Self-styled Queen of Canada charged after raid on Saskatchewan compound

A day after Romana Didulo, the self-styled Queen of Canada, and 15 of her supporters were arrested in a tiny Saskatchewan town, she and the owner of her group’s compound were both charged.

The RCMP had announced earlier on Thursday that they had to release the group because no charges had been secured in the investigation, but they noted an unidentified man and woman had been taken back into custody. 

The force later clarified in a news release that those rearrested were Ms. Didulo, 50, and the compound’s owner, 61-year-old Ricky Manz. Both were charged with failure to abide by the conditions of an undertaking that they not contact each other. They were both also charged with intimidation of a justice system participant.

The RCMP said the charges related to a case from July that involved Mr. Manz allegedly assaulting police at the compound, a decommissioned school.

Ms. Didulo was released from custody Thursday and must appear in court in Swift Current Friday morning, while Mr. Manz remained under arrest before he was due in the same court at the same time, according to the RCMP.

Police had acted on a complaint from last week that someone with Ms. Didulo’s Kingdom of Canada group had a firearm. On Wednesday, officers initially said they had seized four replica handguns as they searched the property in Richmound, Sask. But they adjusted that number on Thursday to “13 imitation semi-automatic handguns, ammunition, as well as a large number of electronic devices.”

Less than 24 hours after dozens of RCMP members executed the Wednesday raid, Ms. Didulo and the majority of her followers had returned to the site.

Before her rearrest, Ms. Didulo appeared in a video tour of her base on Thursday, expressing her disbelief that Mounties had slashed the tires of eight RVs and a handful of trucks at the decommissioned school, which her group has occupied for the past two years.

In addition to appealing to supporters for donations, she speculated that a force other than the RCMP must be responsible for the damage, which included the seizure of the video cameras that ringed the site.

“I don’t think that’s part of the RCMP’s professional work, to go around slashing tires,” she said at one point in the video, while adding that she would pursue restitution for the damage through her system of “natural law.”

For many locals, the initial news of Wednesday’s raid, which made international headlines, brought a sense of relief after months of growing suspicion about the activities of the conspiratorial enclave, according to Dustin Cowan, editor-in-chief of Our Community Free Press, a monthly non-profit newspaper serving nine communities in the region.

“Yesterday there was cheering throughout the whole town,” Mr. Cowan said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon.

About five police cars remained outside the school’s fencing early Thursday morning, he said.

Mr. Cowan, who moved last summer from Guelph, Ont., to the hamlet of a hundred or so people, said it is heartening that the raid did not uncover a cache of more dangerous weapons, as some in the wheat and lentil farming region had feared.

The group alienated locals by erecting fencing and security cameras, and constantly surveilling anyone using the adjoining playground, baseball diamond and dog park, he said, noting his 13-year-old daughter and her friend had recently left the playground after a man at the school walked out and began filming them on his phone.

“You just hope that what you see from the outside matches the inside and that it’s just a bunch of pensioners and disenfranchised people kind of plain pretending to be a government,” Mr. Cowan said.

Christine Sarteschi, a criminology and sociology professor at Pittsburgh’s Chatham University who has been studying this group since it arose early in the pandemic, said Ms. Didulo’s extreme worldview is informed by a constellation of conspiracy theories, and that she and her followers do not recognize Canadian authorities.

Ms. Didulo solidified her prominence amid a number of anti-establishment influencers during the self-described freedom convoy protests by burning a Canadian flag in the streets of Ottawa, Dr. Sarteschi said in a phone interview. From there, her small convoy of two or three RVs that came from British Columbia rolled east to Nova Scotia, back through Ontario and finally to Saskatchewan about two years ago.

Along the way, the caravan of campers, or “The Kingdom of Canada’s Royal Mobile Government Team,” as she refers to it on her website, would stop to allow her to greet small groups of supporters.

Dr. Sarteschi said the number of her followers appears to have drastically decreased in recent years.

Discussing the ideology espoused by Ms. Didulo, she said, “People just get tired of it and she can make promises but they never come true.”