Morning Update: Ukrainian refugees worry about vanishing support as war nears six-month mark

Good morning,

Anastasia Laurikova worries she got out of Ukraine too late. After arriving by train in Poland with her mother, she grew anxious that the country’s support services will be stretched and the best housing and jobs will be taken. It’s a valid concern. As the war reaches the six-month mark on Aug. 24, the refugee crisis has changed dramatically and much of the early support has vanished.

Poland has taken in nearly two million Ukrainians and while the initial public response was generous, interest has faded. In the first weeks of the war, 77 per cent of Poles volunteered or gave money to refugee relief agencies, according to a study by the Polish Economic Institute. By May, the engagement had fallen to 39 per cent.

Aid workers say the situation could change quickly if fighting intensifies or if Ukraine faces a brutal winter. And they worry that there won’t be the same outpouring of support as there was six months ago. As the war drags into the second half of the year, many charities are finding it hard to keep donors engaged. “Fatigue is obvious,” said Jose Andres, founder of World Central Kitchen.

Read more:

The Expo trade centre in Warsaw has been one of the city’s largest refugee centres since the war began.Anna Liminowicz/The Globe and Mail

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Canada ‘forever discharged’ Catholic entities from $25-million campaign for residential-school survivors

Canada agreed to “forever discharge” Catholic entities from their promise to raise $25-million for residential-school survivors and also picked up their legal bill, a final release document shows. The Canadian Press obtained a signed copy of the 2015 agreement through federal Access-to-Information laws.

The residential-schools settlement obligated the 48 Catholic entities involved to pay $79-million, which was broken into three parts, including making “best efforts” to raise $25-million for residential-school survivors. At issue was whether lawyers for both sides had agreed to free the church groups from all financial commitments – including the $25-million for survivors – in exchange for a payment of $1.2-million, or only had an agreement covering a more narrow part of their financial responsibilities.

By Oct. 30, 2015, a final agreement was signed by the former deputy minister in what had been called Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Canada, freeing the Catholic entities of their financial obligations. “Canada does hereby remise, release and forever discharge the Catholic entities … its directors, officers, shareholders, agents, lawyers, and employees … of and from all manners of actions, causes of action, suits, debts, dues, accounts, bonds whatsoever against the releases,” it reads.

Despite pleas for help, a gas explosion rocked this Ontario town. What went wrong?

The first sign that something was wrong in Wheatley, Ont., came via a call to 911 on June 2, 2021, at 2:22 p.m. Building owner Whit Thiele had discovered a gas leak. This smell was different – it was pungent, “like very strong, rotten eggs.” Mr. Thiele and a contractor friend went into the basement to investigate. There they heard a low hiss and a deep rumbling from beneath the building before water and sludgy mud started bubbling up.

Later that day, the hazmat team from Windsor – the nearest specialist fire crew trained to deal with gas leaks – retrieved gas readings from the doorway of The Pogue, discovering high levels of hydrogen sulphide, also known as sour gas. The next morning, the mystery of the gas leak still unsolved, Chatham-Kent Mayor Darrin Canniff declared a state of emergency in the small southwestern Ontario town of about 3,000 residents.

He and other municipal officials contacted the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources, asking for help to determine the source of the gas. The levels of gas dropped to zero two days later. Although the source remained a mystery, on June 19, the evacuation order was lifted. But then, almost three months later, Mr. Canniff’s dire warning came to pass.

On Aug. 26 at 6:13 p.m., an explosion flattened The Pogue, destroying a neighbouring building and injuring about 20 people. Given the multiple early warning signs – another evacuation in July followed the first – it was a nearly deadly catastrophe that could have been avoided.

Read more:

Destroyed buildings in the centre of Wheatley, Ont., in October, 2021, two months after the explosion.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail

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Also on our radar

Toronto passenger ferry crashed at city terminal dock, injuring 17: Toronto police and Transport Canada are investigating the crash at the city’s terminal dock over the weekend. The cause of the collision was still not known on Sunday, but the city announced that the ferry service’s schedule would be modified for the rest of the summer.

Blue Jays beat by Yankees, miss series sweep: Andrew Benintendi hit a tiebreaking, two-run homer in the seventh inning, securing a win for the New York Yankees they desperately needed and beating the Toronto Blue Jays 4-2 Sunday to avoid a four-game sweep.

Vehicle crashes into wedding party in West Vancouver killing two, injuring 10: A West Vancouver police spokesperson said the accident happened at around 6:10 p.m. local time on Saturday when the driver of the vehicle was trying to get out of their driveway, which is shared between two homes. A next-door neighbour who witnessed the event described the driver as “elderly” and said she had no malicious intent.

Monkeypox public-health messaging needs to avoid stigmatizing LGBTQ+ community: Experts are concerned that monkeypox is being stigmatized as a “gay disease,” like the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Although stronger LGBTQ+ health initiatives have changed the game, making it easier to vaccinate communities at risk, monkeypox’s public-health messaging needs to improve, health leaders say.

Contentious commercial dog ban prevents rabies spread, says veterinary association: A coming ban on commercial dogs, including rescue dogs, from more than 100 countries is necessary to prevent the spread of rabies in Canada, says the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association. But an animal-protection organization insists that less-restrictive measures should be taken.

Morning markets

Growth worries weigh on markets: World shares slipped on Monday and the U.S. dollar extended its climb amid angst over global growth as most central banks keep raising rates. Around 5:30 a.m. ET, Britain’s FTSE 100 was down 0.56 per cent. Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 lost 1.8 per cent and 1.65 per cent, respectively. In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei closed down 0.47 per cent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng slid 0.59 per cent. New York futures were lower. The Canadian dollar was trading at 76.94 US cents.

What everyone’s talking about

Kelly Cryderman: “Alberta could also become a friendly country supplier of minerals critical to energy transition and defence applications in the United States. It’s not the Alberta that many outsiders imagine.”

Jillian Horton: “One might expect that a person in Vanessa’s shoes would be angry, resentful of the fact that she exhausted herself for others on the front line, only to become one of the legions of immunosuppressed Canadians who are now told to look after themselves because their provincial government’s work is done.”

Gail Lord: “This describes neither a museum nor a warehouse, but a proposal that I call an ‘aware-house.’ Such a space would display fallen statues to build understanding about historical processes, including how and why they were first erected and how they came to be removed.”

Mike Tipton: “The Physiological Society has joined the call for heat waves to be named, much as storms and hurricanes are. Doing so can bring focus and co-ordination while triggering responses to a more discrete and recognized threat.”

Today’s editorial cartoon

Living better

Women often face negative reactions to their body hair. Can that conversation change?Larisa Stefanuyk/iStockPhoto / Getty Images

Body hair: It’s time to work it, own it and love it

If public reactions to body hair on women could be slotted into a genre, it would be horror. In one advertisement by the Gillette razor company, which featured aggressive campaigns starting around the early 1920s, a woman opens the shutters to her house, exposing her armpit hair to the people beneath her who scream and run away.

“This girl had really hairy arms, so she was called Chewbacca,” said Montreal-based Esther Calixte-Bea, a self-described “very hairy person,” about the stigma surrounding body hair on women she witnessed growing up. Those who choose to not remove their body hair may face romantic, social, and professional repercussions. But some argue that policing hair on women’s bodies amounts to an act of control, or an indication that women’s bodies in their natural state are objectionable. But women can push back and start new conversations about femininity and female body hair.

Moment in time: Aug. 21, 2022

Lonely lifeguard at Woodbine Beach in Toronto, as bathers, frightened by poliomyelitis, typhoid fever and dysentery have left Toronto lifeguards with little to do but practice rowing, read books and write letters on August 21, 1959.Jack Mitchell/The Globe and Mail

Swimmers stay away from beaches in 1959

After 40 successive days of temperatures above 30 Celsius, you might imagine the beach would be the perfect place to cool off. But in August, 1959, in the middle of a heat wave, the shore was nearly deserted under the lonely, and perhaps bored, eye of the lifeguard at Toronto’s Woodbine Beach in this photo by Jack Mitchell. Although water treatment and industrial pollution practices had improved since the turn of the century, the lake still seemed to threaten swimmers with typhoid fever, dysentery and polio. By the late 1960s, conditions had worsened: Bloated fish were washing ashore and beaches were unusable, the water thick with algae. In 1972, the U.S. and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which kick-started a series of actions to restore the lakes. Now, many Toronto beaches, including Woodbine, are designated Blue Flag, meaning they meet high global standards for cleanliness and maintenance. Lisan Jutras

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