A dream New York tour turns into a Montreal airport nightmare for N.L. teens - CBC.ca | Canada News Media
Connect with us

News

A dream New York tour turns into a Montreal airport nightmare for N.L. teens – CBC.ca

Published

 on


Air Canada is apologizing for a situation that saw nearly three dozen teenagers from Conception Bay North, along with their five adult chaperones, stranded for three days in Montreal, dashing their hopes of visiting New York City.

The travel company that arranged the tour, meanwhile, is not commenting.

But despite the unpleasant experience, the students remain determined to one day visit the city that’s famous for its arts scene and iconic landmarks.

In a statement to CBC News, an unnamed Air Canada spokesperson blamed unfavourable weather conditions and a shortage of air crew for what the airline described as a regrettable situation.

And since most flights are booked because of the busy summer travel season, the airline said its ability to rebook customers following a flight cancellation is limited, especially for large groups.

“As a result, we were unable to transport these customers as planned and we have apologized for not providing our normal levels of customer service,” the statement reads.

Stress and confusion

The 34 students — all 14 and 15 years old — from Amalgamated Academy in Bay Roberts and Holy Redeemer in Spaniard’s Bay departed St. John’s airport on an Air Canada flight on Saturday. They were accompanied by five teacher chaperones from their schools.

The educational tour was organized by a company called Brightspark by WorldStrides. The trip was a year in the making, and came with a price tag of nearly $4,000 per student.

As the minutes stretched into hours at the airport in Montreal, there was not much for students to do but lay on the floor and nap. (Submitted by Stephanie Gifford)

New York City is one of the most famous cities in the world, and the four-day itinerary included everything from a Broadway musical and shopping to visits to landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center.

The plan was the fly to Montreal, and connect with another flight to New York.

But a dream end-of-school-year adventure turned into three days and two nights of stress, confusion and discomfort, said Emma Gifford of Port de Grave, one of the students on the trip.

“It was very challenging because we were all there without our parents. For a lot of us it was our first time travelling without our parents,” she said.

A cascade of problems

After landing in Montreal, the tour group was forced to wait on the plane for two hours before learning their connecting flight to New York was cancelled.

That began a series of problems that included long waits at the airport terminal, late-night and early morning taxi rides to and from a nearby hotel, eating food from vending machines and growing increasingly fatigued and frustrated as delays piled on top of each other.

It was a challenging introduction to air travel for students like Kairah March of Bareneed.

“It was kind of disappointing that the first time leaving Newfoundland, I spent most of the time in an airport. On an airport floor. It was pretty bad,” said March.

Some of the 34 Conception Bay North teens who saw their New York City dream vacation dashed this week are pictured here in Port de Grave. They are, front, left to right: Emma Gifford and Ally Bennett; back, Skylar Newell, Emily Smith, Sarah Holmes, Kairah March, Michela Hawco and Alexa Burton. (Terry Roberts/CBC)

On Sunday, word came down that the trip to New York was cancelled. It was a heartbreaking outcome for students who used the trip as motivation as they prepared for and wrote their year-end exams.

‘We just wanted to go home’

But that wasn’t the end of their travel turmoil. The students had to endure several more delays and hours of uncertainty before they finally arrived back at St. John’s International Airport Monday night.

“I felt helpless, and I know a lot of us did as well. It was fearful. We just wanted to go home,” said student Sarah Holmes.

While the students sweated it out in the humidity and smoke-filled air of Montreal, where wildfires in northern Quebec had dramatically lowered the air quality, parents back home in Newfoundland were scrambling for answers.

“Brightspark was saying you need to call Air Canada. And when we reach out to Air Canada, Air Canada said you need to talk to Brightspark. So we had both companies putting the liabilities over to somebody else,” said Stephanie Gifford, Emma’s mother.

“From Saturday when she left, right up until Monday night, I didn’t know how she was getting home, didn’t know where she was sleeping in the evenings, didn’t know how she was eating.”

Some parents were preparing to board a plane and fly to Montreal, she said.

“(Emma) was very upset. She had nose bleeds. She was feeling sick. I know it’s embarrassing for her now. But she just wanted her mom. She wanted her family. She just wanted to be home and not on a floor in an airport.”

Brightspark says Air Canada ‘not much help’

A message to parents from Brightspark, which was obtained by CBC News, cited “unforeseen circumstances” for the travel turbulence. But the company also singled out Air Canada for criticism, saying the airline “was not much help in making alternate arrangements for the group.”

The message said “Brightspark did the best we could on short notice, hampered by (a) provincial holiday (Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day) on the weekend, to first and foremost ensure the safety of the students.”

Air Canada and Brightspark covered the cost of hotel accommodations, while Air Canada also provided daily food vouchers to the group. Brightspark also chartered a bus on Monday to transport the group from the hotel to a morning meal, to a shopping mall, and then to the airport.

The students from the Bay Roberts and Spaniard’s Bay area spent long days at the Montreal airport, trying to make the best of a challenging situation, instead of enjoying a dream trip to New York City. (Submitted by Stephanie Gifford)

The breakfast was the first warm meal the students ate since Saturday morning, said Stephanie Gifford.

The students credit their chaperones for helping make the situation bearable, and note that the adversity helped solidify old and new friendships.

“I’m a lot closer to each and every one of them, because we spent a lot of time together,” said Ally Bennett of North River.

Many of the students are involved in the drama program at their schools, which is largely why they were so drawn to Broadway’s famous theatres. 

Meanwhile, the travellers were insured, but it’s not yet clear how much of their expenses will be refunded.

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador

Adblock test (Why?)



Source link

Continue Reading

News

CP NewsAlert: Body of teen in Walmart bakery oven was discovered by her mother

Published

 on

HALIFAX – A Sikh organization has identified the 19-year-old woman who died in a Walmart bakery oven and says her mother — a co-worker at the store — was the one who discovered the body.

The Maritime Sikh Society has identified the victim as Gursimran Kaur, a Sikh woman originally from India who had immigrated to Canada with her mother a couple of years ago.

Balbir Singh, secretary of the society, says Kaur’s mother is still suffering from shock but has authorized the release of information on her daughter for an online fundraising page.

The GoFundMe page, which had raised more than $80,000 as of 11 a.m., says the mother became frantic after her daughter stopped answering her phone during the Saturday night shift.

The group hasn’t released the name of the mother but says she was the one who opened the walk-in bakery oven at the store and found her daughter’s burned body.

The fundraiser describes the young woman as “a young beautiful girl who came to Canada with big dreams,” and it requests donations to bring her father and brother from the Punjab region of India to Nova Scotia for the funeral.

A spokeswoman from Walmart wasn’t immediately available for comment.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 24, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



Source link

Continue Reading

News

Abortion bans are top of mind for young women in North Carolina as they consider Harris or Trump

Published

 on

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — The TikTok videos haunt 26-year-old Christy Kishbaugh.

One seared into her memory shows a young mom talking about how several Idaho emergency rooms rejected her because of the state’s abortion ban, leaving her to bleed for weeks after a miscarriage.

Kishbaugh sends videos like that to friends, saying “Can you believe this?”

She can’t.

In a hushed voice near a popular park, the married suburbanite worried about her own future under the new patchwork of state laws that have prevented thousands of women across the country from having abortions.

“Thinking ahead, if anything were to go wrong,” Kishbaugh nearly whispered, iced coffee in hand. “The idea that myself, my friends, people close to me, that they could potentially die or never have kids or lose a child because they’re not getting access to the health care they need, that really dwells with me.”

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the tensions over abortion have only intensified, setting up the presidential election as a referendum on fundamental rights for tens of millions of women.

Republicans have long relied on deep support from white women in states such as Georgia, Florida and Texas who back them at higher levels compared to white women nationwide, data from AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the electorate, show. But in a battleground state like North Carolina, where Donald Trump won 60% of the vote of white women in 2020, their allegiance could be strained by the state’s new 12-week abortion ban.

If Trump’s support among white women in North Carolina drops closer to the group’s national average of 52% in 2020, he could find it difficult to earn the state’s 16 electoral votes again. Vice President Kamala Harris could narrowly win if just a fraction of white women decide to support her instead of Trump, who took North Carolina by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020, Trump’s narrowest margin of victory.

Abortion was a top issue for just 3% of North Carolina voters in 2020, with nearly all of them backing Trump and his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the high court ruling that had guaranteed a woman’s right to abortion for nearly half a century.

Now the court has left abortion rights up to the states and the issue is far from settled, with legislatures passing a range of restrictions. Harris has made fallout from the laws a focus of her campaign. And a different crop of North Carolina voters — 10% of them in 2022 — have named abortion as their highest priority, according to AP VoteCast data. Nearly 8 in 10 of North Carolina voters in 2022 who prioritized abortion backed a Democratic candidate statewide.

This presidential contest will reveal how much abortion access really matters to them and whether it’s enough to overcome their misgivings about Harris on the economy, immigration and other matters.

Did Republicans set off a hand grenade on abortion?

Targeting women under 35, North Carolina Democrats are telling voters that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and want control over women, said Morgan Jackson, a campaign adviser for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein.

“Republicans have set off their hand grenade in their own hands,” Jackson said. “They thought you were with them all the way. It’s way more complicated than that.”

Nationally, 4 in 10 women under 30 years old say abortion is their top issue, according to a poll released Oct. 11 by KFF, a health policy research organization.

North Carolina, however, is one of the only southern states that hasn’t instituted the type of strict ban that have made abortions nearly impossible to obtain. That moderate approach will make this a less pressing issue for the state’s voters, said Republican state senator Vickie Sawyer.

Sawyer considers what she hears from her own young adult daughters. Abortion comes up, she said, but not as much as worries about the cost of housing or everyday items.

“It’s right in the wheelhouse of something that could affect them,” Sawyer said. But “they know their rights are protected” because the state’s 12-week abortion ban also allows for some exceptions in the second trimester.

But Democrats are telling voters that bigger threats to abortion rights linger with the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, who once promised to outlaw “abortion in North Carolina for any reason.” During NFL games on Sunday, commercial breaks feature an ad of a woman sitting on an operating room table, explaining how she nearly bled out in a Texas emergency room because doctors were afraid to treat her with a dilation and curettage surgery — a procedure often used during abortions — after she gave birth.

With enthusiasm already high among Black women, the Harris campaign will focus on using the abortion issue to win over suburban white and Latino women, Jackson said. No Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina since Barack Obama in 2008.

In the final weeks of the campaign, North Carolina has had a series of dueling visits from the presidential candidates and their surrogates. Trump surveyed storm damage in western North Carolina on Monday, after Harris stopped by a predominantly Black church and rallied a crowd of 7,000 at Eastern Carolina University earlier this month.

Last Thursday, as a record 353,166 votes were cast at polling sites across the state, Harris’ running mate Tim Walz implored the crowd at a Winston-Salem high school gymnasium to consider that abortion access could be restricted further under a second Trump presidency. Voters, he argued, should not believe the former president’s statement that he would refuse to sign a national abortion ban.

“The people in our lives — our wives, our daughters, our mothers, our friends, for Christ’s sake, our neighbors — their lives are literally at stake on how we vote,” Walz said.

The Harris campaign has 29 field offices and over 340 staff in the state, and has made contacting Black and younger voters a priority, the campaign said. Trump’s team referred an emailed request for details on his campaign’s presence to Sawyer, who represents a conservative patch of Charlotte’s suburbs.

Harris’ campaign might find the votes she needs tucked in the hills of fast-growing Forsyth County, flush with women, college students and young working professionals. The county seat of Winston-Salem, dotted with trendy apartment lofts converted from old cigarette factories and artsy coffee shops, has added the most people, a shift that’s helped Democrats take power in the once-blue collar town after years of Republican control. The city’s economy runs in part on more than a half-dozen colleges, including Wake Forest University.

It’s on one of those college campuses where 21-year-old Jenny Gonzalez said the issue of abortion motivated her to register to vote in her first election. She’ll cast a ballot for Harris.

“It should be access to all women, no matter the situation, because everyone goes through different things and you don’t know why they decide to get the abortion,” said Gonzalez, who is studying pharmacy technology at Forsyth Technical Community College.

About 120 miles southeast of Winston-Salem, 48-year-old Christine Ducheneaux sat on a bench in downtown Fayetteville as she explained why abortion is her top issue, too.

“For me, it’s just about body autonomy,” said Ducheneaux, a mother of three children. “I hate to use generalizations, but, you know, like older white men, making a decision about what’s good, what’s best for me and my family or my life, is crazy. You’re not my doctor, you know?”

Ducheneaux said she wasn’t excited about voting for President Joe Biden, but once he dropped out she became “super excited” to support Harris.

Abortion restrictions have 44-year-old tattoo artist Liz “Gruesome” Haycraft, a former Republican who once opposed abortion, feeling on edge. Haycraft doesn’t plan to have children, but worries about women who have faced hurdles getting medical care.

“There is no reason that women should have to give up their lives or their bodies,” said Haycraft, who plans to vote for Harris.

Standing outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic, armed with bags of snacks and anti-abortion pamphlets for those walking into the facility, 45-year-old Laura Browne tried to persuade women to talk to her instead. The retired Air Force staff sergeant and mother of two daughters believes Democrats are using horror stories about abortion to scare young women.

“I believe they’re being told there’s only one option, and that they’re too young to have children,” said Browne, who works for a nearby anti-abortion center that counsels pregnant women. “And I would say that that is wrong.”

Browne declined to share how she’d vote in the election.

It’s still all about the economy, Republicans say

Republicans, for the most part, are downplaying the subject. Trump’s campaign is running ads in the state instead attacking Harris for supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgery. And locally, GOP loyalists are raising questions about how well the Biden administration has responded to Hurricane Helene’s devastation.

Abortion may resonate deepest with younger women, but they’re also a historically unreliable voting bloc, said Linda L. Petrou, a longtime Forsyth County Republican and district chair.

“There might be more women – younger women – coming out and voting for Harris because of that,” Petrou acknowledged, but she added, “the percentage of young people who vote is relatively small.”

Older women — even Democrats — see abortion as more of a peripheral issue when compared to their younger counterparts.

To Donna Klein, an 80-year-old retiree, women’s rights are “important,” but the environment is her top concern, a worry punctuated only by the hurricane destruction for the longtime Democrat.

“It’s very important we try to figure out what’s going on, what we can do it about it,” Klein said. “As an older person, as I think about my grandkids. What kind of earth are they going to inherit?”

Petrou said Republicans are counting on widespread dissatisfaction with the economy to keep their voters firmly in Trump’s camp.

Inflation has 20-year-old Wake Forest student Leyla Herrera considering a vote for Trump in her first presidential election. The biology student, who doesn’t align with a party, says increased prices have been tough on her middle-class family, based in a Charlotte suburb.

“Donald Trump, when he was in office, there was better prices, especially for gas. Food is a really big thing, all of that has really gone up,” she said.

But on abortion, Herrera is conflicted. She’s doesn’t like new laws that have prevented women who have been raped from ending a pregnancy. But she thinks about her mom, born and adopted the year before the U.S. Supreme Court initially affirmed national abortion rights in 1973.

“I feel really lucky because if she was born a year later, I wouldn’t be here,” Herrera said. “It really weighs on me.”

Some Republican women also struggle with where they stand.

Weeks out from the election, Robin Spadt, a Canadian immigrant who doesn’t like the influx of immigrants that have crossed the U.S. border illegally, is still unsure how she’ll vote. Harris won’t get her vote, she says. But after voting for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, she describes his recent remarks as “a lot of crazy.”

And the 68-year-old suburban grandmother has another problem she’s trying to reconcile before she heads to the voting booth.

“I’ve got five granddaughters, and I don’t like the government telling them what to do with their bodies,” Spadt added.

___ Superville reported from Fayetteville, North Carolina. AP National Writer Allen G. Breed in Fayetteville and Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Winston-Salem and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.



Source link

Continue Reading

News

The EPA imposes stricter standards to protect children from exposure to lead paint

Published

 on

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two weeks after setting a nationwide deadline for removal of lead pipes, the Biden administration is imposing strict new limits on dust from lead-based paint in older homes and child-care facilities.

A final rule announced Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency sets limits on lead dust on floors and window sills in pre-1978 residences and child-care facilities to levels so low they cannot be detected.

Paint that contains lead was banned in 1978, but more than 30 million American homes are believed to still contain it, including nearly 4 million homes where children under the age of 6 live. Lead paint can chip off when it deteriorates or is disturbed, especially during home remodeling or renovation.

“There is no safe level of lead,” said Michal Freedhoff, EPA’s assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention. The new rule will bring the United States “closer to eradicating lead-based paint hazards from homes and child care facilities once and for all,” she said.

The EPA estimates the new rule will reduce the lead exposures of up to 1.2 million people per year, including 178,000 to 326,000 children under age 6.

Lead is a neurotoxin that can irreversibly harm brain development in children, lower IQ, cause behavioral problems and lead to lifelong health effects. It also affects other organs, including the liver and kidneys.

The new rule, which takes effect early next year, targets levels of lead dust generated by paint. Currently, 10 micrograms per square foot is considered hazardous on floors, and a concentration 10 times that high is considered hazardous on window sills. The new rule brings both of those levels down to no detectable lead.

The proposed rule also would reduce what level is allowed when a lead-abatement contractor finishes work on a property where lead has been identified as a problem. These levels would be 5 micrograms per square foot on the floor and 40 micrograms per square foot for sills.

Individuals and firms that perform abatement work must be certified and follow specific work practices. Testing is required afterward to ensure dust-lead levels are below the new standards.

Environmental justice and public health experts called the EPA rule long overdue, noting that lead poisoning disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color.

“We can all breathe a little easier now that the EPA has significantly lowered its dust lead standard to protect children,” said Peggy Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York-based advocacy group.

Shepard, who serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said public health experts have long understood there is no safe level of lead in a child’s blood, yet New York state leads the nation in cases of children with elevated blood levels. Black children in Harlem living below the poverty line are twice as likely to suffer from lead poisoning as poor white children, she said.

The U.S. government has gradually been reducing the standard for what counts as poisonous levels of lead in children’s blood, with the most recent change occurring in 2021. But the EPA rule marks an effort to take more proactive action.

“When you are relying on the blood lead level in children to indicate whether there is lead in the environment, we are basically using the children as canaries in the mine,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a Boston College biology professor who directs the school’s Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good.

The National Child Care Association said when the lead rule was proposed last year that it could hurt many financially struggling child-care centers — especially those in low-income neighborhoods, where the facilities tend to be older. Without appropriate federal funding, the rule could push small, local child-care centers to close, the group said.

Earlier this month, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced $420 million in grants to remove lead hazards from homes, including HUD-assisted homes. Additional HUD grants will continue to be available to help with lead paint removal, the White House said.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Exit mobile version