THE BRAMPTON OBSERVER — Brampton, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, January 9, 2030 — Front page
‘BEFORE THE SKY CLOSES’: PEARSON BUCKLES UNDER RUSH OF REUNION FLIGHTS AS REGION WAITS ON GREAT LAKES QUESTION
Grocery shelves thin across Peel; council votes to open community centres; U of T astronomer says asteroid arrival window now “late March, with high confidence”
By Harleen Dhillon, Staff Reporter
BRAMPTON — The lineup outside the Punjabi grocer on Queen Street East began forming before dawn Tuesday, and by the time Gurdev Sandhu unlocked the doors at eight, it stretched past the pharmacy and around the corner.
“Flour, rice, dal, oil. Same four things, every customer,” said Sandhu, 61, who has owned the store for twenty-three years. “Nobody is panicking, they tell me. Everybody is just buying like the people who are panicking.”
Four weeks after the transmissions began — the repeating, 306-second messages that world governments now concede originate from the objects inbound from the asteroid belt — the anxiety that officials spent December calling premature has arrived in Peel Region ahead of the asteroids themselves.
The most visible sign is in the sky that is supposedly soon to close. Toronto Pearson International Airport recorded its highest-volume week in history over the New Year, driven by what travel agents are calling “reunion flights” — families paying any fare to bring parents and grandparents from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Guyana and Jamaica to Canada, or in some cases flying the other way, before the transmissions’ deadline, if it is a deadline, arrives with the objects. Kulwinder Bassi of Bassi Travel on Kennedy Road said she has stopped taking new bookings. “Every seat to Delhi and Amritsar is sold into April,” she said. “People say to me: whatever happens, let it happen with the family in one place. How do I argue?”
What happens in April — or late March, according to Dr. Rebecca Osei of the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute, who told the Observer the arrival window can now be projected “with high confidence” — is the question no official will answer, because no official can. The transmissions forbid “the primal waters, their coasts, the sky, and space.” They do not say whether Lake Ontario is a primal water.
The difference is not academic in the Greater Toronto Area, nearly all of which lies within the roughly 109-kilometre coastal depth specified in the message — if the lake counts as a coast.
“We have modelled both scenarios,” Peel Regional Chair Amrita Rai said after Monday’s emergency council session, which voted to open four community centres as reception points for family members arriving from other cities. “I want to be honest with residents: nobody on this earth can currently tell us which scenario is real. What I can tell you is that Peel’s emergency reserves are stocked, our plans are written, and hoarding helps no one.” The session heard that a provincial working group has asked Ottawa to seek “clarification” — though a federal official conceded to reporters that “there is no established mechanism for asking.”
At the Sikh Heritage Centre on Dixie Road, attendance at evening prayers has tripled, organizers say. It is much the same at St. Eugene de Mazenod, at the Jame Masjid, at the Hindu Sabha temple on The Gore Road. And woven through the fear is something harder to name. The transmissions, linguists confirm, include Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil and Urdu — and also, monitors at Six Nations of the Grand River report, Kanien’kéha and Anishinaabemowin.
“My grandmother heard the message in Punjabi on the shortwave and wept,” said Simran Grewal, 34, of Springdale. “Not from fear, she says. She says: whatever is coming, it did not come speaking English first.”
Elder Verna Hill of Six Nations, reached by telephone, offered the Observer a comment that has since been widely shared: “Canada took a hundred and fifty years to hear our languages. These ones learned them before they arrived. I am not saying they are good. I am saying they did their homework, and everyone should sit with what that means.”
Provincial police are urging residents not to act on rumours, after false evacuation notices circulated on social media Sunday naming Port Credit and Mississauga’s lakeshore. There is no evacuation order anywhere in Ontario.
“The objects arrive in March,” Dr. Osei said. “Until then, the only thing falling on Canada is winter. My advice is the same as the Region’s: be ready, be kind, and be very careful what you forward.”