Huge Security Moves For Queen In Canada

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30560, 1 October 1964, Page 17

Huge Security Moves For Queen In Canada

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copy rishi) CHARLOTTETOWN (Prince Edward Island), Sept. 30. The greatest security operation in Canada’s history will get underway on Monday when an airliner carrying Queen Elizabeth will arrive here.

About 2000 highlytrained “Mounties” Army squads and Canadian railway policemen will swing into action. This huge Royal bodyguard will be on the alert for the next eight days as the Queen and her husband swing hundreds of miles by sea and air from here to Quebec city to Ottawa. The Royal tour marks the centenary of conferences in Charlottetown and Quebec city that led in 1867 to the Dominion of Canada.

Among a score of State functions, the Queen is set to formally open the 5,500,000dollars new Fathers of the Confederation memorial building here, address the Quebec Legislature, and attend a ceremony at Ottawa’s national war memorial. But as the final touches are being put this week-end to

the pomp and pageantry, Canadians are asking themselves: How serious are the extremist threats against the Queen and how effective will the security measures be. Shadow Across Tour

The shadow across the tour arises from the activities of some French Canadians who have organised self-styled extremist groups loosely banded into Le Front de Liberal Quebecois (F.L.Q.). Their aim is to separate Quebec from the rest of Canada. Once they limited themselves to a handful of bomb incidents, bank holdups and raids on armouries. But as plans for the Royal visit were completed, their campaign took the form of warnings and hints and threats. An anonymous letter in March told the Queen not to come “unless she is aspiring

to be the first British Sovereign to die on the soil of Quebpc.” A month earlier a separatist leader, Marcel Chaput, came out in the open with the comment that the Queen would be made “brutally aware” there was no welcome for her in Quebec. “Lunatic Fringe” The Canadian Government thinks differently, although it is alive to the possible dangers from a lunatic fringe recruited in colleges and cafes of Quebec and Montreal with a chip on the shoulder about being “second-class citizens.” It is convinced Quebec people will make the Queen welcome and that although they have sympathy for the cause of a new vigorous Quebec they have nothing but contempt for extremism. But while the Government believes the risks to the

Queen are not so great as some alarmists fear—-these have called for the tour to be cancelled—they have taken elaborate and determined precautions. According to some reports, the most important aspects of the Warren report of President Kennedy's assassination were passed on to the Canadian Government long before the report was released. In Charlottetown, where the Queen will live on the Royal yacht Britannia, a lonian frogman team trained to handle underwater explosives has joined the security force. In Quebec city police have checked and rechecked the Royal route, questioning everyone who lives and works on the two streets involved. They have searched the towering ctiffs and ramparts of Wolfe’s cove where the Britannia will berth. In all three cities of the tour the Queen will drive in an enclosed bullet-proof car under the “umbrella” of a massive bodyguard. In Quebec there will be a special waggon carrying 20 tough police armed with revolvers, sub machine-guns and steel helmets.