Gilbert Proulx said he almost couldn’t believe it when he looked at his phone.
He had just landed in Calgary on Sunday afternoon after a flight from Toronto. Proulx, his wife and two sons, 9 and 6, were returning from a trip to the Bahamas.
As the family prepared to dash off the plane to make their final connection to Regina, Proulx received a ping from WestJet.
Due to unscheduled maintenance, their flight had been cancelled, the email said. To get passengers home, ground transportation would be provided.
“I had to do a double take,” said Proulx, a teacher in Regina, in an interview on The Homestretch on Monday.
“I was sitting there, like, is this actually happening right now? You know, you pay good money to these airlines to provide you with transportation, and I’m sitting there, like, this is the best they can do for us right now?”
In an emailed statement to CBC Calgary, Denise Kenny, manager of public relations with WestJet, said the airline apologizes for the disruption to passengers’ travel plans.
“Unfortunately, reaccommodation options were limited due to the high demand for travel over the weekend and significant weather events across Vancouver and Vancouver Island, which caused compounding operational impacts and limited aircraft availability,” the statement read.
“In order to best support impacted guests in reaching their destination as quickly as possible, ground transportation was arranged to provide an immediate travel option for those who were unable to wait for an alternative flight option.”
For some passengers, the swap meant a one-hour flight became about an eight-hour bus ride through the night.
Proulx said that after receiving the message, his wife and children went to find some food — which the airline had sent vouchers for — while he scoped out the bus situation. The email instructed passengers to meet at Gate 1 for 4:30 p.m. MT, about a half hour after they’d landed.
“By the time I got there, there was a pile of passengers already kind of just standing around,” he said.
“I was actually really impressed with the overall vibe of a group of passengers being told that this was the only way that they were going to get home.”
Proulx said staff on the ground told him the next available flight to Regina would leave three days later, on March 1.
“They basically said this is your only option. If you want to get home, you need to get on the bus.”
The group left Calgary at about 5 p.m. MT, Proulx said. They took a 10-minute rest stop in Medicine Hat and arrived in Regina at about 1 a.m. MT.
“Part of me is glad I got home,” he said. “But I have such a hard time wrapping my head around that that was their answer. We’re going to put everyone on a bus.”
LISTEN | Gilbert Proulx describes his travel experience on Sunday:
The Homestretch9:30WestJet passengers board a bus to Regina
After a cancelled WestJet flight from Calgary to Regina, the airline offered travellers an unusual option to get home: an eight-hour bus trip. Gilbert Proulx and his family were shepherded on to a charter bus for a long-distance drive to Regina’s airport. Proulx joins us to talk about the experience.
Chris Henderson, a musician from Regina, got the same email notifying him about the cancelled flight after landing in Calgary from Grande Prairie, Alta. He’d planned to take a connection home from there.
Instead of boarding the bus, he visited the customer service counter, hoping to snag another flight.
Since he was travelling solo, he said he was able to book the only seat left on a WestJet flight to Regina on Monday morning. He said he’ll be trying to get his hotel stay in Calgary reimbursed.
“I know there were a bunch of other people that were looking for alternatives because they were rebooked to fly out on Wednesday or Thursday,” he said.
“It was just kind of a mess.… I’ve never been offered a bus ride from an airline before.”
Proulx said he will be following up with WestJet to try to get a full refund for his family’s trip.
“It was not what we had paid for,” he said. “I’m going to do what I can to make sure that we’re fairly compensated for, I mean, what in my opinion is a really unacceptable thing on an airline’s part.”
He said the airline might’ve helped ease some frustration if it had better communicated with passengers throughout the evening.
“I always like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I will be hard pressed to book another flight with WestJet.”
The lack of available seats comes after Air Canada cut service between Calgary and Regina and Calgary and Saskatoon, leaving Prairie travellers reliant on WestJet.
However, WestJet said last month it would ramp up service between Alberta’s largest city and Saskatchewan starting Feb. 16, with one more daily flight between Calgary and Regina, amounting to as many as seven flights each day.
It also said it would tack on three more daily flights between Calgary and Saskatoon, totalling up to nine direct flights a day.
A technical error by Tim Hortons led coffee drinkers across Canada to falsely believe they had won a $55,000 boat as part of the franchise’s Roll Up To Win promotion.
It’s unclear how many people were impacted, but the chain told CBC Hamilton in an email it was an “unfortunate error” and some customers were sent an email with incorrect information.
Darren Stewart-Jones of Hamilton said he opened an email on Wednesday morning from Tim Hortons that recapped all the prizes he won this year and it included one he didn’t recognize: a 2024 Tracker Targa 18 WT boat and trailer, which retails for $39,995 US (about $55,000 Cdn) — the only one available to participants.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this could be really awesome,'” Stewart-Jones told CBC News in a phone interview.
But his initial burst of excitement turned into questions as he scrolled through his emails to find out when he’d won the boat.
He said he’d always received emails after winning past prizes.
Within an hour, he got a call from a friend in Brampton, Ont., who said she also won a boat.
“That’s when I clued in and thought, ‘I think this is a huge mess-up,'” Stewart-Jones said.
Chris Rivet, from Edmonton, had the same experience.
“I went from being a winner to a loser,” Rivet said.
Alanna O’Hoski of Hamilton said she received the email and spent part of the day on hold waiting for an answer from Tim Hortons.
“With how tight things are nowadays, it was definitely a gut punch,” she said in a message to CBC News. “A lot of people, myself included… thought they won something of potential life-changing value.”
Tim Hortons sent customers an email with instructions to “disregard” the recap email they received, saying “technical errors” may have allowed for some prizes they didn’t win to end up in the recap email.
“We apologize for the frustration this has caused and for not living up to our high standards of providing an exceptional guest experience,” read the letter, which Tim Hortons shared with CBC.
Rivet said he has filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau of Canada and is considering filing a lawsuit.
On Wednesday afternoon, a Facebook group formed with over 200 people expressing outrage about the mistake and threatening to file lawsuits.
“NOPE, Not taking this as an answer!! Two words: CLASS ACTION,” read a post from Christiane Marie.
“I want my boat!” read another post, from Beau Johnson.
Just over a year ago, the Tim Hortons app mistakenly informed users they’d won $10,000.
“This is a repeated pattern of behaviour and simply saying it’s a technical issue just goes to show Tim Hortons didn’t do its due diligence,” Rivet said.
“It doesn’t exclude them from the harm they’ve caused.”
After the last mishap, Hamed Aghakhani, associate professor of marketing at Dalhousie University’s Rowe School of Business, told CBC News the coffee chain’s terms and conditions likely protect the company in case of an issue like this.
But he also said if the issue remains unresolved, it would erode the public’s confidence in the brand over time.
The gold has likely all been melted down, reforged into other forms, and made its way into local or international markets
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Published Apr 17, 2024 • Last updated 3 hours ago • 8 minute read
The Toronto Pearson airport gold heist was such an inside job that the Air Canada manager who gave police investigators a tour of the crime scene at the cargo warehouse from where it was stolen is now wanted for the $24 million theft, along with another Air Canada employee who has been arrested.
Precisely one year after the brazen and baffling theft, Peel Regional Police announced nine arrest warrants as part of the gold heist.
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Five of the accused were arrested in Canada and have already been released from custody on conditions pending trial.
Four more are wanted in Canada, although one, the alleged driver of the truck used to cart off the gold from the airport, is in custody in the United States, where he was arrested after police stopped a car in Pennsylvania with 65 handguns in the trunk that were allegedly being smuggled into Canada.
Authorities said a portion of the proceeds from the stolen gold was used to fund a cross-border gun running plot, leading the chair of the Peel Police Services Board, Nando Iannicca, to say the case was about “reverse alchemy … how gold becomes guns.”
The gold has likely all been melted down, reforged into other forms, and made its way into local or international markets.
A tiny portion of what police believed is gold from the heist has been recovered. It had been forged into six crudely made gold bracelets, mimicking the look of cheap bangles. With the purity of the gold, they are worth about $90,000. Police seized smelting pots, casts, and metal molds believed to have been used to transform the missing gold.
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As well, $430,000 in Canadian currency, believed to be some of the profit from the sale of the gold, was recovered by police. The white five-ton truck allegedly used in the heist has also been seized and provided the backdrop for the police announcement, Wednesday, in Brampton.
Peel police officials outlined the heist and their investigation, a 17-person team codenamed Project 24K, the measurement for nearly pure gold.
The size of the heist plot is suggested by two versions of a “debt list” found by police during two different raids; police believe they outline those who received or were owed a portion of profits from the job. One was for $9,943,000 and the other for $10,023,000. It suggests the thieves sold the gold at half price.
There appears to be 18 names on both lists. The names are the same between the two, police said.
“We are working hard to identify each of these individuals,” said Detective Sergeant Mike Mavity, major case manager for Project 24K.
The lists allocate money for supplies, travel and personal items, he said.
Among those allegedly involved are two who were Air Canada employees at the time of the heist, and a jewelry store owner.
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Mavity said it was an inside job: “Because of their position within Air Canada in my opinion, yeh, they needed people inside Air Canada to facilitate this stuff.”
Intimate inside knowledge of Air Canada cargo operations, and access to Air Canada’s equipment to print a duplicate shipping waybill, made the heist seem absurdly easy.
That inside action, however, also tipped police off to possible suspects early in the investigation, police said.
Mavity said they learned that an Air Canada cargo manager, who had earlier given investigators a tour of the crime scene, was resigning. That’s one clue of a possible insider. When investigators went to speak with him, he had disappeared, another strong clue.
“He resigned in the summer of last year. And then we have not been able to locate him since. We have an idea of where he is,” Mavity said.
Although it seemed an easy score, Nishan Duraiappah, Peel police chief, said the job was carefully planned and orchestrated by a large group of criminals.
Mavity summarized the investigation.
A shipping container filled with 6,600 variously sized bars of almost pure gold, weighing 400.19 kilograms, from a refinery in Zurich, Switzerland, arrived aboard a daily Air Canada flight to Toronto at 3:56 p.m., on April 17, 2023.
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The gold was valued at the time at more than $20 million. The shipping container also contained foreign currency worth about $2.5 million. The contents were being delivered by Brink’s on behalf of two clients.
It was taken to Air Canada’s cargo facility.
At 6:32 p.m., a man arrived at the warehouse driving a white, five-ton truck, reversed it into one of the many loading docks and went inside to talk to Air Canada warehouse staff. He had a waybill.
It was a real Air Canada waybill, but for a legitimate shipment of seafood that had been picked up the day before. The duplicate waybill was printed off within the Air Canada cargo facility, Mavity said.
“Once inside the warehouse, the suspect then provided it to an Air Canada cargo warehouse attendant. A short time later a forklift arrived with a container of gold and foreign currency and loaded it into the rear of the suspect’s truck.”
He then drove away.
It wasn’t until 9:30 p.m. that evening that Brink’s security personnel arrived expecting to collect the valuable container. Air Canada employees couldn’t find it, realized it was missing, and began an internal investigation, Mavity said.
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At 2:43 a.m., on April 18, 2023, Peel police were called and told of the theft.
Each gold bar had individual serial numbers.
Peel investigators went door-to-door over four weeks seeking video surveillance images to help track the truck, starting from the warehouse. The area around the airport is thick with businesses small and large.
Mavity said his team managed to track the truck leaving through Peel region onto Highway 401, heading west. It exited the highway at Bronte Road and headed north on Bronte, in Oakville.
Once the truck reached Milton, the area becomes more rural with little video coverage.
“We lose sight of the truck,” he said but it was later recovered.
Over the year, Project 24K investigators executed 37 search warrants, 70 production orders, and interviewed more than 50 people.
One of the first on their radar was the alleged driver, Durante King-Mclean, 25, of Brampton.
“Through a forensic identification and other police techniques we identified King-Mclean as the driver early in the investigation,” Mavity said.
For months police quietly searched but couldn’t find him. They didn’t know he was in the United States.
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As luck would have it, on Sept. 2, 2023, a Pennsylvania state trooper pulled over the driver of a Nissan Sentra that seemed to be driving erratically and had windshields tinted too dark, near the town of Shippensburg, about 150 kilometres northwest of Washington, D.C.
Police say the driver ran away but was arrested shortly after. He appeared to be illegally in the United States. When they checked him on the police database, it flagged him as wanted by Peel police.
When troopers opened the Nissan’s trunk, they didn’t find gold bars, but 65 guns instead, that were destined to be smuggled into Canada, an indictment filed in the U.S. alleges. Two were fully automatic, 11 had been stolen, and one had an obliterated serial number, U.S. officials said.
U.S. investigators say they found messages between King-Mclean and another man from Brampton, Prasath Paramalingam, 35, from about a week or so after the gold heist discussing King-Mclean illegally crossing the border to get guns and bring them back to Canada. They used Threema, an encrypted messaging app, and Instagram.
Paramalingam told King-Mclean he is going to leave Portugal early to get cash for him. The next day he sent King-Mclean a photograph of large amounts of Canadian currency wrapped in stacks with rubber bands, the indictment says.
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Paramalingam and another unnamed person from Toronto flew from Toronto to New York City to deliver money to King-Mclean. Five days later, Paramalingam flew back to Toronto via Miami.
While King-Mclean stayed at an Airbnb in Fort Lauderdale, he allegedly took several photos with his phone of guns and large amounts of U.S. currency. He left Florida in August 2023 in a rental vehicle and drove north.
That’s when he was stopped by state troopers.
Nine people have been identified or charged in their probe.
The five arrested in Canada are: Parmpal Sidhu, 54, of Brampton who was named as an Air Canada employee. He is charged with theft over $5,000 and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence; Amit Jalota, 40, from Oakville, charged with possession of property obtained by crime, theft over $5,000, and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence; Ammad Chaudhary, 43, from Georgetown, charged with accessory after the fact; Ali Raza, a 37-year-old jewelry store owner from Toronto, charged with possession of property obtained by crime; and Paramalingam, charged with accessory after the fact.
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Paramalingam also faces charges in the United States of conspiracy to traffic in firearms and attempting to unlawfully export firearms. The United States is seeking his extradition, said Ben Benson with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, known as the ATF.
King-Mclean, the alleged driver, is formally listed as wanted by Peel police, although he is in custody in the United States.
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Peel police are also searching for three other men.
– Simran Preet Panesar, a 31-year-old Brampton man who was an Air Canada employee at the time of the theft but resigned after the heist. He is wanted for theft over $5,000 and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.
– Archit Grover, 36, from Brampton who is considered a fugitive in Canada and the United States. In Canada he is wanted for theft over $5,000 and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence. In the U.S. he is accused of helping King-Mclean after his roadside arrest and hindering the investigation, including removing possible evidence from the Airbnb that King-Mclean stayed at and arranging a $1,000 payment to the car rental agency for an amended rental agreement.
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– Arsalan Chaudhary, 42, from Mississauga, wanted for theft over $5,000, possession of property obtained by crime and conspiracy to commit and indictable offence.
Peter Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for Air Canada confirmed that two of those suspected in the heist worked for Air Canada’s cargo division at the time.
“One left the company prior to the arrests announced today and the second has been suspended,” he said. “We thank the police for their diligent efforts in investigating this matter. As this is now before the courts, we are limited in our ability to comment further.”
Kelly McNeff, a spokeswoman for Brink’s, said the company wouldn’t comment on the alleged inside job at Air Canada because Brink’s is suing the airline for negligence in the theft.
“We are pleased to know the identities and to hear of the arrests of the individuals,” she said. She thanked police for their diligence and said the company would continue to cooperate in any investigation.
Police said the investigation continues.
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A photo of green onions being sold with the roots chopped off at a Toronto Loblaws store is stirring more anger online against the grocery giant.
The photo posted to the Reddit forum Loblaws Is Out Of Control shows bundles of green onions without the roots at the bottom being sold for $1.79 per bunch.
Many in the comments pointed out that cutting the roots off of a green onion impacts how it tastes, as well as how long it stays fresh.
“I wouldn’t buy those, Glittering_Search_41 wrote. “If you cut off the ends they aren’t retaining their flavour.”
“They will also not keep very long with the root removed,” Mralisterh wrote. “Quartered the shelf life of them, you can already see oxidation. They’re going to rot within days.”
Others speculated that the product could have been chopped by the supplier, or by a new employee in the produce department.
The person who posted the photo said it was the second time they’d seen onions being sold with the roots cut off at the Loblaws located along Toronto’s Lakeshore.
“I believe this is more of a concerted effort to not allow us to regrow our purchased produce and to extract maximum profit,” Party_Setting7622 wrote.
A similar photo of rootless green onions being sold has been posted to the forum before, where one user wondered: “Is that to stop us from regrowing them at home?”
If you cut off the ends they aren’t retaining their flavour.
Loblaw did not respond to a request from comment from Yahoo Canada.
During the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, green onion became a trendy vegetable to showcase on social media, thanks to how easily they can sprout by putting the roots in a glass of water.
Arlene Hazzan Green, co-founder of the Backyard Urban Farm Company in Toronto, says there are many other vegetables that can be grown at home like a house plant, and without a plot or garden.
“All you need is a pot with holes, some potting mix, a saucer, a watering can, some sun and seedlings,” she says.
Hazzan Green explains there’s two types of plants — cold hardy plants, which can grow in cooler temperatures, and heat loving plants, which need frequent and direct light.
Leafy vegetables like kale, arugula, lettuce, chard and mustard greens and herbs, like basil and mint, fall into the first category and can be grown simply in a flowerpot on a window sill or balcony this time of year.
“You don’t need to wait until May 2-4 weekend, which is what everyone thinks,” she says. “I’ve got seedlings that I got started indoors and now I’m planting them outside.”
Tomatoes can also grow easily in a pot, though they fall under the heat loving plant category and need to grow outside and receive lots of sun.
“They’re great on a balcony,” Hazzan Green says. “And they’re way more tasty when you grow your own.”
When it comes to planting green onions, urban farmer Derek Barber of Homestead Toronto says they can be grown from seed, which is generally done in soil. You can also take the ends of another green onion, which would otherwise go to waste, and place them in water to sprout indoors. An entirely new onion won’t grow but you’ll get the leaves. This trick can be done a few times.
“It’s a great way to reuse vegetable scraps and it’s nice to have an ongoing supply of green onion leaves indoors,” says Barber. “The bottom does slowly decompose so you need to cut the new onions higher up the stem to avoid the soft part and you need to change the water regularly.”
Barber says this sprouting trick can also be done with celery, carrots and radish. Though you’re not getting a complete vegetable from it, the sprouts will produce leaves that make a great garnish and can add some fresh flavour to your meals.
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