrest since 1647. If King Charles is the cold patriarch Logan Roy, Andrew is the ultimate Cousin Greg – the bumbling B-character who thought he was “in” until the police came knocking.

Titles are temporary, but statutes are stable. Think of the Crown like the 2008 housing market. Everyone views it as a a Triple-A rated asset, but the Palace was bundling “toxic assets” – subprime characters like Andrew – and selling the whole package to the Commonwealth as stability.

Andrew wasn’t a diplomat; he was a leaky faucet in a room full of government trade secrets. While Epstein was building a blackmail-fueled transnational child sex trafficking network, Andrew was allegedly handing over government secrets. He traded the kingdom’s prestige for the company of a monster, and yet, he still remains eighth in the line of succession. He is the Designated Sacrifice who had his title stripped of him to save the Firm, but who, by a quirk of ancient law, is still technically a “Designated Survivor” for the throne.

Now it’s unlikely that Andrew will ever attain the throne, as something terrible would have to happen to the seven people ahead of him (or he’d have to do seven things absolutely perfectly), but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem not needing resolution.

So why can’t we just fire him? Because the Crown is “divisible”, King Charles isn’t just one King; he’s King of 15 different jurisdictions. To scrub Andrew from the lineage, you need a symmetrical strike across the globe in tandem.

In the UK, it requires a Royal Act of Parliament plus the formal consent of all other realms under the Statute of Westminster. In Canada, we rely on the Principle of Symmetry – the idea that whoever is King of the UK is automatically King of Canada.

We saw this play out in 2013 when the UK changed the rules to allow first-born daughters to inherit the throne. The Canadian government bypassed provincial consent, and the courts upheld it.

But Andrew is a different beast. Removing a specific person from the succession is a constitutional Rubik’s Cube where every side has to turn at the exact same second, or we hit a Split Crown scenario: different King’s for different jurisdictions of the Commonwealth. Andrew could legally be the heir in Canada while being a private citizen in London.

While Canada waits patiently to emulate whatever the UK decides to do, Jamaica is playing a different game. They aren’t trying to make edits the book; they’re burning the library. Jamaica has a referendum this year to remove its relationship to the Crown and Monarchy all together.

They aren’t trying to fix a broken tool in the toolbox; they’re throwing the whole toolbox out. They are essentially saying, “We’re moving out, and you can keep the security deposit and the creepy brother.” Merits of the monarchy aside, they are the acting with the immediate logical clarity required to solve a monarchical crisis: stop being a monarchy.

Back in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney is playing Constitutional Chicken. He’s using the Crown as a Shield of Sovereignty to avoid having to enter into protracted debates about the Crown and Canada’s relationship to it.

Carney, like his predecessors, knows the moment opening the Constitution is discussed to fire Andrew, Alberta and Quebec will hold the vote hostage. Quebec has already stripped the Crown from Quebec’s coat of arms. Alberta is having a referendum. They’ll both demand billions in health transfers or carbon tax exemptions just to sign a paper firing a disgraced Prince. They aren’t looking to fix the Crown; they’re looking to leverage its decay.

We don’t have to wait for Ottawa to see the writing on the wall however. Look at St. Catharines, where the Mayor is already moving to rename Prince Andrew Court. He knows that name doesn’t reflect our values.

If a city can scrub a name off a street sign for free, why are we paying to keep a potential prisoner who traded state secrets to a convicted pedophile child sex trafficker in the line of succession?

It’s time to remove Andrew from Canada’s line of succession, before, God forbid, it’s too late.

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