Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s three-day visit to Canada marking one year until the 2025 Invictus Games will garner them some “positive publicity” and provide fans with a rare opportunity to see the duchess at a series of public events, a new episode of Newsweek‘s The Royal Report podcast has heard.
The duke and duchess will visit Canada from February 14 to 16, attending events connected with the games, which provide a global platform for wounded, sick and injured veterans to showcase their mental and physical rehabilitation.
The 2025 games will take place in Vancouver and Whistler from February 6 to 17 and will be the first to include winter sports among its roster of adaptive events.
Harry and Meghan’s visit to the country comes as they have recently undergone a rebrand. Their personal website was overhauled on February 12, transforming from archewell.com to sussex.com with the new brand line “The Office of Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex.”
Chris Jackson/Getty Images for the Invictus Games Foundation/ KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images
While the couple’s popularity has been slow to recover from the slump that followed Harry’s memoir release in January 2023, the series of joint appearances at the Canadian Invictus events will likely add to their recent gains, chief royal correspondent Jack Royston has told Royal Report listeners.
“This is something they do for the Invictus Games every year. They have a kind of ‘get everyone excited’ PR photocall one year before the main event where Harry and Megan go to the host nation and they pose for some pictures and they meet some important people and they just basically whet everybody’s appetite for the games,” he said of the Canada visit.
“We’re expecting to see both Harry and Meghan, so that’s good news for fans of the Duchess of Sussex,” he added, noting that nowadays she is “probably the less frequently seen” of the royal pair, only rarely making appearances at awards shows or Hollywood industry events.
“These big set piece events do usually give them some good positive publicity, which is what they’ve been really needing recently,” he said.
“They are much more popular now than they were at the start of 2023 when they had that big post-Spare, post-memoir implosion. So expect some really fantastic pictures of them. It’s good news for royal fashion fans too because we’d like to see some great outfits on Meghan.”
The couple have strong ties to both the Invictus Games and Canada, making their visit for the one-year waypoint events all the more poignant.
Harry co-founded the games in 2014, hosting the first tournament in London, which was attended by his father, King Charles and Queen Camilla (when Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall) and his brother and sister-in-law, Prince William and Kate Middleton.
After meeting in the summer of 2016, much of Meghan and Harry’s early relationship was spent in Canada where the future duchess was living in Toronto while filming the hit TV show Suits.
When the 2017 Invictus Games were held in Toronto, the couple used the opportunity to mark their relationship by attending their first official event together.
In addition to these links, Canada was also the country the couple first made their home after splitting from the monarchy. Subsequently they moved to California, where they live today with their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.
James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek‘s royal reporter, based in London. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
Do you have a question about King Charles III, William and Kate, Meghan and Harry, or their family that you would like our experienced royal correspondents to answer? Email [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.