October 8, 2010 is an eventful day in my world of stories.
News comes that the Canadian women competing in the 4x100 freestyle relay swim event in the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, India, have just won but then been disqualified from the silver medal, because one of the swimmers – not immediately clear if it was Montreal’s Victoria Poon, Geneviève Saumur, Calgary’s Erica Morningstar or Stratford’s Julia Wilkinson – leaped into the pool early thus committing an “illegal takeover”. (“Swimming DQ costs Canada a medal”, by Jesse Campigotto, October 8, 2010, CBC Sports.)
On the cheerful side of news, the Chinese intellectual and democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, who in a sense is a “prisoner of conscience” at the early stage of an 11+2-year jail sentence in China (an 11-year prison term plus 2 additional years without normal citizen’s political rights), is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee based in Oslo, a city Liu had visited in 1988 as a scholar before the 1989 Chinese democracy movement thrust him into the spotlight – during its final days on Tiananmen Square in late May and early June of that year. (“International PEN calls Liu Xiaobo’s sentence a grievous betrayal of inalienable human rights”, December 25, 2009, International PEN; “Nobel Peace Prize Given to Jailed Chinese Dissident”, by Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield, October 8, 2010, The New York Times; “Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel Peace Prize”, October 8, 2010, USA Today; and, “Liu: A champion for political change with a heart of gold”, by Mark MacKinnon, October 8, 2010, The Globe and Mail.)
To confess my relative lack of patriotism as a Canadian without others’ sporting fervor, and my relative lack of political correctness as someone who had grown up and received university education in China but did not become a more righteous human-rights campaigner, I admit that I feel more interested in, and intrigued by, another news story the meaning and morale of which is not so crystal clear: U.S. President Barack Obama announces the resignation of National Security Adviser James L. Jones, who will be replaced by his deputy Thomas Donilon. (“Security adviser Jones the latest to leave Obama's White House”, by Sheldon Alberts, October 8, 2010, Leader-Post.)
Ah, Mr. Donilon’s brother, Mike, is Vice President Joe Biden’s adviser, and his wife Catherine Russell is Mrs. Jill Biden’s Chief of Staff – I can see the point of it. (“Jones to announce resignation today, Donilon to replace him”, by Josh Rogin, October 8, 2010, Foreign Policy.)
I am thinking about the Joe Biden who before assuming the vice presidency was this curious yet assertive chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during much of the short time in the New Millennium, providing the necessary scrutiny on George W. Bush’s War on Terror, and earlier had been the aggressive chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee known for his opposition to George H. W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas for the United States Supreme Court – Justice Thomas won in 1991 despite Biden and moreover despite Anita Hill who accused him of sexual harassment. (“Biden and Anita Hill, Revisited”, by Kate Phillips, August 23, 2008, The New York Times; “Joe Biden's the Man on Guantanamo, Iraq and the “War on Terror””, by Andy Worthington, August 24, 2008, The Huffington Post; and, “After Cheney”, by James Traub, November 29, 2009, The New York Times.)
What else, i.e., beside the Biden connections? Donilon was just in Beijing in early September, in a visit during which he and White House Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers met with at least five Chinese Communist Party Politburo members, eager to pressure China to let its Yuan currency appreciate. But soon after the visit Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration and ex-President of Harvard, tendered his resignation, and now less than three weeks later General Jones, ex-Commandant of the United States Marine Corps and former Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, follows. (“Summers, Donilon Get Unusual China Access as Yuan Debate Looms”, September 8, 2010, Bloomberg News; and, “Summers resigns as adviser on economy – Follows exits by Romer, Orszag”, by Kara Rowland, September 21, 2010, The Washington Times.)
Donilon and Biden are the men now, and we are talking about probably “back to the future” in Biden’s way, who for decades took the commuter train daily from Wilmington, Delaware to the Union Station in Washington, D.C. to work at the Capitol, and whose favorite sport is women’s lacrosse! (“Biden First Nominee To Be Daily Amtrak Commuter?”, By Tom Acitelli, August 25, 2008, The New York Observer; “Biden announces change in Title IX women's sports policy”, by Jill Dougherty, April 20, 2010, CNN; and, “Joe Biden, No. 1 Fan of Women's Sports”, by Libby Sander, April 20, 2010, The Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Hopefully the changes of President Obama’s advisers and the increase of Joe Biden’s influence will lead to revisiting some important issues without falling into the danger of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease – something I discussed in an earlier blog article, ““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou”.
I actually am a sports fan, but not the type bitten by the ice hockey bug Canadians are supposed to be – as just reaffirmed by the installation of the new Governor General of Canada David Johnston, the British Queen’s vice-regal representative in Canada, in this case a former two-time hockey All-American at Harvard praised by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper as “a true all-rounder”. (“For new GG David Johnston, being vice-regal is a family affair”, by Heather Scoffield, October 2, 2010, Winnipeg Free Press.)
For a long time Canada’s only national sport was actually lacrosse – a game first invented by the aboriginal people – until 1994 when the Parliament officially designated hockey the national winter sport, and lacrosse the national summer sport albeit by this time lacrosse has only a small following. (Alain Bairner, Sport, nationalism, and globalization: European and North American perspectives, 2001, State University of New York Press; and, “National Sports of Canada Act”, 1994, Canadian Heritage.)
So if Mr. Biden is looking to Canada, he is a little late and the glass is not even half full – unless global warming works in his favor.
For me though, when I was younger I dabbled in various sports recreationally but lacking the physical build and strength I could only wish I had really been competitive – so I’ll choose lacrosse if I were to play.
I am also a fan of women’s sports, and when it gets to the right level of skills versus physical power I can like women’s more, such as in the case of international volleyball. I remember when I was a Berkeley grad student I once volunteered to drive some of the visiting Chinese junior women’s volleyball players around sightseeing; and the only other time at Berkeley when I drove for anyone of celebrity type was when the actress Joan Chen – later of the movie “The Last Emperor” fame – and her all-boys entourage came to town – an anecdote I mentioned in my earlier blog article, ““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou”.
Many years later on October 23, 2001, the Canadian women’s national hockey team came to San Jose for an exhibition game with the American women’s, a warm-up for the Salt Lake City Olympics in which the two were expected to be the ultimate rivals (“News”, Stanford Canadian Club). I had just established connection with Bernard Etzinger, then Canadian Consul and Trade Commissioner in Silicon Valley (“Canada Plans Legislative Secretariat in Washington, D.C.”, by Larry Luxner, August 2004, The Washington Diplomat), and through him to Paula Fairweather and the local Canadian club she headed, Digital Moose Lounge (“A New Magnetic North – How Canada Can Attract and Retain Young Talent”, July 1, 2001, Canada25), and was very glad to go with the other transplanted Canadians to cheer for the girls.
It was a good hockey game, and an even more interestingly enjoyable experience when at game’s start Bernie brought over and introduced to me Beth Lawlor, a newly arrived post-doc researcher at the University of California medical school in San Francisco, who so happened had just received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia and studied with a cancer-research scientist to whom I am related – albeit on the downside I had been kicked out of UBC by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on July 2, 1992 at the end of my faculty job there when a civil dispute with my then boss, “Maria”, had turned politically charged.
But somehow there was something unsettling on this occasion of an exciting girls’ hockey game, to me anyway: the Canadians’ coach who later would lead the women to Canada’s first Olympic hockey gold in 50 years, was Sergeant Danièle Sauvageau, a Montreal police officer sometimes undercover in narcotics and formerly with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“Danièle Sauvageau – Former Canadian Olympic Hockey Coach”, Speakers' Spotlight); then after the game, three Canadian players came to meet with us the local Canadians and the one towering above the other two was goalie Kim St. Pierre, a student at McGill University in Montreal (“2002 Games Team Canada – Kim St. Pierre”, Canoe.ca).
So it would take a Montreal police sergeant to lead the Canadian girls to make history, but was it just hockey – Sauvageau had distinguished herself as the founding coach of the Canadian junior women’s team (“Danièle Sauvageau”, Wikipedia) – or had there been safety concerns haunting the girls, like ghosts of the Montreal Massacre?
I hadn’t talked to Bernie (Etzinger) much after becoming acquainted with him only days earlier, but he was a friendly and no-nonsense guy, and at one point during the game he turned to me and said, “Last year I was invited to the wedding of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s daughter, and it was very nice, in 2000. It was Caroline. Or was it someone else?” (“Mulroney wedding to be a who's who”, August 23, 2ooo, CBC News.)
Ah hah, an unforgettable moment. I certainly knew only little about the Canadian liberal Frank magazine’s contest of “Deflower Caroline Mulroney” back in 1991, about then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s reaction to the joke about his only daughter, “I wanted to take a gun and go down there and do some serious damage to those people”, or about Caroline’s new husband Andrew Lapham, son of the famously liberal Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine. (“Lion of the US left”, by Gary Younge, March 5, 2003, The Guardian; and, “Mulroney’s Shadows: The Many Images of Canada’s Eighteenth Prime Minister”, by Jonathan Malloy, June 2008, Carlton University.)
But sitting with Mr. Etzinger the diplomatic consul on this occasion I was fully aware that Kim Campbell, Mulroney’s successor as the Progressive Conservative party leader and the first female Canadian Prime Minister, before that Justice Minister and my Member of Parliament in the Vancouver Centre riding during that earlier era, had just been the Canadian Consul General in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2000, overseeing several states including California, and Hawaii where I worked from 1997 to 1999. (“Campbell, Kim – Prime Minister of Canada (1993)”, Club of Madrid.)
Back in November 1992 I was politically active circulating press releases critical of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership and conduct; then on November 30 several hours after I’d faxed the press releases to Campbell’s Vancouver MP office, RCMP Sergeant Brian Cotton led another officer arrived at my apartment, and he took me to UBC Hospital for a psychiatric assessment whereby I was involuntarily committed into the psychiatric ward. (I have mentioned some of this and related experiences in another blog article, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”.)
In fact, I was more than aware when Bernie suddenly so casually mentioned Mulroney: in the no more than ten days or so since first meeting him at the San Jose Consulate and Trade Office I had enquired about Kim Campbell, told by him that he hadn’t worked with Campbell much because until recently he had been dealing with Peru matters within foreign affairs, nevertheless received Campbell’s Harvard e-mail address from him, and on October 22 – the day before this hockey game – I had sent an e-mail letter to Kim Campbell asking if she could revisit my political case.
Women are better than men in positions of authority only when they can use the law better and not just cloak themselves in the aura of womanhood. Whether that had been the case in Canada is not clear to me, only that most of Kim Campbell’s contemporary female political leaders did poorly in elections – Campbell herself especially whose leadership bid had possibly involved a deal for Mulroney’s endorsement. (My blog article, ““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou”.)
But sitting here with Mr. Bernard Etzinger the Canadian diplomatic consul – who several months later became deputy director of public relations and official spokesman at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. – and watching the Canadian girls play hockey under their coach who was a former RCMP officer and active-duty Montreal police sergeant, I wasn’t a suspect in anything diabolically deadly, was I? No way, out of others’ minds but not mine.
But you never know in politics.
The Montreal Massacre that came to mind refers to an event on December 6, 1989 at École Polytechnique, the engineering school of the University of Montreal, where a young man Marc Lepine carried a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle into the building and killed 13 female students and one female staff. Lepine, the son of a Algerian father and a former Canadian nun mother, had allegedly been rejected by this school but on this occasion he picked out the women to shoot at. He yelled “I hate feminists”, and expressed his intent to kill them in a suicide note found on his body. (“Marc Lépine” and “École Polytechnique massacre”, Wikipedia.)
Canadians have generally been outraged by the atrocity. Gun-control law was soon strengthened by Justice Minister Kim Campbell, although it was not until the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien in 1995 that a more general gun registry and more stringent restrictions were brought in – something I discussed in my blog article, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”.
To the feminists and many others, Lepine’s act was clearly that of anti-feminism and he chose this school to target because it was a training ground for women in engineering (“Remembering the Montreal massacre”, by Terri Saunders, December 6, 2009, Canoe.ca):
“Investigators and sociology experts tried to understand why Lepine did what he did and why he chose to do it at Ecole Polytechnique. The overwhelming conclusion was Lepine felt the school, which offered non-traditional trades training to women in fields such as engineering, would be a good place to find women he labeled as feminists.”
But I think Sgt. Danièle Sauvageau of the Montreal police probably knows more details than most of us, like for instance, why Lepine had written the following in his suicide note claiming that he was “forced to take extreme acts” (“Marc Lépine”, Wikipedia):
“Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts.”
As a matter of fact Sgt. Sauvageau and many of her police colleagues may have also known Lepine’s last victim personally: Maryse Leclair, shot and then knifed to death by Lepine before he committed suicide, was the daughter of Pierre Leclair, director of public relations and chief spokesman for the Montreal police. Maryse Leclair’s name was actually on a list of 19 women Lepine had intended to kill, found with his suicide note. (“Montreal gun man had suicide note”, by David E. Pitt, December 8, 1989, The New York Times; Kevin Dwyer and Juré Fiorillo, True Stories of Law & Order: The Real Crimes Behind the Best Episodes of the Hit TV Show, 2006, Berkley Books; and, “École Polytechnique massacre”, Wikipedia.)
Many readers of the media stories about the Montreal Massacre may not have noticed an intriguing tale, that Maryse Leclair was a first cousin of Dominique Leclair, a friend of Marc Lepine’s from working together at a Montreal hospital where Lepine’s mother Monique was the nursing director and Dominique Leclair’s father was the hospital head who gave Marc Lepine the food-service job (“The Montreal massacre”, February 8, 1990, Canada.com):
“Dominique Leclair was 19 when she met Lepine that summer in the kitchen at St. Jude’s. Her father runs the hospital and was good friends with Monique Lepine when she was his nursing director. He gave Marc his job.
But that’s not why Dominique befriended Marc Lepine.
“I was kind to him because he was so hyperactive and nervous, nobody would talk to him at lunch or break time... Everyone else tried to avoid him because he was a bit strange because of his shyness.”
Lepine’s hyperactivity and his job didn’t mix either.
“He was always rushing things. He would never be calm.”
He raced the food carts the same way he did everything else. Always in a hurry. Soup got spilled. Dishes got broken.
Everytime he made a mess of something, his reaction was always the same: “Ah shit.”
Finally, he was put on food-serving duty in the cafeteria where his pace would at least be tempered by the task. But the steamy kitchen atmosphere had festered his already unsightly acne problem.
Dominique recalls: “The employees would say they didn’t want him to serve them their lunch because of his acne. They were mean.”
Lepine was stuffed back in the kitchen where no one would have to look at his pimples.
He tried growing a beard to hide the acne, but it was scraggly and seemed to make the rest of his complexion worse. He would cut it off and grow it again like a suburban lawn.
No matter how hard he might have tried, Lepine just couldn’t shed his shyness. Even with Dominique, he would stir his food and stare at the floor when he was speaking.”
So much about the Montreal Massacre being a random act of extreme violence. Although from China I have many second cousins born and raised in North America, including those in the successful Ling family in Canada (my blog article, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”); now if a colleague of one of them pulled a stunt or played a trick on me, would I consider it “random”, not “institutional”?
We see that even though Marc Lepine eventually became a monster of a human being and a “Mad Killer”, he had also endured a lot of emotional abuse over the years not just from his father as the media like to emphasize but from others in the community. The fact that in the end he lost it not only in an extreme manner but in a planned and premeditated manner makes Marc Lepine’s case worth further scrutiny.
It reminds me of a former Berkeley math professor I once studied briefly with. Prof. Andrew Majda was known for his strong temperament, and the year I was auditing a graduate class from him he was in the process of moving to Princeton which had made him an important job offer. Near the Berkeley classroom there was construction work going on at the time and the noise sometimes got really loud, and Majda would burst into tantrums like, “It’s driving me crazy, they are driving me out of Berkeley.”
Andrew Majda’s wife, Prof. Gerta Keller, an expert in the study of dinosaur evolution, has told of a tale of travelling in Algeria as an adventurous 20-year-old Swiss woman in 1965, not being let go by Algerian soldiers at the border, and exhorted by a 24-year-old or so looking French commander of the soldiers as possibly “the obstinate female I can’t get rid of”. (“Gerta Keller”, by Donna Gialanella, January 27, 2008, The Star-Ledger.)
I don’t know if anyone was trying to drive Prof. Majda out of Berkeley, but there have been others who questioned some of the feminist political agendas in the context of the Montreal Massacre.
University of Toronto computer science professor Charles Rackoff – someone in my professional field with whom I had at least some passing acquaintance – stirred a major controversy in December 2000 when he wrote some comments in an e-mail about a memorial service to mark the Montreal Massacre, comparing the feminist agenda to the Klu-Klux-Klan’s (“Professor criticizes Montreal massacre memorials”, December 7, 2000, CBC News):
“It is obvious that the point of this is not to remember anyone. The point is to use the death of these people as an excuse to promote the feminist/extreme left-wing agenda.”
“It is no different, and no more justified, than when organizations such as the Klu-Klux-Klan (sic) use the murder of a white person by a black person as an excuse to promote their agenda.”
Fortunately I am by no means cynical like, or so universal in doubting about political agendas as, my respected senior Prof. Charles Rackoff, whose remarks touched off a wave of condemnations from within the university (“Campus Briefs”, January 8, 2001, The McGill Tribune).
The city of Montreal in French-speaking Quebec has been one of the North American cities with an unusually high profile of social violence – in Montreal’s case at universities and colleges. After the 1989 Montreal Massacre, in August 1992 there was a multiple-murder shooting at Concordia University that killed 4 male engineering professors and wounded a female secretary.
After a more recent occurrence of multiple shooting in Montreal, in September 2006 at Dawson College killing a female student and wounding scores of men and women, The Globe and Mail newspaper published a front-page article in which columnist Jan Wong expressed the view that these killings had resulted from social resentment due to marginalization of immigrant minorities (“The Montreal Shootings – ‘Get under the desk’”, by Jan Wong, September 16, 2006, The Globe and Mail (courtesy of Vigile.net)):
“What many outsiders don’t realize is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city. It hasn’t just taken a toll on long-time anglophones, it’s affected immigrants, too. To be sure, the shootings in all three cases were carried out by mentally disturbed individuals. But what is also true is that in all three cases, the perpetrator was not pure laine, the argot for a “pure” francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial “purity” is repugnant. Not in Quebec.
In 1989, Marc Lepine shot and killed 14 women and wounded 13 others at the University of Montreal’s École Polytechnique. He was a francophone, but in the eyes of pure laine Quebeckers, he was not one of them, and would never be. He was only half French-Canadian. He was also half Algerian, a Muslim, and his name was Gamil Gharbi. Seven years earlier, after the Canadian Armed Forces rejected his application under that name, he legally changed his name to Marc Lepine.
Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor, was an immigrant from Russia. In 1992, he shot four colleagues and wounded one other at Concordia University’s faculty of engineering after learning he would not be granted tenure.
This week’s killer, Kimveer Gill, was, like Marc Lepine, Canadian-born and 25. On his blog, he described himself as of “Indian” origin. (In their press conference, however, the police repeatedly referred to Mr. Gill as of “Canadian” origin.)
It isn’t known when Mr. Gill’s family arrived in Canada. But he attended English elementary and high schools in Montreal. That means he wasn’t a first-generation Canadian. Under the restrictions of Bill 101, the province’s infamous language law, that means at least one of his parents must have been educated in English elementary or high schools in Canada.
To be sure, Mr. Lepine hated women, Mr. Fabrikant hated his engineering colleagues and Mr. Gill hated everyone. But all of them had been marginalized, in a society that valued pure laine.”
Jan Wong probably hadn’t anticipated the furor her article would cause. It was roundly criticized by many in Quebec including Quebecois journalists, and called a “disgrace” by Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who questioned why French culture was singled out to blame (“Charest blasts Toronto reporter”, September 19, 2006, Montreal Gazette):
“The recent events at Dawson College seem to defy all logic. These events have brought back painful memories-for all of us in Québec, as well as people in the US, France, Ireland, Russia and to all other nations-who have experienced similar tragedies in recent years. This tragedy is certainly reminiscent of the shootings that took place in downtown Toronto on December 26, 2005.
In this kind of situation, anyone who ventures to put forward explanations or comparisons at the very least risks making a fool of himself. Jan Wong has certainly discredited herself with her gamble.
I was shocked and disappointed by the narrow-minded analysis published in the Saturday, September 16 edition, in which Ms Wong sought to identify the affirmation of French culture in Québec as the deeper cause of the Dawson College shootings and the killings at the Polytechnique in 1989.”
In the above quote, Charest stated that the Dawson College shooting reminded him of the shootings in downtown Toronto, on December 26, 2005. In that Boxing Day incident a white teenage girl, Jane Creba, out shopping with her family, was critically shot – and later died in hospital – when two groups of mostly black youths had an argument in front of a Foot Locker store and exchanged gunfire. (“If Jane Creba had been black”, by Arthur Weinreb, January 11, 2006, Canada Free Press; “Doctor only steps away from Creba”, by Peter Small, November 11, 2008, Toronto Star; “Four suspects acquitted in Creba shooting”, November 23, 2009, CTV Toronto; and, “Judge sentences final two men in Creba killing”, by Megan O’Toole, August 26, 2010, National Post.).
Premier Charest had a reason to be incensed that Jan Wong had picked out Quebec’s French language law to blame, but one should not ignore the fact that in all of the three multiple-shooting cases in Montreal as cited by Wong the perpetrator was a member of an immigrant-minority culture while the victims tended to be more mainstream white and better educated, and likely had not been picked at random. Even in the case of Jane Creba’s death in Toronto, the “accidental” nature of her being caught in the crossfire between black gang members should not be presumed – at least I would not – until the undercurrent of its circumstances is adequately assessed without prejudice.
But then what the Canadian Parliament, which essentially represented the country in such a situation of public controversy, and The Globe and Mail newspaper did were excessive in my opinion, amounting to letting democracy be an institutional means to suppress a vital function of democracy that in this instance had incurred the wrath of some: the House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution calling for an apology to Quebec, and The Globe and Mail’s editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon who had cleared Wong’s article for publication, fired her and also imposed a gag order that she not speak publicly – in exchange for money, which she agreed to for a set period of time. (“Gagged No Longer: Controversial Journalist Breaks Silence”, by Jason Li, October 16, 2009, Digital Journal.)
It’s true that the journalist Jan Wong had a history of small acts of radical behavior that smack of ambitious opportunism (“Jan Wong, disgrace to journalism”, by Warren Kinsella, September 28, 2006, National Post; and, “The one who didn’t get away”, by Brian Bethune, October 31, 2007, Maclean’s), and in this case her logic of deduction to blame Quebec’s French language law was probably not sound. But if each time something like this happens the journalist has to apologize and retract simply because her criticism is directed at part of the political/legal institution, then any part of such institution when cloaked in the veil of secrecy or deception, and with the official appearance of democracy, would be untouchable by the media or the public, and thus become an organ of authoritarianism rather than democracy.
Montreal Gazette Columnist Hubert Bauch pointed out that this was exactly the outcome when it came to the French language law (“Jan Wong was misguided, maybe. But why the fuss?”, by Hubert Bauch, October 1, 2006, The Gazette (courtesy of Vigile.net)):
“The worst thing about what’s being called “l’affaire Wong” is that it makes it more difficult to rationally discuss what is in fact a very real problem, the integration of non-francophone immigrants and visible minorities into the mainstream of Quebec, said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies and former Quebec regional director of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Racism is no more prevalent in Quebec than anywhere else, he is quick to say. But because of the particular nature of Quebec society and the complications of the language situation, the problem of integrating newcomers is more acute than elsewhere.
“They’re not being included in the decision-making fabric of Quebec,” Jedwab said. “If you look at the nominations process, to boards, committees, to various positions, Quebec has an absolutely abysmal record. Its public service by all standards has the lowest representation of visible minorities of any province or state in North America.””
Whether some of these high-profile cases of violence have been connected to gender politics, race politics, or other politics, my experience tells me that political agendas do often attempt to take control of issues of public debate and force outcomes in a direction wanted by powerful interests.
Thus I find it regrettable when the Canadian House of Commons recently intervened again to condemn, once more unanimously, a September 2010 Maclean’s Magazine cover story that calls Quebec the most corrupt province in Canada.
When this recent article came out, Liberal Member of Parliament Marc Garneau characterized it as “sensationalism”, “unworthy of a Canadian magazine” and “divisive” for the magazine’s use of the Quebec symbol Bonhomme Carnaval on its cover (“Will House demand Maclean’s apologize to Quebec?”, by Norman Spector, September 25, 2010, The Globe and Mail), but then the parliamentary motion was introduced, and Mr. Garneau expressed some concern that it might be overreacting (“Parliament rebukes Maclean’s”, by John Geddes, September 30, 2010, Maclean’s Magazine):
“If in two weeks, another magazine writes something that’s considered excessive,” Garneau said, “we can’t make a habit of putting out a motion every time we’re not happy about what’s written in the media.”
In my opinion, the “corrupt” label may be offensive to Quebec but the facts cited in the Maclean’s article cannot be denied out of hand, and Quebec Premier Jean Charest has inherited dubious political connections to some past practices perceived as corrupt by the public. (My Facebook comments and links posted to Andrew Coyne, national editor of Maclean’s Magazine, http://www.facebook.com/walltowall.php?id=1761327938&banter_id=712680225, and to David Frum, Canadian-American columnist, http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=164721990204765&id=555811580.)
(A week after the initial posting of a draft in progress for this blog article, on October 15 Maclean’s Magazine’s Facebook page announced that its national editor Andrew Coyne’s Facebook account was hacked and was then removed by Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MacleansMagazine/posts/157752344258228. The comments I left with Andrew who was a Facebook friend of mine are therefore gone, but the earlier cited Facebook “wall-to-wall” link is kept in this article as a record – I hope Andrew Coyne is not suffering like Jan Wong was.)
The mentality that every time someone in the media says something terribly offensive the person and the message need to be condemned is rather old and should be considered outdated, but unfortunately civility is often equated with democracy – even in modern Canadian politics – and that serves to suppress meaningful discussions and debates. Columnist David Frum puts it somewhat cynically when he compares it to the old English law of “seditious libel” (“Truth is no defence”, by David Frum, October 2, 2010, National Post):
“Some may wonder: What specifically about the Maclean’s piece gave such offence? The piece was built upon uncontested facts, including such nuggets as the information that to build a highway in Quebec costs 30% more per mile than anywhere else in Canada. It quoted acknowledged experts, including Quebec politicians. Nobody has detected -- or even suggested --any important errors of fact or interpretation in the piece.
But to ask the question is to misunderstand the problem.
In the old law of England, there existed a crime of “seditious libel” -- a libel that specifically affected the reputation of the sovereign. In a case of seditious libel, truth was not a defence. Very much to the contrary: As the saying went, truth compounded libel.
If you said the king was an imbecile, when he was not an imbecile, that would be bad. But if you said the king was an imbecile and he actually was an imbecile -- that would be very, very much worse.”
In his article accompanying the Maclean’s cover story, columnist Andrew Coyne points out that power and impotence are among the important factors in politics that can corrupt the political process (“What lies beneath Quebec’s scandals”, by Andrew Coyne, September 24, 2010, Maclean’s Magazine):
“Fighting corruption has often proved the best opportunity for it. The young Maurice Duplessis made his name denouncing the venality of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau’s government (Taschereau was eventually forced from office on charges of abusing public funds, the third Quebec premier to suffer this indignity), much as Brian Mulroney rose to fame for his work on the Cliche commission—and just as Jean Chrétien came to power promising to clean up the mess left by Mulroney. Sponsorships, Shawinigate, the ghostly voters of the Gaspésie, Airbus: there’s a pattern here, and it’s useless to deny it.
What explains Quebec’s unusual susceptibility to money politics? Deeply entrenched deference to authority? A worldly Catholic tolerance of official vice? There is no grand unified theory: at different times and in different situations, different forces have come into play. Nevertheless, a few broad factors emerge:
Power corrupts, but so does impotence. Healthy political cultures are marked by contestability: results are unpredictable, success is incremental, and neither victory nor defeat are ever far from view. But the tendency, in federal politics, for Quebecers to throw their support to one party or another en bloc—and the province’s outsized importance, therefore, in deciding elections—has given rise to a peculiar set of pathologies.
…”
Power can control, and impotence may mean reliance on that power of control and hence the en bloc approach in electoral politics that when unchecked can have the tendency to encroach on other vital parts of a democracy.
Returning to my personal story earlier, but fast forward from the Team Canada-Team USA women’s hockey game in San Jose, California, on October 23, 2001, which as said earlier was one day after my sending an e-mail letter to Kim Campbell enquiring about my old political case first presented to her through her Member of Parliament constituency office on November 30, 1992, when RCMP officers soon came to take me to a psychiatric committal.
In February 2003 I was now in Toronto, Canada, and through Lori Dawe, constituency director for then Progressive Conservative party leader Joe Clark, I requested a meeting with Mr. Clark, who had been the Minister of Constitutional Affairs in 1992 overseeing the Charlottetown constitutional process under then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. I submitted a number of questions to Joe Clark, under four categories:
a) “Western alienation” and the Charlottetown constitutional campaign;
b) Bring Quebec into the constitution, and the balance between the interests of
Quebec and those of the western provinces;
c) Your contributions to the Charlottetown constitutional process, vs. contributions
by former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney; and
d) Distinct Society, Aboriginal self-government, and ethnic minority cultures.
These topics had been part of my interest back in 1992 when I circulated press releases critical of Brian Mulroney’s leadership and conduct, and Joe Clark’s role in constitutional reform was mentioned in some of them. But by the time in 2003 when I tried to connect directly to Clark, I had shifted my attentions away and back to computer science and software engineering, working in Hawaii and California from 1997 onward, and so my memory in 2003 of the earlier politics was a little faulty. Later during 2009 I took the time to review some of these constitutional and political issues, and my survey and analysis – including copies of some of the old press releases – can be found in my blog article, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”.
Nonetheless, the questions I raised to Joe Clark in early 2003 were meaningful, and some of them are excerpted here (My document, “Questions for honorable Joe Clark, February 12, 2003”).
From under a):
“It is somewhat puzzling to me that the Charlottetown accord, formed on the basis of broad nationwide consultations, and backed up by a strong group of political leaders from the west including yourself and Ms. Kim Campbell, faired rather disappointingly in the national referendum in the western provinces.
Is there a clearly identifiable explanation(s) for this? Could it be that the western populace found the referendum a good occasion to vent their angers, regardless of the substances in it for the west’s interests? Or could it be that the final form of the accord was perceived as relatively weak for the interests of the west, and therefore did not satisfy the voters? If the latter were the case, what would be your view of what to blame, the difficult-to-satisfy appetite of the west (analogous to what former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau commented on about the popular mood in Quebec), or certain aspects of the accord desire to be improved?”
From under b):
“Therefore, when the Charlottetown accord did not do well in the national referendum in the western provinces and in the referendum in Quebec, it appeared to be evidence of regional conflicts being hard to resolve.
What is your opinion on this issue, that the gaps between the interests of the two regions were indeed difficult to bridge and the Charlottetown accord did as much as could be done at the time, armed with the knowledge and wisdom gained through expert and grass-root consultations? Could it be, instead, that some elements of the accord may not have been very good in this area, even in your judgment?”
From under c):
“Another major intervention by Mr. Mulroney, I remember, was with the final form of the accord (the consensus report). I cannot remember the details of the points by now, and would have difficulty finding the old media coverage stories on it (The Vancouver Sun newspaper had a long article on this during that time). The thrust of the story was that the accord draft in its pre-final form was completed by you after committee discussions and several rounds of inter-provincial negotiations. At the time Mr. Mulroney was busy with other governmental affairs and went on a foreign trip near the end. When he returned, he was displeased with some aspects of the accord and made several changes before taking it to the last round of negotiation with the premiers.
What were the main changes made by Mr. Mulroney at that time? I seem to
remember things about the senate (natural resources?) and about manpower control for Quebec, in particular.”
Under d):
“The French people of Canada, being one of the two European groups to first settle in the land that is now Canada, and the aboriginal people who by most historical accounts were the first to inhabit this land and were the inhibitors [correction: inhabitants] when the Europeans came, are certainly unique in their (powerful) positions in the Canadian society. But they are not unique in their desires to integrate with the rest of the Canadians but at the same time to preserve their native languages and cultures. Should the constitution address these issues for the other ethnic groups in a more definitive manner, beyond the ethnic minority rights in the charter? Would something like the Canadian Mosaic thinking be a good thing in formal language in the constitution? The Canadian constitutional experiments are interesting in an international sense as they may provide valuable lessons and precedence to a big part of the world.”
My document with the above and other questions were sent via e-mail to Lori Dawe on February 12, 2003. It took quite a while before Joe Clark sent me an e-mail reply, on April 3, 2003, the content of which is as follows (My document, “E-mail reply from Joe Clark, April 3, 2003”):
“Dear Dr. Gao:
Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning Western alienation and the Charlottetown Accord. I appreciate your having taken the time to contact me.
Once I cease to be Leader of the PC Party, I am hoping to have more time to adequately reflect upon that period of our collective history and perhaps, at some point in the future, I will put pen to paper and write my memoirs. Until then, however, I must deal with the present and as such, unfortunately, I am not be able to meet with you to discuss the issues you have raised.
Sincerely,
Joe Clark”
At the time, Joe Clark had in August 2002 announced his intent to resign as PC party leader, and in November 2002 a party leadership convention was set for May 29-31, 2003 in Toronto. (“Clark agrees to give up leadership”, by Tim Naumetz, August 7, 2002, Ottawa Citizen; “Tories set tentative dates: Leadership convention in late May or early June”, by Maria Babbage, October 6, 2002, The Telegram; and, “How Eves can thwart the Liberals and (maybe) avoid humiliation”, by Adam Radwanski, November 7, 2002, The Ottawa Citizen.)
But why was Joe Clark not only unwilling to discuss the constitutional issues with me – not that he had to – but essentially stating that he would not discuss them until when he wrote his memoirs?
To this day Clark has not published any memoir and has been largely inactive in public when it comes to Canadian constitutional issues. It is a far cry from his first departure from electoral politics in 1993 when he wrote and published the book, A Nation Too Good To Lose: Renewing The Purpose of Canada, in 1994 (“Talk about Renewing Canada – A summary of books and articles relating to the question of national unity”, Dialogue Canada), and a far cry even from Brian Mulroney who has published an 1152 page memoir in September 2007 focusing just on his earlier years to the time of his 1993 retirement from politics (“Memoirs 1939-1993, Written by Brian Mulroney”, McClelland).
When I scrutinize Joe Clark’s terse reply more carefully and ponder about any hidden meanings, there appears to be an answer emerging as in the following:
1) “that period of our collective history” – it means Clark hadn’t made all his decisions alone – there was Mulroney and there was the party at the least – and now it’s not that straightforward he could discuss them at his own will;
2) “Once I cease to be Leader of the PC Party, I am hoping to have more time to adequately reflect” – at this time Clark was also the party leader so his current consideration for the “collective” was more than just about the past;
3) “perhaps, at some point in the future, I will put pen to paper and write my memoirs. Until then, however, I must deal with the present” – only until when he writes his memoir that he would not be dealing with the present, i.e., even after retirement as the party leader it still wouldn’t be the future but the present, and that ‘later present’ may include his own reflection but not open discussion on the collective past.
The message was constant as I understand it: the past had been “collective”, the present was “collective”, and the future without Joe Clark would still be the “collective” present; the barometer of change to the real future is when Clark himself “perhaps” writes his memoir and touches on some of these topics – that so far hasn’t happened.
Brian Mulroney had been the boss of a big party during that “collective” past, Joe Clark was the boss of a small party in April 2003 when he sent me this reply, and Peter MacKay became the boss in late May 2003 when he replaced Clark as leader; then a few months later in December MacKay led the Progressive Conservative party to a merger with the Reform party (then called Canadian Alliance) under Stephen Harper to form the Conservative party. (“The Conservative Party of Canada”, January 30, 2006, CBC News.)
Now with Stephen Harper as the leader of this new party, and especially with Brian Mulroney having played a patriarchic role to help bring about the merger, Joe Clark is entitled to none of the “collective future” if it ever comes. In fact, Clark and the progressive wing of the PC party strongly opposed the merger, with Clark sitting out the remainder of his Member of Parliament term as an independent as well as declaring his support for then incoming Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin; Harper doesn’t like Clark at all if only for this reason, although he has also maintained some degree of skepticism about Mulroney. (“Progressives at the brink”, by Joe Clark, November 14, 2003, The Globe and Mail (courtesy of davidorchard.com); “Joe Clark says he’d choose Martin over Harper”, April 26, 2004, CTV News; “The Right Honourable Joe”, May 14, 2004, CBC News; and, “Mulroney casts long shadow in Harper circle”, by Jane Taber, November 10, 2007, The Globe and Mail.)
I have wondered why Joe Clark chose to use the word “cease” to describe the end of his party leadership – a rather archaic and unflattering usage in this situation – and whether it gave away a sense that his party could “cease” to exist soon (a more typical use of the word).
I think Clark had a sense that the party was going to cease its presence soon, even though at the time the leadership frontrunner Peter MacKay denied any such intention (The Conservative Party of Canada”, January 30, 2006, CBC News); and I have also come to think of the merger prospect at that point as probably linked to the future plan of the former party leader in between Kim Campbell and Joe Clark – Jean Charest the once young rising star. It was Charest who was generally believed to have a future to lead the Progressive Conservative party back to government after it had nearly been eliminated in the 1993 election under Campbell when many of the MP seats in western Canada were taken over by the upstart Reform party and the Quebec ones taken over by the upstart Bloc Quebecois. But after the 1997 election the PC party was still far behind either the opposition Reform party or the separatist Bloc Quebecois in its standing in the House of Commons, and in 1998 Charest bolted to become leader of the Quebec Liberal party, which was also in opposition. (“Jean Charest” and “Progressive Conservative Party of Canada”, Wikipedia; and, “Former Quebec minister accuses Charest Liberals of major ethics violations”, April 13, 2010, The Daily Gleaner.)
On February 12, 2003 when I sent my list of questions to Joe Clark with a request for a meeting, there was no election in Quebec, then in March the Parti Quebecois government there called an election. The polls in Quebec during March mostly put the separatist party ahead of Charest’s Liberal party, until Jean Charest’s performance in a leaders’ debate at the end of March brought a sudden surge of popularity for him and for his party. (“PQ Takes Lead In Quebec Provincial Election”, March 30, 2003, and, “Liberals Take Lead In Quebec”, April 3, 2003, Angus Reid Public Opinion.)
The first poll results clearly in favor of Charest and his party went public on April 3, the same day Joe Clark sent me the earlier-quoted e-mail reply. (“Quebec: Charest Won Election Debate”, April 3, 2003, Angus Reid Public Opinion.)
In the April 14 election Jean Charest won a majority government, defeating the PQ under Premier Bernard Landry.
My sense is that during the February-April 2003 period Joe Clark waited until the Quebec election prospect and situation became clear, that Jean Charest would stay in Quebec as the next Premier, to send me a response conveying his feeling that the future did not look good for his federal PC party.
After all, Peter MacKay is the son of Elmer MacKay, a former senior figure in the Mulroney government, also known as one of the prominent Canadian friends of German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, the central figure in the Airbus Affair regarding tens of millions of dollars he distributed in Canada for the 1988 sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada, some of which may have gone to officials and politicians in government, possibly including Prime Minister Mulroney personally. (“Former Mulroney aide denies Schreiber’s allegations”, December 6, 2007, CBC News; and, my blog article, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”.)
Peter MacKay had all the reason to agree to a merger, and Brian Mulroney all the reasons to ferment one: the Reform party enjoyed a squeaky-clean image, and as long as the leadership of the new party went to a Reformer – it should given the Reform party’s much larger size and stronger position in the House of Commons – whatever collective past and unsavory past of the Progressive Conservative party would be buried and considered dealt with.
The timing of it was also critical: in August 2002 a few weeks after Joe Clark’s announcement of his retirement intent, then Prime Minister Jean Chretien of the Liberal party did it also – after winning three back-to-back majority government terms that earned him a place in history and outlasting Brian Mulroney in the length of time served as Prime Minister; eventually Chretien stepped down in December 2003 (my blog article, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”). The merger of the Progressive Conservative party with the Reform party came only days before Chretien’s stepping down and presented a stronger party of the right ready to take on Chretien’s party on the left after his departure.
These motives were quite likely behind what happened in the December 2003 merger and then with the new Conservative party, except that Karlheinz Schreiber, who had begun to turn against Brian Mulroney in 1999, also stepped up his efforts to expose Mulroney and win his fight to avoid extradition to his native Germany where he faced criminal charges of fraud and tax evasion. The first media report of some murky $300,000 Schreiber had given Mulroney during the 1990s came in November 2003 – just before the party merger.
My blog article, “The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”, has touched on some of these topics about Karlheinz Schreiber and Brian Mulroney. The Mulroney-Schreiber squabble became known as the Mulroney-Schreiber affair, and was the subject of a 2008-09 public inquiry led by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant; however, under mandates recommended by Dr. David Johnston – as earlier mentioned now the new Governor General of Canada appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper – and adopted by the Harper government, the inquiry would only examine the business and financial relationship between the two – mostly focusing on the $300,000 as conducted by the Oliphant Commission.
In the end, Justice Oliphant’s inquiry report has given Brian Mulroney a slap on the wrist, a very light one, concluding that Mulroney’s business and financial dealings with Schreiber were inappropriate and violated the ethics rules set by his own government in 1985 (“Oliphant Commission Report”, May 31, 2010, Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations Respecting Business and Financial Dealings Between Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney):
“… I found that the business and financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate. I also found that Mr. Mulroney’s failure to disclose those business and financial dealings was inappropriate.
Simply put, Mr. Mulroney, in his business and financial dealings with Mr. Schreiber, failed to live up to the standard of conduct that he had himself adopted in the 1985 Ethics Code.”
Karlheinz Schreiber wasn’t that dumb, at least not as to let himself be the fall guy hung out to dry for so little. Schreiber wrote and talked extensively in the last few years about the matters involving Mulroney. He stated unequivocally to the Oliphant Commission that his relationship with Brian Mulroney had begun with his helping depose then Progressive Conservative party leader (and former Prime Minister) Joe Clark and install Mulroney as the party leader in 1983 (“Summary of Interview of Karlheinz Schreiber”, March 24, 2009, Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations Respecting Business and Financial Dealings Between Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney):
“Mr. Schreiber recalled that in the late 1970s, he was approached in Germany by Walter Wolf and told that Canadian conservatives were seeking support. According to Mr. Schreiber, Mr. Wolf invited him to Newfoundland to meet with Frank Moores, who had just left office as Premier of Newfoundland. At the time, Mr. Moores was president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada [sic] (the “PC Party”), and he and Mr. Wolf were looking for support for Mr. Mulroney.
Mr. Schreiber stated that soon after his introduction to Mr. Moores, he met Mr. Mulroney who was president of Iron Ore, for the first time. Subsequent to this meeting, Mr. Moores asked Mr. Schreiber for funding, which was initially to be used for the 1983 party convention in Winnipeg. Mr. Schreiber was told that delegates were to be flown from Quebec to Winnipeg by Max Ward to ensure there would be sufficient votes against then party leader Joe Clark. Mr. Schreiber donated $30,000 or $50,000 CAD to this cause through his Alberta company MLE Industries. He gave the donation directly to Mr. Wolf (through his lawyer Michael Cogger) who may have claimed the donation as his own.”
Twenty years later, in the evening of the first day of the 2003 Tory (PC) party convention to elect a new leader to replace him, May 29, 2003, a tribute was held for Joe Clark at the convention venue, Toronto Metro Convention Centre. Joe Clark and his family were there.
Brian Mulroney wasn’t there, not arriving at the convention until the next day, but he did send a videotaped message full of praise for Joe Clark, especially for Clark as his government’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and full of boasts about their friendship.
I was there at the tribute for Joe Clark, even though I have never been a Tory. The tribute gathering was open to the public and I attended as a small gesture of respect for Mr. Joe Clark. I don’t know how many in the public like me at the time anticipated – probably a lot more among the party delegates in the packed convention hall – that in a few months Mulroney would become a guiding patron of a newly merged party without Joe Clark, one that would return to governing in another two years or so – obviously without Joe Clark.
When it comes to his political image Brian Mulroney is a control freak where his influence can extend to, and from time to time quite a few journalists have looked upon him as a sort of Richard Nixon of Canadian politics. (“WASHINGTON NOTEBOOK”, by Susan Chung, December 1, 1995, Time – Colonist; “Free Speech; Canada Still Has Mulroney to Kick Around”, by Clifford Krauss, September 25, 2005, The New York Times; “Mulroney’s Shadows: The Many Images of Canada’s Eighteenth Prime Minister”, by Jonathan Malloy, June 2008, Carlton University; and, “The Mulroney show; Canadians are reminded why they dislike him so much”, by Don MacPherson, May 16, 2009, The Gazette.)
It was thus not surprising to see Brian Mulroney talk forcefully, and quite intimidatingly, before and during the Oliphant inquiry about defending his “father’s good name”, asserting that he kept his business dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber secret because he feared the Airbus Affair events of 1995-97 that “scarred me and my family for life”. (“Whatever did Mulroney expect after taking the cash?”, November 27, 2007, The Vancouver Sun; “Mulroney says he feared renewed Airbus attacks”, May 12, 2009, Fort Frances Times; and, “Mulroney: Bear Head deal kept secret to avoid another Airbus controversy”, May 12, 2009, The (Charlottetown) Guardian.)
But the logic really should be the opposite, that if Mulroney hadn’t done anything wrong false allegations could stick only temporarily yet nondisclosure on his part would keep them persist.
I remember commenting in a press release in November 1992, just after the Charlottetown constitutional referendum, somewhat cynically about then Constitutional Affairs Minister Joe Clark:
“Poor Mr. Clark, he never failed Mr. Mulroney, not yet anyway”.
Well, has Joe Clark ever, or ever will.
That time over a decade earlier I was muzzled when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police sent me to the psychiatric ward only hours after I had faxed press releases critical of Mulroney to Kim Campbell’s Member of Parliament constituency office. This time I communicated with Joe Clark through his constituency office and received a polite but “perhaps” revealing reply. Maybe – just maybe – this time Joe Clark was muzzled also but to a lesser degree.
The RCMP officer taking me to psychiatric committal on November 30, 1992 was appropriately named “Brian Cotton”. Later in 1993 another RCMP officer acting as liaison with some other psychiatric institutions over my case was identified as “Corporal Libel”.
I wonder if the “cotton” was clean, and whether the “libel” was considered “seditious”.
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