OTTAWA — Quebec separatists on Tuesday vowed to disrupt Prince William and Kate Middleton’s visit to Canada later this year in their first overseas royal tour as a married couple.
“We are not going to let British royals walk upon Quebec soil with complete impunity,” the militant Reseau de Resistance (Resistance Network) said in a statement, adding it would “do everything in its power to make the monarch’s visit as unpleasant as possible.”
The group also protested Prince Charles’s visit to Canada in 2009 and forced the cancellation the year before of a re-enactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
They said the re-enactment and the royal tour evoked memories of English hegemony in the French-speaking Canadian province.
On the fields outside the stone walls of Quebec City’s old quarter, General James Wolfe defeated General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm in 1759 to secure control of New France for the British.
Prince William and Kate Middleton are to visit Canada from June 30 to July 8, two months after their wedding in London’s Westminster Abbey on April 29.
The search-and-rescue pilot is directly in line to become Canada’s king after his father Prince Charles, the heir to the throne in the 16 Commonwealth realms, including Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
The tour by William, 28, and Kate, 29, will include Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Prince Edward Island, Quebec and the capital Ottawa.
William, the son of Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, last visited Canada when he went to Vancouver aged 15 in 1998 with his father and brother Prince Harry. He was given a pop star’s welcome and was mobbed by teenage girls.
The brothers also toured Ontario province with their parents in 1991.