Parents board flight, forget toddler at airport on their first day in Canada

A family's first day in Canada turned into a nightmare when they forgot their toddler at the Vancouver airport and boarded a flight to Winnipeg. The boy's father, Jun Parreno, said yesterday the family had just immigrated to Canada from the Philippines.

They were catching a connecting flight to Winnipeg and were running late because they had to unpack and re-pack all their bags. "We had 10 minutes before boarding," he said. "We were running for the gate."

Parreno thought his son, J.M., was with his wife and the boy's grandparents, who were running ahead of him. Meanwhile, they thought he had the 23-month-old.

The family members were sitting in separate sections of the plane, and had no idea their son was wandering around Vancouver airport alone between the security checkpoint and the gates.

A security guard in Vancouver airport found the boy, Air Canada spokeswoman Angela Mah said. Mah said because the boy is so young, he didn't have a boarding pass because he would be seated on someone's lap.

Air Canada hadn't received any panicked calls about a missing child from anyone on board any of the morning's flights. "We eventually determined who his parents might be - they would be from the Philippines - and the flight crew talked to them," Mah said. When the flight landed in Winnipeg, the airline put the child's father aboard a flight to Vancouver to retrieve the child.