A Toronto teacher who led a school canoe trip during which a teenage student drowned told his trial Monday that he didn’t follow certain safety guidelines established for such trips because they didn’t reflect industry standards and would have prevented some kids from participating.
Nicholas Mills testified that the guidelines for overnight canoe trips set by the Ontario Physical and Health Education Association don’t align with standards and practices used in commercial excursions, private trips and outings organized by Scouts Canada, adding some are “not practical” or “not necessary.”
The rules requiring that students pass a swimming test beforehand without wearing a lifejacket, and that all lifeguards on the trip be over 18 years old, are among those Mills said he didn’t follow for the annual trip, which ran from 2013 until the fatal outing in 2017.
“I knew that you could run safe canoe trips without following all the OPHEA rules, and I don’t even know the number of people who do (follow those rules) every single summer,” he told his trial Monday.
“And it was a really great experience for the kids” to go on the multi-day excursion, he said.
Even so, the rules he did put in place for the school trips were “way above normal standards in the canoeing industry across the country,” Mills said.
Mills, a teacher at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute, organized and oversaw the July 2017 trip to Algonquin Provincial Park during which 15-year-old Jeremiah Perry drowned. He has pleaded not guilty to criminal negligence causing death.
Prosecutors allege the teacher neglected safety rules and requirements related to the multi-day excursion.
Mills said Monday he saw the OPHEA guidelines as just a “framework that you use with your own personal skills,” but acknowledged that if he wrote on his paperwork that they weren’t being met, “the superintendent or someone above me… would not let the trips happen.”
He insisted, however, the school’s principal at the time, Monday Gala, knew students were being allowed to undergo the swimming test with a lifejacket — something Gala denied when he testified earlier in the trial.
The teacher said the pair discussed the issue clearly in the early years of the trip, and noted Gala had seen students take the test in the school’s pool before the process was moved to Sparrow Lake in 2015.
The principal knew “we were modifying the test, just like we were modifying so much else,” Mills said.
He compared allowing lifejackets during the test to giving students with learning disabilities more time to take an exam, saying both measures allowed more students to participate.
Students who did the assessment with a lifejacket would have to wear one to swim during the trip as well, the teacher testified. Everyone had to wear them while in a canoe, he said.
A student who was also on the trip previously testified he never saw Perry without a life jacket on the trip, but said the teen appeared to be a bad swimmer.
Adrian Coufadis told the court earlier this month that he teased Perry about his poor swimming skills after seeing the younger boy struggling to reach their canoe on the first day of the trip.
But Coufadis said he didn’t think at the time to tell Mills about his observation.
The trial is proceeding in person and by videoconference.
WASHINGTON — It took just two weeks for the first Indigenous cabinet member in American history to publicly express her deep personal dismay at the grim residential school revelations emanating from north of the border.
It was only another 11 days before Deb Haaland, one of the first Native Americans ever elected to Congress and President Joe Biden’s newly appointed secretary of the interior, took matters into her own hands.
“The department shall undertake an investigation of the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of residential Indian boarding schools,” Haaland wrote in a memo last week.
“Only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future we are all proud to embrace.”
In geopolitical terms, the time between Haaland’s June 22 memo and May 27 — the day a B.C. First Nation announced the grim discovery of the remains of 215 children at a former residential school — was the blink of an eye.
Rarely do developments on Canadian soil prompt such rapid, dramatic policy decisions in the U.S., a telling measure of magnitude for what Haaland’s investigation may uncover in a country where Indigenous issues are seldom considered front-page news.
“There is a reckoning happening,” said Chase Iron Eyes, a prominent U.S. Indigenous activist and lead counsel for the North Dakota-based Lakota People’s Law Project.
“They don’t teach this in schools — not in Canadian schools, not in American schools — that there are mass graves of children at church-run, government-sponsored residential schools and boarding schools.
“And now we’re no longer able to hide from those truths.”
Haaland’s own heritage doubtless helped move things along.
“My great-grandfather was taken to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania,” Haaland wrote in a moving column in the Washington Post this month that opened with the news out of Canada.
“Its founder coined the phrase, ‘Kill the Indian, and save the man,’ which genuinely reflects the influences that framed these policies at the time.”
It’s a chilling echo of words frequently attributed to Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald — “take the Indian out of the child” — in his 19th-century defence of Canada’s residential school system.
The similarities between the systems that existed in Canada and the U.S. likely don’t stop there.
“I think the scale, in terms of sheer numbers, is fairly comparable,” said Circe Sturm, an anthropology professor and Indigenous issues specialist at the University of Texas at Austin.
By the turn of the century, after the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs had taken over Indigenous schooling from the Christian missionaries who started the effort, the department was operating 147-day schools and 81 boarding schools on U.S. reservations, and another 25 boarding schools off-reserve, Sturm said.
In Canada, an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children are believed to have attended one of about 150 residential schools that operated between the 1880s and when the last one closed in 1996.
Haaland’s “Indian Boarding School Initiative” will seek to identify all of the schools that were part of the program, with a particular emphasis on “any records relating to cemeteries or potential burial sites? which may later be used to assist in locating unidentified human remains.”
The department will also liaise with Indigenous communities across the U.S., including in Alaska and Hawaii, on how best to handle any such remains, with plans for a final report by April of next year.
“Many who survived the ordeal returned home changed in unimaginable ways, and their experiences still resonate across the generations,” Haaland wrote.
“The work outlined will shed light on the scope of that impact.”
The potential scale of the situation in Canada took a dramatic turn Thursday when the Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of what are believed to be 751 unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School on southern Saskatchewan.
That news generated uncommon media interest Friday in the U.S., where the Post played it on the front page and the New York Times devoted a full inside page to coverage of the discovery, as well as Haaland’s announcement.
Sturm demurred when asked whether she expects broad change in U.S. attitudes toward Indigenous Peoples on a scale comparable to last year’s social upheaval in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
“I suspect that many Americans will struggle with the hard truth about the founding of this country _ some by choosing to ignore it, others with guilt and anger,” she said.
“But because we are talking about the senseless death of children, there is a good chance that a significant number of Americans would be moved enough to insist on action.”
If such discoveries are what it takes to finally end public complacency about the plight of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, so be it, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested Friday.
The federal government intends to help with “the healing and the fixing of the generations of trauma that Canadians have all too often turned an eye from, all too often shrugged away from,” Trudeau said.
“And if it took discovering these graves for Canadians to wake up to how much we need to continue to do, then that perhaps gives us a starting point to continue to do even more.”’
Indigenous leaders in Canada have been pressing Trudeau to secure an apology, on Canadian soil, from Pope Francis himself for the role the Catholic Church played in operating residential schools.
Those demands _ which Trudeau repeated again Friday — have so far gone unheeded. But they may carry more weight if, in the fullness of time, Biden is in a position to join the call.
“I think Trudeau and Biden together is a stronger force than either of them alone. I do believe that,” Iron Eyes said.
“We need those calls to come from within the Christian community, because those ‘ideals’ upon which these countries were founded were very much informed by Christian and Western theology and world views.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 27, 2021.
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP) — The death toll from the collapse of a Florida beachfront condo building has risen to nine as search-and-rescue efforts continue, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Sunday.
One person died in the hospital, and workers pulled four more bodies from the wreckage, the mayor said.
Scores of rescue workers remained on the massive pile of rubble, working to find survivors among the more than 150 people who remain unaccounted for. Four of the dead have been identified and next of kin notified, the mayor said.
Four days after Thursday’s collapse, more than 150 people remain unaccounted for in Surfside, and authorities and loved ones fear the toll will go much higher.
As rotating teams of rescuers used heavy machinery and power tools to clear the rubble from the top and tunnel in from below, the Noriega family hoped that their 92-year-old matriarch, Hilda Noriega, had somehow survived.
When Mike Noriega heard that part of the condominium tower where his grandmother lived had collapsed, he rushed with his father to the scene. They arrived at a nightmarish 30-foot pile of broken concrete and mangled metal, the remains of the 12-story building known as Champlain Towers South.
But among the flying debris, they stumbled across mementos that bore witness to Hilda’s life on the sixth floor: an old picture of her with her late husband and their infant son, and a birthday card that friends from her prayer group sent two weeks earlier with the acronym “ESM,” Spanish for “hand-delivered,” scrawled across the yellow envelope with a butterfly etching.
“There was a message in the mess of all this,” said Mike Noriega, who last spoke with his grandmother the day before the disaster. “It means not to give up hope. To have faith.”
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett sought to assure families Sunday that rescuers were working nonstop. “Nothing else on our mind, with the only objective of pulling their family members out of that rubble,” he told ABC’s “This Week.”
“We’re not going to stop doing that — not today, not tomorrow, not the next day. We’re going to keep going until everybody’s out.”
The Noriega family described Hilda as a fiercely independent and vivacious retiree — in Mike’s words, “the youngest 92-year-old I know … 92 going on 62.”
Hilda Noriega had called Champlain Towers South home for more than 20 years. But six years after her husband’s death, she was ready to leave. The condo was for sale, and she planned to move in with family.
She loved living near the ocean and friends, but “when you lose a spouse, you want to be surrounded by family … and she wanted to spend more time with her family and grandchildren,” said Sally Noriega, Hilda’s daughter-in-law.
Hilda Noriega was a loving person who built a life with her husband and raised a family after coming to the U.S. from Cuba in 1960, her daughter-in-law said.
“She was just one of those people who from the first time she met a person she instantly loved that person, and that person instantly loved her,” Sally said.
Carlos Noriega, Hilda’s son and police chief of nearby North Bay Village, was one of the emergency responders atop the pile.
The Noriegas don’t entirely know what to make of the treasured mementos found amid the chaos, but Sally said: “We are a family of faith. We’ll just leave it at that.”
They are among dozens of anguished families awaiting word on the fate of loved ones. The wait has been agonizing.
The atmosphere inside a hotel ballroom where around 200 family members were being briefed by authorities Saturday was tense, two people present told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations.
The two said families frustrated with the slow pace of recovery efforts had demanded they be allowed to go to the scene and attempt a collective shout — an attempt as much to find survivors as a cathartic farewell to those who had died.
The mayor said Saturday that the identification of three bodies had dropped the number of people unaccounted for down to 156, and crews also discovered other unspecified human remains. The remains are being sent to the medical examiner, and authorities are gathering DNA samples from family members to aid in identification.
A video posted online showed an official briefing families. When he said they had found remains among the rubble, people began sobbing.
Late Saturday, four of the victims were identified, as Stacie Dawn Fang, 54; Antonio Lozano, 83, and Gladys Lozano, 79; and Manuel LaFont, 54.
Burkett said a city official had led a cursory review of the nearby Champlain Towers North and Champlain Towers East buildings but “didn’t find anything out of the ordinary.”
The news came after word of a 2018 engineering report that showed the building, which was built in 1981, had “major structural damage” to a concrete slab below its pool deck that needed extensive repairs, part of a series of documents released by the city of Surfside.
Further documentation showed the estimated cost of the repairs would total over $9 million. That included more than $3.8 million for garage, entrance and pool remediation and nearly $3.2 million for fixes to the exterior facade.
While officials said no cause for the collapse early Thursday has been determined, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said a “definitive answer” was needed in a timely manner.
A mass vaccination clinic held Sunday at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto administered close to 27,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, setting a new North American single-day record.
Public health officials say 26,771 doses were administered to more than 25,000 adults and almost 1,300 youth as part of the “Our Winning Shot” initiative, breaking the previous record of 17,003 set back in April at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, Texas.
Officials say they eclipsed the Canadian record with of 10,470 doses, which was set back in May at a Thorncliffe Park clinic, just before 2:30 p.m. ET.
At around 8:30 p.m., Mayor John Tory tweeted that they had reached their goal of administering 25,000 doses.
A total of 981 first doses were given out while 25,793 second doses were administered. Mayor Tory himself received his second dose on Sunday. He got the Moderna shot after receiving AstraZeneca for his first dose back on April 10.
“I had my first dose with AstraZeneca and I had my second dose with Moderna and I just want people to know because there are people that have a lot of questions about this, it’s been a bit confusing,” Tory told those waiting to get vaccinated at the clinic, trying to allay concerns about mixing doses. “It’s safe to do what I did, what some of you did – I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t safe.”
The majority of shots given at the clinic were Moderna, while doses of Pfizer were reserved for anyone between the ages of 12 and 17.
Toronto has administered more than 3.2 million vaccine doses since the start of the immunization campaign with 76 per cent of Torontonians having received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine while more than 35 per cent have now been fully vaccinated.
As of Saturday, anyone between the ages of 12 to 17 who live in Durham, Halton, Hamilton, Peel, Porcupine, Simcoe-Muskoka, Toronto, Waterloo, Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph and York are eligible to book their accelerated second vaccine dose appointments.
Starting Monday at 8 a.m., all adults who received a first dose of AstraZeneca vaccine at least eight weeks ago or a first dose of Moderna or Pfizer vaccine at least 28 days ago will be eligible to book an accelerated second doses.
WINNIPEG (CityNews) — An epidemiologist says the death of a child under the age of 10 years old in Manitoba due to COVID-19 is an extremely rare occurrence, but still serves as a tragic reminder that the virus is still present in our lives.
Epidemiologist Cynthia Carr says the Winnipeg girl’s death, which Manitoba health officials reported in the province’s daily COVID bulletin Sunday, was the 13th death in Canada of a person aged 19 and under.
That puts the fatality rate for that age group at 0.05 per cent in Canada.
“It’s so rare in fact that even Health Canada in their weekly surveillance reports — when they report deaths for example by age group — the age group cluster is actually under 19. They don’t even report weekly the numbers of deaths under the age of 10 because it’s so rare.
“So one death for this little girl here in from the Winnipeg region is certainly absolutely tragic, but also very rare. And unfortunately, very rare events do happen.
“It’s a tragic situation and reminds us that this virus is dangerous. It’s killed over 26,000 Canadians, it’s killed over 1,100 Manitobans and made other many many thousands more very very sick in hospital, and many more taking a long time to recover from this virus.”
Prior to this, the youngest known Canadian to die in which COVID-19 was a factor was an infant in B.C. in January. Health officials in that province also confirmed in April that a two-year-old had died as a result of coronavirus.
In April, a 13-year-old girl from Brampton, Ont., became one of four Ontarians under the age of 19 to die from the virus.
Sunday’s provincial health update did not provide more information or the child’s exact age. It is not known either if the girl had any underlying conditions.
It also was not revealed if the child’s death was linked to a variant of concern or the original coronavirus strain.
“What has changed with these variants of concern is their enhanced ability to transmit,” said Carr. “They’re getting better and better at latching onto our cells and getting in, getting more efficient at creating more and more copies once they’re in, and then some are getting even better at starting to be able to evade our immune response.”
Manitoba’s COVID-19 death toll since the start of the pandemic is 1,139.
The province also identified 97 new cases of the coronavirus, but removed one due to a data error. Most of those (50) came from the Winnipeg region. The positivity rate is 6.5 per cent.
There are currently 94 Manitobans hospitalized due to the virus, including 64 in intensive care.
“In Manitoba there’s still about 14,180 cases that are active, that’s a lot of people with active virus,” said Carr. “And you know, even if we’re over 70 per cent of the population aged 12 and over that are vaccinated with their first shot, that’s still a lot of targets that are available for those circulating cases.”
–With files from Marie Gomez
As Canada’s Indigenous communities grapple with the horrific discovery of 751 unmarked graves at a former residential school in Saskatchewan, Toronto is offering condolences and symbols of support.
While many are questioning if Canada Day should be celebrated this year in light the country’s connections to residential schools, Toronto’s most iconic landmark announced a show of solidarity.
The CN Tower will be lit orange on Canada Day (July 1) “in solidarity with and in support of Indigenous communities across Canada.”
In a statement, Toronto mayor John Tory called the discovery of unmarked graves at the former Marieval residential school in Saskatchewan “heartbreaking.”
“This is another tragic reminder of the pain and suffering Indigenous peoples endured at residential schools across our country,” Tory wrote.
“The recent discoveries bring us face to face with a brutal truth that we must acknowledge and never forget … we remain committed to doing the real work of reconciliation.
The City of Toronto said it would be lowering flags to half mast on Thursday, as well as dimming the Toronto sign and silencing its social media channels.
Last month another mass grave was unearthed by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation at the former Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia.
The remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found buried on the school grounds – once the largest in Canada’s residential school system.
A Cowessess First Nation elder is recalling the abusive and dehumanizing experiences she had while attending a residential school in Saskatchewan as news of the hundreds of unmarked graves found at the site rippled around the world.
Florence Sparvier, 80, said Thursday that she spent time at the Marieval Indian Residential School when she was a child.
“They made us believe we didn’t have souls,” said Sparvier, who is a knowledge keeper at Cowessess.
“They were putting us down as a people, so we learned how not to like who we were.”
She said she was taken to the school by her parents.
“At that time, if the parents didn’t want to allow their children to go to boarding school, one of them had to go to jail. So in order to keep the family together, we went to boarding school.”
On Thursday, Cowessess First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected 715 unmarked graves at the Marieval site. Last month, a First Nation in British Columbia said radar had found what are believed to be the remains of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Sparvier was the third generation of her family to go to the Marieval school, after her mother and her grandmother. She also attended the Lebret Indian Industrial Residential School.
She said the nuns at the Marieval school worked to strip students of their Indigenous knowledge and identity.
“We learned,” she said. “They pounded it into us. And really, they were very mean. When I say pounding, I mean pounding.”
The school, about 160 kilometres east of Regina, was built in 1899 by Roman Catholic missionaries. It closed in 1996.
“We had to learn to be a Roman Catholic,” Sparvier said. “We couldn’t say our own little blessings the way we said it at home.
“We had our own way of honouring ourselves and Mother Earth in our own homes when we were little, but we had to leave all that.”
Sparvier said the teachers at the residential school were “very condemning” about First Nations people.
Eagleclaw Thom in Ottawa said he cried on the phone with family members as they shared stories of attending Marieval and other residential schools.
Thom, who is from Sakimay First Nation, which borders Cowessess, did not attend Marieval but his father and paternal grandparents did.
To really honour those who lost their childhoods or their lives at the school, he said, action needs to be taken to ensure Indigenous children are now supported, too.
“They are still jailing our kids,” he said.
Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations described the residential school system as “a crime against humanity, an assault on First Nations people.”
The federation represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan.
“The only crime we ever committed as children was being born Indigenous,” he said.
Toronto police are launching a one-year pilot project which will see some 911 calls diverted to a community-based crisis response centre.
The Gerstein Crisis Centre, a well established 24-hour mental health service, will work with police to try and divert as many of the mental health calls as possible away from an armed police response.
Under the pilot project, call-takers in the Toronto police communications call centre will evaluate incoming calls and determine if a crisis worker is better suited to handling the situation rather than a police response. The crisis worker would be able to provide immediate support and intervention, referrals and connection to further services as needed.
Should the call require a police response – such as one that involves weapons, an imminent threat to life or domestic violence – the crisis worker would be able to assist in trying to de-escalate the situation until police and/or a Mobile Crisis Intervention Team arrive on scene.
The death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in May of 2020 escalated calls to reform how police respond to a mental health crisis. The 29-year-old fell to her death from her apartment balcony while police were on scene responding to a 911 call for help. The province’s Special Investigations Unit cleared Toronto police of any criminal wrongdoing in her death.
“This collaboration with Gerstein Crisis Centre supports our mutual goal of a fast, effective and compassionate response for people experiencing a mental health related crisis in our community,” said Deputy Chief Peter Yuen. “This pilot project is one of several ways TPS is addressing an appeal from the mental health community to explore alternative models of mental health crisis response.”
The pilot project is scheduled to begin late summer in the downtown neighbourhoods within 14, 51 and 52 Divisions. It is part of 81 recommendations on police reform accepted last year which called for the development of alternative models of community safety response for mental health calls.
The Montreal Canadiens have advanced to the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in 28 years after defeating the Vegas Golden Knights 3-2 in overtime on Thursday night.
Artturi Lehkonen scored the game winner at 1:39 of the extra period. Cole Caufield and Shea Webber had the other goals for Montreal.
Montreal, who qualified for the post-season with the fewest points of any of the playoff teams, won the best-of-seven series 4-games-2.
It marks the first time since 1993 that the Canadiens have advanced to the final. That was also the last time they won the Stanley Cup.
The Canadiens, who improved to 5-1 in OT in these playoffs, are set to meet either the Tampa Bay Lightning or New York Islanders in the final. That semifinal matchup sits tied 3-3 with Game 7 set for Friday in Tampa.
The frustrated Golden Knights finished the regular season second in the NHL’s overall standings – 23 points ahead of the 18th-ranked Canadiens – but much like the heavily favoured Toronto Maple Leafs and Winnipeg Jets before them, had no answer for a relentless opponent that’s spent much of the last two months confounding the hockey world.
Thursday was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in Quebec, and there was more to celebrate than usual as the Canadiens will now look to bring the sport’s Holy Grail back over the border after Vancouver (1994 and 2011), Calgary (2004), Edmonton (2006) and Ottawa (2007) all fell short in the final since Montreal’s triumph 28 years ago.
With similarities to the team’s memorable run in the spring of 1993 – an underdog not expected to challenge the big boys – Montreal is into its NHL-record 33rd final since 1917-18 and will be looking to add to its league-topping 24 Cup banners.
The Canadiens clinched a berth in the title series on home ice for the seventh time since the league expanded in 1966-67, and the first since defeating the Islanders in Game 5 at the Montreal Forum on May 24, 1993.
Montreal advanced to the Eastern Conference final in both 2010 and 2014, but lost out to the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers, respectively.
Ontario will enter Step 2 of the province’s three-step COVID-19 reopening plan on June 30, sources tell 680NEWS.
An official announcement from the government is expected on Thursday.
The move will mean barbers and salons will be able to open next Wednesday, two days earlier than expected. Capacity limits for retail stores and patios are also expected to expand.
Outdoor gathering capacity will increase to 25 people while indoor gatherings will be allowed with up to five people.
Step 2 required 70 per cent of adults with one dose and 20 per cent fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
As of Wednesday, 76 per cent of Ontario adults have received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and roughly 27 per cent are now fully vaccinated.
That vaccination rate matches the 70 to 80 per cent that is outlined for Step 3 of the reopening plan.
Premier Doug Ford had previously hinted that he would like to move to Step 2 a little bit sooner than originally planned.
There are 255 new cases of COVID-19 in Ontario today and 11 more deaths linked to the virus.
Health Minister Christine Elliott said there are 57 new cases in Toronto, 53 in the Region of Waterloo, and 25 in Peel Region.
