Friday, August 15, 2003 Canadian Government Can't Find Ass
With Either Hand TORONTO (Reuters) - As Canada's biggest city struggled back to life on Friday following a massive power outage that hit large areas of North America, Toronto residents were looking around for their civic leaders.
There was a noticeable lack of leadership to guide Toronto, the country's financial hub, as subways ground to a halt, the city was pitched into darkness and thousands were milling about downtown streets late into the night.
In contrast to New York City and Ottawa, where mayors quickly appeared at press conferences to calm residents and provided regular updates, Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman was noticeably absent.
Lastman appeared only briefly at a press conference in a command center in northern Toronto.
Ontario's Premier Ernie Eves was not in the city when the blackout hit but held a hasty scrum to say the government was not to blame for the outage. He flew back to Toronto and, via a statement, declared a state of emergency and encouraged people to stay at home on Friday.
"The question -- and it deserves to be shouted -- is: 'Where was the government?"' said the Globe and Mail in a thin edition of its newspaper on Friday. "Don't people have the right to hear from their elected officials, if only to be reassured?
"The silence was deafening."
Instead, residents of "Toronto the Good" took matters into their own hands, directing traffic, sharing radios and information and helping each other.
"People's reactions are just unbelievable," a Toronto waitress told a newspaper. "No-one's panicking. Everyone's cool. We're all helping each other. I love this."
For seven hours, one in three Canadians had no electricity as the blackout cut power to some 10 million people after the outage that was blamed, in conflicting reports, on a plant in New York or Pennsylvania.
The Toronto transit system ground to a halt and thousands were stranded as temperatures hit 30 C (86 F). Subway stations were closed to prevent overcrowding.
Even at the federal level the reaction was muted and confusing.
The office of Prime Minister Jean Chretien -- who was in his hometown of Shawinigan, Quebec, which was unaffected by the blackout -- initially said the outage was due to a lightning strike at a Niagara Falls, New York, plant.
Then the prime minister's office said it was a fire, not lightening.
That contradicted his Defense Minister, John McCallum, who held a conference call -- carried live on Canadian radio -- to announce it was actually a fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. McCallum then said it was not a fire but an outage and urged people not to panic.
On Friday morning, there was still no clear assessment on what exactly caused the outage. ReutersNo comment, the story speaks for itself. -- posted by Chuck at Friday, August 15, 2003 | E-mail | Permalink | Main |
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