Vancouver Information and Newspaper

Archive for January, 2010

JACMEL, Haiti – Canada’s Disaster Assistance Response Team is putting a new tool in the field in earthquake shattered Haiti.

The DART will send out a mobile medical team today for the first time in Haiti.

The team will spend the day in an area about 15 kilometres from the village of Leogane.

In an email, Canadian Forces Major Bernard Dionne says the area has been assessed as one where many Haitians suffered earthquake-related injuries.

The mobile medical teams consist of nearly a dozen medical personnel, plus a few soldiers to offer protection and Dionne says they can treat 100 people a day.

He says the military plans to send one team out each day, and will use helicopters to get them into areas where no road access is available.

Dionne says the concept was used successfully in Pakistan after that country was hard-hit by an earthquake in 2005.

Personnel from the teams are drawn from DART’s medical clinic.

OTTAWA – Another group of adoptees from earthquake ravaged Haiti arrived in Canada Saturday, greeted by frigid Canadian temperatures.

An Air Canada Airbus carried almost 60 adoptees. They were taken off the plane bundled in blankets to their new parents who were pressed against the glass of the Ottawa airport terminal, straining to gain a look.

One Alberta couple, Chris and Adyne Bell, told reporters that they waited in Ottawa for more than a week for their adopted daughters to arrive.

But the couple were excited at the sight of their adopted children.

“So amazed, it’s just overwhelming, just so happy, happy to see them,” said Aldyne Bell.

The federal government said the children ranged in age from three months to 17 years, with almost half under the age of two.

In the wake of this month’s massive earthquake, the federal government fast-tracked adoptions for 217 children approved by Haitian officials.

The first group of 28 arrived in Ottawa last weekend and a second group of 52 arrived Wednesday.

GRIMSBY, Ont. – A close-knit southern Ontario community mourned Saturday in coffee shops and hockey arenas as word spread that two members of the town lost their lives in a skiing accident in British Columbia.

“They’re pretty much in shock. I think the reality of it has begun to sink in and now we’re just trying to cope with it, trying to understand,” said a stunned Ken Watson, manager of the Grimsby Minor Hockey Association, as he described how the deaths of Steve Babb, 47, and Sam Vogl, 17, have rocked the small town.

Babb, his son Colin, 16, and the teen’s friend, Vogl took to the slopes Thursday afternoon at Revelstoke Mountain Resort in B.C.’s interior when they decided to go off the groomed path.

They skied to the base of a steep, icy incline, and tried to walk up it, but instead fell, sliding 100 metres before going over a cliff.

RCMP said Colin was the only survivor, but he suffered a broken ankle during the fall.

The frightened teenager managed to make a call from a cellphone he had with him.

“He was calm enough to make the appropriate calls and stay on the line to our communications centre people, but he’s also a 16-year-old boy that just went through a devastating, scary event,” said RCMP Staff Sgt. Jacquie Olsen, as she described the teen’s composure during the harrowing incident.

While family members were in B.C. Saturday dealing with the devastating loss and waiting for Colin to have surgery, Watson said friends back home were talking, as they tried to make sense of what happened.

“People are just sort of congregating,” said Watson. The hockey arena in this quiet town near St. Catharines, where Colin Babb and Vogl grew up playing the game, was full of people sharing stories.

Watson said Vogl was a popular leader in his peer group, and worked on the student council at Grimsby District Secondary School.

Facebook tributes poured out for Babb and Vogl, as thousands of members wrote their condolences on the page and others posted photos of a smiling Vogl dressed up in costume.

“He was the kind of friend that never let you down, who was always there for you, and whenever you weren’t doing so good he would make you smile,” Santoy Mckenly wrote in an email about his friend, Vogl.

Mckenly said Vogl was one of the first to make him feel welcome when he started at the school.

“Sam Vogl was the guy who instantly made friends with me, from then on we became best friends. When I was told about the accident it absolutely broke my heart,” Mckenly said. “Just thinking of it makes me cry.”

Alannah Morton-Reeve, who also went to school with Vogl, said the teen had a great sense of humour.

“There was one thing that everyone new about him and that is that he was always a happy guy and had the biggest smile. He would light up the faces of everyone around him and he was always so positive,” Morton-Reeve wrote in an email, as she remembered how Vogl lifted school spirits by dressing up as Santa Claus one day.

“He just gave everyone a good laugh. He was really one of the funniest guys you could meet.”

Watson said Babb was a pilot. He said Babb loved playing hockey in the old-timer league and helped to coach a high school team.

“He was a good man, said Watson. “He was very supportive, very athletic, very involved in things.”

RCMP said the coroner has ordered an autopsy and it’s unclear when the bodies of Vogl and Babb will be brought home.

-By Ciara Byrne in Toronto

MONTREAL – By all accounts, Haitian earthquake victims Georges and Mireille Anglade were polar opposites. He had a flamboyant personality while hers was quiet and unassuming.

At funeral services for the couple Saturday, both were remembered for their intellect, strength and dedication to helping others.

The Haitian-Canadian couple were killed in the quake that devastated the impoverished country Jan. 12, leaving over 150,000 dead and many more injured and homeless.

Hundreds of friends, family and colleagues bid goodbye to the husband and wife who spent much of their lives fighting for dignity and democracy in Haiti.

Two large photos of the couple were placed on either side of the altar at Montreal’s Notre Dame Basilica. One, in black-and-white, showed them in their youth, Georges with his arm draped around Mireille’s shoulders as she gazed shyly at the camera. In the other, they stood together, much older now, his dark blue suit offset with a red pocket square, she at his side in a white dress.

“Papa made us think big,” his daughter Dominique told the congregation, recalling her father’s encouragement when his children expressed and defended their opinions, something he taught them through his own actions.

Georges had been a political prisoner under the Duvalier regime, helped lead Haiti’s democracy movement, served as public works minister in the Aristide government, wrote several books, and was an adviser to current president Rene Preval.

Pascale, the couple’s second daughter, said their parents also taught them the importance of strong relationships.

“My parents had opposite personalities but made a perfect couple,” she said.

Mireille was an economist who worked with the United Nations in Haiti and was actively involved in women’s rights.

She was “the hyphen” who held the family together, Pascale said.

Colleagues also remembered Mireille as someone who united people – French and English, Haitians and Canadians.

“She was unique and unassuming,” said Quebec Court Justice Juanita Westmoreland-Traore, a close family friend.

“You would look at her and enjoy being in her presence. I called her effervescent.”

Claude Corbo, the rector of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, said Georges’ death will resound in both Canada and Haiti.

“It was a major loss, especially for his home country,” he said. “The knowledge of Haiti he gained over the years in his scientific work would have been an important tool in the rebuilding of the country.”

Georges helped found the Montreal university in 1969, where he continued to teach geography between trips to Haiti.

Georges’ cousin Frantz Voltaire said the couple’s work and writings will live on to help rebuild the devastated country.

“They are people who made a mark,” he said.

The Anglade family is also mourning the loss of their cousin and uncle in the disaster, along with countless others.

“This tragedy took four people from us,” Dominique said. “But there were 150,000 people taken in the earthquake – 150,000 other tragedies.”

Former Liberal MP Serge Marcil was also laid to rest in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, Que., on Saturday.

The church was packed with over 1200 mourners, including many his former political colleagues. Among them were federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, his predecessor Stephane Dion and former Quebec premier Daniel Johnson.

Marcil was briefly a provincial labour minister in Johnson’s cabinet in the 90s.

“The scope of the tragedy in Haiti is tenfold the scope of the pain and sadness we all feel when you know people who disappeared in those moments,” Johnson told the media before the ceremony.

“I’m trying, with my presence here, to lessen the pain his family is feeling.”

Journalist Daniel Grenier from the Journal Saint-Francois – one of the local papers – said the whole community came to pay homage to Marcil, the man he called “the region’s son.”

“He did a lot for Valleyfield since he went into politics,” he said.

“He was a great humanists, a positive man who was always ready with a smile and a kind word. He was a man of the people. It was practically a state funeral.”

Marcil’s body was recovered last week in the rubble of the Hotel Montana in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

Two other victims of the earthquake in Haiti were mourned Saturday in Quebec. A funeral was held for UN worker Alexandra Duguay in Quebec City and a memorial mass took place for humanitarian worker Camil Perron in St-Felicien.

As of Saturday, Foreign Affairs said a total of 26 Canadians were confirmed dead as a result of the quake.

CALGARY – Environmentalists and opposition politicians are dismissing the Conservative government’s latest pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with one group predicting they’ll actually increase under a new agreement hammered out last year.

The federal government formally notified the United Nations that Canada will cut its carbon emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels over the next 10 years as part of the Copenhagen Accord on climate change, Environment Minister Jim Prentice said Saturday.

But a spokesman for Greenpeace says these targets will actually increase emissions, not lower them.

The Canadian targets are similar to those of the United States, something the federal government planned all along, Prentice said.

“Throughout the Copenhagen negotiations we maintained that our clear policy was to support the outcome of Copenhagen and also to align our clean energy and climate change policies with those of the Obama administration,” he said.

Although reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent will be challenging, Prentice said he believes it is attainable. He didn’t offer any specifics about which actions would be taken to achieve those cuts.

“We’ll deal specifically with the oilsands, we’ll deal specifically with all sources of emissions but today the objective of this announcement is to fulfil our obligations under the accord,” he said. “We know we can achieve that target, we’re prepared to stand behind it and other countries will now have to do the same.”

While the government’s previous emission targets, announced in 2006, would have resulted in a three per cent reduction in emissions over 1990 levels, these latest targets will actually increase emissions by 2.5 per cent, said Dave Martin, a climate and energy co-ordinator with Greenpeace.

“We’re heading in exactly the opposite direction that we need to head,” Martin said. “Not only have they reneged on the target that they adopted a couple of years ago, they have also failed to put in place the regulations that they promised last year.”

He said the lack of details on how to achieve those emission cuts is indicative of the real problem the Conservative government has with the climate change issue.

“I think they’re really beholden to the oil and gas industry in Alberta and they don’t want to address how to make serious reductions to protect the planet and the environment,” Martin said.

Countries who attended the climate change conference in Copenhagen were supposed to outline their own emission-reduction targets before the UN’s final deadline of Jan. 31. The accord, which isn’t legally binding, offers money to developing nations to help them fight global warming but doesn’t set new greenhouse gas reduction targets. Instead, countries are to set their own targets, without mandatory limits.

David McGuinty, the Liberal environment and energy critic, accused the federal government of abdicating its sovereignty on a climate change plan for Canada by aligning its emission targets and policies with those of the United States. He also said Canada is taking a huge risk by waiting to see what kind of climate change legislation the U.S. will come up with, once it has worked it way through Congress.

Canada and the U.S. are already working on harmonizing their approaches on greenhouse gas emissions for passenger vehicles, air and marine transport and heavy vehicles, Prentice said.

“Everything that we hear from the minister and the prime minister is that we’re are now effectively taking our marching orders from America’s Capitol Hill,” McGuinty said.

Canada should be developing its own legislation instead of waiting to see what the U.S. does, McGuinty said.

“The risk we’ve now put ourselves in is that we are to take a policy designed for the United States and wait to see whether it is for our benefit. The chances are, I can guarantee you in fact, that it won’t be for our benefit.”

Prentice said he is focusing his efforts over the next year on helping to negotiate a binding agreement with all carbon emitters, including China and the U.S.

But he cautioned that the process may take a while, noting it took years to translate the Kyoto Accord into binding treaties.

Prentice pointed out the major emitters such as China, Brazil, India and the United States didn’t have obligations to cut emissions under the Kyoto Accord. He hopes this time it’s different, and that there will soon be news of emission cuts from countries that haven’t yet announced their own targets.



Prentice refused to speculate on the consequences if some of the developing nations decide not to indicate their willingness to cut greenhouse gases by the Jan. 31 deadline.

“We will wait and see how that unfolds. The United States filed their target yesterday. We filed our target today, said Prentice.

-With files from Lisa Arrowsmith in Edmonton

BELLEVILLE, Ont. – Friends and family of a 27-year-old Belleville woman who has been missing since Thursday are appealing to the public for help in what they call a “suspicious” disappearance.

Police say Jessica Elizabeth Lloyd was last heard from at 10:30 p.m. on Thursday night after sending a text message, and never showed up for work the next day.

Terra Dafoe, a friend of the missing woman, says it’s out of character for the young woman to ignore calls from family and friends.

Almost 2, 000 members have joined a Facebook group dedicated to finding Lloyd.