It's a question Prince Charles himself once asked the trailing media during one of his many foreign jaunts.
"Have any of you the slightest idea what I'm doing here?"
It's a question some Canadians appear to be asking as the Prince of Wales makes his 15th trip to Canada, the first with second wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, in tow.
A Canadian poll leaked this week in London suggested profound public indifference to the royal tour that begins Monday in Newfoundland and ends 11 days, 10,000 kilometres and four provinces later in the national capital.
"The monarchy in Canada faces the threat of an ebbing tide," said the 15-page survey from Toronto communications firm Navigator, according to a report in the London Telegraph.
"The tide's recess is not caused by anger, resentment or republican ideology but by disinterest. . . . There is a heavy fog of apathy shrouding the institution as a whole."
So why is Prince Charles here?
His official website blandly states the tour "involves a busy itinerary aimed at meeting a cross-section of Canadians . . . ."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the visit "will allow all of us, particularly young people, an opportunity to learn more about the heritage and traditions of which we are all proud."
It all seems to sell the future king a little short.
After all, his views on the dire need for action on climate change in advance of next month's United Nations summit in Copenhagen have been making headlines in Britain.
He recently told Italy's parliament that climate trumps the global economic crisis, warning that failure would cause "a new Dark Age to sprawl across our future, plunging us on a course towards catastrophe."
His long-held opposition to genetically modified crops put him far ahead of the curve in the Europe Union, which this summer banned Canadian flax imports because of genetic contamination found in seeds.
Neither his apocalyptic environmental activism nor his precautionary stand on genetically modified foods would endear the Duke of Cornwall to Canada's current Conservative government.
The Prince's Trust, Charles' brainchild, has helped more than half a million disadvantaged young people over the past three decades.
Another of his pet projects, an eco-friendly village on England's southwest coast, now has 5,000 residents.
He's recently expressed concern about nanotechnology and its regulation, and is an outspoken critic of modern architecture.
Alas, according to the Navigator poll -- the firm will not say who commissioned the survey and is appalled it became public -- a majority of Canadians say they know little or nothing of Charles' many high-profile public causes.
And only one in five of some 1,400 survey respondents said they'd make an effort to see the visiting prince, even if he were nearby.
The royal couple's tour takes them from St. John's, N.L., to Hamilton and Niagara in southern Ontario, to Vancouver and Victoria, back to Montreal and wraps up with Remembrance Day ceremonies in Petawawa, Ont., and Ottawa.
So why is he here?
"Obviously the reason for this visit, I believe, is to give the opportunity for Canadians to get reacquainted with Charles," Robert Finch, dominion chairman of the Monarchist League of Canada, said in an interview, noting it is the prince's first visit in eight years.
"And I think that's critical because there is a disconnect there."
The report of Charles' self-parodying, existentialist question came from a longtime royal journalist, as told in one of the many profiles produced to mark the prince's 60th birthday last November. The quotation was an aside muttered during a visit to Lisbon in 1987, when Charles's marriage to Princess Diana was in tatters and his public opinion was raking rock bottom.
In the years since, he's had a steady renaissance in Britain. Polls linked to his Nov. 14 birthday last year found that 42 per cent of Brits favoured Charles succeeding the Queen, while 35 per cent felt the throne should skip a generation to his popular son William. Three years earlier in 2005, those numbers were more than reversed.
If Canadians, or others, seem to have missed the parade, Charles sounds unfazed.
"I could have sat doing very little indeed and I would have been got at just as much by people saying, 'What a useless idiot he is'," Charles said of his many activist pursuits in a BBC documentary last year.
"So I would rather be criticized for doing things, rather than not doing them."
He and Camilla, the future Princess Consort (as opposed to Queen, a title she has eschewed), maintain a frenetic domestic schedule, reviewing regiments visiting town fairs and even a Marks and Spencer 125th anniversary celebration.
The British public is warming to Camilla, once viewed as in interloper to the immensely popular Diana, who died in a 1997 car crash. A poll last year found support for Camilla becoming Queen had quadrupled over the previous two-year period.
This is her first official visit to Canada.
There's been a lot of water under the royal bridge since the first time a Duke and Duchess of Cornwall -- later to become King George V and Queen Mary -- toured Canada in 1901.
That two-month odyssey was followed by a similar two-month train tour in 1919 by another Prince of Wales -- the future King Edward VIII -- who was so enamoured of the former colony that he bought a ranch in Pekisko, Alta., which he owned for 40 years.
There's a Canadian connection for the current Prince of Wales, too.
Earlier this year, six love letters that Charles sent to a Montreal girlfriend in the late 1970s were put up for auction on eBay. Sample prose: "I still think my solution of marrying a girl from each commonwealth country is the best one."
The former Camilla Parker Bowles has her own, more sterling, Canadian roots.
Her great, great, great maternal grandfather was Sir Alan Napier MacNab of Hamilton, Ont., the premier of Upper Canada from 1854 to 1856. MacNab's wife was a descendent of 17th century French immigrants to Quebec.
And Sophia Mary MacNab, their daughter and Camilla's great, great grandmother, married William Coutts Keppel, Earl of Albermarle, who at that time was superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Dominion of Canada.
Which leads us back to Cupids, N.L., the outport village that claims to be the oldest British settlement in Canada, where Charles and Camilla will visit Tuesday.
So why are they here? They've got some history.
