The Canadian community celebrated the Canadian national day in Taipei yesterday for the first time in two years, with live performances, games and food stalls selling Canadian specialties.
Canada’s July 1 birthday falls on Friday, but was celebrated early to allow weekend attendance.
This was the first Canada Day celebration to be held in Taipei since 2020, said Jordan Reeves, the outgoing executive director of the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei.
Photo: CNA
The event was a wonderful way to wrap up his four-year tenure in Taiwan, he said.
The trade office represents Canada’s interest in Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic relations.
Taiwan’s celebrations had been the largest Canada Day events in Asia before the COVID-19 pandemic, attracting more than 9,000 people each year, said the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan, which organized yesterday’s event.
The number of people in attendance at yesterday’s event, which ran for nine hours beginning at noon, appeared to be much less than previous years, likely due to the COVID-19 situation in Taiwan and a thunder shower that occurred in the afternoon.
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Harry Tseng (曾厚仁), who was at the event, said the celebration demonstrated the determination of the Canadian community in Taiwan to help “bring our lives back to normal.”
He added that the government would continue to “open up” the nation’s border controls and loosen COVID-19 measures in the near future.
The Canadian community is deeply involved in Taiwan’s economic and cultural development, Tseng said.
“Taiwan and Canada are like-minded partners. We both value and cherish freedom and democracy, and respect human rights and the rule of law,” he said.
“I believe Canada and Taiwan should be working even more closely together to bring our bilateral relations to a new height,” Tseng said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching