22 Repat

The Ottawa Citizen

CFB TRENTON — RCMP Chief Supt. Doug Coates returned home Friday from his final overseas mission, his flag-draped coffin carried by eight uniformed officers from a gray military plane on to the tarmac and past his waiting family.
Coates, acting commissioner of the UN’s stabilization mission in Haiti, was found dead last Saturday in the rubble of the UN headquarters building in Port-au-Prince. His colleague, Sgt. Mark Gallagher from Halifax, had been found dead a few days earlier in the ruins of his rented home. The two are the first RCMP officers to die while on an overseas mission.
The military airplane from Haiti carrying the officers’ remains landed just before 4 p.m. for the repatriation ceremony.
Once an honour guard with officers from the Ottawa area was in place, Coates’ family walked onto the tarmac followed by uniformed RCMP officers. Eldest son Luc Coates, wearing his air force uniform, his mother, Lise, brother Mathieu and sister Julie, came to a stop beside the plane.
They stood still as eight pallbearers carried Coates’ coffin down a ramp and into a waiting hearse while uniformed officers stood at attention.
The ceremony was repeated again as Gallagher’s coffin was carried from the plane, with his own honour guard made up of officers from the Atlantic region standing at attention.
Members of the public, past and present police officers, military personnel and firefighters were silent as they watched the repatriation unfold in the below freezing weather. They lined the fence along the airbase for the ceremony.
After it was over, onlookers turned to the road to watch as a procession of OPP, Toronto Police and RCMP cars as they led the black limousines carrying the fallen officers’ families. The procession crawled along while people in the street held Canadian flags and looked on.
Luc Coates rolled down the window of the limousine as he rode, to see the hundreds of people who lined the street.
The procession continued onto the Highway of Heroes for the journey to the medical examiner’s office in Toronto.
A group of military personnel from CFB Kingston took a bus to witness the repatriation ceremony, including Pte. Jacqueline Girouard, whose husband was killed in Afghanistan three years ago. She said she knows the importance of seeing the streets lined with supporters and said RCMP officers attended her husband’s repatriation ceremony.
“It absolutely makes a difference in the healing process when you’re on that side,” Girouard, referring to the hundreds of people she saw as she was driven through the street after her husband’s repatriation ceremony.
“RCMP, fire, police, they all come out. It was only natural for me to come.”
Paul Cane, co-founder of the Canadian Army Veteran association, was stationed with the Canadian military in Haiti in 1998, and said he made lasting bonds with the police officers he met.
“It forms a connection that never goes away,” Cane said as he waited for the ceremony to begin. “If we can stand in the cold and be there for the family, then we will.”
Coates, who worked in Ottawa when not on a mission, first became involved in peacekeeping in 1993, when he was deployed to Haiti.
He then worked as director of the international peace operations branch in Ottawa, which oversees the deployment of peacekeeping operations.
He went back to Haiti in 1994 and 1995. From 2000 until 2001, Coates led the RCMP's international training section. For two years beginning in 2004, Coates worked as chief operations officer for the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre.
Gallagher joined the RCMP in 1998 after fourteen years with the Moncton Police Service. In 2007, he was promoted to the rank of sergeant as the media relations officer for the province of Nova Scotia.
On July 7, 2009 Gallagher was deployed to Haiti on a nine-month United Nations peacekeeping mission, working as a project coordinator.