Amid deteriorating security and mounting desperation in the days following the Haitian earthquake, Ottawa is dispatching another 1,000 soldiers to the nation as part of a “major muscle movement.”
The troops based at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier in Quebec will work on peacekeeping in an area plagued by looting and will help with the massive relief effort aimed at keeping as many as three million people alive.
The group will bring with it 60 vehicles and enough medical staff to operate a field hospital.
"The situation in Haiti is grave and fragile and in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake a lack of basic needs such as food and clean water are causing stress and anger amongst the local population," Defence Minister Peter MacKay said at a news conference on Sunday.
"The government of Canada feels it has a moral imperative to do everything in its power to help with the international relief and stabilization efforts in [Haiti], and to do so as quickly as humanly possible."
Some 200 soldiers are already in the disaster zone. Two Canadian navy vessels carrying 500 soldiers are expected to reach the shores of the Caribbean nation early this week. And more than 200 members of Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team are preparing to set out.
Also on Sunday, Ontario announced it’s sending its chief forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Pollanen, to Haiti on Monday to help identify victims and assess the amount of personnel and resources needed to carry out the task.
Eight Canadians are now confirmed dead, including RCMP Supt. Doug Coates, computer science professor Denis Bellavance, and two relief workers, Guillaume Siemienski and Helene Rivard, whose deaths were announced on Saturday.
RCMP Sgt. Mark Gallagher, Montreal professor Georges Anglade and his wife Mireille as well as Yvonne Martin, a nurse from Elmira, Ontario, were all found dead within two days of Tuesday's disaster.
There are 1,115 Canadians still missing while some 593 evacuees have been brought home, including a group that landed in Montreal Sunday morning.
With files from the Canadian Press