OTTAWA - If Kate and Will have a baby girl this summer, Canada is ready to let her wear the Maple Crown, QMI Agency has learned.

Heritage Minister James Moore has called a press conference in Ottawa Thursday and, according to sources providing information on condition of confidentiality, he is expected to speak to Canada's plans to officially change the rules for Royal succession.

The proposed rule change follows commitments made at the 2011 Commonwealth Summit in Perth, Australia, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and other leaders of realms over which Queen Elizabeth II reigns.

In Perth, Harper, Cameron and the 13 other leaders of Her Majesty's "realms" agreed they would take steps to change the 300-year-old rules of succession which favour male heirs over females.

"Put simply, if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a little girl, that girl would one day be our queen," Cameron told reporters in Perth in 2011.

Under the current rules, if Kate and Will have a girl - she is due in July - and then later have a boy, the boy would be ahead of his older sister in line for the throne.

The proposed rule change would simply order the line of succession according to age and ignore gender.

And don't think these changes are incidental. Had those been the rules for succession 120 years ago, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany might very well have been King of Canada and Great Britain during the First World War.