Toronto Police have joined forces with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and Mac’s Convenience Stores to launch a campaign to help find hundreds of missing children.
The campaign, launched at Toronto police headquarters on Friday, will screen the names and faces of hundreds of missing children at local Mac’s stores.
The initiative will also ask patrons to give donations to the missingkids.ca, a website dedicated to raising public awareness about missing child cases.
Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair was on hand for the campaign launch and urged the public to help out.
“You’d be amazed how a whole bunch of little bits of information can add up to eureka moment of discovery and resolution of these cases,” he told CTV Toronto.
Police hope the campaign will help bring light to the hundreds of cold cases across the country.
Blair pointed to the decades-old missing-persons case of Nicole Morin, an eight-year-old girl who vanished from her Etobicoke home in July 1985.
The young girl told her mother she was going to meet her friend to go swimming, but never returned home.
Her childhood friend, who is now a Toronto police office, says Nicole’s disappearance has haunted her for years.
“It is something that always remains in the back of my mind,” Const. Melissa Elaschuk told CTV Toronto. “I often wonder if there’s something I know that could have helped in this case, that I just don’t even realize was significant.”
Blair noted that while many cases have remained unsolved for years, the police remain dedicated to finding Canada’s missing children and bring much-need closure to anxious families.
“We will never relent in our pursuit of the missing,” he said.
With a report by CTV Toronto’s Tamara Cherry
