Why is the Qanon ‘Queen of Canada’ allowed to terrorize our towns?
As the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country shows, a cult moving into (or nearby) a small town can turn ugly fast. While it took a few years for things to turn truly toxic between devotees of guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who built the utopian intentional community of Rajneeshpuram, and nearby townspeople in The Dalles, Oregon, the people of Richmound Saskatchewan haven’t hesitated to make their concern immediately known regarding the occupation of an abandon school in their town by the self proclaimed ‘Queen of Canada’, Romana Didulo, and her followers. Perhaps some of those residents saw Wild Wild Country too, and didn’t want to risk becoming victims of a mass poisoning like that seen in 1984 when the Rajneeshees contaminated food that several hundred people consumed, rendering them unable to vote in the local election. Given Romana Didulo’s proclivity for violent threats who can blame them.
But how did things even get to this point? Where a standoff is now emerging between a whole town and a bizarre cult built around a peculiar middle-aged woman nobody had really ever heard of until 2021?
How exactly Canada’s law enforcement professionals and courts determine what constitutes a threat and what merits judicial attention can mystify the lay-person in this country sometimes. In October of 2022 the mayor of Surrey, BC, was charged with public mischief for claiming that a political opponent ran over his foot in a parking lot. He was later found not-guilty, but not after the drama played out in the law courts and court of public opinion. In the 2010s Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies began monitoring environmental advocacy organizations and First Nations opposed to oil and gas pipelines, positioning them as potentially violent threats to the national interest. CSIS even mulled over whether or not First Nations, like the Wet’suwet’en, could be classed as terrorists for opposing pipelines on their lands. For years in Vancouver and other Canadian communities we’ve seen low-income residents and people who use drugs apprehended under the mental health act and taken into custody every day. Yet Queen Romana has appeared to have grown her following, putting lives at risk along the way, with very little interest or resistance from Canadian law enforcement.
Perhaps if she took a strong stance against a pipeline she’d be viewed as more of a threat…
As a researcher concerned with the impacts of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracism on public discourse and public policy formation, I don’t claim to understand how law-enforcement and the courts make determinations about risks or when it is in the public interest to charge someone with something like mischief. I just try not to break any laws myself as a respectful citizen and peaceful subject of the Crown.
Romana Didulo hasn’t made a public issue of someone running over her foot in a parking lot, yet, and she hasn’t tried to block a pipeline from being built, but a litany of abhorrent, abusive, threatening, bizarre and harmful things she has done to Canadians from one side of the country to the other continues to add up. An excellent comprehensive accounting of it appears in a recent article in the International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation (IJCAM) (Yes, there’s a journal for that, and thankfully I might add) by Professor Christine Sarteschi. Sarteschi specializes in political extremism and the sovereign citizen movement, among other things. Many of the absurd and disconcerting things Didulo continues to say and do are also noted by Sarteschi in this article in The Conversation.
From threatening healthcare workers in 2021 (how I was first introduced to Didulo) to burning Canadian flags at the Ottawa anti-vaxxer trucker occupation in February of 2022, to a bizarre attempt to arrest police officers in Peterborough Ontario, Queen Romana Didulo has been on a whirlwind tour of Canada that currently sees her and her devotees occupying the abandoned school in Richmound. The town, understandably, is concerned. They have every right to be. As Sarteschi notes in her article:
Didulo is and remains one of the most active conspiracy figures currently operating in North America. No one else in Canada who expresses this kind of radical agenda has accumulated a similar sized follower base. Didulo regularly engages in stochastic terrorism: inciting speech used to encourage others to engage in violent acts (Sarteschi, 2023)
Here is a short rundown of some other notable developments detailed in the article. Mack Lamoureux at Vice seems to be one of the few journalists in Canada who has been following the Didulo story closely, and links to a few of his stories are included below too.
Didulo has convinced a startling number of people that they don’t have to pay their taxes and bills and mortages (by Royal Decree), only to see their water and electricity turned off or telephone disconnected. As Sarteschi observes “refusal to pay debts has led to seizure and foreclosure of property, vehicles, and homes. Some followers have been threatened with legal action, and warned they could face fraud changes.” (p11) In keeping with the financial fantasy LARPing, Didulo then introduced Canadian Tire style ‘loyalty money’ to her devotees. Where exactly this money can be used is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t seem to matter to her followers, as they seem equally ready to accept that she is a divine being who has access to top secret technology, like ‘med-beds’ that can cure all diseases. She was denied entry to the US multiple times, Sarteschi notes that it may have been because Didulo “used her fake, purple-colored “Kingdom of Canada” passport” (p11). This only scratches the surface of the preposterous claims and real world damage made and done by Didulo.
Didulo’s self-constructed myth reads like a mashup of ideas from Erich von Däniken, David Icke, Drunvalo Melchizedek and Chris Carter. It’s like if someone spilled a jug of Qanon on the kitchen table and then used an old dishrag with some bits of 1970s new age and sci-fi still on it to wipe it up. Whatever was strained out of that rag is the alternate universe Didulo reigns in, like an inter-dimensional creature from a Robert Anton Wilson book that never made it to print because he was just too high when he wrote it. She has a penchant for graphic and violent rhetoric. She repeatedly calls for public executions, and if the rhetoric isn’t enough, several devotees have since come forward detailing absolutely hair raising details of their treatment while in her thrall. As Sarteschi notes:
Didulo’s former cadres described “never-ending” abuse at her hands. They regarded her as dangerous. She threatened to kill them several times, including throwing one individual from a helicopter into a volcano (Sarteschi, 2023)
I’m deeply appreciative of our rights in Canada which protect our freedom to express our opinions and beliefs, but how on earth someone who has become such a disruptive force in peoples’ lives, someone this abusive, threatening, and violently delusional, has been allowed to grow their following and now occupy a town in distress is confounding to many. Myself included.
Richmound is taking a stand to defend their town from this insanity, but that stand is also on behalf of all of us in Canada who believe this shit has been allowed to go on long enough.
I wish them the very best of luck, and I thank them for their service.