A devastating earthquake in Haiti Tuesday has reinforced Canada’s ties with that nation.
In case you didn’t know, this country has quite a few Haitians — mostly in Montreal (newcomers from Haiti tend to prefer to settle in Quebec because of the French spoken there).
As well, for a number of years now, RCMP members have been stationed in the tiny Caribbean nation — where they have been training police officers.
Such charitable organizations as CARE Canada, Oxfam-Quebec, Save the Children Canada and Doctors Without Borders have also long been helping out in the western hemisphere’s poorest country.
Unfortunately, many Canadians probably couldn’t find Haiti on a map.
If you don’t already know, along with the Dominican Republic, it occupies the island of Hispaniola.
The Dominican Republic is mostly Spanish speaking while most Haitians speak French.
The Dominican Republic is also poor, but not nearly as poor as Haiti.
The Dominican Republic has a relatively well developed tourist industry (its all-inclusive resorts are among the cheapest in the Caribbean), but Haiti has so far done little to cater to tourists. Medical care is poor in the Dominican (not nearly as good as it is in Cuba), but even at that it is apparently still ahead of Haiti.
According to most sources, the country’s human population is about 10 million.
It’s impossible to know how many people were killed by Tuesday’s earthquake, but some estimates have put the number as high as 100,000 and as low as 50,000 or less.
How many Canucks were killed by the earthquake is so far unknown, but The Evangelical Church of Canada says one of its nurses was killed.
A Canadian navy ship, the HMCS Halifax, is preparing to set out for Haiti with humanitarian aid.
Medical supplies, food, water purification tablets, construction materials and other equipment have been loaded onto the vessel in Halifax.
Ottawa will send more relief supplies once it receives assessments from a reconnaissance team that travelled to Haiti on Wednesday aboard a C-130 military transport plane.
Unfortunately, it often seems that natural disasters mostly strike the poorest of nations.
Sure, there was the earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, but such disasters have happened more frequently in the Third World.
So, as with the tsunami that rocked Southeast Asia in 2004, it will be up to the developed world to rescue Haiti.
That’s fair enough as that country simply doesn’t have the resources to effect much change.
Still, it does make one wonder how one country can be allowed to remain so poor when there is so much wealth in other nations.
Lee Giles is an Advocate editor.