And yes, the story is real.
The image above is a crop from an image found on lolpix, but the article is real — click the image to get to the online version.
Another related story by the same writer (Margaret Munro of CanWest News Service) can be found here.
The lolpix image of the print copy of the CanWest article was first pointed out to me by Aurora_Bird on DelphiForums.