Prince William and his bride Catherine’s first official foreign trip as newlyweds turned grim on Saturday when Quebec republicans welcomed them to Montreal shouting “down with the monarchy.”
“We will never bend, Willy go home!” some 60 protesters shouted outside a Montreal children’s hospital the royal couple visited. “French Quebec!” and “Parasite go home!” they chanted.
The group pounded on buckets as the couple entered the hospital without acknowledging them, drowning out a much larger group of well-wishers, many of whom cried out: “We love you Kate!”
Outside the Quebec tourism and hotel business institute, a line of riot police with shields and rooftop snipers watched over a second group of protesters behind a barricade when the royal couple arrived for a cooking class.
Britain conquered the former French colony of Quebec in 1763, but its culture and language survived, and today it is a bastion of French culture in North America.
British rule, however, still evokes resentment in some quarters of the Canadian province.
The first of Saturday’s demonstrations was organized by a group rattling for the defense of the French language in North America.
Its president, Mario Beaulieu, said the duke and duchess’s visit “raises the issue of francophone assimilation,” as well as “the linguistic purging of Quebec, in which the Canadian government is complicit.”
The monarchy “is an obsolete institution, anti-democratic and sexist, and Quebec wants none of it,” he added.
As a member of the Commonwealth, Canada’s official head of state is the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, who is represented by a governor general.
However, a poll released on the eve of William and Kate’s visit found that a third of Canadians want to cut ties with the British monarchy.
In Quebec, where 83 percent of the population speaks French and only 10 percent speak English, disaffection with the royals runs as high as 60 percent, according to the Angus Reid survey.
Quebec twice rejected independence in referendums in 1980 and 1995, the last time by a narrow margin.
Separatists would like to hold a third vote, but recent infighting has marred their organization.
Prince William, second in line to the British throne, and his wife celebrated Canada Day among hundreds of thousands of adoring fans in Ottawa, with fireworks and musical performances on Friday.
The duchess of Cambridge smiled broadly and exchanged polite banter as she shook hands with the crowd for longer than the intended hour.
The Quebec leg of their trip, however, includes no major public events, apparently an attempt to reduce possible confrontations with anti-monarchists or separatists like the one that embarrassed William’s father, Prince Charles, when he visited in 2009.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing