OTTAWA – A link on a Transport Canada website set up to promote the history of Canadian aviation has been offering visitors a decidedly different flight of fancy: Turkish and American call girls.
Until late Tuesday, Transport Canada’s main site included a link to the Centennial of Flight website, whose domain – canadiancentennialofflight.ca – the government no longer owns after it was recently allowed to lapse.
The site’s new owners have retained the original artwork and sponsorship logos, including those of the Government of Canada and the Department of National Defence, but added their own touches, including links to pages featuring nude and scantily clad escorts.
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The site also includes a message for the “previous domain owner,” explaining that the new owners bought the domain after it expired and chose to keep the old content for the benefit of existing Internet traffic and “to avoid losing good quality of it (sic).”
Only the tiny links at the bottom of the page to “Istanbul escorts,” “Independent Escort Service” and “Washington escorts” – to say nothing of the decidedly adults-only content they lead to – betray the fact it’s no longer a Government of Canada site.
A link to http://www.canadiancentennialofflight.ca was prominently displayed on the main Transport Canada site until Tuesday afternoon, when – following media reports about the advertisements for escort services – it abruptly vanished.
Transport Canada said on Tuesday that it never owned the Centennial of Flight website in the first place.
Spokeswoman Maryse Durette said the site was set up several years ago by a group of associations and federal government departments to promote the 100th anniversary of the first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight in Canada in 1909.
The use of government copyrighted logos is prohibited, Durette said.
Transport Canada is attempting to contact the new site owners to remove all the government logos and links, she added.
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