Soldiers guard a Canadian Forces plane upon its arrival in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
A massive Canadian response to the plight of the Haitian people could put more than a thousand soldiers on the ground of the devastated island nation by the beginning of next week.
The army has told 800 troops from CFB Valcartier in Quebec that they could be deployed to Haiti as soon as Saturday. The actual size of the contingent is expected to be announced at a news conference Saturday morning.
Those soldiers would join the nearly 150 Canadian Forces personnel who are already unloading planes in Port-au-Prince. And 500 Canadians on the ships HMCS Halifax and HMCS Athabaskan are due to arrive in the Haitian capital on Monday or Tuesday.
It is a mobilization that demonstrates the ability of the military - and Ottawa - to respond more quickly to disaster than ever before with equipment, recently purchased, that makes Canada a key player in times of international calamity.
"Could we have done this 10 years ago? I don't think so. Not this fast and not to this degree," said a military spokesman who described the total number of Canadian troops who would be deployed overseas as "historic."
In addition to the nearly 3,000 troops in Afghanistan, a battle group is currently training in California to be deployed to the war zone in March. And other soldiers are preparing to provide security for the Olympic Games in Vancouver.
The troops sent from Valcartier will include a headquarters unit and two infantry companies as well as logistics, medical and engineering personnel.
They will arrive too late to pull survivors from what is left of buildings. But the aim is to prevent the earthquake disaster compounding through disease, lack of security, and the inability to obtain food and water.
Meanwhile, the back-and-forth airlift that began Thursday with four flights out of CFB Trenton in Ontario continues.
Twice a day, for the foreseeable future, a massive C-17 Globemaster - the cargo plane that is often likened to a football field on wings - will lumber down the military runway with its co-ordinates set for Haiti.
Supported by the smaller workhorses of the Canadian air force, the Hercules C-130s, the aircraft will carry the myriad of people and supplies needed to bring relief to a country buried in rubble and return with stranded Canadians.
"The speed at which the Canadian Forces prepared and executed the initial steps of this operation is in my view unprecedented," Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Friday. "It is a testament to their professionalism and their dedication."
Still, the situation on the ground remains grim.
One of the confirmed dead and another who is still missing were RCMP officers taking part in an 82-member peacekeeping team. The scope of the disaster means even more police are needed.
Defence Minister Lawrence Cannon said Friday that the United Nations has welcomed an offer to send additional officers from Canada to Haiti, but neither the government nor the RCMP could say how many would go, or when.
As that is being decided, the C-17s are suddenly and dramatically proving their worth.
It was former defence minister Gordon O'Connor who signed off on the purchase of the massive planes. He did so in the face of criticism that the C-17s were not necessary and that the $3.4-billion spent to buy and maintain them should have been used to purchase tactical aircraft better suited to the battlefields of Afghanistan.
But the capabilities of the giant cargo planes in the face of a disaster on the scale of the Haitian earthquake has done much to justify their cost.
Steven Staples, the president of the Rideau Institute, an independent research institute based in Ottawa, said on Friday: "I was skeptical of this purchase, these are very expensive aircraft. But, I will have to admit this it's good to see this kind of equipment being spent in this way."
And Molly Finlay, the director of public relations for World Vision Canada, said the government's offer to allow her organization to put some of its supplies on a C-17 flight will mean more aid for the Haitian people.
"If is wasn't for cargo space like that that DND had offered to us, it would cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to charter a plane to take this stuff over there," said Ms. Finlay. "It means that we can put more financial resources into meeting needs on the ground."