1/The first time I heard about Haiti’s so-called “independence debt” was while I was on assignment in Haiti in 2010, covering the earthquake and the country’s tentative attempts at reconstruction.
#Haiti
Canadians are calling it C-Day. On Wednesday, Canada will legalize recreational cannabis use across the country. I'll be live on Periscope at 3 p.m. ET tomorrow at a pot lounge in Toronto, answering your questions & giving you a look at the festivities. Tweet me your questions.
Breaking news: A task force of the FBI and NYPD is raiding the N.Y. HQ of Peter Nygard, the Canadian fashion executive, as part of its investigation into allegations of sex trafficking against him.
Dear World: This is the story I've been working on for the past 3 months. It both broke my heart and made me whole. In
#Haiti
, many people are too poor to bury their loved ones. A group of men have stepped in to offer some dignity.
Impossible not to weep absorbing the Humboldt Bronco’s pastor’s anguish. He was driving behind the bus with his kids to watch Fri night’s game. He held players hands as they were dying, wondering where God was.
For those following the Peter Nygard case, he was denied bail today -- which is pretty rare in Canada. It means he could remain in jail for years while fighting extradition to the US, according to experts. 1/2
PM Trudeau was at last night’s vigil for Humboldt Broncos, quietly sitting in the crowd. No fanfare, no speeches. How many national leaders would be so quietly supportive? Seems quintessentially Cdn to me.
Minister Freeland said this to reporters, holding Rahaf’s arm : “This is Rahaf Alqunun, a very brave new Canadian. Rahaf wants Canadians to see that she’s arrived but she’s had a very long, tiring journey so she would prefer her not to take questions today.”
A little breaking news from
#canada
. I just got off the phone with Canada’s Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen
@HonAhmedHussen
. He told me about the 600 slaves from Libya that Canada has or is in the process of rescuing and bringing to the country as refugees.1/8
This young woman is someone to watch in Canada's new government - a young, proud Inuit woman -- with traditional tattoos -- who speaks openly about the horrifying suicide rates in Canada's north.
Many Canadians wish they were in BC now, where restaurants and schools are open. Dr. Bonnie Henry has lead the province's response to COVID19 with kindness as her motto. My profile:
Toronto has more than double the rates of coronavirus as NYC. Yet, while they shut down schools & left open bars and restaurants, this city did the opposite.
Edge of the Knife is a Haida story, written by Haida, acted by Haida, filmed in Haida Gwaii and most spectacularly, delivered in the Haida language, which only a handful of people still speak fluently. If you have a chance, see it on Monday at TIFF.
There are lots of weed parties in Canada today, as the country legalized recreational cannabis across the country. I'll be live on Periscope at 3 p.m. ET at a pot lounge in Toronto, answering your questions & giving you a look at the festivities. Tweet me your questions.
“Canada will remain a country that continues to provide protection to the most vulnerable. We will never shy away from that,” Minister Hussen said. “Where we can make a difference, we will make a difference.” 8/8
1/My story about Inuit artist Ooloosie Saila was published this past weekend. She lives just below the Arctic Circle in Cape Dorset, a hamlet named the art capital of the country. It’s Inuit name is Kinngait, which means “high mountains” in Inuktitut.
Canada accepted fewer than 1200 Yazidi refugees. They are challenging the country’s hands-off settlement system because they are so traumatized from ISIS. My story:
It was an emotional day for many in Canada today. The first coronavirus vaccines went to people in nursing homes - those living there and working there. My story:
Shen Yue got a civil engineering degree. Now, she works as a "programmer motivator” at a Chinese tech company: part psychologist, part cheerleader, hired to chat up and calm stressed-out male coders. Eye-opening story from China by the great
@suilee
JOB POSTING ALERT: The NYT is hiring a full-time news assistant in Canada. This is a great job for a budding journalist looking to get experience. Please retweet:
Nygard can appeal the decision, but only on legal grounds or a change in material change of circumstances. He can't simply offer a new bail plan, lawyers say. Story will be up momentarily 2/2
.
@TanyaTalaga
delivers a searing verdict: “If you call yourself a Canadian and you have not taken a moment today to think about Barbara Kentner, you have no idea what is really happening in this country.”
Le street artiste
#Invader
compte parmi ses fans l’astronaute
@Thom_astro
, qui lui a proposé d’installer une de ses mosaïques sur la Lune. “Cela semblait logique que ses petits aliens soient dans l’espace, à nous observer de là-haut,” dit M. Pesquet
The GoFundMe campaign for the Humboldt Broncos is growing by $100,000 an hour, by my calculations. Six hours ago, it was at $6.8M. 2 hours ago: $7.3M. Now, $7.5 million.
Charges against Chief Allan Adam were dropped. Meanwhile, his lawyer revealed the officer caught by dash cam tackling and pummeling the chief over an expired license plate is facing criminal charges for assault from a case last year.
Freedom Convoy is "slow rolling" the Ottawa airport right now, leading dozens of pick-ups trailing Canadian flags in loops around the arrivals and departures lane, honking and hollaring "freedom."
They aren’t the only slaves Canada has taken in. Remember the Yazidis? More than 1000 have been resettled in Canada. They are modern Holocaust victims. Their settlement process has not been smooth. 5/8
Jian Ghomeshi wrote a column for the New York Review of Books. The internet reacted with fury. Now, the editor who published the column is gone.
#MeToo
This fits into a larger Liberal narrative, as the country heads into an election this fall. Instead of retreating from Trudeau’s famous tweet () about Canada opening its doors the world’s oppressed, the government is doubling down on it. 7/8
Hussen, who was once a Somali refugee himself, said he was sickened by the images and stories. And shocked. “When you hear about slavery, it’s usually in a historical context. Not 2017 and 2018,” he said. 3/8
There have also been the Syrians, the Yazidis, the white helmets,
@rahaf84427714
, some 12,000 Eritreans, and now these freed slaves. A clear pattern is emerging… 6/8
1/ The vaccine roll-out in Canada has been glacial, frustrating many. Only 1.4 per cent of people have received both doses. Many of the lucky few live in nursing homes, where the virus has reeked its most gruesome damage. But they say their lives have not changed at all.
Gendarmes appear suddenly in the middle of farm fields misted by morning rain. They wear bulletproof vests and carry guns. They are guarding a gigantic reservoir. Welcome to the front line of France’s water wars. My story:
Super excited to meet
@tessavirtue
and
@ScottMoir
in the green room of
@TheSocialCTV
this aft. Told them that my secret stress release on tough assignments is to watch videos of their hip-hop dance classes. That’s my happy place.
#fangirlmoment
One of the ten remaining elected officials in
#Haiti
is Senator Rony Celestin. He bought a $3.4 million house in Montreal early this year, with no mortgage. He says he is a rags-to-riches icon who made his millions through sweat & enterprise. Our story:
I’m back in
#Haiti
reporting with
@federicorios
on the deportation of many Haitians who have lived abroad for many years and took the unfortunate risk of trying to get into the US. Here is the story:
Canada's placid capital has been turned into a tailgate party. Locals see it as a sanitization of the protest's darker motives. My dispatch from Ottawa:
When you give birth to a baby, you spend 9 months in discomfort & 1.5 days in agony, and this miracle emerges & changes your life. When you give birth to a book, you spend years alone toiling, mostly before sunrise. Then a courier package arrives...It still feels miraculous.
We spent the day in the Atlas Mountains, visiting villages damaged by the quake and meeting regular Moroccans who had packed cars, vans and Mack trucks with food and emergency supplies to give to survivors. It was a heart-warming display of solidarity.
Have you listened to my colleague
@rcallimachi
new podcast, Caliphate? It brings her to
#Canada
to meet a local ISIS fighter who moved back home, and he's not what you might expect
10/ Our research showed that if that money had stayed in Haiti, it would have boosted the economy by $21 billion to $115 billion. When I think about those numbers, I think about $10 billion promised in earthquake relief and rebuilding that was supposed to “build back better.”
5/Haiti is the only country in the world where descendants of formerly enslaved people paid descendants of their former masters for generations - for essentially their freedom.
For those who are interested in how we researched the series on Haiti's independence debt, we published a methodology/bibliography. Newspapers don't normally do this, but we thought it was important. Here it is:
1/J’ai entendu pour la première fois parler de la "dette de l'indépendance" d'Haïti lors d'un reportage en Haïti en 2010, pour couvrir le tremblement de terre et la reconstruction du pays.
I was invited into one man's living wake and assisted death. The ground rules for reporting were: No Photos, No Pad, No Pen. I was asked to participate, not just witness.
Sask Premier Moe: “In these boys, we see teammates, we see classmates, we see friends, we see brothers, sons and grandsons. These boys are our boys, their team is our team, their school is our school, their community is our community and their families are now our families.”
3/I couldn’t believe what I learned - that decades after formerly enslaved people rebelled en mass, and beat Napoleon’s forces, declaring the first free Black country in the Americas, they were forced to pay again - in cash.
6/We did genealogical research to track down 30-plus descendants of colonists who got big payouts. They included European royalty & French aristocrats. Most didn’t know their family had ties to Haiti.“This is part of my family history I never knew,” said the Duke of Leuchtenberg.
1/Canadian fashion millionaire Peter Nygard has made headlines this month, after 10 women sued him for rape.
@kim_barker
@gr_ashford
and I spent months digging into the story behind the lawsuit, interviewing more than 270 people. Our story:
As Toronto slowly comes back to life after 2 years of repeated lockdowns & closures, the wreckage of the pandemic is surfacing like cigarette butts in melted snow drifts. Among the rare stores that have opened are pot shops. Hundreds of them. My story:
This is who Alberta police tackled over an expired license plate: Allan Adam. He survived Canada’s notorious residential schools & went on to lead his own nation. He battled governments & oil giants, garnering the admiration of Desmond Tutu, Greta & Leo.
St. Michael's College, a private all-boys Catholic school in Toronto at the centre of a growing sex scandal, has just received a bomb threat, Toronto police announce at news conference.
4/How much did they pay? How much of the Haitian budget did it drain? With
@ConstantMeheut
@selamgkidan
@mattapuzzo
we set about to find out. We went to archives in Haiti France & the US, with the help of researchers, tracked down evidence of payments over 64 yrs.
My last story from Canada took me to Coutts, where a cache of weapons was found by police during the Freedom Convoy last Feb. Though the trucks left, the convoy is still there, in spirit and philosophy:
6/There are more than 500 orphanages in Haiti, according to some statistics. But since few are registered, no one really knows. It took us weeks to find the orphanage the Barrett kids were adopted from. Here’s the story:
Getting picked for the first phone call from a new president is a big deal, it turns out. Particularly during a pandemic, when official visits are unlikely, says former ambassador Bruce Heyman. So that means we are friends again, America!
7/ Though the French government said it would not profit from the payments, my colleague
@ConstantMeheut
found official documents in the archives showing they had: 2 million francs, or about $8.5 million today.
Peter Nygard is scheduled to appear in bail court today. The Canadian playboy and fashion magnate is facing extradition to the US, where he’s been indicted for sex crimes involving dozens of women and teenage girls. 1/
21/At the end of my stay, I was left with the inverse question: Not why art had not raised the town’s prospects, but how artists managed to produce such spectacular work here. Check out the latest prints from Cape Dorset, released last weekend:
8/It wasn’t the rich in Haiti who paid. It was the poor. Mostly poor coffee farmers, through tax on exports. Last year, I visited coffee farmers in northern Haiti to see what their lives were like and ask them what they knew about the debt.
9/I went to Dondon, a beautiful town tucked into a giant garden. Most coffee farmers here live without electricity or running water. Most had never heard of the debt their ancestors paid. Their reactions ranged from outrage to pride to indifference.
2/ Any journalist who spends time there, and confronts its overwhelming poverty and threadbare infrastructure will ask: Why is the country like this? I knew about the corruption. But what was this debt?
‘Schitt’s Creek’ uber-star Dan Levy signed up for a university course on Canada's Indigenous history and world views. Some 64,000 of his fans joined him.
@danjlevy
@UANativeStudies
My story:
10/Johnny Pootoogook was one of the talented artists I met working at the new Kinngait studios. At the time, he was homeless, and couch surfing while waiting for social housing.