Nicholas Vachon
By Jane Armstrong - Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 0 Comments
He loved volunteer firefighting so much he decided against a career move to Calgary
illustration by marc ngui
Nicholas Vachon was born Sept. 12, 1981, at Montfort Hospital in Ottawa to Isabelle and Claude Vachon, two quiet schoolteachers who lived in Curran, a small village about 80 km east of Ottawa. Nicholas was their first son, the third of five Vachon children.
As a boy, Nicholas was serious beyond his years, Claude says. He brooded about global issues like pollution and foreign conflicts, and pestered his father with questions about the 1991 Iraq war. Art was an outlet, and he’d spend hours drawing elaborate pictures of war scenes and sinking ships.
At the village school, the other kids bullied Nicholas. But his younger sister, Marie-Claude, worshipped him. In winter, they’d take their sleds to the highest hill in town, packing a picnic so they could spend the entire day on the slope. “We did everything together,” Marie-Claude says. “I wanted to be with him everywhere he went.” Continue…
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Fast and furious
By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 9 Comments
Do street racing laws actually violate the Charter of Rights?
If nothing else, Ontario’s new “street racing” law has made for some amusing police blotter. There was that heavy-footed firefighter who had his emergency vehicle impounded for seven days (he was off-duty when a North Bay cop clocked him at 70 km/h over the limit). Another driver nabbed in the same part of the province also lost his wheels for a week—as did the speeding tow truck driver who came to impound the car. And then, of course, there was Antonio Talarico, the 26-year-old who made headlines across the country last month when his Infiniti G35 was spotted tearing down a Toronto highway at a whopping 250 km/h. His first words after being pulled over? “I’m sorry.”The Ontario Provincial Police certainly isn’t apologizing. Or laughing. The force says the tough new street racing penalties—including possible prison time for anyone caught driving more than 50 km/h over the limit—are doing exactly what they were designed to do: save lives. In 2008, the law’s first full year on the books, fatalities on OPP-patrolled roads plummeted by almost one-third (from 451 to 322), and in the first three months of 2009 there were 17 speed-related deaths, a 29 per cent drop from the same period last year.
