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Queen's Platinum Jubilee offers subtle hints about the future of the monarchy

Who's on the balcony?There is a reason this seemingly random question intrigues royal watchers each time a Big Event focuses the public spotlight on the Royal Family.And perhaps no more so than over the next few days, as Queen Elizabeth marks her Platinum Jubilee and 70 years as monarch.Today's appearance by members of the Royal Family on the balcony at Buckingham Palace in London — and perhaps another such appearance later in the extended Jubilee long weekend — offer subtle signs about the future for the monarchy, even as so much attention focuses on the 96-year-old Queen and her unprecedented seven decades on the throne.

"It's a remarkable title and accomplishment for the Queen, but it does hint that … no one is immortal," David Johnson, a political science professor at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, said in an interview "We see that … the Queen is slowing down."With today's balcony appearance limited to working senior members of the Royal Family — no Prince Andrew, no Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — there is another reminder of what many see as a signal of a slimmed-down monarchy favoured by the Queen's heir, her eldest son, Prince Charles.Johnson also sees hints of the future in the ways the Jubilee is being marked beyond the festivities spilling into the streets of London over the next few days."Some of the events even in Canada, encouraging people to plant trees, and to plant Jubilee gardens, be involved with nature, those are all interests of the Prince of Wales," said Johnson, author of Battle Royal: Monarchists vs. Republicans and the Crown of Canada.

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As much as the Queen is slowing down, and other members of the Royal Family are taking on more of what she used to do, there is little sense she is in any way detached from the goings-on within the House of Windsor now.

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