Prince Harry capped off his two-day visit to Toronto with a warm tribute to the city.
“This city will always mean a great deal to me,” he said in a speech on Thursday evening. “You provided a wife for me and you hosted the Invictus Games in 2017, touchstones in my life both professionally and personally.”
That wife, of course, is Meghan Markle, who was living in the city filming “Suits” when they first started dating. The couple made their public debut in the stands of those 2017 Invictus Games.
“Together we witnessed something extraordinary. The strength of the human spirit that shines when people who have served rise again through sport, teamwork and a redefined purpose,” he said. “That spirit, the devotion to those who serve, is something Canada embodies like no other nation.”
Prince Harry gave this speech for more than 500 people in the ballroom at the Liberty Grand, gathered for veteran’s charity True Patriot Love’s annual gala, which honours Canada’s military community and raises funds to support active service members, veterans and their families.
In his speech, he touched on his own memories with Canada’s armed forces, which included training in Alberta and serving with our troops when he was deployed in Afghanistan.
Earlier in the day, wearing a Toronto Blue Jays hat, he also apologized to the nation for wearing a Dodgers hat “under duress” during the World Series, despite his claimed loyalty as a Jays fan. He returned to the theme in his speech to explain his wife’s unabashed love for the opposing team.
“[She] has deep affection for this city, so much so that many people around the world believe she’s Canadian,” he said. “So I think we can forgive a native Californian for her Dodgers loyalty, even if just for one evening.”
On Thursday afternoon, the royal, who served as a combat pilot himself, stopped by the Sunnybrook Veterans Centre.
According to the prince’s official website, he was there “meeting and having a laugh with Canadian veterans who showed off their creative arts programs,” which includes everything from ceramics to photography. A highlight, per his website, was seeing the helmets that veterans have turned into “profound works of self-expression.”
One of the veterans Prince Harry met was 101-year-old Brenda Reid, who served in an all-woman-run Royal Canadian Navy station in Nova Scotia. While chatting with a group of residents, the prince asked about their best war stories. Reid joked, “You can’t always believe the boys.”
Keeping under the radar for much of this visit, his official website says that the Duke of Sussex spent Wednesday morning with members of the Canadian Army’s reserve forces: The close-to-home-in-name Queen’s Own Rifles and Royal Regiment of Canada.
He apparently watched as reservists displayed various skills — band members, dive team members and a weapons display among them — and then chatted with service members and their families about “their dual role as reservists and civilians.”
The Sussex site doesn’t specify, but it’s likely this visit was at the Fork York Armoury, which is a big hub for reservists in the GTA.
This is the Duke of Sussex’s second visit to Canada in 2025: He was in British Columbia in February for the Invictus Winter Games, where he thanked our nation for being “really good” to him and his wife, Meghan Markle.
After the L.A. Dodgers’ World Series win, Meghan posted footage from their home theatre of him looking bereft while she celebrated the Dodgers’ win — suggesting his baseball loyalties may indeed lie with the team whose country he’s in line to inherit the throne of (that earlier appearance at a playoff game in a Dodgers’ hat notwithstanding).
There are some corners of the internet that are raising their eyebrows at the timing of this visit, which happens right when his older, estranged brother, Prince William, is in Brazil to celebrate The Earthshot Prize, the future king’s flagship sustainability project. People magazine, however, “understands” — code for someone on the inside has told them this — that this visit was organized over a year ago, and the royals across the pond were told about it. The reason that it’s all been announced at the last minute, however, is because of Harry’s ongoing concerns about his security given the fact that he no longer gets government-funded protection.
