Prince Harry is coming to Toronto this week.
Days after his wife posted footage from their home theatre of him looking bereft while she celebrated the L.A. Dodgers’ World Series’ win — suggesting his baseball loyalties may indeed lie with the team who’s country he’s in line to inherit the throne of (his earlier appearance at a playoff game in a Dodgers’ hat notwithstanding) — the royal will be spending some time north of the border.
On Monday, the prince’s 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.
Prince Harry’s two-day visit will kick off on Wednesday with “a series of events to support the Canadian Armed Forces and veteran community,” followed by a private lunch where he’ll discuss “international veterans’ issues.” That same evening, he’ll be at a fundraising gala for The HALO Trust, the same land-mine-removal charity that brought us the famous images of his mother, Diana, walking through a cleared minefield in Angola in 1997 to raise awareness for the issue.
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.
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.
