We’ve got the first news about what Prince Harry has been up to on his two day visit to Toronto.
Keeping under the radar, his official website tells us that the Duke of Sussex spent the 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.
The prince is in Toronto today and tomorrow to attend multiple events in honour of Remembrance Day. On Monday, his office announced that he would be in Toronto for several events this week, timed to Remembrance Day. This visit is at the invitation of True Patriot Love, a charity that supports Canadian veterans.
On day one of his Toronto visit, Prince Harry will mostly be out of the spotlight: He’s doing a few unspecified events that “support the Canadian Armed Services and veteran community,” and then he’s got a private lunch where he’ll apparently give a talk about veterans’ issues. This evening, he’ll likely suit up a fundraiser for the HALO Trust, a landmine removal charity first championed by his mother.
On Thursday, Prince Harry — who served two tours in Afghanistan himself, and has made advocacy for military service people a key pillar of his philanthropic purview — will tour the Veterans Centre at Sunnybrook Hospital. He’ll cap his visit off with the annual True Patriot Love fundraising dinner.
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.
That’s a nod to the couple’s deep history with Canada. They stayed on Vancouver Island for several weeks right after announcing their decision to step away from working royal life in 2020, and much of their courtship seems to have played out in Toronto because of Meghan’s work here as an actor filming the TV show ‘Suits.’ They also made their first public appearance as a couple when the Toronto hosted his Invictus Games, an Olympics-like competition for wounded service people, in 2017.
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 (his 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.
