The military must be too risqué for Toronto

Well, as it turns out, Canadian Angels did make it into the National Post on Saturday, just not the Toronto edition. Toronto. Where I live. And buy the paper.

The front page of the Saturday National Post in Toronto was a pair of socks. Because socks are peaceful. Socks don't fight. Socks don't die.

Toronto can apparently only handle the fluff pieces about socks, whereas the rest of Canada has the guts to deal with the Armed Forces. Siri Agrell wrote a great piece, and at least the rest of Canada got to see it. If she has her way, Toronto may see it tomorrow. If not, and we wind up with tulips or something equally inoffensive, here is what she wrote:

Soldiers to get gifts from 'Angels': Torontonian inspired by U.S. group
National Post
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Page: A8
Section: Canada
Byline: Siri Agrell
Source: National Post

A Toronto woman has started a network to allow Canadians to express their
support for members of the armed forces.

Wendy Sullivan, a legal assistant and part-time blogger, yesterday launched
a Canadian version of Soldiers' Angels, a popular U.S. group that sends
letters, e-mails and care packages to members of the military.

Canadian Angels, which can be found at www.canadianangels.org, hopes to pair
citizens with Canadian armed forces personnel stationed in Afghanistan or
here at home.

Ms. Sullivan, who has no personal connection to the armed forces in Canada
or the United States, said she has long been looking for a way to express
her support for the Canadian military, but found few means to do so.

For the past year, as a member of Soldiers' Angels, Ms. Sullivan has sent
messages and gifts of support to individual U.S. soldiers in Iraq, joined a
group that has "adopted" the 82 Airborne division and raised money for a
program that provides voice-activated lap tops to wounded soldiers.

"It's really just a matter of sending letters, remembering birthdays,
sending off Christmas presents," she said. "All it is, is keeping in touch
and letting them know that there's someone at home who is thinking about
them."

Her main problem will be finding the names of individual soldiers for her
"angels" to communicate with.

"The system in the Canadian military is that you can send a package to a
soldier if you have his or her name and address, but you can not send
general mail," she said. "That leaves a whole bunch of people not being able
to hear from me. Short of showing up on [General Rick] Hillier's doorstep
and saying 'Hi, I'm Wendy,' I'm not quite sure what to do."

She received an e-mail from Patti Bader, head of the U.S. Soldiers' Angels
network, who gave her blessing and support to the project and Ms. Sullivan
also hopes to find a corporate partner. In the United States, a company
called Minimus provides travel- sized snacks and other products to the
Soldiers' Angel group and makes up care packages it ships to U.S. military
bases.

"I just sent one out to one of my American guys in Iraq," Ms. Sullivan said
yesterday. "They range in price from about $10 to $150 and it's just so
easy."

From her experience with such projects in the United States, Ms. Sullivan
says she knows first-hand how much these gifts can mean to soldiers and
hopes the project will take off in Canada.

She dismisses the idea that it is unfair to send gifts to some soldiers to
the exclusion of others, which is why the Canadian Armed Forces discourages
the public from sending gifts.

"Saying that they can't give things to some soldiers and not all of them, to
me that's kindergarten not war," she said. "I want to spoil them rotten."

"I thought, well, if I can't help the guy next door, I can help the country
next door, so I joined Soldiers' Angels," she said.

Ms. Sullivan is in the process of registering Canadian Angels as a
charitable organization, but she said she has already signed up about 20
volunteers and had people send money and express their support for the
project.

sagrell@nationalpost.com