Elton John cancels Toronto concert

Elton John and American singer-songwriter Billy Joel have called off their joint concert in Toronto following the alert over the Sars virus, it emerged today.

The concert was to take place on Monday night at the city’s Air Canada Centre.

Meanwhile, Canada’s prime minister Jean Chretien insisted that Toronto was a safe place to visit, even as officials reported three more deaths due to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus to bring Canada’s toll to 19.

Chretien said he spoke yesterday to Gro Harlem Brundtland, head of the World Health Organisation, about its decision to add Toronto to a list of cities travellers should avoid because of Sars.

“We all believe that the World Health Organisation came to the wrong conclusion,” he said in Ottawa.

Brundtland agreed to review the situation next week, the prime minister said, in his first public comments since the WHO travel advisory was issued on Wednesday.

And in a symbolic show of his confidence in Canada’s largest city, Chretien scheduled a Cabinet meeting in Toronto for Tuesday, instead of in the capital, Ottawa.

“I will be staying at a Toronto hotel on Monday night and I will sleep very, very, very well,” he said.

The latest Sars deaths bring the total in the Toronto area to 19, out of more than 250 probable and suspected cases reported in Canada’s largest city. Health authorities have warned for days that some critically ill Sars patients were likely to die, often due to underlying illness.

Toronto is the epicentre of the biggest outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome outside Asia, where it originated. Although 19 people have died in Toronto, about half the number of people known to have been hit by Sars have made a full recovery.

Travel boss Lorenzo Durso of Swiftrans Services Ltd, which operates daily bus tours from Toronto to Niagara Falls and airport charters for local hotels, said his business was “going down the tubes”, adding that British travellers had cancelled tours worth more than £45,000 through his Cross Canada Travel business.