The old saying goes “no good deed goes unpunished.” But every once in a while, life upsets the cart on that bit of wisdom and sends something nice rolling towards someone who deserves it.
Elijah Porter was one of those people Tuesday.
The 10-year-old Paradise boy got a morning visit from two members of the Canadian men’s 4x100-metre Olympic relay team: Seyi Smith of Ottawa, Ont., and Jared Connaughton of New Haven, P.E.I.
Their teammates, Gavin Smellie of Brampton and Justyn Warner of Markham, Ont., could not make it. Their flight was cancelled due to post-tropical storm Leslie. They sent along their regrets.
It was a nice surprise to get first thing in the morning exclaimed Elijah.
“Well, I didn’t know what was going on,” he said.
The Telegram website offers only a sample of the stories our reporters, editors and photographers work hard to get to the public every day.
Wednesday’s print edition of The Telegram, on the other hand, contains much, much more, from news to opinion to our expanded Business section.
Inside Wednesday’s print edition:
• Glenn Petten brought a little red Corvette as a fixer-upper.
“I guess I’ve got a lot of work to do on her now,” he said Tuesday, laughing.
The sports car that originally needed only a few mechanical improvements now pretty much needs a complete overhaul.
That’s after gusts from tropical storm Leslie caused Petten’s 14-x-16-foot garage behind his house on Brisbane Court in Paradise to lift up from the ground and blow over Tuesday.
It landed on top of the Corvette, smashing the roof and windshield.
• Tuesday’s post tropical storm was a test for the provincial government, Premier Kathy Dunderdale said Tuesday, and it passed.
After meeting with emergency co-ordinators at the provincial command centre, Dunderdale talked to reporters, and said everybody is pretty happy with how things went.
“(We) wanted a test of our emergency plan, wanted to see how our infrastructure was going to stand up,” Dunderdale said.
“You can do all kinds of tests, but there’s only one test that counts, and that’s when you’re in the face of a weather event such as this, and we’re all delighted with how the emergency plan has worked.”
• Airport workers hit the picket line at 5 a.m. Tuesday, but tropical storm Leslie issued a temporary injunction.
The 85 members of the Union of Canadian Transportation Employees local 90916, part of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), went on strike Tuesday morning in front of the St. John’s airport, after negotiations broke down with the airport authority.
Workers have been without an agreement since 2009 and haven’t had a wage increase in four years.
• The power knocked out by tropical storm Leslie came back on just three minutes before the start of federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s luncheon with the St. John’s Board of Trade.
The dining room at the Sheraton Hotel had been equipped with emergency lighting that turned out not to be needed for Flaherty’s speech.
His speech outlined infrastructure spending in the province while touting the Conservative government’s response during the economic downturn of 2008-09 and describing the “fragility and uncertainty” in the Canadian economy, which he said is susceptible to crises in other world economies.
“The danger then, as we perceived it, of course, was the weakness in the United States economy, the American economy, and the fact they were accumulating so much public debt and running such large deficits,” he said. “That hasn’t changed much, but it has been overridden in the meantime by the weakness in the European banking system and some of the sovereign countries in Europe.”
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