The Prescott Coast Guard hosted a special ship on Wednesday in honour of Canada’s 150th birthday.
The decommissioned icebreaker, formerly known as the Polar Prince, docked in town as part of a “coast to coast to coast” journey celebrating 150 years of Canada. The ship has been dubbed the C3 and is travelling from Toronto to Vancouver by way of the North West Passage.
After a brief tour of downtown, with Councilor Fraser Laschinger, Mayor Brett Todd welcomed the travelers with a short speech and thanked them for making Prescott one of their stops. The mayor then turned the microphone over to Councilor Laschinger who delivered an informative speech about Prescott’s history. The final speeches came from participants in the C3 project, with Raymond Guillermo reading a poem he’d written on the journey.
The C3 will take 150 days to complete its trip while making 150 stops along the way. The journey has been broken in to 15 legs, lasting between 10 and 7 days. On each leg of the journey the citizens joining the ship’s crew and science team will change but representatives from the C3 project say this is not just a site-seeing trip.
Participants spend their time aboard the ship learning about four key themes; diversity and inclusion, youth engagement, science and the environment and reconciliation with the goal of organizers being to inspire a deeper understanding of the country and cultural groups from past to present. The C3 also hosts a team of scientists and researchers studying; coastal marine soundscape, the impact of mircoplastics and the hybrid offspring of polar and grizzly bears, to name just a few.
This leg of the journey will end in Montreal on June 10th with the trip finishing up entirely when it reaches Vancouver on October 28th. For more information about the C3 project visit https://canadac3.ca/en/homepage/ .