DANGER OF TRAMPLING

A Canadian educational tour company called Education First brought a group of 9,000 visitors, most of them students. It wrote a formal complaint to Minister Kent Hehr:

While the visit was an honour, “sadly, that honour was diminished by extremely disappointing event management by Veterans Affairs Canada.”

It said that “provisions for safety, basic human needs and crowd control were dangerously inadequate,” and “some of our participants were injured departing the site.”

It added there was a real danger of trampling and there were two- hour waits for toilets.

During a full year of trying to contact Veterans Affairs before the event, the letter says, “we ... were repeatedly met with no response or with empty assurances that all would become clear at a later date.”

The company asks the minister for an apology and says it will abandon plans to participate in Juno 75 celebrations ( in 2019) unless there is “a full review of VAC’s dysfunctional planning” so that the company feels safer about the next event.

A spokesman for the tour company said Friday that the injuries were somewhere “in the tens” and several involved heat stroke, while others occurred during the mass exit. As for the apology, he said the company was “satisfied with what we’ve heard back from VAC at this point. Clearly there are more conversations to be had. But VAC has expressed regret about the concerns we raised and has committed to working with us to improve moving forward.”