As in earlier Parts of this blog article, in the fall of 1993 I attempted to continue political activism by revitalizing a civil lawsuit against the University of British Columbia, my former employer, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The lawsuit had been filed in October 1992 but was stalled due to psychiatric intervention by RCMP and UBC starting on November 30, 1992, just after I had faxed documents to Vancouver local Member of Parliament and Justice Minister Kim Campbell to expose certain leadership misconduct by then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
Then in October 1993-February 1994, as detailed in Parts 8 & 9, four Vancouver law firms/related organizations where I sought legal assistance, played critical roles to abort my civil litigation by working with the authorities to file criminal charges against me, alleging fear of violence, that was untrue or unfounded. It allowed the authorities to step up politically motivated criminal prosecution and intensify psychiatric oppression.
Recall that these law-practice entities were: Cram & Associates and lawyer Arnold Shuchat, YMCA Enterprise Centre where my then defence lawyer Richard Dempsey had an office, Warren & Eder, and Connell Lightbody and lawyer Marion Buller.
Rather curiously and intriguingly, Cram & Associates and Connell Lightbody were soon engulfed in negative public controversies of their own later in 1994, though under stringent criminal and psychiatric regimens I was unable to utilize the new circumstances to turn things in my favor – even when I was aware as in the case of Cram & Associates.
As in Part 9, in January 1994 I had phoned an academic institution in New Jersey to inquire about job prospect, and though dialling the right phone number my calls kept reaching an office where a young woman answered that it was the chemical company Dow Corning.
It turned out that at the time there was a continuing stream of news stories in Canada regarding civil litigation against Dow Corning, a leading manufacturer of women’s breast implants, for product defects. The massive health situation had garnered Canadian government attention since early 1992 (“Judge OKs breast implant suit”, August 27, 1993, The Hamilton Spectator):
“Across Canada, between 100,000 to 200,000 women received implants from 1969 until January 1992, when Health and Welfare Canada imposed a moratorium on implants because of health concerns.”
On September 7, 1993, Dow Corning had agreed to a $4.75 billion legal settlement over a class-action lawsuit brought by U.S. women, and class actions by Canadian women were approved by the court in Ontario and being considered by the court in Quebec (“Woman plans lawsuit over breast implants”, September 28, 1993, Kitchener - Waterloo Record).
But not in British Columbia, where the laws, protective of doctors and hospitals, had strict time limitations on lawsuits, and wouldn’t allow class action. As a result one B.C. woman, represented by Victoria lawyer Deborah Acheson, had joined a U.S. class action in Michigan against Dow Corning. (“B.C. woman joins suit against Dow-Corning”, July 28, 1993, Kitchener - Waterloo Record)
Acheson and Vancouver lawyers Mark Steven and David Klein were attempting to get the law changed to allow class actions, and the B.C. government said there would be an announcement “in the near future”. A news story on this appeared on November 6, 1993, when I was in police custody, as in Part 9 charged with Criminal Harassment by the complaint of lawyer Marion Buller at Connell Lightbody, to which Mark Steven actually also belonged (“Class-action litigation planned by 3 lawyers”, by Rebecca Wigod, November 6, 1993, The Vancouver Sun):
“Deborah Acheson, Mark Steven and David Klein -- the three lawyers handling most of the province's breast-implant cases -- said Friday they expect Attorney-General Colin Gabelmann will introduce legislation that will enable them to follow that course.
The lawyers estimate that 15,000 B.C. women have had breast implants and that hundreds or thousands have medical problems as a result.
They said only three per cent of the implant manufacturers' $4.75-billion US settlement fund has been set aside for foreign litigants.
“This is totally unreasonable and unacceptable,'” said Steven, a Vancouver lawyer with 52 breast-implant cases.
“We must either attempt to increase that small ‘set-aside’ fund or find other ways of ensuring the victims of these implants get adequate compensation.”
Acheson, a Victoria lawyer who also has about 50 cases, said having B.C. women sue individually would be unsatisfactory.
“You cannot effectively fight these cases one by one,” she said.
“There are only so many medical experts. You cannot bring in that medical expert 400 times. He doesn't want to spend his life sitting in courts.”
Acheson said he has been urging the attorney-general’s ministry to allow a class action and has had a positive response.
“They will be coming forward with an announcement in the near future, and that announcement hopefully will allow us to proceed on a class basis in
B.C,” she said.”
But The Vancouver Sun story didn’t mention Dow Corning or Connell Lightbody. So I was aware of the breast-implant issue but not the law firm link.
In February-March 1994, there was more coverage of the B.C. issue by the Ontario media, mentioning Down Corning but not Connell Lightbody, and quoting Mark Steven who called the small amount of money allocated to non-Americans in the U.S. $4.75 billion class-action settlement “a very barbaric treatment” (“Breast implant settlement sells Canadians short: lawyer”, February 16, 1994, The Hamilton Spectator):
““The 3 per cent will amount, at best, to a tiny hill of beans,” said Mr. Steven. “For the rest of the world, it's a very barbaric treatment.””
“A tiny hill of beans” it might be, but class actions weren’t even possible in B.C.
At this time the issue was not further covered by the B.C. press, despite that a single lawsuit by B.C. woman Susan Hollis reached Supreme Court of Canada by way of a Dow Corning appeal against her $95,000 B.C. court award (“High court will hear appeal by breast implant maker”, March 11, 1994, The Hamilton Spectator):
“The case, the first involving liability for breast implants to go to the Supreme Court, could set a precedent for thousands of Canadians suing implant manufacturers.
Women in Ontario and Quebec have already launched class-action suits and there are individual cases across the country.
A spokesman for Dow Corning said the company is pleased the Supreme Court will hear the case.
The lawyer for Ms Hollis, Guy Holeksa, said his client is upset the case has not been resolved but remains optimistic it will be decided in her favor.
Dow Corning and other silicone breast-implant makers have offered a $4.75-billion US settlement to women in the United States and elsewhere who experienced problems. Dow Corning stopped making the implants in 1992.
Lawyers for Canadian women fear little of the money will go to women outside the United States. And it could take many years before anything is paid.
About 150,000 Canadian women have had silicone breast implants. About one-third have suffered problems. The implants were banned in 1992.”
I wonder why, being part of a $4.75 billion U.S. compensation scheme, Dow Corning would continue to fight Susan Hollis’s $95,000 award – too rich for one foreigner perhaps?
But I also wonder why Mark Steven’s lawyer colleague Marion Buller, an Aboriginal Canadian woman, who as in Part 9 was very quick taking a lead role in a public inquiry into RCMP mistreatment of Natives in B.C.’s Cariboo-Chilcotin region, and a lead role to crush my civil lawsuit-centered political activism, didn’t or couldn’t get the B.C. government she had influence with to move faster on this issue – the “near future” the government had promised the B.C. breast-implant women’s lawyers wasn’t coming anytime soon.
Finally on April 29, The Vancouver Sun mentioned Connell Lightbody in the ‘footnote’ of a breast-implant story, when it reported that lawyer David Klein said time was running out for Canadian women and he would go to the U.S. courts (“Compensation deadline looms for Canadian breast-implant victims”, by Rebecca Wigod, April 29, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
“Time is running out for Canadian women who want compensation for failed breast implants, says a Vancouver lawyer representing 105 women with
implant-related problems.David Klein said Canadian women wanting a share of the $4.7-billion US settlement fund must register by Dec. 1, at the latest.
“Canadian women have about six months to file all their material. American women have 30 years,'' said Klein, who recently attended a Chicago seminar on the fund.
It is the largest product-liability settlement in history, but it won't be generous to women who received their implants outside the U.S. Altogether, these so-called foreign claimants are entitled to a maximum of $45 million US. The fund won’t compensate foreign claimants for implant rupture or removal, either.
Klein will seek a share of the fund for about 20 of his breast-implant clients. These are women who either cannot determine which company made
their implants or who received implants made by companies that are now bankrupt or financially shaky.Each will likely receive between $5,000 and $10,000 US from the fund, said Klein.
He will sue in U.S. courts for most of his clients, whose implants were made by major manufacturers. If these women win their cases -- if they are seriously ill, and a link to their implants is demonstrated -- they could each win hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.
The deadline for opting out of the fund, for the purpose of filing suit in the U.S., is June 17. The major contributors to the fund are Dow Corning Corp., Baxter Healthcare Corp. and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. Earlier this month, five more companies -- including Union Carbide and 3M -- agreed to contribute.
…
About 400 B.C. women are seeking compensation for implant troubles. Most are represented by Klein’s firm, Klein Lyons; by Connell Lightbody, also of Vancouver; by the Victoria firm Acheson Shaw, or by Medical Legal Consultants of Washington, in Seattle.”
Susan Hollis’s $95,000 B.C. court award was much more than the $5,000-$10,000 for a Canadian from the U.S. settlement, but Klein was aiming for “hundreds of thousands” through the U.S. courts.
Curiously, while Connell Lightbody was mentioned in the above story, Mark Steven wasn’t. Having called the U.S. multi-billion dollar settlement’s small allowance for foreign victims “a very barbaric treatment”, was Steven now unwilling to take it to the American justice system the way Klein was eager to?
Or maybe just that on such a high-profile international matter, a Connell Lightbody lawyer would only say in public what the Canadian government wanted him to say – that would be related to the negative media publicity about this law firm that came later in June 1994.
In early June, The Ottawa Citizen newspaper reported that two Vancouver law firms, Ray Enright & Associates and Connell Lightbody – formerly Ray Connell as in Part 9 – were among top-10 law firms doing untendered contracts for the Canadian government in 1993 (“$45M government legal bill under attack; Critics question value of services but government resists tendering”, by Ron Eade, June 7, 1994, The Ottawa Citizen):
“More than 600 outside lawyers and law firms collected almost $45 million in legal work from the federal government last year. Not one of the contracts went to public tender.
The auditor general has questioned whether taxpayers are getting value for their money…
Last year's legal tab -- $44.7 million -- is down less than two per cent from a record $45.1 million in the previous year. The top 10 law firms billed
$12.7 million, or 28 per cent of the total paid to hundreds of outsiders by the federal government.…
Two U.S. firms were the highest billers, for very specialized work. Washington-based Weil, Gotshal & Manges, and Miller & Chevalier pulled in a total of
$4.6 million to fight complicated trade disputes. A year earlier, the same firms billed $6.4 million (including expenses), which ranked them first and
sixth, respectively, on the list.…
Election records show that in 1992, for example, Connell Lightbody (then known as Ray Connell) donated $7,386 to the Conservatives and $2,042 to the Liberals. The firm has been representing federal interests since the late 1960s under both Liberal and Conservative administrations.
“It’s patronage with a capital P as far as I’m concerned, counters Reform Party MP Myron Thompson.
Thompson says tendering should be followed, if only because Canadians demand an arms-length relationship between government and its suppliers.
The MP wants more of the federal work done in-house, or kept in the government family by paying provincial Crown attorneys to prosecute some drug cases for them. At the very least, Thompson says, the government should call tenders to see if cheaper rates are available.
“We’re quite happy with the way it is now, says Penny Lipsett, spokesman for Justice Minister Allan Rock.
…
The Top 10 list of billings from all legal firms in fiscal 1993-94, including fees and expenses:
1. Weil, Gotshal & Manges (Washington, D.C.)
Total billing: $2,419,520
…2. Miller & Chevalier (Washington, D.C.)
Total billing: $2,137,177
…
3. Patterson Kitz (Halifax)
Total billing: $1,708,782
…
4. Ray Enright & Associates (Vancouver)
Total billing: $1,147,132
…
7. Connell Lightbody (Vancouver)
Total billing: $847,589
…”
There were several interest points in this story.
First, for 2 years in a row the annual government money for these law firm contracts was around $45 million, coincidentally near the U.S. $4.75 billion breast-implant settlement’s allocation for foreign victims.
Second, the top two earners of the Canadian government money were American law firms based in the U.S. Capital, together making $6.4 million and $4.6 million in the 2 years past.
And third, Connell Lightbody – No. 7 on the money list behind Vancouver’s Ray Enright & Associates at No. 4 – was singled out in this news story for its history of “representing federal interests since the late 1960s”, and appeared to be a target of the “patronage” criticism from opposite Reform Party Member of Parliament Myron Thompson.
Such a close affiliation with the federal government by Connell Lightbody – besides lawyer Marion Buller’s clout with the B.C. government – coupled with the fact that my political activism had focused on exposing the Prime Minister’s misconduct, made the existence of a federal government dimension very likely in the criminal persecution of me initiated by Buller.
And the law firm’s longstanding government representation made it especially interesting that Mark Steven lamented on “very barbaric treatment” by U.S. breast-implant manufacturers yet was not outspoken like David Klein about going to the U.S. courts.
Perhaps the government of Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who had defeated Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative Party successor Kim Campbell in October 1993, while unhappy with American “barbaric treatment” wanted to avoid any counter-criticism that the Canadian legal system wasn’t as open to class actions.
Two days after the The Ottawa Citizen story, The Province newspaper in B.C. named the 2 Vancouver law firms, and quoted Justice Department B.C. director Jim Bissell defending the government practice (“Law firms scooping Crown bucks”, June 9, 1994, The Province):
“Ray Enright and Associates of Vancouver earned $1.15 million in federal billings, mainly for drug prosecutions, according to figures released on Monday.
“Over the years it has grown and grown,” said Enright, a 34-year- old lawyer who started working for the Crown in 1989.
“We don’t handle any of the large, important cases. We get left with the very bottom end.”
The major cases are handled by the justice department’s lawyers.
Also among the top billers was Connell Lightbody, which earned $848,000 for prosecutions of tax fraud, drug offences and delinquent student loans.
The B.C. director of the justice department, Jim Bissell, says hiring private firms is unavoidable, even though he’s got 91 lawyers on the public payroll.
…
Bissell said at least 4,500 new cases land on his desk every year.
And he said cases are getting more and more complex, and often need outside expertise.
…
Despite Bissell's complaint, the department says it is planning to halve its outside work and do the work in-house.”
J. D. (Jim) Bissell had been the government lawyer who signed Justice Department’s Statement of Defence in November 1992 to counter my lawsuit claims, as in Parts 5 & 9.
Mine was only one of 4,500 cases on his desk every year, but as late as 1991 Bissell had been Justice Department director for the Atlantic region based in Halifax, Nova Scotia (“‘Biased’ judge back on bench Feb. 11”, January 30, 1991, Halifax Daily News). The timing of Bissell’s transfer to B.C. coincided with the transfers of RCMP Chief Superintendent M. K. M. Clegg from Alberta and Chief Supt. P. M. Cummins from Ottawa, who were then involved in sending an RCMP letter to Ottawa dated on my birthday on January 29, 1993, when I was in psychiatric committal as in Parts 6 & 7.
I note that Mulroney had attended St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia (“Mulroney: Time often favours leaders”, by Aaron Beswick, November 15, 2012, The Chronicle Herald), and that when Bissell was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Counsel title on December 30, 1988, so was Mulroney’s former principal secretary Bernard Roy (“Mulroney’s former top secretary among 31 lawyers appointed QC”, December 31, 1988, The Globe and Mail).
Moreover, Patterson Kitz, the Halifax law firm that was No.3 on the 1993 government money list, topping all Canadian firms, had lawyer Fred Dickson, one of Mulroney’s advisers on government appointments – as leading anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron, prominently featured in earlier Parts, had noted just one day before the announcement of Queen’s Counsel title for Roy and Bissell in 1988 (“PEOPLE WATCH Tory connections give law firms a share of government liberality”, December 29, 1988, The Globe and Mail):
“Start, for example, with close friends of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Halifax lawyer Gerald Doucet and Quebec City lawyer Gary Ouellet are partners in an Ottawa lobbying firm, Government Consultants International. They also are still partners in their law firms, Doucet and Associates and Levasseur Ouellet, respectively, which are getting steady government business.
…
Montreal’s Stikeman Elliott (which does have some senior Liberals like Marc Lalonde), is also home to Tory fund raiser David Angus and, until recently, to new Mulroney chief of staff Stanley Hartt; its billings, for the past three years, have added up to nearly $616,000.
Ogilvy Renault, Mr. Mulroney’s old firm, where his former principal secretary Bernard Roy is a partner, has billed nearly $500,000, of which $132,000 last year was for opinion work from Yves Fortier, now Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.
…
Another sure route to legal business is service as a party vice-president or on Mr. Mulroney’s now-disbanded advisory committees on patronage appointments.
Of 103 people serving on these committees, at least 36 were lawyers. For most of those practicing back in their home towns, federal business has been brisk. In Halifax, for example, appointments adviser Fred Dickson saw his firm, Patterson Kitz, bill nearly $160,000 in the past two years.
…
Victoria’s Jones Emery saw its income from federal legal business over the past four years add up to nearly $1.27-million; partner Michael Donison has been another appointments adviser.
In Vancouver, appointments adviser Lyall Knott’s firm, Clark Wilson, has billed a total of more than $332,000 in three years.
Another Vancouver firm, Macauley McColl, has done particularly well harvesting that cash crop of the legal field, financing for test cases involving native land claims. In 1987 James Macauley, the Tories’ 1984 B.C. campaign organizer, and other Macauley McColl lawyers billed nearly $738,365 acting for the Justice Department in three native land claims including the Gitskan Wet'suwet’en trial. In the previous year, the firm had billed about
$339,000 for those cases.Some lawyers say these figures pale beside earnings from Crown corporations. Others go even farther. “You know what?” commented one top Ottawa official, helping with the figures. “All this is chicken feed compared to what the lobbyists are making right here.””
“Chicken feed” it wasn’t, all this government money for the Mulroney-associated law firms Stevie Cameron counted in 1988. But it certainly paled in comparison to what Patterson Kitz and Connell Lightbody later got in 1993 – with the exception of Vancouver’s Macauley McColl handling native land claims in 1987.
Coincidental in timing, only after this public controversy about Connell Lightbody as a top-10 government-favoured law firm did the B.C. press, The Province in this case, mention lawyer Mark Steven as a member of this law firm. But it was now just one day before the deadline to opt out of the small pool of money for foreign women in the U.S. $4.75 billion breast-implant settlement (“Women cool to implant offer: Few B.C. claims for U.S. compensation package”, by Holly Horwood, June 16, 1994, The Province):
“Mark Steven estimates 80 per cent of the roughly 750 women who have sought legal advice in the controversial issue won’t apply for claims that may offer only $200 to $2,000 Cdn for non-Americans.
“Those who are opting in (from B.C.) are those who can’t identify (the manufacturers of) their implants or who are American,” said Steven, of Connell Lightbody, which represents 174 women with implants.
Claimants have until tomorrow to indicate they’re opting out of the proposed $4.25-billion-US compensation package -- three per cent of which is available for non-Americans.”
What Klein had said in April of “between $5,000 and $10,000 US” for each foreign victim from a $45 million total was now only “$200 to $2,000 Cdn” according to Steven – no doubt due to an overwhelming number of foreigners applying.
But in 1994 and the years that followed I was unaware of the public controversy about Connell Lightbody’s government affiliation, or that a lawyer there was representing B.C. women on the breast-implant matter against Dow Corning. The only newspaper I subscribed to was The Vancouver Sun, but it completely omitted certain news: it gave no coverage of Connell Lightbody being a Canadian government’s top-10 favourite law firm; its April 29 breast-implant story by Rebecca Wigod referred to Connell Lightbody in a ‘footnote’ without naming Mark Steven; and on June 16 when The Province‘s Holly Horwood mentioned Mark Steven of Connell Lightbody, The Vancouver Sun’s report by Rebecca Wigod didn’t mention Connell Lightbody (“Implant activist urges B.C. women to turn down offer”, by Rebecca Wigod, June 16, 1994, The Vancouver Sun).
Had I known of Connell Lightbody’s government money controversy, I could have made a point to my lawyer Phil Seagram and probation officer Fred Hitchcock – both mentioned in Part 9 – about possible biases and hidden agendas on the part of this law firm, which had been behind a Criminal Harassment charge ending my hope of resuming civil litigation vs. UBC and RCMP.
The Vancouver Sun finally mentioned both Mark Steven and his law firm Connell Lightbody on March 1, 1995, but even worse than one day before a deadline on June 16, 1994, it was now the day of an extended deadline for Canadian women to join the U.S. legal settlement on faulty breast implants. Though still small, the allotment for foreign victims had been increased to $113 million then $135 million, and the women were allowed to wait for up to 30 years for their illness symptoms to appear in order to claim “appropriate compensation” (“Implant victims told to register”, by Rebecca Wigod, March 1, 1995, The Vancouver Sun):
“The deadline for applications to the ongoing disease compensation program has been extended to today.
They must bear today’s postmark.
Vancouver lawyer Mark Steven, who represents numerous B.C. women seeking financial redress for implant-related illnesses, said the ongoing disease program was designed for women who believe breast implants could cause them problems over the next 30 years.
“If they are registered by March 1, they can then go to the fund -- say, in 10 years’ time -- with a diagnosis and claim appropriate compensation at that point,” said Steven, who is with the firm Connell Lightbody.
Last September, a U.S. court increased the amount of compensation offered to foreign women, including Canadians, from $113 million to $135 million.”
The last of my 3 one-year probation orders had just ended on February 23, 1995, with the one due to Connell Lightbody having ended on February 11. But would I also have to wait for 30 years to resume my peaceful activism on important political issues?
The subtle information omissions by The Vancouver Sun remind me that, as in Part 6, in October-November 1992 when I communicated with the media for lawsuit publicity, unlike CBC and BCTV The Vancouver Sun would not accept documents from me, but only from my lawyer – on October 21 lawyer Brian Mason faxed to a Mr. Rockingham there – despite my having been an avid reader since arrival in Vancouver in 1988.
In any case, class-action lawsuits were still not allowed in B.C., not until August 1, 1995 (“BILL 16 – 1995 CLASS PROCEEDINGS ACT”, British Columbia Legislature). Introduced in May, the legislation was cheered by the breast-implant victims, but Dow Corning, once the biggest implant manufacturer, quickly filed for bankruptcy protection (“Bill to allow class-action suits cheered: Silicone implant victims happy”, by Rebecca Wigod, May 11, 1995, The Vancouver Sun; and, “Breast-implant lawsuits too rich for Dow Corning”, May 16, 1995, The Province).
I note that the B.C. class-action law was enacted exactly 2 years after Canadian criminal code’s Criminal Harassment section in 1993, under which I was charged 3 months later in 1993 because of Marion Buller and Connell Lightbody.
Finally, in February 1999 the B.C. lawyers, now representing Canadian victims outside of Ontario and Quebec, reached a settlement with Dow Corning as similar deals were reached for Ontario and Quebec and U.S. victims. It would allow Dow Corning to come out of bankruptcy. The B.C. settlement amount was either $39 million as approved by B.C. court in 1998 or $25 million as approved by a U.S. judge in 1999, for an estimated 3,700 to 4,100 victims outside Ontario and Quebec. (“Breast implant settlement deal approved; Lets Dow Corning get out of bankruptcy”, and, “Dow Corning implant settlement approved”, December 1, 1999, Toronto Star)
The B.C. lawyers let women participate from nationwide outside of Ontario and Quebec – my guess is there was no class action allowed in Canada outside of these 3 provinces – but several U.S. breast-implant manufacturers didn’t agree. On November 8, 2000, a B.C. court class action against the other breast-implant manufacturers cleared the hurdles to proceed. (“Breast Implant Class Certification”, January 1, 2001, Lexpert Financial)
But this moment in year 2000 was probably the last time Mark Steven was a Connell Lightbody lawyer. The firm known as Ray Connell I had visited in September 1992 and then Connell Lightbody when I visited again in November 1993 and suffered criminal prosecution as in Part 9, was disappearing.
On November 16, law firm Macaulay McColl – a big government money earner in 1987 according to Stevie Cameron as quoted earlier – announced that J. Gavin Connell, a 1959 UBC law graduate and founder of Connell Lightbody, joined as an associate counsel (“Macaulay McColl Barristers & Solicitors”, November 16, 2000, The Globe and Mail).
Despite a long history and an equally long full name, Ray, Wolfe, Connell, Lightbody & Raynolds (“Into an Improved State of Medico-Legal Etiquette”, by Walley P. Lightbody, September 1972, Chitty’s Law Journal; and, “Leone mixes haute couture with some lean cuisine”, by Malcolm Parry, April 7, 2005, The Vancouver Sun) inexplicably didn’t survive the start of the New Millennium.
But lawyer Marion Buller, whose criminal complaint had ended my hope of reviving civil litigation in late 1993, had left Connell Lightbody in September 1994, appointed a provincial judge in Port Coquitlam with jurisdiction over Forensic Psychiatric Institute, the center of false diagnoses of me as “Paranoid Schizophrenic”.
The last time Steven’s name appeared in major newspapers was for an information session on the Dow Corning settlement he and Victoria’s Acheson & Co. lawyer Kevin Whitely (Whitley) held on March 22, 1999 (“Women’s Health: Information offered on breast-implant case”, March 18, 1999, The Vancouver Sun; and, “Implant info”, March 21, 1999, The Province).
In June 2004, Dow Corning emerged from Bankruptcy protection to begin making payments for its breast-implant legal settlements. The B.C. settlement was reported to be $34 million (“Dow Corning set to make payments in Canadian breast-implant lawsuits”, by Joe Friesen, June 12, 2004, The Globe and Mail) – for an estimated 3,700 to 4,100 victims outside of Ontario and Quebec as of December 1999 as quoted earlier.
In October 2005, Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co., Baxter Healthcare and 3M, the other breast-implant manufacturers that the B.C. lawyers had continued class action against in 2000, agreed to a settlement of $2.5-$4.3 million for an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 victims outside of Ontario and Quebec (“Silicone implant makers settle lawsuit; Three companies agree to pay $2.5 million to $4.3 million B.C. high court-approved deal affects about 2,000 women”, by Greg Joyce, October 6, 2005, Toronto Star).
The Dow Corning settlement was clearly much richer for its Canadian victims than the other manufacturers’, though still less than $10,000 per victim on average, not the “hundreds of thousands” David Klein had talked about in April 1994.
Mark Steven’s success was noted in the Fall 2009 issue of The Dragon, a publication of his alma mater, St. George’s School for boys located on West 29th Avenue in Vancouver: the class of 1968 graduate was “one of three lawyers in British Columbia who successfully settled British Columbia’s first certified class action lawsuit” representing “4,162 claimants”, a partner at Connell Lightbody from 1980 to 2000 and “sole practitioner” afterwards (“Saints’ Notes”, November 1, 2009, The Dragon).
As if folding at the start of the New Millennium wasn’t enough misfortune for Connell Lightbody, its member who handled the first B.C. class action didn’t enjoy the success for long: Mark Robert Steven, a graduate of St. George’s School, UBC and Cambridge University, suddenly died after dinner on June 1, 2012 (“Mark Steven Obituary”, June 12, 2012, The Vancouver Sun).
But Connell Lightbody’s legacy of the 1990s, when its member Marion Buller led a crackdown on my civil action and political activism, lives on on the Canadian national stage with a new Member of Parliament in Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government: former Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and current Associate Minister of National Defence Kerry-Lynne D. Findlay, who had left Connell Lightbody after 9 years in 1996 to join law firm Watson Goepel Maledy (“Executive Committee 1998/1999”, The Canadian Bar Association British Columbia Branch; and, “PM Harper shuffles cabinet to fill aboriginal affairs gap”, by Laura Payton, February 22, 2013, CBC News).
I can’t help but draw a parallel to a more famous conservative woman, Brian Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell: in 1992 when I faxed to her my press releases critical of Mulroney and RCMP came to take me to a psychiatric committal, Campbell was Minister of Justice and 2 months later Minister of National Defence, both a first for a woman, not to mention as Prime Minister later – but only to see her party nearly wiped out in the October 1993 election as in Part 8.
The cause for Connell Lightbody’s demise is unclear, but a year 2000 Texas court case shortly beforehand might offer some clue.
As quoted earlier from David Klein in April 1994, the B.C. lawyers took their breast-implant cases to the U.S. court. Starting in July 1995 they also contracted an American law firm, Sydow & McDonald in Texas, to assist them in order to increase their legal strength and enforce any judgment against Dow Corning from the Michigan court and later from the B.C. court – especially when Dow Corning had filed for bankruptcy protection. But the settlement with Dow Corning went smoothly and so the B.C. lawyers changed their minds about paying the Texas lawyers 50% of the multi-million dollar contingency legal fees as agreed to; the Texas lawyers then sued them in the Texas court. (“SYDOW v. ACHESON & CO. 81 F.Supp.2d 758 (2000)”, January 26, 2000, United States District Court, S.D. Texas, Galveston Division)
In a nutshell, Victoria law firm Acheson & Co. and Vancouver law firm Connell Lightbody – Mark Steven in particular – tried to get out of paying their expensive Texas collection enforcers.
But neither David Klein, the most publicly vocal lawyer about taking the B.C. cases to the U.S. court, nor his law firm Klein Lyons, was named in this Texas lawsuit. I would infer he chose to pay some money to the Texans.
The two partners of the law firm Klein Lyons, David Klein and Mark Lyons, had been Ontario lawyers educated in and practicing in Toronto before moving to British Columbia. In contrast, the other two law firms and lead lawyers, namely Mark Steven and Connell Ligthbody’s lead partners J. Gavin Connell and Walley P. Lightbody, and Acheson & Co.’s Deborah A. Acheson and Kevin W. Whitley as on its website (“Our Lawyers”, Acheson Whitley Sweeny Foley Holekamp), had practiced only in B.C. or Western Canada, and were all UBC graduates – except Whitley from the University of Alberta.
UBC influence was evident in the May 2009 issue of UBC Okanagan alumni web publication, which reported that UBC alumnus Walley Lightbody lived in Kelowna in the B.C. interior and used his Supreme Court of Canada connections to benefit education (“Fifty Years of UBC for Law Alumnus Walley Lightbody, QC, BA'56, LLB'59”, May 2009, UBC Okanagan Alumni Relations):
“This month, Walley Lightbody will attend and speak at the 50-year reunion of his UBC Law School graduating class. Walley and his wife Marietta are great friends of UBC Okanagan.
Over the last academic year, Walley was instrumental in bringing Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice Frank Iacobucci to Kelowna as speakers – for both the public and directly to students – and he was a speaker himself at UBC Okanagan’s Mentoring Luncheon What I Did with my Arts Degree.”
Law connections and arts degree were especially useful when one no longer had his law firm, but what distinguished UBC alumni: Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice Frank Iacobucci of the highest court in Canada, all friends of Walley Lightbody, and no doubt Gavin Connell – both UBC law graduates of 1959.
Though unaware of Connell Lightbody’s involvement in the breast-implant matters, back in 1994-95 I was aware of the role of Klein Lyons, a small law firm located in a tall office building at 805 West Broadway – across from the Vancouver General Hospital neighbourhood – specializing in malpractice injury claims (“Amended Statement of Claim”, July 15, 1998, Hepatitis C Tainted Blood Class Action, Klein Lyons).
As in Parts 8 & 9, in September-October 1993 I visited some law firms to look for a lawyer to continue my lawsuit vs. UBC and RCMP, but a few of them instead targeted me criminally for civil disobedience. At the time I didn’t approach Klein Lyons because its law practice did not include the areas of employment dispute and human rights, even though my lawsuit needed expansion to cover the psychiatric oppression, which could be within its areas.
My sense is that in the early-mid 1990s there likely was a relation between British Columbia’s lagging behind Ontario in allowing class-action lawsuits and the arrivals of David Klein and Mark Lyons, who then boosted the B.C. legal community’s strength and resolve in taking steps in that direction – having practiced together since 1988 at Klein Lyons in Toronto they moved to Vancouver in 1992 (“Mark Lyons, Lawyer – Work Experience”, Klein Lyons).
The Law Society of B.C. records put David Klein’s date of call to B.C. bar, i.e., receiving a license to practice, as August 28, 1992, and Mark Lyons’s as November 13, 1992 (“Lawyer Lookup”, The Law Society of British Columbia) – the Society can confirm that on the latter day the Vancouver firm Klein Lyons was formed.
These particular dates would later constitute a rare coincidence with two dates in the career and life of two other, much more influential and highly-placed Canadian lawyers, adding more mystery to some intriguing events discussed in earlier Parts.
In Parts 3, 5 & 6 it has been discussed that then Justice John Major, who happened to share his annual birthday with my father, was named to the Supreme Court of Canada on November 13, 1992 – the same day as Mark Lyons’s call to bar in B.C.
Also discussed in the earlier Parts are facts the public weren’t aware of at the time, that Bruce Verchere, the lead partner of law firm Bennett Jones Verchere where John Major had been a lawyer before appointed an Alberta justice in 1991, was Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s personal lawyer and financial trustee, and that later Verchere died of a reported suicide on August 28, 1993.
Verchere’s death was on the first anniversary of David Klein’s call to B.C. bar.
Thus, two small Vancouver law partners from Toronto started their B.C. careers on dates so intriguingly coincidental to milestone dates for two elite Canadian law partners in Brian Mulroney’s circle – marking the highest elevation for John Major, and an exact year in advance of the end of Bruce Verchere.
From my perspective I wouldn’t quite call it ‘bizarre’, but such mysterious date coincidences for Klein Lyons rivalled the intrigues in Connell Lightbody’s longstanding representation of government interests, leading role in suppressing my political activism, and demise at the dawn of the New Millennium.
As stated earlier, among the four Vancouver law firms/organizations that had filed criminal complaints against me in late 1993, two, Connell Lightbody and Cram & Associates, in 1994 were at the center of negative media publicities.
I had met lawyer Jack Cram, the principal of Cram & Associates, in early October 1993 before his associate Arnold Shuchat reviewed and then turned down my civil case, yet prodding me to be persistent so he could complain to police, as in Part 8; that led to the other 3 criminal complaints in late 1993 – Connell Lightbody being the last – as I went about looking for legal defence.
Jack Cram had been willing to stand up to powerful government interests during 1992-93.
For instances, in February 1992 representing mining companies at the B.C. Supreme Court, Cram accused the left-wing New Democrat B.C. government of “breach of our whole system of justice” (“Politicians interfered, says lawyer”, by Marc Edge, February 19, 1992, The Province):
““It’s a breach of our whole system of justice,” Jack Cram told Justice Mary Saunders.
“People should have a fair hearing, free from political interference.”
Cram is representing Michael Hretchka, whose two companies, Chromex Nickel Mines Ltd. and Kleena Kleene Gold Mines Ltd., were before the securities commission in a hearing that began Dec. 10.
The six-week hearing was to investigate allegations of inadequate accounting procedures by the companies, but was called off after four weeks of evidence.
Cram claimed the hearings were scrubbed because the securities commission and the new New Democrat government didn’t like the way they were going.”
Representing the same companies a month late in March, Cram accused B.C. Finance Minister Glen Clark’s lawyers of “obstruction of justice” (“Clark’s lawyers accused of obstruction”, by Larry Still, March 21, 1992, The Vancouver Sun):
“Cram raised the matter of obstruction of justice at an examination for discovery, a pre-trial hearing at which Clark appeared with four lawyers.
When Clark emerged from the private room at the Vancouver Law Courts, he told a reporter he was not able to disclose what was said at the closed hearing.
Cram emerged minutes later and told all.
He said he asked the minister to explain why the appointment of John Robbins as a member of the securities commission was not renewed in December, 1991.
Cram said as soon as he asked the question, government lawyer George Copley, representing Clark, interjected: “I am advising the minister not to answer.”
Cram told the hearing: “We regard the conduct of the lawyers for the defendants herein to be a serious obstruction of justice, namely obstructing the discoveries that we are entitled to have.””
Then in June 1993, representing a land owner in the suburb of Delta south of Vancouver, whose goal of developing a 307-hectare (758-acre) irregular package of land into a complex of parks, hobby farms and housing had been consistently rejected by the municipal council, Cram accused that some council members “acted dishonestly” in order to “minimize the property’s value for purposes of acquisition” (“Spetifore owner plans to get personal with council”, by Jamie Lamb, June 18, 1993, The Vancouver Sun):
“The result has been a more-or-less continuing clash between the owner – George Hodgins of Century Holdings – and the municipality, with the owner pitching new development schemes, the council rejecting them.
The majority of Tsawwassen residents – although not the local business community – do not want to see the property developed. On the other hand, they have not pushed their council to acquire it.
And the municipality couldn't afford to acquire it so long as the land could be used for housing, what with the owner estimating that by devoting 30 per cent to park and the rest for development – about 12 houses to the hectare, or five to the acre – it would be worth a gross profit of over $500 million. Delta is not about to consider a half-billion dollar purchase for park land.
The latest go-round began last September when Hodgins applied to turn four eight-hectare (20-acre lots on the property … into hobby farms, as allowed under the municipality’s agricultural use guidelines.
The municipality didn’t reply until eight months later, when it issued four letters turning down the proposals. …
… Not only is Hodgins’ lawyer claiming Delta council's purpose is to minimize the property’s value for purposes of acquisition, he proposes to get very personal with the council itself.
According to a letter written to council by Hodgins’ lawyer Jack Cram, if litigation proceeds, “Mr. Hodgins and Century intend to allege and prove that members of council including Mayor (Beth) Johnson, several council members and Mr. (Wayne) Dickinson (municipal approving officer) have acted dishonestly in the various pretexts that they have used to camouflage their real purpose, and have acted spitefully and maliciously towards Mr. Hodgins personally in these actions.””
No doubt the above were all pro-business and pro-development cases, but as far back as 1986 – before my arrival in B.C. – Cram had represented a minority immigrant businessman confronting the monopoly powers of the right-wing Social Credit Party Premier Bennett dynasty in their home turf of Kelowna, in a bizarre case involving not only psychiatry like in my case, but also international violence (“B.C. exploited shaky mental state of man who sold land, court told”, February 13, 1986, The Gazette):
“The British Columbia government took advantage of entrepreneur Eddy Haymour’s unstable mental state to buy a tiny island in Okanagan Lake, B.C. Supreme Court was told yesterday.
Haymour’s lawyer, Jack Cram, said the provincial government had Haymour sign papers transferring ownership of Rattlesnake Island to the government as Haymour stood in the prisoner’s box during a provincial court hearing into Haymour's sanity.
The sanity hearing was brought against Haymour by yet another arm of the provincial government, the Attorney General’s ministry.
“Even if Mr. Haymour was not mentally ill in the slightest. . . this was hardly the atmosphere for him to transfer the island that had meant so much to him,” Cram told Mr. Justice A.G. MacKinnon.
Cram, who was summarizing Haymour’s suit against the provincial government after seven weeks of trial, is asking the court to rescind the land transfer and return the island to Haymour.
Haymour, who was born in Lebanon, sold the island to the provincial government in 1974 for $40,000 after trying unsuccessfully for three years to develop it as a Middle East theme tourist attraction.
The sale followed a well-publicized struggle between Haymour and the government, who Cram claims “expropriated the island by use of regulations.”
Haymour attracted international attention in 1975 when he took hostages at the Canadian Embassy in Beirut, demanding that the provincial government return the island to him.
Cram maintains the government campaign started after a Kelowna resident complained to former premier W.A.C. Bennett in 1972, after Haymour had begun developing the island, that it should be left in its natural state.
Bennett, says Cram, then set the wheels of government in motion against Haymour.
Cram was particularly critical of a former director of lands, A.A. Smith, and Bob Williams, then minister of lands and forests, for pursuing the purchase of the island even though they knew Haymour was “at the end of his rope.””
Cram was quite courageous making accusations against former Premier W. A. C. Bennett and the B.C. government on behalf of such a businessman – he was of Arab origin, ambitious of building a Middle East theme park, mentally ill and in prison, and had a record of armed hostage taking at the Canadian Embassy in Beirut due to this dispute.
W.A.C. Bennett was the father of B.C. Premier Bill Bennett at the time of this court hearing in February 1986.
The one day after Bill Bennett’s reign ended 0n August 6, 1986 (“Bill Bennett”, Wikipedia), B.C. Supreme Court Justice Gordon McKinnon ruled on August 7 that Eddy Haymour hadn’t been mentally ill at all, that there had indeed been “an understanding among the ministers of the Crown, including the premier, that the full force of government would be invoked” to prevent Haymour’s business venture, an amusement park, to succeed (“After 15 years, ‘Crazy Eddy’ proves he’s not”, by Graham Rockingham, September 27, 1986, The Ottawa Citizen):
““We always thought it was Eddy who was crazy,” said a local businessmen. “But now we’re wondering if it wasn’t the government that was insane all along.”
In 1955 , at age 25, Haymour emigrated from Lebanon to Canada with $17 in his pocket. It took him just 10 years to become a respected Edmonton businessman with a string of hair salons and beauty schools. In 1971, he moved to British Columbia’s scenic Okanagan Valley. In the back of Haymour’s mind was a dream of building an amusement park – and when he found Rattlesnake Island just off the banks of Okanagan Lake, he thought that dream had come true.
His lawyers went to work, government bureaucracy churned, and finally Haymour was able to purchase the island and started building.
That was when he crossed paths with an Okanagan neighbor – Premier W.A.C. Bennett. Bennett, who ruled B.C. from 1952 to 1972, needed something to counter criticism that he was doing too little to protect the environment.
Suddenly, the wheels of government that so slowly ground in Haymour’s favor began grinding against him. He was refused permission to build a ferry dock on government land. His zoning was changed retroactively. Bureaucrats refused to consider his applications for building permits.
After investing $100,000, Haymour was ordered to halt construction.
It would be 15 years after Haymour started, and seven years after Bennett had died, that Supreme Court Justice Gordon McKinnon would verify what Haymour knew all along:
“Unbeknowst to the plaintiff,” the ruling said, “There was an understanding among the ministers of the Crown, including the premier, that the full force of government would be invoked to prevent the lands being used as an amusement park.”
In his Aug. 7 decision this year, McKinnon also found that government was not satisfied to just stop the project, but then proceeded to conspire to drive “the price of the property down through the use of regulation, and effectively drove the plaintiff to the brink of financial disaster.”
Back when it was all happening, Haymour cracked under the pressure. His wife and four children left him. When he publicly threatened government officials, the RCMP put him under surveillance and paid an informer to befriend him.
Based on the informer’s evidence, Haymour was arrested at gun point by a squad of police and special army personnel. He was charged with 37 criminal offences, including manufacturing letter bombs, plotting to bomb a bridge and several cars, and conspiring to hijack an airplane. Denied bail, he spent five months in jail before appearing in court.
When he finally did appear, all charges were dropped for lack of evidence, except one – possession of an aluminum “knuckleduster.”
Although he tried to plead guilty to that charge, prosecutors insisted he be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
The judge ruled Haymour insane – specifically because of his “delusions” of government persecution. He was committed to an asylum indefinitely.
While under psychiatric examination, the government had Haymour sign over Rattlesnake Island for $26,000. (The Supreme Court later ruled he was underpaid by $44,000.) To add insult to injury, an arsonist burned down his $100,000 home.
After 11 months and a promise to leave Canada forever, Haymour was released.
And he was mad. He wanted to get even.
Returning to Lebanon in 1976, he recruited five of his cousins, armed them with heavy machine guns and seized the Canadian embassy in Beirut. He held more than 20 hostages for 14 hours – demanding that his property in Canada be returned, that he be given safe passage back to British Columbia, and that he be given $20,000 to help start his legal case against government.
Haymour was given a chartered plane back to Canada, but he never saw the $20,000.
On his return, Haymour remarried and built a modest house near the shore of the Okanagan. He borrowed enough money from his few remaining friends to resume his legal battle which resulted nine years later in Justice McKinnon's decision.
In that decision the court squarely put the blame for Haymour’s 15 years of misery on the government.
But Haymour was awarded only $150,000 – the difference between the true value of his island and the amount he was paid, plus interest.
To no avail, Haymour’s lawyers have simply tried to have the island’s sale invalidated since it occured while Haymour was in a mental institution.
McKinnon, however, ruled that Haymour really was sane at the time of his hospitalization, even though it was a lower court that committed him in the first place.
The $150,000 did little more than help him pay off his debts. His lawyer, Jack Cram, has filed his intention to appeal the size of the award with a higher court. The government has also filed for appeal of the judgment on unspecified grounds.
Haymour, now 56, visits Rattlesnake Island whenever a friend will lend him a boat.”
A long saga worth reading. Particularly interesting was when Haymour wanted to plead guilty to a minor charge the government instead declared him insane to lock him up – not unlike my predicament in January 1993, as in Part 7, when CBC threatened to charge me for persistence and I responded I would talk in criminal court about “criminal” conduct by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, the Vancouver police sent me to a psychiatric committal.
The Eddy Haymour tale became a legend recalled from time to time. For instance, in February 1992 when my political dispute with my then boss Maria Klawe at UBC had begun, The Vancouver Sun mentioned him (“Canada’s Carmel?: California dreamin’ drags Peachland into controversy”, by Stewart Bell, February 25, 1992, The Vancouver Sun):
“Sue and Bob Menzies moved here from North Vancouver 2 1/2 years ago to get away from the pressures of the big city and raise their daughter in a kinder, gentler town.
But when a real estate investor knocked on their door last month and offered $135,000 for their lakefront home, they began to realize their escape from the urban jungle may have been temporary.
The Menzies turned down the offer since they didn’t want to move and their house had an appraised value of $160,000 (about $60,000 more than they paid in 1989).
…
The real estate boom in nearby Kelowna and the opening of the Coquihalla Connector have made this former fruit-growing colony on the western shore of Lake Okanagan an attractive place to live and invest.
…
And now Kelowna real estate investor Brian Lovig, president of Powerline Ventures Inc. and a number of other companies, is trying to scoop up the downtown lakeshore strip so he can transform it into a California-type beach town.
…
But Peachland has a history of sending developers packing. The last person who had grandiose plans for the area was Eddy Haymour, a Lebanese-born businessman who in 1971 wanted to build an Arabic theme park on nearby Rattlesnake Island.
The provincial government opposed the plan and Haymour was arrested when he allegedly threatened provincial officials.
He was eventually cleared and in 1986 won a $340,000 award for damages from the province - but not until he spent 6 1/2 months in jail, 11 months in an insane asylum and took hostages at the Canadian embassy in Lebanon.”
On the same day, The Vancouver Sun also reported that Haymour was about to sign a movie deal with Unistar International Pictures, which wanted actor Kevin Klein to portray him (“Hollywood, Haymour deal”, by Stewart Bell, February 15, 1992, The Vancouver Sun):
“Haymour, a Lebanese-born Canadian who fought the provincial government for 15 years over a plan to develop an Arabic theme park on an island near here, said he hopes to sign a contract soon with Unistar International Pictures.
Unistar president Gloria Morrison said the working title for the movie is Once Upon an Island. She hopes to enlist American actor Kevin Klein to play the lead role.
Morrison, who specializes in feature films about true stories, said filming could begin next year and it would likely be another year before the film is released.”
I have no idea what has happened to that movie plan.
Like Haymour’s lawyer Jack Cram, lawyer Brian Mason who launched my lawsuit in October 1992 but then quit in April 1993, as in Parts 6 & 7 had also represented high-profile political cases – challenging the conduct of Bill Bennett’s successor Bill Vander Zalm who would resign amid the Fantasy Gardens scandal.
I also spent months in jail detention and months in psychiatric committals. But after much longer than the 15 years Eddy Haymour had endured, nothing has really changed for me in this regard.
Was Haymour’s hostage taking at the Canadian Embassy in Beirut, which garnered international attention and brought him initial concession from the Canadian government, the real difference here?
My predicaments as described in Parts 6-9 looked like a lighter version of Eddy Haymour’s but without his resorting to violence. I can only wish that Cram & Associates had chosen to take my civil lawsuit in October 1993. But the reality, described in Part 8, was that I was out of financial resources and could only rely on “contingency fee” arrangement for the lawyer to share the compensation if my case was won, not unlike the breast-implant class-action cases; unlike businessman Eddy Haymour I had no money, and being money-motivated lawyers Cram & Associates must have found that my chance of winning wasn’t good.
Only weeks after my meeting Jack Cram and his associate Arnold Shuchat, Kim Campbell was defeated in the October 1993 federal election. But Cram & Associates had already filed a police complaint – likely also money motivated as discussed in Part 8 – that led to criminal prosecution, and a second complaint had come from YMCA Enterprise Centre where my then defence lawyer Richard Dempsey failed to show up for our appointment, and things went further downhill from there.
As in Part 3, I stayed unemployed until 1996 when a businesswoman originally from Taiwan asked me to help start a small business, telling me that her late father had spent years in jail due to his association with General Sun Li-jen, a Virginia Military Institute graduate and World War II hero who himself suffered nearly lifetime detention in Taiwan due to political opposition to former Chinese strongman Chiang Kai-shek.
Similar to Haymour’s plight under the successive B.C. governments of the Bennett family, Sun Li-jen was under house arrest from 1955 on, during the rule of not only Chiang Kai-shek but also Chiang’s son Chiang Ching-Kuo, until the latter’s death in 1988 (“Sun Li-jen”, Wikipedia).
So it appears that when an immigrant from the Third World ran afoul of some political power in Canada, the standards from that person’s origin would be applied by the Canadian authorities, unless or until the person acted violently – like Haymour did in Beirut – and was hailed as heroic by the foreign media according to those standards. What a pity!
When I met Jack Cram in October 1993 I didn’t know about his standing up against the government and powerful politicians in the past. Even now, newspaper articles about his acting as lawyer for Eddy Haymour, in the ProQuest archive I regularly accessed through the City of Toronto Public Library, have only appeared for the first time in my searches as I write this Part of my blog article.
In 1993-94 after my negative experiences at Cram & Associates and Connell Lightbody, I would still be unaware of media publicities about the latter’s role in the breast-implant legal matters, or about its being a top-10 law firm in receiving untendered Canadian government contracts, due to The Vancouver Sun’s evasive reporting.
But when some sensational media stories about Jack Cram appeared in 1994 I learned right away, and found them very relevant: beginning in April and extensively covered by The Vancouver Sun during that year, Cram accused the B.C. justice system of “massive corruption”.
On April 23, news reported a courtroom drama in which Cram, acting as counsel for another lawyer, Renate Andres-Auger, had heated verbal exchanges with a B.C. Supreme Court judge and physical confrontations with courthouse security and police (“lawyers arrested as fists, charges fly in near-riot in court”, by Phil Needham, April 23, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
“At the height of the affray, as fists flew and allegations of corruption were being shouted, city police and 20 additional sheriff’s deputies from other court locations were called in to try to control the situation.
The lawyers arrested were Jack Cram, a prominent counsel with more than 25 years at the bar, and Renate Andres-Auger, a suspended lawyer for whom Cram has been counsel.
…
The disturbance broke out while Cram was appearing before Justice Howard Callaghan regarding applications by the Law Society of B.C. and its
former top officer, Peter Leask, to dismiss lawsuits filed last year by Cram.Also present were more than 120 people who jammed the courtroom to support Cram and hear him expose what he called corruption in the courts.
When the judge refused to let Cram embark on a three-hour argument, the lawyer told him, “I have absolutely no confidence in this court because there is massive corruption in this court.”
…
With both arms raised, his hair mussed, Cram turned to the roomful of supporters and urged, “Come on people – let’s go.””
What was all the fuss about?
A few days later a partial transcript of the conversations between Cram and Justice Howard Callaghan was published (“‘… I am an honest lawyer …’”, April 27, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
“THE COURT: What are you handing up?
MR. CRAM: It is a transcript of the proceedings from April 11 and a ruling that occurred on that day. Perhaps you could -
THE COURT: By whom?
MR. CRAM: Mr. Justice Catliff.
…
THE COURT: I read all the material.
MR. CRAM: It is not part of the material, my lord. Who has been giving you this? This is the Corporation of the District of Matsqui. What has that got to
do with Cram and Leask?THE COURT: I have read it all.
MR. CRAM: Did somebody give you this?
THE COURT: Don’t question me.
MR. CRAM: I want to know.
THE COURT: Mr. Cram, don’t question me.
…
MR. CRAM: … I have absolutely no confidence in this court whatsoever and none of my clients have either because there is massive corruption in this court and I am here to tell you about it.
THE COURT: Mr. Cram, you are getting very close to contempt.
MR. CRAM: My lord, I am going to read to you a few things that prove that there is corruption in this court and you cannot hold me in contempt for saying that there is corruption in this court because that very order would be corrupt. Your sitting on this case is corrupt. So you should get out of here.
THE COURT: Mr. Cram, you don’t -- I gather you have no faith at all in the system?
MR. CRAM: Absolutely not.
THE COURT: Then why are you practising in this province if you have not?
MR. CRAM: Because I am an honest lawyer and I am trying to keep it up right now today. Read that; an M.D. accused of molesting girls. The Chief Justice of this court and that Chief Justice was aiding and abetting an alleged pedophile to be able to molest children for an entire year. That is our Chief Justice and you want me to have any respect for this court?
THE COURT: As I have said, Mr. Cram, you are getting very close to contempt.
MR. CRAM: I am supposed to -- I am in contempt of a court that has a Chief Justice that aided and abetted a child-molester -- alleged child-molester. I am in contempt of that and I am also in contempt of a Chief Justice of the Court of Appeal who defrauded that natives of their lands in this province and I will prove that. Do you want me to prove it, because I can prove it in about five minutes, and that is why these people, many of them Natives, are here, because they want to be heard.
THE COURT: You keep talking like that -
MR. CRAM: Go ahead and throw me in jail, I don’t care. This is a disgustingly corrupt court.
…”
In short, Cram alleged that the Chief Justice of the B.C. Supreme Court “aided and abetted a child-molester”, and that the Chief Justice of the B.C. Court of Appeal – the highest court of the province – “defrauded” Aboriginal natives of their lands. Cram submitted material to the court but was not allowed time to present the details at the hearing.
For me Cram’s phrase, “the Corporation of the District of Matsqui”, corroborated what forensic psychiatrist Dr. Mel Dilli had said on January 26 when sending me to a psychiatric committal as in Part 9, that otherwise I could be sent to “Matsqui” (the prison Matsqui Institution) where I could be “raped” – so “Matsqui” likely stood for a sort of oppressive, rough justice by means of prison gangs.
News coverage of the next court hearing, now for Contempt-of Court charges against him, gave a clearer picture of Cram’s allegations (“6 sheriffs carry lawyer into court: Barrister spars with judge in round two”, by Larry Still, April 27, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
“Face down in a horizontal position, the veteran trial scrapper was carried into the courtroom by six burly sheriffs, acting on the orders of B.C. Supreme
Court Justice Howard Callaghan.“Get your hands off me,” yelled Cram, his silver hair dishevelled and his smart navy-blue suit crumpled in the melee.
“This is the second suit they have ruined,” Cram complained, referring to a similar incident last Friday when he was handcuffed and forcibly removed
from a courtroom.Cram was summoned to court Tuesday to answer an allegation in which Callaghan cited him for contempt in respect to his conduct at Friday’s hearing.
The bizarre hearing Tuesday included tight security in which all spectators, having been videotaped by a Vancouver police officer, were frisked at the door. A posse of 20 sheriff’s deputies ringed the courtroom.
The hearing partly concerned a suit in which two of Cram’s clients filed a writ of summons against Chief Justice William Esson, Attorney-General Colin Gabelmann and his ministry, lawyers David Crossin, Peter Leask and Megan Ellis, the B.C. Law Society, Southam Inc., Pacific Press and pediatrician Dr. John Gossage.
The writ claims damages against the defendants for conspiracy to pervert and subvert the course of justice in a civil suit filed against Gossage, as well as damages for libel and slander and malicious prosecution.
The suit alleges the defendants conspired to release Gossage’s name as a child molester because Cram was about to call the doctor as a defence witness in a civil suit in which his client is accused of sexual assault.”
The scenario alleged by Jack Cram was convoluted: the B.C. Supreme Court and B.C. government, including Chief Justice William Esson and Attorney General Colin Gabelman, the Law Society of B.C. and lawyers David Crossin, Peter Leask and Megan Ellis, and the owners of The Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers, knew that pediatrician Dr. John Gossage was a suspected child moletser but did nothing; then when Cram was to call Gossage as a lawsuit witness, they conspired to publish Gossage’s name as a suspect in order to diminish his legal credibility.
If it was true, then the justice system, the government, the legal community and the media had expediently used a pedophilia issue as political weapon against Jack Cram’s legal endeavour. But it was flimsy to accuse them of “aiding and abetting” – not just turning a blind eye to – a child molester, unless Cram had the evidence to prove it.
Cram wasn’t allowed to present the details in court, and was later taken to a psychiatric committal (“Lawyers saddened after colleague sent for psychiatric tests”, by Larry Still, April 28, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
“Along with his undoubted skills as a barrister, Cram demonstrated a willingness to act for seemingly eccentric clients, people dismissed by other lawyers as hopeless cases.
Lawyers who have known Cram for more than 20 years were saddened Wednesday after he was committed to a psychiatric facility, suffering from what was described as mental exhaustion.
The Ontario-born lawyer’s committal to Vancouver Hospital came late Tuesday night, hours after he delivered a rambling submission in B.C. Supreme Court in response to a contempt citation.
…
Vancouver police media-relations officer Const. Anne Drennan said police, acting under the provisions of the Mental Health Act, arrested Cram in the parking lot of a False Creek residence he occupies with his wife and two daughters of a previous marriage.
Drennan said Cram is detained at the hospital for a 30-day psychiatric assessment.
Sources said the committal to hospital, considered to be in Cram’s best interests, was initiated by the lawyer’s wife.
…
Lawyer David Gibbons described Cram as a “tough, hard-working barrister,” who took on extremely difficult cases and obviously succumbed to the pressures of trial work.
“It should be said that our profession, particularly the work of a barrister in hard cases, is extremely stressful,” Gibbons said Wednesday in an interview. “The pressure has taken its toll on Jack, which is why it's all so sad.”
Lawyer Russ Chamberlain, who at Tuesday’s contempt hearing urged Callaghan to adjourn the matter at the outset, said in an interview he still believes the appropriate thing would have been to halt the proceedings before Cram spoke.
“History has borne me out,” Chamberlain said, referring to Cram’s committal. “I am grateful that Jack is now getting the help and the rest he so obviously needs.”
Chamberlain, who also displays a feisty manner, said the courtroom spectacle Tuesday, a horror show in which Cram was dragged into court by six
sheriffs, did neither Cram nor the administration of justice any good.”
So suddenly Jack Cram was considered mentally ill, like his former client Eddy Haymour in the 1970s, and like me whose lawsuit his firm had turned down in October 1993. Given my own experience of political activism having been suppressed by psychiatric intervention, I would suspect that Cram indeed had some evidence to support his allegations.
But the bottom line for a law practice was money, and the lack of it in my guess had been a main reason Cram’s firm didn’t take my case. Now his outbursts against corruption in the justice system caused concerns from his family and his lawyer peers, who clearly wanted to avoid the subject. David Gibbons – as in Part 6 he at one point obstructed RCMP investigation of the 1985 Air India bombing because lawyers wanted to make more money – used “stress” to justify the psychiatric intervention on Cram; and Russ Chamberlain, a colorful personality I had met in the fall of 1993, said that the courtroom spectacle “did neither Cram nor the administration of justice any good”.
Chamberlain himself at the time was accusing the Vancouver Police of hidden motive to see his client Binde Johal, leading suspect in a Vancouver gang war, dead (“Lawyer claims police not protecting client so he’ll be informant”, by Jeff Lee, April 28, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
““The most cynical view is that the police want to see this problem go away by mutual destruction of both sides.”
He said police had given the impression in media interviews that Johal was “a fink” and that he was cooperating with the investigations.
“That is designed to get my client killed,” he said.
As a result, Johal has gone into hiding to protect his family, he said.
Chamberlain provided The Vancouver Sun with a thick package of material, including copies of letters he wrote to Vancouver police officers and city hall alleging his client and several others are being harassed.”
So Cram’s peers understood that pointing fingers at the police and the government was one thing, at the court was quite another.
Much luckier than Haymour or myself, Cram was released after a week – being sent to the more tolerant Vancouver General Hospital likely have been a reason as discussed for my case in Parts 6, 7 & 8 –and met his supporters at the G. F. Strong Rehabilitation Centre; but his legal practice was suspended (“Lawyer released from hospital”, May 4, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
“A week after he was arrested and detained at Vancouver General Hospital for a 30-day psychiatric assessment, Vancouver lawyer Jack Cram was out of hospital and back with his supporters Tuesday night.
He spoke to about 40 of his friends at a meeting in a lecture room at the G.F. Strong Rehabilitation Centre on Laurel Street.
Cram said he owed everything to two supporters who did the work that enabled him to be released from the hospital.
…
The B.C. Law Society confirmed that a judge last Thursday appointed a custodian to look after Cram’s law practice. A further application has to be made to the judge before the custodian order is lifted.”
After Cram’s release from psychiatric committal, journalist Doug Donaldson, founder of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en School of Journalism – later a New Democrat Member of B.C. Legislature (“BCAFN Daily News”, May 15, 2012, British Columbia Assembly of First Nations) – reviewed the big picture of Jack Cram’s obsession as motivated by B.C. native land claims (“Jack Cram’s corruption tirade tests the resolve of land-claims chiefs”, by Doug Donaldson, May 5, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
“It was a display of flimflam and bullying on a grand scale. The lawyer addressed an assembly of Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en chiefs at Tse Kyah Hall on
Hagwilget Reserve near Hazelton as if he was a prosecuting attorney on a cheap TV drama and they were the guilty defendants.At that April 16 meeting prominent Vancouver lawyer Jack Cram urged the chiefs to sue their lawyers, the courts and the Canadian government because of his belief that the entire justice system is corrupt.
A week later Cram made front-page news in The Vancouver Sun when he was arrested in B.C. Supreme Court for starting what the presiding judge called a near riot after he was not granted permission to use three hours to present a case against the B.C. Law Society.
A few days after that, Cram was committed for a 30-day psychiatric evaluation.
Cram’s credibility may be damaged, but the effect of his presentation to the chiefs sent shock waves throughout the Gitksan and Wet'suwet’en communities of northwest B.C. as they prepare to present their land claim case to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The written portion of the appeal is due in late summer or early fall of this year and there are rumors that the court may hear the oral argument as
soon as May 1995.It's a quick time-frame which demands the full attention of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en people.
Incidents like the one Cram instigated divert focus but it is easy to see why he received so much attention in the communities.
After decades of oppression, and 10 years after the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en filed a claim for ownership and jurisdiction over 57,000 square kilometres of territory in northwestern B.C., the level of frustration and self-doubt over the court case is rising.
It would be hard to imagine any Gitksan or Wet’suwet’en believing they could find justice in the courts after the trial judge’s decision was handed down in March, 1991, seven years after the proceedings began.
Chief Justice Allan McEachern discounted oral histories as unreliable, characterized Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en laws as nothing more than a flexible set of customs and said social organizations weren’t evident in their pre-contact existence.
McEachern, who was trial judge when the case began, but has since been appointed Chief Justice of British Columbia, found the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en were “a primitive people without any form of writing, horses or wheeled vehicles. . .” before Europeans arrived in their territories and, adopting Thomas Hobbes, called their pre-contact lives “nasty, brutish and short.”
The ruling against Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en ownership, jurisdiction and self-government on their traditional territories was condemned in Canada and around the globe.
A United Nations Commission on Human Rights report on worldwide discrimination released last year said the decision demonstrated that “deeply rooted Western ethnocentric criteria are still widely shared in present-day judiciary reasoning.”
…
Although the B.C. Court of Appeal sided 3-2 in favor of McEachern’s decision on June 25, 1993, they ruled native rights were never extinguished by
the colonial government before Confederation.Since the appeal court ruling, Wet’suwet’en and the Gitanyow people whose land is in the western part of the claims territory have used the decision
as a powerful tool to negotiate terms of reference for forest use agreements with the provincial government.”
So that was it, Jack Cram was using a corruption issue as a political weapon against the B.C. justice system after the system, represented by Justice Allan McEachern, harshly characterized B.C. Aboriginal natives as “primitive”, “nasty, brutish and short” in his dismissal of a tribal land claim. As the Natives were taking their appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, Cram came out as a crusader to hit back at the justice system by asserting that it had “massive corruption”, was “aiding and abetting” a child molester.
But did Cram’s legal and political antics “divert focus” from the more important higher-court appeal, as Doug Donaldson asserted, or did they put public pressure on the justice system?
Later when Cram was convicted of Contempt-of-Court charges, levied a $10,000 fine, barred from legal practice for a year, described as having “paranoia” and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment, Justice Thomas Braidwood noted that Chief Justice William Esson and the integrity of the court were “assailed from all directions by the media and on various talk shows” as a result of Cram’s accusations (“Cram handed $10,000 fine for contempt”, by Larry Still, October 15, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
“Although his preposterous allegations of corruption within the judicial system were fuelled by a deep-seated mental illness, lawyer Jack Cram’s
contemptuous conduct cannot be excused, a judge decided Friday.B.C. Supreme Court Justice Thomas Braidwood, who earlier convicted Cram of two counts of criminal contempt, refused to grant the Vancouver lawyer
a conditional discharge.Saying Cram’s conduct, but for the circumstances, would have warranted a lengthy prison term, Braidwood imposed a $10,000 fine.
…
Ordering the lawyer to continue psychiatric treatment, the judge also barred him from practising law for one year, to which Cram had already consented.
…
The judge said the consequences of Cram’s conduct for the judicial system and, in particular, for the B.C. Supreme Court, have been dramatic.
He said Chief Justice William Esson had the onerous task of upholding the integrity of the court, which, because of Cram’s unfounded allegations, was assailed from all directions by the media and on various talk shows.
Although the judge commended the lawyers and other witnesses who spoke for Cram at his sentencing, he wondered why they didn’t come forward
before the lawyer’s conviction was recorded.“I cannot help but wonder where you were when the chief justice and other judges were under attack?” he asked.
“I hope this deficiency will be remedied by the media in light of the great injustice that has been done to this court.”
The judge noted Dr. Stanley Semrau said the stressed-out Cram, his paranoia growing, gradually became “short-tempered, irritable, humorless and generally aggressive and combative in his work as a lawyer.”
Semrau said Cram, over-worked, over-fatigued and chronically sleep-deprived, eventually conjured up “a complex interwoven conspiracy involving the highest level of our justice system and government.”
Braidwood said Cram’s paranoia became so pronounced that at one point he insisted on swapping packed lunches with a riding companion at his ranch.
At restaurants, he sent back beer unless it was opened at the table.
The judge said Cram’s condition was aggravated by the continued presence of his so-called supporters -- his wife called them “leeches,” lawyer Charles Maclean called them “malcontents” -- who held similar irrational beliefs about the justice system.
Braidwood accepted Semrau’s conclusion that although Cram’s beliefs were irrational and driven by paranoia, the underlying drive came from a respect for the justice system.”
Aha, I had made accusations against Prime Minister Brian Mulroney earlier but not the justice system, as in Parts 6-9, and some psychiatric diagnoses on me – Delusional Disorder of Persecutory Type, Paranoia and Paranoid Schizophrenia – were harder than on Cram, but I wasn’t and he was convicted of criminal charges.
Wasn’t it a subtle difference, due to Cram’s accusing the court, between political repression and political retribution?
But Justice Thomas Braidwood wasn’t all accurate when he admonished lawyers and witnesses for their “deficiency” not coming out earlier to defend “the chief justice and other judges” – Russ Chamberlain had tried.
The irony was that, while B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Esson took all the wrath about “aiding and abetting” a child molester, B.C. Court of Appeal Chief Justice Allan McEachern, the target of Jack Cram’s earlier rumbling, “and I am also in contempt of a Chief Justice of the Court of Appeal who defrauded that natives of their lands in this province”, was unscathed.
Previously as in Part 3, back in March 1991 – the same month Justice McEachern handed down his negative decision on the native land claim – a B.C. Supreme Court jury acquitted Barry James Evans of Calgary in the murder UBC Computer Science systems manager Rick Sample; heading a panel of justices in (March) 1992, Chief Justice McEachern then overruled the jury acquittal and ordered a new trial, describing the prosecution case as “very strong … almost an unanswerable one”; but the decision was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada in March 1993.
Note that McEachern had presided over the land claim case 7 years earlier as a B.C. Supreme Court Justice before reaching the ‘overdue’ March 1991 decision when he was already Chief Justice of the Court of Appeal, and the natives had to appeal to that higher court headed by him and suffered another loss, before going to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Quite a humiliating process, wasn’t it?
A UBC alumnus and former President of the Canadian Football League, after retirement McEachern became UBC Chancellor, and in early 2008 passed away on that post (“HON. ALLAN MCEACHERN, UBC’S 16TH CHANCELLOR”, by Brad Bennett, Chair of UBC Board of Governors and Stephen J. Toope, UBC President, January 11, 2008, UBC Faculty of Law; and, “Allan McEachern, Chancellor of UBC, dies at 81”, by Neal Yonson, January 11, 2008, UBC Insiders).
It showed the importance of “deeply rooted” loyalty to one’s society – to the point of charactering another culture as “nasty, brutish and short”.
Back in April 1994 I felt encouraged by the Jack Cram news, as I recall, to contemplate having my probation terminated early and reviving my political activism.
Here was this lawyer whose firm’s refusal to take my civil lawsuit in October 1993 had led to a sequence of 3 Mischief charges against me, culminating with a Criminal Harassment charge from Connell Lightbody’s Marion Buller that ended my aspiration at the time. But when these charges went to court in February 1994 and my lawyer Phil Seagram was arranging for peace bonds, Cram & Associates became the only complainant that let go without any condition as in Part 9.
Now 2 months later, Cram came out with sensational accusations of “corruption” among the justice system, including the judges. To me that felt like a change happening.
Reviewing the timeline of events in 1994 as recorded in the documents from personal-information disclosures and presented in Parts 8 & 9, April 1994 around the time when the Cram story came out, stood out as a focal point in coincidence.
First, in October 1993 after the Mischief charges at Cram & Associates and then YMCA Enterprise Centre, I briefly had Warren & Eder represent my legal defence, but that law firm set the trials in April 1994 and rejected my request to move them to earlier; I became persistent and incurred a third Mischief.
Though it isn’t direct evidence that Warren & Eder manipulated timing of my criminal trials to fit Cram’s agendas, the first April 1994 Jack Cram news story quoted earlier did report that his lawsuits for Renate Andres-Auger had been “filed last year”.
Then, after my January-February 1994 psychiatric committal at Forensic Psychiatric Institute, from which I was discharged after appealing to a mental health review panel, the psychiatrist’s Separation Summary report was not produced until April 11, concluding, despite lack of evidence, that I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia”.
Cram’s legal quest for Andres-Auger had already begun on April 11 as a court transcript quoted earlier indicated.
Finally, in April at Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic sessions the nurses and I reviewed my past persistence in the context of “anxiety or nervousness”; then starting from the April 26 session with Dr. Clifford Kerr, who held the hardline opinion of “Paranoid Schizophrenia” despite Vancouver General Hospital psychiatrists’ view that I wasn’t psychotic, my counselling schedule was reduced from weekly to biweekly – just after the initial, April 23 new story about Jack Cram’s spars with a judge.
In the Clinic notes for my next session on May 12, info was recorded about my renewed objective:
“Believes he never suffered from a mental illness, that his hospitalization was solely stress related & the doctor’s misdiagnosed me. … Indicated consideration being given to having his period of probation reduced next month through his lawyer.”
But soon Cram was convicted of criminal charges and found to have paranoia. As in Part 9, in the end I also decided to abandon the attempt to shorten probation time, out of fear that Dr. Kerr and probation officer Fred Hitchcock might use the occasion as a “trap” to submit legally damaging information to the judge to worsen my punishment instead.
Nonetheless, even Justice Thomas Braidwood, when convicting Jack Cram of contempt of court, agreed that Cram was driven by “a respect for the justice system”. One must ponder whether the thrust of Cram’s allegations as reported, about the justice system’s “massive corruption” and “aiding and abetting” a child molester, might have some credibility – in particular the “conspiracy” claims against the B.C. Supreme Court and B.C. government, including Chief Justice William Esson and Attorney General Colin Gabelman, the Law Society of B.C. and lawyers David Crossin, Peter Leask and Megan Ellis, and The Vancouver Sun and The Province owners Southam Inc. and Pacific Press.
In my case, Parts 6-9 have shown that the justice system and the government, including the police, played roles in controlling and suppressing my political activism, most likely for the interests of certain institutional powers and political powers, and that instead of helping my defence some lawyers were involved in schemes that escalated criminal prosecution and psychiatric oppression.
Regarding the press, as shown earlier The Vancouver Sun exhibited subtle biases in its news coverage, featuring the Jack Cram stories prominently but completely avoiding the controversy on Connell Lightbody’s untendered government contracts.
As for favouritism for pedophilia, Part 8 has contained some tantalizing clues that there could be such within the justice system.
One example was then B.C. County Court Judge J. P. van der Hoop in 1989, favoring a 33-year-old man who had committed sexual assault on a 3-year-old girl, blaming the child as “sexually aggressive”. Despite public protests against his ruling, Justice van der Hoop was not censored, instead in 1990 became a UBC “judge-in-residence” and a B.C. Supreme Court Justice, and also collaborated on legal education with then B.C. Supreme Court Master Pamela Kirkpatrick – my then UBC colleague David Kirkpatrick’s wife – who later in November 1992 was promoted to Justice and cooperated with RCMP to bring in psychiatric suppression of my political activism.
Another example was the justice system’s preferential treatment for the well-known criminal and pedophile Clifford Olson, using him as an informant and protecting him from other prisoners, while Olson escalated his criminal behavior and eventually became the worst serial murderer in Canadian history to that point.
But unbeknown to the public in 1994, there were indeed more serious accusations filed in court by Jack Cram’s client, lawyer Renate Andres-Auger, about pedophilia practice at the Vancouver Club – B.C.’s most elite social venue. Apparently the press was silent on this.
The publicity blackout began to crack in April-May 1999, when an international conference on commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth, organized by Alliance for the Rights of Children, was held in Vancouver featuring senior government officials Hedy Fry, Canadian Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Status of Women – as in Part 8 she had defeated Kim Campbell as local MP in 1993 – Ujjal Dosanjh, B.C. Attorney General and Minister Responsible for Multiculturalism, Human Rights, and Immigration – he would later become Premier – Rick Antonson, President and CEO of Tourism Vancouver, and Brent Parfitt, Deputy Ombudsman of B.C.
One of the keynote speakers was international human rights advocate Jennifer Wade, who disclosed that in April 1994 Renate Andres-Auger had sworn a court affidavit referring to pedophilia at the Vancouver Club and at resorts in Whistler (“It’s a Crime: An Act Local - Think Global Conference on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth”, April 30-May 1, 1999, The FREDA Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children, Simon Fraser University):
“While doing some research for this presentation, I came across the affidavit of a Cree lawyer named Renate Andres-Auger who filed an affidavit in April 1994 naming prominent legal personalities and the BC Law Society for destroying her legal practice and libelling and slandering her (I have a copy of that affidavit listing prominent plaintiffs with me). Renate Auger alleged this happened partly because of her knowledge of pedophile rings operating out of the Vancouver Club and out of resorts in Whistler. In a very bizarre scene as it was described in the papers I discovered, Ms. Auger and her lawyer, Jack Cram, were first not listened to in the court, and then were handcuffed and dragged out of the courtroom to a jail cell. When Jack Cram eventually did speak, he put before the judge some of his allegations involving cover-ups by the head officers of the Law Society and the judiciary to aid and abet
pedophiles and drug dealers. When he insisted on giving more details on radio, Jack Cram was met by 10 policemen upon his return from a radio station. He was then put into an ambulance and taken to the psychiatric ward of Vancouver General Hospital. He believes he was injected again and again with mind disorienting drugs.The Cram/Andres-Auger story, to this day, remains a very strange and fearful tale of alleged corruption and pedophilia in high places. It is also a story which has never yet been completely told. Perhaps if it were, along with a few other strange stories, we as Canadians would have little reason to gasp at the exposure of pedophile rings in Belgium operating in high places two years ago. The matter of cover-ups possibly existing for those in high places in Canada is becoming more and more credible as more and more people speak out.”
Wade went on to relay other stories, of sexual abuse of Native children:
“But the sex trade in children, especially young Native children, goes back much further than the time of Renate Andres-Auger. This became a very real fact to me, unthinkable as it was, last June 12 to 14 when I happened to attend a Tribunal arranged by a UN affiliate group here in Vancouver to hear testimonies of Native people who had attended the church-run residential schools. Although I have been associated with Amnesty International since its beginnings in 1961, I must admit that what I heard at that Tribunal was horribly disturbing and shattering. … the accounts given of pedophile groups consisting of church men and women administering what were called “white vitamins” to little children of 9 and 10 who were taken one by one to the so-called infirmary at night. Few of them recalled what happened next except that when they came to, they often saw blood on a sheet and remembered experiencing great pain. Harriet Nahanee, a Native elder, has given the police her story of hearing a young child called Maisie Williams crying on Christmas Eve for her mother after being with one of the alleged pedophiles at the Port Alberni School. And then Ms. Nahanee testified that this child was pushed down the basement steps to where Harriet Nahanee was herself hiding. This young girl is reported by Ms. Nahanee to have died, and this is confirmed in a copy of the school records I have seen. Ms. Nahanee herself alleges she was molested time and time again by the principal of the school, a Rev. Caldwell, who has since died. And the police therefore claim they can take no action on her story. Other women at the Tribunal testified to “being cleaned up” on a Saturday night and being taken often by Native people themselves to clients. One person mentioned the Vancouver Club.
… How prevalent such cases were, one can only guess. Certainly everyone here tonight should think carefully upon the figures given in the Royal Commission Report on Aboriginals that 125,000 children went into those schools
and 50,000 never came out.”
The disturbing storyline recalled by Aboriginal victims went from the infamous Port Alberni School (“Totem pole raised at former site of notorious Port Alberni residential school”, by Quintin Winks, May 3, 2010, Times – Colonist) to the Vancouver Club, once the preeminent business club in Western Canada (Wallace Clement, Class, Power, and Property: Essays on Canadian Society, 1983, Methuen Publications; and, “Vancouver Noir and Class War”, by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw, March 24, 2012, The Tyee).
They happened to be landmark institutions in Kim Campbell’s birthplace and her base of meteoric political ascent, respectively. Coincidentally, my first dwelling in Vancouver was an apartment at 1830 Alberni Street, before moving in the spring of 1989 to one at 1640 West 11th Avenue owned by Norma Bagnall, mother of future Vancouver Provincial Court Judge Conni Bagnall as in Part 9.
Finally, in September 2011 former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney came to visit the Vancouver Club, and the anti-war protests he drew were prominently covered by The Vancouver Sun and The Province (“Anti-Cheney protesters outside The Vancouver Club”, September 26, 2011, The Province; and, “Dick Cheney visit draws 250 protesters to downtown Vancouver”, by Evan Duggan, September 27, 2011, The Vancouver Sun).
But amid the heightened tension, a number of small B.C. newspapers, including northern B.C.’s Hazelton Daily, Kitimat Daily and Smithers Daily, and the Vancouver Observer, reported accusations from the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State, that “senior judges” had been part of child molestation at the Vancouver Club (“Dick Cheney to Speak at Notorious Child Trafficking Center”, September 23, 2011, Hazelton Daily; and, “Dick Cheney reviled by international rights group. Vancouver Club called “infamous.””, by Linda Solomon, September 26, 2011, Vancouver Observer):
“A statement from The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State
…Since the spring of 1994, lawyers and journalists have named the Vancouver Club as a site where children are routinely trafficked, exploited sexually and possibly killed. These crimes were documented, including with photographic proof, by Vancouver trial lawyer Jack Cram and his assistant Renate Andres-Auger, during 1994. …
2. Aboriginal children have been a prime target of the Vancouver Club pedophile ring, which involves senior judges, church lawyers, businessmen and politicians. To quote Jack Cram’s statement in the BC Supreme Court on April 26, 1994, “Indian children go into the Vancouver Club and are never seen again.” As recently as the summer of 2009, aboriginal children have been observed being taken against their will into the rear entrance of the Vancouver Club at 915 West Hastings street from the Squamish Indian reserve in North Vancouver, during the hours of 1 and 3 am.
3. An attempt by reporters with the Vancouver Province and the North
Shore News to investigate these claims and the Cram evidence was stopped
by a threatened lawsuit against these newspapers from the two Supreme
Court judges named by Cram, during 1996 and 1997.…”
In 1994 there was even “photographic proof” from Cram and Andres-Auger about Vancouver Club pedophilia, but nothing was reported by the press. The Province‘s attempt to investigate was stopped by intimidation from B.C. Supreme Court justices. Meanwhile, child molestation at the Vancouver Club continued into the summer of 2009 according to ITCCS.
In 2011 the media blackout was finally broken.
In 2010, the Vancouver Club had become an official venue hosting members of the International Olympic Committee during the Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler (“The Vancouver Club”, Charles MacPherson Associates):
“Charles MacPherson Associates (CMA) was retained in November 2009 by The Vancouver Club – a prestigious and historic private club situated in the heart of Vancouver’s business district.
Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. The Vancouver Club has been selected by the IOC to host IOC members, events, sponsors as well as media.”
But was there indeed pedophilia at such high places?
Since April 1994 there has been at least one proven case of sexual assaults by a B.C. judge, reported in detail by The Province newspaper. In May 2004 – just over 10 years after the case of Jack Cram and Renate Andres-Auger – Prince George Provincial Court Judge David William Ramsey pleaded guilty to sexual assaults of girls as young as 12, “mostly aboriginal girls living in poverty and in trouble with the law”, during 1992-2001; Ramsey later died of cancer during his 7-year jail term (“Former B.C. judge Ramsay, who preyed on young girls, dies in jail”, January 20, 2008, The Province):
“Ramsay pleaded guilty on May 3, 2004 to sexual assault causing bodily harm, breach of trust and three counts of buying sex from a person under 18. The offences took place between 1992 and 2001.
His victims, mostly aboriginal girls living in poverty and in trouble with the law, were subjected to acts of escalating sexual violence. Some were as young as 12 years old.
In June 2004, Ramsay was sentenced to seven years in jail.”
But Judge Ramsey was not senior enough, not likely to have been a Vancouver Club member.
Then in 2012, news broke out that John Furlong, former CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, was accused by a large number of Natives of a secret past of cruelty and abuses as a young Catholic missionary in Burns Lake, B.C. (“John Furlong biography omits secret past in Burns Lake”, by Laura Robinson, September 26, 2012, Georgia Straight):
“The fact that most of those people are Natives puts a cruel spin on the fact that the 2010 Winter Games are widely remembered as the first Games to include aboriginal peoples as official hosts.
…
John Furlong’s official Olympic CV and his book say that he arrived in Canada in the fall of 1974. He actually arrived years previously, in 1969, as an Oblate Frontier Apostle missionary. He went not to Prince George to direct a high-school athletic program but to Immaculata Elementary School in Burns Lake, B.C., to help save the souls of First Nations children. It was here that 18-year-old Furlong, fresh out of Dublin’s St. Vincent’s Christian Brothers Secondary School, with no formal training as a teacher and no university behind him, ran physical-education classes.
But if his goal was to persuade First Nations children of the virtues of Catholicism, he chose, say former students, a brutal way to do it.
One student, Beverley Abraham, from Babine Lake First Nation, had Furlong as a phys-ed teacher and school disciplinarian when she was 11 and 12. She said in a 2012 affidavit: “He worked us to the bone. His attitude was very bad. ‘You good for nothin’ Indians—come on, come on. If you don’t do this, you’re going to be good for nothing.’…He would stand over us. If we didn’t complete it, he would take his big foot and slam us down on the floor. It really hurt our chests.”
Abraham is one of eight former students of Furlong’s who have signed affidavits for the Georgia Straight alleging his physical and mental abuse. Many more told the Straight about the abuse Furlong meted out.”
And in 2010 John Furlong was the Olympic Games boss entertaining the international ruling body members from around the world at the Vancouver Club – how fitting, and what a pinnacle before any bad news!
Back on January 1, 1995, Jack Cram let his B.C. lawyer license expire, and has not been in law practice since. In 2004 he tried to get reinstated as a lawyer but the effort appeared unsuccessful. (“Discipline Digest . 04/02 Admission: Intemperate and disrespectful conduct in court JOHN NORSWORTHY (JACK) CRAM”, The Law Society of British Columbia)
So Cram was gone by the time I was out of probation in February 1995, unavailable had I then tried to revive my civil litigation. I didn’t as I had no money and my attempts regardless in the fall of 1993 had ended in criminal-law troubles – ironically started by his law firm.
But Cram didn’t give up his righteous thinking of a corrupt justice system. In 2004 while waiting for the Law Society of B.C. reinstatement hearing, he got special permission to act as defence lawyer for 80-old Raymond Michel Lehoux, who threatened to attack a prosecutor the way he had done to a lawyer resulting in permanent injury (“New trial for man accused of threatening prosecutor”, by Keith Fraser, December 1, 2004, The Province):
“An 80-year-old man will be tried again on the rare charge of intimidating a prosecutor after his case resulted in a hung jury in B.C. Supreme Court.
Raymond Michel Lehoux was charged with uttering threats and intimidating a justice-system participant in connection with an alleged confrontation he had with veteran Vancouver prosecutor Susan Brown earlier this year.
Lehoux allegedly threatened to do to Brown what he had done to Graeme Keirstead, a lawyer who was representing Lehoux's ex-wife in a bitter divorce proceeding. In 1996 Lehoux was sentenced to seven years in prison after he attacked Keirstead in court with a sickle.
Lehoux told the court he wanted to be charged so he could get a chance to condemn the justice system.
Keirstead suffered permanent scarring and nerve damage in the attack at the New Westminster courthouse. In addition to the criminal trial, he sued Lehoux and won $74,000 in damages.
…
Lehoux, a retired longshoreman from Surrey, was represented in court by Jack Cram, who got special permission to act for the elderly man.
In January 1995 after being convicted of criminal contempt of court in B.C. Supreme Court, Cram voluntarily ceased being a member of the Law Society
of B.C. after non-payment of fees. In July he admitted to “intemperate and disrespectful” conduct in court and applied to be reinstated with the
society, which has agreed to hold a reinstatement hearing.”
My goodness, as a crusader against corruption in the justice system a case had to be this violent to satisfy Jack Cram’s legal ego, and an accused this old also?
I note that in July 2004 when Cram tried to return to law practice, Judge David Ramsey had been sentenced in June to a 7-year jail term for sexually assaulting young girls – the same length for Lehoux for his earlier violence.
But Jack Cram wasn’t the only radical figure in Vancouver having his life changed in early 1995 when my probation was ending.
Before visiting Cram & Associates in October 1993, in August-September I had visited a UBC law student clinic at the head office of an Indo-Canadian organization, Orientation Adjustment Services for Immigrants Society (OASIS), founded by soon-to-be Liberal MP Herb Dhaliwal, where unbeknown to me convicted Sikh extremist Harjinderpal Singh Nagra was a board member and involved in Dhaliwal’s election campaign, as in Part 8.
Nagra’s 1990 conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada in March 1994, with a new trial ordered for his passport fraud to smuggle another Sikh militant into Canada. In February 1995, news came that a deportation order against Nagra based on the criminal conviction was no longer valid according to Justice Department lawyer Sandra Weafer, although his Canadian status was still in dispute – he had come to Canada by marriage but the woman had since withdrawn her sponsorship of him. (“Deportation order against ex-Sikh radical ‘invalid’: Criminal convictions overturned”, by Moira Farrow, February 8, 1995, The Vancouver Sun)
As in Parts 7-9, in June 1993 my mother had come from China while I was in pre-trial detention due to earlier persistent civil disobedience similar to in late 1993, soon Rev. Stephen Lee, husband of her cousin, Vancouver Provincial Court interpreter Sally Lee, found a basement rental unit for us, not far from OASIS – as a result I then visited the UBC law student clinic there. In February 1995, my counselling psychiatrist Dr. Clifford Kerr recorded that my mother was waiting for the Canadian government’s decision on her application to extend her visitor visa.
Less than 2 months after my probation’s end, on April 7 my mother sent a letter to Liberal MP Raymond Chan to appeal for help with her immigration issue. As the letter disclosed, my parents had applied for Canadian immigration in 1991, were notified on January 24, 1992 to proceed, and received an adjournment due to my father’s teaching career – as a Philosophy professor at Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University in China – before my mother came to visit because of my troubles, as she described:
“…
Then came June 1993. Suddenly we learnt Feng Gao had hallucinosis. Since he was all alone in Canada, we as parents immediately proceded our immigration application. At the same time, I obtained a tourist visa, flew to Canada and take care of him until this day.
During my stay, I was fortunate to be granted several visa extension by the lmmigation Office. Meanwhile, my husband and I followed the procedure laid down by the Canadian Consolate in Hong Kong and eventually completed our medical examination in May (Guangzhou) and July (Vancouver) respectively. Since my son needs me, I continue to apply for visa extension, hoping that my immigration papers will be issued while I am still here.
In my last visa extension, the lady officer interviewing me told me that for the last time, she would extended my stay to June 30, 1995; the reason being that I have stayed in Canada for almost two years, which is much longer than the normal practice. Furthermore, since my son is out of a job, she was worried that I might become a financial burden to the Canadian Government. Regarding our immigration application, she suggested to me that we can either apply for adjournment or appeal the case if it is turned down. When I told her that my uncle in Toronto is willing to sponsor and financially support me, she replied that he is not qualified because he is not a direct family member.
From then on, we were living in agony and pain. lf I leave Canada, nobody will care for Feng Gao. Most likely his sickness will deteriorate. According to the psychiatrist handling his case, hallucinosis is a form of mental breakdown. Feng Gao simply cannot stand up to the immense pressure of seeing his mother deserting him.”
Despite some factual errors, such as that I had started sponsoring my parents as a Canadian citizen – I wasn’t until July 1, 1992 as in Part 5 – or that I had “hallucinosis” – as in Parts 6-9 no symptom of hallucination was ever observed – my mother wrote an emotional letter, mentioning my father’s willingness to “relinguish” his immigration application, and pledging that she would never seek government welfare as my sister and her husband would financially support her:
“For the future prospect of Feng Gao, and fulfill our parenthood, my husband is willing to relinguish his immigration application. …
Should I be granted migration, I hereby guarantee that I shall never seek any welfare support from the Canadian Government. My daughter, Ning Gao, presently lecturing in New York State University, is willing to support me so that I can take good care of her only brother. My son-in-law, Yu Zhuo Li, a lecturer with the Clarkson University, USA, also confirms his total support.”
Unfortunately life has no guarantee, and “hallucinosis” isn’t the worse. As told in another of my recent blog posts, “Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)”, my brother-in-law Yuzhuo Li, an accomplished academic and a leading research scientist at the world’s largest chemical company BASF, unexpectedly and tragically died in Germany last November at the age of only 54.
My mother’s letter also mentioned her “uncle in Toronto”, i.e., (the late) Rev. Edward Ling as in some of my earlier blog posts (“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 (Part 3)”).
As stated in the letter her English was inadequate and Raymond Chan, a Chinese Canadian mentioned in Part 8, was my mother’s logical choice among Canadian politicians. Her letter was originally in Chinese, accompanied by the English version someone translated for her.
But there was a more direct reason she wrote to Chan. In late 1993 as I was in and out of police custody due to lawyer complaints, my mother brought home a young Chinese man to sublet a spare room in the basement we rented at 258 East 58th Avenue as in Pat 8.
“Zhong Fan”, or “Frank”, had been studying engineering at Xiangtan University, the local university in the late Chairman Mao Zedong’s home region in Hunan province, when in the spring of 1989 he participated in pro-democracy student demonstrations and was jailed for a few months after the June 4 military crackdown on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and government suppressions nationwide. When we met he was a Langara College student, involved with the Vancouver Society in Support of Democracy Movement in China formerly led by Raymond Chan, that had been Chan’s claim to fame.
I wasn’t too surprised that my mother brought in Frank. As in Part 3, my undergraduate Computer Science thesis adviser at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong province was originally from Hunan, just north of Guangdong, and as in a 2011 blog post (“忆往昔，学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom) – Part 2 & Part 3”) my father had attended high school in Hunan. But Xiangtan University in Mao’s hometown was unique and special, according to the university (“Introductions of Xiangtan University”, Xiangtan University):
“It situates in Xiangtan city, an area of outstanding natural beauty and a remarkable place producing outstanding people----- such as Mao Zedong, Zen Guofan, Liu Shaoqi and Zhu Rongji, Qi Baishi, who changed Chinese modern history. Huxiang culture, the key makeup of Chinese culture, was cradled here.”
It was through Frank Fan that my mother sent her letter to Raymond Chan, who Frank had known also because of other common interests with Chan, a former UBC nuclear physics engineer.
But Frank once lamented that Chan had distanced himself from the human-rights focus after becoming the first Chinese Canadian cabinet minister, Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific. Indeed Chan himself had said so (“Hong Kong-born secretary of state unexpected bonus for Asian media”, by Daphne Braham, November 22, 1993, The Vancouver Sun):
“Explaining exactly which country he represents took up a lot of time at last week’s APEC meeting for the Hong Kong-born Chan. People just kept
assuming that he was from the Chinese delegation or the Taiwanese or even the Hong Kong delegation.…
As the former leader of Canada’s democracy for China movement, Chan said human rights will continue to be an important issue for him.
It’s something he raised during bilateral meetings in Seattle and will raise the issue at meetings with Asian countries such as China and Indonesia
that have poor records.But the secretary of state is opposed to trade sanctions because of human rights violations.
“After three or four years working on human rights issues, I have come to believe there are other ways more positive ways you can do things to encourage democracy -- things like cultural exchanges, elevating the educational, commercial and economic standards,” he said. “Human rights and trade are not mutually exclusive.”
…
He admitted to still being overwhelmed with the changes in his life since his election on his 42nd birthday -- Oct. 25 -- and he clearly was uncomfortable with all the attention walking into a restaurant with two U.S. secret service officers attracts.”
So Raymond Chan’s October 25, 1993 election to the Parliament was also a huge birthday present for him. In stark contrast, my January 29 birthday in both 1993 and 1994 was spent in psychiatric committal as in Parts 6 & 9.
It was my stand that former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership misconduct, especially in the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional reform processes as discussed in Parts 6 & 7, was critical like human rights issues and should be publicly addressed – a far cry from my mother’s expectation of compassion from the politicians for my “hallucinosis”.
Branding a young academic of ethnic immigrant background and political ambition as mentally ill was convenient, as alluded to by UBC Hospital psychologists in a December 1992 report as in Part 6:
“immigrants have an increased risk of developing delusional disorder”.
But the reality was that the political standard bearer of one’s ethnic community likely wouldn’t pursue the Canadian political issues I wanted to, but would rather thank God for his incredible luck (“Minister believes God is reason for his success”, by Doug Ward, March 24, 1994, The Vancouver Sun):
Faith in God had a lot to do with it, said Chan, an engineer who was elected as the member of Parliament for Richmond last fall. He recalled his pessimism the night before his triumphant Liberal nomination meeting in Richmond.
In his bedroom, Chan got down on his knees and prayed. “I said: ‘Look, God, if You feel I am not ready or I should not be there, so be it. And so I slept real well. I told my wife, I’m not worried.”
Chan became uneasy again when he was sworn in as secretary of state on his first day in Ottawa as an MP. The reception he and Foreign Affairs Minister Andre Oullette received later at the foreign affairs department was overwhelming.
“It was: ‘Welcome, ministers, honorable ministers.’ Then we were led to our different offices. There was a secretary for me. She took my coat and
poured me a cup of coffee and addressed me as Honorable Minister Chan. The office had a tremendous view, on the top floor.‘I looked around and thought it must come with tremendous responsibilities. I was worried and wondered if I was ready for it. We went into a briefing and they were talking about Yugoslavia, Haiti, Asian Pacific Region. And I was overwhelmed.
‘I thought: Do I know how to do my job?”
Chan couldn’t sleep for nights. He told his wife about his lack of confidence.
‘But I prayed. And on Sunday, I went to a church in Ottawa. And it’s amazing, it’s a miracle. Every chapter that the pastor wanted me to turn to -- one flip, I got the page. Twice and three times.
“The song that we were going to sing, I flipped the page to there. I looked at my wife and said: ‘God's here.’”
…
Chan has been rattled by newspaper reports that, he feels, question his support for human rights in China. Chan was one of the founders of the Chinese democracy movement in Vancouver. Three years ago, as a democracy activist, Chan was detained and expelled by Chinese authorities in
Beijing for protesting on behalf of dissidents.”
While crediting God for his success, Raymond Chan had the political credit of a past expulsion by Chinese authorities due to protesting in China, not unlike Frank Fan’s time in the Chinese jail. Meanwhile, I kept peacefully persistent on Canadian political issues that others, acting like God, didn’t think I should succeed – a mental-illness conclusion must have been a solution for them.
In fact, while I was under court-ordered psychiatric counselling in 1994, Frank was once interviewed at our basement suite by a local Chinese TV reporter with a TV camera set up in front of my room – the closest I ever got to despite persistent efforts in November 1992-January 1993, mostly with CBC but also with BCTV as in Parts 5-7.
Raymond Chan also credited his parents for instilling in him the importance of running nonstop to where he could find living as a refugee, so now he could express human rights concerns over dinner rather than protesting with a placard in hand (“Our man in Asia defends low-key approach to his job”, by Barbara Yaffe, February 17, 1996, The Vancouver Sun):
“It was the human-rights issue that opened up a political career for the 46-year-old former University of B.C. Triumf engineer. He became known to Richmond’s Chinese-Canadian community when he organized and led opposition to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
Chan traces the roots of his inspiration and becomes tearful as he recalls how his parents, both teachers, used to tell him to “keep running, Raymond.”
The family had moved from mainland China to Hong Kong when the Communists took power in ’49. The Chans always feared the Communists would soon seize Hong Kong and advised their son, who was born in the British colony, to “keep running, get an education, work hard and don’t be a lawyer. Be technical. Be an engineer. Then, as a refugee, you will find a living.”
At 17, following his father’s death from cancer, Raymond Chan came to Canada to live with an older sister and got a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics at the University of B.C. while working as a restaurant busboy.
In a bid to “experience democracy directly,” Chan entered politics. He chose the Liberals after flirting with the New Democratic Party.
Now, he says, there is no longer a need to carry placards. His efforts have become less visible, more delicate. “I have a dialogue with them now, I don’t need to stand in front of the consulate. Now I can ask this guy out for dinner and talk to him across the table and express Canada’s concern.”
He has been criticized for becoming soft on human rights , for buying into Jean Chretien’s perceived priority of promoting trade, even with oppressive governments.
“It must be cruel for him,” a Liberal colleague says of Chan. “He has been silenced on human rights and told to go ahead with the trade aspect.”
Chan disputes this interpretation: “There’s a lot of things you can do but not talk about.””
Who could dispute that, then Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s policy was cruel for Raymond Chan, and compassionate to me?
Psychiatrist Dr. Mel Dilli had conveyed that referring to “Matsqui” as in Part 9 where I have also quoted a 2009 blog post referring to “the Liberals’ retreat from its election promise of higher priority for international human rights, to focus on the economy and business” – a swift shift of priority from their 1993 election campaign.
In some sense Raymond Chan served a key role for the Chretien government, that the combination of his laurel as a human rights leader and his willingness to follow God, or his government boss, allowed other agendas to sail through with the appearance of human rights concerns.
For instance, in 1996 when intellectuals in the West became concerned with the harsh jail terms imposed by the Chinese government on political dissident Wei Jingsheng, Raymond Chan’s speaking out was all the Canadian government did in public (“Canadians pen protest over Chinese dissident”, by Judy Stoffman, February 9, 1996, Toronto Star):
“The only official Canadian reaction to Wei’s sentencing, last December, came from Raymond Chan, secretary of state for the Asia - Pacific region. (Andre Ouellet, who was foreign affairs minister at the time, avoided comment.)
“We deplore the treatment of Mr. Wei,” Chan told reporters Dec. 13., noting that Canada’s ambassador in Beijing and officials from the foreign affairs department in Ottawa had voiced concern to Chinese authorities.”
Even that minimal expression by the Canadian government wasn’t easy. Frank Fan mentioned in a January 1995 article – shortly before the end of my probation – under his Chinese name 范中 in the Chinese political dissident publication Beijing Spring, that Chinese diplomats in Canada had publicly warned Chan not to risk his “political future” by commemorating the dead of the June 4, 1989 event (“陈卓愉应否纪念“六四”？”(“Should Raymond Chan commemorate June 4?”), by 范中, January 1995 (collated January 29, 2003), Beijing Spring).
In April 1997, Canada withdrew its continuing support of an annual United Nations resolution condemning human rights abuses in China, and Raymond Chan defended the official decision (“Canada won’t support UN criticism of China”, by Daphne Braham, April 15, 1997, The Vancouver Sun). It drew protest letters to the media, such as from Bill Chu of Chinese Christians in Actions (“B.C.’s Liberal MPs disappoint writers: These letters have been excerpted from the Bilingual Forum of Ming Pao Daily”, April 28, 1997, The Vancouver Sun):
“The two Liberals who have defended Canada’s decisions are Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy and Raymond Chan, the Richmond MP. I can excuse Axworthy somewhat for his ignorance of Asian affairs. I cannot excuse Raymond Chan. He came to Canada from Hong Kong. He was involved in the Vancouver Society in Support of Democratic Movement in China. He is the only Chinese-Canadian MP and he has been charged by the government with Asia - Pacific responsibilities.
Canadians should expect of him an honest evaluation of Pacific affairs. Instead he has helped Canada kowtow before the oppressors of the region.”
Back in 1995 after writing to Chan, my mother met with Dr. Clifford Kerr, my counselling psychiatrist at Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic, to obtain a letter of support for her immigration appeal. Dr. Kerr seemed enthusiastic in the May 11 interview and letter, to the point of omitting the hardline opinion of “Paranoid Schizophrenia” he had held since 1993 as in Parts 8 & 9, referring only to UBC Hospital’s original “Delusional Disorder” diagnosis:
“It is very clear that Mr. Gao’s mother’s presence has had a profoundly beneficial effect upon his own sense of well being. Mr. Gao currently has no symptoms of mental illness, is not on any medication and is able to follow direction in an appropriate fashion. Mr. Gao said that he is optimistic of returning to work in the near future, hopefully within 6 to 12 months. However, it is clear that the presence of Mr. Gao’s mother in Canada is having a beneficial effect upon his future employability.
In summary, Mr. Gao has a history of mental illness dating back to 1992. Mr. Gao has received a diagnosis of suffering from a delusional disorder with paranoid features in a somewhat obsessive personality. However, since the arrival of his mother in June of 1993, Mr. Gao’s mental state and overall level of functioning have dramatically improved.”
It would appear that my mother’s letter to MP Raymond Chan brought some compassion; Dr. Kerr was now willing to confirm that even without medication I had “no symptoms of mental illness”.
But it was more deceptive.
Unbeknown to me or my mother, one week earlier the Forensic Psychiatric Institute where I had been committed in January-February 1994, and which supervised the Outpatient Clinic, had reaffirmed the “Paranoid Schizophrenia” diagnosis in its final Medical Summary Report:
“Psychiatric Dix: Paranoid Schizophrenia
Problem List
1. EPS from medications.
2. Previous hepatitis B – non-carrier”
Like Dr. Kerr stated, there was no psychotic symptom.
Rather, EPS was a side effect of sustained use of anti-psychotic medications like Haldol I was forced to take since December 1, 1992 as in Part 6, body tremors that could include parkinsonian symptoms, dystonia, akathisia and tardive dyskinesia (“Antipsychotics - The Future of Schizophrenia Treatment”, by George Beaumont, 2000, Medscape). In February 1994 I refused all anti-psychotic medications as in Part 9, and Dr. Kerr’s letter confirmed there was no problem because of it.
As for past hepatitis, on January 26, 1994 I told FPI about my past borderline positive test for hepatitis as a child in China when nutrition was poor and the disease was rampant. My FPI test as in the Medical Summary Report showed I was fine and immune, but it was included in the Problem List despite lack of relevance to psychiatry.
Recall as in Part 9 that during my FPI committal, despite lack of psychotic symptom the Problem List had been:
“1. Alteration in thought process (persecutory type thinking).
2. Lacks insight into mental condition.
3. Non-compliance regarding medication regime.”
None of these were in the final Medical Summary Report, but the diagnosis of “Paranoid Schizophrenia” – considered a permanent disease as discussed in Part 6 – remained.
A long-term negative political implication as reviewed in Part 9, was that the “Paranoid Schizophrenia” conclusion on FPI file was related to the September 1994 appointment of Marion Buller, the Connell Lightbody lawyer responsible for my last criminal charge in late 1993, as a provincial court judge at Port Coquitlam, where the FPI has been located.
On August 10, 1995, the Adult Forensic Psychiatric Community Services produced a Closing Summary for my case at the Outpatient Clinic. It stated that I had come through probation – in August 1993 as in Part 8 – and had a history of committals at UBC Hospital and VGH. The closing diagnosis was:
“DIAGNOSIS
In a letter dated May 11, 1995, from Dr. [name not released] stating “Mr. Gao has received a diagnosis of suffering from a delusional disorder with paranoid features in a somewhat obsessive personality”.”
The outpatient Closing Summary thus omitted any reference to the Forensic Psychiatric Institute, from which a psychiatrist had first given a diagnosis of “Paranoid Schizophrenia” in January 1993 – as in Part 7 – while I was lobbying the CBC to expose certain misconduct by then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and the same diagnosis continued through my 1994 committal and remained.
Despite her plea to a Member of Parliament, my mother’s immigration application would not be approved, but she was allowed to stay in Canada until the end of 1995 as I recall. By the time she was getting ready to leave, Frank Fan had moved out of our basement suite and moved in with a fellow Langara College student from Romania.
My mother had become friends with a leader of the Chinese Jehovah’s Witnesses in Vancouver, to the point of attending their group meetings regularly. “Mr. Yong” as in Cantonese, of the same family name as my university classmate “Yi Rong” mentioned in another blog post, “Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)”, had business interests in Richmond and an engineer background not unlike Richmond MP Raymond Chan and his associate Frank Fan, and insisted vocally that I terminate my Canadian credit cards and return to China with my mother – “If they don’t like you here why would you still stay?” Mr. Yong asked rhetorically.
I knew Jehovah’s Witnesses had a Pacifist reputation, more than the Mennonite Church in which our relative Rev. Stephen Lee was a minister as in Part 8. But ironically in hindsight, this type of Pacifism demonstrated by Mr. Yong in this case would probably have had a similar effect on those they preached to later the hawkish U.S. President George W. Bush’s famous saying might have, “You are either with us or against us” (“‘You are either with us or against us’”, November 6, 2001, CNN).
Personally, I wasn’t in favor of my mother’s immigrating at that time given the difficult political issues, though not the so-called mental illness, I was facing. In fact, I wasn’t even pleased with her appealing to a politician about mental illness being my problem, contrary to the fact that it was fabricated to justify suppression of my political activism – a view that I had expressed in writing to local MP Kim Campbell in December 1992 and later Hedy Fry after her defeat of Campbell, and in person to Member of B.C. Legislature Tom Perry – as in Parts 5 & 8.
Over a decade later it was a shock to me when I studied the documents from a 2003 personal-information disclosure by B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Services Commission, and realized that my father’s death due to heart failure on August 10, 2005 – I hadn’t expected it and didn’t get to say farewell at his hospital bedside in China – happened on the 10-year anniversary of the earlier-quoted outpatient Closing Summary referring to Dr. Clifford Kerr’s May 11, 1995 letter in support of my mother’s immigration appeal.
I can’t help but think of what my mother’s letter said about my father, quoted earlier:
“For the future prospect of Feng cao, and fulfill our parenthood, my husband is willing to relinguish his immigration application.”
10 years later it was his life, but the progress I was pushing for still eludes.
From the start of my psychiatric saga, my father’s heart problem was recorded in UBC Hospital record on November 30, 1992, when I was taken to a psychiatric committal by RCMP collaborating with B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, after I had faxed to MP Kim Campbell regarding Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership, as in Part 6.
But as I commented in a February 20, 2009 blog post, my father’s birthday had been related to the birthday of former Supreme Court of Canada Justice John Major and that of former Newfoundland Premier Frank Moores, a key figure in the Airbus Affair involving Mulroney in the news headlines in late 1995, and his death in timing to Major’s retirement announcement and Moores’s death (“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 (Part 1)”):
“The time around the liver-cancer death of Mr. Frank Moores and the announcement of Justice John Major’s retirement would happen to be also a very difficult time in my personal life: my father, a professor of philosophy in Canton, China, who happened to have been born exactly 76 years ago on the date of this February 20, 2009 blog article, exactly two years after Justice Major was born, and exactly two days after Premier Moores was born, was having serious heart-exhaustion problems and would die of heart failure on August 10, 2005, exactly one month after Frank Moores; being in a difficult situation here in Canada myself I did not receive adequate notice of the gravity of my father’s situation and missed being with my father at his final moment, whom I had not seen since just before Christmas in 2001.”
I also mentioned other notable events around the time of my father’s death:
“The several days around my father’s death were also turbulent in Canadian and international human affairs of relevant interest: three days prior on August 7 Peter Jennings, ABC News anchor and probably the most recognizable Canadian in the world, who had just celebrated his 67th birthday on July 29, died of lung cancer; one day prior on August 9 Dana Reeve, widow of ‘Superman’ actor Christopher Reeve who had died of paralysis from a 1995 horse-riding accident, announced her recent lung-cancer diagnosis as well despite being a non-smoker (she would died of it in March 2006); and two days afterward on August 12 Ludwig-Holger Pfahls, former head of West German domestic intelligence and junior defence minister under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, was sentenced to jail for accepting bribes from Karlheinz Schreiber in an arms sale to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War, after being on the lam from authorities for several years in Hong Kong, Jakarta, Madrid, Montreal and Paris, and despite court testimonies in favor of him from former Chancellor Kohl and former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher”.
The German dominoes could fall, like Ludwig-Holger Pfahls in 2005, and then Karlheinz Schreiber in 2009 as in Part 1, but the Canadian ones never, or not quite.
Barely 2 weeks after the Closing Summary of my forensic psychiatric outpatient case, a violently escalated episode in a long-running series of B.C. Aboriginal natives’ confrontations with the RCMP and the government over native land rights became the latest news.
As in Part 5, back in November 1990 Native blockades near Whistler-Pemberton north of Vancouver, waged by Lil’wat Peoples Movement of the Mount Currie Band, became confrontations with RCMP and Inspector D. G. Cowley was promoted to Superintendent to lead a police crackdown, who later as RCMP Vancouver Subdivision commander also issued authorization to obstruct and suppress my lawsuit when it was launched in October 1992 vs. UBC and RCMP.
Not unlike the 1992 move of lawyers David Klein and Mark Lyons from Toronto to Vancouver that boosted B.C. legal community’s strength pursuing American-style class actions against breast-implant manufacturers like Dow Corning, in November 1990 a Toronto lawyer came to the B.C. Natives’ defense.
White lawyer Bruce Clark and his family had lived on the Temagami Indian band reserve in Ontario since 1978, helping the Natives in a land-rights case known as the Bear Island case, intending to stop an amusement park project on Maple Mountain, a Native sacred site.
Note that lawyer Jack Cram’s client Eddie Haymour had wanted to build one such on a B.C. lake island.
When he lost the Bear Island case at the Ontario Supreme Court in 1985 Clark was dismissed by the Natives, who hired Toronto lawyer Ross Murray, a Queen's Counsel – a prestigious title mentioned earlier – for their appeal. Murray reasoned to the Ontario Court of Appeal that as legal counsel Clark had bee “inexperienced, disrespectful and inappropriate” while the earlier judge had been biased toward the Natives; but he also failed. (“Indians’ lawyer dumped after long battle”, by Kirk Makin, July 11, 1989, The Globe and Mail)
Feeling insulted by the established lawyer, Bruce Clark went to study at Aberdeen University in Scotland, and for his Ph.D. thesis discovered some British legal and royal documents dating 1704 and 1763 that affirmed rights and protections for the Mohegan natives in the U.S. State of Connecticut, who had appealed to the Queen, and who have since become extinct – their violent end fictionalized in an 1826 novel and 1992 movie, “The Last of the Mohicans”. (Bruce A. Clark, Justice in Paradise, 2004, McGill-Queen’s Press; and, “The Last of the Mohicans” and “The Last of the Mohicans (1992 film)”, Wikipedia)
In November 1990, the night before Supt. Cowley’s RCMP force was to launch its crackdown on the Lil’wat protesters, in Toronto Bruce Clark was phoned and invited by one of the protesters’ lawyers – one was Lyn Crompton as cited in Part 5 – to come to Vancouver to defend the Native protesters in accordance with his constitutional views.
With a special practice permission from the Law Society of B.C., Clark began to argue in court that the Lil’wat people were a sovereign nation under the terms of the British Royal Proclamation of 1763, and that there existed a “conspiracy of white judges” attempting to evade constitutional laws upholding Native sovereignty (“Judge refuses to declare mistrial in Indian hearing”, by Larry Pynn, November 21, 1990, and, “Indians’ lawyer alleges white-judges conspiracy”, February 9, 1991, The Vancouver Sun; and “Judge steps down from appeal hearing; Lawyer denounced for allegations”, by Deborah Wilson, February 13, 1991, The Globe and Mail).
In the various court hearings, Clark’s attempted use of “sovereignty” arguments was rejected by B.C. Supreme Court Justices Bruce MacDonald and Thomas Braidwood – the same judge who would find Jack Cram guilty of contempt of court in 1994 – until late February 1992 when Provincial Court Judge Keith Libby ruled that he would hear the arguments (“Native sovereignty arguments allowed in blockade case”, February 28, 1992, The Vancouver Sun):
“He accepted a motion from native rights lawyer Bruce Clark, who said the Lil’wat consider themselves a sovereign people with their own land over which the B.C. government and courts have no jurisdiction.
“I think it is not unreasonable to allow a litigant a great deal of latitude, at least in the beginning,” Libby said over objections from the Crown.
He also agreed to spend time with Clark and the native community to become more familiar with the issues they are trying to present, as well as receive written and audio-visual submissions from the Lil’wat before ruling on the case.”
In July 1992 Judge Libby ruled that the provincial court had jurisdiction over charges against the Lil’wat protesters, and before the ruling Clark had lost his B.C. Law Society permission to act as lawyer because his Ontario Upper Canada Law Society membership fees were overdue – along with his family living on welfare on the Lil’wat reserve he couldn’t afford to pay (“Natives' lawyer loses credentials for failing to pay society fees”, July 11, 1992, The Vancouver Sun).
Interesting timing that Judge Libby agreed to hear Clark’s “sovereignty” arguments just as my dispute at UBC with my boss Maria Klawe intensified, as in Part 4, and then Clark lost his B.C. legal practice permission when my UBC employment ended.
Disobeying a judge’s order, Bruce Clark attempted to continue representing the Lil’wat protesters and was arrested once in August 1992. Now 3 years later in late August 1995 Clark was back in the news, representing a heavily armed group of renegade Natives from the Shuswap Nation, who were squatting on ranch owner Lyle James’s land near Gustafsen Lake in the 100 Mile House area of the Cariboo region farther north of Whistler-Pemberton. They had fired off warning gun shots towards RCMP officers in their standoff with police. B.C. Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh disagreed with the group’s ways (“Indians fear police assault: Defenders of Shuswap Nation heavily armed, police say: CARIBOO: Tensions rising”, by Mike Crawley, August 21, 1995, The Vancouver Sun):
“B.C.’s new attorney-general disagreed.
“Gustafsen Lake has nothing to do with aboriginal land-claim issues. It’s purely to do with the weapons found there and the shots that have been fired,” said Ujjal Dosanjh.”
This was the Ujjal Dosanjh who later in 1999 would lead an international conference on sexual exploitation of children that looked at the case of Jack Cram, Renate Andres-Auger and Vancouver Club pedophilia, so wasn’t someone unsympathetic to the Natives.
Cariboo Tribal Council also disagreed with the renegade’s tactics (“Indian rebels plan to ‘leave in body bags’: Fringe group says it will continue occupying land near 100 Mile House; INDIANS: Police note rebels appear more than willing to use assault rifles”, by Sherryl Yeager and Justine Hunter, August 22, 1995, The Vancouver Sun):
“Representatives of the Cariboo Tribal Council denounced the fringe group as outsiders and said they are afraid the group will tarnish the image of native people and harm the land-claims process.
About 20 natives are at the Gustafsen Lake site and they have been joined by about 10 non-natives who call themselves supporters of the sovereigntists.
The non-natives filmed and photographed reporters and frequently interjected lectures about the history of native oppression as reporters attempted to interview the group.
“The RCMP have a choice: they can listen or they can kill us, and that way they’ll show their true colors,'” said one unidentified non-native woman at the camp.”
No kidding, these Cariboo native protesters wanted the RCMP to kill them?
Hadn’t native lawyer Marion Buller, crucial in suppressing my civil litigation efforts in 1993-94, successfully represented the Cariboo-Chilcotin natives in a public inquiry by Judge Anthony Sarich into RCMP mistreatment of them? As in Part 9, Buller was later promoted to be a Port Coquitlam Provincial Court judge – with jurisdiction over Forensic Psychiatric Institute that had a false “Paranoid Schizophrenia” conclusion on me.
The reality was that these militants appeared to have an agenda for greater publicity for broader Native issues – just like Bruce Clark had – by claiming that the land occupied was the site of their annual Sundance ritual adopted from the Sioux Indians of America. The saga involved a mixed bag of characters, led by Jones Ignace (“Key players in Gustafsen Lake standoff”, September 18, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):
“Jones Paul Ignace (Wolverine): One of the two leaders of the rebel group that occupied privately owned ranchland at Gustafsen Lake, Ignace was known as Jonesy to his friends before the standoff began. He is a Shuswap native from Chase, and more vocal and militant than his co-leader Percy Rosette. Ignace was charged and acquitted in the beating death of his first wife in 1968. His current wife, Flora Sampson, is also inside the camp.
Percy Rosette: The faithkeeper of the sundance ceremony, Rosette has been instrumental in bringing the Sioux ritual to the Shuswap area. He believes in being self-sufficient, living off the land and not accepting any government money. His strong beliefs in this area have alienated him from his band at Alkali Lake.
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Bruce Clark: The rebels’ controversial Ottawa lawyer, dismissed by many native leaders as an opportunist. He believes the Canadian government and courts have no jurisdiction over his clients. He wants the Queen to call an international tribunal. …
Glen Kealey: His claims that an international conspiracy led by the Rothschild banking family wants to create a “New World Order” inspired some of the militants. Wolverine listened to Kealey, of Ottawa, during a speaking engagement this spring in Salmon Arm and has said he believes everything Kealey says.
Splitting the Sky: Based in Hinton, Alta. and also known as “Doc,” this native Indian acted as an adviser to the Gustafsen Lake sundancers. He was identified as John Hill, an American convicted in the Attica prison riot in New York in the 1970s. He says he was at the Oka blockade in 1990.”
Glen Kealey, the other White man beside Bruce Clark among this radical group, had started out as a businessman in dispute with Brian Mulroney’s associates, evolving to the point of pursuing criminal prosecution of them but ending without much success, as covered in my 2009 blog post, “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 (Part 3)”.
After small gun battles with RCMP, including an incident in which 2 officers were shot in the back but saved by their protective vests, the group agreed to surrender when their spiritual leader, Sundance “medicine man” John Stevens from Alberta, mediated (“GUSTAFSEN LAKE, B.C.: Rebel standoff ends peacefully; Medicine man coaxes group to leave ranch”, September 18, 1995, The Ottawa Citizen):
“Native supporters awaiting the arrival of the rebels at the airport cheered, clapped and waved as leader William Jones Ignace, also known as Wolverine, emerged from an RCMP helicopter in handcuffs.
Wolverine, who had vowed to only leave the camp in a body bag, displayed no emotion as he walked to a police cruiser while natives beat drums. A Mohawk Warrior Society flag was draped over the airport road fence.
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A breakthrough in the 30-day occupation, marred by gun battles and failed negotiations, came when sundance medicine man John Stevens entered the camp, about 450 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, on Sunday.
Stevens, from Alberta’s Stoney reserve, is the leader of the Gustafsen Lake sundance, a Plains Indian ceremony held annually on a parcel of the Lyle James ranch since 1990.
Earlier, Rosette said the squatters would leave if Stevens told them to. But certain sacred objects, including buffalo skulls, should remain at the sundance site and be guarded. Rosette said the site was chosen for sundances because he had a dream it was sacred.”
Bruce Clark was charged with contempt of court and assaulting a police officer, sent to a psychiatric assessment at Riverview Forensic Institute – the Riverview Hospital I could have been sent to in October 1993 as in Part 8 – and was eventually jailed for a few months and disbarred. In the process, Clark also went on an exile in Europe and applied for refugee status but was turned down. But unlike Jack Cram, Bruce Clark is a “legal scholar” with a Ph.D., and has been hailed by some as a modern-day Louis Riel, leader of the 19th-century North-West rebellion. (“Indian rights lawyer Clark ‘in exile’ in Holland”, by Lindsay Kines, October 19, 1995, The Vancouver Sun; “Talking with Bruce Clark: Can he be rehabilitated?: Disbarred by his peers, scorned by the media, the radical lawyer of Gustafsen Lake notoriety seeks refuge in the Ivory Tower. There, he’s hailed as a prophet akin to Louis Riel”, by Ian Mulgrew, May 22, 1999, The Vancouver Sun; and, “Norway spurns lawyer’s refugee claim”, January 26, 2000, Sudbury Star)
Bruce Clark has been unsuccessful in over 25 court hearings arguing about Canadian authorities’ campaign of “genocide” against native cultures. For the B.C. Native protesters represented by him, the ending has been quite the opposite to what the B.C. breast-implant class actions achieved under lawyers David Klein and Mark Lyons from Ontario, Mark Steven of Vancouver and Deborah Acheson of Victoria.
But wasn’t much of it just publicity stunts?
Bruce Clark acted like a rock star and a Star Wars movie character (“Treaty process frustration growing; Return of Bruce Clark does not bode well for smooth settlement”, by Ian Mulgrew, June 21, 2012, The Vancouver Sun):
“Time has not made him more mellow. Who can forget the 1995 summer standoff in the Cariboo that pitted 400 heavily armed Mounties against a handful of natives, their supporters and the baldheaded lawyer wearing Star Wars glasses?
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He hasn’t changed - he still won’t tug on his forelock to get his law licence back, still thinks Canada and the U.S. committed genocide against the first nations and still sports spectacles from the future.”
Splitting the Sky, one of the 1995 Sundance militant leaders, originally American, faired better. He became an actor, and claimed the interest of Hollywood director Robert Redford in making a movie on his life experience (“Gustafsen Lake to Hollywood”, by Ian Mulgrew, July 22, 2005, The Vancouver Sun):
“A decade ago this month, he was in the Cariboo ranchland near Gustafsen Lake leading a group of Sun Dancers at the centre of international attention -- besieged by a heavily armed, militarized force of some 400 RCMP officers.
What a long, strange trip it has been for the American Indian Movement warrior imprisoned for 20 years in Attica for attempted murder, to movie actor and author.
Little wonder that Hollywood has finally come calling -- especially this year when issues of red pride are again at the fore and natives buying hunting rifles are enough for police takedown.
He met Robert Redford two years ago through a casting call in Chase for native extras for the film Deepwater and he got a four-scene role as a casino owner in the movie.
Aside from the role in Deepwater, a new psychological thriller featuring Peter Coyote and Lesley Ann Warren, Splitting The Sky has a lead role in a fall City TV production and Redford is mulling an option on his autobiography.”
Splitting the Sky also took part in efforts to criminally prosecute former U.S. President George Bush. But his big dreams didn’t happen when he died this March at the age of 61. (“Indigenous warrior Splitting the Sky dies at 61”, by Stephen Hui, March 22, 2013, The Straight)
I don’t know of any movie made for Jack Cram’s former client Eddy Haymour, either.
Noted Canadian academic Anthony J. Hall, of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, views both the Jack Cram & Renate Andres-Auger story and the Bruce Clark story as prominent events in the Canadian Aboriginals’ struggle against colonialism, and is positive about Clark’s claim of historical sovereignty (“The Hauntings of Colonialism”, by Anthony J. Hall, January 4, 2007, Canadian Dimension):
“Cram’s rapid transformation from a successful and well-regarded Vancouver lawyer to an involuntarily institutionalized patient in the psychiatric ward of the Vancouver General Hospital resembled the treatment extended the following summer to Bruce Clark. It seems that the propensity is high in B.C. to kill the messenger rather than to grapple with the content of difficult messages.
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Clark later moved from Ontario to British Columbia, where he specialized in representing Aboriginal clients like Shuswap elder William Jones Ignace. Ignace and many of Clark’s other clients found legitimacy in their own traditions of Aboriginal governance rather than in the federally funded system of band-council governance spawned and fertilized by Canadian Indian Act. As Clark and his clients saw it, the application of the Indian Act system in B.C. was illegal and tailor-made for manipulation by Crown paymasters. In their view, the organization of B.C. treaty negotiations on the basis of the system of political and legal representation rooted in the Indian Act was an abomination.
Clark’s interpretation emphasized four dates: 1537, 1704, 1763 and 1948. The first date corresponds with the Papal Bull recognizing the right of Indians in the Americas not to be enslaved or robbed of their liberty and property. The second corresponds with a constitutional ruling issued in 1704 by Queen Anne’s Privy Council in the case, Mohegan v. Connecticut. A key facet of that ruling held that any future arbitration on the issue of Aboriginal title in the English colonies in North America would have to be done by independent jurists not connected to the contending jurisdictions.
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Clark rounded out his interpretation by drawing heavily on the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and on the Genocide Convention. The result was a reading of the law that ranks as one of the most challenging ever brought forward by a legal advocate in Canada. Clark did not back away from accusing the judges he faced of treason, fraud, complicity in genocide and the usurpation of jurisdiction.
Not surprisingly, some jurists lost their composure. Chief Justice Antonio Lamar, for example, responded in 1995 in the Supreme Court of Canada by calling Clark a “disgrace to the bar.””
Born and bred in the English culture in Canada, judges like, e.g., former UBC Chancellor Allan McEachern, accomplished in it and adored by its elites (“Obituary: Allan McEachern, 1926-2008 – ‘He was a judge’s judge and a lawyer’s lawyer’”, January 12, 2008, Times – Colonist), could commit “treason”? I doubt it.
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