Front Burner - Canada’s QAnon ‘Queen’ and her escalating rhetoric
Episode Date: December 6, 2021For months, a B.C.-based QAnon conspiracy influencer named Romana Didulo has been amassing followers online, declaring herself the “Queen of Canada.” In the summer, her audience began distributing... cease-and-desist letters across North America on her behalf, demanding a stop to COVID-19 restrictions. Recently, her rhetoric escalated when she urged her followers to “shoot to kill” anyone who administers vaccines to children. The RCMP have visited her since, and one of her followers in Laval, Que., was arrested after allegedly posting threats about his daughter’s school. Today on Front Burner, Vice World News reporter Mack Lamoureux discusses this influential QAnon figure, her active base of followers and law enforcement’s response.
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Hi, I'm Angela Starrett.
If you need my name, you can get it through Romana.
She's the new commander-in-chief.
I'll be reporting back.
So she's, Romana's the new chief commander of Canada.
Oh, why?
Yeah.
Okay. That's a clip from a video
posted online this summer
of a man headed into a police station
to deliver a letter
with an order to stop
all COVID-19 restrictions.
Not there, folks.
Is what you call
putting them on notice.
He says he's doing this
on behalf of someone named Romana,
who he says is the new commander-in-chief of Canada.
He's referring to Romana Didalo,
a middle-aged woman in British Columbia
who's become an unlikely influencer
in the QAnon conspiracy world
and who's escalating violent rhetoric
has now put her on the radar of the RCMP
and led to the arrest of
one of her alleged followers. Today, Vice News' Mac Lamoureux is here to explain the disturbing
latest twist in the QAnon conspiracy world right here at home.
Hey, Mac.
Hey there. Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for being here today and taking us through this.
I'm wondering if you could bring me back to the sort of origins of this figure.
You follow this world very closely.
When did she first come on your radar?
She came on my radar around spring of this year. And kind of prior to that, she had started this kind of go nowhere, had no follower political party she called Canada First.
But in early 2021, she declared herself the Queen of Canada and started going
in more of this rhetoric that we're familiar with today of what
she's kind of spreading. And that also kind of didn't go anywhere. But when some pretty big
players within the QAnon movement, quote unquote, confirmed her and kind of started sharing her
videos around, followers went to her and drove. She went from maybe having like 13 to 15 followers
to all of a sudden having over 20,000.
And that's when I kind of started paying attention to her is when her profile exploded in the spring of this year.
Hello, Canada. I'm Romana Didolo.
I'm the founder and leader of Canada First.
I'm the founder and leader of Canada First.
As of February this year, 2021,
I am the head of state and commander-in-chief of Canada, the Republic.
In case you're wondering...
We know that she's claiming to be the Queen of Canada.
What is her role in this QAnon conspiracy universe?
Yeah, so the QAnon movement revolves around this idea that there's like this secret army that's fighting alongside Donald Trump, going to war against like this evil deep state that's made up
of this sort of pedophilic cabal of politicians, journalists, celebrities, kind of the elite. And it was all
kind of centered around these posts made by the titular Q, who would kind of post cryptic messages
on online forums. And so she's inserted herself directly into this mythos as this figure who was
put into power by the White Hats, which is the army that's fighting alongside Donald Trump.
And she was put into power to lead Canada into the future.
So whereas other kind of influencers are kind of analyzing the posts of Q
and kind of being more analytical,
she's kind of positioning herself as this kind of mythological figure
where it's been over a year since Q was posted
and it's left quite a bit of a vacuum
and it's allowing people like her to set up within there.
Wow. So if she's the queen, the commander in chief, who is the actual queen? Like where are our actual political leaders here? Oh, they're all dead. They've all been arrested and executed long time ago within this conspiracy. Know this.
Inside the Republic,
the penalty for crimes against humanity,
treason,
economic sabotage,
and bioterrorism is death.
She's even posted several times
and made videos several times about how the queen
has been executed. This is what they actually believe, that the queen of England has been
executed. Yeah, a center part of this entire kind of conspiracy is these mass executions that are
taking place behind the scenes. And it holds true throughout the entire kind of QAnon ecosystem, is that what
you're seeing isn't actually what's happening. In some cases, doubles have been put in place,
or that they just kind of disappear. So like, the interesting thing about this movement is that it
is kind of a big tent conspiracy movement. So there's a lot of people within it that kind of
have different beliefs, but a lot of it kind of comes back to this center of violence.
Wow. And I want to get to that in a bit because that's, I think, the more disturbing element of this story.
But what do we know about who she is in the real world?
So honestly, we don't know all that much.
I've tried to speak to people who seemingly knew her before she kind of took on this new role.
But at this point, I've been unsuccessful.
before she kind of took on this new role.
But at this point, I've been unsuccessful.
So what we know is that she's a middle-aged woman of Filipino descent living in Victoria.
She says she came over here very young with her uncle
after her parents died.
Tracking her online history,
we can see that she's kind of, for a little while,
positioned herself as kind of a business expert
that could help you kind of succeed in the business world.
But that went nowhere. And on top of that, she kind of formed all these corporations,
but also they all went nowhere. But other than that, we don't know very much about her,
to be completely honest.
I want to talk about her following.
You mentioned her following exploded this year. Just how big is her following at this point?
Yeah, so from this year, she went from someone who no one really knew anything about
to having over 70,000 followers on Telegram now.
And how many of those are journalists or trolls or people that are just there to kind of watch and to lurk is unknown.
But what I can say is that within that number, a good portion of it are true believers, certainly within the thousands, mostly in Canada, but across the world.
And they love their queen.
And Telegram, it's basically, I was seeing people on Instagram saying they'd been kicked
off or they'd been booted off Instagram and Twitter.
And so people have gone to this platform called Telegram, which I originally thought was just
sort of like WhatsApp in a way.
But what is it kind of like a Twitter?
Like you can have followers. What is it? What are people posting on it in the same way as they would on
Twitter? Or is it more like WhatsApp? Yeah, it'd be more like giant WhatsApp groups. So yeah,
it's a social media platform kind of just known for its very lax moderation rules. And so when
you kind of get into like harder regimes, like say like China or places where being a political dissident is actually very important, this is a great tool.
But within kind of Western society, it's been primarily known for being used by kind of extremists and people that are been booted off more traditional social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
Do you have a sense of who her followers are?
That's a really hard one because kind of with any movement, they kind of come in all shapes
and sizes. But just this week, she held her first ever live stream where her followers
could interact with her, which was very interesting to watch. I watched the entire thing
and let my brain melt a little bit.
So within that group, a lot of them are kind of older people, many of whom seem desperate,
but there's also some younger people. There was a younger woman in there that was kind of telling her she was going through a medical episode where she was losing her teeth and was begging Queen
Romana to help heal her teeth. And that's one thing that's kind of constant within this group is Queen Romana is offering kind of healing abilities. And these people are coming
to her with asks. But a lot of these people kind of seem to be some of the people you would see in
kind of like homeopathy stores buying crystals, but you don't really want to paint the community
with one brush. It's really hard to wrap my head around anyways as to how these happen. I mean, you've written that the members run the gamut from electricians to
real estate agents to outdoor guides. Yeah, it's kind of, as I said, it kind of runs the gamut.
And there are real estate agents, there are kind of blue collar people. There's going to be,
I remember there was one I found that works in
art curation in Quebec. And it's all over the place. And a lot of it is people that have kind
of been opposing kind of pandemic regulations and kind of have fallen just so far down the
rabbit hole of this narrative. And this is just kind of a continuation of that.
Yeah. And I mean, I want to talk about like how her followers are really
loyal to her. I understand that it's hard to tell who's taking what she says seriously versus who
sees it as just, you know, I guess a form of entertainment. But I guess there are some people
who are willing to act on her behalf. We heard a bit of that in the intro. So before this latest escalation,
which we're going to get to in a minute,
what had we seen her followers do on her behalf?
Yeah, so one of the really concerning things about Romana
is that she's been able to mobilize
her rather large audience offline.
Her audience is not passive. They are very active,
as you heard in the video, as you just mentioned. I just wonder if this detachment's been served
the cease and desist order? Yeah, anything related to the authority of COVID?
So like kind of their first really big, I guess you could call it group project,
was to file these kind of cease and
desist orders that demanded in the name of Queen Romana that businesses, institutions,
what have you, stop enacting any sort of pandemic regulations.
So you're not going to let me purchase this without a mask on?
Okay, really? They told you gals politely.
They told you politely.
It is the policy.
So you've been served.
You've got seven days.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
Okay, what I'm here, I'm going to the police station right now.
Right now, and I'm going to arrange a holding cell for all of you.
Okay?
I'm going to leave this with you.
You're being served
a cease and desist order these what you're administering are war crimes um and so they
formed into regional groups where they could better organize and then they kind of went hard
uh they started sending out these cease and desist orders on the hundreds they started keeping spreadsheets on where they were
going and delivering it uh by hand in one case uh in alberta a group of her followers actually
got kicked out of a high school for going into the high school and handing it out in there
thousands of letters were sent and all of them were essentially saying, stop on behalf of our new queen or else. And I really want to
get the point across that this was a large campaign. A ton of these letters got sent out.
So these are people that aren't just sitting at home and watching Telegram or watching YouTube
videos and just kind of sitting on the couch. These are people willing to get up off their
seat and do something for their queen. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.
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to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I suppose this is all especially
concerning because her calls to action have recently escalated. How have her calls to action
escalated? As I said earlier, kind of violence and kind of these mass executions have been at the center of kind of her following.
But they have always been kind of behind the scenes, something celebrated but not really spoken about directly.
But recently in the last two weeks, Romana has really escalated her rhetoric.
It's a tad bit confusing, so bear with me.
But so essentially about two weeks ago, she issued an order to her soldiers in, quote, unquote, her kingdom of Canada's military,
demanding that these kind of white hats, but also her followers who consider themselves soldiers within this group,
which are a subsect, to go and commit mass arrests of the people that
they consider in opposition. But within this post, she also said, and I'm going to quote directly
here, shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject children under the age of 19 years old with
Corona-19 vaccines slash bioweapons or any other vaccines, which is a pretty extreme thing to say to your audience.
It was so extreme it actually got kicked off Telegram, which we were talking about is
incredibly lax for its rules. The post has said now says this post has been removed because it's
issued a call to violence. And at the same time, she started organizing these groups called
Duck Hunters, which were essentially her followers
who wanted to get their hands dirty alongside these white hats and following her order.
They created private chats for themselves through kind of Romana sharing these links.
And I got inside some of these. And within these chats, they were sharing addresses where places
were facilitating vaccines for kids. And these things, you calling them duck
hunters, the Queen of Canada, they do seem very goofy on a surface level, but they're goofy until
they're not. They're goofy until someone gets hurt. And I think we're nearing that precipice.
I understand someone even posted a picture of their guns. Is that right?
Yeah, somebody posted pictures of kind of their
hunting weapons. It was a few rifles, one shotgun and said, I'm ready to go hunting. Let's do this.
And a lot of other people were being offering their homes to let the American duck hunters,
which would have been the white hats coming up to stay with them, or celebrating that they were
going to get this training to go out and do this.
And like a lot of them were and still are ready to kind of take part in this.
That's all super alarming to hear. And I would have to imagine this is on the radar of law enforcement at this point.
What do we know about their response to Romana's post so far?
Yeah, so the weekend after she made this post, so about a week ago, the last weekend of November,
BC RCMP executed a search warrant on Romana.
That I do know.
I tried to get my hands on the search warrant, but the records are actually sealed right now.
She made a live stream where she kind of discussed what happened to her followers.
So we're going to have to actually take her word on this because RCMP won't talk to me.
But she said that she had her electronics seized and that she was taken to a nearby psychiatric hospital for evaluation.
And then she was taken to a nearby psychiatric hospital for evaluation. And then
she was released. And she told her followers this in a very long and meandering kind of live stream
on Telegram. And what have experts told you about this response? One expert I spoke to who has been
in this extremist space for years and years said that he's never ever heard of this kind of response
to somebody kind of issuing this kind of response to somebody kind of issuing
this kind of decree to somebody kind of doing something that could relate to domestic terror.
And I think it also points to the fact that this is an incredibly new and bizarre kind of thing for
law enforcement to deal with. And I think they're still trying to get their heads around it. They're
still trying to figure out what's the best way to handle this. And that wasn't the only response from law enforcement. I understand one of
her alleged followers was also arrested in the last few days? Yeah, so earlier this week,
one of Queen Romana's followers was arrested in Laval, Quebec. He's a 42-year-old man who was active within the Duck Hunters chat. In there, I saw
that he had posted details of his daughter's school who were offering vaccinations for the
people who go there, the students. And at the end of this kind of long post detailing the address
and what times the vaccinations were happening, he wrote, time to hunt, bang, bang.
And we know he's been arrested by Laval police, but we don't know if he's been charged.
And one of the kind of really unique things in this is that in the press release that Laval
police put out, they said directly, explicitly, that they learned about this post from a CBC
article outlining it. And that kind of just shows the lack of understanding
and just kind of a step behind, I would say,
most law enforcement, especially local law enforcement is.
And you have to be incredibly nimble
to deal with these kind of things
because they are so fast moving and so bizarre.
And a lot of our Canadian institutions
and a lot of the institutions to the south of us
are a lot of things, but nimble is not one of them.
And I understand her rhetoric. It's changed now a bit, right?
Yeah. So the rhetoric around the violence, she's walking it back incredibly hard.
The response by the RCMP and the response by Laval police against one of her followers may have shown her that this is very real.
may have shown her that this is very real.
But also she's not stopping and she's not kind of pulling back
in regards to increasing her following.
So she's been going more so on the direction
of offering kind of healing for her followers
rather than kind of promising
that they can take part in violence.
But again, it's so fluid and it happens so quickly
that you don't even know what's going to happen day to day. But again, this is it's so fluid, and it happens so quickly that you don't
even know what's going to happen day to day. But it's changed quite a bit. And this whole thing,
as I mentioned earlier, is mutating. So it's going to be interesting to see where this ends up.
Hopefully, it doesn't end in tragedy. I mean, this all just sounds so strange. And it also
almost sounds, I know this is controversial to say,
but it sounds like a cult.
I would be in full agreement with that. I consider a lot of stuff to do with QAnon to be very, very cult-like.
We're seeing something actually happen down in Dallas right now
surrounding this kind of cult that believes JFK is going to be coming back.
JFK is alive. You'll find out.
JFK is alive. He's alive. He's a president.
So is Junior.
And people are actually leaving their homes and going to follow this guy who goes by the name Negative 48.
And they're kind of going and living with him in Dallas,
and they're talking about kind of setting up maybe some sort of a commune
down there.
And some journalists,
I know my colleague,
David Gilbert has been following along very closely and they just recently
held like a big talk where they discussed having to escape.
I think the mortal coils through real death to kind of further their journey,
which is incredibly alarming.
Do we have to experience that physical death?
Let go of where you go and come out on the other side,
burn everything that is in front of us,
burn all the lies away and all this love, just the truth.
Yeah, all of this sounds really hard to grapple with.
You know, in one moment it sounds so absurd, so ridiculous.
Then the next it sounds, you know, actually deeply disturbing
and violent. And then also really sad to think of all the people who are susceptible to believing
in this. It's really sad. When you kind of dig down deep into it, and you kind of see these
followers in real life, see them speaking to her, and some of them are crying. And it's really heartbreaking. These people aren't here for a laugh.
They're not here for a joke.
They truly believe this.
And it's sad.
And I hope we can help them.
I don't like to think these are people that we are going to write off.
I hope we can figure out a way to, you know, bring them back down to earth
and carry on a normal life.
This is such a, like such a wild story, you know, for anybody to listen to, to go down these rabbit holes.
I'm wondering if you could just explain, though, why you report on fringe conspiracy figures like this.
Why do you think it's important that we talk about them?
And what questions do you grapple with when you're talking about them in this way? I think it's really important to kind of report on this
because it is something that's kind of unfolding in real time
and has taken a lot of people's loved ones away from them.
We've seen violence does come from this kind of fringe activity
and these fringe conspiracies.
We know that kind of the QAnon movement
has millions of followers across the world.
And on another sense, we know that, as we spoke earlier, law enforcement is having a very hard time dealing with them.
So I think it's important that we have reporters who kind of understand this to kind of fill that hole.
But I also think this is something that you shouldn't report on willy-nilly.
also think this is something that you shouldn't report on willy-nilly um because when you do report on these groups you know you're gonna drive people towards them um it's we work very hard to
only report on things that have either reached a precipice of real world activity like we saw with
the cease and desist letters or something something that we feel could be a danger,
like this call to violence. But I think this is something that you need to be very cognizant of.
And it's hard, but worth it, I guess I would say.
Mack, thank you so much for this today and for all your reporting on this
very bizarre and disturbing story.
Yeah, thanks for having me on and letting me kind of rant about it. I really appreciate it.
Before we go today, an update on last week's story out of High River, Alberta,
where employees at the Cargill Beef Process processing plant have narrowly averted a possible strike and lockout.
On Saturday, workers there voted in favour of a new contract, which includes provisions to ensure worker health and safety benefits and new rights for sick employees.
and new rights for sick employees.
This comes in the aftermath of a massive COVID-19 outbreak at the plant in spring 2020 that left hundreds sick and three dead.
The union representing workers at the plant called the contract vote
a bittersweet victory and said reforms of the meatpacking industry are still needed.
That's all for today.
And if you like this episode, please rate and
review the show wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Angela Starrett, in for Jamie Poisson.
Thanks for listening to Frontrunner.