Haiti's sudden turn for the worse puts Trudeau on the spot
CBC
"There's one event that tells it all," Haitian businessman Marco Larosilière told CBC News from his home in Port-au-Prince.
"Last week, the general inspector of the national police was kidnapped with his son in front of his school."
If a high-ranking official of the national police is not safe, said Larosilière, "what about the rest of the population?"
"It's unbearable," he added. "You feel that every day, the situation is getting worse and worse. And you're thinking it can't be worse. And the next day, you find out it's worse."
Larosilière's own neighbourhood has so far been spared, although he can hear the gunfire.
He's essentially trapped in Port-au-Prince, unable to reach his agrifood business in Haiti's south because of the gangs' stranglehold on the capital.
Over the past two weeks, the situation in Port-au-Prince has taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse.
Dr. William Pape of Cornell University is a member of the World Health Organization's scientific committee and one of Haiti's most distinguished medical doctors. He warned last week that the country could be on the road to a Rwanda-scale massacre (albeit without the inter-ethnic element of those events).
And last week, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was forced to close its hospital in Cite Soleil, a place famous for staying open no matter what. "We are living scenes of warfare just meters from the establishment," said MSF medical adviser Vincent Harris in a media statement.
The spiralling chaos comes at a difficult time for the Trudeau government as it prepares to welcome U.S. President Joe Biden to Canada.
Canada has been saddled with the expectation that it will "take the lead" in restoring order to Haiti because the Biden administration pressured it to do so — and because it suggested to other countries that Canada was going to do so.
The last time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Biden shared a bilateral stage was in Mexico City on January 11. "We're all very aware that things could get worse in Haiti," Trudeau said then.
"That's why Canada and various partners, including the United States, are preparing various scenarios if it does start to get worse."
Since then, U.S. pressure on Canada appears only to have increased.
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