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Good morning. It’s Wendy Cox in Vancouver.

The enormity of the loss for Canada is gut-wrenching.

This week’s downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 took the lives of at least 57 Canadians. But in Globe and Mail newsrooms across the country, as we scrambled to respond to the sudden loss of Canadian lives, it became gradually clearer that the toll to Canada went well beyond those 57.

Early in the day, media in Ukraine posted the flight manifest, listing the names of the 176 people aboard the aircraft, along with their nationalities. It was a precious piece of information, enabling reporters to begin to gather the stories that brought these people to life.

At first, we focused on the names with CAN behind them. But over and over, reporters were hearing about others who did not have that designation behind their names. Our bureau was asked to start combing through the names with IRN – Iranian – behind them.

The first name I googled was the first on the manifest: Abbasnezhad/Mojtaba. A young man with the same name turned up as a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto. He was later confirmed as one of the victims.

Name after name from the manifest entered into Google turned up people with substantial links to this country: as students, as researchers, as spouses, doctors, relatives.

There were at least 57 Canadians on that plane, but there were also 82 Iranians and many of them had strong ties to this country. Relatives and friends told us of recent weddings, of extended Canadian family, of plans to put down roots here.

The Iranian community in Edmonton was especially hard hit. About 30 people were believed to be among the victims, including professors, students and staff at the University of Alberta.

A community leader in Edmonton noted that about one in every 100 Iranians living in the city was on Flight 752, many returning home from visiting family for the holidays.

“The grief is just dripping from the walls,” University of Alberta president David Turpin said Thursday.

Outside a bakery in North Vancouver, where the Iranian community is tight-knit and vibrant, a memorial of flowers and photographs grew and grew. The bakery is owned by Amir Pasavand, who lost his wife and daughter in the crash.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made his first public comment about the crash, he referenced 138 people travelling to Canada. He did not distinguish between those of Canadian or Iranian citizenship.

The Globe’s diary of victims from the crash is a vivid depiction of why. It details Canadian ties and dreams, regardless of passport.

Novelist Nazanine Hozar, who was born in Tehran but makes her home in British Columbia, wrote that members of Canada’s Iranian population were seized with new terror, but also weary upon news of the U.S. killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

“For every Iranian-Canadian this was horror experienced through the prism of five days of accumulated shock, exhaustion, confusion and fear. This is the kind of gut punch that comes at you before you’ve had a chance to catch a breath after the first punch has already landed.”

She finishes the piece with a plea for a kind word and an assurance that everything will be okay.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here. This is a new project and we’ll be experimenting as we go, so let us know what you think.

Around the West:

SMUDGING CEREMONY: The B.C. Supreme Court ruled that a Vancouver Island elementary school did not violate Charter rights to religious freedom by conducting an Indigenous smudging ceremony. The court challenge began after Candice Servatius, an evangelical Christian from Port Alberni, B.C., argued that her two children experienced mental distress when exposed to Indigenous ceremonies in 2015.

COASTAL GASLINK: While a standoff between a group of hereditary chiefs with the Wet’suwet’en Nation and Coastal GasLink, the RCMP announced it has launched a criminal investigation. The force will be looking into safety hazards, such as partially cut trees and stack of tires and accelerants, that were found along a remote access road that construction workers need to build the contentious natural gas pipeline.

BISON: Researchers in Saskatchewan are fast at work building a genome biobank using the semen and embryos of purebred bison from Canada’s conservation herds. The hope is that the project could help produce even more purebred beasts, ultimately increasing their scant numbers.

SKIING IN RED DEER Nearly 100 elite ski athletes will be racing and training at a surprising ski resort outside of Red Deer, Alta. The hill, which is actually the western side of a canyon, stretches 164 vertical metres from top to bottom and has some surprisingly tricky elements along the way according to the skiers who train on it.

CLOSING SHOP: A long-time fixture of Vancouver’s Chinatown neighbourhood is closing its doors after 102 years of business. The owner of Ming Wo, a cookware store on East Pender, said there were multiple reasons for closing after the family behind the operation sold the building, where the Wong family’s business has been since 1917.

BRON STUDIOS Ian Bailey caught up with the Vancouver-based husband-and-wife producing team behind BRON Studios, which has brought much-hyped films to the theatres, including Joker and the coming Ghostbusters sequel.

ALBERTA DOCTORS: The province’s doctors are considering all options – including a court challenge – to combat changes to their billing ability by the UCP government. The change centres around rules that link payments to how long a doctor sees a patient. Doctors argue that this change could profoundly affect patient care.

MANITOBA FIRE EXPERTS: Two fire experts from Manitoba returned home this week after a five-week stint helping efforts in Australia. The pair helped co-ordinate and deploy crews in the southeast end of the country, where they said the fires are ‘growing substantially.’

GALAXY-CLUSTER IMAGE: A University of Victoria astronomer and his colleagues have opened a rare window into cosmic history by discovering that many members of a distant cluster of galaxies look surprisingly evolved, despite having been glimpsed at a tender age. The finding adds a new wrinkle to the puzzle of precisely when the first stars and galaxies emerged from the primordial hydrogen and other elements that permeated space shortly after the Big Bang, during a period known as the “dark age.”

OPINION:

Gary Mason on the Coastal GasLink pipeline protest: “The confrontation has been framed by some as some sort of intractable quandary for the B.C. government and NDP Premier John Horgan. Of course, not long ago, Mr. Horgan was being hailed by First Nations leaders across the country for heading the first government in the country to bring UNDRIP into law. He’s also made Indigenous reconciliation a major part of his government’s overarching governing philosophy. So it’s assumed this dispute presents a major dilemma for his government. It doesn’t.”

Glenn McGillivray on forest fires: “When we look at the current fire situation playing out in Australia, where a prolonged period of exceptionally hot, dry weather has contributed to four straight months of major wildfires (called bushfires Down Under), a question is rekindled: Does the situation there portend a hotter, dryer more fiery future for places such as British Columbia and Alberta?”

Alexandra Gill on good vegan restaurants “Did you wake up on Jan. 1 and vow to become a lean, ripped, libidinous elite athlete fuelled by the astounding powers of plant-based protein? Me too. … For those with stronger willpower – or for those who are merely curious about meat- and dairy-free dining options – I recommend these two excellent downtown Vancouver restaurants, both recently reinvented by omnivore chefs, which do all the heavy lifting for you.”

Sarah Maetche on Third Option programs: “But the period of time right after a sexual assault – a critical time when collecting evidence is pertinent – survivors are often not ready to report to the police, and as a result, many don’t pursue medical attention at all. What the Third Option does is exactly what’s in its name: it offers survivors another option of having the evidence collected and then stored for up to a year without police investigation, giving them time to assess options, process and heal before making an ultimate decision. On Dec. 17, Alberta Health Services (AHS) and the RCMP announced that they will expand the program to rural hospitals within the Edmonton zone, as well as the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre. That’s a very good thing: Sexual assault and sexual crimes are violent acts that remove an individual’s most fundamental human right – the right to choose what happens to their body – and the Third Option brings back some semblance of this right, offering a choice to the survivor at a challenging and confusing time.”

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