Dave Yakichuk was only about 16 years old when he left Canora in 1945, but he made a name for himself as a member of the Peel Regional Municipal Police, the third largest municipal police department in Canada. Now 84 years old and long since he retired, he was given quite an honour recently when a park in Mississauga was named the S/Sgt. David Yakichuk Park.
When he left Canora, Yakichuk said he was desperate to find work in the east and heard that farmers were hiring. While he did that work for a while in the Oshawa area, he soon moved into the Toronto region and worked for several farm machinery manufacturing companies as well as doing variety of other jobs that even included baking donuts. He was working for Massey Harris when an opportunity arose to join the York Township police department.
A couple of years later he transferred to the Cooksville Police Department. That was in 1954 and he served for 34 years with the department that continued to evolve. Cooksville is now recognized as a neighbourhood in Mississauga.
On January 1, 1974 the Peel Regional Police was established along with the creation of the Regional Municipality of Peel. It incorporated the former police services of Mississauga, Port Credit, Streetsville, Brampton, and Chinguacousy.
Always working in general traffic patrol, Yakichuk distinguished himself by heading a police-in-the-school program. The Peel Regional Police identify him as a pioneer in youth education. He mainly taught driver education in many of the schools starting in 1959. He made some of the first police movies stressing careful driving. For one of the movies, he used an actual example of a vehicular accident in which three teens were killed as the basis for the driver education movie.
Yakichuk was promoted to a sergeant in 1973 and to a staff-sergeant in 1982. The park which was named in his honour is in the Cooksville district (Mississauga) at the intersection of Confederation and Dundas. It is 3.36 acres in size.
Over the years, Yakichuk has made the trip back to Canora many times, but he says he doesn’t recognize it as the same place where he grew up. The town has grown a lot and most of the old landmarks are gone. He used to have a number of relatives in the area, but they are mostly gone. Among the most recent is his sister Hattie Berlinski and her husband Greg who also died recently. There are still a few more distant relatives in the area such as Deb Leson, a niece, who works at the Canora Library.
