Stephen Bates
Guardian
July 3, 2011
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge faced the first organised protests against their visit to Canada within minutes of their arrival in Montreal on Saturday night.
Demonstrators held up placards denouncing the couple as “parasites” as they arrived at the world renowned Sainte-Justine university hospital. They were heavily outnumbered by others who had come out to cheer the royal couple, but one of the protest organisers, Guillaume Martin, told reporters: “We think the monarchy is something from the middle ages and we don’t want to pay for the trip.”
The Canadian government, which is meeting the bill, says that the extra cost, equivalent to £950,000, amounts to only a few cents a head for the country’s population. The couple ignored the demonstration and spent more than an hour chatting to child cancer patients inside the hospital.
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