Toronto Star on the Waterfront

By Betsy Powell, Toronto Star Pop Music Critic. May 18, 1999

Loreena McKennitt was mixing her first live album at Real World Studios in England last July when she received the devastating news that her fiancé was missing after a boating accident on Georgian Bay.

After months of touring behind her most acclaimed and commercially successful CD, The Book Of Secrets, McKennitt, who heads her own record company, flew back to Toronto and drove straight to the Bruce Peninsula.

That afternoon, the body of Ron Rees was discovered. The 28-year-old was wearing a life jacket and died of drowning or hypothermia.

"Ron and I were planning to get married last fall," McKennitt said quietly yesterday, revealing her loss publicly for the first time.

For a week, the Stratford, Ont.-based singer/composer and multi-instrumentalist kept a vigil at the Coast Guard office as divers searched the lake bottom and shoreline for two other missing men, Ron's younger brother Rick, 26, and 17-year-old Gregory Cook, also from Stratford, Ont.

When the search was called off, McKennitt hired a Virginia company with high-tech equipment that wasn't then used by Ontario rescue officials. "They came up and conducted a further three-day search . . . but that didn't prove to be successful."

Their bodies were never found.

At the time, local newspaper accounts referred to McKennitt as an "anonymous friend" who acted as a spokesperson for the families but didn't want to be identified for fear her celebrity status would bring more attention to the tragedy.

McKennitt, who's in her early 40s, now feels differently.

She is holding a news conference today down at the water's edge in Toronto to kick off a two-week national campaign aimed at highlighting water safety. She hopes to prevent such an accident from happening again.

"I feel a responsibility," she said yesterday, calm and composed, in a lakeside hotel room surrounded by life preservers and other boating safety equipment. Peter Garapick, a supervisor with the Canadian Coast Guard's Office of Boating Safety, sat nearby.

"If this (publicity) campaign can help save just one life, then it will be more than worth the effort and the loss of my friends' lives will seem less senseless."

Last fall, the Cook-Rees Memorial Fund, established by the trio's friends and family, presented the Ontario Provincial Police Underwater Search and Recovery Unit with a Sea Scan sonar system designed to pinpoint the location of objects in deep water. Today, the fund will give the unit a shark machine - a multipurpose, remotely operated vehicle used to help verify underwater objects.

Also today, the multimillion-selling artist releases Live In Paris And Toronto, recorded last April at the Salle Pleyel in Paris and at Massey Hall on May 3 and 4 of last year. Proceeds from the double CD, available only through mail order from McKennitt's label, Quinlan Road, will be donated to the fund.

Some of the money will be earmarked for water safety education, something McKennitt is impassioned about.

"We want to rattle any complacency there might be within the public," McKennitt said.

"That's a good word,'' Garapick added. ``Everybody thinks it's not going to happen to me and it can happen so quickly on the water.''

McKennitt says the Rees brothers, who owned a successful business installing traffic signals, had finished work in Owen Sound with Cook, their younger employee.

"They were great guys... they donated a lot of time to the community, putting up Christmas decorations," she said.

They set off for a sunset sail on Georgian Bay near Meaford last July. "It wasn't a windy night, it wasn't a stormy evening... it was a beautiful sunny evening."

But something went wrong - possibly a wind squall - capsizing the 16-foot boat. It was found overturned at 2 p.m. the next day

"For me, one of the biggest gaps last summer in that accident was that six or seven people knew that these three fellows were out there and never called the Coast Guard,'' said McKennitt.

"This is what family and friends can be trained in. If you're planning to go out in any craft... you make sure you log with someone that you've gone out and where you're planning to go and when you plan to be back. I think that's an absolute must."

The singer said she's relieved new federal safety requirements are now in effect. (About 200 people die on average in boating mishaps across Canada every year.) The new regulations include tightened restrictions for children and new training requirements for power vessel operators, to be phased in over 10 years.

Garapick said boaters should be especially vigilant this Victoria Day weekend because water levels are extremely low. "Rocks are higher, shoals
are higher."