Montreal, Canada – Marie-Andree Cadorette was getting desperate.
After being punted between government, police and animal welfare agencies, each saying they couldn’t do anything to help, the general manager of the tiny Canadian village of Saint-Severe, Quebec – population 320 – needed reinforcements.
Eight cowboys on horseback answered her call, equipped with a drone and fencing. Their target? A group of young runaway cows that has been on the lam since the summer, wreaking havoc and causing tens of thousands of dollars in damages in the largely rural area.
“They succeeded in encircling them,” Cadorette said in an interview with Radio-Canada’s widely watched Sunday evening programme, Tout le monde en parle. “But unfortunately, the heifers passed by a field of corn that hadn’t been harvested yet, and they fled into the cornfield.
“And then there was nothing left to do.”
The tale of the approximately two dozen missing farm animals has captured media and public attention across the French-speaking province of Quebec, with the agricultural ministry calling the situation “complex and unprecedented”.
It even reached Canada’s Senate last week, as Senator Julie Miville-Dechene expressed her “amused admiration” for the young bovines, which she said had “recovered their freedom”.
Translation: A tribute to inspiring cows and to Marie-Andree Cadorette, general manager of Saint-Severe, a fearless woman. #polqc #cows #freedom
Fear of road accidents
For the tiny village of Saint-Severe, the saga of the young dairy cows has been a frustrating headache. Since going to the media, Cadorette said she has received more than 200 emails from members of the public, each proposing solutions to bring an end to the drama.
The most common piece of advice? Try to lure them by playing the recorder, she told Radio-Canada, laughing. But that, too, failed. (Yes, she tried it – though mainly to bring levity to the situation, she said.)
The group of mostly heifers – young cows that have not yet bred calves – has been on the loose since July, local media reported. They are believed to have jumped a fence on a dairy farm in the municipality of Saint-Barnabe, about 5km (3 miles) from Saint-Severe, after being scared during a thunderstorm, according to Saint-Severe’s Mayor Jean-Yves St-Arnaud.
“When it became concerning for us was as soon as they got out of the woods and came towards private homes. They were also going near young people, children, crossing the street … it became dangerous,” St-Arnaud said on Tout le monde en parle on Sunday.
He said the young cows have not had much human contact and are scared, which makes catching them more difficult. “We’re not talking about a cow that is wild; we’re talking more about a cow that’s agitated, that’s anxious, that doesn’t know much about human beings,” St-Arnaud said.
The cows’ owner, Pierre Lapointe, told local news outlet Le Nouvelliste last week that he wanted a month to try to get them back. He said the cows had been with the herd of 200 for less than a month before they bolted due to the storm.
“This has never happened in 40 years,” Lapointe said.
‘All-you-can-eat buffet’
The cows have been able to survive since their escape by eating unharvested corn and other crops and drinking from streams in the area, about 130km (81 miles) east of Montreal, Quebec’s largest city.
But with local harvesting completed and temperatures dropping, Cadorette said the situation has become more serious. “They had an all-you-can-eat buffet all summer,” she said during the Radio-Canada interview. “But now as we speak, the harvests are done. There isn’t much left to eat … it’s really an emergency to recover them.”
Elsa Vasseur, associate professor at McGill University and research chair in the sustainable life of dairy cattle, said the young age of the escapees – heifers do not yet need to be milked – means that their main concern is finding food.
And as readily available food supplies dwindle in the winter, efforts to catch the herd should be more successful. “As soon as the food runs out, they will try to find the most strategic way to get food,” she told Al Jazeera.
Cows, she said, are generally very curious creatures, and they also live in groups, which makes the communal escape unsurprising. “As soon as one runs away, generally it won’t be alone,” she said.
The danger of the ongoing evasion, Vasseur added, is having cows in places drivers don’t expect them to be. “If you think about Iceland, for example, or Ireland or Corsica, animals wander, cows wander, so people are aware of that,” she said, whereas in Quebec, people travelling on a country road “don’t expect to come face-to-face with a cow, or a pig, or a horse”.
Dairy cows graze in a field outside Montreal, Quebec [File: Christinne Muschi/Reuters]
The plan
On Saturday, Quebec’s ministry of agriculture, fisheries and food said it had deployed a team of experts to plan out next steps in coordination with other partners.
“Facing a complex and unprecedented situation, the ministry firstly is accompanying the owner who has said he wants to recover his herd,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that it needed to take into account the wellbeing of the cows and the safety of residents, among other factors.
The local branch of the Union of Agricultural Producers (UPA, according to its French-language acronym) said on Monday that the “game plan” is to use strategically positioned feeders to provide the cows with food, and then capture them “when the time comes”.
“We primarily have two concerns in this situation: making sure the animals are in good health (and remain so during the course of the operation) and that the animals don’t end up on public roads,” the union said. “Until then, the order of the day is: patience. It will take time, but we will keep you informed when the operation is completed successfully.”
The mayor of Saint-Severe also recently urged residents to not get in the way of these efforts.
So while the story has captured imaginations, for the people of Saint-Severe, it can’t end soon enough. “It would be wonderful,” Cadorette said at the end of her Radio-Canada interview, “if it was taking place somewhere else.”
VANCOUVER – Contract negotiations resume today in Vancouver in a labour dispute that has paralyzed container cargo shipping at British Columbia’s ports since Monday.
The BC Maritime Employers Association and International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 514 are scheduled to meet for the next three days in mediated talks to try to break a deadlock in negotiations.
The union, which represents more than 700 longshore supervisors at ports, including Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Nanaimo, has been without a contract since March last year.
The latest talks come after employers locked out workers in response to what it said was “strike activity” by union members.
The start of the lockout was then followed by several days of no engagement between the two parties, prompting federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon to speak with leaders on both sides, asking them to restart talks.
MacKinnon had said that the talks were “progressing at an insufficient pace, indicating a concerning absence of urgency from the parties involved” — a sentiment echoed by several business groups across Canada.
In a joint letter, more than 100 organizations, including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Business Council of Canada and associations representing industries from automotive and fertilizer to retail and mining, urged the government to do whatever it takes to end the work stoppage.
“While we acknowledge efforts to continue with mediation, parties have not been able to come to a negotiated agreement,” the letter says. “So, the federal government must take decisive action, using every tool at its disposal to resolve this dispute and limit the damage caused by this disruption.
“We simply cannot afford to once again put Canadian businesses at risk, which in turn puts Canadian livelihoods at risk.”
In the meantime, the union says it has filed a complaint to the Canada Industrial Relations Board against the employers, alleging the association threatened to pull existing conditions out of the last contract in direct contact with its members.
“The BCMEA is trying to undermine the union by attempting to turn members against its democratically elected leadership and bargaining committee — despite the fact that the BCMEA knows full well we received a 96 per cent mandate to take job action if needed,” union president Frank Morena said in a statement.
The employers have responded by calling the complaint “another meritless claim,” adding the final offer to the union that includes a 19.2 per cent wage increase over a four-year term remains on the table.
“The final offer has been on the table for over a week and represents a fair and balanced proposal for employees, and if accepted would end this dispute,” the employers’ statement says. “The offer does not require any concessions from the union.”
The union says the offer does not address the key issue of staffing requirement at the terminals as the port introduces more automation to cargo loading and unloading, which could potentially require fewer workers to operate than older systems.
The Port of Vancouver is the largest in Canada and has seen a number of labour disruptions, including two instances involving the rail and grain storage sectors earlier this year.
A 13-day strike by another group of workers at the port last year resulted in the disruption of a significant amount of shipping and trade.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
The Royal Canadian Legion says a new partnership with e-commerce giant Amazon is helping boost its veterans’ fund, and will hopefully expand its donor base in the digital world.
Since the Oct. 25 launch of its Amazon.ca storefront, the legion says it has received nearly 10,000 orders for poppies.
Online shoppers can order lapel poppies on Amazon in exchange for donations or buy items such as “We Remember” lawn signs, Remembrance Day pins and other accessories, with all proceeds going to the legion’s Poppy Trust Fund for Canadian veterans and their families.
Nujma Bond, the legion’s national spokesperson, said the organization sees this move as keeping up with modern purchasing habits.
“As the world around us evolves we have been looking at different ways to distribute poppies and to make it easier for people to access them,” she said in an interview.
“This is definitely a way to reach a wider number of Canadians of all ages. And certainly younger Canadians are much more active on the web, on social media in general, so we’re also engaging in that way.”
Al Plume, a member of a legion branch in Trenton, Ont., said the online store can also help with outreach to veterans who are far from home.
“For veterans that are overseas and are away, (or) can’t get to a store they can order them online, it’s Amazon.” Plume said.
Plume spent 35 years in the military with the Royal Engineers, and retired eight years ago. He said making sure veterans are looked after is his passion.
“I’ve seen the struggles that our veterans have had with Veterans Affairs … and that’s why I got involved, with making sure that the people get to them and help the veterans with their paperwork.”
But the message about the Amazon storefront didn’t appear to reach all of the legion’s locations, with volunteers at Branch 179 on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive saying they hadn’t heard about the online push.
Holly Paddon, the branch’s poppy campaign co-ordinator and bartender, said the Amazon partnership never came up in meetings with other legion volunteers and officials.
“I work at the legion, I work with the Vancouver poppy office and I go to the meetings for the Vancouver poppy campaign — which includes all the legions in Vancouver — and not once has this been mentioned,” she said.
Paddon said the initiative is a great idea, but she would like to have known more about it.
The legion also sells a larger collection of items at poppystore.ca.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
