A ‘SHOCKING’ ARREST
BROTHER ASKS FOR PRAYERS AFTER ARCHITECT CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER
The brother of Ellis Galea Kirkland, the architect, des i g ner, l obbyist and consultant arrested in a dramatic takedown — police rappelled down the side of a hotel where the distraught woman had perched f or hours while wanted in the stabbing of a doorman at her tony Toronto condominium — asked for prayers for his sister.
“There is more in the papers than I know,” Father Edwin Galea, parish priest at Toronto’s St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church, said Friday. “It’s very challenging, please keep her in your prayers.”
Friends and clients expressed a similar mix of concern and shock at Thursday’s events.
“I’m very surprised and shocked at what I hear,” said Chief Leo Friday of the Kashechewan First Nation, a troubled northern Ontario reserve that Kirkland is a longtime lobbyist for on infrastructure matters.
“I understand it is going to the courts. I want to know more about things,” he said.
Kirkland, 60, is charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault, assault with a weapon and weapons dangerous after the 67- yearold doorman at Arbour Glen Apartments was stabbed multiple times with a kitchen knife.
The man is recovering in hospital after surgery.
After the stabbing, police issued a warning Thursday to be on the lookout for Kirkland, whom they described as armed and dangerous.
When they found her she sat perched on the railing of a 27th-floor balcony of a downtown hotel, leading to a tense three-hour discussion with a crisis intervention team. The standoff ended when Emer- gency Task Force officers rappelled from the roof to the balcony and apprehended her without injury.
After a brief court appearance Friday, Kirkland will be held in custody through the weekend because she has not retained a lawyer. A publication ban was granted on the victim’s identity and any evidence heard in court.
Kirkland is to appear Monday morning at the Toronto Mental Health Court in the basement of Old City Hall.
On Friday, her name was removed from the public list of vice- presidents of NATO Association of Canada.
She has been with the association, as a director and vice- president, for more than 17 years, according to her curriculum vitae. Kirkland is also chair and founder of the association’s special project, NATO Paxbuild Economic Platform, “designed to encourage peace and security through economic stability.”
She was also a chair of the Committee of Canadian Architectural Councils in 1993 and president of the Ontario Association of Architects from 1992 to 1994.
Kirkland immigrated to Canada as a toddler with her parents and siblings in 1957 from Malta.
She comes from oldstock Maltese families, she once told a writer of a glowing profile, with her father’s family tracing their lineage back to 800 AD.
She was born into a family of over- achievers, she told a writer in the mid 1980s, with an uncle who was vice- president of t he European Economic Council and another who was a Vatican theologian. Her great- grandfather designed and built an elaborate church in Italy, and his old parchment drawing of it once adorned her St. George Street consulting office.
"I remember when I was young, whenever I would say ‘ I want this,’ my father would answer, ‘ Well, figure out how to get it, if that’s what you want.’ That was it. He wasn’t going to give it to me. If I wanted something I had to find out how to get it,” she is quoted as saying in Canadian Woman Studies magazine.
When her f ather, Paul Carmel Galea, died in 2013, a motion of condolence was passed by Toronto city council.
Kirkland, who has been married twice, is described as self confident and self assured, proud of remaining outside the orthodoxy of what was expected of her as a woman, as an immigrant and as a person. The profile said that she was driven to succeed in her career and had put off marrying and having children in order to accommodate her goals.
She graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor or Architecture degree, one of few women pursuing that career at the time.
Kirkland was an A- type personality who was always smiling despite the gruelling five- year architectural program at U of T, said a former classmate.
“There were 72 of us who started the program and only nine of us graduated after five years,” the classmate said, requesting their name not be published. “Ellis was a very bright woman in school, a smart woman,” the classmate said.
Kirkland married a former professor f rom t he school, Michael Kirkland, after her graduation. The two went into business together as well, working on waterfront projects, but the marriage did not last.
After U of T, she went to Harvard University for a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design degree in the school’s graduate school of design.
Her specialty was critical infrastructure with an emphasis on rebuilding infrastructure within failed regions, skills she applied as a lobbyist for two northern Ontario First Nation bands, Kashechewan and Fort Albany.
Under the business of Kirkland Capital Corp., she registered as a federal lobbyist.
In registering as a lobbyist in 2005, she declared s everal previous public appointments and public service involvement, as required, including 10 years as a board member of the Atlantic Council of Canada and work with the department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
From 1995 to 1998 she did work for the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and in 1994 was on the Sectoral Advisory Group on International Trade for DFAIT.
In October 2014, another magazine profile, this one in Ottawa Life, called her “the go-to person for insight into large infrastructure projects.”
Kirkland was the first female president of the Ontario Association of Architects and has worked on high- profile projects in Canada, including Toronto’s waterfront, Ottawa Life reported.
I’M VERY SURPRISED AND SHOCKED AT WHAT I HEAR.