Thanks for the question.
Madam Chair, it represents the tradition that we come from. We in Canada have the privilege of being part of a group of countries, like Australia, the United States, India, New Zealand, and other places, many that you can count in the Commonwealth, such as Trinidad and Jamaica, where the tradition is deeply rooted. We have a stable political system. Normally these countries have retained their parliamentary institutions intact, their mode of electing members, and so on.
I have not done the comparison, but I think if you lined them up, you would probably find those countries with a stable political system would tend to make fewer superficial changes of this nature, knowing that the tradition hangs together. It's an organic whole in a sense, and when you eliminate the phrase “in all thy sons command”, I think you're erasing a piece of our collective memory, because tradition cannot be established from above by fiat. It has to grow from the ground up in people's psyche, and it takes time for that to develop into tradition.
George Orwell wrote that he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future. That's why he had a ministry of truth whose job was to change history and to change the history books, the newspapers, movies, and radio. I haven't read the book in a long time, but maybe the ministry of truth even changed the national anthem.