Canadian Hydro crews are on their way to Florida.
This is the second group of workers and equipment to head to the state to help out.
Three weeks ago 270 Hydro One staff and 130 pieces of equipment headed down.
Hydro One’s Daffyd Roderick said the employees have volunteered because they know how important electricity is.
“These are the same guys who go out in minus-25C and howling wind to get your lights back on,” Roderick said. “We’ve had to turn guys away.”
Even when the work stops, the goodwill doesn’t.
Recently during a break, some Hydro One crewmembers working near a football field began throwing some balls around with children from a local team. Team manager Karen Weiss asked the crew if they could use Hydro One as the team name.
A lines manager, Ron Matthews from Clinton, took the request one step further and collected over $1,000 from all Hydro One staff in the area as a donation for team jerseys. In return for the sponsorship, the team was named the Hydro One Redskins.
Pay Hike and Haiti
Parliament isn’t sitting yet, and already rumours of pay hikes for MP’s and federal judges have people in an uproar.
The federal pay commission is recommending, against the wishes of the government, that 1,100 federally appointed judges be given a 10% pay raise, plus a cost-of-living increase in each of the next three years, retroactive to April. Most judges would get about $244,000 a year.
Under current rules, MPs get the same pay hike rates as the judiciary, and they would be paid about $151,000 annually.
On average, Canadians receive 2.5% annual pay hikes.
Hello. Ottawa. If this has been floated to distract voters from other domestic issues, you won’t win any brownie points from your electorate.
The DART team is a special group in Canada’s military that hasn’t been deployed since 1999 when they helped out Turkey after a massive earthquake. The headlines are saying “Feds say no to Haiti relief”, but that isn’t quite true. The military Disaster Assistance Response Team hasn’t been deployed and probably won’t be deployed to help out in Haiti.
Why?
It costs too much according to Foreign Affairs.
Canada has committed 3 million in disaster relief from hurricane Jeanne, and has 150 million set aside for several years of reconstruction in Haiti.
The military says the 200-member emergency team is ready to go anywhere on 48 hours notice. The government just has to give the order.
The estimated death toll from flooding and mudslides stands at 1,500, with 900 missing, most in the city of Gonaives, where aid workers continued to face desperate crowds clamouring for, and sometimes attempting to loot, emergency supplies.
Food distribution efforts were mired in chaos as gangs roamed the streets of Gonaives. According to reports, UN security forces – now reinforced to 700 troops – were finding it near impossible to provide adequate security around distribution centres as armed thugs took to robbing people of their food on their way home from the centres.
Observers said there were also too few distribution centres to supply the devastated city, where bodybags were piling in the streets, with food. It is believed that Jeanne may have left more than 300,000 people homeless.
I know we can’t help the whole world, and I know Canada doesn’t make a lot of noise about what it does do. We have troops and aid workers front and centre at the moment. It sounds cheap and it sounds wrong when you put MP pay hikes and DART decisions side by side, doesn’t it?
