tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74010745786627866092024-03-09T04:08:24.692-05:00Feng Gao's Blog - Reflections on Events of InterestFeng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-24242508265103871402014-06-07T20:57:00.001-04:002014-07-19T00:02:28.152-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 13) — when power politics angles for monopoly<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2014/01/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 12</a>)</p> <p>The cozy links between the circle of former Canadian Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien who governed from November 1993 to 2003, and former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney who had ruled from 1984 to June 1993, and the political implications, have been a key topic of Part 12 of this blog article.</p> <p>One critical link between Chretien personally and Mulroney was influential Montreal businessman Paul Desmarais, French Canadian owner of the Power Corporation of Canada, who was known to patronize Canadian establishment politicians of power potential, regardless of their political stripes. Demasrais’s son Andre, Power Corp. president, had worked in the early 1980s as press secretary to then Justice Minister Chretien in the Pierre Trudeau government, courting and later marrying Chretien’s daughter France. As a lawyer before entering politics Mulroney had been a Desmarais protégé, and in 1993 after departing national leadership he became Power Corp.’s chief counsel while his successor Kim Campbell campaigned and lost in an October election to Chretien.</p> <p>Another crucial link between the Chretien circle and Mulroney was lawyer and distinguished constitutional expert Roger Tasse. In the 1960s Tasse had taught classes in which Member of Parliament Chretien was one of the students. In the early 1980s Tasse was deputy justice minister under Chretien – when Andre Desmarais was press secretary – and was credited as an architect of the 1982 Canadian Constitution. After Trudeau’s 1984 retirement, his successor John Turner soon lost a September election to Mulroney; Chretien, despite his popularity, left politics for private law practice, recruiting Tasse out of government service to open a law office for him in Capital Ottawa where, using a local Tory as the managing partner, their branch of the Canadian law firm Lang Michener excelled during the Mulroney era, doing much better than some well-known Mulroney-connected law firms, and was touted in July 1988 as a “Liberal government in waiting”.</p> <p>Tasse also became a constitutional adviser to Prime Minister Mulroney, playing a key role in Mulroney’s ill-fated Meech Lake constitutional accord endeavour from 1987 to 1990, attempting to bring French-speaking Quebec – the lone constitutional holdout province in 1982 – into the Constitution’s fold.</p> <p>With the Chretien circle not in political opposition to him in 1988, Mulroney seemed set to defeat Turner, once again, in a November election; but the second time was trickier as the Mulroney Tories had become corruption scandal-plagued. In August 1988, the small leftwing opposition New Democratic party’s candidate Phil Edmonston in the riding of Chambly, Quebec, made a corruption complaint to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police against Tory MP Richard Grise, and RCMP then inquired with the Prime Minister’s Office.</p> <p>On November 7, two weeks before the November 21 election, Mulroney’s principal secretary Peter White sent a reply letter to RCMP via Ward Elcock, Privy Council deputy clerk of intelligence and security; RCMP then interviewed White and determined there was basis to conduct a criminal-investigative search of Grise’s offices in Ottawa and in the town of Longueuil in his riding.</p> <p>On November 14, RCMP investigators raised the matter to Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell in charge of criminal investigations in Quebec, but McConnell decided to postpone the search until after the election. RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster and his second-in-command, Deputy Commissioner Henry Jensen, were attending an International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) meeting in Thailand, and McConnell notified the acting deputy commissioner of his decision.</p> <p>Around November 7, a major national poll had indicated that Turner’s Liberals would dethrone the Mulroney Tories and win a majority at that point in time. Had the Richard Grise criminal investigation commenced without delay, it would have become a major news story and played a role against the election prospect of the Mulroney government; instead, Mulroney’s Tories were able to catch up and win their second majority.</p> <p>In the Liberal-leaning Canada, Mulroney thus became the only Conservative leader, other than Prime Minister John A. MacDonald in the 19th century who had led Canada’s founding in 1867, to win consecutive parliamentary majorities.</p> <p>A year later in November 1989 when Commissioner Inkster found out about the delay of the Grise investigation avoiding the 1988 election, he had already publicly assured the parliamentarians that RCMP had done everything right in the Grise case. By then Richard Grise had pleaded guilty to corruption-related charges and resigned his MP seat, but the controversy surrounding the RCMP delay became the Richard Grise affair. When the delay decision was traced to Brian McConnell, he countered through the media that he had informed his superiors in Ottawa; Deputy Commissioner Jensen, who had not been informed until two weeks after the election, took the blame with early retirement.</p> <p>By November 1992 when I began to send out press releases critical of Mulroney’s leadership conduct and calling for his removal, both of the Mulroney government’s constitutional initiatives had failed, the Meech Lake accord in 1990, and the Charlottetown accord, which also introduced Aboriginal self-government rights and electoral reform of the Senate, in a national referendum defeat on October 26, 1992. Jean Chretien was now the Liberal leader, and Brian Mulroney was so unpopular that in a November 1991 article the <em>Toronto Star</em> had used the title, “Worth repeating”, to report a 1970s’ anecdote about the Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu meeting Mulroney and likening him to Richard Nixon.</p> <p>As in Parts 5 & 6, the day I sent out my first press releases, November 10, 1992, happened to be when RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster was proclaimed president of  INTERPOL after the only other contender, China’s candidate, had withdrawn in Inkster’s favor; then on November 13, Mulroney appointed Justice John C. Major of Alberta to the Supreme Court of Canada.</p> <p>As reviewed in those Parts, unbeknown to the public Major’s law firm, Bennett Jones Verchere, was headed by Mulroney’s personal tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere, and Major was also a friend of Karlheinz Schreiber, the German Canadian businessman later at the center of the Airbus Affair concerning suspected financial kickbacks to Mulroney for Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of Airbus planes as in Part 11.</p> <p>As in Part 9, Inkster had become RCMP Commissioner in the Mulroney era, and the new Prime Minister Chretien in February 1994 announced Inkster’s retirement to take effect in June – Mulroney’s own retirement announcement and departure had taken place in February and June of 1993, respectively – despite that it would lead to Canada’s loss of the INTERPOL presidency.</p> <p>In November 1992 with the new top jobs given Inkster and Major, Brian Mulroney had his reputation and legacy safely guarded. On November 30 after my faxing of press releases, along with the written allegation of political persecution by Mulroney, to my local MP, Justice Minister Kim Campbell, RCMP Sergeant Brian Cotton and a fellow officer came and brought me under psychiatric oppression. RCMP did so in collaboration with newly promoted British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, who and whose husband David, my former colleague at the University of British Columbia, had played roles in my civil dispute with UBC Computer Science Department Head Maria Klawe as in Parts 4 & 5.</p> <p>By January 1993 my documents sent to Campbell reached Solicitor General Doug Lewis and were forwarded by Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell, RCMP Director of Enforcement Services, to the commanding officer of “E” Division in B.C.; McConnell specified that it was a complaint about local RCMP detachment officers’ role in my eviction at the end of my UBC job – despite my press releases’ accusations of misconduct in Mulroney’s leadership. As in Parts 6 & 7, at the recommendation of Chief Superintendent P. M. Cummins, a former head of RCMP national security investigations, “E” Division responded that I already had a civil lawsuit in place – in reality the lawsuit was stalled and practically suppressed by the psychiatric oppression.</p> <p>As in Part 12, A/Comm. J. W. B. McConnell was in fact the same person as C/Supt. Brian McConnell of the 1988-89 Richard Grise affair in Quebec.</p> <p>After my sending out press releases critical of Mulroney, in November 1992 another matter was simmering, as in Part 12, that could tie Mulroney to corruption: in late November, Revenue Canada threatened legal enforcement against Mulroney’s old friend and former aide Patrick MacAdam, a member of the Ottawa lobby firm Government Consultants International, for tax evasion; GCI was owned by former Newfoundland Premier Frank Moores, Mulroney’s friend and a key figure in the distribution of secret Airbus commissions to Mulroney’s circle; MacAdam had joined GCI in 1989, and then stopped paying income taxes.</p> <p>But the justice system and the media avoided any ramification the MacAdam case might have for Mulroney. There was no media mention of the MacAdam criminal investigation  while the Mulroney and Campbell governments were in power, even when Revenue Canada forced Mulroney to cancel his plan to appoint MacAdam to the Senate, when GCI was searched by the revenue agency and RCMP in March 1993 for evidence of MacAdam’s tax evasion, and when the police search led to GCI’s loss of all clients. Kim Campbell even made MacAdam a speech writer for her October 1993 election campaign.</p> <p>In 1994 under the Chretien government, criminal charges were filed against MacAdam and in October there were press stories, but without emphasis to his links to Mulroney; then there was no more news story, until February 1997 just before MacAdam’s April trial. Thus, the MacAdam case skipped the entire Airbus Affair publicity period – from November 1995 when RCMP announced criminal investigation of Mulroney, to January 1997 when the government settled on Mulroney’s libel lawsuit, apologizing for calling his activity “criminal” without sufficient evidence.</p> <p>The Airbus Affair was an unprecedented event, the first time a former Canadian PM became the suspect of a criminal investigation. But it was handled by the Chretien government, RCMP and the media primarily as an unprecedented event of a former PM suing the government for reputation damages.</p> <p>On the eve of the Airbus Affair publicity in November 1995, there was another unprecedented event, one that happened to Prime Minister Chretien as in Parts 11 & 12.</p> <p>In early November Mulroney learned from Karlheinz Schreiber that RCMP/Justice Department had sent a request on September 29 to the Swiss police, for examining some Swiss bank accounts as part of an investigation into criminal activity by Mulroney. In the evening of November 4, Mulroney had lawyer Roger Tasse – the former confidante, Justice Department deputy and law partner of Chretien – phone Justice Minister Allan Rock to negotiate; Rock replied that he was unaware of the case.</p> <p>Earlier that day, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated, and Chretien and wife Aline were getting ready to leave the next day for the funeral. Then after midnight Andre Dallaire, a man from Longueuil, Quebec, with an open jackknife in hand, broke into the Prime Minister’s residence and came face-to-face with Mrs. Chretien just outside the Chretiens’ bedroom. Aline locked the bedroom doors and phoned the RCMP guards, and the couple waited for several minutes before an RCMP Corporal came, alone, to arrest the intruder.</p> <p>The incident exposed the laxity of RCMP security for that residence, internally reported several times since 1989 but never corrected. But more importantly it revealed troubling RCMP attitudes: lowest-ranked officers with no VIP security training were assigned as guards, with the Corporal on duty overseeing security of 3 head-of-state and head-of-government residences at the same time; and when the intrusion happened, the more senior officers did not bother to attend the site or increase protection for the Chretiens.</p> <p>The problems weren’t really solved as the media, though intensely interested in a shocking event like the intrusion at the Prime Minister’s residence, did not sufficiently connect the dots to uncover the intriguing, crucial politics. In this case as well as with the Airbus Affair criminal investigation, which made no progress, the Chretien government also chose to keep the real facts from going public.</p> <p>One missing story, never reported, was the other identity of the RCMP Capital Ottawa region “A” Division Commanding Officer Bryan McConnell, who had jurisdiction over VIP security in Ottawa and who took charge of public-relations and damage-control measures after the intrusion, including making disciplinary decisions that let senior officers off the hook.</p> <p>As Part 12 has reviewed and concluded, this A/Comm. Bryan McConnell was almost without a doubt the same person as the former Director of Enforcement Services J. W. B. McConnell, who in January 1993 excluded the Mulroney-related topics from the designated scope of a complaint I had faxed to MP Kim Campbell, and the same person as C/Supt. Brian McConnell in Quebec, who in November 1988 delayed the Richard Grise corruption investigation until after the election.</p> <p>Another rare coincidence but likely not coincidental, was the origin of the intruder Andre Dallaire: Longueuil, Quebec, the same town where Richard Grise was located in 1988, whose office there was searched by RCMP after the 1988 election.</p> <p>Moreover, the RCMP “A” Division headed by McConnell also had jurisdiction over the Airbus Affair criminal investigation, for which only one investigator, low-ranked Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald, was assigned in 1995. The lack of investigative progress and Fiegenwald’s reckless leaking of information, strengthened Mulroney’s case for his libel lawsuit, which would lead to a government apology with an unprecedented extension to his family.</p> <p>The RCMP’s real roles in the Chretien residence incident and the Mulroney corruption investigation, undisclosed to the public, are of genuine concerns as concluded in Part 12: Bryan McConnell’s evasive history involved not only persistent political favors for Mulroney, but most likely also cover-up of RCMP failure in the 1980s’ to capture Allan Strong, murderous deputy leader of the notorious Montreal East End Gang, whose escape was likely helped by RCMP Montreal drug squad head, Inspector Claude Savoie; later in 1992 while under internal investigation, Savoie died of a reported suicide in December just before Canadian Broadcasting Corporation The Fifth Estate program’s airing of a story on his relationship with the gang; even in November 1995 at the time of the Chretien residence intrusion, McConnell’s subordinate responsible for VIP security, Chief Superintendent Al Rivard, had in 1989 failed to apprehend escaped murderer Allen Legere for 10 months in New Brunswick, resulting in 4 more murders by Legere.</p> <p>Some elite members of the media also acted conspicuously in favor of Mulroney in the political intrigue, which by my analysis was an alarming cause for concern about a possible Mulroney link to the Chretien residence incident. <em>The Globe and Mail</em>, “Canada’s National Newspaper”, had in November 1988 behaved similarly to RCMP C/Supt. Brian McConnell, delaying publishing a Richard Grise corruption story until after the election; then in November 1995 as the Airbus Affair publicity broke out, its editor-in-chief William Thorsell, a Mulroney friend, was given special access to Mulroney’s libel lawsuit, and then wrote an editorial in which he invoked notorious names such as Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald to make the point that there was no such equivalence to suspect a dark conspiracy involving Mulroney.</p> <p>As in Parts 11 & 12, the cover-up for any behind-the-scenes dark politics went well from 1995 to 1997 – given the likely roles of the Chretien government, RCMP and the justice system, and given the media’s lack of investigative zeal.</p> <p>By June 1996 Andre Dallaire, found guilty of attempted murder in the Chretien residence intrusion, was declared criminally not responsible due to “Paranoid Schizophrenia” – a label the B.C. justice system had applied to me in 1993-94 through forensic psychiatry so that my political activism could be suppressed as in Parts 7-9.</p> <p>In January 1997 just one day before the scheduled civil trial, the Chretien government settled with Mulroney on his libel lawsuit. Sgt. Feigenwald’s unprofessional conduct and the RCMP’s unwillingness to disclose more information in trial were reported as reasons. But the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney was allowed to continue.</p> <p>In February 1997, Bryan McConnell reappeared outside of RCMP, as the new Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police – with official influence over police forces all over Canada.</p> <p>After that, the tax-evasion trial of Mulroney’s friend, former GCI lobbyist Patrick MacAdam, proceeded and led to his conviction, but without drawing extra attention to the Airbus Affair or to Brian Mulroney – with the exception of MacAdam’s wife Janet openly airing anger at Mulroney for not helping Pat, and Mulroney spokesman Luc Lavoie responding that Mulroney had helped the most in the past with jobs and private-sector contracts.</p> <p>Part 12 has pointed out the Airbus Affair as desirable publicity foreseen beforehand by the Chretien Liberals:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Liberals say the Prime Minister never looks better than when he is compared with former prime minister Brian Mulroney.”</p> </blockquote> <p>On the other hand, the close links between Mulroney and Chretien, as illustrated by their mutual relationships to the business tycoon Paul Desmarais and to the prominent constitutional expert and lawyer Roger Tasse, meant that the Chretien government had a reason not to prosecute Mulroney – lest it damaged Chretien’s own interests.</p> <p>As will be reviewed in the present Part of this blog article, through such balancing acts compromising the standards of politics, Chretien would continue and extend his rule in an unchallenged manner for as long as he could – Mulroney had done it before him.</p> <p>The continuing Mulroney corruption investigation, balanced by a libel-settlement apology to him for uncalled-for public humiliation, effectively neutralized Mulroney and the Airbus Affair as political problems for the Liberals; Chretien then quickly called an election for June 2, 1997, only a little over 3-and-1/2 years after October 1993, squeezing through to his second parliamentary majority (“ELECTION ’97 Liberals cling to majority; Solid support in Ontario assures re-election; Tories, NDP regain status in House”, by Murray Campbell and Jeff Sallot, June 3, 1997, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Jean Chrétien’s Liberals won re-election yesterday, but with a razor-thin majority, leaving Canada a country politically divided along regional fault lines.</p> <p>The Reform Party, with its dominance in the West, will replace the Bloc Québécois as the Official Opposition.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Liberals lost 28 seats on a 3-per-cent drop in their share of the popular vote.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The reduced total for the Liberals calls into question the judgment of Mr. Chrétien, who decided to call an election with about 18 months left in the overwhelming mandate he won in 1993.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Chrétien, 63, was looking for a place in history as the first Liberal prime minister since Louis St. Laurent 44 years ago to win back-to-back majority governments.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Just as noteworthy as the focus on national unity was the fact that many issues received no sustained discussion.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The cancellation of the Pearson Airport privatization contract, the Airbus affair involving former prime minister Brian Mulroney and the closing off of the Somalia inquiry were rarely, if ever, discussed by the party leaders.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As the above report indicated, consecutive majorities did not happen often in Canada, and Chretien’s back-to-back were the first time in nearly a half-century for a Liberal leader – though not yet as historic as Mulroney’s only back-to-back in the 20th century for a Conservative leader.</p> <p>Chretien would continue with this kind of expedient action, in year 2000 calling another election for November 27 – less than 3-and-1/2 years from June 1997 – after former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s death on September 28 – as in Part 12 just days after the star-studded wedding of Mulroney’s daughter Caroline.</p> <p>Chretien made no secret of channelling Canadians’ sympathy for Trudeau for his own election win, as I reviewed in a June 2009 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-7/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 6)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… Chretien had wasted no time – after the mourning was over for Pierre Trudeau who had passed away of prostate cancer – to announce that he would call an election in which his campaign would emphasize Trudeau’s legacy; although election speculations had been around before Trudeau’s death, some cynics opined that Chretien must have known for a while Trudeau had been gravely ill, and was so eager to make electoral history as to take the opportunity of Canadians’ sympathy over Trudeau’s death to get his third majority term – without other urgent issues calling a new election sooner than any majority leader in history but former Liberal prime minister Wilfred Laurier in 1911 – over the relative inexperience of the new Alliance leader Stockwell Day and the split of conservative votes between the Alliance and the Tories – the latter again led by Joe Clark.</p> <p>Chretien would win his third majority handily on November 27, 2000, garnering 41% of the popular vote – highest of his 3 times.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So, in just over 7 years Chretien clearly bettered Mulroney by winning 3 consecutive parliamentary majorities – among the most achieved by any Canadian prime minister in history – but he would wait until the length of his rule surpassing Mulroney’s to announce his retirement intent, and would step down only after 10 full years in power. I analyzed the numbers in a April 2009 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-3/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 4)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… one notes that when Jean Chretien stepped down as prime minister in December 2003, he had completed a decade-long reign in which he won three back-to-back majorities – among the most Canadian prime ministers have done in history – in elections in 1993, 1997 and 2000…</p> <p>On the date of the 10-year anniversary of his election to power, Saturday, October 25, 2003, Chretien celebrated by visiting the sacred Sikh Golden Temple in India on a day that happened to be Diwali – India’s equivalent of Christmas, basking in happiness among over 100,000 revellers and accompanied by natural resources minister Herb Dhaliwal, one of several Sikh Canadian Liberal MPs, while in Ottawa in the House of Commons a motion put forward by the Bloc Quebecois was to be voted on that Tuesday to force Chretien to step down as soon as Paul Martin became the Liberal leader in November…</p> <p>…</p> <p>Now, taking notice of Mr. Chretien’s liking of anniversary dates and milestones, one recognizes that on April 22, 2003 when the RCMP announced termination of the Airbus Affair criminal investigation, the day happened to be the 10-year anniversary of the Liberal Party’s unveiling of its law-and-order platform for the 1993 election, an election that would turn out to be historic as the Tories under Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell would be reduced to only two seats and without official-party status – the worst federal electoral defeat in Canadian history.</p> <p>And in case when it came to versus Brian Mulroney the date symbolism might not be so important, one should also recognize that it was actually the more important: although Paul Martin had openly challenged Chretien’s leadership since June 2002, when on August 21, 2002 Chretien suddenly announced to step down in February 2004, it was when he had just surpassed Mulroney’s length of prime-ministership by 10 days, which had been from September 17, 1984 to June 24, 1993 for Mr. Mulroney and had taken Mr. Chretien from November 4, 1993 to August 11, 2002 to match; yet everyone was “shocked” why Chretien suddenly announced his retirement plan at that time, and also wondered why he wanted to drag on to early 2004 before leaving – when he would need at least till November 4, 2003 for a full ten years. Such milestones must have been sacred for Mr. Chretien.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As cited above, the day April 22, 2003, when the RCMP announced Airbus Affair investigation’s end, happened to be the 10-year anniversary of the Chretien Liberals’ unveiling of their 1993 law-and-order election platform – the Mulroney criminal investigation was an important law-and-order publicity show.</p> <p>Also noteworthy is that in October 2003 as Chretien was celebrating his 10-year anniversary of winning power at the sacred Sikh Golden Temple in India, some parliamentarians were restlessly trying to get him out of the way soon. In fact, according to a national poll at the end of 2002, 59% of Canadians had wanted Chretien to retire soon (“Another Liberal victory predicted: SIX OF TEN CANADIANS WANT PM TO RETIRE SOONER, POLL SHOWS”, by Joan Bryden, December 31, 2002,<font color="#0000ff"><em> </em></font><a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Almost six in 10 Canadians believe Prime Minister Jean Chretien should cut short his long goodbye, a year-end poll has found.</p> <p>But despite the apparent dissatisfaction with the prime minister, a slim majority of Canadians still believes the country will stick with the ruling Liberals in the next election, when the party is led by a new leader.</p> <p>The poll, conducted for Maclean’s magazine, Global TV and Southam News by the Strategic Counsel, found 59 per cent of Canadians think that Chretien should retire sooner than his intended departure in February 2004. Only 35 per cent believe the PM should stick to his announced timetable.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But Canadians might not have noticed the mastery of numerology at work for the symbolism and PR images of Chretien’s political successes. Anyone attempting to usher in a new era, such as his eventual Liberal successor Paul Martin, would have to wait patiently or risk futility and animosity.</p> <p>Previously in the United States in 1988 when President Ronald Reagan was in his last year of office, the White House confirmed that he and wife Nancy were deeply into astrology, i.e., observing dates and numbers like in numerology but for superstition (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/04/us/white-house-confirms-reagans-follow-astrology-up-to-a-point.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">White House Confirms Reagans Follow Astrology, Up to a Point</font></a>”, by Steven V. Roberts, May 4, 1988, <em>The New York Times</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, are both deeply interested in astrology, the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, said today, and two former White House officials said Mrs. Reagan’s concerns had influenced the scheduling of important events.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In answer to a barrage of questions today, Mr. Fitzwater said: “It’s true that Mrs. Reagan has an interest in astrology. She has for some time, particularly following the assassination attempt in March of 1981. She was very concerned for her husband’s welfare, and astrology has been part of her concern in terms of his activities.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>At his briefing, Mr. Fitzwater acknowledged that the President has a superstitious streak. He often talks in speeches about “lucky numbers,” and jokes that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln resides in the White House.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As quoted, Nancy Reagan became especially involved in following astrology after the March 1981 assassination attempt on her husband. But for Jean Chretien, even before the armed break-in at his Prime Minister’s residence on November 5, 1995, he had used the symbolism of dates and numbers efficiently, like with Mulroney-era RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster’s departure: it was announced on February 4, 1994 as in Part 9, exactly 3 months into his own era that had begun on November 4, 1993 as quoted from my April 2009 post.</p> <p>From 1995 onward, The Chretien government strung along the Airbus Affair criminal investigation of Mulroney until a few months before Chretien’s retirement announcement, but with the RCMP showing no progress during the entire time as I commented in my first blog post on Canadian politics in February 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-polices-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-10/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 1)</font></a><font color="#0000ff">”):</font></p> <blockquote> <p>“And so you see, from 1989 to 1995 the RCMP had sit on a ‘nominal’ criminal investigation for 6 years, allegedly due to pressure from the Mulroney government (1984-1993), then for 4 years from 1995 to 1999 the RCMP presumably did not do much either (given the RCMP’s own admission that they started to interview Karlheinz Schreiber from the year 2000 forward), possibly to do with the Chretien Liberal government’s inaction, and then from 2000 to 2003 the investigation was likely more active – still under the Chretien government – when RCMP interviewed Karlheinz Schreiber “numerous” times by Sgt. Sylvie Tremblay’s account; but then the RCMP was unable to even figure out the $300,000 from Schreiber directly to Mulroney in spite of the many interviews with Schreiber, let alone uncover anything more elaborate.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Part 11, previously the RCMP had quietly looked into the Airbus secret commissions issue in 1989.</p> <p>But even in November 1995 it should have been obvious that the Chretien government was using the criminal investigation of Mulroney as publicity for its own political power advantage, and that Mulroney’s relationship with the Chretien circle made the government’s pursue of a serious investigation unlikely. Unfortunately the politicians and the media kept silent about it – despite that some had openly questioned Chretien’s close ties to Paul Demasrais and Roger Tasse regarding the direct satellite TV issue as in Part 12.</p> <p>Such political gain at another’s expense did not come free for the Chretien government. Allan Rock, the justice minister who handled the Airbus Affair, suffered bad publicity as discussed in Parts 11 & 12. After the 1997 election, Rock immediately gave up the justice portfolio (“Few strings on new mandate; This time PM careful not to make promises he might not be able to keep”, by James Travers, June 3, 1997, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“With the exception of Allan Rock, who has made it clear he does not want to return to the justice portfolio where the Airbus fiasco gave him a rough ride, the Prime Minister faces few difficult personnel decisions and the cabinet will have a familiar but not identical face.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Once touted as a future prime minister as in Part 11, Allan Rock’s leadership potential would be fading.</p> <p>Immediately after the November 2000 election, which the Liberals won handily by capitalizing on Canadians’ sympathy for Pierre Trudeau’s death due to prostate cancer, in early December Rock, by this time Health Minister, was diagnosed with prostate cancer (“Prostate surgery for Rock today: ‘Prognosis for him is a total cure,’ doctor says $20 test credited with early detection”, by Mark Kennedy, February 13, 2001, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Ottawa Citizen</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Health Minister Allan Rock has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and is to undergo surgery at a Toronto hospital today.</p> <p>The cancer was first diagnosed by a blood test in early December and confirmed by further tests a month ago. However, Mr. Rock's physicians say the disease is in its early stages and has not spread beyond the prostate gland.</p> <p>… “The prognosis for him is a total cure,” Dr. Jim Paupst, Mr. Rock’s general practitioner, said in an interview yesterday. “He is so lucky, truly. It’s nice to have a happy ending.”</p> <p>Dr. Paupst credited the early detection of the cancer to the fact that Mr. Rock, 53, has been having an annual blood test -- known as a prostate specific antigen, or PSA --since 1993. The blood test is designed to help detect prostate cancer in its earliest forms, but there are mixed opinions within the medical community about its usefulness. The $20 test is not insured by provinces such as Ontario.</p> <p>Mr. Rock’s father died of prostate cancer several years ago -- a fact that doubled the health minister's own chances of getting the disease. Mr. Rock, a fitness enthusiast who jogs every morning, is an ardent advocate of preventive medicine and disease research.</p> <p>As health minister in February 1999, Mr. Rock announced a five- year, $15-million federal grant to establish a national centre of excellence in Vancouver to conduct research on prostate cancer. At the time, he noted the disease had surpassed lung cancer as the most common cancer among Canadian men.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Prostate cancer is second only to lung cancer as the deadliest form of cancer for men. About 4,200 Canadian men will die of it this year. The key to avoiding serious complications and death is early detection. That helped in the case of former Reform party leader Preston Manning, 58, who was diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer last August through a PSA test. In October, he was told surgery was needed.</p> <p>The operation was performed in mid-December and Mr. Manning returned to the Commons last week. Among those who publicly welcomed his return, during an exchange in question period, was Mr. Rock.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As reported in the above story, not only that the justice minister of the Airbus Affair era was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the month after the November 2000 election called following Trudeau’s death, but the main right-wing opposition Reform party’s leader of that era, Preston Manning – by this time ex-leader – was diagnosed with prostate cancer in August 2000, i.e., the month before Trudeau’s September death due to the disease.</p> <p>Rock’s “first instinct” was to keep his prostate cancer problem private, but his aide Cyrus Reporter felt it would be impossible (“Is the man fit to serve?”, by Anne McIlroy, October 18, 2003, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The cloak of secrecy is so extensive that, when Allan Rock, then the health minister, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2001, his first instinct was to keep the news private. Cyrus Reporter, then a top aide to the minister (now with the national law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain), says he quickly realized it would be impossible to hide Mr. Rock’s absence of several weeks. He also says former Reform Party leader Preston Manning had led the way a year earlier by revealing that he had undergone surgery for the same ailment.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Cyrus Reporter had been a key aide for Rock since the Airbus Affair days; had Mulroney’s libel lawsuit gone to trial instead of a settlement in January 1997, Reporter and 3 female journalists – including Stevie Cameron – would have had to give testimonies due to subpoenas by Mulroney’s lawyers to find out their roles in the RCMP investigation, as I noted in a March 2009 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-11/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 2)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In 1996 during his civil litigation with the RCMP and the Canadian government over the Airbus Affair, Mr. Mulroney’s side expressed the view that there was a vendetta against him in the Canadian media that contributed to the RCMP criminal investigation, and his lawyers subpoenaed three top Canadian journalists to testify to find out their roles in it, who were: author and former <em>The Fifth Estate</em> host Stevie Cameron, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> newspaper columnist Susan Delacourt, and <em>Maclean’s</em> magazine writer Mary Janigan; all happened to be women (in addition to the three female journalists, Mulroney’s lawyers also subpoenaed the executive assistant of then justice minister Allan Rock by the name of Cyrus Reporter).”</p> </blockquote> <p>As Reporter pointed out, former Reform leader Preston Manning had led the way in 2000 by letting the public know of his prostate cancer status. However, even Manning hadn’t let it become public when diagnosed in August, or when told in October surgery was needed, but until December 13-14 – his surgery time just like Rock later (“Manning urges men to have prostate test; Cancer expert praises ‘wonderful example’”, December 14, 2000, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““In the middle of all this when he’s telling me, he’s also saying ‘Get the word out to other men,’” said family friend Ron Wood, Manning’s Calgary spokesperson for years. “He’s got a heart as big as Western Canada or maybe bigger and he takes the time to think about other people.”</p> <p>Manning, 58, who will be treated for early stage prostate cancer, advocated a prostate-specific antigen blood test, which can detect if cancer is present in the prostate, a gland surrounding the neck of the bladder in males.</p> <p>A cancer expert says Manning is to be commended for letting Canadian people know what he’s going through.</p> <p>“It’s brave,” said John Blanchard, president of the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Few men who have survived prostate cancer want it known they’ve had the disease. Many keep silent, embarrassed by common side-effects of treatment such as incontinence and impotence.</p> <p>Manning’s doctor suggested he take the PSA test during a physical in August. The cancer was confirmed during the recent election, which saw Manning re-elected in his Calgary Southwest riding.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Manning, the father of five grown children, faces a four-to-five-hour operation today or tomorrow in a Calgary hospital. His family expects he could be back at work when Parliament resumes Jan. 29.”</p> </blockquote> <p>After the election on November 27, the Parliament didn’t reconvene until January 29, 2001. Upon the early-December prostate cancer diagnosis, Allan Rock could have had a January surgery to keep his temporary absence from the political scene unnoticeable, and yet he waited until February 13.</p> <p>In comparison, the pre-eminent Canadian elder statesman and political leader of his time, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, hid his terminal illnesses from the public until after his death; afterwards, his family continued to maintain privacy regarding some of the diseases that claimed him at the age of 80.</p> <p>Though he never won 2 or 3 consecutive parliamentary majorities like Mulroney and Chretien later did, Trudeau had cemented his place in history as the longest-serving Canadian prime minister from Quebec – the same province Mulroney and Chretien were from – and the one who instituted Canada’s own Constitution. Later, surviving polarized public opinions about him by the time of his 1984 retirement, Trudeau endured to become one of the most adored Canadians by the end of his life. (“<a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19840614&id=iH4xAAAAIBAJ&sjid=taUFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1520,1367536" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Trudeau: ‘Lucky to face issues for which he had been tutored’</font></a>”, by L. Ian MacDonald, June 14, 1984, <em>The Gazette</em>; and, “<a href="http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/obit-trudeau.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Charismatic Canadian Prime Minister, Dead at 80</font></a>”, by Michael T. Kaufman, September 29, 2000, <em>The New York Times</em>).</p> <p>On September 7, 2000, only 3 weeks before his death, Trudeau’s family made the first announcement about him not being well, with no other details; it generated a great deal of media interest (“Trudeau ailing, sons say: Concern for his health explodes after family releases brief note”, by Kate Jaimet, September 8, 2000, <a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Times – Colonist</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Concern about the health of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau grew on Thursday after the family released a brief statement that he is “not well.”</p> <p>The statement from his sons Justin and Sasha indicated that Trudeau is receiving medical attention but is resting comfortably at home.</p> <p>The brief note fuelled a media storm with rumours flying that the former prime minister was on his deathbed.</p> <p>From about 4 p.m., when the news of Trudeau’s illness first broke, until after nightfall, a crowd of reporters and cameramen filled the sidewalks outside the front and rear entrances of the former prime minister’s home on Montreal’s busy Avenue des Pins. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Fritz Niederegger, a neighbour, was one of those who passed by Friday, hoping for news. A collector of Mercedes automobiles, Niederegger said he chatted with Trudeau last year about the former prime minister’s vintage car, a 1959 Mercedes 300SL.</p> <p>“He’s extremely friendly. He’s not an arrogant man at all,” Niederegger said. “When people here saw him on the street, they talked to him. I see (former prime minister Brian) Mulroney sometimes. He wouldn’t smile at anyone at all. Not like Mr. Trudeau.”</p> <p>Neighbours said everyone on the street respected his privacy. He would greet neighbours and exchange hellos, but often nothing more than that. Still, he commanded a great respect.</p> <p>“He was a clairvoyant man. He saw 10 years into the future,” said one next-door neighbour who declined to give his name.</p> <p>Earlier in the day, Ann Paris, Trudeau’s assistant at the prominent Montreal law firm Heenan Blaikie, said that the two sons are with their father.</p> <p>“He’s 80 and so of course he’s not going to feel well. But he’s not well and he’s receiving medical attention.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Trudeau family guards its privacy carefully and the release of the brief statement about the former prime minister prompted an immediate flurry of speculation about his state of health. However, despite the massive media scrum outside the art deco mansion in a posh part of Montreal, few other details were released.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“Not well” seemed the only info from either Trudeau’s family or assistant Ann Paris at his law firm Heenan Blaikie; but the lack of details did not prevent rumours from flying that he was on deathbed.</p> <p>As his neighbours indicated Pierre Trudeau had been an intensely private person, despite his friendliness in contrast to the imperious and stern Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>So how much did the media learn from other sources? Trudeau had had a bout of pneumonia earlier in the year, and some latest info indicated he had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for about 5 years, but according to his friend Senator Serge Joyal, Trudeau was “as sharp as usual”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Senator Serge Joyal, a Trudeau friend, said he and other friends have seen Trudeau regularly during the past few months.</p> <p>“It is our general perception that he never recovered from the pneumonia he had last winter,” said Joyal. “He is 80 years old and he doesn’t have the same capacity as someone 20 or 30 years old. But it has no impact on his mind. He is as sharp as usual.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>It emerged from a variety of sources on Thursday that the former prime minister has been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for about five years.</p> <p>“It is an average Parkinson’s -- no trembling,” added Joyal. “As my mother would say he needs a good strong dose of vitamins. On the other hand, he is not suffering from cancer or any other major disease.””</p> </blockquote> <p>So Trudeau had begun to suffer from Parkinson’s Disease around the time of the Airbus Affair. But “he is not suffering from cancer” as his old friend, Senator Serge Joyal, stated flatly.</p> <p>According to another old friend, retired Senator Jacques Hebert, Trudeau had “no illness”, but rather the lingering psychological effects from the death of his youngest son Michel – discussed in Part 12 – and that of his old friend Gerard Pelletier, one of the “Three Wise Men” including Trudeau who had entered federal politics together in 1965 (“‘He seemed to have become more frail’: The recent losses of his beloved son and a lifelong buddy have been hard on the man who once defined charisma. Chris Cobb reports”, by Chris Cobb, September 8, 2000, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Ottawa Citizen</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“But according to retired senator Jacques Hebert, Mr. Trudeau was gradually recovering from the loss of Michel.</p> <p>“It’s not every 80-year-old who walks to work every day,” Mr. Hebert said when his longtime friend turned 80 last Oct. 18. “He’s aged a little but has no illness. Like any father, the loss of his son was a huge shock but he has intense inner strength. Little by little he’s getting through it.”</p> <p>Michel’s death was the worst of a series of personal tragedies that have befallen Mr. Trudeau in recent years.</p> <p>The loss of another longtime friend, Gerard Pelletier, to cancer in 1997 was also a terrible blow. Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Pelletier and the late Jean Marchand, who were called the “Three Wise Men,” set out for Ottawa in 1965 to combat separatism by reforming federalism. Their aim was to create a bigger role for francophones in federal affairs.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Former Trudeau cabinet minister Marc Lalonde, another old friend, also confirmed that Trudeau had no particular illness, and that “his mind was all there”: </p> <blockquote> <p>“Marc Lalonde, who served as a senior Liberal cabinet minister under Mr. Trudeau in the 1970s, said his longtime friend appeared weak when he met him in August.</p> <p>“He was frailer than he used to be, but he was in a very good condition and his mind was all there,” Mr. Lalonde said in an interview.</p> <p>“We had lunch together, and it was a very pleasant event.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>“He was showing his age,” Mr. Lalonde noted. “He is an 80-year-old man. He seemed to have become more frail, he lost weight. But otherwise, nothing in particular.””</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Part 11, in 1996 in his libel lawsuit testimony during the Airbus Affair, Brian Mulroney had identified Marc Lalonde as German Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber’s lawyer lobbying the Chretien government on Schreiber’s behalf.</p> <p>It appears to me to have been a generational gap in the degree of social openness, between Mr. Trudeau with his old political friends and the newer Preston Manning and Allan Rock. Something was wrong with Trudeau’s health and third-party observations would not lie:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Michel, 23, had been back-country skiing with friends in B.C.’s Kokanee Glacier Park on Nov. 13, 1998, when he was swept into Kokanee Lake by an avalanche. The drowning, said one Trudeau colleague, hit the former prime minister like a sledgehammer.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Trudeau’s last major trip was to London late last year, where he was honoured by the Aga Khan Foundation. The Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the Ismaili sect of Shiite Muslims, long admired Mr. Trudeau and his sympathetic policies towards the Ismaili people.</p> <p>There is some dispute as to whether Mr. Trudeau, the honoured guest at the Aga Khan Millennium Ball, was supposed to speak, but in the end he did not. One participant spoke later of being surprised and saddened at the vacant look in the honoured guest’s eyes. There was a sense, said an acquaintance, that he wasn’t always connecting with his surroundings.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“Vacant look” in Trudeau’s eyes even when he was the honoured guest at the international Aga Khan Millennium Ball.</p> <p>Three weeks later when Trudeau died, his sons formally disclosed that their father had suffered from Parkinson’s and prostate cancer (“THE STATEMENT”, September 29, 2000, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The following is the statement issued yesterday by the sons of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau:</p> <p>Justin and Sacha Trudeau deeply regret to inform you that their father, the Rt. Honourable Pierre Elliot Trudeau, passed away shortly after 3:00 p.m. today, September 28, 2000. In addition to Parkinson’s disease, Mr. Trudeau suffered from prostate cancer.</p> <p>Funeral arrangements are being prepared and the details will be provided as soon as they are finalized.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Either the old guards of the Trudeau political circle were also kept in the dark, or they protected his impeccable, regal image to the very end.</p> <p>But what about the “vacant look” others had observed?</p> <p>Part 12 has cited that Trudeau died of dementia and prostate cancer. Dementia would have fit that “vacant look” description, but it was an illness not publicly associated with Trudeau until a 2013 book on Trudeau’s eldest son Justin, who by this time was on his way to fill the father’s old shoes as Liberal party leader (“<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/03/06/pierre-trudeau-dementia-cancer-treatment_n_2820558.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Pierre Trudeau’s Dementia Led Him To Turn Down Cancer Treatment</font></a>”, March 6, 2013, <em>The Huffington Post Canada</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Pierre Trudeau chose not to be treated for metastasized prostate cancer after he was diagnosed with dementia, a new Huffington Post Canada ebook reveals. The cancer could have been treated, but the former prime minister wanted the disease to claim him before he lost his mind.</p> <p>…</p> <p>According to the New York Times, Trudeau was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, which often leads to dementia. He died on Sept. 28, 2000.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In an interview with The Canadian Press, Justin Trudeau said he does not dispute the account,</p> <p>“The characterization in the book is certainly not something that I would say is false,” Trudeau said. “It’s not anything that my father said explicitly to me. He may have said it to some other people.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>“He remained extremely lucid right up until the very end.””</p> </blockquote> <p>“Extremely lucid right up until the very end” according to Justin, hmm. But at least a plausible end-of-life cause that fit the appearance is not denied.</p> <p>In Part 12, I have mentioned the coincidence that recently in 2013 when the French Canadian business patriarch Paul Desmarais, who had been a close patron of former prime ministers Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, passed away on October 8 it happened to be the 3rd anniversary of this blog-post series by me focusing on Canadian politics and its international links.</p> <p>It had taken me nearly 3 years in this long series to get to the infamous Airbus Affair of 1995-97 – with Part 11’s initial posting in September 2013 – and well over 3 years to get to the monopoly-inclined politics of the 1980s under Brian Mulroney and the 1990s under Jean Chretien, and their behind-the-scenes links – when I put forth Part 12 in late January 2014.</p> <p>Around this later time the rather unthinkable happened: Heenan Blaikie, Pierre Trudeau’s law firm since retiring from politics in 1984, later joined by Jean Chretien after his retirement, and a financially healthy and growing firm, suddenly collapsed in January 2014 when dozens of partners left, and closed its door in February.</p> <p>The history of Heenan Blaikie can be a case study of monopoly-oriented elite politics.</p> <p>By any stretch of the imagination, Heenan Blaikie had been “a great success story” up until 2 months before the sudden closing (“<a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2014/02/08/how_the_heenan_blaikie_law_firm_collapsed.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">How the Heenan Blaikie law firm collapsed</font></a>”, by Sandro Contenta, February 8, 2014, <em>Toronto Star</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Forty years ago, three friends gathered over drinks at McGill University, their alma mater, and agreed to launch a law firm in Montreal. They sealed the deal the way friends do — they shook on it.</p> <p>“We started this firm on a handshake, not on a partnership contract, because we knew that it had to be founded on trust,” says Roy Heenan, referring to the firm he launched with Donald Johnston and Peter Blaikie.</p> <p>In the early days, the lawyers relaxed by throwing a football around the office. Then Johnston became an MP, so his name came off the door. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau joined in 1984, and a rush of marquee names followed. In what seemed like no time at all, the firm had 500 lawyers with offices across the country and in Paris.</p> <p>By any measure, Heenan Blaikie was a great success story.</p> <p>“When we were moving into the Adelaide Centre five years ago,” recalls Toronto partner John Craig, referring to the five floors the firm occupies, “between signing a lease and actually moving in we had become too big for the space. We just kept growing.</p> <p>“It seemed like the sky’s the limit.”</p> <p>And then it came crashing down.</p> <p>Heenan Blaikie became the biggest law firm to self-destruct in Canada when partners voted Wednesday to dissolve it. It collapsed so fast it left the legal community breathless.</p> <p>The <i>coup de grâce</i> was an exodus of partners in the month before its demise.</p> <p>And yet, on paper at least, the ship wasn’t sinking. Heenan says the firm billed clients $222 million for services last year and cleared a $75 million profit. Last December was one of its best months ever, with $35.1 million billed.</p> <p>“That’s another irony in all this — things seemed to be turning around,” Craig says, referring to the December revenue.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Heenan Blaikie was a mid-sized firm bolstered by big names like former prime minister Jean Chrétien, retired Supreme Court justice Michel Bastarache, and former Quebec premier Pierre-Marc Johnson. …</p> <p>… </p> <p>Johnston went on to become a Liberal cabinet minister, Blaikie became president of the Progressive Conservative Party in the early 1980s, and Heenan concentrated on running the firm. </p> <p>The Toronto office, the first outside of Montreal, opened in 1989.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In 2011, the firm opened an office in Paris with a team of 18 lawyers — many poached from the British firm Norton Rose — largely to access markets in Africa.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As co-founder Roy Heenan tells it, Heenan Blaikie has been a great success story founded on trust, by handshake.</p> <p>Undoubtedly, the prominent Liberal celebrities who joined the firm, including former Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien and former Quebec Premier Pierre-Marc Johnson, were testimonials to Heenan’s sense of trust. The founders themselves were no less stellar: Donald Johnston, one of the three, became a Liberal cabinet minister while another, Peter Blaikie, became president of the Progressive Conservative Party “in the early 1980s”.</p> <p>But wait, two Heenan Blaikie co-founders had senior leading roles, respectively, in the two main political parties opposing each other – how would such multi-party politics be viewed as?</p> <p>Governing “by consensus” perhaps, or that is how Roy Heenan, the other co-founder and longtime chairman, sees “the beauty of the firm” and its success under him, shaking his head over its demise after his retirement:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Some partners talk of a “perfect storm” — fewer and stingier clients, more competition for contracts, tensions over restructuring, a sudden drop in profits, partners nervous about cuts to their incomes and rival firms smelling blood, and poaching.</p> <p>But Heenan, the firm’s chairman from 1973 to 2012, says the real problem is the loss of trust, the firm’s founding ingredient. He describes a firm torn over the past year by infighting and clashing visions, where individuals and whole offices were accused of not pulling their weight, and disputes raged over practices that should be cut.</p> <p>“It’s very hard to see it end as a result of squabbles, because I really think that’s what brought the firm down, rather than the financial situation,” says Heenan, 78, now the firm’s chairman emeritus.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“I always tell the story of the handshake to show that this was a place where you dealt in trust,” he says by phone from the firm’s Montreal office. “We liked each other, we were happy together. I’ve got dozens of emails from former partners saying, ‘I can’t believe it, it was such a great place to work.’ So that’s the sad part.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Some see a storied law firm caught off guard by a changed business climate. But Heenan blames managers for failing to work as a team.</p> <p>“We used to manage by consensus, and that was the beauty of the firm. But once you start throwing stones, that atmosphere disappears.</p> <p>“It’s very upsetting to me,” he adds. “I think ending the firm was totally unnecessary.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Ending the law firm that has been the devotion and pride of his career and life may have been brought unnecessary sadness to Mr. Heenan, but in politics the notion of “consensus” could sometimes be hard to differentiate from ‘monopoly’.</p> <p>For one, the joining of Heenan Blaikie by Pierre Trudeau soon after his retirement in 1984 had carried a symbolism of overarching political ambitions by Heenan Blaikie (“Trudeau joins Montreal law firm as senior counsel”, by Lawrence Surtees, September 20, 1984, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau starts work today with the Montreal law firm of Heenan, Blaikie, Jolin, Potvin, Trepanier, Cobbett after a 19-year absence from legal practice.</p> <p>Mr. Trudeau’s duties as senior counsel to the 11-year-old firm will be to advise and discuss cases with any of the 40 members of the firm, said senior partner Roy Heenan. It is very unlikely, however, that Mr. Trudeau will plead any cases before the courts for the firm’s corporate clients.</p> <p>…</p> <p>As counsel to the firm, Mr. Trudeau “will be involved in almost any area of the law but our respective interests lie primarily with the Charter of Rights.</p> <p>“Having the chief architect of the Charter as counsel to the firm will be of great benefit, particularly since it is a booming area in legal practice,” Mr. Heenan said in an interview.</p> <p>Mr. Trudeau succeeded in his drive for a constitutional Charter of Rights and Freedoms when the Constitution was patriated from Britain and proclaimed into law by the Queen in April, 1982.</p> <p>Mr. Trudeau brought his interest in civil liberties to Parliament in 1965 and he began an unrelenting push for a charter of rights following his appointment as minister of justice in April, 1967, by then prime minister Lester Pearson.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Trudeau was introduced to the company in 1978 when he convinced Donald Johnston, a founding partner of the firm – then named Johnston, Heenan and Blaikie – to run for Parliament. Mr. Johnston was elected in the October, 1978, by-election in the Montreal riding of Saint-Henri-Westmount, joined the federal cabinet in March, 1980…</p> <p>Peter Blaikie, the other senior and founding partner, was unsuccessful in his 1983 bid for the leadership of the federal Progressive Conservative Party. He was a former president of that party.”</p> </blockquote> <p>No doubt next to God and Christ, Pierre Trudeau was the most treasured for the ambitious Heenan Blaikie, whose co-founder Donald Johnston had received senior Liberal jobs from Trudeau and now accorded Trudeau his: “senior counsel to the firm” advising other lawyers. Had co-founder Peter Blaikie, the Tories’ national president in the early 1980s, won the 1983 leadership contest over Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark and others, Heenan Blaikie would have ruled Canadian democracy like a “consensus” overlord – or at least could have as they wished.</p> <p>Falling short of such hegemony goal, and with Brian Mulroney in power, rallying around Pierre Trudeau became the political undertaking of Heenan Blaikie’s founders, notably in support of Trudeau’s staunch opposition, previously mentioned in Part 12, to the Mulroney government’s constitutional reform initiatives: the Meech Lake accord and the Charlottetown accord.</p> <p>In a July 2009 blog post I summarized the relevant history from the 1982 Constitution to the 1987-1990 Meech Lake accord, and Pierre Trudeau’s opposition to the latter (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-6/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 7)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“When Canada was founded as a British dominion in 1867, the British North America Act establishing it became its Constitution – updated only by the power of the British parliament – until prime minister Pierre Trudeau ‘repatriated’ a modern Constitution in April 1982 in a ceremony attended by Queen Elizabeth II. The 1982 Constitution had a Charter of Rights and Freedoms with protection for the basic rights and freedoms, recognition of English and French as the official languages, and recognition of “existing” aboriginal and treaty rights of the native people; it also specified a future constitutional amending formula, under which major constitutional changes would require approval by the parliament and by at least two-thirds of the provincial legislatures representing at least 50% of the population of all provinces; but the 1982 Constitution left the national political institutions unchanged – including the appointed Senate modeled after the British “House of Lords” but without a peerage system and with a mandatory retirement age of 75.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In late 1981 Quebec’s Levesque refused to sign the agreement for the new Constitution, claiming that his province had the right to exercise a veto based on English-French duality in Canada, or alternately unanimity among provinces was required for constitutional change…</p> <p>The new Constitution’s mention of existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the native people was won near the last minute in 1981, after years of native protests led by the National Indian Brotherhood (predecessor of the Assembly of First Nations) and intense pressure put on the British parliament by the Canadian natives; however the natives continued to seek recognition of “title” rather than “rights”, a veto similar to what Quebec claimed, as well as a greater political role.</p> <p>…</p> <p>During the 1984 election Tory leader Brian Mulroney expressed sympathy toward Quebec separatists who opposed the “Centralistic” attitudes of the Liberal government; after he became prime minister and in 1985 Quebec Liberal leader Robert Bourassa became premier (again), negotiations for a constitutional amendment to accommodate Quebec began with a 1986 summary of five demands from Quebec: recognition of Quebec as a distinct society, a guarantee of increased provincial powers on immigration to Quebec, limits on federal spending power in areas of provincial jurisdiction, a Quebec say in Supreme Court of Canada appointments, and a Quebec “right of veto” on future constitutional changes.</p> <p>The Meech Lake accord reached in 1987 by the federal government and all provinces gave Quebec better concessions in most areas of the five demands than Bourassa had originally asked for, but it was achieved in accordance with the Mulroney Tories’ decentralization agenda; thus, whereas Quebec alone would be recognized as a “distinct society” for its unique French culture, in most of the other areas the same or similar concessions would be granted to all provinces; in particular, future constitutional changes concerning the Senate, the House of Commons and the Supreme Court would require consent by every province in Canada.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In retirement from politics, Pierre Trudeau was very critical of many aspects of the Quebec demands, of the Meech Lake accord acceding to these demands, and of the Mulroney government’s decentralization objectives.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Trudeau’s opposition to the Meech Lake accord received a major publicity boost from his law firm Heenan Blaikie when co-founder Donald Johnston took up the role of Trudeau promoter, publishing a book of Trudeau’s speeches on the subject and doing a national promotional tour (“MP publishes Trudeau’s anti-Meech talks”, September 22, 1988, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Windsor Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Donald Johnston, the MP who quit the Liberal caucus over opposition to the Meech Lake accord, is publishing a collection of speeches against the constitutional deal by former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.</p> <p>Johnston, who now sits as an Independent Liberal, said people still respect Trudeau and will listen to his arguments against Meech Lake.</p> <p>“The person that people would most like to hear from is Trudeau himself,” the former cabinet minister said yesterday.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The accord, signed at a meeting between Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and the premiers last year, would amend the Constitution to designate Quebec as a “distinct society,” give the provinces the power to appoint senators and Supreme Court judges, make it more difficult for the territories to become provinces themselves, and limit the power of the federal government to introduce new national shared-cost programs like medicare.</p> <p>The pact must be ratified by all provinces and Parliament by June, 1990, to come into force. Thus far, eight provinces and Parliament have approved it, leaving only Manitoba and New Brunswick to follow suit.</p> <p>The book, to be published by Toronto-based Stoddart Publishing, goes to the presses Friday and will be in book stores in three to four weeks, Stoddart spokesman Angel Guerra said.</p> <p>Johnston will tour Canada to promote the book, which has Trudeau’s blessing, Guerra said…”</p> </blockquote> <p>So Donald Johnston’s opposition to the Meech Lake accord was so strong that as an MP he quit the Liberal party caucus over the party’s support of the accord under leader John Turner.</p> <p>Perhaps not coincidentally, the ever-majestic Pierre Trudeau earlier showed contempt for Turner after the latter’s succession as Prime Minister in 1984 following a leadership contest Johnston had also participated (“‘I was my best successor,’ Trudeau says at fund-raiser”, by Lawrence Martin, November 21, 1984, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Asked if the Liberals chose someone as good as him, Mr. Trudeau said casually: “As good as me? I was my best successor, but I decided not to succeed myself. . . . That’s all.” Asked about Mr. Turner’s statement in a recent interview that Mr. Trudeau did not leave the party with policy or preparation, the former PM replied somewhat sardonically: “You know how things are. When you go, you take everything with you.” He added: “I didn’t plan to leave, so maybe there wasn’t much left when I left.” The two long-time Liberal adversaries were at a fund-raising reception for Donald Johnston, an unsuccessful candidate in the Liberal leadership race.</p> <p>Mr. Turner approached Mr. Trudeau as he stood at the side of the room at one point and the two said hello. But Mr. Trudeau had been talking to artist Bruce LeDain and continued to do so. Mr. Turner stood beside them for a moment and then moved away without conversing further.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Though neither succeeded, a revealing scenario had been there for Peter Blaikie to become the Tory leader and Donald Johnston the Liberal leader, and if successful their Heenan Blaikie “consensus” would then guide the Canadian democracy of the mid-1980s.</p> <p>In the end the Meech Lake accord collapsed in 1990, to a large degree due to the Aboriginal people’s objection to its focus excluding their issues, as I reviewed in July 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-6/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 7</font>)</a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“But when the deadline of of June 23 arrived, [Premier] Clyde Wells had done nothing to put the accord to a vote in Newfoundland; he made the decision after an aboriginal people’s campaign – with Manitoba Legislative Assembly member Elijah Harper as their point man – had prevented the accord from being introduced in the Manitoba legislature, with the natives objecting to the negotiations’ exclusion of native participation and the accord’s exclusion of aboriginal issues; at that point Wells decided to rebuff Tory Senate leader Lowell Murray’s proposal of extending the deadline and let the accord expire.”</p> </blockquote> <p>After the Meech Lake accord’s failure, the 1992 Charlottetown accord also introduced Aboriginal self-government rights, an elected Senate and a Social Charter. Mulroney ceded to demands by Liberal party leader Jean Chretien and Deborah Gray, Reform party’s lone MP at that point, for a national referendum, which had been a rarity in Canada as I reviewed in a still unfinished November 2009 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-2/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 11</font>)</a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Referendum, which when non-binding is often referred to as plebiscite, was quite common at the provincial and territorial level in Canada – by the time of the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional accord it had been used at least 47 times in history and by all the provinces; at the national level though, referendum had been used only twice before, each time non-binding and called by a Liberal government, in 1898 on alcohol prohibition and in 1942 on military conscription.<sup> </sup>”</p> </blockquote> <p>Many in Trudeau’s political circle opposed the Charlottetown accord, as did Trudeau himself though this time, unlike with the Meach Lake accord, he did not announce his view early.</p> <p>Noted among the Charlottetown accord opponents campaigning to defeat it were lawyer Deborah Coyne, who had borne a daughter out of wedlock with Trudeau, and Heenan Blaikie co-founder Peter Blaikie (“‘No’ camp attracts odd bunch”, by Patrick Doyle, September 17, 1992, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“As the No side for the Oct. 26 referendum shapes up, it looks like the bitterest of enemies will be marching cheek by jowl to defeat the new Constitution.</p> <p>Strange bedfellows?</p> <p>Try convicted FLQ murderer Paul Rose and diehard Canadian nationalist Pierre Elliot Trudeau.</p> <p>The former prime minister hasn’t committed himself yet but the number of people around him who are firmly in the No camp is fuelling speculation he will leap that way.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Trudeau was an avowed enemy of the Meech Lake accord, forerunner of the current deal, and observers are saying he is aching to get into the referendum campaign.</p> <p>Perhaps the closest of Trudeau associates foursquare against the constitutional amendment is Deborah Coyne. The mother of his 2-year-old daughter Sarah, Coyne has formed a small group of academics to actively campaign for the No side.</p> <p>A constitutional lawyer and former adviser to Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells, she argues that there are at least three major flaws with the Charlottetown accord:</p> <p>* There hasn’t been sufficient public debate.</p> <p>* The deal diminishes the federal government, establishes undemocratic mechanisms and would make Canada “incoherent and unable to function effectively.”</p> <p>* The Charter of Rights would be undermined and the proposed Canada Clause would “set groups against groups in a hierarchy of rights.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Another dissident Tory is former party president Peter Blaikie. Currently a partner in the Montreal law firm where Trudeau works, Blaikie says he doesn’t like the deal and will campaign against it.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As strange bedfellows go, Blaikie’s opposition to the Charlottetown accord wasn’t about Coyne’s interest of public debate or protections for federal government power and the Charter of Rights. He viewed the accord a worse route for Quebec to achieve independence and security (“There are strong echoes of 1980 in the current No campaign”, by Gretta Chambers, September 17, 1992, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The mystique of No, which played such a large part in the winning of the 1980 [Quebec] referendum for federalism, is now being put to work against the proposed federalism of 1992. The idea that No is always safer, because it does not commit Quebec to anything definitive and immutable, has already become the cornerstone of today’s No campaign.</p> <p>In 1980, those who favored voting No to sovereignty-association painted the Yes option as shutting Quebecers into much narrower constitutional confines from which there would be no escape. Once the notion of inescapability was well established, the 1980 No campaign went on to describe sovereignty as an uninhabitable prison of deprivation and isolation. Not until the end of the campaign were the strengths of Confederation brought into play.</p> <p>Prime Minister Trudeau’s famous speech in the Paul Sauve Arena is seen as the upward turning point for the No campaign. His ringing defence of the federation and his promise of its renewal fell on fertile ground already tilled by the fear of an irrevocable unknown.</p> <p>Today, the No campaigners are preparing the same ground just as assiduously. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>A high-profile standard-bearer for the No side in 1980, Peter Blaikie, a past-president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and former Alliance Quebec chairman, is saying No this time, too. Independence, says Blaikie, is preferable to the chaos that would ensue from the Charlottetown deal.</p> <p>Both times, Blaikie’s No has been directed against disruptive change. This time, however, there is no avoiding change. It’s a matter of choosing the most promising path to security.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Being ‘in bed’ together but from entirely different perspectives is perhaps an essence of what Roy Heenan fondly refers to as “consensus”.</p> <p>Before the Charlottetown accord was reached, in June 1992 Blaikie had written an article arguing against the constitutional negotiation, expressing opposition to further decentralization of government power, but also pointing out that decentralization had gone on under the former Trudeau government (“MUDDLING TO DISASTER; Constitutional reformers may end up destroying the country”, by Peter Blaikie, June 10, 1992, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Ottawa Citizen</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“From at least 1976 until 1984, Brian Mulroney seemed to be plus catholique que Trudeau. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>He was bitterly critical of the position adopted by Joe Clark following Pierre Trudeau’s late 1980 proposal to unilaterally patriate the Constitution, <br />insisting that the Conservatives must vigorously support the then Prime Minister.</p> <p>There is no link, other than the instinct for power, between the 1976 declaration and the radically different view of Canada now being espoused by <br />Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>The principal rationalization, which has become a mantra in some circles, is the need to decentralize power. Arrant nonsense.</p> <p>Indisputably, Canada is today the most decentralized country in the industrialized world. Contrary to popular myth, the process of decentralization continued under the Trudeau governments. Most Canadian provinces are currently unable to finance properly their existent responsibilities. There is no convincing evidence, even in Quebec, that the citizens of Canada, as opposed to the provincial political barons, want significant further decentralization. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Why, when we have so little confidence in any of our leaders, do we appear so eager to let them cobble together a deal, not through rational analysis, but as the result of threats and trade-offs, what Ms. Gagnon calls the buffet-monstre, where “Mr. Clarke has put everything on the table, and everyone helps himself?” One thing is clear; whatever the other participants agree on, the federal government will concede. For Brian Mulroney and Joe Clarke there is no Rubicon, no line in the sand.” </p> </blockquote> <p>Six days later Blaikie followed up with another article in which he attacked not only the Quebec separatists but Aboriginal self-government rights, calling it “evidence of national dementia” (“Questions; The headlong rush to ‘get a deal’ is dangerous”, by Peter Blaikie, June 16, 1992, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Why, when we have so little confidence in our leaders, are we so eager to let them cobble together a “deal?”</p> <p>Why should we allow the separatists, as will occur in a referendum on “federal offers,” to attack the proposal without having to defend their position?</p> <p>There is a second, equally dangerous form of dismantling of Canada being proposed. Until recently, the issue of native “self- government” has been largely ignored by political commentators. The virtual silence is profoundly disturbing.</p> <p>In fact, the current proposal to enshrine, for Canada’s aboriginal peoples, an “inherent right to self-government,” is evidence of national dementia.</p> <p>Consider the following questions, which are only some of those one might properly ask:</p> <p>a) What is the underlying objective, the vision, behind the proposal? “Self-government” is simply a means. What is the end?</p> <p>One must conclude that the government has abandoned any belief that native peoples are best served by integration into the mainstream of Canadian life. Is apartheid the goal? If so, how will that improve the life of the aboriginal peoples?</p> <p>…</p> <p>d) What are to be the content and limits of “self-government?” There is little doubt that Ottawa and the native leaders have dramatically different views. It appears, from Joe Clark’s bafflegab, that Ottawa is thinking in terms of municipal governments. Anyone who accepts that the native leaders <br />agree believes in Santa Claus and every other multicultural equivalent. Is it unreasonable that we, the citizens of Canada, its “owners” so to speak, <br />insist that, before approving the “deal” that is going to save us from hellfire and damnation, our “servants” tell us what it means?</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Suddenly this former Tory national president sounded a more staunch federalist than even Pierre Trudeau. I can see that, had Peter Blaikie become the Tory leader, none of the Mulroney-era constitutional reform initiatives would have been attempted.</p> <p>Later after the Charlottetown accord’s defeat, in May 1993 Blaikie’s criticism received a belated response from Mulroney prior to the end of his leadership, who pointed out that in the early 1980s Blaikie had criticized Trudeau the same way (“It was all a big joke; Can’t take PM’s comments seriously”, by William Johnson, June 1, 1993, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… Last Thursday, Mulroney spoke for 70 minutes to a room full of Tories in what purported to be a defence of his record on national unity, and an onslaught against Pierre Trudeau, source of all the country’s disunity.</p> <p>…</p> <p>His text is full of such little gems. Thus, he cudgels Trudeau with a 1983 quote from Peter Blaikie.</p> <p>“On Jan. 21, Mr. Blaikie, who subsequently served as chairman of Alliance Quebec, was quoted in Le Droit as saying: ‘I reproach Mr. Trudeau for refusing to understand what is happening in Quebec, for having built his career on anti-nationalism. Trudeau only worsened the situation.’”</p> <p>Blaikie did, indeed, later become chairman of Alliance Quebec – in 1987. But, what Mulroney didn’t say was that Blaikie, at the very time of that quotation, was national president of the Progressive Conservative Federation of Canada and so an ex-officio opponent of Trudeau. That would have given some context to the quotation from Blaikie who, just a few weeks later, entered the Tory race to succeed Joe Clark – the race that was to be won by Brian Mulroney.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As journalist William Johnson noted, Blaikie’s 1983 criticism of Trudeau had been from the role of the Tory national president and the aspiration to win the Tory leadership. Now in the Mulroney era in 1992 Blaikie spoke out as an individual, and of course he was Trudeau’s law partner also.</p> <p>My opinions in <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot033 - Fax to MP Kim Campbell, Nov 30, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my November 1992 press releases</font></a> were in partial agreement with Deborah Coyne and Peter Blaikie, that the final Charlottetown accord – reached in August two months after Blaikie’s articles – was a deal through “threats and trade-offs” as in Blaikie’s words unknown to me at the time; but I contrasted two different stages of constitutional negotiations, namely under then Constitutional Affairs Minister Joe Clark versus under Mulroney:</p> <blockquote> <p>“His constitutional adventures have done nothing but damages to both national unity and the economy. The horse-trading approach he employed during the final stage of the Charlottetown constitutional negotiation after he pushed Joe Clark aside (Poor Mr. Clark, he never failed Mr. Mulroney, not yet anyway), and discarded proposals based on the efforts of many experts, political leaders and ordinary people, together with his hardball tactics during the referendum campaign, caused the massive No votes across the country and the resulting division and resentments among people.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The fact was that there had been an early stage of public consultation in the form of a royal commission led by Keith Spicer, which I briefly reviewed in my July 2009 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-6/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 7</font>)</a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… in November 1990 Mulroney took a bolder first step toward post-Meech Lake constitutional reform, appointing a 12-member royal commission, headed by prominent academic and journalist Keith Spicer, to hear the views of ordinary Canadians across the country on the future of Canada; Mulroney said:</p> <p>“Every Canadian who wants to will be able to have a say.”</p> <p>Reactions to the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future from politicians and the media were mixed: some felt that by using this forum to preclude other concrete constitutional steps he had previously promised Mulroney was actually stalling the new reform; some others felt that due to Canadians’ “divergent aspirations” the forum would lead more to cacophony and anarchy than to constructive inputs on constitutional reform; Spicer viewed it as a kind of collective therapy for the country, a quest for the Canadian soul and values.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Columnist Don McGillivray believed the Spicer forum was just “window dressing” by Mulroney, and predicted that once the process was over Mulroney would revert to his accustomed, behind-closed-doors discussions and negotiations for the Constitution.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In fact, Roger Tasse, Chretien’s former deputy, law partner and confidante, later Mulroney’s lawyer during the 1995-97 Airbus Affair, and a key figure in the controversial political “fixes” detailed in Part 12 between Mulroney and Chretien’s political circle, was appointed by Mulroney to the Spicer Commission. The inquisitive journalist Don McGillivray suspected a hidden agenda (“Spicer commission looks like rerun”, by Don McGillivray, November 3, 1990, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mulroney also said that the government “will not control the forum or dictate its findings” although he plans “to state my own views from time to time.”</p> <p>The bit about not dictating the findings needs a pinch of salt, too.</p> <p>Remember Spicer’s press conference statement that “the poets and people” will get their say first and then the lawyers will write the report.</p> <p>And watch Roger Tasse, Mulroney’s constitutional adviser, star government witness before the Charest committee last spring and the prime minister’s hit-man in the final bitter struggle over Meech Lake.</p> <p>I suspect he’s on the commission to shape the final report.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Well, a role for Tasse would at least make it easier for Liberal leader Chretien to endorse Mulroney’s deal if and when it became the reality.</p> <p>McGillivray turned out to be foresightful: once the consultation process was over and a draft, the Pearson accord, was reached under Clark but without the official participation of Quebec – after the Meech Lake accord’s demise in 1990 Quebec began to boycott constitutional reform – Mulroney did not like it and, in my view as expressed in November 1992, sabotaged it during the final negotiation stage to reach the Charlottetown accord.</p> <p>The July 7, 1992 Pearson accord was remarkable in that it packed in most of the open constitutional issues, including an elected Senate with equal provincial representation and some effective power – the Triple-E Senate notion – and reduced the provincial veto power in the flawed Meech Lake accord, as I reviewed in an August 2009 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-5/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 8)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“From July 3 to July 7, with Mulroney out of Canada, the premiers (minus Quebec’s Bourassa) and Joe Clark reached a full constitutional deal, which included an elected and equal Senate with some general veto powers that were stronger for taxation bills affecting natural resources but less for other legislations.</p> <p>The July 7 constitutional deal – known as the “Pearson Accord” – would become the basis on which Quebec premier Robert Bourassa was invited to first ministers’ meetings led by prime minister Brian Mulroney to forge a final constitutional deal; but its ‘Triple-E’ Senate part was not liked by Mulroney, and when the Charlottetown Accord was reached in August among the changes from the Pearson Accord most of the Senate veto powers would be stripped away.</p> <p>A number of issues in the Pearson accord are of particular interest here.</p> <p>In addition to recognizing aboriginal people’s “inherent right” of self-government, the Pearson accord would indeed provide guarantee in the Constitution for special Senate seats for aboriginal people, but with details to be worked out later.</p> <p>Clyde Wells’s idea of special Senate veto for Quebec (on matters affecting Quebec’s language, culture and civil law tradition) was also adapted as a mechanism where the approval by majority of Francophone senators (in addition to approval by majority of the Senate) would be required to pass “federal legislation that materially affects French language and culture”.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Pearson accord separately provided a provincial veto for constitutional changes related to the Senate:</p> <p>“Amendments to provisions of the Constitution related to the Senate should require unanimous agrement of Parliament and the provincial legislatures, once the current set of amendments related to Senate reform have come into effect.”</p> <p>In other words, Quebec and every other province would have a veto on future constitutional changes related to the Senate after the current Senate reform was completed – to Don Getty’s satisfaction as he had said all along; the veto was provided only for changes to the Senate and not for other constitutional changes.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But Brian Mulroney did not like the Senate reform package. In August 2009 again comparing the final Charlottetown accord reached under Mulroney to the draft Pearson accord, I found my November 1992 criticism of the final accord reasonably justified:</p> <blockquote> <p>“On Senate veto power in general, the Pearson accord categorized legislations into: bills materially affecting French language and culture, revenue and expenditure bills, bills involving fundamental tax policy changes directly related to natural resources, and ordinary legislation.</p> <p>A Senate majority defeat or amending of a revenue and expenditure bill would only lead to a “30-day suspensive veto” which could be overridden after that time by re-passing the bill in the Commons; but a Senate majority defeat of a bill involving fundamental tax policy changes directly related to natural resources – a matter of special interest to Alberta as earlier noted – would end the bill.</p> <p>The most interesting, and controversial, part of the Senate veto power as provided in the Pearson accord was with ordinary legislation: a 70%-vote rejection was required to defeat a bill for good, while a rejection by between 60% and 70% of the senators voting would trigger a “joint sitting” of the Senate and the Commons, where a joint vote would determine the bill’s fate.</p> <p>Below 70% supermajority, when 8 senators each from ten provinces, 2 from each of the two northern territories and several additional aboriginal senators sat together with 312 Commons MPs, the Senators’ voting power would be very meagre.</p> <p>Barring this “joint sitting” mechanism Senate power was meant to be real. Overall it was “only about half-way to being Effective”.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Yet, intriguingly when the Charlottetown accord was finally reached in August, under Mulroney’s direct supervision and starting from the Pearson accord, there would be no 70% absolute veto – nothing else but “joint sitting” – in the Senate’s veto power on ordinary legislation – and with only 6 senators (instead of 8) from each of the ten provinces, 1 (instead of 2) from each territory and several from the aboriginal people, but with 337 MPs instead of 312 (Quebec and Ontario would receive additional Commons seats in exchange for the loss of current Senate seats).</p> <p>…</p> <p>Despite its deficiencies the July 7 Pearson accord was not final and could be corrected and refined, but after Mulroney returned from Germany and took over, the turn of events led instead to results that looked like a ‘sham’ in the much heralded Charlottetown accord.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Charlottetown accord’s elected Senate, adopted under Mulroney’s supervision, would have been reduced to a chamber of dissenting voices doing rubber stamping for the most part – it hadn’t been so in the draft Pearson accord reached under Clark.</p> <p>But to Trudeau partisans, like Deborah Coyne and former Tory national president and then Trudeau law partner Peter Blaikie, an accord from the Tory government – or “Brian Mulroney and Joe Clarke” as in Blaikie’s June 10 article – was just unacceptable.</p> <p>As for Blaikie’s criticism of Aboriginal self-government, likening the idea to “apartheid”, one should understand it in it historical contexts, including “decolonization” as per then Ontario Premier Bob Rae, noted in my August 2009 blog post:</p> <blockquote> <p>“When the full constitutional negotiation led by Joe Clark went forward in April 1992 with the aboriginal leaders onboard it made immediate progress in that area, announcing a “historic breakthrough” – the first in the negotiation – to entrench the “inherent right” of native self-government in the Constitution; although most of the details remained to be worked out, Ontario premier Bob Rae praised the progress and addressed it as an issue of ‘decolonization’ – a topic that could be touchy for some Canadians as the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America was arriving (in October two weeks before the Quebec sovereignty referendum deadline); Rae said:</p> <p>“We are now ready to accept the notion of de-colonizing our relationship with <br />aboriginal peoples.””</p> </blockquote> <p>As my review in Part 10 has highlighted, the Canadian Native people aspired to have their own lands. But in this regard the Charlottetown accord did not grant them the rights to land from which to practice self-governing, as I noted in an October 2009 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/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-pa-9/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 10)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In the end, the concerns of Bourassa and Wells with regard to native self-government were addressed through mediation by Bob Rae, with Mulroney looking over his shoulder, between Bourassa and aboriginal leader Ovide Mercredi, leading to the Charlottetown accord provisions that the native self-government right “should not create new Aboriginal rights to land”, and that the courts when intervening should first focus on effecting “a negotiated resolution”; in any case Bourassa won it through Rae, whom and Romanow were the only premiers trusted by the natives according to Mercredi.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In fact, back in 1983 then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had expressed support for limited Native sovereignty (“PM says Ottawa supports limited self-rule for natives”, by Jeff Sallot, March 16, 1983, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The federal government supports the principle of limited self-government for aboriginal groups, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced yesterday at the opening of a two-day constitutional conference on native rights.</p> <p>While rejecting “full independence or absolute sovereignty” for native people, Mr. Trudeau said that because of their history as aboriginal people, Canada’s natives are entitled to “special recognition in the Constitution and to their own place in Canadian society.</p> <p>Native leaders said they were intrigued by the federal proposal, but want to learn more.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Trudeau’s announcement about native self-government is the latest development in a long evolution in federal thinking about aboriginal rights. In 1969, the Trudeau Government talked about ways to phase out Ottawa’s special obligations to natives.</p> <p>Yesterday, however, Mr. Trudeau said that native self-government is at the heart of any effort to improve the lot of Canada’s natives.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Trudeau’s statement, however, said that native governments should not function as parallels to or separate from federal and provincial governments. Aboriginal government will have to fit into that system and will have to be linked to existing governments in areas such as education, health care and other services.</p> <p>Chief David Ahenakew, the spokesman for the 300,000-member Assembly of First Nations, an aboriginal rights group that represents Indians recognized and registered under federal law, said that every time natives talk about self-government white politicians trot out a red herring, trying to depict the request as separatism. “We are not talking about extremes” such as a separate armed forces, he said.</p> <p>Indians, Chief Ahenakew said, want sovereignty in areas such as education, health care and social services.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Apparently the national Aboriginals, then led by Chief David Ahenakew, had wanted more self-government than the Trudeau government was willing to give. So the subsequent constitutional reform evolution by the Mulroney government, with its emphasis on decentralization of the federal government, became too much for Trudeau.</p> <p>Now in 1992, Trudeau first returned to his beginning in politics 42 years ago when he founded the federalist magazine <em>Cite Libre</em> and decried Quebecers as “blackmailers”, lambasting Quebecers again in a <em>Maclean’s</em> magazine article (“Trudeau Speaks Out” by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, September 28, 1992, <em><a href="http://www.macleans.ca/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Maclean’s</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Commenting on Quebec nationalist politics in the first issue of Cite Libre 42 years ago, I wrote, “The country can’t exist without us, we think to ourselves. So watch out you don’t hurt our feelings.... We depend on our power of blackmail in order to face the future.... We are getting to be a sleazy bunch of master blackmailers.”</p> <p>Things have changed a lot since then, but for the worse. Four decades ago, all Duplessis was asking for his province was that it be left in peace to go its own slow pace. His rejection of proposals for constitutional reform was intended mostly to block an updating of Canada’s economic and social institutions. And Quebec’s “no” was formulated by a relatively small political class. In today’s Quebec, however, the official blackmail refrain gets backup from a whole choir of those who like to think they are thinking people: “If English Canada won’t accept Quebec’s traditional, minimum demands, we’ll leave....”</p> <p>Leave for where? What for?</p> <p>Consider that in the past 22 years the province of Quebec has been governed by two premiers. The first was the one who coined the phrase “profitable federalism.” We’ll stay in Canada if Canada gives us enough money, he argued. …</p> <p>The other premier was the one who invented “sovereignty-association.” He demanded all the powers of a sovereign country for Quebec, but was <br />careful to arrange for the sovereign country not to be independent. Indeed, his referendum question postulated that a sovereign Quebec would be <br />associated with the other provinces and would continue to use the Canadian dollar as legal tender. Money, money, money!</p> <p>So for 22 years the Quebec electorate has suffered the ignominy of having to choose between two provincial parties for whom the pride of being a Quebecer is negotiable for cash. And if by some stroke of ill fortune the rest of Canada seems disinclined to go along with the blackmail, as happened over the Meech Lake accord, it is accused of humiliating Quebec. In Quebec, humiliation is decidedly selective.</p> <p>Except for a small handful of dyed-in-the-wool separatists, together with the sprinkling of Montrealers who exercised their vote in favor of the Equality party, just about all the cream of Quebec society approves of this shameful horse trading, and so without batting an eye has backed one or the other of the above-mentioned premiers for 22 years.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The September 28 issue of <em>Maclean’s</em> came out on September 21 and was almost sold out instantly (“Dollar drops after Trudeau joins the fray; Politicians’ reactions: contempt to approval; Referendum ’92”, by Philip Authier, James Mennie and Sarah Scott, September 22, 1992, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Given the ferocity of the published attacks, even some of their Heenan Blaikie colleagues felt the necessity to publicly distance themselves from Trudeau and Blaikie, as senior partner Georges Audet wrote in a letter to <em>The Gazette</em> newspaper (“Law firm unfairly tagged”, by Georges Audet, September 25, 1992, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“As a senior partner of the firm Heenan Blaikie, I was shocked by Aislin’s cartoon in the Sept. 22 edition of The Gazette, which associated our law firm with the position recently restated by Pierre Elliott Trudeau concerning the constitution.</p> <p>I would have thought it would be obvious to anyone that in a major law firm composed of over 100 lawyers located in four different Canadian cities, the personal and public views of one or two people (Peter Blaikie and Mr. Trudeau) do not represent those of other members of the firm.</p> <p>I find it unfair that your newspaper would choose to name and associate our firm with the No side of the referendum when, in fact, I have no doubt that the vast majority of our lawyers do not share the views of either Mr. Blaikie or Mr. Trudeau on this issue.</p> <p>GEORGES AUDET</p> <p>Heenan Blaikie</p> <p>Montreal”</p> </blockquote> <p>Next, Trudeau gave his only speech of the Charlottetown referendum campaign on October 1, 1992, at a Montreal Chinese restaurant, La Maison Egg Roll, where his old magazine <em>Cite Libre</em>, abandoned decades ago when he went into federal politics but recently revived, held monthly meetings (“Chinese restaurant has date with destiny; Understanding the referendum”, by Peter Maser, October 1, 1992, <font color="#0000ff"><em></em></font><a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>).</p> <p>This time, the Charlottetown accord’s Aboriginal self-government rights were also criticized by Trudeau (“Trudeau blasts accord, backers”, October 2, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A constitution based on the Charlottetown accord would set up a hierarchy of Canadians with Quebecers at the top of the heap, former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said Thursday.</p> <p>The Canada clause in the agreement places Quebecers first, with the right to protect their culture, followed by natives, ethnic minorities and women, he said.</p> <p>Like a professor leading a law class, Trudeau read through the Aug. 28 Charlottetown agreement and explained to his 400 guests why it is unacceptable.</p> <p>“Your vote (in the Oct. 26 referendum) has a tremendous importance,” he lectured a packed audience at La Maison egg roll, a Chinese restaurant in the working-class neighborhood of St-Henri where guests paid $6.95 for a buffet supper.</p> <p>“So important that it can’t be based on emotions.”</p> <p>He told them that “people in high places want you to believe that a Yes vote in the constitutional referendum is a Yes to Canada and a No vote is a rejection of Canada.”</p> <p>“It’s a lie,” he said.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“Voting No will mean we’ve had enough of the Constitution. We don’t want to talk about it any more.</p> <p>“The blackmail will continue if you vote Yes.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Trudeau’s audience was packed into the second-floor room at the Chinese restaurant at the invitation of Cite libre , the recently resurrected highbrow magazine Trudeau helped create in 1950. It had been closed since 1965.</p> <p>Led by his son Justin, Trudeau inched his way through a pack of reporters, cameramen and photographers to reach the restaurant door. For two <br />hours before his arrival, police were directing traffic around the besieged restaurant.</p> <p>Under the glare of TV lights, Trudeau was asked whether it felt like the old days.</p> <p>“Yes, it’s very nice,” he said. “Stick around.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Some of Trudeau’s criticisms apparently had been voiced earlier by Deborah Coyne.</p> <p>Like Trudeau and some others in the media, in <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot033 - Fax to MP Kim Campbell, Nov 30, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my November press releases</font></a> I criticized Brian Mulroney’s “horse-trading approach” and his “hardball tactics during the referendum campaign”; but unlike Trudeau I viewed open discussions of the constitutional issues as positive, giving merit to the earlier “proposals”, i.e., the July 7 Pearson accord, and fingering Mulroney’s horse-trading as “during the final stage of Charlottetown constitutional negotiation after he pushed Joe Clark aside”.</p> <p>Unlike with the Meech Lake accord, the Charlottetown accord was endorsed by Liberal leader Jean Chretien and his party, and as in Part 12 Mulroney cited the support of Roger Tasse and Jean Chretien to rebuke Trudeau’s criticism of a hierarchy of rights being created by it.</p> <p>Chretien’s deputy leader Sheila Copps sounded like an enforcer for Mulroney on the Charlottetown accord, attacking Alberta-based Reform leader Preston Manning for deriding it as “the Mulroney deal” (“Copps disgusted: Reform Party ads are ‘cheap shots’ at PM”, by Sheldon Alberts, October 15, 1992, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In a debate Wednesday, Copps told a Calgary audience she was disgusted by the tactics and advertisements used by Manning and his Reform Party to discredit the deal.</p> <p>Reform Party ads featuring Manning label the accord as “the Mulroney deal.” It’s a cheap shot which Copps says uses the prime minister’s unpopularity as a reason for voting No.</p> <p>“I’m astounded at that approach,” said Copps, MP for Hamilton-East and deputy Opposition leader.</p> <p>She was debating Diane Ablonczy, a Reform candidate in Calgary and one of the party’s founders, at Mount Royal College.</p> <p>Copps said the deal was a remarkable agreement among all of Canada’s leaders, not just Mulroney.</p> <p>“Let’s be blunt about this. I don’t think there is anyone in the country who would like to see Brian Mulroney defeated more than I would. But this constitutional agreement is not about Brian Mulroney’s future. It is about the potential future of the country,” said Copps, who has had several well publicized run-ins with Mulroney.</p> <p>Canadians who don’t like Mulroney should save their anger and vote him out in the next federal election, she said.</p> <p>“It’s reasonable to vote against the agreement if you don’t like the agreement. It’s not reasonable to vote against the agreement just because you don’t like Brian Mulroney.”</p> <p>Copps also took aim at the Reform Party’s condemnation of the reformed Senate agreed to in Charlottetown.</p> <p>Ablonczy said the Senate is ineffective because it only has absolute veto power over new taxes on natural resources and bills affecting French language and culture.</p> <p>Natural resources legislation accounts for only about “one per cent” of bills the Senate would deal with, Ablonczy said.</p> <p>It’s ironic, said Copps, that the Reform Party champions a Triple-E Senate, but would choose the status quo over the Charlottetown senate.</p> <p>If the Charlottetown deal is voted down, the Senate “will return to 104 appointed political hacks who remain in their jobs until age 75 with no chance of being thrown out by a democratic vote of the people,” Copps said. “That’s the Senate alternative Preston Manning is asking you to endorse.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Whatever Preston Manning or Sheila Copps called it, the elected Senate in the final constitutional accord reached under Mulroney’s supervision was a fiasco waiting to happen, and not to be rectified without all provinces’ consent – the Canadian Constitution itself hasn’t had that unanimity to this day. </p> <p>But I can imagine the lure of Mulroney getting his deal and Chretien getting his turn to rule, as partly shared by Don McGillivray’s cynicism: with Roger Tasse’s involvement in the constitutional reform, Chretien had the basis to pay off Mulroney valiantly with it and make his own next big move – as Mulroney had done vice versa, as in Part 12.</p> <p>In the end, any Mulroney constitutional achievement did not materialize as the Charlottetown accord “consensus” lost the October 26 national referendum by a moderate margin (“<a href="http://www.efc.ca/pages/law/cons/Constitutions/Canada/English/Proposals/charlottetown-res.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Charlottetown Accord Referendum Results</font></a>”, Electronic Frontier Canada; and, “<a href="http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/QuebecHistory/stats/1992ref.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">National Referendum on the Charlottetown Accord (October 26, 1992)</font></a>”, Quebec History, Marianopolis College).</p> <p>Perhaps the law firm business was different; but the notion of “consensus” treasured and upheld by Heenan Blaikie co-founder Roy Heenan as the reason for success, in politics has not always been what it seemed.</p> <p>When Mulroney forged the final constitutional agreement he, too, proudly labeled it the “Consensus Report” and the “Charlottetown Accord”, as I noted in my yet incomplete November 2009 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-2/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 11</font>)</a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The “Pearson Accord” had received its name from the Lester B. Pearson building in Ottawa, where the July 7 deal had been reached under Joe Clark: the final negotiations under Brian Mulroney on August 18-22 were also held in the Pearson building.</p> <p>The “Charlottetown Accord” and the final text of its “Consensus Report” became official during two days of meetings in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, August 27-28; prime minister Mulroney was the first to publicly refer to it by that name.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Charlottetown, PEI, was historically significant for the 1864 “Charlottetown Conference” that set in motion a process leading to the birth of Canada as a nation (“<a href="http://www.pei2014.ca/history_pg1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Birthplace of Confederation: The 1864 Charlottetown Conference</font></a>”, Prince Edward island 2014).</p> <p>Right here was Brian Mulroney’s consensus as the Charlottetown accord, despite flaws like the elected Senate with a deformed voting structure and diminished power, reached shortly after taking over the negotiation from Joe Clark who had been the Constitutional Affairs Minister since after the Meech Lake accord’s 1990 demise (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-8/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 3)</font></a>”).</p> <p>And here was also Pierre Trudeau who, courted by the co-founders, had joined Heenan Blaikie in 1984 to be at its center – of consensus no doubt under Roy Heenan’s chairmanship – but whose towering statue in September-October 1992 stood unbendingly opposed to the constitutional “consensus” despite his views not being shared by “the vast majority” of Heenan Blaikie lawyers – a fact senior partner Georges Audet had to publicly clarify due to the tense political situation.</p> <p>So I wonder how often in the decades of Heenan Blaikie legal business a consensus was genuinely achieved, not merely accepted by others in deference to the statues of Mr. Roy Heenan, Johnston and Blaikie, and of course Mr. Trudeau.</p> <p>The truth can shed light on why, after Mr. Heenan’s retirement over a decade past Trudeau’s death, Heenan Blaikie partners soon fell into disarray and have finally voted to dissolve the firm – as told in a February 2014 <em>Toronto Star</em> story quoted earlier.</p> <p>A year after the Charlottetown accord referendum, in October 1993 Chretien defeated Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell. Some of Chretien’s next big moves were then internationally oriented.</p> <p>Back in 1990 when the federal Liberal party elected Chretien as its new leader, replacing John Turner who hadn’t been a Trudeau loyalist, it also chose Trudeau’s Heenan Blaikie partner Donald Johnston as its new president. At the time, Albert journalist Don Braid saw the selections as a losing move in Quebec (“Liberals willing to buck Quebec”, by Don Braid, June 24, 1990, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Liberals, like an unwary buffalo herd, have allowed themselves to be stampeded over a cliff. The result could be a long fall to a hard landing.</p> <p>First they chose Donald Johnston, the most prominent anti-Meech English-Canadian in Quebec, as party president.</p> <p>Then they picked Jean Chretien, the second most prominent anti-Meech francophone (after Pierre Trudeau), as leader.</p> <p>To many Quebecers, this will be a double provocation. The day after Meech Lake crashed, the federal party that leads the polls appeared to rub their noses in the rubble.</p> <p>This isn’t necessarily a knock on the two winners. Johnston, especially, is an amiable man of high principle and great honesty. The Montreal lawyer and former cabinet minister is a Trudeau loyalist and makes no bones about it.</p> <p>Chretien has been fairly honest too, at least until the leadership race tempted him to muddy his views. He has the good of Canada very much at heart.</p> <p>It's just that for most Quebecers, they're exactly the wrong men for the jobs they hold.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Chretien is not the man. In Quebec he is regarded as an archaic figure, even as an object of scorn and ridicule. His belief in a strong central government is extremely unpopular.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Braid wasn’t untypical of the Alberta elite, who understood the federal Liberals’ historical powers but felt that time was now changing (“WILL THE NEW LIBERAL LEADER BE THE COUNTRY’S NEXT PM?”, by Harvey Schachter, June 25, 1990, <a href="http://www.thewhig.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Whig – Standard</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Seven of the eight leaders of the Liberal Party since Confederation have served the nation as prime minister. And it's the feeling of three political scientists attending last week’s Liberal convention that Jean Chretien will probably achieve that milestone.</p> <p>But they are far from definite in making that prediction, after it was put to them by The Whig-Standard in a special round table held moments after the convention ended. If he does gain that post, it will only be after enormous difficulty and adjustment to some profound changes in our political map, <br />they suggest. He faces daunting organizational problems in his party. The next Parliament, they believe, will be a change from the present.</p> <p>“If Jean Chretien is a prime minister, it will be a prime minister with four parties in Parliament and not a majority position,” said Keith Archer, of the University of Calgary.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That Alberta-biased view would be wrong: Chretien would not just win a majority but bag three consecutive ones. Chretien’s success was helped by historical changes in the national political landscape at the end of the Mulroney era, when most of the Tories’ political base in Quebec went to the separatist Bloc Quebecois and much of its Western-Canada base switched over to the Reform party (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-7/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 6)</font></a>”).</p> <p>However, the Liberals would not achieve a monopoly level of national dominance like in Heenan Blaikie’s old wish for Johnston and Blaikie to be respective leaders of the Liberals and the Tories – in the two’s case, each did serve as the respective party’s president in the end, but at different times.</p> <p>By April 1993 Mulroney was about to depart, and Trudeau’s every move was worthy of news, like being taken to lunch by Johnston for the 25th anniversary of Trudeau’s Liberal leadership (“25 years ago, Trudeau became Liberal chief; Colleagues take ex-prime minister out for an anniversary lunch”, April 7, 1993, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Maybe it was the long-awaited spring sunshine that made Pierre Trudeau so cheerful yesterday.</p> <p>It appears it wasn’t because he was celebrating the 25th anniversary of his election as leader of the federal Liberal Party.</p> <p>At least that’s what an upbeat Trudeau maintained as he headed out to lunch with Donald Johnston and Sheila Gervais, respectively president and national director of the Liberal Party of Canada.</p> <p>The former prime minister said he was surprised to learn of the anniversary date when news photographers caught up with him.</p> <p>He then turned to Johnston and asked playfully: “Did you arrange this?”</p> <p>Quipped Johnston: “Seeing as this has turned into an anniversary lunch, I guess I get stuck with the tab.”</p> <p>Johnston and Trudeau work in the same law office in downtown Montreal.</p> <p>On April 6, 1968, a Liberal leadership convention elected Trudeau on the fourth ballot to replace Lester Pearson. He was sworn in as Canada’s 15th prime minister two weeks later and won the ensuing general election in June in a wave of popularity given the name of Trudeaumania.</p> <p>At Liberal Party headquarters in Ottawa, a spokesman said the trio’s lunch date was strictly personal and laughingly denied it was an attempt to draft Trudeau back as head of the party.</p> <p>“His royal highness is what now – 74?” he asked. Trudeau turns 74 in October.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“His royal highness” was only 73. Seven years later when he died on September 28, 2000, only weeks short of his 81st birthday, the <em>Maclean</em> magazine issue carrying his article admonishing Quebecers’ blackmail of Canada had been dated 8 years ago that day.</p> <p>But even if Chretien’s third election in November 2000 was then helped by Canadians’ outpouring emotions for Trudeau’s passing, Chretien won his first two without the expedience of the sympathy factor.</p> <p>As mentioned earlier, once in government one of Chretien’s first key personnel moves was the retirement of Mulroney-era RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, announced by Chretien on February 4, 1994.</p> <p>That led to Canada’s loss of the INTERPOL presidency held by Inkster. But Chretien already had a more glamorous international leadership move in his back pocket.</p> <p>The media had just reported the nomination of Liberal party president Donald Johnston to lead the influential Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (“Liberal boss touted for OECD job; PM’s office denies Johnston’s nomination partisan politics”, by Alan Freeman, February 2, 1994, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Liberal Party president Donald Johnston has been nominated for the top job of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.</p> <p>The federal government wants the 57-year-old Mr. Johnston to replace Jean-Claude Paye of France as secretary-general of the Paris-based OECD this fall. The job comes with a tax-free salary of about $245,000 a year.</p> <p>Peter Donolo, press secretary to Prime Minister Jean Chretien, denied suggestions the nomination is politically motivated.</p> <p>“Mr. Johnston has got a strong background in economic issues as a senior economic minister. To say it’s a partisan thing is ludicrous. It’s not a Canadian decision. He’s not going to be paid by the Canadian taxpayer.”</p> <p>Mr. Johnston, a former Treasury Board president who has presided over the Liberal Party since 1990, was a cabinet minister in the government of Pierre Trudeau and an unsuccessful candidate for the Liberal leadership in 1984. He is now a member of the Montreal law firm of Heenan Blaikie, where Mr. Trudeau also practices.</p> <p>…</p> <p>There is no guarantee that Mr. Johnston will get the OECD job. The decision is up to the 24 governments who make up the organization, considered the club of the wealthiest industrialized countries. On Monday, Britain nominated former chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson for the position.</p> <p>But weighing in Mr. Johnston’s favour, the United States is anxious for a non-European to take the job, diplomatic sources say. While an American may not win the job because of European sensitivity, U.S. officials would be satisfied with a Canadian.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It was quite an honor for a Trudeau associate to be competing with a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, for the venerable international job. OECD secretary-general, Jean-Claude Paye of France, was not pleased with the prospect of a Canadian taking over (“U.S. push for Canadian in OECD decried; Johnston has backing for top job”, May 18, 1994, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Non-European support for a Canadian for the top job at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has produced a plea from the incumbent against turning the race into a political issue.</p> <p>It came from Jean-Claude Paye, a Frenchman whose second five-year term as secretary-general expires in September. He warned the United States that it was making a mistake if it was trying to oust a European candidate in order to win greater leverage at the economic think-tank.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Paye is one of three European candidates for the post.</p> <p>With strong backing from the United States, Japan and at least three other non-European members of the 25-nation OECD, Canada has proposed Donald Johnston for the job.</p> <p>Mr. Johnston, a former cabinet minister in Pierre Trudeau’s government, has been on a whirlwind tour of the world to back his bid in time for the OECD annual ministerial meeting next month.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Chretien government made the right move because it understood the unique role Canada could play in the wealthy industrialized world, that between the traditional European dominance and the modern American global power there were few other desirable compromises to head this “rich man’s club”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The United States insists that its backing for Mr. Johnston stems from nothing more sinister than a conviction that he is the best man for the job.</p> <p>But a diplomat at the OECD said the United States and others are anxious to break what they see as a European stranglehold on top jobs at multinational institutions.</p> <p>There is also a sense that the changing complexion of the world economy has left the 33-year-old OECD in need of a face lift.</p> <p>For many years a “rich man’s club” where members exchanged views on economic and social issues, the Paris-based OECD is now grappling with the impact of events such as the fall of communism and Southeast Asia’s economic explosion.</p> <p>Mexico this year became the first new member since 1973.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The question being posed was: How would the rich men of the world’s nations adapt and take advantage of “the fall of communism and Southeast Asia’s economic explosion”, with Mexico just becoming the first new member, since 1973, of the “rich man’s club” OECD?</p> <p>Brian Mulroney had pursued relevant agendas. As reviewed in Part 12, Mulroney had been eager to explore business opportunities in China and Asia: upon his retirement as Prime Minister he soon became the chief legal counsel for business tycoon Paul Desmarais’s Power Corporation of Canada, in October 1993 accompanying Desmarais to the Chinese capital Beijing to start an international business joint venture.</p> <p>The Chretien Liberals paid more attentions to Chinese human rights issues, as in Part 10 recruiting Vancouver’s top Chinese human-rights activist Raymond Chan to enter Canadian politics and become the first Chinese Canadian cabinet minister, Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific.</p> <p>But to a large degree Chan’s role was to provide the political image the Chretien government needed to pursue its trade promotion agendas, as I have reviewed in Part 10:</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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…</p> <p>…</p> <p>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…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Chretien also made a foreign policy first in relations with Mexico – the newest OECD member as quoted earlier – in March 1994 – soon after his Liberal colleague and Trudeau law partner Donald Johnston’s nomination as the next OECD secretary-general. Chretien chose Mexico, instead of the United States as previous Canadian prime ministers had done, for his first official foreign visit, as I reviewed in May 2009, quoted in Part 9:</p> <blockquote> <p>“While Inkster’s resignation in 1994 was expected to give the Liberal government a fresh start in gun control at home, it also took place amid the Liberals’ retreat from its election promise of higher priority for international human rights, to focus on the economy and business; and as if that had not been enough, prime minister Chretien’s first official foreign visit – to Mexico instead of traditionally to the U.S. – in March 1994 was marred by the assassination by gunshot of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that had ruled uninterruptedly for 65 years) just before Chretien’s arrival, by a large and angry mob shouting “out” while Chretien attempted but failed to pay respect to the body of the slain, and by a rare type of rebuttal of Chretien’s notion that Mexican democracy and Canadian democracy were just different types – from Subcomandante Marcos of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in a jungle interview in Chiapas, Mexico.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Chretien demonstrated friendliness and personal courage in his fresh international gestures, but as the facts showed they were not necessarily welcome by the grassroots in a country like Mexico where people had their own ways of expression.</p> <p>In contrast to Chretien’s people-oriented approach, the Mulroney government had invested in growing Canada’s influence at the world police body INTERPOL, cultivating the Chinese government’s agreement to withdraw its competition to Canada’s Norman Inkster for the helm of an organization heavily represented by Latin American and other third-world countries, and influenced by their corruption practices as I noted in 2009, quoted in Part 9:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Imagine what kind of clout in the international law-and-order arena the new Chretien government would lose with the departure of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, whose Interpol appointment had been praised by the RCMP as “a great honour for Canada” and for the RCMP, even if within the RCMP there were different opinions about the Interpol: while Inspector Claude Sweeney, head of Interpol’s Canadian branch, was enthusiastic about the benefit of computerized information hook-up in the plan, others pointed to examples of concern, such as in Venezuela where Interpol was expected to help track dissidents as criminals, or former Interpol drugs committee chairman Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader indicted in 1988 in the United States on narcotics charges, or former Interpol president Jolly Bugarin, crony of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, widely accused of a cover-up in the killing of Marcos opponent Benigno Aquino in 1983.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Despite the Canadian government’s different orientations under different political parties and leaders, some things were fundamentally more constant in Canadian foreign relations.</p> <p>When it came to China, the close relationships with business tycoon Paul Desmarais on the part of both Mulroney and Chretien, and Trudeau earlier, helped cement Canada’s China policy for a long period.</p> <p>In Part 2 I have made a point that the Chinese Communist government in the early 1970s during the Cultural Revolution showed a special sense of kinship toward someone like Jan Wong, a young Chinese Canadian student and self-styled “Montreal Maoist”; Wong was allowed the exception of pursue university study in Beijing, and she eventually became the Beijing bureau chief for <em>The Globe and Mail</em>, “Canada’s National Newspaper”.</p> <p>But Jan Wong was merely an example. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister at the time, was an embodiment of Canada’s improving relations with Communist China.</p> <p>Prior to entering politics Trudeau had visited Mainland China twice: in 1949 as the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek was retreating to Taiwan and, after the Communist revolution’s triumph, in 1960 with a group of Canadian private citizens including his friend Jacques Hebert – retired senator by the time of Trudeau’s 2000 death mentioned earlier. Trudeau and Hebert wrote a book about that second trip. Many Canadians and Americans later came to suspect Trudeau of being a part of “the international communist conspiracy”, according to historians J. L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell in their book on Trudeau’s foreign policy legacy, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=taZ0pK71QikC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy</em></font></a> (1990, University of Toronto Press):</p> <blockquote> <p>“After a trip to China in 1960, Pierre Trudeau and his friend Jacques Hebert published a little book in Quebec. Within a few months of his becoming prime minister, Trudeau brought out the volume in English under the title <em>Two Innocents In Red China</em>. The book is a travelogue in the form of a joint diary, interesting but exceptional only because its co-author rose to the top of the greasy role. But there is one provocative comment in Trudeau’s brief introductory note to the English edition: ‘If there are any statements in the book which can be used to prove that the authors are agents of the international Communist conspiracy, or alternatively fascist exploiters of the working classes, I am sure that my co-author, Jacques Hebert, who remains a private citizen, will be willing to accept entire responsibility for them.’ That flippant comment said much about Trudeau’s style. Unfortunately, as his policy to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union developed, many of his countrymen, and others in the United States, came to the view that Trudeau almost literally was part of the international communist conspiracy.</p> <p>Like other French Canadians of his generation, Pierre Trudeau was raised on stories told by Roman Catholic missionaries of their struggles in China against the Yellow Peril and for God. Unlike others, however, Trudeau went to China twice before he became prime minister. In 1949, while bumming around the world, he travelled to Canton and to Shanghai, far enough to see the chaos that was Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomingtang in its final moments. On another trip to Asia, Trudeau visited Taiwan. Then, eleven years after his first visit to China, Trudeau was part of a small party of Canadians who visited the People’s Republic on a month-long journey. Trudeau observed the latent power of the new China, and he came to understand that Mao Tse-tung’s country was fully aware that critical questions of peace, war, disarmament, and nuclear weaponry could not be settled without its participation. It was folly, Trudeau came to believe, to leave a quarter of the human race unrepresented in the United Nations and treated as a pariah by the United States. ‘Time is on its side,’ Trudeau and Hebert wrote, adding that the idea that Chiang’s Republic of China, shrunken to the island of Taiwan, could still be seen by some as the government of China was almost incomprehensible. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>Once in the Lester Pearson government, Trudeau began pushing for diplomatic recognition of Communist China, and continued to maintain a high-profile and firm position on this issue during his meteoric rise to national leadership in 1968 – in the face of strong political opposition from the United States:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Trudeau, then parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, went to the United Nations General Assembly in the fall of 1966. Also on the delegation was Donald Macdonald, parliamentary secretary to the secretary of state for external affairs, Paul Martin. Although there had been some indications earlier in the year that Canada was ready to move for the admission of the People’s Republic to the UN, and although opinion polls suggested that a majority in Canada favoured China’s admission to the UN and recognition of the PRC by Canada, there were countervailing pressures on Ottawa. The United States, protective of Chiang and, as the Vietnam War heated up, still viewing the world struggle through red-coloured lenses, remained adamantly opposed to ‘Red China’s’ admission. There was also some opposition in External Affairs, especially from officers who had served in Vietnam with the International Control Commission … Moreover, as China continued to tear itself apart in the Cultural Revolution and as embassies in Peking came under attack by mobs of Red Guards, a very credible argument could be made against doing anything until the situation there had calmed. …</p> <p>Nonetheless, Trudeau and Macdonald discovered that they thought alike, on the need for a new realism towards China, as did Heward Grafftey, a Progressive Conservative MP on the delegation. … As a result, on 23 November Martin called for the seating of both the PRC and Taiwan in the General Assembly and for Peking (Beijing) to have the Security Council seat. The Americans, ‘absolutely dumbfounded … with this belated and rather scattershot Canadian initiative, continued their opposition…</p> <p>Little over a year later, Trudeau was minister of justice and a candidate for the Liberal leadership. … Trudeau remained firmly of the view that Canada should recognize China. … After his selection as Liberal leader, the new prime minister retracted not a word of his position. … Trudeau was blunt, most notably in a major speech announcing a review of foreign policy on 29 May:</p> <p><font face="Calibri">We shall be looking at our policy in relation to China in the context of a new interest in Pacific affairs generally … Canada has long advocated a positive approach to Mainland China and its inclusion in the world community. We have an economic interest in trade with China ... and a political interest in preventing tension … Our aim will be to recognize the People’s Republic of China Government as soon as possible and to enable that Government to occupy the seat of China in the United Nations, taking into account that there is a separate Government in Taiwan.</font>”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Paul Martin cited here, secretary of state for external affairs in the Pearson government, was the father of future Prime Minister Paul Martin, Jean Chretien’s successor mentioned earlier.</p> <p>As Prime Minister, Trudeau’s China policy set a precedent for establishing full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, by only ‘taking note of’ – without formally agreeing to – China’s territorial claim over Taiwan:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Trudeau’s 29 May address delicately raised the possibility of recognizing the PRC while still continuing Canada’s recognition of the Nationalist government on Taiwan. No other country had succeeded in doing this, [foreign minister Mitchell] Sharp realized, but, as he told one of his officials, it was not out of the question that Canada could succeed. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>The negotiation once begun lasted into October 1970, a far longer period than anyone on the Canadian side had anticipated. The PRC’s charge had laid out his government’s ‘three constant principles’ to the Canadian ambassador to Sweden, Arthur Andrew, at the first meeting:</p> <p><font face="Calibri">1. A government seeking relations with China must recognize the central People’s Government as the sole and lawful government of the Chinese people;</font></p> <p><font face="Calibri">2. A government which wishes to have relations with China must recognize that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory and in accordance with this principle must sever all kinds of relationships with the ‘Chiang Kai-shek gang’;</font></p> <p><font face="Calibri">3. A government seeking relations with China must give support to the restoration of the rightful place and legitimate rights in the United Nations of the PRC and no longer give any backing to so-called representatives of Chiang Kai-shek in any organ of this international body.</font></p> <p>…</p> <p>… The Canadian position had changed substantially since Trudeau had first raised the idea of recognition. Initially, the government had hoped to be able to keep relations with Taiwan in a one-China, one-Taiwan policy; then Ottawa had recognized that links with the PRC would ‘affect’ relations with Taiwan; finally, Ottawa had come to accept that there could be no government-to-government relations with Taiwan if recognition of the PRC was to be secured. People-to-people relations, such as trade, however, could be continued with the Nationalist regime.</p> <p>The text of the communique on recognition, dated 10 October 1970, noted this shift with just enough face-saving to make the exchange of diplomats with the PRC palatable for Ottawa: ‘The Chinese Government reaffirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China. The Canadian Government takes note of this position of the Chinese Government.’ That anodyne phrasing allowed Beijing to press its claim to Taiwan as loudly and as often as it chose, but Canada, by simply taking note of that position, did not imply agreement or disagreement with it.</p> </blockquote> <p>The Communist government in Beijing could live with the Trudeau government’s “take note of’ wording and it was soon adopted by other Western nations to normalize relations with China; but the Chinese side found it apt to explain that it was a compromise acceptable with Canada given Trudeau’s sincerity, but not with the United States: </p> <blockquote> <p>Yao Guang, at this time the director of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Department of Europe and the Americas and hence the official in charge of the negotiations in Beijing, recalled that the Canadian negotiators had come to understand the PRC’s position that Taiwan was an inalienable part of Chinese territory. Once that understanding had been achieved, then the Canadian formula became acceptable to Beijing. Had the United States, with whom the Chiang regime had a military alliance, been on the other side of the table, ‘take note of’ would not have been accepted by China. But there was no fundamental conflict between Canada and China, Beijing understood the difficulties Canada faced on this issue because of American pressure, and it appreciated Trudeau’s courage in seeking recognition. In all the circumstances, Yao Guang said, Mao and Chou En-lai, who had to take the final decision, had decided to accept the Canadian formulation. The same form of words eventually allowed other Western nations to proceed to recognize China.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Trudeau’s diplomatic achievement was hailed by Canadian foreign policy experts as comparable to those of his predecessor Lester Pearson; but the Tory opposition expressed reservations, including former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s concern of “deluge of Communist spies”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The reaction in Canada, where the majority of people were glued to the TV screen as the October Crisis dominated the news, was mixed. Liberals and most of the press cheered the news and foreign-policy experts called recognition ‘a foreign policy coup rivalling the internationally acclaimed achievements of Lester Pearson.’ Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield, however, indicated that he supported recognition of China, but was opposed to the breaking of relations with Taiwan. Former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, reiterating comments made earlier by the RCMP, complained about the ‘deluge of Communist spies who will come in here attached to the Chinese embassy.’”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Canada-China relations breakthrough came amid the so-called “October crisis” in Quebec where, as in Part 2, Trudeau had invoked the War Measure Act to handle the kidnapping of a British diplomat and a Quebec Cabinet minister by the left-wing separatist Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ). Foreign policy experts’ praises and comparison to Canada’s Nobel peace laureate (“<a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1957/pearson-facts.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lester Bowles Pearson – Facts: Father of the United Nations Forces</font></a>”, Nobelprize.org) was no doubt a boost to Trudeau’s confidence at a delicate time.</p> <p>The exchange of embassies between Canada and China was soon followed by other Western nations’ diplomatic moves, and by the U.S.’s easing of hostility, toward China; despite not formally recognizing the Beijing government, U.S. President Richard Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger secretly visited China, and Nixon soon made his historical visit, as also noted in Part 2, one year ahead of Trudeau’s first official visit:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Soon after the announcement, embassies were opened in Ottawa and Beijing. On 13 April the exchange of ambassadors was announced, as China sent Huang Hua, one if its leading diplomatic figures, to Canada. Within months of the Canadian recognition, other countries found the ‘take note of’ formula their route to recognizing the PRC.</p> <p>The Canadian recognition of China may have represented a watershed in China’s relations with the West. In early April, after secret U.S. – PRC diplomacy underway since 1969, the unyielding hostility between the United States and China began to crack. Ping-pong teams visited the PRC, President Nixon announced that his government would permit trade between the United States and China, Henry Kissinger secretly visited Beijing, and in July Nixon announced that he himself would go to China. By August the United States had indicated that it now supported Chinese admission to the UN.”</p> </blockquote> <p>During his 1972 China visit, Nixon indeed needed to give recognition, clearer than Trudeau’s, to the Chinese claim of Taiwan being a part of China, and he promised the U.S. military’s eventual withdrawal from that island (“<a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v17/d203" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Joint Statement Following Discussions With Leaders of the People's Republic of China, Shanghai, February 27, 1972</font></a>”, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The U.S. side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.”</p> </blockquote> <p>For the U.S., the quick about-face moves by Kissinger and Nixon prevented Canada from being the sole beneficiary of the China trade for long, as Granatstein and Bothwell noted in their book:</p> <blockquote> <p>“If Canada had hoped to pave the way for the United States, that had been achieved, though there was apparently no direct connection between the Canadian and American moves nor any Canadian role as an intermediary. If Ottawa had hoped to steal a march on the United States by establishing a firm trade relationship with the PRC, that would now be harder to accomplish. At the very least, however, Nixon’s demarche to Beijing meant that right-wing attacks against Prime Minister Trudeau for his government’s China policy lost their force.</p> <p>… [trade minister] Jean-Luc Pepin led a trade mission in June 1971 that won Chinese agreement to ‘consider Canada first’ as a source of wheat, and a contract for $200 million worth of grain followed in December. There was also a huge Canadian Trade Fair in Beijing in August 1972 that drew a quarter of a million visitors. But after Nixon’s 1973 [1972] visit and the first U.S. wheat sale to China, the Canadian share of the market began to fall from 100 percent in 1971 to 65 per cent in 1976 and 41 per cent in 1978. Even so, Canada had a large and continuing trade surplus with China (rising from $123 million in 1970 to $320 million in 1975 and to $1361 million in 1983) that upset Beijing. …</p> <p>The highlight of the immediate post-recognition was Trudeau’s visit to China in October 1973. … he was ‘an old friend,’ a term of high approbation in China. Trudeau had two long and friendly sessions with Chou and a briefer meeting with Mao, and he signed a number of agreements … Chou also accompanied Trudeau on some of his trips outside Beijing, as did the just rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Most notably, although no preparations had been made by the Chinese, a trade agreement granting each country’s goods most-favoured-nation status in the other was hurriedly cobbled together to accommodate the visitors. That, the Chinese said, was possible only when one had the desire.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Canada-China trade figures cited above show that the real boom of Canadian trade surplus would come in the late 1970s to early 1980s – even when Canada’s share of the market – wheat market as cited – continued to shrink.</p> <p>There should be no question that the rise of China’s economic reform leader Deng Xiaoping after the 1976 deaths of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and the corresponding China trade impetus from the Canadian business community with Paul Desmarais as a prominent leader – founding chairman of the Canada China Business Council in 1978 as in Part 12 – had much to do with the real trade growth that was good for Canada.</p> <p>But as the Chinese said to the visiting Pierre Trudeau in 1973, “most-favoured-nation” trade status was “possible only when one had the desire”. That kind of desire must not lie only within the business community but be shared by the political circles as well.</p> <p>Indeed, from an early stage the Chinese Communist officialdom invested high hopes in Paul Desmarais’s patronage of the Canadian politicians.</p> <p>In Part 12, the in-law relationship between Desmarais and Jean Chretien has been shown to be at the center of intricate Canadian political events during the 1990s. In fact, when that relationship was first forged in 1981, there was media talk of a “new political dynasty” (“THE OTTAWA SCENE Wedding may found new dynasty”, January 26, 1981, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“An early contender for Ottawa's marriage of the year, and perhaps even the start of a new political dynasty, takes place on May 23 when Andre Desmarais, younger son of Power Corp. chairman Paul Desmarais and press secretary to Justice Minister Jean Chretien, marries the boss’s only daughter, France. The marriage links the families of two of French Canada’s most conspicuous achievers - Jean Chretien, the “petit gars de Shawinigan” who has held a series of top Cabinet posts and may yet climb to the top job, and Paul Desmarais, who went from a small Sudbury bus company and built one of the country’s giant conglomerates.</p> <p>The two families have known each other for many years. And the two fathers are great mutual admirers, as much for a shared sense of fun as for their strong views on Canadian nationalism. (When Mr. Chretien entered hospital last week with stomach spasms he was asked whether he had any allergies and replied: “Only one – separatists.”) It is no secret that Power Corp. will underwrite much of Mr. Chretien’s leadership bid when Pierre Trudeau steps down. But at election time, Mr. Desmarais is scrupulously fair and throws about $50,000 each to the Liberals and Conservatives.</p> <p>Andre, the second Desmarais son to work briefly in Mr. Chretien’s Cabinet office, had hoped to keep the engagement and wedding quiet, so there has been no formal announcement. But proud papa Jean is letting word slip out whenever he can. Andre plans to quit his job as press secretary after the wedding. It wouldn’t do to have to call the minister “Dad.””</p> </blockquote> <p>As the report disclosed, Andre was but the second of Paul Desmarais’s sons sent to work at Justice Minister Chretien’s office, and he was the lucky one winning the hand of France, the political boss’s only daughter.</p> <p>China was there, too, represented by one of only 3 foreign ambassadors to Canada – from Morocco, Venezuela and China – at the wedding of Andre Desmarais and France Chretien, a glamorous event attended by 320 guests (“Desmarais newlyweds honeymoon in Europe”, by Zena Cherry, May 29, 1981, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. and Mrs. Andre Desmarais have left for a honeymoon in France, Italy and Greece.</p> <p>The bridegroom is the second of four children of Mr. and Mrs. Paul O. C. Desmarais of Montreal and Palm Beach, Fla. The bridegroom’s father has been called “a conspicuous achiever” – he started in a small Sudbury bus company and is now chairman of Power Corp. Ltd., one of Canada’s huge conglomerates.</p> <p>The bride was France, eldest of three children of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph-Jacques Jean Chretien of Shawinigan. Her father is Justice Minister, Attorney-General of Canada and Minister of State for Social Development.</p> <p>It was a black-tie 5:30 ceremony in the Notre-Dame Roman Catholic Cathedral in Ottawa and the officiant was the Very Rev. Georges-Henri Levesque of Montreal.</p> <p>Maureen Forrester sang Meine Glaubiges Herzen by Bach, Ave Maria by Bach-Gounod, Agnus Dei by Georges Bizet and Notre Pere by Malotte.</p> <p>There were 320 guests, including three Ambassadors to Canada: Nourreddine Hasnaoui from Morocco; Francisco Paparoni of Venezuela and Wang Tung from China. Also two former U.S. ambassadors, James Atkins, who was in Saudi Arabia, and Thomas Enders, former ambassador to Canada.</p> <p>The matron of honor was Helene Desmarais; bridesmaids were Marie-Andree Chretien, Sophie Desmarais and Sonia Ouellet.</p> <p>Paul Desmarais Jr. was best man; ushers were Peter Kruyt, Lee Bass of Fort Worth, Tex., Count Arnaud de Vienne of Paris, Hubert Chretien and Roderick Groome.</p> <p>The reception, dinner and dance were in the Confederation Room in the West Block of the Parliament Buildings.</p> <p>Torontonians attending with their wives included John A. Armstrong, chairman of Imperial Oil Ltd.; two bank chairmen, Jock Kinghorn Finlayson, Royal Bank; and Cedric Ritchie, Bank of Nova Scotia; and three lawyers, R. Alan Eagleson, Pierre Genest and Donald Stovel MacDonald.</p> <p>The bride has just finished law studies at the University of Ottawa.</p> <p>The bridegroom, a graduate of Loyola University, was press secretary to Mr. Chretien but, as of his marriage to his boss’s daughter, he resigned.</p> <p>What next for him? That’s a deep secret …”</p> </blockquote> <p>Two of the three Toronto lawyers at the wedding were of high public profiles.</p> <p>Donald MacDonald, as in Part 12, was a former Trudeau cabinet minister, a senior partner at law firm McCarthy & McCarthy – as in Parts 6 the former firm of B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick who collaborated with RCMP to initiate psychiatric oppression against me in 1992 – and later a quick changeover playing the role of a U.S-Canada free-trade champion for Mulroney.</p> <p>Also at the wedding was lawyer Alan Eagleson, the promoter behind the famous 1972 hockey Summit Series between Canada and Russia mentioned in Part 2. A self-professed admirer of “men of strong personalities” as quoted in Part 12, Paul Desmarais must have been pleased to see Eagleson there.</p> <p>Back when Pierre Trudeau first became Prime Minister, Alan Eagleson received a mandate to make Canadian hockey great again in the world (“<a href="http://www.thetelegram.com/News/Regional/2007-09-28/article-1441252/Eagle-almost-caged-in-Moscow/1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Eagle almost caged in Moscow: Thirty five years to the day of Henderson’s goal, Eagleson recalls the ’72 Summit Series</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, by Robin Short, September 28, 2007, <em>The Telegram</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In 1967, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau established a review of amateur sport. Out of that came Hockey Canada which was established, in Eagleson’s view, “to reinstate Canada’s international hockey reputation.”</p> <p>Eagleson was dispatched to Stockholm and the world championship in the spring of ’69 to talk to the individual hockey federations about Canada’s return to the tournament. Canada had voted to withdraw from the world championship because the International Ice Hockey Federation would not accept this country’s wish to use its best – in other words, NHL – players.</p> <p>The only federation which would not hear of Canada’s use of pros was, you guessed it, the Soviets.</p> <p>“I said, ‘Fine, but my ambassador in Moscow is going to be talking to your sports minister in and I’m going to Moscow next week and you better arrange a meeting for me.’</p> <p>“I got a telex from our ambassador saying the Russians would only meet with Clarence Campbell. So then I sent a telex to the (Canadian) Embassy, knowing the Russians would read it. ‘Dear Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Campbell represents the capitalist owners of the National Hockey League. I represent the worker players.’ Within a day, I had my meeting with the Russian Federation in Moscow. April 8, 1969. I met with them for about four hours and after the meeting, my wife typed up an agreement that we had made in long hand. They signed it and I signed it. We would try to get a tournament that would involve the best professional players in the world against the best amateur players in the world.””</p> </blockquote> <p>That was easy for Alan Eagleson in 1969. Just emphasizing that he represented the “working players” rather than the “capitalist owners” of the National Hockey League – Eagleson headed the NHL Players Association while Clarence Campbell was NHL president – and the Soviet government agreed to cooperate with him to start a Canada-Russia hockey tournament, even though Soviet Russian amateur players made meagre livings compared to the serious monies NHL players earned from the capitalist owners.</p> <p>Eagleson acknowledged that Trudeau’s intervention really made a difference:</p> <blockquote> <p>““It was only after prodding and pounding and pounding and the intervention of the Canadian embassy, and Pierre Trudeau himself, that things started to happen,” he said.”   </p> </blockquote> <p>But Eagleson has since been convicted of fraud in both the United States and Canada in relation to his leadership of the NHL Players Association, and served a prison term:</p> <blockquote> <p>“There is no greater fall from grace within hockey circles than R. Alan Eagleson’s plunge. Convicted of three counts of fraud and theft in a Boston court in 1998, and another three counts of fraud in a Toronto courtroom, Eagleson has paid his debt to society, as dictated by the courts. In his case, a $1-million fine in the U.S. and an 18-month sentence (he served four and a half) at the Mimico Correctional Centre, a medium security prison outside Toronto.</p> <p>Eagleson remains a pariah in some corners, disbarred by the Law Society, stripped of his Order of Canada and escorted from the Hockey Hall of Fame after his resignation.</p> <p>But try as his detractors might, there is no rubbing out Eagleson’s central role in making the Summit Series happen.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In some circles, great success and corruption would live side by side, and such was the case of Alan Eagleson, whose crimes involved ripping off the pension and disability monies of former “working players”, even colluding with some of the “capitalist owners” in committing fraud (“<a href="http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/48355-No-room-for-Alan-Eagleson-at-Summit-Series-celebrations.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">No room for Alan Eagleson at Summit Series celebrations</font></a>”, by Adam Proteau, September 6, 2012, <em>The Hockey News</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“For those unfamiliar with Eagleson’s rise and downfall, a quick recap: He first came to prominence as a Toronto lawyer who served as business advisor for a number of Maple Leafs in the 1960s. He founded the NHL Players’ Association in 1967 and served as its executive director for a quarter-century. He stepped down in 1992 amid allegations and evidence of severe misconduct unearthed by player agents Ritch Winter and Ron Salcer as well as Massachusetts journalist Russ Conway. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Eagleson wasn’t a man wrongly convicted. He systematically and callously shut out a group of NHL players from their pension and disability monies, leaving some destitute and broken. He swindled Bobby Orr and colluded with his NHL team owner pals (including notoriously cheap Hawks owner Bill Wirtz) and used NHLPA funds to fuel his extravagant lifestyle. He lied and lied and lied some more and has remained shamelessly unrepentant for the catastrophic damage he wrought on the game.</p> <p>Ultimately, Eagleson betrayed NHLers in the worst way possible: he took the trust of athletes famous for their good nature and team mentality and twisted it into a poisonous origami sculpture to be admired by his country club buddies and a small inner circle of hockey friends (including then-NHL president John Ziegler) and clients he treated very well. He was so close to all levels of power, he was inducted as a builder in the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Eagleson colluded with the NHL owners possibly because he had the ambition to enter politics and become the Tory leader:</p> <blockquote> <p>“For all he did for Canada at the Summit Series, Eagleson was, as usual, out for himself. Here’s an example: after the series ended, the plane carrying Canada’s players landed in Montreal and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was waiting on the tarmac by the front exit of the plane to congratulate them. Eagleson, a political animal who had designs on leading Canada’s Progressive Conservative party, attempted to snub Trudeau by having the players exit at the rear of the plane, but was unsuccessful.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Not unlike Donald MacDonald in the ambition to move things toward the political right; but Canada was not only a left-leaning nation but a hockey-worship country, and in attempting a ‘chameleon color change’ this working-players representative must have gotten himself burned.</p> <p>In any case, the association between Alan Eagleson and Paul Desmarais was incidental, unlike that between the Canadian political leaders and Desmarais.</p> <p>Obviously, none of the top politicians was as close to Desmarais as Jean Chretien after France and Andre had tied the knot, but Chretien had a good reason for achieving, that his father had been a lifelong laborer in a paper mill company owned by Power Corp. and “the mill owner was now part of the family” (“NEW LEADER ‘A PRACTICAL GUY LOOKING FOR A PRACTICAL SOLUTION’”, by Harvey Schachter, June 25, 1990, <a href="http://www.thewhig.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Whig – Standard</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““My father, Wellie Chretien, was a machinist in the Shawinigan paper mill, but politics was his favorite hobby,” Jean Chretien wrote in his best selling book, Straight From The Heart.</p> <p>“He was a Liberal organizer and I used to help him distribute pamphlets when I was quite young. During the 1949 federal election, when I was 15, I argued for the Liberals in a poolroom near our home. At 18 I was taking on the poolroom near our home.”</p> <p>Those weren’t intellectual debates. It was far from the schooling in politics that Pierre Trudeau got.</p> <p>“I have always had to pay a political price among the intellectuals of Quebec for using slang, emotion, and jokes in my speeches, but the St. Maurice Valley was a region of populist politicians famous for their colorful style. Duplessis and J. A. Mongrain were in Trois-Rivieres, Hamel and Lavergne were in Shawinigan, Maurice Bellemare was in Champlain, and Real Caouette and Camille Samson of the Creditistes were also from Maurice,” he wrote.</p> <p>“Since I had to fight populists, I learned from them and even tried to outdo them. That has often shocked and annoyed the intellectuals, who exaggerate my humble beginnings or conclude I’m not educated.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>“I was a working class lawyer and I deliberately built my house in a working class area, Shawinigan North, while most of the professionals were going to Shawinigan South. My oldest friends are working class people, although many of them have moved into administration or started businesses, and the president of my riding association has always been a blue collar worker. When the lawyers ask me what they can do to help me, I say, ‘stay at home.’”</p> <p>But the man who has cultivated his working class roots is also proud of his ties to one of the wealthiest arms of francophone business. His daughter France, a lawyer, married Andre Desmarais, a son of Paul Desmarais, the chairman of Power Corporation, who, it’s worth noting, used to employ as his labor lawyer Brian Mulroney and assisted him in his leadership campaigns.</p> <p>Power Corporation used to own Consolidated-Bathurst, the paper company for which Jean Chretien’s father toiled all his life, Mr. Chretien notes in his book. The mill owner was now part of the family.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Unlike lawyer Trudeau the intellectual, or lawyer Chretien the working-class practical guy intermarrying his family with the tycoon owner’s, Mulroney the labor lawyer who had worked for Desmarais was a businessman himself – at one time the president of Iron Ore Company of Canada as quoted in Part 12.</p> <p>Right after taking over government in 1984 Mulroney took a vacation, and journalist Jeffrey Simpson was upset that Mulroney, unlike Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, did not tell his countrymen their leader’s Florida vacation place – most likely Paul Desmarais’s villa (“The hidden benefactors”, by Jeffrey Simpson, October 18, 1984, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Conservatives’ provincial executive, which will meet this weekend in Toronto, is leaning towards allowing candidates to keep secret the source of their financial contributions.</p> <p>That’s the policy both the federal Liberals and Tories adopted, and it’s a bad practice.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Not only are we ignorant about the Prime Minister’s fundraising, we don’t even know where he is. He has gone to Florida on a vacation that no fair-minded person can begrudge him. But his staff won’t say where he is staying.</p> <p>The Prime Minister has the right to privacy. But there are rumors – nothing more – that he’s resting at Montreal financier Paul Desmarais’ villa. If the rumors are true, how would that be different from former Liberal ministers flying on private corporate jets or taking paid holidays at corporate expense?</p> <p>If the rumors are false, why doesn’t the Prime Minister’s staff say where he is staying? When President Ronald Reagan goes on vacation, the whole world knows where he is. When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher holidays in Switzerland, she says where she’s staying and is left in peace.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As the pro-business Prime Minister, Mulroney understood the value of personal connections, not just privacy. For important international occasions, Mulroney ensured that Desmarais was at the head of the table – so to speak as in Part 12 – with business opportunities in mind.</p> <p>Part 12 has told of Mulroney’s eagerness to take credit for introducing Desmarais to then U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush, despite that in an earlier era Trudeau’s principal secretary Jim Coutts had accompanied Desmarais to Washington D.C., where they partied with Bush and others while Reagan was recuperating from attempted assassination injuries.</p> <p>Perhaps Mulroney meant that he had done it personally, such as in his official U.S. visit in 1986 (“Montreal Chest Hospital Auxiliary to hold dance”, by E. J. Gordon, March 20, 1986, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was host last night at a black-tie dinner at the Canadian embassy in Washington in honor of U.S. Vice President George Bush, and Mrs. Bush.</p> <p>Canadians who were honored with invitations included the Canadian ambassador to Washington, Allen Gotlieb, and Mrs. Gotlieb; Mr. and Mrs. Paul Desmarais, Mr. and Mrs. Andre Desmarais; the mayor of Westmount, Brian Gallery, and Mrs. Gallery; Hubert Pichet; David Angus; Nancy Southam, and Mr. and Mrs. Jean-Louis Lesaux, of Montreal.</p> <p>Torontonians who attended were Mr. and Mrs. Paul Reichman; Mr. and Mrs. Conrad Black; Mr. and Mrs. Bill Davis, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Light; Mr. and Mrs. Trevor Eyton; Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Deichter; Mr. and Mrs. Irving Gertstein; John Tory; Barbara Hackett and Jocelin Bennett.</p> <p>Other guests were Mr. and Mrs. Desmond Hallissey, of Quebec City; Arthur Erickson of Vancouver; movie director Norman Jewison, and columnist Allan Fotheringham.</p> <p>The previous evening, Canadians were among the guests at the White House dinner given by the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, and Mrs. Reagan in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Mulroney.</p> <p>Mrs. Reagan’s gown was of shimmering brown and gold. Mrs. Mulroney wore a gown of deep violet sequins, and Maureen Reagan, the president’s daughter, was in green velvet.</p> <p>On the international guest list were Mr. and Mrs. Paul Desmarais; Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Deichter; Arthur Erickson, who designed the new Canadian embassy in Washington; actress Kate Nelligan, and Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Plummer.</p> <p>Others who were invited were Prince Karim Aga Khan, and Princess Selima Aga Khan; Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat, and Mrs. Agnelli; author Ariana Stassinopoulos, and actress Catherine Oxenberg.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Be it Mulroney’s longer Canadian guest list or Reagan’s shorter one as reported in the media, Desmarais was at the top. But Trudeau probably hadn’t care much for it – the U.S. that was. </p> <p>Right after Mulroney had taken over power, Trudeau told him, “stop kowtowing to Mr. Reagan”, at an event honoring Trudeau, Desmarais and philanthropist Phyllis Lambert as Great Montrealers, highlighted in a news story in its entirety here (“Stop kowtowing to U.S., Trudeau tells Mulroney”, October 26, 1984, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A singing Pierre Trudeau stole the show – and surprised a black-tie dinner last night by telling Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to “stop kowtowing” to U. S. President Ronald Reagan.</p> <p>After remaining tightlipped about his Wednesday meeting in Ottawa with the Prime Minister, Mr. Trudeau told the $125-a-plate gala event honoring him as a Great Montrealer he wanted to set the record straight.</p> <p>As a smiling Mr. Mulroney watched from the head table, Mr. Trudeau said the media “exaggerated a little” about the visit at which he was reported to have agreed to advise the new Conservative Government on peace and foreign affairs.</p> <p>Without specifying how the reports were inaccurate, Mr. Trudeau said Mr. Mulroney “always promised an open Government” and “I hope to be an open counsellor. “The advice I gave him (Wednesday) was that perhaps he should stop kowtowing to Mr. Reagan if he wants Canadians to respect his foreign policy,” Mr. Trudeau said.</p> <p>Ambushed by a mob of reporters after the dinner, Mr. Mulroney brushed off Mr. Trudeau’s words, saying he took them in jest. “I thought Mr. Trudeau spoke with tremendous good humor,” Mr. Mulroney said. He was honored last year as a Great Montrealer of the Future.</p> <p>Earlier, an easy-going Mr. Trudeau, minus the trademark red rose in his lapel, brought cheers from the 870 guests, including Governor-General Jeanne Sauve, with a tuneful rendition of a jingle from his youth originally performed by the renowned French Canadian singer La Bolduc. “Jobs, there will be some for everyone this winter,” he piped. “But it’s necessary to give the new Government a little time.” The former law professor declared: “To those who may be discouraged, I can tell you those hopes are well-founded – I found a job just recently myself.” Mr. Trudeau joined the Montreal legal firm of Heenan Blaikie Jolin Potvin Trepanier and Cobbett as senior counsel last month.</p> <p>He said he didn’t know whether his colleagues were good lawyers, “but I can tell you, they’re a helluva good gang.” Others honored as Great Montrealers at the dinner were Power Corp. chairman Paul Desmarais and architect Phyllis Lambert, director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and founder of the conservation group, Heritage Montreal.</p> <p>Mr. Desmarais, who parlayed his family’s bus company in Sudbury, Ont., into control of the $10-billion Power Corp. of Canada Ltd. empire, paid brief tribute to Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau, another of the head table guests, who celebrated his third decade in politics yesterday. “For 30 years, he has enlivened Montreal life,” Mr. Desmarais said, praising Mr. Drapeau for making Montreal a world class city.</p> <p>Ms Lambert, daughter of whisky and oil magnate Samuel Bronfman, is known as a tireless crusader to save the city’s historical sites.</p> <p>Forever tilting at City Hall, she said she viewed her award as “an endorsement and an encouragement for the work that is to be done.” Before the festivities got under way, two members of a group campaigning for more provincial financial aid for young welfare recipients crashed a news briefing for the gala.</p> <p>The two men, indentifying themselves as members of a group called Little Montrealers, unfurled a banner in front of television cameras that read: Everybody Has a Right to Eat.</p> <p>Alain Larose, who staged a 24-day hunger strike earlier in the year to protest the plight of welfare recipients, said he was speaking out for the Little Montrealers – “those who have to prostitute themselves” and the <br />handicapped, the elderly and the poor.</p> <p>Security officials cut short his speech, hustling him and his companion out of the hotel.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“A clairvoyant man” who “saw 10 years into the future” as his next-door neighbor would admiringly say in September 2000, Trudeau joined “a helluva good gang” that he knew in 1984; and although not the entire Heenan Blaikie then stuck with him through thick and thin, the founders gang did, as described earlier, and would be nicely rewarded 10 years later with Jean Chretien.</p> <p>When one’s the pride of a city of roses one wouldn’t kowtow to a cowboy, would one?</p> <p>Mulroney didn’t endear Desmarais to Reagan only, though. He used his official role to help Desmarais with the Canada-China trade, which Trudeau had done.</p> <p>Two months after the 1986 U.S. visit, Mulroney was officially visiting China at the same time as the annual Beijing meeting of the Canada China Business Council headed by Desmarais (“China is more than a market”, April 30, 1986, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“When Prime Minister Brian Mulroney arrives in Peking next week, he’ll find a reservoir of goodwill for Canada among his Chinese hosts. And it isn’t just because the Chinese are, by nature, a hospitable people. In the Communist regime of the People’s Republic of China, friendly feelings for Canada and Canadians were nurtured by Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who ministered to Mao Tse-tung’s revolutionaries on their long march to power, and by the late Chester Ronning, the Canadian diplomat who kept open lines of communication between China and the West when normal diplomatic relations had been suspended.</p> <p>The friendship was cemented in 1970 when Canada formally recognized the Mao regime, re-established diplomatic ties and opened the door to recognition by the United States.</p> <p>These days, it’s nearly impossible even for a tourist to visit Peking without running into a Canadian businessman, trade delegation, doctor or professor. Indeed, Mulroney’s visit coincides with the annual meeting in Peking of the Canada-China Trade Council, presided over by its chairman and Mulroney’s fellow-Quebecer, Paul Desmarais.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney took time to address the Canada China Business Council meeting; and while he was busy meeting Chinese leaders, Desmarais was busily signing a business deal for a joint investment venture between China and Consolidated-Bathurst – the company Jean Chretien’s father had labored for (“PM hands out goodies on first day in China”, by Terrance Wills, May 10, 1986, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Prime Minister Brian Mulroney handed out a free fertilizer plant and some interest-free financing as he opened a four-day visit to China yesterday.</p> <p>In return, he received promises from Chinese leaders:</p> <p>To keep buying Canadian wheat even though U.S. wheat will become much cheaper because of subsidies. Sales last year were worth $446 million.</p> <p>To keep Canadian businessmen in mind when making big transportation and energy purchases as China follows its new open-door policy of modernization.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Two Montreal businessmen in Peking for the annual meeting of the Canada-China Trade Council got something more concrete than promises from the Chinese.</p> <p>W. I. M. Turner, chief executive officer of Consolidated-Bathurst Inc., and Paul Desmarais, chairman of Power Corp., told The Gazette last night their companies had just signed a joint deal with the Chinese to invest in a pulp mill in Canada.</p> <p>The China International Trust and Investment Corp., which is putting up 50 per cent of the capital, will take half the output for a new paper plant Consolidated-Bathurst will build in China as part of the deal, Turner said.</p> <p>This morning, Mulroney addressed a session of the Canada-China Trade Council, which is headed by Desmarais.</p> <p>Turner said the council meeting marked the fourth time he has visited China on business. He said it takes a long time to build up confidence and contacts to do business in China.</p> <p>“They don’t like to see different faces,” he said.</p> <p>Eighty-five prominent Canadian businessmen attended the meeting.</p> <p>Mulroney told the Canadian and Chinese businessmen:</p> <p>“This nation of 1 billion people is embarking upon a unique experiment, an effort to blend Chinese vigor, socialist planning and western technology. Canada is ready as never before to expand its economic and trade relations with China.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney felt particularly good that the Chinese economic reform leader Deng Xiaoping accorded him the respect given to only a few foreign leaders (“Mulroney, Chinese Premier discuss human rights, clergy”, by James Rusk, May 12, 1986, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Prime Minister Brian Mulroney raised the issue of imprisoned Chinese clergymen today during a farewell meeting with Premier Zhao Ziyang.</p> <p>The meeting at the close of Mr. Mulroney’s four-day state visit to China was supposed to last 10 minutes, but turned into a half-hour discussion of human rights in China, the Prime Minister said at a press conference.</p> <p>…</p> <p>A Canadian Government official said Friday about a dozen priests – all Chinese – are imprisoned in China.</p> <p>On Saturday, Mr. Mulroney spent 70 minutes with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and said later it was “like meeting Churchill.”</p> <p>While that meeting – “the highlight of my visit to China” – focused on the economic reforms, which Mr. Deng has used in the last decade to revitalized the Chinese, it became clear the meeting’s atmosphere was perhaps more important than the business conducted.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Deng assured Mr. Mulroney that China will not abandon the massive economic reforms by which he has carefully rebuilt an economy that lay in ruins when Mao died. …</p> <p>At 81, he is supreme leader of nearly a quarter of the world’s people, the living symbol of more than six turbulent decades of Chinese history, from the Communist activism of the 1920s and the Long March through Mao’s rule, to his return from the political wilderness to become the political father of a nation that now may be finding its future.</p> <p>For Canada it was important not only that the meeting was held – Mr. Deng now sees only a few of the world leaders who come through Peking at a rate of more than one a week – but that it went on so long; most such meetings are for only half an hour.</p> <p>…</p> <p>… The meeting received extensive coverage in the press yesterday, and a picture of the two leaders was on the front page of the official People’s Daily.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Clever Mr. Mulroney, he knew how to please Mr. Deng Xiaoping: I wonder if anyone noticed that human rights weren’t a focus of his meetings with the Chinese leaders until the last moment, with business deals signed, the patriarch Deng Xiaoping already met and Mulroney saying goodbye to his host Premier Zhao Ziyang when he raised the rather limited issue of imprisoned Chinese priests – as in Part 12 the favorite kind of issue he also raised with Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu.</p> <p>In comparison, Pierre Trudeau had great political issues, like world peace, to elaborate on. His belittling of the U.S. governed by the Reagan stereotype did not apply to Desmarais’s business, as the pioneering Trudeau was now taking his businessman friend and fellow Great Montrealer in the direction of the Soviet Union led by Mikhail Gorbachev (“Capitalists circling as the Soviets open door”, by Lawrence Martin, February 21, 1987, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>): </p> <blockquote> <p>“Paul Desmarais, Pierre Trudeau and Bernard Lamarre trooped quietly into Red Square again last week. The head of Power Corp. of Canada, the former prime minister and the Lavalin Inc. chief executive had also slipped into Moscow last fall, when they held a series of confidential talks with Soviet leaders. Now they were at it again, taking part initially in the Soviet Union’s world peace forum and then lingering a while, “just taking care of business,” as an official put it.</p> <p>For they, along with many leading Western financial magnates, have developed a rather sudden and eager interest in one of the world’s biggest, and heretofore most closeted, economies. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>The economic reforms being instituted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev include significantly liberalized foreign trade procedures, efforts to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the International Monetary Fund, a system of more varied wages based on the merit principle and some free initiative.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Trudeau’s help was invaluable to Desmarais, and later in November 1987 when Desmarais formed an international advisory council for Power Corp. Trudeau was among the “16 Wise Men”, who included Saudi sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and RJR Nabisco Inc. president Ross Johnson (“For Power Corp., the world is now its ‘oyster’, by James Daw, January 27, 1989, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>”; and, “Waiting for Desmarais; He’s got cash for a big deal but has he still got the nerve?”, by Jan Ravensbergen, February 18, 1989, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Power Corp.’s coming of age in international presence was made possible by Desmarais’s success in Canada turning around the paper mill company in which Chretien’s father had labored all his life, by Desmarais’s mutually beneficial joint-business development with a Chinese state-owned company, by Desmarais’s friendship with Brian Mulroney in government, and by a leading American company’s willingness to invest in Canada.</p> <p>As quoted earlier, Consolidated-Bathurst, partly owned by Power Corp., was the paper company for which Chretien’s father had worked all his life at a mill, and that in May 1986 when Mulroney officially visited China Desmarais and Consolidated-Bathurst CEO W. I. M. Turner signed a joint deal with the China International Trust and Investment Corp. for a pulp mill in Canada and a paper plant in China.</p> <p>The Chinese joint-investment was a latest part of Desmsarais’s transformational development plan for Consolidated-Bathurst, 40% owned by Power Corp. Previously the paper company had diversified into oil and gas ventures in western Canada and into the packaging industry, but with disappointing results (“Consolidated-Bathurst gets back on track”, by Kimberley Noble, February 18, 1988, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Since the late 1960s, when he became its major shareholder, Mr. Desmarais has had big plans for the Montreal pulp, paper and packaging manufacturer. He has imagined it as a worldwide natural resource empire – a company that would lead Canadians into overseas markets, and make him the international industrialist he longs to be.</p> <p>After two decades of dabbling in sometimes ill-fated diversification, Consolidated-Bathurst is now back on this track – having got out of oil and gas and consumer packaging and back to being a pure pulp and paper company.</p> <p>The money it gets from the sale of extraneous assets and subsidiaries, as well as from the current pulp and paper boom, will be used to upgrade Canadian operations and product lines, and to build mills in foreign countries, industry analysts and company officials said.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The strategy has done a U-turn since the last cycle, which peaked in 1979 and 1980. Consolidated-Bathurst, 40 per cent owned by Mr. Desmarais’ Power Corp. of Canada Ltd., came out of the trough five years later looking like, and describing itself as, a diversified manufacturing company with a pulp and paper division.</p> <p>The last time around, it plowed its profits into investments that management thought would smooth out the impact of the wild pulp and paper swings.</p> <p>More than $100-million went into western Canadian oil and gas ventures, and the number of packaging subsidiaries acquired made it the largest manufacturer in the country. In 1984, the glass, plastic and metal packaging operations were spun off as CB Pak Inc., and 20 per cent was sold to public investors.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The investment in oil and gas proved disastrous and expensive. Stakes in Sulpetro Ltd., Sceptre Resources Ltd. and others have been written down in stages since 1985; Sulpetro was written off altogether after Imperial Oil Ltd. bought the bankrupt company’s assets last year.</p> <p>But as recently as 1986, the packaging division was still viewed as a necessary contributor. Packaging revenues, which include those from Europe Carton AG in West Germany and Canadian paper packaging operations, accounted for half of total sales. …</p> <p>Circumstances changed dramatically over the last two years. The packaging industry, a hot investment in 1986, proved a major disappointment to many investors.</p> <p>…</p> <p>So, when earlier this week, Consolidated-Bathurst put the rumors to rest by announcing that it had agreed to sell CB Pak to its senior managers – if the buy-out team can raise the requisite $25.50 a share by April 25 – industry analysts said they could hardly blame it.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Returning the company Chretien’s father used to labor in to its traditional focus of pulp and paper, the new plan by Consolidated Bathurst and its owner Power Corp. was helped by their joint deal with a Chinese state-owned company to invest in a B.C. paper mill – the first investment from China in any Canadian company – was accompanied by corresponding Canadian investment in China, and spurred the Soviet Union’s interest in similar projects there:</p> <blockquote> <p>“[Levesque Beaubien Inc. analyst] Mr. Saucier said that from now on, most of the company’s energy and money will go toward two things – modernizing mills in Quebec, New Brunswick and Ontario to make higher value-added products out of an ever-diminishing wood supply, and looking for places to expand overseas.</p> <p>Consolidated-Bathurst is already well-established as an international operator. It has made paperboard and cartons in west Germany since the late 1960s, and owns a British newsprint mill near Liverpool that, despite a shaky start, now provides a more than healthy return on investment.</p> <p>In 1986, Consolidated-Bathurst and Power Corp. became the first Canadian companies to bring in investment from China when they formed a joint venture with China International Trust Investment Corp. (a merchant banking and investment arm of the Chinese government) to buy the Cellgar pulp mill at Castlegar, B.C., from British Columbia Resources Investment Corp.</p> <p>Their agreement with the Chinese (a pact that was spearheaded by Mr. Desmarais, head of the Canada-China Trade Council, who reportedly persuaded Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to telephone the consortium of bankers involved in the purchase to make sure the Chinese financing went through), stipulates that the two partners will also build a pulp or paper mill in mainland China, as soon as the Chinese select a site and a product that the Canadians think will work.</p> <p>In addition, Consolidated-Bathurst has signed an agreement to pursue a similar project in the Asian part of the Soviet Union, following Mikhail Gorbachev’s decree allowing joint ventures with Western companies. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>I note that for these international joint projects to work the top-level political world’s involvement was crucial, including cooperation by the governments of China and the Soviet Union, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s phone calls to bankers and the personal participation of Pierre Trudeau visiting Moscow.</p> <p>The next step Desmarais wanted to take, in 1988-89, was to turn Consolidated-Bathurst into the dominant forest-products company in Quebec, big enough to compete on the world stage. His plan was to take over the company’s main Quebec competitor, Domtar Inc. But Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa’s government refused to sell its stake in Domtar at a favorably low price to Consolidated-Bathurst, instead suggesting to help Desmarais buy the Chicago-based Stone Containers Corp., a world-leading company interested in acquiring Consolidated-Bathurst. In the end, Stone’s favorably rich offer won over Desmarais, who sold to the U.S. company and got out of this field altogether (“Waiting for Desmarais; He’s got cash for a big deal but has he still got the nerve?”, by Jan Ravensbergen, February 18, 1989, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Even in a merger-shocked market, the takeover bid for Connie-Bath came as a surprise. Desmarais had helped nurse the company into tip-top shape over the more than two decades of his involvement. Stone, the world’s largest maker of corrugated packages and paper bags, agreed to pay $2.6 billion for it and take on between $400 million and $450 million of its debts.</p> <p>The previous evening, less than an hour before a 9 p.m. deadline imposed by Stone, Desmarais had agreed to tender Power’s 40-per-cent control block. The $3-billion deal turned out to be an offer he couldn’t refuse. After negotiations had broken off last spring and then resumed in early January, Stone chairman and chief executive Roger Stone agreed to pay $25 a share, a full 50 per cent above Connie-Bath’s pre-announcement price on the stock markets.</p> <p>“It’s a good deal from our point of view,” Desmarais commented laconically at the news conference, “because Mr. Stone is paying a lot of money for it.”</p> <p>Last year, Desmarais wanted to take over his forest-products competitor, Domtar Inc. of Montreal.</p> <p>But he insisted on being in the driver’s seat of a combined Connie-Bath and Domtar Inc. That proved politically unpalatable to Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, because it would have given the Parti Quebecois fresh ammunition to attack the premier for being too generous to big business interests.</p> <p>The Quebec government holds sway over Domtar because of its 44.5-per-cent control block. The holding is in two parts: 16.5 per cent is held by the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, the government agency that invests the assets of the Quebec Pension Plan, while the other 28 per cent is held by Le Groupe SGF, a Quebec government industrial-development arm.</p> <p>Desmarais did make a last-hours, take-it-or-leave-it offer to the Caisse de depot when the bargaining with Stone was getting down to the wire. In a rare breach of the usual silence in which the Caisse normally does things, Jean-Claude Scraire, its senior vice-president for legal and corporate affairs, told selected financial journalists that the Desmarais proposal undervalued Domtar by between $300 million and $400 million. The Caisse turned the offer down, and then offered to discuss turning the tables on Stone in concert with Desmarais, by helping him finance a buyout of Stone.</p> <p>Desmarais opted to take his profits instead.</p> <p>While there was “some discussion of the matter,” Roger Stone said about that day's proposal and counter-proposal involving the Caisse, he added that he viewed the interplay as “really nothing very serious.”</p> <p>Despite his apparent bargaining ploy in the hours before he struck the deal for Connie-Bath, Desmarais had accepted that without Domtar he could not build a forest-products operation big enough to compete on the world stage. And the offer from Stone was enough to persuade him to get out of the business altogether.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The money from the American company was enough for Desmarais to try his greater ambitions, namely for Power Corp. to acquire a major company in Canada or make serious investments in China, the Soviet Union and the world:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Connie-Bath sale would leave Desmarais with no debt and nearly $1.5 billion in cash, enough to buy virtually any company in Canada.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Desmarais certainly knows how to spend cash personally. With his wife, Jackie, he has hosted some of the most expensive galas in recent memory for the Montreal Establishment, both in the city and abroad.</p> <p>“Without question, in terms of spending money,” the Desmarais clan is the leader of the Montreal social set, says an individual who attends many of their events.</p> <p>“They overdo it,” adds the observer, who also asked not to be identified.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The odds are that Power will invest some or all of the money overseas. Desmarais has good contacts in Europe as well as a yen to develop business in both the Peoples’ Republic of China and the Soviet Union.</p> <p>In addition, he has assembled an international council, known as his 16 Wise Men. They include former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Saudi sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and RJR Nabisco Inc. president Ross Johnson.</p> <p>Desmarais must also grapple with his own future. In 1986, he said he planned to retire by 65, or possibly sooner. That would leave him less than three years to groom his two sons, Paul Jr., 34, and Andre, 32.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So in early 1989 under his in-law Paul Desmarais’ stewardship, the company Jean Chretien’s father had worked for in a lifetime went into American hands. It had been Power Corp.’s largest direct industrial holding (“Desmarais keeps analysts guessing on his next move”, by John Stackhouse, January 31, 1989, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Windsor Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““I would have preferred to use Consolidated-Bathurst to build a greater pulp and paper company for ourselves,” Desmarais said. “We’ve taken this company from a very precarious position, developed it and sold it to a very responsible buyer.”</p> <p>What Desmarais will do with the proceeds is a bigger question. Connie-Bath is his second-largest asset, after Great West Lifeco Inc. of Winnipeg, which he holds through Power Financial Corp.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Looking at the numbers, I can guess that selling it to the Americans likely also made Paul Desmarais a billionaire, more or less, from this point on (“For Power Corp., the world is now its ‘oyster’, by James Daw, January 27, 1989, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Power Corp., which also has a stake in insurance, trust, newspaper and broadcasting and banking companies, will have between $1.25 billion and $1.5 billion in liquid assets after the transaction.</p> <p>“The world is their oyster with that much money,” said Eugene Bukoveczky of Midland Doherty Ltd.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The multi-millionaire Desmarais, 62, owns about 62 per cent of the shares of Power Corp., which reported profit of $183 million before extraordinary items on revenue of $196 million in 1987.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The years 1988-89 happened to be when Air Canada did an $1.8 billion deal with the European Airbus company to purchase 34 A320 planes, and RCMP’s anti-corruption squad then quietly began to look into whether Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his associates benefited from Airbus secret commissions, as detailed in Part 11.</p> <p>Prior to that point, media criticisms of Mulroney’s character in this respect had been on the showy and expensive lifestyles; but there was one exceptional case where the lifestyle spending escalated into a potential legal dispute, when an interior designer who had done work for the Prime Minister’s residences threatened to take the Mulroney family and the Canadian government to court for service fees unpaid.</p> <p>In my March 2009 blog post I mentioned this 1987 incident, noting that the small businessman was then “given career-ending threat not to pester Mr. Mulroney who being the national leader was powerful and influential” (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-11/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … (Part 2)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Not a surprise at all for Stevie Cameron to be casted as someone driving behind the RCMP Airbus-Affair criminal investigation, as she has been a leading Canadian journalist of anti-political-corruption repute ever since the early years of the Mulroney era. … by the mid-1980s, Cameron had begun to take on assignments investigating political ethics and conduct, and she made her initial fame in this field through reporting on the lifestyles and related problems of the family of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, in 1987 exposing the so-called Gucci-gate, i.e., Prime Minister Mulroney’s closet built to house 50 pairs of Gucci shoes, 30 suits and other personal furnishings.</p> <p>More intriguing among what Cameron reported in 1987 than the fact that the Progressive Conservative Party helped pay for the Mulroney lifestyles, was that during those early years there were already prospects of a legal dispute with a legitimate businessperson who did services for the Mulroney family for their lifestyles, who was threatening to take the family and the government to court for money owned; but he was given career-ending threat not to pester Mr. Mulroney who being the national leader was powerful and influential.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The businessperson threatening to sue was interior designer Giovanni Mowinckel, in a dispute with Mrs. Mila Mulroney and the government over interior design costs for the Prime Minister’s official residence …”</p> </blockquote> <p>Extensively reported by anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron and others, the “career-ending threat” against Giovanni Mowinckel was from Mila Mulroney’s executive assistant Bonnie Brownlee – the Mulroney family’s executive assistant as previously cited in Part 12 for comments related to Caroline Mulroney and Michel Trudeau.</p> <p>The background of the dispute was the expenses for the Prime Minister’s official residences, which had cost the government and the Progressive Conservative party well over $1.2 million (“Hired for NCC job; PM’s decorating bills approved by ex-butler”, by Stevie Cameron, April 30, 1987, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A National Capital Commission official who approved spending more than $38,000 retroactively on renovations and redecorating at 24 Sussex Dr. and Harrington Lake formerly served on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s household staff, the NCC has acknowledged.</p> <p>Albert (Robby) McRobb worked as a butler at the Prime Minister’s residence from February to September, 1985, when he was hired by the NCC. The Crown corporation is responsible for administering extensive federal Government holdings in the Ottawa-Hull region, as well as Canada’s official residences, and is financed mainly by tax revenues.</p> <p>…</p> <p>A spokesman for the NCC said Mr. McRobb was chosen to sort out the bills for the Prime Minister’s residences because of his knowledge of the houses.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The NCC's payment was in addition to more than $300,000 in payments for renovations and redecorating made by the PC Canada Fund and previously reported by The Globe.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. McRobb's commitment that the NCC would pay $38,414.60 toward renovations and furnishings at the residences came when staff from the Prime Minister's Office, the NCC and an Ottawa design firm met on June 2, 1986, to divide outstanding decorating bills for the official residences.</p> <p>The NCC was involved because it had assumed responsibility for official residences in January of 1986.</p> <p>In addition to Mr. McRobb, those at the meeting included Bonnie Brownlee, Mila Mulroney’s executive assistant, and three staff members from Colvin Design Canada Ltd., the firm responsible for furnishing and decorating the houses and the Mulroneys’ offices.</p> <p>Mr. McRobb and Ms Brownlee agreed to divide $51,000 in outstanding bills, most of which had been owed to Colvin Design for eight months. Mr. McRobb agreed to ask the NCC to pay $38,414.60 worth and Ms Brownlee said she would ask the Mulroneys to pay $5,494.26 for “personal” items…</p> <p>…</p> <p>For the rest, Colvin Design agreed to forgive nearly $3,000. But there was no decision made about who would pay another $5,496 owing in design fees and that amount is still outstanding.</p> <p>Until it went into receivership last month, Colvin Design was run by Giovanni Mowinckel…</p> <p>…</p> <p>According to receipts and invoices in Colvin files, Mrs. Mulroney frequently shopped for goods herself and charged them to the Colvin account or asked <br />that the bill be sent to Mr. Mowinckel. He paid them and then sent invoices to Alfred Doucet, the Prime Minister’s senior policy adviser.</p> <p>Mr. Doucet in turn passed the bills on to David Angus in Montreal, the chairman of the PC Canada Fund. Mr. Angus sent cheques to Mr. Doucet to pay <br />the bills.</p> <p>After the first year of work on the houses, however, both the PC Canada Fund and Public Works Canada, the Government department responsible for <br />the residences at the time, stopped paying bills.</p> <p>As a result, Mr. Doucet was unable to pay accumulated invoices of $51,000 built up during the fall of 1985 and the winter of 1986, according to <br />documents obtained by The Globe and Mail.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Additional documents obtained by The Globe also show that the PC Canada Fund’s expenditures on the houses were greater than previously <br />reported.</p> <p>At least $10,000 that has not been reported in previous stories was paid during 1985, bringing the total spent by the Conservatives’ fund-raising <br />wing to $324,000.</p> <p>(This amount is on top of the $508,000 spent on 24 Sussex Dr. and $437,000 on Harrington Lake by the Public Works Department and the NCC over <br />the past 2 1/2 years for capital expenditures, operations and maintenance, and furnishings and decorating.) …</p> <p>The cheque for $108,645.81 came with a personal note to Mr. Mowinckel from Mr. Angus, asking for a receipt. The note, written in longhand, said: “Giovanni – Please confirm receipt directly to me in Montreal. My business card is attached. Make it ‘confidential.’” … The payment schedule included the following cheques: $10,000 and $25,000 dated Oct. 24, 1984; … $5,000 dated Aug. 15, 1985; . $5,494.26 (from David Angus personally) on Sept. 3, 1986.</p> <p>Colvin Design financial statements show they received other PC Fund cheques in 1984 and 1985, which made the total from the Conservatives about $324,000.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So the numbers were: with over $1.2m spent on the official residences – $945,000 by the government and near $320,000 paid to Mowinckel by the Tory party – Mowinckel’s firm was still owed $51,000 for 8 months; eventually on June 2, 1986, he was able to sit down with a government official – the Mulroneys’ former butler Albert McRobb – and Mila Mulroney’s executive assistant Bonnie Brownlee, and got the government to pay it – except $5,494.26 for the Mulroneys’ “personal items”, later covered by Tory party fund chairman David Angus personally, and $5,496 in design fees still outstanding.</p> <p>Mowinckel had mentioned legal action in order to get the government’s attention. After the June 2 meeting, he raised it again, and Brownlee responded by saying that if Mowinckel took legal action he would lose business contracts with Paul Desmarais, which had earned him well over $100, 000:</p> <blockquote> <p>A week later, with no response from the Government, Mr. Mowinckel threatened legal action again. According to Colvin Design’s bookkeeper, Marie Dorion, this threat caused Ms Brownlee to tell her that if Colvin Design proceeded with legal action it would lose the lucrative account with Montreal millionaire Paul Desmarais, a close friend of the Mulroneys.</p> <p>Mr. Mowinckel did not proceed but he did lose the Desmarais account, one which had earned his firm well over $100,000 over the previous few years.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mowinckel did not file any lawsuit but lost the Desmarais account anyway.</p> <p>The Desmarais family denied the link, saying that Mowinckel’s contract merely ended, i.e., wasn’t cancelled; but Mowinckel had a document to support his allegation (“Quarrel, threats apparently ended designer’s business with Mulroneys”, by Stevie Cameron, April 16, 1987, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Miss Brownlee would not comment on the costs involved in the renovations and furnishings, referring these questions to Fred Doucet, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s senior adviser, who did not return calls from The Globe. But Miss Brownlee added that “the work he (Mr. Mowinckel) did for Mila made his name in this country and brought him many good clients. He’s done well for the fact he’s worked for Mila. Working for me wouldn’t have got him anywhere.”</p> <p>Although she denied that there had been any threat about the Desmarais business, Mr. Mowinckel’s files indicates that he lost the account.</p> <p>Mr. Desmarais, the owner of Montreal-based Power Corp. of Canada, is a close friend of the Prime minister.</p> <p>The documents show that Mr. Mowinckel had done thousands of dollars worth of design work for the Desmarais family, including an $1,800 upholstery contract for cushions for their private jet. He had also visited the family in Palm Beach to help plan a new 35,000-square-foot French-style chateau, Manoir Desmarais, to be build for them in the Saguenay region of Quebec, in the heart of a 3,500-acre tract of land. Ottawa architect John Cook was involved in the project, as was Ottawa contractor D’Arcy Cote.</p> <p>They worked on the project for at least three months and Mr. Mowinckel was paid $10,000 in design fees, but the account was suddenly cancelled.</p> <p>Francoise Patry, a spokesman for the Desmarais family, said that Mr. Mowinckel did not lose the account.</p> <p>“He finished the job. There’s no way he would get the Manoir project. He had some work to do and it’s done. He was not the only decorator working for the Desmarais and we never said he would have the contract.”</p> <p>But a letter to Mr. Desmarais dated April 23, 1986, enclosed revised perspectives and layouts for the project and adds, “I now put a lot of people on standby for this operation and will be awaiting your instructions.””</p> </blockquote> <p>So the Desmarais-related facts were: as of April 1986, Mowinckel’s firm was working on decoration plans for the new 35,000-square-foot Manoir Desmarais in the 3,500-acre Desmarais family domain in Quebec, and a $10,000 design fee was paid to Mowinckel; but the contract was not his firm’s after Mowinckel’s threat in June to sue the Mulroneys over under $5,500 design fees owed for decorating the official residences, out of a total cost of over $350,000.</p> <p>Stevie Cameron explained that Mowinckel’s firm typically earned a design fee of 10% of the total cost, plus markups on the supplies and furnishings, but that for the Mulroneys he had waived the markups; now with the dispute, losing the Desmarais contracts was only the beginning of Mowinckel’s woes, and in March 1987 he left abruptly for his original country of Italy, leaving his firm in receivership and debts of over $400,000 (“Former designer for Mulroneys leaves debts and many unanswered questions”, by Stevie Cameron, April 18, 1987, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“At the heart of the debate over the way Prime Minister Brian Mulroney paid for renovations to his official residences is one person – designer Giovanni Mowinckel.</p> <p>If. Mr. Mowinckel had not suddenly left the country for Italy a month ago and had not left his business in receivership, no one might ever have known the full extent of the work on the houses or how the bills were paid.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Mowinckel came to Ottawa in 1979 with no clients and no reputation but with talent, good looks and enormous charm. He built a highly respected business, acquired an impressive list of wealthy, powerful clients, made many close friends in Ottawa and became a Canadian citizen.</p> <p>He was a bird of paradise in a dowdy town, a witty charmer among cautious bureaucrats and strong-willed politicians.</p> <p>His secret, he once told a reporter, is that he specialized in the “old-money look” much prized by the nouveau riche, a look that combined rich fabrics, gleaming antiques, oriental rugs, fragile porcelain, botanical prints and hallmarked silver.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Mowinckel’s mother was Norwegian, his father was Hungarian, and he was raised in Italy. Trained as a lawyer specializing in marine law, he was living in Paris when he decided he preferred the decorative arts to the law. He worked as a designer in London for several years in a shop called Colvin Design, after founder Alistair Colvin.</p> <p>He moved to Montreal in the mid-1970s, opening a business under the same name with help from Montreal businessman Toppy Eberts. He moved the business to Ottawa in 1979 with backing from Montreal businessman Aubrey Schwartz. Clients at that time included the late Liberal Cabinet minister Robert Andras, who hired the designer to do his house in Ottawa and later, his house in Vancouver.</p> <p>Mr. Mowinckel’s most distinguished clients were Brian and Mila Mulroney, who hired him to redecorate Stornoway, the home of the Leader of the Opposition, in 1983. After the 1984 election, they asked him to take on 24 Sussex Dr., the Prime Minister’s summer home at Harrington Lake and their offices in the Parliament Buildings.</p> <p>Some of the Prime Minister’s staff also hired him. He did work for Bernard Roy, Mr. Mulroney’s principal secretary, Hubert Pichet, Mr. Mulroney’s former executive assistant, and Bonnie Brownlee, Mrs. Mulroney’s assistant.</p> <p>John Bosley, former speaker of the Commons, hired him to redecorate his official residence, The Farm at Kingsmere, Que., a $400,000-plus job that has not been finished. Mr. Mowinckel worked for many other senior Tories, including Dalton Camp and William Neville.</p> <p>There were also jobs for some of the country’s best-known businessmen, including Thomas D’Aquino, head of the Business Council on National Issues, Hamilton Southam, former director of the National Arts Centre and now chairman of the Official Residences Council, Marshall (Mickey) Cohen, president of Olympia & York and former deputy finance minister, Imperial Oil president Arden Raines and New Brunswick food processor Harrison McCain.</p> <p>Mr. Mowinckel hired a team of young designers and won some enviable contracts. The team worked on the official residences and the highly praised $800,000 interior of Ottawa’s exclusive Rideau Club, and supervised the decoration of the Ronald McDonald House at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa.</p> <p>One of his best clients was Montreal millionaire Paul Desmarais, head of Power Corp. Over the past few years, Mr. Mowinckel earned at least $60,000 in design fees for work on Desmarais houses. Until July of 1986, he worked on plans for a new 3,200-square-metre country house, Manoir Desmarais, earning $10,000 in design fees, but lost the account very suddenly.</p> <p>His friends and staff say it was because he had pressed the Prime Minister’s Office for payment on a bill for eight months, finally threatening legal action; in retaliation, the Desmarais were persuaded to drop him. Francoise Patry, a spokesman for the Desmarais family, denied the story.</p> <p>One of the latest projects is a house for ABC Television’s New York anchorman, Peter Jennings, on Long Island. The house is being designed by Mr. Jennings’ brother-in-law, Ottawa architect Ian Johns, who is happy with Mr. Mowinckel’s contribution to the interior. “Giovanni has enormous talent, far beyond provincial Ottawa,” Mr. Johns said.</p> <p>So what happened? Why did such a prosperous business go under so dramatically?</p> <p>The explanations are complicated. First of all, Mr. Mowinckel’s friends place some of the blame directly on the official residences’ job. Like many designers, Mr. Mowinckel usually charged design fees of 10 per cent of total costs plus a generous markup on all supplies and furnishings. For this job, however, he charged only design fees and no markup on the supplies and furnishings.</p> <p>He did this because of the publicity and prestige the job would bring him. But, his friends say, the job turned out to be three times larger than he thought and lasted more than a year instead of a few months. Design fees did not begin to cover his overhead costs, and his cash-flow problem became acute.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The loss of the Desmarais account was a blow, but his personal spending habits added to his problems. Over the past three years he leased eight cars, including one $60,000 BMW. Last fall, he imported an antique Bentley from England. He invested in real estate. In addition to a country home in the Cotswolds in England, bought several years ago, he purchased a condominium in Florida and one in Toronto, a farmhouse in the Gatineau Hills…</p> <p>Before he moved to Italy he sold as many of the properties as possible and what remains is said to be heavily mortgaged.</p> <p>After he left, his creditors began to surface and now his debts are estimated at at least $400,000 spread among at least 40 firms.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As indicated by Cameron’s excellent investigative account, oversize of the projects for the Prime Minister’s official residences, loss of the Desmarais contracts, and Giovanni Mowinckel’s own lofty lifestyle, all contributed to his downfall despite numerous successful design jobs for powerful and wealthy Canadians.</p> <p>But I also wonder, given Bonnie Brownlee’s statement quoted earlier that “the work he did for Mila made his name in this country and brought him many good clients”, if there weren’t other big losses of clients for Mowinckel since many were politicians connected to the Mulroneys – Paul Desmarais was of course the wealthiest, but news anchor Peter Jennings appeared the only major client still willing to publicly praise Mowinckel.</p> <p>Royal Bank of Canada was owed $244,000 and asked the RCMP to investigate, which decided to charge Mowinckel with theft and fraud for over $300,000 of the debts; the charges also made it into the international news, but Mowinckel’s Italian citizenship protected him from extradition (“RCMP probing bankruptcy of designer; Bank requests police investigation after man apparently flees to Italy”, by Stevie Cameron, July 31, 1987, and, “Police cite evidence of fraud Charges laid against PM’s ex-decorator”, by Stevie Cameron, April 21, 1988, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>; and, “<a href="http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1988/Names-in-The-News/id-f084f0db3c4e32c806464d5ee61e2077" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Names in the News</font></a>”, April 22, 1988, The Associated Press).</p> <p>Frequent redecoration costs for Canada’s official residences had a long history predating the Mulroney era, and back in 1984 when Mulroney first became Prime Minister the issue and Giovanni Mowinckel’s name had made it to <em>The New York Times</em> (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/15/garden/canada-s-official-residences-the-politics-of-redecoration.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canada’s Official Residences: The Politics of Redecoration</font></a>”, by Douglas Martin, November 15, 1984):</p> <blockquote> <p>“IF Americans sometimes wonder about periodic redecoration of the White House, they can at least be thankful elections happen only every four years. Canadians – who foot the bills for the houses of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition – have had to pay for 10 moves, complete with personalized redecoration, in the last five years.</p> <p>Canada has changed Prime Ministers four times since 1979. And it has had to house them in the style to which heads of state are accustomed – a style that seems to include expensive renovations of the official residence, 24 Sussex Drive, each time occupancy changes.</p> <p>Indeed, Pierre Elliott Trudeau felt the need to redecorate after his re-election in 1980, even though he had been out of office just nine months. During his brief absence, he and the Government had more than $100,000 of work done on the residence of the Leader of the Opposition, also paid for by the Government.</p> <p>… </p> <p>The cost of the latest renovations, being carried out by Giovanni Mowinckel of Design Canada, has not been released. But over the last five years more than $170,000 has been expended on Prime Ministerial digs.</p> <p>Since 1979 nearly $260,000 went to beautify and maintain the opposition leader’s residence, called Stornoway. Last year the Mulroneys did $114,000 worth of renovations there, building a new front porch, painting the living room walls a rusty red and adding lemon-yellow curtains. They also redid the third floor to make bedrooms for their three children.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It was unclear why Mowinckel chose to run away in 1987, but the social cost was high for him as he went to live in a small and obscure rural setting in Italy, where he had grown up and where the Italian villagers stood by him as did some of his Canadian friends (“Ruined designer out to rebuild his life; Flight to Italy left $400,000 in debts but dual nationality blocks extradition”, by Stevie Cameron, March 12, 1988, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“From 1978 to 1987, Mr. Mowinckel was one of Ottawa’s most glamorous citizens. Handsome, witty and talented, he built an enviable clientele of politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats, not just in Ottawa but across Canada and in the United States.</p> <p>Besides Mr. Jennings, he worked for Montreal millionaire Paul Desmarais , U.S. publisher Walter Annenberg and for the late Liberal cabinet minister <br />Robert Andras in Vancouver.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Last March, after months of business worries and a serious quarrel with the Mulroneys, Mr. Mowinckel left Canada suddenly.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Back in March, Mr. Mowinckel moved to a small village near Grosseto and started looking for a house in the country near his sister’s home. His friends were farmers and grocers and cafe owners; they helped him find a house, they let him use their phones, they protected him from reporters chasing him for details of his relationship with the Mulroneys.</p> <p>Even today the villagers are protective. They won’t tell reporters where he lives although they relay telephone messages.</p> <p>And slowly, Mr. Mowinckel’s life is starting to come back to normal again.</p> <p>His Canadian friends are frequently in touch; two have just bought a country place near his. Friends from England visit and he is close to many of the local people.</p> <p>“I’m taking a breather, trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life,” he said in an interview.</p> <p>Mr. Mowinckel will not say why he left Canada so suddenly. Before he left, his business was basically sound, financial experts say, despite many expenses and a big debt load. He abandoned it without any explanation, leaving clients in the middle of projects, leaving suppliers unpaid.</p> <p>So why did he leave so suddenly? And why did he leave his business affairs in such a mess?</p> <p>“No comment,” he said grimly.</p> <p>His relationship with the Mulroneys is another mystery. While he admits he is on bad terms with them and feels bitter about his relationship with them, he will not discuss the subject.</p> <p>“It’s like a doctor-patient relationship,” he said, “and people trust you. You can’t discuss them.”</p> <p>Although he’s close to Rome and just a two-hour drive from Florence, he lives in a wild and unspoiled part of Tuscany. Without any mention in the Michelin guides, the local villages are ignored and few people here speak any English. Tourists, in fact, are a curiosity.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Thanks to the media coverage in 1987-88, especially Stevie Cameron’s unrelenting expositions of the subject, Canadians were presented some facts about the lifestyles and the ways of the powerful and rich in capital Ottawa.</p> <p>A designer fleeing his debts was fraud. But wasn’t there also something wrong in law, or at least in conduct, with the Prime Minister’s prior retaliation, through the wealthy and powerful Paul Desmarais, against Mowinckel’s expression of taking legal action?</p> <p>Desmarais’s possible role in dealing a blow to the career of a successful small businessman for daring to dispute Prime Minister Mulroney, and Desmarais’s attempt to have Consolidated-Bathurst take over Domtar to form Quebec’s dominant forest-products company, were nothing new in the sense of what his ambitions would lead him to do.</p> <p>Back in the Trudeau era’s 1970s, Power Corp.’s attempt to take over another holding company, Argus Corp., had led to so much political and business concern that a Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration was formed to study his takeover bid and the issues in general (“You’re Brilliant, Mr. Bryce: But do you know what you’re doing?”, by Graham Fraser, May 1, 1976, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In his recent best seller, The Canadian Establishment, Volume One, Peter C. Newman says that Keynesianism was the theoretical basis for the Liberals during the war and after: it was a non-Marxist alternative to the unfettered vagaries of the free market.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The protagonists were two of the titans of corporate power in Canada, Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation and John A. McDougald, chairman of the board of Argus Corporation. Desmarais, a Franco-Ontarian from Sudbury, had built Power Corporation’s massive holding empire with the aid of a complex technique best described as “reverse takeovers.” To put it simply, he had devised a system of buying companies with their own money. He’d built an empire whose assets in 1974 totalled $495 million. Now he wanted the Argus Corporation.</p> <p>McDougald’s Argus is generally regarded as the single most powerful Canadian holding company. Though its 1975 assets of $204.5 million imply a lesser worth than Power Corporation, the figure considerably understates Argus’ importance which is grounded on its practice of controlling subordinate firms through masterfully strategic holdings of minority shares. Desmarais wanted Argus.</p> <p>If the bid had been a success, it would have created an unprecedented concentration of corporate power, and yet one that operated in such a diversity of areas that no government regulation would apply. “It’s an area which is almost unexplored in economic terms,” says Sylvia Ostry, the deputy minister of consumer and corporate affairs, who is believed to be the person who suggested the royal commission. “The question of a conglomerate in which there is not an increase in market control or product concentration is not covered either by the present Combines Investigation Act [currently under revision], or by any American legislation, which is far more elaborate than our own.”</p> <p>So before the Power bid expired, the government decided to do something. Or at least, to look like as if it were doing something. Quickly.</p> <p>…</p> <p>On Tuesday, April 22, 1975, Prime Minister Trudeau announced the appointment of the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>The commission’s reputation has not been helped by the fact that its hearings have uncovered little that was not already on the public record. In fact, at times the hearings have created the strange impression that it was merely a theatrical presentation of Peter Newman’s book, with parts written in for radicals.</p> <p>The stars, of course, have been Paul Desmarais and John McDougald. Desmarais told the commission, as he told Newman, how his reverse takeover strategy works, and said that Power Corporation “looked like a peanut stand” in comparison with American, European and Japanese competitors.</p> <p>That was in Montreal.</p> <p>In Toronto, McDougald swept up to the Hyatt Regency hotel in his Rolls-Royce, posed for the press photographers and, looking like a short plump John Gielgud in a dark three-piece suit, made a presentation on behalf of Argus Corporation to the effect that “there’s nobody here but us minority shareholders.” …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Two days later, the impression that it was all merely a staging of Newman’s book was strengthened when Newman himself presented a brief consisting of selected portions of his book, and joked that he hoped the commission, in translating all briefs, would provide him with a French edition.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Paul Desmarais might have acted like Napoleon Bonaparte trying to convince the French Republic to let him consolidate power before conquering the world. Such ambitions were well-known among his influential circle of friends (George Tombs, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=yp5aMfOSmAkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Robber Baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour</font></em></a>, November 2007, ECW Press):</p> <blockquote> <p>“He was a new kind of business tycoon for Canada. He had a private projection room installed in his Ramezay Road mansion in Westmount so he could sit in privacy, watching his favourite film,<em> The Godfather</em>, over and over again. He joked with friends that he would make offers they couldn’t refuse, just like Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone. Desmarais liked the company of intellectuals – he often drove down to the Mount Royal Club in his black Mercedes 600 to drink Moet et Chandon with Quebecois novelist and <em>La Presse</em> publisher Roger Lemelin. But he was not an intellectual himself: his bookshelf had only a handful of volumes – Dale Carnegie’s<em> How to Win Friends and Influence People</em> and biographies of Napoleon and Roy Thomson.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Trudeau-appointed royal commission’s conclusion was sympathetic to Desmarais, stating that there was no corporate concentration of concern (“Control of Argus by Power held not harmful to public”, by Wayne Cheveldayoff, May 16, 1978, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The 1975 proposed Power Corp. of Canada Ltd. takeover of Argus Corp. Ltd. would not have adversely affected the public interest, according to the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“Our analysis of the Power-Argus situation leads us to think that the power resulting from a merger of the two firms is not likely to have an adverse effect on the public interest,” the commissioners conclude.</p> <p>“Had Power acquired Argus, it would not thereby have significantly increased its market power in any industry.</p> <p>“There are no other factors in the Power-Argus situation that lead us to conclude that the merged firm or those controlling it would act in a way that would be detrimental to the public interest.”</p> <p>The commissioners also recommended that whatever potential for the lessening of competition that could occur in communications and pulp and paper industries from the merger of the two multi-billion-dollar conglomerates could easily be handled by competition legislation. …</p> <p>And Parliament, the commissioners say, should be the only body to judge whether the future mergers of large and diverse corporations should be stopped.</p> <p>The reason for leaving it in the hands of the federal Cabinet and Parliament on a case-by-case approach is that legislative criteria could not adequately be established, they say.</p> <p>The social and economic issues raised by such large-scale mergers could not be dealt with adequately under competition law, they argue.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The latest figures show Power Corp. has assets of $538-million and Argus has assets of $180-million.</p> <p>However, both companies control several billions of dollars of assets each by their direct and indirect control of numerous small and large companies. Often, a minority ownership interest of only 10 per cent is enough to control the entire company.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Oh right, Canada’s political leaders were such saints compared to the business leaders, that leaving it to their discretionary decision would mean problems solved in a non-Marxist manner – like described by bestselling author Peter C. Newman cited earlier.</p> <p>Of concern had been a type of corporate power consolidation much subtler than the direct dominance of the market place: effective control would be exercised through a variety of power influences. Now, what if the power influences also extended to the political world, and to the political leaders who had the decision power?</p> <p>Everything came together during the 1980s and early 1990s for Paul Desmarais, giving him “enormous political clout” by the advantage of “the extreme concentration of corporate ownership” (“Desmarais seeks political capital from power links”, by Ian Austen, February 10, 1990, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Few Canadians can match Paul Desmarais’s connections. And in the current Liberal leadership race, the links forged by the chairman and chief executive officer of Montreal-based Power Corp. have doubled his chances of satisfaction.</p> <p>Desmarais once employed Paul Martin, and Power Corporation sold Canada Steamship Lines Ltd. to him. The transportation company became the cornerstone of Martin’s personal fortune.</p> <p>Jean Chretien, too, has had a long association with Desmarais. Nine years ago Desmarais’s son Andre, president of a Power Corp. subsidiary, married Chretien’s daughter France. When he needed a manager for his leadership campaign, Chretien turned to Power vice-president John Rae.</p> <p>A couple of contenders for the top job in an opposition party aren’t Desmarais’s only well-placed friends. He’s also on good personal terms with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, former PM Pierre Trudeau, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, even Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Rae, the brother of Ontario NDP leader Bob Rae, is angered by suggestions that Power cultivates political influence with money or contacts. “It’s unfair, inaccurate and inappropriate,” he says. “The reason people give to politics isn’t a quid pro quo. The system needs people who can participate in it without having to worry if they can meet their election expenses.”</p> <p>But a prominent Montreal Conservative, who requested anonymity, says Desmarais is one of “a small number of Canadians that have enormous political clout.” That power, this party insider says, comes not so much from campaign donations as from the extreme concentration of corporate ownership in Canada. “It’s a hell of a small elite and these guys have tentacles in all the political parties. This country is so small and economic power is so concentrated, it is simply unavoidable.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Much of Desmarais’s political influence had been seeded in the earlier decades, and the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration had thought about it from that angle:</p> <blockquote> <p>“A 1976 Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration – established after Desmarais made an unsuccessful bid for another giant holding company, Argus Corp. – reached a similar conclusion. It said that Desmarais “cultivates personal friendships with important political leaders in the two major political parties. More than most businessmen, he is aware that in a direct confrontation, political power exceeds the power of capital.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Presumably Canadians could leave it in the hands of Pierre Trudeau.</p> <p>But Brian Mulroney wasn’t as subtle. Not only that there was no official inquiry into any controversy involving Desmarais during the Mulroney era, but that Mulroney himself would use his friendship with Desmarais to head off a potential legal challenge from the ambitious interior designer Giovanni Mowinckel.</p> <p>At this point I can imagine Mulroney arguing, defending himself by saying that it was about protecting the respected image of the leader for the national interest, and that on the important issues he did not do worse than Trudeau.</p> <p>The first imagined Mulroney argument would not be quite valid because, not long after this Mowinckel affair, the Richard Grise affair in 1988-89 as detailed in Part 12 showed Brian Mulroney was concerned with his image primarily for the interest of winning another election with another parliamentary majority.</p> <p>My sense is that Mr. Mulroney’s oversized ego and unchecked ambition implied inevitable retaliation against Mowinckel, whose subsequent difficulties I sympathize given my later predicaments, as detailed in Parts 5-10, in 1992-93 when Mulroney might seek a third electoral term.</p> <p>The second imagined Mulroney argument, namely that he wasn’t that bad in comparison to a Liberal prime minister like Trudeau – or Chretien later – was in fact paraphrased for him, in 1995 before and during the Airbus Affair, by some journalists.</p> <p>In June 1995, journalist Paul Palango pointed to a reason behind the Chretien government’s reluctance to investigate possible corruption by Mulroney, as quoted in Part 11:</p> <blockquote> <p>“In virtually every other Western democracy in recent years, serious and successful investigations have been mounted against former government and business leaders for corruption. Only in Canada has such judicial scrutiny failed to materialize.</p> <p>Governments here seem reluctant to investigate their predecessors because their successors might investigate them. What kind of honesty is that?”</p> </blockquote> <p>Another journalist, William Thorsell, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> editor-in-chief and a friend of Mulroney’s, in November 1995 vividly expressed the kind of argument Mulroney would make, as quoted in Part 12:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It is true that some of Mr. Mulroney’s caucus members ran afoul of the law during his nine years in office, but neither the frequency nor the extent of those episodes was unusual in Canadian politics. An inventory of “scandals” during Pierre Trudeau’s or Lester Pearson’s time would be as impressive.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So Mulroney was of the mindset, or rather calculated that way perhaps, that what he did wasn’t worse than what Trudeau had done.</p> <p>Hence, a more careful comparison of Mulroney and Trudeau in this regard is in order, and I focus on the major international-relations issues I have pounded Mr. Mulroney on.</p> <p>One issue is Mulroney’s masterful handling of human rights issues during his May 1986 state visit to China, as I have noted that he waited until his business and trade agendas, coordinated with the Canada China Business Council annual meeting led by Paul Desmarais, had been taken care of with the Chinese Communist leaders and he was bidding farewell to his host Premier Zhao Ziyang, to raise a human-rights issue, and still focused on a limited one – imprisoned Chinese priests.</p> <p>As cited earlier, in the fall that same year 1986, Trudeau went with Desmarais to the Soviet Union and held high-level confidential talks with Soviet leaders; early the next year, the two again visited Moscow, attending a world peace forum before taking care of business.</p> <p>Contents of Trudeau’s confidential talks with the Soviets are obviously unavailable for comparison here. But some of the world peace forum subjects were reported to the public.</p> <p>Pierre Trudeau was a prominent participant from the West in an event largely organized by the Soviet leadership but showcasing unprecedented intellectual freedom for political dissident and Nobel peace laureate Andrei Sakharov (“<a href="http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1987/Sakharov-Invited-to-Government-Sponsored-Peace-Forum/id-2f45eae5820146b4216adf8020aba5f5" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sakharov Invited to Government-Sponsored Peace Forum</font></a>”, February 2, 1987, Associated Press):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov has been invited to take part in a Kremlin-sponsored international forum on peace, nuclear weapons and disarmament this month, organizers said Monday.</p> <p>… </p> <p>It would be his first role in such a government-sanctioned event since he emerged as a dissident in the 1960s. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. </p> <p>Organizers told a news conference 740 scientists, businessmen, authors, cultural workers, doctors and religious leaders from 80 countries had expressed interest in joining the conference on a non-nuclear world and the survival of mankind. </p> <p>Soviet leaders may expect Sakharov to reiterate his opposition to nuclear testing and the U.S. space-based defense system commonly known as ''Star Wars.'' </p> <p>Sakharov, 65, is the most celebrated Soviet dissident. He was allowed to return to Moscow on Dec. 23 from nearly seven years of internal exile in the closed city of Gorky, 250 miles east of the capital. </p> <p>Conference organizers said participants would include Pierre Elliott Trudeau, former prime minister of Canada; American industrialist Armand Hammer, and Dr. Robert Gale, who helped treat victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. </p> <p>[Academy of Sciences vice-president Yevgeny] Velikhov said the conference sessions will be closed and journalists will have access to participants only during breaks.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The forum marked a change in the Soviet Union’s nuclear-disarmament policy under Mikhail Gorbachev, according to retired U.S. Air Force General Chris Adams (Chris Adams, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=Rd5iFbF5rjYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Deterrence: An enduring Strategy</font></em></a>, October 1, 2009, iUniverse):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… The Kremlin gave complete support in a Moscow Peace Forum during February 14-16, 1987. Their theme was: “For a Nuclear Free World, for the Survival of Humanity”.</p> <p>The forum brought anti-nuclear ideological and religious, as well as political, radicals from all over the world. Gorbachev addressed the forum, calling the movement “new thinking” in the Soviet Union and “fresh impetus” in the struggle against nuclear weapons. The Soviets brought Andrei Sakharov, the former nuclear weapons genius turned pacifist, out of imposed exile to participate in the forum. Their sudden turn to embrace an anti-nuclear weapons and peace-movement stance puzzled many but succeeded convincingly so that the Soviets had finally come to their senses, and that the United States was the real war-minded culprit.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The non-partisan, positive assessment of the world peace forum by a former U.S. military leader was corroborated by what the religious peace activists were permitted to present in the spirit of international understanding and cooperation, here as from Neal C. Wilson, General Conference President of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (“<a href="http://www.adventistpeace.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/1424/peace_-and-_peacemakers-a_christian_perspective_wilson.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Peace And Peacemakers: A Christian Perspective</font></a>”, by Neal C. Wilson, February 10, 1987, International Forum for a Non-nuclear World and the Survival of Humanity) </p> <blockquote> <p>“… I ask only that you recall the crimes that have been done in the name of Lenin—and testified to by Soviet leaders from Khrushchev on. I note the anguished admissions of “contradictions” in General Secretary Gorbachev’s report to the 27th Party Congress. But as Lenin said: “Our strength lies in stating the truth.”</p> <p>In fact, it is General Secretary Gorbachev’s frank call for “radical reform” and “democratization” of Soviet society, as well as his program for peace that encourages me to speak of a perception that must be faced if the Soviet Union is to achieve these objectives.</p> <p>I refer to the widespread belief that religious freedom in the Soviet Union means something different from its meaning in many other countries, particularly those in the West.</p> <p>…</p> <p>As a Christian, I find it painful to admit, further, that the great pogroms of history have come most often not from bad people trying to make other people bad, but from good people trying to make other people good. Well our prayer might be “Lord, save us from the saints.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>I say, then, that while the Christian world cannot condone the persecutions of the Stalinist era and, to a lessening degree, afterward, it should understand them. In addition, I am compelled to admit that, unlike their status under the czar, all religions have equal standing before the law.</p> <p>And certainly, as leader of a world church, I would not wish to leave the erroneous impression that restrictions on religion are a monopoly of the Soviet state or of Eastern Europe. The most severe restrictions today, as historically, are imposed by countries dominated by fundamental religions.</p> <p>Why, then, must I speak of Soviet policy toward believers, particularly at a conference that seeks unity on issues of peace?</p> <p>Simply stated, because Christians of the Western World, and especially the United States, who are disturbed by the circumstances of their colleagues in the Soviet Union, translate their concerns into influence and support for defense alliances and strategic defense initiatives.</p> <p>It is really no necessary that our gracious hosts and we agree on whether the Christians I refer to reflect reality or perception. For perception is enough, in and of itself, to frustrate mankind’s hope for peace and, as General Secretary Gorbachev more specifically defines it, the building of “an all-embracing system of international security” (CPSU Report, p.92).”</p> </blockquote> <p>Surprisingly candid, pacifist perspectives from an American religious leader.</p> <p>Comparing the Beijing visit by Mulroney and the Moscow visits by Trudeau, all with Demarais around, my impression is that, while they achieved comparable results in trade and economic development cooperation, Trudeau was somewhat ahead of Mulroney in the public-relations arena – in spite of the official limelight for Mulroney.</p> <p>A second international-relations issue on which I have criticized Mulroney was the manner in which RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster became INTERPOL president. I wrote in a May 2009 blog post, as quoted in Part 5:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Even more intriguing is the fact that back on November 10, 1992 when Mr. Inkster was named president of Interpol, he got the job without competition: he became the only candidate when a second nominated candidate – from China – withdrew in favour of him.</p> <p>Now that’s worth pondering: with Mr. Mulroney’s diplomatic clout among western leaders, Mr. Inkster likely had been agreed upon by them; but a Chinese government non-compete gesture at a time when the June 4, 1989 violent military crackdown on Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests was still fresh in people’s minds? That had to be the result of some deal from Mr. Mulroney.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Obviously Mulroney could righteously say that, if his government indeed lobbied the Chinese government to drop its competition against Inkster, it was only for the good of the democratic world – that a Chinese police candidate not be given the INTERPOL top job just 3 years after the ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’.</p> <p>My counter-point would be that a behind-the-scenes deal to bypass the electoral mechanism of the INTERPOL presidency sent exactly the wrong message in the circumstances, that the Chinese leadership could interpret that the democratic West was preoccupied with ensuring its international leadership, in this case over law enforcement, not be challenged by Communist China, and to this end the electoral mechanism was merely secondary. If so, why should the Chinese Communists even care about election in their country?</p> <p>Here is where an imagined, albeit very real in substance, Mulroney argument of Trudeau comparison might come in: Trudeau had taken Desmarais to Poland to visit the Communist leadership there for business, a leadership that, years before China, had imposed martial law to crush grassroots protests from the Solidarity union movement.</p> <p>Indeed, Trudeau and Desmarais had done that in February 1987, in a low-key visit only briefly noted by the press, such as in the following full news report (“Trudeau visits Polish leader”, February 21, 1987, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Ottawa Citizen</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau was received in Warsaw Friday by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, leader of the Polish Communist party, the Polish news agency reported.</p> <p>Trudeau, who arrived here from an international conference in Moscow, also met the Polish prime minister, Zbigniew Messner.</p> <p>Talks concerned an improvement in economic and political relations between Warsaw and Ottawa, which deteriorated after the coup against the Solidarity union movement in December 1981.</p> <p>Trudeau was accompanied by Paul Desmarais, chairman and chief executive officer of Power Corp. of Canada.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But I notice that Trudeau and Desmarais were on their way back from the World Peace Forum in Moscow, an international public-relations event in line with Trudeau’s ideological interests – during the Trudeau era in the early 1980s the official relations between Canada and Poland had “deteriorated” following the Polish military coup, and now Trudeau helped Desmarais with business, just like Mulroney did, but as a private citizen.</p> <p>When the broader context becomes clear, my impression is that Trudeau was still better than Mulroney in prudence.</p> <p>However, I find that back at the time when massive political oppressions occurred in a Communist country, as in Poland in 1981 during the Trudeau era and in China in 1989 during the Mulroney era, Mulroney’s responses exhibited better clarity than Trudeau’s.</p> <p>In 1981-82, the first reactions by Prime Minister Trudeau and his government’s seemed to be, while deploring the martial law, to give sense to the Polish government decision, and to avoid any economic fallout in bilateral relations (“Splits with allies Soviets tolerant on Poland, Canada says”, by Charlotte Montgomery, January 9, 1982, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… Canada has still not made a decision about whether to support the call for economic sanctions made by the United States, the officials said, but they indicated that Canada considers such sanctions against Warsaw or Moscow “inappropriate.” …</p> <p>At most, they said, the NATO meeting in Brussels might produce a unanimous agreement to take some political sanctions against Poland in the form of <br />condemnations by United Nations agencies. Nor does Canada feel it should remove its ambassador in Poland as a form of protest against conditions <br />there, they said.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Although it would be difficult for Canada to resist if there was a general agreement at the meeting to economic sanctions, they said that such moves could hurt Canada more than Poland.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Canadian officials said their information shows that martial law was put in place “very skilfully” with minimal resistance, and that the death toll so far in Poland probably ranges from 10 to 50 people. Despite much higher numbers that have been reported, they said they believe there have been no more than 5,000 arrests.</p> <p>Such large-scale detention “often happens when you're not sure of your audience,” they said.</p> <p>Although the officials repeated Canada’s position that it deplores martial law, they told reporters: “That doesn’t say that occasionally it doesn’t have to be used.” Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau drew a barrage of criticism recently when he said the imposition of martial law in Poland may not be bad if it prevents civil war. In a later statement, he urged the Polish Government to compromise so that problems there could be resolved peacefully.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Specifically, Prime Minister Trudeau stated at a news conference in December 1981 (“Trudeau urges moderation; Food for Poland will continue”, December 19, 1981, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“There is no doubt, if there is a civil war in Poland, there is a very good chance the Soviet Union would intervene because it couldn’t allow a civil war on its border”.</p> <p>“Therefore everything which would prevent a civil war is for me a positive step. If a military regime prevents a civil war, I can’t inherently say it is bad.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The violent crackdown by the Chinese army on pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989 was shown on television worldwide and necessitated condemnation. Still, Mulroney’s response was especially passionate about liberty (“‘Don’t despair,’ Mulroney tells young Chinese”, June 9, 1989, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Students and other “young heroes” struggling for democracy in China will triumph in the end, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney predicted last night.</p> <p>“I say to those young heroes: ‘Do not despair’,” Mulroney told a Progressive Conservative fund-raising dinner at a posh Vancouver hotel. “Victory must eventually be yours because liberty can never be denied.”</p> <p>The remark earned him the loudest ovation of the night from the 1,200 well-dressed Tory supporters in the cavernous banquet room.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Student leaders who survived Sunday’s military assault on the square have gone underground. But one activist, Liu Xiaobo, has already been seized.</p> <p>The crackdown coincided with the re-emergence of Premier Li Peng, the hardline leader who declared martial law at the height of the student movement on May 20.</p> <p>He was shown on television praising troops involved in the storming of central Beijing. “On behalf of the state council, I bring you greetings,” Li said. “I hope you will continue to work hard to preserve peace and order in the capital.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney also promised Chinese students in Canada that they would not be sent back to China (“Chinese students can stay; Mulroney promises shelter”, June 10, 1989, <font color="#0000ff"><em></em></font><a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“He told reporters the situation in China is unusual and dangerous for the students, some of whom have appeared on television protesting their government's attacks on dissidents.</p> <p>“This is a very unusual and important event in the life of a people,” he said after a meeting with B.C. Premier Bill Vander Zalm.</p> <p>“I personally . . . can’t think of anything that would persuade me to return one of those students to Peking against his will. . . .</p> <p>“I think most Canadians would want us to respond with generosity and compassion as we have in other circumstances.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Nonetheless, the Mulroney government – like the Trudeau government earlier – did not want to see negative impacts affect bilateral trade and economics, and Mulroney personally assured businessman Tom Chan among a Chinese Canadian delegation meeting with him that economic sanctions would not be a good idea:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It appears unlikely Canada will impose economic sanctions against China.</p> <p>Tom Chan, a Vancouver businessman who was part of a delegation of Chinese-Canadians who met the prime minister earlier in the day, said Mulroney told them sanctions would likely hurt ordinary people more than the government.</p> <p>“He told us that it is the government’s opinion that it will be the people who will be affected (by sanctions). The army will always be fed,” Chan said in an interview.</p> <p>However, Mulroney’s press secretary, Gilbert Lavoie, said Ottawa is taking some economic steps.</p> <p>For example, Ottawa has cancelled a Canada-China meeting on nuclear co-operation.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Furthermore, as has been shown about him before, Mulroney’s priorities were openly pro-business – the Chinese Canadian delegation he met consisted of business leaders – but an exception could be made for a Christian clergyman regarding human rights:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mulroney dodged a public relations bullet when he met briefly with a local cleric who has been working with Chinese students living in British Columbia.</p> <p>At first, Rev. Set Wai Lo was told he would not be able to meet Mulroney because his name was not on the list for the delegation. Most of the six people on the list were business leaders invited by Lt.-Gov. David Lam.</p> <p>But Lo was allowed to speak briefly to Mulroney and give him a letter from the Chinese students, who said they appreciate Canada’s criticism of China.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So it’s not surprising that a few years after a violent political crackdown each of these former Canadian prime ministers would be there to explore business opportunities, in the company of their influential businessman patron Paul Desmarais.</p> <p>Even so, Trudeau had a pure passion of world peace that he wore on his lapel more than any that Mulroney did.</p> <p>Another international-relations matter on which I have lamented about Mulroney is the timing of his business visit to China soon after stepping down as Prime Minister: months after his government managed to get the Chinese government to drop its competition against Norman Inkster for the INTERPOL presidency, Mulroney stepped down in June 1993 and by early October, accompanying Paul Desmarais and officially representing Power Corp., he was on a business joint-venture visit to Beijing while an election campaign was going on pitching his successor, Prime Minister Kim Campbell, against Desmarais’s in-law, Liberal leader Jean Chretien.</p> <p>I have said in Part 12:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Over 2 weeks to go before the October 25, 1993 Canadian election, around October 7 a number of newspapers, including <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em>, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> and <em>Edmonton Journal</em>, published a news report by Southam News reporter Dave Todd disclosing, or more like announcing, that Brian Mulroney was now the chief counsel of Power Corporation of Canada, and that at Paul Desmarais’s personal request Mulroney was accompanying him on a visit to China’s capital Beijing for the Asia Power Group joint venture by Ontario Hydro, Hydro Quebec and Power Corp., for energy development in China and other regions of Asia …</p> <p>…</p> <p>I get a sense that Mr. Desmarais had to show off Mulroney as the Desmarais family company’s chief counsel at this time – as Mulroney’s law partner Raymond Crevier noted – while a heated election campaign was going on between Mulroney successor Kim Campbell and Desmarais in-law Jean Chretien, so that Canadians, especially those in politics in Capital Ottawa and those closer to Campbell in Western Canada, would know that the Power Corp.’s international business goals had already brought Mulroney – the mentor Campbell was loyal to – onboard and closer to Chretien.”</p> </blockquote> <p>This is an issue about Mulroney’s political judgment, that in the rush to open up new business opportunities in China for Canadian businesses – including for his own business interests – now that he was departing politics, Mulroney showed cavalier disregard for the wellbeing of his Progressive Conservative party and his leadership successor.</p> <p>Rather dramatically, Kim Campbell, the first and only female Canadian prime minister, then suffered the worst federal electoral defeat in Canadian history: a party’s parliamentary majority was reduced to only 2 seats – as quoted earlier from my April 2009 blog post – and Campbell lost her own seat as mentioned in Part 8.</p> <p>But I can imagine Mulroney arguing forcefully, comparing himself to Trudeau, that nothing could have been worse than the rush to a full diplomatic relationship with Communist China while the Cultural Revolution was at its height there, and while the United States was engaged in a bloody war in China’s neighbor Vietnam to try to stop the geographical expansion of Communism.</p> <p>As historians J. L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell indicated in their book <font color="#333333">quoted earlier, similar arguments were among those Trudeau had to overcome in the late 1960s as the new Canadian prime minister in his diplomatic initiative toward China.</font></p> <p>In my opinion, the ideological outlooks previously expressed by Pierre Trudeau as an independent intellectual were important factors: as the incoming Canadian leader, Trudeau viewed the China issue as something that he not only had personally invested in – including with his private visit there during the prime of the Communist rule – but also could pursue as a statesman, and that could extend the Canadian Liberals’ left-leaning empathy but not break Canada’s Western alliance commitment.</p> <p>Granatstein and Bothwell pointed out that before entering federal politics Trudeau had cultivated an anti-war and anti-nuclear weapon profile that saw him openly criticize then Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson (<a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=taZ0pK71QikC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy</em></font></a>, 1991, University of Toronto Press):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… He had been in China during the civil war that preceded Mao’s victory, in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, and in Africa. He had returned to China in 1960 and, with his friend Jacques Hebert, had written a book the following year on his experiences. His interest in the Third World and his concern for the process of development were genuine and longstanding.</p> <p>So was his horror of nuclear weapons. In January 1963, on the verge of entering federal politics in the election that all could see coming, Trudeau had been appalled by Pearson’s reversal of his party’s policy of refusing nuclear weapons. Pearson had been supported by the opinion polls, and his action helped to precipitate the breakup of the Diefenbaker government. Trudeau angrily declined a Liberal nomination and used the editorial pages of <em>Cite Libre</em> to excoriate Pearson and his party in extreme terms, citing ‘brutal cynicism,’ ‘selfish docility,’ and those who ‘tremble with anticipation because they have seen the rouged face of power … What idiots they all are!’ The ferocity of the language was different from that found in comparable English-language journals, and it stung the Pearson Liberals. Other Trudeau articles dissented on the Vietnam War and on United States policy, at a time when most Liberals, and most Canadians, assumed that the Americans must be correct.”</p> </blockquote> <p>According to a more recent book, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=ACC_G_kiR4cC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000</em></font></a>, by historian John English (2010, Random House), Trudeau’s anti-war stance had dated back to oppositions to the Second World War and the Korean War:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… Trudeau had always stood outside the mainstream of Canadian foreign policy. He had opposed the Second World War and, later, the American-led United Nations intervention in Korea, and he had attacked Canada’s alliance politics and Pearson’s acceptance of nuclear weapons for Canadian forces in 1963.”</p> </blockquote> <p>A one-time Liberal politician himself, John English also pointed out that even then Prime Minister Lester Pearson had grown to have “strong doubts” about Canada’s international role and foreign policy, which he had been a founder of and awarded the Nobel peace prize for, and it led Pearson to look to Trudeau despite having been severely criticized by the latter:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Even Lester Pearson, Canada’s greatest player, had developed strong doubts in the sixties about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), of which he had been a founder, and the United Nations, in whose corridors he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. The presidency of Lyndon Johnson and the expanding Vietnam War shattered his confidence in American leadership of the West, the foundation on which Canadian diplomacy had rested. Robert Bothwell, the leading historian of Canadian foreign policy, notes that this “sense of an unsatisfactory present” meant that “it was time for a change, to find someone or something that would cross the political and social crevasse that had opened up under Canada’s national institutions.” This sense caused Pearson to look to Trudeau as his successor, the contender who promised a sharp turn away from those institutions that Canada and Pearson himself had helped to build.</p> <p>When Pearson told Paul Martin, his external affairs minister, that his time to lead the Liberal Party had passed, the bell tolled for Canada’s activist internationalism focused on the United Nations, close alliance with the United States, military commitment to the defence of Europe, and a key role in building the Commonwealth from the ashes of the British Empire.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In fact, at the top of the foreign policy agenda of the incoming Canadian leader Trudeau in 1968-69 was not only opening diplomatic relations with China but re-evaluation of Canada’s role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), according to Granatstein and Bothwell:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Sharp added that, as of now, it looked as if the result would be a continuation of present policy. But Trudeau was not prepared to let the opportunity pass. ‘It was intended that the forthcoming review of Canadian foreign policy,’ he said, ‘should take into account possible changes more basic than those contained in a review which had already been made’ by Norman Robertson.</p> <p>As a result, Sharp on 27 May sent the prime minister a long memorandum detailing the review he proposed his department should undertake. He set out Category One areas, where there had been controversy, such as membership in NATO and the recognition of China, and Category Two areas, where policy, such as relations with francophonie or with Western Europe generally, might be re-evaluated. The first category was to receive urgent examination, the second to be examined in depth. Other subjects, such as the Commonwealth, Canada-U.S. relations, and the United Nations, Sharp defined as Category Three, and said that they would be reviewed in line with a schedule of forthcoming international meetings.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In the end, though, the Liberal establishment was not ready to go as far as Trudeau might, and Trudeau’s passion for equality for French Canadians in a strongly federalist Canada, an issue about domestic political and social changes, took up most of his priorities as John English observed:</p> <blockquote> <p>“For Trudeau, the neutralism of his fellow “wise men” Gerard Pelletier and Jean Marchand, or of his valuable Toronto supporters Walter Gordon and Donald Macdonald, was not an option. The forces of Liberal tradition remained too strong. knowing that he could represent a search for new direction while forswearing a clear break with the past, Trudeau found agreement with Pearson on the central proposition: the crisis of national unity must take precedence. It was time to search within, not to project to the world a confident face that concealed a confused soul.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So diplomacy with Communist China turned out to be, already, the only major ground-breaking foreign policy initiative Trudeau accomplished, in spite of a host of them he had taken strong stands on.</p> <p>As for the timing, it was a direct consequence of both Trudeau’s ascendance to national leadership and Canadian public support indicated by nationwide polls, as Asian studies scholar Paul Evans reviews in his new book, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=fKA9AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Engaging China: Myth, Aspiration, and Strategy in Canadian Policy from Trudeau to Harper</em></font></a> (March 2014, University of Toronto Press):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Diplomats, including Pearson, had for twenty years been making the case that contact with Communist China was necessary, and that a positive approach to mainland China and its inclusion in the world community would be productive. Containment and isolation were seen as a dead end.</p> <p>Around them, the climate of opinion, still divided, was shifting. On the recognition issue, national polls indicated that in 1950 before the Chinese intervention in the Korean War 38 per cent supported recognition and 39 per cent opposed it. In 1959, 32 per cent supported and 44 per cent opposed. In 1964, 51 per cent were in support and 34 per cent opposed; in 1969, 52 per cent were in support and 28 per cent opposed. A Liberal Party conference in October 1966 passed a resolution in support of recognition and U.N. admission.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Chinese Cultural Revolution was no doubt a very traumatic period of history, which I have discussed in Part 2 in relation to my childhood experiences. I note that by the end of 1968, the violence by the revolutionary Red Guards beginning in 1966, was over and a military-led revolutionary rule was in control.</p> <p>But as unfortunate as it was during that time in China and with the U.S.’s Vietnam War engagement, the cited national polls indicated that, while Canadians had opposed China’s Korean War participation on the side of North Korea, now that China was not in the Vietnam War its domestic politics did not have a major negative impact on Canadian opinions.</p> <p>Thus, Trudeau’s China initiative was consistent with his long-stated ideologies and political views, and with the direction his party was moving toward.</p> <p>On the other hand, what Mulroney later did in October 1993 could be suspected by some Canadians as – like his friend William Thorsell, <em>The Globe and Mail</em>’s editor-in-chief, worried about during the Airbus Affair – “double-dealing”, namely abandoning the political interests of the old party he had just led for his new business interests.</p> <p>Nonetheless, one can still ask if Trudeau’s ideological outlooks had made him a part of “the international communist conspiracy” referred to by historians J. L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell.</p> <p>For one, what Trudeau did in the 1980s as a private citizen, accompanying Desmarais to bolster Canadian trade with and investment in the Soviet Union, would suggest that even if he had been, Trudeau was closer to Mikhail Gorbachev-type of reform-minded Communists.</p> <p>For another, recall that on October 1, 1992, when Trudeau appeared in a Montreal Chinese restaurant to campaign against the Charlottetown constitutional accord, he was led there by his young son Justin, who has since become the Liberal party leader and the apparent heir to the father’s political legacy; so if one has faith in what Justin Trudeau has said, then Pierre Trudeau could not have been a Communist by belief (“<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/05/19/justin-trudeau-abortion_n_5352867.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On Abortion, Justin Trudeau Looks To His Father’s ‘Deeply Held Personal Views’</font></a>”, by The Canadian Press, May 19, 2014, <em>The Huffington Post</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau says he is following an example set by his famous father when it comes to his position on election candidates and abortion.</p> <p>In an email to supporters Monday, Trudeau offered a “personal reflection” to anyone who has concerns about his decision to turn away new candidates who are unwilling to vote pro-choice on relevant Liberal legislation.</p> <p>“I had an extraordinary example in a father who had deeply, deeply held personal views that were informed by the fact that he went to church every Sunday, read the Bible regularly to us, and raised us very religiously, as Catholics,” Trudeau wrote.</p> <p>“But at the same time my father had no problem legalizing divorce, decriminalizing homosexuality and moving in ways that recognized the basic rights of the people.</p> <p>“He too held fast to his beliefs. But he also understood that as leaders, as political figures, and as representatives of a larger community, our utmost responsibility is to stand up for people’s rights.”</p> <p>Trudeau says he shares his father’s view of leadership in that regard.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Before entering politics, Trudeau’s trips to China had given him more sympathy for Mao Zedong’s China than for Chiang Kai-shek’s earlier, as summarized succinctly by author Paul Evans:</p> <blockquote> <p>“His two trips to China, in 1949 and 1960, provided an extraordinary glimpse into China in civil war and Maoist mobilization. No Canadian leader before or since has had such grounded intensity of experience with China before entering political life. In his 1949 [1960] trip he criticized Western countries for the political error of “refusing to recognize the existence of those who rule a quarter—soon to be a third—of the human race” … He also took aim at the “spiritual error” of the West in “perpetuating the established identification between Christianity and the most reactionary interest of the West, notably in linking the future of a certain kind of missionary effort to the return to power of Chiang Kai-shek.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So Trudeau aired his view that the West’s linking Christian missionary efforts to the possible return to power of the former Strongman Chiang Kai-shek, represented “the most reactionary interest[s] of the West”.</p> <p>In their recent book, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=PNA3i1gkzcEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman 1944-1965</em></font></a> (2011, Random House), Pierre Trudeau biographers Max Nemni and Monique Nemni have similarly interpreted Trudeau’s strong criticisms of Pearson during the Korean War in the early 1950s, opining that what might be pro-Communist flair displayed by Trudeau was really defiance toward the United States’ policy:</p> <blockquote> <p>“On April 10, 1951, Pearson gave a speech entitled “Canadian Foreign Policy in a Two-Power World,” a copy of which Trudeau obtained. After paying tribute to the United States, on behalf of Canada, for the struggle against Communist imperialism, Pearson gave unconditional support to its policy in Korea. The world, he said, was in a perilous state: “The situation which faces us may erupt into an explosion at any time. . . . It may be a deliberate and controlled explosion brought about by the calculated policy of the hard-faced despots in the Kremlin, men hungry for power and world domination. Or more likely it may be an accidental one. . . . We should accept without any reservation the view that the Canadian who fires his rifle in Korea or on the Elbe is defending his home as surely as if he were firing it on his own soil.”</p> <p>Trudeau could barely contain his indignation. On April 28, 1951, he wrote to two colleagues, first to Lester Pearson’s secretary, and then to another acquaintance…</p> <p>… By accusing the Kremlin leadership of being power-hungry despots bent on world domination, wrote Trudeau, Pearson was in fact contradicting “the reports on the situation in Russia and China sent back by two special envoys of the Canadian government.” On the one hand, “Watkin’s last dispatch from Moscow (March 29th) pictured Soviet Russia as a country of war-weary, peace-desiring people, naively proud of their primitive democratic institutions, and where the government was actively engaged in improving the economy, and was even proceeding with a certain amount of demobilization.” On the other hand, “Ronning’s last Report from Nanking (January 24th) was along similar lines: ‘The fundamental problems of China (he wrote) are finally receiving the attention of Chinese leaders, and progress is being made in their solution for the benefit of the Chinese people as a whole.’” Pearson’s position could therefore in no way be justified…</p> <p>Moreover, Pearson was gutless and his foreign policy did not promote peace: “Wars are fought with physical courage, but in these times courage of a finer temper is required to affirm one’s belief in truth and justice. If Mr. Pearson had that courage, would he not acquaint the public with facts which tend to open avenues of comprehension and sympathy towards the potential enemy? Or because our world is fractured, must we regard it as our duty to render it completely asunder?” …</p> <p>Was Trudeau criticizing Pearson out of sympathy for the Soviet Union and China? Was he revealing secret Communist leanings in signing the letter “Comrade Trudeau”? Clearly, the letter suggests otherwise. He was above all criticizing Pearson’s subservience to the United States, the illogical character of his position, and his unwillingness to engage in dialogue with the enemy, in order to avoid war. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>Nonetheless, my reading of the book by Trudeau and Hebert on their 1960 visit to China finds Trudeau giving logical justification to rural collectivization, i.e., the highly involuntary organizing of the peasantry into the confine of  the commune within which to live and work. Trudeau argued that even if China had become “a mass of labour camps” it was a preferable recourse to traditional Chinese feudalism or foreign colonialism (Jacques Hebert and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books/about/Two_innocents_in_Red_China.html?id=GlE_AAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Two innocents in Red China</em></font></a>, Translated by I. M. Owen, 1968, Oxford University Press):</p> <blockquote> <p>“That is what Westerners fail to see behind all the absurdities related by their newspapers for the last two years. <em>Even if</em> the communal system had turned all China into a mass of labour camps (and it is hard to believe that the Chinese would have preferred to stay in their former servitude and misery) – <em>even if</em> the commune has to turn over a large share of its proceeds to the State (and it can’t be more than the tributes formerly exacted by the feudal landlords) – the communard <em>sees</em> the soil producing more than it used to, and he <em>knows</em> that the share levied by the State goes to enrich China, not Japan, England, or France.”  </p> </blockquote> <p>The same glass may look different to a different person. In contrast here is my summary of my analysis in a November 2011 Chinese blog post (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/blogs/introduction/2013/11/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7-reminiscing-the-past-learning-historys-wisdom-part-6/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom) – Part 6</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The “Land to the Tiller” idea proposed by Sun Yat-sen and advocated by the Communist Party was praiseworthy. But the proletariat-led, highly centralized hierarchy system established under Mao Zedong’s leadership through agrarianism, elimination of the wealthy classes and then collectivization, had its superiority manifested mainly in comparisons to the Medieval feudal serfdom society’s system of personal bondage to the land and subordination to the land owner: peasants still did not have their own land, but the land no longer belonged to the rich, in practice belonging to the various levels of the Communist Party and government organs of concentrated power, while the working, living and activity spaces of the peasants and ordinary people were still fully bonded to and subordinated to the organizational units in which they worked.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So from my angle, in Maoist communism peasants were not unlike the Medieval serfs in terms of the degree of freedom, but they were not subordinated to wealthy owners.</p> <p>Author Paul Evans views it as a “paradox” about Pierre Trudeau, that while advancing rights and freedoms in Canada Trudeau openly sympathized with a foreign political system highly restrictive of personal rights and freedoms:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The paradox is that the person who led to an opening with Communist China and who cemented high-level personal relations with its leaders was also the person deeply committed to advancing rights and freedoms in Canada. … His universalisms, if he held them, were complicated; he saw the differences between societies in shades of grey, not black and white; and his sense of history was fluid. </p> <p>The architects of recognition, including Trudeau, never made the case that fundamental change within China would be automatic. At the same time, none of them believed that any kind of political or social change would occur without an end to China’s diplomatic isolation. The implicit reasoning of the Liberal foreign-policy elite of the late 1960s was that it was unrealistic even to begin to think about substantial change in Mao’s China…”</p> </blockquote> <p>On Evans’s point of “paradox”, my sense is that Trudeau’s grey could sometimes be darker, that his convictions of world peace and social peace included use of military power, not so much to fight a war but to maintain peace and order – as illustrated by his invoking of the War Measure Act in Quebec in October 1970 to combat separatist violence and at the same time establishing diplomatic relations with Communist China, and by his statement in December 1981 giving merit to the imposition of martial law in Communist Poland.</p> <p>Perhaps not coincidentally, Trudeau’s eldest son and political heir Justin has also expressed “a level of admiration” for the “basic dictatorship” in China, for its ability “to turn their economy around on a dime” (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/justin-trudeau-s-foolish-china-remarks-spark-anger-1.2421351" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Justin Trudeau’s ‘foolish’ China remarks spark anger</font></a>”, November 9, 2013, CBC News):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Members of the Asian-Canadian community are demanding an apology from Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, following his comments on Thursday expressing admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship.”</p> <p>A round table of people from China, Taiwan, Tibet and Korea — all of whom say they suffered at the hands of China’s dictatorship — said they were insulted by Trudeau’s remarks, made on Thursday at a women’s event.</p> <p>The Liberal leader was asked which nation he admired most. He responded: “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.””</p> </blockquote> <p>But regardless of a political party leader’s view, the Canadian political system is fundamentally different. Even if a degree of “fixing” in favor of political monopoly exists at a certain level, such as quite likely there was with Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien as analyzed in Part 12, the system is after all a multi-party democracy in a primarily capitalist economy; and so concentration of political power, if it happens, more likely takes place behind the scenes and in connection with powerful business interests, such as it did via the patronage of Paul Desmarais.</p> <p>(Continuing to next part)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-22877308998015721162014-01-26T01:37:00.001-05:002015-06-07T23:17:11.712-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 12) — when the elites follow the powers<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2013/09/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 11</a>)</p> <p>Two major events that broke into the news in November that year were 1995’s biggest scandalous political stories in Canada, as detailed in Part 11 of this blog article.</p> <p>First, in the early morning wee hours of November 5, the day when Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien and wife Aline were to leave for Israel to attend the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated the day before, a man broke into the Prime Minister’s Residence at 24 Sussex Drive in Capital Ottawa, holding an open jackknife and came face-to-face with Mrs. Chretien just outside the couple’s bedroom.</p> <p>Then on November 14, Royal Canadian Mounted Police held a media interview to announce its Airbus Affair criminal investigation, confirming news reports originating from Europe that at RCMP’s request police in Switzerland were searching for evidence of multimillion secret commissions from the European Airbus company to associates of former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney for the $1.8 billion sale of 32 planes to Air Canada under the Mulroney government in 1988, prior to Air Canada’s privatization in 1989.</p> <p>In both instances, RCMP appeared to be handling the matters dutifully, but media coverage soon showed very different pictures, critical of RCMP performance as discussed in Part 11.</p> <p>In the case of the PM’s residence break-in, the house ground was guarded by several RCMP Special Constables and Constables, the lowest-ranked members in the force and they, along with guards at the Governor General’s residence and at the Prime Minister’s summer residence outside Ottawa, were together led by a Corporal, at just one rank above, posted at the GG’s residence. Most of the officers guarding the Chretien residence had no training in VIP protection, and none had been inside the house.</p> <p>When Mrs. Chretien phoned them about an intruder the onsite guards simply surrounded the house and called for help, until the corporal arrived and entered by himself to make an arrest. Fortunately, the 34-year-old intruder Andre Dallaire, a convenience store worker from Longueuil, a suburb of Montreal, Quebec, did not try to break into the bedroom or fight the police.</p> <p>Notified of the break-in, the senior RCMP supervisors didn’t bother to attend the scene or to immediately increase protection for the Chretiens. Later, the RCMP management blamed the poor police response on the onsite personnel, announcing disciplinary measures against them while quietly shifting the senior officers’ duties.</p> <p>Intense media interests in this dangerous breach of the national leader’s security led to disclosures that there had been internal RCMP reports since 1989 about poor security at the Prime Minister’s residence due to low quality of the surveillance cameras, the guards’ dismissiveness toward alarms, and lack of monitoring on the backside of the ground, but that those reports were ignored by the RCMP management or by the Prime Minister’s Office.</p> <p>In the Airbus commissions case, RCMP first exhibited a similar type of callous dismissiveness toward allegations of corruption in Brian Mulroney’s political circle.</p> <p>Anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron’s best-selling book, <em><a href="http://steviecameron.com/on-the-take-crime-corruption-and-greed-in-the-mulroney-years/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years</font></a></em>, published in October 1994, referred to possibly $20-70 million Airbus secret commissions paid to Government Consultants International, a Ottawa lobby firm founded by Mulroney’s friend, former Newfoundland Premier Frank Moores, likely funnelled through German Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber.</p> <p>In January 1995 RCMP Inspector Carl Gallant and Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald privately met with Cameron about the allegations.</p> <p>In March, both <em>Der Spiegel</em> magazine in Germany and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate program publicized further details, about a Liechtenstein company reportedly owned by Schreiber that received multimillion commissions from Airbus, and bank accounts held by Schreiber and his friend Moores at Swiss Bank Corporation. German tax investigators quickly started an investigation into Schreiber’s activities, but Carl Gallant, promoted to Superintendent, said RCMP was not investigating.</p> <p>As in Part 11, Journalist Paul Palango lamented in June 1995: </p> <blockquote> <p>“In virtually every other Western democracy in recent years, serious and successful investigations have been mounted against former government and business leaders for corruption. Only in Canada has such judicial scrutiny failed to materialize.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Eventually on September 29, Justice Department lawyer Kimberly Prost sent a letter to the Swiss authorities to request assistance probing certain bank accounts in that country, alleging “criminal activity” and “an ongoing scheme by Mr. Mulroney” to defraud Canadian taxpayers of millions of dollars during his entire time as Prime Minister, including taking a $5 million kickback from Airbus. But with such serious accusations the RCMP criminal investigation assigned only one investigator, Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, to the case – not much better than the low level of protection for Prime Minister Chretien’s residence.</p> <p>After Swiss investigators gave Karlheinz Schreiber a copy of the September 29 letter from Canada, written in German, Schreiber informed Mulroney and had a Swiss law firm translate it into English. It was then quoted by <em>The Financial Post</em> reporter Philip Mathias on November 18, in the first media report that Mulroney was personally a target of the investigation.</p> <p>Seizing the public-relations initiative, Mulroney immediately launched a $50 million libel lawsuit against RCMP and the government. Disclosures from the civil litigation showed that as early as in December 1993 – after the Liberals had in October defeated the Tories led by Mulroney’s successor, Vancouver Member of Parliament Kim Campbell – Justice Minister Allan Rock made a request to Herb Gray, Solicitor General overseeing RCMP, for an investigation into the former Mulroney government’s contracting practices but it was declined by RCMP.</p> <p>By November 1995 there was a publicized Airbus Affair criminal investigation, but RCMP was put on the defensive by Mulroney’s lawsuit, the first ever from a former prime minister against the government, and by Mulroney’s show of indignity, disgust and self-righteousness, who described the investigation’s allegations against him as “fascism”. Meanwhile, RCMP didn’t report progress in the investigation even after transferring Inspector Peter German from British Columbia “E” Division to lead it in July 1996, while in May 1996 Schreiber won at the Federal Court of Canada blocking RCMP access to his Swiss bank account information, until the Supreme Court of Canada sided with RCMP 2 years later.</p> <p>As in Part 11, the RCMP later closed the Airbus Affair investigation in 2003, but subsequent revelations about $300,000 cash from Schreiber to Mulroney in 1993-94 led to the so-called Mulroney-Schreiber Affair in 2007-2009, with a public inquiry ordered by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, limited to exclude the Airbus Affair issues. New revelations also showed that as Schreiber first handed cash to Mulroney in August 1993 – after Mulroney had stepped down in June – the next day Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere, a board director of Swiss Bank Corp., died of a reportedly suicide – facts unknown to the public during the Airbus Affair in 1995-97.</p> <p>In contrast, criminal investigations in Germany made significant progress and discoveries. Investigators searched Schreiber’s home near Munich, and found a money distribution list containing coded info, including on a bank account “Frankfurt” with money reportedly for Frank Moores to distribute in Canada. Police then searched the homes and offices of several of Schreiber’s German friends, including: Max Strauss, son of Franz Josef Strauss, the late Airbus board chairman, leader of the West German Christian Social Party, West German defense minister and governor of Bavaria; Ludwig Holger Pfahls, former head of West German domestic intelligence and junior defence minister under Chancellor Helmut Kohl; and Winfried Haastent, board chairman of German manufacturer Thyssen. Pfahls was later convicted and sent to jail in 2005 for taking bribes through Schreiber for the sale of Thyssen armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, and was sent to jail again in 2011 for hiding additional bribe money.</p> <p>Pale in comparison, the Canadian government and RCMP were only able to achieve a libel-lawsuit settlement with Mulroney, in January 1997 just one day before the lawsuit trial, admitting lack of evidence to conclude “wrongdoing”, issuing an apology and paying for his legal expenses of around $2 million. RCMP was allowed to continue the criminal investigation at the time.</p> <p>Two major reasons were cited for the government’s settling with Mulroney: due to international law enforcement “confidentiality” RCMP refused to disclose some information to the civil-lawsuit trial; and Sgt. Fiegenwald made a late admission that in November 1995 before the case became public he had confirmed to Stevie Cameron, and according to the Mulroney side to other reporters, that Mulroney was named in the September 29 letter – it was careless lack of professionalism.</p> <p>Like with the Chretien residence break-in, the low-level officer Sgt. Fiegenwald faced disciplinary actions, but otherwise no one else in the RCMP was officially blamed.</p> <p>As the media pointed out, a full civil trial would have allowed the public to learn much more about the facts; instead, questions remain, such as who in the RCMP approved the letter accusing Mulroney of criminal activity when evidence was lacking, who first leaked the letter to the media in November 1995, and what evidence RCMP collected after all.</p> <p>In Part 11, my detailed analysis of the press data has pointed to far more complex, very political roles of the RCMP in handling both the PM’s residence intrusion and the Airbus Affair, and has also found tantalizing links between the Chretien residence break-in and the Airbus Affair criminal investigation publicity, or at least links between RCMP handlings of the seemingly unrelated events.</p> <p>In the residence break-in case, a shocking history has emerged in the career record of then RCMP Chief Superintendent Al Rivard responsible for VIP security, including protection for the prime minister, cabinet ministers and foreign diplomats: back in 1989 – the year when internal RCMP reports began about poor security at the PM’s residence – in the province of New Brunswick, for 10 months leading a force of over 100 elite officers including SWAT teams Rivard was unable to catch escaped murderer Allen Legere, who was hiding not far from their searches; Legere killed 4 more people during that time, and after capture taunted “that RCMP Rivard” in a letter to the media.</p> <p>As in Part 11, one day after the PM’s residence break-in Rivard was quietly moved to a new job, and RCMP spokesman Inspector Jean St. Cyr asserted it was an unrelated reassignment.</p> <p>In the Airbus Affair, on November 4 only hours before the intrusion at Chretien’s residence, Brian Mulroney’s side made its first contact with the government regarding the criminal investigation, with Mulroney lawyer Roger Tasse phoning Justice Minister Allan Rock.</p> <p>Such simultaneous timing would normally have been unrelated, but in this instance it appeared conspicuous and suggestive of a possible connection, for several reasons.</p> <p>Firstly, Mulroney’s Tory party and Chretien’s Liberal party had been the only governing contenders and the main political foes in Canadian history, Mulroney’s party under Kim Campbell had been nearly wiped out by Chretien’s party in the 1993 election, and now the Airbus Affair criminal investigation and the Prime Minister’s residence intrusion mutually targeted the two men personally.</p> <p>The Chretien residence intruder Andre Dallaire, though with a knife, didn’t appear aggressively violent. He was found guilty of attempted murder but not criminally responsible due to “Paranoid Schizophrenia”; soon released, in 1998 Dallaire moved to live only a few blocks from Chretien’s residence; as in Part 11, at that point RCMP spokesman Sgt. Andre Guertin even said, “We don’t see any more problems with Mr. Dallaire”, that Dallaire understood he could not come within 500 metres of the prime minister.</p> <p>Likewise, in November 1995 only about 10 days after the break-in, the newly featured RCMP Airbus Affair investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald privately – almost wilfully according to Mulroney’s side – let reporters know that Mulroney was being investigated, and the reporters then swarmed Mulroney and his lawyer Roger Tasse with many phone calls.</p> <p>These could be low-level skirmishes happening to both Chretien and Mulroney.</p> <p>Secondly, by letting low-level personnel be in charge with the Chretien residence security and with the Mulroney criminal investigation, RCMP left rooms for confusions and incidents while maintaining deniability by senior management.</p> <p>The RCMP spokesman Sgt. Guertin who said in 1998 that the freed Dallaire understood he could not come within 500 metres of the prime minister, had been RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray’s spokesman in early 1997 regarding the legal settlement with Mulroney in the Airbus Affair. That could be a subtle indication that in the intrusion case the RCMP’s highest level knew what RCMP was dealing with, that the probability of real violence was low; when a little intimidation of Chretien was tolerated, Mulroney could be a beneficiary.</p> <p>And thirdly, the two cases appeared conspicuously related because, as I have identified in Part 11, there was one RCMP senior leader figure likely responsible for supervising both events, and when the residence break-in occurred in the early morning of November 5 he chose to oversee “damage control”, i.e., public relations, rather than the Chretiens’ safety: then RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, commanding officer of the Capital Ottawa “A” Division with jurisdiction for guarding the Prime Minister’s residence and for the Airbus Affair criminal investigation.</p> <p>As presented in Part 11: after the break-in it was McConnell who made announcements to the media, including for his decision to discipline the onsite junior officers but not the senior supervisors; that decision drew open criticisms from “A” Division staff elected representative Staff Sgt. Joe Brennan; the poor security also drew criticisms from Canadian Police Association president Neal Jessop, representing “40,000 police officers across Canada, including many RCMP members”; then on November 18, RCMP announced security upgrades for the residence, with better monitoring equipment, VIP-protection trained guards and direct reporting to RCMP headquarters, and the next day Chretien said the RCMP was now doing enough and a public inquiry was not needed.</p> <p>One can speculate that taking the ultimate command of his security out of A/Comm. Bryan McConnell’s hands made a difference to Prime Minister Jean Chretien.</p> <p>In January 1997 when the Mulroney lawsuit reached settlement and the media criticized RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray’s performance, his spokesman Sgt. Guertin responded by saying, without naming McConnell, that the responsibility for the letter to the Swiss police had not been in Murray’s hands but in the “A” Division’s, as quoted in Part 11:</p> <blockquote> <p>“His spokesperson, Sgt. Andre Guertin, said Murray cannot be expected to take a hands-on approach to every criminal investigation undertaken by the force.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Guertin later said the letter never made it to RCMP headquarters and the ranking officer to sign off on the accusatory missive would have been in Ottawa’s A Division, someone between chief investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald and deputy commissioner Frank Palmer.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell’s departure from RCMP soon after the Mulroney lawsuit settlement, by February 1997 as in Part 11, suggested a link to the Airbus Affair, much like the reassignment of Chief Superintendent Al Rivard away from VIP security the day after the Chretien residence intrusion in November 1995 – Rivard had been his subordinate.</p> <p>If so, i.e., McConnell’s departure was a result of his bad performance during the Chretien residence intrusion and in supervising the Mulroney criminal investigation, as he appeared to have bungled it in each case, then his new appointment as Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police – as in Part 11 recorded in Parliament of Canada records – was a subtle but more troubling sign, namely a vote of confidence in McConnell by the police chiefs across Canada, to have him as an executive in charge for them.</p> <p>In Part 11 I have pointed out that letting low-level officers be in charge in both cases actually favored Mulroney over Chretien, because when security was lax an armed intruder got through and nearly harmed Mr. & Mrs. Chretien, whereas when a criminal investigation was lax the suspect, i.e., Mr. Mulroney, got away with a government apology and payments for his lawyers.</p> <p>A deeper question that needs answering is whether the RCMP mishandlings were intentional, and whether they indeed had to do with ‘Brian Mulroney versus Jean Chretien’.</p> <p>These two cases were by no means the first time RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell favored Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>During my activities to bring about political changes in 1992, pursuing a dispute with Maria Klawe, my former boss at the University of British Columbia’s Computer Science Department, and attempting to challenge Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct, I sent press releases to two TV media venues, and in the morning of November 30 faxed them to the local office of MP Kim Campbell, with the allegation of political persecution by the PM in my cover note to her, as quoted in Part 5:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I have strong reason to believe the CBC regional management has informed against me and a political persecution ordered by the PM is underway. I need the immediate support of my MP and the B.C. Tory MPs. Charlottetown constitutional process was an elaborate setup by the PM to settle political scores and eliminate potential political opponents.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Part 6, in that afternoon RCMP Sergeant Brian Cotton and a Constable showed up at my apartment unexpectedly, allegedly to see how I was since a July 2 eviction by RCMP from my former UBC office when my job had ended; when Sgt. Cotton learned that I had been persistently phoning CBC about the political issues, he took me to UBC Hospital for a psychiatric assessment allegedly requested by newly promoted B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, whom I knew because her husband David had been a UBC Computer Science colleague.</p> <p>Then in early January 1993, the documents sent to Campbell were forwarded to RCMP “E” Division in British Columbia, but as a complaint only about the July 2 UBC eviction and brief detention, even though Mulroney’s leadership conduct was the primary topic in my documents; A/Comm. J. W. B. McConnell, RCMP Director of Enforcement Services, specified in his January 6 letter to “E” Division commanding officer, as in Part 6:</p> <blockquote> <p>“<strong>Subject: Dr. Feng Gao <br />Complaint Concerning his Arrest <br /><u>by University Detachment Members</u></strong></p> <p>…</p> <p>Correspondence has been prepared for the Minister’s signature advising Dr. Gao that the CO “E” Division or his delegate would examine his concerns as they relate to his arrest and imprisonment and would respond to him direct.</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>In press archives there is an October 2, 1991 reference to the RCMP director of enforcement services as Bryan McConnell, about tackling a serial rapist case (“RCMP analyst called in to help MUC police track serial rapist”, October 2, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Inspector Ron Mackay, a top criminal analyst, is helping Montreal Urban Community police construct a psychological profile of the serial rapist that has been terrorizing West Island women.</p> <p>… Mackay, head of the violent-crimes analysis section, was trained by the FBI.</p> <p>At the Ottawa office of Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, director of the RCMP’s Enforcement Services branch, an aide said it was unusual for Mackay to get involved in a rape case.</p> <p>“It’s the first time I can recall him doing something like this,” said the aide, Danielle Hanson. “He usually works on serial murders, homicides, that sort of thing.”</p> <p>Police blame the rapist for four attacks in the past seven months, including three since August. Police went public after the last attack occurred Sept. 22. Three victims live in Dollard, one in Ste. Genevieve.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So J. W. B. McConnell was also named Bryan McConnell.</p> <p>I have not come across any info indicating that this RCMP director of enforcement services in 1991-1993 was not the same person as the “A” Division commanding officer in November 1995, But a more detailed profiling would help clear any potential mix-up.</p> <p>Like the “A” Division commander in 1995, this Bryan McConnell also exhibited willingness to discipline lower-level officers, and in doing so favor Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>As outlined in McConnell’s January 1993 letter, only RCMP University Detachment members’ conduct that was of concern to me would be examined. As in Part 6, the documents I had sent to Campbell referred to RCMP in the context of my July 2 eviction and arrest at UBC by University Detachment’s Corporal Nancy E. McKerry and Constables A. M. Bangloy and C. L. Dinham-Jones, months before I started criticizing Mulroney’s conduct; after University Detachment’s Sgt. Brian Cotton came took me to a psychiatric committal on the day after my fax to Campbell, a second letter was sent to Campbell on or around December 7 to complain about the escalated persecution by psychiatry – this second letter has never been acknowledged.</p> <p>Thus, under A/Comm. J. W. B. McConnell’s direction my concerns “relate” only to the low-level RCMP officers at UBC in my dispute with a department-level management personality, while issues about Prime Minister Mulroney – the main target of my communications to Campbell – were excluded.</p> <p>One fact that is clear is that J. W. B. McConnell was previously the RCMP officer in charge of criminal operations in Quebec, based in Montreal, cited in that name in April 1990 on the case of Cpl. Michel Boyer, a member of the RCMP national security investigations section charged with 2 counts of corruption, one of drug trafficking and 9 of breach of trust (RCMP officer arrested on corruption charges”, April 6, 1990, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“When Cpl. Michel Boyer, a 20-year career RCMP officer, reported for work Thursday at C Division headquarters just west of the Montreal Forum, a fellow officer arrested him.</p> <p>Boyer, 41, was charged with two counts of corruption, nine counts of breach of trust and one of trafficking in a narcotic.</p> <p>He works with the Montreal detachment of the RCMP’s national security offences investigation section.</p> <p>“The charges he faces are not related to national security,” said Chief Supt. J. W. B. McConnell, officer in charge of criminal investigations.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Besides in <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em>, for this case “Chief Supt. J. W. B. McConnell” was also cited in <em>The Gazette </em>(“RCMP security officer arraigned on 12 counts”, April 6, 1990, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>), and <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> (“Mountie charged with corruption, drug trafficking”, April 5, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/‎" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>As in Parts 6 & 7, in 1989-90 the RCMP national security investigations section was headed by C/Supt. Patrick Cummins, who by January 1993 would be in charge of Contract Policing at “E” Division in British Columbia and would block an investigation for my complaint forwarded to “E” Division by A/Comm. J. W. B. McConnell.</p> <p>But my search of the newspaper archives led to the spectre of a possibly different type of “mistaken identity”.</p> <p>I found only one article referring to J. W. B. McConnell as “Bryan McConnell”, quoted earlier about a serial rapist in 1991 when he was RCMP director of enforcement services – J. W. B. McConnell as in his January 6, 1993 internal letter I obtained via personal-information disclosure.</p> <p>On the other hand, many newspaper articles in 1989 had referred to the RCMP officer in charge of criminal operations, or criminal investigations, in Montreal as “Brian McConnell”.</p> <p>For instance, in <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em> on December 12, 1989 (“MPs unease over rash of RCMP probes”, by Iain Hunter and Graham Parley, December 12, 1989, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“[RCMP Commissioner Norman] Inkster caused a sensation three weeks ago when he admitted Chief Supt. Brian McConnell, the head of RCMP criminal investigations in Montreal, delayed search warrants against Grise until the day after the Nov. 21, 1988 federal election.</p> <p>McConnell said later he did not want to “improperly influence the electoral process.””</p> </blockquote> <p>And in <em>Toronto Star</em> a day later (“Top Mountie misled his chief, MPs informed”, by Patrick Doyle, December 13, 1989, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Search coincidence</p> <p>Inkster testified before the committee in June that the search of Grise’s offices on Nov. 22 last year, the day after the general election, was simply a coincidence entirely unrelated to political considerations.</p> <p>Last month Inkster stunned the committee with an admission that he had misled it in June and that the investigator in charge of the case, Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell, had in fact delayed getting search warrants against Grise in order not to interfere with the election.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Perhaps J. W. B. McConnell is only “Brian McConnell”, i.e., the lone article referring to “Bryan McConnell” as “director of the RCMP’s Enforcement Services branch”, on October 2, 1991 in <em>The Gazette</em>, inadvertently spelled differently.</p> <p>But Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell has in fact identified himself as “J. W. Bryan McConnell” in the directory of the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs. In Part 7 I have cited CACP’s <font color="#333333">2002-2003 membership directory</font> to identify RCMP officer P. M. Cummins as “Patrick Cummins”. But after my posting of Part 11 critical of RCMP “A” Division commander Bryan McConnell’s roles in handling the Jean Chretien residence intrusion and the Airbus Affair criminal investigation, the CACP website document has become inaccessible to the public. So here is my <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/BspotSpecial001 - CACP 2002-2003 membership directory.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">downloaded copy</font></a>, which shows there was one and only one McConnell in that year’s directory: “<font color="#333333">J. W. Bryan McConnell</font>”.</p> <p>Given that the former RCMP “A” Division commander Bryan McConnell became CACP Executive Director in early 1997, there was no reason in 2002-03 for that Bryan McConnell not to be in the membership directory if he was alive; and the only McConnell in the directory was “J. W. Bryan McConnell”, i.e., J. W. B. McConnell, the person who in January 1993 directed that the press releases and cover note I had faxed to MP Kim Campbell be treated as a complaint only about low-level RCMP members at UBC, not about Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>So the conclusions are: the two Bryan McConnell’s were almost without a doubt the same person, and it was no coincidence that in my case in January 1993, and then in the Airbus Affair criminal investigation in 1995-97, Mulroney was craftily let off the hook by Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell, or Bryan McConnell; the threat of violence against Prime Minister Jean Chretien through the November 1995 residence intrusion might have also been tolerated by McConnell.</p> <p>As for reference as “Brian McConnell” besides in 1989 in Montreal by the major press, there have been a small number of mentions in that name but outside of the major media.</p> <p>As its executive director, McConnell was occasionally identified by CACP as Brian McConnell (“<a href="http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2012/grc-rcmp/JS61-3-1998-eng.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canadian Police Research Centre Annual Report</font></a>”, 1998, Government of Canada).</p> <p>While still in the RCMP, on June 8, 1995 – only months before Justice Department’s September 29 letter to the Swiss police for assistance in investigating Mulroney’s criminal activity – McConnell was reported as “Assistant Commissioner Brian McConnell” by <em>The Klondike Sun</em>, when he accompanied RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray and Deputy Commissioner “Benoit” to Dawson City,Yukon, to celebrate the retirement of Yukon Territory Commissioner Ken McKinnon at his last Commissioner’s Ball (“<a href="http://klondikesun.com/newspapers/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/1995-06-08-pt1%20_vol%207_%20no%202_.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Red Serge at the Palace</font></a>”, by Dan Davidson, June 8, 1995, <em>The Klondike Sun</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“McKinnon noted that this final ball was the first time that his entire family (Judy, Craig and Alexia) had been able to be together at this event.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Commissioner’s guest this year read like a who’s who of the R.C.M.P. establishment.</p> <p>“I can see there’s more red serge here tonight then there has been at any time since Arizona Charlie Meadows opened the dance hall here” he said as he began his introductions. “Of course, that’s because of the 100th anniversary of the R.C.M.P.”</p> <p>Guests included the Commissioner of the R.C.M.P., Phil Murray, Deputy Commissioner Benoit, Assistant Commissioner Brian McConnell, Inspector Gary Leopke, aide to Commissioner Murray, all from Ottawa. From Yellowknife came Superintendent Brian Watt, commanding officer of G Division. From Whitehorse came Chief Super. Ed. Henderson, commanding officer of M Division, Inspector Russ Juby, the chief organizer of the force’s centennial schedule, and Insp. Barry Kutryk, McKinnon’s aide de camp.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Clearly identifying almost every RCMP guest’s job, this news story however didn’t mention if Brian McConnell was director of enforcement services or commanding officer of “A” Division. Deputy Commissioner “Benoit” was also not a full name; as in Parts 9 & 11, Commissioner Murray’s second-in-command was Frank Palmer, promoted from the B.C. “E” Division in June 1994 to succeed Murray as deputy commissioner for criminal operations when Murray succeeded Norman Inkster, and was still at that job as of 1996 and early 1997, using “international law enforcement confidentiality” to object to disclosing information for Mulroney’s lawsuit trial.</p> <p>But the Yukon Commissioner’s happy last Ball attended by his entire family and the RCMP brass from Ottawa, organized by the women’s organization IODE, Klondike National Historical Sites and Girl Guides, was somewhat spoiled by IODE’s charging admission fees to make up for its charity shortfall due to lack of river ice for its annual Ice Pool (“<a href="http://klondikesun.com/newspapers/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/1995-06-08-pt1%20_vol%207_%20no%202_.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Commissioner’s Last Tea</font></a>”, by Dan Davidson, June 8, 1995, <em>The Klondike Sun</em>).</p> <p>Looking ‘wimpy’ for this Royal Canadian Mounted Police centennial year of 1995.</p> <p>Still earlier in April 1992, a Canadian government news release on combating tobacco smuggling referred to “Brian McConnell” as RCMP director of enforcement services (“<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/documentStore/m/g/v/mgv31a99/Smgv31a99.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">news release, April 8, 1992, Government of Canada</font></a>”, The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, University of California, San Francisco.</p> <p>So Bryan McConnell was sometimes “Brian McConnell”, in government documents or out-of-town news stories.</p> <p>But my study of the major newspaper archives has uncovered a more definitive pattern of how the two different first names were used when McConnell was with RCMP: working in Montreal he was identified as “Brian McConnell” or “J. W. B. McConnell”, and working in Ottawa he was referred to as “Bryan McConnell” – the only exceptions, as noted in Part 11, was handling the Prime Minister’s residence break-in in Ottawa amid intense media scrutiny in late 1995 when <em>The Globe and Mail</em> used “Brian McConnell” twice.</p> <p>As a matter of fact, Bryan McConnell had been an RCMP senior officer in Ottawa before Montreal, as early as in July 1982 (“ACROSS CANADA Ex-bureaucrat sentenced”, July 22, 1982, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A former senior federal public servant was sentenced yesterday to two years less a day in jail for misappropriating $226,749 in Government funds. Paul Becker, 40, now of Toronto, was also placed on probation for three years … RCMP Insp. Bryan McConnell told the court Mr. Becker had misappropriated funds from the Health and Welfare Department and the Ministry of State for Social Development.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Part 3 I was still in China then, about to go to graduate school in the United States.</p> <p>In 1985-86 Bryan McConnell headed RCMP’s 45-man drug squad for the Capital region (“The life of a drugbuster; 7 Ottawa undercover officers battle street traffickers”, by Ian MacLeod, October 5, 1985, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Ottawa police concede it would be folly to think they could ever put a stop to the illegal drug trade.</p> <p>Instead, seven men work undercover to keep the street traders off balanced and nervous.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Ottawa also has a 45-man RCMP National Capital drug squad located in offices on Cooper Street. It monitors major drug trafficking operations in which drugs flow in and out of this part of Ontario from other provinces and countries.</p> <p>In one of the drug routes, for example, narcotics arrive in the country at Montreal or Toronto and are sometimes shipped here to be divided up and sent by road or mail to places like Northern Ontario, parts of Quebec and Western Canada. Because the shipments usually cross provincial and municipal boundries, the RCMP is the only police force with jurisdiction in all areas.</p> <p>To combat the trade at those levels, roughly defined as quantities involving more than an ounce or pound of narcotics, the Mounties have, “access to a budget adequate to the level of the problem,” says Insp. Bryan McConnell, head of the federal squad.</p> <p>As well as considerable drug-buying cash, that budget allows the RCMP to supply, when required, expensive cars and hotel rooms so their men can <br />pose as out-of-town buyers.</p> <p>Street drug enforcement, which is targeted mainly at low-level pushers selling quantities measured by the gram, falls to the municipal squad. It is equipped with modest unmarked cars and an equally modest five-figure drug-buying budget, partly because of other demands on the police force’s budget.”</p> </blockquote> <p>McConnell’s 45-man RCMP drug squad actually wasn’t as successful as the Ottawa police using 7 undercover cops and the help of Ontario Provincial Police: the biggest drug bust of 1986 in Ottawa was carried out by RCMP with 24 arrests and trafficking charges against 30 suspects, whereas the Ottawa and Ontario police forces’ operation in December 1985 had napped nearly 100 suspected traffickers (“24 arrested, six still sought in year’s biggest drug investigation”, by Ian MacLeod, November 28, 1986, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>).</p> <p>One of the suspects who slipped out of RCMP’s arm in 1986 was 40-year-old Allan Strong of Cantley, Quebec, who according to Inspector Bryan McConnell had sold a pound of the narcotic stimulant “amphetamine speed” to an RCMP undercover agent but when RCMP looked for him again Strong had disappeared (“Police want Cantley man on drug charges”, by Ian MacLeod, December 15, 1986, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Crime Stoppers is appealing for public help in finding a former Cantley, Que. man named in an RCMP warrant for trafficking in an estimated $75,000 worth of the amphetamine speed.</p> <p>RCMP Insp. Bryan McConnell, head of the force’s national capital drug squad, says an undercover agent bought about one pound of the narcotic stimulant from a man in the summer of 1984.</p> <p>Police say they were planning to make another purchase from the man later in an attempt to catch other people suspected of working with him, when he disappeared.</p> <p>Wanted is Allan Strong, 40. He is five foot, 11 inches, about 240 pounds, with brown hair and eyes and possibly a moustache. He has a heart-shaped tattoo on his upper left arm.</p> <p>Since the arrest warrant was issued, McConnell said Strong is reported to have been seen in the Ottawa and Montreal areas.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In most likelihood Allan Strong was no longer in Canada, but had fled to Florida in the United States and had already been a murderer, as told in writer D’Arcy O’Connor’s 2011 book, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=z8nSP8NMXPMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Montreal's Irish Mafia: The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang</em></font></a> (March 2011, John Wiley & Sons):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Following the murders of Ryan and Phillips, Singer, now living in Pompano Beach, Florida, was the next witness targeted for elimination. On May 12, 1985, he was found shot dead at the age of thirty-one with three .38-caliber bullets to his head and chest, his body sprawled across the back seat of a stolen car that had been abandoned in Tigertail Like Park in Dania, Florida, just south of Fort Lauderdale.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Two days before his body was found, Singer had been “taken for a ride” in the stolen car by two West End Gang hoods, Allan Strong and Raymond Desfosses. Their mission, which allegedly was ordered by Alan Ross, was to get rid of the first-hand witness to the murder of  Eddie Phillips.</p> <p>Strong, who also went under the Aliases of Jean-Guy Trepanier and Yvan-Jacques Rousseau, was originally from Cantley, Quebec. He’d been serving a 10-year sentence for armed robbery at the Cowansville penitentiary until his escape on May 9, 1973. He was next arrested, at the age of twenty-seven, during a gun battle with police following an aborted Montreal bank robbery on March 15, 1974, during which an innocent bystander was shot and killed by a stray bullet. His accomplices were William Lydon, twenty-nine, and William White, twenty-three, both of whom were prison escapees from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute. After his release in 1984, Strong became an international drug trafficker with ties to Colombia’s Cali cartel, and was second in command to Alan Ross, who had taken over as leader of the West End Gang following Ryan’s assassination. Shortly after that, Strong fled to Florida.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The place of origin and age of the two Allan Strongs’ were so alike I would have to think they were the same person. A big-time Montreal West End Gang leader and murderer had slipped out from under his watch, and RCMP Inspector Bryan McConnell wanted the public to think it was only about some stimulant drug.</p> <p>With such a pale and blemished record not recognized by the public, in 1989 McConnell, by now Chief Superintendent “Brian” McConnell, received major national media attentions for his work in charge of criminal operations in Montreal.</p> <p>Then in 1990 in Montreal he was reported as “J. W. B. McConnell”, and by October 1991 he was back in Ottawa again as “Bryan McConnell”, Assistant Commissioner overseeing RCMP enforcement services across Canada.</p> <p>It was not until early 1992 that Allan Strong and his Montreal West End Gang cohorts were indicted for murder in Florida, and his cohorts arrested, following a 6-year investigation involving police agencies around the world, including Montreal police, RCMP, Surete du Quebec, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the U.S. Marshal Service, and police from the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal. (“Busted; Quebecers face murder, drug charges in Florida”, by Catherine Buckie, March 28, 1992, and, “Lawyers to offer no evidence in Ross’s defence”, by William Marsden, May 13, 1992, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>)</p> <p>But Allan Strong was nowhere to be found. In 1992 he slipped away from the international police dragnet just like he had done from RCMP Insp. Bryan McConnell, and the media failed to even note that it might be the same Allan Strong.</p> <p>Then starting on December 22, 1992, the murder suspect was reported as “Alain Strong” in the media, with the reported suicide of RCMP Inspector Claude Savoie – an underling of A/Comm. McConnell – while under investigation for ties to the West End Gang (“RCMP ex-drug-squad head kills self; Thought to have links to Allan (Weasel) Ross”, by William Marsden, Mike Boone, Eddie Collister and Charles Lewis, December 22, 1992, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The assistant director of the RCMP's criminal-intelligence service in Ottawa, who killed himself in his office yesterday, was under investigation for leaking information to a former Montreal crime boss.</p> <p>Inspector Claude Savoie, 49, who was head of the Montreal drug squad from 1989 to 1991 before being transferred to the intelligence department in Ottawa, shot himself with his service pistol at 9:15 a.m., the RCMP said.</p> <p>Savoie was alone in his office at the time and all indications point to suicide, Ottawa coroner James Dickson confirmed.</p> <p>One source said Savoie had been under investigation for a year for leaking information to convicted drug dealer Allan (The Weasel) Ross, former head of Montreal's West End Gang. But the official RCMP statement said the investigation was several months old.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Savoie shot himself a day before the CBC current-affairs show, the Fifth Estate, was about to air a segment on Ross and the West End Gang.</p> <p>High-placed informants</p> <p>The program, to be broadcast tonight at 8 o’clock, concentrates on information made public at Ross’s trial on drug-conspiracy charges in Florida last spring after which Ross was convicted and given three life sentences.</p> <p>It also airs a widely held belief that Ross was never prosecuted in Canada because he had high-placed informants within Canadian police departments.</p> <p>The Fifth Estate reports private meetings between Ross and Savoie at a downtown restaurant and in the offices of Ross’s lawyer, Sidney Leithman, who was murdered in 1990.</p> <p>The report, titled The Weasel, was ready for broadcast when producer Julian Sher heard about Savoie’s suicide.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The RCMP would not allow the Fifth Estate to interview Savoie on camera and would not authorize anyone to discuss the Ross case which, Sher was told, was still under RCMP investigation.</p> <p>…</p> <p> </p> <p>After former West End Gang leader Frank (Dunie) Ryan was murdered in 1984, Ross took command. He paid $200,000 to a Hell’s Angels contract killer to avenge Ryan's murder. Four suspects in Ryan's killing were blown up in a de Maisonneuve Blvd. apartment.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In 1985, West End Gang member David Singer was murdered in Florida, apparently because he knew too much about Ross and the de Maisonneuve Blvd. killings. Ross is awaiting trial in Fort Lauderdale for the Singer slaying.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Ross’s main pilot was veteran U.S. smuggler Bert Gordon. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Gordon and another Ross associate, Alain Strong, were supposed to handle the shipment when it arrived. (Strong, also known as Jean- Guy Trepanier, is a fugitive charged in the U.S. with the Singer slaying and with drug dealing.) But the shipment was seized by Portuguese police and U.S. narcotics agents.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The ‘name change’ to Alain Strong had the effect that future media publicity would not be linked to the Allan Strong that had slipped out of Insp. Bryan McConnell’s grip in 1986.</p> <p>What other reason could it be? J. W. B. McConnell’s loyal lieutenant in Montreal, promoted to follow him to RCMP national headquarters I presume, had helped a big-time gang leader escape?</p> <p>Quite possibly.</p> <p>At the time of the Savoie suicide story before Christmas 1992 I had just been discharged from my first psychiatric committal, on December 21 – the day of Claude Savoie’s death – as in Part 6, having been taken to UBC Hospital on November 30 by RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton. A/Comm. McConnell’s internal letter forwarding my complaint to “E” Division would not be issued until January 6, 1993, and none of the <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> articles on the Savoie story mentioned Alain Strong (“TV probe linked to Mountie’s death”, by Bob Cox, December 22, 1992, “Mountie's suicide linked to violent trail of crime”, December 23, 1992, and, “RCMP says it will do a full probe of inspector’s suicide”, December 31, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Prior to that, Claude Savoie seemed to have been reported in <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> only once, in 1987 when the Montreal RCMP, with help from the Soviet Union, made a huge bust of a $100 million worth of drug shipment from Afghanistan (“Soviets helped in drug bust”, August 21, 1987, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Alain Strong was eventually arrested in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in February 1994 after a 3-year search, and RCMP was reportedly anxious to learn from him more about the dead Claude Savoie (“Police manhunt nabs suspected drug dealer; Three-year search by RCMP, MUC police ends with arrest in Amsterdam”, by William Marsden, February 16, 1994, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The RCMP also are eager to talk to Strong about the corruption of police officers and specifically Inspector Claude Savoie, former head of the RCMP’s <br />Montreal drug squad who committed suicide in 1992.</p> <p>The RCMP says Savoie received about $200,000 between 1988 and 1991 from the West End Gang for information about police investigations.” </p> </blockquote> <p>Wow, the West End Gang paid an RCMP drug squad boss as much as they had paid a Hell’s Angel contract killer – $200,000 as in the December 22, 1992 <em>The Gazette</em> story quoted earlier. For that kind of cozy relationship and money prospect, Strong’s 1986 escape may indeed have been helped by Savoie, and for McConnell the police search for Strong had been 8 years, not 3 years.</p> <p>Strong was extradited back to Canada and then to Florida, where he was convicted of drug trafficking – but not murder – on March 29, 1996 (“West End Gang member convicted of trafficking: Florida court could impose life sentence”, by William Marsden, March 30, 1996, and, “Florida prosecutor looks for witnesses for trial of ex-West End Gang members”, by Lisa Fitterman, May 2, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>; and, “<a href="http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1998-05-29/news/9805290088_1_state-trooper-john-howes-drug" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">High-profile Inmate Pleads No Contest To Killing Charge</font></a>”, by Jose Lambiet, May 29, 1998, <em>Sun Sentinel</em>).</p> <p>According to D'Arcy O’Connor’s book on the West End Gang cited earlier, Allan Strong received a 25-year jail term. Published in 2011, the book contains the crucial info identifying Allan Strong’s age and his being from Cantley, QC, matching the December 1986 <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em> article about the amphetamine speed dealer wanted by RCMP Insp. McConnell. I cannot find that info, be it for Allan Strong, Alain Strong or the aliases as in D’Arcy O’Connor’s book, in any other article in the major newspaper archives. </p> <p>“Allan” and “Alain” could be just an English-French difference. Could it be like that when it came to “Bryan” or “Brian” McConnell?</p> <p>I don’t know if anyone should still be so naive to look upon it as only different letters in a name. Instead, I look into whether some sort of favor for Brian Mulroney was involved, and there would be a positive answer – similar to McConnell’s handling of the Chretien residence intrusion and the Mulroney criminal investigation in 1995-97, and his handling in January 1993 of the documents I had sent Kim Campbell.</p> <p>Recall as in Part 9, in 1989 Richard Grise, a Member of Parliament in Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Tory party quit the parliament and pleaded guilty to 11 corruption charges, but other fraud charges against him lingered until June 1994 when RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster was about to retire.</p> <p>The story had been much worse for RCMP back in November-December 1989, when Inkster had to admit that timing of the Richard Grise affair had been delayed by RCMP to avoid the November 1988 federal election (“Mounties stalled raid on MP's office until after election”, by Patrick Doyle, November 21, 1989, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Mounties intentionally delayed a probe of a Quebec Tory MP suspected of fraud until after last year’s federal election, RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster admitted today.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Until today the RCMP insisted that it was simply coincidence that search warrants were delayed until the day after the Nov.21 election.</p> <p>Grise was re-elected in that election, but resigned May 30 after pleading guilty of fraud and breach of trust. He was sentenced to one day in jail and a $20,000 fine.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It was the fault of Chief Superintendent “Brian” McConnell, who decided to postpone a warrant search of Grise for a corruption complaint first filed in the summer, until after the November 21 election so as not to be “unfair” (“Probe of MP delayed until election over”, November 21, 1989, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Inkster had told the Commons justice committee last summer that the timing of the investigation of Grise - who later pleaded guilty to 11 charges of fraud and breach of trust and resigned from the House - was purely coincidental.</p> <p>But Inkster said today that he had been misinformed by aides.</p> <p>The commissioner said that Chief Supt. Brian McConnell, head of criminal investigations in Montreal, made a decision to delay the execution of search warrants in the case until Nov. 22, 1988, the day after the election.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The commissioner said he just found out last night and had not yet had a chance to speak to McConnell and ask him to explain his action.</p> <p>But he indicated that it appeared the Montreal officer acted on the mistaken belief it would be unfair for the investigation to become public during the election campaign.</p> <p>Allegations against Grise were raised in the summer of 1988 by Phil Edmondston, a New Democrat candidate who lost the Chambly riding south of Montreal to Grise.</p> <p>Inkster, testifying on a range of issues, said he is not aware of any improper political influence by the government in any RCMP investigations.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Corruption allegations against Mulroney’s associates had been a recurring theme his government had to face, as detailed in Stevie Cameron’s 1994 book cited earlier. Commissioner Inkster’s disclosure amounted to an admission that RCMP had played favorites with electoral politics.</p> <p>He could be sincere that he had just found out about the problem, but I see Inkster’s finger point at a Brian, not the real name Bryan, McConnell in charge of criminal investigations in Montreal. </p> <p>C/Supt. Brian McConnell nearly contradicted Inkster, stating that he had informed superiors in RCMP headquarters ahead of time and received approval. On an official visit in the Soviet Union, Mulroney asserted that no one should even question RCMP’s independence on a matter like this (“Probe delay was okayed, Mountie says”, by Stephen Bindman, November 22, 1989, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… McConnell told Southam News he informed assistant commissioner Marcel Coutu last Nov. 14, the same day he decided to postpone the search.</p> <p>“I made my decision and then I advised Ottawa of a decision I had already taken,” McConnell said in an interview.</p> <p>“The decision was accepted at that time. The decision was made, the searches were delayed and that was that.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>“The RCMP is an independent agency run by an independent career officer,” Mulroney said.</p> <p>“It is a profound disservice by the opposition to even suggest anything to the contrary.”</p> <p>Mulroney is on an official visit to the Soviet Union.”</p> </blockquote> <p>McConnell disclosed that the investigation delay in November 1988 also applied to Tory politician Joseph Hamelin (“Allegations repugnant, Mountie says”, by Stephen Bindman, November 22, 1989, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“McConnell said he also discussed the postponement with other senior Mounties.</p> <p>…</p> <p>McConnell added later that he also put off an investigation involving Joseph Hamelin.</p> <p>Hamelin, the riding secretary for St-Hubert riding near Montreal, faces charges of bribery and fraud, while Danielle Hervieux, who resigned as Tory candidate in the riding before the election, is charged with fraud.”</p> </blockquote> <p>McConnell explained that the decision came up on November 14, a week before the election, because RCMP investigators asked him on that day (“Brass OK’d delaying probe, says Mountie”, by Graham Parley, November 22, 1989, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“McConnell said investigators told him on Nov. 14, a week before the election, that they planned to obtain search warrants in both the Hamelin and Grise investigations.</p> <p>The chief superintendent said he was convinced there was no urgency and “proceeding with these searches less than one week before the federal election could have harmed a number of innocent people, including many having nothing to do with the investigations.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Commissioner Inkster reacted to McConnell’s explanation by saying that he had not been informed (“Mountie put off Grise raid to avoid influencing vote”, by William Marsden, November 22, 1989, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“McConnell said he immediately relayed his decision to Marcel Coutu, acting deputy commissioner of criminal investigations in Ottawa. He said Coutu told him “he had no problem” with the delay. </p> <p>Informed later of McConnell’s comments, Inkster said: “This is news to me.””</p> </blockquote> <p>McConnell reassured that no politician had tried to contact him about the matter: </p> <blockquote> <p>“Yesterday, McConnell told The Gazette he was never contacted by any political official during the Grise and Hamelin investigations.</p> <p>He said he made the decision to delay the searches at a meeting with chief investigating officer Yves Berube and two senior officers.</p> <p>He said everyone at the meeting agreed “nothing would be lost to delay the searches for a few days.”</p> <p>“But, on the other hand, proceeding with those searches in less than one week before a federal election ... perhaps could have influenced the election on a local and national level,” McConnell said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Brian McConnell was right that the Tory corruption bad news at that time “could have influenced the election on a local and national level”; two weeks before the election, a major national poll had shown that the opposition Liberal party would win a majority (“Business worry: Can Mulroney win election and save free trade?”, by Larry Walsh, November 21, 1988, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Toronto stock market tumbled more than 75 points in one day after a Gallup poll released two weeks ago showed the Liberals had enough support to win a majority government if the election were held then.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Instead, Mulroney won his second majority in a row (“THE LESSONS OF CAMPAIGN ’88 Now it’s Tory Quebec”, by Lisa Bissonnette, November 26, 1988, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>When the political wind was so changeable, anything could matter: there had been communication from the Prime Minister’s Office to the RCMP earlier in November 1988 about the Grise and Hamelin cases.</p> <p>Back in June 1989 Inkster told a parliamentary committee that Mulroney’s principal secretary Peter White had sent a letter to RCMP on November 8 – about a week before McConnell’s decision to postpone the warrant search (“Mountie put off Grise raid to avoid influencing vote”, by William Marsden, November 22, 1989, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>): </p> <blockquote> <p>“The RCMP received a letter from Peter White, Mulroney’s principal secretary, on Nov. 8, 1988, which discussed accusations against Grise and Hamelin involving an alleged unemployment insurance paycheque scam, Inkster acknowledged to the committee in June.</p> <p>Inkster refused at the time to make public the letter because, he said, it involved a case still before the courts.</p> </blockquote> <p>Grise’s complainant Phil Edmonston, New Democrat Party candidate who had filed the complaint in August 1988, called the investigation delay a betrayal by RCMP:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Allegations against Grise were originally brought to the RCMP in August 1988 by his main opponent in Chambly, New Democratic Party candidate Phil Edmonston. Grise won the election by about 8,000 votes.</p> <p>Edmonston said in an interview yesterday that he felt “betrayed” by the RCMP decision to delay the searches until after the election.</p> <p>“They (the RCMP) changed the normal routine for political reasons,” he said. “You are supposed to have blinders in an investigation. You are not there to be affected by outside things.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Opposition Liberal leader John Turner – not yet Jean Chretien at that time – asked the Mulroney government what was in the PMO letter (“PM aide’s statement to Mounties queried”, by Jim Brown, November 23, 1989, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The government should come clean and explain what Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s right-hand man told the RCMP about a Tory MP accused of corruption during last year’s federal election, Liberal leader John Turner says.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Chief Supt. Brian McConnell, the officer who made the decision, has said he feared that carrying out searches during the campaign would have “improperly affected the electoral process.”</p> <p>Turner rejected that explanation in the Commons, saying “the public interest demands prompt and impartial investigations . . . whether or not there’s an election on.”</p> <p>Noting that McConnell’s decision came just after the Mounties received White’s document, Turner demanded: “What was in that document?””</p> </blockquote> <p>Turner viewed it as a part of a wider pattern of government misusing RCMP for political purposes (“Misuse of Mounties could be widespread Liberals charge”, by Patrick Doyle, November 23, 1989, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Three apparent cases of government interference with RCMP investigations may be part of a wider pattern of the Progressive Conservative government’s misuse of the federal police force, Opposition leader John Turner has charged.</p> <p>…</p> <p>At issue are three cases that opposition critics say give the impression the government is manipulating the RCMP for its own purposes:</p> <p>* A trial in which Global TV reporter Doug Small and two others face charges arising out of the leak of the federal budget last April. An RCMP staff sergeant has testified that he did not think the charges should have been laid and that the case went to court only to please the government.</p> <p>* An admission by RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster this week that an investigation of Quebec Tory MP Richard Grise was delayed until after last November's federal election - in which Grise was re-elected - so as not to interfere with the vote.</p> <p>* Allegations that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s principal secretary Bernard Roy was improperly involved in an RCMP investigation of convicted Quebec Tory Michel Gravel.</p> <p>Roy has denied such involvement.</p> <p>Outside the Commons, Turner told reporters, “These are perhaps not isolated cases. These are perhaps a course of conduct on the part of the government. The political interference issue must be cleaned up as soon as possible.””</p> </blockquote> <p>So two of Mulroney’s principal secretaries, Peter White and Bernard Roy, appeared to have interfered when Mulroney’s underlings were investigated by police.</p> <p>RCMP scoffed at the “big fuss over nothing”, explaining that the info from Peter White had helped police prosecute Richard Grise (“PM’s aide’s letter helped RCMP probe of Grise”, by William Marsden, November 29, 1989, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Referring to repeated demands in the House of Commons that the government make public the letter, one RCMP source said: “It’s a big fuss over nothing.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>A memorandum from the prime minister’s office obtained by The Gazette shows that White initially sent his written statement Nov. 7, 1988, to Ward Elcock, former assistant secretary in the Privy Council and now deputy clerk of intelligence and security. Elcock in turn gave it to then RCMP assistant commissioner Rod Stamler on Nov. 8, 1988, who relayed it that same day to RCMP investigators in Montreal.</p> <p>The investigators then interviewed White.</p> <p>Police sources said the essential facts of White’s statement were revealed in four police affidavits that accompanied requests for search warrants for Grise’s home and offices in Longueuil and Ottawa.</p> <p>According to the affidavits, White told police that Grise confessed he was “worried because he thought he had been implicated in some improprieties in 1985 and 1986.”</p> <p>White also told the RCMP in his statement that Grise said Hamelin was implicated with him “in contractual arrangements between Grise and a woman connected with Hamelin.” About a week earlier, the woman had alleged to police that Grise and Hamelin had used her to commit fraud.</p> <p>The warrants also state that Grise confessed that a company called “Les Consultants Sorig International Inc. was involved in the improprieties.” Grise was the president of this company.</p> <p>White’s statement was used to support demands for four search warrants obtained Nov. 21, 1988, and Jan. 16, 1989.</p> <p>Timing of the Nov. 21 warrant became an issue in Ottawa last week when RCMP Chief Supt. Brian McConnell said he delayed the execution of the warrant until after the election.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In a nutshell, Grise confessed to Mulroney’s office about “improprieties” in business practice, and that info was relayed to RCMP which, in turn, decided to prosecute the case only after the election.</p> <p>To be fair, RCMP did get a concession from Mulroney’s side. However, it wasn’t clear when the RCMP request for info was first made for a complaint filed in August, that it took the PMO until just 2 weeks before the November 21 election to reply.</p> <p>My guess is that Prime Minister Mulroney wouldn’t risk incurring public condemnation by dragging the matter to post-election but also wouldn’t want to give the political oppositions an election opportunity, so the incriminating info was given to RCMP with a very short, 2-week window of time, and C/Supt. Brian McConnell was there to let the time run out.</p> <p>And Mulroney likely also deployed national security gimmicks for his interests: facing re-election in 1988 his office’s letter on the Grise case was not sent directly to RCMP but via Ward Elcock, Privy Council “deputy clerk of intelligence and security” as in the above quote; later in January 1993 when RCMP “E” Division decided to use my pending lawsuit as the reason not to investigate my complaint forwarded from A/Comm. McConnell, it was per the recommendation of C/Supt. P. M. Cummins, former RCMP national security investigations head transferred to B.C. not long beforehand, as in Parts 6 & 7; then in 2007 when Mulroney faced fresh allegations about money from Karlheinz Schreiber, as in Part 11, Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed Mulroney-era RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster as his national security advisory council chair.</p> <p>The Richard Grise affair proved that Brian McConnell, i.e., Bryan McConnell, had a long history of giving Brian Mulroney political favor in handling investigations, dating back to 1988. The Allan Strong case proved that McConnell had an earlier history of being evasive about criminal information, and that his colleague/subordinate Claude Savoie likely helped very violent criminals.</p> <p>But McConnell didn’t take the fall for the Grise affair in 1989; Deputy Commissioner Henry Jensen, who had failed to inform Inkster of the controversial delay, was blamed and took early retirement, succeeded by Gilles Favreau (“Top Mountie misled his chief, MPs informed”, by Patrick Doyle, December 13, 1989, and, “Rough ride for the Mounties; Fabled force finds trouble on the Hill”, by Patrick Doyle, December 26, 1989, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>; and, “Successor to Jensen appointed”, January 9, 1990, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Windsor Star</font></em></a>)</p> <p>The new RCMP second-in-command, Deputy Commissioner Gilles Favreau, was known to have been a target of disrespect by the Ottawa police when he headed the Ottawa region “A” Division, over handling of hostage taking of Bahamian vice consul Janet Rahming in Ottawa – because the city police did not need RCMP’s help according to RCMP Inspector Philip Murray (“Police, RCMP dismiss charges of squabbling during hostage-taking”, by Ian MacLeod, April 9, 1986, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Ottawa police Staff Insp. John McCombie, the chief negotiator during the night-long ordeal at the Kent Street building, acknowledges a senior officer from each force had “a difference of opinion” at the start of the drama over how the police operation was to be carried out.</p> <p>He said the dispute was over technical operations, not jurisdiction, and did not jeopardize negotiations with the hostage-taker.</p> <p>…</p> <p>But RCMP Insp. Phil Murray said the dispute between the unidentified Ottawa inspector and RCMP Chief Supt. Gilles Favreau, head of the force’s Ottawa division, started when the Ottawa officer “said he didn't really need our help. But obviously, the RCMP had a role to play.”</p> <p>Despite their different versions of the dispute, Murray and McCombie said the issue was soon resolved when more senior Ottawa officers arrived on the scene.</p> <p>“From our perspective, the co-operation was very good. They understood there is a dual role to play,” Murray said. “The federal government, through the RCMP, has to protect internationally protected persons.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Solicitor General Perrin Beatty also hotly denied that RCMP and Ottawa police had argued about jurisdiction, insisting instead that their superb work resulted in a peaceful end to an explosive situation.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“I think we got lucky... in that incident,” retorted Liberal MP John Nunziata, who had been questioning the minister about police actions after vice-counsul Janet Rahming was taken hostage last Tuesday.</p> <p>Rahming was released unharmed after being held at gun-point for 15 hours. Clifford David William Maltby, 39, was sentenced to five years in prison when he pleaded guilty to unlawful confinement, possession of a handgun dangerous to public peace and threatening to murder Rahming.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So the less-than-effective policing by RCMP was not confined to Bryan McConnell and Claude Savoie, but was a local police view in Ottawa toward the RCMP regional division headed by Favreau, later headed by McConnell at the time of the Prime Minister’s Residence break-in.</p> <p>By 1991 known again as “Bryan”, McConnell was Assistant Commissioner directing enforcement services in RCMP headquarters. But his mid-1980s Ottawa contemporary, Inspector Philip Murray quoted above, who handled cabinet-level and VIP matters (“Mulroney initiated RCMP probe of leak: official”, May 11, 1985, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>) when Insp. McConnell headed the drug squad, faired better.</p> <p>Whereas McConnell let slip violent gang leader Allan Strong, nothing was left to chances under Murray’s VIP protection (“Television best place to see Reagans during Ottawa visit”, by John Kessel, April 4, 1987, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Supt. Philip Murray says anyone near Parliament Hill and along the Sussex Drive route the president’s limousine will take to and from Government House, are “just going to get a glance.”</p> <p>Murray, who heads the RCMP “P Directorate,” responsible for security of VIPs visiting the capital, says the best view of Reagan and the First Lady will be on television.</p> <p>He’ll be directing about 400 uniformed and plainclothes officers from five police forces - the RCMP , Ottawa, Gloucester, OPP and military - in the “blanket” security coverage Murray says has been set up.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Ottawa police Staff Insp. Bob Kelly said his force will have about 100 uniformed men involved in security.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Most of the demonstration will be aimed at the free trade talks between the U.S. and Canada, disarmament and acid rain.</p> <p>Kelly said the group will be protesting everything from soup to nuts and his officers will be mostly responsible for manning the barricades on the Hill <br />and the streets which have been blocked off in front of Parliament buildings.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The routes have been inspected for more than a week with special police units.</p> <p>“Everything is already in place in regards to all levels of threat we can expect against the president,” Murray said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Murray was named Assistant Commissioner commanding the Capital Ottawa “A” Division in March 1991, then Deputy Commissioner of administration by year’s end, and in November 1993 the new Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s choice for the RCMP’s second-in-command, replacing Gilles Favreau (“RCMP names new top cops”, by Stephen Bindman, November 22, 1993, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>; and, “The RCMP gets its man: Commissioner Philip Murray’s low-key style has kept him out of the limelight and in touch with his force”, by Carolyn Abraham, August 3, 1996, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>).</p> <p>As shown earlier from Part 11, Philip Murray was later the RCMP Commissioner who and whose underlings in November 1995 and January 1997 subtly suggested – at his high level of delicate attention – that mishandlings of the Chretien residence break-in and of the Mulroney criminal investigation were “A” Division commanding officer Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell’s problems.</p> <p>But that wasn’t it.</p> <p>I notice more in the stories, easy to overlook but tantalizingly intriguing: as in the November 29, 1989 news report by William Marsden quoted earlier, Richard Grise’s home and offices searched by RCMP in November 1988 were “in Longueuil and Ottawa”.</p> <p>In the wee hours of November 5, 1995, it was from Longueuil, Quebec, that convenience store worker Andre Dallaire came with a jackknife in hand, breaking into Prime Minister Chretien’s residence, and the RCMP officer who had shown favoritism for Mulroney and Grise in 1988, C/Supt. Brian McConnell, was now A/Comm. Bryan McConnell supervising officers responsible for VIP security, and handling disciplines and media “damage control” in the aftermath.</p> <p>But in November 1995 no one in the media even whispered that back in 1988-89 there had been another infamous Longueuil man Richard Grise, and that this RCMP McConnell might just be that McConnell.</p> <p>I would think that, had he not strategically used one name in Ottawa and another in Montreal, McConnell would have run into serious objections to his promotion back to Ottawa by the Mulroney government after the Grise affair, and would have caused a public uproar in November 1995 when under his watch an armed intruder went so close to Mr. and Mrs. Chretien.</p> <p>But the second time some in the media likely knew “Bryan” McConnell was “Brian” McConnell. As noted in Part 11, amid the intense media coverage of the Chretien residence break-in in late 1995,<em> The Globe and Mail</em> referred to Assistant Commissioner McConnell as “Brian”, twice, in a November 17 report by Hugh Winsor, and in the following year-end summary of annual events, about who’s hot and who’s not (“Here's looking at who’s hot, who’s not; Brian Tobin, who raised up turbots by their fingernails; ticked off taxpayers; the humbled Montreal Canadiens; a feisty British Columbia: These are among the year’s newsmakers as compiled by The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa bureau staff”, December 30, 1995,<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Really hot - Aline Chretien, who remains calm and collected, locking doors and phoning police.</p> <p>Cold - RCMP Assistant Commissioner Brian McConnell, who as head of A Division is responsible for 24 Sussex Dr. security, went to RCMP headquarters to oversee damage control rather than to the Prime Minister's residence to oversee security.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mrs. Chretien’s bravery when confronted by the armed intruder earned her a “really hot” accolade, while “Brian” McConnell wasn’t even “not”, but “cold”.</p> <p>If some at <em>The Globe and Mail</em> knew Brian McConnell of 1988-89 and Bryan McConnell were the same person, then they likely were aware of things worse than reported to the public.</p> <p>If so, then it had to do with the fact that back in November 1988 <em>The Globe and Mail</em> had acted the same way as C/Supt. Brian McConnell in the Richard Grise affair, delaying reporting until after the November 21 election. Paul Palango described in his book, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=kxlG6ZhyKSoC&dq=editions:RG-AVFxuqZwC" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Above the Law: The Crooks, the Politicians, the Mounties, and Rod Stamler</em></font></a>, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1994 over a year before November 1995:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… During the days leading up to the election, the Economic Crime police were investigating the case of Tory backbencher Richard Grise. On November 15 – six days before the election – investigators in Montreal determined that there was enough evidence to seek a search warrant against Grise for fraud and breach of trust involving his duties as a parliamentarian. At the time, most of the RCMP brass, including [assistant commissioner Rod] Stamler, were out of the office, Jensen and Inkster in Thailand at an Interpol meeting. The assistant commissioner sitting in for Jensen that day, Marcel Coutu, decided to sit on the application for a search warrant until November 21, the day of the election. Jensen didn’t learn about Coutu’s decision until two weeks after the election.</p> <p>The fear of being accused of political interference on the one hand, and of angering or embarrassing the Mulroney government on the other, seemed to extend to the media, as well. The <em>Globe and Mail</em>, which had been in the forefront of writing about the petty and not-so-petty corruptions of the Tories, had its own Grise story ready for publication prior to the election. However, after much internal wrangling, the paper made the decision to hold off until after the election, on the grounds that it didn’t want to influence unduly the outcome of the campaign in Grise’s riding by providing an unfair advantage to his opponents.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Unfortunately, in his 1994 book Paul Palango neglected to refresh his readers the name of RCMP officer Brian McConnell from the 1988 events.</p> <p>The situation in November 1995 became worse: an armed intruder from Richard Grise’s old turf broke into the official residence of Jean Chretien whose Liberals had decimated the Tories in the 1993 election, and the RCMP commander supervising those responsible for VIP security was the same McConnell who had handled the Grise case in favor of Tories’ election prospect in 1988.</p> <p>This time <em>The Globe and Mail</em> put off reporting the real story indefinitely.</p> <p>There is a coherent explanation for this, that in November 1995 as 7 years earlier, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> continued to favor Brian Mulroney in the high-level political intrigues.</p> <p>While he likely suppressed exposing the “Brian” McConnell story, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> editor-in-chief William Thorsell also acted as a special friend of Mulroney’s in the latter’s public-relations campaign against the RCMP’s Airbus Affair criminal investigation (“Editor subpoenaed: Mulroney gave Globe and Mail chief details before launching libel suit”, by Rod MacDonell, December 13, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The editor in chief of the Toronto Globe and Mail, William Thorsell, was served with a subpoena yesterday ordering him to appear in Superior Court in Montreal on Jan. 6 to testify about his dealings with Brian Mulroney in the 20 days before Mulroney filed an unprecedented $50-million libel suit against the federal government.</p> <p>…</p> <p>On Nov. 19, 1995, Mulroney faxed Thorsell copies of legal documents that were to be filed the next day in Montreal in support of his suit against Ottawa.</p> <p>Longtime Supporter</p> <p>Thorsell is a longtime supporter of Mulroney and has written editorials denouncing Ottawa for its tactics in its investigation of the former prime minister. He also has called on Ottawa to apologize to Mulroney and settle the dispute out of court.</p> <p>Mulroney’s fax to Thorsell gave the Globe the inside track on other media people who got the documents the next day from the Montreal courthouse.</p> <p>Mulroney aide Luc Lavoie told the Globe last September that “Thorsell called because he had Mulroney’s personal home number and Mr. Mulroney, despite my advice, decided to send it (the stack of court documents) over to him.””</p> </blockquote> <p>I note that the 20-day period the government lawyers requested William Thorsell to tell the Mulroney lawsuit trial about in his dealings with Mulroney, included November 4 when, as in Part 11, Mulroney lawyer Roger Tasse first approached the Justice Department about the RCMP investigation, and hours later November 5 when the Chretien residence was broken into.</p> <p>Thorsell was never forced to tell as the lawsuit was settled a day before the trial’s January 6, 1997 start.</p> <p>Long considering itself “Canada’s National Newspaper” as in Part 2, a venerable media venue such as <em>The Globe and Mail</em> was apparently highly partisan in its political news reporting.</p> <p>But the Canadian government itself was far from beyond reproach: it not only settled with Mulroney in his lawsuit one day before the trial instead of letting the trial lead to public disclosure of significant facts, but also was the government supervising the RCMP which mishandled both Chretien and Mulroney matters.</p> <p>Had the public become aware in late 1995 not only that Andre Dallaire was from the disgraced Richard Grise’s old turf of Longueuil, Quebec, but that the RCMP officer Brian McConnell who had given Grise and Mulroney an election-time favor was now Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell handling Dallaire’s breach of security and supervising the Airbus Affair investigation, they could have seriously questioned if the occurrences were merely coincidences.</p> <p>Sensitive as it was, in a November 25 editorial Mulroney’s friend William Thorsell lambasted the notion of “the conspiracy culture surrounding Brian Mulroney”, referring to the allegations of Airbus kickbacks but not the Chretien residence intrusion (“What is fuelling the conspiracy culture surrounding Brian Mulroney?”, by William Thorsell, November 25, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… This week’s revelations about Ottawa’s unsubstantiated charges that Mr. Mulroney was on the take from three European corporations grow out of an extremely fertile field of dark, popular beliefs. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>… Why? Where is the equivalent of Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald in creating such momentum in Canada for conspiracy theories about Brian Mulroney?</p> <p>It is true that some of Mr. Mulroney’s caucus members ran afoul of the law during his nine years in office, but neither the frequency nor the extent of those episodes was unusual in Canadian politics. An inventory of “scandals” during Pierre Trudeau’s or Lester Pearson’s time would be as impressive.</p> <p>Was it how Mr. Mulroney lived at 24 Sussex Drive? The Conservative Party did pay for some much-needed house renovations…</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney is certainly something of an operator, in the sense that he loves to play the negotiator and middle-man among competing interests. We saw that in Meech Lake, Charlottetown and international relations. Do Canadians have congenital intolerance of compromise, equating it with “double-dealing”?</p> <p>He is obviously ambitious, rising from a poor, rural family in Quebec to become prime minister. He was an outsider from the lower classes who brought many similar Tories with him to Ottawa. Do Canadians despise the <em>nouveaux riche</em>?</p> <p>He is enormously competitive and partisan in politics, but so are people such as [former New Democratic Party leader] Ed Broadbent and Jean Chretien. Was Mr. Mulroney’s crime that he let it show?”</p> </blockquote> <p>One should view <em>The Globe and Mail</em> editor-in-chief’s message together with Paul Palango’s lament earlier in June 1995 about Canada ignoring a possible Airbus corruption scandal of the former Mulroney government, quoted in Part 11:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Governments here seem reluctant to investigate their predecessors because their successors might investigate them”.</p> </blockquote> <p>Thorsell’s message was stronger and unmistakable: those who rumored against Mulroney had nothing substantiating, and if those in power had dirt on him Mulroney would have as much on their past, and even their present – not even necessary to wait for a future government.</p> <p>So Mulroney was unassailable, nearly untouchable.</p> <p>The typical Canadian politically-correct attitude would simply ignore such a problem like Palango said, or blame the Americans, like Jeff Koftinoff of British Columbia did in late 1995 about an American conspiracy (“America’s secret, grand conspiracy to annex Canada”, by Susan Chung, December 22, 1995, <a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Times – Colonist</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Premiers Ralph Klein and Mike Harris slashing social benefits. The near breakup of Canada. The near break-in at Prime Minister Chretien’s residence.</p> <p>Are these headline stories random events or are they part of an insidious conspiracy to annex Canada to the United States by the year 2005?</p> <p>It’s the latter, it seems, if you surf to Jeff Koftinoff's web page on the Internet.</p> <p>The 26-year-old Grand Forks, B.C., man has gathered together an impressive body of documents supporting a massive plot to break up Canada and annex every province but Quebec to the United States.</p> <p>The key players in Project Continental Union include Mike Harris, the Ontario premier; Andre Dallaire, the allegedly deranged convenience store clerk who broke into the prime minister’s Sussex Drive residence last month; and Audrey Bouchard, the wife of outgoing Bloc Quebecois leader and separatist Lucien Bouchard.</p> <p>The plot, more ingenious than any X-Files episode, goes something like this: In an effort to secure a fresh water supply for the United States in these uncertain times of global warming, the Americans take over Canada as the 51st state, except for Quebec, by the year 2005.</p> <p>…</p> <p>French-speaking Quebecers would never integrate well with the U.S. Therefore, the Americans hatched a deal with the separatists to break up Canada. Americans would get a politically and economically weakened country ripe for takeover, and the separatists would finally get their own <br />country.</p> <p>Is it any coincidence that Audrey Bouchard, wife of separatist leader Lucien Bouchard, is an American?</p> <p>Conspiracy watchers also allege Prime Minister Chretien is a puppet to American interests. Chretien was strangely silent during the days leading up to the Oct. 31 referendum.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Indeed, the slim margin by which separatists failed to succeed angered the American power brokers so much they dispatched Andre Dallaire to break into the prime minister’s residence and give Chretien a “wakeup call.”</p> <p>Denizens of conspiracy cyberspace note that Dallaire of Montreal has a psychiatric record, and may have been the product of secretly funded U.S. Central Intelligence Agency experiments done at McGill University involving psychiatric patients as mind-control guinea pigs.</p> <p>The CIA financed the clandestine research of Dr. Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist at the university’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal from 1957 to 1960. Dallaire was born a year after the experiments ended.</p> <p>The good doctor had injected a variety of mind-altering treatments and drugs, including LSD, under the guise of psychiatric treatment to unsuspecting Canadian patients, according to a report in the Globe and Mail.”</p> </blockquote> <p>After his arrest Andre Dallaire did say that Quebec separation was his inspiration, as in Part 11. But the scenario that a hypothetical CIA experiment on future parents could produce a son under psychiatric control who could be dispatched to invade the Canadian Prime Minister’s residence, sounds far-fetched.</p> <p>Nevertheless, the speculation that CIA-related mind-control and drug experiments could have links to political violence proved insightful – if anyone had paid attention to Jeff Koftinoff.</p> <p>Several months later in April 1996, the U.S. FBI arrested Theodore Kaczynski, identifying him as “Unabomber”, who had waged a serial bombing campaign since 1978. It was surprising that this most hunted domestic terrorist at that point – a 150-person FBI-led task force had been investigating his cases – had once been a Mathematics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where as in Part 3 a bomb attributed to him exploded in 1985 while I was a Mathematics Ph.D. student (“<a href="http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/april/unabomber_042408" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">FBI 100, The Unabomber</font></a>”, April 24, 2008, The Federal Bureau of Investigation):</p> <blockquote> <p>“How do you catch a twisted genius who aspires to be the perfect, anonymous killer—who builds untraceable bombs and delivers them to random targets, who leaves false clues to throw off authorities, who lives like a recluse in the mountains of Montana and tells no one of his secret crimes?</p> <p>…</p> <p>In 1979, an FBI-led task force that included the ATF and U.S. Postal Inspection Service was formed to investigate the “UNABOM” case, code-named for the <b>UN</b>iversity and <b>A</b>irline <b>BOM</b>bing targets involved. The task force would grow to more than 150 full-time investigators, analysts, and others. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>It turned out that as a Harvard University student Kaczynski had been a guinea pig in a psychological study from 1959 to 1962, conducted by psychologist Henry A. Murray who had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency’s predecessor, Office of Strategic Services, and who also led drug experiments with Timothy Leary, a future advocate guru for the psychedelic drug LSD (“<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/unabomber-decoded-did-harvard-study-fuel-rage/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Unabomber Decoded: Did Harvard Study Fuel Rage?</font></a>”, November 9, 2010, CBS News; and, “<a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mind-wars/201205/harvards-experiment-the-unabomber-class-62" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Harvard’s Experiment on the Unabomber, Class of  ’62</font></a>”, by Jonathan D. Moreno, May 25, 2012, <em>Psychology Today</em>).</p> <p>In his 2003 book, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books/about/Harvard_and_the_Unabomber.html?id=JYNrQgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist</em></font></a> (published by W. W. Norton & Company), author Alston Chase offered a “logical”, instead of conspiratorial, view of how psychological guinea-pig experiences at Harvard led to Kaczynski’s evolution into a terrorist:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Gradually, while he immersed himself in his Harvard readings and in the Murray experiment, Kaczynski put together a theory to explain his unhappiness and anger: Technology and science were destroying liberty. The system, of which Harvard was a part, served technology, which in turn required conformism. By advertising, propaganda, and other psychological techniques, this system sought to transform people into automatons, to serve the machine.</p> <p>As he continued to suffer through Murray’s experiments, Kaczynski began to worry about society’s use of “mind control”. In the context, this was not a paranoid delusion. Kaczynski was not only rational but right. In Murray he had encountered the quintessential Cold War warrior, bent on perfecting behavior modification. The University and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in an experiment that treated human beings as unwitting guinea pigs, and had treated them cavalierly. Here was a powerful, logical foundation for Kaczynski’s latterly expressed conviction that academics—and in particular, scientists—were thoroughly compromised servants of “the system,” employed in the development of techniques for the behavioral control of populations.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But Theodore Kaczynski didn’t become a terrorist immediately after Harvard. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a Sumner Myers prize for the annual best Ph.D. dissertation in Mathematics, and then taught at UC Berkeley – both leading activist campuses in that anti-Vietnam War era – before dropping out of teaching in 1969, then going into the Montana wilderness.</p> <p>His brother David who turned him in apparently thought the Berkeley background might be relevant (“<a href="http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/april/unabomber_042408" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">FBI 100, The Unabomber</font></a>”, April 24, 2008, The Federal Bureau of Investigation):</p> <blockquote> <p>“<b>The big break in the case came in 1995.</b> The Unabomber sent us a 35,000 word essay claiming to explain his motives and views of the ills of modern society. After much debate about the wisdom of “giving in to terrorists,” FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno approved the task force’s recommendation to publish the essay in hopes that a reader could identify the author. </p> <p>After the manifesto appeared in <i>The Washington Post</i> and <i>The New York Times</i>, thousands of people suggested possible suspects. One stood out: David Kaczynski described his troubled brother Ted, who had grown up in Chicago, taught at the University of California at Berkeley (where two of the bombs had been placed), then lived for a time in Salt Lake City before settling permanently into the primitive 10’ x 14’ cabin that the brothers had constructed near Lincoln, Montana.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Did the anti-war movement motivate him? Chase’s reasoning is that the political activism of the time was merely part of Kaczynski’s environments while he had his own mind:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Eventually, May 15, 1969, would be known as “Bloody Thursday” in Berkeley. But until things got out of hand, it seemed like just another campus riot.</p> <p>…</p> <p>… Governor Ronald Reagan called in 2,200 National Guardsmen. Soon the place was a war zone. A police officer was stabbed. Three students suffered punctured lungs, thirteen protesters were hospitalized with shotgun wounds, and one was killed by police gunfire. Eventually, a thousand people would be arrested, two hundred of whom were charged with felonies.</p> <p>All this happened just a few short blocks from the apartment where Ted Kaczynski lived, and along the route he walked to and from campus.</p> <p>…</p> <p>His own University of Michigan thesis adviser, Allen Shields, was already deep into antiwar politics, having even participated in street protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the previous year. But not Kaczynski. He didn’t even join in the politics of his own mathematics department, which its chairman, John W. Addison, described as having been at that time “one of the three most radical departments on campus.”</p> <p>Kaczynski ignored the riot because he had his own agenda. And that involved a different plan of action.</p> <p>Just ten weeks earlier, on March 2, Kaczynski wrote Addison to say that he would resign his position as assistant professor of mathematics, effective in June. Addison was astounded. Although he thought Kaczynski “pathologically shy” and not a good teacher, nevertheless he recognized the young man’s brilliance. And Kaczynski published prolifically. Why leave?</p> <p>…</p> <p>… Kaczynski didn’t give up mathematics because he got bored. Neither was it because, as so many media commentators suggested after his arrest, he had become radicalized by the student activism of the 1960s. Rather, his decision to leave academe was made in Michigan that fateful fall of 1966, as he left the University Health Center psychiatrist’s office [he visited due to having thoughts for a sex-change operation]. He took the Berkeley job not to launch an academic career, but to earn a grubstake sufficient to support himself later, in the wilderness. When he arrived at Berkeley in 1967, his ideology and life’s plan were fixed. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>The UC Berkeley bombings attributed to the Unabomber, on July 2, 1982 and May 15, 1985 – the second on an anniversary of the 1969 “Bloody Thursday” quoted above – seemed to corroborate Chase’s thesis that Kaczynski’s hatred was directed at technology, “the system” including the academic establishment, and possibly war by association, in that order – through some rather odd chances of fate.</p> <p>Unlike some of the other Unabomber attacks when bombs were mailed to the intended targets, each time at UC Berkeley a bomb was placed in the Electronic Research Laboratory building like a misplaced item – anyone who handled it at this technology research place could have been the victim.</p> <p>Somehow, the first time the Lab’s most established academic, long-time director Professor Diogenes Angelakos, handled it and was hit (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/11/us/diogenes-angelakos-77-scholar-who-was-target-of-unabomber.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Diogenes Angelakos, 77, Scholar Who Was Target of Unabomber</font></a>”, June 11, 1997, <em>The New York Times</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Diogenes J. Angelakos, a professor emeritus of electronic engineering at the University of California at Berkeley who was an early victim of the Unabomber, died on Saturday at his home here. He was 77.</p> <p>The cause was prostate cancer…</p> <p>…</p> <p>Serving as director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley from 1964 to 1985, Dr. Angelakos was also widely credited with building the small departmental research group into one of the university’s largest research laboratories, with a yearly budget of some $35 million.</p> <p>Still, it was the event of the morning of July 2, 1982, that brought Dr. Angelakos’s life to the attention of the nonscientific world.</p> <p>While lounging in a room near his laboratory, Dr. Angelakos happened on an oddly shaped device: a silver cylinder studded with gauges and dials. He later told reporters that he believed the object to be a misplaced construction tool.</p> <p>But an instant after Dr. Angelakos grabbed the contraption’s handle, a pipe bomb secreted inside the cylinder exploded, ripping through his right hand and sending shrapnel tearing into his face.</p> <p>Dr. Angelakos was spared worse injury, however, when a gasoline component of the bomb failed to ignite. The bomb was later determined by Federal law-enforcement officials to have been designed by the serial bomber known as the Unabomber.</p> <p>Dr. Angelakos’s life was touched by the Unabomber’s violence again three years later when a Berkeley graduate student, Capt. John E. Hauser, was badly maimed by another bomb left in his laboratory’s building. Dr. Angelakos, who was working nearby at the time, was one of the first on the scene after the explosion.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Dr. Angelakos, who retired in 1990, made an almost complete physical recovery from the bombing. But in an 1993 interview with The New York Times, he said he blamed injuries he received in the bombing for robbing him of precious time with his wife, Helen, who died of cancer shortly after the explosion.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Having earned a Master’s and a Ph.D. there many years before Kaczynski, Angelakos had far more prestigious Harvard academic pedigrees (“<a href="http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97legacy/diogenes.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">UC Berkeley emeritus engineering professor and microwave expert Diogenes Angelakos is dead at 77</font></a>”, by Robert Sanders, June 10, 1997, The University of California at Berkeley).</p> <p>Nearly 3 years later, graduate student John Hauser triggered the second bomb, who happened to be a U.S. Air Force pilot aspiring to become an astronaut (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/04/us/unabomber-s-track-victims-places-where-bombs-killed-day-for-memories-nervous.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">ON THE UNABOMBER’S TRACK: THE VICTIMS; At the Places Where Bombs Killed, a Day for Memories and Nervous Optimism</font></a>”, by Neil MacFarquhar, April 4, 1996, <em>The New York Times</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“There was a tremendous bang, a loud concussion like zaaaaaaaaaaaack,” said John E. Hauser, an Air Force pilot who was working on a master’s degree at the University of California at Berkeley and dreaming of being an astronaut until May 15, 1985.</p> <p>All he did was move a seemingly misplaced plastic box on a computer laboratory table. The bomb permanently shredded his right arm and fingers, ripping off his Air Force Academy ring with such force that it imprinted the words “Academy” on the wall behind him. Mr. Hauser, now a 37-year-old professor at the University of Colorado, says he remembers watching the pooling blood, screaming for help and wondering “Why would someone do this?””</p> </blockquote> <p>“Why would someone do this?” That was Captain John Hauser’s question.</p> <p>Some Unabomber victims who received Unabomber bombs in the mail seemed to have accepted that reality and asked a more personal question, ‘Why me?’:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I never had a sense of why he targeted me,” said Percy A. Woods, 76, who retired as president of United Airlines in 1983, three years after the bomb that wounded him arrived at his home in Lake Forest, Ill., burrowed inside a novel. “I don”t think any of us ever had.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Patrick Fischer, head of the computer science department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, was on vacation when the package arrived for him. His secretary, Janet Smith, opened a wooden box with a pipe bomb, and it blew up in her face. She recovered physically in weeks, but has refused to speak about the incident publicly.</p> <p>“At first I always thought it had been a random thing,” Mr. Fischer said. “I figured the guy said this time I want to do a computer scientist. So he would go look up computer scientists in the Who's Who and take it from there.”</p> <p>But the manifesto published last year changed Mr. Fischer’s mind. It smacked of careful plotting. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>“Careful plotting”! That would contradict the FBI conclusion that the victims were “random targets”.</p> <p>For the UC Berkeley bombings the question isn’t yet why, but how in the first place. How, each time, did a bomb that appeared as a misplaced item in a shared space in the university laboratory environment get to be handled by none other than a person most ‘deserving’ in the Unabomber’s twisted mind? First the lab director. Then a graduate student who was a U.S. Air Force captain – his astronaut dream aborted in a flash on the 16th anniversary of the Berkeley anti-war “Bloody Thursday”.</p> <p>If one does not take the conspiracy mindset too far but uses a more forensic approach to review the facts, then one can reason that in November 1995 the Chretien residence intruder Andre Dallaire being from the town where the corrupt Richard Grise had been MP under Brian Mulroney, and the RCMP officer Brian/Bryan McConnell who had given Grise and Mulroney an election-time favor now being the commander supervising those responsible for the residence’s security, were most likely not mere coincidences.</p> <p>Firstly, using different names to conceal his past RCMP service history of the Richard Grise affair and favor for Mulroney’s party should automatically make Assistant Commissioner McConnell a suspect where political bias and hidden motives might be involved – such as with the Chretien residence intrusion and the Airbus Affair criminal investigation – until proven innocent.</p> <p>Secondly, the Allan/Alain Strong story was already a convincing case of such in his past: in hiding his error or poor oversight, not only that then Inspector and later Chief Superintendent McConnell misrepresented and minimized to the public the danger of a big-time violent gang leader, but that it concealed a more serious issue, namely his peer and later subordinate Insp. Claude Savoie’s friendship with the criminal gang, including possibly tipping off Strong to escape justice.</p> <p>Thirdly, as in Part 11 but now looking like a repeat of the Savoie situation in light of the further evidence reviewed in this Part, on November 5, 1995 when Andre Dallaire broke into Chretien’s residence, McConnell’s subordinate officer responsible for VIP security in Ottawa was C/Supt. Al Rivard with a graver service record than McConnell’s, namely failing to capture escaped murderer Allan Legere for months in 1989 despite the large police force under his command, resulting in 4 more killings by Legere.</p> <p>And fourthly, as commented on in Part 11, when the Chretien residence intrusion occurred RCMP personnel, from the lowest-ranked onsite cops to the Capital region “A” Division commanding officer Bryan McConnell – with the exception of a Corporal acting alone to confront and arrest Dallaire – showed a total lack of sense of urgency, and even displayed indifference to the life danger faced by Mr. and Mrs. Chretien in their home.</p> <p>The following news report by Tim Harper on November 17, 1995, quoted in Part 11, showed how apathetic the senior RCMP officers were at the time:</p> <blockquote> <p>“McConnell, as the ranking officer, should have told his subordinate Rivard to get to Sussex Dr. as quickly as possible the night of the break-in, sources say.</p> <p>Instead, he called to the site and reported Dube was on his way.</p> <p>But Dube was at least two hours away - even though he was supposed to be within easy response time of 24 Sussex Dr.</p> <p>Rivard received a call at 3:30 a.m. after the suspect was arrested. He was expected to be at 24 Sussex and call bodyguards to the site to have the Chretiens escorted from the home, sources said.</p> <p>He stayed at headquarters instead.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As earlier, McConnell himself was chided as “Cold” by <em>The Globe and Mail</em> for going to the RCMP headquarters to handle “damage control” rather than immediately attending the site – no senior officers did under his command.</p> <p>My comment in Part 11 has been:</p> <blockquote> <p>“These senior officers had better be sure nothing worse could happen to the Chretiens.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But these RCMP personnel’s acts of malfeasance, so contrary to professional standards but not due to lack of expertise or experience, can be explained if the facts that Andre Dallaire was from Richard Grise’s old turf and Bryan McConnell was Brian McConnell of the Richard Grise affair in 1988-89 were not coincidental, and the RCMP knew whom they were dealing with.</p> <p>When briefing the media after the incident, McConnell tried to suggest that the RCMP response had been appropriate, as quoted in Part 11:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The individual was in the house; there’s no question about that. The individual was armed, the individual did not attempt to get into the private quarters”.</p> </blockquote> <p>Precisely. If the RCMP had prior knowledge about this intruder they would have assessed, and likely concluded that the real life danger to the Chretiens wasn’t great, wasn’t a cause for panic and – like the conspiracy minded Jeff Koftinoff speculated – they could afford to “give Chretien a “wakeup call”” this way.</p> <p>Of course, this wouldn’t be risky only if the RCMP’s assessment and judgment were sound, that is, if an “amphetamine speed” stimulant dealer as McConnell had told the public about Allan Strong in 1986 weren’t actually a notorious criminal gang leader and possible murderer.</p> <p>It was an early “wakeup call” for the Chretiens on November 5, 1995, as on that day they were leaving for the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated on November 4.</p> <p>The conspiracy minded would be partially vindicated here, as Rabin’s killer Yigal Amir turned out to be closely linked to Avishai Raviv, an agent of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet, who was well-known for his own anti-Rabin views and was nearby when the murder took place (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/26/world/ex-undercover-agent-charged-as-a-link-in-rabin-killing.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ex-Undercover Agent Charged as a Link in Rabin Killing</font></a>”, April 26, 1999, <em>The New York Times</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Israel charged a former undercover agent and right-wing radical today with failing to prevent the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish hard-liner.</p> <p>The former agent, Avishai Raviv, who had been an informer in the ranks of the militant right for the Shin Bet security service, was also charged with conspiracy and “support for a terrorist organization,” the right-wing group Eyal, which he founded and led.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Amir, who had been befriended by Mr. Raviv, vehemently opposed Mr. Rabin’s peace moves with the Arabs. According to the charges, on several occasions, Mr. Amir told Mr. Raviv that the Prime Minister had transgressed rabbinic decrees and “needs to be killed.”</p> <p>Mr. Raviv was present at the peace rally in Tel Aviv where Mr. Amir shot Mr. Rabin twice in the back at point-blank range.</p> <p>“The defendant knew that Yigal planned to commit a crime, and did not take all the reasonable measures to prevent its commission or its completion,” the charges read.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“Time after time, Avishai Raviv went out and convinced people to murder Yitzhak Rabin,” said Deputy Minister Michael Eitan, who had spearheaded the battle to bring the charges.”</p> </blockquote> <p>If his was only a “wakeup call” lesson Jean Chretien understood, and he decided against any independent inquiry into RCMP mishandling of the intrusion incident, or into RCMP mishandling of the Airbus Affair investigation – but with caution in the intrusion case, as in Part 11, that Chretien waited until after RCMP announcement of transferring security command for his residence to its national headquarters, i.e., away from the Ottawa region “A” Division and commander Bryan McConnell, before telling the media there would be no inquiry.</p> <p>Reviewing the various facts that have come together as strong, albeit partly circumstantial, evidence on RCMP mishandlings of the two seemingly related matters in 1995 affecting then Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his former political nemesis, ex-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, I have come to a conclusion that the RCMP was a very canny, if political deceptive, law-enforcement agency that held its decision ground firmly even in very compromising positions.</p> <p>A good example is when C/Supt. Brian McConnell gave Mulroney’s party the favor of postponing a warrant search until after the election: Mulroney’s principal secretary Peter White had provided RCMP with evidence to help convict Richard Grise for corruption.</p> <p>In other words, if a complainant pushed harder the RCMP would reply that, all things considered, we had already achieved better – but the agency would not disclose the full facts lest a hidden catch be revealed.</p> <p>With this new insight, I look back at my activism in late 1992-early 1993 trying to dethrone Mulroney and account for his leadership misconduct, and the January 6, 1993 RCMP letter from A/Comm. J. W. B. McConnell, Director of Enforcement Services, to B.C. “E” Division commanding officer regarding my complaint, and ask: Did McConnell get something elsewhere from Mulroney to justify treating my complaint as only about RCMP in one UBC incident, and ignoring my statements sent to MP Kim Campbell about Mulroney’s conduct?</p> <p>There was, at least by February-March 1993, with Mulroney announcing his retirement plan on February 24 as discussed in Part 7. But the public was not informed by the government or by RCMP.</p> <p>The story was only recently disclosed, in a February 9, 2013 article by Patrick MacAdam, the Mulroney associate targeted by RCMP and Revenue Canada in early 1993, who was a member of Frank Moore’s lobby firm Government Consultants International (“<a href="http://www.capebretonpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/2013-02-09/article-3173669/Ricochet-from-Airbus-affair-cost-me%2C-but-it-ain%26rsquo%3Bt-over-till-fat-lady-sings/1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ricochet from Airbus affair cost me, but it ain’t over till fat lady sings</font></a>”, by Pat MacAdam, February 9, 2013, <em>Cape Breton Post</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“It will be 20 years ago next month that Luc Lavoie, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s press secretary, told the Toronto Globe and Mail that the prime minister intended to appoint me to the Senate. I was 57 and could look forward to 18 years in the Red Chamber.</p> <p>It was not to be. A week or 10 days later, the PM called me and said he had to pull in his horns and put the Senate appointment on hold because Revenue Canada planned to charge me for income tax and GST evasion.</p> <p>He did offer me a five-year stop-gap appointment to the Canadian Transportation Commission at $135,000 a year. I turned it down flat because: A) I knew little about transportation; and, B) I was only mildly interested in transportation.</p> <p>One March morning, 32 Revenue officers and 12 RCMP officers, armed with search warrants, raided six venues hoping to find tax and GST information relevant to me.</p> <p>I didn’t fall off the rhubarb truck from Glace Bay. I wasn’t the target. My employers — Government Consultants International (Frank Moores and Gary Ouellet) — were.</p> <p>I can’t prove it, but I think the real target was Airbus and Revenue Canada was looking for a smoking gun to involve the prime minister, Frank Moores, Gary Ouellet and Karl-Heinz Schreiber.</p> <p>General Ramsey Withers was the chief operating officer at Government Consultants International. He was one of Canada’s most decorated public servants; chief of Canada’s defence staff and deputy minister of transport.</p> <p>Ramsey had to stand in the hall outside his small office while Revenue agents tossed his desk and files.</p> <p>Dream on!</p> <p>Their daylong search turned up nothing.</p> <p>I was charged and the original 14-16 charges were reduced to two charges at trial.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So in February 1993 when Mulroney decided to quit, his spokesman Luc Lavoie – same as late during Airbus Affair as in Part 11 – told his preferred news venue <em>The Globe and Mail</em> that Pat MacAdam would be appointed a senator. <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em> reported it as a rumor (“Patronage appointments likely today”, by Jack Aubry, February 26, 1993, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The speculation started with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s retirement notice Wednesday when he noted he would “soon fill 11 vacant Senate seats.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Rumors on Parliament Hill suggest that such Mulroney cronies as Pat MacAdam, his old pal from St. Francis Xavier University, and Marjorie LeBreton, who heads the Tory appointment machine, are on their way to the Senate.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As MacAdam recalls, Revenue Canada then told Mulroney of its plan to charge MacAdam with tax evasion, and Mulroney rescinded the appointment plan. MacAdam strongly believes it was a pretence for the tax agency and RCMP to target his employer GCI owned by former Newfoundland Premier Frank Moores – and considered the main conduit for secret commissions from the Airbus company to Mulroney’s circle as detailed in Part 11 – and possibly target Mulroney personally.</p> <p>So GCI in Ottawa was searched for a full day in March 1993, over 2 years before the RCMP sought Swiss police cooperation in September 1995 for its new criminal investigation targeting Mulroney.</p> <p>But it’s only MacAdam’s belief that his bosses Moores and Gary Ouellet, and Mulroney and Schreiber were the target of the March 1993 raid – the only one ever criminally charged in Canada has been MacAdam himself. </p> <p>There was absolutely no news coverage of this in 1993, what would have been a politically explosive story.</p> <p>In June 1993 when Mulroney was stepping down, rumor about a patronage appointment for MacAdam came again, this time from inside GCI (“Three big ones flee ‘Fisherman Frank’”, by Greg Weston, June 4, 1993, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Another of GCI’s key insiders, Pat MacAdam, is this very morning packing up his beloved pictures of Brian Mulroney and leaving the firm. The PM’s buddy isn’t saying where he is going next, although one of his officemates offers this vaguest of clues: “Ask the prime minister. Stay tuned for tonight’s expected flurry of Mulroney farewell patronage appointments.</p> <p>…</p> <p>As for Mulroney pal MacAdam going to patronage heaven, and the three other heavyweights going into competition with GCI, Ouellet says “they are all being replaced by some very exciting names.”</p> </blockquote> <p>His GCI friend was wrong; no patronage heaven befell MacAdam in this last round of the Mulroney era. But there was not yet criminal prosecution either – MacAdam’s recent article quoted earlier has left out the timeline of events.</p> <p>Had anyone gone public with the story in 1993, RCMP would have had the basis to say that it did better this time than with the Richard Grise case, that MacAdam and GCI were warrant-searched in March 1993 while Mulroney was Prime Minister and before any expected federal election by his successor – but no one went to the media, and apparently neither did RCMP.</p> <p>Kim Campbell was crowned Prime Minister and called an election, and MacAdam was invited, along with other Mulroney associates who had been “feeling left out”, to join her election campaign team (“ELECTION ’93 Campbell loop may not be there ANALYSIS ” In a bid to end the bickering and make a reality of ‘politics of inclusion,’ the PC campaign leadership is inviting a few of the Tories who have been feeling left out to accept roles”, by Jeff Sallot, October 1, 1993, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Ms. Campbell, who inherited an election campaign machine assembled by former prime minister Brian Mulroney, gives every indication that she calls the important shots herself.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Campaign chairman John Tory Jr. has moved this week to end the bickering and to make a reality of Ms. Campbell’s catchphrase “the politics of inclusion.”</p> <p>He has invited a few of the Tories who have been feeling left out to contribute to the campaign, including Pat MacAdam, an old buddy of Mr. Mulroney from student days.</p> <p>Mr. MacAdam has signed on as a speech writer for Ms. Campbell and is busily preparing quotable quotes for the TV debates that begin Sunday night.”</p> </blockquote> <p>No story of his legal problem, and MacAdam was reported as an odd old pal “feeling left out” of Mulroney’s departure goodies.</p> <p>The Tories under Campbell were nearly wiped out in the October election, even without any additional MacAdam bad news.</p> <p>Former Liberal leader John Turner, who at the helm of the opposition in the November 1988 election had been robbed of a Tory corruption story by C/Supt. Brian McConnell’s decision to delay search of Richard Grise, now openly aired his contempt for the Mulroney-circle lobbyists (“Millionaire Tory lobbyists get shoved out into the Ottawa cold”, by Jonathan Ferguson, November 6, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Former Liberal prime minister John Turner, who attended Thursday’s swearing-in of the Jean Chretien government, says the Tory lobbyists who’ve become millionaires in the past nine years are in for a rude awakening.</p> <p>“I hope they stashed it away because the pipe is turned off,” Turner said.</p> <p>“There’s nothing wrong in people approaching ministers and members of Parliament and bureaucrats, but I don’t like to see a toll-gating operation. I think we had a lot of sleaze around here and I hope that’s cleaned up.”</p> <p>Out in the cold are Brian Mulroney’s notorious cronies Frank Moores, Harry Near, Allan Gregg, Bill Neville, Pat MacAdam, Michael Coates, Fred Doucet and Bill Fox, to name a few.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But Turner might not realize that his party again missed the more exciting story for an election: a Mulroney associate like MacAdam didn’t even pay taxes for money made in the “sleaze”.</p> <p>Finally a year later in October 1994, there was news that Pat MacAdam was charged for tax evasion (“Former Mulroney aide charged with tax evasion; Revenue Canada documents allege MacAdam made false GST return, failed to declare income of more than $938,000”, by Tu Thanh Ha and Edward Greenspon, October 12, 1994, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Three charges laid under the Excise Tax Act allege that Mr. MacAdam:</p> <p>. Made a false and deceptive GST return for the third quarterly reporting period of 1991;</p> <p>. Omitted information in corporate documents for the purpose of evading $16,355.14 in GST in 1991;</p> <p>. Failed to declare taxable supplies in the amount of $250,000.</p> <p>Earlier, in March, Mr. MacAdam was also charged with two violations of the Income Tax Act, according to the same court documents, in which he is listed as John Patrick MacAdam.</p> <p>Both charges cover the 1989, 1990 and 1991 taxation years.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. MacAdam, who has two bachelor degrees from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., is part of the network of friends and associates that Mr. Mulroney built while he studied there in the 1950s.</p> <p>Mr. MacAdam, the editor of the Xaverian Weekly, the campus paper, was the first student that Mr. Mulroney introduced himself to when the freshman from Baie-Comeau first arrived in town in 1955.</p> <p>Mr. MacAdam has been an active member of the Progressive Conservative Party since the 1950s, when he wrote speeches for Mr. Diefenbaker.</p> <p>Fiercely loyal to Mr. Mulroney, Mr. MacAdam was, as caucus liaison, known as the prime minister’s eyes and ears on Parliament Hill. In 1983, Mr. Mulroney performed the duty of best man at Mr. MacAdam’s wedding.</p> <p>In 1987, Mr. MacAdam was appointed a press counsellor at the Canadian High Commission in London but his term ended two years later amid health problems and opposition from local foreign service officers.</p> <p>Mr. MacAdam then became a lobbyist for Government Consultants International and was widely expected in 1993 to be among a handful of close associates Mr. Mulroney would name to the Senate before he left office.</p> <p>But to the surprise of many observers, Mr. MacAdam was left out while Mr. Mulroney picked other prominent Conservatives, such as party president Gerry St. Germain, adviser Pierre-Claude Nolin and deputy chief of staff Marjory LeBreton.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Though with some details, the media reporting was quite lame: there was no news when the first charges were filed in March 1994, and reporting on the latest charges in October the media still didn’t note that MacAdam had not been a “surprise” “left out” of Mulroney’s patronages in 1993 – he had been under criminal investigation already.</p> <p>Another news report disclosed that it was due to a first report by the satire <em>Frank</em> magazine that the mainstream media now covered it (“Mulroney crony facing charges of tax evasion in $800,000 case”, October 12, 1994, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Pat MacAdam, who was one of Ottawa’s most prominent lobbyists during the Mulroney years, has been remanded until Oct. 20 in Ontario Court on three charges under the Excise Tax Act and two charges under the Income Tax Act.</p> <p>The charges against MacAdam under the Income Tax Act are in connection with the Birkenhead Group, of which he is a principal. Revenue Canada alleges the company did not report income of $557,365 in 1989, 1990 and 1991.</p> <p>In addition, MacAdam has been charged with not reporting personal income of $380,917 during the same tax years.</p> <p>…</p> <p>News of MacAdam’s legal problems surfaced in the latest issue of Frank Magazine, the satirical bimonthly, and were confirmed through court documents Tuesday.</p> <p>MacAdam is known around Ottawa for his fierce loyalty to Mulroney and his dealmaking.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The satire publication <em>Frank</em> magazine broke the story first! As in Part 1, this venue had held a “Deflower Caroline Mulroney” contest in 1991 that drew Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s vow to defend his daughter by force, “I wanted to take a gun and go down there and do some serious damage to those people”.</p> <p>A related news story, about the declining fortune of GCI, mentioned a tax-investigation search of MacAdam in 1993, but still didn’t get to the fact that it occurred when Mulroney was still at the helm, or that others in GCI might have been targets – even after a bankruptcy trustee stated that the search led to GCI’s loss of all clients (“Once-powerful lobbyist bankrupt; Ouellet says Jeep is all he has”, by Andrew McIntosh, October 14, 1994, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Quebec City lawyer Gary Ouellet, who became one of Ottawa’s most powerful, influential and wealthy lobbyists while former prime minister Brian Mulroney was in power, has resigned from the Quebec Bar and gone bankrupt.</p> <p>Ouellet went bankrupt on Sept. 19 with $335,746 in debt and declared his only asset was a 1990 Jeep Cherokee, worth $8,000, according to documents filed in Quebec Superior Court.</p> <p>He declared that he doesn’t have a cent in his personal bank account.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Quebec City bankruptcy trustee Michel Leblond is handling the case. He has scheduled a creditors' meeting at his offices for Oct. 20.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In court documents, Ouellet disclosed he still owns 33.3 per cent of the shares of GCI Inc. but stated that the shares are now worthless.</p> <p>Ouellet is also a professional magician and works as a consultant and helps produce shows in the field. He is currently travelling on business in the United States and was unavailable to comment.</p> <p>Trustee Leblond said Ouellet went bankrupt because GCI’s fortunes went into a tailspin after its Ottawa offices were raided last year by tax authorities investigating a client of the firm, Mulroney friend Pat MacAdam.</p> <p>“The raid had an incredible impact. It created a panic and they lost all their clients. And then the Tories lost the 1993 election,” Leblond said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The mainstream political media was not merely lame; it was either tardy or thoroughly intimidated by Mulroney – as not to breach a thin veil upholding his authoritative image about his last months of official power.</p> <p>Why were the charges moving forward at the court now in October 1994? The timing could be related to the high expectation for the publication of Stevie Cameron’s book, <em><font color="#333333">On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years</font></em> (“New books season full of promise; Excitement from CanLit favorites and newcomers”, by Judy Stoffman, August 31, 1994, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Last year McClelland & Stewart’s big fall book was Pierre Trudeau’s own memoir, which sold more than 200,000 copies. This year it’s deja vu all over again, when M & S brings out the second volume of Trudeau And Our Times, by the Governor-General’s Award winning team of Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson. Subtitled The Heroic Delusion, it takes up the former prime minister’s career after the ’74 election. A hot political book, awaited with trepidation by some, is On The Take: Greed And Corruption In The Mulroney Years by Stevie Cameron (Macfarlane Walter & Ross). Another book that will make Conservatives uncomfortable is The Poisoned Chalice: How The Tories Self-Destructed by David McLaughlin (Dundurn).”</p> </blockquote> <p>Jean Chretien’s Liberal associates were happy about the coming of Cameron’s book (“NATIONAL NOTEBOOK”, September 17, 1994, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Liberals say the Prime Minister never looks better than when he is compared with former prime minister Brian Mulroney. So they expect to sustain high ratings in opinion polls and extend their political honeymoon well into the fall with the publication next month of journalist Stevie Cameron’s newbook, On the Take.</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney, dolled up in black tie and tux, will be grinning at Canadians from the cover of a book that is likely to get prominent display in stores across the country. The subtitle is Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years.”</p> </blockquote> <p>My point is that when in June 1995 Paul Palango accused the government and the RCMP of ignoring a scandal about the Airbus commissions story – more was quoted in Part 11 – the blames were not fully deserved because the media also ignored it; the MacAdam case showed that even after the government and RCMP had made limited moves, the media lacked investigative enthusiasm to get into the GCI dirt and hopefully through it to the Airbus money and Mulroney.</p> <p>The media’s lack of pursue of the MacAdam case was better illustrated by its near absence of mention during the Airbus Affair period from November 1995 to January 1997, at which time Mulroney’s libel lawsuit reached a settlement with the government; I find only one relevant mention of MacAdam, in the context of Airbus Affair but not of his case (“Deal linked to other contracts BACKGROUND / Costly lobbying a common factor”, by Howard Ross, November 20, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The 1988 purchase of European aircraft by Air Canada that has prompted the RCMP to investigate any links to former prime minister Brian Mulroney has direct ties to two other major federal contracts that were marked by expensive lobbying efforts and allegations of insider influence.</p> <p>In one case, a key company involved in the deal with Airbus Industrie - German aircraft maker Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm GmbH - ended up selling the federal government $25-million worth of helicopters in a deal that a federal audit later termed unjustifiable.</p> <p>In the second case, German arms manufacturer Thyssen Industries spent millions of dollars lobbying for a $58-million military-equipment contract to be executed in Nova Scotia in fulfillment of Mr. Mulroney's promises to bring jobs to the depressed area.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In both contracts, as in the Airbus purchase, former Newfoundland premier and Mulroney confidant Frank Moores was the prime lobbyist.</p> <p>The former prime minister, through his lawyers, has denied any involvement in the contracts or knowledge of the events surrounding them.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The project, named Bearhead after the name of the Thyssen subsidiary that was to operate it, was intensely sought after by then Nova Scotia premier John Buchanan and 3,000 steel workers at nearby Trenton who had been promised in 1984 by their MP, Mr. Mulroney, that they would be kept locally employed.</p> <p>…</p> <p>As late as 1990, the key lobbyists in GCI, including Mr. Moores, Fred Doucet, Patrick MacAdam and Gary Ouellet, were registered with the Lobby Registration Branch as working for Bearhead Industries.”</p> </blockquote> <p>No mention of the MacAdam case at all! The media seemed to have treated MacAdam’s evasion of taxes on nearly $1 million income while working at Frank Moores’ GCI as a lone phenomenon, no relation to the Airbus Affair – even when reporting on RCMP investigation into “any links to former prime minister Brian Mulroney” in government lobbying and contracting.</p> <p>Thoughtfully, the Ontario justice system waited out the entire Airbus Affair period of November 1995-January 1997 – until the intense media coverage waned after the Mulroney lawsuit settlement with a government apology for using terms like “criminal” to describe him without solid evidence – before bringing Pat MacAdam to trial in April 1997.</p> <p>The media resumed covering the MacAdam case in February 1997 – separately from the Airbus stories. </p> <p>The first article, on February 1 in <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em>, had only one appearance of the word “Airbus”, about MacAdam accusing the Liberal government of using his case to “discredit Mulroney”. But despite his loyalty to Mulroney in public, MacAdam’s wife Janet openly aired anger about Mulroney not helping her husband (“A backroom boy out in the cold: Pat MacAdam was once Brian Mulroney’s partner in power. Now, he says, he’s down to his last 13 cents and faces tax charges”, by Mike Shahin, February 1, 1997, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Why should anyone care about Pat MacAdam’s downward spiral? He is well-known to political junkies and journalists. But most Canadians don’t know his name, because he did most of his work in the shadow of better-known men: Diefenbaker, Stanfield, Mulroney.</p> <p>…</p> <p>MacAdam is to go to trial in April on charges of failing to report more than $1.2 million in taxable income from 1989 to 1991, commercially through Birkenhead Group Inc., and personally. The charges allege MacAdam would have had to pay nearly $300,000 in taxes on the unreported income. He is also charged with failing to pay the GST on $250,000 in sales.</p> <p>…</p> <p>MacAdam blames his fall from grace, in large part, on the tax-evasion charges laid against him by Revenue Canada in 1994. He suggests that there was political motivation behind the investigation, which he says bordered on “harassment.” Echoing the views of much Conservative commentary on the Airbus affair, MacAdam says he thinks the current Liberal government might be engaged in a concerted attempt to discredit Mulroney and his political associates.</p> <p>“If I was Joe Shmoe and drove a Zamboni, this wouldn’t be happening,” Pat says.</p> <p>Revenue Canada investigator Richard Labelle says that if MacAdam had any evidence of a conspiracy or political pressure or media leaks in his case, he should present it as evidence in court. But Labelle, chief of special investigations, says the case has been handled fairly from the start and charges would never have been laid if evidence was “tainted” or obtained in a “wrongful manner.”</p> <p>Of his old friend Mulroney, MacAdam refuses to speak a negative word, defending him as a “good, decent guy.” But Janet MacAdam is less diplomatic, and flashes anger where her husband shows only frustration. Both reveal considerable hurt: it is clear that MacAdam and Mulroney have grown apart, and have not spoken for quite a while.</p> <p>“You did so much for him (Mulroney) for so many years,” she says, “and he just turned his back on you.”</p> <p>“I went into this with my eyes open,” Pat MacAdam says. “I didn’t expect anything from Brian, I didn’t ask for anything. At least I can look in the mirror in the morning and see the face of an honest man.”</p> <p>“But what good has it done you?” his wife says. “It never occurred to Pat, ever, that Brian would not be there for him as a friend, as a supporter.”</p> <p>Through his legal secretary, Brian Mulroney was asked by the Citizen to discuss his relationship with MacAdam. Mulroney asked his spokesman, Luc Lavoie, to conduct the interview on his behalf.</p> <p>“I know that Mr. Mulroney feels very sad about what is happening to Pat,” Lavoie says. “One has to realize that not one individual in the world has done so much for Pat.” Lavoie went on to list the various jobs Mulroney has given MacAdam, from senior adviser in the PMO to contracts in the private sector. Mulroney “can’t believe it” when people tell him that he might not have done enough for MacAdam, Lavoie says.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Didn’t Luc Lavoie inform the media of “contracts in the private sector” Mulroney had given MacAdam? I haven’t come across any media report of the details. That could be the sort of thing Justice Minister Allan Rock had been interested in when he approached RCMP in December 1993 as in Part 11. </p> <p>After an extensive review of press coverage during the Airbus Affair, I have opined in Part 11 that the RCMP let Brian Mulroney take the PR offensive and sue the government, and let the media publicities on the lawsuit cover for a criminal investigation not being seriously conducted. </p> <p>The justice system’s timing control for the Patrick MacAdam case was strong evidence to corroborate my view on the Airbus Affair. It showed a scenario that the Chretien government and RCMP offered a ‘diplomatic’ handshake to Brian Mulroney over the Airbus Affair and received, in exchange, Mulroney’s acquiesce that his old pal Pat MacAdam, who likely had had involvement with Airbus money while at GCI, would be rigorously prosecuted in a separate case for the necessary political scores – an advance indication that in the end the criminal investigation of Mulroney would not achieve results.</p> <p>Also a part-time journalist, MacAdam had worked at GCI for 4 years, 1989-1993, receiving over $480,000 (“Former Mulroney aide in court on tax evasion charges: ‘Quit bothering me,’ Pat MacAdam told Revenue Canada”, by Mike Shahin, April 8, 1997, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>)</p> <blockquote> <p>“The only flashes of the drama behind Mr. MacAdam’s case will come if and when defence lawyers argue, as Mr. MacAdam has already done publicly, their client is a victim of harassment by Revenue Canada and of a conspiracy by the Liberal government.</p> <p>The conspiracy theory revolves around Mr. MacAdam’s political and personal connection to Mr. Mulroney and to former Newfoundland premier Frank Moores, head of the now-defunct lobbying firm Government Consultants International.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Federal Crown David McKercher told the court that Mr. MacAdam’s unreported income came from Ottawa developer Pierre Bourque and Sons Ltd. ($250,000), the Ottawa Sun newspaper ($250 a week in payment for freelance writing) and Government Consultants International (GCI), a firm with close ties to the Conservative government of the time.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Moore’s firm paid Mr. MacAdam a salary of $80,000 a year for four years, from 1989 to 1993, according to testimony from his executive assistant, Nancy O’Neill. Monthly or quarterly payments totalled $20,000 a year for expenses, $12,600 for travel costs, and thousands more for additional expenses. Finally, Mr. MacAdam received $33,332 in severance pay after sending a resignation letter to GCI’s Gary Ouellet, also a former confidant of Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>The money, more than $480,000, was paid directly to Mr. MacAdam, to Birkenhead (which is now dormant) or to his current firm, McMac Communications Inc., Ms. O’Neill said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Despite the remarkable GCI facet of the matters, the prosecution said that MacAdam’s tax problem was his own fault, his own intention (“MacAdam hinges defence on issue of criminal intent”, by Mike Shahin, April 12, 1997, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Crown prosecutor David McKercher argued that Mr. MacAdam “intended the natural consequences of his act.” Mr. MacAdam used delay tactics, made inconsistent statements to Revenue Canada investigators and kept no books or records on his company’s financial activities, Mr. McKercher said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Ontario Provincial Court Judge Patrick D. White found MacAdam guilty of the tax evasion charges. <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em> printed a long, edited version of the judge’s findings, which showed that MacAdam had first stopped paying taxes for 1989, i.e., the same year he started working for GCI (“‘Failure to file returns was a deliberate and wilful omission’”, April 18, 2997, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“I find upon the evidence presented that the last income tax return filed by Mr. MacAdam was for the 1988 taxation year. It is common ground that Birkenhead never filed a return.</p> <p>Robert Johnston, as part of his normal duties with Revenue Canada, was assigned the task of contacting Mr. MacAdam to request compliance with the filing requirements. He began by sending on August 20, 1990 a request for returns. He followed this by a demand to file.</p> <p>On November 1, 1990, Mr. MacAdam wrote claiming that he had in fact filed his ’89 return and that he was at a loss to explain why Revenue Canada did not have it. This was untrue.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Finally, on November 23, 1992, Mr. [Revenue Canada auditor Thomas] Lavell, having met with virtually a total lack of cooperation, wrote requesting that Mr. MacAdam contact him within 15 days in order to arrange for his inspection of documents, failing which enforcement action might be taken.</p> <p>…</p> <p>On March 30, 1993, six (6) search warrants were executed and documents seized at various locations in Ottawa and Nepean.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The 1993 Income Tax Return filed by Mr. MacAdam failed to report a significant portion of his income in the form of a severance package from Government Consulting International (GCI).</p> <p>Also in 1993, he arranged to divert his income from the Ottawa Sun to his wife, under her maiden name.</p> <p>Neither he or she reported this income in 1993.</p> <p>It is clear that following Mr. Lavell’s letter of November 23, 1992, Mr. MacAdam set about to evade the collection arm of Revenue Canada.</p> <p>…</p> <p>After the search warrants were executed, he changed his tactics completely. Suddenly, he became available to meet with representatives of Revenue Canada.</p> <p>At this meeting, which took place on April 8, 1993, he first tried to invoke the ‘Fairness Package.’ He then tried to evoke sympathy by referring to his wife’s poor health and a representation that he was in financial difficulty.</p> <p>This was very different from the representation he was making to his bank at that time.</p> <p>Even as this meeting was taking place, Mr. MacAdam was engaged in evading the collection arm of Revenue Canada by having his income from the Ottawa Sun paid to his wife.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The timing coincidence to my activism was interesting: on November 23, 1992 Revenue Canada began threatening MacAdam with legal enforcement, just after my sending out press releases challenging Mulroney’s leadership conduct on November 10 & 20 as in Parts 5 & 6.</p> <p>Despite the very conspicuous co-relation between Patrick MacAdam’s working for GCI and his not paying taxes, media coverage of his trial toed the justice system’s line and treated his tax evasion as of his own making, as an isolated case unrelated to the Airbus Affair.</p> <p>MacAdam was convicted, sentenced to probation and community service, and levied a $164,610 fine (“Ex-Mulroney aide fined for tax evasion; Judge orders Patrick MacAdam to pay $164,610, saying ‘no one to blame but himself’”, by Janice Tibbetts, June 7, 1997, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>But in his February 2013 article, MacAdam claims that the total fines and penalties were close to $1 million (“<a href="http://www.capebretonpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/2013-02-09/article-3173669/Ricochet-from-Airbus-affair-cost-me%2C-but-it-ain%26rsquo%3Bt-over-till-fat-lady-sings/1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ricochet from Airbus affair cost me, but it ain’t over till fat lady sings</font></a>”, by Pat MacAdam, February 9, 2013, <em>Cape Breton Post</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Fines and penalties approached $1 million.</p> <p>For the past 20 years, and most of my waking hours, I have been appealing and fighting, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Two decades later this man is still dreaming that his misfortune was a “ricochet from Airbus affair” that he can prove.</p> <p>That’s probably because Pat MacAdam knew Brian Mulroney more than most people did, and had unique stories to tell, such as on Mulroney’s friendships with Karlheinz Schreiber and with the late Airbus Chairman Franz Josef Strauss and his son Max, to contradict Mulroney’s own statements under oath in his libel lawsuit litigation in 1996.</p> <p>MacAdam talked about it during the later Mulroney-Schreiber Affair (“The scandal that keeps on flying”, by William Johnson, May 1, 2010, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… When questioned under oath for his 1996 suit against Ottawa, Mulroney minimized his meetings with Schreiber while prime minister and evaded any hint of the stacks of thousand-dollar bills he received in three meetings afterward, as he was later forced to admit.</p> <p>“When he was going through Montreal, he would give me a call. We would have a cup of coffee, I think once or twice.”</p> <p>The government’s lawyer asked: “And was he [Schreiber] known to you as a friend of Franz Josef Strauss?” Mulroney replied: “He was not known to me as that, but I subsequently read that he was known to Mr. Strauss. I did not know Mr. Strauss myself, nor did I know any of his family.”</p> <p>He was asked: “Is it not a fact that Franz Josef Strauss was the chairman of Airbus?” Mulroney replied: “I knew of Franz Josef Strauss; I didn’t know him personally, I never met him, but I knew of him as the premier of Bavaria and as a minister of finance in the Federal Republic. I had no idea what his other occupations may be.” So he had never heard of the chairman of Airbus.</p> <p>Mulroney hired his friend from university, Pat MacAdam, as the prime minister’s appointments secretary. MacAdam recalled Schreiber meeting Mulroney with Strauss’s son Max. “I was the gate-keeper then, and kept the appointments, and he’d come in with Max Strauss and say hello and leave.” And how often did Schreiber meet Mulroney back then? “Oh, maybe five, six, seven times a year.”</p> <p>MacAdam also stated: “The father, Franz Josef Strauss, was a good friend of Mulroney’s in years gone by.”</p> <p>A commission of enquiry called in 2008 under Mr. Justice Jeffrey Oliphant is scheduled to report at the end of May. But nothing conclusive is expected: Its terms of reference excluded investigating any connection Mulroney might have had to the Airbus deal. That’s staging <i>Hamlet </i>without the Prince of Denmark.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Parts 1 and 11, at the advice of then University of Waterloo President David Johnston, Governor General of Canada since, Airbus Affair issues were excluded from the 2008-2009 public inquiry into the business relationship between Mulroney and Schreiber.</p> <p>MacAdam also knew, first hand, that the dictatorial Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu likened Brian Mulroney to Richard Nixon – even before Mulroney became the Tory leader (“My visit with The Chosen One”, by Pat MacAdam, May 29, 1998, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In the newspaper he was referred to as The Chosen One, The Genius of the Carpathians, The Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma, Most Loved and Esteemed Son of the Romanian People, The Creator of the Epoch of Unprecedented Renewal and The Presence.</p> <p>I was bowled over when Brian Mulroney, Bob Coates, Ambassador Peter Roberts and I were ushered into the presence of the Comrade for a 20-minute meeting that stretched into an hour. I had an immediate grudging admiration for him even though our ideologies were poles apart.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Ceausescu opened the bilateral with a set piece on the glories of Marxist socialism. He didn’t get far. Coates stopped him cold with an upraised hand. “Hold it, hold it, isn’t it interesting, Mr. President, the four of us together in this room this morning -- Mr. Mulroney, the son of a unionized electrician in a pulp and paper mill, Mr. MacAdam, the son of a unionized machinist in a coal mine in Nova Scotia, myself, the son of a butcher in Nova Scotia, and, you, sir, the successful son of a Romanian peasant shoemaker?”</p> <p>I thought Coates had gone too far this time. The Comrade positively beamed. He immediately tacked out of the socialism wind and began to talk about world trade, joint ventures and counter trade.</p> <p>He then turned his attention to Mulroney, then President of Iron Ore Company of Canada. He said: “Mr. Mulroney, some years ago Richard Nixon was in this very same room with me and he was in disgrace. He had lost the presidency to Kennedy and he had been defeated when he ran for governor of California. He sat in the very chair you are sitting in, Mr. Mulroney. Richard Nixon didn’t give up. Don’t you give up either.”</p> <p>When the interpreter translated his words we were absolutely stunned. He was obviously well briefed on Mulroney’s 1976 loss at the hands of Joe Clark. I often wondered later if there was a method to Nicolae Ceausescu’s invitation to Mulroney. Did he know then that Mulroney was a dauphin in waiting for the Tory party leadership?</p> <p>We were there at Ceausescu’s invitation to discuss selling iron ore pellets and concentrates for Romania's steel mills. The Comrade told his Ambassador to Canada, Barbu Popescu, to make arrangements for us to fly over on TAROM -- gratis. Mulroney wasn’t having any of that because TAROM had the worst accident record of any airline. Iron Ore provided tickets on Swissair.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Brian Mulroney has done absolutely better than either Nicolae Ceausescu or Richard Nixon in avoiding official ‘disgrace’. In 1995 several Airbus planes of the Romanian Tarom airlines, which Mulroney had refused to fly on in favor of Swiss Air as MacAdam noted, malfunctioned and one brought all its passengers to deaths as in Part 11, but Mulroney survived the Airbus Affair and made the RCMP criminal investigation of him look like a sham.</p> <p>On that point, one year before my press releases calling for Mulroney’s removal from national leadership, in November 1991 a <em>Toronto Star</em> article cited that early Mulroney-Ceausescu meeting episode from author John Sawatsky’s new book, <em>Mulroney: The Politics of Ambition</em>, under the title “Worth repeating” in an apparent swipe at Mulroney’s helm. Here is the full article (“Worth repeating”, November 13, 1991, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“During a ‘black’ period in his life after losing the Tory leadership to Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, president of Iron Ore of Canada, wound up a fruitless sales trip to Romania by meeting dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. John Sawatsky describes the event in Mulroney: The Politics of Ambition:</p> <p>The only positive note during his stay came on the last day when he received an audience with President Nicolae Ceausescu, who greeted Mulroney wearing purple lattice-weave shoes, purple socks, a purple suit, and a tartan shirt that would have done Don Messer proud.</p> <p>“Mr. Mulroney,” Ceausescu said through his translator, “12 years ago Richard Nixon sat in that very same chair you are sitting in. Now, he didn’t give up. And look where he went. And don’t you give up either.”</p> <p>“Oh Jesus,” Mulroney said afterwards, “he’s well briefed.” The meeting went smashingly well, lasting 40 minutes - twice as long as scheduled.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The episode highlighted the fact that Brian Mulroney carefully cultivated relations with important figures whose political stripes were very different from his, and would use them when necessary. In fact, he used his friendship with Ceausescu – a violent dictator who later met with violent death – at least once to help a Romanian Baptist pastor in human-rights dire straights, as told by The World Evangelical Alliance global ambassador Brian C. Stiller recently – after the posting of Part 11, my first expose on the Airbus Affair (“When Mulroney saved a clergyman”, by Brian C. Stiller, November 4, 2013, <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>National Post</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Paul [Negrut], previously a clinical psychologist, had spent six years working in the local hospital but in time decided his real love was to serve as a pastor. In time he left the hospital and became minister of a Baptist church in Oradea, in northwestern Romania.</p> <p>It was in the 1980s, when the harsh heel of communist dictator Ceausescu ruled the country. Rising to power in 1965, he modelled his regime after Stalin, creating the infamous Securitate, imposing control, surveillance and dominance from 1965 to 1989. It was considered the most repressive regime in Europe. Finally during the revolutionary days of 1989, after he ordered his troops to fire on crowds gathered in Timisoara, they revolted, and he and his wife were shot as they tried to flee.</p> <p>Yet while Ceausescu was in power, it was pretty much assured that once Paul had become a minister, it wouldn’t be long before the police would visit. He was picked up and sent to a concentration camp rather than a prison, sparing officials the annoyance of having to lay charges and fill out documents.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Some weeks after his arrest, a Canadian working in Romania heard of Paul’s arrest, went to his apartment and asked Paul's wife for his photo. Composing a letter describing the stifling oppression and lack of religious freedom, this Canadian stranger wrote to then-prime minister Brian Mulroney, not sure if it would ever reach the Prime Minister’s desk.</p> <p>Canada, producer of the Candu nuclear reactor being built in Romania in the 1980s, had leverage. Bilateral talks necessitated Ceausescu visiting Canada. On one occasion, after official niceties, Mulroney and Ceausescu had a private discussion. After asking him about the state of religious liberties in Romania and getting the usual song and dance of how wonderful, peaceful and free was his nation, the prime minister had a surprise.</p> <p>Reaching into his briefing file, he pulled out a picture of Paul Negrut and asked, “Then why is this Baptist minister in prison?” Buffaloed by this unexpected confrontation, within hours Ceausescu sent a curt message to Bucharest: “Get Negrut out.” In 1989, the wall of repressive communism tumbled and Romanians found themselves liberated. Paul Negrut completed a PhD and now serves as president of Emanuel University in Oradea. He may never have had the chance if not for the unheralded and critical initiative of one concerned Canadian, and the simple yet precisely timed question of a prime minister who cared deeply about human freedom.</p> <p>Brian C. Stiller is global ambassador of The World Evangelical Alliance.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“Oh Jesus”, if Brian Mulroney’s one “precisely timed” noble act of saying something to a foreign dictatorial figure to help free a clergyman was worth the conviction of eternal gratitude by The World Evangelical Alliance, for which Brian C. Stiller tours internationally, then Richard Nixon most likely had helped save many more and I would need to watch my back all the time – as discussed in a March 2009 blog post, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-8/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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)</font></a>”, my maternal grandmother’s extended Ling family, with a long Chinese Christian history, has been closely associated with Toronto’s Tyndale University College & Seminary where Winston Ling worked for years under Dr. Stiller (“<a href="https://www.tyndale.ca/news/dr-brian-c-stiller-appointed-president-emeritus" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. Brian C. Stiller Appointed President Emeritus</font></a>”, June 20, 2011, Tyndale University College & Seminary; and, “<a href="http://www.intrust.org/Portals/39/docs/CooleySummer2011.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Neither Yes: Recruiting the right chief</font></a>”, by Holly Miller and Jay Blossom, Summer 2011, <em>In Trust</em>).</p> <p>I hope that in the 21st century Christianity will be a force for peace, through fairness and understanding, rather than for sectarian Holy warfare.</p> <p>Nonetheless, there could be a Christianity dimension to Nicolae Ceausescu’s death as he was executed on Christmas Day 1989 after being toppled. But when he was alive, in 1981 the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. sold a CANDU nuclear reactor to Romania, and the project became one of his prides and – according to Brian Stiller quoted above – led to his visit to Canada. No other country bought CANDU again before his death. (“Ceausescu, wife shot; ‘Antichrist died on Christmas Day’--Bucharest radio”, December 26, 1989, and, “Ceausescu used forced labor to build Candu plant; CANDU”, by Dave Todd, December 30, 1989, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Within Canada, an important figure of an opposite political stripe Brian Mulroney had cultivated good relations with over the years was senior law and government personality Roger Tasse.</p> <p>In November 1995 filing his $50 million libel lawsuit against the government over the RCMP Airbus Affair criminal investigation, as quoted in Part 11 Tasse was one of Mulroney’s 5 lawyers:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mulroney has assembled a top-calibre team of lawyers to argue his case. The team includes Harvey Yarosky, one of Canada’s top criminal lawyers; Gerald Tremblay, one of the province’s top civil litigators; Fred Kaufman, a criminal-law expert and former justice of the Quebec Court of Appeal; Roger Tasse, a former federal deputy justice minister; and Jacques Jeansonne, a partner of Tremblay.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As earlier, Tasse was the Mulroney lawyer phoning Justice Minister Allan Rock on November 4 to negotiate before the case became public, and hours later Jean Chretien’s residence was broken into.</p> <p>But on January 5, 1997, at the final moment of negotiation for a legal settlement of his lawsuit, supervised by former Quebec Superior Court Chief Justice Alan Gold, Tasse was not among the lawyers with Mulroney at his home, as quoted in Part 11:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Mulroney was at his home, waiting with his media adviser, Luc Lavoie, along with Mr. Tremblay and Mr. Jeansonne, for news of the negotiations.</p> <p>The phone rang. It was Mr. Gold. Mr. Mulroney took the call, smiled, and simply said: “It’s done.””</p> </blockquote> <p>So Gerald Tremblay and Jacques Jeansonne were law partners special to Mulroney’s lawsuit endeavour, personally with him when the settlement was won. During the Airbus Affair period from November 1995 to the settlement time, there was no press mention of which law firm they were a part of, but as in Parts 6 & 11 Tremblay was with McCarthy Tetrault – the former law firm of B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick who had played a role in the RCMP-initiated psychiatric oppression of me.</p> <p>Once the settlement was reached, a news story stated the two lawyers’ law firm affiliation, and made an unmistakable point that these two were the key lawyers, with Tremblay the lead lawyer, winning the desired outcome for Mulroney, and that Roger Tasse and Harvey Yarosky were there to help (“Taxpayers on hook for $2 million”, by Sarah Scott, January 7, 1997, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Windsor Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… taxpayers will pay for Mulroney's legal team, plus all the experts who furnished reports for the trial that didn’t take place.</p> <p>Mulroney’s lead lawyer, Gerald Tremblay, told reporters Monday that the bills would be “very, very high.” But he wouldn’t confirm newspaper reports the Mulroney team’s bills were between $1 and $2 million.</p> <p>Tremblay, a Queen’s Counsel, along with Jacques Jeansonne -- both of the prominent Montreal law firm McCarthy Tetrault -- worked on the Mulroney legal team.</p> <p>They were helped by Ottawa lawyer Roger Tasse, a former deputy justice minister, and Montreal criminal lawyer Harvey Yarosky.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It’s unclear when or why former Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Fred Kaufman dropped out of Mulroney’s legal team. Press archives indicate Kaufman was Harvey Yarosky’s partner at Montreal law firm Yarosky, Daviault and Issacs. As late as of August 1996 he was reported, along with Tasse, as among 5 prominent lawyers who “have worked on Mulroney’s side”, but by that time he had been appointed to lead a public inquiry into “the wrongful conviction of Guy Paul Morin” for the October 1984 abduction and subsequent murder of 9-year-old neighbor Christine Jessop. (“Morin inquiry launched”, by Greg Crone, June 27, 1996, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Windsor Star</font></em></a>; and, “Ottawa's legal bill in Mulroney suit nears $500,000: Tally for expert opinions, many lawyers and court costs keep adding up”, by Stephen Bindman, August 19, 1996, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>)</p> <p>Like the MacAdam trial, the Morin inquiry began after the Mulroney lawsuit settlement – in February 1997 and Kaufman was called “a member of former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s legal team in the early stages of his libel action against the Canadian government over the RCMP's Airbus investigation” (“Gentleman judge ‘A problem-solver,’ Fred Kaufman presides over public hearings, starting tomorrow, into Guy Paul Morin’s wrongful conviction”, by Tracey Tyler, February 9, 1997, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>).</p> <p>A few days after the legal settlement, an “insider” story from former Mulroney aide L. Ian MacDonald detailed Mulroney’s friendship with Tremblay and revealed “significant” reasons why Yarosky and Tasse had also been hired (“Mulroney’s fight for honor: ‘This is about my place in history,’ former PM tells law partner”, by L. Ian MacDonald, January 11, 1997, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“At a table by the bar of Le Mas des Oliviers, a legendary Montreal hangout of lawyers and pols, Brian Mulroney was finishing a long lunch on Thursday afternoon in the company of Gerald Tremblay, lead counsel in his libel action against the federal government.</p> <p>“We’ve had a lot of meals together in the last 14 months,” Mulroney said, “and lots of them have had funny moments, and their share of laughter, but none of them have been joyous. This is joyous.”</p> <p>The former prime minister took a sip of tea, and leaned back in his chair. “Life is good again,” he said. “Life is good.”</p> <p>Tremblay is chairman of McCarthy Tetrault in Quebec, and its rainmaker. But it’s in court that he’s made his name not only as a leading litigator of the Montreal bar, but as one who comes to court impeccably prepared.</p> <p>Over the last year, he built a case that left the government no alternative other than to settle on the courthouse steps. His case was in 26 boxes of paper, paper with a thousand cutting edges.</p> <p>…</p> <p>… Mulroney was the leader of his own Dream Team, composed of Tremblay and his colleague Jacques Jeansonne, noted Montreal civil-rights attorney Harvey Yarosky and, significantly in Ottawa, former deputy justice minister Roger Tasse, later a partner in the private practice of Jean Chretien, who had been his minister at the justice department.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Aha, in November 1995 when faced with a criminal investigation, Brian Mulroney suddenly saw the need for “civil rights” and Yarosky was hired; and Tasse was hired because he had been not only Chretien’s deputy minister at the Justice Department but also Chretien’s law partner in private practice!</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney certainly knew the value of the inside track in his “Dream Team”. But did the Canadian public really think in November 1995 that Mulroney could lose his legal battle against the government with a close associate of Prime Minister Chretien on his side?</p> <p>Most of the public likely weren’t aware of that fact. In the major press archives from the Airbus Affair period before the legal settlement I can find only one mention of a law partner of Tasse’s, and it wasn’t Chretien (“No reason PM should have known of probe, senator says”, by David Vienneau, December 20, 1995, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“There is absolutely no reason why Prime Minister Jean Chretien should have known anything about the Airbus affair, one of former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s solicitors-general says.</p> <p>Senator James Kelleher based his comment on the policy that Mulroney established when he was the occupant of 24 Sussex Dr.</p> <p>Kelleher said Mulroney did not want to know any details until hours before a charge was to be laid.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Chretien says in a CTV interview to be broadcast Dec. 26 that he knew nothing about allegations of alleged kickbacks paid by the European aircraft manufacturer. He also said he did not ask about them.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Kelleher, who was appointed to the Senate by Mulroney in 1990, said it was unbelievable to think that no one within the government would have heard of an investigation into the activities of a former prime minister.</p> <p>“It’s a pretty serious thing for a country when you are investigating a former prime minister,” said Kelleher, who is a partner of Roger Tasse, one of Mulroney’s lawyers.</p> <p>“I find it hard to accept that word of that would not have reached quite a few people. But I have no evidence to substantiate a statement like that.”</p> <p>Tasse, who was Chretien’s deputy minister of justice in the early 1980s, called Rock at home one night to inquire about the investigation. Rock did not want to discuss the issue.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So the public was only told that Mulroney lawyer Roger Tasse had been deputy justice minister, a lead civil servant position, under Chretien but was otherwise a law partner of Mulroney-era solicitor general – minister overseeing RCMP – James Kelleher.</p> <p>On behalf of Mulroney, Tasse called Justice Minister Allan Rock at home the night of November 4, Rock did not want to discuss the issue and early next morning Chretien’s residence was broken into – so conspicuous, ‘God forbid’.</p> <p>People with a longer memory might remember that when Chretien first became Prime Minister in November 1993, a press story referred to Tasse as Chretien’s former teacher on the politician’ role in government, and as the person administering the Justice Department while Justice Minister Chretien made political decisions (“Chretien accorded respect; THE PAST”Former deputy says next PM ‘easy to work with’”, by Murray Campbell, November 1, 1993, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““He learns quickly, and he has very strong instincts to get to the issues and understand them in a political context,” said Roger Tasse, who served as Mr. Chretien’s deputy in the Justice Department from 1980 to 1982.</p> <p>Mr. Tasse, now an Ottawa lawyer, recalled teaching a night class in law and government in the mid-1960s. Among his 12 students were two back-bench MPs - Jean-Luc Pepin and Mr. Chretien. They were eager students who wanted to soak up everything there was to know about how governments operated.</p> <p>Years later, when Mr. Chretien was on the verge of being appointed justice minister, he called his former teacher and spelled out what he had learned in the classroom - that the civil service was there to administer and that he was there to make the political decisions.</p> <p>“This was the first time that this had happened to me, that a minister had phoned me just a few minutes before he was to become the minister,” Mr. Tasse said. “I had the sense that he understood very well the role of government. We were welcomed and we were challenged to help him out on his task. This is the kind of thing a deputy minister appreciates in a minister.””</p> </blockquote> <p>So Mulroney’s lawyer Roger Tasse had not only been a former government deputy and private law partner of Chretien, but a genuine confidante of him.</p> <p>When the history from the 1980s forward is also reviewed, a clear picture emerges of how Mulroney got to have Tasse on his side when this critical time about his political legacy came.</p> <p>The opening section of the <a href="http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms</font></a> states, concerning the limits of rights and freedoms:</p> <blockquote> <p>“<strong><a>1.</a></strong> The <cite>Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms</cite> guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The phrase “as can be demonstrably justified” was said to be the “brainchild” of deputy justice minister Roger Tasse, one of the 1982 Constitution’s architects working under Justice Minister Jean Chretien in the Pierre Trudeau government (“ANALYSIS PM’s proposed charter of rights could have far-reaching effects”, by Robert Sheppard, February 14, 1981, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“This new opening section, or limitation as it is called, is a dramatic improvement over the first draft, in the opinion of every eminent group that has studied the two. The original version was the most widely criticized section of the charter, seeking to appease the provinces’ concern for parliamentary supremacy by inserting a clause that made the rights subject “to such reasonable limits as are generally accepted in a free and democratic society with a parliamentary system of government.” More than 20 groups such as the Canadian Bar Association, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the United Church of Canada and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind had criticized the original limitation clause as a copout that did not put the entrenched charter out of reach of ordinary legislation as it purported to do.</p> <p>All these groups suggested dropping the reference to “parliamentary system of government,” and many put forward their own versions, some of which would have put certain rights (in the legal and non-discrimination categories) beyond the reach of legislatures altogether, even in emergencies. The active phrase in the new version, “demonstrably justified,” is the brainchild of Roger Tasse, deputy minister of justice, in a late-night brain-storming session, according to drafters. The phrase reflects the concern expressed by Dr. Wilson Head, president of the National Black Coalition of Canada, that the burden of proof that rights can be restricted should be on governments, and that while it is common in French jurisprudence it has little usage in English law.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“Brainchild” indeed. When the provincial minds were worried about too much rights and freedoms but many political activist groups wanted no limit, Roger Tasse, the man administering the Justice Department where legal limitations would originate, proposed the resolution: ‘if and only if I can justify the limits”.</p> <p>As liberal as the Trudeau government was, Justice Minister Chretien had wanted the Charter’s equality rights to apply only to the public sector, but senior Justice Department officials pointed out that the United States courts had broadened constitutional rights application to the relevant private sector:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Justice Minister Jean Chretien stated that the Government’s intention is that equality rights apply only to the public sector. But senior Justice officials acknowledge that U.S. courts have broadened the application of these laws substantially in that country by including private-sector firms that receive public funds or contracts or are government-regulated.</p> <p>The U.S. experience could be germane to what happens in Canada after entrenchment of a charter of rights because the United States is the main Western nation with long-standing jurisprudence in this area, and Canadian jurists may begin looking there more for guidance.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The elected Liberal overseeing Canadian law was actually less liberal than the senior mandarins under him, whose brains would determine how much Canadians could enjoy those rights and freedoms. Some of the other key Justice Department mandarins were: acting deputy minister Frederick Jordan, and chief legislative counsel Gerard Bertrand (“Chretien holds Ottawa dinner for fellow patriation backers”, by Zena Cherry, April 17, 1982, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stepped down in 1984, handing the reign to John Turner, who was soon defeated in a September election by new Tory leader Brian Mulroney. Despite announcing retirement from active politics in 1986, Jean Chretien was regarded as the most popular politician in Canada (“CHRETIEN; For a political pensioner he keeps a high profile”, by Hubert Bauch, August 9, 1986, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Dame Fortune is smiling on Jean Chretien these days. Either that or he’s making all the right moves with no hands.</p> <p>Four months after he announced his departure from active politics, a poll from a reputable firm dribbles out, leaked to the media by a Chretien partisan, showing Jean Chretien as the hands down most popular politician in the country.</p> <p>If the poll gives him any ideas, Chretien isn’t saying.</p> <p>“I know what you want to talk about and I don’t want to talk about it,” is the first thing he says when contacted.</p> <p>Instead he hangs the gone fishin’ sign on his office door and slips off to Nova Scotia for a strictly private family affair.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“Strictly private family affair”? Chretien’s Liberal mind had much more. Prior to political retirement he had returned to law practice, lured Roger Tasse away from the government to his Toronto-based law firm Lang, Michener, Cranston, Farquharson and Wright, and had Tasse and his own political organizer Eddie Goldenberg open a branch in Ottawa for him – not to leave all the spotlights to Mulroney’s circle (“Heavyduty legal beagles crowd local lawyers’ turf”, by Stephen Bindman, September 7, 1985, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“More than the political face of Ottawa changed with the election of a Progressive Conservative government last Sept. 4 - the legal community took on a new look too.</p> <p>Seven big law firms in Toronto and Montreal, many boasting prominent Tory partners, have opened offices in Ottawa or become associated with established Ottawa law firms since the election.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The big Toronto newcomers have also lured several highly-placed federal government lawyers out of the public service.</p> <p>When Deputy Justice Minister Roger Tasse leaves Sept. 30 after 29 years in government, he’ll open a local office for the prestigious Toronto firm of Lang, Michener, Cranston, Farquharson and Wright, which already boasts former justice minister Jean Chretien as company counsel.</p> <p>Although the plans have not been finalized nor formally announced, Tasse will be joined here by longtime Chretien organizer Eddie Goldenberg.</p> <p>Tasse and Chretien worked closely together in the drafting of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the patriation of the constitution in the early 1980s.”</p> </blockquote> <p>By 1988, before the November election, some of the Tory lawyers in Ottawa were feeling pessimistic, but the law office of Chretien, Tasse and Goldenberg were doing extremely well, as Stevie Cameron noted (“PEOPLE WATCH Ottawa’s Tory pastures not lush enough for some big law firms”, by Stevie Cameron, March 17, 1988, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“It will be a sad day tomorrow for Weir and Foulds. After nearly four years of trying to make a go of it, the big Toronto-based law firm is closing its Ottawa office.</p> <p>Weir and Foulds is one of a dozen law firms with excellent Conservative connections that opened Ottawa offices after the Mulroney Government came to office in September, 1984. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s close friend, Toronto lawyer Sam Wakim, joined Weir and Foulds with a handsome dowry: an estimated $200,000 worth of annual business from the Export Development Corp. Frisky with its good fortune, Weir and Foulds hired two lawyers from Gowling and Henderson, the Ottawa firm that had handled the EDC business, and set up shop in Ottawa.</p> <p>The EDC business was not enough, however, and the firm did not grow the way it had hoped. It was not alone; Toronto firms Goodman and Carr and Lyons Arbus and Goodman (which had hired Maureen McTeer, the wife of External Affairs Minister Joe Clark) closed their Ottawa offices; so did Calgary’s Burnet Duckworth and Palmer. The Calgary firm also has a Clark connection; Mr. Clark’s brother Peter is a senior partner.</p> <p>…</p> <p>… To get an idea how lucrative Government work can be, just look at the money the Government spends helping native groups with their legal bills. In British Columbia, the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en bands have launched a land claims test case in the B.C. Supreme Court and the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development has allocated $4.7-million over three years to help them pay for legal work and research. These bands are using B.C. lawyers, but many other bands have hired lawyers based in Ottawa. The best known is former Liberal justice minister Jean Chretien, a partner at Lang Michener Lash Johnston.</p> <p>In fact, a mention of Mr. Chretien irks many of the ambitious newcomers to Ottawa because his firm is doing so well. Lang Michener’s Ottawa office opened in 1985 with three partners and has mushroomed to 25 with a broad base of tax, banking and regulatory work. Envious Tories generally consider Lang Michener a Liberal firm because of the presence of Mr. Chretien and his former executive assistant Edward Goldenberg, but they brought in Roger Tasse, former deputy minister of justice, who has never stated his political affiliations, and managing partner Kent Plumley is a well-known local Tory.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Ottawa law office of Chretien, Tasse and Goldenberg had grown to a size of 25 during the first term of the Mulroney government, with local Tory Kent Plumley as their managing partner – later in November 1995 as the Airbus Affair came Mulroney could be thinking of getting his payback by hiring Tasse to his legal team.</p> <p>As a matter of fact, the Ottawa law office led by Chretien and Tasse did so well that it was dubbed a “Liberal government-in-waiting” in July 1988, with at least 10 of their lawyers recruited from the big law firm Gowling Henderson – even when their own firm Lang Michener Lash Johnson’s Toronto head office was engulfed in a scandal of fraudulent immigration schemes for Hong Kong clients (“T.O. Law reeling from body blows; Prestigious firm rocked by probes of lawyers”, by Lynda Hurst, July 21, 1988, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“He wore silk suits and drove a Rolls Royce with a car phone. He frequently jetted back and forth to the United States and across the Pacific on business.</p> <p>Pilzmaker, 37, specialized in immigration law and he created quite a stir in 1985 when he joined Lang Michener Lash Johnson, one of Toronto’s most prominent law firms, established back in 1926 by Roland Michener, later Canada’s Governor-General.</p> <p>He brought two associates with him and within the first year, had earned the firm almost $1 million in Hong Kong-based business.</p> <p>But Pilzmaker’s style and demeanor were at odds with the company’s low-key WASP image. Twenty months later, he was quietly dismissed.</p> <p>Last month, his two associates, Gary Wiseman and Lloyd Ament, were also expelled.</p> <p>Today, all three and a secretary are being investigated by the RCMP.</p> <p>And the firm of Lang Michener Lash Johnson? It’s reeling from a series of body blows to its reputation that may take years to overcome:</p> <p>* The RCMP is investigating allegations that Pilzmaker and cohorts fraudulently orchestrated immigration status for wealthy Hong Kong clients by faking Canadian residence and investment requirements.</p> <p>* RCMP officers raided the firm's posh First Canadian Place offices June 8, seizing files on 149 Hong Kong clients and two numbered Ontario <br />companies.</p> <p>* The Law Society of Upper Canada is investigating 14 other partners who allegedly failed to report suspicions of impropriety on the part of Pilzmaker <br />as soon as they should have. They could face charges of professional misconduct.</p> <p>* After an internal inquiry into Pilzmaker’s conduct earlier this year, four other Lang Michener lawyers were found by the firm not to have declared <br />duty on jewlery and other items brought back from their trips to Hong Kong.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Although the firm is said not to be as stereotypically Upper Canadian in style as Osler Hoskin or McCarthy & McCarthy, it has a long-established reputation for solid, ethical corporate-commercial legal work.</p> <p>The Lang Michener side was jointly founded in 1926 by Roland Michener (at 88, he’s no longer an active partner) and the late Daniel Lang (father of the current Daniel Lang, who has been a Liberal senator since 1964).</p> <p>In 1986, it merged with Lash Johnson to create one of Canada’s biggest corporate law firms. The merger was the largest in the country’s legal history.</p> <p>It also set up an Ottawa office. Peopled by former justice minister Jean Chretien, his one-time deputy Roger Tasse and other politically connected lawyers, it’s been described as a “Liberal government-in-waiting.”</p> <p>The Ottawa office is now among the three or four largest in that city, but its starting up left some bad blood at other law firms.</p> <p>“They did major raiding jobs on other firms,” says one observer. “Close to 10 lawyers at Gowling Henderson were pirated. They wanted to become the biggest in Canada but now they’re trapped with this.””</p> </blockquote> <p>“Liberal government-in-waiting”? John Turner was still the Liberal leader, later to contest the November 21 election against the Mulroney government as discussed in the context of the Richard Grise affair. Had RCMP C/Supt. Brian McConnell not suppressed the Grise case before the election, Turner would have had a chance to win – McConnell’s decision was not only Mulroney’s gain but also a later gain for Turner’s leadership rival Jean Chretien.</p> <p>But before the Grise situation arose, in October 1988 Roger Tasse joined the corporate world to become Bell Canada’s executive vice-president of legal affairs (“Registering of lobbyists signals tougher climate as lawyers flock to field”, by Michael Crawford, November 3, 1988, <a href="http://www.financialpost.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Financial Post</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Had Tasse foreseen a Turner loss, or that a Turner win wouldn’t be the same as a Chretien win for him? </p> <p>Perhaps not exactly either.</p> <p>Since 1987 Roger Tasse had also become a legal adviser for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who was keen at citing the talent and record of someone so distinguished in constitutional law to help him pass the 1987 Meech Lake constitutional accord mentioned in Part 7 (“The Lost Clause: PMO tries to shift blame”, by Paul Gessell, June 10, 1990, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Tasse wrote much of the 1982 Constitution when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister and Jean Chretien the justice minister.</p> <p>Tasse later became Chretien’s law partner.</p> <p>But that did not stop Mulroney from turning to him in his hour of need.</p> <p>That hour occurred June 2, 1987 when Mulroney locked up the premiers for the night in the Langevin Block on Wellington Street to finalize the details of the Meech Lake accord.</p> <p>Participants at the historic gathering divulged -- years later -- that Tasse was instrumental in convincing some premiers, especially Ontario’s David Peterson, that the accord would not undermine the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.</p> <p>Mulroney came to rely upon Tasse increasingly over the years, despite the fact that Tasse’s partner, Chretien, could soon become the prime minister’s chief political rival.</p> <p>Tasse became a prominent champion of the Meech Lake accord and Mulroney began to quote his legal arguments to show that such a distinguished constitutional expert -- and an associate of Chretien -- was on side.</p> <p>“Roger Tasse’s views satisfied prime minister Trudeau in 1982,” Mulroney told a Conservative caucus meeting May 4 in Mont-Tremblant, Que.</p> <p>“His assurances satisfied Prime Minister Mulroney in 1987 and I hope they will assist in satisfying any doubts some premiers may still have in 1990.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney showed his political smart using Roger Tasse’s constitutional-law statue to pressure the provincial premiers and his own Tory caucus to go along with his constitutional accord.</p> <p>But Mulroney didn’t give Tasse credit in public. Instead, to the media in 1990 the Prime Minister’s Office blamed Tasse for making a unilateral decision during negotiations to revise the Meech Lake accord, that almost killed it:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered no public thanks when a trusted adviser played a key role in convincing reluctant premiers to sign the Meech Lake accord in 1987.</p> <p>But three years later, Mulroney’s office is trying to blame Roger Tasse for an “innocent mistake” Friday night that almost killed Meech Lake.</p> <p>Tasse, a former deputy justice minister, has the job at the marathon constitutional talks of drafting the wording of agreements reached by Mulroney and the premiers.</p> <p>Mulroney’s office is blaming Tasse for neglecting to tell Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells that a key clause he wanted included in an agreement to salvage Meech Lake had, in fact, been scrapped and would not appear in final legal documents.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mulroney never mentioned Tasse by name, but one of his aides did.</p> <p>Marcel Cote, Mulroney’s communications director, said Tasse realized the clause desired by Wells was “a dead duck” so he shelved it, did not include it in the final legal text and neglected to inform Wells of the change.</p> <p>Wells was furious.</p> <p>But how did Tasse ascertain the clause was “a dead duck?”</p> <p>Cote was loathe to provide such an explanation. But some other provincial officials suspect they were duped -- that Tasse acted only after the prime minister’s office ordered the deletion.</p> <p>The 59-year-old Tasse is considered one of Canada’s leading constitutional experts and a master in drafting legal language in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of first ministers’ conferences.</p> <p>He is an experienced bureaucrat and it would be highly unusual for someone of his background to decide, without direction from his political masters, to scrap a clause from a federal-provincial agreement that could kill a deal as important as Meech Lake.”</p> </blockquote> <p>A constitutional clause Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells had wanted was omitted from an accord revision by Tasse, and the change was unacceptable to Wells.</p> <p>But others shouldn’t presume as cited above, that the experienced former bureaucrat Tasse must have had direction from “his political masters” but was then blamed. The fact that Tasse had been a former close associate of Chretien who had his own Liberal government ambition, left open the possibility that Tasse might not always toe Mulroney’s line – especially when he received no public credit, unlike in the Trudeau-Chretien era.</p> <p>Roger Tasse’s loyalty to Brian Mulroney could not be taken for granted. As in Part 11 it happened again in November 1995, when acting as a lawyer and go-between for Mulroney to negotiate with the Justice Department, Tasse withheld some key info, not passing it to Mulroney – that might have cost Mulroney the opportunity to keep the RCMP criminal investigation of him from becoming public knowledge.</p> <p>For Mulroney, the advantage of using Roger Tasse in the 1987-90 constitutional negotiations was political because Tasse gave his support to Mulroney’s constitutional endeavour when both Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, especially Trudeau, opposed the Meech Lake accord (“Trudeau vowed to block Chretien unless he opposed Meech Lake, Copps claims”, March 21, 1990, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau pledged last summer to derail Jean Chretien’s bid for the Liberal leadership unless he campaigned against the Meech Lake accord, leadership candidate Sheila Copps said yesterday.</p> <p>“Mr. Trudeau told me last summer that if Jean Chretien didn’t take his view, that he would do everything in his power to defeat him,” Copps said during a campaign stop.</p> <p>Trudeau made the comment during a private meeting last August, said Copps who supports the accord, as does leadership hopeful Paul Martin.</p> <p>Chretien, who held several key cabinet posts in Trudeau governments, has said he consulted his former boss before taking a public stand against the accord Jan. 16 - a week before declaring his candidacy.</p> <p>Copps told reporters she's “not sure” Chretien always shared Trudeau’s opposition to the accord.</p> <p>“I had the courage to state my view where it differed from Mr. Trudeau, I only hope that Jean Chretien had the courage to do the same.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Sheila Copps had a big mouth, didn’t she, outing Trudeau’s behind-the scenes maneuver against the Meech Lake accord?</p> <p>Later as Chretien’s deputy prime minister, Copps was in the news on November 15, 1995, confirming the RCMP Airbus Affair criminal investigation as in Part 11. Coincidentally the next day, someone in her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, uttered a death threat against her at her mother’s office (“Arrest follows Copps death threat”, by Dan Nolan, November 20, 1995, <a href="http://www.thespec.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Spectator</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A Hamilton man charged with making a death threat against Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps was arrested hours before Ms Copps made a public appearance in Hamilton’s Santa Claus parade.</p> <p>The suspect was arrested at his home at about 1 a.m. Saturday after Hamilton-Wentworth police received a complaint Friday afternoon from the office of Alderman Geraldine Copps, who is Ms Copps’ mother.</p> <p>The Deputy PM, who is also environment minister and the member for Hamilton East, was in the second vehicle in the parade, which wound its way through downtown Hamilton Saturday morning.</p> <p>The arrest comes two weeks after a man broke in to the prime minister’s residence in Ottawa carrying a knife and was confronted by Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s wife, Aline. The Montreal man, upset with the outcome of the Quebec referendum, was arrested and has been charged with attempted murder.</p> <p>Inspector Brian Mullan said the man arrested in Hamilton is alleged to have made threats of “a general nature” and did not specifically target Ms Copps’ appearance in the parade. He said, however, police couldn’t rule it out.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Acting Inspector Mike Shea said the man was arrested in connection with an incident Thursday at city hall. The inspector said a man went to Alderman Copps’ office and asked for “personal information” about the deputy prime minister.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“When refused, he became irate and made statements which alarmed the secretary,” the inspector said. “The secretary expressed fear for Sheila Copps’ well-being.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>He said the man is known to Alderman Copps and her office staff and had been “bothering them for a long time.”</p> <p>Charged with threatening death is Thomas Frederick Sedjevick, 44, of Charlton Avenue East. He is also known as Tommy Sedgwick, police say.”</p> </blockquote> <p>By the time of the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional accord negotiated after the Meech Lake accord’s failure in 1990, Liberal leader Chretien endorsed it, and in a media interview Prime Minister Mulroney publicly cited the positive stands of both Chretien and Tasse to rebuff Trudeau’s continuing staunch opposition (“TRUDEAU BACKLASH Mulroney claims foe has aided ‘Yes’ side”, by Edison Stewart, October 2, 1992, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… the Prime Minister said, no concession to the provinces in this deal is as big as Trudeau’s agreement in 1981 to allow legislatures to override the Charter of Rights through the so-called notwithstanding clause.</p> <p>Mulroney rejected Trudeau’s argument that the deal would create a hierarchy of six classes of rights, with Quebecers and aboriginals at the head of the list.</p> <p>If there is any hierarchy of rights, it is within the existing Charter of Rights which Trudeau inserted in the Constitution, Mulroney said.</p> <p>Trudeau’s interpretation has been rejected by two of his former constitutional advisers, Liberal Leader Jean Chretien and former deputy justice minister Roger Tasse, Mulroney added.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney’s exact words about the “Notwithstanding Clause” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms were more hyperbolically critical of Trudeau (“Don’t risk gains, PM tells Quebec; Mulroney says Trudeau opposes deal because Bourassa obtained ‘too much’”, by Graham Fraser, October 3, 1992, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Asked by reporters about Mr. Trudeau’s argument that the federal government had made a series of concessions to the provinces without receiving anything in return, he replied: “Lookit. No concession has ever been made, I don’t think in Canadian history, by the government of Canada that will ever rival the notwithstanding clause.</p> <p>“For a prime minister of Canada to give away to the provinces the right to override decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, I believe this is a concession on a scale probably unprecedented in a modern industrialized society.””</p> </blockquote> <p>But in saying this, Mulroney ignored the fact that in 1981 under the Trudeau government it was Justice Minister Jean Chretien and two provincial justice officials, Ontario’s Roy McMurtry and Saskatchewan’s Roy Romanow, who introduced the “Notwithstanding Clause” on the basis of the “McMurtry formula”, to allow the federal or a provincial legislature to suspend the rights and freedoms, as I reviewed in a July 2009 blog post, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-6/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 7)</font></a>”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“In 1981 in reaching an agreement between the federal government and nine provinces (without Quebec) on the new Constitution, there was a “kitchen” episode involving a crucial compromise worked out among then justice minister Jean Chretien, Ontario attorney general Roy McMurtry, and Saskatchewan attorney general Roy Romanow, at Chretien’s Ottawa home and then in a fifth-floor kitchen of the Government Conference Centre in Ottawa, regarding what rights should be in the Constitution: at the time, Trudeau felt that minority-language educational rights (i.e., rights of French education for people of French heritage in an English region, and vice versa) were his bottom line and that the usual fundamental rights could be for a national referendum to decide, but he had difficulty getting agreement of the provinces and was thinking about the federal government going it alone; Quebec’s separatist Parti Quebecois premier Rene Levesque wanted both the minority-language rights and the fundamental rights to be decided by a referendum; then in late 1981 the “kitchen” players initiated a compromise whereby the federal government and the nine English-speaking provinces would accept the minority-language rights but would add a “notwithstanding clause” in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms so that the parliament or a provincial legislature would have the option to ‘suspend’ the “fundamental freedoms”, “legal rights” or “equality rights” in the Charter, i.e., to make a legislation exempt from the rights and freedoms; Trudeau agreed to this “McMurtry formula” on the ‘sunset’ condition that any ‘suspension’ would need to be re-enacted every 5 years.”</p> </blockquote> <p>To participate more fully in the Charlottetown constitutional reform process, Roger Tasse quit his Bell Canada executive job at some point and continued as a registered lobbyist for Bell. After the Charlottetown accord was reached he returned to law practice, not at Lang Michener where he and Chretien had been but joining the firm Fraser Beatty (“Tasse's appointment clue to Spicer’s future”, April 8, “Group working on Constitution plays down federal links”, April 12, “Hats off to customs’ carpet bagger”, September 24, and, “Tasse stays busy lobbying”, November 4, by Frank Howard, 1991, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>; “Fraser & Beatty”, September 15, 1992, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>; and, “Consultant fees topped $1.7 million”, October 2, 1992, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>).</p> <p>After Mulroney’s retirement in June 1993 and Chretien’s October 1993 electoral triumph over Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell, discussed in Parts 7 & 8, rather surprisingly Roger Tasse, the former inner-circle brain of Chretien’s “Liberal government-in-waiting”at the Ottawa office of Lang Michener, did not return to government.</p> <p>Instead, in June 1995 – I note that Paul Palango had published an article on June 1 denouncing the inaction of the Chretien government and the RCMP on the Airbus commissions issue – Tasse was recruited to the law firm Gowling, Strathy and Henderson, as quoted earlier a big law firm Tasse and Chretien had “pirated” 10 lawyers from to their “Liberal government-in-waiting” (“National Notebook”, June 24, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Tory watching . . . It’s always interesting to watch the rare gatherings of Tories in Ottawa these days. Ever since the Progressive Conservatives were dumped from office in 1993, the sight of several hundred of them meeting in one room can elicit nostalgia, curiosity and sometimes even sympathy. But the gawkers at a big Conservative debate in Ottawa - between Hugh Segal and David Frum - got a special sight this week when a Mulroney graced the hall. No, it wasn’t the former prime minister, Brian Mulroney, who has not been seen in Tory circles in Ottawa since the June, 1993, leadership convention. It was his daughter, Caroline Mulroney, who appeared at the National Press Club on Wednesday night to watch the debate. More interesting than the sight of Ms. Mulroney, though, was the sight of all the knots of onlookers, whose conversations abruptly ceased as they acknowledged the celebrity in their midst. ’Tis an ill wind . . . Former deputy justice minister Roger Tasse has a knack for remaining at the centre of things. A legal architect of the 1982 Constitution, who also had a hand in creating the subsequent, doomed constitutional accords of the 1990s, Mr. Tasse resurfaced recently as one of the three “wise guys” who formed a special policy panel advising the government on how to handle the new generation of direct-to-home satellite TV services. That latest role did not go unnoticed in the boardrooms of the big Ottawa law firms. Last week, the biggest of them, Gowling, Strathy and Henderson, announced Mr. Tasse would be joining the firm. Gowling hopes that Mr. Tasse will help them break into the lucrative communications/entertainment legal business, currently dominated by Gowling’s competitors.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It was something to have Caroline Mulroney and Roger Tasse in the same news column.</p> <p>A few months later Tasse became Mulroney’s political and legal insider lobbyist with the Chretien government after RCMP announcement of the Airbus Affair criminal investigation – when Mulroney needed prominent lawyers for his libel lawsuit and public-relations campaign Chretien’s former confidante was outside of the Chretien government and available to Mulroney.</p> <p>As in Part 11, in November 1995 Chretien said he was unaware of the RCMP investigation; as in a news report quoted earlier, Chretien also said in a CTV interview to air on December 26, that he knew nothing about allegations of Airbus kickbacks, while Tasse’s latest law partner James Kelleher expressed puzzlement about it – without directly referring to Tasse’s old friendship with Chretien.</p> <p>As reviewed and discussed, the Canadian media knew of Roger Tasse’s history inside and out but kept silent during the Airbus Affair, identifying him only as a former deputy justice minister under Chretien, and otherwise a law partner of former Mulroney government solicitor general James Kelleher – not noting that it was barely 6 months at Gowling, Strathy and Henderson (“<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=16&cad=rja&ved=0CDwQFjAFOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cimoney.com.ky%2FWorkArea%2FDownloadAsset.aspx%3Fid%3D478&ei=TI7kUr25K9XKsQTYioGIBA&usg=AFQjCNGtTggsjAdzW2AHfGMf3xk2N643AA&bvm=bv.59930103,d.cWc" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Annual Report</font></a>”, July 1, 2004 – June 30, 2005, Cayman Islands Monetary Authority).</p> <p>Gowling Henderson was not only a big Canadian law firm but a corporate group that include Gowlings Consulting Limited (“<a href="http://www.gowlings.com/SiteInfo/privacy.asp" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Gowlings, privacy</font></a>”, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP), where Norman Inkster, Mulroney’s RCMP Commissioner and now Stephen Harper’s Chair of Advisory Council on National Security, was a recent partner as in Part 11.</p> <p>I can imagine the media countering my criticisms about its selective reporting along official lines, by pointing out that the media’s first role was to report what others said, that most of the political and legal elites knew of Tasse’s backgrounds and yet they, especially the opposition parties in Parliament, did not sound any alarm in November 1995.</p> <p>Indeed, elected politicians who were critical of Mulroney and in opposition to the Chretien Liberal government had not only the duty but the political incentive to pounce on this matter and stir a major public controversy.</p> <p>In fact, a year earlier in November 1994 the opposition Reform party did raise a Roger Tasse issue publicly, smelling a kind of “private family affair” in the appointments of Roger Tasse and 2 others to a “special policy panel” mentioned in the earlier quote, also dubbed the “‘Death Star’ panel” (“Ottawa names ‘Death Star’ panel; But group hit at outset with complaint of bias”, by Robert Brehl, November 30, 1994, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The federal government has named a three-person panel to draw up battle plans for a fight with U.S. “death stars.”</p> <p>But the opposition charges the panel is hardly objective.</p> <p>"Two of the three members of the government’s so-called non-partisan committee have strong links to Power Corp., strong links to the Prime Minister and his associates, or both,” Reform MP Jan Brown said in the House of Commons yesterday.</p> <p>Montreal-based Power Corp. owns 80 per cent of Power DirecTV, a company hoping to use U.S. satellites to provide a U.S.-Canada hybrid for direct-to-home services, which have been dubbed death stars by cable operators.</p> <p>Without a change in rules, Power DirecTV will not operate, officials said.</p> <p>Brown, along with some in the industry, fear Power DirecTV will get preferential treatment from this panel.</p> <p>Power Corp. president Andre Desmarais is married to Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s daughter.</p> <p>The direct-to-home satellite policy panel will be headed by former Canadian trade negotiator Gordon Ritchie.</p> <p>Brown takes exception to the appointments of Roger Tasse, a former deputy minister to Chretien in the justice department, and Robert Rabinovitch, former deputy minister of communications and current executive with investment firm Claridge Inc., part of the Bronfman empire.</p> <p>“The review process has not even begun and the fix is in,” Brown said.</p> <p>Industry Minister John Manley denied any of the three on the panel have a conflict of interest.</p> <p>“I suggest to her that it is improper to impugn the integrity of people who are operating on the basis of a request from the government of Canada,” Manley said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“The review process has not even begun and the fix is in”, Reform MP Jan Brown was onto something: Montreal-based Power Corp. owned 80% of Power DirectTV, Power Corp. president Andre Desmarais was Jean Chretien’s son-in-law, and the Chretien government appointed Tasse, someone of a close link to Chretien, to the 3-person policy panel on direct-to-home satellite TV service.</p> <p>Either Jan Brown didn’t say or the media report omitted it, that Tasse was also Chretien’s former private law partner.</p> <p>The appointment of Robert Rabinovitch, former deputy communications minister and executive in Bronfman family company Claridge Inc., was a lesser “family affair” in comparison. </p> <p>A year later the RCMP Airbus Affair criminal investigation had just begun and, again, ‘the fix was in’ with Tasse acting as a lawyer for Mulroney. How could the RCMP and Justice Department move the criminal investigation forward without being preferential to Tasse, and thus to Mulroney?</p> <p>But it was an even closer “private family affair”when it came to Mulroney, Tasse, Chretien and his Desmarais in-laws. In May 1995 amid the Power DirectTV controversy, the media aired some of it, including that Mulroney was a legal counsel for the Desmarais family’s Power Corp., and that when Chretien was justice minister his future son-in-law worked for him (“Desmarais never far from PM’s office”, by Paul Gessell, May 2, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“One of the few constants in Canadian politics is that regardless of who is prime minister, Paul Desmarais is never far away.</p> <p>The Liberal government’s involvement in a controversy between competing satellite television companies has provoked considerable comment in the Commons and the news media about the personal links between Desmarais’ Power Corp. and Jean Chretien’s administration.</p> <p>These connections include the marriage of Desmarais’ son and right-hand man, Andre, to Chretien’s daughter France. Andre, when still courting France, even worked as press secretary in the early 1980s to then justice minister Jean Chretien.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Ian MacDonald, a Mulroney friend and biographer, described Desmarais as “Mulroney’s mentor in the business world.” Desmarais’ biographer, Dave Greber, calls Mulroney “an old Desmarais protege.”</p> <p>Mulroney and Desmarais go back at least as far as 1972, when Desmarais, as the proprietor of the Montreal newspaper La Presse, hired Mulroney, in his capacity as a labor lawyer, to negotiate an end to a union dispute.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mulroney, now in political retirement, is a hired gun, lobbyist, legal counsel and trophy director for several big corporations, including Power Corp.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Deputy justice minister Roger Tasse was there, in Andre Desmarais’s courtship of France Chretien by working as press secretary for Justice Minister Jean Chretien.</p> <p>So “the fix” was even more in, more of a “private family affair”: in November 1995 Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s in-law Paul Desmarais’s old friend and protege, Desmarais family company legal counsel, namely former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, was being investigated by RCMP for possible corruption; and Roger Tasse, an old Justice Department friend of both Chretien and his son-in-law Andre Desmarais, and old mentor and partner of Chretien in law, was made available as a lawyer for Mulroney to deal with RCMP and the Chretien government.</p> <p>But what happened in November 1995 to the “considerable comment in the Commons and the news media about the personal links between Desmarais’ Power Corp. and Jean Chretien’s administration” just a few months earlier, now turned into silence when it concerned a criminal investigation of Brian Mulroney and his legal and PR counter-offensives?</p> <p>On the politicians’ part, MP Jan Brown of the Reform party, which had taken most of the Tory votes in Western Canada in the 1993 election as mentioned in my June 2009 blog post, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-7/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 6)</font></a>”, had objected to Tasse’s appointment to the “Death Star panel”. Now with the Airbus Affair, Reform leader Preston Manning coyly skirted it by throwing circumventing punches at both Chretien and Mulroney (“Charest suggests Reform in turmoil”, by Norm Ovenden, December 19, 1995, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Last week, Reform Leader Preston Manning suggested Prime Minister Jean Chretien should be impeached for his “irrational” efforts to repair national unity.</p> <p>St. Albert Reform MP John Williams and B.C.’s Keith Martin criticized the personal attacks on Chretien as grandstanding.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Manning isn’t too worried about [Tory leader Jean] Charest or the Tories. He said they were shellacked for good reason in the 1993 election by Canadians who still remember the failures on ethics, unity and public finances. The ghost of unpopular former prime minister Brian Mulroney still walks through the memory halls of many voters, Manning said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Clearly, some Reform MPs openly disagreed with attacking Chretien personally.</p> <p>On the media’s part, <em>The Globe and Mail</em>, with its editor-in-chief William Thorsell a special Mulroney friend, did try to bring up the issue by quoting from a <em>Winnipeg Free Press</em> editorial on November 24, and then publishing a William Thorsell editorial on the 25th.</p> <p>Without naming Tasse, the <em>Winnipeg Free Press</em> editorial quote lambasted Mulroney (“Western Voices Memo to Brian Mulroney: The RCMP is just doing its job REACTIONS / Commentators reflect on the former prime minister’s lawsuit, Ralph Klein’s tactics and the Reform Party’s aching desire to form the Official Opposition”, by Scott Feschuk, November 24, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Mulroney would have been well advised to wait for the RCMP to complete its investigation. Instead, Mr. Mulroney hired a team of lawyers with the stated intention of trying to head off the police investigation with a phone call to Justice Minister Allan Rock. This pathetic attempt to intimidate the federal government and the RCMP only serves to convince Canadians that, at best, Mr. Mulroney believes the RCMP should not treat him like any other suspect, or, at worst, he is a man with a lot to hide.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The next-day’s Thorsell editorial, titled “What is fuelling the conspiracy culture surrounding Brian Mulroney?”, has been quoted in some details earlier, with its intimidating words and phrases like “the equivalent of Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald”, “inventory of “scandals” during Pierre Trudeau’s or Lester Pearson’s time”, “congenital intolerance of compromise”, “double-dealing”, “outsider from the lower classes”, “the <em>nouveaux riche</em>”, etc., and a comparison to Jean Chretien:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He is enormously competitive and partisan in politics, but so are people such as Ed Broadbent and Jean Chretien. Was Mr. Mulroney’s crime that he let it show?”</p> </blockquote> <p>With Mulroney unhesitant to throw mud or worse at anyone, the omnipresence of Paul Desmarais’s political patronages would be good enough for most politicians to keep mum (“Desmarais never far from PM’s office”, by Paul Gessell, May 2, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Why do prime ministers embrace Desmarais more than any other business leader? Just how different would our country be if prime ministers were as chummy with union leaders, symphony conductors or Nobel Prize physicists?</p> <p>Back in 1981, Jim Coutts was Pierre Trudeau’s principal secretary and chief confidant. Coutts made headlines in April that year by accompanying Desmarais on a Power Corp. jet to Washington for a “social” weekend.</p> <p>The socializing included a round of golf, a theatrical performance at the Kennedy Centre, guest bedrooms at the home of Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Peter Towe, and an embassy dinner party with a guest list including George Bush, vice-president at the time, and several other Washington high rollers.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Desmarais pays attention to leadership campaigns. One of his top executives, John Rae, played a key role in both of Chretien’s campaigns to become Liberal leader. John Rae, by the way, is the brother of Ontario’s New Democratic Party premier, Bob Rae.</p> <p>When Chretien retires and a leadership convention is held to replace him, chances are Desmarais will be on hand. Finance Minister Paul Martin could quite possibly be Chretien’s successor. And who taught Martin how to succeed in business? None other than his former employer, Paul Desmarais.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In short, it seemed that Chretien’s in-law Paul Desmarais had all establishment politicians of power potential, regardless of political stripe, in his Power Corp. back pocket. </p> <p>Further entangling the complex web was Mulroney’s propensity to insert his credit wherever he could, such as in a July 2009 Bloomberg news’ report for introducing Desmarais to U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush (“<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aEl4wizkuSTQ" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Buffett Loses to Desmarais as Power Exceeds Return</font></a>”, by Lisa Kassenaar, July 30, 2009, Bloomberg.com):</p> <blockquote> <p>““They keep a very low profile,” says Brian Mulroney, who met Desmarais in 1965 and, as Canada’s prime minister from 1984 to 1993, introduced him to President Ronald Reagan and Bush. “That’s the way they like it.””</p> </blockquote> <p>But Desmarais had in April 1981 officially partied with Bush – Reagan was recuperating from injuries of an assassination – in Washington, D.C., courtesy of the Trudeau government.</p> <p>Mulroney’s nasty message in November 1995 had likely been privately circulating among the elite circles, as his former aide Ian MacDonald shared, after the lawsuit settlement, some of Mulroney’s private words and thoughts (“Mulroney’s fight for honor: ‘This is about my place in history,’ former PM tells law partner”, by L. Ian MacDonald, January 11, 1997, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… Brian Mulroney was finishing a long lunch on Thursday afternoon in the company of Gerald Tremblay , lead counsel in his libel action against the federal government.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The former prime minister took a sip of tea, and leaned back in his chair. “Life is good again,” he said. “Life is good.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>On a cold night in early November 1995, Mulroney went for a walk near his home in Westmount, and shared with an old friend and financial adviser the accusations that were in the wind.</p> <p>“What are you going to do?” the friend asked.</p> <p>“Well, I can do one of two things,” Mulroney replied. “I can let it sit there, in the hope that, maybe, well, it will go away. That wouldn’t cost me a nickel. But knowing these people, this will leak and I’ll die the death of a thousand cuts. My life will become unbearable. The alternative is to get my lawyers together so that if and when this leaks, I’ll file the most massive pre-emptive lawsuit in Canadian history.”</p> <p>Mulroney understood that unless he struck back swiftly and decisively … historians would conclude that he was a crook.</p> <p>Instead of noting that he was the only Conservative leader to win consecutive majority governments since Macdonald, their only historical comparison with Sir John A. would be the scandals.</p> <p>And even then, Mulroney knew it would be a long and expensive battle. He knew a trial, if it came to that, would be a street fight on both sides. But then he is a streetfighter.</p> <p>In two national campaigns, he had always done what it takes to win. John Turner could have told Jean Chretien that.</p> <p>Or as Mulroney said at the end of his lunch on Thursday: “You can say what you want about me, I don’t care about that. But attack my family or my name and you’ll be in for the fight of your life.””</p> </blockquote> <p>It’s unclear if the “old friend and financial adviser” Mulroney confided in was related to the Desmarais family, and if that person then “told Jean Chretien” what was in Mulroney’s mind – an ego the size of a Siberian mammoth expressed like a mafia boss would, that the public would also get a taste of from William Thorsell’s parroting, or paraphrasing.</p> <p>It’s also unclear why a criminal investigation of Mulroney was akin to an attack on his family. But the Chretien government understood Mulroney’s “in for the fight of your life” mentality, and the legal settlement in January 1997 included an “unprecedented” government apology to his family – something his lawyers Gerald Tremblay and Jacques Jeansonne eagerly took credit for, as Ian MacDonald described:</p> <blockquote> <p>“In the end, in what could be called the [Mulroney wife] Mila clause, the government “fully” apologized to Mulroney “and his family.”</p> <p>To Tremblay’s knowledge, it is unprecedented in Canadian jurisprudence for a family to be included in an admission of error by the government.</p> <p>Harvey Strosberg, the prominent Ontario libel lawyer who was brought in by Rock to bolster the government’s legal team, agrees that it was unprecedented to include Mulroney’s family in the apology.</p> <p>Jeansonne, who filled out Mulroney’s table at lunch on Thursday, suggested Mulroney did better by settling than he would have by winning in court, <br />in that Superior Court Judge Andre Rochon could have ordered costs and damages in a judgment, but could not have compelled the government to <br />apologize.”</p> </blockquote> <p>One possible explanation that the government apology had to cover his family, is that to Mulroney the criminal investigation of him was ‘discriminative’, not because of his skin color but because of his social roots.</p> <p>As in Part 11, during court testimony in April 1996 Mulroney decried the RCMP allegations of him in a September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss police, as “poisonous and really fraught with fascism”.</p> <p>His choice of lawyer Harvey Yarosky to help McCarthy Tetrault lawyers Tremblay and Jeansonne with his libel lawsuit reflected that “civil rights” thinking.</p> <p>Harvey Yarosky had achieved prominence in 1991-92 as the special coroner in an inquest into the death of Marcellus Francois, a 24-year-old black father of two, killed by Montreal police Sergeant Michel Tremblay on July 3, 1991, allegedly due to a mistaken identity, an act that left Francois’s wife Sylvia Clark a widow with 5 children. Yarosky’s report condemned the police mentality as “racist” (“Police racism endangers lives, coroner says”, by Eric Siblin, May 8, 1992, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Marcellus Francois, 24, was killed last July when a police SWAT team officer, mistaking him for an attempted murder suspect, fired a single shot into his head at close range.</p> <p>The stinging report released Thursday by special coroner Harvey Yarosky says the shot fired from the M-16 rifle of Sgt. Michel Tremblay resulted from “misinformation. misperception and misjudgment.”</p> <p>Yarosky says the question of whether racism played a part in the shooting – which touched off angry demonstrations in the black community last summer – can only be speculation.</p> <p>“However, the evidence at the inquest disclosed in some members of the Montreal police department the existence of a racist attitude that is totally unacceptable,” he says in the 90-page report.</p> <p>“If uncorrected, it could lead to further situations endangering life.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Francois, the third black man to be shot dead by Montreal police in as many years, had been sitting in the passenger seat of a car that had been swarmed by police in the city’s financial district.</p> <p>Tremblay testified during the inquest that he thought Francois was reaching for a gun in the car. But no weapon was found.</p> <p>The entire chain of police actions leading to the shooting were linked by a “shocking absence of continuity, co-ordination, communication and supervision,” Yarosky writes.</p> <p>Members of the police surveillance team who mistook Francois, a father of two, for the attempted murder suspect were working with inadequate fax copies of a color photograph of the suspect, the report notes.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Yarosky, a well-known criminal lawyer, pointed to racial slurs such as “nigger” and “blackies” used by police in radio communications while trailing the car in which Francois was riding.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Sylvia Clark, Francois’s widow and the mother of five children, applauded Yarosky’s comments and said “justice has finally been served in some way.”</p> <p>Her lawyer, Jean-Paul Braun said he is preparing a civil suit for “millions of dollars” against the Montreal police.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But the mistaken-identity explanation accepted by Yarosky didn’t quite square with the facts.</p> <p>Neither the physical build nor the look of Marcellus Francois came anywhere close to those of the murder suspect Kit (Kirt) Haywood police were seeking, and some of the police officers knew Haywood quite well as an informer for the drug squad. Here is one media version of the mix-up (“Suspect’s identity was uncertain, inquest told”, by Patricia Poirier, October 4, 1991, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““We’ll jump them and we’ll figure it out later,” Sergeant Pierre Sasseville is heard telling members of his team in a taped radio conversation taken from <br />the records of the Montreal Urban Community police telecommunications centre.</p> <p>He made the comment after an undercover officer admitted he was only “75 per cent” sure that he was following an attempted-murder suspect, believed to be dangerous.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Kit Haywood, the murder suspect police were seeking, had long dreadlocks, was almost six feet tall and weighed 160 pounds, while Mr. Francois was shorter, lighter-skinned and had closely cropped hair.</p> <p>The officer who shot Mr. Francois knew the actual suspect police were seeking, because Mr. Haywood had been a police informer when the officer was assigned to the drug squad.</p> <p>Mr. Haywood turned himself in to police three days after Mr. Francois was shot, and was released on bail. He was found shot to death on Sept. 2 in what police say was a settling of accounts between drug dealers.”</p> </blockquote> <p>There is no question that Montreal police Sgt. Michel Tremblay was trigger happier than RCMP Insp. Bryan McConnell and Insp. Claude Savoie – and the real suspect Kirt Haywood was also dead in the end.</p> <p>Here is a different, more detailed version of the mix-up (“How and why Marcellus Francois died remains a mystery”, by James Mennie, December 7, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Forty-six witnesses testified and more than 100 exhibits were entered into evidence before coroner Harvey Yarosky.</p> <p>…</p> <p>But the fundamental question of how and why Francois was shot - appears to remain unanswered.</p> <p>…</p> <p>All 12 police officers who testified to being at the scene when the shot was fired said they were too busy moving into position or taking cover to see it happen.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Testimony from police involved in the operation also showed that even after the fatal shot had been fired, no one thought a blunder had been made.</p> <p>As Francois lay bleeding in the front of the seat of the Pontiac, an argument occurred between Pablo Palacios, a police lieutenant who had dealt with Haywood in the past and took charge of the shooting scene in the seconds after the incident, and the surveillance sergeant over the identity of the person who had just been shot.</p> <p>The presence of Palacios at the scene so quickly after the shot was examined by the inquest. Indeed, testimony given concerning his relationship with Haywood made headlines on its own.</p> <p>A former undercover agent in the narcotics section, Palacios detailed to Yarosky how he had used Haywood as an informer and how he tried to find Haywood after he was identified July 2 as an attempted-murder suspect.</p> <p>During two days of testimony, Palacios said he became aware of the SWAT operation only after two squad cars in his precinct - District 24 - were put on standby as Tremblay’s team closed in on the car carrying Francois.</p> <p>Palacios testified that as other calls began to pile up for his squad cars, he drove off to find the surveillance operation and was passed by the car carrying Francois.</p> <p>Williams, a passenger in the car who testified she heard no warning before the shot was fired at Francois, identified herself as the mother of Haywood’s three children.</p> <p>Williams said she didn’t like Palacios and that the lieutenant was always trying to discover Haywood’s whereabouts. She testified that she had heard that Palacios was “paying 10 rocks” to find out their new address.</p> <p>Asked what she meant by “rocks,” Williams replied free-base cocaine, but she was not questioned on where she got her information.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Marcellus Francois might or might not be clean given Haywood’s spouse in the car with him, but he certainly didn’t deserve death, not to mention that the drug squad trick of awarding cocaine – “10 rocks” in the instance quoted – for info tips helped breed the youths’ disregard for the law.</p> <p>Coroner Yarosky’s report was made public right after the 1992 Los Angeles riot triggered by the acquittal of white police officers who had on March 3, 1991 – exactly 4 months before Francois’s death in Montreal – viciously beaten black man Rodney King. A lot of black riots had occurred in North America but the problems remained, journalist Jack Todd noted (“Dead right; Report on police ‘fiasco’ doesn’t pull punches”, by Jack Todd, May 8, 1992, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“If the operation had not led to the shooting of Francois, a man who did not remotely fit the description of the drug dealer police were seeking, it would have been hilarious. Instead it was tragic.</p> <p>Tragic - and inexplicable. Unless you want to succumb to the darkest theories of police conspiracy, it is still difficult to understand how an experienced <br />SWAT-team sergeant with an outstanding career record could have fired the shot that killed Marcelus Francois.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Yarosky’s report comes on the heels of the Los Angeles riots, and the disturbances in Toronto touched off by yet another police shooting of yet another black man.</p> <p>It is, at least in outline, an outstanding report, direct and courageous. I wish I could feel more hopeful about what will follow.</p> <p>But it is nearly 30 years since the riot in Watts, 24 years since I covered my first “riot,” in Omaha after racist presidential candidate George Wallace visited the city in ’68.</p> <p>…</p> <p>After those riots there were an endless series of reports, and commissions, and studies. After Watts in 1965, the Johnson administration in the U.S. even attempted to do the right thing, pouring billions into inner-city projects that were supposed to make it all better.</p> <p>It didn’t work, but at least someone was trying. Under Reagan and Bush, the U.S. just gave up. Until the burning of Los Angeles, the attitude was that private enterprise would eventually see to it that some wealth trickled down to blacks.</p> <p>Problems still manageable</p> <p>In practice, “trickle-down economics” meant something like this: “Here’s a quarter boy, now shine my shoes.”</p> <p>The result, three decades after the Watts riot, is that relations between blacks and whites all over North America have rarely been worse.</p> <p>Police officers, asked to act like a kind of occupying army in black neighborhoods, are routinely despised. When they swing into action, the results are too often disastrous. Rodney King is beaten, Marcelus Francois shot to death.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But Jack Todd missed a point of comparison here. In contrast to the mistaken identity on Marcellus Francois, Rodney King, one year older at 25, had led police onto a dangerous high-speed chase, hoping not to be caught with drunk driving while on parole from a robbery conviction (“<a href="http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/famoustrials/king.php" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Rodney King Beating Trials</font></a>”, by Douglas Linder, December 2001, <em>Jurist Legal News & Research</em>; “<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/17/us/obit-rodney-king/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Rodney King dead at 47</font></a>”, June 18, 2012, CNN; and,<em> “</em><a href="http://newsone.com/2423835/rodney-king-riots-2/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Rodney King Riots In Los Angeles Began On This Day In 1992</font></a>”, by D. L. Chandler, April 29, 2013, <em>News One For Black America</em>).</p> <p>Surely Mr. Mulroney would have understood the difference, that the civil-rights case on which lawyer Harvey Yarosky had achieved fame as a specially appointed inquest coroner, not only was more tragic by itself but involved a legally innocent victim.</p> <p>With Roger Tasse providing inside lobbying service and Harvey Yarosky presenting outside civil-rights image, it was for the two McCarthy Tetrault lawyers on Mulroney’s “Dream Team”, Gerald Tremblay and Jacques Jeansonne, to get what he wanted in the litigation and settlement.</p> <p>As earlier, the Mulroney team had included Yarosky’s partner, former Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Fred Kaufman, but then Kaufman ceased to be a part with no public explanation – imagine the spectacle of supporting Mulroney’s courtroom flaunting and self-aggrandizing with Justice Kaufman’s prior journalistic experience writing for <em>Time</em> and <em>Life</em> magazines and <em>The New York Times</em>, or earlier life experience escaping Nazi German-occupied Austria (“<a href="http://adrchambersinternational.com/cvkaufman.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Honourable Fred Kaufman, C.M., Q.C.</font></a>”, ADR Chambers International; and, Fred Kaufman, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=ldpwWeQWUIgC&dq=Searching+for+Justice:+An+Autobiography&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Searching for Justice: An Autobiography</em></font></a>, 2005, University of Toronto Press).</p> <p>Tremblay and Jeansonne couldn’t disappoint Mulroney, for they had been with Clarkson Tetrault, a Montreal law firm that in the Mulroney era had shown off one of its own, the Tories’ national president William Jarvis, like Mulroney’s friend Frank Moores, as above others in Ottawa’s lobbying world (“Capital pursuits: Ottawa’s ‘consultants’ reject the lobbyist label”, by Hugh Winsor, December 19, 1987, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Existing government-relations firms scrambled to find Conservative names to put on their stationery, while people like former Newfoundland premier Frank Moores, a Mulroney pal and one of the important string-pullers in the campaign to vault Mr. Mulroney into the Conservative leadership, and Paul Curley, a former national director of the party, set up shop in Ottawa making no secret of their connections.</p> <p>Joining the scramble were contingents from many of the big Montreal and Toronto law firms that decided to open Ottawa offices. One firm, Clarkson Tetrault of Montreal, leased offices overlooking the Supreme Court Building and installed William Jarvis, president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and a former cabinet minister, as its principal liaison man.”</p> </blockquote> <p>With his own lawyer background mostly in Montreal, it took Mulroney a little longer to get comfortable with the Toronto-based law firm McCarthy & McCarthy, more Liberal in background and “Upper Canadian in style” as described in an earlier-quoted news story by Lynda Hurst.</p> <p>In 1982, then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had appointed Donald MacDonald, a McCarthy & McCarthy law partner, former Liberal cabinet minister in the portfolios of defence, energy and finance and a possible leadership successor, to co-chair a new royal commission studying the Canadian economy (“Macdonald, Stewart reported heading commission PM to set up inquiry on economy”, by James Rusk, November 5, 1982, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Soon after the Mulroney Tories’ triumph over Trudeau’s successor John Turner in a September 1984 election, as the head of that commission MacDonald publicly expressed support for free trade with the United States (“Macdonald report already under fire”, by Linda Diebel, September 5, 1985, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“There have been 400 royal commissions since Confederation, but few have generated the grassroots emotional response this one has.</p> <p>Criticism has centred on the usefulness of yet another royal commission, on the $800-a-day stipend allotted commission chairman Donald Macdonald, and on his statement in favor of free trade only part-way through his mandate.</p> <p>…</p> <p>According to Macdonald, the commission - formally, the Royal Commission on Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada - is supposed to “structure political debate in this country for at least another three decades.”</p> <p>But critics already dismiss it as a report tailored to the needs of corporate Canada and attacked its authors for their spending habits and style.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Others criticize Macdonald a former Liberal finance minister and partner in the Toronto law firm of McCarthy and McCarthy for publicly supporting a free-trade treaty with the United States.</p> <p>Macdonald first urged Canadians to move quickly and “take a leap of faith” on the free-trade issue in November 1984 two years into his mandate with the commission.”</p> </blockquote> <p>MacDonald then co-chaired the Canadian Alliance for Trade and Job Opportunities, a free-trade lobby group, and his contributions so pleased Mulroney that in August 1988 he was appointed Canada’s top diplomat, the Canadian High Commissioner, in Britain, replacing Roy McMurtry – the former Ontario cabinet minister known for the “McMurtry formula” leading to the “Notwithstanding Clause” in the 1982 Constitution. (“Macdonald named top U.K. envoy”, by Stephen Bindman, August 6, 1988, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>)</p> <p>In comparison, as in an earlier-quoted news story by Tu Thanh Ha and Edward Greenspon, Mulroney’s old pal Pat MacAdam had been appointed to the Canadian High Commission in Britain only as a press counsellor.</p> <p>Adding to Donald MacDonald’s free trade profile was that of Thomas d’Aquino, the long-time president and CEO of the Business Council on National Issues – now known as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives – and a leading lobbyist for Canada-U.S. free trade, who was a special counsel at McCarthy & McCarthy from 1987 to 1990 (“HIGH PROFILE series Top business lobbyist enjoys clout in Ottawa”, by Shawn McCarthy, June 30, 1991, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>; “<a href="http://www.ceocouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/archives/MAR_31_92_ENG_Speech_Suicide_Or_Renaissance.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Suicide or Renaissance? Canada at the Crossroads</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, by Thomas d’Aquino, Canadian Council of Chief Executives; March 31, 1992; and, “<a href="http://thomasdaquino.ca/assets/TdA-Historical-Background.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">THOMAS D’AQUINO, B.A., J.D., LL.M., LL.D., Biographical Notes, Historical Background</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, thomasdaquino.ca).</p> <p>These high-profile roles signified McCarthy & McCarthy’s position as a leading pro-business, pro-free-trade law firm.</p> <p>Thus the 1990 merger of Clarkson Tetrault and McCarthy & McCarthy created not only Canada’s largest law firm but vast lawyer resources available to the Mulroney government. As in Parts 5 & 6, in 1992 several controversial matters of political interest involved lawyers or former lawyers of McCarthy Tetrault: in Montreal, Concordia University counsel Richard Beaulieu’s handling of engineering professor Valery Fabrikant might have stimulated the latter’s murder urge, and Gerald Tremblay tried to ban Quebec media publicity on the Diane Wilhelmy affair during the Charlottetown constitutional campaign; and in Vancouver, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick collaborated with RCMP to psychiatrically suppress my political activism.</p> <p>The January 1997 legal settlement in favor of his libel lawsuit cemented McCarthy Tetrault’s special relationship with Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>Two Montreal landmark former hotel buildings, the historic grand Le Windsor closed in 1981, in danger of demolition, and the less old Mont-Royal closed in 1984, went through extensive renovations during the Mulroney era and reopened in 1987; noted new corporate tenants in the former Windsor hotel building, “a private sparkling jewel”, included Charles Bronfman’s private holding company – Claridge Inc. mentioned earlier – law firm Clarkson Tetrault and accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand (“Elegance regained.; Restoring a landmark is a costly gamble. At the Windsor and Mont-Royal, they feel it’s worth it”, by Robert Winters, October 3, 1987, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A feeling of discouragement hit architect Ken London when he walked into the dark, boarded-up Windsor Hotel in February 1985. The first thing he saw, in the glare of his flashlight, was a 20-inch-thick layer of ice in the once-elegant ground-floor reception rooms.</p> <p>Today, as he shows off Le Windsor’s soaring atrium and its glittering entrance-hallway, it is hard to imagine how severe the deterioration was after the hotel closed in 1981. London estimates the landmark would have had to be demolished if left vacant another five years.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Even when extra items such as interest, professional fees, site purchase and tenant leasing incentives are added, the total cost for the Windsor redevelopment was only $41.5 million, said Claude Normandeau, president of FIC Fund Inc., a Laurentian Group Corp. company.</p> <p>Considering that the total “gross space” of Le Windsor is 290,000 square feet, Normandeau said the overall cost of the redevelopment was $143 a square foot. This compares favorably with the $150-to-$180-a-square-foot cost of building new, first-class downtown office space downtown, he said.</p> <p>While renovation and restoration saved money at the Windsor, it added expense at the Mount Royal redevelopment just up Peel St. There, a $30-million cost overrun has pushed the total cost to $180 million for one million square feet, or about $180 a square foot.</p> <p>Joanne McLaughlin, co-manager of the project, called Les Cours Mont-Royal, said it could have been more economic to demolish the structure and start over.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The renovation of the Windsor, which closed in 1981 after 103 years of serving such guests as Mark Twain, King George VI and Winston Churchill, marks a major change from the hotel’s dying days, when mega-decibel punk-rock concerts were held in its ballroom.</p> <p>Now, the discreet-looking business people walking in the punk fans’ footsteps are clients or executives of some of Montreal’s top-drawer, blue-chip firms, including Charles Bronfman’s private holding company as well as the Clarkson, Tetrault legal office and the Coopers & Lybrand accounting firm.</p> <p>Tawdry with time</p> <p>Most Montrealers will never have a chance to tour Le Windsor, a private sparkling jewel whose centrepiece is a peaceful winter-garden courtyard with tropical plants and a giant, curving skylight.</p> <p>But the public is invited to Les Cours Mont-Royal, where about 500 workers are rushing to put the finishing touches on the retail level in time for its opening in late October. In fact, Mont-Royal is counting on drawing a stream of 50,000 people a day through its Yuppie-targeted retail space, which includes high-fashion outlets such as Parachute, and the Cineplex chain’s new Canadian-flagship cinema complex featuring an Egyptian-tomb motif.</p> <p>When it closed in 1984, the Mount Royal had given up its choice position as one of the city’s top luxury hotels, its once impressive interiors having grown tawdry with time and benign neglect. The constant flow of pedestrian traffic through the 62-year-old hotel from the Peel Metro station almost seemed to have tired its once proud spirit, and the once famous rooftop shows, featuring such acts as Frank Sinatra and Mary Pickford, had faded into the past.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In September 2000 when Mulroney’s daughter Caroline was to wed in Montreal, on September 9 <em>The Globe and Mail</em> published a detailed article describing the glittering event in advance, especially the wedding party set for the Windsor ballrooms – with a mention that Mulroney’s Airbus Affair lawyer Gerald Tremblay’s firm McCarthy Tetrault was located in the same building (“Goin’ to the chapel”, by Leah McLaren, Gayle MacDonald and Susanne Craig, September 9, 2000, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/‎" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Caroline Mulroney’s marriage next weekend in front of hundreds of dignitaries and high-society guests in Montreal is the biggest event yet in the coming-out of a new generation of Canadian political progeny.</p> <p>A week from today, hundreds of guests will file into Montreal’s elaborately frescoed Saint Léon de Westmount church, a stone edifice set amid leafy, genteel lower Westmount. Taking their seats on rose-embellished pews, guests will be serenaded by the 45 voices of Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal, a Montreal boy’s choir. Minutes later, 26-year-old Caroline Mulroney will climb the short flight of steps.</p> <p>Some 500 heads will turn to watch her father, the controversial former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, lead her down the aisle to her waiting groom, Andrew Lapham -- the 28-year-old son of left-leaning Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham.</p> <p>Billed as Canada’s society wedding of the year, the Mulroney-Lapham marriage has Montreal buzzing, despite the Mulroneys’ best efforts to keep the guest list under wraps. Confirmed invitees include George and Barbara Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy (he declined), and rumoured well-wishers include former British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, Queen Noor of Jordan and TV personality Kathy Lee Gifford.</p> <p>The bride is part of an emerging pack of political progeny -- with names like Trudeau, Clark, Chretien and Turner -- for whom this week marks a bittersweet historical moment. On the eve of Caroline Mulroney’s talked-about wedding, Pierre Trudeau’s sons, Alexandre (Sacha) and Justin, care for their ailing father in Montreal.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Caroline Mulroney’s wedding will certainly be an event worthy of an “equestrian-class” bride. The celebrations will be spread over an entire weekend in Montreal, unfolding in some of the city’s poshest spots.</p> <p>After the vows, the wedding party decamps to the opulent surroundings of the Windsor ballrooms in downtown Montreal, with gilded, 20-foot-high ceilings and crystal chandeliers -- ballrooms that have been graced by the likes of Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and the Queen when she was still Princess Elizabeth. One of the rooms will be decorated with an elaborate interior garden and fountains.</p> <p>(The Windsor hotel building also happens to house the offices of the blue-chip law firm McCarthy Tetrault. One of its lawyers, Gerald Tremblay, defended Brian Mulroney during the Airbus affair.)”</p> </blockquote> <p>It was the happiest of moments for the Mulroney family. “Life is good”, except for U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy’s decline of the wedding invitation, and in Montreal the gravely ill condition of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, cared for by his sons Alexandre (Sacha) and Justin.</p> <p>Trudeau had been “deeply saddened” by the freak death of Michel, the youngest of his 3 boys, at the age of 23 in 1998, swept by an avalanche into British Columbia’s Kokanee Lake (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/16/world/pierre-trudeau-s-youngest-son-believed-killed-in-avalanche.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Pierre Trudeau’s Youngest Son Believed Killed in Avalanche</font></a>”, by Anthony DePalma, November 16, 1998, <em>The New York Times</em>).</p> <p>Various sorts of comparison were inevitable in September 2000:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Canadian public is intimately connected to these children. Two years ago the whole country mourned when the third Trudeau brother, Michel, died in a freak avalanche. “We knew them all as small children. We saw some of them born. We followed them for a while, then we lost track, and now they’re attracting more attention,” says Bonnie Brownlee, former executive assistant to the Mulroney family. “Like their parents or not, these kids are part of this country’s psyche.”</p> <p>“The Trudeau children are special,” adds Ottawa author Charlotte Gray. “To lose a brother and then support two parents, who each in their different ways fell apart, make us see them as very impressive individuals. They’re not children any more. Caroline’s still a kid, really. Getting married, dressing up and being a princess for a day.”</p> <p>Stanley Hartt, a former deputy minister of finance and chief of staff for Mulroney, adds that Canadians are justifiably proud of most of these kids, because like Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., they seem to have their heads screwed on right.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Days after Caroline Mulroney’s wedding, on September 28 Pierre Trudeau passed away, having suffered from dementia and prostate cancer (“<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/03/06/pierre-trudeau-dementia-cancer-treatment_n_2820558.html?just_reloaded=1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Pierre Trudeau’s Dementia Led Him To Turn Down Cancer Treatment</font></a>”, March 6, 2013, <em>The Huffington Post Canada</em>).</p> <p>As in Part 1, in October 2001 Bernard Etzinger, the Canadian consul and trade commissioner in Silicon Valley, proudly told me while we were at a Canada-U.S. national women’s hockey exhibition game, that he had attended Caroline Mulroney’s wedding.</p> <p>Not bad to be among 500 invited and attending, considering how studded it was with international royalties, celebrities and political and business leaders (“A modern fairy tale: With a romantic flourish, Mulroney wedding goes off without a high-society hitch”, by Rochelle Lash, September 20, 2000, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Leaving the church, guests dodged flashbulbs and onlookers, clambered into their cars and drove - or were driven - over to the glittering reception at Le Windsor’s lustrous ballrooms, a fitting palace for an occasion that had taken on royal proportions.</p> <p>Shimmering crystal chandeliers dripped like giant teardrop earrings from the 20-foot ceiling of the historic entrance hall, Peacock Alley, where the bedazzling mirrored walls seemed to aggrandize the powerful guests. Once the glorious Windsor Hotel, the place had a pedigreed guest register that listed the likes of Princess Elizabeth, Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy.</p> <p>Mila sealed her reputation as Montreal's hostess-with-the-mostest as she greeted all the well-wishers. How did this affair get so big and high-profile?</p> <p>Mulroney is now senior partner at a leading law firm, Ogilvy Renault, a director of several international corporations including the Chase Manhattan <br />Bank, and considered by many to be one of Canada’s most influential businessmen. Mila is the mother of four, a corporate board member, charity <br />spokesperson and sophisticated socialite in Palm Beach and beyond. Together, the globe-trotting couple is renowned for their easy-going charm and energetic youthfulness, and have been adopted by a coterie of powerful friends around the world.</p> <p>Like George and Barbara Bush, for instance, who chatted easily with the other guests. “I’m confident that my son will be the next president and he’ll be better than I was,” Bush told me.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Queen Noor of Jordan, whom I had met in March, told me that she has been close friends with the Mulroneys “since they were in power.” She was wearing a slim, sparkly black sheath. “We have to keep our wardrobes simple when we’re traveling or working ... you know that, too, Rochelle.” Yup, we’re just two career gals.</p> <p>Others there were Lord Charles and Lady Carla Powell of London, Prince Alexander and Princess Katherine of Yugoslavia, Princess Alexandra Theodoracopoulous of Greece with her husband, Taki, of the London Daily Telegraph, Prince Phillip Radziwill, Lord Henry Hindlip of London, Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford, Alan Thicke, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder of New York, Princess Eugenie Radziwill of Greece, Charles and Andy Bronfman, Galen and Hilary Weston, in a long beige-gold coat dress, and Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel, who wore a long, black and gold fitted brocade suit and her favourite Manolo Blahnik shoes. She explained that her searing newspaper column is not appearing currently because she’s working on a book.</p> <p>Other guests included Paul and Jackie Desmarais, who were seated with the Bushes, Derek and Joan Burney, Ted and Loretta Rogers, Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman, Laurent and Claire Beaudoin, Peter and Melanie Munk, chic in a delicate black dress, Mrs. Henry (Kate) Ford II of Detroit, who said that she drives a Lincoln Town Car, a Jaguar (owned by Ford) and “many Mustangs,” Tom and Cinda Hicks of Dallas, shipping magnate Dino Goulandris of London and Athens, and authors John Mortimer and Barbara Taylor Bradford.</p> <p>…</p> <p>After dinner there were speeches by George Bush, Caroline’s brother, Ben Mulroney, the groom’s father, Lewis Lapham, and Mila’s brother John <br />Pivnicki. In his toast to Caroline, Brian Mulroney joked about her marrying an American. He said, “I never thought free trade would mean this.””</p> </blockquote> <p>My perception of this firsthand wedding party story by<em> The Gazette</em>’s Social Columnist Rochelle Lash is that Paul Desmarais was singled out, along with wife Jackie, as heading a table of mostly political and business leaders, including former U.S. President George Bush Sr. with wife Barbara.</p> <p>So it may not have always been for his own business interests that Desmarais had all the leading Canadian establishment politicians under his patronage.</p> <p>When Paul Desmarais passed away in Quebec on October 8, 2013 – the day happened to be the 3rd anniversary of the start of this blog post series – this view was reasserted by the words of Michael Pitfield, former Power Corp. vice chairman and former clerk of the Privy Council in the Trudeau era, that Desmarais was “engaged in the active governance” of Canada, not so much “to make him richer” but “using his power base to press for what he thinks are desirable policies” (“<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/behind-the-scenes-paul-desmarais-was-a-force-in-canadian-politics/article14768860/?page=all" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Behind the scenes, Paul Desmarais was a force in Canadian politics</font></a>”, by Sandra Martin, October 9, 2013, <em>The Globe and Mail</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“He never ran for public office, never accepted a seat in the Senate or an appointment as Governor General. Still, Paul Desmarais was a singular political force in Canada for more than five decades. The most powerful francophone in the country, he knew and influenced, in small ways or large, every Canadian prime minister and Quebec premier over the past five decades. He negotiated a business deal with Maurice Duplessis, argued against separation with Quebec premiers Daniel Johnson and Réne Lévesque, helped prime minister Pierre Trudeau open up relations with China by becoming a founding chairman of the Canada China Business Council in 1978 and kept in close touch with succeeding prime ministers, no matter their political affiliation, including Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.</p> <p>…</p> <p>A little more than six feet in height, handsome, with a commanding gaze, Mr. Desmarais liked playing cribbage and poker and admired innovative and powerful leaders. “I respect greatly men of strong personalities,” he told l’actualité magazine in 1974. “If I had to name some, I’d say Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Franklin Roosevelt, Mao Zedong.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>“The easy thing to think about Paul is that he has the politicians in his pocket, that he’s a sort of master of marionettes,” Michael Pitfield once said. Mr. Pitfield, clerk of the Privy Council during the Trudeau era (and later a senator) became vice-chairman of Power Corp. in 1984. “But he’s not. He’s a player. He never disengages; he never withdraws from the arena. He made an enormous fortune by age 35 and has ever since been engaged in the active governance of this country. Most people automatically assume that Paul’s policy involvements are designed to make him richer, that he tries to control people and events to get some desired, selfish result. In fact, he’s an active participant, using his power base to press for what he thinks are desirable policies. It’s very important to understand that distinction.””</p> </blockquote> <p>The late Paul Desmarais greatly respected “men of strong personalities” such as Winston Churchill and Mao Zedong, and so he strongly preferred Pierre Trudeau, afterwards Brian Mulroney, and then Jean Chretien for whom that respect had led to the union of his son Andre with Chretien’s daughter France.</p> <p>In such “active governance” in favor of strong men, someone like Kim Campbell, the Vancouver politician, Mulroney government’s Justice Minister in November 1992 when I first became active on Canadian political issues, and later Mulroney’s successor and the first female Canadian Prime Minister, likely wouldn’t have been to Mr. Desmarais’s preference – besides her being from British Columbia outside of the Desmarais family’s power sphere and her opponent Jean Chretien being part of the extended Desmarais family.</p> <p>Over 2 weeks to go before the October 25, 1993 Canadian election, around October 7 a number of newspapers, including <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em>, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> and <em>Edmonton Journal</em>, published a news report by Southam News reporter Dave Todd disclosing, or more like announcing, that Brian Mulroney was now the chief counsel of Power Corporation of Canada, and that at Paul Desmarais’s personal request Mulroney was accompanying him on a visit to China’s capital Beijing for the Asia Power Group joint venture by Ontario Hydro, Hydro Quebec and Power Corp., for energy development in China and other regions of Asia (“Mulroney in China aiding Power Corp. in Asia venture; Series of power plants planned”, by Dave Todd, October 7, 1993, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Brian Mulroney has discovered life after politics. And it’s already proving richly rewarding.</p> <p>The former prime minister is in China this week as a lawyer and lobbyist for Montreal-based Power Corporation of Canada, while it begins assembling plans to invest in Chinese energy projects and explore other business opportunities.</p> <p>This was revealed in the Chinese capital Wednesday following news that Power Corp., and North America’s two largest public utilities - Ontario Hydro and Hydro Quebec - have joined forces to help China develop its energy potential.</p> <p>Their joint venture, Asia Power Group Inc., will be owned equally by the three Canadian corporate giants involved, and will operate from Hong Kong.</p> <p>Power Corp’s legal interests throughout the Asia Pacific region are expected to be overseen by a Hong Kong branch office of Ogilvy Renault, the Montreal law firm at which Mulroney is a senior partner.</p> <p>A senior Power Corp. official was adamant that Mulroney has not been involved in putting together the Asia Power Group venture or negotiating for it with the Chinese government. But the former prime minister did go to Beijing at the express request of Power Corp. chairman Paul Desmarais, other sources confirmed.</p> <p>“Mr. Desmarais asked for Mr. Mulroney to accompany him. I assume he needed his advice,” said Raymond Crevier, a partner of Mulroney’s at Ogilvy Renault.</p> <p>Meanwhile, in Beijing, Ontario Hydro chairman Maurice Strong predicted Wednesday that Asia Power Group, which hopes to design, build and operate electrical generating stations in India, Malaysia, and the Philippines as well as China, eventually “will become a major player,” in power projects throughout Asia.</p> <p>The consortium, launched as a $100-million joint venture, expects annual returns on investment of about 20 per cent, Strong said.</p> <p>But within hours of the company’s unveiling, it was already headed for controversy.</p> <p>Its initial intention, it says, is to win construction contracts for coal and other fossil-fuel burning plants in China’s southern coastal region.</p> <p>That raises serious environmental questions, said economist Patricia Adams, executive director of Probe International, a development issues think tank in Toronto. “It’s a most remarkable situation,” Adams said referring both to Hydro Quebec and Ontario Hydro’s involvement as well as Mulroney’s links as Power Corp.’s chief counsel.</p> <p>The two huge public utilities will be “investing taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ money in projects in a country where there is absolutely no disclosure and no scrutiny of the management of their operations,” Adams charged.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I get a sense that Mr. Desmarais had to show off Mulroney as the Desmarais family company’s chief counsel at this time – as Mulroney’s law partner Raymond Crevier noted – while a heated election campaign was going on between Mulroney successor Kim Campbell and Desmarais in-law Jean Chretien, so that Canadians, especially those in politics in Capital Ottawa and those closer to Campbell in Western Canada, would know that the Power Corp.’s international business goals had already brought Mulroney – the mentor Campbell was loyal to – onboard and closer to Chretien.</p> <p>Why not, when also onboard were “North America’s two largest public utilities” Hydro Quebec and Ontario Hydro and a corporate leader like Maurice Strong?</p> <p>Meanwhile, Kim Campbell was on her “politics of inclusion” campaign along with the old associates Brian Mulroney had left with her, such as Patrick MacAdam, tainted by the Mulroney era’s corruption in the minds of the public.</p> <p>“The fix” was already in while the election still had a distance to go.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2014/06/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 13</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-5905588672392449142013-09-29T23:52:00.001-04:002015-06-07T23:13:17.807-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 11) — when police statecraft runs political-scandal shows<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2013/05/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 10</a>)</p> <p>As in Parts 5 & 6 of this blog article, in October 1992 while launching a civil lawsuit against the University of British Columbia and Royal Canadian Mounted Police over a dispute I had with my former boss, UBC Head of Computer Science Maria Klawe, I expressed to lawyer Brian Mason my willingness to also take up political issues challenging the conduct of then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney; in November I sent press releases to BCTV and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, calling for the end of Mulroney’s leadership and for an accounting of his misconduct, especially in the Charlottetown constitutional reform process that had failed to pass the October 26 national referendum.</p> <p>From the end of November 1992 to early 1995, I found myself struggling to survive politically motivated psychiatric oppression and criminal prosecution. As in Parts 5 & 6, the psychiatric oppression began on November 30 after I had faxed my press releases and a note to the constituency office of local Member of Parliament Kim Campbell, who happened to be Mulroney government’s Justice Minister, in which I accused that “a political persecution ordered by the PM was underway”; RCMP initiated my first psychiatric committal in collaboration with UBC, UBC Hospital and B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick who happened to be wife of my former colleague David Kirkpatrick, Klawe’s friend.</p> <p>As in Parts 5-9, Vancouver lawyers willing to take up my civil lawsuit or legal defense against criminal prosecution were few, with Mason withdrawing by April 1993 due to my depleted financial resources and his under pressure from RCMP and the Justice Department. Worse, some lawyers I sought help from collaborated with political persecution, allowing the authorities to intensify criminal prosecution that included long detentions, escalating charges, and a forensic psychiatric regime with false and harsh psychiatric labeling to prevent my speaking out. My civil litigation and political activism were forced to stop. </p> <p>But as detailed in Part 10, interestingly some of the lawyers and law firms involved in politically oppressing me soon found themselves engulfed in controversial, some quite negative, media publicities.</p> <p>In June 1994 the law firm Connell Lightbody, responsible for the last criminal charge in November 1993 that ended my civil litigation attempts, was revealed to be closely representing Canadian government interests, and among the top 10 law firms receiving untendered government contracts. In British Columbia, the negative publicity was remedied by the firm’s active role in class actions to seek financial compensations from U.S. manufacturers for Canadian breast-implant victims, but those legal battles dragged on past year 2000 when the law firm inexplicably ceased to exist.</p> <p>Neither the public revelation of Connell Lightbody’s government background nor its later demise changed my plights. Connell Lightbody lawyer Marion Buller, whom other lawyers had suggested for my lawsuit and criminal defense but who instead turned to Vancouver Police against me as in Part 9, since September 1994 has been a B.C. provincial court judge in Port Coquitlam, where the B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute kept a false conclusion of “Paranoid Schizophrenia” on me.</p> <p>Another such Vancouver law firm was lawyer Jack Cram’s Cram & Associates, which in early October 1993 briefly appeared likely to be my next civil lawyer after Brian Mason’s Maitland & Co., but then said no and prodded for my civil disobedience so it could call in police, thus starting a series of criminal charges culminating with the one at Connell Lightbody; however in February 1994 when the charges were converted to peace-bond probation Cram & Associates' charge was dropped.</p> <p>In April 1994, Cram became the subject of major news coverage when at B.C. Supreme Court proceedings he accused the B.C. justice system of “massive corruption”, of “aiding and abetting” a child molester, alleging a conspiracy in this regard involving B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Esson, B.C. Attorney General Colin Gabelmann, the B.C. Law Society and leading lawyers, and owners of <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> and <em>The Province</em> newspapers. Cram was forced to undergo psychiatric assessments and convicted of contempt-of-court, and in January 1995 – shortly before my probation’s end in February – gave up his lawyer license.</p> <p>As in Part 10, for these cases Aboriginal politics was lurking in the background.</p> <p>A former Justice Department prosecutor working with RCMP, when I sought her legal help Marion Buller was highlighted in the media as a native lawyer and counsel for a B.C. government inquiry by Judge Anthony Sarich into RCMP mistreatments of Natives in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region, although in handling me she apparently sided with RCMP.</p> <p>When Jack Cram made his sensational allegations against the B.C. justice system, he was representing native lawyer Renate Andres-Auger, and rallying B.C. Aboriginals to take his hardline stand over a pending appeal of a Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en tribal land-claim case at the Supreme Court of Canada, which had been rejected at B.C. Supreme Court by, and then at B.C. Court of Appeal headed by, Chief Justice Allan McEachern, later UBC Chancellor.</p> <p>Then in the biggest news story of 1995 on B.C. Aboriginal rights, a small group of heavily armed renegade Natives from the Shuswap Nation drew international media attention with tense standoffs and gun battles with RCMP in August-September 1995 – shortly after my forensic psychiatric file was closed by the Outpatient Clinic but with a hidden hard conclusion at FPI in Port Coquitlam as earlier – near Gustafsen Lake in the Cariboo tribal region, where relations with RCMP had supposedly been improved by Marion Buller’s work, her claim to fame for a judgeship at Port Coquitlam.</p> <p>The Shuswap militants subscribed to the political view of their white lawyer Bruce Clark, who advocated his Scottish Ph.D. research finding, despite lack of success at the law courts, that Natives in North America were sovereign nations with rights granted by the British monarchy centuries ago. Clark had moved from Toronto to Vancouver to defend Aboriginal protesters of the Lil’wat Peoples Movement of the Mount Currie Band in the Whistler-Pemberton region, in 1990 when their road blockades were taken down by RCMP led by Superintendent D. G. Cowley, the Vancouver region commander who later in October 1992 authorized obstruction and suppression of my civil lawsuit and political activism. In the end, Clark was forced to undergo psychiatric assessments, convicted of criminal charges and stripped of his lawyer’s license.</p> <p>These Aboriginal issues also had relevance to issues regarding Brian Mulroney’s leadership misconduct in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional reform processes as in Part 7 – relating to the inclusion of Aboriginal self-government rights in the Canadian Constitution.</p> <p>Due to selective reporting by <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> newspaper I subscribed to since arrival in Vancouver in 1988 to teach at UBC, I didn’t learn of the controversy over law firm Connell Lightbody’s untendered government contracts, but I took an immediate interest in Jack Cram’s legal crusade against corruption in the B.C. justice system and attempted to shorten my probation in mid-1994 so I could return to civil litigation versus UBC and RCMP. As in Part 10, unfortunately my hope was overcome by the fear that my probation officer Fred Hitchcock and forensic psychiatrist Dr. Clifford Kerr might be scheming to worsen my plight me if I applied to the B.C. Provincial Court to end probation early, and I also saw that Cram’s tirades were soon crushed by the B.C. Supreme Court.</p> <p>In any case, my short-lived hope in 1994 with the Jack Cram events didn’t compare to when the biggest Canadian news stories of 1995 came, in November that year, that former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was being investigated by RCMP for receiving $5 million kickbacks for the 1988 sale of European Airbus planes to Air Canada. I was a little disappointed to learn that he was only suspected and that he denied it, but I recall CBC national news anchor Peter Mansbridge stating quite positively, “The RCMP says Mr. Mulroney took the money.”</p> <p>November 1995 was just over 2 years since the near wipe-out of Mulroney’s governing Progressive Conservative party led by his successor, Vancouver’s Kim Campbell, in the October 25, 1993 election mentioned in Part 8. But the national media began going after Mulroney sooner, starting with anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron’s new book in October 1994, then CBC The Fifth Estate’s investigative stories in March 1995.</p> <p>Published on October 24, the eve of the 1993 election’s anniversary, Cameron’s book, <em><a href="http://steviecameron.com/on-the-take-crime-corruption-and-greed-in-the-mulroney-years/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years</font></a></em>, was an instant hit, selling out its first print of 20,000 copies within 3 days. A Canadian comedian jokingly compared Cameron to Iranian author Salmon Rushdie (“The book on Stevie Cameron IN PERSON / The author of On the Take, the season’s hottest political book, is a former Ottawa lifestyles journalist who discovered early in her career, when she broke a story damaging to the federal Liberals, that investigative reporting ‘exhilarated’ her”, by Val Ross, December 10, 1994, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Toronto comedian Dave Broadfoot is doing topical humour (book-community style) for 450 people at a Writers Development Trust dinner party in Toronto. “Hey, remember that Salman Rushdie?” he says. “Remember those mobs of Iranians howling for his death? Who could imagine that in Canada, eh - 10,000 Conservatives howling for Stevie Cameron’s death.”</p> <p>A distinctly uneasy laugh ripples through the room. Cameron is the author of On the Take, the season’s hottest political book. It alleges influence-peddling, kickbacks and high living at the highest levels of the government of Brian Mulroney, and describes more than one suspicious death. The laughter is uneasy because before the book came out, in late October, odd stories turned up in the press: Cameron said she had had anonymous, harassing telephone calls; Gary Ross, of Macfarlane Walter & Ross, the book’s publisher, spoke of attempts to steal the manuscript in two separate break-ins in downtown Toronto. Later, these stories were downplayed. Ross’s partner, John Macfarlane, made jokes at another MW&R book launch about Ross's “conspiracy theories” the police made no arrests.</p> <p>In any case, the stories and rumours about the book’s contents created intense interest, and when the much-awaited book was finally published, on Oct. 24, Macfarlane Walter & Ross sold out the first print run of 20,000 copies within three days. A month later, a new press run of 45,000 copies went out. Still, bookstores reported waiting lists 250 people long. Why? Perhaps buying On The Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years was like voting all over again. Quipped Tory columnist Dalton Camp: “If you could sell a book to everyone in this country who hates Brian Mulroney, you'd be rich.” A third printing of 15,000 is planned for January.”</p> </blockquote> <p>For a female author to be compared to Salmon Rushdie, even in humor, was a serious affair. Another journalist woman, Charlotte Gray, chose Cameron’s book as one of her favorites, all deadly serious by female writers (“Putting the best books forward; A browser’s guide to the best of the season”, by Jenny Jackson, December 11, 1994, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Charlotte Gray, political writer and contributing editor for Saturday Night magazine, said she’s enjoying Stevie Cameron’s book On the Take (Macfarlane Walter & Ross), especially as it pertains to the bureaucracy and “the corruption of the ideal of public service.”</p> <p>She’s also enjoying Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Theodore Roosevelt No Ordinary Time, (Simon & Schuster).</p> <p>But her first choice was, E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (Simon & Schuster).”</p> </blockquote> <p>Cameron’s book was on the bestselling lists every week. For instance on December 17, <em>The Gazette</em> newspaper’s list from bookstore sales in Montreal, Quebec, listed Cameron’s as No. 1 the week before and currently No. 2 behind <em>Fear of Frying</em> by Josh Freed (<em>Fear of Frying and Other Fax of Life</em>), while <em>The Globe and Mail</em>’s national list had hers as No.1 the previous week and now No. 2 behind <em>Don’t Stand Too Close</em> by Tim Allen, “the star of TV’s Home Improvement sitcom” (<em>Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man</em>) (“Best-sellers”, December 17, 1994, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>; and, “THE GLOBE AND MAIL NATIONAL BESTSELLER LIST”, December 17, 1994, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>But there were detractors, such as journalist Hubert Bauch (“The man people love to hate: Small details about Brian Mulroney are often far more revealing than the prime ministerial speeches written by professional speech-writers”, by William Johnson, January 12, 1995, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Windsor Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Those who read books obviously like Cameron’s mauling of Mulroney. The literati commenting on the book were often less favorable. Montreal Gazette senior writer Hubert Bauch, for instance, gave the book a mixed review.</p> <p>He recognized that Cameron and her collaborators (Gazette reporters Rod Macdonell and Andrew McIntosh) had accumulated an astonishing menu of major and mini scandals. But Bauch seemed to say, so-what-else-is-new?</p> <p>He put Cameron down for displaying a Victorian sensibility. “At times, Cameron’s unstinting tone of disapproval simply echoes the inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment, whose Earl Grey sensibilities were woefully offended by the Dom Perignon flamboyance of the Mulroney crowd. Her leering rundown of the menu at a 24 Sussex Drive soiree, for instance, sounds vaguely like a Presbyterian spinster’s detailed account of an orgy in the choir loft.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Some of these critics might feel there wasn’t enough meat in Cameron’s account of scandals of the Mulroney era, which she had persistently criticized as I reviewed in a March 2009 blog post, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-11/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 2)</font></a>”.</p> <p>To be fair, no matter how hard Stevie Cameron could have dug Brian Mulroney’s dirt, Canadians preferred the type of short fused, firebrand heroism of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, whose 1993 memoir outshining the rest was the consensus of booksellers in the nation’s capital Ottawa, as journalist Charles Gordon noted on January 29, 1995 (“Winners and not-so-best sellers”, by Charles Gordon, January 29, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In Ottawa, the consensus among booksellers seemed to be that there was no single dominating hot title in ’94 -- nothing to rival the performance of Pierre Trudeau’s autobiography in ’93. Quill and Quire shows that Stevie Cameron’s On the Take was the closest thing to that, with 80,000 books shipped. To give you a point of comparison, the number for Alice Munro's Open Secrets was 35,000, Neil Bissoondath’s Selling Illusions was 15,000 and Russell Smith’s How Insensitive was 4,000. All are considered successes, -- 4,000 for a first novel is great; 15,000 for an “ideas” book is terrific, and 35,000 for short stories is excellent.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But the Airbus story, the most serious allegations Mulroney would face, took up only a few pages tucked in the second half of Cameron’s 500+ pages, with nothing about Mulroney personally (Stevie Cameron, <a href="http://steviecameron.com/on-the-take-crime-corruption-and-greed-in-the-mulroney-years/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years</em></font></a>, 1994, Macfarlane Walter & Ross):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Airbus Industrie was a consortium of four companies: Aerospatiale SA of France, with 37.9 per cent of the shares, Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm GmbH of West Germany, with another 37.9 per cent, British Aerospace PLC with 20 per cent, and CASA of Spain with 4.2 per cent. The consortium had poured nearly $2 billion into the development of a mid-range passenger jet, the A320, and was anxiously looking for customers, a hard sell given that Boeing of Seattle still held the lion’s share of the global market for commercial jets. … “Airbus looked at Canada as a back door into the United States,” explained a senior U.S. businessman who has studied the company carefully. … Franz Josef Strauss, the popular leader of the Christian Social Party, was chairman of the seventeen-member supervisory board of Airbus, and he already had a strong salesman in Canada in the person of Karl-Heinz Schreiber. It was Schreiber who was responsible for Strauss’s personal holding companies in Alberta under the umbrella of Bitucan Holdings Ltd. and who had become so close to Elmer MacKay in the course of promoting the Bear Head project.</p> <p>When GCI [Government Consultants International] hung out its shingle in 1984, one of its first clients was Mercedes-Benz. Very quickly, [Frank] Moores was invited to join the board of Mercedes-Benz, which became, within a few years, the major shareholder in Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm, one of the Airbus partners. Another early client was Schreiber’s Bitucan Holdings; a third was Bear Head Industries, the Thyssen subsidiary Schreiber also represented. Schreiber became a valued GCI client, and he would eventually hire Greg Alford away from GCI to run Bear Head’s Ottawa office.</p> <p>There was yet another factor that made Moores the natural choice as Airbus’s lobbyist. While Moores and [Gary] Ouellet were building GCI into the city’s most powerful lobbying firm, Moores and several other Mulroney supporters – David Angus, Ken Waschuk, and Fern Roberge – accepted appointments to the board of Air Canada. At the time of the appointments in March 1985, the Air Canada board was under the supervision of Moores’s old roommate, Transport Minister Don Mazankowski. …</p> <p>GCI’s connection to Airbus Industrie began to surface that same summer when an official in the Department of Industry told reporters that Moores was trying to drum up business for Airbus, which was eager to sell its aircraft to Air Canada. Ottawa reporter Bob Fife was told that Moores had arranged a meeting with government officials to discuss a number of issues, including a possible Airbus sale to Air Canada. If an Air Canada director was lobbying on behalf of a company trying to sell planes to the airline, there was more than the appearance of conflict of interest. Moores discovered that Fife was pursuing the story and invited him over to 50 O’Connor to talk; when Fife arrived, Moores was waiting with his resignation from the Air Canada board. In return for the scoop, Fife said afterwards, Moores asked him not to mention his relationship with Airbus. Sorry, Fife told him; it’s part of the story. …</p> <p>To this day, Moores publicly denies that he ever lobbied for Airbus. His client, he insists, was the helicopter division of Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm, not the division that made up part of the Airbus consortium. “I don’t know where the hell the rumour came from,” he says. Moores blames Boeing executives for initiating gossip, but others, including senior bureaucrats and political staff, have confirmed the story.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The lobbying went on from both sides through 1987. In early December of that year Boeing, not to mention much of official Ottawa, was stunned by the news that Transport’s deputy minister, Ramsey Withers, a man closely involved with the Air Canada file, was leaving government to join GCI. Withers, a former chief of defence staff, was the first top mandarin to bolt for a lobby firm. Boeing was again upset; it suspected that Airbus, for which Moores was lobbying so strongly, had the inside track on the Air Canada purchase. When the issue was raised in the House of Commons in February 1988, Transport Minister John Crosbie defended Withers as “a man of complete integrity, honour, faithful service and rectitude,” who had no connection with Air Canada’s fleet replacement plans.</p> <p>Crosbie’s assessment of Withers’s character may well have been correct, but he was wrong about the deputy’s knowledge of the fleet plans. … On April 1, 1988, Ramsey Withers became president of GCI.</p> <p>On July 20 Air Canada held a press conference to announce its decision to buy thirty-four Airbus 320s to replace a fleet of thirty-three Boeing 727s, with delivery to begin in 1990. The cost of the planes was set at $1.8 billion, the largest civilian aircraft purchase in Canada’s history. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Karl-Heinz Schreiber did not relax after the Air Canada purchase went through: he still hoped to complete a deal with the federal government for the Bear Head plant in Cape Breton. But there was bad news on October 3: Strauss had collapsed while hunting deer on the estate of Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis; he died of heart failure shortly afterwards in hospital. Germany mourned the loss of its most charismatic politician.</p> <p>Strauss’s death caused barely a ripple in Ottawa; people there were gossiping about the value of the commission paid to GCI for helping to land the Air Canada contract. Estimates fluctuated wildly between $20 million and $70 million. Boeing conducted an investigation into the whole affair, one that involved police forces in both Canada and the United States; it concluded that a commission in the order of $20 to $30 million was paid to Moores and Quellet. The partners always dismissed such stories, and today Moores makes light of the rumours that he had tucked away millions from the deal. “I read that stuff and I wish it were true,” he chuckles.</p> <p>However, there is little question that Moores was prospering. The best evidence of his new-found wealth was the purchase of a luxury fishing camp with about twelve miles of one of the Gaspe’s richest salmon rivers, the Grand Cascapedia. Well-informed Queberckers say he paid an American family close to $2 million for the camp; Moores claims he and Montreal businessman Brian Jones paid less than $200,000. Whatever the purchase price may have been, the camp is now worth a fortune; he has done extensive renovations at a cost of about $1 million, according to sources.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So you see, Cameron’s story didn’t involve Mulroney, only his associates and friends, particularly former Newfoundland Premier Frank Moores and his lobby firm CGI, and Germany-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber; when Moores spent big with his “newfound wealth” he claimed it was only 1/10 as much and in partnership with Brian Jones, a businessman who obviously had money, and now no one can extract the truth from Moores – he died of cancer on July 10, 2005, as in Part 10, a month ahead of my father’s passing due to heart failure.</p> <p>On the other hand, Cameron was receiving tips from people interested in exposing wrongs that might or might not have to do with the former Mulroney government (“Tips roll in since Cameron got wise to Mulroney trough”, by Brian Laghi, December 11, 1994, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Since publishing On The Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 512 pp., $29.95), readers have flooded her with more allegations and anecdotes that, if true, might fill another book.</p> <p>“Just before coming west, I got a call from a guy in Manitoba and two or three people called from Alberta,” says Cameron, in town to promote her book. “And I was visited last week by somebody in Toronto who drove up from Quebec to tell me all about UI scams that take place all around the country.” The tips keep rolling in.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Unemployment insurance scams “all around the country”, more like as in Part 7, former RCMP national security head, Chief Superintendent P. M. Cummins’s interest in cracking down on welfare fraud in B.C. in 1993 while dismissing my complaint faxed to Kim Campbell – far from exposing ex-PM Mulroney and a long way from what Cameron would settle down as her next focus, namely Canada’s worst known serial murderer Robert William Pickton of Port Coquitlam discussed in Part 9.</p> <p>Cameron’s book having kicked up a dust over the politics of the Airbus-Air Canada deal, reports of money trails and legal issues came in March 1995, first by Germany’s <em>Der Speigel</em> magazine on its collaborative investigation with CBC Television’s The Fifth Estate program (“German magazine says lobbyist paid millions in Airbus sale”, by Jeff Heinrich, March 21, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A Liechtenstein company was paid $11 million U.S. for its lobbying role six years ago in the largest civil aircraft purchase ever in Canada, the German magazine Der Speigel reported yesterday.</p> <p>International Aircraft Leasing Ltd. (IAL) received its “commission” through a French bank after then-Crown-owned Air Canada announced in 1988 it was spending $1.8 billion to acquire 34 Airbus Industrie A320 jets, an investigative article in the weekly news magazine said.</p> <p>However, the magazine does suggest the money was destined for a Calgary-based German lobbyist, Karl-Heinz Schreiber, who at the time was an <br />important client and friend of well-known Tory lobbyist Frank Moores, a former Newfoundland premier and close friend of then-prime minister Brian <br />Mulroney.</p> <p>In 1985, Moores resigned from Air Canada’s board of directors amid media reports he had lobbied Ottawa to buy Airbuses for the airline and also <br />lobbied on behalf of two other competing Canadian carriers, Nordair and Wardair. Moores denied the reports. Air Canada was privatized in 1989.</p> <p>In total, unsigned contract records between Airbus and IAL suggest the Liechtenstein company was to have been paid up to $46 million U.S. for helping Airbus market their mid-range jets in Canada, Der Spiegel’s article said. In addition to the Air Canada business, that money was also to be paid for helping sales of Airbuses to Wardair and the carrier with which it was later merged, Calgary-based Canadian Airlines International, the article <br />stated.</p> <p>Under Liechtenstein law, it is impossible to know who owns a registered company, only who runs it. However, the Hamburg magazine suggests Schreiber is the owner, alleging he is now being pressured by IAL's executives to pay an unspecified sum he owes them for their help in the Canadian deals.</p> <p>It also quotes an unnamed “high-ranking aircraft industry manager” as saying: “Without Schreiber, Airbus would not have sold any aircraft in Canada.”</p> <p>Schreiber, 61, who now lives near Munich, denies any connection with IAL.</p> <p>“There is no paper trail at this point” that leads from IAL directly to Schreiber and on to Canadian politicians, lobbyists or airlines, the article’s author, staff reporter Mathias Muller von Blumencron, agreed in an interview yesterday.</p> <p>However, evidence of a Canadian connection could emerge as soon as next week, Blumencron added, when the CBC television investigative show The Fifth Estate, with whom Blumencron worked on the investigation, broadcasts its report on the subject. “We are extending Der Spiegel’s report,” senior producer Susan Teskey confirmed yesterday.</p> <p>In Europe, the allegations are the subject of a federal investigation. Since earlier this month in Germany, federal tax inspectors have been quietly looking into the $11 million U.S. payment to IAL, part of $20 million U.S. which IAL was supposed to receive for the Air Canada deal through the Banque Francaise du Commerce Exterieur, the Der Spiegel article stated, citing signed copies of bank records.</p> <p>In Canada, the RCMP’s commercial crime division is not investigating the allegations “at this time,” although it did look into what was thought to be a <br />Canadian lobbying connection briefly in 1988, when Air Canada announced the Airbus purchase, Supt. Carl Gallant said in an interview yesterday from <br />Ottawa.”</p> </blockquote> <p>At least $11-$20 million commissions were paid by Airbus to Schreiber for lobbying Air Canada, and up to $46 million total for lobbying airlines in Canada. German authorities were investigating, at least for taxation reason, but RCMP wasn’t.</p> <p>Not in public. Supt. Carl Gallant cited in the above story had interviewed Stevie Cameron in January, as I reviewed in June 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-7/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 6)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… in January, RCMP investigators Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald and Inspector Carl Gallant visited Stevie Cameron after listening to her talking about her book on the CBC Radio program <em>The House</em>; they told her that in 1988 there had been a brief FBI investigation on the Airbus sale to Air Canada but that the Canadian government and police had been unwilling to cooperate; she told them in return her experience that interviewing people in Europe had been more helpful.”</p> </blockquote> <p>For whatever reason Inspector Gallant was promoted to Superintendent in the two months, it wasn’t the Airbus matters.</p> <p>A week after <em>Der Speigel</em>, CBC The Fifth Estate quoted International Air Transport Association director-general Pierre Jeanniot, ex-president of Air Canada, as saying the Airbus commissions were “useless” (“Airbus ‘crazy’ to pay lobbyists, Jeanniot says”, by Jeff Heinrich, March 29, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In an interview with the CBC television show The Fifth Estate, Pierre Jeanniot said Airbus “uselessly” paid $11 million in commissions to the Liechtenstein company after government-owned Air Canada spent $1.8 billion to buy close to three dozen Airbus jets in 1988.</p> <p>“Some clever people made money which a company didn’t have to pay,” Jeanniot, director-general of the International Air Transport Association, said on the program, broadcast last night.</p> <p>“Why pay a commission to something when they don't get a service? I think it’s useless,” Jeanniot said, chuckling. “Useless because you would have bought (the aircraft) anyway?” he was asked.</p> <p>“No,” responded Jeanniot, who was Air Canada’s president at the time, “because we would have made the decision that was right for the company. The Airbus company was naive in doing this, in believing the fact that by giving someone a commission they could influence the decision.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Jeanniot’s dismissal of the Airbus commissions’ importance contradicted the view of a “high-ranking aircraft industry manager” quoted by <em>Der Speigel</em> that Schreiber’s lobbying in Canada was critical.</p> <p>More recently, The Fifth Estate showed evidence of Frank Moores’s middleman role in the Airbus-Air Canada negotiation (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/moores-linked-to-airbus-before-mulroney-came-to-power-memo-reveals-1.795938" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Moores linked to Airbus before Mulroney came to power, memo reveals</font></a>”, by Harvey Cashore, April 10, 2009, CBC News):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Moores, who died in 2005, always maintained he had nothing to do with the deal.</p> <p>But documents provided to <i>The Fifth Estate</i> also show that on Feb. 3, 1988, Moores wrote to then Airbus chairman Franz Josef Strauss, raising concerns that Airbus might not provide the Crown corporation with what’s known as a “deficiency guarantee” — an aircraft manufacturer’s guarantee of a plane’s future resale value.</p> <p>The Airbus chairman responded on March 29, affirming the guarantee would be in place.</p> <p>The next day, March 30, Air Canada’s board of directors met and approved the proposed Airbus purchase.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As the date in Cameron’s book indicated, 2 days after Air Canada board’s approval of the Airbus deal General Ramsey Withers became president of Moores’s lobby firm GCI.</p> <p>To whom the money went certainly mattered. The Fifth Estate reported Swiss bank accounts held by Schreiber and Moores, with one account codenamed Devon for “a Canadian politician”, and the Airbus company’s condition that commissions might not be paid “in the event of a major political change in Canada”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“IAL was a “shell company” - only a postbox and a bank account - controlled by Alberta-based German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber.</p> <p>…</p> <p>IAL was to be paid a commission of at least a half-a-million American dollars for each plane sold,” journalist Trish Wood narrated.</p> <p>“There was one particularly interesting clause: The contract would be canceled in the event of a major political change in Canada.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Three months after that, in October, 1988, IAL got its first payment: $5 million U.S., almost half of the $11 million U.S. that would flow into the company’s coffers over the next two years, according to bank records. The money came from the Banque Francaise du Commerce Exterieur, in Paris, a bank sometimes used by Airbus, the Fifth Estate report showed.</p> <p>From Liechtenstein, the money was then transferred to secret Swiss bank accounts held by Schreiber, the news program said. He and Moores both had accounts at a Zurich branch of the Swiss Bank Corp. Moores’ accounts dated back to 1986.</p> <p>In that year, accompanied by Schreiber, Moores had opened two accounts at the bank - one for himself, the other for “a Canadian politician,” an unnamed source told The Fifth Estate.</p> <p>The first account, No. 34107, was in Moores’ name.</p> <p>The other, No. 34117, had a code name attached: Devon.</p> <p>“Airbus was secretly trying to gain influence in Canada,” Wood said in her conclusion to last night’s broadcast. “The commissions were paid by Airbus, and moved through a series of financial transactions, but where all that money ended up is still a mystery.””</p> </blockquote> <p>The implication was that the Airbus money was for persons associated with Mulroney’s government, and that Moores might be looking after Mulroney’s personal interests through a Swiss bank account.</p> <p>Later in 2007 while fighting extradition to Germany to face criminal charges, Schreiber admitted to receiving $20 million, part of which went to Moores, for the Air Canada deal as I noted in February 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-polices-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-10/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 1)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… after Karlheinz Schreiber received around $20 million dollars of commissions from Airbus Industrie (an amount according to himself), Moores billed Schreiber at least a confirmed $1.3 million for his part of the commissions; the conventional wisdom is that Moores was a middle man for Schreiber in distributing millions of dollars of commissions to others in Canada”.</p> </blockquote> <p>Back in late March 1995, the Canadian commissions story wasn’t the only thing dogging Airbus.</p> <p>Days later on March 31, a Romanian Tarom airlines Airbus 310 crashed after take-off from Bucharest to Brussels, killing all 59 aboard, including 10 crew members and 49 passengers – all Europeans except a Thai and 3 Americans: U.S. Treasury Department official Mrs. Terry Chung and Christian missionaries Rev. Norman Hoyt and wife Virginia of Columbia International University in South Carolina. That Tarom flight earlier on March 15 had received a bomb threat, and this time someone on the ground witnessed an explosion. (“Crash kills all 59 on Romanian plane”, April 1, 1995, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>; and, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/01/world/crash-of-romanian-airliner-kills-all-59-aboard.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Crash of Romanian Airliner Kills All 59 Aboard</font></a>”, April 1, 1995, <em>The New York Times</em>)</p> <p>The next day, the death toll was revised to 60 to include a Tarom security guard on the flight “to collect a Romanian asylum-seeker”. Belgium’s ambassador in Romania said he was sure the investigators “would prove it was an accident”. (“One flight recorder damaged”, April 2, 1995, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>)</p> <p>Within 2 days, Tarom’s general manager said internal investigation has ruled out pilot error (“Investigators sift debris site of air crash: Pilot error unlikely cause, airline says”, April 3, 1995, <a href="http://www.thewhig.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Kingston Whig - Standard</em></font></a><strong></strong>).</p> <p>The airport’s director of air traffic control and a top Romanian forensic expert both said evidence pointed to an explosion (“Explosion downed Romanian jet: expert”, April 4, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A commission investigating the crash declined to comment until their work is finished. But Dr. Vladimir Belis, head of Bucharest's Forensic Institute, which is trying to identify the victims, said the way the body parts were burned “was very specific to an explosion.”</p> <p>Seven forensic experts from Belgium and two from the United States were assisting in the identification. Thirty-two of the people killed were Belgians and three were Americans.</p> <p>Even as investigators analyzed the plane's flight data recorders, a bomb scare yesterday caused new jitters at the carrier.</p> <p>Bucharest’s Otopeni Airport was closed for four hours after an anonymous caller claimed a bomb was planted aboard a Tarom jet bound for Paris, national radio quoted airport chief Constantin Tudose as saying. The plane made an emergency landing in Timisoara, in western Romania, and was searched.</p> <p>No bomb was discovered, but the plane was returned to Bucharest and another sent to Timisoara to fly the passengers to Paris.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Investigators were cautious about making any assessments before the analysis of the flight data and voice recorders is complete. They began decoding the voice recorder Sunday, and the data recorder was sent to England for analysis.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Ovidiu Traichoiu, director of the Otopeni Airport air traffic control, said all indications were that the accident was caused by an explosion, but added: “We don’t know whether it was a bomb or a technical defect.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Well, the Belgium ambassador was right. A week later the government investigation ruled out bombing, didn’t refer to explosion, and at completion in November 1997 blamed mechanical fault and pilot “incapacitation”, despite a 40-second late, last-moment recovery attempt by the co-pilot (“Europe Technical failure ruled in crash”, April 11, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>; “Pilot, throttle problems caused ’95 Romanian air crash: inquiry”, November 28, 1997, <a href="http://www.thestarphoenix.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Star – Phoenix</em></font></a>; <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/misc.transport.air-industry.cargo/aY9Mipzxvi0" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Air Bulletin, Vol. 2 No. 11</font></a>, November 28, 1997, Google Groups; “<a href="http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/tarom-a310-crash-pilot-was-incapacitated-30427/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Tarom A310 crash pilot was ‘incapacitated’</font></a>”, December 10, 1997, Flight Global; and, “<a href="http://cliffordlaw.com/success/?attorney&practice-area=aviation-litigation" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Record of Justice</font></a>” and “<a href="http://cliffordlaw.com/practice/aviation-law-accident-attorney/aviation-cases/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A Partial List of Our Aviation Cases</font></a>”, Clifford Law Offices).</p> <p>Only 30 days before the Bucharest disaster, on March 1 a Tarom Airbus A310 over Quebec on an international flight from Chicago to Amsterdam suddenly behaved uncontrollably, going rapidly up and down. A Canadian official investigation concluded that “a misrigged autopilot elevator servo control” and “the crew’s ineffective or inappropriate pitch control inputs” were to blame. (“<a href="http://www.bst-tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/aviation/1995/a95h0004/a95h0004.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">AVIATION OCCURRENCE REPORT, REPORT NUMBER A95H0004</font></a>”, 1995, Transportation Safety Board of Canada)</p> <p>And only months earlier on September 24, 1994, a Tarom Airbus A310 with 11 crew members and 173 passengers stumbled into a steep dive near Orly Airport in Paris, France, before the pilot regained control and landed it. The incident prompted French civil aviation authorities to issue an international warning about flying Airbus A310s (“Jet in steep dive over French airport”, September 25, 1994, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>; and, “French issue Airbus alert”, by Pierre Sparaco, October 24, 1994, <a href="http://www.aviationweek.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Aviation Week & Space Technology</em></font></a><strong></strong>).</p> <p>Airbus’s safety reputations weren’t great, nor were Romanian pilots’ skills.</p> <p>These earlier Tarom Airbus A310 troubles didn’t develop into accidents like the Bucharest crash, which was merely the latest of 4 Airbus commercial flight crashes in about a year, including: a Russian Aeroflot flight in Siberia on March 22, 1994, when the pilot let his daughter and then son take the control, which then suddenly moved on its own, with all 75 onboard dead; a (Taiwanese) China Airlines flight in Nagoya, Japan on April 26, 1994, partly blamed on high body alcohol levels of pilot and co-pilot, with 264 dead of 271 onboard; and a Korean Airlines flight on Chenju Island, South Korea on August 10, 1994, with no death of 158 onboard, but with Canadian pilot Barry Woods and Korean c-pilot facing criminal charges for fighting over landing control (“Pilot’s son at controls’ of Russian jet before fatal crash”, April 3, 1994, <a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Times – Colonist</em></font></a>; “At least 259 killed as Taiwanese plane crashes at airport in central Japan”, by David Thurber, April 27, 1994, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>; “Co-pilot in 264-death crash drunk by road standards, says Tokyo paper”, May 6, 1994, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>; “Doomed plane’s pilot grappled with sophisticated computer”, by David Holley, May 11, 1994, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>; “Treatment of Canadian by Koreans angers pilots; Captain involved in crash could face prison term”, by Mary Gooderham, August 30, 1994, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>; “Pilot back home after Korean ordeal; But Canadian will return to Seoul to face charges in crash”, by Carolyn Lewis, September 26, 1994, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>; “Russian jet crash more than just child’s play, investigator says”, by Julia Rubin, September 28, 1994,  and, “Mind & Matter Who’s in charge? The captain or the computer?”, April 29, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>In-between the 4 commercial flight crashes there was an Airbus test flight crash on June 30, 1994 in Toulouse, France, killing 7, making for a total of 11 fatal Airbus crashes in 7 years (“NEWS BRIEFING Airbus crashes on test flight in France”, July 1, 1994, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>; and, “Altitude cited as crash cause”, July 2, 1994, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Windsor Star</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Despite all that, Air Canada, privatized since 1989, announced in May 1995 it would buy a fleet of the new Airbus A340 instead of the new Boeing 777 (“Canadian airlines have no plan to order passenger-friendly 777”, May 19, 1995, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Boeing turned over the wide-body plane to United in a ceremony filled with songs of praise for the aircraft as the most passenger-friendly plane ever built.</p> <p>The 777 also has been ordered by British Airways and by 13 other airlines.</p> <p>However, it may be some time before Canadian travellers get to see the inside of the jetliner. Air Canada and Canadian Airlines International say they have no plans to order the 777.</p> <p>Air Canada is in the midst of an aggressive buying spree, but spokeswoman Sandie Dexter says it has opted for the Airbus Industrie A340 instead.</p> <p>The airline owns Airbus A320 aircraft, and Dexter says the similarity of cockpits means pilots trained on the A320 can also fly the A340.</p> <p>Canadian spokeswoman Laurie Schild says a committee is forming a plan to renew the airline’s fleet, but so far the 777 is not part of that picture.”</p> </blockquote> <p>This verified Pierre Jeanniot’s assertion that Air Canada would buy Airbus planes without any sales commission – even with all the deadly Airbus accidents!</p> <p>In fact, at this time the city of Montreal prepared for the emergency scenario of an Airbus plane crash onto the city (“Coping with catastrophe; Simulated disaster conducted to test local emergency plan”, May 19, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“An Airbus flying from North Ireland to New York lost an engine on Metropolitan Blvd. during rush hour yesterday morning then crashed on a CP freight train near the Blue Bonnets raceway, killing 207 people and 50 horses.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The crash and ensuing rescue operations were part of a simulation performed inside one of the Montreal Urban Community's three emergency-measures centres to see how Civil Protection, the MUC, police, medical and other crews would respond to a major disaster in the MUC.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“It was not one of the worse scenarios but it was bad enough,” said Paul St-Pierre, head of the operation - code-named Icarus - which was staged in the MUC’s emergency measures office, in the city’s water-filtration plant in the east end.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Cameron’s book, Aerospatiale SA of France owned 37.9% of Airbus shares, and Montreal was also Brian Mulroney’s home.</p> <p>Also around this time, Boeing and Airbus planned to fully go separate ways and scrap a $10 billion joint project on a next-century, 800-seat superjumbo jet (“Plans for 800-seat plane axed; Boeing, Airbus too good at rivalry for jet partnership”, by Joanna Walters, May 20, 1995, and, “Boeing, Airbus partners shelve plans for ‘super-jumbo’ jet”, by Paul Sloan, July 11, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Regardless of Airbus’s fortune and bad breaks, Stevie Cameron’s book was selling well, surpassing the 100, 000-copy mark (“Celebrities”, May 3, 1995, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>).</p> <p>But that bestseller status was more of a consolation for Cameron’s ambitious goals, because not many seemed to care about the Airbus commissions story; certainly not the RCMP or Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s government, as journalist Paul Palango bitterly lamented (“Canada ignores a scandal; $40 million in Airbus kickbacks gets a yawn instead of an inquiry”, by Paul Palango, June 1, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Fifth Estate’s certainly wasn’t the first story about the Airbus deal. Since the purchase was announced, rumors had been swirling about payoffs to top government officials. Newspapers in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa had devoted much time and effort in attempting to track down leads. Airbus’s competitor, U.S.-based Boeing Co., had even launched a complaint at one point that the fix was in, but later withdrew it. This happened at about the same time the federal government allowed Boeing to purchase de Havilland Aircraft in Toronto.</p> <p>An investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police went nowhere, which seemed to be no accident either. Members of the force wanted to track down the Airbus payments, but say they were prevented from doing so. RCMP insiders such as former deputy commissioner Hank Jensen and former assistant commissioner Rod Stamler have gone on record as saying they believe the Mulroney government used its political power to effectively block the police from conducting a thorough and complete investigation of the Airbus deal, among other things.</p> <p>In its investigation, The Fifth Estate found the best evidence to date that something shady took place in the Airbus sale. Using a copy of Airbus Industries’s own contract with Air Canada, The Fifth Estate was able to trace payments through a series of bank accounts and shadowy companies in France, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.</p> <p>Money was paid to people in Canada who were trying to hide their involvement in the transaction. Why were they afraid to make themselves known?</p> <p>The answer is obvious.</p> <p>One would have thought, therefore, that after the CBC broadcast its program, there would be an uproar in Parliament and the media. But no, this is Canada. The world of politics and journalism doesn't work quite that way here any more.</p> <p>Politicians yawned and said the story was old news. The Canadian media, almost without exception, labeled The Fifth Estate story as old news or whatever excuse was needed to conveniently pass on it. The story disappeared from sight faster than a bombed airplane in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The federal government and the RCMP each ignored the story, too, arguing that there was no evidence that a crime had been committed. After all, an RCMP spokesman told a reporter, the fact that Airbus Industries chose to pay a commission on a sale was not a criminal act.</p> <p>It wasn’t?</p> <p>…</p> <p>After watching The Fifth Estate story and reading Stevie Cameron's book On the Take and my own, Above The Law, ordinary citizens can’t help but be disconcerted by the unwillingness of the Chretien government and the RCMP to take action. It’s in the public interest that this issue be pursued.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In virtually every other Western democracy in recent years, serious and successful investigations have been mounted against former government and business leaders for corruption. Only in Canada has such judicial scrutiny failed to materialize.</p> <p>Governments here seem reluctant to investigate their predecessors because their successors might investigate them. What kind of honesty is that?”</p> </blockquote> <p>Palango’s explanation made sense that the Chretien government didn’t want to investigate the former Mulroney government for fear that itself would become target of the next government. But that still could not explain why most of the media were dismissive of the story.</p> <p>Meanwhile, Mulroney’s circle were courted by some among international dictatorships accused of not only corruption but murder (“Former Tory minister to defend ex-dictator; Danis hired for Bangladeshi murder trial”, by Alexander Norris, July 15, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A former Tory politician who served in Brian Mulroney's government has been hired to act as lead defence lawyer in the politically charged murder trial of a onetime military dictator of Bangladesh.</p> <p>Marcel Danis, who was Canada's labor minister from 1991 to 1993, is to leave Montreal today for Bangladesh after being retained by the Jatiya Party of former strongman Hussain Muhammad Ershad to act in Ershad's defence team.</p> <p>Ershad - who ruled the impoverished Asian nation with an iron fist from 1982 to 1990 and is now in jail for corruption - is charged, with four retired army officers, with murdering General Abul Manzoor in 1981.</p> <p>Manzoor was slain after a failed coup attempt that he was said to have led.</p> <p>While Ershad was in power, his regime was the target of numerous complaints from human-rights groups about torture, detention without trial, political imprisonment and other forms of repression.</p> <p>Yesterday, the former MP’s association with the former dictator was greeted with consternation by some professors at Concordia University, where Danis is now employed as vice-dean in the faculty of arts.</p> <p>“I have trouble with someone who works at my university travelling halfway around the world to defend one of the biggest crooks, a criminal of big time proportions," said economics professor James McIntosh, who worked in Bangladesh while Ershad was in power.””</p> </blockquote> <p>To be fair, not all under Brian Mulroney enjoyed that kind of reputation or association. His successor Kim Campbell, to whom I had faxed documents critical of Mulroney, said in her new Vancouver radio show that Cameron’s book was “very interesting” (“IT’S C-KIM!: Ex-PM woos new riding in radio talk-show land”, by Jason Proctor, August 1, 1995, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Province</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“She’s already ruled the country. The airwaves should be a cinch.</p> <p>Still, former prime minister Kim Campbell was a little white- faced yesterday as she tensely sat in her chair and cleared her throat before kicking off her latest career, as Vancouver’s newest CKNW talk-show maven.</p> <p>“Good morning, this is Kim Campbell,” she said, looking down at the script in front of her.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Campbell, 48, invited listeners to ask her anything, but few took the opportunity.</p> <p>“It is indeed an honor to be the first to talk to the right honorable Kim talk-show host,” said the first caller, kicking off a love-fest that lasted until about Caller 6.</p> <p>“You keep trying to push your book. I wonder if you’ve read Stevie Cameron’s book, On The Take,” (an expose of corruption during the years when Brian Mulroney was Tory prime minister,) the first negative caller said.</p> <p>“I thought it was very interesting,” Campbell replied.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Hmm, more interesting to Kim Campbell than to Jean Chretien whose Liberals had decimated Campbell’s Tories in October 1993.</p> <p>Airbus’s success on the international market emboldened the global ambition of an European banker like Hans Baer, chairman of the 105-year-old Julius Baer Group headquartered in Switzerland, to compete with the United States (“Swiss banker blunt in his views; U.S. dollar won’t remain world leader, Quebec separation not a wise move”, by James Ferrabee, September 23, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Hans Baer, true to form, soars like an eagle over the Alps when discussing the state of the world’s financial and economic systems.</p> <p>But he also has blunt views he isn’t shy to express on everything from the future of the U.S. dollar as a world currency, which he feels is bleak, to Quebec separatism, which he calls a form of economic suicide.</p> <p>Baer, chairman of the 105-year-old Julius Baer Group with headquarters in Zurich, said a single European currency is inevitable, although he sees turmoil in the markets before the actual implementation date in 1999.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“The Germans feel threatened because the only currency that’s better (than a single currency) is the deutsche mark and the only central bank that is <br />better is the Bundesbank.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>“The U.S. economic figures aren’t very good. The budget situation is better but the balance of payments is worse,” said Baer, whose firm, with 1,400 employees worldwide, opened its first office in Canada two years ago.</p> <p>“The government in the U.S. operates on benign neglect. (President) Clinton doesn’t care where the dollar goes,” he said.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“After you have exported jobs, what else can you export?” he asked. He pointed to the aircraft industry, which the U.S. once dominated.</p> <p>“Once the largest planes were made by American companies, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. Now Airbus has seriously challenged them.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Another is that European firms like Swiss-based Nestle, the largest food-products company in the world, with annual sales of $60 billion Canadian, <br />have world-wide exposure.</p> <p>“After all, when we buy Nestle, we buy the world,” said Baer.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Buying more Airbus planes but getting prepared for one to crash onto Montreal, could be Hans Baer’s advice. Not being bothered with where the Airbus commissions went in Canada, might be like U.S. President Bill Clinton’s “benign neglect”.</p> <p>A few days after the appearance of Han Baer’s Canadian media interview, on September 29 Justice Department lawyer Kimberly Prost sent a letter to the Swiss authorities as part of an RCMP criminal investigation of possible “criminal activity” by Brian Mulroney, triggering a libel lawsuit from Mulroney as I noted in March 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-11/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 2)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… as for the real story of how the Justice Department letter dated September 29, 1995 and signed by senior counsel Kimberly Prost – another woman – came to include the reference “criminal activities carried out by the former prime minister”, it has never been adequately explained, i.e., who was, or were, behind the criminally accusatory language that would result in a $50 million defamation lawsuit from Mr. Mulroney and over $2 million of legal-settlement costs by the government.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney’s lawsuit against the Canadian government and RCMP would become the focus of the Airbus Affair.</p> <p>But just before that, news involving Prime Minister Jean Chretien shocked many Canadians.</p> <p>On October 30, 1995, a Quebec referendum called by the separatist Parti Quebecois government over whether to seek sovereignty from Canada was defeated by a razor-thin margin of 50.6% No over 49.4% Yes. A French Canadian himself, Chretien led the national campaign for the No side and was vilified in Quebec, but overall was viewed positively in English Canada (“CANADA’S FUTURE: Majority back PM’s role in unity debate, poll finds; Only Quebecers consider Chretien a liability to talks”, by Joan Bryden, November 5, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>).</p> <p>But the outcome’s narrow margin was a cause of uncertainty for businesses and the financial market, as journalist David Israelson observed (“Canadian roulette; Endless gaming over Canada’s future is trying the patience of foreign investors and we're all paying for it”, by David Israelson, November 5, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Canada has just closed its eyes, prayed and played another round of referendum roulette.</p> <p>Who won and who lost? “We won,” said Prime Minister Jean Chretien, downplaying the narrowness of the 50.6 per cent versus 49.4 per cent federalist victory in last Monday’s vote in Quebec.</p> <p>But did we?</p> <p>In the great global casino - the international, around-the-clock money markets – it’s a bit more dicey.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The opposition Reform party led by leader Preston Manning blamed Chretien for nearly losing Canada; Chretien had taken compromising stands toward the larger Official Opposition party, separatist Bloc Quebecois as journalist Lorne Gunter pointed out (“Liberals point fingers at Reform”, by Lorne Gunter, November 4, 1995, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Two days after Quebecers nearly voted to rip Canada apart, Reform leader Preston Manning accused Prime Minister Jean Chretien of bringing the country to “the brink of disaster,” with “his lame-brained strategy” of non-involvement in the sovereignty referendum.</p> <p>Chretien’s actions had been “sickening,” “pathetic” and “tragic,” Manning charged. “(His) gross miscalculations almost cost us the country.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>In each of the first two sessions of this Parliament, the Liberals have used their majority to assure that BQ MPs have become vice-chairs of all Commons committees. The BQ go along with the Liberals’ social engineering programs more readily than Reformers.</p> <p>For two days after the referendum, the Liberals levelled no criticism at the Bloc. Instead, every time the subject came up, the Liberals turned their wrath on Reform.</p> <p>On referendum day, Manning proposed that O Canada be sung each Wednesday in the Commons. The Liberals defeated the motion out of deference to the Bloc MPs, all 53 of whom were boycotting the House that day to signal their hatred for Canada.</p> <p>Halifax Liberal MP Mary Clancy, summed up the Liberals’ utter disdain for Reformers when she scoffed, “For those creatures to suggest a government led by Jean Chretien doesn’t want to sing O Canada, I think it’s reprehensible.””</p> </blockquote> <p>The Canadian-flag and Quebec-flag waving scenes of the referendum campaign prodded <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>’s excerpt, on November 4, of a memoir by Vancouver Stock Exchange Chairman Patrick Reid on the Canadian flag’s creation in November 1964 (“A wild colonial boy tames the flag problem”, by Patrick Reid, November 4, 1995, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“[John] Matheson, a disabled war veteran, entered Parliament in 1961 and became the chosen executor of Lester Pearson's plan to have a new Canadian flag by 1965. He was totally and courageously committed to a symbolic renewal that he hoped would ease the divisions that were all too apparent as Canada approached its Centennial in 1967. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Tom Wood, our chief designer, suggested Jacques Saint-Cyr for the job. …</p> <p>Jacques produced a 13-point leaf, not dissimilar to one that he had designed for a recent Canadian exhibit in Europe. Matheson appeared to be warming to that particular version. We agreed to meet again on Nov. 6, after Jacques had had a chance to work up some variants. …</p> <p>Matheson phoned to say that he had to have a flag at the prime minister’s residence on the morning of Nov. 7. It would be flown there for the PM’s inspection when he got up. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>I told Matheson what was proposed. He had no objection except that time was running out. Jacques was already on a redesign, and an hour later we had a precise, 11-point, maple leaf.</p> <p>…</p> <p>… About 2 a.m. the flag was ready and Ken Donovan set off for Sussex Drive. He was to phone when he had made the delivery.</p> <p>Ken was almost incoherent when he telephoned to say that the RCMP security guard at the gate had taken one look at his beaten-up old car and refused him admission. He was persuaded to go back and give the flag to the guard. We would telephone and make sure it was picked up.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The final design was sent to Matheson on Nov. 9. We had been able to demonstrate that the natural maple leaf became a blob as it receded, while our design maintained its outline and identity.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As the tale went, the first finished Canadian flag – of the last-to-final design by chief designer Tom Wood and actual designer Jacques Saint-Cyr – was delivered in the wee hours of November 7 to the Prime Minister’s residence at Sussex Drive in Ottawa for then Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s inspection, but was refused entry by the RCMP guard due to the deliverer’s “beaten-up old car”.</p> <p>Part of the flag design project in 1964, Patrick Reid is today Chairman of the Rick Hansen Foundation (“<a href="http://www.leadership-canada.com/en/leadersdetail.aspx?lId=228" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Reid, Patrick, O.C., M.C., C.D.</font></a>”, Leadership Canada).</p> <p>31 years later Prime Minister Jean Chretien had no time for such niceties. On November 4 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, and Chretien had to go to Israel for the funeral and proceed to other overseas visits (“PM to attend funeral”, by David Vienneau, November 5, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Officials in Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s office were scrambling last night to make arrangements for him to attend Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral tomorrow.</p> <p>“I will be leaving Canada with my wife (Aline) to be present at the funeral of Prime Minister Rabin,” a saddened Prime Minister told reporters last night. “I will be back” Nov. 19.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In the wee hours of November 5, a knife-wielding intruder, 34-year-old Andre Dallaire from Quebec, slipped inside the Prime Minister’s residence and came face to face with Mrs. Aline Chretien, who quickly retreated to their bedroom, locked the doors and called RCMP guards, who took 10 minutes to arrive and arrest the man holding an open jackknife outside the main bedroom door (“PM says wife kept assailant out of bedroom; Couple waited up to 10 minutes for police arrival”, by Mike Blanchfield, November 6, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““I would like to say that my wife did not panic,” Chretien said before boarding a plane to Israel for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin.</p> <p>“I think that I’m lucky that she was there. And I’m grateful.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>With Aline at his side, Chretien was solemn but did not appear shaken as he spoke of the incident.</p> <p>“Around a quarter to three, my wife heard a noise. She heard somebody walking in the house,” Chretien said.</p> <p>He was not awakened until Aline slammed the door shut and locked it after coming face-to-face with a man wearing glasses and a moustache. She also locked a second bedroom door.</p> <p>“She called police right away and I could not believe what she was telling me,” he said. The Mounties arrested the man, who was carrying an open jackknife, after responding to the bedroom phone call “within six or 10 minutes, I don’t know,” Chretien added.</p> <p>Police charged Andre Dallaire, 34, of the Montreal suburb of Longueuil, with several offences, including break and enter and possession of a weapon. He was to appear in court this morning.</p> <p>Police in Longueuil said Dallaire is a convenience store worker whose family says he has a history of psychiatric problems. His family reported him missing on Wednesday.</p> <p>It is well-known that 24 Sussex is staffed around the clock by Mounties and has alarms and cameras. It is enclosed by a wall made of stone and wrought iron and sits atop a cliff overlooking the Ottawa River.</p> <p>“When I go over there, I practically have to take a lie detector test,” said one Chretien aide.</p> <p>In a press release, the Mounties said the Chretiens’ “lives could have been in danger.”</p> <p>Insp. Jean St-Cyr, an RCMP spokesman, said the incident was under investigation and security measures would be reviewed. He could not explain how the man entered the grounds or how he made it to the bedroom door undetected.</p> <p>“We don’t have much to go on. We have to presume he jumped the fence somewhere,” he said.</p> <p>St-Cyr said RCMP officers are on duty outside the house at all times. “There were some on the grounds, but not in the home. We are not in the house usually.”</p> <p>One former resident, Margaret Kemper, the ex-wife of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, said it didn’t surprise her to hear someone had got inside the house without being detected.</p> <p>“I can see it happening easily. There are all kinds of ways to get into the house,” she said Sunday, recounting that, in 1969, a woman got into the house without the RCMP knowing about it. Trudeau, she said, found the woman locked in his bedroom closet.</p> <p>Kemper, who married Trudeau in 1971 and separated from him in 1977, speculated the intruder got into the house through either a side door or a door at the rear of the house. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Ottawa-Carleton police chief Brian Ford said, “It’s beyond me how it could happen . . . (but) It happens from time to time, people get through a security system. It doesn’t necessarily mean people aren’t doing their jobs.</p> <p>…</p> <p>A spokesman for Solicitor General Herb Gray said the minister will comment only when he has a full report.</p> <p>Last year, Gray expressed concern about Chretien’s security when he was jostled by a crowd in Mexico while trying to pay respects to a slain <br />presidential candidate.</p> <p>In May, a man armed with a crossbow entered the Winnipeg Convention Centre shortly before Chretien arrived to deliver a speech. He was arrested <br />without incident.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As Pierre Trudeau’s ex-wife Margaret Kemper said, an undetected intrusion at 24 Sussex Drive had happened before but that intruder meant romance with Trudeau.</p> <p>RCMP spokesman Inspector Jean St-Cyr, who said there were guards outside but usually not in the house, happened to have the same uncommon surname as the Canadian flag’s designer Jacques Saint-Cyr in <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>‘s tale just the day before the intrusion, that the first Canadian flag’s delivery to Lester Pearson at the residence couldn’t get past RCMP guards in the early morning of November 7, 1964.</p> <p>I don’t doubt the patriotism of the iconic Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but this oversight occurred just before the eve – the Chretiens would be in Israel – of the 31st anniversary of that Canadian flag delivery rejection; Stevie Cameron’s 1994 book publisher, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, had served her stories of Mulroney-circle corruption to the public on the eve of the anniversary of the Chretien Liberals’ trouncing of the Mulroney Tories under Kim Campbell.</p> <p>Safety for the leader of the peaceful Canada was so easily breached just as he was going to pay tribute to the assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin – worse than Chretien’s 1994 visit to Mexico when the ruling party’s presidential candidate was assassinated, which I commented on in May 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 5)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“While [RCMP Commissioner Norman] Inkster’s resignation in 1994 was expected to give the Liberal government a fresh start in gun control at home, it also took place amid the Liberals’ retreat from its election promise of higher priority for international human rights, to focus on the economy and business; and as if that had not been enough, prime minister Chretien’s first official foreign visit – to Mexico instead of traditionally to the U.S. – in March 1994 was marred by the assassination by gunshot of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that had ruled uninterruptedly for 65 years) just before Chretien’s arrival, by a large and angry mob shouting “out” while Chretien attempted but failed to pay respect to the body of the slain, and by a rare type of rebuttal of Chretien’s notion that Mexican democracy and Canadian democracy were just different types – from Subcomandante Marcos of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in a jungle interview in Chiapas, Mexico.</p> <p>Subcomandante Marcos’s criticism of Chretien was voiced at a time when Canadian native leaders had been expressing support for more rights (including land-title rights) for the Mexican Mayans in light of swift acceptance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by the new Chretien government – an agreement that had been negotiated by the Mulroney government and had contributed to its unpopularity, and one that Chretien during the election campaign had talked about renegotiating.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Defeating Mulroney’s party led by a woman might not be that hard, as the Liberals’ Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and John Turner had ruled 2/3 of the time from 1964 to 1993 over the Tories’ Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell, but it gave Chretien a “free” new start.</p> <p>It was immediately disclosed that RCMP officers did not follow the standard procedure to rush into the house, but surrounded it outside for 6-7 minutes (“Mounties admit serious mistakes in protecting PM”, by Dianne Rinehart, November 7, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Instead of following procedure and rushing to the aid of Chretien and his wife, Aline, officers made a mistake by surrounding the house first, which delayed response to her call for help by seven minutes.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“We expect immediate response. We did not get immediate response,” RCMP Commissioner Phil Murray told reporters.</p> <p>The threat to the lives of the Chretiens caused an uproar in the Commons as Reform MP Deborah Grey said the security breach has upset Canadians.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Grey said the seven-minute delay in getting to the prime minister’s bedroom was unacceptable.</p> <p>“If (Aline Chretien) had called the fire department, they would have been there in 3-1/2 minutes.”</p> <p>Murray said he was embarrassed and angry that the officers did not act first to protect the Chretiens’ lives.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“A judgment call was made (not to rush in immediately) and it was not in keeping with our operational procedure,” Murray said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of it.””</p> </blockquote> <p>According to RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, the intruder was on the house ground for possibly 45 minutes total; Assistant Commissioner Wayne Martel in charge of VIP security would now conduct an internal inquiry (“Quiet man ‘wanted to kill’ PM; Armed man roamed 24 Sussex for 45 minutes; Referendum motive possible; RCMP conduct inquiry into security”, by Leonard Stern, Dave Rogers and April Lindgren, November 7, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Meanwhile, Solicitor General Herb Gray insisted Monday that the force could be relied upon to investigate its own performance and determine what <br />went wrong with security at 24 Sussex.</p> <p>A team of security experts led by Assistant Commissioner Wayne Martel will conduct the inquiry.</p> <p>Martel is responsible for the prime minister’s security, as well as the security for visiting heads of state, the governor general, diplomats, and federal cabinet ministers.</p> <p>“He is in charge of the whole protective detail of the RCMP but he is not involved personally in the security of the prime minister,” said RCMP spokesman Sgt. Pierre Patenaude.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Assistant RCMP commissioner Bryan McConnell said investigators have determined the intruder was on the premises nearly 45 minutes before his <br />arrest. But RCMP officers didn’t learn of the situation until Aline Chretien phoned them at 3 a.m. McConnell said the intruder, armed with a jackknife, <br />was calm and offered no resistance when officers stormed the residence.</p> <p>McConnell would not say if there are electronic security devices at 24 Sussex. But CBC News reported Monday night that a security system inside the <br />sprawling mansion was not working Sunday and that three RCMP officers were on duty. Officials did not comment on the report.”</p> </blockquote> <p>According to Dianne Rinehart’s news report quoted earlier, RCMP guards at Chretien’s residence were not those protecting his travel security, but regular cops:</p> <blockquote> <p>“John Thompson, an expert on security and terrorism at the Mackenzie Institute in Toronto, said there’s no conflict in the RCMP investigating itself.</p> <p>But he said the report might look like a “whitewash” because the RCMP will be reluctant to release security details to the public.</p> <p>RCMP officers who guard 24 Sussex Drive are members of a detachment assigned to protect the residences of the prime minister and governor general.</p> <p>They do not receive intensive training given to the RCMP’s protective service, whose members accompany Chretien when he travels, Inspector Jean St-Cyr said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Meeting reporters on his way from Rabin’s funeral to a British Commonwealth summit in Auckland, New Zealand, Chretien told a tale of grabbing an Inuit carving as weapon just in case, and maintaining his sense of humor (“PM grabbed carving to use as weapon Intruder ‘was six feet from my bed,’ Chretien says”, by David Vienneau, November 8, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““He was about six feet away from my bed,” Chretien said in shedding more light on the 3 a.m. incident.</p> <p>“It was good, in a way, that he had a knife. It was a good thing he didn’t have a gun. I probably would not have survived to wake up.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Chretien had grabbed a soapstone carving of a bird and he was ready to defend his wife and himself if necessary.</p> <p>“He’d have had a headache,” Chretien said.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“He was a good-looking guy but he had a strange look in his eyes,” Chretien said, explaining that while in his housecoat he went to see the individual after he had been handcuffed and arrested.”</p> </blockquote> <p>A good-looking guy looking for a headache.</p> <p>Canadian artists promptly called for a review of a government decision to close the Canada Council's art bank, which furnished art for official residences (“PM made case for art funding: group: No Mounties in sight, Chretien had sculpture for defence”, November 9, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““Unlike the RCMP, art was there when the prime minister needed it,” Greg Graham of Canadian Artists’ Representation said in a statement yesterday.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Graham, whose group represents 2,000 painters, sculptors and other artists, said if the Canada Council had proceeded with plans last spring to close its art bank, the Inuit sculpture might not have been in the bedroom.</p> <p>Most of the art at official government residences is on loan or rented from the art bank, although Chretien is known to be a collector of Inuit art.</p> <p>“We once again call on the Canada Council to re-evaluate their decision to close the art bank. This is now a matter of national security,” Graham <br />said, tongue in cheek.”</p> </blockquote> <p>This type of proud Canadian value promotion hit newspaper front pages, but the Inuit bird sculpture was Chretien’s own (“Break-in finally puts Art Bank on front page”, by Ann Duncan, November 18. 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Art’s role in this was not only a sculpture as weapon but one RCMP guard being from the famous Musical Ride (“PM’s RCMP guard called unqualified; One officer culled from Musical Ride, none had special training, Reform says”, November 9, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Now Reform Party House Leader Deborah Gray has offered a possible explanation for the grave security lapse. Based on a tip that apparently came from inside the force, Ms. Gray said yesterday the three officers on duty on Saturday night were inexperienced, had no special training in security work and one of them “was culled from The Musical Ride.”</p> <p>Possibly he was waiting for his horse to circle the house before riding to the rescue, she said. Possibly he was waiting for orders from one of the three senior officers who were supposed to be on 24-hour call that night, but according to Ms. Gray, did not answer their cellular telephones.</p> <p>Ms. Gray said her party had received a telephone tip about the unanswered cell phones and the lack of training in security.</p> <p>Like the Mounties on the Musical Ride, Ms. Gray said the investigation “is going to go round and round in typical Herb Gray (Solicitor-General, responsible for the RCMP) fashion and go nowhere.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Perhaps the RCMP anticipated another Canadian-flag delivery and wanted a Musical Ride to do it right this time.</p> <p>In fact, Andre Dallaire tripped an alarm but it was ignored by RCMP guards, who thought it was an animal. With a rock he failed to break the front door, succeeding later at a west-side door, and he even waved at the surveillance cameras, surprised by the lack of police response (“Sussex Dr. intruder waved at cameras; Alarm sounded but apparently was ignored”, by Tim Harper, November 10, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“An intruder who entered the home of Prime Minister Jean Chretien waved at RCMP surveillance cameras in an apparently confused effort to be deterred, sources told The Star yesterday.</p> <p>The sources also said the man tripped a perimeter alarm that sounded in the RCMP gatehouse at 24 Sussex Dr. when he entered the grounds early Sunday.</p> <p>But that was apparently ignored.</p> <p>Sources said that was likely because animals climbing through the fences routinely tripped the alarm.</p> <p>The sources also say the man made two attempts to enter Chretien’s residence.</p> <p>The first try, they say, was unsuccessful because the door withstood an attempt to break it down with a rock.</p> <p>The suspect then went to a western entrance and tried again - this time, successfully.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Sources say the intruder spent more than 20 minutes on the grounds in what appeared to be bewilderment, unable to understand why his movements went undetected by RCMP officers.</p> <p>“He basically moved one step at a time, even at one point waving at a surveillance camera,” a source said last night.</p> <p>“It wasn’t like he was prowling. This wasn’t a James Bond operation. He waited for someone to show up, but nobody came.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Chretien asserted that Quebec separatist verbal attacks on him during the referendum campaign might be to blame for a “deranged” intruder (“I felt my life was in danger during break-in: PM”, by Rob Carrick, November 8, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Chretien drew a troubling parallel between the emotions unleashed in the Quebec referendum and the fanaticism that led to the assassination of Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin.</p> <p>He mused about how he was called a “traitor” during the referendum campaign, just as Rabin was called a traitor by extremists who opposed the Israeli leader’s peace attempts in the Middle East.</p> <p>“In my case, too, some adjectives were used that might have excited deranged minds.”</p> <p>Chretien was in Jerusalem on Monday for the funeral of Rabin, who was assassinated by a gunman on Saturday.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Quebec separatist dimension was confirmed by Andre Dallaire in a media interview, who was held at Royal Ottawa Hospital undergoing psychiatric assessment, charged with attempted murder (“Sovereigntist leaders too tame -- Dallaire”, November 15, 1995, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““I didn’t vote (in the Oct. 30 referendum) because I am an independantist,” Andre Dallaire told the Toronto Sun in a phone interview from the Royal Ottawa Hospital, where he is being held for psychiatric assessment until his next court date.</p> <p>Dallaire said he felt that Premier Jacques Parizeau’s Parti Quebecois should have moved more strongly toward founding a separate country.</p> <p>“I am much better than Parizeau,” he said. “I would like an independent state like France or Germany.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>He faces charges of attempted murder, breaking and entering, being unlawfully in a dwelling and possession of a weapon.</p> <p>But said he would be “very surprised” when he offers his explanation of events.</p> <p>“I’ll speak the truth in the courtroom,” he said. “I am a gentle man and I am a good man.”</p> <p>Dallaire will plead not guilty to the charge of attempting to kill the prime minister, his lawyer said Monday.</p> <p>John Hale argued Dallaire did not have the intent to kill, nor did he take steps toward committing murder.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So instead of a Canadian-flag waving fan the Mounties let slip a man wishing to make Quebec independent, i.e., break up Canada, but he didn’t try to stab Mrs. Chretien or break into the bedroom.</p> <p>Besides, Dallaire’s mind was more confused than “deranged”: it wasn’t easy to be both a Quebecer and the leader of Canada; the Reform party had hit hard on Chretien’s “lame-brained strategy” in the referendum campaign and his compromising gestures toward Bloc Quebecois. </p> <p>RCMP management took actions to suspend 4 officers onsite that night, and reassigned 3 of their supervisors, as A/Comm. Bryan McConnell announced (“4 Mounties suspended over Sussex Dr. break-in: 3 supervisors reassigned after incident at Chretien’s residence”, by Jim Bronzkill, November 11, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The four suspended Mounties were on duty at 24 Sussex Dr. when an intruder armed with an open jackknife confronted Jean Chretien's wife outside the couple’s bedroom early Sunday.</p> <p>They failed in their primary duty to protect life and property, Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell said yesterday.</p> <p>“Decisions were made that put the lives of the prime minister and Madame Chretien in danger. That is totally unacceptable and falls below the standards of conduct expected of a member of the RCMP.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Meanwhile, three officers in supervisory jobs have been reassigned.</p> <p>The RCMP , citing privacy provisions, would not make public names or ranks.</p> <p>But Inspector Jean St. Cyr said the four suspended members each had at least five years of experience on the force.”</p> </blockquote> <p>These cops were no rookies, even if not the VIP-protection type.</p> <p>But the media learned 2 of the 4 onsite officers were of the lowest rank, “special constables”, and the reassigned supervisors were already on their way out in pre-planned downsizing (“Mounties’ transfer not tied to break-in; Downsizing explains move at 24 Sussex”, by Leonard Stern, November 16, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Two of the four Mounties on duty that night were special constables, the lowest rank in the force and the one with the least training.</p> <p>…</p> <p>But the three officers -- Supt. Claude Sweeney, Insp. Jean Dube and Staff Sgt. Frank Trottier -- knew before the break-in that their positions were being eliminated.</p> <p>Several sources say that, earlier this year, McConnell was involved with a report recommending that Sweeney’s position be downgraded to inspector, and that those of Dube and Trottier be eliminated.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Sweeney, Trottier and Dube would not comment on McConnell’s statement that their departures were connected to the break-in.</p> <p>Sweeney is taking a government buyout. Dube is the operations officer in the executive and diplomatic protection section. Trottier is in charge of the detachment that includes the prime minister’s and governor general’s residences. Dube and Trottier said questions should be directed to McConnell.”</p> </blockquote> <p>An RCMP employee representative, Staff Sergeant Joe Brennan, complained that the disciplinary actions favored the senior officers:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Rank-and-file police officers are also upset at the way top RCMP officers saddled junior ranks with the blame for the break-in.</p> <p>Staff Sgt. Joe Brennan, the RCMP staff relations representative, said that McConnell’s statement about senior officers being held accountable for the break-in was misleading.</p> <p>“The statement is true that they were re-assigned, but they were going anyway,” he said. “Right now, the cat is being let out of the bag, and senior people have (yet) to be held accountable.””</p> </blockquote> <p>It looked like a potential RCMP “whitewash” security expert John Thompson was predicting as quoted earlier. But in following S/Sgt. Joe Brennan’s lead, the media also missed the point of the planned downsizing of the senior ranks: downgrading the supervisory ranks for Chretien’s security, similar to assigning lowest-rank cops to his residence, had been in the works.</p> <p>Canadian Police Association president Neal Jessop sent a letter to Solicitor General Herb Gray, listing a litany of security problems at the prime minister’s residence and requesting an independent review (“Review of break-in at PM’s home demanded; Full story of incident needed, police association says in letter to Solicitor-General”, November 16, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“People are not being told the full story of what led to the security breach, Canadian Police Association president Neal Jessop says in a letter to Solicitor-General Herb Gray.</p> <p>“The public is only able to hear the explanation offered by those RCMP management personnel whose responsibility it was to ensure adequate security,” says the letter released late yesterday.</p> <p>The association represents 40,000 police officers across Canada, including many RCMP members.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The association says it has heard that: </p> <ul> <li>TV monitors for the security camera system may have been low-quality, providing a picture so poor the officers could not tell the difference between a Mountie and an intruder; </li> <li>Officers responsible for security had never been allowed in the house before that night and were therefore unfamiliar with the layout; </li> <li>On-site security staff had submitted four reports since 1989 that recommended upgrading security at the residence, but all were ignored or refused by RCMP management or the Prime Minister's Office. </li> </ul> <p>…</p> <p>The letter says the unanswered questions about the event do not “justify the convenient silence RCMP management seeks to impose.””</p> </blockquote> <p>So since when Mulroney’s family lived there in 1989, the RCMP guards had submitted 4 reports to request upgrades but were ignored.</p> <p>Hard to believe that security “home improvement” could fall through the cracks like this.</p> <p>Criticisms of RCMP management by S/Sgt. Joe Brennan, “the elected staff representative for A Division”, prompted RCMP “A” Division commander, A/Comm. Bryan McConnell, to issue a formal statement that the 3 supervisors’ transfers were taking place 4 months sooner due to the incident; but Brennan still felt the onsite junior cops shouldn’t be blamed (“RCMP boss disputes Mountie’s version of disciplinary action; Assistant commissioner admits reassigned supervisors’ jobs were to be abolished but says severe punishment was in ending positions early”, by Hugh Winsor, November 17, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Assistant Commissioner Brian McConnell, commander of the RCMP’s A Division, which includes responsibility for security at 24 Sussex Drive, issued a statement yesterday disputing an accusation from a Mountie employee suggesting that the force has been fibbing about disciplinary measures taken.</p> <p>…</p> <p>When he announced last week that four officers on duty at 24 Sussex Drive had been suspended and three of their supervisors had been reassigned, Mr. McConnell said the reassignments were made “because supervisors must be accountable for the actions of their units.” He also said the action taken was severe, “but given the serious errors of judgment that led to the incident, I believe these actions are justified.” But yesterday, following Staff Sgt. Brennan’s intervention, Mr. McConnell admitted the three supervisory positions were being abolished on April 1 as part of an overall restructuring of A Division that had been decided before the break-in. But he said the reassignments had been moved ahead by four months as a direct result of the incident at the Prime Minister’s residence.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Staff Sgt. Brennan is the elected staff representative for A Division, responsible for taking members’ grievances to senior management and acting as an advocate on staff relations’ matters. RCMP members are not allowed to have a union.</p> <p>He has interviewed the four suspended officers and analyzed past security assessments and the picture he presents of what happened at the Prime Minister’s residence is quite different from that painted in earlier reports.</p> <p>Two of the four officers are special constables who have not had the rigorous training given regular force officers; such officers have often been engaged as a cost-cutting measure for less critical security duties.</p> <p>None of the four men on duty had ever been inside the residence, according to Staff Sgt. Brennan and therefore had no idea of the location of the corridor and bedroom where the intruder was.</p> <p>Nevertheless, the corporal in charge of the security detail arrested the man within four minutes of Mrs. Chretien’s call to the security hut, Staff Sgt. Brennan said, not the seven to 10 minutes related by Mr. Chretien the day after the incident.</p> <p>The corporal should be commended for his bravery because he didn’t wait for re-enforcements to arrive before tackling the intruder at risk to his own personal safety, rather than being vilified, according to the staff representative.”</p> </blockquote> <p>According to S/Sgt. Brennan, the RCMP corporal in charge onsite went in and made the arrest on his own within 4 minutes, not 7-10 minutes.</p> <p>The above <em><font color="#333333">The Globe and Mail</font></em> story by Hugh Winsor spelled RCMP “A” Division commanding officer’s name as “Brian McConnell” while all other news reports referred to “Bryan McConnell”. In any case, a picture emerged that A/Comm. Bryan McConnell was the RCMP commander of the Ottawa capital region where the Prime Minister’s residence was located, whereas A/Comm. Wayne Martel doing an internal review was responsible for VIP security.</p> <p>A day later an RCMP decision was made to suspend one of the 3 supervisors, to upgrade security equipment and to require all guards to have VIP training (“Fallout from break-in moves through ranks: Senior mountie suspended over breach of security at prime minister’s residence”, by Leonard Stern, November 18, 1995, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“At Friday’s news conference, the RCMP announced that one of the senior officers now has been suspended indefinitely with pay. Insp. Cindy Villeneuve also said that the four junior members have been given an additional seven days to prepare their explanations.</p> <p>“I think ( RCMP management) may have a change of heart,” said S.Sgt. Joe Brennan, who, as staff relations representative, is advising the junior members. “At first, (the junior Mounties ) were being hanged out to dry, but I really think they’ll be reinstated.”</p> <p>Brennan believes the four junior members were partly vindicated Friday when the RCMP said that the electronic monitoring equipment at 24 Sussex has been upgraded and that all Mounties posted at the house will now receive specialized VIP training.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Villeneuve would not confirm a report that McConnell himself could face disciplinary action. But she did not rule out more suspensions as the RCMP’s internal investigation unfolds.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The latest remedies and policy changes were likely from “A” Division commander’s superiors, as the changes upgraded the Prime Minister’s residence security to VIP-protection level and RCMP headquarters’ direct supervision:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The RCMP announced tighter security measures Friday for the prime minister:</p> <p>* Security for prime minister and his residences (24 Sussex Drive and nearby Harrington Lake) put under one unit, reporting to national headquarters.</p> <p>* Levels of supervision reduced to three from five, shortening chain of command.</p> <p>* RCMP responsible for PM’s personal protection now guard residences on rotating basis.</p> <p>* Unit to be comprised of Mounties with specialized VIP training.</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Now Chretien’s security everywhere was overseen by A/Comm. Wayne Martel, presumably.</p> <p>The next day at an Asia Pacific summit in Osaka, Japan, Chretien said the RCMP was now doing enough and a public inquiry was not needed (“Chretien rejects inquiry into security breach”, by Les Whittington, November 19, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““There’s no need for a public inquiry into that matter. The RCMP is responsible for security at 24 Sussex and they apparently are changing the procedures and the equipment and it's for them to decide.”</p> <p>Chretien made the statement in Osaka, Japan, where the prime minister and leaders of 17 other countries are giving formal approval today to an agreement that is to significantly reduce trade barriers in the Asia-Pacific region over the next 20 years.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Rather than ordering an inquiry, Chretien personally thanked the RCMP corporal in charge that night as it became known that the corporal had come over from the Governor General’s residence to arrest the intruder, within 4 minutes and with no help – an incredibly heroic tale in a debacle (“Mountie thanked by PM, brass told”, by Tim Harper, November 24, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“An RCMP corporal facing dismissal from the force was personally thanked by Jean Chretien for thwarting a potential attack on the Prime Minister and his wife earlier this month, according to information provided to his superiors.</p> <p>The information was given to RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell by Staff-Sergeant Joe Brennan yesterday. It was contained in a written submission in an attempt to have the corporal’s suspension lifted.</p> <p>…</p> <p>According to Brennan’s investigation, the corporal was in charge of three security operations that night - 24 Sussex, the Governor-General’s residence and the Prime Minister 's summer home at Harrington Lake, Que.</p> <p>He was at the Governor-General’s when alerted to the break-in. The staff association says he entered the premises and made the arrest without waiting for back-up.</p> <p>The staff association alleges the four senior officers erred that night and none came to the scene to take charge.”</p> </blockquote> <p>How low and how sad had the RCMP sunk to in this saga: a Corporal, ranked just above Constables, was put in charge of protecting all head-of-state and head-of-government official residences; and when the intrusion occurred he had to go from one place to another, enter an unfamiliar place and make the arrest, while the special and regular constables under him didn’t follow and his superiors wouldn’t bother to show up.</p> <p>Enough for Prime Minister Jean Chretien. But a real story, a fact given by RCMP spokesman Insp. Jean St-Cyr, was tucked away at the bottom of one news article and ignored by other media venues – the reassignment of Chief Superintendent Al Rivard the day after the intrusion, which St-Cyr said was unrelated (“RCMP admits bungling security; Possible assassin gains easy entry”, by Paul Koring, November 7, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“There are two details involved with protecting the Prime Minister, and RCMP sources said there is close liaison and co-ordination between them.</p> <p>However, Sunday’s incident involved only one of the units. The detachment shared by the Prime Minister and Governor-General is responsible for “the two official residences and their occupants,” Insp. St-Cyr said. </p> <p>Ultimately, both that detachment and the Prime Minister’s travelling personal-security unit report to the officer in charge of protective operations. </p> <p>Chief Superintendent Al Rivard held that post until last weekend. He began a new job yesterday, although the move had nothing to do with Sunday’s incident. Supt. Marcel Groulx, the new officer in charge, assumed that post in an acting capacity yesterday.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So both Chretien’s residence security and travel security, though manned by different RCMP units, had been under the command of Chief Superintendent Al Rivard, whose immediate transfer “had nothing to do with Sunday’s incident”.</p> <p>Well, while Capital Ottawa residents were no doubt stunned by what happened so close to the Chretiens, I wonder how many were aware that the security of all top government officials and diplomats had been C/Supt. Al Rivard’s responsibility, and a few months earlier when a homemade bomb had made it into a government office tower, Rivard admitted he was in the dark (“1,800 civil servants flee bomb”, May 25, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Questions about security in federal buildings were raised yesterday after a homemade bomb was smuggled into a Department of Indian Affairs office Tuesday.</p> <p>Nearly 1,800 bureaucrats were forced to flee their desks around 4 p.m. after a man carried the bomb to the ninth floor of the 28-storey tower.</p> <p>There were no injuries as a result of a controlled explosion of the device by defence department bomb experts and only minor damage to the offices.</p> <p>Indian Affairs Minister Ron Irwin, whose office is on the 21st floor, was not in the building at the time.</p> <p>Police later arrested a man from Kuujjuaq, Que., and charged him with illegal possession and use of explosives and mischief.</p> <p>Pierre Claude Dufresne, 41, entered no plea in a Hull courtroom yesterday and was remanded in custody.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Sergeant Yves Martel of Hull police said federal security is generally the responsibility of the RCMP and security branches of individual departments.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Several RCMP officers - including a senior officer in charge of protecting the Governor-General, the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers and diplomats - were surprised to learn of the attack.</p> <p>“If I’m not informed, I can’t comment on that,” said Chief Superintendent Al Rivard, commander of the protective operations branch of the RCMP.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Why Al Rivard had been given that job looks like a mystery given a grave failure in his past record that people in the province of New Brunswick probably all knew. In New Brunswick in 1989, then Superintendent Rivard leading over 100 officers took 7 months to capture escaped killer Allan Legere who was hiding near them in the woods of the Miramichi region, and Legere killed 4 more people during that time and later taunted Rivard in a letter to the media (“Legere says he was never far from police while on the run”, December 10, 1989, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Convicted killer Allan Legere - a suspect in four brutal murders - boasts he was never farther than a shout away from police during his seven months as a fugitive.</p> <p>“All it would take is one good sweep of the forest,” Legere claims in an eight-page handwritten letter sent from his prison cell in Renous, N.B.</p> <p>“Honestly I sincerely believe all those . . . fellows on the SWAT team and Newcastle forces do watch too much TV and are too preoccupied with fancy rifles and the cool look.”</p> <p>The letter, which Legere calls “an exclusive report on my comings and goings,” was mailed to The Saint John Telegraph-Journal this week. In it, Legere, 41, makes many claims and says he followed most of the media coverage since his May “departure.”</p> <p>Legere, who escaped from a Moncton, N.B., hospital in May, was recaptured two weeks ago after one of the biggest manhunts in Canadian history. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>In the seven months that followed Legere’s escape, fear and terror grew along the Miramichi River and many residents took to sleeping with firearms at their bedside.</p> <p>A native of the area, Legere quickly became a prime suspect in four murders that occurred while he was at large. An elderly storeowner, two sisters and a priest were viciously beaten.</p> <p>In his letter, Legere shows just how closely he followed the news by refuting claims about him and mocking police comments.</p> <p>“I’ve noticed that RCMP Rivard calls me chicken, etc.,” Legere wrote, referring to comments by Superintendent Al Rivard. “But do tell me, if I am so chicken and dumb, why couldn’t over 100 of Canada’s finest, with dogs, and SWAT teams find little ol’ moi? Hmmmm? . . . They are not the Sergeant Prestons of bygone years.””</p> </blockquote> <p>The incompetent RCMP force under Al Rivard were no “Sergeant Prestons of the bygone years”, and 4 people were murdered in this 7 months in 1989, including elderly Catholic priest Rev. James Smith, beaten to death in November; then, RCMP took another year until November 1990 to file charges against Legere, due to the slowness of DNA tests according to Supt. Rivard (“'The terror' still hangs over Miramichi”, by Chris Morris, November 20, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A year ago, many residents were paralysed with fear and revulsion after the beating death of an elderly Catholic priest in nearby Chatham Head.</p> <p>There was a memorial service Monday for Rev. James Smith, the 69-year-old parish priest whose body was found in the church rectory Nov. 16, 1989. He had been savagely beaten to death.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Police consider Legere the prime suspect in the Miramichi killings. Today he was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Annie Flam, on May 28, in Chatham; sisters Donna and Linda Daughney, on Oct. 13 in Newcastle; and Smith, on Nov. 15.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The RCMP, which held a news conference today to announce the Legere charges, are expected to introduce DNA fingerprinting evidence, a forensic technique that identifies genetic material in human matter such as hair, fingernails and skin. Scientists believe each person's genetic material is unique.</p> <p>“The testing itself, because it’s a new procedure, every one was doing it meticulously and the testing itself is a very long process,” said RCMP Supt. Al Rivard in explaining why it took so long to lay charges.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Chief Superintendent Al Rivard had been a glaring hole in security, a human-safety disaster waiting to happen. Luckily in Canada’s capital in November 1995, it got to the very top without bloodshed – unlike what happened to Yitzhak Rabin in Israel.</p> <p>At the Prime Minister’s residence the security hole was in the back of the house ground, a fact the RCMP knew since escaped killer Allan Legere’s era: Andre Dallaire likely entered the ground from there, a scenario alerted to in a 1989 RCMP report and in 1995 after a July 28 incident when a man “wandered onto” the ground from the back (“Report cited security flaws before Chretien break-in: The area behind 24 Sussex Drive lacked closed circuit TV cameras, creating a blind spot, an unnamed officer reported”, by Jim Bronskill, December 20, 1995, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Security holes also existed in the systemic ‘acting up’ manner of the RCMP senior officers, not just Al Rivard, shown the night of the Dallaire intrusion (“Break-in probe reaches RCMP brass; One senior officer already suspended, sources say”, by Tim Harper, November 17, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The sources told The Star that one member of a senior management quartet, Inspector Jean Dube, has already been suspended.</p> <p>But the sources say the probe could be extended to include Chief Superintendent Al Rivard; McConnell, the commanding officer of the RCMP’s A Division; and an unnamed superintendent in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards.</p> <p>All must bear some responsibility for the snafu that night, the source said, for not taking charge at 24 Sussex but instead going to RCMP headquarters.</p> <p>Dube is the easiest target because he is the lowest-ranking among the four senior officers.</p> <p>…</p> <p>McConnell, as the ranking officer, should have told his subordinate Rivard to get to Sussex Dr. as quickly as possible the night of the break-in, sources say.</p> <p>Instead, he called to the site and reported Dube was on his way.</p> <p>But Dube was at least two hours away - even though he was supposed to be within easy response time of 24 Sussex Dr.</p> <p>Rivard received a call at 3:30 a.m. after the suspect was arrested. He was expected to be at 24 Sussex and call bodyguards to the site to have the Chretiens escorted from the home, sources said.</p> <p>He stayed at headquarters instead.</p> <p>“Security had been breached,” a source said. “It’s basic. You don’t leave VIPs on unsecured premises.</p> <p>“Who knew if there were other people on the grounds? Who knew if a bomb had been planted? That’s one of the first things they teach you at VIP protection.”</p> <p>The suspended officers on the site were not authorized to escort the Chretiens.</p> <p>Another source said unless proper disciplinary action is taken against the four senior officials, junior officers will rebel. Any attempt to simply penalize those on site will severely damage force morale, he said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Rivard’s spotty record in New Brunswick could be a reason McConnell didn’t call him but the more junior Jean Dube, when told of the intrusion. Dube was 2 hours away while on call, and Rivard when notified afterwards went to the headquarters instead, and so the Chretiens’ security wasn’t immediately beefed up. </p> <p>But why didn’t McConnell attend the scene himself then?</p> <p>He went to the RCMP headquarters “to oversee damage control”. In the year-end “Who’s hot, Who’s not” in Canada in 1995, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> Ottawa bureau staff chose Aline Chretien as “really hot”, and “Brian McConnell” as “cold” (“Here's looking at who’s hot, who’s not; Brian Tobin, who raised up turbots by their fingernails; ticked off taxpayers; the humbled Montreal Canadiens; a feisty British Columbia: These are among the year’s newsmakers as compiled by The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa bureau staff”, December 30, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Really hot - Aline Chretien, who remains calm and collected, locking doors and phoning police.</p> <p>Cold - RCMP Assistant Commissioner Brian McConnell, who as head of A Division is responsible for 24 Sussex Dr. security, went to RCMP headquarters to oversee damage control rather than to the Prime Minister's residence to oversee security.”</p> </blockquote> <p>These senior officers had better be sure nothing worse could happen to the Chretiens.</p> <p>On the day after the intrusion, A/Comm. McConnell seemed very matter-of-fact in explaining the RCMP response (“RCMP admit delay in response; Officers secured house before heading for Chretiens’ room”, by Shawn McCarthy, November 7, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Responding to a reporter’s suggestion that the Chretiens could have been murdered, McConnell seemed to downplay the danger.</p> <p>“The individual was in the house; there’s no question about that. The individual was armed, the individual did not attempt to get into the private quarters,” he said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Rational calculations of a veteran cop deciding whether to pull the trigger, whoever it was to protect, or it seemed.</p> <p>But to suggest, as in Tim Harper’s November 17 news report quoted earlier, that RCMP junior ranks would rebel if the senior officers were not disciplined, was overstating it – rebellion unlikely as the Prime Minister victim himself quickly expressed satisfaction after a few RCMP security upgrades and duty reassignments.</p> <p>So much for RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray’s saying, “We’re going to get to the bottom of it.”</p> <p>Later in June 1996 Andre Dallaire was found guilty of attempted murder but declared not criminally responsible due to “Paranoid Schizophrenia”, and Chretien told the media he was satisfied with the outcome (“No jail time for intruder who wanted to kill Chretien”, by Leonard Stern, June 29, 1996, and, “Chretien satisfied with verdict on break-in”, June 30, 1996, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>).</p> <p>By the spring of 1998 Dallaire had become a neighbor of the Chretiens, living in a house a few blocks away, and it was fine with RCMP (“Sussex Drive intruder now PM’s neighbor”, April 18, 1998, <a href="http://www.thestarphoenix.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Star – Phoenix</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““We don’t see any more problems with Mr. Dallaire,” said Sgt. Andre Guertin, adding that Dallaire understands he cannot come within 500 metres of the prime minister.”</p> </blockquote> <p>What a lucky “good-looking guy”, at around my age when I was arrested at CBC Vancouver in January 1993 and falsely labelled as having the same mental illness, as in Part 7.</p> <p>On November 19, 1995 when Chretien ruled out a public inquiry he was to return home after overseas visits beginning with Rabin’s funeral. The Chretiens’ scare was dropping off most top news, which on November 13 had begun to focus on the Airbus Affair stories.</p> <p>As earlier, in March 1995 <em>Der Speigel</em> magazine and CBC The Fifth Estate had reported that German tax inspectors were looking into the multimillion-dollar Airbus commissions for Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of Airbus planes, paid by the Airbus company to the Liechtenstein company International Aircraft Leasing Ltd. reportedly owned by Karlheinz Schreiber, who allegedly funnelled the money to Canada and whose lobbying for Airbus had involved then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s friend, former Newfoundland Premier Frank Moores and his company Government Consultants International; both Schreiber and Moores had bank accounts at the Swiss Bank Corp.</p> <p>In the weekend of November 11-12, amid the Canadian media frenzies on Chretien residence break-in, French and Swiss media reported that the Swiss justice system was investigating alleged Airbus bribes funnelled into Swiss bank accounts, that unnamed Canadian political leaders received large commissions; RCMP confirmed it was evaluating “certain allegations” and had asked the Swiss for help, but wouldn’t give details until Tuesday (“RCMP evaluates bribery allegations on Airbus sales”, November 13, 1995, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“An RCMP official said late Sunday the force is evaluating “certain allegations” concerning an Air Canada contract with Airbus and that the Swiss have been asked to help.</p> <p>The official said there would be no further comment from the force until Tuesday. The statement comes after news of the Swiss end of the <br />investigation surfaced in Europe.</p> <p>The French news service Agence France-Press said Saturday the Swiss justice system had opened an investigation into alleged bribes funnelled into Swiss bank accounts during a sale of Airbus aircraft to Canadian companies.</p> <p>Its report cited an official for the federal justice and police department in Switzerland who would not give further details.</p> <p>However, the news service said the Swiss TV network DSR reported that unnamed Canadian political leaders received large commissions.</p> <p>A front company consisting of a post office box in Liechtenstein served as a go-between during the aircraft sale and received a commission of about $20 million, the network said.</p> <p>The TV report said Canadian authorities suspect part of that money went into numbered Swiss bank accounts for Canadian politicians.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The European reports were confirmed on November 13 by Swiss police spokesman Folco Galli and Swiss justice department spokesman Peter Lehmann, that Switzerland had received a September 29 request from Canada to look into certain Swiss bank accounts (“Swiss account freeze sought: Canada seeks banks’ help in alleged bribes in Airbus sale; AIRBUS: Canada asks Swiss to put freeze on bank accounts”, by Carolyn Abraham, November 14, 1995, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Folco Galli, speaking for Switzerland's Federal Office for Police Matters, confirmed Monday that Canadian authorities sent a formal request for help in the matter Sept. 29.</p> <p>Galli said Canadian authorities alleged that “the money that has maybe been paid in this affair is in a Swiss bank account.”</p> <p>A recent Swiss television report said Swiss authorities were investigating alleged pay-offs to Canadian politicians ensuring the sale of Airbus aircraft to Canada.</p> <p>Galli said: “The request was that {Canada} was interested in certain bank documents and accounts.” He added that the matter could involve more than one bank in Zurich.</p> <p>Galli could not say if any accounts had been frozen as a result.</p> <p>Peter Lehmann, speaking for Switzerland’s attorney-general, said Swiss authorities have agreed to help and “do the necessary things.”</p> <p>“We have taken a few steps in this, but I cannot say what we did,” Lehmann said.</p> <p>He said Switzerland’s role is continuing, but that Swiss officials “are not the judges for the Canadian authorities.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Frank Moores immediately denied everything (“Airbus bribe claims just ‘nonsense’: ex-lobbyist”, by Edison Stewart, November 14, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Former lobbyist and Air Canada director Frank Moores says allegations of bribery involving the sale of Airbus jets to the airline are “total nonsense.”</p> <p>“There is not a darn thing that I can say at this time except to say what I've said for - what? two or three years now - that is, that it is totally inaccurate,” he said in a telephone interview from Florida.</p> <p>Moores, appointed to the airline’s board by friend Brian Mulroney, said yesterday he had no relationship to Airbus – “none whatsoever.”</p> <p>“I’ve already got a lawyer working on it and I am not in a position to comment on any of this right now because as far as I'm concerned it's total nonsense.””</p> </blockquote> <p>On Tuesday, November 14, the lone RCMP investigator on the case, Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald, did a media interview, stating he merely started with information from media reports; former senior officers Tim Quigley and Rod Stamler and former Commissioner Norman Inkster all confirmed RCMP had looked at allegations in 1989 but gave conflicting assessments of the seriousness; Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps confirmed a continuing RCMP investigation (“AIRBUS INVESTIGATION: RCMP revive bribery investigation six years after hearing allegations”, by Jim Brown, November 15, 1995, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““There’s a difference between information and evidence,” Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, the only police officer now on the case, said Tuesday. “We have to determine whether the allegations (reported by the media) are appropriate and whether they’re based on fact.”</p> <p>There have long been questions about the role of lobbyists and Conservative politicians in the 1988 deal that saw Air Canada buy 34 A320 medium range jets from Airbus Industrie, a consortium of French, German and other interests.</p> <p>Fiegenwald got on the trail after reports in March -- by the German news magazine Der Spiegel and the CBC-TV current affairs program Fifth Estate -- suggested Airbus may have paid secret commissions to Canadians to facilitate the sale.</p> <p>Authorities in Switzerland disclosed this week the RCMP have asked them for help, including a request to freeze any bank accounts linked to the deal.</p> <p>That suggested the investigation had moved to a new and more serious stage. But Fiegenwald remains cautious. “What we’ve asked them to do is to verify the information that's already been in the media,” he said. “They’ve been very co-operative and I’m sure they’ll give us a speedy response. They know how important it is to us.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>The RCMP first looked into the Airbus sale in 1989.</p> <p>“I wouldn’t even go so far as to call it an investigation,” said Supt. Tim Quigley, who handled that review. “It didn’t develop into anything substantive at all.”</p> <p>Quigley, then an inspector in the elite squad that investigated political corruption, already had his hands full with other matters.</p> <p>He described Airbus as “one of those things on the back burner and it just never got much of a priority.”</p> <p>Rod Stamler, former head of economic crime for the RCMP, has suggested the force caved into pressure from Mulroney’s government in not pursuing Airbus and other politically loaded cases.</p> <p>Stamler notes that after he left the force in 1989, the anti-corruption squad was revamped and its former personnel scattered: “They never continued the investigations of any kind.”</p> <p>His criticism strikes a nerve with Norman Inkster, the RCMP commissioner at the time and a frequent target of Stamler's barbs. “There was never, ever, on any front, any political pressure,” says Inkster. “Any allegations to the contrary are highly improper.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps says simply: “The investigation will continue and hopefully at the end we’ll have some answers.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell had said Stevie Cameron’s book was “very interesting”, as earlier; now her successor, Progressive Conservative party leader Jean Charest, stated on November 14 he’s focused on the future, but admitted that the devastating 1993 election defeat leaving his party with only 2 MPs was “the opportunity for Canadians to voice their views on their party” (“Airbus shouldn’t hurt Tories, Charest says: Bribery allegations? It's news to me, he declares, determined to forge ahead to rebuild party”, by Jack Danylchuk, November 15, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Charest, a junior cabinet minister in the Tory government at the time, said he knows nothing of a deal that is alleged to have seen secret commissions paid on the $1.8-billion sale of the jets to Air Canada.</p> <p>“I think people will look at us in light of how we have behaved since 1993,” said Charest, who was praised for his effort on the No side during the referendum campaign.</p> <p>“That was the opportunity for Canadians to voice their views on their party and they did that.”</p> <p>Charest was in Edmonton for a fundraising dinner and to outline the party’s efforts to rise from the ruins of the crushing defeat in 1993 that left it with only two seats in Parliament.</p> <p>“We're focused on the future; I can’t do anything about what happened in the past. People will judge us on our actions, the referendum campaign being one of the episodes where people can judge what we have to offer the country.””</p> </blockquote> <p>The current Tory leader decided not to stand by Brian Mulroney’s legacies.</p> <p>On that same day of November 14, 1995, there was a new record item in my RCMP file, an <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot143 - RCMP record, Nov 14, 1995.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Occurrence Report – General</font></a> form created at the “E” Division Civil Litigation Unit handling RCMP defence for my lawsuit.</p> <p>What is interesting about this 1-page form that contains no detail is that it was not for any new occurrence of incidents, but for a complaint by me about the RCMP, as it categorized me as “COM [Complainant]” and RCMP as “Oth [Other]”.</p> <p>I had filed only two complaints about the RCMP. The first was at the RCMP Public Complaints Commission in early September 1992, then withdrawn in late September due to pressure from RCMP investigator Staff Sergeant M. M. Ukrainetz, as in Part 5, but I was about to file a lawsuit.</p> <p>The second complaint was my press releases and cover note faxed to local MP Kim Campbell on November 30, 1992, on my lawsuit as well as criticisms of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct; as mentioned earlier, my note contained the allegation, “a political persecution ordered by the PM was underway”. It found its way to then Solicitor General Doug Lewis and was forwarded by Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell, RCMP Director of Enforcement Services, to RCMP “E” Division in early January 1993, as a complaint about RCMP eviction of me from my former UBC office on July 2, 1992, as in Part 6.</p> <p>The RCMP form prepared on November 14, 1995, initially had the “Reported” date as “92-09-03”, meaning for my first complaint, but was then changed to the current date of “95-11-14”, probably upon realization that my first complaint had been withdrawn.</p> <p>For whatever reason, the date didn’t change to the time of my second complaint or when it was forwarded to RCMP, i.e., in the period November 30, 1992-January 1993.</p> <p>If I take it literally, this new RCMP form marked my complaint as reported on the same day when RCMP went public with its Airbus Affairs investigation – pretentious, am I not?</p> <p>The only real content in this form is a brief statement in the “Details/Action” section:</p> <blockquote> <p>“REQUEST FOR LEGAL COUNSEL. X-REF</p> <p>92E-11918 FOR BULK OF PAPER WORK”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Part 6, in January 1993 RCMP “E” Division C/Supt. P. M. Cummins had sent a memo to C/Supt. M. K. M. Clegg whose supervision included civil litigation, to suggest that with my lawsuit pending my (second) complaint be consolidated by the Civil Litigation Unit, i.e., there be no separate internal investigation; accordingly, C/Supt. Clegg sent a letter dated January 29 – it happened to be my birthday – to RCMP Director of Enforcement Services to reply that there was a “continuing [legal] action” in place.</p> <p>But now this new “bulk of paper work” referred to on November 14, 1995, seemed to indicate a change of mind on the part of RCMP, that some work was now done for a complaint by me – enough for the investigator to request “legal counsel” to reference it.</p> <p>The other intriguing fact in this seemingly mundane RCMP form is the surnames of both the investigator, “Rischmueller”, and the signer, Constable “Neustaedter”, distinctively German and uncommon in Canada.</p> <p>This came on the day of RCMP’s first media interview for its Airbus Affair criminal investigation concerning Brian Mulroney and German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, where the lone RCMP investigator’s surname, Fiegenwald, was of German heritage also.</p> <p>I have described in Part 10, how totally unexpected my father’s death on August 10, 2005 was to me – I did not get to visit him at the hospital in China – and how shocked I was later to come to realize that it was on the 10-year anniversary of B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic’s Closing Summary, which referred to a letter the Clinic’s Dr. Clifford Kerr had written for my mother, and which ended the open forensic psychiatric oppression against me since my January 1993 arrest at CBC Vancouver for trying to get a TV interview, as in Part 7, over then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s misconduct in handling the cancer situation of then Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa.</p> <p>But my father had a long history of heart problems – as in Part 6 when on November 30, 1992 I was taken by RCMP to UBC Hospital for my first psychiatric committal, my father was in hospitalization in China for his heart.</p> <p>Not so for my brother-in-law Yuzhuo Li, beloved husband of my sister Ning, mentioned in an April 7, 1995 letter from my mother to Raymond Chan, then MP for Richmond, B.C. and Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific, as in Part 10. In 1995 Yuzhuo was a professor at Clarkson University in New York state, and he went on to become an accomplished academic and leading research scientist (“<a href="http://www.mpcourier.com/article/20130522/DCO/705229761" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Memorial fund established at Clarkson to honor Dr. Yuzhuo Li</font></a>”, May 22, 2013,<font color="#333333"> <em>Daily Courier-Observer</em></font>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A consummate researcher, Li was a leading expert in the area of chemical mechanical planarization (CMP). He was on extended leave from Clarkson serving as head of research & development for CMP, Global Business Electronic Materials at BASF, Ludwigshafen, Germany, from 2008 to 2010, and then as head of research & development for the entire Global Business Electronic Materials division at BASF from 2010 until his untimely passing in November 2012.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As indicated in the above local news in Potsdam, NY, Yuzhuo died young last November.</p> <p>He was 54. Shocking already that a talented scientist looking healthy could suddenly die at a prime age, even more so is that it took place on November 14 in Germany, as I recalled in a February 2013 blog post (“<a href="http://fgaoposts.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/guinevere-and-lancelot-a-metaphor-of-comedy-or-tragedy-without-shakespeare-but-with-shocking-ends-to-wonderful-lives-part-2/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“For over 24 years after receiving his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988, Yuzhuo excelled as an academic and scientist, primarily mentoring students and researchers at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, and for the last nearly 5 years also leading research and development in Electronic Materials at the world’s largest chemical company, BASF in Germany.</p> <p>Yuzhuo’s diligent and productive life was recently cut short, unexpectedly and sadly, by a sudden illness on November 14, 2012 – a coma he couldn’t get out of, I was told.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Truly shocking is that my brother-in-law, an academic scientist recruited to work as an R&D leader in a world-leading German company, in his prime suddenly died there on the 17th anniversary of an RCMP form reviving my complaint against RCMP, prepared by 2 Canadian officers of German heritage on the day in 1995 when RCMP officially went public with its Airbus Affair criminal investigation.</p> <p>Unfortunately, I have been unable to find out from RCMP, despite attempts based on personal-information access laws, what was in the “bulk of paper work” referred to in the RCMP form.</p> <p>On November 14, 1995, the RCMP did not say if Mulroney was named in the September 29 Justice Department letter to the Swiss Authorities. That information came a few days later on November 18 when <em>The</em> <em>Financial Post</em> reporter Philip Mathias quoted from the letter (“Justice seeks evidence on Mulroney, Moores: Mulroney denies any connection with alleged payoffs over $1.8-billion Airbus deal”, by Philip Mathias, <em><a href="http://www.financialpost.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Financial Post</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In letters rogatory sent to Switzerland on Sept. 29, Justice Department senior counsel Kimberly Prost indicates Brian Mulroney received secret commissions from European manufacturers that did business with the government while he was in office.</p> <p>The letter names French aircraft manufacturer Airbus Industrie SA and German arms manufacturer Thyssen AG. It concludes that there was a “persistent plot/conspiracy by Mr. Mulroney [and others] … who defrauded the Canadian government in the amount of millions of dollars.”</p> <p>The Justice Department sent the 13-page demand to Switzerland, written in German, at the request of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”</p> </blockquote> <p>A “persistent plot/conspiracy by Mr. Mulroney” – serious accusations.</p> <p>But according to Mathias, the letter contained no evidence against Mulroney other than what was in the CBC Fifth Estate broadcast in March, which hadn’t named Mulroney or provided evidence of Airbus commissions going into the alleged Swiss bank accounts:</p> <blockquote> <p>“…</p> <p>The Justice document says the Devon account was set up “to direct a part of these amounts to Mr. Mulroney.” But no evidence is offered.</p> <p>The Justice Department says incorrectly: “The CBC report made a connection between Mr. Mulroney and these [alleged Airbus] payments.” In fact, the CBC didn’t identify Mulroney.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Fifth Estate report declared: “We found no evidence that anybody with decision-making power received payments.” It also said: “Fifth Estate has no evidence any commissions were ever paid into the [Moores] accounts …” The program concluded with the words: “Where all the money ended up is still a mystery.””</p> </blockquote> <p>The truth appeared to be in the possession of the ‘paymaster’, Karlheinz Schreiber, who wanted to block the investigation:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It could be months before the RCMP obtains any information from the accounts (if, indeed, they ever do). The reason is that Schreiber has started legal proceedings in Switzerland to prevent information from being disclosed.</p> <p>One of Schreiber’s lawyers said in an interview that his client felt it was “improper” that any of his business affairs unrelated to the Airbus matter should become public through the Canadian request.</p> <p>In response to Schreiber’s move, the Swiss government has sealed the three accounts. A Swiss federal prosecutor has been appointed to determine whether the RCMP’s “evidence” justifies opening the bank accounts under Swiss law. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mathias also reported that during the Mulroney era RCMP had investigated Air Canada officials but found nothing:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… The original decision to buy the A320 aircraft came from Air Canada, and went up to cabinet for approval. Under the Mulroney government the RCMP mounted a lengthy investigation of senior Air Canada officials that led to nowhere.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Brian Mulroney issued a formal statement which, if anyone noticed, didn’t deny he might have received Airbus money, stating that he didn’t have a hand in the Airbus-Air Canada deal (“No influence on decision: Mulroney”, November 14, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.financialpost.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Financial Post</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“An adviser to Brian Mulroney gave The Financial Post the following statement on Mulroney’s behalf:</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney states unequivocally that he did not in any way influence or try to influence Air Canada’s decision to purchase aircraft made by Airbus, a fact which has been repeatedly and publicly confirmed by Air Canada senior officers. Nor was he ever a party to any agreement to influence this decision or to receive any consideration directly or indirectly for so doing. Mr. Mulroney states categorically that he does not now have, nor did he ever have directly or indirectly a bank account in any foreign country. Furthermore no one now has, nor did anyone ever have, such an account on his behalf.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As I understand it, Mulroney only said that he never influenced or been in an agreement to influence Air Canada to buy Airbus planes or to receive money for doing so.</p> <p>In fact, when I first read it – a year or two before the so-called Mulroney-Schreiber Affair mentioned in Part 1 – I said to myself, “Look, Mulroney didn’t deny receiving Airbus money, just not money for helping Airbus as the prime minister.”</p> <p>Unknown to the public until Stevie Cameron’s 1998 book, <a href="http://steviecameron.com/blue-trust/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money</em></font></a>, was the fact that before his August 1993 death Bruce Verchere, a director of the Swiss Bank Corp. where Schreiber and Moores had bank accounts, was Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee, as in Part 5. Nonetheless, as quoted earlier Swiss police spokesman Folco Galli indicated more than one bank could be in the investigation.</p> <p>But by 2007-08 due to Schreiber’s revelation that Mulroney had received $300,000 cash from him (Mulroney said it was only $225,000) shortly after stepping down as Prime Minister, the matter was labelled the “Mulroney-Schreiber Affair”, i.e., some sort of going-on between the two only; as in Part 1, then University of Waterloo President David Johnston – now Governor General of Canada – recommended to Prime Minister Stephen Harper not to include in a public inquiry the Airbus Affair that RCMP had already investigated.</p> <p>I commented in February 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-polices-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-10/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 1)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Prime Minister Harper then turned to an academic, Dr. David Johnston, president of the University of Waterloo, to advise him what to do while the parliamentary ethics committee hearings featuring Schreiber, Mulroney, Mulroney’s long-time aide Fred Doucet and others were under way; Dr. Johnston reported back that there should be a limited public inquiry based on Karlheinz Schreiber’s allegations about Brian Mulroney, but that there is no necessity to include the Airbus Affair in the scope of the public inquiry because the RCMP had spent years conducing a criminal investigation into that, found “insufficient evidence” and closed its file; Dr. Johnston referred to the Airbus Affair as “this well-tilled ground”.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The RCMP did close the Airbus Affair investigation in 2003, but in 2007 admitted they had learned about the $300,000 but couldn’t verify it, as in the above blog post:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… the RCMP announced that the agency long ago during its Airbus Affair investigation had learned of allegations about the $300,000, but could not confirm it or find out what it had been for and decided to let it go when closing the Airbus Affair investigation file in April 2003; the agency has promised to look into it now.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Like with the Chretien residence break-in, the RCMP was either incompetent or ‘acting up’.</p> <p>Forensic accountant Steve Whitla of Navigant Consulting testified at the 2009 public inquiry that the $300,000 was likely from Airbus commissions (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/airbus-funds-likely-source-of-schreiber-s-britan-account-witness-1.778519?ref=rss" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Airbus funds likely source of Schreiber’s ‘Britan’ account: witness</font></a>”, May 6, 2009, CBC News):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A forensic accountant called in to investigate the business dealings between Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber testified Wednesday that there’s a “strong inference” the money alleged to have been paid to the former prime minister came from Airbus funds.</p> <p>Steven Whitla, an accountant with Navigant Consulting, said the account known as Britan, which Schreiber has claimed he used to pay Mulroney $300,000 in cash payments, was funded by a Frankfurt account.</p> <p>In regard to the source of funds for the Frankfurt account, Whitla said: “Our analysis of the facts support a strong inference that the original source of monies withdrawn by Mr. Schreiber from the ‘Britan’ account came in large part from funds received from Airbus.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Norman Inkster, former RCMP Commissioner under Brian Mulroney, including becoming Interpol president as in Parts 5 & 9, had been a Navigant Consulting managing director, active in Transparency International Canada’s lobbying for a public inquiry on the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair (“<a href="http://www.transparency.ca/9-Files/Older/Reports-Older/Newsletters/TIN1201.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Anatomy of Corruption in Canada</font></a>”, Newsletter Vol. 12, No. 1, May 2008, Transparency International Canada).</p> <p>Also in the TI Canada anti-corruption drive was lawyer Milos Barutciski of the law firm Bennett Jones (“<a href="http://www.transparency.ca/9-Files/Older/2008/2008-Events-TIEleventhSymposiumAgendaRegistration.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">"The Anatomy of Corruption in Canada: Its Causes and Prevention" and Eleventh Annual General Meeting, June 12, 2008</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, May 5, 2008, Transparency International Canada) – as in Part 5 Bennett Jones Verchere when then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s financial trustee and tax lawyer Bruce Verchere was alive.</p> <p>TI Canada asked Prime Minister Stephen Harper for an investigation “to get to the bottom of these allegations” (<a href="http://www.transparency.ca/9-Files/Older/2008-New/2008-TIMulroneyletter.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper</font></a>, December 21, 2007, Transparency International Canada): </p> <blockquote> <p>“TI-Canada is of the opinion that the Parliamentary House Ethics Committee was not the appropriate forum to properly and fully deal with these allegations. It had neither the ability, the resources nor the time to properly question Mr. Mulroney or Mr. Schreiber and to get to the bottom of these allegations. We strongly encourage the Government to urgently take full action to investigate these allegations, including a public inquiry if necessary. … And if there is a shred of evidence that these allegations are true and the law of Canada has been broken, then they must be quickly prosecuted in order to restore the public’s faith in a corruption-free government.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But Inkster, previously also a Gowlings Consulting partner, was appointed by Harper as Chair of Advisory Council on National Security in November 2007, and I guess that was it (“<a href="http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=1883" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Prime Minister announces appointments to the Advisory Council on National Security</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, November 1, 2007, Prime Minister of Canada; “<a href="http://www.transparency.ca/9-Files/Older/2008/2008-Events-TIEleventhSymposiumAgendaRevised.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">"The Anatomy of Corruption in Canada: Its Causes and Prevention" and Eleventh Annual General Meeting, June 12, 2008</font></a>”, updated, May 20, 2008, and, “<a href="http://www.transparency.ca/6-WhatsNew/Older/New_2008.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">What Was New in 2008</font></a>”,  Transparency International Canada).</p> <p>In the September 29, 1995 Kimberly Prost letter, Mulroney was accused of “criminal activity” and “conspiracy”, but RCMP provided no concrete evidence, only asking the Swiss to help find it in Switzerland.</p> <p>The Canadian government didn’t disclose contents of the letter, however <em>The Financial Post</em>’s quoting from it let Mulroney take the public-relations offensive and sue the government and RCMP for $50 million in damages (“Mulroney filing suit against feds, RCMP - Former prime minister will”, November 19, 1995, <a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Times – Colonist</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““Any fair-minded person who knows what happened here will easily see that the rights of Mr. Mulroney and of his family have been gravely violated,” lawyer Harvey Yarosky told a news conference Saturday.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mulroney is seeking $25 million in damages to his reputation and $25 million in punitive damages, said lawyer Gerald Tremblay. Any award for punitive damages will be given to charity, he added.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Yarosky said the allegations are ungrounded. “Mr. Mulroney categorically and unequivocally states that he had absolutely nothing to do with Air Canada’s decision to buy Airbus, nor did he receive a cent from anyone. He was simply not part of any conspiracy whatsoever.”</p> <p>Another lawyer, Roger Tasse - a former deputy justice minister in Ottawa - said the Justice Department and RCMP even refused to listen to Mulroney’s side of the story when he offered to co-operate with them.</p> <p>The defendants named in the lawsuit are the government of Canada; RCMP Commissioner Phil Murray; Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, the RCMP investigating officer; and Kimberly Prost, the Justice Department lawyer who sent the documents to Switzerland. …</p> <p>The lawyers said Mulroney’s reputation, which is much better abroad than it is at home, has already been affected and that he has received several calls from around the world.</p> <p>Mulroney practises law in Montreal and sits on the board of directors of some multinational corporations.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I note that Mulroney lawyer Harvey Yarosky’s denial was more absolute than Mulroney’s press statement.</p> <p>Mulroney hired prominent lawyers, including former deputy justice minister Roger Tasse and former Quebec Court of Appeal justice Fred Kaufman, to fight the libel battle against accusation of $5 million in Airbus kickbacks to him, among others (“Probe of former PM looks at more firms; Mulroney files $50-million suit”, by Rod MacDonell, November 21, 1995, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The RCMP are investigating Brian Mulroney not only for possible kickbacks from the 1988 Airbus purchase but also for suspected payments from two <br />German military suppliers.</p> <p>RCMP documents referred to by Mulroney in his unprecedented $50-million libel suit launched yesterday against the federal government also suggest <br />that the former prime minister might have been paid as much as $5 million in the purchase of 34 Airbus jets by Air Canada for $1.8 billion.</p> <p>The documents also revealed other allegations, one arising from Ottawa’s 1986 purchase of 12 Coast Guard helicopters from the firm Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm for $26 million.</p> <p>The other, involving the firm Thyssen Industries, arose from the anticipated construction of a facility to manufacture military vehicles in Nova Scotia. <br />The project never came to fruition.</p> <p>Mulroney, through his lawyers and public-relations consultant Luc Lavoie, has insisted frequently since allegations first surfaced on Saturday that all <br />suggestions of wrongdoing are false.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mulroney has assembled a top-calibre team of lawyers to argue his case. The team includes Harvey Yarosky, one of Canada’s top criminal lawyers; Gerald Tremblay, one of the province’s top civil litigators; Fred Kaufman, a criminal-law expert and former justice of the Quebec Court of Appeal; Roger Tasse, a former federal deputy justice minister; and Jacques Jeansonne, a partner of Tremblay.”</p> </blockquote> <p>News reports I can find on Mulroney lawsuit filing in November 1995 focused on his lawyers’ prominent political backgrounds. But as in Part 6, Gerald Tremblay was the lawyer for a publication-ban effort in the Diane Wilhelmy Affair – during the Charlottetown referendum campaign in September-October 1992 – critical of then Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa as well as Stevie Cameron’s husband David Cameron, and was with McCarthy Tetrault, the former law firm of B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick who cooperated with RCMP to start psychiatric oppression against me in November 1992.</p> <p>Government ministers denied prior knowledge of the Justice Department letter:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Senior Tories alleged that Liberal politicians named Mulroney as a suspect in the investigation for partisan purposes.</p> <p>Justice Minister Allan Rock called those claims “absolute nonsense.”</p> <p>“This request (to Swiss authorities for information about Mulroney) was carried out entirely in accordance with standard practice,” Rock said. “It was done by a police force requesting the department to go to a foreign government for information.</p> <p>“I had no involvement. Indeed I had no knowledge. And that’s the way it should be.”</p> <p>Solicitor-General Herb Gray also denied ministerial involvement in the police investigation.</p> <p>“I was not advised by the RCMP that Mr. Mulroney was being named in the letter sent by justice to the Swiss authorities,” he said, adding: “I do not think that I should have been.””</p> </blockquote> <p>In Osaka, Japan, where as cited earlier he said no to a public inquiry for the intrusion at his residence, Prime Minister Jean Chretien also said he knew nothing about RCMP investigating Mulroney (“Mulroney to sue Ottawa over ‘false’ bribe claim”, by Sandro Contenta, November 19, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Prime Minister Jean Chretien, in Osaka, Japan, last night denied knowing about the justice department investigation.</p> <p>Chretien told The Star’s David Vienneau there is no rule that he be advised if a former prime minister is being investigated for alleged wrongdoing.</p> <p>“I am not aware of anything,” Chretien told reporters at the annual meeting of Pacific Rim nations yesterday. “It is a police investigation. They do their job and they don’t send me any information and I'm not requesting information.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Chretien’s statements in Osaka on these two matters were not even the original timing coincidence of the November 5 intrusion and Mulroney’s legal action (“How simmering Airbus scandal boiled over; Unprecedented legal drama launched by Mulroney libel suit”, by Shawn McCarthy and Derek Ferguson, November 25, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“After years of simmering, the Airbus scandal blew up this week in spectacular fashion when Mulroney launched an unprecedented $50 million libel suit <br />against the federal justice department and the RCMP.</p> <p>By doing so, he becomes the first former prime minister to sue the government.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Swiss agreed on Oct. 24 to freeze the bank accounts in question and co-operate with the Canadian authorities.</p> <p>It’s unclear at this point when and how Mulroney learned of the justice department request. Tasse says in a letter to the department that Mulroney found out only around Nov. 1 and it “has caused him great consternation.”</p> <p>On Nov. 4, Tasse phoned Rock and demanded to talk to the justice minister about the case. Rock refused, saying it would be improper for a politician to get involved in the police investigation. He referred Tasse to the RCMP and justice department officials.</p> <p>Still, on Nov. 8, Tasse wrote to Rock - with copies to Solicitor-General Herb Gray and RCMP Commissioner Phil Murray - objecting to the justice department’s strong language in the letter to the Swiss. He argued the letter went beyond a statement of allegations and “effectively labelled (Mulroney) as a criminal.”</p> <p>In reply, justice department senior counsel William Corbett said the original letter must be read in context and “makes it clear that the conduct described in the request is alleged criminal conduct under investigation.”</p> <p>But Corbett adds his department has written the Swiss again to reiterate that it was discussing allegations and that confidentiality is key.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney lawyer Roger Tasse’s November 4 call was a surprise to Justice Minister Allan Rock and was referred to associate deputy minister Mary Dawson, who and Kimberly Prost, director of Justice Department’s international assistance group and author of the September 29 letter, then met with Tasse; Prost wrote in a memo to deputy minister George Thomson (“Bureaucrats kept Rock from Airbus affair, documents show: The justice minister probably wasn’t aware of the probe until Mulroney’s lawyer called him”, by Gord McIntosh, March 1, 1996, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The decision not to involve the minister was made to protect him against possible allegations of political interference in a police investigation”.</p> </blockquote> <p>RCMP handlings of the Chretien and Mulroney matters were not the only things governments kept in secrecy. According to Karlheinz Schreiber’s former partner, Swiss-Canadian businessman Giorgio Pelossi, the European government-owned Airbus paid the commissions secretly to avoid controversy, and the Swiss justice system could also have links to money laundering (“Airbus pact exists, Pelossi says; Man who signed agreement urges police to locate commissions contract”, by Estanislao Oziewicz, December 11, 1995, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Giorgio Pelossi, who signed the agreement on behalf of International Aircraft Leasing Ltd., said in an interview during the weekend that the RCMP should get a copy of the signed document as part of their investigation into allegations of a secret commissions deal on the sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada, Canadian Airlines and Wardair.</p> <p>Mr. Pelossi, who was Mr. Schreiber’s long-time accountant, confidant and business partner, said he and Airbus have unsigned copies of the agreement. He showed The Globe his copy of the agreement and appendages, but would not allow it to be photocopied.</p> <p>The only signed copy, he said, is held in trust by a Zurich law firm. He said this was done specifically because European government-owned Airbus did not want it known that it paid secret commissions.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Pelossi, 57, said that he has never spoken to the RCMP and that he has never said, nor can he prove, that any commission money actually went to either Mr. Moores or to Mr. Mulroney. He said that he can only document, through Airbus payment schedules and bank drafts, that commissions went from a French bank to IAL Ltd. and then to Mr. Schreiber.</p> <p>Mr. Pelossi has had a falling-out with Mr. Schreiber over his share of profits, a fight that began, Mr. Pelossi said, when Mr. Schreiber initiated criminal charges against him. He said those charges have been dismissed. Mr. Pelossi also spent six months in custody 10 years ago over accusations of misappropriation.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Pelossi said he would provide the RCMP with the business card on which he wrote the numbers of the accounts on one side and the name Frank <br />Moores and the initials BM on the other side. He said the BM refers to Brian Mulroney. He said the BM could not refer to Mr. Moores's wife, Beth. Mr. <br />Pelossi said he did not know Mrs. Moores's first name.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Pelossi said he has been unfairly smeared by Mr. Mulroney’s supporters as a shady businessman. For example, they have leaked suggestions that Mr. Pelossi was somehow involved in the scandal that led to the resignation in 1989 of Swiss justice minister Elisabeth Kopp.</p> <p>Mrs. Kopp resigned after a prosecutor’s report said she was “strongly suspected” of violating an official secret by warning her husband, Hans-Werner, to sever ties with a company under investigation in a major drug money-laundering scandal.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Pelossi said that Mr. Kopp has acted as his Swiss lawyer in his continuing business dispute with Mr. Schreiber after their falling-out in 1991.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But once European governments learned of the Airbus Affair allegations, they acted swiftly, including against some powerful figures in Germany.</p> <p>By January 1996, German police had searched the home of Schreiber’s friend Max Strauss, and son of the late Franz Josef Strauss, as in Cameron’s book once the almighty leader of the Christian Social Party and board chairman of Airbus (“Bavarian home searched in probe of Airbus deal”, January 12, 1996, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The home of the son of a former Bavarian state governor was searched for material dealing with the sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada in 1988.</p> <p>…</p> <p>State Prosecutor Joerg Hillinger said the search of Max Strauss’s Munich home was related to an investigation of businessman Karlheinz Schreiber in connection with the Airbus deal.</p> <p>The home was searched because Strauss is a close confidant of Schreiber, the prosecutor said Thursday. He did not say when the search was done or if any evidence was found.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The state prosecutor in Bavaria is investigating partly because secret commissions would mean the government is owed back taxes.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Former state governor Franz Josef Strauss died in October 1988.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Swiss Police were equally swift and in January interviewed Georgio Pelossi (“Airbus probe visits Pelossi; Swiss interview ex-PM's accuser”, by Derek Ferguson, January 16, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Georgio Pelossi said yesterday he reiterated his claim that Ottawa lobbyist Frank Moores opened two secret bank accounts in a Swiss bank in 1985 and one of them was intended for Mulroney.</p> <p>He said during the four-hour interview conducted by a Swiss general prosecutor and two police officers that he was told this by his former employer, German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber.</p> <p>“I already told them that the two accounts were set up, and one was, I was told by Mr. Schreiber, that the one was for Mr. Mulroney,” Pelossi said yesterday in a telephone interview from Lugano, Switzerland.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“I declared I am ready to go to court,” he said. “The last question they asked me was if I am willing to testify directly, so I think now, with my authorization, they (RCMP) can call me directly without going through the Swiss authorities. They have the authorization to contact me directly.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Pelossi said he told Swiss legal authorities yesterday that he joined Moores, a former Newfoundland premier, and Schreiber in Zurich to open two bank accounts at the Swiss Bank Corp. branch at Paradeplatz. He said Schreiber told him one of the accounts was for Mulroney.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Pelossi said both Moores and Schreiber had gone to court to stop Swiss authorities from turning over the requested bank documents to the RCMP.”</p> </blockquote> <p>With his willingness to cooperate, 2 months later in March Pelossi took a secret trip to Canada and met with RCMP (“Key Airbus figure meets with RCMP, CBC says”, March 14, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>).</p> <p>But Schreiber and Moores kept the Airbus commission money more tightly to their chests: the Swiss Bank Corporation account codenamed Devon, for Brian Mulroney according to Pelossi, Moore asserted was for his wife Beth and never contained more than $575Cdn. Moreover, Schreiber filed a $35 million libel lawsuit against Canadian Broadcast Corporation and reporter Trish Wood for The Fifth Estate reports in March and November 1995. (“Airbus suit seeks $35 million: A German-Canadian accuses the CBC of defaming his character in a TV report”, by Kathleen Engman, January 4, 1996, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>)</p> <p>German police targeted Schreiber directly. A December 1995 search at his home found a list related to Airbus money, with personal identities coded; police then searched the homes of several prominent figures connected to Schreiber (“Schreiber called target of $40-million bribery probe: German tax officials investigating businessman with Airbus links, newspaper says”, by William Marsden, May 12, 1996, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“German tax authorities are investigating German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber for what they claim is a spectacular kickback and tax evasion scheme involving more than $40 million in bribes to important German and Canadian political figures, according to a German newspaper.</p> <p>Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a respected Munich daily, said in an article yesterday that tax investigators found a bribery or commission distribution list last December when they raided Schreiber’s home in Kaufering, Bavaria.</p> <p>The newspaper says that the list included the code names of individuals who received the bribes and claims that the prosecutors leading the investigation have decoded all the names.</p> <p>One of the code names is “Frankfurt.” The newspaper says that a former business partner of Schreiber, Georgio Pelossi, claims Frankfurt is the code name for former Newfoundland premier Frank Moores.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The RCMP and German investigations were sparked by information from Pelossi that Schreiber had paid commissions to German and Canadian politicians through bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Panama and Switzerland.</p> <p>The newspaper claims Schreiber was a member of a close circle of friends connected to the late Franz-Josef Strauss, the former flamboyant German defence minister, premier of Bavaria and chairman of the board of Airbus.</p> <p>This group is referred to in the German media as the “amigo scene.” Sueddeutsche Zeitung said the amigo scene had two companies, called Maple Leaf Enterprises and FMS (Franz Marianne Strauss), that were used to invest money on which they had not paid taxes.</p> <p>Under the headline “Strauss Buddy Deep in a Bribery Quagmire,” the paper states that Schreiber was an important lobbyist for Airbus, Thyssen and Messerschmitt.</p> <p>The paper claims his commissions were funneled through three companies: ATG Investments in Panama, Kensington-Anstadt and International Aircraft Leasing (IAL), both in Liechtenstein.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The raid last December on Schreiber’s home immediately led to four other raids on the homes of three prominent German politicians and a Thyssen executive. These raids were part of a tax-evasion and bribery investigation surrounding the Saudi armored-vehicle deal.</p> <p>Investigators raided the residence of Holger Pfahl, 53, a former state secretary in Germany's defence ministry and leader of the secret service. He is suspected of receiving about $3.5 million in bribes from ATG in Panama.</p> <p>Investigators also raided the home of Walther Leisler Kiep, 70, former treasurer of the German Conservative Party and a close friend of Strauss. He is alleged to have received $900,000 from ATG.</p> <p>Tax police also raided the homes of Strauss’s son Max, 36, and Winfried Haastent, 55, chairman of the board of Thyssen. Strauss, a lawyer, is alleged to have received about $200,000 and Haastent $450,000.</p> <p>The four men have all denied they accepted bribes or evaded taxes.” </p> </blockquote> <p>By June 1996, the home and office of German Member of Parliament Erich Riedl, formerly Germany’s top aviation and space official as a deputy economics minister from 1987 to 1993, was searched for evidence (“German MP target of Airbus investigators”, June 15, 1996, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>).</p> <p>As in the quoted news report by William Marsden, German police raided the home of Holger Pfahls, former state secretary of defence and head of the intelligence agency, for evidence of receiving $3.5 million bribes from Schreiber’s company ATG based in Panama. </p> <p>Targeting Pfahls would turn out to be fruitful.</p> <p>In Part 10 I have contrasted the swift German justice to the Canadian system where practically nothing has happened surrounding the dealings of Karlheinz Schreiber, quoting from my February 20, 2009 blog post Pfahls’s jail sentence 2 days after my father’s August 10, 2005 death that was exactly 1 month after Frank Moores’s:</p> <blockquote> <p>“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”.</p> </blockquote> <p>Pfahls was jailed for $2.5 million bribes taken, and taxes unpaid, for the sale of Thyssen armoured carriers to Saudi Arabia during the 1990-91 Gulf War, a project initiated by then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the behest of then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (“<a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/08/2008410162738460754.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">German leader jailed in Saudi deal</font></a>”, August 12, 2005, Al Jazeera).</p> <p>Executed by Pfahls in a swap, 36 out-of-stock Fuchs-type tanks in German army service were shipped to the Saudis on the Thyssen company’s promise of 36 new ones for the army later; for the 226 million DM deal, Thyssen was paid 446 million DM by Saudi Arabia, an astonishing 220 million DM of it as commissions – far above the typical 10% – from which Pfahls got a share via Karlheinz Schreiber (“<a href="http://star.worldbank.org/corruption-cases/node/18690" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Pfahls/ Kiep/ Luethje/ Weyrauch</font></a>”, Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative, The World Bank):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Thyssen paid 24.4 million DM into a Swiss account with the Swiss Bank Corporation held by Schreiber’s Panama registered firm “ATG”.”</p> </blockquote> <p>More recently on November 9, 2011, Pfahls was handed a second jail term for hiding an additional, over €5 million Euro bribery fortune from the investigation and trial leading to his first jail term, this time along with his wife Viorica and lobbyist Dieter Holzer linked to former Chancellor Kohl’s Christian Democrats as well as foreign government circles (“<a href="http://www.dw.de/the-scandal-that-rocked-the-government-of-helmut-kohl/a-5137950" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The scandal that rocked the government of Helmut Kohl</font></a>”, January 18, 2010, Deutsche Welle; “<a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-21-the-villa-villains-and-rusty" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The villa, the villains and Rusty</font></a>”, by Sam Sole and Lionel Faull, October 21, 2011, <em>Mail & Guardian</em>; and, “<a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/11/09/uk-germany-fraud-minister-idUKTRE7A869H20111109" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Former German minister jailed for fraud</font></a>”, November 9, 2011, <em>Reuters</em>).</p> <p>The wheel of justice started in 1996 after Schreiber was targeted, and came down despite Ludwig Holger Pfahls’s record of government service and political achievement, which included tightening internal security at the intelligence agency in 1985 that triggered the fleeing defection of agency official Hans Joachim Tiedge who had secretly worked for East Germany and betrayed around 350 West German spies and double agents (“Bonn spy scandal widens with arrest in President's office”, August 26, 1985, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>I can’t help but ponder the coincidence that it was RCMP officers of German surnames who on November 14, 1995 prepared and signed a RCMP form to revive my 1992-93 complaint, and despite that the Canadian justice system continued to let oppression be ‘justice’ in my case.</p> <p>An important facet of the Pfahls story is the Panamanian link, that his bribes received via the Swiss Bank Corporation came from Schreiber’s company ATG in Panama.</p> <p>The 1995 RCMP investigation was based on CBC The Fifth Estate stories, which focused on Schreiber’s Liechtenstein company IAL and its links to Frank Moores’s Ottawa company GCI. As a result, in the storm of media publicity surrounding the Airbus Affair there was almost no mention of Schreiber’s Panamanian existence – but the RCMP knew it as the news report by William Marsden indicated.</p> <p>Not until after the 1995-97 Airbus Affair dominated by Mulroney’s lawsuit was over that it was disclosed to the public through Stevie Cameron’s 1998 book <a href="http://steviecameron.com/blue-trust/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money</em></font></a>, that while Mulroney was Prime Minister, Bruce Verchere, a board director of Swiss Bank Corp., was his financial trustee and lawyer, and that Verchere also had a company in Panama – I have commented in Part 8 that it looked like “an extravagant spy tale”.</p> <p>As Stevie Cameron explained, Verchere had moved money from Panama to Switzerland for his family and for some clients (“<a href="http://steviecameronblog.blogspot.ca/2008/02/who-was-bruce-verchere-and-why-did.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Who was Bruce Verchere? And why did Karlheinz Schreiber raise his name?</font></a>”, by Stevie Cameron, February 26, 2008, Stevie Cameron’s Blog):</p> <blockquote> <p>“When Mulroney was elected prime minister in 1984, Verchere managed his blind trust as his financial trustee. He was also his tax lawyer. Both Bruce and Lynne Verchere received patronage appointments from the government during this period.</p> <p>Verchere developed a skill in hiding money. After his wife sold her company to Prentice Hall in 1987 for nearly $17-million, he moved the money around through Panamanian shell companies and other offshore entities until it finally landed in two banks in Geneva: Darier Hentsch et Cie and Pictet Cie, both specializing in wealth management and infinite discretion.</p> <p>Bruce Verchere used these banks for some of his other clients as well, including the Haileys.” </p> </blockquote> <p>Logical suspicions arose in 2009 during the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, as columnist Geoffrey Stevens noted, that Airbus commissions might have gone into Mulroney’s trust run by Verchere, who had died of a reported suicide on August 28, 1993 – as in Parts 3 & 8 – which happened to be “the day after Mulroney accepted his first envelope of cash from Schreiber” (“Mulroney to get grilled this week; Former PM on the stand at the Oliphant inquiry all week long”, by Geoffrey Stevens, May 11, 2009, <a href="http://www.guelphmercury.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Guelph Mercury</em></font></a><strong></strong>):</p> <blockquote> <p>… According to evidence at the inquiry, Schreiber collected more than $30 million from his European clients, Airbus Industrie, Thyssen AG and Eurocopter, to distribute among his Canadian “friends.”</p> <p>He says he gave $300,000 to Mulroney (Mulroney says it was only $225,000). At most, it was only 1 per cent of the $30 million in grease money that Schreiber had at his disposal. Where did the other 99 per cent go? Some, the inquiry has learned, went to Mulroney cronies and supporters Frank Moores and Gary Ouellet (both deceased) and Fred Doucet (he of the failing memory).</p> <p>There is a suspicion, reflected in Schreiber’s records, that some of the money found its way to Bruce Verchere, a Montreal tax lawyer who managed Mulroney’s blind trust when he was PM. Verchere committed suicide on Aug. 28, 1993, the day after Mulroney accepted his first envelope of cash from Schreiber at a hotel near Mirabel Airport.</p> <p>The chief commission counsel Richard Wolson and his assistants would love to uncover what happened to that 99 per cent, but they will be digging with one hand tied behind their backs. They are restricted by narrow terms of reference drafted by University of Waterloo president David Johnston at the behest of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who from the beginning has been more interested in minimizing damage to the Conservative brand than getting to the bottom of the scandal.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As alluded to earlier, “national security” could be an explanation, that even former RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, named by Harper as his advisory chair on national security, likely had to “minimize damage”.</p> <p>Back in 1995-97 in Canada, it being the first time an ex-PM suing the government, the Airbus Affair and most of the media spotlights were consumed by Brian Mulroney’s $50 million libel lawsuit.</p> <p>Government defence strategies began by trying to prove that it was someone on Mulroney’s side leaking the September 29 letter to the media, and if so his side had more to do with damaging his reputation (“Mulroney’s lawyers allege stall tactics; Request for information called ‘abusive’”, by Sandro Contenta, January 17, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mulroney’s suit charges his reputation was seriously damaged by “false” and “reckless” allegations in a justice department letter that he received $5 million in connection with the Airbus deal.</p> <p>But Mulroney 's lawyers yesterday balked at revealing how he got wind of the letter, which asked the Swiss government to help the RCMP’s investigation by freezing and opening two accounts suspected of being used to funnel payments.</p> <p>The justice department letter was written in German and Mulroney’s lawyers also balked at revealing who translated it into English, the version that eventually made its way into media reports last November.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Knowing the author is important because it was this translation that was published in the media, thereby causing the alleged libel, argued Claude Armand Sheppard, lawyer for the Canadian government and for Kimberly Prost, the justice official who signed the letter.</p> <p>But Mulroney’s lawyers argued the libel occurred the minute the justice department letter and its accusations were sent to Swiss authorities.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It did look suspicious, that it was Mulroney’s side leaking the letter to create a media storm in order to sue the government and put RCMP on the defensive, hopefully scaring them off.</p> <p>Quebec Superior Court Justice Andre Rochon ruled that Mulroney didn’t have to provide information in this regard but answer if he knew who had leaked it to <em>The Financial Post</em> (“Mulroney wins right to keep information private”, by Rod MacDonell, January 25, 1996, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>).</p> <p>In a court filing, Mulroney stated he did not know the source of the leak, and also that he might increase his libel claim because the $50 million claim “does not include compensation for real losses” of income. (“Mulroney says damage claim to be more than $50 million”, January 31, 1996, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>)</p> <p>Untouchable superego in display for the court to see.</p> <p>Government lawyers appealed, wanting to know who on Mulroney’s side translated the letter into English and whether he had a copy of the original German, but Quebec Appeal Court Justice Andre Brossard ruled government lawyers had enough information to “adequately prepare” their defence (“Judge quashes bid for more Mulroney data; Lawyers told they have enough to fight lawsuit”, by Sandro Contenta, February 15, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>).</p> <p>Government defence lawyer Claude Armand Sheppard continued to raise the prospect of questioning <em>The Financial Post</em> reporter Philip Mathias about it (“Federal lawyers to target reporter”, by Rod MacDonell, March 22, 1996, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The name of Financial Post reporter Philip Mathias came up in Quebec Superior Court this week during arguments in Mulroney’s $50-million libel suit against the federal government.</p> <p>Mulroney’s lawyer, Jacques Jeansonne, told Judge Andre Rochon that federal lawyer Claude-Armand Sheppard sent him a letter stating that he wanted to question Mathias and others.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mulroney’s spokesman, Luc Lavoie, said Thursday that the documents Mathias used for his story seemed to be copies of Mulroney’s documents.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Reminded that journalists traditionally refuse to reveal their sources, Sheppard said: “It depends on what questions you ask. There are many ways to skin a cat.”</p> <p>Mathias said Thursday he will not reveal the source of the leak if he is called to testify, and he is certain the documents did not come from the Mulroney circle, directly or indirectly.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Around this time in March 1996 at the Federal Court of Canada, Karlheinz Schreiber filed the official English version of the letter he got from “the chief Swiss federal public prosecutor”, in his effort to seek an injunction to prevent the RCMP from obtaining his Swiss banking records; as part of the effort, he agreed to be interviewed by the Justice Department (“Justice letter details payment allegations; Request to Swiss outlines claims of secret transfers to Moores, Mulroney for contracts”, by Estanislao Oziewicz, March 23, 1996, and, “Airbus figure to respond to questions from Ottawa; Schreiber reaches agreement with Justice Department”, by Ross Howard, April 2, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Mulroney’s testimony in April would explain that he first heard the bad news from Schreiber, and that a quick English translation of the September 29 letter in German was done by Swiss law firm Blum & Partners for Schreiber (“Ottawa targets source of Mulroney story Documents in lawsuit argue leak based on translation prepared for former PM”, by Tu Thanh Ha, August 28, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Financial Post and the reporter who wrote the story, Philip Mathias, say that they have no intention of revealing their source.</p> <p>“It’s a futile line of inquiry,” Mr. Mathias said in an interview yesterday, maintaining that the documents he used to write his story did not come from “Mr. Mulroney or his entourage.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>When he was examined under oath in April, Mr. Mulroney explained that he first learned he was under investigation when Mr. Schreiber called him on Nov. 2, 1995.</p> <p>Mr. Schreiber had been advised by the Swiss that transactions in his bank accounts would be suspended. He was also given a copy of the RCMP request, written in German.</p> <p>Because Mr. Mulroney did not speak German, the two agreed to have the Swiss law firm Blum & Partners prepare a summarized translation, a copy of which Mr. Mulroney received within days.</p> <p>Ottawa’s lawyers will argue that the government is not responsible for the fact that the issue became public because what appeared in the Nov. 18, 1995, issue of the Post wasn’t the RCMP letter but an unauthorized translation.</p> <p>“The translation obtained by The Financial Post is not the English version of the request prepared and sent by the Justice Department to Swiss authorities on Sept. 29, 1995,” Ottawa’s filing says.</p> <p>“Rather, it is identical to the Blum translation, made at the request of Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney.”</p> <p>The filing adds: “The defendants will try to establish how the Blum translation ended up in the hands of Philip Mathias and The Financial Post.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Mathias said he had a German version of the RCMP letter but not the official English version, forcing him to rely on an unofficial translation.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It looked possible that Schreiber was the leak source, that in November 1995 when the Swiss police got on his trail he went for immediate publicity to drag Mulroney into the mud – better for himself and likely better for Mulroney. </p> <p>Mulroney’s court testimony came in the examination-for-discovery stage, while his side forewent the early examination of others – similar to with my lawsuit, as in Part 7, that I was examined by a lawyer for UBC in April 1993 but I lost lawyer Brian Mason and did not examine any UBC or RCMP person.</p> <p>The occasion was attended by journalists, and Mulroney’s superego, expressed in hyperboles similar to later in the limelight of live TV broadcast during the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, has always been brimming (“Mulroney denies taking kickbacks ‘It reeked of fascism. Allegations I believe to be poisonous and really fraught with fascism.’”, by Sandro Contenta, April 18, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““It reeked of fascism. Allegations I believe to be poisonous and really fraught with fascism,” Mulroney, 57, said.</p> <p>“My father was an electrician on the north shore of the St. Lawrence. He gave me a good name and that good name was besmirched by the government of Canada. And I want to clear it, despite the smirks from the other side,” Mulroney said, glaring at a government lawyer who had made a facial expression.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Claude Armand Sheppard, who represents the government in the suit, spent much of the morning quizzing Mulroney about the 11 companies for which he sits on the board of directors or on advisory boards.</p> <p>Mulroney argued that “Contrary to the view that I have considerable wealth, I don’t.”</p> <p>He said he immediately offered his resignation after the allegations were made public but all of the companies refused to accept them.</p> <p>Sheppard was trying to demonstrate that despite Mulroney’s claim that his reputation was smeared, it hasn’t stopped him from earning a living or hurt his standing in the business world.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“I have four young children, my mother is 85 years of age, my father-in-law is very ill - to have to explain to them what happened and what is going <br />to happen is a painful thing,” he said.</p> <p>“I had to take my 10-year-old aside: ‘Nicolas, in a little while it will be in the papers. They will say that the government of Canada will say that your <br />father committed crimes and you will be harassed because of it,’” he said.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Later in the afternoon, Mulroney counted the government lawyers sitting across from him.</p> <p>”Two, four, six, seven . . . it’s taxpayers’ money,” he said.</p> <p>“It’s not $50 million,” replied RCMP lawyer Yvan Bolduc.</p> <p>“Tenez vous bien,” Mulroney shot back, which basically translates to, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney’s “very ill” father-in-law, psychiatrist Dimitri Pivnicki as in Part 9, had been  acquainted with Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic’s Dr. Mel Dilli who committed me to Forensic Psychiatric Institute in Coquitlam in early 1994.</p> <p>When his heightened expressions could not evade the fact of his private meetings with Schreiber – in Montreal when he received cash from Schreiber as later admitted in 2007 (“<a href="http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=0d2cf487-0345-49aa-8f95-7e9b3c9420d3" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mulroney admits taking cash a ‘colossal mistake’</font></a>”, November 21, 2007, <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em>) – Mulroney brought up Schreiber’s Chretien Liberal link to cover for it:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He said he first met Schreiber while prime minister, when the businessman wanted federal money to set up a plant in Canada that would produce equipment for the military. Mulroney said he eventually rejected the scheme because it cost too much.</p> <p>After leaving office in July, 1993, Mulroney said he met Schreiber - whom he described as a “well-informed, determined and competent businessman” - once or twice in Montreal.</p> <p>During one of those meetings, Schreiber said he hired former Liberal cabinet minister Marc Lalonde as his lawyer to lobby the current Liberal government about setting up the army equipment plant, Mulroney said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Vividly, Mulroney described his first reaction to the bad news (“Mulroney begins ‘fight for honor’: The former prime minister says allegations he took kickbacks from the sale of 34 Airbus Industrie planes to Air Canada ‘horrified’ him”, by William Marsden, April 18, 1996, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Windsor Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mulroney said that when he learned about the letter Nov. 2 he was “horrified” and couldn’t sleep for weeks.</p> <p>Holding a copy of the letter up to the packed courtroom, he said the only true statement in the letter is in the first line where he is called a former prime minister of Canada.</p> <p>He repeated several times he does not deny the government’s or the RCMP’s right to investigate allegations of kickbacks or to ask a foreign government for help.</p> <p>He said the government went too far in its letter to the Swiss by making blanket statements calling him a criminal and referring to “criminal activity on the part of a former prime minister.”</p> <p>“This is not an allegation. This is an indictment,” he said. “The government has accused me, convicted me and sentenced me.</p> <p>He said he first learned about the letter from Schreiber on Nov. 2.</p> <p>“He told me he had received a document that had been served upon him and he said there are things in here that involve you,” Mulroney recalled.</p> <p>The letter was in German and Mulroney asked Schreiber to give him a summation over the phone.</p> <p>“With each passing adjective my horror and disbelief grew,” he said. “I was thunderstruck. I said, ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ This was something straight out of Kafka.””</p> </blockquote> <p>A strange contradiction of facts showed in the testimony, that both sides had expressed willingness for Mulroney to provide full bank records in exchange for RCMP withdrawal of the letter prior to media publicity, but now each blamed the other as unwilling:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mulroney said he hired Roger Tasse, former federal deputy justice minister, to try to persuade the government to withdraw the letter before the media obtained a copy.</p> <p>He said he offered the RCMP full disclosure of all his bank accounts and relevant documents if they would withdraw the incriminating statements in the letter. He said the government refused.</p> <p>Sheppard asked him if the RCMP had not offered to withdraw the letter at a Nov. 15 meeting with Tasse if Mulroney would hand over all his banking records. Mulroney denied that the RCMP had made the offer.”</p> </blockquote> <p>If neither side was lying, then the middleman Roger Tasse had done a sloppy job. Mulroney quickly realized it and 2 days later explained that the circumstances by November 15 had changed, journalists including Stevie Cameron were getting to the story (“Officials backed probe, ex-PM says; Unlikely that senior authorities did not see claims in letter, Mulroney argues”, by Tu Thanh Ha, April 20, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Mulroney’s lawyers say in their revised statement of claim, filed on Jan. 29, that during the Nov. 15 meeting, “the offer of full co-operation from Mr. Mulroney was reiterated.”</p> <p>Yesterday, however, Mr. Mulroney was saying he was ready to open his books only on Nov. 4, not Nov. 15. By the later date, media leaks had made the offer irrelevant, he said.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>“The situation had greatly changed from the 4th to the 15th. . . There was another train coming down the track,” he told the hearing.</p> <p>Considering the circumstances on Nov. 15, his representative was right in refusing to extend an earlier offer to open Mr. Mulroney’s books, the former prime minister said.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Tasse did well in his meeting with Mr. Fiegenwald to withdraw that proposition.”</p> <p>Three days after that meeting, The Financial Post, on Nov. 18, was the first media outlet to state that Mr. Mulroney was named in a police investigation.</p> <p>But the Mulroney team says that other publications were already on the same path, including the magazines Der Spiegel and Maclean’s.</p> <p>At one point, Mr. Mulroney implied that some of the leaks came from the RCMP.</p> <p>He said that on Nov. 16 he had received a fax from Maclean’s which made it clear that Maclean’s reporter Stevie Cameron already knew that Mr. Tasse had met the RCMP.</p> <p>“You can be certain of this: Roger Tasse didn’t call Stevie Cameron,” Mr. Mulroney said, adding that he was hoping to see Ms. Cameron take the stand eventually to explain how she got the information.”</p> </blockquote> <p>A world full of holes and leaks.</p> <p>Mulroney would not provide financial records now, and he denied being a good friend of Frank Moores (“Mulroney lawsuit: Former PM calls claims a ‘setup and a sham’”, by William Marsden, April 20, 1996, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Testifying in Superior Court, Mulroney , 57, said Moores did not support him when he won the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party in 1983. He also said Moores later angered him prior to the 1988 federal election when Moores told reporters that the Tories would probably lose the election.</p> <p>“He just wasn’t on my hit parade in those days,” Mulroney said in response to questions from government lawyer Claude-Armand Sheppard.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mulroney has denied ever having a foreign account and said Friday that for the last 25 years he has maintained only one account, at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Montreal.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The government has subpoenaed Mulroney’s bank records and tax returns, but Mulroney’s lawyers are challenging the request.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The media pointed out, that newspapers had recorded intimate socializing between the Mulroney family and the Moores family at the time Mulroney was supposedly angry at Moores (“Mulroney party guest lists dispute Airbus testimony”, by Rod MacDonell, May 22, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Globe and Mail reported Jan. 9, 1988, that Moores was invited to Mulroney’s country retreat Dec. 31, 1987, to celebrate New Year’s.</p> <p>In March, 1989, the Toronto Sun reported that Mila Mulroney threw a 50th birthday party for her husband and invited 20 couples, including “lobbyists Frank and Beth Moores.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney’s aggressive offense worked well and media coverage was taken by it – he, his foes and others agreed (“AIRBUS AFFAIR How Brian Mulroney’s pre-emptive strike won the PR war”, by Estanislao Oziewicz, September 14, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“On the night of Friday, Nov. 17 last year, Ottawa public-relations executive Luc Lavoie was enjoying a glass of nouveau beaujolais at a party in Montreal when his cell phone rang. It was Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>The former prime minister told his trusted retainer that Senator Marjory LeBreton had just informed him that CTV’s Craig Oliver was onto what would later break wide open as the Airbus story.</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney gave Mr. Oliver’s home phone number to Mr. Lavoie with orders “to try to stop him.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Whatever the venue, the article in the Post on Nov. 18 was the trigger for a calculated legal and public-relations strategy in which Mr. Lavoie, Mr. Mulroney’s former deputy chief of staff and current vice-president and managing partner of National Public Relations Inc., played a crucial role.</p> <p>…</p> <p>From the beginning the goal, as he later testified in an examination for discovery in the libel case, was to have headlines say, “Mulroney Suing the RCMP for Libel,” as opposed to “RCMP Accuses Mulroney of Having Secret Bank Accounts in Switzerland and Receiving Bribes.”</p> <p>Within hours of the publication of the Post story, Mr. Mulroney’s high-profile Montreal lawyers, including Gérald Tremblay, Harvey Yarosky and Roger Tassé, held a news conference in Montreal to announce that their client was suing the federal government for $50-million.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Says Patrick Gossage, former press secretary to Pierre Trudeau: “The unbendable principle of political PR, when you know an issue is coming up and you know it’s a serious issue that’s liable to have big public impact, is ‘The first cut is the deepest,’ which was a Bryan Adams song when I was at the Prime Minister’s Office."</p> <p>…</p> <p>“If I had not acted the way I did,” Mr. Mulroney explained later, “and as quickly as I did, to convey to the Canadian people that this was a hoax and a fraud being perpetrated against me, and if I had not acted in a way to convey that internationally, then the damage to my reputation, which is already very significant, would have been lethal.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Claude-Armand Sheppard, the lead lawyer for the Justice Department, says of Mr. Mulroney’s performance at the discovery: “That must go down as a <br />masterpiece of answering to another audience rather than to your questioner. It was brilliant. As I left, I said to someone, ‘I now understand two things: how Mr. Mulroney rose so high and how he fell so low.’””</p> </blockquote> <p>Both the Canadian public and the court now expected RCMP evidence to substantiate its claim in the September 29 letter about Mulroney’s “criminal activity”. Government lawyers countered that RCMP had sensitive information from informants other than news media but disclosure at this time would harm the criminal investigation. (“Society’s interest outweighs ex-PM’s right, lawyers argue; Ottawa says judge’s order for details threatens probe”, by Tu Thanh Ha, May 24, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>)</p> <p>RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray said if necessary RCMP would invoke the Canada Evidence Act related to “national security” to avoid disclosing info at the civil trial (“Airbus probe comes before Mulroney lawsuit, RCMP says: Mounties will invoke national security to avoid testimony”, by Carolyn Abraham, May 29, 1996, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In a meeting with the Citizen’s editorial board, Murray said RCMP investigators or sources called to testify at the civil trial will invoke the Canada Evidence Act in hopes of being exempt from answering questions that could jeopardize the criminal investigation.</p> <p>A sweeping provision of the Canada Evidence Act, traditionally used by RCMP , federal government officials and Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents, blocks testimony that threatens national security.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The government was now on the defensive, and Mulroney’s PR offense went farther, portraying the RCMP investigation as a political move by Liberal Justice Minister Allan Rock (“RCMP had Rock’s support, Mulroney says Airbus probe based on work of two journalists, former PM claims in rebuttal prepared in libel suit”, by Tu Thanh Ha, June 4, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Lawyers for Brian Mulroney say the RCMP started their investigation of the former prime minister in the Airbus affair mainly on the basis of journalists’ research and with the “implicit support and encouragement” of Attorney-General Allan Rock.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Rock has said that he was unaware of the investigation and the letter to the Swiss.</p> <p>He has said that in late 1993, the year the Liberal government was elected, he heard allegations of illegal payments during the Progressive Conservatives’ years in office. The allegations did not include specific references to the Airbus purchase, and Mr. Rock said he passed the information to Solicitor-General Herbert Gray, taking no further part in the matter.</p> <p>The Mulroney rebuttal notes Mr. Rock’s action. But it says his information was “from a source that he admitted publicly that he could not deny were journalists.”</p> <p>Mr. Rock’s decision to pass on the allegations “gave to the entire process that would ensue a stamp of laxity that would mark the process leading to sending the letter,” the rebuttal says.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Rock then disclosed his December 2, 1993 letter to Solicitor General and RCMP’s declining reply (“Rock releases letters to counter Mulroney; Proof that file was closed, minister’s aide says”, by Tu Thanh Ha, August 10, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The first of the letters was sent by Mr. Rock on Dec. 2, 1993, to Solicitor-General Herbert Gray, the minister responsible for the RCMP.</p> <p>The letter shows that Mr. Rock reported rumours that he heard on two separate occasions in November, 1993 of “serious wrongdoings and possibly criminal offences” in the contracting practices of Mr. Mulroney’s government.</p> <p>The second letter, a reply sent by RCMP Inspector Marc Beaupré to Mr. Rock on Feb. 22, 1994, says that, after meeting Mr. Rock on Jan. 10 and subsequently interviewing two journalists, no grounds were found to pursue an investigation. Neither document mentions Mr. Mulroney’s name.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So Allan Rock’s political view had led to a request through Solicitor General for RCMP to investigate the former Mulroney government, but it wasn’t Airbus money specific and was declined.</p> <p>Similarly my documents faxed to Kim Campbell, then Justice Minister, on November 30, 1992, might have gone from her to Solicitor General, though as in Part 6 local RCMP, including Sgt. Brian Cotton taking me to psychiatric committal, got copies immediately. The difference for my case was that RCMP accepted it as a complaint about RCMP in one UBC incident as specified by A/Comm. J. W. B. McConnell – but so far no result other than the November 14, 1995 form referring to “bulk of paper work”.</p> <p>Reform MP Stephen Harper accused Rock of conducting a private investigation, which Rock denied (“Justice minister accused of meddling in Airbus affair: Allan Rock says he knew about the kickback allegations but denies he was conducting his own private investigation”, by Adrienne Tanner, June 15, 1996, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““Going back to the beginning of this affair, why was the minister of justice conducting his own private investigation?'” asked Reform MP Stephen Harper.</p> <p>Rock denied all charges. The only investigation into the Airbus affair is being done by the police, he insisted.</p> <p>But Rock admitted that he received information from journalists about the kickback allegations shortly after becoming justice minister.</p> <p>After consulting with his deputy minister and federal Solicitor-General Herb Gray, he says he told the RCMP everything he knew.”</p> </blockquote> <p>RCMP draft of the letter to Swiss police, later filed at court, did reveal remarkable editing by Justice Department for Kimberly Prost’s final version, specifically to accuse Mulroney of fraud during his entire prime ministerial era (“RCMP letter ‘toughened,’ Mulroney aide says”, by Derek Ferguson, November 14, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““What was sent to the department of justice in August, 1995, was three pages long, and what came out on the 29th of September, 1995, was seven pages long. You can tell that it’s the same flow - actually some of the paragraphs are identical,” said Lavoie, who provided copies of both letters to The Star.</p> <p>“But it was toughened up, especially the part . . . which says that this is proof of an ongoing scheme on the part of Mr. Mulroney to defraud Canadian taxpayers of millions of dollars from the day he was elected prime minister to the day he resigned in 1993.””</p> </blockquote> <p>In an April 2009 blog post I agreed with what Mulroney said in 1997 after his lawsuit settlement, that the Chretien government had been involved in the Airbus Affair criminal allegations, but I viewed it as part of the Liberal government’s law-and-order politics (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-3/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The myth of political vendetta … and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 4)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“And Mulroney further stated the Liberal government must have been behind the RCMP in branding him a criminal in a letter to the Swiss authorities:</p> <p>“If anyone believes that this could take place without the knowledge of the minister of justice or the knowledge of the solicitor general or the knowledge and approval of the commissioner of the RCMP or the knowledge of the PMO [i.e., Prime Minister’s Office] anybody who believes that, I wish them well in Disney World”.</p> <p>While the Chretien government at the time denied any involvement in the RCMP investigation, I would give Mr. Mulroney the benefit of the doubt on his points quoted above. My analysis of press archives has suggested to me that such were likely the case, however that it was not obvious vendetta against Mulroney but a part of the incoming Liberal government’s law-and-order agendas during 1993-1995 to include a criminal investigation of Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair…</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>The RCMP was not only put on the defensive at the lawsuit front, but also suffered a legal setback in the criminal investigation. Schreiber’s application to the Federal Court of Canada to block RCMP access to his Swiss bank records won on constitutional grounds regarding police search (“Airbus probe ‘back to start’ as judge rules against RCMP: Mounties back to ‘square one’”, by Stephen Bindman and Rod MacDonell, June 5, 1996, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Justice Howard Wetston of Federal Court said federal officials should have obtained a judge’s approval before sending the letter to Swiss authorities requesting access to the bank records of German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Justice Minister Allan Rock has said officials in his department merely transmitted the Mounties’ request to the Swiss and did not evaluate the police investigation.</p> <p>But Wetston ruled the government’s action violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because a judge did not grant prior authorization as would be required if the search were conducted in Canada.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In contrast, the Swiss Federal Court actually rejected Schreiber’s request to block RCMP access (“Swiss open records to Airbus probe: RCMP to examine accounts allegedly linked to Mulroney”, by Bill Schiller, June 18, 1996, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The request by the Canadians for legal assistance contains a concise and detailed presentation of their suspicions,” said the court decision, written in German. “The Canadian authorities are not obliged to present any proof.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Still, the Swiss police investigation had to be suspended due to the Canadian court ruling (“Judge orders Ottawa to halt Airbus search; Quest for documents in Switzerland to await outcome of new court hearing”, by Paul Koring, July 27, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Eventually in May 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada would side with RCMP, stating that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms applied only within Canada and a search request to foreign police was not a Canadian police search (“Airbus search allowed by Supreme Court; Schreiber’s Charter rights not violated by RCMP request to Swiss government to seize bank records, top judges say”, by Kirk Makin, May 29, 1998, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>But during the tense time in 1996-97 defending against Mulroney’s libel lawsuit, RCMP now had nothing new legally to add to the speculative info that had led to Kimberly Prost’s letter.</p> <p>Despite media speculations of lawsuit settlement the two sides couldn’t agree to terms, as Mulroney wouldn't accept any deal without an apology while the government would only express “profound regret” and promise review of RCMP procedures (“Rock pours cold water on settlement with Mulroney: Minister blames ex-PM’s team for leaking details of negotiations”, by Stephen Bindman and Rod MacDonell, June 18, 1996, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>).</p> <p>On August 28, 1996 – I notice it as the 3rd anniversary of Bruce Verchere’s death as in Part 3 – Justice Andre Rochon set the trial to begin on January 6, 1997, with a 60-day length expected – 15 days for Mulroney’s side to make its case and 45 days for the government to counter with defence witnesses (“Mulroney libel trial to begin Jan. 6”, by Rod MacDonell, August 29, 1996, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>).</p> <p>More than the coincidence of the day was that of the high-profile government lead lawyer Claude Armand Sheppard – lawyer for Verchere in his dispute in 1993 with his wife Lynne Walters, mentioned in Part 8, that allegedly led to his emotional ruin and suicide (“<a href="http://steviecameronblog.blogspot.ca/2008/02/who-was-bruce-verchere-and-why-did.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Who was Bruce Verchere? And why did Karlheinz Schreiber raise his name?</font></a>”, by Stevie Cameron, February 26, 2008, Stevie Cameron’s Blog; and, “<a href="http://www.investorvillage.com/groups.asp?mb=6966&mn=26211&pt=msg&mid=7187736" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Suicide & Airbus intrigue</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, by Stephen Maher, May 5, 2009, <em>The Chronicle Herald</em>, as shared on InvestorVillage).</p> <p>In June, after Mulroney’s successful courtroom testimony and as Justice Minister Allan Rock was accused by Mulroney’s lawyers and the Reform party as politically behind the RCMP investigation, the government hired lawyer Harvey Strosberg of Windsor, Ontario, whose philosophy was, “litigation is war and the weak go to the wall”, as a “backroom adviser” for the defence (“Ottawa bolsters its defence team in Mulroney case”, by William Marsden, December 7, 1996, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Strosberg had become Rock’s friend since Rock’s articling student days at a Toronto law firm 20 years ago, and a close friend for nearly a decade, and his joining was a sign that Rock’s political future – a possible prime minister – could be in the balance (“‘Lawyers’ lawyer’ gets call: Mulroney’s libel lawsuit is the latest in a string of high-profile cases for litigator”, by Grace MacAluso, December 14, 1996, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Windsor Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Rock’s political future could hinge on the outcome of the lawsuit, but Strosberg is reluctant to talk about his relationship with a man who has been touted as a future prime minister.</p> <p>“He’s one of many close friends,” he says. Still, it’s clear the two mean a lot to each other. “It’s hard talking about him,” says Strosberg. “He’s like family.””</p> </blockquote> <p>To strengthen its defence against defamation claim, the government side also filed at court a linguistic analysis report by German-language expert, University of Windsor professor Ingrid Helbig, which concluded that the Kimberly Prost letter quotes in <em>The Financial Post</em> on November 18, 1995, were very likely from the Swiss law firm Blum & Partners’ translation ordered by Schreiber for Mulroney (“Ottawa attributes leak to document for Mulroney; Court filing part of defence strategy in Airbus libel suit”, by Tu Thanh Ha, October 2, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The document that Ottawa filed with the court yesterday says that the quotes in the Post story and the Blum translation are very much alike. It was written by German-language expert Ingrid Helbig, a professor at the University of Windsor.</p> <p>For example, Ms. Helbig notes that the German “eines andauernden Komplott durch Herrn Mulroney” is officially translated as “an ongoing scheme by Mr. Mulroney.”</p> <p>In the Blum summary, however, the words were presented as: “a persisting plot/conspiracy by Mr. Mulroney” -- an uncommon choice of words that reappears in Mr. Mathias’s article.</p> <p>“The double wording is so unusual that, had I assigned this German passage to my university students, and had two of my students rendered ‘Komplott’ as ‘plot/conspiracy,’ I would immediately have concluded that they had consulted and copied,” Prof. Helbig wrote.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Aha, Kimberly Prost had only called Mulroney’s activity “an ongoing scheme”, not quite “a persistent plot/conspiracy”, but the Swiss law firm translation made it much more irritating to Mulroney.</p> <p>The analysis of “linguistic fingerprints” was allowed by Justice Andre Rochon as evidence for the trial, “relevant in determining the damages Mulroney can claim for harm to his reputation” (“Mulroney loses fight over disputed letter: A Montreal judge refuses to throw out a key piece of evidence in Ottawa’s defence against the ex-PM’s libel suit”, by Rod MacDonell, October 16, 1996, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>).</p> <p>The RCMP also intensified its criminal investigation, hiring forensic accountant Richard Monk’s firm to examine documents to find links between Mulroney and the Airbus commissions (“RCMP hires accountants to examine Airbus papers; Ottawa firm takes close look at financial documents”, by Estanislao Oziewicz, September 7, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A small Ottawa forensic accounting firm, working on behalf of the RCMP, has begun a detailed examination of documents related to the Airbus investigation.</p> <p>Richard Monk, a partner of Boyer, Monk & Payne Inc., confirmed yesterday that his firm has a short-term contract to review financial and other records provided by the RCMP in its investigation of allegations of illegal commissions in the 1988 sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada.</p> <p>Mr. Monk said he did not know whether this initial contract would lead to further forensic work on the Airbus file.”</p> </blockquote> <p>There was also a major RCMP reinforcement, the transfer of RCMP Inspector Peter German, a lawyer, from “E” Division in British Columbia to take over the criminal investigation:</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Detective Inspector Peter German, who heads the Mountie’s major fraud investigation unit probing the Airbus case, said yesterday he cannot <br />comment about any aspect of the on-going investigation.</p> <p>“My hands are tied,” he said.</p> <p>Inspector German, a lawyer as well as an investigator, moved to Ottawa from Vancouver earlier this summer to take over the Airbus investigation. In British Columbia, Inspector German was chief of the so-called bingogate inquiry into allegations that the governing New Democrats misused charity money for political purposes.”</p> </blockquote> <p>German was promoted from Staff Sergeant to Inspector for this, so finally RCMP was getting more serious than having a lone Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald on the case (“RCMP inspector selected to help beef up Airbus probe; Experience includes B.C. ‘bingogate’ investigation”, by Derek Ferguson, December 24, 1996, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Peter German was promoted to inspector from staff-sergeant when he was transferred from Vancouver to Ottawa in July after being selected to head the moribund Airbus investigation.</p> <p>…</p> <p>German confirmed that he is in charge of the Airbus investigation, but said Fiegenwald remains a part of the probe.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That was literally a “German”, besides Fiegenwald’s surname. I have to seriously wonder if the two German surnamed “E” Division officers, “Rischmueller” and “Neustaedter” as on the November 14, 1995 form to revive my RCMP complaint, were not part of this “German” mission.</p> <p>But the government defence for the lawsuit proposed an unusual legal step, one that RCMP would find intrusive for their police investigation. Government lawyers asked and received court approval, despite initial objection from Mulroney’s side, that Swiss police lawyer Pascal Gossin, responsible for handling the Kimberly Prost letter, take part in the trial to explain how the Swiss worked (“Ottawa wins key ruling in Airbus case; Lawyers can go to Switzerland to question Swiss official about RCMP’s letter”, by Tu Thanh Ha, October 9, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The ruling is important for Ottawa because it hopes the testimony of Swiss police lawyer Pascal Gossin will support the government’s contention that <br />a letter the RCMP wrote about former prime minister Brian Mulroney was typical of foreign requests for assistance the Swiss receive.</p> <p>…</p> <p>But because Mr. Gossin handles so much sensitive information, Ottawa said it was doubtful that the Swiss would let him travel to Montreal to testify.</p> <p>That is why the federal government petitioned for an overseas hearing.</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney’s lawyers opposed the move, saying that Mr. Gossin should be questioned only on specific facts of the case, not on the general way such requests are handled, since that is a role reserved for expert witnesses.</p> <p>Furthermore, the Mulroney side says that holding a hearing in Switzerland would be costly.</p> <p>Yesterday’s ruling by Mr. Justice André Rochon of the Quebec Superior Court would allow Mr. Gossin to be questioned by a Swiss judge in a hearing in Bern.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>The questions will be submitted in advance by both sides so Swiss authorities can examine them. The hearing transcript will then be used in the Canadian trial.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Mulroney’s lawyers decided to swamp Gossin with many questions, 100 of them; RCMP found it too much for the criminal investigation, and like Commissioner Philip Murray had said invoking the Canada Evidence Act if necessary, Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer – a lawyer himself – filed RCMP objection to 8 of them, citing international law enforcement “confidentiality” (“RCMP object to some Airbus queries; Mulroney spokesman scoffs at claim foreign relations would suffer if questions allowed”, by Estanislao Oziewicz, November 6, 1996, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a> ):</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer said in a certificate filed yesterday in Quebec Superior Court that premature disclosure of information gathered by police in a criminal investigation “would benefit those who are the subject of the investigation by providing them indications of what is known or unknown by the police and what directions the investigation is taking, and by thus giving them an opportunity to take counter measures that would jeopardize the success of the ongoing investigation.”</p> <p>Mr. Palmer, a lawyer with 38 years of RCMP service, also argues that disclosure of the information sought by Mr. Mulroney’s lawyers would compromise the RCMP’s relationship with foreign governments, police and security forces.</p> <p>“International co-operation between law enforcement agencies is based on a recognized quid pro quo,” Mr. Palmer argues. “A failure to guarantee the confidentiality of information exchanged would have the effect of reducing and possibly destroying the likelihood of future co-operation in the sharing of information, not only by Switzerland but by most other foreign police agencies.</p> <p>“The international law enforcement community is a dynamic group who maintain a general awareness of what is occurring between and among its various member agencies; as a result, failure to guarantee confidentiality of information exchanged with Switzerland would reverberate throughout the international community. We know many foreign national agencies are watching this case with great interest -- and concern.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Lawyers for both sides were required to submit, in advance, questions they wish to ask Mr. Gossin. Last week, the government side submitted a list of 46 questions; Mr. Mulroney’s lawyers presented 100.</p> <p>Citing the Canada Evidence Act, the RCMP has objected to eight of the 100 questions. These include whether the Sept. 29, 1995, letter of request to Swiss authorities about banking records was preceded by other queries and, if so, by whom, and how many people in all were notified about Canada’s request.</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney has argued that the Canadian request was written in such a careless way that even though it was supposed to be a confidential government-to-government communication, it was inevitable that it would be leaked and damage his reputation.</p> <p>Luc Lavoie, a spokesman for Mr. Mulroney, said in a telephone interview yesterday that it is interesting to note the RCMP, not the Justice Department, is objecting to the questions.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It looked like a blunder, a repeat of RCMP rejection of Justice Minister Allan Rock’s December 1993 request for an investigation of the former Mulroney government. But this time government lawyers must have consulted with RCMP in advance – so it might just be Rock’s valiant gesture of international openness.</p> <p>Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie noticed the difference:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Lavoie said it is obvious that a serious rift has developed between the Justice Department and the RCMP in their defence of the libel action.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Merely days before the trial’s start, the government’s hope of winning the lawsuit was dashed by Federal Court of Canada’s decision in favor of Mulroney’s appeal against the RCMP objection to 8 of the questions for Pascal Gossin, and by what Mulroney had suspected in his April testimony, that RCMP might have leaked something – Sgt. Fiegenwald had told a reporter Mulroney was named in the letter before <em>The Financial Post</em> quoted from the Schreiber-Mulroney translation on November 18, 1995 (“Money key to lawsuit’s settlement COVER STORY / Rock was willing to apologize but Mulroney wanted Ottawa to pay his legal costs. A deal seemed impossible until the federal government learned of a crucial mistake and changed its strategy”, by Tu Thanh Ha, January 11, 1997, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“As 1996 was drawing to a close, Justice Minister Allan Rock and Brian Mulroney were holed up on separate floors of a prestigious Montreal office building for two days, closely monitoring talks to end the former prime minister’s unprecedented lawsuit against the federal government.</p> <p>The talks failed. And both men rang in the new year facing the prospect of a three-month trial that could leave a permanent -- perhaps fatal – mark on their political reputations.</p> <p>But on Jan. 2, the two sides agreed to resume the secret talks that would lead to last Sunday’s dramatic out-of-court settlement, the day before the trial date of Mr. Mulroney’s $50-million libel suit against the government.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The two sides had roughly agreed that Mr. Mulroney would drop his lawsuit in return for an apology. There was also no objection from the plaintiff’s side to a clause saying that Mr. Rock was not aware of the investigation until contacted by one of Mr. Mulroney’s lawyers on Nov. 4, 1995.</p> <p>But the federal side did not want to pay costs. It argued that it could not shell out any sums during a time of budget cuts. The federal side warned that Mr. Mulroney had little chance of recovering his costs, even if he were to win some damages. One federal lawyer said that Mr. Mulroney could not expect to win more than $2-million, what it would have cost him to wage a three-month trial.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Then, suddenly, the federal case collapsed.</p> <p>Mr. Rock was at home watching CBC’s The National news, at 10:10 in the evening, when the phone rang. It was Mr. Thomson.</p> <p>During a final preparation session with Justice Department lawyers, Staff Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald, the lead RCMP Airbus investigator, disclosed that he had confirmed to a reporter that Mr. Mulroney’s name appeared in the letter to the Swiss before it had become public knowledge in November, 1995.</p> <p>This was bad news because, in Quebec, an action for defamation is similar to an action for negligence in a Common Law jurisdiction. So Ottawa would have had trouble arguing that it had acted with the appropriate precautions and the requisite standard of care.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The next day, several federal officials glumly gathered in an office at the Justice Department’s building in Ottawa: lawyers Vincent O’Donnell and Claude-Armand Sheppard from Montreal, Mr. Strosberg, who had flown in from Windsor, and Mr. Thomson, Mr. Palmer and RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray.</p> <p>…</p> <p>While the officials were still discussing the problem, more bad news came in. Mr. Justice Pierre Denault of the Federal Court had ruled that the RCMP could not invoke international relations as a reason to deny Mr. Mulroney the opportunity to ask questions about the way the letter was handled by the Swiss.</p> <p>…</p> <p>SUNDAY, JAN. 5</p> <p>Again, the Mulroney side offered another proposal: “Any conclusions or suggestions of wrongdoings were and are unjustified.” Again, the government turned it down.</p> <p>On monetary matters, the government had conceded that it would cover Mr. Mulroney’s costs. The agreement would say that the RCMP would pay “all fees and disbursements . . . reasonably incurred.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>After 5 p.m., the deal was reached, without the word “suggestions.”</p> <p>It read: “Based on the evidence received to date, the RCMP acknowledges that any conclusions of wrongdoing by the former prime minister were -- and are -- unjustified.”</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney was at his home, waiting with his media adviser, Luc Lavoie, along with Mr. Tremblay and Mr. Jeansonne, for news of the negotiations.</p> <p>The phone rang. It was Mr. [former Quebec Superior Court chief justice, settlement facilitator Alan] Gold. Mr. Mulroney took the call, smiled, and simply said: “It’s done.””</p> </blockquote> <p>RCMP didn’t have evidence to conclude Mulroney wrongdoing. By settling before trial, RCMP avoided more facts to come to the open:</p> <blockquote> <p>“There are many questions that the trial might have looked at:</p> <p>Who saw and approved the letter before it went out?</p> <p>Who initiated the investigation and included Mr. Mulroney’s name, and on what basis?</p> <p>What evidence has been discovered over the past 18 months?</p> <p>Why hasn’t the RCMP talked to Air Canada?</p> <p>Who leaked the letter to the Swiss authorities and why?</p> <p>These remain unanswered, however, as both sides opted for the certainty of a three-page document over the three-month uncertainty of a landmark trial.”</p> </blockquote> <p>One of these questions had an answer, as earlier, that RCMP had investigated Air Canada shortly after the 1988 Airbus deal.</p> <p>An expensive hoax perhaps. Mulroney’s legal expenses could be $2 million, but Allan Rock’s friend, lawyer Harvey Strosberg was elated (“Taxpayers on hook for $2 million”, by Sarah Scott, January 7, 1997, <a href="http://www.windsorstar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Windsor Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Justice Minister Allan Rock is exonerated in the deal, said Strosberg, a longtime friend of Rock who was asked by Rock last spring to help in the defence.”</p> </blockquote> <p>From the start it was to Mulroney’s advantage to take the offensive with a libel lawsuit, but there were indications that RCMP also provoked Mulroney to do so; in other words, RCMP likely also wanted a media circus focused on an unprecedented lawsuit by an ex-Prime Minister against the government, thus avoiding a harder criminal investigation the German police did in contrast.</p> <p>For one, RCMP, including Commissioner Murray, treated Mulroney’s early intermediary, lawyer Roger Tasse, aloofly and even rudely (“Mulroney lawyer: Suit was avoidable; Ottawa rejected apology before allegations public, Tasse says”, by Edison Stewart and David Vienneau, January 8, 1997, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray knew the key contents of a controversial letter in the Airbus case in time to rectify the damage, according to a lawyer for former prime minister Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>Murray says it was only last week that he first read the 1995 justice department letter to Swiss authorities which accused Mulroney of criminal activity and sought their help in the investigation into alleged kickbacks.</p> <p>But lawyer Roger Tasse says he personally read excerpts of an unofficial translation of the letter to Murray before the Airbus allegations were made <br />public in the Financial Post on Nov. 18, 1995.</p> <p>“I took some time to go over the essential parts (and) I said if you want a copy you can have a copy, but he didn’t accept my invitation,” Tasse said in a telephone interview.</p> <p>…</p> <p>He said he met two RCMP investigators Nov. 15, 1995, and then wrote to them the following day asking for both the clarification and the apology that has now been issued.</p> <p>“They said no, no regrets, no apology, no nothing,” he said in an interview.”</p> </blockquote> <p>For another, Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald leaked to quite a few reporters that Mulroney had been named in the letter, and then denied leaking until a few days before the trial’s start (“Leak final blow to federal position: RCMP prober talked to ‘two or three’ reporters”, by William Marsden and Paul Wells, January 8, 1997, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Lavoie said that, around that time, Mulroney received numerous calls from reporters claiming they knew Mulroney was named in the letter, calls which made it clear that the RCMP was leaking information.</p> <p>…</p> <p>… a high-placed government source close to the investigation named Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, who was the lead investigator on the Airbus investigation.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The official, who did not want to be named, said Fiegenwald made the admission in answer to a direct question posed by a government lawyer last Thursday, about whether he had told Cameron that Mulroney was named in the letter.</p> <p>“His response was that, ‘Well, I wasn’t forthcoming with the name; it was just a sort of confirmation (of the name),’” the official said.</p> <p>The official said Fiegenwald had been asked the same question several times over the past five months and had replied in the negative.</p> <p>The RCMP has begun an internal investigation into Fiegenwald and reassigned him to administrative duties, the official says.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mulroney’s lawyer Roger Tasse … recalled that on Nov. 15, 1995, he met Fiegenwald at the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa and was given assurances that Mulroney’s name would be kept confidential.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Tasse said he began to have suspicions about the RCMP when, soon after his meeting with Fiegenwald, he received several phone messages that Cameron wanted to speak to him. He said only a handful of people knew that he was acting for Mulroney and that he had met with the RCMP.</p> <p>“I had never met Cameron, but I knew who she was and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what she wanted,” he said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The way the RCMP acted, they probably didn’t plan to win any libel defence against Mulroney, either.</p> <p>The last time when Prime Minister Jean Chretien said RCMP was now doing enough to rectify the situation with the break-in of his residence, he was in Japan. This time visiting South Korea, Chretien stated RCMP was doing enough on the Airbus Affair with an internal inquiry on Sgt. Fiegenwald’s conduct (“RCMP chief has support of the PM -- for now”, January 14, 1997, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray has a vote of confidence -- for the time being -- from Jean Chretien over police handling of the Mulroney –Airbus investigation.</p> <p>“I have confidence in everybody that is in the job until you know he is no more in the job,” the prime minister said Monday as he concluded a visit to South Korea.</p> <p>“So I have confidence in him.</p> <p>“He is looking into the matter. He is supposed to act on the problem according to his own responsibilities. But you know an inquiry is an inquiry and there is no political interference with that.”</p> <p>The statement was reminiscent of the qualified confidence the government repeatedly expressed in Gen. Jean Boyle until he abruptly quit as chief of defence staff last year over claims that he had lost control of the armed forces in the Somalia affair.</p> <p>RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Mike Gaudet rejected any parallel with Murray.</p> <p>Boyle ran into trouble because he “minimized his role and somewhat blamed his underlings,” Gaudet said. “That hasn’t been the case with the commissioner. He has simply explained the process. He has not assigned blame.”</p> <p>Murray has been under fire since he admitted he did not personally read a contentious letter to Swiss authorities before it was sent in September <br />1995.</p> <p>…</p> <p>An internal RCMP investigation is under way into a Mountie suspected of telling a journalist in November 1995 that Mulroney had been named in the letter to the Swiss.</p> <p>There has been no word on when the internal inquiry will be completed, and it appears the force doesn’t intend to share the results.</p> <p>“The findings cannot be disclosed publicly,” said Gaudet. “They remain confidential.”</p> <p>That came as a surprise to Reform justice critic Jack Ramsay, a former Mountie. “I would think that probe should be made public because of the high-interest nature of this inquiry,” said Ramsay.</p> <p>The RCMP has not named the officer, but sources identify him as Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, former lead investigator in the Airbus case. If he violated the RCMP code of conduct, he could face sanctions ranging from counselling to dismissal.</p> <p>More senior officers, including Murray and Frank Palmer, the deputy commissioner for operations, were briefed on the case as it unfolded but their exact roles remain a mystery.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Holding an internal inquiry looking only into the conduct of a Sergeant, albeit the lone investigator in the Airbus Affair investigation, looks to me like “minimizing” RCMP senior management’s responsibility in the legal setback, similar to in the Chretien residence intrusion case when initially only low-ranking onsite officers were penalized by Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, and senior supervisors’ roles were never properly reviewed.</p> <p>This time, there was also a subtle RCMP revelation that it was happening the same way, but again the media didn’t pursue it (“Airbus letter puts heat on top Mountie Botched probe casts force in role of bumblers”, by Tim Harper and Derek Ferguson, January 11, 1997, <em><a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Three key questions still surround Murray’s performance on the file.</p> <p>* How could he have not read until nine days ago the accusatory letter sent to Swiss authorities implicating Mulroney - even though Mulroney’s lawyer had offered him a copy and asked for the language to be changed 12 days before its contents became public?</p> <p>* How could a letter, all but convicting the country’s former prime minister, have been sent without his approval or even his knowledge?</p> <p>* Did he mislead Jocelyne Bourgon, the country’s top bureaucrat, about the nature of the investigation into Mulroney? He is said to have told her that she was not informed because Mulroney was not a cabinet minister.</p> <p>Murray would not be interviewed for this story.</p> <p>‘LUDICROUS’ EXPECTATION</p> <p>His spokesperson, Sgt. Andre Guertin, said Murray cannot be expected to take a hands-on approach to every criminal investigation undertaken by the force.</p> <p>“That would be ludicrous. It would be exceptional,” Guertin said.</p> <p>He also said Murray purposely refused to be briefed on the case after Nov. 18, 1995, when Mulroney named the commissioner as one of the respondents in his $50 million libel suit.</p> <p>Murray said Monday the RCMP approved the now infamous letter from its regional headquarters for the national capital before it was sent to Swiss authorities.</p> <p>Guertin later said the letter never made it to RCMP headquarters and the ranking officer to sign off on the accusatory missive would have been in Ottawa’s A Division, someone between chief investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald and deputy commissioner Frank Palmer.</p> <p>Even when Roger Tasse, one of Mulroney’s lawyers, met with Murray on Nov. 6, 1995, to discuss the letter and seek an apology, Murray dismissed him and told him to take up the matter with Palmer.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Both RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray and his spokesman Andre Guertin made it quite explicit, that the RCMP “A” Division responsible for Capital Ottawa had been in charge of the Airbus Affairs criminal investigation.</p> <p>Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell? As earlier, he was the “A” Division commander overseeing “damage control” after the Chretien residence break-in, announcing some cover-up like decisions, including transferring Chief Superintendent Al Rivard away, quietly.</p> <p>Wonder why a lowly ranked Corporal was in charge of onsite security for all of the head-of-state and head-of-government official residences, and why at just one rank above, a Sergeant was the lone investigator up against Brian Mulroney?</p> <p>It was A/Comm. McConnell’s turn to be let go, again quietly, but it was ‘coincidentally’ marked in the records of the Parliament of Canada (“<a href="http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/HOC/Archives/Committee/352/srgc/evidence/13_97-02-04/srgc-13-cover-e.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">EVIDENCE Sub-Committee on the DRAFT REGULATIONS ON FIREARMS of the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affair</font></a>”, Chairman: Russell MacLellan, Meeting No. 13, February 4, 1997, House of Commons, Parliament of Canada):</p> <blockquote> <p>“<b>The Chairman:</b> We’re ready now to resume our hearings on the proposed regulations under the Firearms Act.</p> <p>I want to welcome this afternoon our witnesses from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. We have with us Chief Brian Ford from the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police Service; Mr. N.G. Beauchesne, legal adviser to the law amendments committee; and Mr. Bryan McConnell, the executive director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.</p> <p>Welcome, gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to have you once again in this room. We look forward to your presentation. We’re hopeful that after the presentation you’ll allow us some time to ask some questions.</p> <p>Chief Ford, are you making the presentation?</p> <p><b>Chief Brian Ford (Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police Service; Chair, Law Amendments Committee, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police):</b> Yes, I’ve been elected.</p> <p><b>The Chairman:</b> Picked the short straw, eh?</p> <p><b>Some hon. members:</b> Oh, oh!</p> <p><b>Chief Ford:</b> Not in the true democratic sense, Mr. Chair, but nonetheless it’s a pleasure for me again to appear on behalf of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. I am here as the chair of the law amendments committee and also as chief of the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police Service. I speak both as the chair of the law amendments committee and as a chief of police in a local municipality.</p> <p>I’m joined here today by Rusty Beauchesne, a police legal adviser to the Metropolitan Toronto Police Service and a member of the law amendments committee.</p> <p>I’m also pleased to introduce Mr. Bryan McConnell, who is the new executive director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. Mr. McConnell is a former assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was commander of the A division here in the national capital, and has now assumed duties as the executive director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police here in Ottawa.</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Merely weeks after the Mulroney legal settlement Bryan McConnell was no longer policing the nation’s capital and was out of the RCMP, “not in the true democratic sense”, but chosen by the chiefs nationwide to coordinate police matters across the entire Canada.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2014/01/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 12</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-28895807984724064702013-05-16T23:58:00.001-04:002013-10-22T23:42:19.133-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 10) — when political scandals go by the wayside<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2012/10/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 9</a>)</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.thespec.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Hamilton Spectator</em></font></a>): </p> <blockquote> <p>“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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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, <a href="http://www.therecord.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Kitchener - Waterloo Record</em></font></a>).</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.therecord.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Kitchener - Waterloo Record</em></font></a>)</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>The lawyers estimate that 15,000 B.C. women have had breast implants and that hundreds or thousands have medical problems as a result.</p> <p>They said only three per cent of the implant manufacturers' $4.75-billion US settlement fund has been set aside for foreign litigants.</p> <p>“This is totally unreasonable and unacceptable,'” said Steven, a Vancouver lawyer with 52 breast-implant cases. </p> <p>“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.”</p> <p>Acheson, a Victoria lawyer who also has about 50 cases, said having B.C. women sue individually would be unsatisfactory.</p> <p>“You cannot effectively fight these cases one by one,” she said.</p> <p>“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.”</p> <p>Acheson said he has been urging the attorney-general’s ministry to allow a class action and has had a positive response.</p> <p>“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 <br />B.C,” she said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> story didn’t mention Dow Corning or Connell Lightbody. So I was aware of the breast-implant issue but not the law firm link.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.thespec.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Hamilton Spectator</em></font></a>): </p> <blockquote> <p>““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.””</p> </blockquote> <p>“A tiny hill of beans” it might be, but class actions weren’t even possible in B.C.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.thespec.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Hamilton Spectator</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>Women in Ontario and Quebec have already launched class-action suits and there are individual cases across the country.</p> <p>A spokesman for Dow Corning said the company is pleased the Supreme Court will hear the case.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>About 150,000 Canadian women have had silicone breast implants. About one-third have suffered problems. The implants were banned in 1992.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Finally on April 29, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> 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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Time is running out for Canadian women who want compensation for failed breast implants, says a Vancouver lawyer representing 105 women with <br />implant-related problems.</p> <p>David Klein said Canadian women wanting a share of the $4.7-billion US settlement fund must register by Dec. 1, at the latest.</p> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <br />their implants or who received implants made by companies that are now bankrupt or financially shaky.</p> <p>Each will likely receive between $5,000 and $10,000 US from the fund, said Klein.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>In early June, <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em> 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, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>The auditor general has questioned whether taxpayers are getting value for their money…</p> <p>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 <br />$12.7 million, or 28 per cent of the total paid to hundreds of outsiders by the federal government.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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 <br />$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 <br />sixth, respectively, on the list.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“It’s patronage with a capital P as far as I’m concerned, counters Reform Party MP Myron Thompson.</p> <p>Thompson says tendering should be followed, if only because Canadians demand an arms-length relationship between government and its suppliers.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“We’re quite happy with the way it is now, says Penny Lipsett, spokesman for Justice Minister Allan Rock.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Top 10 list of billings from all legal firms in fiscal 1993-94, including fees and expenses:</p> <p>1. Weil, Gotshal & Manges (Washington, D.C.)</p> <p>Total billing: $2,419,520 <br />…</p> <p>2. Miller & Chevalier (Washington, D.C.)</p> <p>Total billing: $2,137,177</p> <p>…</p> <p>3. Patterson Kitz (Halifax)</p> <p>Total billing: $1,708,782</p> <p>…</p> <p>4. Ray Enright & Associates (Vancouver)</p> <p>Total billing: $1,147,132</p> <p>…</p> <p>7. Connell Lightbody (Vancouver)</p> <p>Total billing: $847,589</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>There were several interest points in this story.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Two days after the <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em> story, <em>The Province</em> newspaper in B.C. named the 2 Vancouver law firms, and quoted Justice Department B.C. director Jim Bissell defending the government practice (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot138 - Law firms scooping Crown bucks, Jun 9, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Law firms scooping Crown bucks</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, June 9, 1994, <em>The Province</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Ray Enright and Associates of Vancouver earned $1.15 million in federal billings, mainly for drug prosecutions, according to figures released on Monday.</p> <p>“Over the years it has grown and grown,” said Enright, a 34-year- old lawyer who started working for the Crown in 1989.</p> <p>“We don’t handle any of the large, important cases. We get left with the very bottom end.” </p> <p>The major cases are handled by the justice department’s lawyers.</p> <p>Also among the top billers was Connell Lightbody, which earned $848,000 for prosecutions of tax fraud, drug offences and delinquent student loans. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Bissell said at least 4,500 new cases land on his desk every year.</p> <p>And he said cases are getting more and more complex, and often need outside expertise.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Despite Bissell's complaint, the department says it is planning to halve its outside work and do the work in-house.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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,<em> <a href="http://www.hfxnews.ca" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Halifax Daily News</font></a></em>). 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 <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot046 - RCMP E division C-Supt Clegg letters to Feng Gao & Dir Enforcement Services H.Q., Jan 25-29, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">RCMP letter to Ottawa dated on my birthday on January 29, 1993</font></a>, when I was in psychiatric committal as in Parts 6 & 7.</p> <p>I note that Mulroney had attended St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia (“<a href="http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/174629-mulroney-time-often-favours-leaders" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mulroney: Time often favours leaders</font></a>”, by Aaron Beswick, November 15, 2012, <em>The Chronicle Herald</em>), 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, <em><a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></a></em>).</p> <p>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, <em><a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>In Vancouver, appointments adviser Lyall Knott’s firm, Clark Wilson, has billed a total of more than $332,000 in three years.</p> <p>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 <br />$339,000 for those cases.</p> <p>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.””</p> </blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>Coincidental in timing, only after this public controversy about Connell Lightbody as a top-10 government-favoured law firm did the B.C. press, <em>The Province</em> 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, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>,<em> </em>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 <em>The Province</em>‘s Holly Horwood mentioned Mark Steven of Connell Lightbody, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>’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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).<em> </em></p> <p>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.</p> <p><em>The Vancouver Sun</em> 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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The deadline for applications to the ongoing disease compensation program has been extended to today.</p> <p>They must bear today’s postmark.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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. </p> <p>Last September, a U.S. court increased the amount of compensation offered to foreign women, including Canadians, from $113 million to $135 million.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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?</p> <p>The subtle information omissions by <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> remind me that, as in Part 6, in October-November 1992 when I communicated with the media for lawsuit publicity, unlike CBC and BCTV <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> would not accept documents from me, but only from my lawyer –<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot047 - Lawyer Brian Mason fax cover to Mr. Rockingham at The Vancouver Sun, Oct 21, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"> on October 21 lawyer Brian Mason faxed to a Mr. Rockingham there</font></a> – despite my having been an avid reader since arrival in Vancouver in 1988.</p> <p>In any case, class-action lawsuits were still not allowed in B.C., not until August 1, 1995 (“<a href="http://www.leg.bc.ca/35th4th/3rd_read/gov16-3.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">BILL 16 – 1995 CLASS PROCEEDINGS ACT</font></a>”, 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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>; and, “Breast-implant lawsuits too rich for Dow Corning”, May 16, 1995, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>).</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.thestar.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>)</p> <p>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. (“<a href="http://www.lexpert.ca/deal.php?id=1313" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Breast Implant Class Certification</font></a>”, January 1, 2001, <em>Lexpert Financial</em>)</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <em><a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></a></em>). </p> <p>Despite a long history and an equally long full name, Ray, Wolfe, Connell, Lightbody & Raynolds (“<a href="http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/chittylj20&div=53&id=&page=" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Into an Improved State of Medico-Legal Etiquette</font></a>”, by Walley P. Lightbody, September 1972, <em>Chitty’s Law Journal</em>; and, “Leone mixes haute couture with some lean cuisine”, by Malcolm Parry, April 7, 2005, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>) inexplicably didn’t survive the start of the New Millennium.</p> <p>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”.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>; and, “Implant info”, March 21, 1999, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>). </p> <p>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, <em><a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></a></em>) – for an estimated 3,700 to 4,100 victims outside of Ontario and Quebec as of December 1999 as quoted earlier.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.thestar.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>).</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Mark Steven’s success was noted in the Fall 2009 issue of <em>The Dragon</em>, 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 (“<a href="http://issuu.com/saintsmag/docs/fall2009" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Saints’ Notes</font></a>”, November 1, 2009, <em>The Dragon</em>).</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/vancouversun/obituary.aspx?pid=158007652#fbLoggedOut" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mark Steven Obituary</font></a>”, June 12, 2012, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>).</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.cba.org/bc/bartalk_95_00/10_98/PrintHtml.aspx?DocId=39608" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Executive Committee 1998/1999</font></a>”, The Canadian Bar Association British Columbia Branch; and, “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2013/02/22/pol-cabinet-shuffle-valcourt-aboriginal-findlay-defence.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">PM Harper shuffles cabinet to fill aboriginal affairs gap</font></a>”, by Laura Payton, February 22, 2013, <em>CBC News</em>).</p> <p>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.</p> <p>The cause for Connell Lightbody’s demise is unclear, but a year 2000 Texas court case shortly beforehand might offer some clue.</p> <p>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. (“<a href="http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?xmldoc=200083981FSupp2d758_1747.xml&docbase=CSLWAR2-1986-2006" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">SYDOW v. ACHESON & CO. 81 F.Supp.2d 758 (2000)</font></a><i></i>”, January 26, 2000, United States District Court, S.D. Texas, Galveston Division)</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.achesonwhitley.com/our-lawyers/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Our Lawyers</font></a>”, 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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.ubc.ca/okanagan/alumnirelations/__shared/assets/may-200930832.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Fifty Years of UBC for Law Alumnus Walley Lightbody, QC, BA'56, LLB'59</font></a>”, May 2009, UBC Okanagan Alumni Relations):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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 <i>What I Did with my Arts Degree</i>.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.kleinlyons.com/class/settled/hepc/sofc.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Amended Statement of Claim</font></a>”, July 15, 1998, <em>Hepatitis C Tainted Blood Class Action</em>, Klein Lyons).</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.kleinlyons.com/lawyers/mark-lyons.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mark Lyons, Lawyer – Work Experience</font></a>”, Klein Lyons).</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.lawsociety.bc.ca/apps/lkup/mbrsearch.cfm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lawyer Lookup</font></a>”, The Law Society of British Columbia) – the Society can confirm that on the latter day the Vancouver firm Klein Lyons was formed.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Verchere’s death was on the first anniversary of David Klein’s call to B.C. bar. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>Jack Cram had been willing to stand up to powerful government interests during 1992-93.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““It’s a breach of our whole system of justice,” Jack Cram told Justice Mary Saunders.</p> <p>“People should have a fair hearing, free from political interference.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>The six-week hearing was to investigate allegations of inadequate accounting procedures by the companies, but was called off after four weeks of evidence.</p> <p>Cram claimed the hearings were scrubbed because the securities commission and the new New Democrat government didn’t like the way they were going.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Cram raised the matter of obstruction of justice at an examination for discovery, a pre-trial hearing at which Clark appeared with four lawyers.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Cram emerged minutes later and told all.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Cram said as soon as he asked the question, government lawyer George Copley, representing Clark, interjected: “I am advising the minister not to answer.”</p> <p>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.””</p> </blockquote> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>The municipality didn’t reply until eight months later, when it issued four letters turning down the proposals. …</p> <p>… 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.</p> <p>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.””</p> </blockquote> <p>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, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Gazette</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>The sanity hearing was brought against Haymour by yet another arm of the provincial government, the Attorney General’s ministry.</p> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>The sale followed a well-publicized struggle between Haymour and the government, who Cram claims “expropriated the island by use of regulations.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Bennett, says Cram, then set the wheels of government in motion against Haymour.</p> <p>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.””</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>W.A.C. Bennett was the father of B.C. Premier Bill Bennett at the time of this court hearing in February 1986.</p> <p>The one day after Bill Bennett’s reign ended 0n August 6, 1986 (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bennett" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Bill Bennett</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>), 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, <em><a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>His lawyers went to work, government bureaucracy churned, and finally Haymour was able to purchase the island and started building.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>After investing $100,000, Haymour was ordered to halt construction.</p> <p>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:</p> <p>“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.”</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>When he finally did appear, all charges were dropped for lack of evidence, except one – possession of an aluminum “knuckleduster.”</p> <p>Although he tried to plead guilty to that charge, prosecutors insisted he be found not guilty by reason of insanity.</p> <p>The judge ruled Haymour insane – specifically because of his “delusions” of government persecution. He was committed to an asylum indefinitely.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>After 11 months and a promise to leave Canada forever, Haymour was released.</p> <p>And he was mad. He wanted to get even.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Haymour was given a chartered plane back to Canada, but he never saw the $20,000.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>In that decision the court squarely put the blame for Haymour’s 15 years of misery on the government.</p> <p>But Haymour was awarded only $150,000 – the difference between the true value of his island and the amount he was paid, plus interest.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Haymour, now 56, visits Rattlesnake Island whenever a friend will lend him a boat.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> mentioned him (“Canada’s Carmel?: California dreamin’ drags Peachland into controversy”, by Stewart Bell, February 25, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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).</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>The provincial government opposed the plan and Haymour was arrested when he allegedly threatened provincial officials.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>On the same day, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> 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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I have no idea what has happened to that movie plan.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Li-jen" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sun Li-jen</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>).</p> <p>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!</p> <p>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<em> ProQuest</em> 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.</p> <p>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 <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>’s evasive reporting.</p> <p>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 <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> during that year, Cram accused the B.C. justice system of “massive corruption”.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The disturbance broke out while Cram was appearing before Justice Howard Callaghan regarding applications by the Law Society of B.C. and its <br />former top officer, Peter Leask, to dismiss lawsuits filed last year by Cram.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>With both arms raised, his hair mussed, Cram turned to the roomful of supporters and urged, “Come on people – let’s go.””</p> </blockquote> <p>What was all the fuss about?</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“THE COURT: What are you handing up?</p> <p>MR. CRAM: It is a transcript of the proceedings from April 11 and a ruling that occurred on that day. Perhaps you could -</p> <p>THE COURT: By whom?</p> <p>MR. CRAM: Mr. Justice Catliff.</p> <p>…</p> <p>THE COURT: I read all the material.</p> <p>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 <br />do with Cram and Leask?</p> <p>THE COURT: I have read it all.</p> <p>MR. CRAM: Did somebody give you this?</p> <p>THE COURT: Don’t question me.</p> <p>MR. CRAM: I want to know.</p> <p>THE COURT: Mr. Cram, don’t question me.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>THE COURT: Mr. Cram, you are getting very close to contempt.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>THE COURT: Mr. Cram, you don’t -- I gather you have no faith at all in the system?</p> <p>MR. CRAM: Absolutely not.</p> <p>THE COURT: Then why are you practising in this province if you have not?</p> <p>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?</p> <p>THE COURT: As I have said, Mr. Cram, you are getting very close to contempt.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>THE COURT: You keep talking like that -</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>MR. CRAM: Go ahead and throw me in jail, I don’t care. This is a disgustingly corrupt court.</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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 <br />Court Justice Howard Callaghan.</p> <p>“Get your hands off me,” yelled Cram, his silver hair dishevelled and his smart navy-blue suit crumpled in the melee.</p> <p>“This is the second suit they have ruined,” Cram complained, referring to a similar incident last Friday when he was handcuffed and forcibly removed <br />from a courtroom.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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 <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> and <em>The Province</em> 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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. </p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Drennan said Cram is detained at the hospital for a 30-day psychiatric assessment.</p> <p>Sources said the committal to hospital, considered to be in Cram’s best interests, was initiated by the lawyer’s wife.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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.”</p> <p>Chamberlain, who also displays a feisty manner, said the courtroom spectacle Tuesday, a horror show in which Cram was dragged into court by six <br />sheriffs, did neither Cram nor the administration of justice any good.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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”.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““The most cynical view is that the police want to see this problem go away by mutual destruction of both sides.”</p> <p>He said police had given the impression in media interviews that Johal was “a fink” and that he was cooperating with the investigations.</p> <p>“That is designed to get my client killed,” he said.</p> <p>As a result, Johal has gone into hiding to protect his family, he said.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So Cram’s peers understood that pointing fingers at the police and the government was one thing, at the court was quite another.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Cram said he owed everything to two supporters who did the work that enabled him to be released from the hospital.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.bcafn.ca/files/breaking-news-2012-05-15.php" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">BCAFN Daily News</font></a>”, 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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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 <br />Hagwilget Reserve near Hazelton as if he was a prosecuting attorney on a cheap TV drama and they were the guilty defendants.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>A few days after that, Cram was committed for a 30-day psychiatric evaluation.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <br />soon as May 1995.</p> <p>It's a quick time-frame which demands the full attention of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en people.</p> <p>Incidents like the one Cram instigated divert focus but it is easy to see why he received so much attention in the communities.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>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 <br />the colonial government before Confederation.</p> <p>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 <br />as a powerful tool to negotiate terms of reference for forest use agreements with the provincial government.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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?</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Although his preposterous allegations of corruption within the judicial system were fuelled by a deep-seated mental illness, lawyer Jack Cram’s <br />contemptuous conduct cannot be excused, a judge decided Friday.</p> <p>B.C. Supreme Court Justice Thomas Braidwood, who earlier convicted Cram of two counts of criminal contempt, refused to grant the Vancouver lawyer <br />a conditional discharge.</p> <p>Saying Cram’s conduct, but for the circumstances, would have warranted a lengthy prison term, Braidwood imposed a $10,000 fine.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Ordering the lawyer to continue psychiatric treatment, the judge also barred him from practising law for one year, to which Cram had already consented.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Although the judge commended the lawyers and other witnesses who spoke for Cram at his sentencing, he wondered why they didn’t come forward <br />before the lawyer’s conviction was recorded.</p> <p>“I cannot help but wonder where you were when the chief justice and other judges were under attack?” he asked.</p> <p>“I hope this deficiency will be remedied by the media in light of the great injustice that has been done to this court.”</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>At restaurants, he sent back beer unless it was opened at the table.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>Wasn’t it a subtle difference, due to Cram’s accusing the court, between political repression and political retribution?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Quite a humiliating process, wasn’t it?</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.law.ubc.ca/news/2008/jan/01_11_2008_mceachern.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">HON. ALLAN MCEACHERN, UBC’S 16TH CHANCELLOR</font></a>”, by Brad Bennett, Chair of UBC Board of Governors and Stephen J. Toope, UBC President, January 11, 2008, UBC Faculty of Law; and, “<a href="http://blogs.ubc.ca/ubcinsiders/2008/01/11/allan-mceachern-chancellor-of-ubc-dies-at-81/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Allan McEachern, Chancellor of UBC, dies at 81</font></a>”, by Neal Yonson, January 11, 2008, <em>UBC Insiders</em>).</p> <p>It showed the importance of “deeply rooted” loyalty to one’s society – to the point of charactering another culture as “nasty, brutish and short”.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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”.</p> <p>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”.</p> <p>Cram’s legal quest for Andres-Auger had already begun on April 11 as a court transcript quoted earlier indicated.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>In the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot126 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Apr-Jul, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Clinic notes</font></a> for my next session on May 12, info was recorded about my renewed objective:</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> and <em>The Province</em> owners Southam Inc. and Pacific Press.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Regarding the press, as shown earlier <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> 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. </p> <p>As for favouritism for pedophilia, Part 8 has contained some tantalizing clues that there could be such within the justice system.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://fredacentre.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/ActLocal-ThinkGlobal-1999.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">It’s a Crime: An Act Local - Think Global Conference on the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, April 30-May 1, 1999, The FREDA Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children, Simon Fraser University):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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 <br />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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Wade went on to relay other stories, of sexual abuse of Native children:</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>… How prevalent such cases were, one can only guess. Certainly everyone here tonight should think carefully upon the figures given in the <em>Royal Commission Report on Aboriginals</em> that <strong>125,000 children went into those schools <br />and 50,000 never came out</strong>.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The disturbing storyline recalled by Aboriginal victims went from the infamous Port Alberni School (“<a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/totem-pole-raised-at-former-site-of-notorious-port-alberni-residential-school-1.23682" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Totem pole raised at former site of notorious Port Alberni residential school</font></a>”, by Quintin Winks, May 3, 2010, <em>Times – Colonist</em>) to the Vancouver Club, once the preeminent business club in Western Canada (Wallace Clement, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=J-4NAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Class, Power, and Property: Essays on Canadian Society</font></em></a>, 1983, Methuen Publications; and, “<a href="http://thetyee.ca/Books/2012/03/24/Vancouver-Noir/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Noir and Class War</font></a>”, by Diane Purvey and John Belshaw, March 24, 2012, <em>The Tyee</em>).</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> and <em>The Province</em> (“<a href="http://www.theprovince.com/news/Photos+Anti+Cheney+protesters+outside+Vancouver+Club/5461561/story.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Anti-Cheney protesters outside The Vancouver Club</font></a>”, September 26, 2011, <em>The Province</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Dick+Cheney+visit+draws+protesters+downtown+Vancouver/5465525/story.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dick Cheney visit draws 250 protesters to downtown Vancouver</font></a>”, by Evan Duggan, September 27, 2011, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>).</p> <p>But amid the heightened tension, a number of small B.C. newspapers, including northern B.C.’s <em>Hazelton Daily</em>, <em>Kitimat Daily</em> and <em>Smithers Daily,</em> and the <em>Vancouver Observer</em>, 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 (“<a href="http://www.hazeltondaily.ca/show1032a0x300y1z/DICK_CHENEY_TO_SPEAK_AT_NOTORIOUS_CHILD_TRAFFICKING_CENTER" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dick Cheney to Speak at Notorious Child Trafficking Center</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, September 23, 2011, <em>Hazelton Daily</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/publishersplatform/2011/09/26/dick-cheney-reviled-international-rights-group-vancouver-club" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dick Cheney reviled by international rights group. Vancouver Club called “infamous.”</font></a>”, by Linda Solomon, September 26, 2011, <em>Vancouver Observer</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A statement from The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State <br />…</p> <p>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. …</p> <p>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.</p> <p>3. An attempt by reporters with the Vancouver Province and the North <br />Shore News to investigate these claims and the Cram evidence was stopped <br />by a threatened lawsuit against these newspapers from the two Supreme <br />Court judges named by Cram, during 1996 and 1997.</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>In 1994 there was even “photographic proof” from Cram and Andres-Auger about Vancouver Club pedophilia, but nothing was reported by the press. <em>The Province</em>‘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.</p> <p>In 2011 the media blackout was finally broken.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.charlesmacpherson.com/default.asp?id=the-vancouver-club&l=1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Club</font></a>”, Charles MacPherson Associates):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.” </p> </blockquote> <p>But was there indeed pedophilia at such high places?</p> <p>Since April 1994 there has been at least one proven case of sexual assaults by a B.C. judge, reported in detail by<em> The Province</em> 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 (“<a href="http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=e0cfd66a-d774-4428-ac99-1a88c9e4a9df&k=1159" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Former B.C. judge Ramsay, who preyed on young girls, dies in jail</font></a>”, January 20, 2008, <em>The Province</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>In June 2004, Ramsay was sentenced to seven years in jail.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But Judge Ramsey was not senior enough, not likely to have been a Vancouver Club member.</p> <p>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. (“<a href="https://www.facebook.com/fenggao0/posts/395654553841470" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">John Furlong biography omits secret past in Burns Lake</font></a>”, by Laura Robinson, September 26, 2012, <em>Georgia Straight</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>Abraham is one of eight former students of Furlong’s who have signed affidavits for the <em>Georgia Straight</em> alleging his physical and mental abuse. Many more told the <em>Straight</em> about the abuse Furlong meted out.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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!</p> <p>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. (“<a href="http://www.lawsociety.bc.ca/apps/hearing_decisions/viewreport.cfm?hearing_id=129" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Discipline Digest . 04/02 Admission: Intemperate and disrespectful conduct in court JOHN NORSWORTHY (JACK) CRAM</font></a>”, The Law Society of British Columbia)</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>): </p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Lehoux told the court he wanted to be charged so he could get a chance to condemn the justice system.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Lehoux, a retired longshoreman from Surrey, was represented in court by Jack Cram, who got special permission to act for the elderly man.</p> <p>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 <br />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 <br />society, which has agreed to hold a reinstatement hearing.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>But Jack Cram wasn’t the only radical figure in Vancouver having his life changed in early 1995 when my probation was ending.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>)  </p> <p>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.</p> <p>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. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot139 - Mother's letter to MP Raymond Chan, Apr 7, 1995.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">As the letter disclosed</font></a>, 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:</p> <blockquote> <p>“…</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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:</p> <blockquote> <p>“For the future prospect of Feng Gao, and fulfill our parenthood, my husband is willing to relinguish his immigration application. …</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Unfortunately life has no guarantee, and “hallucinosis” isn’t the worse. As told in another of my recent blog posts, “<a href="http://fgaoposts.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/guinevere-and-lancelot-a-metaphor-of-comedy-or-tragedy-without-shakespeare-but-with-shocking-ends-to-wonderful-lives-part-2/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)</font></a>”, 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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-8/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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)</font></a>”).</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/blogs/introduction/2011/03/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7-part-2-part-3/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧 (Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom) – Part 2 & Part 3</font></a>”) my father had attended high school in Hunan. But Xiangtan University in Mao’s hometown was unique and special, according to the university (“<a href="http://en.xtu.edu.cn/2006/0228/article_1.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Introductions of Xiangtan University</font></a>”, Xiangtan University):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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 <br />assuming that he was from the Chinese delegation or the Taiwanese or even the Hong Kong delegation.</p> <p>…</p> <p>As the former leader of Canada’s democracy for China movement, Chan said human rights will continue to be an important issue for him.</p> <p>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 <br />that have poor records.</p> <p>But the secretary of state is opposed to trade sanctions because of human rights violations.</p> <p>“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.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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”. </p> <p>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:</p> <blockquote> <p>“immigrants have an increased risk of developing delusional disorder”.</p> </blockquote> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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 <br />poured me a cup of coffee and addressed me as Honorable Minister Chan. The office had a tremendous view, on the top floor.</p> <p>‘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.</p> <p>‘I thought: Do I know how to do my job?”</p> <p>Chan couldn’t sleep for nights. He told his wife about his lack of confidence.</p> <p>‘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.</p> <p>“The song that we were going to sing, I flipped the page to there. I looked at my wife and said: ‘God's here.’”</p> <p>…</p> <p>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 <br />Beijing for protesting on behalf of dissidents.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>In a bid to “experience democracy directly,” Chan entered politics. He chose the Liberals after flirting with the New Democratic Party.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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.”</p> <p>Chan disputes this interpretation: “There’s a lot of things you can do but not talk about.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Who could dispute that, then Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s policy was cruel for Raymond Chan, and compassionate to me?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.thestar.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Toronto Star</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.)</p> <p>“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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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<em> Beijing Spring</em>, 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 (“<a href="http://beijingspring.com/bj2/1995/420/2003129133243.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">陈卓愉应否纪念“六四”?</font></a>”(“Should Raymond Chan commemorate June 4?”), by 范中, January 1995 (collated January 29, 2003), <em>Beijing Spring</em>).</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>). 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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>Canadians should expect of him an honest evaluation of Pacific affairs. Instead he has helped Canada kowtow before the oppressors of the region.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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 <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot141 - Forensic psychiatrist letter for mother, May 11, 1995.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">May 11 interview and letter</font></a>, 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:</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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”.</p> <p>But it was more deceptive.</p> <p>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 <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot140 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute medical summary report, May 4, 1995 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Medical Summary Report</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Psychiatric Dix: Paranoid Schizophrenia</p> <p>Problem List</p> <p>1. EPS from medications.</p> <p>2. Previous hepatitis B – non-carrier”</p> </blockquote> <p>Like Dr. Kerr stated, there was no psychotic symptom.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/407762" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Antipsychotics - The Future of Schizophrenia Treatment</font></a>”, 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.</p> <p>As for past hepatitis, on January 26, 1994 <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot117 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute patient record, Jan 26-Feb 9, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I told FPI about my past borderline positive test for hepatitis</font></a> 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.</p> <p>Recall as in Part 9 that during my FPI committal, despite lack of psychotic symptom the Problem List had been:</p> <blockquote> <p>“1. Alteration in thought process (persecutory type thinking).</p> <p>2. Lacks insight into mental condition.</p> <p>3. Non-compliance regarding medication regime.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>On August 10, 1995, the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot142 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic case closing summary, Aug 11, 1995 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Adult Forensic Psychiatric Community Services produced a Closing Summary</font></a> 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:</p> <blockquote> <p>“<u>DIAGNOSIS</u></p> <p>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”.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, “<a href="http://fgaoposts.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/guinevere-and-lancelot-a-metaphor-of-comedy-or-tragedy-without-shakespeare-but-with-shocking-ends-to-wonderful-lives-part-2/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)</font></a>”, 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.</p> <p>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” (“<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">‘You are either with us or against us’</font></a>”, November 6, 2001, <em>CNN</em>).</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <font color="#333333">outpatient </font>Closing Summary referring to Dr. Clifford Kerr’s May 11, 1995 letter in support of my mother’s immigration appeal.</p> <p>I can’t help but think of what my mother’s letter said about my father, quoted earlier:</p> <blockquote> <p>“For the future prospect of Feng cao, and fulfill our parenthood, my husband is willing to relinguish his immigration application.”</p> </blockquote> <p>10 years later it was his life, but the progress I was pushing for still eludes.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-10/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I also mentioned other notable events around the time of my father’s death:</p> <blockquote> <p>“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 67<sup>th </sup>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”.</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Note that lawyer Jack Cram’s client Eddie Haymour had wanted to build one such on a B.C. lake island.</p> <p>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, <em><a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></a></em>)</p> <p>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, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=11rBWpN0vTkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Justice in Paradise</font></em></a>, 2004, McGill-Queen’s Press; and, “<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Last of the Mohicans</font></a></i>” and “<em><font color="#0000ff">The </font></em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans_(1992_film)" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Last of the Mohicans</em> (1992 film)</font></a>”, Wikipedia)</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>; and “Judge steps down from appeal hearing; Lawyer denounced for allegations”, by Deborah Wilson, February 13, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></a></em>).</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.” </p> </blockquote> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“B.C.’s new attorney-general disagreed.</p> <p>“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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>The non-natives filmed and photographed reporters and frequently interjected lectures about the history of native oppression as reporters attempted to interview the group.</p> <p>“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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>No kidding, these Cariboo native protesters wanted the RCMP to kill them?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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, <em><a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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. …</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-8/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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)</font></a>”.</p> <p>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, <em><a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>; “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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>; and, “Norway spurns lawyer’s refugee claim”, January 26, 2000, <a href="http://www.thesudburystar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Sudbury Star</font></em></a>)</p> <p>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.</p> <p>But wasn’t much of it just publicity stunts?</p> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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?</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> </blockquote> <p>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. (“<a href="http://www.straight.com/blogra/364976/indigenous-warrior-splitting-sky-dies-61" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Indigenous warrior Splitting the Sky dies at 61</font></a>”, by Stephen Hui, March 22, 2013, <em>The Straight</em>)</p> <p>I don’t know of any movie made for Jack Cram’s former client Eddy Haymour, either.</p> <p>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 (“<a href="http://canadiandimension.com/articles/1806" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Hauntings of Colonialism</font></a>”, by Anthony J. Hall, January 4, 2007, <em>Canadian Dimension</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>…</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”” </p> </blockquote> <p>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 (“<a href="http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=f77c934f-db82-4bcd-b306-e9d53e382e7c&k=34725" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Obituary: Allan McEachern, 1926-2008 – ‘He was a judge’s judge and a lawyer’s lawyer’</font></a>”, January 12, 2008, <em>Times – Colonist</em>), could commit “treason”? I doubt it.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2013/09/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 11</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-85735459738655838732012-10-26T23:57:00.001-04:002014-04-04T16:42:27.993-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 9) — when individual activism ranks at oblivion<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2012/06/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 8</a>)</p> <p>As in Part 8 of this blog article, the criminal complaint by lawyer Marion Buller in early November had the most negative impact on my activity in the fall of 1993 to revive civil litigation versus University of British Columbia and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The October 6, 1992 lawsuit over a UBC employment dispute had been part of broader issues regarding then UBC Head of Computer Science Maria Klawe’s management, and also challenged RCMP’s role in my eviction on July 2 upon end of my UBC faculty job.</p> <p>The lawsuit needed expansion, to cover psychiatric oppression RCMP brought in after I also challenged Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct in press releases to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and BCTV. As in Part 6, RCMP did so with UBC and B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, who happened to be wife of my former UBC colleague David Kirkpatrick, on November 30, 1992 after I had just faxed the press releases to local Member of Parliament Kim Campbell – also Mulroney government’s Justice Minister.</p> <p>But as in Part 8, in August-October 1993 I couldn’t find a civil lawyer to replace Brian Mason, who had launched my lawsuit but quit in April 1993. By early November I was instead facing 3 counts of Mischiefs for being persistent at Cram & Associates, the last law firm I had visited for my civil case, at YMCA Enterprise Centre where lawyer Richard Dempsey had an office, who had defended my earlier incidents of civil disobedience but now skipped my appointment for the new charge, and at law firm Warren & Eder, which agreed to defend the two preceding mischiefs but refused to set trial earlier than April 1994.</p> <p>My acts of persistence were peaceful, as in Part 8 described by Crown prosecutor Marjorie Munkley as “passive resistance or mere nuisance”, as reason for filing Mischief charges when Vancouver Police wanted Assault-by-Trespass – a type RCMP had upgraded to Assault in two earlier incidents of standoff with UBC Hospital security guards as in Part 7.</p> <p>But with Marion Buller, who claimed an unspecified “conflict of interest” for declining my civil case, my persistence led unexpectedly to a Criminal Harassment charge on November 4.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot103 - Vancouver Police record, Nov 3, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Police report on November 3, 1993</font></a> by officers T. Catchpole and C. Egge showed that the concern by Marion Buller’s law firm really did not justify a charge that was, as in Part 8, newly created to deal with violent stalkers and carry a possible 10-year jail punishment on the basis of fear alone, not actual violence:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Due to GAO’s previous behaviors regarding the same type of behavior with other lawyers in recent weeks, the employees of the law firm are very concerned for their well being and safety. At this time GAO’s continued behavior of the same nature suggests that he has a great deal of difficulty accepting no for an answer, and there is an obvious concern that without restrictions he will continue to inconvenience and bother the people of the law firm.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Could behavior of “inconvenience and bother” justify worry of violence?</p> <p>Listed in police record info as “Accused Background” were the 3 mischief charges, and “record of violence” without detail. Among pages attached to the police notes was a copy of my May 6 bail under the first Assault charge, probably evidence of “violence” but I had been found not guilty of it, though guilty of a second such charge in June but given an absolute discharge as in Part 7.</p> <p>Earlier there had been an escalating pattern of prosecuting, as prosecutor Marjorie Munkley’s comments indicated I likely had not been violent. The falsely profiled violence had their source in my UBC dispute as discussed in Parts 4, 6 & 7.</p> <p>Adding Criminal Harassment to 3 Mischief charges was a “Three strikes and you’re out” type of escalating punishment, as I have asserted in Part 8. </p> <p>Marion Buller had been suggested by lawyers at other firms, to represent both my criminal defence and civil lawsuit – and as a female lawyer which I preferred as discussed in Part 7. </p> <p>At that point I had met lawyers Peter Eccles and Brian Rhodes at her firm, who couldn’t due to their other work, possibly for Justice Department as I recall; but they cautioned that Buller had recently gotten ‘engaged’ and was quite busy. I didn’t get the message they conveyed as these lawyers chose not to be explicit, and I was unaware of two crucial facts that would have given me serious second thoughts. </p> <p>The first crucial fact I missed was that I had been to this law firm in September 1992 and had one of my most extensive discussions with any lawyer before lawsuit’s launch.</p> <p>That law firm had been Ray Connell, but in early November 1993 it was called Connell Lightbody, where Marion Buller was. The name change had taken place on June 1 (“Campbell fundraiser draws familiar faces”, by Malcolm Parry, June 26, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… though Walley Lightbody didn't mention it, one recalls that 28-lawyer Ray Connell became Connell, Lightbody June 1.</p> <p>For the record, the be-bop-playing barrister handles a tenor sax – and his haircuts – better than U.S. president Bill Clinton.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In this <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> social column, lawyer Walley Lightbody was compared to Bill Clinton, who had been in town his April summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, held at UBC as in Part 7.</p> <p>Among the pages attached to Vancouver Police’s November 3, 1993 notes was a record of my two consultations, costing $35 and $350, at the law firm on September 4 & 9, 1992, with lawyer E. Ajit Saran who referred to “Dr. Ghoa” and “wrongful dismissal claim against U.B.C.”.</p> <p>The police notes said that I had just been to this law firm 7 times in 2 days, and that building security and police were called to “remove” me. I am confident that when security, and possibly police, were first called I hadn’t even spoken with Marion Buller: by the time I was given a chance, directed by a security guard to an internal intercom phone to wait for her call from an office floor above, my ‘pattern’ of persistence at this firm had been established.</p> <p>I recall it was around the time of this phone conversation when I turned around and saw a vaguely familiar gentleman in the midst of an empty office floor, staring at me with a bepuzzled look.</p> <p>Mr. Saran was possibly thinking, “Why is Dr. Ghoa here? Last year I advised him to expand the proposed lawsuit suing UBC to include RCMP, but told him that our firm couldn’t  do it because while we do some legal work for UBC we do a lot for the federal government.”</p> <p>I, on the other hand, was befuddled looking at Saran, “He looks like a lawyer I discussed with last year, but why is he here?” I was unable to recall the past specifics, and security personnel quickly re-emerged to escort me out.</p> <p>It had likely been due to Saran’s suggestion that suing RCMP came onto the agenda. As in Parts 5 & 6, unbeknown to me at the time, my lawsuit served to RCMP by lawyer Brian Mason brought instant consternation and punishing reaction from RCMP Superintendent D. G. Cowley, Officer Commanding Vancouver Subdivision.</p> <p>Ajit Saran later did take on that line of legal action himself, in 1998 for fired West Vancouver police officer Glen Mason against his former employer, which I note wasn’t part of the federal RCMP; Saran also claimed that police favoured prominent people (“Fired West Van police officer sues”, by Glenn Bohn, May 2, 1998, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A former West Vancouver police officer who was fired after he allegedly displayed his handgun during a Block Watch meeting filed a wrongful dismissal suit …</p> <p>The municipal police department forced Constable Glen Mason to resign in April 1996 after a disciplinary hearing found Mason guilty of “deceit” …</p> <p>Mason successfully appealed to the B.C. Police Commission … but the West Vancouver police department hasn’t reinstated Mason …</p> <p>“He’s working elsewhere, but he wants to go back to his life as a police officer,” Mason’s lawyer, Ajit Saran, said Friday in an interview. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>During Mason's appeal to the B.C. Police Commission, his lawyer tried to introduce a 1996 internal report written by another police officer.</p> <p>It suggested prominent people weren’t given the same treatment by police as other members of the public. One incident cited involved a traffic ticket issued to former Vancouver Canucks hockey player Cliff Ronning. The ticket was cancelled … for “public relations” reasons.”</p> </blockquote> <p>When Marion Buller was pitched against my political activism, “public relations” being in her favor was an important factor – but it will take the presentation of many more facts for the real picture to emerge.</p> <p>The second crucial fact about Connell Lightbody I was unaware of in November 1993, was its being in the same office building as the Justice Department representing RCMP defence over my lawsuit. The building housed some government offices as I had been there for an Unemployment Insurance appeal hearing, a matter related to my May-June standoffs with security guards at UBC Hospital, which as discussed in Part 7 refused to provide a mental-health clearance over the psychiatric oppression it had started.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot029 - lawsuit filing, RCMP Vancouver Subdiv & DoJ reactions, Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Justice Department’s first letter to my lawyer</font></a>, dated October 20, 1992, relaying indignation by RCMP as discussed in Part 5, had listed its address as 28th floor, 1055 West Georgia Street, while <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot098 - Surety bail recognizance, Nov 9, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my November 9, 1993 bail following the Marion Buller incident</font></a> listed Connell Lightbody’s address as 1055 West Georgia Street – a legal document on the internet lists it as on the 19th floor (<a href="http://mcdpri.com/victoria/npubs-petition-doc1.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Petition to the Court, The Neighbourhood Pub Owners’ Association of B.C.</font></a>).</p> <p>Even today I still can’t tell what her “conflict of interest” was, albeit it was within Marion Buller’s right not to take any case. But helping police bring down the Criminal Harassment ‘stick’ meant for violent stalkers?</p> <p>Press archives show that Buller had been a Justice Department prosecutor (“RCMP paid snitch $80,000”, by Marc Edge, April 18, 1990, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Cpl. Barry Bennett told Vancouver county court Judge Marion Allan that Cahill came under suspicion as part of a 15-month sting known as Operation Deception.</p> <p>Bennett said a small-time criminal who has been a paid RCMP agent since 1983 tipped police to Cahill, saying the construction superintendent could provide quantities of cocaine.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Prosecutor Marion Buller refused to provide Cahill’s age, as did her boss, Brian Purdy of the federal Justice Department.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Buller’s former boss Brian Purdy was Justice Department’s acting director in B.C., and later supervised all criminal prosecutions there (“Americans - again - looking to Canada as draft refuge”, by Mark Hume, January 12, 1991, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>; and, “Open door to police commission, critic urges”, by Don Braid, November 7, 2000, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>). So if the Buller charge against me was in fact a ‘sting’ wanted by RCMP, then Purdy may have had a role.</p> <p>In August 1992 when I was looking for a lawyer and about to visit Ray Connell, Buller was still reported as a federal prosecutor on drug cases (“‘Merchant of misery’ must pay fare of 14 years, judge rules”, by Larry Still, August 13, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>Then in October when my lawsuit was filed, there was news about B.C. Cariboo-Chilcotin region’s aboriginal natives complaining of RCMP mistreatment, B.C. government holding an inquiry by provincial court Judge Anthony Sarich, and the inquiry lacking a lawyer. Buller spoke out as a member of the Indigenous Bar Association of Canada in support of the natives’ request for a lawyer, after Justice Department agreed (“Natives demand commission counsel”, by William Boei, October 21, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Federal justice department lawyer Gordon Bourgard, representing the RCMP, said he has told Sarich the natives’ request “makes sense, and we encourage you to do it, because our interest is to have an orderly and efficient inquiry where all of the evidence gets heard in a reasonable way.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>A Vancouver native lawyer said a commission counsel is essential.</p> <p>Running the inquiry without one “would severely impair the native people’s ability to state their position adequately and thoroughly,” said Marion Buller, a member of the Indigenous Bar Association of Canada, which represents about 160 native judges, lawyers and law students.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Bourgard, the RCMP lawyer, said a commission counsel ensures an inquiry doesn’t drag on for months longer than necessary, and that witnesses are not inconvenienced.”</p> </blockquote> <p>When the inquiry opened in December 1992, Marion Buller, now with Ray Connell, was the commission counsel nominated by the natives (“Natives vs. justice system: Hearings open with probe of Indian leader’s death”, by Robert Mason Lee, December 5, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Buller, a Cree from the Vancouver law office of Ray Connell, was nominated by a native law centre to act as the non-partisan lawyer for the commission. Before her appointment earlier this month, natives were saddled with the job of researching and presenting evidence.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So there should have been no direct conflict of interest for Marion Buller to act for my lawsuit suing RCMP, given that she had recently moved down several floors in her building, from being a federal prosecutor working with RCMP to being a private lawyer and counsel for a public inquiry into RCMP conduct.</p> <p>Moreover, a few days before my attending Connell Lightbody in early November 1993, unaware that it was Ray Connell, an October 29 news report – also cited in Part 8 – had reported that Buller would do province-wide legal consultation for the natives (“Native justice report raps arrogant RCMP”, by Scott Simpson, October 29, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The attorney-general said the RCMP are moving forward on some areas of aboriginal policing.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Gabelmann also announced that Marion Buller, who acted as counsel for the commission, will carry out a province-wide consultation on aboriginal legal issues.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Thus, even if past federal government work was a hindrance for Ajit Saran it was for Marion Buller as illustrated by her role at the Sarich inquiry. That would leave RCMP and Justice Department as behind Buller’s rejection of my lawsuit. It could be RCMP, or Justice Department given other facets of the politics, such as my past communication to then local MP Kim Campbell on November 30, 1992 – and another in early December also for her capacity as Justice Minister, as in Part 6.</p> <p>But Buller’s negative act critically added to the oppression against me, recalling <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot029 - lawsuit filing, RCMP Vancouver Subdiv & DoJ reactions, Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Justice Department lawyer Paul F. Partridge’s ‘veiled’ warning</font></a> to my lawyer on October 20, 1992:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… the named defendant, R.C.M.P., is not a legal entity capable of being sued.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In other words, civil legal actions against the Canadian law-enforcement icon, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, should be only pre-approved legal shows such as the Sarich inquiry for which Buller was the lawyer, or the plaintiffs risked troubles.</p> <p>Such was ‘rule of law’, and rule of engagement.</p> <p>After getting out on bail in November 1993 with surety-bail help by my Aunt Sally, who happened to be a court interpreter and who also helped get me defense lawyer Phil Seagram as in Part 8, I continued to attend UBC Hospital to seek a review of the original “Delusional Disorder” diagnosis. In my mind, the psychiatric oppression related to my UBC dispute was a main obstacle to my civil legal action.</p> <p>But UBC Hospital would no longer do psychiatric re-assessment for me after the last two: in August by Dr. A. Bergmann as in Part 7, stating I was “nondelusional”; and on October 20 sending me to Vancouver General Hospital for a committal, claiming I was obsessed and harassing staff, from which I was released on the federal election day October 25 as in Part 8.</p> <p>In the afternoon of November 29, I was informed by UBC Hospital psychiatrist Dr. (Jonathan) Fleming that <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot104 - UBC Hospital record, select Oct 30-Nov 30, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">provincial Medical Services Plan would no longer cover my visits</font></a>. It could be that I was no longer considered a mental patient there.</p> <p>Earlier that day, I had an appointment with my new probation officer, Fred Hitchcock assisted by Randy Watts, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot099 - Probation officer notes, Nov 10-26, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">as reassigned from David Phillips starting November 22</font></a>. I had known both from my detentions at Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre, normally in the Disordered Offender Unit; Hitchcock was director for this program in Vancouver and Watts supervised the inmates’ Sheltered Workshop. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot105 - Vancouver Probation record, Nov 29, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Hitchcock’s notes stated</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The initial combined supervision of Mr. Gao (by Watts and Hitchcock) is a reminder to the subject of his previous incarceration for not complying by court orders (resulting in further charges). Basically the message to Mr. Gao is that Corrections and Forensic will assist him including referring for job placement and community work if he is <u>cooperative</u>. Otherwise we will have him returned to court for a review (or if applicable a breach).”</p> </blockquote> <p>Looking back, these two events taking place on the same day was no coincidence: assigning jail detention staff as my new probation staff and ending my medical coverage for hospital psychiatric visits – both provided by B.C. government agencies.</p> <p>This followed the riskiest criminal charge I had faced –due to complaint by a lawyer who was the counsel for a high-level B.C. government commissioned inquiry and had a prosecutor background working for federal Justice Department and RCMP. </p> <p>As earlier quoted, the rationale by Justice Department and RCMP to allow a legal counsel for the Sarich inquiry to address aboriginal natives’ concerns was that it “ensures an inquiry doesn’t drag on for months longer than necessary, and that witnesses are not inconvenienced”.</p> <p>That same rationale was probably also applied to my case, to cut my civil litigation short without any real action, so that it wouldn’t be “longer than necessary” as  the authorities deemed, or “inconvenience” important persons: Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative party had been decimated under Kim Campbell – all that was “necessary” for Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s Liberals – while Maria Klawe’s UBC management career was still advancing – and not to be “inconvenienced”.</p> <p>As in Parts 7 & 8, my earlier persistent phoning of Vancouver lawyer Patricia Connor after a no-contact condition had been added to my bail on an Assault charge, led to more criminal charges and a guilty verdict in July 1993 at Richmond Provincial Court for Breach-of-Recognizance, and a December 1 sentence to conditional discharge with 1-year probation. </p> <p>The probation reassignment happened on the eve of that sentencing. New probation officer Fred Hitchcock’s reminder, i.e., warning, implied that further persistence – with Marion Buller now – would mean harder punishment.</p> <p>No doubt had I not deemed it necessary I wouldn’t have gotten into such troubles at all. During my jail detentions I was not only forced to take the anti-psychotic medication Haldol with its unpleasant side effects but, for persisting against correction staff’s orders, was slapped with various restraints, including: lockdown, i.e., confined to my cell without access to the common area; hogtie with chains; sleep naked on cement floor in the basement; and ‘helicopter ride to the hole’, i.e., taken on an elevator ride by the toughest Officer-in-Charge – jail supervisor – and his assistants, with my hands held at the back and lifted up so my body severely bent forward, to a windowless solitary cell on the top floor, where he put his knee on my back to force my lying facedown until I agreed not to make noise – likely already less than the proverbial thing with its rumored beatings.</p> <p>In the clampdown on my political activism, the local RCMP did decide not to overdo it as on December 20, 1993 the Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic, handling my court-ordered counselling, received a <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot106 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Dec 20, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">phone call from Hitchcock about a conversation with RCMP “Cpl. Libel”</font></a>, who said that RCMP’s UBC detachment didn’t view me as a “violent” threat:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Cpl. Libel reports that this detachment doesn’t perceive Mr. Gao as a threat to be violent, but rather that he seeks to be arrested in the hope of obtaining a psychiatric report that would guarantee him a pension that was otherwise denied him when his contract expired and was renewed at U.B.C.” </p> </blockquote> <p>While Cpl. Libel’s descriptions were all mixed up in regard to my UBC dispute and my attempts to get rid of the psychiatric oppression, his words did point to forensic psychiatry as an alternative measure in criminal justice – a subject touched on in Part 8, in particular in the case of serial child killer Clifford Olson.</p> <p>Around December 30, Hitchcock produced a new “<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot107 - Vancouver Probation case management plan, ~Dec 30, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Case Management Plan</font></a>”, with Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic’s Dr. Clifford Kerr and nurse Daniel Mets leading the contact list. Compared to the first one devised in September as in Part 8, Cpl. Libel was a notable addition, whereas hardline UBC Hospital psychiatrist Dr. M. O. Agbayewa was now omitted – likely because I was no longer allowed SMP-funded visits there. </p> <p>Co-relating to the escalating prosecution utilizing Marion Buller’s involvement, was the ending of other community involvement.</p> <p>As in Part 8, the September case plan had come out of a “Multi-Service Network” case conference organized by the community-based Vancouver South Mental Health Team, and in December VSMHT was trying to do a second conference that might also involve Aunt Sally, and my mother who had come from China in June.</p> <p>But now, t<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot108 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Dec 17, 1993-Feb 2, 1994 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">he involvement of MSN and VSMHT was ended by Hitchcock</font></a>.</p> <p>On the same day when Forensic Clinic recorded RCMP UBC detachment Cpl. Libel’s statement that I was not perceived as a violent threat there, VSMHT was also told by Crown counsel Marjorie Munkley that<font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#333333">UBC should get its own civil restraining order</font>.</p> <p>Piecing together the various info from probation, Forensic Clinic, UBC Hospital and VSMHT, a picture emerged in November-December 1993, of consolidating control in the hands of provincial jail staff acting as probation staff, and in the hands of provincial forensic psychiatrists, with a plan to escalate penalties through the criminal court if I was not “complying” or “cooperative”.</p> <p>Indeed, when I attended UBC Hospital in December, staff there just phoned probation staff. On January 13, 1994 I was there for the last time, and without the option of interviews with psychiatrists I just asked that the hospital review my records to correct any wrong diagnosis. I <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot109 - UBC Hospital record, Dec 8, 1993-Jan 13, 1994 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">was told nothing had been done wrong</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Arrived by bus asking for the Dr. to read his past charts to see if a wrong dx has been made. Informed that there were no mistakes made. left to parking lot in his own car.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But this last record item already had a fact wrong: having arrived by bus, how could I leave in my own car when I hadn’t been there for days?</p> <p>To shift my focus, Fred Hitchcock introduced me to Nancy Carroll and Katherine Au who could help find volunteer work and employment, but I was more interested in a computer science job. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot110 - Vancouver Probation record, Dec 30, 1993-Jan 5, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On December 30 Hitchcock told me Microsoft was hiring</font></a> in Vancouver.</p> <p>So in the week prior to UBC Hospital’s January 13 final statement of denial of psychiatric oppression, I went to Microsoft Canada’s Vancouver office, left a resume and was later told that it would be kept on file and I would be contacted if the company was interested.</p> <p>According to <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot111 - Vancouver Police record, Jan 11, 1994 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Police record on January 11, 1994</font></a>, from January 4 on I “attempted to gain access” to Microsoft office several times and was removed by security. The incident was then reported to police along with background info found from UBC, including: “let go under questionable circumstances”, “RCMP were called to assist in evicting”, and “institutionalized for a short term”. “Additional information” was referred to, but is not in the police report as in the personal-information disclosure.</p> <p>I didn’t persist further with Microsoft, and police didn’t witness an incident. Still, the January 11 police report categorized the offence as “Threatening/Harassing”, despite nothing “threatening” in its info.</p> <p>The Vancouver Police was likely acting on the same master plan as with Marion Buller’s involvement, taking it to the next level of the ‘violent stalker’ scenario Criminal Harassment charge was about. I had accumulated 3 Mischief charges due to my activity of civil disobedience prior to the Criminal Harassment charge. But there was no violence in any of the incidents.</p> <p>The entire period, from my July 2, 1992 UBC eviction by RCMP to the November 4, 1993 Criminal Harassment charge due to Marion Buller, coincided with that of a political campaign drive in California – and other similar drives in the United States – to enact a “3-strike” law – spurred by the June 29, 1992 murder of Kimber Reynolds by repeat felons Joseph Michael Davis and Douglas David Walker, and the October 1, 1993 kidnapping and eventual murder of Polly Klaas by repeat felon Richard Allen Davis. Under such new laws, a person convicted of a third violent felony would see a much longer prison term, or life in prison. “Three strikes and you are out”, even President Bill Clinton got in on the act in his January 1994 State of the Union address. (“<a href="http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/poldocs/uspressu/SUaddressWJClinton.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">State of the Union Address</font></a>” by William J. Clinton, January 25, 1994, <em>Electronic Classics Series</em>, The Pennsylvania State University; and, “<a href="http://www.sjra1.com/index_files/theadvocate_files/advocatepdf/VOL%201%20ISSUE%2012-FEB%202010.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Passage of the 3-strikes Law</font></a>”, by Douglas W. Kieso, February 2010, Vol. 1, Issue 12, <em>SJRA Advocate</em>)</p> <p>But these laws have been controversial. Two of the major criticisms are: many of the prisoners, in the thousands, serving life sentences under “3-strike” laws do so not for violent offences; and, among those serving “3-strike” sentences a disproportionate number are minorities, particularly Blacks (“<a href="http://gradworks.umi.com/1466354.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Three Strikes Law of California Proposition 184. of March 1994: A Policy Analysis</font></a>”, by Cesar Urizar, May 2009, <em>UMI ProQuest</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/opinion/three-strikes-of-injustice.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">'Three Strikes of Injustice’</font></a>”, By Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway, October 8, 2012, <em>The New York Times</em>). </p> <p>After I began political blogging in January 2009, and in February started a series of blog posts on Canadian politics especially regarding former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Microsoft announced on March 9 that Maria Klawe became a director of its board, as in Part 4. When I learned it I felt a sense of deja vu, as when Microsoft recruiter “Ken Button” phoned me in Silicon Valley in early 2000s the above 1994 incident had come to my mind.</p> <p>Powerful interests seem to have the prerogative to do as they please, and in the process trample on others whose existence they can even deny.</p> <p>In January 1994 I also began looking for an academic job. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot112 - Vancouver Probation record, Jan 19, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Hitchcock’s January 19 notes</font></a> recorded:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Gao (in the company of his mother – who can’t speak English) … He stated he received his medical injection from the Forensic Clinic nurse on Jan 14, 1994. He appeared restless, wanted to telephone a New Jersey University twice within 15 minutes. re: their response to his seeking employment. He stated that when he has completed his court dates in February, 1994 he intends to move to the U.S.A. to seek University employment. I advised him that he would have to seek permission from the court …” </p> </blockquote> <p>so I was restless about going to the U.S. for academic work while still facing criminal charges at Vancouver Provincial Court, to be tried on February 11 & 23 as in <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot110 - Vancouver Probation record, Dec 30, 1993-Jan 5, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Hitchcock’s December 30 notes</font></a>, and being enforced on anti-psychotic medication by Richmond Provincial Court as part of the December 1 sentence as in Part 8 – I disliked Haldol so much that the Clinic switched to long-term injection of it.</p> <p>I recall something interesting trying to reach the academic institution referred to in Hitchcock’s notes. The first time I phoned, a young woman answered that it was the company Dow Corning. I hung up, dial the same correct number and reached the same person who again answered it was Dow Corning. Eventually a New Jersey telephone operator connected me to the right destination. The episode reminded me of  episodes as in Part 7, that in November-December 1992 B.C. Tel kept tap of my phone calls to CBC TV, providing phone record for Vancouver Police, and in June 1993 cutting my phone service at my apartment at 1640 West 11th Avenue.</p> <p>At the next probation appointment on January 26, I told Hitchcock the injected medication didn’t have effect – meaning that it wasn’t necessary – and he suggested I report to the Forensic Clinic, but really thought of me as “very agitated”. As<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot113 - Vancouver Probation record, Jan 26-Feb 3, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"> Hitchcock’s notes recorded</font></a>, I complied with his advice, and was unexpectedly certified at the Clinic and taken to a psychiatric committal at Forensic Psychiatric Institute.</p> <p>Visiting me at FPI on February 3, Hitchcock noted improvement in my behavior. He now recorded my claim – I am sure I had said the same on January 26 – that I could control behavior without medication, and said I would likely be released before the February 11 court date:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… I noticed a substantial improvement in his behaviour. Though he is on a different medication, he claims he is controlling his behaviour – separate from meds. He will likely be released prior to his next court date – February 11, 1994.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It was a trap to send me to an involuntary committal before recording my point of view – not unlike from the start of this political saga when my political views were acknowledged only as “delusions” for hospital records.</p> <p>This was my 4th and last committal. The first two had direct political backgrounds as in Parts 6 & 7: the first, at UBC Hospital, was initiated by RCMP Sergeant Brian Cotton on November 30, 1992, with a role by newly appointed B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, hours after I had faxed documents to MP Kim Campbell’s local constituency office; the second, at Vancouver General Hospital and UBC Hospital, was brought in by Vancouver Police and Vancouver Provincial Court after my January 14, 1993 arrest at CBC TV for insisting on a media interview to expose Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s handling of Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa’s health as weakened by cancer.</p> <p>The third committal, for which I was certified at UBC Hospital and sent to VGH by RCMP, occurred a few days before the October 25, 1993 federal election that would see Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell suffer a crushing defeat; I was released on election day as in Part 8.</p> <p>This fourth committal showed no obvious political background in its timing or as in my patient records.</p> <p>Attending the Forensic Clinic on January 26 as Hitchcock advised, I didn’t get to meet my counselling psychiatrist Dr. Clifford Kerr, who held the opinion – as in his October 19, 1993 pre-sentencing report discussed in Part 8 – that despite no observed psychotic symptom I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia”  as inferred from my persistent behavior.</p> <p>Instead, I was interviewed by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Mel Dilli, whom I hadn’t met before. Dr. Dilli said he would have to send me to an FPI committal for two reasons: one, since I claimed Haldol didn’t have effect but had bad side effects, FPI would try a new experimental medication; and two, if he didn’t send me to a committal for the experiment to calm me, I might be sent to “Matsqui” – the medium-security Matsqui Institution prison in now Abbotsford, B.C. – where I could be “raped” by other inmates – a scary claim but in any case the committal was involuntary and not up to me.</p> <p>Months later in May, I read a newspaper article by him and realized Dr. Dilli was the leader of Bosnians in British Columbia (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot114 - Bosnian holocaust ignored at our peril, May 13, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Bosnian holocaust ignored at our peril</font></a>”, by Mel Dilli, May 13, 1994, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“As B.C. Bosnians, we monitor closely the western news-media reports on the holocaust in the former Yugoslavia, and we are immeasurably pained by the considerable ambivalence, if not indifference, that is shown by Judeo-Christian civilizations.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Even the late president of the United States, Richard Nixon, concluded that had this genocide been perpetrated on Christians or Jews, it would have been stopped a long time ago.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Are there any Christians left in the world to raise their voices against the Hitlerian “final solution” of an innocent and decent people with a culture of tolerance and compassion going back to the 15th century? Where did Sephardic Jews escape from the Spanish Inquisition if not to Bosnia? Sarajevo was a city of exemplary coexistence of religious beliefs -- centuries before the Philadelphia declaration of human rights -- a church there, a mosque adjacent to it and a synagogue next to it.</p> <p>Has the world really become so numb and so indifferent? Why not take pity at least on women and children and take them away from the least-safe havens on planet Earth, even to the Arctic or the Sahara desert, where they may perish with more human dignity? Even Palestine, comparatively speaking, would be a great premium. If nothing else, let us send a horde of Kevorkian doctors to put them out of their misery in a far more humane manner than the constant fear, torture, rape, hunger and deprivation they have been going through for years. ”</p> </blockquote> <p>Dr. Dilli’s claim to me that psychiatric committal was a merciful alternative to prison “rape” now appeared vividly in this article, but for a much worse life-and-death fiasco in his native land, and expressed in a manner worthy of a history scholar.</p> <p>For years afterwards I didn’t realize that there had been a stream of political news with Dr. Dilli at the center of, that had connections to the psychiatric oppression against me.</p> <p>On December 7, 1992, as I was sending a second letter to MP Kim Campbell a week into my first psychiatric committal for attempting to publicly challenge the leadership conduct of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as in Part 6,  Dr. Dilli appeared in his first major political news story, meeting Mulroney whose wife Mila – mentioned in Part 1 – was a Serbian Canadian with a psychiatrist father Dr. Dilli had known, over the plight of Bosnian refugees (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot115 - PM to consider more refugees, Dec 7, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">PM to consider more refugees, Bosnian, Muslim groups told</font></a>”, by Frank Rutter, December 7, 1992, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The prime minister … said the crisis in the Balkans had affected many peoples’ lives and said it had touched his family personally when his father-in-law, Dimitri Pivnicki, a Montreal psychiatrist, had been booted out of the Serbian Orthodox Church because he did not agree with what was happening in his native land. </p> <p>Pivnicki was born in southern Serbia. His mother-in-law, Bogdana, came from Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital still under Serbian siege despite supposed ceasefires and agreements to allow movement of aid convoys arranged by the United Nations. </p> <p>Mulroney met in the lobby of the Hotel Vancouver with Dr. Mel Dilli, a Vancouver psychiatrist and immigrant from former Yugoslavia, who is leading a campaign to raise funds for refugees. </p> <p>Dilli said that Mulroney had promised to consider raising the ceiling of 26,000 refugees at present allowed to enter Canada from the region. </p> <p>“I will talk to the minister about it. We will discuss this in cabinet,” Mulroney said.</p> <p>During the conversation with Dilli and lawyer Al Jina, Mulroney called over his press secretary, Mark Entwistle, and asked him to see that External Affairs Minister Barbara McDougall telephoned Dilli this week. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Dilli, who said he came from the same region in southern Serbia as Mila Mulroney's father, and had known him earlier in Montreal, said the local Bosnian Association, of which he is president, had collected $150,000 in the last few weeks in Vancouver. The money is for medical supplies and food aid to besieged Bosnians.”</p> </blockquote> <p>With a much worse human tragedy going on, a political leader who I strongly felt exhibited bullying behavior was instead someone else’s hope of a saviour. It wouldn’t be surprising if Dr. Dilli participated in my oppression in exchange for Mulroney’s promise.</p> <p>In my 2009 blog posts on Canadian politics, I referred to journalist Christopher Young’s criticism published on February 20, 1988, that Mulroney’s Meech Lake constitutional accord could push Canada into a Yugoslavia-style civil conflict (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-6/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 7)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… the late columnist Christopher Young of <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em> pointed to the potential break-up crisis developing in Yugoslavia where Mulroney’s wife Mila was from, and warned Canadians to take a look in relation to the provincial-veto issue before deciding to accept the Meech Lake accord:</p> <p> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="429" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="63"> </td> <td valign="top" width="364"> <p>“Prime Minister Mulroney in particular should take a look, in the light of his decision at Meech Lake to concede a constitutional veto power to every Canadian province.</p> <p>Prime Minister Mulroney … may soon have the chance. At meetings in Ottawa and Calgary last week, Mulroney told Yugoslav Prime Minister Branko Mikulic that he and his Yugoslav-born wife, Mila, may accept an invitation to visit the country in September or October. </p> <p>… </p> <p>Yugoslavia is in a deep crisis, both economic and political, a crisis aggravated and made more difficult to solve by a constitution that allows each of the country’s six republics and two provinces a veto on major constitutional change.”</p> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> </p> <p>Despite these and a few other voices of opposition, prime minister Mulroney forged ahead …”</p> </blockquote> <p>Well, Canada wasn’t as violent so to Mulroney there obviously was plenty of cushion for his politics.</p> <p>By February 22, 1993 – 2 days before Mulroney’s sudden announcement to retire as in Part 7 – Dilli was frustrated with lack of progress in the Bosnian crisis, and became persistent (“Bosnians call for end to atrocities”, by Kevin Griffin, February 22, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“With a sheaf of photocopied newspaper stories from The Vancouver Sun, Time, and other print media, he pointed to story after story, commentary after commentary about the continued Serbian aggression in the former Yugoslavian republic.</p> <p>“Everybody writes about it, but nobody does anything,” said Dilli, president of the Bosnian Association and director of the B.C. Muslim Association.</p> <p>“When I read these, I cry and cry and cry.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Then suddenly a Muslim extremist bombed New York City’s World Trade Center. Dilli came out to condemn it and plead for others not to treat all Muslims like terrorists (“Don’t implicate all Muslims for alleged sins of one individual”, by Mel Dilli, March 16, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A Muslim has now been implicated in that bombing. If a Muslim individual or group did play any role in the bombing, they acted on their own and against Islamic principles that assure the safety of civilians even in times of war. </p> <p>As Muslims, we are outraged by violence against civilians wherever it occurs. We therefore ask official agencies and the media to stop using misleading terms like “fundamentalist Muslims” and “Islamic fundamentalists” in such situations. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>With the public clarification made, Dilli continued lobbying on the Bosnian crisis. He met with many government politicians including Defence Minister Kim Campbell (“End to ‘ethnic cleansing’ sought”, by Douglas Todd, March 19, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>), who was on her way to succeed Mulroney as in Part 7, and B.C. Premier Mike Harcourt, while lamenting that Canadians paid little attention (“B.C. balks at Bosnia victim aid: It’s federal issue,Victoria says as 2 provinces offer treatment”, by Pamela Fayerman, August 12, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““We sent out 7,000 invitations to a fund-raising lecture. Everyone in the medical community was invited. We expected 300 people. Only eight showed up. Three of them were organizers, and another four were my friends.”</p> <p>Dilli said Harcourt and other political leaders should stop using the it's-not-our-jurisdiction line.”</p> </blockquote> <p>When even Dr. Dilli’s medical community peers were a no show, one couldn’t just blame Brian Mulroney or his Serbian psychiatrist father-in-law, could one? It was familiar to me: as in Part 8, around the same time in August 1993 I had a meeting with Member of B.C. Legislature Dr. Tom Perry, Advanced Education Minister, over my UBC dispute, then a few weeks later Premier Mike Harcourt shuffled Perry out of his cabinet job; and as in Part 4, back in 1992 while pursuing a UBC internal grievance, I attempted many times to have a meeting of Computer Science Department members to hear my complaint of Department Head Maria Klawe’s management tactics, but had no success.</p> <p>By November 1993 Mel Dilli became co-chair of B.C.-based World Movement for Peace in Bosnia, with a surprising co-chair, disgraced former B.C. Premier Bill Vander Zalm whose downfall and my former lawyer Brian Mason’s role in related politics have been discussed in Part 6, in the news on the day Aunt Sally bailed me out after the Marion Buller incident (“Refugee plan start of group’s effort for peace”, by Moira Farrow, November 9, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Vander Zalm has been very kind and helpful and we’re delighted he’s joined us,” Dilli said. He said it’s important both Christians and Muslims should be involved in the new organization.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So months before his May 1994 article decrying the indifference of the world’s Christians while heaping praise on former U.S. President Richard Nixon, Dilli had figured out that ‘devils’ like Mulroney and Vander Zalm were smart to be with – I guess so long as they weren’t the worst ones against him.</p> <p>After the December 1992 coincidence of his meeting Brian Mulroney while I was psychiatrically committed due to attempts to expose Mulroney, in February 1994 while I was psychiatrically committed through him, Dr. Dilli talked to the media about meeting Prime Minister Jean Chretien (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot116 - Vancouver Bosnian calls for air strikes, Feb 8, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Bosnian calls for air strikes</font></a>”, by Kim Bolan, February 8, 1994, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““Fifty years after what happened to innocent Jews in Warsaw ghettos, now it’s happening all over again and there is no excuse,” Dilli said.</p> <p>Canada must take in more refugees as Prime Minister Jean Chretien promised to do before he was elected, Dilli said. “Only about 2,000 Bosnians have been allowed in so far,” he said. “I hope to see Mr. Chretien again in the next few weeks.””</p> </blockquote> <p>In FPI committal I knew nothing about Dr. Mel Dilli’s political activism, but I knew psychiatric oppression was “happening all over again” under Jean Chretien’s government, with Dr. Dilli’s explanation of it being “more humane” than prison “rape”.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot117 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute patient record, Jan 26-Feb 9, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Forensic Psychiatric Institute record for the committal</font></a> included two medical certificates written on January 26, 1994. One with handwritings similar to, e.g., <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot100 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Nov 12-26, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic notes on November 24, 1993</font></a>, was by Dr. Clifford Kerr, stating that I believed TV & radio were giving me messages:</p> <blockquote> <p>“His family tell us that he believes that TV & radio are giving him messages. He wants Radio & TV to broadcast his predicament, i.e., he is being persecuted. He is mentally ill and in need of hospitalization and treatment for his own protection.”</p> </blockquote> <p>My “family” meant my mother and Aunt Sally. But Dr. Kerr didn’t claim danger to others – in fact not even in his detailed, <font color="#333333">October 19, 1993 pre-sentencing report</font> discussed in Part 8.</p> <p>The other certificate would be by Dr. Dilli, whose difficult-to-read handwritings appeared to say:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He is intemperate[?] and unpredictable with his behavior and needs inpatient observation & treatment with medical neuroleptics for his own protection and others.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Protection of “others”? I wonder Dr. Dilli added that for the authorities or for his friends Brian Mulroney and Mulroney’s psychiatrist father-in-law.</p> <p>At admission I was categorized as a “Paranoid Schizophrenic” with “Obsessive-Compulsive Personality” and <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot117 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute patient record, Jan 26-Feb 9, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">3 problems</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“01. Alteration in Thought Processes (Paranoid Type Delusions)</p> <p>02. Impaired Insight Into Mental Condition</p> <p>03. Non-compliance RE: Medical Regime”</p> </blockquote> <p>A corresponding plan of treatment was devised:</p> <blockquote> <p>“01. Use of psychotropic medications as prescribed. Reality orientation.</p> <p>02. Chemotherapy. Reality orientation.</p> <p>03. Reality Orientation. Pt. Teaching. Monitor for Compliance.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As it turned out in the Progress Notes, basically everyday at FPI no such problem was found:</p> <blockquote> <p>“No Listed Problem”</p> </blockquote> <p>I wasn’t mentally ill, so to be perfectly fine I just refrained from discussing politics or being persistent on anything, and took medication as required.</p> <p>It helped that the experimental medication, Risperidone, didn’t have Haldol’s side effects such as depressed appetite, drowsiness, low mood, poor concentration, and physical trembling. I did suffer slight nosebleed while taking it.</p> <p>Despite lack of ‘symptoms’ and Hitchcock’s note during a February 3 visit that I likely would be released before the February 11 court date, FPI did not voluntarily discharge me. A Mental Health Review Panel I appealed to ordered my release on February 9.</p> <p>As in Parts 6 & 7, while VGH discharged me on the election day in October 1993 a few days into my third committal, a review panel was needed for my first two committals at UBC Hospital. For this<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot118 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute review panel record, Feb 1-9, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">last Mental Health Review Panel hearing</font></a>, again I had patient advocate Brett Haughian and at my request the presence of B.C. Civil Liberties Association.</p> <p>A February 3 FPI Psychiatric Social Worker’s report to the review panel omitted the politics regarding Brian Mulroney, reviewing only the UBC dispute, and overstated the criminal-law aspect by describing my conditional-discharge probation due to breach-of-recognizance as having been “convicted” of “assaulting a security guard”. The report also showed the extent I was monitored, citing sources ranging from my mother to unspecified persons “in the community”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Although he has at times appeared to have put his differences with others aside and got on with other things, his mother recently became concerned that his problems were coming back to him. He was continuing to believe that he had been persecuted by his former employer, and that his grievances actually had been aired on television in the U.S. (they were not.) As well, he had recently got his car repaired and felt he had been overcharged for the work and on January 23, 1994 four spare tires were coincidentally stolen, and Mr. Gao perceived a connection which was not apparent to others, and there was a concern in the community that he was again decompensating and would again be harassing people.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So when I didn’t talk politics to them, FPI staff would raise what they got from other sources; and when I questioned things that happened to me, they would raise unspecified “concern in the community” to dismiss my view. But if there was concern in the community against me, why couldn’t some persons have acted against me? Gossips in the grapevine about me were ‘legitimate’ to this social worker, but my perceiving links among negative things to me was “delusion”.</p> <p>A February 7 forensic psychiatrist’s report to the review panel, based on January 26 & 31 and February 7 interviews, recorded my explanation about TV & radio messages, namely that I “read between the lines”. Despite referring only to the UBC dispute regarding “delusion”and no psychotic symptom, the report concluded that I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia”, and that without medication I might “deteriorate” and be “potentially dangerous”, thus substantiating the assertions of both Dr. Kerr and Dr. Dilli in the January 26 certificates:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… Mr. Gao was convinced he was wrongly diagnosed there [at UBC Hospital] and was insistent on disputing his diagnosis with his psychiatrist at the Forensic Out-Patient Clinic. Furthermore, he apparently told his mother that he was receiving messages from the radio and t.v. and that he indeed still wanted his claimed injustices broadcast on the media.</p> <p>…</p> <p>I interviewed Mr. Gao on three occasions, January 26, & 31 and February 7, 1994. …</p> <p>… Mr. Gao admitted that in November 1992 he wanted to contact Gloria Makarenko (host of a CBC news program), and be interviewed by her so that he could tell his story to the public and explain the conspiracy against him, as well as tell the public that the Charlottetown Accord was a “scam” planned by the then Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney. … In reference to the claim that he receives messages from the T.V. and radio, he states that his mother misunderstood him. He states he does not receive messages, but believes he has a keen ability to “read between the lines” and interpret the “true and hidden” meaning of the news broadcasts.</p> <p>It is my opinion that Mr. Gao suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia and has some paranoid and schizoid personality traits. … Mr. Gao does not believe he suffers from a mental illness… I feel he has a fixed delusion in regards to his failure to secure a permanent teaching position at U.B.C. Although to date his actions have not been seriously aggressive, I believe that if he is not compliant with medication he may deteriorate and would then be potentially dangerous, and for these reasons I recommend the Review Panel detain Mr. Gao until he is fully stabilized.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Apparently the social worker’s claim of community concern and the psychiatrist’s claim of potential danger to others had some sway; the review panel ruled to release me, but also reached a “paranoid disorder” diagnosis:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It is our opinion that Dr. Gao suffers from a mental disorder, namely paranoid disorder with a persistent lack of insight. However, it is also our opinion that he does not meet the B.C. Mental Health Act criteria for continued in-hospital treatment as an involuntary patient and must therefore discharge him.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So this was the kind of help from the sympathetic community activists: I shouldn’t be in committal – but given my “paranoid disorder” and others’ “concern” the psychiatrists could always initiate another one.</p> <p>Life wouldn’t be normal.</p> <p>In fact as in Parts 6 & 7, a “paranoid” disorder diagnosis was what RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton had wanted at the start when he took me to UBC Hospital on November 30, 1992, then in summer 1993 hardline UBC Hospital psychiatrist M. O. Agbayewa, Officer-in-Charge of its psychiatry department, insisted that I still had “paranoia” – both men played key roles manipulating my seeking review of psychiatric diagnoses into standoffs with security guards and assault charges – to justify false profiling of “violence”.</p> <p>In the end, the review panel wouldn’t get past that. How could oppression end when my advocates and my oppressors disagreed only on its degree?</p> <p>In a similar vein, how much could one expect a change of government from the Mulroney Tories to the Chretien Liberals to change my predicament, or to change the calamitous Bosnian situation Dr. Dilli tirelessly campaigned to government politicians on while cooperating with my oppression?</p> <p>After my FPI discharge, the Criminal Harassment trial on Friday, February 11 at Vancouver Provincial Court didn’t go forward, as my lawyer Phil Seagram negotiated a deal whereby I would agree to a 1-year peace bond with probation conditions, acknowledging the complaint without a plea of guilt or innocence, for the charge to be stayed. I wanted to go to trial and use it to present background political issues like I had done at Richmond Provincial Court in July 1993 as in Part 7, but Seagram advised against it, informing me of Marion Buller’s strong position that I be criminally convicted based on her fear for “personal injury” – without actual violence.</p> <p>A conviction would have been twisted traverse of justice, when Buller herself dealt with RCMP policing of aboriginal natives where physical violence was more commonplace.</p> <p>I agreed to the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot119 - Vancouver Provincial Court record, Feb 9-11, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">1-year peace bond approved by Judge A. W. (Anne Winter) MacKenzie</font></a>. The no-contact condition was detailed: among “any staff or lawyers at the law firm of Connell and Lightbody”, 8 individuals “involved in the incident”, led by Marion Buller, Brian Rhodes, Peter Eccles and Ajit Saran, were singled out to have no contact with.</p> <p>The condition for counselling specified “treatment including medication as prescribed at the Forensic Outpatient Clinic”. A similar rule was first set for the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot102 - Richmond Provincial Court record, June 18, July 27 & Dec 1, 1993 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">December 1, 1993 1-year conditional-discharge probation</font></a>, as in Part 8 ordered by Richmond Provincial Court Judge J. R. Groberman whose request for a forensic psychiatric pre-sentencing report was met by Dr. Kerr.</p> <p>Seagram later explained that Judge MacKenzie had been a federal Justice Department lawyer and he knew her as a University of Victoria classmate, hinting to me that it was his acquaintanceship with the judge that got this peace bond deal.</p> <p>But I find no public information to indicate Judge MacKenzie as a UVic – not UBC which Seagram didn’t mention – alumna (“<a href="http://wire.arts.ubc.ca/alumni/ubc-alumna-anne-mackenzie-first-woman-promoted-to-associate-chief-justice-of-the-bc-supreme-court/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">UBC Alumna Anne MacKenzie first woman promoted to Associate Chief Justice of the BC Supreme Court</font></a>”, By Katie Fedosenko, May 14, 2010, <em>Arts Wire</em>, The University of British Columbia), whereas the complainant Marion Buller turned out to be a UVic alumna (“<a href="http://alumni.uvic.ca/events/AW-12/DA12bios.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">2012 Distinguished Alumni Awards</font></a>”, University of Victoria Alumni).</p> <p>Justice MacKenzie, today of the B.C. Court of Appeal as is Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, had indeed been a Crown counsel with the Justice Department in Vancouver until 1990 (“<a href="http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/news-nouv/ja-nj/2011/doc_32680.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">British Columbia Judicial Appointment Announced</font></a>”, December 2, 2011, Department of Justice Canada). As Buller had also been a Justice Department prosecutor, Seagram’s real hint could be that the judge and the complainant were close to each other so my conviction would have been very likely – a question mark on how justice was reached!</p> <p>As in Part 8, my previous defence lawyer Richard Dempsey, who had handled two charges, Assault and Breach-of-Recognizance, at the Richmond court in July 1993 but who then partially facilitated my second Mischief charge at YMCA Enterprise Centre in October, was a part-time prosecutor at the Vancouver court, which I hadn’t been aware of earlier.</p> <p>Again unbeknown to me, Phil Seagram had been and would again become a provincial prosecutor (“6-year-old testifies father left him”, by Larry Still, January 26, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>; and, “Bad heart puts end to sex trial: But accused plays golf -- alleged victim”, by Judy Smith, July 20, 1995, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>).</p> <p>In 1993-94 Phil Seagram was a duty counsel at the Vancouver court and a defence lawyer, in the news when an accused of indecent act bared himself in court (“BUTT, YOUR HONOR . . .”, by Greg Middleton, April 22, 1993, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>), and later in December 1994 for a case bearing remarkable resemblance to mine but for its obscenity (“Woman freed on stalking charge: Sent former lover ginger-bread man with head broken off”, by Phil Needham, December 17, 1994, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A woman was found not guilty of stalking her former lover Friday but is on a one-year peace bond to stay away from him.</p> <p>Port Coquitlam provincial court Judge Susan Antifaev concluded chiropractor Kenneth Mikkelsen, 44, had reasonable grounds to fear for his safety in November, 1993, when Sylvia Caroline Swan, 35, resumed phoning his Langley office and sending letters to him despite a court order against having contact with him.</p> <p>The final communication, Nov. 29, 1993, was a note taped to a gingerbread man with its head broken off.</p> <p>She agreed to the peace bond which requires her to have no contact with Mikkelsen and prohibits her from going to Belcarra, where he lives.</p> <p>Swan's lawyer Phil Seagram said she has already found alternate stabling for her horse, which she used to keep in Anmore.</p> <p>The judge said Swan deluded herself into believing Mikkelsen was the man prowling outside her apartment window Nov. 10 and seen masturbating by two witnesses.</p> <p>The apartment caretaker, Alan Bell, said he saw the prowler from 30 metres away under a street light. But the judge said Bell was improperly led to the identification by private detective Ron Foyle, hired by Swan through a lawyer to try to obtain evidence against Mikkelsen.</p> <p>The Crown refused to approve a charge of committing an indecent act.</p> <p>Swan swore out a private information in May, 1994, but the resulting charge against Mikkelsen was stayed by regional Crown counsel Austin Cullen in June.</p> <p>The charge of criminal harassment, colloquially known as stalking, was laid against Swan last December. Swan is believed to be one of the first women charged with the offence, which came into effect Aug. 1, 1993.”</p> </blockquote> <p>My goodness, in December 1993 Sylvia Caroline Swan, 35, was one of the first women charged with Criminal Harassment that had become law only on August 1. In early November was I, 34, one of the first?</p> <p>It also looked like I was lumped into a category where indecency made the news. Why was my asking for anchor Gloria Macarenko in November 1992 while seeking publicity at CBC TV – as in Part 7 – was singled out in the FPI psychiatrist report to the review panel, and why was my asking psychiatrist Dr. (Susan Jane) Finch to review my record in October 1993 – as in Part 8 – was cited by UBC Hospital as the cause for my third committal? It might be because sexually harassing important women would have had a better chance of media coverage than my issues about Maria Klawe’s management conduct and Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct.</p> <p>At our next meeting after February 11, Fred Hitchcock said he did some legal research and found that medication could not be enforced by a probation order. Sympathetically, Hitchcock said that he wouldn’t enforce the medication requirement in the two probation orders I had received, and that if I declared my refusal of it he would write a letter to the judge overseeing my last trials on February 23, so that the requirement would be dropped from any new probation orders.</p> <p>I followed his suggestion, and <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot120 - Vancouver Probation record, Feb 16, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Hitchcock’s February 16 letter to Crown counsel</font></a> stated:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… on February 15, 1994, Mr. Gao advised that he:</p> <p>(1) Does not believe he has any psychiatric/Psychological ailment.</p> <p>(2) He adamantly refuses to take any medication as prescribed by the psychiatrist at Forensic Outpatient Clinic.</p> <p>On January 26, 1994 Mr. Gao reported to Forensic Outpatient Clinic and Dr. [name withheld] psychiatrist was of the opinion that Mr. Gao had deteriorated and had him certified and transferred to Forensic Psychiatric Institute where he was stabilized on medication. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>A passage in this letter has not been released. But the disclosed part was very different from what Hitchcock had told me: it didn’t refer to medication’s unenforceability by probation order, and instead hinted at effectiveness of FPI committal Dr. Dilli/Dr. Kerr had initiated to enforce medication.</p> <p>Hitchcock probably ‘double-crossed’ me, more so than on January 26, potentially playing my dislike of anti-psychotic medication to a worse outcome.</p> <p>My refusal of medication was promptly recorded in <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot121 - Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient medication record, 1993-94.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Services’ medication record</font></a>, in Dr. Kerr’s handwriting:</p> <blockquote> <p>“94/2/17      Mr. Gao has refused all medications.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The scenario was fraught with danger to me.</p> <p>In his <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot090 - Forensic Psychiatric Services pre-sentencing report, Oct 19, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">October 19, 1993 pre-sentencing report</font></a> Dr. Kerr had told the Richmond court something close to what Hitchcock conveyed in his February 16 letter, that counselling at Forensic Clinic was for the purpose of committal when needed:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Unfortunately, we are unable to force Mr. Gao to take medication treatment unless he is certified under the Mental Health Act. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>… I would certainly recommend that Mr. Gao be instructed to attend the Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic so that we can continue to monitor his mental state and if his mental state deteriorates to a point where he is certifiable and then he could be placed in hospital and appropriate treatment commenced.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Dr. Kerr’s report then led to the medication requirement in the December 1 probation order to help the Clinic enforce it. That might not be legal as Hitchcock now found out, but he mya not have said so to the Crown counsel or the court. Given his letter’s relay of the Forensic Clinic’s view, he likely played jeopardy with the situation: my formal refusal of medication could be basis for even stronger psychiatric enforcement given that Mental Health Review Panel had freed me from a Clinic-initiated committal – next time I probably could not be easily freed.</p> <p>In court on February 23, Phil Seagram again arranged for peace bonds. But this time I seriously objected: these were Mischiefs not Criminal Harassment; but the peace bond was a criminal bond for which the complainant would swear fear that I would “cause personal injury to her”; how could my persistent annoyance become violence?</p> <p>The Criminal Harassment charge I had faced was intended for the ‘stalking’ scenario, carrying up to 10-year jail even without actual violence. But the Mischief charges I was facing were only about “wilfully obstructing, interfering and interrupting with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property”.</p> <p>Seagram responded that the Mischief complainants had now also sworn fear for personal injury; again I would likely be convicted. So I again accepted his ‘goodwill’ arrangement.</p> <p>Not until years later that I realized I had been misled into a potentially really bad outcome. The Criminal Code’s Mischief section had penalties much tougher than the up to 2-year imprisonment for interfering with use of property, but life sentence for danger to life (“<a href="http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/page-198.html#docCont" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Criminal Code: Mischief <strong>430</strong></font></a>”, Department of Justice Canada):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Every one who commits mischief that causes actual danger to life is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.”</p> </blockquote> <p>By swearing “fear” for personal injury caused by me, the Mischief complainants had in effect escalated minor-looking charges into the spectre of “actual danger to life” punishable by life in prison.</p> <p>Recall when she told Vancouver Police she would file Mischief instead of Assault-by-Trespass prosecutor Marjorie Munkley explained, “there’s no evidence of resistance beyond passive resistance or mere nuisance”. Still, I had seen 2 Assault-by-Trespass charges upgraded to Assault charges at Richmond court, yet the worst Assault conviction carried only 10-year imprisonment (“<a href="http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/page-129.html#docCont" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Criminal Code: Assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm <strong>267</strong></font></a>”, Department of Justice Canada) just like Criminal Harassment without the actual violence.</p> <p>But without my awareness, my “passive resistance or mere nuisance” could lead to life in prison!</p> <p>Now one gets a feel how so many repeat offenders in the United States could legally end up life-term prisoners on 3 strikes of nonviolent crimes.</p> <p>In front of the judge, Seagram pulled me aside for a solemn warning, “You shouldn’t be persistent with these law firms again. They want to send you to prison. You should change your focus now.” He might not have meant the complainants per se, but Seagram’s warning was consistent with Dr. Dilli’s January 26 warning of being sent to “Matsqui” where I could be “raped”. I took it seriously.</p> <p>It turned out that the judge on February 23 was Judge Conni L. Bagnall – I knew about her.</p> <p>As in Parts 5, 7 & 8, from early spring of 1989 to June-July 1993 I lived in an apartment at 1640 West 11th Avenue in Vancouver. My landlady, Mrs. Norma Bagnall, had lived there before moving to New Westminster, the suburb where only days before my psychiatric oppression started – in late November 1992 – B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick was appointed, with jurisdiction over RCMP’s UBC area as discussed in Part 6.</p> <p>When we first met Norma had said her daughter was a lawyer. Then in 1992 as my UBC dispute was escalating, she told me her daughter was being appointed a provincial court judge, though Norma didn’t mention the provincial prosecutor background (“Professor accused of harassing student”, February 12, 1987, and, “Jury finds man guilty of violent sex assaults on 3 prostitutes in ’88”, by Kayce White, June 27, 1989, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>So that was a second instance of a local connection turning into a judge – after Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick.</p> <p>Part 8 has mentioned Justice Kirkpatrick’s collaboration on legal education with Justice J. P. van der Hoop, who had been controversial in 1989 for referring to a 3-year-old girl’s sexual drive as the reason for leniency for her adult sexual assaulter.</p> <p>Well, Judge Bagnall later collaborated on legal education with prosecutor Austin Cullen who – as in a news story quoted earlier – back in 1994 had made a decision against my lawyer Phil Seagram’s other Criminal Harassment client Sylvia Caroline Swan in a case laden with obscenity and indecency, not long before Cullen was appointed to B.C. Supreme Court in March 2001 (Conni L. Bagnall and Austin F. Cullen, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books/about/Criminal_Law_Advocacy_Materials_Prepared.html?id=M6mtAAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Criminal Law Advocacy: Materials Prepared for the Continuing Legal Education Seminar, Criminal Law Advocacy, Held in Vancouver, B. C. on November 23, 2000</em></font></a>, 2000, Continuing Legal Education Society of British Columbia; and, “<a href="http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/supreme_court/about_the_supreme_court/Judges_and_Masters_of_the_Supreme_Court.aspx" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Members of the Supreme Court of British Columbia</font></a>”, The Courts of British Columbia).</p> <p>Maybe lightening didn’t strike twice, but sexual curiosity was more pervasive in the justice system.</p> <p>On February 23 Judge Bagnall was of some help given Hitchcock’s February 16 letter to Crown counsel, reversing a bit of the accumulated psychiatric-oppression regime begun since Justice Kirkpatrick on November 30, 1992. Instead of imposing a harsher rule for my “adamant” refusal to take medication, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot122 - Vancouver Provincial Court record, Feb 21-23, 1994 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Judge Bagnall excluded any mention of medication or Forensic Clinic</font></a> from the peace bonds’ counselling condition she approved:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Take psychiatric and psychological counselling as directed by your Probation Officer.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So on the psychiatry issue Judge Bagnall sent the ball back to the probation staff.</p> <p>But the scenario was still fraught with danger to me.</p> <p>Judge Bagnall’s probation orders without medication requirement were exceptions that may have come out of her sympathy due to her family’s awareness of my predicament, rather than legal confirmation of Hitchcock’s interpretation that medication couldn’t be enforced by probation orders.</p> <p>No attempt was made by Hitchcock to change the previous two probation orders by Judge J. R. Groberman and Judge A. W. MacKenzie, probably because he didn’t think those judges would easily accept his view. Thus my refusal of medication was in violation of the earlier issued orders, but in an unenforced situation per Hitchcock’s understanding.</p> <p>The situation was indeed as precarious as Phil Seagram and Dr. Mel Dilli had warned, that if something led to a deterioration in his opinion of my “behavior” – similar to back on January 26 – Hitchcock’s unproven legal interpretation would likely ‘go out the window’ and the fragile “peace” at his favor with the earlier bonds would crash down on me, and the “behavioral” issue would likely also destroy the more stable peace with Judge Bagnall’s bonds.</p> <p>Adding to the difficulty if the “peace” collapsed, was that most of the complainants were lawyers or law firms, making it even harder than before to obtain lawyers’ help to fend off the ‘upgraded’ complaints with “fear” of violence sworn against me in these criminal bonds.</p> <p>In such a doomsday scenario, even if the law and the real facts were actually in my favor the outcomes would not.</p> <p>There was another bit of easing of tension besides removal of medication requirement in the last batch of bonds for the 3 Mischief charges: only two of the complainant entities, YMCA Enterprise Centre represented by Roma McGill-Bowen and Warren & Eder represented by Tamara Sheer, entered affidavits against me. with the former’s executive director Kofi Ohene-Assante and the latter’s law partner Birgit Eder, mentioned in Part 8, in the no-contact conditions.</p> <p>Cram & Associates apparently decided to let its Mischief charge stay, i.e., be dropped, unconditionally. It was rather ironic because the first Mischief had arisen at Cram & Associates in early October 1993, where lawyer Arnold Shuchat had reviewed my civil lawsuit vs. UBC and RCMP, decided not to take it, and instead prodded me to persist as to incur a criminal charge – likely motivated by a financial agenda as discussed in Part 8. The other Mischiefs and Criminal Harassment followed as a result.</p> <p>With this disposition of my charges through peace-bond arrangements, my ongoing complainants also became an all-female cast – to make “fear” of injury by me appear more real presumably.</p> <p>So by late February 1994 my criminal charges were all disposed of, and I was on 1-year probation for a conditional discharge and 3 peace bonds, without any criminal conviction. But all 3 peace bonds were loaded with sworn fears of personal injury caused by me, related to charges that set high premiums on danger of violence, while my refusal of anti-psychotic medication was in breach of an unenforced requirement of the conditional discharge and a peace bond.</p> <p>It wouldn’t be too bad if this peace could last. Most importantly, the duties paid wouldn’t be in vain if the political issues for which they were paid and other sacrifices were made could open up in the future.</p> <p>During the period of my FPI committal and court disposition of charges, there was an important change at RCMP. On February 4, nearly a year after former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s February 24, 1993 announcement of retirement which then took place in June,  Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster’s retirement, to take effect in June (“Top Mountie to turn in his badge, says force needs periodic renewal”, by Stephen Bindman, February 5, 1994, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced Friday that Inkster will step down after almost seven years as RCMP commissioner when Parliament adjourns for the summer, likely in June.</p> <p>…</p> <p>He could stay on as president of the international police organization Interpol – he was named in November 1992 to a four-year term – but will discuss it with his replacement as commissioner and the world body’s executive.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Among the low points, Inkster said, was the political storm he created on Parliament Hill in 1989 when he revealed more than a dozen MPs and senators were under RCMP investigation.</p> <p>Another was last year’s suicide of Insp. Claude Savoie, who was under investigation for leaking information to a Montreal drug kingpin.</p> <p>“We will never know why he chose to be his own judge and jury. It was a very sad point for all members. We all suffer and we all lose a little bit if one of our own gets into that sort of difficulty.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Norman Inkster’s resignation was of special interest because, as in Part 5, he was elected President of International Police Organization on November 10, 1992, the same day I began circulating political press releases, unopposed after a candidate from China withdrew in his favor.</p> <p>Inkster was hoping to keep his INTERPOL presidency, but later gave that up in September (“TOP MOUNTIE BACK IN SADDLE: Former RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster takes on a different kind of sleuthing with KPMG”, by Carolyn Green, March 1, 1995, <a href="http://www.financialpost.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Financial Post</em></font></a>).</p> <p>In my 2009 blog posts on Canadian politics, I viewed Inkster’s stepping down not as merely an attempt to depart from the Mulroney era, but a “retreat” from the international arena by Canada (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 5)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Imagine what kind of clout in the international law-and-order arena the new Chretien government would lose with the departure of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, whose Interpol appointment had been praised by the RCMP as “a great honour for Canada” and for the RCMP, even if within the RCMP there were different opinions about the Interpol: while Inspector Claude Sweeney, head of Interpol’s Canadian branch, was enthusiastic about the benefit of computerized information hook-up in the plan, others pointed to examples of concern, such as in Venezuela where Interpol was expected to help track dissidents as criminals, or former Interpol drugs committee chairman Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader indicted in 1988 in the United States on narcotics charges, or former Interpol president Jolly Bugarin, crony of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, widely accused of a cover-up in the killing of Marcos opponent Benigno Aquino in 1983.</p> <p>…</p> <p>While Inkster’s resignation in 1994 was expected to give the Liberal government a fresh start in gun control at home, it also took place amid the Liberals’ retreat from its election promise of higher priority for international human rights, to focus on the economy and business; and as if that had not been enough, prime minister Chretien’s first official foreign visit – to Mexico instead of traditionally to the U.S. – in March 1994 was marred by the assassination by gunshot of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio (of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that had ruled uninterruptedly for 65 years) just before Chretien’s arrival, by a large and angry mob shouting “out” while Chretien attempted but failed to pay respect to the body of the slain, and by a rare type of rebuttal of Chretien’s notion that Mexican democracy and Canadian democracy were just different types – from Subcomandante Marcos of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in a jungle interview in Chiapas, Mexico.”</p> </blockquote> <p>After my court dispositions, the forensic-psychiatry regime slowed down while holding steady its negative views of me, as seen in two FPI reports for my January 26-February 9 committal, coming out in March and April.</p> <p>The <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot123 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute nursing assessment, Mar 7, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Nursing Assessment dated March 7</font></a> quoted me on what happened at the Outpatient Clinic on the day of committal when I was seen by Dr. Dilli instead of Dr. Kerr:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The patient states … “I went to see [name withheld], but I didn’t get a chance to see him. So [name withheld] saw me. The ambulance then took me here to F.P.I. …”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Questioned the patient as to why he was sent here to the F.P.I.: “They don’t know if I have Schizophrenia or not. So the doctor feels I can take a large injection or take pills here.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I carefully omitted Dr. Dilli’s warning of otherwise Matsqui prison where “rape” could happen, while highlighting that at least Dr. Dilli didn’t know if I had Schizophrenia – as in Part 8 Dr. Kerr had told me his “Paranoid Schizophrenia” diagnosis at a pre-sentencing interview in October 1993.</p> <p>After a series of test questions and answers, including about names of the prime minister and B.C. and federal ruling parties – none in Brian Mulroney’s corner for that matter – and no psychotic symptom was found, the nursing assessor reported 3 problems in conclusion:</p> <blockquote> <p>“<u>PROBLEM FORMULATION:</u></p> <p>1. Alteration in thought process (persecutory type thinking).</p> <p>2. Lacks insight into mental condition.</p> <p>3. Non-compliance regarding medication regime.”</p> </blockquote> <p>During my FPI committal the staff didn’t find any of the 3 problems listed at admission on January 26. In this report they were modified: “Paranoid Type Delusions” became “persecutory type thinking” and “Impaired Insight” became “Lacks insight”, with the 3rd problem staying the same.</p> <p>This interview was done during my committal but the report was dated a month later, and so the subtle changes probably reflected the assessor’s thinking for the longer term, dropping words like “delusions” and “impaired”. As for medication, in mid-February after FPI discharge I formally declared my refusal.</p> <p>As in Part 6, during my first committal at UBC Hospital there was a similar change in the psychiatric diagnosis: at admission on November 30, 1992 it was “paranoid delusional disorder”, but in the psych ward the next day it became “Delusional Disorder, Persecutory Type”.</p> <p>But in this March 7, 1994 nursing assessment the dropping of the term “delusion”, other than when reviewing history, signalled a possible, tentative step toward easing the psychiatric regime. </p> <p>As if showing any progress would be fragile, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot124 - Vancouver Probation record, Mar 22, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">on March 22 probation officer Fred Hitchcock’s note</font></a> made an error on recent history, missing my last probation orders on February 23, thus flip-flopping on the medication requirement:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Since Feng was released from F.P.I. he has refused to take medication but he is conscientous about his reporting both with Probation and Forensic Outpatient Clinic. He has no further charges since his disposition of February 11, 1994 to a Recognizance of non-association with several lawyers (victims) and his is to accept treatment with Forensic Services including taking <u>medication.</u>”</p> </blockquote> <p>Recall on February 15 at Hitchcock’s suggestion I had announced refusal of medication, he then wrote a letter to prosecution, and Judge Conni Bagnall’s February 23 probation order dropped the requirements of “treatment” and “medication”. But when Hitchcock counted the February 11 order from Marion Buller’s complaint as the last, then accordingly I was to accept treatment and medication.</p> <p>Indeed, any potential progress from the March 7 nursing assessment was erased by the next FPI report, a <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot125- B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute separation summary, Apr 11, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Separation Summary dated April 11</font></a>.</p> <p>The report’s first part consisted mainly of the nursing assessment content, and the second part contained info from the psychiatrist’s interview. It recorded an initial psychiatric interview on January 26 by Dr. (Philip) Adilman, and two more on January 31 and February 7 – the interviewers’ names for the last two have been withheld, but it was the same doctor as per the February 7 FPI report to Mental Health Review Panel quoted earlier.</p> <p>In it was an interesting anecdote at the end of the January 26 interview:</p> <blockquote> <p>“When Dr. Adilman got up to leave the interview the patient asked, “Just what did [name withheld] write about me on those notes?”</p> <p>It was [name withheld] assessment that, due to the patient’s non-compliance with oral medications, he is a potential risk to others given his paranoid belief.”</p> </blockquote> <p>This occurred on the day of my admission so I was asking what the psychiatrist who had committed me had written, and Dr. Adilman replied it was about me as “a potential risk to others”. Comparison to the January 26 certificates quoted earlier can confirm that it wasn’t the one in my counselling psychiatrist Dr. Kerr’s handwriting, but the other.</p> <p>After the two January interviews, Dr. Adilman’s tentative conclusion was:</p> <blockquote> <p> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="361" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="115">“Assessment: </td> <td valign="top" width="244">? Paranoid Schizophrenia. Poor insight.</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="115"> </td> <td valign="top" width="244"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="115">Plan: </td> <td valign="top" width="244">Continue Risperidone.”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </p> </blockquote> <p>At this point he was unsure about “Paranoid Schizophrenia” as diagnosed by Dr. Kerr at Outpatient Clinic. But after the last interview on February 7, the same day when he sent the earlier-quoted FPI report to the review panel, Dr. Adilman became more sure of it – despite lack of real symptom:</p> <div> <blockquote> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="324" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="116">“Assessment:</td> <td valign="top" width="206">The patient continues to deny any mental illness and his suspicious nature suggests that he is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="116"> </td> <td valign="top" width="206"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="116">Plan:</td> <td valign="top" width="206">Recommend he stay at F.P.I. for a short while longer and stay on Risperidone.”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </blockquote> </div> <p>My “suspicious nature”? The only thing obvious in this report about such nature was the episode when I asked what Dr. Dilli had written “about me on those notes”.</p> <p>The report’s final conclusion, dated April 11, was “Paranoid Schizophrenia”.</p> <p>In this manner without real factual basis, the Forensic Psychiatric Institute legitimized the “Paranoid Schizophrenia” label on me previously given by some psychiatrists like Dr. Clifford Kerr but disagreed with by others as acknowledged in Dr. Kerr’s October 1993 pre-sentencing report. Dr. Dilli’s allegation that I would be a danger to others without anti-psychotic medication was also accepted.</p> <p>“Paranoid Schizophrenia” was much worse than symptom of “delusion”. Any tentative inclination toward progress in the March 7 nursing assessment was now overridden. Schizophrenia was normally incurable as mentioned in Parts 6 & 7; the conclusion and late dating of the psychiatrist’s summary signalled long-term psychiatric oppression.</p> <p>Since January I had ceased attending places with persistence which I had felt might move forward my grievances and political goals – chiefly at UBC Hospital.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot126 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Apr-Jul, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Forensic Outpatient Clinic records in April-July</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> showed a return to normalcy, with one intriguing episode of exception.</p> <p>At the April 7 counselling session – just ahead of FPI Dr. Adilman’s April 11 Separation Summary – I was interviewed by one of two nurses whose handwritings regularly appeared in the Clinic records – Kelly Lynd, assigned during the pre-sentencing stage in September 1993 as in Part 8, and Daniel Mets as in a December 1993 probation management plan discussed earlier. We discussed job searching and my mother’s stay, and the nurse concluded I remained “in denial around” my “illness”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Hasn’t had any response to his job applications, which he states isn’t surprising as there are very few teaching positions available. Not even remotely interested presently in job training through Canada Manpower. Presents as depressed & quick to deny same & present as superficially brighter. … Mother is staying until at least June ’94 & her return to China hinges on whether or not Feng is employed & “doing well”. Remains in denial around his illness.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Then at the April 21 session, the other nurse and I were able to discuss my past persistence in the context of “anxiety or nervousness” that could “disrupt other areas of our life”; immediately starting at the April 26 session with Dr. Kerr, the weekly counselling schedule was reduced to biweekly, and possibly even less frequent if it went well.</p> <p>My mother’s visitor visa, who had come from China in June 1993 as in Part 7, would end in June but she applied for an extension, hoping to be around until I became employed and “doing well”. Given her situation, I began to consider applying for early termination of probation orders so I could accompany her to China if she had to leave Canada. At the May 25 session, I told Dr. Kerr I might discuss it with defence lawyer Phil Seagram.</p> <p>On June 2, I spoke with probation officer Fred Hitchcock, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot127 - Applications to terminate probation order (unfiled), Jun 2, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">who provided the forms</font></a> to apply for early termination and filled out one for Judge Groberman’s December order. I followed suit with Judge MacKenzie’s and Judge Bagnall’s February ones. Hitchcock’s stylish handwritings and my awkward ones remind me of being taught read-and-write at over 4 years old by my maternal grandfather, as recalled in my Chinese blog post, <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%E5%BF%86%E5%BE%80%E6%98%94%EF%BC%8C%E5%AD%A6%E5%8E%86%E5%8F%B2%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7%EF%BC%88%E4%BA%8C%EF%BC%89%E7%AB%A5%E5%B9%B4%E7%9A%84%E5%90%AF%E8%92%99/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧(二)——童年的启蒙</font></a> (an <a href="http://fenggao.org/blogs/introduction/2011/03/%E5%BF%86%E5%BE%80%E6%98%94%EF%BC%8C%E5%AD%A6%E5%8E%86%E5%8F%B2%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7-part-2-part-3/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English synopsis</font></a> is posted on website <em>FengGao.ORG</em>).</p> <p>At my June 7 session I brought along probation documents to ask for Dr. Kerr’s help, and the nurse’s notes illustrated how I had to behave as completely non-anxious to try to obtain a good opinion – even though with the short timeframe for my mother I must have been somewhat anxious:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Requests that [name withheld] write a letter of support re: his applications. Was informed that [name withheld] would make that decision at his next appointment in 2 weeks. Was accepting of same. Stated that if he was turned down he would accept same. Denied any feelings of urgency to have forms & letter completed. States his mood is good, Denies any present concerns or worries. Mother has applied for extension on visa to remain in Canada.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Whether Dr. Kerr would be supportive was be critical. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot128 - Vancouver Probation record, Jun 10, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Hitchcock’s June 10 notes outlined his conditions</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> for supporting early termination of probation:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I told him that I would <u>not</u> support his request unless:</p> <p>(1) He obtained a letter from [name withheld] Forensic Outpatient Clinic which advised the court that he no longer required treatment and/or medication.</p> <p>(2) That he had to complete 6 months supervision of his three one year court orders.</p> <p>I believe Mr. Gao is successful in controlling his compulsive/obsessive behaviour while attending appointments with Forensic and Probation, […</p> <p>contents withheld …]”</p> </blockquote> <p>For the February orders the termination couldn’t happen until August. But was Hitchcock about to say that outside of my attending Forensic and Probation he knew I wasn’t so “successful”?</p> <p>I recall asking Hitchcock at the time if I could get another psychiatrist’s letter of support but he said no, that it had to be by Dr. Kerr, who was my counselling psychiatrist at the Clinic.</p> <p>I felt that Hitchcock was playing it very tight that could put me in jeopardy. For Dr. Kerr to say that I wouldn’t require treatment/medication would not be easy – it was his October 1993 pre-sentencing report that had led to the treatment-medication requirement in the probation orders.</p> <p>My Clinic interview for this purpose was either also on June 7 – Clinic record’s date was altered – or most likely 2 weeks later on June 22 as the nurse had said. Dr. Kerr and another person interviewed me. Dr. Kerr’s notes said I told of a major obstacle:</p> <blockquote> <p>“ – Probation – Dec 93 – Dec 94.</p> <p>3 peace bonds Feb 94 – Feb 95.</p> <p>Mr. Gao says that his lawyer has told him that it is unlikely that the Richmond Judge would agree to an early termination of the Richmond probation order the Dec 93 – Dec 94.</p> <p>Mr. Gao will discuss this with Mr. Hitchcock.</p> <p>I spoke with Mr. Hitchcock and say that I would support early termination in August 1994.</p> <p>Mr. Hitchcock will make final decision with Mr. Gao.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In other words, according to my lawyer it would be unlikely for Richmond Provincial Court Judge J. R. Groberman to end his order early – for Breach-of-Recognizance due to phoning lawyer Patricia Connor – if not for the two Vancouver Provincial Court female judges.</p> <p>To me, Dr. Kerr and Judge Groberman were the biggest obstacles. In the worst case, it could be ‘suicidal’ to ask the psychiatrist most adamant about my “Paranoid Schizophrenia” and medication need to write to the judge who had strongly enforced his recommendation, who could tell the judge I had been refusing medication since mid-February.</p> <p>Dr. Kerr’s written notes, which I had no access to, say he would write a letter of support for early termination in August. In my understanding at the time I interpreted it as willingness to write a letter, not unambiguously supporting the early termination. But my progress was apparently satisfactory as my next Clinic appointment was made for July 19 – from bi-weekly to now in 4 weeks or a month.</p> <p>Guessing hard what Dr. Kerr really meant about his support, later on June 22 I suddenly snapped and phoned the Clinic frequently, “in excess of 10 times” according to the nurse, who interpreted it as anxiety and asked me to come in to discuss. I declined but said:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I have a feeling that I will have a job next week in the States.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In my mind it felt like going to be a repeat of my January 26 drop-in at Hitchcock’s advice when I was then taken to a FPI committal, another ‘trap’ again. My mention of a job prospect was likely an attempt to head it off. On the phone an additional appointment was made for June 30, and the nurse noted:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Gao is +++ ambivalent & is demonstrating behaviour that is similar to his past difficulties. Writer will notify Fred Hitchcock.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Then I changed my mind, coming just to notify the Clinic of my decision not to pursue the early termination, and then leaving quickly. I was told not to be anxious as paperwork hadn’t been done:</p> <blockquote> <p>“When writer attempted to aleviate Mr. Gao’s anxiety by informing him that no paperwork has been done & won’t unless Mr. Gao requests this, he stated he had to leave & left this Clinic.”</p> </blockquote> <p>By the Clinic record disclosure, it wasn’t a pre-arranged scheme to ‘trap’ me into a bad situation whereby my noncompliance with medication would ruin the “peace” with Judge Groberman. But when I panicked and thought it could be a “trap”, my persistent anxiety was reported to Hitchcock – then something bad could still come.</p> <p>I had trouble assessing the paradoxical scenario correctly: according to lawyer Phil Seagram, Judge Groberman was unlikely to agree to early termination; Hitchcock required the support letter to be by Dr. Kerr, who had told me in October 1993 during pre-sentencing assessment for Judge Groberman that I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia”; and, though I had Hitchcock’s consent my refusing medication since February 15 was in violation of Judge Groberman’s order. Depending on what Dr. Kerr would have stated in that support letter, I risked harder punishment from Judge Groberman.</p> <p>Like discussed in Part 7, there appeared a lot of game playing towards me that made my persistence more intense.</p> <p>I dropped in at the Clinic again on June 24 to ask for sleeping pills – likely another attempt to head off anything unpleasant in the works.</p> <p>To my surprise I was interviewed by – the notes’ handwritings indicate – Vancouver General Hospital’s Dr. (John Mark) Levy, who in contrast to Dr. Kerr had viewed me as “not mentally ill” and provided a support letter for my unemployment insurance appeal in 1993, although later when discharging me from VGH on election day October 25 he didn’t completely rule out mental illness, as in Parts 7 & 8. What a rare appearance that Dr. Levy now showed up – but Hitchcock had required Dr. Kerr’s letter.</p> <p>Such coincidence of timing indicated the Clinic knew exactly what was in my sudden “behaviour” problem, that I couldn’t trust what would be in Dr. Kerr’s letter without trying to get more feedbacks; it also reinforced my perception that others were playing games that put me at greater risks.</p> <p>Dr. Levy prescribed Imovane. At the additional appointment on June 30 Dr. Kerr also prescribed Imovane, and noted that I made “no further phone calls” and that my mother would “await result of application to extend her visa until Dec 1994”.</p> <p>Then at the July 19 session scheduled a month earlier, Dr. Kerr noted that I had no psychiatric symptom:</p> <blockquote> <p>“No evidence of psychosis.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So this intriguing episode ended with any disaster averted for now, but my hope of probation early termination was aborted, and apparently due to the June 22 frequent phone calls my next appointment was back to bi-weekly.</p> <p>Three days later on July 22 – exactly one month after the June 22 episode – <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot129 - Justice Department memo, Jul 22, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Department of Justice changed its lawyer</font></a> defending RCMP in my lawsuit, from David Fitzsimmons since August 1993 as in Part 8, to D. Nygaard.</p> <p>It turned out that the June 22 episode took place just one day before the official retirement of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, who was replaced by Philip Murray, Deputy Commissioner in charge of criminal operations (“Inkster steps down as forces’ top Mountie”, June 24, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>Inkster was departing under a cloud over a major criminal investigation into MPs and Senators, under his watch since 1989, as quoted earlier from a February 5 news story:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Among the low points, Inkster said, was the political storm he created on Parliament Hill in 1989 when he revealed more than a dozen MPs and senators were under RCMP investigation.” </p> </blockquote> <p>Low to the point that a conclusion of the 1989 RCMP investigation didn’t come until June 1994 before his retirement (“One MP cleared, one guilty, in House of Commons fraud”, by Stephen Bindman, June 8, 1994, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“After a four-year legal battle, one former Quebec Tory MP has been acquitted and a second has pleaded guilty to fraud charges in connection with House of Commons contracts.</p> <p>Gilles Bernier, now sitting as an independent MP, was cleared of charges of fraud and breach of trust following a preliminary hearing last week.</p> <p>Bernier represented the riding of Beauce near Quebec City for the Conservatives since 1984, but former prime minister Kim Campbell refused to sign his nomination papers before October’s election and he was re-elected as an independent.</p> <p>Former Tory MP Richard Grise pleaded guilty to two counts of breach of trust in connection with the same incident and was fined $5,000.</p> <p>Grise, who quit his Parliament seat in 1989 after pleading guilty to 11 corruption charges for demanding bribes from contractors and pocketing Commons funds, was also ordered to perform 300 hours of community-service work.</p> <p>At issue were two contracts worth $4,000, issued by Bernier in June and November 1987 for Grise's son Bruno to do political research on free trade, acid rain and tax reform. (Commons rules forbid MPs from hiring their own spouses and children.)</p> <p>At last week’s hearing, Bruno Grise testified he knew nothing about the contracts and had not endorsed two government cheques made out to him.</p> <p>His father testified he had signed the contracts in his son’s name, forged his signature on the cheques and pocketed the money.</p> <p>Richard Grise said he never discussed what he was doing with Bernier, did the research himself and passed it on to his fellow MP.</p> <p>In discharging Bernier, Judge Maria Linhares de Sousa of Ontario Court provincial division said it was “clear” a fraud took place in the contracts between the MP's office and the younger Grise.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That was a long saga when the guilty guy, Richard Grise, had pleaded so to much more in 1989 but took another 4 years to testify that his fellow MP, Gilles Bernier, wasn’t that bad. Meanwhile, Bernier’s 1993 election candidacy caused a headache for then Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who broke with him but ironically lost her party and her own seat as in Part 8, while Bernier won as an independent.</p> <p>At this point <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>, on a daily basis my sole printed news source since my arrival in the fall of 1988, likely didn’t cover a related major story – not I can find in <em>ProQuest</em> database for Canadian Major Dailies – that Norman Inkster’s own role in another 1989 RCMP investigation, that of a federal budget leak, was being probed (“Inkster probe can proceed, court rules”, June 24, 1994, <a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Times – Colonist</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“An independent probe into the way top Mountie Norman Inkster investigated the leak of the 1989 federal budget can proceed even though he begins retirement today, says the Federal Court of Appeal.</p> <p>The court, in a judgment released Thursday, said the RCMP Public Complaints Commission can investigate former Mounties if they were on the force when the complaint was lodged. "Parliament did not go through the whole business of setting up a new and independent commission . . . to have complaints . . . abandoned on the ground that the members concerned were discharged from the force after the filing of the complaint," the court said in its ruling.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>Inkster was on the force when a citizen complained in 1990. But a second Mountie named in the complaint, former deputy commissioner Henry Jensen, had already retired.</p> <p>After the budget leak, the RCMP began a criminal investigation that led to charges against journalist Doug Small and public servants John Appleby and Normand Belisle. The prosecution was eventually dropped.</p> <p>John Colvin, of Ottawa, complained that Inkster and Jensen allowed charges to be laid even though no crime had occurred.</p> <p>Inkster has refused to co-operate with the commission's probe, arguing that he has to decide how to respond to any findings of RCMP wrongdoing.” </p> </blockquote> <p>The 1989 federal-budget leak investigation as discussed in Part 7 was an achievement for Chief Superintendent P. M. Cummins who at the time headed RCMP national security directorate. Now the review of Comm. Inkster’s role was to be conducted by RCMP Public Complaints Commission, which as in Parts 5 & 6 had handled a complaint by me in August 1992 that was later withdrawn under RCMP pressure, when C/Supt. Cummins was in B.C. in charge of Contract Policing.</p> <p>Upon Inkster’s retirement <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> instead reported a June 24 RCMP announcement, that Assistant Commissioner Frank Palmer of B.C.’s “E” Division was promoted to Ottawa to fill Comm. Murray’s previous job of second-in-command (“Senior B.C. Mountie promoted to Ottawa”, June 25, 1994, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>At the time I wasn’t familiar with “E” Division’s hierarchy, but was with the news coverage of its leader Deputy Commissioner Dennis Farrell. A year earlier I had read a story in which Palmer also appeared, when Hong Kong police commissioner Li Kwan-ha visited around the time of the UBC summit between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin – I had known a retired Hong Kong police superintendent as in Part 5.</p> <p>That news article was mysteriously titled, “If Judas got all the headlines, would it be fair to the other Eleven?” (by Denny Boyd, April 12, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“When you fret about the drug trade, youth gangs, extortion, home invasions, teen violence, crime in general and its possible acceleration through <br />Pacific Rim immigration, stop and think about the better part of a ruler.</p> <p>Commissioner Li Kwan-ha urges you to do so.</p> <p>Commissioner Li is a decorated 36-year member of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, currently finishing up his watch in a city that has powerful ties and similarities to Vancouver in geography and problems.</p> <p>At noon on April 2, when it seemed every uniformed and plainclothes police officer in the nation was at Canada Harbor Place, seeing to the security of Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, a few of them were just up the street, sitting down to an intimate lunch for 20 in the Fireside Room of the Terminal City Club at 837 West Hastings.</p> <p>Chief Constable Bill Marshall of the Vancouver Police Department was there with Deputy Chief Ray Canuel. So was Deputy Commissioner Dennis Farrell, Commander, E Force, the RCMP, and Assistant Commissioner Frank Palmer.</p> <p>There were two members of Vancouver City Council, four members of the Vancouver Police Pipe Band, several members of the Vancouver Chinatown <br />business community and, sitting smack in the middle of the head table, Commissioner Li and his theory on rulers.</p> <p>Host for the lunch was Vancouver businessman Pat Claridge, the former B.C. Lions tight end, who also underwrites the annual Police Pipe Band <br />Gentlemen’s Dinner.</p> <p>Commissioner Li came here after attending a symposium on organized crime in Washington, D.C., to meet informally with local police and to visit a daughter who lives in Vancouver.</p> <p>The 56-year-old policeman, born in Hong Kong, took some pains to arrest what he calls “a persistent rumor and whisper in international police circles <br />since 1984 that I plan to move here. I don’t.”</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Who is Judas? And who is Jesus then? In April 1993 I had given it some thought, with no good answer.</p> <p>“E” Division Commanding Officer D/Comm. J. D. (Dennis) Farrell was a business-friendly figure sitting on the same B.C. Science World board as UBC’s Maria Klawe as in Part 7.</p> <p>But A/Comm. Palmer’s position was assigned the attention for a January 6, 1993 letter to “E” Division from RCMP Director of Enforcement Services, that forwarded my complaint sent to MP Kim Campbell on November 30, 1992 against UBC/RCMP, which was then forwarded to C/Supt. P. M. Cummins, as in Parts 6 & 7.</p> <p>So these RCMP senior officers probably had awareness of the Maria Klawe controversy.</p> <p>However, Palmer had a history going back to 1977 when he used RCMP power to intimidate Canadians who wanted more RCMP accountability, quoted before in Part 7:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Opposition MPs are encouraging a trial by press of people implicated in RCMP wrongdoing, Liberal Roderick Blaker charged yesterday.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Canadian Civil Liberties Association counsel Alan Borovoy quickly countered that he agreed there should be no accusation without a trial, but he only wished that some trials would take place.</p> <p>In a spirited exchange punctuated by enthusiastic applause, the two men debated the federal Government’s use of a royal commission to handle charges of Mountie illegalities…</p> <p>…</p> <p>Conservative MP Elmer MacKay (Central Nova), another member of the panel, said he had been disappointed in the ability of parliamentary committees to look into allegations of wrongdoing.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The panel’s fourth member was Sgt. Frank Palmer of the RCMP, a member of the force’s legal branch who holds a master’s degree in law. Sgt. Palmer discussed the need for more police powers, particularly in regard to the opening of mail.</p> <p>He told the students that we do have spies running around this country, regardless of how unimportant Canada may seem to you in the scheme of things in this universe.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Parts 6 & 7, on January 29, 1993 while I was in my second psychiatric committal on my birthday, RCMP C/Supt. M. K. M. Clegg sent RCMP Director of Enforcement Services a reply that a lawsuit was already in place in regard to my complaint – a response recommended by Cummins. Days later, Palmer was quoted in a news story expressing reservation about freedom of information, also quoted in Part 7:</p> <blockquote> <p>“While people who fight for the rights of psychiatric patients, paraplegics or union employees are excited about the legislation, the institutions that hold information about them are wary.</p> <p>“There’s great paranoia at the beginning,” admitted RCMP assistant commissioner for B.C. Frank Palmer, who has already been through a round of this once with the federal government's freedom-of-information legislation.</p> <p>“That’s what’s happening here now, with people worried about protecting privacy and coping with the demands for information.””</p> </blockquote> <p>It’s perplexing that in June 1994 no one in the media expressed surprise, that a career officer with a pedigree in law and in enforcing policies and police tactics that were oppressive and against openness was promoted by Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien to hold RCMP’s second most powerful position.</p> <p>But the 1977 story in the era of Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau suggests that on some things the difference between the Liberals and the Mulroney Tories could be paper-thin.</p> <p>After the June 22 episode was deemed not a psychiatric trouble by Dr. Kerr on July 19, things became normal and uneventful.</p> <p>After my next Clinic session with a nurse 2 weeks later, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot130 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Aug-Sep 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">counselling schedule was reduced to every 3 weeks</font></a> in August-September and with a nurse only, though not to the onetime 4 weeks/1 month as from June 22 to July 19. In this period, the nurse noted that I expressed “hesitancy towards any type of medication”, that I would like my mother to remain in Canada longer and if she left with me still unemployed my stress level could go up, and that I would discuss with probation officer about taking a trip with her back to China if she had to leave by the end of December 1994.</p> <p>On September 21 – in the month when Norman Inkster also stepped down from his INTERPOL presidency – a news story titled, “BRIEFLY: Indian lawyer, DNA expert named judges” (September 21, 1994, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>), reported that Marion Buller was appointed a judge at Port Coquitlam Provincial Court, along with 7 others in the province, most notably prosecutor Rick Miller, a champion of DNA identification:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The commission counsel for the Cariboo-Chilcotin native Indian justice inquiry and an expert on genetic identification have been named provincial court judges.</p> <p>Marion Buller, a native Indian lawyer, is one of eight provincial court judges named Tuesday.</p> <p>A member of the Indigenous Bar Association of Canada, Buller has carried out B.C.-wide consultation on aboriginal legal issues for the provincial government.</p> <p>New Westminster prosecutor Rick Miller, who championed efforts to make DNA identification as acceptable in court as conventional fingerprinting, will sit as a judge in Surrey. DNA analysis is considered to be the most significant investigative tool since fingerprinting was devised.</p> <p>The other appointments are: Legal Services Society lawyer Agnes Krantz in Prince Rupert, tax-law specialist Jeanne Watchuk in Vancouver, civil, family <br />and criminal lawyer Gurmail Singh Gill in Surrey, criminal lawyer Daniel Steinberg in Vancouver, B.C. Native Lawyers member Christopher David <br />Cleaveley in Fort St. John, and Expropriation Compensation Board chair Lorna-Jeanne Marie Harvey in Victoria.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Part 8, in October-November 1993 the Outpatient Clinic had done a DNA test on me and told probation officer David Phillips the result that remains a mystery. DNA is not an acceptable scientific tool for psychiatric diagnosis.</p> <p>Recall that in December 1994 my lawyer Phil Seagram was in the news for defending a Criminal Harassment case for Sylvia Caroline Swan, that was laden with obscenity. Well, that was at Port Coquitlam court though Susan Antifaev, not Marion Buller, was the trial judge.</p> <p>In the <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> article about Buller’s appointment were other interesting stories of relevance. One was about policing victims not as fortunate as the Cariboo-Chilcotin natives:</p> <blockquote> <p>“An Abbotsford man is upset that Attorney-General Colin Gabelmann is rejecting the ombudsman’s requests for a royal commission into an alleged police beating almost 10 years ago.</p> <p>“This is a slap in the face for everybody in B.C. who believes in the ombudsman,” said Bob Fullerton.</p> <p>Ombudsman Dulcie McCallum urged that a new inquiry be held to deal with matters not addressed by a B.C. Police Commission inquiry concerning the Fullertons.</p> <p>Fullerton and his wife Francine claim they were beaten in 1985 by several Matsqui police officers in a gravel pit.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Cariboo-Chilcotin aboriginal natives had better success lobbying B.C. government for a public inquiry, with Marion Buller’s lawyer role as ‘icing on the cake’, than Bob and Francine Fullerton, victims of brutality by – literally – “Matsqui police officers” 9 years earlier, despite help from B.C. Ombudsman Dulcie McCallum.</p> <p>In 1992 prior to launching lawsuit I had contacted McCallum’s office but it determined my UBC dispute as outside its jurisdiction, as in Part 6.</p> <p>Another story regarded B.C. government corruption in a native region:</p> <blockquote> <p>“A former employee of the B.C. forest ministry in Lillooet has been charged with fraud and breach of trust after a three-year investigation by Kamloops RCMP.</p> <p>The charges involve alleged overbilling of about $300,000 for work done in the forest district.</p> <p>Wolf Hickl will appear in Kamloops provincial court Oct. 21.</p> <p>Charges of fraud have also been laid against Martin Andrew White and M.A. White and Associates Ltd.</p> <p>The investigation took place after the discovery of alleged irregularities in billing practices in the Lillooet forest district involving M.A. White and Associates Ltd. between 1989 and 1991.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As natives, Lil'wat Peoples Movement of the Mount Currie Indian Band in Lillooet had held the Duffey Lake Road blockade protests in 1990-91 around the time of this local forestry fraud by Martin Andrew White and associates, and the protests’ crackdown was led by RCMP Vancouver Subdivision commanding officer Supt. D. G. Cowley, who later in 1992-93 was behind oppression of my civil legal action and political activism, as in Parts 5 & 6.</p> <p>One more story was about tragic deaths in a airlines plane crash:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The Transportation Safety Board and the coroner’s office are investigating a plane crash last Saturday in Illahie Inlet, 80 kilometres south of Bella Bella, which claimed the lives of three people.</p> <p>Killed in the Twin Otter float plane operated by Pacific Coastal Airlines were Gerard William Carson, 34, of Port Hardy; Carson’s mother, Mary Stachan, 64, of Mississauga, Ont., and co-pilot Jeffery Miller, 29, of Powell River.</p> <p>The pilot of the plane was in stable condition in Vancouver Hospital. His name was not released.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The unnamed sole survivor was stable at Vancouver (General) Hospital.</p> <p>So in this “Briefly” news summary headlining Marion Buller and a DNA-identification expert, next to the 3 tragically killed in a float plane accident the Fullertons were the unluckiest – for their encounter with Matsqui police.</p> <p>The notoriety of “Matsqui” was not just the prison Dr. Dilli mentioned on January 26. </p> <p>The location of Marion Buller’s court appointment was of serious implication to me.</p> <p>As in Part 4 there had been UBC Computer Science programmer Martin Frauendorf’s murder by Alfred James Bailey of Port Coquitlam on August 11, 1993, but that particular Vancouver suburb link appeared random.</p> <p>Then in January 1994 I was taken to Forensic Psychiatric Institute for a committal that legitimated the false “Paranoid Schizophrenia” label placed on me, by Outpatient Clinic’s Dr. Clifford Kerr and before him a forensic psychiatrist on January 15, 1993 after my arrest at CBC as in Part 7.</p> <p>FPI has been located at <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot117 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute patient record, Jan 26-Feb 9, 1994.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">70 Colony Farm Road in Port Coquitlam</font></a>, among a vast psychiatry complex tucked away in a forested hill surrounded by farm land. I remember walking a long road out of Colony Farm to the bus stop after discharge, sensing pastoral serenity amidst historical farm fields – a feeling in my local experience second only to at the Minnekhada marsh and farm in Coquitlam.</p> <p>A century of history for B.C.’s “Hospital for the Mind” and “the best farm in Western Canada” (“<a href="http://www.bcmhas.ca/AboutUs/History.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">History: BC Mental Health Timeline</font></a>”, BC Mental Health & Addiction Services), has been eloquently told from a uniquely intriguing perspective by author and journalist Stevie Cameron – I have cited another of her trailblazing books in Parts 5, 6 & 8 regarding former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere – in <a href="http://steviecameron.com/on-the-farm/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women</font></em></a> (2010, Alfred A. Knopf Canada) :</p> <blockquote> <p>“For several years the Picktons’ nearest neighbour was the new Essondale Hospital, built on a thousand acres of cleared land at the top of their hill to house mental patients. Essondale, named after Dr. Henry Esson Young, the provincial politician responsible for it, had been designed to replace B.C.’s first hospital for the mentally ill, the Provincial Hospital for the Insane, which was built in 1878 in New Westminster…</p> <p>By the time the Pickton kids were climbing onto a school bus in the 1950s, Essondale had become a sprawling hospital complex. Five handsome houses on the hill were for the senior doctors who worked there…</p> <p>…</p> <p>“We were all terrible to the Picktons, especially to Robert”, says a doctor’s daughter who now lives in Alberta. Part of the reason was that the boys had speech problems…</p> <p>…</p> <p>Paradise or not, it sounds more like <em>Lord of the Flies</em> than Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Or perhaps even more like <em>One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest</em>…</p> <p>…</p> <p>Patients who needed psychiatric assessment before being transferred to the appropriate centre at Essondale also worked in the dairy, fields and barns of Colony Farm. This was a working farm at the bottom of the hill below the Pickton property that provided food for all the patients and staff at Essondale and Woodlands. Government records show that farm supervisors used patient labour to clear and dike the original land there to prepare it for farming use. Doctors would take their children down to Colony Farm to see the prized Colony Clydesdales, which won awards at the Pacific National Exhibition every year. Government statistical records brag that it was regarded as “the best farm in Western Canada”…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Of course in early 1994 I had no idea there was a Robert William Pickton in this neighborhood of the community, who would one day replace Clifford Olson, a personality discussed in some details in Part 8 relating to psychiatry, as Canada’s worst serial killer – in the number of murder charges if not convictions.</p> <p>It was a tragic irony that Marion (Ruth) Buller (Bennett), British Columbia’s only aboriginal woman judge and founding judge of the First Nations Court in New Westminster (“<a href="http://alumni.uvic.ca/events/AW-12/DA12bios.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">2012 Distinguished Alumni Awards</font></a>”, University of Victoria Alumni), has held court for nearly two decades in a Vancouver suburb where Canada’s most notorious murderer of aboriginal women, mostly prostitutes in Downtown Eastside around Chinatown, has held his butchery.</p> <p>The locale was perhaps no coincidence for Buller, given her focus on aboriginal justice. In 2007, the 4th Annual Forensic Psychiatry Conference held in Victoria, B.C., featured Judge Marion Buller Bennett in “Plenary Session: First Nations Mentally Disordered Offenders”, educating the professionals “in relation to the particular sensitivities and cultural considerations of First Nations patients/clients as they move through the Justice System”, issues that seemed a lifetime matter (“<a href="http://www.bc-psychologist.com/downloads/other/forensic_brochure_email.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mental Health and the Justice System Across the Lifespan</font></a>”, March 28-30, 2007, 4th Annual Forensic Psychiatry Conference, Victoria Conference Center, 720 Douglas Street, Victoria, BC).</p> <p>The troubling reality for me was that as a complainant Buller had contributed decisively to the escalating oppression of me, leading to the justice system’s legitimization, through FPI at Port Coquitlam, of a false “Paranoid Schizophrenia” outlook that could mean lifetime political repression, and she then became a judge overseeing that jurisdiction where it was officially on file.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot131 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Oct 1994-Feb 1995.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">My forensic psychiatric counselling schedule</font></a> continued to be triweekly in October-December 1994, with only one interview with Dr. Kerr post-July 19, on December 6, before the entire January off and the final session with Dr. Kerr on February 2.</p> <p>Two weeks after news of Marion Buller’s judge appointment, at the October 4 session the nurse recorded just one issue of substance, my UBC dispute’s effect on my job search:</p> <blockquote> <p>“No changes in lifestyle, no responses to job applications – he speculates because if a potential employer contacted U.B.C. where he was employed, they’d likely disclose his behaviors when his contract expired. Pleasant and co-operative throughout interview.”</p> </blockquote> <p>At the October 25 session I again said that if my mother had to leave by the end of 1994 I would accompany her to China, and the nurse insisted that I discuss it with probation officer as there were “two peace bonds running until Feb 95, and with conditions to attend this clinic”.</p> <p>I spoke with Fred Hitchcock, and the nurse’s notes on December 29 recorded some result of it:</p> <blockquote> <p>“States that his concerns are focused around his mother’s pending visa extension and this will not be confirmed until mid January. He has a letter of support from Mr. Hitchcock P.O. to have his mother remain in the country. … If mother returns to China Mr. Gao will remain in Canada and wait for his peace bonds to expire and then look for employment opportunities in the U.S. & Canada.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Hitchcock’s letter of support for my mother’s visa extension is not among the B.C. Corrections personal-information disclosure. But it was a mixed help at best, as it disclosed to the Canadian immigration authority my criminal-law problems when I had no criminal (conviction) record.</p> <p>At the final Clinic session on February 2, 1995, Dr. Kerr noted that there was still no response to my mother’s visa extension. Both Dr. Kerr and the nurse in their last sessions advised I could continue to seek Clinic help on a voluntary basis. But as Dr. Kerr wrote at the end:</p> <blockquote> <p>“file to be closed.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Besides lack of Dr. Kerr’s role after July 19, brevity of <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot132 - Vancouver Probation record, Jul 1994-Feb 1995 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">probation officer’s record for August 1994-February 1995</font></a> also confirmed the normalcy of things: it had only one short passage on August 28 and a final one on February 22, 1995 – although some contents have not been released for each of these two short notes.</p> <p>But probation officer Fred Hitchcock did write a letter of support for when I might take a trip to China prior to end of probation.</p> <p>Dated November 22, 1994, the letter also recorded my idea of moving to Ontario to seek employment upon return from China. On February 7, Hitchcock wrote another letter to confirm my completion of all court orders and my “right to travel and live anywhere in Canada”. Both were written in his capacity as Local Director, Vancouver Disordered Offender Unit.</p> <p>Coinciding with my probation’s ending, RCMP and Justice Department began long-overdue update in regard to my lawsuit.</p> <p>On December 30, 1994, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot133 - RCMP letter to Justice Department, Dec 30, 1994, DoJ & RCMP disclosures.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Supt. D. R. Canning, RCMP “E” Division Officer-in-Charge, Admin Services</font></a>, sent a letter to Justice Department lawyer David Fitzsimmons, who as in Part 8 had been assigned since August 1993, to request “update to the current status of this matter”. Justice Department received the letter on January 9, 1995.</p> <p>In her January 11 reply letter, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot134 - Justice Department letter to RCMP, Jan 11, 1995, DoJ & RCMP disclosures.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Justice Department lawyer Donnaree Nygard</font></a> advised RCMP that she had now “assumed conduct of this matter” from Fitzsimmons. It was received by RCMP on January 13 – some content has not been released.</p> <p>Recall as in Part 6, 2 year earlier on January 25, 1993, C/Supt. M. K. M. Clegg, “E” Division Officer-in-Charge, Administration & Personnel, had sent a handwritten note to Officer-in-Charge, Admin Services, attention of Cpl. Dennis Garrett, to request a reply letter be written to RCMP headquarters regarding my complaint sent via Solicitor General, and that reply was dated January 29.</p> <p>Supt. D. R. Canning was likely C/Supt. Clegg’s subordinate to whom the handwritten note was addressed, and now this December 30, 1994 letter looked like signed by Cpl. Dennis Garrett on his behalf. As in Parts 5 & 6, since my lawsuit’s filing Cpl. Garrett was the “E”Division Civil Litigation Unit officer “monitoring” my file after Sgt. Frank Kelley received negative feedback from Vancouver Subdivision Supt. D. G. Cowley.</p> <p>So there was continuing RCMP senior management oversight over my matter while the work was done by junior personnel.</p> <p>As earlier, a month after the June 22 Forensic Clinic episode and 3 days after Dr. Kerr concluded there was “no evidence of psychosis”, on July 22 a Justice Department memo showed my lawsuit case reassigned from Fitzsimmons to “D. Nygaard”. The coincidence of that timing, and now the timing of reviving lawsuit update between RCMP Supt. D. R. Canning and Justice Department as my probation was ending, were circumstantial evidence that senior managements were aware of my criminal-law probation status and inability for the lawsuit process.</p> <p>There was stronger evidence that Justice Department persons were aware of my inability with the lawsuit due to lack of a civil lawyer. On the same day January 11 when Nygard sent her reply letter to RCMP, Justice Department prepared, and then on January 13 filed, a B.C. Supreme Court <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot135 - Justice Department address-change filing for lawsuit, Jan 13, 1995.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">change of delivery address for defendant RCMP</font></a>, to:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Department of Justice</p> <p>900 – 840 Howe Street</p> <p>Vancouver, BC</p> <p>V6Z 2S9”</p> </blockquote> <p>As discussed earlier, in the same office building as Criminal Harassment complainant Marion Buller’s law firm Connell Lightbody, <font color="#333333">Justice Department had been located</font> at:</p> <blockquote> <p>“2800 – 1055 West Georgia Street</p> <p>Vancouver, BC</p> <p>V6E 3P9”</p> </blockquote> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot076 - Justice Department letter to RCMP, Aug 23, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">as late as of August 23, 1993</font></a> when David Fitzsimmons was assigned to my lawsuit.</p> <p>It is unclear when Justice Department moved its Vancouver office, but the fact that it didn’t bothered to update its address for my lawsuit showed that it didn’t consider the civil litigation to be active.</p> <p>Moreover, both the November 18, 1992 Statement of Defence as in Part 5, and this change of address were formally filed by Justice Department lawyer J. D. Bissell, who happened to be the regional director also overseeing criminal prosecution where it was “business as usual” (“‘Business as usual’ for police enforcing Canada’s drug laws”, by Neal Hall, June 20, 1995, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>) – very relevant if there was a ‘sting’ on me in the Marion Buller and other incidents.</p> <p>No other excuse for that.</p> <p>On January 17, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot136 - Justice Department note of phone calls with RCMP, Jan 17, 1995.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Cpl. Garrett phoned Justice Department</font></a> and left a message, and his call was returned by Justice Department. The content of their conversation has not been released, but it appeared like an actual update between the two.</p> <p>On January 23, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot137 - Justice Department address-change letter, returned to sender, Jan 23-30, 1995.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Donnaree Nygard sent me a letter</font></a> to notify that she was now the lawyer for RCMP, and that Justice Department had a new address. But her letter was returned on January 30, as it was mailed to 201 – 1640 West 11th Avenue in Vancouver, the apartment owned by Mrs. Norma Bagnall, mother of Judge Conni Bagnall. As in Part 7, Aunt Sally’s husband Rev. Stephen Lee had moved my belongings out of it in June-July 1993 while I was in detention at Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre, charged by RCMP with Assault due to standoff with UBC Hospital security guards.</p> <p>So I, too, hadn’t updated my address for the lawsuit. But any comparison between my predicament and Justice Department’s circumstances would have been like night and day.</p> <p>It so happened that on the last day of my probation, a California State Legislature Analyst report was issued on the impacts of the “3-strikes” law in its first year (“<a href="http://www.lao.ca.gov/analysis_1995/3strikes.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Three Strikes and You’re Out Law</font></a>”, February 22, 1995, California Legislative Analyst’s Office), and it already found widespread misuse of the new law:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… about 70 percent of all second- and third-strikes are for <i>nonviolent and nonserious offenses.</i>”</p> </blockquote> <p>It has probably been “business as usual” since then.</p> <p>The next day, my first day of freedom from criminal law since June 1993, woodcarver and handyman Bill Wilson saw a cut-in-half human skull at the riverbank near the mouth of Stave River at Mission, B.C., 40 kilometers east of Port Coquitlam; already with 2 violent crime convictions for indecent assault and sexual assault, Wilson hesitated for a day before reporting to Mission RCMP on February 24, 1995, which sent over Constable Chris Annely to recover it – according to Stevie Cameron’s book “<em>On the Farm</em>”.</p> <p>To me that would have been the 2-year anniversary of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s announcement of stepping down.</p> <p>DNA of the female’s skull later matched with bones found since 2002 in Robert William Pickton’s pig farm, and she officially became the first victim chronologically among his 27 murder charges – and the only one unidentified.</p> <p>Through INTERPOL, RCMP has appealed to police worldwide for help, but “Jane Doe” remains a mystery (“<a href="http://www.ctvnews.ca/rcmp-seek-help-identifying-woman-tied-to-pickton-farm-1.609868" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">RCMP seek help identifying woman tied to Pickton farm</font></a>”, February 19, 2011, <em>CTV News</em>).</p> <p>At his 2006 trial in New Westminster, Pickton pleaded not guilty to all other murder charges but refused to enter a plea on Jane Doe, and that charge was later thrown out by B.C. Supreme Court Justice James Williams (“<a href="http://www.missingpeople.net/judge_throws_out_murder_count.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Judge throws out murder count against Pickton</font></a>”, by Greg Joyce, <em>Canadian Press</em>, March 2, 2006, m<em>issingpeople.net</em>), who stated:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I find that in the circumstances of this case, the count as drawn fails to meet the minimal requirement set out in Section 581 of the Criminal Code. Accordingly, it must be quashed.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But like my misunderstanding in 1994 with Phil Seagram’s tale of saving me from criminal conviction by a certain judge, here I don’t quite see the application of<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/page-325.html#docCont" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Criminal Code Section 581</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> – curious justice!</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2013/05/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 10</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-6643731479088039522012-07-06T23:59:00.000-04:002013-10-22T23:38:05.134-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 8) — when political power games rule<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2012/04/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 7</a>)</p> <p>As in Part 7, I was freed on bail after a July 27, 1993 guilty verdict at Richmond Provincial Court for violating a pre-trial bail condition not to contact Vancouver lawyer Patricia Connor – a result of my persistence seeking her legal defense for an assault charge arisen from my standoff with University of British Columbia Hospital security guards; on July 23 I had been unfairly found guilty for the assault charge but given an absolute discharge.</p> <p>On July 30 I returned to UBC Hospital to request a reassessment of the wrongful psychiatric diagnosis of “Delusional Disorder” from my first involuntary committal initiated by Royal Canadian Mounted Police on November 30, 1992 – hours after my faxing to Member of Parliament Kim Campbell documents critical of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct, and of UBC Computer Science Head Maria Klawe named in my October 6 lawsuit.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot073 - UBC Hospital record, July 30-Aug 17, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">As Hospital record indicated</font></a> RCMP was quickly called, and responding officer Peter Kennedy, who as in Part 7 had handled a similar previous assault charge for which I was acquitted, assured the staff there was no “outstanding restraining order”. I was then told by the physician to follow up with my family doctor and with psychiatrist Dr. Laura Chapman who had supervised the first committal. </p> <p>My new claim of being “suicidal” was ignored.</p> <p>I wasn’t suicidal at all, but wanted to continue accessing UBC Hospital psychiatrists to request a reassessment. As in Part 7, by June the time for submitting supporting documents for my Unemployment Insurance benefit appeal was over despite UBC Hospital’s refusal to provide an acceptable clearance backdated to my February 12 release from the second, last committal; to see a psychiatrist I needed another excuse, but not “delusional disorder” which I never accepted – a depressed mood might work given my recent long pre-trial jail detention, guilty verdicts and loss of my apartment as mentioned in Part 7.</p> <p>During this long political saga I often borrowed ideas I found in the media from daily listening to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio program and reading <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> newspaper. At the time there were press stories referring to “depression” or “suicidal” as I retrace, especially one on July 27 about Zerom Seyoum, former UBC graduate student from Africa and murderer of a UBC lab technician in 1987 due to “paranoid schizophrenia”, being allowed to take public transit alone (“Paranoid killer free to travel alone”, by Moira Farrow, July 27, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Psychiatrist Dr. Emlene Murphy, of B.C.’s adult forensic services department, testified that Zerom Seyoum, originally from Ethiopia, has been given this freedom even though he still lives in a psychiatric hospital, suffers from paranoid delusions, and has threatened to kill a lawyer.</p> <p>She also testified that when Seyoum travels by bus he develops a crick in his neck from looking constantly out of the window because he feels “molested” and troubled by women in the bus.</p> <p>She said he is allowed to travel by bus because he is in a job search program.</p> <p>Seyoum was 32 when he killed laboratory technician Minh Trang Nguyen in 1987 just as they were about to start work in a research laboratory in the University of B.C.'s chemistry building.</p> <p>Seyoum was found not guilty of second-degree murder by reason of insanity. B.C. Supreme Court Justice Douglas MacKinnon ordered him detained at the Forensic Psychiatric Institute at Essondale until the provincial cabinet orders his release.</p> <p>He was due to appear Monday before the B.C. Review Board in New Westminster in connection with a Nov. 10, 1992 order restricting his liberties at the institute but no details were given. The restriction has since been lifted.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The doctor, responding to another question, said it’s possible that Seyoum could have another unexpected “incident” and he sometimes feels suicidal at certain disappointments in his life.”</p> </blockquote> <p>This killer confined at Forensic Psychiatric Institute had been slapped with even more court-ordered restrictions on November 10, 1992, the day when I first sent out press releases critical of my then UBC boss Maria Klawe and then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and also the day when RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster was elected INTERPOL president as discussed in Part 5. But less than a year later Zerom Seyoum was free to travel alone even with risk of “unexpected” killing, while as a peaceful activist I was considered “mentally ill” and “violent”, and subjected to psychiatric measures.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot073 - UBC Hospital record, July 30-Aug 17, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A week later on August 6 I went to UBC Hospital again</font></a>. This time I was asked to describe my “depressed” mood including idea of “suicide”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He has thought definitely of committing suicide. He has thought of walking out in front of an automobile.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Emergency physician, Dr. M. Carter brought out resident psychiatrist Dr. A. Burgmann to interview me, who found that my “suicidal” ideations were “vague”, “fleeting”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Presently in ER with complaints of depressed mood over past 4 days. Accompanying symptoms include difficulty initiating sleep, ↓ appetite, generalized feelings of hopelessness and vague suicidal ideations. General interests remains intact. Suicidal ideations are fleeting non planned thoughts.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Dr. Bergmann’s conclusions about my mental state were good; for the first time a UBC Hospital psychiatrist didn’t consider me “mentally ill”:</p> <blockquote> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="294" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="100">“– Thoughts</td> <td valign="top" width="192">– no formal thought disorder</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="100"> </td> <td valign="top" width="192">– non delusional</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="100"> </td> <td valign="top" width="192">– no psychosis”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </blockquote> <p>His diagnosis was “Acute Reaction Disorder” and plan was “Referral to Crisis Clinic”.</p> <p>On August 5, the prior day of this hospital visit, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> had run a story about Karla Teale – one half of the notorious couple Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo in their common married name Teale, serial killers of Niagara Falls area teenage girls – with a depression claim by her lawyer George Walker (“Killer Karla Teale under close guard as ex-husband’s murder trial awaited”, August 5, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Teale’s lawyer, George Walker, has said his client has been suicidal and undergone psychiatric treatment for depression since her husband’s February arrest.”</p> </blockquote> <p>My sense is that back then I studied news stories like the above when making up depression claims to continue accessing UBC Hospital psychiatrists.</p> <p>Some of these stories may have carried deeper meanings. For instance, in May Karla Teale had been offered a 12-year jail plea bargain; then lawfully, Homolka would later be released on July 4, 2005 and given absolute freedom on November 30 (“<a href="http://www.brockpress.com/focus/timeline-karla-homolka-1.2308887" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Timeline: Karla Homolka</font></a>”, by Amanda Roth, June 14, 2010, <em>The Brock Press</em>).</p> <p>One week later on August 12, there was news on the July 20 suicide of Vincent Foster, deputy White House counsel and long-time law partner of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary, revealing that at his wife’s request Foster had written a list of concerns related to his “depression” (“White House lawyer wrote list of concerns”, by Stewart Powell and Dan Freedman, August 12, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Roughly 10 days before deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster committed suicide, his wife Lisa urged the 48-year-old lawyer to write down the concerns that were contributing to his depression.</p> <p>Foster, a Little Rock lawyer and long-time law partner of Hillary Clinton, took his wife’s advice. Using a pad of lined yellow paper that is the trademark of the legal profession, Foster detailed the frustrations that apparently drove him to take his own life a few days later with a 1913 .38-calibre Colt revolver in a secluded Virginia park on July 20.</p> <p>Investigators concluded Tuesday that Foster committed suicide.</p> <p>The note was later found in the bottom of his briefcase, torn into more than two dozen pieces. It was turned over to the U.S. Park Police by White House officials some 30 hours later.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In the afternoon of August 12 I was again seen at UBC Hospital, claiming to be “suicidal”. </p> <p>The <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot073 - UBC Hospital record, July 30-Aug 17, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">psychiatric assessment report drafted by Dr. A. Burgmann on August 6 was formally dated August 12</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>, although he didn’t interview me on this day. A noticeable change in the formal report from the draft was the diagnosis:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Acute Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood, Rule Out Major Depression”.</p> </blockquote> <p>In psychiatry an “acute adjustment disorder with depressed mood” was presumably more real and less “fleeting” than an “acute reaction disorder”, but the new diagnosis also let Dr. Burgmann rule out any scenario of a “major depression”.</p> <p>Dr. Burgmann also changed his referral, instead of to Crisis Clinic it was now to psychiatrist Dr. A. M. Marcus in the community:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Gao was originally referred to the Crisis Clinic, but upon reevaluation of the situation, it was deemed that this might be inappropriate due to the fact that he has a lot of negative institutionalized transference which he may use during the sessions at the UBC Hospital. It was thought that a more appropriate treatment intervention would be by a psychiatrist in the community. Dr. A. Marcus was chosen due to the fact that he has much experience in forensic psychiatry and he may be most apt in dealing with this difficult patient.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I don’t think the Foster “depression” news story had anything to do with the psychiatrist’s change of plan: as in Parts 4 & 7 a UBC Computer Science person I had known, programmer Martin Frauendorf, had just been beaten to death with a baseball bat on August 11 while bike riding in the woods of University Endowment Lands.</p> <p>My guess is that in this sudden circumstances “Crisis” and “Acute Reaction” became sensitive words while “major depression” would imply a real tendency to commit suicide, so Dr. Burgmann made some adjustments. The reality was that I wouldn’t have gotten myself killed – but could have been staged to, I suppose.</p> <p>As discussed in Part 5, back in August 1992 after news of multiple murders by engineering professor Valery Fabrikant at Concordia University, RCMP’s UBC detachment was intensely lobbied by UBC Computer Science Department to link my dispute to Fabrikant’s at Concordia, and ‘doctored’ police file on me to emphasize preventing “physical violence”.</p> <p>This time, UBC Hospital referred to me as “difficult patient” but was not so hostile.</p> <p>On August 12, 1993 I was not given Dr. Burgmann’s new referral, but one by emergency physician Dr. (Harold) Schubert to the community-based Vancouver South Mental Health Team. As in Part 7, I now lived in south Vancouver after some relatives had moved my belongings out of my apartment at 1640 West 11th Avenue while I was in pre-trial detention and owing back rents.</p> <p>Dr. Burgmann’s referral letter to psychiatrist Dr. Marcus was dated August 16, and when I was at UBC Hospital again on August 17 psychiatrist Dr. (Jonathan) Fleming set up my first session with Dr. Marcus for August 19.</p> <p>I was also on pre-sentencing bail, with <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot074 - Pre-sentencing psych evaluation arrangement, July-Aug 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">pre-sentencing evaluation and forensic psychiatric assessment ordered by Judge J. R. Groberman</font></a> and next court date set for September 2. On August 5 I quickly signed a waiver to let probation officer David Phillips access my personal information at medical providers, and on August 16, the same day when Dr. Burgmann wrote referral to Dr. Marcus, <font color="#333333">Phillips made a referral to Adult Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Services</font><font color="#0000ff"></font> for a psychiatric evaluation.</p> <p>Previously in June while trying to obtain a medical clearance for Unemployment Insurance benefit – as in Part 7 – I was cool to a UBC Hospital referral to Kitsilano Mental Health Team. Now comfortable with Dr. Burgmann’s new assessment I connected with Vancouver South Mental Health Team, and on August 19 <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot075 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Aug 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">VSMHT began receiving my personal information from Vancouver General Hospital, UBC Hospital nurse Diane Woodhouse and my family doctor</font></a>.</p> <p>In his feedback, <font color="#333333">family doctor Dr. James K. Lai said I was “very healthy” and he would only treat medical problems, wouldn’t have much to contribute to a “CC” (case conference) being set up by VSMHT</font>.</p> <p>UBC Hospital info from Diane Woodhouse – so as in Dr. Burgmann’s referral to Dr. Marcus – falsely asserted existence of a restraining order, which RCMP officer Peter Kennedy had stated there wasn’t – in May and June there had been bail conditions not to attend the site while facing assault charges due to standoffs with UBC Hospital security guards.</p> <p>Interestingly, although a VGH psychiatrist had given me a letter of medical clearance for my Unemployment Insurance benefit appeal the VGH info looked as if no such letter existed as I hadn’t followed advice to attend VGH outpatient clinic.</p> <p>As in Part 7, a letter was written on April 30 by a VGH psychiatrist who on May 10 also wrote a forensic psychiatric assessment for my first assault charge, and he was the first psychiatrist to declare me “not mentally ill”. It was possible the April 30 letter was off the hospital record due to political pressure enforcing the “mentally ill” label RCMP had initiated on November 30, 1992. As I have recalled in Part 7 that VGH psychiatrist was likely Dr. (John Mark) Levy; <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot060 - Forensic assessment, May 10, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">in the May 10 forensic psychiatric assessment</font></a> his phone number was 875-4009 and he also listed Adult Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic’s phone number 660-6604. </p> <p>Instead, VGH info reported an earlier VGH visit for fever/cold symptoms on April 14, 1989 – not long after I had moved to my apartment at 1640 West 11th Avenue near VGH. I note that it was 4 years from this date, i.e., on “93414” as in Part 7, when Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy lawyer Don Richards conducted an examination for discovery for my lawsuit’s defendant UBC.</p> <p>Having received a mentally-normal assessment from UBC Hospital, I felt it was time to resume civil litigation versus UBC and RCMP. It had been stalled as in Parts 5, 6 & 7 after the RCMP-initiated psychiatric intervention, with my lawyer Brian Mason quitting in early April after I had run out of money.</p> <p>On August 20 I wrote a letter to Albert McClean, UBC Associate Vice President in charge of legal affairs, to request reopening a UBC investigation into my employment grievance against Maria Klawe, and addressing her fitness as Computer Science Head.</p> <p>On the same day, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot074 - Pre-sentencing psych evaluation arrangement, July-Aug 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Adult Forensic Psychiatric Outpatients Services notified probation officer Dave Phillips</font></a> that it would take 6-8 weeks to complete pre-sentencing evaluation and my next court date should be postponed.</p> <p>To me it was a temporary lull of less oppressive pressure for me to consider my next steps. </p> <p>On August 23, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot076 - Justice Department letter to RCMP, Aug 23, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Justice Department changed its lawyer for RCMP</font></a> from Alisa Noda to David Fitzsimmons.</p> <p>Around this time I visited Albert McClean at his office. McClean said he would not reopen the closed file on my employment grievance but, McClean told me, formerly as Dean of Law he had been involved with the UBC student legal clinic helping low-income people with their legal problems, and now unemployed if I sought legal help at the clinic and the law students brought my lawsuit to him he would review it.</p> <p>Founded by B.C. New Democrat Premier Mike Harcourt as a law student in 1969, UBC student legal clinic had a reputation as a good last resort for persons who couldn't afford a lawyer and didn’t know other low-cost legal services (“Can't afford a lawyer? Many turn to students”, by Ellen Saenger, June 2, 1987, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>When the job market was tight such as in 1988, the year I would start teaching at UBC, the legal clinic was a venue of starting summer jobs for law graduates when there weren’t for their peers in other fields (“Specialized work still hard to find”, by Pat Leidl, May 3, 1988, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>In January 1990 the clinic received a boost in expertise when B.C. County Court Judge John Peter van der Hoop, a leading expert in civil procedures, began helping students in the legal clinic as Judge-in-Residence at UBC Faculty of Law. It also gave the clinic a bit more media profile as Judge van der Hoop had stirred up controversy in November 1989 by calling a 3-year-old girl “sexually aggressive” in a sexual assault by a 33-year-old man (“Sex-ruling judge heads for UBC post”, by Justine Hunter, January 13, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“County court Judge Peter van der Hoop, who stirred a controversy over his characterization of a three-year-old girl as sexually aggressive, began a term as judge-in-residence at the University of B.C. faculty of law this week, the faculty dean confirmed Friday.</p> <p>Prof. Peter Burns said the arrangements coincide with the Vancouver judge’s sabbatical from the bench, “which I might add was something arranged about nine months ago” and was “absolutely unconnected” to the furore raised over the court finding.</p> <p>Judge van der Hoop gave Delbert Leeson, 33, a suspended sentence Nov. 14, 1989 after Leeson admitted to a sexual incident with the toddler. The judge found the victim was “sexually aggressive” and Leeson was tired and <br />under the influence of alcohol at the time.</p> <p>The decision prompted an outcry from the public and 250 people demonstrated outside the Vancouver courthouse the following week to demand Judge van der Hoop’s removal from the bench.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Judge van der Hoop is helping law students working out of UBC’s legal clinic.</p> <p>The clinic handles about 1,000 files a year, including cases that go into the provincial courts and some administrative tribunals, Burns said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Not only wasn’t Judge van der Hoop removed from the bench as protesters had demanded, but during 1990 he became B. C. Supreme Court Justice as B.C. County Court merged into Supreme Court, and even coauthored a book and taught a “continuing legal education” course with then B.C. Supreme Court Master Pamela Kirkpatrick – my UBC colleague David’s wife who later in November 1992 helped RCMP start psychiatric oppression against me as in Parts 6 & 7! (<a href="http://abl.bccls.bc.ca/?hreciid=|library/marc/dynix-bccls|13054" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Supreme Court Chambers Orders, Annotated</font></em></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>, by British Columbia Supreme Court, J. P. van der Hoop, Pamela A. Kirkpatrick, William McCallum, edited by Linda Rainaldi, 1990, Continuing Legal Education Society of British Columbia; and, “<a href="http://www.holmesandking.com/lawyer-profiles/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Robert D. Holmes, Q.C.</font></a>”,<font color="#333333"> Holmes & King</font>)</p> <p>Right away UBC student legal clinic aimed for higher success, taking an immigration appeal to Federal Court of Canada (“Emigre's age barrier queried in appeal bid”, by Kevin Griffin, February 7, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Blake Hobson and Terri Stevenson, third-year law students working in UBC's legal clinic, believe they have a strong case with Ricardo A. Orantes, the father of three young children.</p> <p>Orantes, in Canada on a minister's permit, was told last year that he had a credible basis for a refugee claim but would not be given landed immigrant status because of Sec. 19 (1) (b) of the Immigration Act.</p> <p>That section says “persons who there are reasonable grounds to believe are or will be unable or unwilling to support themselves and those persons who are dependent on them for care and support” will be deemed inadmissible to Canada.</p> <p>Hobson said he and Stevenson believe that amounts to discrimination under the equality rights section of the charter.</p> <p>…</p> <p>According to his examination under oath, Orantes’ persecution in El Salvador began after a niece who felt entitled to an inheritance she did not receive falsely accused Orantes of being a Communist who associated with guerrillas in neighboring Guatemala.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It was around this time in spring 1990 when my UBC employment dispute originated as in Part 4 when I applied to convert my fixed-term faculty job to a tenure-track one: Department Head Maria Klawe was in overall charge, while David Kirkpatrick expressed support for me but then brought in Jack Snoeyink from Stanford to be given a tenure-track job.</p> <p>By late 1990, a new “women’s legal clinic” opened as part of the student clinic, staffed by female law students providing free legal service for women (“New legal clinic comes to women’s aid”, by Alicia Priest, November 16, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“…</p> <p>A new women’s legal clinic, operated by the Greater Vancouver Law Student’s Legal Advice Society, and “womaned” by University of B.C. law students, aims to address that inequity.</p> <p>The Vancouver west side clinic offers free legal advice to all women who cannot afford regular legal services.</p> <p>The idea for the clinic originated when “a group of women realized there was a gap in legal services available to women in particular,” says UBC second-year law student and clinic volunteer Morgan Rea.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Rea says even if the clinic cannot handle a particular client’s case, the volunteers can always give competent advice on legal matters and women’s rights.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Now in late August 1993 as advised by former Dean of Law Albert McClean I would visit a UBC student legal clinic office, and surprise, one was near me! </p> <p>At 8163 Main Street, about 1/2 mile from my new dwelling in south Vancouver, was the head office of Indo-Canadian community organization Orientation Adjustment Services for Immigrants Society, or OASIS. Like UBC student legal clinic OASIS had a long and proud history, helping South Asian immigrants adjust to life in Canada since 1975 (“Oasis cash dries in wake of audit: Indo-Canadians are the victims”, by Stewart Bell, September 24, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>In the OASIS head office was a UBC student legal clinic open 2-3 times a week, operated by a small group of mostly female law students. The Indo-Canadian community was also raising fund to start a South Asian Women’s Centre at that location (“Centre aims to combat sexism, racism”, by Kim Bolan, March 14, 1994, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>OASIS had been headed by businessman Herb Dhaliwal, an Indo-Canadian community leader who had fought racism with his own fists as a new immigrant kid (“Prominent British Columbians recall the sting of racism”, by Carole Taylor, May 10, 1991, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Herb Dhaliwal, a successful businessman from Richmond and president of OASIS, an immigrant-services agency, is clearly a happy man when he talks about his young daughter’s recent play. But his eyes cloud over when he thinks of his own school experiences. They were not so carefree.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Not speaking a word of English, Harbance found that his name was changed to Herb for the convenience of the teacher and other students. And just when he was beginning to make some friends, he was required to repeat his year because he had moved to Canada in December and missed a couple of months’ school.</p> <p>Humiliation and a profound sense of not belonging haunted this little boy. Desperately trying to fit in, Herb would never bring roti in his lunch. Strange foods ostracized one; white-bread sandwiches did not. He was made to feel embarrassed about his ways and ashamed of his heritage. When the other kids called him names, he didn’t know they were racist, he just knew they weren’t nice. The only level playing field he had was his physical strength, so he beat them up.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Here was a ethnic community leader who had known how to “beat up” racists since childhood, yet in contrast UBC and RCMP had to impose a false label of “violence” on me who challenged authority figures through peaceful politics.</p> <p>But in August-September 1993 when I came to visit, serious financial problems at OASIS were about to come to the fore.</p> <p>Misuse of government funding had surfaced in 1990 with Dhaliwal at the helm, but ignored by funding agencies until now – when Herb was heading toward a greater future as Liberal party parliamentary candidate under opposition leader Jean Chretien, with his election campaign office nearby and a campaign underway now that Kim Campbell had succeeded Brian Mulroney as Prime Minister (“Indo-Canadian group got grants despite serious internal problems”, by Stewart Bell, September 24, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Concerns about the Orientation Adjustment Services for Immigrants Society (OASIS) began surfacing in 1990, according to a government audit report on the organization viewed by <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> on Thursday.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mobina Jaffer, a member of the OASIS board of directors until 1991, said she tried to convince the funders, after she became aware of problems at the organization, to hold back money as a way of pressuring senior managers to clean up their act.</p> <p>But the funding agencies did not respond until this year, when many of them suspended their financial support following a government audit that uncovered serious mismanagement of funds and staff.</p> <p>“I tried to get the funders to get involved. I really tried,” said Jaffer.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Jaffer is one of two former OASIS directors now running for the Liberal party in the federal election. Jaffer is running in North Vancouver. Herb Dhaliwal, who is running for the Liberals in Vancouver South, was president of OASIS until 1991.</p> <p>Dhaliwal said when he first became aware of the problems, he set in motion a process to restructure the organization, taking power away from the office of the executive director. But before the changes were carried out, Dhaliwal left to devote more time to his business.</p> <p>“When I left, I don’t know how far they got, but (the changes) were being implemented,” said Dhaliwal, whose Main Street campaign office is a few doors away from the OASIS head office.</p> <p>Dhaliwal said he is saddened by the problems at OASIS because the services are needed and he worked hard for many years to improve the organization. The collapse of OASIS will only hurt the Indo-Canadian immigrants who need services, he said.</p> <p>The changes that began during Dhaliwal’s reign were never completed.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Back in 1990 when the financial problems began to surface – the same year when UBC student legal clinic strode for greater success with Judge J. P. van der Hoop’s help – tragedies also struck close to OASIS. In April, 43-year-old Gina Jagjit Kaur Sara, a UBC graduate originally from Punjab, India, one of the first women hired by the Canadian government’s immigration department 17 years ago, one of its “finest minds” and a bridge to Indo-Canadians, was killed in a car accident (“Funeral today for immigration specialist Gina Sara, 43”, April 7, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Gurdeep Singh Atwal, who knew Ms. Sara for 17 years, said she was a unique person who was admired and liked by everyone who met her.</p> <p>“She was very community-minded. She played a key role in educating the immigration department about Indo-Canadians and also in educating Indo-Canadians about immigration,” said Atwal, a program director for the Indo-Canadian immigrant services agency OASIS.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Then in December 1990, at an OASIS-sponsored social evening to educate immigrants to the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse, a hail of gunfire greeted the attendees at the end as they exited, killing 2 and wounding 3 (“Tragedy unfolds after play’s over; His play upstaged by a true tragedy: Audience emerges to find two men dying, three hurt”, by Salim Jiwa and Shelly Easton, December 3, 1990, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Province</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A stage play depicting one tragic death was upstaged by a double slaying at an immigrants’ social evening Saturday.</p> <p>Surrey realtor Bhupinder Dhaliwal was wiping the makeup from his face after acting in the play when the real life-and-death drama began unfolding outside.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Dhaliwal said he had written and directed the stage play, and was one of several volunteers who had helped organize the evening to educate immigrants to the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse. Almost 400 people attended.</p> <p>The function, held at Delta senior secondary school, was sponsored by the immigrant-services group OASIS.</p> <p>One survivor told his brother that the shooting began as soon as he and four friends left the school auditorium.</p> <p>“The two guys who died were the first to come out,” said Swinder Bhatti, brother of injured victim Jatinder Bhatti.”</p> </blockquote> <p>When I came to visit, OASIS’s financial problems were still weeks away from being reported in the media. At the student legal clinic there, I presented my civil action to two female UBC law students. The more ‘tomboy’-like one, Alison as I recall her name as, showed great interest and enthusiasm, but I was told by the other, whose name I don’t recall but whose look later reminded me of Roma Downey – Irish actress in “Touched by an Angel” – or a smaller Lucy Lawless – New Zealand actress and environmentalist – that the clinic gave advice but wouldn’t represent lawsuits, and that all they could do was to mediate the employment dispute with UBC.</p> <p>I suggested that I get a lawyer to lead the law students on the civil litigation, but the response was they wouldn’t be involved if I had a lawyer.</p> <p>Perhaps suing UBC was a problem for them, but I would also guess that to the UBC law students my case wasn’t like the 1990 immigration case of Ricardo A. Orantes when Judge Peter van der Hoop was with the clinic: its origin had been an inheritance dispute in El Salvador.</p> <p>It reminds me of the mathematician John Nash with his mysterious history of “mental illness” mentioned in Part 7. As discussed in my first blog article “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/greeting-the-new-millennium-%E2%80%93-nearly-a-decade-late-part-2/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a>”, Nash’s wife Alicia Larde was from a social-elite family in El Salvador, with an uncle working as a United Nations interpreter in New York in 1958-59 when Nash became active in peace politics and showed bizarre behavior that led to his psychiatric committal and “Paranoid Schizophrenia” diagnosis at Boston’s McLean Hospital.</p> <p>Similarly unsatisfactory were my discussions with retired UBC faculty member, private psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Marcus in his Gastown office as referred by UBC Hospital. Dr. Marcus said that while I might not have “delusional disorder” he felt I had “obsessive-compulsive personality disorder” as shown in my persistence. He ordered a copy of my UBC Hospital records, but told me he could help only if I stopped trying to get UBC Hospital to review the original diagnoses, and shift my focus to an academic career away from UBC, e.g., at Simon Fraser University.</p> <p>In May I couldn’t agree to criminal defense lawyer Linda Hall’s advice to forgo the politics and move on as discussed in Part 7, now in August I could not accept Dr. Tony Marcus’s conditions as they were far short of my goals for the civil litigation, which as discussed in Parts 4 & 5 included examination of Maria Klawe’s management conduct.</p> <p>In fact, in 1988 before accepting a fixed-term position at UBC Computer Science Department I had been offered a tenure-track one at SFU – the type at the core of my employment dispute with Head Klawe as in Part 4. The SFU job prospect has been mentioned in my 2009 blog post, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a><font style="font-weight: normal">”.</font></p> <p><font style="font-weight: normal">The arrival of Maria Klawe and her husband Nicholas Pippenger made UBC Computer Science more important but reduced my prospect of a longer employment, so between ‘fate’ and ‘luck’ – SFU professor Wo-Shun Luk had been particularly interested in my going there – I had chosen fate.</font></p> <p>Worse yet, it was a ‘double’ fate: while still at UC Berkeley in April-May 1988 it had been Klawe’s good friend Professor Richard Karp – today the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/science.education.millennium/posts/377055385692573" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">founding director of Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing</font></a> – informing me of the couple’s decision to go to UBC – thus no immediate chance of tenure-track for me – and also advising me to choose UBC over Simon Fraser because of the new strength; then in 1990 when I applied for a tenure-track position under Head Klawe, “Dick” Karp’s promised reference letter was a no show without my knowledge as discussed in Part 4.</p> <p>Around the time of visiting UBC student legal clinic and attending Dr. Marcus’s counselling sessions, there was an intriguing death event, unbeknown to me and of unclear ramifications: on August 28, Bruce Verchere – as in Parts 3, 5 & 6 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee, appointed as Chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. just before Mulroney’s retirement – died of a gunshot in his Montreal home in what was ruled a suicide.</p> <p>A UBC law graduate and son of former B.C. Supreme Court Justice David Verchere, Bruce had married his wife Lynne Walters, a computer programmer at IBM, in Vancouver (Stevie Cameron, <a href="http://steviecameron.com/blue-trust/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money</font></em></a>, 1998, MacFarlane Walter & Ross):</p> <blockquote> <p>“When David Verchere won a coveted appointment to the British Columbia Supreme Court, he didn’t need to feel any deference towards Vancouver’s private-school boys, who swaggered through the big law firms on Howe Street. And when Bruce arrived at the University of British Columbia in 1957, everyone knew he was a judge’s son. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>If there was one word people used to describe Verchere, it was “charming.” Like his father, he believed that life was for living. But there was a ruthlessness in him that showed up early on. He dated Carol Sloan for four years… Let’s get married, he urged her before he left for Ottawa in the late summer of 1963. Not now, she told him. You need to grow up a little.</p> <p>Carol Sloan paid a high price for her honesty. Three weeks after she turned Verchere down, he proposed to Lynne Walters, a young woman he’d just met. The were married a few months later, on December 27, 1963, at St. Mary’s, Kerrisdale, an Anglican church. … She had a commerce degree and a job as a computer programmer.</p> <p>Computers? In 1963 people barely knew what computers were, much less knew anyone who had studied them at university. But Lynne had landed a job at IBM… in the engineering labs, where IBM was developing computer systems. At UBC the computers were so primitive that junior staff in different buildings had to gather up boxes of stiff punch cards at the end of each day and walk them over to the administration building for sorting and entering in the university’s clunky mainframe.”</p> </blockquote> <p>No one in the Computer Science field could afford to defy IBM’s omnipotence, especially given how primitive UBC computers had been as described in the above quote from Stevie Cameron.</p> <p>In 1989 courtesy of Head Maria Klawe who had moved from IBM, as in Part 4 with her prestigious IBM Fellow husband Nick, the company gave $5 million to UBC for a joint project on graphic, film and computers (“IBM teams with university in $5M computer project; Confusion reigns when calculating charges”, by Michael Bernard, November 27, 1989, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Maria Klawe, a former IBM researcher, said the idea of the project came to her after she talked to Canadian computer scientist Bill Reeves, one of the key men involved in creating Tin Toy, a computer-generated feature that won an Oscar in 1988 for animation.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But Lynne Walters Verchere was more than Maria Klawe.</p> <p>In 1993 after his February announcement to retire as discussed in Part 7, in April Brian Mulroney appointed Walters as Chairman of Official Residences Council, overseeing Canadian government official residences including Prime Minister’s Residences at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa and at Harrington Lake. Lynne didn’t disappoint when Mulroney stepped down in June, authorizing a $150,000 payment for old furniture Mulroney’s wife Mila left. (“No politics involved in purchase, insiders say”, by April Lindgren, July 13, 1993, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>; and, Stevie Cameron, <a href="http://steviecameron.com/blue-trust/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money</font></em></a>, 1998, MacFarlane Walter & Ross)</p> <p>The Mulroney furniture deal generated intense public criticisms, and Mila subsequently cancelled it (“Public anger cited in cancellation of furniture deal; Have to respect wishes of Mila Mulroney, NCC says”,, by Jeff Sallot, July 17, 1993, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>); but the public didn’t know that the chair of the government council recommending it was the wife of Mulroney’s own lawyer whom had just been given a major government board chairmanship.</p> <p>After Bruce Verchere’s death and the defeat of Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell, incoming Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien would keep Lynne Walters at that job according to Stevie Cameron’s book.</p> <p>As mentioned in Parts 3, 5 & 6, the business relationship between Mulroney and Verchere was never reported in public until Cameron’s 1998 book, despite the fact that it had been from Verchere’s law firm lawyer John Major was first appointed to Alberta Court of Appeal and then on November 13, 1992 to Supreme Court of Canada.</p> <p>Searching through major newspaper archives I find only a one-line mention of Verchere’s appointment on June 24, 1993 as AECL board chairman (“Bruce Howe named head of nuclear agency”, June 28, 1993, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Bill McKnight’s final act as energy minister was to appoint a new head of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.</p> <p>Bruce Howe, deputy minister of Western Economic Diversification, has been named president of the Crown corporation.</p> <p>…</p> <p>McKnight also appointed a new chairman for the corporation.</p> <p>Bruce Verchere, a partner with the law firm Bennett, Jones Verchere, will head the corporation’s 13-member board of directors.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The public wasn’t told about the final act by Mulroney appointing his personal lawyer and financial trustee to oversee Canadian government’s nuclear facilities.</p> <p>Verchere’s death was said to be a result of emotional ruin from a family dispute due to his financial fraud and extramarital affairs, some of which read like from an extravagant spy tale (Stevie Cameron, <a href="http://steviecameron.com/blue-trust/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money</font></em></a>, 1998, MacFarlane Walter & Ross):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Panama was a good choice for the kind of secrecy he wanted. One of the most notorious tax havens in the world – or, more politely, what McGill crime expert Tom Naylor, in the 1994 edition of his book <em>Hot Money</em>, called a “peekaboo financial center”… With no owner of record, Verchere’s shell companies could deposit money in bank accounts protected by Panama’s infamous secrecy laws. On March 7, 1988, Verchere arranged for Alfaro and Moreno to incorporate a new Panamanian company for him called Shore Operations S.A. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>After Verchere’s death on Saturday, August 28, Lynne Walters chose Mulroney as a funeral pallbearer along with Verchere’s sons Michael and David, son David’s friend Greg Williams and two of Verchere’s law partners. There, Mulroney jokingly let it be known he viewed Verchere as someone of very big “guilt”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The coffin, carried by Michael, David, Williams, Walker, Britton, and Mulroney, left the church; the hearse, followed by many mourners, took it to the Mount Royal Crematorium for cremation and the final committal. After that the family drove to the University Club, where they held a reception. Mulroney didn’t attend the reception, but he had the last word on the day, one that the people who heard him will never forget. Turning to Bill Britton, Mulroney tried to inject a little levity by cracking a joke. “You know what we Irish say about funerals,” he grinned. “The bigger the guilt, the bigger the funeral.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Fellow pallbearer Greg Williams was in an unusual relationship with the Verchere family: a McGill University rowing athlete – of interest in relation to some murder cases discussed in Part 3 – and the ‘boyfriend’ of Bruce’s son David, he had recently moved in with the family at the height of their internal tension; then after Bruce’s death he showed police where the guns had been stored in the house.</p> <p>The death-funeral notice in <em>Montreal Gazette</em> newspaper mentioned nothing about who Bruce Vechere was. For this “charming” son of a B.C. Supreme Court justice, who had made it to among the elite few in Canadian legal practice, it was an obscure end – in stark contrast to the international attention given to deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster’s death in the United States.</p> <p>The <em>Montreal Gazette</em> notice also omitted mention of Bruce’s two younger children, Paul and Emma Hailey, from his affair with bestselling international author Arthur Hailey’s daughter Diane. </p> <p>Verchere’s death happened on the 11th anniversary day of my arrival in North America – for graduate study at University of California, Berkeley. As conveyed in Part 4, any malicious agenda against me by some in the Canadian gay community would have been unjustified given my prior intellectual immersion in an environment most open to homosexual rights.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot075 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Aug 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On August 30, Dr. A. M. Marcus told Vancouver South Mental Health Team</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> he couldn’t help me:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Dr. Marcus – says that he tried his best & failed. He’s willing to try again in a couple of months if Feng agrees but doesn’t feel that he can be effective now.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Before quoting him, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot075 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Aug 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">VSMHT’s August 30 notes mentioned</font></a> that on August 19 I had signed a “contract” with Dr. Marcus promising not to visit UBC Hospital but then gone straight there, and <font color="#333333">that UBC Hospital’s Dr. McGarvey, Dr. “Agbaeweya” and a woman from Crisis Clinic would attend a meeting on my case</font>.</p> <p>The participation of Dr. M. O. Agbayewa, a hardline psychiatrist as in Parts 6 & 7, signalled the return of greater oppressive pressure linked to RCMP. VSMHT’s August 30 notes also showed probation officer Dave Phillips contacting “Dr. Maria Klawe” at UBC Computer Science, an act outside the scope of his bail supervision for a breach-of-recognizance case outside of UBC.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot077 - UBC Hospital record, Aug 26-Oct 13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">According to UBC Hospital notes in late August</font></a>, I had seen Dr. Marcus on August 19 & 25, but on August 26 told hospital I didn’t know Dr. Marcus and wanted to see a psychiatrist there, and was declined by emergency physician Dr. A. Holler on that day and the next. </p> <p>Finally on August 30 emergency physician Dr. M. Carter – he had brought out psychiatrist Dr. A. Burgmann on August 6 to assess and refer me to Crisis Clinic – cited Dr. Marcus as advising to have RCMP arrest me and impose a restraining order.</p> <p>The warning likely worked: I didn’t attend UBC Hospital again until early October according to the records.</p> <p>As respected as Dr. Tony Marcus was, formerly Head of UBC Psychiatry Department’s Forensic Psychiatry Division, his experience was more noted in handling psychiatric diversion for hardcore criminals who faced strict law-and-order and found his psychiatry a more flexible alternative.</p> <p>Dr. Marcus had played a key role in the legal defense of notorious serial child killer, police informant Clifford Olson (“Remains of missing B.C. girl believed topic of Olson talks”, by Ian Mulgrew, December 2, 1982, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Olson, a long-time police informant who pleaded guilty to murdering 11 youngsters between November, 1980, and July, 1981, is lobbying intensively for a transfer to the Regional Psychiatric Centre at Abbotsford, where mentally ill prisoners are treated.</p> <p>He has written letters to federal and provincial officials and was believed to have been bargaining with authorities by offering them information on a number of murders in exchange for a transfer, which would allow him more frequent visits from his family.</p> <p>If he were granted the transfer, Mr. Olson has said in letters that he would probably allow a team of psychiatrists - led by Dr. Anthony Marcus, the head of the division of forensic psychiatry at the University of B.C. - to study him. “I’m sure it can be of some help to society to have an insight as to what should be looked for and maybe to prevent this kind of tragedy to a certain degree,” he wrote a letter to a <em>Vancouver Sun</em> reporter.</p> <p>Dr. Marcus, who interviewed Mr. Olson for his defence before his trial last January, told reporters he was interested in such a study. “He (Mr. Olson) has an uncanny ability to make victims of us all - you, me, the Government, the police, everyone right up to the Cabinet,” Dr. Marcus said. “Olson is holding the country to ransom - he has everyone frightened of him.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Having described Olson as “uncanny” in 1982, in 1997 when Olson applied for parole Dr. Marcus would describe him as a person of “true moral insanity” who claimed he could help police with 143 unsolved murders (“Olson claims he had role in 143 killings: Confessed murderer either deluded or history’s worst serial killer, psychiatrist says”, by Ken MacQueen and Neal Hall, August 19, 1997, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““I know I will never be paroled, I’m not a stupid man,” Mr. Olson told the jury.</p> <p>But he then went on to urge jurors to weigh his character as they consider his fate. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>The mostly middle-aged jurors, selected barely an hour earlier, sat grim-faced as Mr. Olson, wearing a tattered red T-shirt and leaning over the rail of the prisoner’s dock for emphasis, claimed to have knowledge of 143 unsolved murders -- some of which he committed himself or with an accomplice -- including 64 in six Canadian provinces and dozens more in the U.S.</p> <p>…</p> <p>A terse Justice Richard Low reacted to Mr. Olson’s claims by telling the jury much of the evidence that Mr. Olson referred to will not be admitted during the hearing.</p> <p>“This is not a negotiating session,” he said, an apparent reference to Mr. Olson’s claim he could locate other bodies for “Christian burial.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>The first witness at the hearing, Dr. Tony Marcus, a court-appointed psychiatrist called by Mr. Olson as a witness, testified he interviewed Mr. Olson for 11 hours in June, and Mr. Olson claimed he was involved in 60-plus murders with another man, whom Mr. Olson identified only by the initials RRY.</p> <p>He said he doesn’t know whether to believe Mr. Olson’s claims, but added that he asked Mr. Olson why he didn’t mention he had committed other murders when he was previously interviewed by Dr. Marcus in 1981. He said Mr. Olson replied, “I only got $100,000 -- I didn't get half a million.” (Mr. Olson was paid $10,000 for each of the bodies of his victims recovered by police after he told them where to look, and for supplying other evidence. He got a total of $100,000, which was used by his wife Joan to start a new life for herself and her one-year-old son.)</p> <p>…</p> <p>He suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, sexual sadism, is callous, grossly self-centred and lacks a conscience, he added.</p> <p>“He can tell you about horrendous things as if he’s reading a grocery list,” he added. “He shows a true moral insanity. His value system, as such, is totally flawed.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Mr. Olson thanked Dr. Marcus for an excellent report, adding he couldn’t disagree with it.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But didn’t Dr. Marcus overlook the point that as flawed as Olson’s human values were his claims on unsolved murders could be of investigative worth? Olson had clearly honed “negotiation” skills for financial gain, probably during his police-informant career.</p> <p>In the criminal world Clifford Olson was known as both “a snitch” and “a predator”, and had almost been killed in jail for being both by a “hardened criminal”, Gordon Lussier, years before he committed the 11 child murders now known (“<a href="http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/canada/archives/2011/09/20110924-110026.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ex-con recalls attempt to kill Clifford Olson</font></a>”, by Michelle Mandel, September 24, 2011, <em>The Toronto Sun</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“It was on Feb. 13, 1976, four years before Clifford Olson would go on to kidnap, rape and murder his 11 victims, that hardened criminal Gordon Lussier decided the “f***ing scum piece of trash” had to die.</p> <p>To his fellow inmates at Prince Albert prison, Olson was well known for two things: being a snitch and being a predator.</p> <p>Lussier hated him on both counts.</p> <p>In jail at the time for assaulting a police officer, the Toronto native had just 25 days left on his sentence before he’d be free. But Lussier had heard from several sources that the recently-arrived Olson had already chosen a young prisoner as his sex slave and it touched a raw nerve. He had been sexually abused as a boy – “brutally” he recalls -- and he couldn’t stand by and do nothing.</p> <p>…</p> <p>An Olson biography says Lussier actually stabbed him seven times -- three in the arm, two in his back, one in the kidney and a grazing wound to the head. Olson had surgery at a Prince Albert hospital and, unfortunately, survived. He even went on to collect $3,500 for the attack from the Saskatchewan Criminal Compensation Board, which found his conduct was “above reproach and indicates an unusual degree of moral and physical courage.”</p> <p>..</p> <p>After months in “the hole”, Lussier took a doctor hostage and won his demand to be transferred to Laval. A short time later, that prison erupted in a riot over its sub-human conditions and Lussier was involved in the hostage taking of three guards. They were released after officials agreed to fly Lussier and another ringleader to Dorchester in New Brunswick. “It was crazy,” he concedes. “I sit back and ask myself why.””</p> </blockquote> <p>The fact that government financial compensation for Olson’s prison-attack injury came with a praise for his “unusual degree of moral and physical courage” pointed to his being more of a valued informant than a despised pedophile to the criminal justice system.</p> <p>So an answer to the question before the above quote is: indeed Clifford Olson may have committed or known more deadly acts, if not the many he claimed. He had quickly sold out murderer Gary Francis Marcoux to police, but only let police try hard to figure out his deadly deeds when he wasn’t given a good deal, likely taking skeleton secrets to his grave when he died of cancer in 2011 (“Worried about attacks from prisoners RCMP bungled case, multiple killer says”, January 18, 1982, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>; “Portrait of a serial killer”, by John Kessel and Brad Evenson, September 21, 1987, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>; “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/09/30/clifford-olson-death.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Serial killer Clifford Olson dies: Canada's most notorious dangerous offender dead from cancer</font></a>”, September 30, 2011, <em>CBC News</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.mapleridgenews.com/news/131294949.html?mobile=true" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">‘</font><font color="#0000ff">I was Clifford Olson’s lawyer’</font></a>”, by Monisha Martins, October 7, 2011, <em>Maple Ridge News</em>).</p> <p>But stories like below suggest Olson’s attempted killer Gordon Lussier may have only been a jealously ‘manlier’ imitator (“<a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Clifford+Olson+Canada+national+monster+dead/5484826/story.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Clifford Olson — Canada’s national monster — dead at 71</font></a>”, by Ian Mulgrew, October 3, 2011, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“He escaped from jail seven times.</p> <p>In 1965, for instance, The Vancouver Sun reported the search for him on its front page.</p> <p>Serving 3 1/2 years in the B.C. Penitentiary for break-and-enter theft, Olson fled three guards who had escorted him to Shaughnessy Hospital after he feigned illness.</p> <p>The chase involved dozens of police and, at one point, the armed-and-dangerous Olson slipped through a closing net of investigators in Vancouver’s east end by only seconds. He spent that night hiding under the Queensborough Bridge in New Westminster.</p> <p>After a week on the loose, Olson was nabbed in Blaine, Wash. - sniffed out by Tiger the police dog.”</p> </blockquote> <p>For a few days in one of my detentions at Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre in 1993 I was put in a normal unit instead of the Disordered Offenders Unit as in Part 7; I could see that some normal prisoners were much more hardened.</p> <p>So Dr. Tony Marcus’s psychiatry might have helped Clifford Olson ease his prison life. But in my case it was wrongheaded: I didn’t need psychiatric counselling help, but rather the help to unravel the wrongful psychiatric measure that was a means of political oppression.</p> <p>Despite the tightening oppressive grip at the end of August, I decided to look for a lawyer for civil litigation rather than have my lawsuit against UBC and RCMP mediated by law students without lawyer’s advice. With a lawyer I would also expand it to cover the wrongful psychiatric oppression brought by UBC and RCMP involving Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick after lawsuit’s filing.</p> <p>My financial situation was also worse than when filing the lawsuit in October 1992, unable to afford legal expenses but a ‘contingency fee’ arrangement – not accepted by most lawyers. </p> <p>I recall in the morning of the first day to visit law firms I received a phone call from Alison, informing me UBC student legal clinic’s decision not to mediate my UBC dispute.</p> <p>In mid-September I was notified by Adult Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic that <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot078 - Appointment letters from Forensic Psych Services, Sept-Oct 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">the pre-sentencing evaluation would start on October 6</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>. Then on September 21, coordinated by VSMHT, a case conference was held under the hospice of “The Multi-Service Network” with UBC Hospital’s Dr. Agbayewa in attendance, agreeing on <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot079 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Sept 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">a plan to request court sentencing to impose forensic psychiatric counselling and no-go conditions for UBC Hospital and entire UBC</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Service Plan: Those present agreed to the following:</p> <p>Legal:</p> <p>Any court order should include</p> <p>1) A no contact order for all areas of the University of British Columbia and Health Sciences Hospital - University Site;</p> <p>2) A condition related to counselling at the Forensic Outpatient Clinic; and</p> <p>3) Periodic reviews by the judge.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Part 7, forensic psychiatric counselling through criminal prosecution had been suggested by UBC Hospital’s Dr. James Harris supervising my second psychiatric committal in January-February, who opposed my release.</p> <p>A no-go condition for the entire UBC area would be new, possibly a retaliatory measure for my latest liaison with Associate Vice President McClean.</p> <p>In the “Treatment” plan there was a response to my new claim of being “suicidal”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Suicide threats will result in certification and referral to the Forensic Psychiatric Institute.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The escalating plan of committal at FPI showed how crucial it was for me to claim only a mild depressed mood and not overdo it, because hardline psychiatrists like Dr. M. O. Agbayewa would quickly respond with a harsher level of psychiatric oppression.</p> <p>Kelly Lynd, Adult Forensic Psychiatric Outpatients Clinic nurse handling my pre-sentencing evaluation, took part in the case conference, as did probation officer David Phillips. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot080 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Aug 20-Oct 13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lynd’s notes showed the idea of forensic psychiatric counselling as from UBC Hospital’s views</font></a>,<font color="#0000ff"></font> with the Clinic only preparing for an evaluation at that point.</p> <p>So the community mental-health involvement only served the purpose of UBC Hospital which had referred me to VSMHT, to impose its views onto justice matters through a “multi-service network” approach, i.e., with “community” support: criminal charges relating to UBC Hospital had all been resolved, and a no-go condition for entire UBC would serve Computer Science Head Maria Klawe’s interests, while a court-ordered psychiatric approach was likely preferred by RCMP Vancouver regional commander Superintendent D. G. Cowley as seen in Parts 5 & 6.</p> <p>Kelly Lynd erroneously recorded the start of the Clinic record as on July 20 upon Richmond Provincial Court Judge J. R. Groberman’s request of psychiatric assessment – it was August 20 as cited earlier. July 20 had been deputy White House counsel Vince Foster’s date of depression-related suicide, with no apparent Vancouver connection other than that the first summit between President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in April at UBC – of all places – as in Part 7.</p> <p>One week after the community mental-health meeting, on September 28 there was press report that Sikh extremist Harjinderpal Singh Nagra had become an OASIS board member in a board reorganization two months ago in response to funding agencies’ pressure.</p> <p>Nagra had gone to jail for smuggling a fellow extremist into Canada. He ran a newspaper advocating Sikh independence and a print shop next door to OASIS, printing political campaign material for Herb Dhaliwal (“Indo-Canadian group elected ex-smuggler as director”, by Stewart Bell, September 28, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A former Sikh extremist who spent time in jail for trying to smuggle a fellow activist into Canada is now a director of the troubled organization that helps Indo-Canadian immigrants settle in B.C.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Nagra was elected to the board of directors two months ago, when the previous board was purged following the release of a government audit report that found serious abuses of public money within the society.</p> <p>…</p> <p>He operated a Punjabi-language newspaper in Vancouver that promoted Sikh independence. He later bought C.K. Printers Inc., a company formerly owned by Buksh, who is now president of OASIS.</p> <p>The printing shop is next door to the OASIS head office on Main Street, and a few doors away from Liberal party candidate Herb Dhaliwal’s campaign office. Dhaliwal is a former president of OASIS. Nagra has printed some of Dhaliwal’s campaign material.”</p> </blockquote> <p>This news came one month after the death of Brian Mulroney’s lawyer Bruce Verchere, who and whose suicide were largely unknown to the public.</p> <p>As in Part 5, former UBC co-worker Theresa Fong’s sister Christine had been in a human-smuggling case reported by the press yet Theresa’s companion was a retired Hong Kong police superintendent, and their brother Paul operated a printing business in Delta near Richmond so the setting was familiar if not the political extremism.</p> <p>The next day September 29, UBC Associate Vice President <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot081 - Letter from UBC Associate Vice President Albert McClean, Sept 29, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Albert McClean wrote me to reject reopening my employment grievance or investigating Maria Klawe’s Headship</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font><font color="#0000ff"></font>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I now have had the opportunity of considering the requests made in your letter of August 20, 1993. I do not, however, see any basis for re-opening the question of your job application or for any general enquiry into Dr. Klawe’s Headship.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As in Parts 4 & 5, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot010 - April 92 letter to Strangway, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my employment grievance</font></a> had been rejected on June 23, 1992 <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot019 - June 92 UBC reply from McClean-Strangway, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">by UBC President David Strangway as advised by McClean</font></a>; but my request of a broader investigation into Klawe’s Headship, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot016 - June 92 Faculty Assoc, McClean, van Hentenryck case, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">raised in a June 18, 1992 letter to McClean</font></a>, was never responded to even after <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot020 - June 92 last attempt at Klawe's headship, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I reiterated it to Strangway on June 25 after his rejection of my employment grievance</font></a> – until on September 29, 1993.</p> <p>In my long saga of political contests with Maria Klawe, Albert McClean maintained a neutral, noncommittal appearance to me while I tried hard at my own peril, as illustrated in an <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot082 - Email from Albert McClean, August 1, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">e-mail McClean sent me a decade later in August 2003</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>, in retirement responding to my enquiry about reopening the issues:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Dear Dr. Gao</p> <p>I am not prepared to take part in any steps to reopen any issues you may have with UBC.</p> <p>Yours sincerely</p> <p>Bertie McClean”</p> </blockquote> <p>He sounded like a friend even when he had been the one officially closing it against me.</p> <p>The way McClean liked to ‘keep the door open’ means that his closing the entire UBC matter at that time may have been prompted by news of Sikh extremist involvement at OASIS, concerned about such political links UBC law students might have there – the 1990 story of the student clinic helping Ricardo A. Orantes had illustrated the subtle risk of links to political extremism.</p> <p>Nonetheless, I doubt the Sikh extremist story had taken McClean by surprise – if only because my move to living near the OASIS location of UBC student legal clinic had been no accident.</p> <p>As mentioned in Part 7, while in pre-trial detention in June my mother had arrived from China sponsored by relatives, who also moved my belongings out of <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot073 - UBC Hospital record, July 30-Aug 17, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my apartment at 1640 West 11th Avenue</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> for which I owed back rents; we stayed at <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot074 - Pre-sentencing psych evaluation arrangement, July-Aug 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">their home at 5826 Wales Street</font></a> following my release after the July 27 trial.</p> <p>In early August while I was looking for a place to move to, Uncle Stephen, husband of Mom’s first cousin Aunt Sally, told us he found one and quickly helped us move our belongings, including some of my furniture, into the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot073 - UBC Hospital record, July 30-Aug 17, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">basement of a house at 258 East 58th Avenue</font></a> owned by a Chinese couple living above, the husband working in a factory in Richmond and two of their three daughters attending UBC – one in nursing.</p> <p>But Uncle Stephen was Rev. Stephen Lee of Vancouver Chinese Mennonite Church located in Chinatown, founded by him on June 4, 1978 (“<a href="http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/V3532.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Chinese Mennonite Church</font></a>”, <em>Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online</em>) – another appearance of the number “64”, like in my previous apartment address and other things mentioned in the earlier Parts.</p> <p>The Mennonite church had a long tradition of Pacifism, respected by the Canadian government, and as conscientious objectors to war (“<a href="http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/pacifism" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Pacifism</font></a>”, <em>The Canadian Encyclopedia</em>).</p> <p>Originally from China, Stephen had immigrated from Hong Kong with Sally, living in Calgary before Vancouver, and Sally’s younger brother, also Uncle Stephen (Wong), formed an interracial family with Aunt Nina Hooker from Calgary.</p> <p>South Vancouver was a leading ethnic minority area in British Columbia, courted by former OASIS president Herb Dhaliwal as federal Liberal candidate, competing with Chinese Canadian Liberal-turned-Conservative K. K. Wan after losing party nomination in Richmond to Chinese human-rights activist Raymond Chan whom Wan had helped (“Two success stories compete for job”, by Doug Ward, September 27, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Liberal Herb Dhaliwal and Conservative K.K. Wan are front-runners in the race to succeed the popular John Fraser, a Tory who appeared to own the riding during his 21 years as its member of parliament for South.</p> <p>Businessman Dhaliwal and dentist Wan were raised in the working class -- Dhaliwal in South and Wan in Hong Kong. Both now live on the bourgeois side of the street -- Dhaliwal in Richmond and Wan in the neighbor riding of Quadra.</p> <p>The Liberals thought the retirement of Fraser presented them with a perfect opportunity in South. After all, the riding has one of the highest percentage of non-whites in all of B.C. -- a group traditionally loyal to the Liberals.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Wan himself was a Liberal until months before his Tory nomination this spring. He voted in the Richmond Liberal nomination this winter for his friend Raymond Chan who ironically defeated Dhaliwal.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The ethnic-minority Liberal trio Chan, Dhaliwal and former B.C. Medical Association president Hedy Fry who ran against Prime Minister Kim Campbell in Vancouver Centre riding where I had lived, would score big in the October 25 election as I reviewed in 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 5)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Kim Campbell turned out to be the biggest winner – and the biggest loser – of the ambiguous, non-open pressure waiting on Mulroney’s decision, as she would be crowned Mulroney’s successor (i.e., without a lot of competition) and become the first female prime minister after having been the first woman as justice minister and as defence minister – a real “triple crown” – but she would also suffer the worst electoral defeat in Canadian history at the hand of the Chretien Liberals.</p> <p>Adding insult to injury was the fact that Campbell would lose her own MP seat, to Liberal Dr. Hedy Fry, former president of B.C. medical association and the first woman of color to be in the cabinet; the Vancouver area also elected Raymond Chan, the first Chinese-Canadian cabinet member, and Herb Dhaliwal, later the first (Sikh) Indo-Canadian cabinet minister and the one accompanying Chretien to the Sikh Golden Temple in India to celebrate their 10-year victory anniversary.”</p> </blockquote> <p>A veteran UBC law dean like Albert McClean would have had a good sense of local politics. A question in hindsight is: given this ethnic political movement, wouldn’t it have been wise for me to accept mediation by UBC law students at OASIS?</p> <p>There were at least three factors implying a likely negative answer when my goal was to unravel wrongdoings by Klawe and Mulroney.</p> <p>Firstly, despite the electoral euphoria, community power still lied within institutional entrenchment. VSMHT’s serving as a community venue for UBC to push its harder agendas against me to the justice system illustrated the easy bias and sway of community orientation.</p> <p>Indo-Canadian political activist Mobina Jaffer, former OASIS board director and also Liberal parliamentary candidate, lamented about the situation at OASIS (“Indo-Canadian group got grants despite serious internal problems”, by Stewart Bell, September 24, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Jaffer, a family lawyer, said she was alarmed to discover that people running workshops on domestic violence were unqualified and giving bad advice to victims of spousal abuse.</p> <p>“One of my concerns was women were being counselled to go back to violent situations,” she said.</p> <p>“I blame the funders. They were like ostriches. They should have done this four years ago.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Such OASIS counselling would have “mediated” me back to under the kind of management I had complained against. The OASIS board had been reorganized but if a Sikh extremist’s elevation to it was any indication, the fact that the 1985 Air India bombing had originated from the B.C. Sikh community – as in Part 7 a worst civilian air disaster RCMP Chief Superintendent P. M. Cummins supervising B.C. municipal policing in 1993 had previously failed to solve as RCMP’s lead investigator – would suggest a potentially violent direction rather than my peaceful activism.</p> <p>Though not directly linked, UBC Computer Science programmer Martin Frauendorf was murdered after Harjinderpal Singh Nagra’s election to the OASIS board.</p> <p>Secondly, even in elected politics, entanglements between the Conservatives and the Liberals in Canada made it unlikely for either to really poke the other’s sensitive spots.</p> <p>The example of Vancouver South Tory candidate K. K. Wan was right there, who had just switched from the Liberal party after helping Raymond Chan win party nomination in Richmond.</p> <p>Another example, as in Part 6, was the fact the lead lawyer Jack Giles for UBC in the civil litigation of my lawsuit had acted as a henchman for the former B.C. Socred government of disgraced ex-Premier Bill Vander Zalm while Giles’s law partner, Keith Mitchell, was a leading B.C. fundraiser for federal Liberal leader Jean Chretien, and both Giles and Mitchell had roles in the political oppression against me.</p> <p>Thirdly, it could be a situation where an elected politician of another stripe wouldn’t or couldn’t help.</p> <p>In August prior to meeting UBC law students at OASIS, I had been given a meeting with Tom Perry, New Democrat Member of B.C. Legislature and Minister of Advanced Education, in whose Vancouver-Little Mountain riding my former apartment was located.</p> <p>In <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot010 - April 92 letter to Strangway, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my 1992 UBC internal grievance</font></a> I had raised the spectre of taking it to “the Office of the Minister of Advanced Education of British Columbia”; then at the end of July 1993 I read a news story that prompted me to do so, when Minister Perry also happened to be local MLA. The story reported an open disagreement and dispute between Advanced Education Minister Tom Perry and UBC President David Strangway over the setup of a UBC research institute, a project Strangway alleged had been killed by B.C. government “with the stroke of a pen” (“Perry challenges UBC on research site”, by Moira Farrow, July 31, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>Tom Perry, and Hedy Fry who would defeat Kim Campbell as federal MP, were medical doctors as was Stan Wilbee, former Tory MP for Delta whose challenge of Mulroney’s continuing leadership I had highlighted in <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot033 - Fax to MP Kim Campbell, Nov 30, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my November 1992 press releases</font></a> discussed in Part 6.</p> <p>Dr. Perry was kind enough to meet with me and listen to my presentation on the documents I provided him, most of which I had sent to former MP Kim Campbell in November-December 1992.</p> <p>Elected in 1989, after our meeting Perry would soon lose his Minister of Advanced Education job in a September cabinet shuffle by Premier Mike Harcourt, and would retire from electoral politics altogether in 1996 – with a few other NDP MLAs including Harcourt himself (“Clayoquot jail terms out of proportion”, October 19, 1993, <a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Times – Colonist</em></font></a>; and, “Ex-minister Perry returns to medicine”, by Jim Beatty, February 15, 1996, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>). By this later time Maria Klawe was already UBC Vice President as mentioned in Part 4.</p> <p>After Hedy Fry’s defeat of Campbell in October, in November 1993 I also sent the documents to Dr. Fry’s constituency office. </p> <p>No known positive result has come out of these political lobbying efforts by me.</p> <p>On the other hand as in Part 5, in 2004 Jean Chretien, Maria Klawe and Brian Mulroney’s in-law, Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis Lapham, all received honorary degrees at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, with Klawe on June 4.</p> <p>In hindsight, could I have spoiled such future happy “togetherness”, possibly planned over a decade in advance for these personalities?</p> <p>With a math background I am sensitive to numerical patterns. The repetition of the number “58” in my addresses in July-August 1993 was an especially interesting one.</p> <p>First it was the home of Rev. Stephen Lee and Aunt Sally Lee at <font color="#333333">5826 Wales Street where Mom and I stayed briefly, </font>across from B.C.’s oldest working diary farm Avalon Diary at 5805 Wales Street, owned by founder Jeremiah Crowley’s grandson Lee Crowley (“<a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Historic+Avalon+Dairy+east+Vancouver+sold+million/5905919/story.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Historic Avalon Dairy in east Vancouver sold for $6 million</font></a>”, by Denise Ryan, December 23, 2011, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>; and, <a href="http://www.avalondairy.com/index-2.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Avalon, Certified Organic, since 1906</font></a>).</p> <p>Recall in Part 6, UBC Hospital psychiatrist Dr. Laura Chapman had referred to UBC’s Dr. Klawe as “Dr. Crowley” and “Dr. Cowley”, and I knew no one by these names but later RCMP disclosure has linked to then Vancouver Subdivision commanding officer Supt. D. G. Cowley – now here was a Crowley family milking cows!</p> <p>After that, our basement dwelling was at <font color="#333333">258 East 58th Avenue.</font></p> <p><font color="#333333">The recurrence was </font>interesting coincidence with my persistence approach to try achieving my objectives in political activity. It was intriguing because my mother was living with me at these addresses and I had been born in January 1959, so the coincidence of repetitive “58” would indicate she was ‘pregnant’ with a difficult-to-give birth, i.e., me, albeit in a political sense.</p> <p>What’s more, in her real life it had been true as I was not Mom’s first pregnancy: partly due to her demanding activity as an amateur athlete – member of the Guangzhou City ping-pong team – she had suffered a ‘stillborn’ carriage a year prior.</p> <p>Such hidden meaning could be ominous. Did it imply that one dead fetus wasn’t enough, that the second fetus would also be difficult, ‘sick’ or near ‘stillborn’ in a political sense? It’s a legitimate question because – due to political complexity as reasoned above – I was engulfed in near futility in my perseverance.</p> <p>Ironically, by 2004 when Queen’s University honoured Jean Chretien, Maria Klawe – on June 4 – and Lewis Lapham I still was, and now writing this blog post nearly two decades later I still am, a political ‘stillborn’.</p> <p>The fetus metaphor may be more real in the example of the partnership of lawyers Jack Giles and Keith Mitchell representing UBC and participating in political oppression against me: as in Part 5, my first day in Vancouver, August 24, 1988, coincided with then B.C. Ombudsman Stephen Owen’s release of a report censoring Socred Premier Bill Vander Zalm’s government for intrusive spying on a pro-abortion group with the infiltration and spying supervised by Jack Giles and his law firm Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy – hence my referring to Giles as a “henchman” for the Vander Zalm government.</p> <p>Anther noteworthy repetition was Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic’s phone number, 660-6604, repeating “660” with an enveloping “6 … 4”. My Chinese blog post,<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/%E5%BF%86%E5%BE%80%E6%98%94%EF%BC%8C%E5%AD%A6%E5%8E%86%E5%8F%B2%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7%EF%BC%88%E4%B8%89%EF%BC%89%E6%96%87%E9%9D%A9%E7%A0%B4%E6%97%A7%E7%AB%8B%E6%96%B0%E5%BC%80%E5%A7%8B/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧(三)——文革“破旧立新”开始的记忆</font></a>, has told my experience as a child witnessing a Chinese Cultural Revolution “home raid” on my Mom in the summer of 1966 at our dwelling near “Guangzhou 2nd Workers Cultural Palace located at 640 Tongfu East Road”; here from its <a href="http://fenggao.org/blogs/introduction/2011/03/%E5%BF%86%E5%BE%80%E6%98%94%EF%BC%8C%E5%AD%A6%E5%8E%86%E5%8F%B2%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7-part-2-part-3/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“<strong>Part 3</strong>,<strong> “文革“破旧立新”开始的记忆 (memories of the start of “destroying the old to erect the new” in Cultural Revolution)”</strong>, recalls early Cultural Revolution experience started by a student Red Guards’ “home raid” on Mother in the summer of 1966.</p> <p>One Sunday after seeing a morning movie in a theater in the nearby Guangzhou 2nd Workers Cultural Palace located at 640 Tongfu East Road, Father, Feng and sister arrived back at the dorm building’s 3rd-floor stairs across from parents’ room, only to be stopped by Grandma from entering: Mother’s middle-school student Red Guards were in the room executing a “home raid”. Feng could hear Mother weep and men’s chastising voices inside.”</p> </blockquote> <p>There were other interesting patterns: my new phone number in south Vancouver was <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot069 - Vancouver South Probation Office phone record, August 13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">323-8110</font></a>, quite close to but ‘smaller’ than OASIS’s 324-8186 (“Here's how to find help”, by Kathy Tait, April 10, 1994, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Province</font></em></a>), and had similarity to Vancouver South Mental Health Team’s <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot079 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Sept 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">324-3811</font></a>; as in Part 7 my previous number had been disconnected by B.C. Tel due to excessive phoning of lawyers Patricia Connor and Carol Konkin.</p> <p>In any case, in summer 1993 my mother, who didn’t speak English or know Canadians outside of a few Chinese ones, likely knew the hopelessness of my situation more than I did.</p> <p>With my sense of optimism, in September I went on a second round of civil-lawyer search, but with fewer law firms to visit than in July-September 1992 first exploring a lawsuit against Maria Klawe at UBC: those that had said no would be even less interested given my lack of money now.</p> <p>Still, as I recall I revisited as least one of the previous law firms, Bull, Housser & Tupper, for two reasons. One, a year ago I had had interviews with several lawyers there courtesy of a senior partner’s arrangement, and come away very impressed by Dan Bennett, a young associate and UBC Law adjunct-faculty member, with his ‘crash course’ for me on civil lawsuit, employment and labor-relation matters. Two, the earlier trip had been prior to my taking on criticizing then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and now in 1993 in my bigger political adventure I learned that lawyer Bob Seeman from this firm was running as an independent candidate for Vancouver Mayor, e.g., from a news story on the same day as the one about Karla Teale being depressed (“Yuppie lawyer with sense of humor wants to sit in mayor’s chair”, by Wyng Chow, August 5, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“What do a lawyer and sperm have in common?</p> <p>Both have about a one-in-a-million chance of becoming a real human being.</p> <p>That is lawyer Bob Seeman’s favorite lawyer joke.</p> <p>He wants to become Vancouver’s next mayor … </p> <p>…</p> <p>Well, he’s a Kitsilano yuppie who rides the bus to work downtown. Only now he’s taken a leave of absence from the law firm of Bull, Housser and Tupper to devote all of his time to winning support.</p> <p>And no, he says he’s not interested in becoming premier of B.C. - unlike Mike Harcourt and Gordon Campbell.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As I recall this time at Bull, Housser & Tupper I met with a female lawyer, who told me she and her husband lived in North Vancouver – my criminal defense lawyer Richard Dempsey lived there also.</p> <p>By September’s end I had found no lawyer to take my case. The September 29 letter from UBC Associate Vice President Albert McClean to close the issues internally at UBC would have arrived when I began visiting the last law firm picked from the Yellow Pages or Lawyer Referral Service info, on Friday, October 1. After that I would abandon my lawyer-search effort for the time being.</p> <p>But this law firm would start a further downward slide for me – despite my refrain from civil disobedience given my bail status arisen from persistently phoning lawyer Patricia Connor.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot083 - Vancouver Police record, Oct 7, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">According to Vancouver Police record</font></a>, I visited law firm Cram & Associates located in a building at 900 Howe Street on October 1, and was told on October 6 the firm would not take my case, at which time I became argumentative and returned to try again numerous times, and police attended; the next day, police officers Manhas (badge No. 1319), Fox (No. 1494) and Wood (No. 1659) attended and I was eventually arrested.</p> <p>As I can recall, on October 1 I attended a phone-scheduled visit to Cram & Associates and was introduced by the secretary to lead lawyer Jack Cram, who shook my hand and confirmed that his associate, Arnold Shuchat, would interview me. As Mr. Cram conveyed, I needed a ‘contingency fee’ arrangement and his junior associate would be the only cost-feasible option. A little disappointed it wouldn’t be like my previous lawyer Brian Mason who led his firm Maitland & Company as in Part 6, I was relieved to find a lawyer to resume civil litigation versus UBC and RCMP.</p> <p>It was much more disappointing when I phoned back to enquire about Shuchat’s progress in studying my case and was told he wouldn’t take it because it wasn’t a good one.</p> <p>I then went to Cram & Associates to retrieve my documents, and tried to pitch him the scenario of taking the next provisional step and assessing the prospect, but Shuchat was firm in his refusal and instead subtly gestured me to lift my voice and persist – as if I would need to be ‘manlier’ in this predicament.</p> <p>This happened on the anniversary of my lawsuit’s October 6, 1992 filing.</p> <p>The police record had only Cram & Associates’ side of the story. However, a public document exists about another case, enough to illustrate that our interaction going downhill had to do with their deceptive practice based on a legal case’s monetary value, which quite belied Arnold Shuchat’s youthful and active appearance.</p> <p>A February 29, 1996 B.C. Expropriation Compensation Board ruling on a 1993 dispute between B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Highways and Bill's Frontier Restaurant & businesswoman Panayota Giannikos over legal fees for the latters’ lawyers including Jack Cram and Arnold Shuchat, admonished Cram for his unreasonably high legal fees and showed Shuchat, from Quebec with little legal experience in B.C., as assisting Cram but billing as a separate legal entity (“<a href="http://www.ecb.gov.bc.ca/decision/5391104.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">February 29, 1996, E.C.B. No. 53/91/l04 (58 L.C.R. 204)</font></a>”, British Columbia Expropriation Compensation Board):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The claimants engaged the services of three successive law firms in advancing their claim. They first retained Mr. Basil Hobbs of the firm of Hobbs Harvey (later Hobbs Harvey Hargrave) in Nanaimo from March, 1990 until late November, 1991. They next retained Mr. Jack N. Cram of Vancouver beginning in late November, 1991 and continuing into the period of the compensation hearing in late May, 1993. Finally, they retained Mr. Arnold E. Shuchat of Vancouver, whose initial involvement in late March of 1993. was evidently in collaboration with Mr. Cram but who eventually appeared as counsel of record on behalf of the claimants throughout the compensation hearing. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Turning to the accounts of Mr. Cram, I will not belabour the obvious which is that his hourly fee of $250 is so far above that which the board has thus far considered reasonable even for senior, experienced counsel that, in the absence of compelling evidence in support, it must be substantially reduced. Again, I have no evidence from the claimants as to the experience of either Mr. Cram or his associate, Mr. Hood. What I do have is a letter from the respondent to the law firm, dated November 15, 1992, recalculating what it considers a “reasonable” hourly rate of payment for Mr. Cram at $150 and for Mr. Hood at $75. In all of the circumstances, I would be inclined to accept the respondent’s suggested rate for Mr. Cram and adjust upward to $100 per hour the rate for Mr. Hood who was a called lawyer at the relevant time. …</p> <p>The respondent submits that the claimants’ change of law firms, first from Hobbs Harvey to Mr. Cram, and then from Mr. Cram to Mr. Shuchat, resulted in duplication of time and effort on the file, the costs of which the respondent should not be required to pay. I accept that there was some measure of duplication …</p> <p>At the date of the compensation hearing, the claimants’ third counsel, Mr. Shuchat, was a lawyer of approximately eight years’ experience, having been called in the province of Quebec in 1985 but not having commenced practice in British Columbia until 1993. It appears that the present matter was his first involvement in the field of expropriation law. In my opinion, Mr. Shuchat’s hourly fee rate of $125 is not unreasonable. The manner in which he prepared for and conducted the claimants’ case, however, bears some scrutiny. Although he had assisted Mr. Cram with discoveries several weeks prior to the compensation hearing, Mr. Shuchat only took over full conduct of the case approximately three weeks before commencement of the hearing.”</p> </blockquote> <p>When I met him in October 1993 Shuchat was an associate of Cram’s, but for this ECB case he had appeared in March as Cram’s associate then starting in May as his own “law firm” – getting a legal-fee rate close to what the Board would give to Cram himself.</p> <p>Likewise, these ‘legal sharks’ must have really asked around about my case, and their rejection indicated my chance of winning likely wasn’t good, not enough to get them the handsome legal fees from the other side – the writing was already in Albert McClean’s September 29 letter to me, unless a lawyer would take his/her gloves off.</p> <p>In that vein, prodding me to display civil disobedience was the logical next step for civil lawyer Arnold Shuchat to create new opportunity for criminal defense lawyers, who could be paid by Legal Aid given my poor financial status.</p> <p>Already in bad circumstances, my situation was made worse by <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot083 - Vancouver Police record, Oct 7, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">outdated, exaggerated police information</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>, misinterpreting old charges as “currently charged” and asserting “record of violence”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“GAO is believed to be potentially dangerous and mentally unstable.”</p> </blockquote> <p>On October 8 at Vancouver Provincial Court, instead of Assault-by-Trespass charge initiated by police <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot084 - Vancouver Provincial Court record, Oct 8, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I was charged with Mischief</font></a> concerning the disruption I had allegedly caused to the law office.</p> <p>In that day’s news story, Sikh extremist Harjinderpal Singh Nagra resigned from OASIS board, stating he would remain active with the society (“Former Sikh extremist resigns OASIS post”, by Stewart Bell, October 8, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>).</p> <p>The Cram & Associates incident ended a trouble-free two months since my bail release in late July. <font color="#0000ff"></font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot077 - UBC Hospital record, Aug 26-Oct 13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">According to UBC Hospital records</font></a>, after August 30 I had stopped going there to request a review of the original mental-illness diagnosis. Clearly, I could stop my persistence and perseverance when there appeared to be a promising civil approach to pursue the matters.</p> <p>The lawyers’ refusal to take my case, instead prodding for civil disobedience, ended a period of civility and began an escalating process of new legal troubles leading to an even more oppressed state of mind for me, that I wouldn't have lawyer representation for the civil lawsuit.</p> <p>On October 6, the first day of police intervention at Cram & Associates, was also my first appointment at Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic. Clinic’s record didn’t show any interview, only obtaining <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot080 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Aug 20-Oct 13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my “DNA” sample</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. GAO DNA”</p> </blockquote> <p>I vaguely remember having done tests there, but not a DNA test as highlighted in the record.</p> <p>Even in the present day, not to mention in 1993, the determination of mental illness by DNA test is still scientifically elusive as Dr.  John Grohol, Editor-in-Chief of the internet publication <em>World of Psychology</em> commented in July 2010 (“<a href="http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/07/24/genetic-testing-for-mental-disorders-avoid-23andme-navigenics-others-for-now/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Genetic Testing for Mental Disorders: Avoid 23andme, Navigenics, Others for Now</font></a>”, by John Grohol, July 24, 2010, PsychCentral):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Two years ago, I wrote that I thought genetic tests for mental health problems are largely scams. Today, I’m here to reaffirm that our understanding of the causes of mental disorders has progressed very little in two years. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>This is modern day snake oil, in my opinion. The research on the genetics of mental disorders remains very much in its infancy, yet companies are selling you hope that their DNA testing will reveal something of value to you.”</p> </blockquote> <p>‘Modern day snake oil scams’ as Dr. Grohol puts it, yet back in 1993 forensic psychiatrists at B.C. Adult Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Services, part of B.C. government’s Ministry of Health, unabashedly featured a “DNA” test in my patient record.</p> <p>Clinic record showed that from October 7 to October 13 I was in police custody and the first psychiatry interview was done on October 13 upon my release on bail – after I went to UBC Hospital and was redirected to the Clinic. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot077 - UBC Hospital record, Aug 26-Oct 13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">UBC Hospital record showed that after August 30 I first appreared on October 12</font></a> so apparently was freed on that day, and on October 13 was redirected to see Dr. Kerr at Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot085 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Oct 13-22, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">VSMHT record</font></a> cited Clinic nurse Kelly Lynd as saying an interview had been missed due to police detention.</p> <p>The DNA test result hadn’t come back on October 13 when I had<font color="#333333"> my first Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic interview – with Dr. Clifford Kerr</font>.</p> <p>As I recall it was during my first Outpatient Clinic interview I was told by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Kerr, who also reviewed my UBC Hospital records, that in his opinion I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia”.</p> <p>As in Part 7, previously unbeknown to me on January 15 in my first Vancouver Police detention, a forensic psychiatrist had made this hardline diagnosis – in response to accusations I made to CBC about Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s conduct in handling Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa who had cancer.</p> <p>Dr. Kerr’s diagnosis came as a shock to me, but I knew I couldn’t change it. It only intensified my efforts to get UBC Hospital to review its original diagnosis of “Delusional Disorder” made in November-December 1992, which Dr. A. Burgmann already dropped from his psychiatric assessment on August 12, 1993.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot086 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Oct 15-27, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Clinic’s record showed</font></a> that in mid-October I frequently phoned and visited UBC Hospital, but didn’t attend a psychological testing appointment at the Clinic. In phone conversations with UBC Hospital nurse Diane Woodhouse, the Clinic suggested to pursue a harassing phone call charge and get RCMP intervention, but Woodhouse was more interested in sending me to another psychiatric committal, away from UBC this time at Forensic Psychiatric Institute – it had been agreed on by a “Multi-Service Network” case conference. In response, <font color="#333333">on October 18 the Clinic suggested Riverview Hospital, then on October 19 changed the proposed site to Vancouver General Hospital</font> after receiving a phone call from VGH’s Dr. Diane Watson.</p> <p>Lobbying UBC Hospital was only half of my activity in mid-October. Facing a new criminal charge I needed to meet with my defense lawyer Richard Dempsey who had handled the July trials at Richmond court. Over the phone we agreed to an appointment at his office at YMCA Enterprise Centre, but when I appeared Dempsey was a no show, and several follow-up phone messages were not returned by him.</p> <p>There might be a problem, I was aware it could be but it wasn’t my oversight.</p> <p>As in Part 7, Richard Dempsey first came to visit me in pre-trial detention in June/July, after my attempts to get female defense lawyer Patricia Connor or Carol Konkin for an assault charge arisen from a standoff with UBC Hospital security guards led to harassing-phone-calls and breach-of-recognizance charges.</p> <p>In July I accepted Dempsey’s defense for his willingness to call my testimony in the assault trial so I could present a summary of the political background issues. Under his defense I then received a guilty verdict but absolute discharge for the assault charge, and was acquitted of other charges except breach-of-recognizance in phoning Patricia Connor, for which I was released on bail for pre-sentencing evaluations.</p> <p>But then when I met with Dempsey during August-September to discuss the pre-sentencing matters, one meeting took place in a room at Vancouver Provincial Court, for the reason – he told me only when making that appointment – he was a part-time prosecutor at the Vancouver location and needed to squeeze time for my appointment.</p> <p>I felt as my lawyer Dempsey had been soft in defending me at Richmond court, but I was in a political-persecution frame of mind and the outcomes though dragging on were not the worst, so I couldn’t afford to be too unhappy.</p> <p>But now as I faced an additional legal trouble Richard Dempsey simply dropped out of sight, to avoid a direct conflict of interest perhaps, but left no explanation for me whose troubles from looking for lawyers he had handled – it was akin to opening up for more hassles.</p> <p>I went to the Crown prosecution office at Vancouver court and couldn’t find Dempsey. So on October 19 I returned to YMCA Enterprise Centre and became restless, walking around asking for Dempsey but otherwise not creating problems. A man introducing himself as the executive director told me that I was disruptive to the office tenants, and that police would be called if I refused to leave. I didn’t obey, and <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot087 - Vancouver Police record, Oct 19-20, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">police officer Fung (badge No. 1305) made arrest</font></a> for an Assault-by-Trespass charge, for my “mental instability” and his “genuine concern” of violence based on my police record, with a suggestion that the court impose “psych help” and close monitoring.</p> <p>Again, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot088 - Vancouver Provincial Court record, Oct 19, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mischief was the actual charge filed</font></a> in court. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot087 - Vancouver Police record, Oct 19-20, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Crown prosecutor M. (Marjorie) Munkley explained her rationale</font></a> in a memo to officer Fung:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… based on the repeated visits over the last week, I think there’s a substantial likelihood of conviction!</p> <p>I didn’t lay assault by trespass b/c there’s no evidence of resistance beyond passive resistance or mere nuisance.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The prosecution clearly saw no violence, not even “resistance”. As for the “repeated visits” I only remember at most three trips, but on that last trip I did walk around persistently looking for Dempsey.</p> <p>In court responding to my explanation that I had been there to find my lawyer, the prosecutor said Dempsey would represent me at the Richmond court for breach-of-recognizance sentencing.</p> <p>But the brief phone conversation to set up his no-show appointment would be my last contact with Dempsey, who had a <a href="http://www.ksw.bc.ca/index.php/lawyers/richard-dempsey/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">very low profile in his legal practice since 1989, until joining the firm Kane, Shannon & Weiler in 2008</font></a>, disclosing that his “criminal law experience is primarily as a federal prosecutor where he spent many days in court appearing on a wide range of federal matters”.</p> <p>The incident appeared to have been ‘set up’ by Richard Dempsey, possibly for Justice Department handling RCMP defense for my lawsuit, to create a false profile of me as a ‘radical’ who escalated hostilities and law-breaking from at an academic institution (UBC) to at a government institution (CBC), then to law offices and now local businesses.</p> <p>Evidence for such a ‘sting’ included that the court documents for the YMCA Enterprise Centre charge didn’t mention Dempsey, and that he wasn’t even an office tenant there.</p> <p>The YMCA Enterprise Centre was a small-business incubator sponsored by the Canadian government’s Unemployment Insurance program, to provide business start-up training and office support. It’s facilities were used on a time-share basis, so my “mischief” could easily inconvenient others unrelated to Richard Dempsey. But Dempsey likely wasn’t a qualified tenant in the Centre (“Centre that aids startups faces funding crunch”, by David Smith, October 29, 1991, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>): </p> <blockquote> <p>“The centre has two one-year programs. One for young entrepreneurs, ages 17 to 30, and another for women over 30. Applicants must work less than 20 hours a week and must really want to create their own business.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Richard Dempsey was probably over 30 like me, obviously not female, and definitely wasn’t an unemployed type starting a new business but working part-time for the government’s law-and-order branch – unless he provided legal help to the Centre or its tenants in an arrangement, which could have been the case.</p> <p>The YMCA had such enterprise centres around the country. In spring 1990, coincidentally the beginning of my UBC employment dispute when Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick’s husband David bringing in Jack Snoeyink from Stanford as in Part 4, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> ran a story about the Montreal one, mentioning lawyer help (“Young entrepreneurs get a boost”, by Craig Toomey, April 16, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Since being created three years ago, the enterprise centre has helped 67 other small businesses get off the ground, according to its president, Paul Krivicky.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The centre also makes available accountants, lawyers and other professionals needed by businesses and offers continuing business advice for two years.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In 1992 when my UBC job was ending, Vancouver YMCA Enterprise Centre’s government funding was to end also, but apparently continued with a change of executive director from Niall Trainor to Kofi Ohene-Asante (“Centre that aids startups faces funding crunch”, by David Smith, October 29, 1991, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>; and, “Y’s centre nurtures budding businesses”, November 21, 1993, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Province</font></em></a>).</p> <p>In police custody <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot089 - Forensic psychiataric assessment, Oct 19, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">the night of the YMCA Enterprise Centre incident, a forensic psychiatric assessment</font></a> mentioned a pre-sentencing report being prepared at Outpatient Clinic, gave a diagnosis of “schizophrenia”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… he has ‘soft signs’ of schizophrenia, namely guardedness, a tendency to lack an appreciation of social cues and particularly refusals…”.</p> </blockquote> <p>On that day, October 19, prior to YMCA Enterprise Centre I had attended my second interview at Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot090 - Forensic Psychiatric Services pre-sentencing report, Oct 19, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The pre-sentencing report by Dr. Clifford Kerr was written that day</font></a>, whose name has been withheld from disclosure but whose initials CGK are on it.</p> <p>By the standard mental-health indicators in the report I was quite normal:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Gao was well oriented for time, place and person and his intellectual and cognitive functions were grossly intact.</p> <p>Mr. Gao did not appear to be seriously depressed or suicidal.</p> <p>Mr. Gao denied that he was in any way a danger to himself or others.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Regardless, Dr. Kerr insisted I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It is my own opinion that Mr. Gao does indeed suffer from Paranoid Schizophrenia and that his overall functioning is gradually deteriorating and his illness is causing him to come into increasing conflict with the community.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Lying to the psychiatrist was probably considered part of the mental-illness symptoms, but Dr. Kerr himself was confused with key facts:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Indeed, when I interviewed Mr. Gao on the 12th of October, 1993 he did not tell me the truth; he said that he had not been attending the U.B.C. Hospital nor was he harassing the staff, when in fact, he had actually been at U.B.C. the previous day and that morning.</p> <p>In view of the above, unfortunately Mr. Gao’s version of events cannot be taken as truthful which makes his assessment more difficult.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As discussed earlier, according to Clinic notes and UBC Hospital records the interview as on October 13 when I went to UBC Hospital and was redirected to the Clinic and October 12 was my first UBC Hospital visit since August 30. I was just released from police custody following the October 7 Cram & Associates incident and felt the need to resume perseverance given the setback in getting a lawyer for civil litigation.</p> <p>Dr. Kerr acknowledged that he found no psychotic symptoms but used “inference” from my perseverant behavior to “assume” mental illness:</p> <blockquote> <p>“While Mr. Gao currently denies any psychotic symptoms I do wonder whether or not Mr. Gao continues to suffer from a number of delusional symptoms which he is not disclosing to physicians, because he does not wish to be perceived as mentally ill nor does he wish any kind of treatment. However, because Mr. Gao’s behavior is so clearly disturbed I would assume by inference that he continues to suffer from mental illness.</p> </blockquote> <p>He recommended forensic psychiatric counselling at the Clinic, with the readiness to send me to psychiatric committal for “treatment” when needed:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… I would certainly recommend that Mr. Gao be instructed to attend the Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic so that we can continue to monitor his mental state and if his mental state deteriorates to a point where he is certifiable and then he could be placed in hospital and appropriate treatment commenced.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That was despite his acknowledging that VGH psychiatrists didn’t see a mental illness with me:</p> <blockquote> <p>… Indeed, I understand that Mr. Gao was recently at Vancouver General Hospital where he was seen by a number of Psychiatrists, none of whom found him to be psychotic, none of whom found him to be certifiable and he was therefore released to the community without any on-going treatment.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But here again Dr. Kerr was mixed up: I hadn’t been released from VGH to the community yet; for my second psychiatric committal starting from the first “Paranoid Schizophrenia” diagnosis by a forensic psychiatrist on January 15 while in police custody I was sent to VGH then transferred to UBC Hospital as in Part 7; but “recently” on the day of this report, October 19, VGH’s Dr. Diane Watson had phoned the Clinic to arrange for a VGH committal wanted by UBC Hospital – that might be how Dr. Kerr learned that VGH psychiatrists didn’t view me as mentally ill but the committal wouldn’t begin until next day.</p> <p>On October 20 when I went to UBC Hospital again, emergency physician Dr. Schubert brought out psychiatrist Dr. Kathleen Ann McGarvey and resident Dr. Jaswant Singh Bhopal to interview me, who saw no “delusional” symptom but still diagnosed “Delusional Disorder”, and after consultation with VGH’s Dr. Diane Watson and Dr. Levy transferred me there via RCMP escort.</p> <p>In her certificate <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot092 - Vancouver General Hospital record, Oct 20-25, 1993 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. McGarvey claimed she had witnessed threatening behavior</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He believes he was wronged by psychiatrists in the past. I witnessed him screaming aggressive & angry & threatening ...”</p> </blockquote> <p>But <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot091 - UBC Hospital record, Oct 20-25, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. Bhopal’s notes recorded the opposite</font></a>, that I was cooperative and reasonable:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Staring eyes, looks around nervously at times. Cooperative. Good rapport. Can be reasoned with. Realizes that he was delusional in past.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Dwells on the notion that he has been wrongly diagnosed, and unfairly mistreated.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That wasn’t a “threatening” personality at all.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot092 - Vancouver General Hospital record, Oct 20-25, 1993 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. Bhopal’s certificate</font></a> cited my being “obsessed with a Dr. Finch” and a history with violence as “danger”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He seems to have become obsessed with a Dr. Finch (a psychiatrist resident). He has a history of harassment, assault and jail terms. He is a danger to self & others.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That was a false history to justify “danger”. As in Part 7 my two assault charges had ended in an acquittal and a guilty but discharged outcome – there was no criminal conviction let alone “jail terms”.</p> <p>The <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot085 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Oct 13-22, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">“Dr. Finch” tale was spun to greater height</font></a> in the community VSMHT record:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He has never met Dr. Finch. No one knows how he got her name but he has been ejected from the psych ward when he went there looking for her on several occasions.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Female resident psychiatrist Dr. Finch had assisted Dr. Harris during my second committal and I had met her at the time. The above information indicated Harris and Finch misrepresented the facts to others.</p> <p>As in Part 7, Dr. Harris who supervised my second committal in January-February, opposed my release ordered by a mental-health review panel and suggested that I be criminally charged and handled by forensic psychiatry; he then wrote a reference letter stating I was mentally ill, resulting in rejection of my unemployment insurance claim, leading to my frequenting UBC Hospital to get a medical clearance, standoffs with security guards there and the assault charges – “violence”-related charges resulted from UBC Hospital hardline machination rather than my behavior.</p> <p>I tried to persuade Dr. Finch, whose name I seem to recall as Susan, to review my record and correct the wrong diagnoses.</p> <p>Internet information shows basically only one female psychiatrist Dr. Finch in Canada: Susan Jane Finch graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, received her McGill University MD degree in 1991, became FRCPC (Fellow of Royal College of Physicians of Canada) while at UBC, and in 2001-02 moved back from Duncan, B.C. to teach at Queen’s and counsel for Metis Nations of Ontario; her primary interest was “social psychiatry <br />and the use of coercion in psychiatry”. (“<a href="http://ww1.cpa-apc.org/Publications/Archives/CJP/2001/August/PDF/letters.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sexual Aversion Disorder Treated With Behavioural Desensitization</font></a>”, by Susan Finch, August 2001, Vol. 46, No. 6, <em>Can. J. Psychiatry</em>; “<a href="http://www.queensu.ca/news/sites/default/files/assets/gazette/gazette20020114.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">New Faculty Profiles: Susan Finch</font></a>”, January 14, 2002, Vol. 33, No. 1, <em>Queen’s Gazette</em>; “<a href="http://ww1.cpa-apc.org/Publications/Archives/CJP/2004/august/letters.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Beyond Haloperidol: Teaching Emergency Medicine Residents to Manage Acute Agitation and Aggression in the Emergency Department</font></a>”, by Susan Finch, August 2004, Vol. 49, No. 8, <em>Can J. Psychiatry</em>; “<a href="http://www.queensu.ca/psychology/news/Weekly-Memo/MAD9registrationform.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Registration Form, 9th Annual Conference Mood & Anxiety Disorders</font></a>”, November 14, 2009, Queen’s University; and, “<a href="http://www.physiciandirectory.ca/phy.php?id=22519" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Finch, Susan Jane</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, Physician Directory)</p> <p>I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the UBC Hospital Dr. Finch of 1993: as in Parts 4 & 6, Andrew K. Martin, a key agitator and antagonist in 1992 at UBC Computer Science Department and allegator of “violence” and “mental illness”, was from Queen’s University; and in 2004 Maria Klawe received a Queen’s honorary degree when Jean Chretien and Brian Mulroney’s in-law Lewis Lapham also did; besides, the name Jane-Finch (‘Jane and Finch’) has long referred to Canada’s most violent crime-infested neighbourhood, albeit located in Toronto.</p> <p>On October 20 as in <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot092 - Vancouver General Hospital record, Oct 20-25, 1993 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">VGH record</font></a>, I retracted claims of being “suicidal”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Many prior reports of suicidal ideation which he now says he made up.</p> <p>…</p> <p>– lies and then admits to the lie</p> <p>– paranoid re doctors/lawyers”</p> </blockquote> <p>No evidence of violent behavior, psychosis, delusion or even obsession was observed during my VGH stay, and I was released on October 25, despite the standard one-month period two (UBC Hospital) medical certificates authorized. </p> <p>Having given info of my legal troubles to VGH, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot093 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Oct 25-Nov 10, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">community VSMHT persons were surprised to learn I was not mentally ill</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He is not in any way psychotic or certifiable. Nor is he delusional.”</p> </blockquote> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot092 - Vancouver General Hospital record, Oct 20-25, 1993 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Written by Dr. (John Mark) Levy</font></a>, my Discharge Diagnosis was “Compulsive personality disorder” and Secondary Diagnosis “Delusional disorder, remission”.</p> <p>This VGH conclusion looked like a compromise between a May 10 forensic psychiatric assessment while in police custody, most likely by Dr. Levy which stated I was not mentally ill, and a June 14 one that said my delusional disorder was “in partial remission with medication”, as discussed in Part 7.</p> <p>The keeping of a little “secondary” “remission” tail had to do with politics, in my view, and was likely wanted by UBC Hospital: October 25 was the day of the federal election, in which Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative party under Prime Minister Kim Campbell would be nearly wiped out by the Liberal party under Jean Chretien, with Campbell – a former UBC faculty member – also losing her local seat.</p> <p>I was let go at 11:00 a.m., enough time for the person to participate in voting. The harder committal wanted by UBC Hospital, a transfer to Forensic Psychiatric Institute, or Riverview Hospital per Forensic Clinic’s suggestion, would have treated me as a ‘criminal offender’ or an ‘unclear’ patient, and detained me for longer in violation of my constitutional voting right – Section 3 of Charter of Rights and Freedoms – on top of other violations of constitutional rights and freedoms in the political use of psychiatry.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot094 - Probation pre-sentencing report, Nov 1, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On November 1 probation officer David Phillips produced his pre-sentencing report</font></a>. A most objectionable part of it was his interviewing some UBC persons for their views on my years there and my employment dispute, when the court case – breach of recognizance phoning a lawyer to seek defense for a charge due to standoff with UBC Hospital security guards – had no relation to them. Phillips then recommended that I not be allowed on “University of British Columbia Endowment Lands” or near “University of British Columbia Health Sciences Hospital” or “U.B.C. Department of Computer Science” – no-go conditions approved by a VSMHT community ‘case conference’ as discussed earlier.</p> <p>The timing – coming after the October 25 federal election – showed that under political psychiatry a major change of the political environment would have no help for me, whose legal troubles had stemmed from trying to publicize criticisms of ex-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney but were pre-conditioned by the UBC dispute. If anything, the new political climate would favor Maria Klawe as her management style wrapped in the skin of academia was likely empathized with by the Chretien Liberals – no less than their sympathizing with Lynne Walters Verchere – and she would grow further in power and glory.</p> <p>The most troubling, negative implication of Phillips’s report would be any hidden deal like this: in a ‘remotely’ connected criminal case the UBC dispute was summarized in favor of UBC, and my civil litigation vs. UBC and RCMP would be without a lawyer yet considered ‘compensated for’ in some judgment – a kind of ‘monopoly’ scheme I had called “conspiracy” in November 1992 when first taken by RCMP to psychiatric committal.</p> <p>In this report and in UBC Hospital Dr. Bhopal’s notes on October 20, Richard Dempsey was identified as my lawyer for this Richmond court case sentencing set for November 4.</p> <p>I needed a lawyer for the two new Mischief charges at Vancouver court, and a day or two before this November 1 report I had found a law firm, Warren & Eder.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot092 - Vancouver General Hospital record, Oct 20-25, 1993 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">VGH social worker Brad Pearce’s October 22 note</font></a> indicated I had gotten from the Court a trial date of April 25, 1994, normally not assigned right away, for the Mischief charges, the second of them filed only on October 19 – Pearce recorded an anecdote that I had once phoned court clerks 7 times in a day. The date was set for over 6 months later so I had time to find a lawyer.  </p> <p>Now a few days later Warren & Eder agreed to represent me, so I asked if they could move the trial date earlier so that I could get it over with and find a civil lawyer to resume civil litigation, and they said “no”. I then asked if they would do civil cases so I could wait that long and also use their legal representation for my lawsuit after the criminal trial, but the answer was again “no”.</p> <p>I became persistent, and <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot095 - Vancouver Police record, Nov 1-2, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">on November 1 incurred another criminal charge</font></a>.</p> <p>At that point I had gotten into a frame of mind, that if a lawyer or law firm appeared to be the only option or unusually promising, and then turned out unsatisfactory, instead of giving up I would persist – to the point of drawing a minor criminal charge if necessary. The mindset had begun in May-June with female lawyers Patricia Connor and Carol Konkin as in Part 7, ended afterwards, and then returned in the Cram & Associates incident partly due to Arnold Shuchat’s prodding.</p> <p>To be honest, these mischiefs did cause inconveniences for the lawyers or law offices, but after Connor and Konkin any inconvenience was minor as it took place within one or two days and it was then my troubles only, and my court records which I felt were needed albeit carrying negative ramifications. Any concern for “violence” was unjustified, not real for the “victims”, but previously fabricated or exaggerated by UBC and RCMP in their political agendas – as in Parts 4, 5 & 6 – to make it much worse for me.</p> <p>That said, when compared to Cram & Associates and to YMCA Enterprise Centre where Richard Dempsey had an office, Warren & Eder had the least expectation to be inconvenienced as they had not prodded for my persistence or tricked me into being helpless, but was merely unable or unwilling to do more than ‘in a set manner’. As a result, I struggled in my thought over whether to persist with them.</p> <p>I have since learned of the media profile of lawyers Eric Warren and Birgit Eder in defending the legal rights of prisoners and of women, especially prostitutes, against unnecessarily harsh measures even if they had been ‘guilty’ – meaningful work where they faced rigid, freedom-limiting rules as the norm (“Another B.C. prisoner seeks release on parole”, January 13, 1987, “Supreme Court won’t question law to hold dangerous prisoners”, October 23, 1987, “Slain hooker ‘too shy’ for streets”, by Robert Sarti, April 6, 1988, “TB patients agree to stay in hospital”, by Robert Sarti, June 14, 1988, and “Mentally ill woman sent to hospital, but wanted jail: Found not guilty due to insanity for vicious assault in Richmond”, by Phil Needham, October 5, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>; and, “Veteran cop is found guilty”, by Staff Reporter, May 19, 1991, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Province</font></em></a>).</p> <p>Again, on November 2 instead of <font color="#333333">Assault-by-Trespass police had filed</font> I was charged with a third Mischief, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot096 - Vancouver Provincial Court record, Nov 2, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">with the Crown consolidating the 3 cases</font></a>, i.e., at Cram & Associates, at YMCA Enterprise Centre and at Warren & Eder, as 3 counts of one case. Prosecutor Marjorie Munkley sent a memo to police like with the previous charge, pointing out that <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot095 - Vancouver Police record, Nov 1-2, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I made only “passive resistance” and “a civil restraining order” would be an alternative</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… I can’t lay asst. by trespass charges b/c he only offers passive resistance. … When Mr. Gao has been persistent in his activities i.e. repeatedly attending to the offices & ‘harassing’, I’ve laid a mischief charge. He has 2 outstanding mischief charges b/c of this. Again, his actions aren’t enough to lay charges re: s. 264.</p> <p>The only alternative is a civil restraining order.</p> <p> <u>P.S.</u> I’ve heard that MR. Gao is well-known in Richmond for the same kind of activities.”</p> </blockquote> <p>By Ms. Munkley’s logic the Richmond court Assault charges from standoffs with UBC Hospital security guards would have been questionable as well.</p> <p>By this time I had spoken to other criminal lawyers, and some suggested that I get a lawyer to do both criminal defense and civil lawsuit – apparently my criminal offenses involving lawyers “victims” made it even less likely, beside my lack of money, for lawyers not dealing with criminal cases to take on such a civil ‘client’. I recall when I asked Warren & Eder about it on November 1 I had just been given that idea by other lawyers.</p> <p>Regarding legal expenses, one lawyer I spoke to was a key figure at Legal Services Society handling Legal Aid, and he told me Legal Aid provided some financial assistance to civil cases such as in family law, but not for employment dispute. He did bring my case to an executive meeting to see if logistic expenses could be covered in a <em>pro bono</em> manner, but it was not approved.</p> <p>As for a lawyer to handle both criminal and civil cases, several of the lawyers I spoke to highly recommended Marion Buller, enthusing that here was a female lawyer who could do both.</p> <p>Two lawyers within her firm cautioned that Buller had recently become “engaged” and was quite busy, but I tried regardless, not getting to meet with her but speak once on the firm’s internal intercom-phone, who told me she would be in a conflict-of-interest position were she to take my case.</p> <p>I persisted again, but <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot097 - Vancouver Provincial Court record, Nov 4, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">this time when Vancouver Police came I was charged with Criminal Harassment</font></a>.</p> <p>This was a new type of criminal charge that had become part of the law on August 1, 1993, to target ‘stalking’ as a crime (“<a href="http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/Statcan/85-002-XIE/0129685-002-XIE.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Criminal Harassment</font></a>”, by Rebecca Kong, Vol. 16, No. 12, <em>Juristat</em>), and contained the following descriptions (“<a href="http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/page-125.html#docCont" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Criminal Code</font></a>”, Department of Justice Canada):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Criminal harassment</p> <p><strong><a>264.</a></strong> (1) No person shall, without lawful authority and knowing that another person is harassed or recklessly as to whether the other person is harassed, engage in conduct referred to in subsection (2) that causes that other person reasonably, in all the circumstances, to fear for their safety or the safety of anyone known to them.</p> <p>Prohibited conduct</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>This was the “s.264” Marjorie Munkley had referred to in her November 1 memo, that my actions weren’t enough for this charge, which emphasized fear for safety on the victim’s part – with protection of women in mind – and carried a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail – actual violence not required!</p> <p>Whether it had caught any real stalkers at that point, the new law netted me so wasn’t in vain. The evolution of the history starting from my UBC employment dispute and even prior – as in earlier Parts of this blog article – showed how crucial it was for those with oppressive agendas to concoct a thread of “violence” early on for the “fear” factor.</p> <p>In hindsight there was the ‘Three strikes and you’re out’ doctrine on police’s part after I had piled up 3 mischief charges, but it would take a strong accuser to make “s.264” happen – when my actions didn’t justify it as Munkley stated.</p> <p>I was unclear how ‘hot’ Marion Buller was, but to execute a pre-meditated ‘sting’ to clampdown on peaceful activism by asserting that minor infractions were actually fearsome and dangerous acts would take a strong personality, or a strong motive. Ms. Buller didn’t lack either (“Native justice report raps arrogant RCMP”, by Scott Simpson, October 29, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Attorney-General Colin Gabelmann says he will tell the RCMP to improve its treatment of aboriginals following a report that says some police officers in the Cariboo-Chilcotin treat native Indian people with arrogance and disrespect, bordering on contempt.</p> <p>Gabelmann spoke Thursday at the Toosey reserve during the release of Judge Anthony Sarich’s long-awaited report on the Cariboo-Chilcotin native justice inquiry.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Sgt. Peter Montague, the RCMP’s media liaison, said the RCMP received a copy of the report late Thursday afternoon.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Gabelmann also announced that Marion Buller, who acted as counsel for the commission, will carry out a province-wide consultation on aboriginal legal issues.”</p> </blockquote> <p>A top B.C. lawyer on Aboriginal issues, Buller had been the legal counsel for a justice inquiry into RCMP mistreatment of natives in a B.C. region and was in charge of further province-wide consultation for the government.</p> <p>No wonder other lawyers had told me she would be the person to take all my cases. But when she didn’t, didn’t care to, or couldn’t, she had no problem helping police execute a “3-strikes” measure on me.</p> <p>On November 4 I appeared in Vancouver Provincial Court for the Criminal Harassment charge, instead of at Richmond Provincial Court sentencing for the breach-of-recognizance charge from phoning lawyer Patricia Connor. At this point lawyer Richard Dempsey likely dropped out from the Richmond case, as <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot093 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Oct 25-Nov 10, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">VSMHT notes on November 5 described the situation</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Dave Phillips – they have not proceeded in Richmond for two reasons. 1) Mr. G is up on yet another charge in Van. 2) There is a problem with obtaining a lawyer who is willing to represent him.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Richmond court sentencing hearing was rescheduled for early December.</p> <p>Now Crown prosecution opposed releasing me on bail for the 4 Vancouver court charges – most likely because of Criminal Harassment. Previously in May-July I had been denied bail twice for two Assault charges at Richmond court, as in Part 7, due to my breaching no-go or no-contact bail conditions. Now in October-November it was my piling up new charges at new locations.</p> <p>In Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre several corrections/probation officers formed an informal group to manage my situation, and Aunt Sally became part of it.</p> <p>Why my Aunt Sally? It turned out that before I got into the legal troubles Sally – her husband Rev. Stephen Lee had founded Vancouver Chinese Mennonite Church on June 4, 1978 as discussed – had already worked for several years as a Vancouver Provincial Court Chinese-language interpreter (“<a href="http://www.lawsociety.bc.ca/docs/publications/reports/InterpretersWG.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Report of the Interpreters Working Group</font></a>”, July 14, 2006, Law Society of British Columbia). What a surprise, quite in contrast to John Nash’s wife’s uncle having been a United Nations interpreter with elite Salvadoran family background – as if the kind of issues in one’s future had been predicted.</p> <p>Fortunately,<font color="#333333"> Sally and Stephen volunteered to put up a surety bond for my bail</font>, i.e., if I got into future bail trouble they would lose the money, so on November 9 I was released from what would be my last jail detention in Vancouver.</p> <p>On <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot098 - Surety bail recognizance, Nov 9, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">this surety bond recognizance</font></a> as well as on the immediate previous ones, the no-go locations included “Crown Counsel Office at 222 Main Street” in Vancouver as a result of my frequenting that office to look for Richard Dempsey after his appointment no-show at YMCA Enterprise Centre and my mischief charge there.</p> <p>Sally Lee’s address of 5826 Wales Street – right across from Lee Crowley’s Avalon Dairy at 5805 Wales Street – was also on it.</p> <p>Immediately I was assigned earlier trial dates in 1994 for the Vancouver court charges: <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot099 - Probation officer notes, Nov 10-26, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">February 11 for Criminal Harassment and February 23 for the Mischiefs</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>. This meant <font color="#333333">lawyer Phil Seagram took up defense for all my pending criminal cases</font>, who told me Aunt Sally had spoken to him.</p> <p>On November 12, my “DNA” test result came back to Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic. Clinic notes didn’t disclose what it meant, only that my <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot100 - Vancouver Forensic Psychiatric Clinic record, Nov 12-26, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">probation officer was informed</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“p/c to P.O., informed him client D.N.A. on 93.11.12.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As discussed earlier, using DNA to determine mental illness is more a “scam” than medical science even today.</p> <p>On December 8, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot101 - Vancouver South Mental Health Team record, Nov 12-Dec 8, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver South Mental Health Team listed “Aunt Sally Lee & Mom”</font></a> among potential participants for another “CC” (case conference) wanted by UBC Hospital nurse Diane Woodhouse.</p> <p>Prior to that on December 1, Richmond Provincial Court held sentencing hearing for my breach-of-recognizance from phoning lawyer Patricia Connor, and I was given a<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot102 - Richmond Provincial Court record, June 18, July 27 & Dec 1, 1993 (end).pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">one-year conditional discharge</font></a> by Judge J. R. Groberman, where probation conditions included no contact with Patricia Connor as well as what UBC Hospital’s Dr. James Harris had suggested since February, i.e., forensic psychiatric counselling – with treatments including medication:</p> <blockquote> <p>“(4) You are to abide by all appointments set up through your P.O. and all appointments set up by the Forensic Clinic.</p> <p>(5) You are to accept such treatments as provided by the doctors assigned to you and you are to take medication as prescribed for you by your doctor.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Compared to the many bail recognizances I had been given to that point, this was the first time “treatments” and “medication” were written into the conditions – Forensic Clinic psychiatrist Dr. Clifford Kerr’s October 19 pre-sentencing report had indicated he wanted to use treatment including medication.</p> <p>But there was no condition that I not go to UBC Hospital or UBC, recommended by the September 21 VSMHT community case conference and by probation officer David Phillips’s pre-sentencing report.</p> <p>Somewhat relieved, I thanked lawyer Phil Seagram for doing his job.</p> <p>By the time of the February Vancouver court trials, my lawyer would negotiate for those charges to be stayed in exchange for several one-year peace bonds with certain conditions. It was something I would have mixed feelings about, and wasn’t all Seagram’s credit, or Aunt Sally’s as no Chinese interpretation was needed. A judge presiding over some of the cases happened to be my former landlady's daughter – the apartment at 1640 West 11th Avenue in Vancouver.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2012/10/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 9</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-48106240812810400362012-04-30T23:58:00.001-04:002020-12-11T00:00:36.038-05:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 7) — when legal and judicial prudence means the powerful is right<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2012/03/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 6</a>)</p> <p>In-between “E” Division Contract Policing Branch’s February 3 receipt of a copy of Chief Superintendent M. K. M. Clegg’s January 29 letter from“E” Division to Royal Canadian Mounted Police Headquarters in response to my complaint forwarded by Solicitor General – as in Part 6 of this blog article – and C/Supt. P. M. Cummins in charge of Contract Policing receiving it on February 5, on February 4, 1993 <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> newspaper quoted RCMP Assistant Commissioner Frank Palmer on newly proposed freedom-of-information laws for British Columbia (“Institutions are worrying about how many secrets they will have to disclose”, by Frances Bula, February 4, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The proposed law - the second phase of B.C.’s new information and privacy legislation - is supposed to come into effect in October, 1994. (The first phase, affecting central government, should be in effect by this fall.)</p> <p>While people who fight for the rights of psychiatric patients, paraplegics or union employees are excited about the legislation, the institutions that hold information about them are wary.</p> <p>“There’s great paranoia at the beginning,” admitted RCMP assistant commissioner for B.C. Frank Palmer, who has already been through a round of this once with the federal government's freedom-of-information legislation.</p> <p>“That’s what’s happening here now, with people worried about protecting privacy and coping with the demands for information.””</p> </blockquote> <p>The “RCMP assistant commissioner for B.C. Frank Palmer” talking about “great paranoia at the beginning” wasn’t exactly RCMP’s top leader in British Columbia. Nonetheless, A/Comm. Palmer was in charge of Criminal Operations at “E” Division in B.C., i.e., the officer to whose attention my complaint was directed before forwarded to a subordinate, C/Supt. P. M. Cummins.</p> <p>It wasn’t only that Frank Palmer, or F. G. Palmer, happened to be talking about “great paranoia” at this time, but that his media profile had placed him personally on record for criminal prosecution of only one politician in B.C., and that unlucky one wasn’t ex-Premier Bill Vander Zalm in 1991-92 for his “breach of trust” in the Fantasy Gardens scandal covered in Part 6, but former Vander Zalm cabinet minister Jack Kempf (“RCMP investigating Socred MLA: Kempf’s supporters stand by him”, by Daphne Bramham, August 14, 1991,<a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“An RCMP investigation of Social Credit MLA Jack Kempf “makes it hard to run an election campaign,” the president of Kempf’s constituency association said Tuesday.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Assistant deputy attorney-general Bill Stewart confirmed Tuesday the former forests minister is under investigation and has been for more than four months.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The investigation is being overseen by special prosecutor Richard Peck, who was appointed by the attorney-general May 2 and is responsible for determining whether charges should be laid.</p> <p>His appointment was made by the attorney-general's office following an April 19 request from RCMP assistant commissioner F. G. Palmer that a special prosecutor be appointed.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Special prosecutor Peter Freeman is expected to report to Attorney-General Russ Fraser within the next two weeks on whether charges should be laid against Vander Zalm.</p> <p>…</p> <p>NDP leader Mike Harcourt defended Kempf’s right to run as a Social Credit candidate.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Kempf was appointed forests minister in 1986 and was forced to resign in 1987, after the comptroller-general determined there were irregularities in the ministry’s financial operation.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That’s right, after Vander Zalm’s disgraced exit there was a criminal prosecution of the ex-Premier; yet the RCMP officer in charge of criminal operations, Frank Palmer, was not on press record for it but for prosecution of Jack Kempf, a pioneer in challenging Vander Zalm’s personal credibility as a lawsuit witness in 1989 called by Brian Mason who later became my lawyer in 1992 – as discussed in Part 6.</p> <p>From the fall of 1991 to the spring of 1992, the two nemeses Vander Zalm and Kempf were each prosecuted on “breach-of-trust” charges, Vander Zalm defended by prominent business lawyer Peter Butler of Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy, and Kempf by Mason – the same opposing lawyers in the Peter Griffiths lawsuit litigation in 1989.</p> <p>Vander Zalm was acquitted in late June 1992 as in Part 6. But Kempf made an unexpected guilty plea for misuse of constituency office money, on March 16 after a last-minute discussion with prosecution (“Kempf admits he breached trust of constituents”, by Larry Still, March 17, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>)</p> <p>March 16, 1992 was an ‘infamous’ day when I had heated email exchanges with graduate student Christopher Healey at UBC Computer Science Department, that then went into RCMP file through an exaggerated complaint by some about so-called “violence” – as in Parts 4, 5 & 6.</p> <p>That date was something intriguing shared by Kempf and me: bad personal political luck on the same day with no apparently connection other than that later his lawyer I would hire who otherwise wasn’t known for political cases.</p> <p>So in October-December 1992 when Justice Department lawyer Paul Partridge for RCMP, and Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy lawyers – especially Jack Giles, a henchman for the Vander Zalm government – for UBC tried to get Brian Mason to back down from my legal action as discussed in Parts 5 & 6, they probably mentioned higher levels than Superintendent D. G. Cowley, RCMP commander for Vancouver region who personally intervened on October 14 to obstruct my lawsuit.</p> <p>RCMP personal-information disclosures so far have not revealed if he acted oppressively on my case, but Frank Palmer had a law degree so was qualified to handle legal situations, and had been known for a hint of “McCarthyism” since the 1970s, intimidating people on behalf of RCMP (“Opposition accused of ‘trial by press’”, by Mary Trueman, November 26, 1977, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Opposition MPs are encouraging a trial by press of people implicated in RCMP wrongdoing, Liberal Roderick Blaker charged yesterday.</p> <p>Mr. Blaker, MP for Lachine-Lakeshore and parliamentary secretary to Solicitor-General Francis Fox, told several hundred students at a University of Ottawa panel discussion that the process involves an opposition member asking a question in the Commons containing several allegations of wrongdoing of which he has no proof but which he knows will make the <br />news at 6 and 11 o’clock and the newspaper headlines.</p> <p>Canadian Civil Liberties Association counsel Alan Borovoy quickly countered that he agreed there should be no accusation without a trial, but he only wished that some trials would take place.</p> <p>In a spirited exchange punctuated by enthusiastic applause, the two men debated the federal Government's use of a royal commission to handle charges of Mountie illegalities, with Mr. Borovoy calling the commission an oversized receptacle that the Government is using to handle allegations which in many cases call for immediate investigation and prosecution.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Conservative MP Elmer MacKay (Central Nova), another member of the panel, said he had been disappointed in the ability of parliamentary committees to look into allegations of wrongdoing.</p> <p>Parliament is the highest court in the land and committees are very important adjuncts of Parliament, he said. …</p> <p>The panel’s fourth member was Sgt. Frank Palmer of the RCMP, a member of the force’s legal branch who holds a master’s degree in law. Sgt. Palmer discussed the need for more police powers, particularly in regard to the opening of mail.</p> <p>He told the students that we do have spies running around this country, regardless of how unimportant Canada may seem to you in the scheme of things in this universe.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So back in 1977 when Canadians were passionate about investigating RCMP wrongdoing and Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau appointed a royal commission to do so, Canadian Civil Liberties Association counsel Alan Borovoy wanted to prosecute it as crime, and Tory MP Elmer MacKay – father of today’s Defence Minister Peter MacKay and friend of Airbus Affair businessman Karlheinz Schreiber as in Part 1 – wanted parliamentary committee investigations, whereas RCMP Sgt. Frank Palmer wanted to open people’s mail to see if they were foreign spies.</p> <p>Why then in January 1993 didn’t the powerful A/Comm. F. G. Palmer simply dismiss my complaint forwarded from Solicitor General Doug Lewis, which contained documents with a much broader scope, sent on November 30, 1992 to Member of Parliament Kim Campbell who happened to be Justice Minister, intended to raise the issue of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct? As in Part 6 when the complaint came down on January 6 from A/Comm. J. W. B. McConnell, RCMP Director of Enforcement Services, it had already been restricted to only about my July 2 arrest in an RCMP-led eviction after my UBC faculty job had ended.</p> <p>It turned out that C/Supt. P. M. (Patrick) Cummins (<a href="http://www.cacp.ca/media/library/download/364/annualdirectory.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police 2002-2003 Membership Director</font><font color="#0000ff">y</font></a>) who was given my complaint and made the decision to shove it under RCMP civil litigation for my lawsuit, had been the kind of man Palmer would want for opening people’s mail and catching spies.</p> <p>Cummins had been RCMP’s leading national-security investigator in its headquarters in 1989-90, but inexplicably by January 1993 was only in charge of Contract Policing, i.e., municipal policing, in B.C.</p> <p>A press report 4 years earlier in January 1989 had described then Supt. Cummins taking part in British police’s Pam Am Flight 103 bombing investigation, noting the lack of progress in the RCMP investigation he led into the 1985 Air India Flight 182 and Narita Airport twin bombings (“Canadians join investigation of Pan Am sabotage”, by Paul Koring, January 4, 1989, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Superintendent Patrick Cummins and Canadian Aviation Safety Board investigator John Garstang will consult in the investigation of the Dec. 21 destruction of Pan Am Flight 103, spokesmen from their agencies said.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Supt. Cummins is expected to stay only about a week. He heads the RCMP investigation into the twin bombings of the Air-India jet, which killed all 329 people on board, most of them Canadians, and a blast at Tokyo's Narita airport the same morning that killed two baggage handlers. The second bomb is thought to have been intended for another Air-India jet and had been carried across the Pacific aboard a CP Air jumbo.</p> <p>Both bombs began their air journeys in Vancouver, and extremist Sikh separatists have been widely blamed for the attacks. The RCMP, however, has yet to arrest anyone in connection with the bombings, the worst-ever terrorist attack on civilian airliners.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In fact, the RCMP investigation into the Air India bombing was so slow that in a face-to-face meeting a year later with C/Supt. Cummins, victim families blamed RCMP for blocking a public inquiry and for ignoring repeated warnings before the tragedy (“RCMP accused of blocking inquiry into Air-India crash”, by Charles Rusnell, January 31, 1990, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A group representing Canadian victims of the 1985 Air-India crash has accused the RCMP of blocking its bid for a public inquiry.</p> <p>About 20 members of the Citizens' Alliance for a Public Inquiry into the Air-India Disaster met with Chief Supt. Pat Cummins of the RCMP's criminal investigation division Monday.</p> <p>But alliance spokesman Sundaram Ramakesavan said Cummins wouldn’t answer specific questions about the investigation except to say the RCMP didn’t have enough evidence to charge anyone in connection with the crash.</p> <p>Ramakesavan said the group left the meeting convinced the RCMP has made no progress in its five-year investigation.</p> <p>He said the alliance, which has about 200 members, believes the force is refusing to end its investigation and hand the matter over to an inquiry because the RCMP might be found negligent.</p> <p>It has been reported the RCMP was warned several times before the crash that an Air-India flight was to be bombed.”</p> </blockquote> <p>You see, later in 2011 Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass blamed the late Vancouver lawyer David Gibbons for blocking RCMP investigation of the Air India bombing, as in Part 6, but it sounded rather whimsical in this context: for years with its topnotch investigators and state-of-the-art equipment under C/Supt. Cummins RCMP made little progress, and an egoistic lawyer making money from middle-class immigrants was to blame?</p> <p>I make this personal observation because, as in Part 6, David Gibbons’s small law office was the first Vancouver law firm I visited, in July 1992 recommended by Justice (at the time Master) Pamela Kirkpatrick of the B.C. Supreme Court whose husband David had been my UBC colleague and mentor.</p> <p>At the time I looked at <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot070 - 1992 Vancouver Yellow Page courtesy of VPL Special Collections librarian Andrew Martin.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Gibbons law firm’s address, 2 Gaoler’s Mews</font></a>, and said to myself, “It’s got my name and the cat’s meows – my favorite feminine sound!”</p> <p>Well, even after my political activism in Vancouver had gone into hiatus my limited English still didn’t recognize ‘Jailer’s Cages’ in “Gaoler’s Mews” – site of Vancouver’s historical first jail (“<a href="http://ghostsofvancouver.com/gaolers_mews.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Haunted Locations: Gaoler's Mews, 12 Water Street</font></a>”, Ghosts of Old Vancouver).</p> <p>So Justice Kirkpatrick had subtly warned me of police traps, which Supt. D. G. Cowley would soon authorize although it remains unclear if A/Comm. F. G. Palmer and C/Supt. P. M. Cummins also did.</p> <p>Later in the 1990s, Gibbons expanded his law firm Gibbons Ritchie and moved to the historical Marine Building’s Suite 1300 – another 13th-floor exception in Vancouver like Justice Kirkpatrick’s old firm McCarthy Tetrault as covered in Part 6. (“<a href="http://www.cpaiii.com/pdf/Gibbons.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">David W. Gibbons recommendation letter for CPA Investigations</font></a>”, November 30, 1999, CPA Investigations)</p> <p>As for the Air India bombing, I doubt C/Supt. Cummins had also been blocking the truth, but more likely torn apart by his various agendas as a ‘jack of all trades’ in the national security arena.</p> <p>At the time in 1989-90, Cummins also led RCMP’s National Security Investigations Directorate and National Emergency Operation Centre, busy with catching spies and countering terrorism. His directorate was not even supposed to exist because past RCMP “dirty tricks” in national security had led to the field’s takeover by a civilian Canadian Security Intelligence Service after studies by royal commissions investigating RCMP activities. One of the royal commissions, the McDonald Commission, was at the center of debate in 1977 in the earlier story about Sgt. Frank Palmer wanting to open people’s mail to catch spies. (“Some RCMP traditions never die”, by Bob Bragg, July 9, 1989, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>; and, “WAR ROOM: Command centre ready for battle”, by John Kessel, February 19, 1990, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>)</p> <p>In fact, in June 1989 when RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster disclosed the existence of the national security directorate, Cummins was at his prime, touted as a future RCMP Commissioner (“RCMP security team may be rival of CSIS”, by Richard Cleroux, July 4, 1989, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster confirmed the existence of the 131- member section, which he called a directorate, at a Justice Committee hearing in Ottawa in June.</p> <p>The directorate, the highest designation given to a special group in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police , is led by Chief Superintendent Pat Cummins . Mr. Cummins, a bilingual Western Canadian in his early fifties, is often touted as a possible future commissioner of the RCMP.</p> <p>CSIS has the mandate to gather intelligence on groups in Canada with links to foreign revolutionary organizations. The RCMP is supposed to receive intelligence from CSIS and become involved only when it has evidence or suspicions of criminal activity.</p> <p>But there has been bad blood at various levels between the two organizations since CSIS was set up after two royal commissions - the McDonald Commission in Ottawa and the Keable Commission in Montreal - exposed a series of dirty tricks committed by the old RCMP security service in the name of national security.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Though not the Air India bombing, but Cummins did achieve success on ‘smaller’ cases. The parallel bomb explosion killing two baggage handlers at Japan’s Narita Airport was solved, as was a budget leak parallel to the Doug Small affair – a copy of the 1989 federal budget summary found in a trash bin and given to Global TV reporter Doug Small who aired it early.</p> <p>For the parallel budget leak, Cummins determined that a copy obtained by Johan Mares, a manager at Mutual Life Assurance of Canada, allowed the company to benefit in a business deal though it backed out at the last minute. (“Pieces could be key to Air-India charges”, by Paul Koring, September 2, 1989, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>; “Bureaucrat ‘schemed’ against Small, officer says”, by Richard Cleroux, November 9, 1989, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>; “INTRIGUE; Chaotic budget-leak trial leaves a spy-novel trail of twists and turns”, by Greg Weston, November 11, 1989, <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></em></a>; and, “MOUNTIE DESCRIBES DUAL PROBE: TOKYO BOMBING, AIR CRASH CITED; Terrorist trial told of dual probe”, by Marc Edge, September 19, 1990, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>)</p> <p>So it must have been an extremely important assignment, or a slap in the face, for C/Supt. P. M. Cummins to find himself handling municipal policing in British Columbia where the Sikh extremists had originated their Air India Flight 182 and Narita Airport bombings. He did get press coverage for complaining about welfare fraud, but it’s a far cry from the glory of national security (“‘We’re legitimizing fraud,’ police say”, by Salim Jiwa, December 3, 1993, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Province</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Ironically though not quite coming full circle, many years later in a 2010 inquiry report on the Air India bombing, by then retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice John Major not only criticized RCMP dismissiveness toward prior warnings but pointed to “contract policing” as reducing RCMP’s ability to act on national security (“<a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/17/john-ivison-rcmp-csis-bumbling-behind-air-india-tragedy/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">RCMP, CSIS bumbling behind Air India tragedy</font></a>”, by John Ivison, June 17, 2010, <em>National Post</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2010/06/18/major-rcmp018.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">RCMP, airports in spotlight after Air India report</font></a>”, June 18, 2010, <em>CBC News</em>).</p> <p>I doubt the training of the RCMP officers who evicted me from UBC office on July 2, 1992 endowed them to catch spies or terrorists, but in B.C. their duties in ‘small’ cases like it were ultimately overseen by C/Supt. Cummins, who on January 13, 1993 blocked a required investigation for my complaint that had gone through Solicitor General Doug Lewis – not to mention my allegations against Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct in the documents.</p> <p>But given the history of Frank Palmer and Patrick Cummins, I get the sense that being declared a “paranoid ideation” and sent to psychiatric committal by RCMP, as in Part 6, was already fortunate. These RCMP leaders had their magnifying glasses on looking for anything resembling ‘spying’ or ‘terrorism’, and tossing a plastic coffee mug or water in it not at anyone – as in Parts 4 & 5 – could be an act of “violence” to be compared to Valery Fabrikant’s multiple murders.</p> <p>Yet the web of connections was such that even if a ‘McCarthyish” police leader had not been there my complaint about RCMP likely would still have been cast aside, for it was an extension of my UBC dispute with Computer Science Head Maria Klawe, whose regional ties were more cemented than an average person like me realized.</p> <p>At the time RCMP’s top leader in B.C. was Deputy Commissioner J. D. (Dennis) Farrell, “E” Division Commanding Officer to whom A/Comm. McConnell’s January 6 letter forwarding my complaint was addressed as in Part 6.</p> <p>Farrell was a business-friendly figure, also interested in science as he sat on the board of B.C. Science World, wisecracking about being the only policeman in that circle (“Fund raiser for Science World was no gamble”, by Malcolm Parry, February 18, 1995, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“SCIENCE BREAKOUT. . . After eight years of holding decorous fund-raising events in the Hyatt's sombre ballroom, event chairs Joan Proudfoot and Kim Stevens moved no-host bars, roulette wheels and blackjack tables into Science World's own False Creek facility Thursday and began raking attendees' wallets.</p> <p>“All the bandits in town are here: the bankers, the lawyers, and I’m the only policeman,” RCMP deputy commissioner and Science World director Dennis Farrell joked of the $150-per event as cards turned against him.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Well, since 1990 my boss then ex-boss Maria Klawe had been on the same Science World board (<a href="http://www.hmc.edu/about1/administrativeoffices/officeofthepresident1/bio1/cv.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Curriculum Vitae</font></a>, Office of the President, Harvey Mudd College) and was not a policewoman. So one of the bandits?</p> <p>Then consider C/Supt. M. K. M. (Mike) Clegg, the officer in charge of Administration & Personnel at “E” Division who sent letters to me on ending investigation for my 1992 public complaint and on receipt of my new complaint in January 1993, and sent the January 29 letter to RCMP headquarters in Ottawa regarding my new complaint. As late as November 1991 – when my dispute with Klawe was flaring up – then Supt. Clegg was still in Edmonton in charge of RCMP personnel in Alberta. (“RCMP reconsider apology”, by Ron Collins, August 23, 1991, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Calgary Herald</em></font></a>; “Alleged rape victim to file complaint about RCMP”, November 28, 1991, <a href="http://www.edmontonjournal.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Edmonton Journal</em></font></a>; and, “Mountie's firing over secrecy oath demanded”, by Neal Hall, November 3, 1993, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></font></a>)</p> <p>As touched on in Part 5, Maria Klawe didn’t just come from an Edmonton family with her parents University of Alberta professors, but one in which her British mother had been a intelligence officer during World War II and her Polish father the chief cartographer (map maker) for Thomas Nelson & Sons, one of the oldest publishers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – the kind of heritage endearing to Canadian police.</p> <p>I was simply unaware of the broader critical factors blocking my efforts, and my lack of knowledge was made worse by disinformation tactics from persons like Klawe even before our dispute, before an 1990 incident alleged in my lawsuit and mentioned in Part 4 about availability of Computer Science faculty positions. I met her parents in 1989 when she and her husband, colleague Nick Pippenger, invited me and visiting professor Chee Yap over for dinner, where she introduced her dad as an Alberta professor of Chemistry who had served as a medical doctor in India’s military – Sherlock Holmes kind of fairy tale no one there contradicted!</p> <p>In January-February 1993 when RCMP “E” Division senior officers were blocking my complaint forwarded from Solicitor General, I was actually under a second round of psychiatric suppression after an arrest at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Vancouver site while attempting an interview, this time criminally charged by Vancouver Police then diverted to psychiatric committal. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot048 - RCMP E division C-Supt Clegg letter to Feng Gao returned to sender, Jan 25-Feb 24, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">One of the two letters from C/Supt. M. K. M. Clegg</font></a> was undelivered and returned to RCMP.</p> <p>Previously, on December 22, 1992 a mental health review panel had ordered my release from my first psychiatric committal, which had begun on November 30 at UBC Hospital with an RCMP intervention led by Sergeant Brian Cotton with cooperation of Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick after I had faxed documents to MP Kim Campbell as in Part 6. Back in my Vancouver apartment, I continued phoning CBC TV about issues in press releases I had sent CBC and Kim Campbell.</p> <p>In the late evening of January 12, 1993, after CBC national news had ended at 10 p.m., a man on the phone line asked me to come right away, I was surprised and asked for the purpose, and he said for an interview I had been requesting.</p> <p>I went immediately for my first-ever visit to CBC Vancouver at 700 Hamilton Street, told the reception at the empty lobby about the news interview appointment, and was asked to sit down and wait. For over an hour, every time someone came down, apparently to go home, I wondered if it was to greet me. After midnight the reception again asked me what I was there for, I explained accordingly and the receptionist said but no one was in the newsroom now.</p> <p>Disappointed, but feeling positive that at last I was given an interview, I made phone calls on January 13 around news hours to CBC to reconnect for the interview ‘granted’, but was again put on long holds like before. That evening after the early local news I decided to attend the CBC site, hoping that whoever had asked me to come last night would pick it up again.</p> <p>As discussed, January 13 was also the day when <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot044 - RCMP E division C-Supt Cummins letter to C-Supt Clegg, Jan 13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">RCMP C/Supt. P. M. Cummins, former national-security head, sent a memo to C/Supt. M. K. M. Clegg</font></a> to suggest that given my lawsuit there be no separate investigation for my complaint directed from Solicitor General.</p> <p>That day was also the start of the Vancouver Police record as released to me in a 2003 personal-information disclosure.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot049 - Vancouver Police record, Jan 14, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Police officers Munroe and Bieg attended the CBC site on January 14 and made an arrest</font></a>, after police had started attending in the evening of January 13 at the request of CBC security, and phone records given to police by the head of security showed a history of many calls and that at CBC’s request B.C. Tel security had been monitoring my calls.</p> <p>There was a major error in officer Munroe’s notes, the claim that I had been “escorted off many times in the past for weeks”. I had begun attending CBC site on January 12 after being asked to come for an interview – but it was then like hadn’t happened to CBC however B.C. Tel security records could contain the info.</p> <p>The following in a Synopsis by officer Bieg was largely accurate:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Accused (GAO) first attended on 93-01-13 @ 1915 hrs after numerous unsuccessful telephone calls for his interview. He was escorted off the premise by security staff. GAO returned one hour later and police were called. Police attended and escorted GAO off the premise. GAO returned 1/2 hrs later again demanding an interview. GAO was convinced that there was no one in the newsroom (2318 hrs) and left. GAO returned the next morning and once again refused to leave. Police were called and escorted him off the property. GAO returned 30 minutes later and once again refused to leave. Once again, police were called and PC’s 1410 BIEG and 1396 Munroe attended.</p> <p>PC’s attempted to dissuade GAO from pursuing his cause in this manner and suggested numerous alternatives. GAO was granted a start(?) interview with CBC staff, but this also failed to satisfy him. GAO was requested to leave by staff several times and continued to refuse. GAO stated if arrested, he would return. GAO eventually arrested after refusing to leave and stating he would keep returning.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Thanks to these two Vancouver Police officers Bieg and Munroe, I got to speak with an executive producer.</p> <p>More specifically, when two young officers, Bieg and Munroe as in police record, arrived on bicycles they asked me what I wanted to talk about. I said that during Charlottetown constitutional negotiation Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had intentionally subjected Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, who had been weakened by skin cancer and treatment, to physically exhaustive tactics in order to extract concessions from Quebec, and I felt it was criminal conduct.</p> <p>It was the second time I mentioned this to police. Late the night before on January 13 I had told two older officers called to escort me away and they responded, “it’s too late, nobody is in the newsroom, come back tomorrow.”</p> <p>Now just before noon on January 14, police officers Bieg and Munroe said let’s go inside to ask CBC if it would cover this issue. After the officers spoke to the security personnel, an executive news producer came down and said I could be given an interview by staff but not for news. I replied it would be insufficient as the issue needed to be reported and discussed, and he responded, as if asking, that CBC would have to file a criminal charge over this for my refusal to leave and whether it would be okay with me. I said okay.</p> <p>Thus the only time a CBC newsroom staff met with me was when two police officers accompanied me inside to ask, but it was also these same officers who then arrested me for my first-ever criminal charge.</p> <p>My allegation about Mulroney making life difficult for Bourassa’s health had not been in my press releases referred to in Part 6, but was prompted by the latest news in January 1993 that Bourassa’s cancer had spread, as I later recalled in 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-8/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“During the Charlottetown constitutional negotiations in 1992 Premier Bourassa was “fatigued” and did not do well, partly due to the long hours and the intensity of the negotiations and partly because shortly after the Meech Lake accord he had undergone treatments for a serious form of skin cancer, which Brian Mulroney personally noted during his public campaign for the Charlottetown accord’s passage in the upcoming October 26, 1992 national referendum, and which would be discovered already spreading shortly after the Charlottetown accord failed in the referendum; Bourassa would ultimately died of it on October 2, 1996.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Later when Bourassa died of skin cancer he was only 63 years old.</p> <p>One newspaper story referred to in my blog post showed a link between the Diane Wilhelmy affair mentioned in Part 6 – a phone conversation transcript leaked to the media about Quebec not doing well at the constitutional negotiation table – and Bourassa’s poor health while under pressure by Mulroney (“PM asks opponents, What are you for? Anti-accord allies lack ‘common vision’ of Canada, Mulroney says”, by Alan Freeman, October 5, 1992, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Mulroney later conceded to reporters that last week’s publication of the transcript of a taped conversation between two top Quebec constitutional advisers was “not helpful.”</p> <p>He said the Yes side had been doing “extremely well” in Quebec until the transcript, in which Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa was accused of caving in during the Charlottetown negotiations, was made public. “We started behind and we were progressing very nicely,” he said, adding that it was only a “temporary downside.”</p> <p>During a stop last night in St-Georges-de-Beauce, south of Quebec City, Mr. Mulroney again defended Mr. Bourassa’s performance in Charlottetown, saying that he was amazed at the Premier’s strength two years after his bout with skin cancer.</p> <p>Mr. Mulroney’s repeated insistence that Mr. Bourassa negotiated strongly on behalf of his province may be a sign that the Prime Minister feels it necessary to offset the damage done in Quebec by the release of the transcript.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Quoted in my blog post, Quebec constitutional official Andre Tremblay lamented in the leaked phone conversation:</p> <blockquote> <p>“We’re walking on our knees, as you know, eh? I think mine are full of holes … We were aggressed, badgered, fatigued. In other words, there were an awful lot of those types of problems. It’s tough to take, psychologically having all these people against you. And they’re all against us.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So in my mind in January 1993 it seemed like physical ‘hazing’ Robert Bourassa had endured prior to the discovery that his cancer had spread.</p> <p>As mentioned in Part 6, in late November 1992 when CBC first said it might file a criminal charge if I didn’t stop phoning, I already replied that I would expose the political issues in criminal court. So it was with this thinking that on January 14 I said okay to CBC filing a criminal charge; I even asked the police officers if I could just go home and receive the notice to attend court, but was told an arrest was necessary.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot049 - Vancouver Police record, Jan 14, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The arrest charge was “Assault by Trespass” as in police record</font></a>, referring to physical resistance against removal or arrest, although the truth is that like in the July 2 RCMP arrest at UBC there wasn’t resistance. With CBC phone records of my many calls and the fact that back on December 12 – when I had eloped home to phone CBC during UBC psychiatric committal as in Part 6 – CBC had contacted Vancouver Police to discuss a charge, police also requested a charge of “Harassing Phone Calls”.</p> <p>What I didn’t expect – like the first time on November 30 with RCMP officers at my apartment – was that Vancouver Police and Crown prosecution would not let me air the political issues in court despite it being already my last-resort venue – but would again send me to a psychiatric committal, though this time with a criminal charge filed.</p> <p>On January 14 officer Bieg then phoned UBC Hospital and spoke with a female psychiatrist – Dr. Laura Chapman as in Part 6 – who provided info on my year-long UBC dispute and my “current obsession” with “corruption and criminal activity in the offices of Prime Minister Mulroney” – all part of a mental illness in need of treatment but wasn’t treated due to my release by a mental health review panel from the last committal.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot049 - Vancouver Police record, Jan 14, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Officer Bieg then listed 3 police recommendations</font></a>, the first as recommended by the UBC psychiatrist:</p> <blockquote> <p>1) 30-day remand to Forensic Psychiatric Center for psych assessment;</p> <p>2) one street block of no-go area around CBC Vancouver building;</p> <p>3) no direct or indirect contact with any CBC premises or employees.</p> </blockquote> <p>Vancouver Provincial Court record shows that <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot050 - Vancouver Provincial Court record, Jan 15, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">on January 15 a “harassing-telephone-calls” charge was filed under Judge W. J. Kitchen</font></a>, then stayed by Crown counsel D. Mulligan. There was no bail requirement, thus no condition of no contact with CBC.</p> <p>On that day I was examined by a Vancouver Police Department medical doctor and then by a forensic psychiatrist from B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute. The <font color="#333333">wheels began the motion for the justice system to diagnose me as a “Paranoid Schizophrenic”</font>.</p> <p>As in Part 6 my psychiatric diagnosis had begun on November 30 as “Paranoid Delusional Disorder”, wanted by RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton, with many differential diagnoses including “Schizophrenia”, and on December 1 became “Delusional Disorder of Persecutory Type” as per Dr. Peter Chan but Dr. Chapman kept one differential diagnosis of “Schizophrenia” – possibly at the request of RCMP Supt. D. G. Cowley.</p> <p>Schizophrenia is a more permanent and real disease whereas delusional disorder can be a temporary mental misperception of reality, as mentioned in Part 6.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot051 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute record, Jan 15, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The first maneuver for “Schizophrenia” was by the Vancouver Police Department doctor</font></a>, who falsified what I had said about Mulroney and Bourassa:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Extremely delusional and quite paranoid. Believe Brian Mulroney is responsible for Robert Bourassa cancer.”</p> </blockquote> <p>That really made me sound kind of ‘crazy’. How could an individual like me have known who, if anyone, had been responsible for Bourassa’s cancer? I was merely protesting about the ‘hazing’ of a Bourassa already weakened by the disease and treatment.</p> <p>Later when Mulroney announced his resignation he would indicate he had taken special notice in 1990 when Bourassa was first diagnosed with cancer, but that was quite different from being responsible for the disease.</p> <p>With this ‘scary’ statement planted in my mouth, the police doctor declared:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Not fit for court</p> <p>1st certificate signed</p> <p>Request psychiatric consult”</p> </blockquote> <p>Clearly this police doctor wanted a hard psychiatric diagnosis for me. However the released police record doe not contain a copy of the “1st certificate” he had signed.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot051 - B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute record, Jan 15, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The forensic psychiatrist interviewing me in the evening of January 15</font></a> did record a correct version of what I said:</p> <blockquote> <p>“He claimed that he was calling CBC for last couple of days and today went there to arrange an interview with news team. When asked what kind of things he wanted to talk on TV, he said, “There are two things. One is about my former boss who planned a scandal about me, the second thing is about Brain [Brian] Mulroney, he knew that Robert Bourassa had cancer but he put him through too much during Charlottetown scandal. He played dirty tricks.””</p> </blockquote> <p>So the psychiatrist concluded that I was fit to stand trial, but still diagnosed me as suffering from “Paranoid Schizophrenia”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“1. He suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia in active phase.</p> <p>2. He is fit to stand trial</p> <p>3. He is certifiable under MHA (certified)</p> <p>4. He should seek treatment for his mental chronicles.”</p> </blockquote> <p>A medical certificate by this forensic psychiatrist is among the police record disclosure.</p> <p>The Forensic Psychiatric Services Referral Form listed a next court date of January 16, which could be when the criminal charge was stayed – following the police doctor’s instead of the psychiatrist’s opinion.</p> <p>Luckily, I was not sent to Forensic Psychiatric Institute for committal, a place for criminal offenders with serious psychiatric problems. Someone asked me if I had a family doctor who could help, I gave Dr. James Lai’s contact info, and an arrangement was made to have Dr. Lai’s referral by which I was sent by ambulance on January 18, with police officers escorting, from the Disordered Offenders Unit of the Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre to Vancouver General Hospital.</p> <p>The diversion to the city hospital instead of the forensic psychiatric facility suggested that the justice system at that point didn’t really treat me as a “Paranoid Schizophrenic”, but used that hard diagnosis to suppress the political issues. I personally was not aware of being that “ill” – not until October when I was assessed as part of another forensic psychiatric assessment required by the court.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot052 - Vancouver General Hospital record, Jan 18-20, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver General Hospital record</font></a> recorded my transfer from Dr. J. K. Lai on January 18 for “Delusional Disorder” as in Admission record, and brought by a police officer as in a medical certificate signed by Dr. Dorothy Linda McWatters.</p> <p>Most likely the police doctor’s “1st certificate” didn’t exist despite the ‘hard’ evidence planted by him so a second certificate was needed for the committal to last more than 48 hours by the B.C. Mental Health Act – but by January 18 it had already been over 48 hours since the evening of January 15.</p> <p>Unlike the November 30 UBC Hospital certificates which had used collateral info from RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton and UBC management, Dr. McWatters’s certificate was objective regarding “violence”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Violence has been alleged by those he accuses of persecuting him.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Without a court trial to present the background political issues but instead in psychiatric hospitalization, I became seriously worried not only because I really disliked the first committal experience and the anti-psychotic medication Haldol, but because of my fear of psychiatric committal turning more permanent like a ‘dark tunnel without light at the end’. </p> <p>I re-evaluated the political allegations I had made, and began to retract from those I had no direct evidence for when speaking to psychiatrists.</p> <p>Of my three claims recorded in Dr. McWatters’s assessment sheet, the first was that my former boss at UBC had made things up and “framed” me, leading to the UBC Hospital committal, and the third was that Mulroney had acted criminally by subjecting a physically weak Bourassa to exhaustive talks during the Charlottetown process. But the second, that Mulroney was personally persecuting me, I retracted given that CBC+Kim Campbell+RCMP+Justice Kirkpatrick wasn’t quite Mulroney:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Says at that time he was delusional that PM Mulroney was personally persecuting him but no longer he believes that.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Dr. McWatters’s diagnosis was still “Delusional Disorder”, but without the “persecutory type” in UBC Hospital’s. Like UBC Hospital at the start there were differential diagnoses, here including “Schizophrenia” and “Psychotic Depression”.</p> <p>My partial retraction of allegations was not enough, and after two days of observation on January 20 I was transferred to UBC Hospital. </p> <p>On arrival for my <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot053 - UBC Hospital notes and reports, Jan 20-Feb 23, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">second psychiatric committal at UBC Hospital</font></a> I denied any belief in my political assertions except to continue with my lawsuit against UBC, and withheld any mention of the Bourassa cancer issue. The Admission Holding Note said:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Currently he admits that most of his actions were likely delusions. He states he does not believe the Mulroney Government is conspiring against him. He believes he was wrongfully dismissed from the University, but feels that his lawsuit is the best approach to dealing with this. He attributes his “new enlightenment” to the Haldol which was restarted & to his police experience & CBC’s refusal to see him.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Regardless, I was diagnosed with “Persistent Delusional Disorder”.</p> <p>By now Dr. Laura Chapman at psych ward 2 West no longer wanted to treat me because <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot049 - Vancouver Police record, Jan 14, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I had refused to accept voluntary treatment as she told Vancouver Police</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>. So I was sent to psych ward 2 East to be treated by Dr. James Harris.</p> <p>At admission I said so little to the interviewing psychiatrist so was scheduled an additional interview with Dr. M. O. Agbayewa, Officer-In-Charge and Associate Head of the Psychiatry Department as in Part 6. I had known Dr. Agbayewa as friendly from the first committal, so when he said I could trust him I raised the Bourassa cancer issue again but added that I no longer believed it:</p> <blockquote> <p>“At the CBC, he insisted on being given an interview to expose the conspiracy that Mulroney was involved in. He thinks Brian Mulroney intentionally exhausted Bourassa, who was recovering from cancer treatment, so that Bourassa gave in to demands. He now says  that he no longer believes this to be true. At the station, he was asked to leave or be charged, he preferred to be charged because of the importance of his task, i.e., exposing Mulroney.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But I didn’t know that during my first committal Dr. Agbayewa had written a letter to notify my lawyer Brian Mason, and likely also updated RCMP Vancouver Subdivision commander Supt. D. G. Cowley’s office regarding my lawsuit, as discussed in Part 6. </p> <p>Without telling me, Dr. Agbayewa then made a diagnosis of “Paranoid Disorder of Schizophrenia”, similar to the forensic psychiatrist’s diagnosis of “Paranoid Schizophrenia” – with a “Paranoid” component wanted by RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton and “Schizophrenia” likely wanted by Supt. Cowley the first time.</p> <p>The Admission Notes written by Dr. Silvia Chang for Dr. Harris made the diagnosis of “Paranoid Delusional Disorder”, same as the very first one on November 30.</p> <p>Like the first time, I applied to a mental-health review panel for release. Supervising psychiatrist Dr. James Harris wrote a report to oppose my release, citing facts that despite stating I no longer believed in my political thinking during each of two passes for home visit I again went to CBC to ask for an interview. Dr. Harris asserted it would take 3-6 months for medications to take effect:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It is evident then, by his actions, that Dr. Gao is in fact still believing in his conspiracy theory and is prepared to act on it. It is also clear that he is telling us contrary things to what he is in fact believing. Therefore, we cannot trust what his words say. We will have to go by his actions. The other thing that we will have to go by is our general knowledge that it takes 3-6 months for fixed delusions to respond to antipsychotic medications.”</p> </blockquote> <p>3-6 months of treatment for “fixed delusions” – one wonders how long it would take for “schizophrenia”? Possibly years.</p> <p>Dr. Harris also raised the spectre of not only destruction of my academic career but “revert to violence” by me, this time at CBC:</p> <blockquote> <p>If he is discharged now, the chances are, I am sure overwhelming, that he will very shortly stop his medication and he will quickly revert back to a full-blown delusional state and start acting on these. At the very least, he will destroy any chance he has for an ongoing career in academia; however, there also is the possibility that as he gets more frantic in his belief of his delusion, that he in fact will revert to violence. It would seem that the people at CBC were somewhat concerned about his behavior and it may have escalated even more if the police had not been called.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As demonstrated in Parts 4, 5 & 6, there had never been real violence on my part, and the myth had come from exaggerated or fabricated statements by some UBC and RCMP persons.</p> <p>In his discharge report, Dr. Harris recommended that for future trouble with CBC I be charged so “the legal system” would have a handle on “treatment”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“If he persists in harassing CBC and again comes to the attention of the police, I would suggest that there is no point in certifying him and treating him in-hospital. His treatment will take at least three to six months’ duration, and we only have a one-month mandate at any given time with certification, and it becomes a charade to keep going through this mock treatment of one month at a time, then releasing him on review panel hearing. If he creates a disturbance at CBC, I would suggest that they going ahead and press charges and that he be dealt with through the legal system where they may in fact have a handle on him to continue in treatment.”</p> </blockquote> <p>After my February 12 release I continued to phone and visit CBC, and was so preoccupied with it that a special-delivery letter from RCMP C/Supt. M. K. M. Clegg – either the January 14 one to terminate my 1992 public complaint or the January 25 one to acknowledge my new complaint through Solicitor General as in Part 6 – did not reach me because I was first in hospital and then too busy to follow a mail notice, and was<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot048 - RCMP E division C-Supt Clegg letter to Feng Gao returned to sender, Jan 25-Feb 24, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">returned to RCMP on February 24</font></a>.</p> <p>Around that time on February 19, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot054 - Justice Department letter to RCMP, February 19, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Justice Department changed its lawyer for RCMP on my lawsuit to Alisa Noda</font></a> from Paul F. Partridge mentioned in Part 5, and RCMP also marked receipt of the notification on February 24.</p> <p>February 24, 1993, was the day when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, whose leadership conduct had been the focus of my political activism since November 1992, suddenly announced his resignation to take effect after a new Tory leader was chosen. Announcing his retirement, Mulroney listed the failure of the Meech Lake constitutional accord – it had failed in 1990 under his stewardship while the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional process had been supervised by Constitutional Affairs Minister Joe Clark until the final negotiation – and Robert Bourassa’s cancer among reasons he hadn’t resigned in August 1990, which I summarized in 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-6/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 7)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“That act of ‘good riddance’ by Clyde Wells became such a lasting sour point between Mulroney and Wells that later on February 24, 1993 when announcing his intent to retire, Mulroney again criticized Wells for not putting the Meech Lake accord to a vote in 1990 and thus betraying a written promise, and Mulroney also revealed that he would have retired in August 1990 – (just in case people were glad to see him go!) – had it not been for the Meech Lake accord’s failure and a number of other issues, including the emerging GST fight with the Chretien Liberals in the Senate and the discovery that Robert Bourassa had cancer.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As reviewed in my blog post, the Meech Lake Accord to bring French Quebec into the Canadian Constitution contained a serious flaw in giving veto power – wanted by Bourassa’s Quebec – to every province on future constitutional changes, at a time when major constitutional reform issues such as an elected Senate and Aboriginal self-government rights had not been considered. Columnist Don McGillivray commented on February 9, 1989:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mulroney may be stalling Alberta’s rush to Senate reform for two reasons. First, like all prime ministers, he likes patronage. And he doesn’t want to jump the gun because Senate reform is the bait by which he hopes to lure the provinces into approving the Meech Lake deal.</p> <p>And it’s like the cheese in the mousetrap, to be seen and sniffed but not to be enjoyed. If Meech Lake is ever approved, Senate reform is dead forever.</p> <p>This is because every province will get a veto over changes to the Senate.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So Mr. Mulroney could have happily retired in 1990 and many Canadians happy without him – but forever with a national constitution of his generation.</p> <p>My complaint in November 1992 was that the 1992 Charlottetown Accord integrating Quebec as well as Senate reform and Aboriginal self-government, that then failed in the October 26 national referendum, contained marks of sabotage by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney himself.</p> <p>5 Days after Mulroney’s resignation announcement, on March 1 Canadian newspapers began to report that Maria Klawe would be heading an $8 million, 24-person, American-Canadian research project funded by the Electronic Arts company, into the educational values of video games. According to Klawe, even violent video games like Street Fighter 2 were good for teaching children because they allowed “mental experience” difficult with pen and paper and cheaper than computer (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot021 - Maria Klawe, BC Supreme Court lawsuit file 2008.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Team plugs into kid’s love of video games to teach them about science, medicine: They allow for experiences different from pen and paper, educator says</font></a>”, by Frances Bula, March 1, 1993 , <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“YOU LOOK at the Super Nintendo game Street Fighter 2 and see the evils of macho violence and weapons worship combined.</p> <p>Maria Klawe looks at it and sees a way teachers could use it to teach children how biologists figure out ways to fight diseases.</p> <p>In the first project of its kind, Klawe is coordinating an American-Canadian team of computer scientists, teachers, education professors and commercial-game producers that will look for ways that schools can plug into children's fascination with video games.</p> <p>“Why video games? They're part of children’s culture. And they really allow for certain types of mental experience that are very difficult with pen and paper. They’re also a lot cheaper than computers,” says Klawe, who is head of the University of B.C.’s computer-science department, the mother of two video-game players, and the kind of person who goes to schools and uses her juggling skills to explain math and science.</p> <p>…</p> <p>To accomplish all of this is going to take several years of research, a team of 24 people - including Simon Fraser University professor Gerri Sinclair and the Burnaby video-game company, Electronic Arts - and $8 million.”</p> </blockquote> <p>To use the video-game metaphor, some at UBC had falsely accused me of “violence” and linked me to real violent atrocities probably because of their own interests in the educational value of violence.</p> <p>Vince Manis, the former UBC colleague involved in the scheme as in Part 4, whose own internet postings had been full of vulgarity and political bashing alluding to violence, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot009 - Vince Manis, BC Supreme Court lawsuit file 2008.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">later joined this video-game company Electronic Arts</font></a>.</p> <p>A few days after the appearance of this first news story about Maria Klawe and video game, UBC and Vancouver were chosen as the official site of new U.S. President Bill Clinton’s first major international summit – with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in early April. </p> <p>I recalled it in my first blog article, in 2009 (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/greeting-the-new-millennium-%E2%80%93-nearly-a-decade-late-part-1/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a>”): </p> <blockquote> <p>“By the time Bill Clinton became U.S. president and right away came to Vancouver for his first major international summit, the first Clinton-Yeltsin summit in April 1993,<sup> </sup>pitching different themes from the previous Bush administration’s, including the re-emergence of Richard Nixon as an elder statesman on U.S. foreign policy, I was already out of the academia and bogged down in some politics of my focus, and was viewing the pomp and circumstance of the glitzy visit by the rare, distinguished guests to a place I had not long before been exiled from – part of the summit was held at the University of British Columbia – as a sort of ‘swan song’ by the departing Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, hardly noticing that at the time President Clinton was also transmitting his message to the U.S. Congress to legislate for <i>Goals 2000, Educate America Act</i>.</p> <p>President Clinton loves Vancouver, British Columbia, obviously.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Clinton definitely liked Vancouver as he has since enlisted Vancouverite Frank Giustra, founder of the movie studio Lions Gate Entertainment, as a major sponsor of the Clinton Foundation and provider of a luxury private jet (“<a href="https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDIQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.canada.com%2Fvancouversun%2Fstory.html%3Fid%3D1227e085-a744-4f9e-aef8-cf646d92f72f&ei=xmmQT5bzGsbv0gHAkZHGBQ&usg=AFQjCNF5PHJ9Tw263MD5cH97XsoRcSGXiw&sig2=PRdiPkL4CAZlbI4a92ghBA" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Archived Profile: Frank Giustra</font></a><em></em>”, June 21, 2007, <em>Canada.com</em>). </p> <p>But back during his first superpower summit, on Canadian soil also featuring Canadians like Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and UBC President David Strangway, and Vancouver places like Queen Elizabeth Park’s Seasons in the Park restaurant and UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, Clinton insisted on staying at an American-owned, unionized hotel, while in the media a joke was played on Strangway about Clinton’s need for even more common Americana like Elvis Presley and McDonald’s (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/02/world/toward-summit-summit-with-ocean-view-3-star-dining-even-woods-walk.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">TOWARD THE SUMMIT; A Summit With an Ocean View, 3-Star Dining and Even a Woods to Walk In</font></a>”, by Clyde H. Farnsworth, April 2, 1993,<em> The New York Times</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>““We’re actually thrilled,” said Dr. Strangway, an Ontario-born geophysicist who studied moon rocks for NASA and is now the president of the University of British Columbia. “What a privilege to be able to say it happened here.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Both men are sleeping downtown -- Mr. Yeltsin in the penthouse of the sparkling white Pan Pacific Hotel Vancouver with a panoramic view of the harbor and Mr. Clinton at the somewhat less prestigiously situated Hyatt Regency, about half a mile inland. A Canadian organizer said “the President insisted on staying at an American-owned, unionized hotel, and the Hyatt fit the bill.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>The university residence is called the Norman MacKenzie House, but it was it was known as Dave’s Bed and Breakfast this week on the Larry and Willy Show, a comedy interlude on one of the most popular rock stations, C-Fox FM 99.3. Is Socks Coming?</p> <p>Someone impersonating President Clinton, but sounding more like Elvis Presley, called in to ask Dr. Strangway, who appeared as a guest on the show, whether there was a deep frier in the house and where the nearest McDonald’s was. Dr. Strangway, playing along in the spoofing, asked whether the caller was bringing along Socks, the Clintons’ cat. A painting of a golden saxophone, called Sax Inc. by Canadian artist Eric Metcalfe, hangs prominently in the house.”</p> </blockquote> <p>After Mulroney’s February 24 announcement of resignation I had begun to attend the CBC site less often as the political issues seemed less urgent, still making phone calls though.</p> <p>Then B.C. Tel cut my phone service temporarily, citing frequent calls to CBC. I took it as a hint to slow down, so by the time of the April 2 & 3 Clinton-Yeltsin summit I had the leisure to walk around at the Kitsilano Beach, where I could see Clinton-Yeltsin motorcades snaking along waterfront streets and hear helicopters buzzing along.</p> <p>But by the end of March UBC’s lawyers at Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy had requested examination for discovery, i.e., <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot055 - Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy notice of discovery, March 30, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">pre-trial cross examination of me for the defendant UBC, by associate Don Richards on behalf of lawyer Jack Giles</font></a>.</p> <p>My lawyer Brian Mason wanted to do the same with one witness each from UBC and RCMP, but I preferred to go directly to trial.</p> <p>It was difficult for me to suggest a UBC person with the facts for Mr. Mason to cross-examine. The real person would have been David Kirkpatrick, whose role had already involved ‘betrayal’ as discussed in Part 4, and <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot010 - April 92 letter to Strangway, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">whose name I had claimed to be forgotten in my UBC internal grievances</font></a> in the dispute with Klawe. Now with his wife Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick involved in the RCMP-led psychiatric suppression, would I still consider him a friendly witness?</p> <p>Most importantly I ran out of money, and so <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot056 - Lawyer Brian Mason letter, April 7, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">on April 7 Brain Mason sent me a letter to terminate his representation</font></a>, leaving me alone to be questioned by an associate of a ‘notorious’ political henchman as discussed in Part 6.</p> <p>In the end the examination conducted by lawyer Don Richards for UBC didn’t appear hostile, considering the circumstances at that point; <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot057 - Wendy Dauphinee, official court reporter.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I kept a business card of official court reporter Wendy Dauphinee who did the transcription</font></a>.</p> <p>With my Mathematics and Computer Science background I find the coincidence interesting, that my case file at Brian Mason’s Maitland & Company had started as “92404”, with not much more than initial lawsuit filing but I suffered a lot of other oppression outside of the file, and then the date of my examination by Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy was “93414”.</p> <p>For my subsistence and to pay off the part of the over $5,000 legal expenses I still owed, I had an immediate obstacle to overcome which determined my course of action in the next 3 months.</p> <p>On April 29 at Vancouver General Hospital, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot058 - Vancouver General Hospital notes, April 29-30, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">psychiatrist Dr. G. Stevenson interviewed me and summarized the situation I was facing</font></a>, that I needed fit-for-work medical clearance to qualify for unemployment insurance benefits, but was denied it by Dr. James Harris at UBC:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Following loss of job in June/92, lived off savings briefly, then on medical unemployment insurance. These benefits ran out in January. He is on welfare now but needs clearance to go to work. He says his GP sent a letter OK’ing him, but Dr. Harris gave a contradictory opinion, so the UI board refused transfer to regular benefits. He has appealed to the board, which will hold a hearing to review his case in ~ 1 month – but he says he can’t wait that long.</p> <p>He also has a lawsuit filed against UBC for wrongful dismissal.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As mentioned earlier, UBC psychiatrist Dr. Laura Chapman required that I attend out-patient psychiatric counselling for any help, but I didn’t consider myself mentally ill and would not do so voluntarily. Dr. James Harris who had supervised my second committal agreed to write a letter, with me attending his office of private practice in Richmond just south of Vancouver, but it stated that I was still mentally ill – not surprising given his February reports’ statements that it would take at least 3-6 months to treat delusional disorder and here I was out for less than 3 months after only 3-4 weeks of treatment.</p> <p>Fortunately, VGH psychiatrists were much more sympathetic, and the experience in contrast reinforced my view that back on November 30 RCMP had been bent on fixing a ‘mentally ill’ diagnosis when Sgt. Brian Cotton rejected my suggestion to go to VGH instead of UBC Hospital as in Part 6.</p> <p>As in Part 4, after the March 16, 1992 incident I was asked to attend counselling by UBC Dean of Science Barry McBride, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot007 - March 92 incident, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">who at the time sent a fax to psychiatrist Dr. John Leslie at VGH</font></a>, and I was then referred by Associate Vice President William Webber to private psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Remick. </p> <p>So unbeknown to me VGH psychiatrists had known about my earlier circumstances, and <a href="http://www.calendar.ubc.ca/vancouver/index.cfm?tree=12,209,379,514" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. G. Stevenson was in fact a UBC professor</font></a>. Moreover as in Part 4 Dr. Remick told me he had been a UBC faculty member with a dispute already resolved, but <a href="http://drronremick.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. Remick’s current biography says he left UBC only in 1992</font></a>. Thus some of the more sympathetic, private or VGH psychiatrists were within UBC academic circle as well. Another interesting person among the UBC Psychiatry faculty was Patrick McGeer, whose son Rick and I had been UBC Computer Science colleagues as in Part 4.</p> <p>Dr. Stevenson’s conclusion was:</p> <blockquote> <p>“<u>Impression</u> delusional disorder in partial remission. Access to deeper content or more complex delusional features not pursued at this time.”</p> </blockquote> <p>It was the first diagnosis to mention “remission” but Dr. Stevenson had a view similar to UBC’s Dr. Chapman when it came to a clearance letter, that I visit out-patient service, which would do counselling.</p> <p>I still didn’t follow the advice, but the next day <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot058 - Vancouver General Hospital notes, April 29-30, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">April 30 I found a psychiatrist at VGH Emergency Department willing to assess and write a letter for me</font></a> as the hospital notes recorded.</p> <p>Eventually this letter was accepted by the UI appeal board as clearance for regular unemployment benefits starting April 30, 1993.</p> <p>There was another reason I went to the emergency department at VGH. I had a political goal in addition to obtaining a good letter for UI benefits, and that was to get a re-assessment of the earlier diagnoses to see if mistakes, i.e., wrongful diagnoses had been made. At either UBC Hospital or VGH, the place I had been first psychiatrically committed was the emergency department.</p> <p>Because VGH had transferred me to UBC Hospital on January 20 and I was then out its care, for the period from my discharge on February 12 to April 30 the psychiatrists who could write a good letter was UBC Hospital ones – neither Dr. Chapman nor Dr. Harris would provide a decent letter so UBC Hospital’s emergency department was my next target.</p> <p>I could have given up on that part of the UI money, but a re-assessment was critical logically as the psychiatric diagnoses hang like a sword over my head – a major obstacle for continuing lawsuit litigation.</p> <p>My attempts at UBC Hospital for clearance and re-assessment would lead to my only ‘guilty’ criminal charges during my political activism in Vancouver – without getting the disputed money in the end that could have help pay my legal bills.</p> <p>Unlike the security guards who kept an eye at VGH, UBC Hospital guards would often actively keep me away on orders, and pushed me off if I tried to enter. They would also call in RCMP officers, and that led to arrests for “Assault-by-Trespass”, and then on May 5 a criminal charge of “Assault” even though I didn’t assault anyone – with only unavoidable but passive physical contacts in a ‘trespassing’ situation.</p> <p>Dr. Harris had said in a February report that I could turn violent at CBC, and that I should be charged there for the legal system to have a handle on psychiatric treatment. Well, after his report I was arrested a few times at CBC by Vancouver Police but never was there violence by anyone or another criminal charge. Nor did my perseverance at VGH cause such problem.</p> <p>So now Dr. Harris’s recommendation was put into action by his hospital’s security guards and RCMP so that his prediction would be validated – to me the real reason being UBC-RCMP objective to use the criminal justice system to justify their false profiling of me as “violent”.</p> <p><font color="#333333">On May 5, the day on which my arrest would turn into an Assault charge</font>, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot059 - UBC Hospital notes, May 5, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Emergency Record written by emergency physician Dr. Ken Edmonds </font></a>surveyed the situation with no reference to “assault” or violence, clearly stating that I wasn’t “mental ill” at this time:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Pt well known to UBC & ER. Admitted several months ago with delusional disorder. He contested his involuntary status & was noncompliant with meds. He was decertified by tribunal & since has been trying to collect U.I. They demand written documentation he is “mentally well”. Apparently his GP requires psych backup & Mr. Gao’s prev. psychiatrists here have agreeably terminated therapy. While Mr. Gao is not psychotic he continues to persevere in his attempts to get a psychiatric referral letter through the ER in spite of instructions with regards to obtaining what he requires. He has become like belligerent. Unfortunately he would not comply with security & was charged.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As a kind of protest I did occasionally walk from the reception area to the the medical area, but never did I attempt to get near patients or medical personnel at work. UBC Hospital and RCMP used technical rules to prolong a peaceful dispute and ferment dissatisfaction, in order to brand me as a “noncompliant” patient toward being “belligerent”, and even ‘violent’ hence the Assault charge.</p> <p>On May 10 in custody I was given<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot060 - Forensic assessment, May 10, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">a forensic psychiatric assessment, by the same VGH psychiatrist who had written a good letter on April 30</font></a> for my UI benefit clearance, who became the first to declare me mentally well:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Patient known to myself as a result of previous recent visits to VGH under similar circumstances of alleged offences. I assessed him on April 30 at Department of The Emergency Physicians when Mr. Gao came to hospital looking for an assessment to help him with his UIC claims. At that time I didn’t find any evidence of psychosis and wrote a letter saying he was free of psychosis and able to look for work. Unfortunately this wasn’t good enough for Mr. Gao’s needs as he wanted it backdated to mid February. As I had not seen him at that time I explained I could do no more. Apparently he then went to UBC …</p> <p>…</p> <p>… At this point in time he is not mentally ill, but is fit to stand trial. It is unfortunate his behavior has resulted in criminal charges as this likely only will make things worse for him.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The psychiatrist’s name has been withheld from the released personal-information documents. My unreliable memory is that it might be <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot052 - Vancouver General Hospital record, Jan 18-20, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. (John Mark) Levy who had handled my first psychiatric admission to VGH on January 18</font></a> as transferred from pre-trial custody. </p> <p>Note that since the start of second psychiatric committal in mid January I had retracted most political allegations I had told psychiatrists. That no doubt helped get ‘mentally well’ assessments, but as Dr. Harris’s February reports clearly indicated hard-line psychiatrists like him would just dismiss the retractions as denials and treat my perseverance as a symptom of “delusional” beliefs.</p> <p>Indeed, in detention again at Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre I would be placed in the Disordered Offenders Unit, forced to take antipsychotic medication Haldol, and subjected to penalties like ‘lockdown’ when I tried to be noncompliant with medication or not to follow orders. Hard-line psychiatric opinions continued to rule – likely because the first forensic psychiatric assessment on January 15 declaring me as having “Paranoid Schizophrenia” had been done there.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot061 - Richmond Provincial Court record, May 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">At the May 28 trial I was found not guilty and the charge dismissed</font></a>, despite testimonies from the prosecution witnesses: UBC Hospital security guards Jose Imperio and Kevin Allan Hatch, and RCMP officer Peter Joseph Kennedy.</p> <p>But I was not satisfied with the trial because I didn’t achieve my original goal of discussing my political allegations as case background at trial, i.e., if I couldn’t air them in the media. That thinking had become even more serious after Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick’s involvement in the RCMP-led psychiatric suppression: I needed my allegations in official court record independently – although by May 1993 that intensity could be partly misguided.</p> <p>I couldn’t get a defense lawyer of my choice so at the last minute a court-appointed counsel acted not to call my testimony.</p> <p>It was part of my ‘overly’ ambitious goals – including on November 30, 1992 when I decided to fax documents to Member of Parliament Kim Campbell who happened to be Mulroney government’s Justice Minister – to find a female defense lawyer who could help me make my political case in court and win.</p> <p>The early 1990s was a time when some ambitious women began to break the career ‘glass ceiling’ and advance to positions of importance in their fields. There was no question Kim Campbell’s ambition to someday become the national leader had weighed in my decision to involve her.</p> <p>Phoning CBC newsroom during November, I had sometimes asked for anchor Gloria Macarenko to be given the political issues, and once a female staff responded, “Gloria is getting married and having a baby. Go away.” In Vancouver Police record of my CBC arrest <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot049 - Vancouver Police record, Jan 14, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">officer Munroe reported “male annoying” about my attending CBC</font></a>, but one can see it was an isolated interpretation to divert attention from the serious issues I raised.</p> <p>So it was fitting that back on November 30 I was then sent to psychiatric committal in a UBC Hospital psych ward supervised by a female psychiatrist, Dr. Laura Chapman.</p> <p>In RCMP custody in May 1993 I phoned Lawyer Referral Service, and through it and the lawyers contacted I reached two female defense lawyers in Vancouver, but both expressed that they could not take my case.</p> <p>In hindsight it was a mistake that I began to persist with these particular lawyers. Considering that after many law firm visits in July-September 1992 I found only Brian Mason willing to do it suing both UBC and RCMP – as discussed in Parts 5 & 6 – it was difficult for me to just get a good lawyer, male or female.</p> <p>But at that point my persistence at VGH in April 1993 had won me a much needed medical-clearance letter for UI benefit appeal, so there was a precedent of payoff. My persistence at UBC Hospital turned out bad because of my UBC dispute history, or so I felt.</p> <p>In RCMP custody and pre-trial detention I kept phoning these two female lawyers. Then one day a woman visitor came, introducing herself as a defense lawyer, by the name of Linda Hall as I recall. I had not known about her but she displayed a good sense of motherly authority and intellectual persuasion.</p> <p>Linda Hall warned that I was on the wrong track attempting to get defense from those two female lawyers, that if I continued to persist there would be negative consequences. She asserted that my perseverance approach and continuing focus on the political issues were also wrong, that my academic career could be ruined. Hall claimed to offer the advice like a friend, saying she could represent my legal defense provided I promised not to persevere, especially not with those two female lawyers, and trust her defense and her advice to move on with my career and life.</p> <p>I couldn’t accept Hall’s advice, and let go on what would turn out to be the only female lawyer I could get – arranged by some authority no doubt. </p> <p>In hindsight my guess is that Linda Hall would probably only get me the same dismissal of the charge without my chance to speak on the political issues, and be credited with the accomplishment as a female lawyer – Kim Campbell’s kind of magic perhaps.</p> <p>After the May 28 trial I was freed, but was soon back at UBC Hospital as I still didn’t have a clearance letter backdating to February 12-13.</p> <p>On June 2 after an arrest by RCMP I was again charged with “Assault”, in more serious circumstances this time for two reasons. First, the security guards blocking my path to the entrance had begun to dare me to fight them, and though I didn’t I felt challenged enough to walk, at a normal pace, toward the entrance despite a guard in front, and at the point of bodily contact he threw me to the ground. Secondly, RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton who had started the UBC Hospital saga on November 30, began to appear on the scene – although when the incident occurred he was absent – and gave the go-ahead for arrest.</p> <p>The appearance of Brian Cotton coincided with that of Dr. M. O. Agbayewa earlier in the day to give me a psychiatric clearance letter, finally. In the morning <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot062 - UBC Hospital notes, June 2, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I was assessed by psychiatrist Dr. (Jonathan) Fleming, who then called Dr. Agbayewa</font></a>. Upon taking the letter in an envelope I felt very happy and left in a hurry, but only after walking away from the hospital did I open the envelope and find – to my shock – that Dr. Agbayewa gave no backdated clearance for me. Instead he felt I had “Paranoia” and referred me to Kitsilano Mental Health Team for further counselling as indicated in the Emergency Record.</p> <p>Dr. Agbayewa’s role is clearly recorded in the hospital records: for my first committal he wrote a letter to my lawyer Brian Mason to exert pressure, and at the start of the second committal he tricked me into mentioning my allegation about Mulroney exhausting Bourassa despite knowledge of the latter’s cancer, and then gave me a diagnosis of “Paranoid Disorder of Schizophrenia”. As discussed before he may have coordinated with RCMP as Officer-In-Charge of the hospital’s Psychiatry Department.</p> <p>But prior to June 2, 1993, I had thought of Dr. Agbayewa as friendly – why I had felt comfortable enough to tell him the Bourassa-health allegation on January 20 when I had begun keeping mum about it and retracting earlier allegations.</p> <p>So around noon on June 2, I walked back into UBC Hospital Emergency Department to ask for another clearance letter, and soon in the ensuing standoff with security guards the incident of my being thrown to the ground occurred.</p> <p>In custody <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot063 - Forensic assessment, June 14, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">on June 14 a forensic psychiatric assessment was done</font></a>, that retreated from the May 10 assessment’s “not mentally ill” conclusion and also referred to possible need for medication:</p> <blockquote> <p>“…</p> <p>- This man agrees that he sometimes becomes compulsive and cannot let go. He says he won’t return to UBC because UIC has accepted his letters.</p> <p>…</p> <p>No evidence of thought form disorder, delusions or hallucinations at present.</p> <p>…</p> <p> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="451" border="0"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="100"><u>Impression</u> </td> <td valign="top" width="349">1) Fit for court <br /> <br />2) May have Delusional Disorder – in partial remission with medication”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </p> </blockquote> <p>So the second time charged with “Assault” I was not only more likely to lose due to RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton’s involvement, but the forensic psychiatric assessment also left open a “Delusional Disorder” possibility thus giving criminal justice system the forensic psychiatry option – as UBC’s Dr. James Harris had suggested in February.</p> <p>At this point the UI appeal board had accepted what I had submitted, but only as documentation for the appeal. When I said I wouldn’t return to UBC Hospital for a letter it was an admission that I likely would not get the backdating I needed.</p> <p>But this time I found a lawyer to let me testify in court, so that my concise discussion of the political issues regarding UBC dispute and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct would be presented as factors for the judge and enter into trial records.</p> <p>I didn’t exactly find this lawyer, Richard Dempsey, but he came to visit me at Vancouver Pre-trial Services Centre like Linda Hall the first time.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot066 - Richmond Provincial Court record, June 3 & July 23, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On July 23 the trial was held under Judge J. R. Groberman as with the first Assault trial</font></a>. Prosecution witnesses were UBC Hospital security guard Lance Theodore Holley, who had thrown me to the ground on June 2, and RCMP officer Brian Thomas Cotton, who interestingly was titled as Constable even though back on November 30 he had introduced himself to me as Sergeant as in Part 5.</p> <p>The driving force for a guilty verdict – like on November 30 at UBC Hospital for a mental-illness diagnosis – was Brian Cotton, whose vivid testimony described seeing me push the security guard backward to try to get access to the hospital, without the real facts that I was the one thrown to the ground and Cotton himself was away during the incident.</p> <p>So I was found guilty despite doing my best on the witness stand to present the political background and recall the incident factually, that I hadn’t assaulted anyone.</p> <p>Fortunately Judge J. R. Groberman – not to be confused with Harvey Groberman who with RCMP Supt. D. G. Cowley had handled the 1990-91 native blockades as mentioned in Parts 5 & 6 – then issued an immediate absolute discharge, which to me suggested that he didn’t view it as much of an assault but granted RCMP the desired verdict.</p> <p>But I wasn’t immediately freed because there were additional criminal charges I was now facing, to be tried several days later.</p> <p>These new charges had arisen from my persistent phoning of the two female defense lawyers I had started in May with the first Assault charge and warned by lawyer Linda Hall about.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot067 - Richmond Provincial Court record, June 18 & July 27, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The two female criminal defense lawyers were Patricia Connor and Carol Konkin</font></a>, and the charges were harassing telephone calls as well as noncompliance with no-direct-contact bail condition with respect to each lawyer, filed on June 18.</p> <p>For each Assault charge, after my initial arrest and a few days of custody I would be given bail on the condition of not returning to UBC Hospital. Inevitably I then returned because I was still in need of a specific medical-clearance letter only psychiatrists there could write. Then after more arrests and releases with the same bail condition I again failed to comply, I would be held without bail until trial.</p> <p>Such was what happened for the first Assault charge. The main reason I was not charged additionally for my failure with the bail condition, I believe, was that the court saw a legitimate need on my part to go to UBC Hospital. </p> <p>I remember Judge Ron Fratkin once asked me, “You kept promising not to return to UBC Hospital and then you went again. I know you need a letter. If I write to them to request an appropriate letter for you, will you promise me not to go there?” I felt Judge Fratkin’s request would not get me what I really wanted and yet I would be indebted to the judge not to go to UBC Hospital again or the consequence would likely be worse, so I gratefully declined his offer of help. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot061 - Richmond Provincial Court record, May 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">This anecdote may have happened on May 18 when I was then denied bail</font></a> until the May 28 trial.</p> <p>But after my UBC Hospital arrest on June 2 for the second Assault charge the two female lawyers in Vancouver became more serious and complained to Vancouver Police about ‘harassing’ phone calls.</p> <p>On June 7, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot065 - Vancouver Police officer Ciok notes, June 7, July 2 & 14, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Police Constable S. A. Ciok responded</font></a> to the first complaint – likely by Carol Konkin – and even tried to find me at my apartment, but determined it was a civil matter:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… On June 4 GAO phoned this law office approx. 30 times & each time asked to speak to [… …] refused to speak to him & finally she did & told GAO not to phone again. On June 7 GAO began phoning again approx. 10-12 times. I was called & while there GAO phoned again. I spoke to him & advised him not to phone. GAO kept saying he didn’t understand. GAO phoned after I told him not to phone. I then went to visit his residence but no one was in.</p> <p>I advised […] that this a Civil Matter and that possibly […] would have to get a Civil Order and also to contact B.C. Tel.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The next day June 8,<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot064 - Vancouver Police record, June 8 & June 18, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">police officer R. Ogier responded to a complaint</font></a> and went to <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot071 - 1993 Vancouver Yellow Page courtesy of VPL Special Collections librarian Andrew Martin.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">#400 - 1 Alexander Street, Patricia Connor’s office address</font></a>. Connor was upset with my phone calls since May 3 and told police an opposite story of what I tried to achieve:</p> <blockquote> <p>“GAO has been assessed at UBC and apparently is fit, but […] believes GAO is trying to establish a pattern of charges, police involvement, and harassment so that he can be declared unfit and qualify for some type of U.I.C. benefits.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Had I known that this kind of distorted presentation was Connor’s way, like another version of Dr. Harris’s hard-line stand, I would have stopped phoning her, ‘cold turkey’, so as not to ruin my goals.</p> <p>Officer Ogier also mentioned the other lawyer in a similar situation. Finding that I had been arrested by RCMP on June 7 on another matter – why officer Ciok hadn’t found me at home that day – Ogier referred the case to Vancouver North Detective Office.</p> <p>As I recall, not long afterwards in June my home phone was permanently disconnected by B.C. Tel due to excessive calling.</p> <p>Detective Sturm’s June 18 report indicated that I was arrested again at UBC on June 13 and released on June 16, this time with new bail conditions of no contact with the two lawyers, and that on June 17 & 18 I phoned one of them twice and the other 26 times, and was arrested for breaching bail conditions.</p> <p>I was arrested by Det. Sturm on June 18, but his note was callous as to what the exact bail conditions had been. Oddly, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot067 - Richmond Provincial Court record, June 18 & July 27, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">they were conditions of ‘no-direct-contact’, as the criminal charges on June 18 then stated</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… fail without lawful excuse to comply with that condition in that he had direct contact with …”</p> </blockquote> <p>Each of the two lawyers had a small office and the phone had been either answered by a receptionist or routed to voicemail or professional answering service, so I knew if I didn’t ask for the lawyer I wouldn’t break the bail condition. I don’t know what Judge J. R. Groberman’s rationale was but his ‘no-direct-contact’ rules confirmed my thinking of something legitimate in my perseverance.</p> <p>The idea of perseverance had begun in the fall of 1991 when my UBC dispute with Maria Klawe first came to the open as in Part 4, that her deceptiveness and trickiness required my coping with her tactics like in game playing. Then in March 1993 Klawe had also stared leading a video game research project as mentioned earlier. </p> <p>That is why out on bail after June 16 I phoned Carol Konkin’s office many times but Patricia Connor’s only twice: the ‘tricky’ Connor all of a sudden answered the phone herself – it had never happened before – so I only needed a second call to confirm she meant to see my bail revoked.</p> <p>It was after I had taken on the additional charges with respect to the two female lawyers that lawyer Richard Dempsey visited me, showing willingness to call my testimony for the Assault trial, and I felt resigned now that women were involved – even if negatively like MP Kim Campbell and Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick back on November 30, 1992.</p> <p>Without further explanation I also accepted Dempsey’s suggestion not to testify against the charges from the two female lawyers – I could not describe my rationale without sounding like “delusional”.</p> <p>In mid-July Vancouver Police officer Ciok who had felt my persistent phoning was a civil matter, looked at it again and was surprised the case was at Richmond court:<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot065 - Vancouver Police officer Ciok notes, June 7, July 2 & 14, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Police Detective Sturm had requested Richmond Provincial Court</font></a>, which had jurisdiction over UBC area under RCMP policing but not Vancouver with its own police force, to add the Vancouver no-contact conditions to my Assault charge bail.</p> <p>In the July 27 trial I was acquitted of the harassing-phone-call charges. Judge J. R. Groberman understood I hadn’t been “with intent to harass a person”.</p> <p>But on the basis of Patricia Connor’s resolute testimony I was found guilty of breaching a bail condition. During trial Judge Groberman did something I thought was judicially incorrect: <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot067 - Richmond Provincial Court record, June 18 & July 27, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">he ordered the ‘no-direct-contact’ bail condition with regard to Connor upgraded to ‘no direct or indirect contact' – retroactively after the fact!</font></a> I remember his morally admonishing attitude speaking toward me, that if someone didn’t want contact then any kind of it shouldn’t be attempted.</p> <p>I didn’t appeal the verdict despite this judicial arbitrariness, knowing that Patricia Connor had personally answered my call for that matter.</p> <p>I was acquitted with regard to phoning Carol Konkin, despite testimonies by witnesses Susan Gray and James Neufeld on my frequent calls to her office.</p> <p>So it ended rather paradoxically, that I was guilty for 2 calls but not for 26 calls.</p> <p>During the time period of the second Assault and phone-calls charges, a number of important events happened.</p> <p>On June 13, the day I was arrested again at UBC Hospital before release a few days later with new bail conditions not to contact the two Vancouver female lawyers, Kim Campbell was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative party, who herself had been a UBC faculty member and Vancouver lawyer.</p> <p>Then while I was in continuous pre-trial incarceration from June 18 onward, Campbell became Prime Minister on June 25 and, as discussed in Parts 5 & 6, on June 24 Mulroney appointed his personal financial trustee and lawyer Bruce Verchere as Board Chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.</p> <p>Around that time my mother arrived in Vancouver as a visitor from China sponsored by some Vancouver relatives of hers, who had been concerned about my situation but hadn’t told me about their contact with her on this. In jail one day I received a phone call, and when totally unexpectedly I heard Mom’s voice telling she was in Vancouver I broke into tears, nearly unable to continue the conversation.</p> <p>With my mother’s arrival the relatives also moved my belongings out of my apartment unit at 1640 West 11th Avenue in Vancouver – an address discussed in Part 5 regarding the interesting ‘64’ – as I had started owing back rent. We began a short period of stay with the relatives.</p> <p>After the July 27 trial I was reunited with my mother whom I had not seen since my parents’ 1990 Canada visit.</p> <p>But I didn’t receive an immediate discharge for the guilty bail violation due to phoning Patricia Connor as I had for the assault charge. Instead, Judge Groberman ordered a pre-sentencing evaluation and a forensic psychiatric assessment, with postponed sentencing that was later held on December 1.</p> <p>In the meantime I was on bail with psychiatric-counselling condition included.</p> <p>So UBC Hospital psychiatrist Dr. James Harris’s hard-line position that criminal justice have a forensic-psychiatry handle on me became reality.</p> <p>In hindsight, things were not as clear-cut. I was likely to be found guilty for the second Assault charge given RCMP officer Brian Cotton’s appearance, but is it as obvious that the charge of bail violation due to phoning lawyer Patricia Connor was purely additional woe? If the justice system at that point had Dr. Harris’s idea of using a forensic psychiatric handle on me, then a prolonged bail/probation period for “assault”, i.e., ‘violence’, would have been the more troublesome.</p> <p>By 2003 when I obtained institutional personal-information disclosures and began analyzing my 1990s period of political activism in Vancouver, I noticed that <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot072 - Patricia Connor, 12 Gaoler's Mews - LawyerSource.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Patricia Connor’s law office had moved to 12 Gaoler’s Mews</font></a>, in the same building lawyer David Gibbons had been in 1992 when I made my first law office visit as mentioned earlier – so Connor was the type of ‘Jailer’s Cage’ I had mistaken for a feminine cat calling out to me in 1993.</p> <p>Anyways, in August 1993 after a few days of rest and catching up with Mom, I returned to UBC Hospital to try to get a re-assessment. The atmosphere was more relaxed, perhaps because UBC and RCMP had gotten a guilty verdict related to violence and a criminal-justice psychiatric handle they had wanted. I was referred to the hospital’s Crisis Clinic.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot068 - UBC Hospital report, August 12-13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On August 12, resident psychiatrist Dr. A. Burgmann issued me a clearance assessment</font></a>. Though not backdating to my February 12 release from the second psychiatric committal, for the first time a UBC Hospital assessment did not mention “delusional disorder”. He also referred me to Dr. A. M. Marcus, retired UBC psychiatrist in private practice, stating that Dr. Marcus could access UBC Hospital records and review the earlier period and the original diagnoses for me. Dr. Burgmann wrote:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Thoughts: no formal thought disorder is identified. Nondelusional, no psychosis.</p> <p>…</p> <p><strong><u>Provisional Diagnosis</u></strong></p> <p>…</p> <p>Continuing conflicts with the University of British Columbia over his employment</p> <p>…</p> <p><strong><u>Plan</u></strong></p> <p>Mr. Gao was originally referred to the Crisis Clinic… It was thought that a more appropriate treatment intervention would be by a psychiatrist in the community. Dr. A. Marcus was chosen due to the fact that he has much experience in forensic psychiatry and he may be apt in dealing with this difficult patient.” </p> </blockquote> <p>On that day there was big news related to UBC Computer Science Department: the day before, August 11, computer programmer Martin Frauendorf had been bludgeoned to death as in Part 4.</p> <p>On August 13, I phoned the probation office as required by bail and left a message. My mother and I had moved into a basement rental unit in a south Vancouver house, and B.C. Tel issued a <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot069 - Vancouver South Probation Office phone record, August 13, 1993.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">new phone number, (604) 323-8110</font></a>, to replace my <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot033 - Fax to MP Kim Campbell, Nov 30, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">disconnected number (604) 734-0095</font></a> that had been on my November 30, 1992 fax note to Member of Parliament Kim Campbell.</p> <p>Still I wasn’t conscious of the fact that the UBC Hospital clearance was issued exactly 6 months from my last psychiatric-committal discharge when Dr. James Harris had stated it would take 3-6 months for medications to work on a delusional disorder.</p> <p>In the meantime I incurred criminal charges, with a guilty verdict on violence envisioned by, and one for forensic psychiatric treatment suggested by Harris, and incarceration for about half of the nearly 8 months, November 30, 1992 – July 27, 1993, including about 3 months since I came under Dr. Harris on January 20.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2012/06/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 8</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-85923051077736128522012-03-25T21:24:00.000-04:002020-05-15T04:43:58.649-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 6) — when law and justice reinforce the authorities<div align="left">
(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2011/10/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 5</a>)</div>
When Sergeant Brian Cotton and his companion from Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s University Detachment showed up at my apartment in the afternoon of November 30, 1992, it was a surprise I hadn’t expected.<br />
Since eviction from my former office at University of British Columbia’s Computer Science Department on July 2 by RCMP, I hadn’t returned to UBC campus. From time to time I did make phone calls to a few former colleagues to continue discussing my dispute with Computer Science Head Maria Klawe over her controversial management style – including her handlings of a tenure-track offer to faculty candidate Pascal van Hentenryck and a tenure-track application by me – but these were specific persons who didn’t show a problem with it. An exception was when once or twice I reached Department administrative manager Carol Whitehead – someone mentioned in Part 4 of this article – close to Head Klawe.<br />
In fact, when I heard the door knocks I thought, “Here comes the Vancouver Police”. I was on hold on the phone with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Vancouver TV station, and several days earlier CBC had threaten me with a criminal charge for “harassing” them if I didn’t stop phoning about removing Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from the national leadership as called for in my press releases. Both my apartment and CBC Vancouver were in Vancouver Police jurisdiction. <br />
Sgt. Brian Cotton said that RCMP hadn’t heard from me since I left UBC in July and would like to see how I was doing. So I invited the two officers in.<br />
I told them that following RCMP advice I hadn’t been back to UBC and was focusing on a civil lawsuit to resolve the dispute so there should be no concern. Cotton seemed to concur, but showed curiosity that I was on the phone, so I said I had been seeking publicity for my lawsuit and was on hold with CBC.<br />
Sgt. Cotton frowned, saying, “Is that how you spend your time?” I responded that it was not only about the lawsuit but about some important issues regarding Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership.<br />
Sgt. Cotton asked if he could speak to the other person – I told him it was a news producer – on the line, I said I was on hold so he asked for the phone number and redialled, and someone answered and spoke with him, miraculously – the CBC phone holds for me typically lasted as long as I waited, and redialling would only lead to a new hold before I had a chance to say something.<br />
After the phone conversation, Cotton turned to me and said that CBC had asked me not to phone them or I could get a criminal charge. I replied that I understood but there were urgent issues about PM Mulroney’s leadership that needed attention.<br />
Sgt. Cotton then said, “You need to come with us for a psychiatric assessment at UBC Hospital.”<br />
I was taken aback, and responded that I had not been back to UBC, was perfectly normal as assessed by private psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Remick in April while still at UBC – mentioned in Part 4 – and it made no sense for RCMP to interfere with my publicity efforts when Vancouver Police did not intervene.<br />
Sgt. Brian Cotton said he would insist so I asked, “Do I have to?” He replied, “You have to. It’s a request from Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick of the B.C. Supreme Court.”<br />
It’s a shock to me! Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick was just the wife of my former UBC senior colleague David G. Kirkpatrick who had been a mentor during my 4 years there, consulted by me on various issues including in my dispute with Head Klawe for which he contributed insightful clarifications. But as discussed in Part 4, in the end Kirkpatrick, and especially his new associate Jack Snoeyink and former graduate student Andrew Martin, had crucial roles in things sliding toward negative for me.<br />
Still, I continued to trust David, and after my July 2 eviction the first lawyer I visited, a female associate as I recall by the name of Mary at the law firm of lawyer David Gibbons, was referred by Pamela. It was in early July, and the thriving, family-type clientele there in Gastown in downtown Vancouver didn’t show off the colorfulness of a prominent lawyer whom a decade later was blamed by RCMP Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass as a main obstructionist to its investigation of the Air India bombing case from 1985, that Gibbons – not publicly named – had prevented his client suspect, both of whom since died in 2004, from cooperating with RCMP as it would be bad for the lawyer’s business. (“<a href="http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2011/01/08/rcmp-boss-talks-about-defence-lawyers-hampering-the-air-india-probe/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">RCMP Boss Talks About Defence Lawyers Hampering the Air India Probe</span></a>”, by Kim Bolan, January 8, 2011, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=533a03ba-929d-40f2-9fcc-0fb78b6a2b48" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Trial faced ‘major setbacks,’ RCMP boss says</span></a>”, January 8, 2011, <em>Vancouver Sun</em>).<br />
In early July David Kirkpatrick at first said things were now out of his hands, suggesting that private psychiatrist Ronald Remick had encouraged me to file a lawsuit. I tried to reach Remick but he was out of town so I asked only for sleeping pills from his stand-in, (the late) Dr. Kristin Sivertz of St. Paul Hospital. Then David gave me the referral to Gibbons law firm, and in a later phone conversation informed me of Pamela’s pending promotion to become a B.C. Supreme Court Justice, to sit in New Westminster just southeast of Vancouver.<br />
When I came to UBC in 1988, Pamela Kirkpatrick was a practicing lawyer with the law firm McCarthy & McCarthy, and in 1989 was appointed a Master of B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver, dealing with routine chamber matters (“Nine lawyers named to new judicial group”, by Larry Still, September 22, 1989, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></span></a>).<br />
That was a time of national mergers for Canadian law firms.<br />
In 1988 when he was part of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s entourage to celebrate U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s upcoming retirement, Mulroney’s financial trustee and tax lawyer Bruce Verchere was identified by the media only as an attorney with the Montreal law firm Verchere, Noel, Eddy (“Gala guests feted in style”, by Bob Hepburn, April 28, 1988, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">Toronto Star</span></em></a>). But as journalist Stevie Cameron’s book, <a href="http://steviecameron.com/blue-trust/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money</em></span></a> also noted, in 1989 Verchere merged his firm of 22 lawyers with the 116-lawyer Calgary law firm Bennett Jones to become Bennett Jones Verchere, a major national law firm under his “taxation expertise” (“Bennett Jones joins eastern law firm”, November 1, 1989, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/index.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Calgary Herald</em></span></a>; and, “<a href="http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/callb24&div=58&id=&page=" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Book Reviews</span></a>”, ed. by Franki Elliott, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1999, <em>Canadian Law Libraries</em>).<br />
As a result of this 1989 merger Bruce Verchere had taken under his wing Calgary lawyers like John Major, whom was then appointed by Mulroney to the Supreme Court of Canada on November 13, 1992 as in Part 5.<br />
After Pamela Kirkpatrick moved to B.C. Supreme Court in 1989, in February 1990 her law firm McCarthy & McCarthy in Toronto and Vancouver merged with Clarkson Tetrault in Ottawa and Montreal to become the largest Canadian law firm, McCarthy Tetrault with more than 450 lawyers (“Lawyer quits firm over misuse of funds $200,000 paid to numbered company”, November 13, 1990, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">The Globe and Mail</span></em></a>; and, “Law firms’ merger trend gains”, by Jeff Adams, January 5, 1991, <a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/index.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Calgary Herald</em></span></a>). It was from this law firm in August 1992 Concordia University counsel Richard Beaulieu sent a controversial threatening letter to engineering professor Valery Fabrikant days before the latter’s murderous rampages – a letter that may have contributed to stimulating Fabrikant’s violent urge according to an independent review quoted in Part 5.<br />
Thursday, November 26, 1992, was when CBC first threatened me with a criminal charge if I continued phoning about deposing Mulroney, and my response was that in that case I would expose the issues in the criminal court.<br />
It turned out that the next day, Friday, November 27, was the official start of Pamela A. Kirkpatrick as a Justice of B.C. Supreme Court (“<a href="http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/court_of_appeal/about_the_court_of_appeal/justices_of_the_court_of_appeal.aspx" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Current Justices of the Court of Appeal</span></a>”, The Courts of British Columbia). I had no idea of the coincidence, but on Saturday phoned David Kirkpatrick about the latest feedback from CBC – Pamela was there and I told her about the CBC warning.<br />
So in this context it wasn’t only the timing of RCMP Superintendent D. G. Cowley’s promotion in November 1990 that coincided with a political ‘crackdown’. Ms. Kirkpatrick today sits on British Columbia’s highest court, Court of Appeal, where there is also Harvey Groberman who – as in Part 5 – in November 1990 was a B.C. government lawyer working with Supt. Cowley to end native blockades.<br />
Thus the unexpected demand from RCMP Sgt. Brian Cotton on November 30, 1992, if not thought of as a ‘betrayal’ like with David Kirkpatrick at UBC, was certainly more powerful than I could free myself from. But I didn’t have that degree of sense yet, still optimistic that a psychiatric assessment would easily clear me like earlier with Dr. Remick so I should be back that evening to continue with publicity attempts against Brian Mulroney’s leadership.<br />
Strictly speaking, the RCMP did not show anything that Justice Kirkpatrick acted in an official capacity to compel me to take a psychiatric assessment, but I decided to cooperate as it was clear that RCMP could take a further step of who knew what if I didn’t. There was a coincidence that Justice Kirkpatrick was appointed to the Westminster courthouse which supervised suburban cities south of Vancouver, including Richmond where the provincial courthouse had jurisdiction over the UBC area.<br />
Before leaving, Brian Cotton showed interest in the papers lying on my dining table doubled as a desk, so I gave him a copy of my fax to Member of Parliament Kim Campbell that morning – my press releases and a cover note. Cotton also had his fellow officer take a peek into the bedroom.<br />
Once outside, I noticed that Cotton and his companion had arrived in separate unmarked police cars and he now sent the other officer to another duty.<br />
Over a decade later when I reviewed RCMP personal-information disclosure in 2003, I began to suspect that in that afternoon of November 30, 1992 when Sgt. Brian Cotton sent his Constable companion to another duty, they were attempting to intercept the fax I had sent in the morning to the local constituency office of MP Kim Campbell.<br />
Here is one crucial piece of evidence supporting this scenario. The <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot033%20-%20Fax%20to%20MP%20Kim%20Campbell,%20Nov%2030,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">November 1992 press releases sent to MP Kim Campbell and disclosed by RCMP in 2003</span></a> are not from the copy I had given to Brian Cotton, but from the copy received at Kim Campbell’s office, as the bottom of every page bears a line of marking from my fax at “9:47” that morning, where “BROADOAKS” was the fax shop at Broadway and Oaks Street not far from my apartment. At the top-right corner of each page of the press releases there is a date-stamp,<br />
<blockquote>
“Attached To<br />
Nov 30, 1992”</blockquote>
The stamp denoted the press releases as attachment to the fax cover note, which was a brief letter to Kim Campbell. I didn’t use that kind of stamp and obviously the fax service wouldn’t tamper with the client’s document, so a question is whether Kim Campbell’s office or the RCMP stamped them. That RCMP has a copy from the fax received isn’t a surprise, as it will be explained later that a copy was officially forwarded to RCMP. But if it was an RCMP stamp then on that same day RCMP got hold of a copy right away.<br />
In the second RCMP personal-information disclosure in 2008, I found a page the content of which has been withheld, but <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot034%20-%20RCMP%20Nov%2018,%2092%20date-stamp%20consistent%20with%20Nov%2030,%2092%20stamps%20on%20press%20releases.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">which has a date-stamp of the same type</span></a>,<br />
<blockquote>
“Attached To<br />
Nov 18, 1992”</blockquote>
So my conclusion is more likely it was an RCMP date-stamp, but only ‘more likely’ because November 18, 1992 happened to be the day when Justice Department filed a Statement of Defence – as in Part 5 – to counter my lawsuit claims so this ‘blank’ page could have come from Justice Department’s Vancouver office, whilst Campbell happened to be Justice Minister, and her MP office also could use the same kind of stamp.<br />
In Sgt. Brian Cotton’s car as he was about to drive towards UBC, I suggested that we instead go to Vancouver General Hospital only a few blocks from my apartment. I reminded him that my pending lawsuit against UBC and RCMP meant taking me to UBC Hospital would be a conflict-of-interest situation for them. <br />
Cotton replied that it had already been arranged at UBC, and then placed a call in his car to the office of Albert McClean, UBC Associate Vice President in charge of legal affairs, to ask for direction for after arrival at UBC Hospital. Recall as in Part 5, McClean had investigated my grievance against Head Klawe on behalf of UBC President David Strangway prior to my job’s end on June 30 and my eviction on July 2, so now the entire table including the top level of UBC was turned against me.<br />
Once at University Hospital – UBC Site, events were recorded in the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot035%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psychiatric%20certification%20and%20notes,%20Nov%2030-Dec%202,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">records for my emergency admission and start of psychiatric committal</span></a><span style="color: blue;"></span>.<br />
At the emergency department with the RCMP officer present I went through waiting and various interviews for about 3 and 1/2 hours before being committed into a psychiatric ward after two doctors, Dr. Alexander Bruce Morrison, emergency physician (normally on duty at the hospital’s Shaughnessy Site), and psychiatrist Dr. Patricia Luz Testa Schwartz, wrote the necessary medical certificates under the B.C. Mental Health Act.<br />
My attending hospital was considered voluntary as the Nursing Assessment noted, but the psychiatric committal was not. The Mental Health Act required any committal of longer than 48 hours to have two medical certificates state that in the professional opinion the patient had a mental illness, and that involuntary hospitalization was needed for the protect of the patient or others.<br />
Dr. Morrison’s certificate stated:<br />
<blockquote>
“Feeling of Persecution. He’s been threatening people with violence.”</blockquote>
Dr. Schwartz’s certificate stated:<br />
<blockquote>
“He has been “very stressed” since he lost his job last July. He feels there is a conspiracy against him by Brian Mulroney & that he has been “framed”. He has been harassing C.B.C. trying to get his story in the news. Over the weekend he made threatening calls to colleagues.”</blockquote>
Both certificates marked that I was brought by a police officer “under the provisions of Section 24(1) of the Act”, which I believe was an older version of<span style="color: blue;"> </span><a href="http://www.bclaws.ca/EPLibraries/bclaws_new/document/ID/freeside/00_96288_01" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">the current Section 28 (1)</span></a> outlining the conditions under which a police officer could “apprehend” and “immediately take” a person to psychiatric examination.<br />
But at no time had I been “apprehended” by Sgt. Cotton.<br />
As demonstrated in Part 5, in my fax cover note to MP Kim Campbell I had alleged a political persecution, likely from PM Brian Mulroney due to my criticism of his leadership and call for his removal. I also expressed a similar feeling in my phone calls to former colleagues and my conversation with Justice Kirkpatrick.<br />
But had I been harassing CBC? That was the assertion of a CBC executive producer.<br />
Had I been threatening anyone with violence? Absolutely not, if anyone felt threatened it would have been over my intent to expose a “conspiracy”. <br />
The “collateral info” from RCMP officer Brian Cotton and police file put it this way:<br />
<blockquote>
“Last few weeks has been repeatedly contacting colleagues by phone to discuss this conspiracy. Also recently has been ‘harassing’ the CBC News to get media coverage for his plight. In addition, now believes that the conspiracy is originating from Brian Mulroney as Pt. has been sending the CBC a number of ‘press release’ criticizing the PM and his policies. Pt. apparently was told by an executive producer at the CBC on Thurs that his situation ‘was not top priority news’, and was warned that if he continued to harass them, the police would be contacted.”</blockquote>
Note that the CBC warning of involving the police was given on Thursday, i.e., November 26, the day before Ms. Kirkpatrick officially became B.C. Supreme Court Justice. RCMP made it clear that it was “Madame Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick” who communicated with RCMP over concern for safety of others:<br />
<blockquote>
“On Saturday, called the home of his colleague in Comp Sci Dr. Kirkpatrick; happened to speak with his wife – Madame Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick – and told her that he was going to do something that would make media headlines. Apparently Ms. Kirkpatrick was concerned somewhat about the safety of her family & the safety of other faculty members, & police were informed. In addition, the Comp. Sci. building was closed down over the weekend in light of the potential threats.”</blockquote>
But what was the source of the allegation of violence that caused such “concern” about safety of others, which the medical doctors took for facts? <br />
It was the same old UBC incidents – particularly on March 16 – as discussed in Part 4, involving heated arguments with persons like instructor Vince Manis and graduate students Christopher Healey and Andrew Martin. Here is the RCMP info regarding that history:<br />
<blockquote>
“Well until earlier this year, when noted to make a few aggressive & compulsive gestures towards other faculty members in the Dept of Computer Science at UBC. Police has a statement from another faculty member dated Mar 16th, in which Pt. walked past him, swore, then threw a coffee cup for no apparent reason. Pt. then pushed faculty member, who was urged by colleagues to file a formal complaint with police, so this had occurred previously but had not been officially documented.”</blockquote>
As I recall that would have been Andrew Martin extending his arm to block my path as if to pick a fight after I had tossed out water in my coffee mug but not toward him, and I pushed his arm away to walk past. <br />
In Part 4 some email exchanges with various Computer Science persons have been discussed, most noticeably those dated March 16 with Chris Healey. Did I appear aggressive or use foul words in some of them? Foul words were used, but in the proper context of the political situation I was only expressing anger in a righteous manner, without the intent of aggression or violence.<br />
But my temper tantrums, provoked by certain UBC persons with grievous agendas, were then used as the pretence to involve the police and to falsely accuse me as violent and mentally ill. As in Part 5, Cpl. Nancy McKerry and her RCMP superiors further fabricated facts and redefined the incident of my July 2 arrest to perpetuate the myth of mental instability and potential violence – partly at the urging of UBC to heighten the fear and bundle me with multiple murderer Valery Fabrikant of Concordia University in Montreal.<br />
What else was new in Justice Kirkpatrick’s concern for “the safety of her family & the safety of other faculty members” as referred to in a quote above? Not that I am aware of regarding me, as I had known Mrs. Kirkpatrick since 1988 and was never given any impression of concern. On the other hand, as noted earlier in August her former law firm McCarthy Tetrault’s Richard Beaulieu had sent a threatening letter to Valery Fabrikant on behalf of Concordia University that may have helped trigger Fabrikant’s violent urge – a real source of concern.<br />
But UBC would go to great length to suppress the wrong person, using a fake doctor’s referral to make the psychiatric committal appear legitimate: Dr. Morrison stated in the Emergency Record and Admission Note that a “Dr. J. Linesley [?]” phoned in a message to refer me to psychiatry in arrangement with a Computer Science faculty member. I had no knowledge of such a doctor, my family doctor was Dr. James Lai, and UBC had no right to impose a medical referral from a doctor who hadn’t seen me.<br />
Another major concern is the Admission Note’s stating that on Wednesday, i.e., November 25, I had found out that my “Professor of Philosophy” father in China was hospitalized for “heart disease”. Father and son were now both hospitalized – father had to in China but that didn’t mean son had to in Canada.<br />
As indicated in Part 5, RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster has just been acclaimed INTERPOL president on November 10 – the same day when I first sent out press releases – after a Chinese candidate had withdrawn in his favor, and Alberta Justice John Major had just been appointed Supreme Court of Canada Justice on November 13, who happened to share his annual birthday with my father and share certain law firm connection with Mulroney the public were not aware of.<br />
“Paranoid ideation” appeared to be what RCMP officer Brian Cotton alleged from the outset as recorded in the Admission Note, and so the main diagnosis was “Paranoid Delusional Disorder”, with differential diagnoses of “manic depression”, “adjustment disorder”, “schizophrenia” and “organic psychosis”.<br />
That would mean a lot of life-endangering, false medical disease hunts.<br />
Fortunately, after my transfer to the psych ward the diagnoses there eased considerably. The psychiatrist who interviewed me first at Ward 2 West, Dr. Peter Chan, gave his diagnosis as “Delusional Disorder, Persecutory Type”, clearly identifying it with my political mindset, which might not have perceived reality correctly but to an intellectual professional was not “paranoid” as to RCMP.<br />
Nonetheless, I was prescribed the anti-psychotic medication Haldol that had very discomforting and risky side effects, and Ativan to counter some of them.<br />
I was then interviewed by the ward’s supervising psychiatrist, Dr. Laura Chapman, who immediately tried to increase the severity of the diagnosis:<br />
<blockquote>
“This man is suffering from a psychotic illness which appears to be most probably a Delusional Disorder of persecutory type with a differential diagnosis of Schizophrenia.<br />
He has persecutory delusions relating to the Head of Computer Science – Dr. Crowley who he believes dismissed him unjustly. He has the desire to “retaliate” stating he will do so by notifying the media of her “wrong doings”, notifying his MP and also his lawyer. He believes Dr. Crowley has been harassing him by sending the RCMP to his home.”</blockquote>
A delusional disorder was likely a temporary mental misperception of reality, but schizophrenia was a disease of the brain that normally couldn’t be cured and the psychiatric means could be permanent to override my political interests against my “desire”.<br />
Was that Dr. Chapman’s honest medical opinion? Her note above didn’t show anything medical about the situation, with her diagnosis based on what I desired to do politically, all peaceful and within my rights to do: contacting the media, my Member of Parliament and my lawyer.<br />
Was her diagnosis of possible schizophrenia politically motivated then? <br />
There are signs in these notes to suggest so. Sgt. Brian Cotton had misquoted Computer Science Head Dr. Maria Klawe’s name as “Dr. Maria Calway”, and here Dr. Chapman referred to Dr. Klawe as “Dr. Crowley”. But there was no one of such names I knew of, and a UBC department head had no power “sending RCMP” to my home.<br />
On the next page of notes Dr. Chapman wrote:<br />
<blockquote>
“– collateral: RCMP & Dr. Cowley.”</blockquote>
Again there wasn’t a Dr. Cowley, but as discussed in Part 5 RCMP Vancouver Subdivision commander in 1992, Superintendent D. G. Cowley, was involved in decisions against me, particularly over my civil lawsuit filed in October. <br />
So it looks like Dr. Laura Chapman misused a name referring to the authority, and that is now very revealing: she kept the option of “schizophrenia” diagnosis open likely at a request from a higher political level, probably through Supt. Cowley, so that more permanent psychiatric means would be available for political suppression.<br />
Dr. Chapman then made a phone call to Staff Sergeant (J. B.) Jansen of UBC RCMP, whose “collateral info” also confirmed the political motive of this RCMP-led psychiatric intervention.<br />
So-called“quasi-violent” behavior on campus was the reason RCMP went to my apartment according to S/Sgt. Jansen, behavior such as throwing an ashtray at someone -- These had been the same kind of allegations from March, and reviewed by Cpl. McKerry prior to my July 2 arrest and then by Jansen on August 25 who concluded it was essentially a civil dispute, as in Part 5. As for the ‘ashtray’, I didn’t smoke and had none.<br />
Jansen admitted there were no weapons in my apartment, no restraining order against me, and he was not aware of any specific threat against others –- In that case, Jansen’s conclusion in August was right that my situation was unrelated to Valery Fabrikant’s at Concordia University and shouldn’t be stretched further into this psychiatric intervention.<br />
Jansen stated I phoned CBC frequently, and phoned UBC Computer Science Department members who “apparently “welcomed” these” –- So clearly I only kept contact with former colleagues who “welcomed” it, and the “violence” allegations were from some others to smear me politically.<br />
Jansen said I phoned Justice Kirkpatrick, and that I accused PM Mulroney of retribution:<br />
<blockquote>
“Feng was talking about PM Mulroney being involved in a conspiracy & that P.M. was personally involved in taking retribution on him.”</blockquote>
That I think was the real reason RCMP officers suddenly went to my apartment on November 30 after I had faxed documents critical of Mulroney to MP Kim Campbell.<br />
Jansen stated that it was RCMP decision for “hospitalization for assessment” on my “level of agitation”:<br />
<blockquote>
“Feng’s level of agitation has <strong><span style="font-size: medium;">↑</span></strong><span style="font-size: x-small;"> over past 2-3 mo</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><strong>∵</strong></span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> RCMP felt that hospitalization for assessment was warranted.”</span></blockquote>
As the earlier quotes have shown, RCMP officer Brian Cotton and possibly Supt. D. G. Cowley wanted real psychiatric diagnoses and got them.<br />
Two days after my initial psychiatric committal, Pamela Kirkpatrick’s November 27 appointment as B.C. Supreme Court Justice was officially reported on December 2, as announced by Justice Minister Kim Campbell (“2 city women among 3 judges to be sworn in to B.C. Supreme Court”, December 2, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></span></a>):<br />
<blockquote>
“Pamela Kirkpatrick, is appointed to the court in New Westminster. She replaces Justice Thomas Fisher, who has become a supernumary judge, meaning he hears cases on a part-time basis. <br />
…<br />
The appointments, which pay an annual salary of $147,800, were announced in Ottawa by federal Justice Minister Kim Campbell.<br />
Kirkpatrick graduated from the University of B.C. law school in 1977 and was called to the bar a year later. She practised with the law firm of McCarthy and McCarthy before she was appointed a Supreme Court Master three years ago. Masters preside in chambers hearings.”</blockquote>
Besides supressing my accusations of Prime Minister Mulroney in a political scandal, blocking my civil lawsuit was another RCMP objective, which Supt. Cowley had expressed on October 14 as in Part 5.<br />
Dr. Alexander Bruce Morrison’s notes on November 30 recorded that I had contacted my lawyer over the weekend – the same weekend when I spoke to Justice Kirkpatrick about political persecution in a “conspiracy” – who then spoke to UBC lawyer but the latter instead accused me of threatening UBC staff.<br />
So now on December 3 my lawyer Brian Mason received a phone call, and a letter on December 4 from Dr. M. O. Agbayewa, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot036%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psych%20dept%20letter%20to%20lawyer%20Brian%20Mason,%20Dec%203,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Officer-in-Charge at UBC Hospital Department of Psychiatry</span></a>, to notify him of my involuntary committal, noting that I could appeal to a Review Panel:<br />
<blockquote>
“We must, of course, discharge him if a Review Panel or other legally constituted body orders his discharge irrespective of our perceptions regarding his readiness for community care. Dr. Gao has been made aware of his rights to appeal the Medical Certificates to the Review Panel …”</blockquote>
On the day of this December 4 letter from UBC Hospital to my lawyer, RCMP S/Sgt. (Norman) Medley who had signed for Supt. D. G. Cowley on October 5 to terminate the investigation for my public complaint about the July 2 arrest as in Part 5, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot028%20-%20RCMP%20processing%20of%20public%20complaint%20and%20withdrawal,%20Sept-Oct%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">now added a footnote to that document</span></a>:<br />
<blockquote>
“Dec – 4 1992 – update of civil suit.”</blockquote>
Obviously UBC Hospital had up-to-date consultation with RCMP about me. There was no other lawsuit activity given my committal. <br />
The mental-health laws were not Brian Mason’s specialty and I was short of money, so I applied to Community Legal Assistance Society and B.C. Civil Liberties Association and was appointed <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot037%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psych%20dept%20memo%20for%20record%20access%20by%20Review%20Panel,%20Dec%2017,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Bert Haughian from CLAS and K. Turkson from BCCLA</span></a> as my advocates, who were given record access by Anne McCarthy in Dr. Agbayewa’s office on December 17, a day before the panel hearing on December 18.<br />
In the meaning time, I tried another to way to counter the psychiatric oppression, by <span style="color: #333333;">writing a letter to Member of Parliament Kim Campbell – possibly also addressing her as Justice Minister – to complain</span> about it as political persecution from the Mulroney government.<br />
<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot038%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psych%20ward%20notes,%20Dec%207,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Dr. Peter Chan recorded on December 7</span></a>:<br />
<blockquote>
“Faxing letter to Kim Campbell, delusions of persecution by ‘political higher powers’ and ‘the government’ involved in conspiracy to keep him here.”</blockquote>
To this day I have not been able to locate a copy of this second letter to Kim Campbell in any of the personal-information disclosures, unlike with my November 30 fax which the RCMP later disclosed a copy to me in 2003. I recall that this December 7 letter was faxed to lawyer Brian Mason who immediately forwarded it to Kim Campbell’s local MP office.<br />
Dr. Chan’s interviews also touched on personal issues, such as personal friendship, or the lack of:<br />
<blockquote>
<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width: 462px;"><tbody>
<tr> <td valign="top" width="79">“– Friends: <br />
: <br />
<br />
– Girlfriend: <br />
: </td> <td valign="top" width="381">not difficult to get along with others <br />
but hard to become ‘deeply involved’ with people <br />
<br />
lasted 4-5 years in China, began age 20 <br />
ended because Feng moved. </td> </tr>
</tbody></table>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
– Canadian citizen since July/92”</blockquote>
My complaint about political persecution targeting me aside, some of my criticisms of Prime Minister Mulroney’s approach to constitutional reform have been <span style="color: #333333;">reviewed in my 2009 blog posts on Canadian politics</span>, where I discussed the<span style="color: blue;"> </span><span style="color: #333333;">disagreeing perspectives between Mulroney and his Constitutional Affair Minister Joe Clark</span> (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-4/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">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 9)</span></a>”):<br />
<blockquote>
“In spite of its shortcomings, the Pearson accord was an important milestone in the Canadian constitutional saga: as the first constitutional agreement – since the failed Meech Lake accord – between the federal government and all provinces except Quebec, all territories and official aboriginal representatives, it greatly surpassed the Meech Lake accord and opened new horizons; it would significantly extend the 1982 Constitution – which did not have Quebec’s consent either – albeit somewhat unconventionally in its enshrinement of specific rights for specific ethnic/cultural minorities; most importantly, the Pearson accord was only a blueprint to be revised and refined by an expected first ministers conference to reach a final accord.<br />
But prime minister Brian Mulroney was not that happy that an accord was reached with him away at the G-7 summit in Munich, Germany, although it was not unexpected to him that the premiers were – in his words – going “to effect a compromise situation”; he was described as “taken aback”, especially that the accord included a Triple-E Senate (really a 2.5-E Senate as previously discussed) when he had made clear that it would not be his choice, be it Equal or Effective (as in real Senate power); according to a press story, former Australian Prime Minister Robert Hawke had convinced Mulroney that a powerful Senate could paralyze the House of Commons.”</blockquote>
Mulroney’s personal supervision of the final constitutional negotiation, turning the July 7 Pearson Accord reached under Clark which Quebec was not part of into the August 28 Charlottetown Accord with Quebec in the agreement, had a sabotage role as I felt in November 1992. <br />
As in my blog post, B.C. MP Chuck Cook in Mulroney’s Tory party had openly expressed fear of Mulroney’s machination:<br />
<blockquote>
“Chuck Cook, Tory MP for North Vancouver, B.C., became openly critical of both Mulroney and Bourassa for what might be in the works between them, saying he was “scared to death”:<br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width: 461px;"><tbody>
<tr> <td valign="top" width="44"></td> <td valign="top" width="415">“I’m scared to death of this,” Cook (PC-North Vancouver) said. “I fear what Mulroney and Bourassa will come out with. I fear it could blow the whole agreement apart.” <br />
… ”</td> </tr>
</tbody></table>
</blockquote>
An episode of events in Quebec during the Charlottetown constitutional referendum campaign from September to October 1992, then showed that despite the Charlottetown Accord being touted as a major concession to Quebec and a credit to Mulroney’s leadership, some important Quebec negotiators felt it was sabotaged.<br />
This episode also had <span style="color: #333333;">an eerie air of coincidence to what would happen to me</span> later on November 30.<br />
A phone conversation between Diane Wilhelmy and Andre Tremblay, Quebec constitutional-affairs officials under Premier Robert Bourassa, was leaked to the media. It was very critical of the final negotiation and certain negotiation tactics, using words like “national disgrace” and “humiliation” to describe what happened to Quebec at the negotiating table. Their laments included calling Ontario constitutional-affairs official David Cameron “profoundly hypocritical”, who curiously happened to be anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron’s husband. Before the phone conversation was widely reported in Quebec, a lawyer for Wilhelmy applied to the court to prevent its publication.<br />
The press ban attempt didn’t succeed but the lawyer, Gerald Tremblay, was with the same law firm where Concordia University counsel Richard Beaulieu was, and B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick had been, i.e., McCarthy Tetrault (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-8/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">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)</span></a>”):<br />
<blockquote>
“If one wonders whether Brian Mulroney was mindful, then and later, of how some Quebecers loathed David Cameron’s role in the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional process, and of the fact that Cameron’s wife Stevie Cameron was a journalist-author writing about corruptions in his government, one can take note of the following fact which seems to have been overlooked: Mulroney not only publicly acknowledged during the October 1992 referendum campaign for the Charlottetown accord that the prospect of its passing was hurt by the Wilhelmy affair, but when the Airbus Affair became the top news story in November 1995 partly thanks to publicity from Stevie Cameron’s second bestselling book, <em>On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years</em>, Mulroney would choose lawyer Gerald Tremblay of the law firm McCarthy Tetrault as his lead lawyer for the $50 million defamation lawsuit against the RCMP and the Canadian government – the same lawyer previously representing Diane Wilhelmy in September 1992 trying to get a court injunction to prevent the phone conversation tape (and its transcript) from being aired by the media in Quebec (a partial transcript quoted above had been published in Ontario).”</blockquote>
As the above quote indicates, Gerald Tremblay later became Mulroney’s lawyer in the 1995 Airbus Affair. <br />
But unlike with the Wilhelmy affair, I didn’t attempt to air criticisms of Mulroney’s constitutional-affairs conduct until after the Charlottetown Accord had been defeated in the October 26 national referendum.<br />
The choice of University Hospital – UBC Site, for the RCMP-led psychiatric intervention despite my suggestion of Vancouver General Hospital contradicted the alleged basis of the use of involuntary psychiatry, namely that I was threatening UBC staff with “violence”. Shouldn’t I be kept far away from that university then?<br />
There might be a more malignant agenda behind the apparent contradiction. by December 9-10 I was allowed to walk around the campus as no violent intent was observed, but with a <span style="color: #333333;">precautionary reminder not to go to Computer Science Building</span>. Visiting the main library I ran into David Kirkpatrick, namely husband of Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, and <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot039%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psych%20ward%20notes,%20Dec%209-11,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">as cautioned I didn’t go to Computer Science Building</span></a>.<br />
I recall David Kirkpatrick saying to me at the time that I should accept what had happened.<br />
But what kind of arrangement was it, that someone persistently accused by certain others in a university department as having had “violent” or “quasi-violent” behavior and a source of concern for violence like a murderer had done at another university, would be brought to the campus as a psychiatric patient against his will “for the safety of others”, where he could walk around, and even go to that department against psychiatrists’ advice had he chosen to?<br />
In my mind it was an escalating ‘trap’ possibly to activate ‘institutional violence’ against me: had I gone to Computer Science Building it would have generated a harder complaint by some about the ‘danger’; given my status as an involuntary mental patient brought in by police in consultation with a court justice, ‘electroshock’ could be next.<br />
A modern version of that, a police taser, as discussed in Part 5 killed Robert Dziekanski on October 14, 2007, who looked “largish” but turned out to have a “pre-existing heart condition” (“<a href="http://www.cpc-cpp.gc.ca/prr/rep/rev/chair-pre/dziekanski/appt-eng.aspx" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Report Following a Public Interest Investigation into a Chair-Initiated Complaint Respecting the Death in RCMP Custody of Mr. Robert Dziekanski: Appendix T – Medical Assessments</span></a>”, Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP). <br />
In November-December 1992 my father had been hospitalized for “heart disease” as per the UBC Hospital notes, so the scheme was more than “hypocritical” but could be diabolical.<br />
It begs the question of what the factors were behind the politics that made it so nasty in the preference of some persons, when it wasn’t even a matter of violence but management behavior and political-leadership conduct in my perspective.<br />
In Part 3 I have outlined intriguing cases of deadly violence in my environments dating back for many years, including with victims in the UBC Computer Science community: the unresolved murder of Rick Sample in 1989, and later the brutal murder of Martin Frauendorf in 1993. But I have not presumed these deaths to have direct relations to the politics of my focus.<br />
There were however, unbeknown to me, additional political intrigues beyond UBC and RCMP when in October 1992 I switched to the venue of civil legal action.<br />
I went through many Vancouver law firm from July through September before meeting lead lawyer Brian Mason of Maitland & Company, who was essentially the only one to agree to do it – with RCMP also as a defendant at the advice of some lawyers I had met.<br />
On October 6 on our way to file the lawsuit, Mr. Mason who had UBC double-major degrees in Math and Physics mentioned with great conviction a favourite scientist of his, Richard Feynman. I was familiar with Feynman’s role inquiring into the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster but not with his involvement in the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb, and I didn’t know that Mason had worked at Atomic Energy Canada Limited – like former UBC Computer Science Acting Head Jim Kennedy and later Mulroney’s financial trustee and lawyer Bruce Verchere as in Part 4 – though only as a summer intern in the year Feynman received Nobel Prize in Physics. (“<a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=8hIoN3Q_zOkC&pg=PA207&dq=richard+feynman+and+the+challenger+explosion&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dnVvT62IOYb20gGayozuBg&ved=0CF8Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=richard%20feynman%20and%20the%20challenger%20explosion&f=false" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Richard Feynman and the Challenger Explosion</span></a>”, in Melvin Joesten, Mary E. Castellion and John L. Hogg, <em><span style="color: #333333;">The World of Chemistry: Essentials</span></em>, 2007, Thomson Books; and, “<a href="http://www.maitland.com/Lawyers/Brian-A-Mason.shtml" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Brian Alan Mason</span></a>”, Maitland & Company)<br />
Afterwards, I said to Mason that my priority now was to get publicity for the lawsuit, as I viewed it as a management-style issue and I also had opinions about Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership which I wouldn’t mind also raising.<br />
Mason responded that he had represented a lawsuit against earlier B.C. Premier Bill Vander Zalm’s former principal secretary David Poole, and it was a front-page story. But he quickly added that I would have to do my own publicity, and I replied that my goal was only to get it into the serious news section.<br />
I knew who David Poole was, not because I had a former UBC Computer Science colleague by the same name, originally from Australia via University of Waterloo in Ontario, who back in 1988 was a fellow new faculty member with me, incoming Department Head Maria Klawe and her husband Nicholas Pippenger.<br />
But I didn’t know that the 1987-89 case Brian Mason represented, on the sideline of the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute, was the first public challenge to Bill Vander Zalm’s premiership, featuring former cabinet minister Jack Kempf as a star witness and including then B.C. Deputy Attorney General Ted Hughes as a defendant (“Vander Zalm lied on talks, Kempf charges”, by Keith Baldrey and Phil Needham, November 25, 1989, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></span></a>):<br />
<blockquote>
“Premier Bill Vander Zalm lied publicly about not knowing of “secret” talks between former forests minister Jack Kempf and a U.S. lumberman on lumber tariffs and ordered an investigation that was nothing more than a “charade,” B.C. Supreme Court was told Friday.<br />
…<br />
Asked by plaintiff’s counsel Brian Mason if he could comment on Kuehne’s testimony without breaching cabinet confidentiality, Kempf said: “Cabinet confidentiality be damned.<br />
“The premier and cabinet knew about my calls to and from Mr. Kuehne. I’m sure that (David) Poole (Vander Zalm’s principal secretary at the time) knew because he sat in on practically every cabinet meeting - so much for confidentiality.<br />
“To emphasize my point, the premier on a TV newscast lied to the people of B.C. with respect to not knowing of my conversations on the phone and of a meeting in Mount Vernon with Mr. Kuehne.”<br />
The testimony went far afield of the issues in the trial, defence lawyer Peter Butler complained, but B.C. Supreme Court Justice Lloyd McKenzie allowed Mason to elicit the evidence.<br />
Mason is representing Peter Griffiths, a former independent logging operator who wrote a freelance column on forestry in Equity magazine from 1984 to 1987.<br />
Griffiths claims he was defamed in statements by Poole to the press alleging he was misrepresenting himself as Vander Zalm’s personal emissary while monitoring the softwood-lumber dispute between the U.S. and Canada. Griffiths also claims deputy attorney-general Ted Hughes tried to restrict his access to the premier.<br />
…<br />
Vander Zalm asked then-attorney-general Brian Smith to obtain details about the alleged secret negotiations and report back to him with any recommendations. Smith directed Hughes to conduct an informal investigation.”</blockquote>
As if an ominous sign for my case later, the Ted Hughes portion of the legal claims was quickly dismissed by the court, and the entire lawsuit was subsequently dismissed in late 1989 after all the media publicity.<br />
Ironically, when Premier Vander Zalm – an ex-Mayor of Surrey where not only RCMP Cpl. Nancy McKerry as in Part 5 but lawyer Brian Mason were residents – was then embroiled in the Fantasy Gardens scandal over the private sale of his family’s Richmond theme park to Taiwanese Filipino tycoon Tan Yu, and resigned in late March 1991 after some of his business practices were publicized, a key factor forcing him to step down was a critical investigation by Ted Hughes, the first Conflict-of-Interest Commissioner Vander Zalm had recently appointed on October 1, 1990. (“Conflict launches Hughes’ new career”, by Vaughn Palmer, October 2, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></span></a>; and,“Ex-premier holds his ground; Vander Zalm says Hughes’ investigation was ‘intimidating, strange’”, Keith Fraser, February 3, 2012, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Province</em></span></a>)<br />
Vander Zalm was outed by Chinese Canadian realtor Faye Leung for pocketing $20,000 small cash for the multi-million dollar deal. At the time Leung was near bankruptcy, under pressure from an RCMP fraud investigation and from a lawsuit initiated by her former business partners Chien Hsuing Lin and Chung Chu Lin, which forced the money for her share of the Fantasy Gardens sale commission to be sent to the court instead. (“Faye's fall: Ambitious real-estate agent hustled the deal of a lifetime, then saw her career crumble”, by Gordon Hamilton, February 16, 1991, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></span></a>; “The much-commended and mercurial woman who has plenty to say about B.C. Premier William Vander Zalm and his involvement in Fantasy Gardens is proud of her connections Agent cherishes role of ambassador”, March 25, 1991, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">The Globe and Mail</span></em></a>; and, “The rise and fall of Bill Vander Zalm”, by Ken MacQueen, March 30, 1991, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Gazette</em></span></a>)<br />
The Lins’ lawyer who launched the lawsuit on October 10, 1990 was Scott Griffin, who kept a low profile in court proceedings and in the media but in fact was with Justice Kirkpatrick’s former law firm McCarthy Tetrault: for example his address for his clients in the <em>Van's Nurseries Inc. v. Leung</em> case at the B.C. Court of Appeal, heard in court on August 20, 1992 – around the time when McCarthy Tetrault’s Richard Beaulieu in Montreal sent a controversial threatening letter to Valery Fabrikant as in Part 5 – was #1300, 777 Dunsmuir Street, Vancouver, which has long been McCarthy Tetrault’s address in Vancouver.<br />
That was curiously interesting, because from my knowledge visiting Vancouver law firms in 1992, #1300 is an office tower’s 13th floor which many of the Vancouver Downtown office towers skipped due to ‘bad luck’ superstition; but apparently McCarthy Tetrault liked Number 13.<br />
At the time I was familiar with the Bill Vander Zalm-Faye Leung-Ted Hughes stories as in the media, but not the Jack Kempf story lawyer Brian Mason had tried to get out, or any McCarthy Tetrault connection to the Vander Zalm saga.<br />
I was also aware of a claim by then B.C. Lieutenant Governor David Lam, another famous Chinese Canadian, that if Vander Zalm hadn’t resigned he was prepared to fire the premier at that point (“<a href="http://www2.canada.com/story.html?id=6138400" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Former B.C. Premier Bill Vander Zalm defines ‘unrepentant’</span></a>”, by Vaughn Palmer, February 11, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>). After my July 2 eviction, UBC Faculty Association’s vice president for legal affairs suggested that I take my grievance further to the Lieutenant Governor in his role as Visitor to the university by British law. I tried and had a phone conversation with Mr. Lam’s executive secretary whose name I recall as John Roberts, who let me know that Lieutenant Governor Lam typically would not intervene in cases like mine.<br />
Another provincial organ at which I filed a grievance was Ombudsman’s Office, which at the time had its first woman at the helm, Ombudswoman Dulcie McCallum (“<a href="http://www.cmha.bc.ca/about-us/patrons" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Our Honorary Patrons: Dulcie McCallum, Shelagh Rogers, Margaret Trudeau</span></a>”, British Columbia Division, Canadian Mental Health Association ), and that office quickly determined that my case fell outside its jurisdiction.<br />
Both attempts were found futile prior to the October 1992 filing of my civil lawsuit.<br />
As in the above quote, in the 1989 legal litigation against David Poole by independent logging operator and journalist Peter Griffiths, Poole’s side was represented by lawyer Peter Butler, who was a flamboyant business lawyer at Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy, one of Vancouver’s oldest elite law firms.<br />
By late 1991 Peter Butler became Bill Vander Zalm’s defence lawyer and in late June 1992 – days before my UBC eviction – won an acquittal from B.C. Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice David Campbell for a criminal charge stemming from the Fantasy Gardens scandal, the first “breach of trust” charge for any premier in the British Commonwealth. (“Ex-B.C. premier not guilty Vander Zalm no criminal: judge”, by Ken MacQueen, June 26, 1992, <a href="http://www.thespec.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Spectator</em></span></a>).<br />
In October 1992 UBC chose Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy as its lawyer, after lawyer Brian Mason and I filed my lawsuit. <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot040%20-%20UBC%20statement%20of%20defence%20from%20Farris%20&%20Co.%20to%20lawyer%20Brian%20Mason,%20Oct%2030,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">UBC’s statement of defence was filed by Jack Giles</span></a><span style="color: blue;"></span>, a lawyer as successful and nearly as prominent as Peter Butler.<br />
Jack Giles was much more controversial, to the point of being notorious.<br />
As in Part 3 I had arrived in Vancouver, i.e., in Canada, on August 24, 1988 to start work at UBC, unaware that it was an anniversary date of the Sterling Hall Bombing at the University of Wisconsin in the anti-Vietnam War era, for which Leo Frederick Burt, one of America’s Most Wanted, fled to Canada and has never been caught. <br />
Four years later the Valery Fabrikant murders at Concordia University discussed in Part 5 also occurred on August 24.<br />
The very day I arrived happened to be when then B.C. Ombudsman Stephen Owen issued a public report condemning Premier Vander Zalm’s government for intrusive spying on a pro-abortion group, spying supervised by Jack Giles and his firm Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy reporting to B.C. Attorney General Brian Smith and Vander Zalm’s principal secretary David Poole (“Watchdog condemns B.C. for spying on pro-choice group”, August 25, 1988, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">The Globe and Mail</span></em></a>):<br />
<blockquote>
“The Ombudsman found that former attorney-general Brian Smith used “questionable judgment” in employing a law firm and private investigators last year to gather information about the Concerned Citizens for Choice on Abortion, and he did not place adequate regulatory controls on them.<br />
…<br />
What complicated the investigation, Mr. Owen said, was that Mr. Smith’s instructions to lawyer Jack Giles were made orally, as were the reports by Mr. Giles to Mr. Smith and by Mr. Smith to Mr. Vander Zalm’s principal secretary, David Poole.<br />
…<br />
The investigators, hired by the Vancouver law firm of Farris, Vaughn, Wills and Murphy, became members of the pro-choice group and over a period of several months obtained membership and donor lists as well as tape recordings made at public meetings.”</blockquote>
So these were the kind of powerful ‘nemeses’ my former colleague and mentor David Kirkpatrick and his wife, new Justice of B.C. Supreme Court Pamela Kirkpatrick were drawing me into facing, while underhanded tactics were deployed against me by Kirkpatrick’s associates who appeared like “members” of political activism as in Part 4.<br />
On December 16, two days before the Mental Health Review Panel hearing on my appeal of the psychiatric committal, Kirkpatrick’s former graduate student Andrew Martin wrote another letter to accuse me of being violent and mentally ill, this time at the request of Computer Science Head Maria Klawe and sent to Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy – as in Part 4 Martin had written one in April to UBC Associate Vice President Albert McClean to counter my grievance against Klawe.<br />
This <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot041%20-%20Andrew%20Martin%20letter%20to%20lawyer%20Keith%20Mitchell,%20Dec%2016,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">December 16 letter from Andrew Martin was addressed to lawyer Keith Mitchell</span></a>, who years later would succeed Peter Butler as the lead lawyer for that law firm. It accused me of throwing out water from my coffee mug across his path in the Computer Science Building hallway, and speaking toward him using words like “f**k” and “dog”.<br />
As a result of this Andrew Martin letter and other UBC documents from the Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy lawyers, my Review Panel hearing was postponed for several days. Fortunately they didn’t succeed in keeping me under forced committal more permanently.<br />
Some appearances of political conflict of interest in this law firm were quite startling, which I have noticed studying the lawyer profiles, but which have apparently been overlooked by the community. <br />
While Peter Butler and Jack Giles at Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy served as henchmen for the former Vander Zalm government and for some of the very controversial business practices in British Columbia and in Canada, their law firm partners Frank Murphy and Keith Mitchell were long-time fundraisers and representatives for the federal Liberal party in British Columbia, including under Jean Chretien who would defeat Brian Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell in 1993 to become Prime Minister.<br />
So while the political persecution involving psychiatric measures would last, on and off, until August 1995 and I wouldn’t be employed until June-July 1996, I read press stories like the following about how cozy Keith Mitchell was with Prime Minister Chretien, and how much the Liberals’ ties to the mental-health field went back to “Pierre Trudeau times” (“Chocolate swans ended ‘welfare bash’”, by Malcolm Parry, March 14, 1996, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>The Vancouver Sun</em></span></a>):<br />
<blockquote>
“JUST DESSERT, PLEASE . . . Anyone having a baby or looking to make bail Monday night would have found a doctor or lawyer among 2,200 or so professional-looking types joining provincial Liberal leader Gordon Campbell at a $250-per-plate dinner of wild-mushroom salad and steelhead with saffron scallops.<br />
Tables were loaded with B.C. wines donated by Calona, Peller, Jackson Triggs and Sumac Ridge, though not Cedar Creek, whose owner, Ross Fitzpatrick, stepped down recently as Prime Minister Jean Chretien's B.C. lieutenant. That was soon after Campbell gave the Ottawa cabinet and caucus a behind-closed-doors bashing at their recent Vancouver get-together.<br />
Some of the federal Grits who showed up Monday speculated Fitzpatrick will have two successors, one of them to be picked from well-connected longtime party hands David McLean, David McPhee, Frank Murphy, Keith Mitchell or possibly Doug Leung. The other is likely to be Burnaby Association for the Mentally Handicapped development director Ethel Cherneski, whose ties go back to Pierre Trudeau times.” </blockquote>
One of the others mentioned along with lawyers Murphy and Mitchell, David McLean (David G. McLean), was a former Chairman of UBC Board of Governors.<br />
Such reminds me of the ‘togetherness’ of Queen’s University’s 2004 honorary-degree ‘bash’ for Jean Chretien, Brian Mulroney’s in-law Lewis Lapham and Maria Klawe, among others at Andrew Martin’s alma mater as covered in Part 5.<br />
Despite the concerted efforts involving some within RCMP, UBC and its law firm to maximize the psychiatric oppression, a relatively positive <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot042%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psychology%20report,%20Dec%2016,%20psychiatry%20discharge%20report,%20Dec%2022,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">psychology consultation report</span></a> was helpful for my Review Panel appeal. I was interviewed on December 15 by psychologists Dr. J. Lenz and Dr. W. J. Koch:<br />
<blockquote>
“He spoke English with a Chinese accent, but his grammar was impeccable, and his vocabulary was extensive. His presentation and his history both indicated a man of very high intelligence, and he demonstrated a good understanding of differences between Chinese and North American cultures.<br />
…<br />
Mr. Gao evidenced no disorder of thought process. He denied hallucinations or perceptual abnormalities, and he was able to converse on most subjects without any indication of psychopathology. However, when discussing his former job or the university or Canadian politics, his conversation strongly indicated the presence of a nonbizarre delusional system involving his persecution by the Chair of the Computer Science Department subsequent to disagreements over departmental hiring practices. … He reported that he believes his current hospitalization has been brought about by his enemies in order to discredit him and encourage him to withdraw his lawsuit against the university. Mr. Gao evidenced an ability to listen to alternative points and alternative explanations concerning his difficulties; however, he is deeply convinced that his interpretation is correct, and he remains certain that he is suffering from no mental disorder.”</blockquote>
Among the psychologists’ conclusions was an interesting social comment:<br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Gao’s personality style has clearly predisposed him to emphasis on societal rules and thereby to his conviction that leaders who harm others must be confronted. In addition, it has been described that immigrants have an increased risk of developing delusional disorder. …”</blockquote>
Political conviction and immigrant background could add up to delusional disorder – well, at least not like “paranoid ideation” in the opinion of RCMP officer Brian Cotton.<br />
In addition to Delusional Disorder of Persecutory Type, the psychologists suggested Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder.<br />
A delayed Review Panel hearing was held on December 21 and the decision was for my discharge. Psychiatrist <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot042%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psychology%20report,%20Dec%2016,%20psychiatry%20discharge%20report,%20Dec%2022,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Dr. Laura Chapman prepared a discharge report</span></a>, which contained interesting details.<br />
The evidence in it showed that I was in fact quite normal:<br />
<blockquote>
“Feng was quite cooperative and reasonably accessible. He had quite a forthright manner and talked with great conviction about his concerns of corruption in the government and the university. There were no abnormalities of speech, eye contact, or psychomotor activity. … As mentioned, he expressed persecutory delusional ideas for which there was no evidence in reality. There was no perceptual disturbance and he had minimal insight and somewhat impaired judgment.”</blockquote>
Obviously my allegations about Head Maria Klawe couldn’t have been all correct given that I didn’t even know there was RCMP Supt. D. G. Cowley involved. Assuming Dr. Chapman knew as she had used the name “Cowley” for “Klawe” in her December 1 notes, hiding it from me wasn’t an issue as it was RCMP’s decision anyway but attributing my ignorance of it as psychiatric “delusion” was unprofessional.<br />
The discharge report also showed that there was no violent intent even when I tried to be disruptive:<br />
<blockquote>
“Feng was initially certified because of the concern regarding dangerousness, particularly to faculty members. When first admitted to the ward, Feng stated that he would “create a disturbance” on the ward by yelling and disturbing the other patients. He was therefore placed in seclusion and given one dose of intramuscular neuroleptic. The next morning he was more subdued and cooperative, and was able to come out of seclusion after approximately twelve hours.”</blockquote>
I was given tranquillizer and isolation-cell confinement right at the beginning just for saying about “yelling and disturbing the other patients”. Later allowed to stroll outside the hospital, had I gone to Computer Science Building and gotten fingered for “dangerousness”, what would the ‘next level’ of anti-psychotic penalty have been, like something Robert Dziekanski would take in 2007?<br />
Because UBC Hospital was a teaching-and-research hospital, the psych ward didn’t show an atmosphere of coercive restraint a psychiatric hospital would, and the solitary cell was the most coercive object within the ward. But on December 9, the day I was first allowed to walk on campus but given a reminder not to go to Computer Science Building, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot039%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psych%20ward%20notes,%20Dec%209-11,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">I was also administered a CT head scan by “Dr. Flak”</span></a>; walking between the ward and the lab with Dr. (Borys) Flak through semi-underground tunnels snaking among hospital buildings, I would be surprised if there weren’t an ‘electroshock unit’ somewhere behind a closed door.<br />
It was a dangerous ‘trap’ that would at least drag me away from my focus, which at the time was to go home and continue phoning Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:<br />
<blockquote>
“… Feng again eloped from hospital and returned to his apartment to continue placing calls to the CBC. He continued to express the idea that if he were only persistent enough, he would be able to get a National News interview as well as organizing an emergency sitting of Parliament to review the Mulroney government’s corruption.”</blockquote>
There are two issues in the above quote, namely my persistence at getting a “National News interview”, and at “organizing an emergency sitting of Parliament”, that should be clarified here.<br />
If my focus on the national media venue CBC was a reason for my being “delusional” or full of “paranoid ideation”, then such a view reflected a shortcoming and pitfall of psychiatry’s personal- and community-based angle looking at politics. Would <em>Kitsilano News</em> – a community newspaper mentioned in Part 5 – be more appropriate for my ‘level’? Quite the contrary in my view. When a community media venue held up the local authority’s opinion in very high regard as in Part 5, on August 26 extensively quoting UBC faculty association president William Bruneau who falsely labelled my July 2 arrest as “violent” and profusely pinpointed the fear for job loss due to Reaganism and Thatcherism as a cause of deadly violence like Valery Fabrikant’s murders of Concordia colleagues, this media venue would only go farther down that trail rather than becoming open-minded and objective.<br />
If larger issues should not be tried at larger media venues by individuals, i.e., individual news seekers should focus on local interests – such as the cellphone video on RCMP tasering of Robert Dziekanski – which might generate greater public interest, would that adequately reflect the public of a nation?<br />
Besides, I had spent much time phoning British Columbia Television as well, whose staff patiently listened to me – rather than playing ‘on-hold’ games like CBC did to report my frequent calls to police – and made genuine efforts before telling me that BCTV normally didn’t cover controversial national politics.<br />
In my 2009 blog posts I have recalled what BCTV did at my prompting to give support to B.C. Tory MP Stan Wilbee who had been requesting a review of Mulroney’s leadership and as a result was in danger of losing his B.C. Tory caucus chair position (<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa/"><span style="color: blue;">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 5)</span></a>):<br />
<blockquote>
“As it happened, I also sent a copy of this press release to BCTV (then part of the CTV network, today part of the Global TV network). In the morning of the day of the B.C. Tory caucus meeting to discuss the fate of Stan Wilbee as caucus chair (November 17, 1992 as per press archives), who had drawn up a letter of resignation to hand in for his challenge of Mulroney, I phoned BCTV to follow up on my press release and told a news staff member about the caucus meeting in Ottawa, who replied that BCTV would send a camera crew there; later that day when I called again (likely in the afternoon) the same staff member said the camera was there right now; but when I called back the day after I sensed disappointment on the part of this BCTV news staff member, probably because it wasn’t as I had told him that the B.C. Tory MPs might turn against Mulroney’s leadership.”</blockquote>
But it was my local MP Kim Campbell, Mulroney’s Justice Minister, who was demanding Wilbee’s resignation as B.C. Tory caucus chair, saying that Wilbee’s view didn’t represent other B.C. Tory MPs’, and Campbell herself was in the process of securing Mulroney’s favor to succeed him as the leader, as reviewed in the above blog post.<br />
In that critical time period, sending press releases and a note critical of Mulroney’s leadership to MP Kim Campbell meant I fell into a big political ‘trap’.<br />
As for an emergency meeting of Parliament to discuss Mulroney government’s problems, my initial intent had been to generate a public outcry about Prime Minister Mulroney’s leadership conduct, as I had said in <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot033%20-%20Fax%20to%20MP%20Kim%20Campbell,%20Nov%2030,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">my first press release on November 10</span></a>:<br />
<blockquote>
“The existent political process of this country has failed the people. We, the people of Canada, must now take the destiny of the country into our own hands. We must speak our mind loud and clear, and force the politicians to face reality, to hold Mr. Mulroney accountable for his irresponsible actions, and to remove him from the leadership position of the country immediately.”</blockquote>
To remove the leader of a majority party government in an immediate fashion, the only realistic option was through a revolt in the party’s caucuses. So my supplementary press release on November 10 aimed at that, the same as what I prompted BCTV on November 17 to send a camera crew to cover at B.C. Tory caucus meeting in Ottawa:<br />
<blockquote>
“Mr. Stan Wilbee, MP for Delta, B.C., has spoken out publicly, criticizing Mr. Mulroney’s leadership and requesting a province-by-province Tory leadership review. The B.C. Tory MPs should speak out now in support of Mr. Wilbee, reaffirm their confidence in him as the B.C. Caucus chair, and defy Mr. Mulroney’s threat of retaliation by means of cabinet restructuring on by any other means.”</blockquote>
That B.C. Tory caucus meeting was not a completely lost cause as reviewed in my 2009 blog post; the MPs did reaffirm their confidence in Stan Wilbee as caucus chair in spite of his open opposition to Mulroney, although obviously the meeting didn’t turn into a revolt as I had hoped:<br />
<blockquote>
“Regardless, I was disappointed that BCTV did not report on the caucus meeting it had camera footage on. Brief press reports indicated that Stan Wilbee’s resignation was rejected by the caucus and days later Dr. Wilbee, a medical doctor and chair of the House of Commons subcommittee on health issues, also launched a parliamentary investigation on the HIV-tainted blood supply issue.”</blockquote>
It was after I had been taken to UBC Hospital psychiatric committal that I began to feel that given my local MP Kim Campbell’s likely cooperation with RCMP in suppressing me, appealing to B.C. Tory MPs was no longer a workable option while appealing to the people directly through the media became unrealistic. Parliament seemed a good choice, then.<br />
The reality was that the Canadian media generally weren’t too open to sensitive political issues even if public sentiments at the level of disgruntlement and disillusionment were routinely given coverage. In October 1992 as one of my first media-contact attempts I phoned <em>The Vancouver Sun</em> newspaper, and was told that it would only accept materials from my lawyer but not myself; <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot047%20-%20Lawyer%20Brian%20Mason%20fax%20cover%20to%20Mr.%20Rockingham%20at%20The%20Vancouver%20Sun,%20Oct%2021,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">I had Mr. Brain Mason fax in the lawsuit document on my behalf</span></a>, and later never sent this venue any of my press releases.<br />
The different outcomes of my publicity efforts with <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>, BCTV and CBC clearly demonstrated that a media venue’s handling of my contact attempts had an influential effect on the approach I would then adopt to communicate with the venue.<br />
Earlier in her December 1 notes, Dr. Chapman had listed “Schizophrenia” as a differential diagnosis to “Delusional Disorder of persecutory type”. Now in the discharge report written on December 22, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot042%20-%20UBC%20hospital%20psychology%20report,%20Dec%2016,%20psychiatry%20discharge%20report,%20Dec%2022,%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">she instead noted</span></a> “Avoidant, schizoid, and obsessive personality traits” as in addition to “Delusional disorder – persecutory type”.<br />
That might not look like a diagnosis of “Schizophrenia”, but a personality trait would be quite inherent of a person and could be an organic basis of a disease.<br />
The use of psychiatry to suppress political dissent is not a phenomenon that existed only in the former Communist countries. In my first blog article in 2009, I made the point that the intriguing and mysterious life story of the mathematician John Nash, recipient of Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 and subject of the Oscar-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind”, had been diagnosed and treated as a schizophrenic since 1959 at least in part due to his political thoughts, which included his claiming that <em>The New York Times</em> articles had coded messages for him (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/greeting-the-new-millennium-%e2%80%93-nearly-a-decade-late-part-2/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 2)</span></a>”):<br />
<blockquote>
“Now there could indeed be something there in 1959, meaning that the talented young mathematician might have in fact been capable of figuring out some crucial politics ahead of time – his credibility bolstered by his prior background of doing research at RAND. One can look at it this way: in January 1959 Fidel Castro’s revolution was winning in Cuba, an island just a stone’s throw across the water from the United States, and North Vietnamese communists were also adopting a path of “armed struggle” to unify with the South against the backdrop of increasing U.S. military assistance to South Vietnam; it was not like signs of warning did not exist for the turbulent decade ahead, and ten years later by 1969 when the Vietnam War was in full force and the St. Stephen’s Day-born American leftist William Ayers was founding the militant-resistance organization Weather Underground to engage in a series of high-profile, violent bombings in the United States for radical causes,<sup> </sup>John Nash’s thoughts by then could have been viewed as a borderline, nonviolent precursor to these later actions of Ayers and his associates; but by then Nash’s expressions had already been concluded as thoughts of “madness” by some (but not all) psychiatrists, and by the authorities.<br />
What else would be a better explanation than the above – beside Nash’s own brash behavior and his habit of convoluted language – that a mathematician of original thinking and prolific production<sup> </sup>who has now been recognized as having made fundamental contributions to the mathematical economic theory, and who has been called “the greatest numerologist the world has ever seen” (i.e., someone better than anyone else at the use of numbers in astrology and other human affairs) by the Princeton mathematician William Browder,<sup> </sup>was “mentally ill” when it came to his thinking about politics? Recognizing credibility in Nash’s political thoughts is like accepting his mathematical brilliance without automatically overriding any legitimate medical issue there might have been.”</blockquote>
In 2009 after my above blog post and my others on Canadian politics, on October 31 there was the incident of New York City police officer Adrian Schoolcraft being forcibly sent to psychiatric committal because his superiors wanted to suppress his whistleblowing on illegal arrests and manipulation of crime statistics within NYPD (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/nyregion/whistle-blower-police-officer-had-backup-secret-recordings.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">An Officer Had Backup: Secret Tapes</span></a>”, by Jim Dwyer, March 13, 2012, <em>The New York Times</em>).<br />
But one of the saddest stories was that of James Vincent Forrestal, the United States’ first Secretary of Defense, who had a fallout with President Harry Truman, lost the job and was in a low mood in March 1949. Accepting the advice of government psychiatrists brought to him by his high-level political friend and confidante Ferdinand Eberstadt, Forrestal voluntarily entered the psych ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland in early April, only to be found dead on May 22 after a fall of 13-storey height from his 16th-floor room window in the darkness of the night, and treated as a piece of suicide statistics. (Jeffery M. Dorwart, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=WzgPjXXlGesC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><em>Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949</em></span></a>, 1991, Texas A&M University Press; “<a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/finding_aids/willcutts/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Admiral M.D. Willcutts Report on the Death of James V. Forrestal, 1949</span></a>”, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University (<a href="http://jamesforrestal.ariwatch.com/WillcuttsReport.htm#P-GNR1a" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">HTML version</span></a>, ariwatch.com); and, “<a href="http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/88152.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Historians Support Inquiry into the Death of James Forrestal</span></a>”, by Hugh Turley, May 29, 2009, George Mason University’s History News Network)<br />
My situation turned out to be not as hopeless, as my November 30, 1992 fax note and attached press releases to MP Kim Campbell, and the psychiatric oppression suffered right afterwards, were not a complete waste.<br />
On January 6, 1993, RCMP Director of Enforcement Services, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot043%20-%20RCMP%20Asst-Comm%20McConnell%20letter%20to%20E%20division,%20Jan%206,%201993.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell, issued a letter to Commanding Officer of “E” Division</span></a> in British Columbia, to the attention of Officer-In-Charge, Criminal Operations, in regard to my complaint about the July 2 arrest:<br />
<blockquote>
<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width: 270px;"><tbody>
<tr> <td valign="top" width="268">“<strong>Subject: Dr. Feng Gao <br />Complaint Concerning his Arrest <br /><u>by University Detachment Members</u></strong></td> </tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
The enclosed correspondence from Dr. GAO was received by the Solicitor General and sent to us for attention.<br />
Correspondence has been prepared for the Minister’s signature advising Dr. Gao that the CO “E” Division or his delegate would examine his concerns as they relate to his arrest and imprisonment and would respond to him direct.<br />
Please provide us with a copy of your response for completion of our file.”</blockquote>
I had never sent any complaint to the Solicitor General who supervised the RCMP, about the July 2 arrest or anything else.<br />
The only things I had sent to the Canadian political high level had all been sent to local Member of Parliament Kim Campbell.<br />
First was the fax on November 30, where the cover note was about my accusations on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s conduct in the Charlottetown constitutional process and on forthcoming retaliatory political persecution against me, and only the first of the three attached press releases including my lawsuit documents mentioned the July 2 arrest by RCMP. When RCMP officer Brian Cotton came to my apartment to take me to a psychiatric assessment at UBC Hospital, I gave him a copy but my copy is not among the RCMP personal-information disclosures whereas a copy received by Campbell’s local office is, which was stamped on November 30, possibly by RCMP as discussed earlier.<br />
Then while in psychiatric committal I sent another letter to Kim Campbell complaining also about the RCMP-led psychiatric committal as political persecution, which may have also addressed her as Justice Minister, but this second letter is not among RCMP’s or any organization’s disclosures I have been given so far.<br />
It was quite possible that Campbell forwarded my documents to Solicitor General as a complaint from me, but given that the only RCMP-disclosure copy, received at Campbell’s office, was likely RCMP-processed on November 30, 1992, the person who provided them to Solicitor General could have been inside RCMP.<br />
I do remember receiving a short letter from then Solicitor General Doug Lewis, a former Justice Minister before Kim Campbell, acknowledging receipt of my complaint.<br />
But as A/Comm. McConnell’s letter specified clearly, my complaint was defined only as about my July 2 arrest, even though the attached documents criticized UBC Computer Science Head Maria Klawe much more than RCMP, and most importantly the overwhelming amount of contents were criticisms about Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership conduct, including about upcoming political persecution against me.<br />
RCMP Director of Enforcement Services didn’t want to deal with it any further than receiving for the file a copy of “E” Division’s direct response to me. But as required the “E” Division Commanding Officer or his delegate would need to examine my concerns and respond to me on that.<br />
The letter was received on January 8 by Criminal Operations at “E” Division, and forwarded to and received by Contract Policing on January 11.<br />
On January 13, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot044%20-%20RCMP%20E%20division%20C-Supt%20Cummins%20letter%20to%20C-Supt%20Clegg,%20Jan%2013,%201993.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Chief Superintendent P. M. Cummins, Officer-In-Charge, Contract Policing Branch, sent a memo to Chief Superintendent M. K. M. Clegg</span></a>, Officer-In-Charge, Administration & Personnel, recommending that the matters be looked after by Civil Litigation handling my civil lawsuit:<br />
<blockquote>
<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="width: 249px;"><tbody>
<tr> <td valign="top" width="247">“<strong>DR. FENG GAO – CIVIL ACTION <br /><u>COMPLAINT OF FALSE ARREST</u></strong></td> </tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Please find attached correspondence received from the Director Enforcement Services, HQ concerning Dr. Gao’s complaint of false arrest by members of University Detachment on July 2, 1992. A check of PIRS indicates that Civil Litigation Section currently has a file open on this matter and rather than duplicate our efforts I would ask that they forward the appropriate response to the Director Enforcement Services. …”</blockquote>
The suggestion appeared most likely that there would be no separate investigation for this complaint forwarded from Solicitor General, but only a response to RCMP Headquarters in Ottawa that a civil lawsuit was already in place.<br />
The memo was written to the attention of <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot029%20-%20lawsuit%20filing,%20RCMP%20Vancouver%20Subdiv%20&%20DoJ%20reactions,%20Oct%201992.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Corporal Dennis Garrett, the officer “monitoring” my lawsuit as Sgt. Frank Kelley had indicated</span></a> back on October 14, 1992.<br />
That was clearly a mixed-up violation of basic professionalism. A complaint should be examined independently and objectively, rather than be handled by RCMP civil-litigation personnel – in this case under an intimidating Sergeant Frank Kelley as in Part 5 – whose objective was not to investigate but to defend RCMP.<br />
Moreover, at this time I had gone through an RCMP-led UBC psychiatric committal and been labelled as suffering from Delusional Disorder of Persecutory Type, thus any statement by me not liked by UBC or RCMP could be categorized by psychiatrists as “delusional”, and my lawyer had also been exerted pressure by Department of Justice and UBC lawyers. Now that a complaint with broad subject matters had gone all the way up to the federal government minister responsible for RCMP but was defined as limited to the July 2 incident only, while RCMP could continue to use psychiatric measures since November 30 to suppress or control me and not be subjected to examination, the complaint was essentially powerless.<br />
That this was RCMP’s plan is also seen in <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot045%20-%20RCMP%20E%20division%20closure%20of%20public%20complaint%20investigation,%20Jan%206%20-%20Feb,%201993.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">RCMP internal documents to complete termination of investigation for the public complaint</span></a><span style="color: blue;"></span> I had filed in August and then withdrawn in September 1992 as discussed in Part 5. They were coordinated in timing with the arrival and processing of the new complaint acknowledged by Solicitor General.<br />
On January 7, the day after A/Comm. McConnell’s letter from Ottawa was issued, Insp. W. B. Vye in charge of “E” Division’s Complaints & Internal Investigations Section, sent the final documents for closing the public complaint to the same C/Supt. Clegg in charge of Administration and Personnel, with the comment:<br />
<blockquote>
“Compl of false arrest – etc. Compl disturbed at the time of his arrest and now willing to terminate his compl.”</blockquote>
Then on January 14, the day after C/Supt. P. M. Cummins’s memo was written to him to suggest that Civil Litigation Section respond to Ottawa for the new complaint, C/Supt. M. K. M. Clegg sent me a letter officially notifying the end of my earlier public complaint.<br />
The January 6 letter from Ottawa referred to my new complaint as about my arrest (and imprisonment), while Insp. Vye on January 7 referred to my old complaint as about “false arrest”, saying I had been disturbed, namely using a ‘mental-illness’ argument. Then in the January 13 C/Supt. Cummins memo about responding to letter from Ottawa, the July 2 incident was also referred to as “false arrest” – presumably Cummins also got the idea that I had been “disturbed”.<br />
<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot046%20-%20RCMP%20E%20division%20C-Supt%20Clegg%20letters%20to%20Feng%20Gao%20&%20Dir%20Enforcement%20Services%20H.Q.,%20Jan%2025-29,%201993.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">C/Supt. M. K. M. Clegg quickly finished rest of the work shoving the new complaint under a lawsuit litigation</span></a> that was already stalled and under control by RCMP-led psychiatric measures.<br />
In his letter to me dated January 25 to acknowledge RCMP receipt of my complaint through Solicitor General, C/Supt. Clegg stated:<br />
<blockquote>
“As you are aware, this matter is currently before the courts and accordingly I am unable to comment at this time.”</blockquote>
On the same day a handwritten note was sent to Cpl. Dennis Garrett, stating:<br />
<blockquote>
“Please ensure a copy of our letter, with suitable overview of circumstances, is sent to Director Enforcement Services as requested. Copy also to O-i/c Contract Policing, please.”</blockquote>
The signature in this note, when handwriting is compared to that on C/Supt. Clegg’s letter to me, seems to read “CAP”, which presumably stood for Clegg’s initial plus those of Administration & Personnel.<br />
On January 29, which happened to be my birthday, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot046%20-%20RCMP%20E%20division%20C-Supt%20Clegg%20letters%20to%20Feng%20Gao%20&%20Dir%20Enforcement%20Services%20H.Q.,%20Jan%2025-29,%201993.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">a letter was written from C/Supt. Clegg to RCMP Headquarters in Ottawa in reply to A/Comm. J. W. B. McConnell’s letter</span></a>. Taking what appeared like a neutral stand describing the UBC dispute as “a long standing feud between Dr. GAO and the university”, Clegg explained that regarding RCMP’s assistance in the July 2 arrest there had been a public complaint from me, an internal investigation commenced and then my complaint withdrawn, and there was now a lawsuit in place and a Department of Justice counsel assigned “to represent the force and our interests in this continuing action”.<br />
Rather oddly, this January 29, 1993 C/Supt. Clegg letter in RCMP disclosure is a “COPY” that was marked “INFO: OIC CONTRACT POLICING, “E” DIVISION”, but was unsigned, instead stamped “Originally Sign By”. <br />
This “copy” of the response letter was received by Contract Policing on February 3, and by C/Supt. Cummins on February 5.<br />
“Contract Policing” and “Federal Policing” were the two categories of RCMP policing as indicated in an <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot045%20-%20RCMP%20E%20division%20closure%20of%20public%20complaint%20investigation,%20Jan%206%20-%20Feb,%201993.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">RCMP Public Complaint Statistical Report</span></a> among the documents for my withdrawal of public complaint.<br />
In that statistical report form, sent him for completion by Cpl. D. Blommaert of the “E” Division Complaints & Internal Investigation Section and received also on January 29, S/Sgt. Medley, assistant of Officer Commanding Vancouver Subdivision Supt. D. G. Cowley, in February 1993 marked off both categories of my complaint about the July 2, 1992 RCMP arrest, “Improper Attitude” and “Oppressive Conduct”, as “Unsupported by evidence” – even though as discussed in Part 5 when my complaint was withdrawn in September 1992 no real investigation had been carried out.<br />
(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2012/04/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 7</a>)Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-51010556366266334002012-02-20T17:09:00.000-05:002012-07-31T23:46:56.814-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 5) — when law enforcement considerations reflect entrenched interests<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2011/05/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 4</a>)</p> <p>(An unfinished draft of this Part was first posted on October 31, 2011)</p> <p>A semester-long effort by me at the University of British Columbia to pursue a formal grievance with the university administration over the management style of my then boss, Head of Computer Science Maria Klawe, and to organize a meeting for Department members to air their opinions, was reaching a fruitless end in late June 1992 with my job there expiring.</p> <p>As discussed in Part 4 of this article, the Department had a tradition that the university-appointed Head voluntarily step down after 4 years of a 5-year term, a tradition Klawe intended to break despite her controversial, hard-handed style of management causing disgruntlements among some faculty members. In pursuing my grievance I cited the instances of Klawe’s handling of my possible tenure-track employment prospect and that of former faculty candidate Pascal van Hentenryck. </p> <p>Dean of Science Barry McBride had not only sided with Klawe – especially when learning of my interest in involving Department members on the issues in a democratic setting – but taken a high-level lead in efforts by some persons to frame me as abusive, potentially violent and mentally ill, so as to foil my peaceful attempts at democratic expressions to unravel wrongdoings. He now sent me <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot023 - RCMP report by Cpl N. E. McKerry on July 2-3, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">a memo dated June 16</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> to remind me to vacate my office and turn over the keys by 4:30 pm on June 30.</p> <p>During the last week of June senior faculty member James M. Kennedy became Acting Head, although I think Head Klawe wasn’t fully away. A former UBC vice president and founding director of UBC Computing Centre, Kennedy had an interesting past which at the time did not appear conspicuous: before UBC, he had been an established scientist at Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), where – as mentioned in Part 3 of this article – a year later in June 1993 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney would appoint his personal lawyer, Bruce Verchere, as chairman of the board, before Verchere died of a gun-inflicted, reported suicide in August. </p> <p>To me, Jim was a nice and friendly senior with a proud and distinguished career, someone hard to argue with – the late Kennedy was around 64 years of age in 1992 (“<a href="http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/tributes/tribk.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Senate Memorial Tributes – “K”: JAMES MACOUN KENNEDY (1928-2004)</font></a>”, University Archives, the University of British Columbia).</p> <p>On June 30, Jim came over to my office several times to remind me to move out, including at 4:30 p.m. when the deadline came; the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot023 - RCMP report by Cpl N. E. McKerry on July 2-3, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">handwriting about this on Dean McBride’s memo</font></a> was probably his. But I made the difficult decision to defy the Dean’s order with the reason that although President David Strangway had replied negatively to my grievance against Head Klawe on my employment dispute, he had not responded on Klawe’s handling of van Hentenryck’s job prospect, which I had formally submitted to Associate Vice President Albert McClean in President’s office, or on the general issue of Klawe’s headship.</p> <p>I had learned from Department office staff that new faculty member Raymond Ng was coming soon and office space was needed, and my defiance of the Dean’s order was a political gesture only. I fully expected to vacate at some point or be evicted, if no compromise came from the administration.</p> <p>It was important for me to have some peace of mind – I was receiving my Canadian citizenship on July 1. As mentioned in Part 3, I had attended July 1 Elementary School on the campus of Sun Yat-sen University in China, but that had been for the Chinese Communist Party’s birthday in my childhood and here it was Canada Day.</p> <p>I was lucky to be able to receive Canadian citizenship just in time. My residency requirement was being fulfilled by the spring of 1992, but a friend, “Christine Fong”, had casually informed me that the waiting queue in Vancouver for citizenship applications was long and suggested that I try Surrey just south, given that my dispute with Maria Klawe at UBC was dragging on and who knew what could happen.</p> <p>Surrey was the place my then Computer Science colleague and gay activist leader, Instructor Vince Manis had posted something unpleasant about on the internet – certain personality behavior of “largish men” there as quoted in Part 4.</p> <p>I  followed Christine’s suggestion, and at Citizenship Canada’s office on King George Highway in Surrey I was quickly processed and approved, in time to join Canada on her national day when I was about to be evicted from UBC.</p> <p>In Part 3 I have mentioned Christine’s sponsorship of a Vancouver high school student Elaine Ng, my distant maternal cousin originally from China, for the 1990 Miss Asia Pageant in Hong Kong, which Elaine won. Elaine subsequently became an actress, and is known as the unwed mother of Kung Fu megastar Jackie Chan’s daughter, “Little Dragon Girl”.</p> <p>Christine is the older sister of “Theresa”, a former UBC Computer Science staff member who had been the unofficial Apple Macintosh user specialist there, done word processing with incredible efficiency and helped faculty members – myself included – with document preparation. Originally part of the secretarial staff, Theresa’s skills were singled out for appreciation after Head Klawe’s arrival, receiving a proposal for promotion to management staff rank, which Theresa happily accepted. But then a year later Theresa was getting pressure from the Head, that with new secretarial staff coming her skills would be redundant – and she no longer had union job security.</p> <p>Fortunately for Theresa, in around 1989 she had met “Frank Kong”, a gentleman from Hong Kong whom Theresa introduced to me as a retired former Superintendent of the Hong Kong police training school, and the two had become like a couple. Frank was getting his American citizenship, living in Seattle nearby to be able to see Theresa often. So in 1991 Theresa made the decision to move down to Los Angeles with Frank, who went to work for a workers compensation board while Theresa joined a jewelry-gift merchandise business.</p> <p>The Fong sisters’ parents had been wealthy business people from Hong Kong, the sisters had brother Paul locally and other siblings internationally, and when I first arrived Theresa was still involved in a downtown Vancouver karaoke-bar business as well as in the ownership of a local racehorse. What was really interesting is that they had connections running on ‘both sides of the track’, as the following passages from a 1990 newspaper article showed ‘the other side’, quite in sharp contrast to Theresa’s police-superintendent companionship (“The Bamboo Pipeline: Triads target Vancouver in dirty business using bribes, forgeries to sneak desperate people and criminals alike across international borders Series”, by Gordon Hamilton, November 10, 1990, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):  </p> <blockquote> <p>“One of the passports was initially queried, then accepted by Canadian authorities. Malaysians are allowed into Canada without visas; they were cleared on the basis of their passports alone.</p> <p>…</p> <p>It was Feb. 1. 1989.</p> <p>The three men were, in fact, ethnic Chinese, suspected of being involved with a brutal Taiwanese triad: United Bamboo. Their passports had been altered, later forensic tests showed.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The incident is only one episode in a two-year-long joint investigation by the RCMP and U.S. immigration officials centred on the Vancouver-to-Seattle link in an alien pipeline run by Yeong Jih Charles Liu, a human smuggler known to his associates here as “The Taiwanese.” Liu had established an international smuggling network that reaches from the triads of Taiwan to the tree-lined streets of Kerrisdale.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Liu smuggled 60 people at about $10,000 per person before RCMP broke the ring. But he was ambitious. He had the means to smuggle 100 a month, he wrote in a note to one of his Vancouver associates. The note was later seized by the RCMP. Liu is still free. He is believed to be in Taiwan beyond the reach of a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest.</p> <p>…</p> <p>On Feb. 5, the trio was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol Special Agent Joel Hardin at SeaTac International Airport as they prepared to board a flight to Texas. Their route from Vancouver to the United States had been monitored from start to finish by the RCMP. The U.S. border patrol followed them to Seattle.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The Vancouver people-smuggling investigation began May 1, 1987, when a wiretap was authorized on Irene Cheung. Initially she was monitored because she was suspected of being involved in the sale of forged passports.</p> <p>Two weeks later, on May 14, police listened while Cheung contacted Liu in Taiwan. During the conversation, Liu stated that he was still waiting for one visa and that 15 to 16 people were “coming over.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>The first indication of people-smuggling came five days later when Cheung telephoned Christine Fong, whose fashionable Trafalgar Street home in Kerrisdale often served as a meeting place for the gang.</p> <p>Cheung mentioned the name of a suspected drug trafficker, “Fatman” Wu, who wanted to send somebody to Canada. She said he was willing to pay $1,000 for the visa. The listening RCMP believe Wu organizes heroin shipments and acts as a drug “overseer” – the individual who rides on the same aircraft as drug couriers to ensure they deliver their contraband once they have cleared customs and immigration at Vancouver.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Fong, a Crown witness at the trial of Cheung and Chan, was not charged.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The Fong sisters’ Kerrisdale neighborhood home was where I reconnected with Elaine Ng (also known as Elaine Wu) and her mother, whom I had not seen since late 1970s. I also met the sisters’ friend, fashion buyer “Irene”, whom I presume was the individual in the human-smuggling case as reported in the above newspaper quote, but I knew nothing of the smuggling and had no idea gang members went there also. </p> <p>In any case, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had everything under surveillance over a year before my 1988 arrival to be acquainted with colleague Theresa but they chose to crackdown only in 1989, after 60 persons had been smuggled and with the gang leader safely in Taiwan – you know what I mean.</p> <p>At least when Christine told me about a long citizenship queue in Vancouver but not in Surrey, she knew what she was talking about.</p> <p>On July 1, 1992, I went to Canada Day festivities in Langley, BC, and felt honored to briefly meet Member of Parliament Robert Lloyd Wenman who presided over the citizenship ceremony. A few years later in June 1995 Mr. Wenman died after contracting a difficult bacteria infection in Asia (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wenman" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Robert Wenman</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>).</p> <p>In the morning of July 2, I returned to my (former) office at UBC Computer Science Department and everything was as it had been there, as was my colleague Norm Dadoun with whom I had shared an office during the last of my 4 UBC years.</p> <p>As the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot023 - RCMP report by Cpl N. E. McKerry on July 2-3, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">handwritten notes on Barry McBride’s memo</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> indicate someone (Acting Head James Kennedy) came for the last time, at 10:30 a.m., to request me to move out. As I recall this time Jim came with Head Maria Klawe – an interesting setup in hindsight as Kennedy was a former UBC Vice President and Klawe not only was defeating my challenge of her management style but unbeknown to me was to be a future Vice President.</p> <p>I didn’t budge so UBC security guards were called to persuade me, and when I again refused they told me the police would come.</p> <p>About 15-20 minutes later, two female and one male RCMP officers walked in, with one of the females in the lead, who immediately came up to me and after a brief conversation placed her right hand on my left shoulder and declared me under arrest. The quick episode, entirely peaceful without any intent of physical resistance on my part, is better told by the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot023 - RCMP report by Cpl N. E. McKerry on July 2-3, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">police report from the lead officer, Corporal N. E. McKerry</font></a>:</p> <blockquote><span> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="489"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42"> <p>“11:55</p> </td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433"> <p>Gao arrested after I explained that he had been given notice of his service no longer required. He had been approached on the 30th 3 times to obtain his keys and he refused.</p> <p>I advised him that if he did not give his keys over, remove his things at once he would be arrested for trespassing, and if he put up and force he would be charged for resist arrest. He stated he would not put up any physical force. He would not return the keys because he had a grievance with the university.</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42"> </td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42">11:56</td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433">Arrested – searched by Cst. Bangloy, note prior to search – given const. rights and police warning.”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </span></blockquote> <p>In RCMP custody I was pressured to give a statement by the male officer, Constable A. M. Bangloy, but refused at the advice of Legal Aid lawyer over the phone. Cpl. McKerry also tried another tactic, ordering the other female officer, Constable C. L. Dinham-Jones, to check my immigration background, but ‘lucky me’:</p> <blockquote><span> <p> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="489"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42"> <p>“12:35</p> </td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433"> <p>Legal aid called and spoke with subject in Booking area.</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42"> </td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42">12:45</td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433"> <p>With Cst Bangloy in Booking area 2nd warning given – No statement you haven’t got a charge – response.</p> <p>I had Cst Dinham-Jones call immigration for a check on subject – just sworn in on July 1st as a Canadian citizen.”</p> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> </p> </span></blockquote> <p>In the end, McKerry warned me that next time I would be charged, then released me with the courtesy of giving me a ride to the Mathematics building across from Computer Science building so I could have colleagues sign a form for my passport application, before escorting me to my car to see me leave:</p> <blockquote><span> <p> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="489"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="41">“</td> <td valign="top" width="11"> </td> <td valign="top" width="435"> <p>I explained to GAO that if I was called again for him charges would be laid. If convicted he would have a great deal of problems getting a green card – USA or in some part of the govt service. He seemed to care about that. </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="41"> </td> <td valign="top" width="11"> </td> <td valign="top" width="435"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="41">13:00</td> <td valign="top" width="11"> </td> <td valign="top" width="435"> <p>I took GAO to the Math BLDG – He wanted to get a Professor to vouch for him on a passport.</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="41"> </td> <td valign="top" width="11"> </td> <td valign="top" width="435"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="41">13:30</td> <td valign="top" width="11"> </td> <td valign="top" width="435">Escort him to his car, escorted away from computer science/UBC”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </p> </span></blockquote> <p>Sometime after this July 2 incident,<font color="#0000ff"> </font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot024 - RCMP statement by Cpl N. E. McKerry, undated.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Cpl. N. E. McKerry produced another statement</font></a> – undated but made to look like a typed version of the July 2 report  – that altered the facts to emphasize mental instability and violence to come, none of which had been in the original report:</p> <blockquote><span> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="489"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42"> <p>“11:54</p> </td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433"> <p>At the computer science building, members of Parking and Security escorted myself and two Csts. to the office of Dr. GAO.</p> <p>Dr. GAO’s body language caused me to believe that he could become violent. I spoke with Dr. GAO. He moved away from me moving his back towards the far wall. His eyes seemed to be blank – no emotion and just staring. His body was ridged and both facial cheeks twitched. I tried to reason with him that the university didn’t want him in the office. I explained that I thought it would be best if he left and dealt with things in a legal manner. He did not seem to want to co-operate, he appeared to me that further action would be of a physical manner. We were at a stale mate. Dr. GAO refused to leave, he had a grievance.</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42"> </td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="42">11:56</td> <td valign="top" width="12"> </td> <td valign="top" width="433">To keep the peace I arrested Dr. GAO.”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </span></blockquote> <p>McKerry’s original report recorded my clear promise of not putting up physical resistance, so there really wasn’t any confrontational staring or violence to come, and I was put under arrest without any problem. The entire process took only 1 or 2 minutes according to either of her reports, how could that be called a “stale mate”?</p> <p>In the typed version McKerry omitted my promise of non-violence as if the conversation hadn’t happened, and added her impression of odd personality, presenting it as her judgment call predicting that I would act in “a physical manner”.</p> <p>McKerry also omitted the original facts that she also had Cst. Bangloy and Cst. Dinham-Jones exert pressure on me to back down.</p> <p>With this falsified account of what happened as the lead RCMP officer saw it during the police intervention, the two institutions now became on the same page, i.e., consistent with each other in their descriptions of me as mentally unstable and potentially violent, the type of allegations UBC Dean of Science Barry McBride had wanted in April and graduate student Andrew Martin then made in a June letter to Associate Vice President Albert McClean, as discussed in Part 4. </p> <p>My UBC dispute now became a problem with the law enforcement as well along the same line.</p> <p>What was also "’contradictory’ is that this altered ‘report’ discloses that Cpl. McKerry had been in telephone contact with UBC security guards prior to the intervention and told there might be “some trouble”, yet she brought a police team that were not “physical”: two females and one Asian male. </p> <p>She either knew that I was not physically aggressive, or had another thinking.</p> <p>Although it may not have happened in my case, sometimes less physical strength on the part of the police could be basis for more lethal force, as the Vancouver-area RCMP’s handling of <font color="#333333">Robert Dziekanski </font>has shown, when the Polish immigrant newly arriving at Vancouver International Airport on October 14, 2007, was repeatedly tasered, unfortunately to death, by RCMP officers due to his erratic behavior causing concerns.</p> <p>The incident was captured on cellphone video by onlooker Paul Pritchard (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/11/14/bc-taservideo.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Taser video shows RCMP shocked immigrant within 25 seconds of their arrival</font></a>”, November 15, 2007, <em>CBC News</em>).</p> <p>A major difference was that Dziekanski had become physically agitating, holding up a small, folding wooden stool like a combat tool though not toward anyone, and methodically throwing a metal object on the floor and the stool at the plexiglass wall, before abandoning more attempt at physical commotion at the persuasion of a female onlooker. But for such, death was a harsh term.</p> <p>In the afternoon of July 2, 1992 when McKerry gave me a ride back to campus in her cruiser, she let me sit in the front passenger seat and told me her name was Nancy, she lived in Surrey and had been with the RCMP Surrey detachment. I told her I was pleased to have my citizenship application approved in Surrey.</p> <p>For female police officers, using lethal force could be more warranted, as shown in the following passage from a book about RCMP women, citing a Nancy McKerry whom I have no reason to think was not the same person (Jane Hall, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=sSm19UkAzXwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Red Wall: A Woman in the RCMP</em></font></a>, 2007, General Store Publishing House):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Six weeks after we graduated, the unthinkable happened: a shooting involving several RCMP members, an ambush followed by one of the longest and bloodiest police shootouts in Canadian history. One member, Dennis Onofrey, was dead, one had lost an eye, and Candy Smith was in critical condition in a Brandon, Manitoba, hospital.</p> <p>Candy had been one of the top members of our troop. Everyone in Troop 9 knew that by disposition and skill, she would have performed better than most of us under fire.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The day after the tragedy, Nancy McKerry, a member of 20 Troop, the only female troop at Depot at the time, recalls that an instructor burst into her class and accusingly announced: “Anyone in this troop who doesn’t feel they can shoot someone can leave now!” No male troop was given that ultimatum.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Come to think of what my former colleague Vince Manis had rumbled about “largish men” in Surrey, Cpl. McKerry happened to be the only one of stocky build among the trio of RCMP officers on July 2, 1992, whereas in the onlooker video at the Vancouver airport on October 14, 2007, none of the RCMP officers were “largish” but ironically Dziekanski was.</p> <p>The other female officer, Cst. Dinham-Jones who checked on my immigration status (and in later incidents also transported me alone while I was in custody), was a petite; interestingly and surprisingly her name was Christine and she has now done a lot of neighborhood patrolling in Langley, where I had received my Canadian citizenship after approval in Surrey! (“<a href="http://www.bccpa.org/bccpn/awardwinners.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Award Winners: B.C Citizen Patrol Network BOB SHIELLS Memorial Innovation AWARD 2005</font></a>”, B.C. Crime Prevention Association)</p> <p>The male officer, Cst. A. M. Bangloy, was fit but slim, and with a personality reminding me of my elementary and middle school friend “Ling” mentioned in Parts 2, 3 & 4.</p> <p>A question is whether McKerry’s altering of report and fabrication of evidence have been part of the RCMP standard practice back then, or even today, because Bangloy later attended law school and since late 2008 has been the Inspector in charge of the Professional Standards Unit for the entire Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“<a href="http://www.filipinojournal.com/v2/index.php?pagetype=read&article_num=12022008190509&latest_issue=V22-N22" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Winnipeg’s Alfredo Bangloy Jr., LL.B. promoted to Inspector with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Officer In Charge Professional Standards Unit</font></a>”, by Marjorie Soldevilla, November 20 - December 5, 2008, Volume 22, Number 22, <em>Filipino Journal</em>).</p> <p>And when I review this history I kind of get a sense that Inspector Alfredo Bangloy is like Maria Aragon, 10-year-old Filipino-Canadian girl from Winnipeg, Canada’s Little Lady Gaga and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s favorite child musician – they sang John Lennon’s song “Imagine” together (“<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/harper-performs-campaign-trail-duet-with-young-gaga-fan/article1962222/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Harper performs campaign-trail duet with young Gaga fan</font></a>”, by Steven Chase, March 29, 2011, <em>The Globe and Mail</em>).</p> <p>More clues will be presented later as to when McKerry began to alter her police statement, and why. </p> <p>In the afternoon of July 2, 1992, Acting Head Jim Kennedy and another professor, Richard Rosenberg, came out of Computer Science building and signed for my passport application, and I was seen off by RCMP Cpl N. E. (Nancy Elizabeth) McKerry. My office belongings were later packed by staff and sent to my apartment, and I have not been back to that building since – McKerry warned me not to! A few years later the Department moved to a new building and I dropped by for several hours in 2002.</p> <p>I spent time exploring various venues to pursue my grievance outside of UBC, and in August 1992 filed a complaint with the RCMP Complaints Commission. I telephoned its Vancouver office and was told that an investigator would call me back. On August 11, investigator Lorraine J. Holland phoned and took my complaint as made on that day, on August 13 it was sent by the Commission’s regional director George Johnson to Inspector W. B. Vye, officer in charge of complaints and internal investigation at RCMP “E” Division in British Columbia, and was received on August 13-14. </p> <p>On September 3 – as indicated by a line of fax marking on the <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot025 - complaint filing through RCMP Complaints Commission, August 11-13, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">copy released to me in 2003 by RCMP</font></a> – my complaint was forwarded to RCMP Vancouver Subdivision which supervised the University Detachment at UBC.</p> <p>At the halfway mark of this 20/21-day duration with my complaint sitting on the desk of the RCMP “E” Division section under Insp. Vye, a tragedy on the other side of Canada produced an international shock. On August 24 at Montreal’s Concordia University, engineering professor Valery Fabrikant brought a handgun to campus, fatally shot 4 of his male colleagues and wounded a female secretary. Originally from Belarus in Soviet Union, Fabrikant had been in disputes with colleagues over research credits and with university administration over his tenure application.</p> <p>As mentioned in Part 1, the Concordia University multiple murders were one of the examples cited by journalist Jan Wong in her September 2006 article criticizing the French Quebec society’s “pure laine” attitude that alienated minorities and immigrants.</p> <p>Prior to the murders, Fabrikant had launched lawsuits and an e-mail campaign against the university and some colleagues, and was sent a letter of notice dated August 21 from the university’s external legal counsel, Richard Beaulieu of the law firm McCarthy Tetrault, basically threatened with firing. </p> <p>In his independent review for Concordia University, respected academic John Scott Cowan has offered the opinion that Beaulieu’s letter to Fabrikant may have contributed to stimulating the latter’s violent urge (“<a href="http://archives.concordia.ca/sites/default/files/uploaded-documents/pages/2011/07/26/Cowan_report.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lessons from the Fabrikant File: A Report to the Board of Governors of Concordia University</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, by John Scott Cowan, May 1994, Concordia University Records Management & Archives):</p> <blockquote> <p>“On August 17, the University's external legal counsel, Me R. Beaulieu at McCarthy Tétrault, sent a draft of a strong letter about the E-mail campaign to Me M. Gamache, the University internal legal counsel. … The final version was dated August 21, signed by Richard Beaulieu, and sent by registered mail. The Rector's office received a copy in the mail on or before August 24, as it bears a receipt stamp dated August 24. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>The letter is problematic, in that I find it to be a very strong letter. … Predicted dismissal just before the season in which he would be considered for tenure was not what he had in mind as a University response to his grievances and accusations, and could be viewed as giving him little to lose.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I would have to agree with Prof. John Scott Cowan on this point, given my UBC experience as described in Part 4, i.e., when I was attempting to pursue matters in a peaceful and democratic manner, some others agitated me and tried to make things worse and possibly violent in order to frame me as violent or mentally unstable. </p> <p>Coincidentally like me, Fabrikant was not only from a former Communist country but also an applied mathematician who twice applied for a UBC job, to the Mathematics Department in 1988 and 1990 – the same year I got my fixed-term Computer Science job and then the same year I tried unsuccessfully to get a tenure-track position as in Part 4 – but was turned down. Days before his killings Fabrikant also sent e-mail letters to a UBC Math professor to spread his complaints. (“Montreal suspect twice sought position at UBC”, by Mary Lynn Young, August 26, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>)</p> <p>The local ‘spin’ machines immediately began to turn upon the shocking news from Montreal. The next day August 25, Staff Sergeant J. B. (Bern) Jansen, officer in charge at RCMP University Detachment, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot026 - RCMP Staff Sgt. Jansen record, Aug 25-27, 1992, 2003 disclosure.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">gave an order to Cpl. Nancy McKerry</font></a> to send the “original” statements about my case to “Key Materials”, “copy” some specific pages and place them “on File” and forward the “Files” to him for review:</p> <blockquote> <p>“<u>File Review</u></p> <p>      Cpl McKerry</p> <p>          (1) Statements</p> <p>                 - Original to Key Materials</p> <p>                 - Copy pages #’d & places on File</p> <p>          (2) Please forward your Files for NCO i/c review as the supervisor.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Was this the start of Cpl. McKerry’s altering of statement and fabricating of facts for my case? Possibly, with the following clues.</p> <p>S/Sgt. Jansen <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot027 - RCMP Staff Sgt. Jansen record, Aug 25-27, 1992, 2008 disclosure.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#333333">said in his notes </font></a>that<font color="#333333"> </font><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot027 - RCMP Staff Sgt. Jansen record, Aug 25-27, 1992, 2008 disclosure.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">some UBC local persons expressed fear about me</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“- File surfaced for review as became topical with a “Professor shooting staff” at Concordia University.</p> <p>- Local staff surfaced fear GAO would return, advised to call A.S.A.P. we would intervene, however we could not re-initiate contact based solely on an unrelated incident.”</p> </blockquote> <p>S/Sgt. Jansen also explained that <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot026 - RCMP Staff Sgt. Jansen record, Aug 25-27, 1992, 2003 disclosure.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">local media asked if there was a local incident</font></a> and he needed to respond:</p> <blockquote> <p>“[…] – Kitsilano News […] called to query if a local incident had occurred.</p> <p>No names released.</p> <p>Advised. “Situation early July – Police intervention to keep peace. Subject in custody less than one hour.””</p> </blockquote> <p>(Contents in […] have been withheld by RCMP from personal-information disclosures.)</p> <p>Jansen then concluded that “to keep peace and ensure no escalation to physical violence” had been <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot026 - RCMP Staff Sgt. Jansen record, Aug 25-27, 1992, 2003 disclosure.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">the reason for my July 2 arrest</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“- File reviewed. Short term detention needed to keep peace and ensure no escalation to physical violence.</p> <p>- Related Files on system relative to GAO.</p> <p>- Essentially a civil dispute thus criminal charges not appropriate.”</p> </blockquote> <p>S/Sgt. Jansen’s notes above essentially outlined the following situation scenario: As local RCMP detachment commander, S/Sgt. Jansen knew my incident was “unrelated” to Valery Fabrikant’s murderous acts in Montreal, but some UBC persons claimed to fear me, and the local media was also interested in a local story; so although the arrest had been to remove me to vacate office, Jansen decided to make it look like preventing violence. He instructed Cpl. McKerry to selectively “copy” some pages of the police statements to keep “on File” and sending the original to a different filing, and somehow what was on file now appeared like preventing violence – doesn’t this look similar to McKerry’s alterations from her original report to her typed version?</p> <p>The local story in the community newspaper, <em>Kitsilano News</em>, sounded even worse, not because of the local violence the story claimed but as a result of UBC Faculty Association President William Bruneau’s excessive politicizing, who made it sound like the conservative policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher caused people to fear losing their jobs and to resort to violence (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot026 - RCMP Staff Sgt. Jansen record, Aug 25-27, 1992, 2003 disclosure.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">UBC profs anxious after tenure fight turns violent</font></a>”, by Russ Francis, August 26, 1992, <em>Kitsilano News</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“A Montreal professor who shot to death three of his colleagues this week was affected by the same “publish or perish” mentality behind two violent incidents involving University of B.C. professors in the last 18 months, says UBC Faculty Association president Bill Bruneau.</p> <p>…</p> <p>“He had to be dragged from his office,” Bruneau said. “It was related to the level of pressure on the campus.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>Staff Sgt. Bern Jansen of the RCMP’s university detachment confirmed that a former faculty member was held in police custody for a short time in early July after refusing to leave his office…</p> <p>“Tenure issues are pretty big here,” Jansen said. “But we’ve never had anything anywhere near as big as the Concordia event.”</p> <p>“There’s a lot of personality issues that takes place here – it’s just like any other community.”</p> <p>…</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>In an interview Tuesday, Bruneau said the Concordia shootings recalled the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre, in which Marc Lepine fatally shot 14 women engineering students. The rising level of violence in society is a concern to academics: “Universities are supposed to be concerned with reason and compassion.”</p> <p>…</p> <p>The university incidents point to a larger social question: “People are terrified they are going to lose their jobs – it’s a consequence of the 1980s, Reaganism and Thatcherism.””</p> </blockquote> <p>So someone like me trying peaceful academic politics was now bundled – though my name wasn’t released – with Valery Fabrikant as causing “violent incidents” in universities.</p> <p>S/Sgt. Jansen was going in the right direction emphasizing “a lot of personality issues”, but that should be about my dispute with Computer Science Head Maria Klawe and not about my mental state as some alleged. Prof. Bruneau was right saying universities were supposed to be “concerned with reason and compassion”, but I had not only been using reason to express my opposition to Klawe’s management style but tried to use democratic methods to address it – unfortunately my efforts may have amounted to nothing in Bruneau’s compassion standard. </p> <p>Bill Bruneau’s political hyperbole seemed a righteous grandstand from his position, but it could do more harm to a former member of his faculty association like me. Bruneau would continue to pound on similar issues, including writing a book (William Bruneau and Donald C. Savage, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Rp_0iQxjINIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Counting out the Scholars: The Case against Performance Indicators in Higher Education</em></font></a>, 2002, James Lorimer & Company):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Performance indicators have a long history. But it is no accident that PIs became the vogue in the Thatcher/Reagan era and beyond—one part of the movement to transform universities into business corporations complete with  CEOs and the top-down structures favoured by the business community. … In the end the result has been the exact opposite—the imposition of costly and highly centralized bureaucracies onto the university system, and the triumph of a right-wing nomenklatura.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Wasn’t it a little hypocritical when the faculty association president, later president of Canadian Association of University Teachers, and also a Bertrand Russell scholar (“<a href="http://www.cautbulletin.ca/en_article.asp?SectionID=80&SectionName=News&VolID=16&VolumeName=No%205&VolumeStartDate=5/1/2006&EditionID=4&EditionName=Vol%2053&EditionStartDate=1/1/2006&ArticleID=71" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">William Bruneau Elected as Speaker</font></a>”, May 2006, Vol. 53, No. 5, <em>CAUT Bulletin</em>), effectively denied about a local management flaw while denouncing, in his publications, the wrong management theory for the world according to him?</p> <p>Take my case as an illustration. Why was my predicament a consequence of Reaganism and Thatcherism, if not as a result of the oppressive means of Maria Klawe and Barry McBride, the backstabbing tricks of Jack Snoeyink, and the provocative/underhanded tactics of Christopher Healey and Andrew Martin as discussed in Part 4?</p> <p>This <em>Kitsilano News</em> story apparently caught S/Sgt. Jansen’s attention, as on the next day, August 27, he faxed a copy to UBC Community Relations office to discuss with them, but their conversation content has been withheld by RCMP.</p> <p>On August 27 Jansen also held a meeting with UBC “Computer Sc Faculty Admin Group”, a group I had never heard of but presume to include Head Maria Klawe and Acting Head James Kennedy, among others.</p> <p>Per Jansen’s notes, the meeting was just more of UBC lobbying the police regarding concern or fear about me over the Montreal shootings. Jansen stood by his position that the two were “unrelated”, and that RCMP’s intervention rule should be normal; but as a precaution <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot027 - RCMP Staff Sgt. Jansen record, Aug 25-27, 1992, 2008 disclosure.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jansen advised redirecting my telephone calls</font></a> made to some colleagues to discuss the dispute:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Recommended: If goals is to eliminate contact with GAO <u>then</u> all calls should be forwarded to university admin staffer <u>outside</u> department. To continue conversations is to encourage him to call.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Jansen also noted that UBC Parking and Security would post a guard at the Computer Science office “as an entry level of precaution”.</p> <p>In summary, although he changed the definition of my arrest from police-assisted removal to preventing violence, by and large the RCMP local detachment commander was careful not to treat me as a real suspect of violence; however, UBC Faculty Association’s president was more belligerent, and wrongheaded in his media interview putting a former member of his association in the same category as a murderer elsewhere, rather than sympathizing with the member’s peaceful dispute with the management.</p> <p>There were two possible factors to account for William Bruneau’s position. </p> <p>One, UBC Faculty Association had cozy connections to the university administration, making it not always easy to distinguish them clearly. Closely related to my case was Dr. William Webber, the Associate Vice President in charge of faculty affairs who in April had arranged for me to be assessed by private psychiatrist Ronald Remick in order to satisfy Dean Barry McBride and keep my e-mail privilege, whereby Dr. Remick determined that I was normal but also labelled me as a patient under his care in a note for the university as in Part 4. Dr. Webber had once held Bruneau’s Faculty Association job, and UBC considered it part of “administrative leadership” (“<a href="http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/tributes/tribw.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Senate Tributes – “W”: WILLIAM A. WEBBER</font></a>”, University Archives, the University of British Columbia):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Bill’s administrative leadership surfaced in 1968 when he became President of the Faculty Association, and expanded in 1971 when he became the Associate Dean of Medicine. Six years later he was appointed Dean of Medicine and served in that capacity for 13 years. … In 1990 he was appointed Associate Vice- President for Faculty Relations, and served in that capacity for six years.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In fact, as in Part 4 it was a suggestion from Associate Vice President Webber’s office that led me to take my grievance also to the faculty association.</p> <p>But in the end, the alignment between the faculty association and UBC management on my dispute was one of entrenched interests that an individual like me could not overcome.</p> <p>A second possible factor was Valery Fabrikant’s poor relation with Concordia University faculty association, which had soured during the association’s mediation of his problems to the point that its president ended up among the shooting dead. Bill Bruneau was angry about it, as the news article indicated <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot026 - RCMP Staff Sgt. Jansen record, Aug 25-27, 1992, 2003 disclosure.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">he also sent a letter of sympathy to June Chaikelson</font></a>, vice president of Concordia University faculty association, on August 25; so as a result of the Montreal event he may have become more agreeable with UBC management’s pre-emptive strike against me politically. </p> <p>The RCMP information cited above is from personal-information disclosures in 2003 and 2008, where the 2008 disclosure released more information from S/Sgt. Jansen’s notes than the 2003 one – the earlier disclosure had withheld all things about UBC’s attempts lobbying RCMP to link my case to the Valery Fabrikant murders. </p> <p>Was the improved information disclosure in this case simply a matter of time passing, or that under former Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s Liberal government in 2003 the political climate ‘covered up’ for <font color="#333333">the </font>academia? It turned out that in the next year 2004, both Jean Chretien and Maria Klawe – by now Princeton University’s Dean of Engineering and Applied Science – as well as Brian Mulroney’s in-law Lewis Lapham, the “famously liberal” <em>Harper’s Magazine</em> editor mentioned in Part 1, received honorary degrees from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, with Chretien on May 27, Lapham on June 3, and Klawe on June 4.  (“<a href="http://queensjournal.ca/story/2004-05-11/news/degree-recipients/?flavour=mobile" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Honorary degree recipients announced: Former Prime Minister, Editor of Harper’s among those selected</font></a>”, May 11, 2004, <em>The Journal</em>)</p> <p>The other honorary-degree conferee on June 4 as Klawe was Gordon Wells, Sub-Lieutenant of the Royal Canadian Navy, advisor to the Government of Jamaica and Senior Advisor to the Contractor General, and Chairman of the Jamaica Broadcasting Commission.</p> <p>I should point out this was the same Canadian university from which Andrew Martin had graduated in 1989 before attending UBC Computer Science Department for graduate study, who in 1992 did more than others behind my back (as in Part 4) to send me to the ‘freezer’ for my opposition to Head Klawe’s leadership. I just didn’t know at the time that Maria Klawe and such powerful Canadian and international figures of  disparate political stripes would be so together.</p> <p>Maybe there were also entrenched foreign interests in the authorities’ considerations.</p> <p>On September 3, 1992 at the RCMP “E” Division complaints & internal investigation section, an Occurrence Report–General form was prepared by investigator Blommaert, and a letter was signed by Insp. W. B. Vye to notify me that the complaint was being forwarded to “Officer Commanding Vancouver Subdivision”. The next day, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot028 - RCMP processing of public complaint and withdrawal, Sept-Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">S/Sgt. Medley in the office of Superintendent D. G. Cowley</font></a>, assigned the investigation to the officer in charge of the Deas Island Highway Patrol detachment, stating:</p> <blockquote> <p>“S/Sgt. JANSEN, NCO i/C University Detachment, has given direction on this investigative file and I would appreciate an external examination of this complaint.” </p> </blockquote> <p>That can be interpreted as that Jansen was involved in my case at this point and someone from outside, his counterpart at the regional highway-patrol detachment, would conduct the complaint investigation.</p> <p>On September 7, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot028 - RCMP processing of public complaint and withdrawal, Sept-Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">S/Sgt. M. M. Ukrainetz prepared an RCMP public complaint receipt form</font></a>, by September 9 he advised the 3 officers, N. E. McKerry, C. L. Dinham-Jones, and A. M. Bangloy, of the complaint.</p> <p>As I recall, in his telephone conversations then with me to initiate the investigation process, S/Sgt. Ukrainetz did nothing but confidently assuring me that RCMP had done nothing wrong in this case, that their assistance had been requested by UBC and so my grievance should be against UBC only. Ukrainetz went as far as telling me, “the RCMP is on your side”.</p> <p>I of course understood the politically correct image of the proud Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but the reality was that it intervened on behalf of UBC. I was unfamiliar with the relevant legal statues governing RCMP, and during that time was also consulting with lawyers about filing a lawsuit, some of whom strongly advised that I name both UBC and RCMP as defendants and use the court as the venue of grievance. </p> <p>So when Ukrainetz called again on September 28, I told him I would be filing a lawsuit where the RCMP aspect of the dispute would also be dealt with, thus I could withdraw the complaint as he had urged. Ukrainetz replied confidently that I should not sue RCMP either.</p> <p>Interestingly, the package I got from the RCMP Public Complaints Commission, a government agency independent of the RCMP, included a <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot028 - RCMP processing of public complaint and withdrawal, Sept-Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank">“<font color="#0000ff">Withdrawal of Complaint” with my name already typed in</font></a>, so I just signed and faxed it to Ukrainetz.</p> <p><a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot028 - RCMP processing of public complaint and withdrawal, Sept-Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">S/Sgt. Ukrainetz’s final report</font></a> dated one day earlier, September 27, showed hints that he had merely been trying to talk me out of it – calling me three times to arrange for an interview yet none was scheduled by the time of my withdrawal:</p> <blockquote> <p>“… The operational file at the University Detachment was reviewed and Dr. GAO was immediately contacted to arrange an interview at a future date.</p> <p>[…]</p> <p>Dr. GAO was contacted on two further occasions in an attempt to arrange an interview with him. During one of these calls, GAO’s position seemed to be softening…”</p> </blockquote> <p>(Content in […] has been withheld by RCMP from personal-information disclosures.)</p> <p>Ukrainetz didn’t mention that I was filing a lawsuit, where RCMP would be named, in place of this complaint.</p> <p>On October 5, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot028 - RCMP processing of public complaint and withdrawal, Sept-Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">S/Sgt. Medley signed for Supt. D. G. Cowley</font></a> to approve termination of the complaint investigation:</p> <blockquote> <p>“In view of the circumstances outlined by S/Sgt. UKRAINETZ and Dr. GAO’s official withdrawal of complaint, I recommend termination of this investigation (Section 45.36(5)(c)).”</p> </blockquote> <p>Though the termination looks routine, a closer inspection suggests that Supt. Cowley may have applied the rules of the RCMP Act somewhat inappropriately in order to cover all the bases for the three officers. </p> <p>Here is a listing of the relevant RCMP rules to explain why.</p> <p>The RCMP Act section cited by Supt. Cowley states (“<a href="http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/R-10/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act</font></a>”, Department of Justice Canada):</p> <blockquote> <p>“<strong>45.36</strong> (5) Notwithstanding any other provision of this Part, the Commissioner may direct that no investigation of a complaint under subsection 45.35(1) be commenced or that an investigation of such a complaint be terminated if, in the Commissioner’s opinion, <br />… </p> <p align="left">(c) having regard to all the circumstances, investigation or further investigation is not necessary or reasonably practicable.”     </p> </blockquote> <p align="left">In other words, all circumstances including my withdrawal were considered for the decision to end the investigation.</p> <p align="left">But there is a more directly relevant rule in the RCMP Act:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Informal disposition</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p><a><strong>45.36</strong></a> (1) The Commissioner shall consider whether a complaint under subsection 45.35(1) can be disposed of informally and, with the consent of the complainant and the member or other person whose conduct is the subject-matter of the complaint, may attempt to so dispose of the complaint.</p> <p>Statements not admissible</p> <p align="left">(2) No answer or statement made, in the course of attempting to dispose of a complaint informally, by the complainant or the member or other person whose conduct is the subject-matter of the complaint shall be used or receivable in any criminal, civil or administrative proceedings other than, where the answer or statement was made by a member, a hearing under section 45.1 into an allegation that with intent to mislead the member gave the answer or statement knowing it to be false.”</p> </blockquote> <p>S/Sgt. Ukrainetz phoned me 3 times just to schedule a formal interview with me, yet none was ever scheduled while he kept trying to “soften” my position, so from my standpoint his efforts to persuade me to withdraw was not yet part of any investigation but attempting to “dispose of the complaint” informally. In this initial stage, statement made by either side to the investigator was not legally liable, except if the RCMP officers made a false statement “with the intent to mislead” they could be subject to a hearing on their conduct per Section 45.1 of the RCMP Act.</p> <p>Cpl. Nancy McKerry’s altered statement (i.e., the typed version) to make me look mentally unstable and about to become violent, if by this time was “on File” when investigator S/Sgt. Ukrainetz reviewed the file, could be subject to a conduct hearing!</p> <p>I wonder if the passage withheld in Ukrainetz’s report may reveal something relevant. But at the time Supt. D. G. Cowley, as signed for him by S/Sgt. Medley, simply invoked a “notwithstanding clause” in the RCMP Act so that all circumstances were declared as already considered by him.</p> <p>The day Supt. Cowley issued his final decision happened to be the day before the filing of my lawsuit. On October 6, lawyer Brian A. Mason of Maitland & Company and I filed “Writ of Summons” and “Statement of Claim” at the British Columbia Supreme Court, naming both UBC and RCMP as defendants.</p> <p>On October 9, lawsuit documents were served to RCMP University Detachment; on the same day S/Sgt. Jansen ordered Cpl. McKerry to hand-deliver them to the Police Car Accident/Civil Litigation Unit of “E” Division, and sent a copy with a cover note to his superior, Supt. D. G Cowley. </p> <p>The office of Officer Commanding Vancouver Subdivision stamped its copy on October 13 and wrote on the cover note, “Supt. Cowley – For your Info.” So included in the RCMP disclosure are <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot029 - lawsuit filing, RCMP Vancouver Subdiv & DoJ reactions, Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">a few pages of my lawsuit copy with Supt. D. G. Cowley’s handwriting and seal</font></a> on them.</p> <p>On the first page of the writ of summons, Cowley’s writing appears to be:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Discussion with Sgt Kelley (Civil Litigation) and he has the matter in hand. We will hold across town & brief subject to reenter or call from Sgt Kelley (264-2864)”</p> </blockquote> <p>The handwritten comment was accompanied by his official seal stamp, signed and dated October 14, 1992.</p> <p>The Occurrence Report–General form for the July 2 arrest, originally prepared by Cpl. McKerry on July 3, was also modified by Cowley, Where McKerry was listed as “Investigator”, “Parking Security UBC” as “comp” (complainant) and I as “sus” (suspect), there is an additional stamp of the same seal of Officer Commanding Vancouver Subdivision, signed and dated October 14, 1992.</p> <p>Because Cowley used his seal to give official status to his comments on my writ of summons, my guess is that the seal stamp on this form served a similar purpose of authorization. I note that the stamp is located inside the “comp” section of the form, investigator McKerry’s Unit info “UBC” is crossed out with a pen, and where UBC Parking & Security’s info was unfilled has a large handwritten cross mark, and next to it is Cowley’s seal stamp.</p> <p>So my sense is that it was a ‘stamp of approval’ after the fact, for the RCMP arrest conducted by Cpl. McKerry, namely that in reaction to my lawsuit Supt. D. G. Cowley post-authorized the July 2 arrest, thereby assuming Cpl. McKerry’s responsibility in a manner analogous to his invoking the “notwithstanding” clause over ending the investigation for my public complaint.</p> <p>In other words, whether with the earlier public complaint or this later civil lawsuit, if I could not overcome the power of RCMP’s Vancouver regional commander I simply would not win, and that was decided by him without my being aware of the situation.</p> <p>Inspecting more carefully I notice that in the “sus” section my race is listed by McKerry as “Ori”, place of birth as “China”, and citizenship unfilled – even though as in her July 2 police report she had Cst. Dinham-Jones check my immigration status and learned that I had just become a Canadian citizen on July 1.</p> <p>After my release on July 2 McKerry told me that she lived in Surrey, which happened to be where my citizenship had been approved. In the “comp” section on this form, Cowley’s seal stamp is at around the location where the info of race, place of birth and citizenship would be.</p> <p>I don’t want to be speculative, but maybe Supt. Cowley held the opinion that as a new immigrant Canadian I was in no position to sue the police.</p> <p>On the same day of October 14, in a memo sent to Department of Justice to request legal representation for Cpl. McKerry, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot029 - lawsuit filing, RCMP Vancouver Subdiv & DoJ reactions, Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sgt. Frank Kelley declared</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It would appear the plaintiff and his lawyer are in the wrong court, however your department may have other ideas.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The meaning of “the wrong court” was already quite explicit, that the RCMP not only did not accept being sued by me but was considering criminal prosecution against me.</p> <p><font color="#333333">Sgt. Kelley also handwrote some additional comment</font>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Supt. Cowley OIC Vancouver S/D called on this civil suit and I advised him the ‘package’ was being taken down this A.M. by Cpl. Pacula, while attending another civil matter.”</p> </blockquote> <p><font color="#333333">Sgt. Kelley’s</font> phrase, “the ‘package’ was being taken down”, smacks of cops pursuing criminal suspects, not unlike the wording of Supt. Cowley’s comment on my writ of summons, “we will hold across town & brief”.</p> <p>These suggest that an intent of criminal prosecution also came from Cowley, RCMP’s Vancouver regional commander, and it was perhaps implied by his seal stamp on the Occurrence Report–General form.</p> <p>The next day, October 15, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot029 - lawsuit filing, RCMP Vancouver Subdiv & DoJ reactions, Oct 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Department of Justice lawyer Paul F. Partridge</font></a> had a phone conversation with my lawyer, and on October 20 sent a letter to Brian Mason stating:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I confirm my suggestion to you that the named defendant, R.C.M.P., is not a legal entity capable of being sued.</p> <p>I confirming your advise that you will be taking steps to amend your pleadings to name a proper defendant and that you will not take any steps in default without having first given me reasonable notice of your intention to do so.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Technically there was a minor glitch in the lawsuit: it was supposed to name “Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada” as the defendant when suing any Canadian government agency. </p> <p>But why all the fuss by Supt. Cowley in his authority, and by him and Sgt. Kelley in their ‘cop talk’, and now by the Justice Department lawyer phrasing a minor technicality as his suggestion that RCMP “is not a legal entity capable of being sued”, and further demanding that my lawyer notify him in advance of the “intention” to take “any steps in default”?</p> <p>My conclusions are that Supt. D. G. Cowley intended to block my civil lawsuit against RCMP – much like Dean Barry McBride blocking my democratic opposition to Head Klawe’s management style at UBC – and to use criminal prosecution as retaliation against me, and that following his cue the Justice Department exerted pressure on my lawyer to ‘get in line’.</p> <p>In a Chinese blog post, “<a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%b8%89%ef%bc%89%e6%96%87%e9%9d%a9%e7%a0%b4%e6%97%a7%e7%ab%8b%e6%96%b0%e5%bc%80%e5%a7%8b/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧(三)——文革“破旧立新”开始的记忆</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (Part 3) – memories of the start of "destroying the old to erect the new" in Cultural Revolution”, with <a href="http://fenggao.org/blogs/introduction/2011/03/%E5%BF%86%E5%BE%80%E6%98%94%EF%BC%8C%E5%AD%A6%E5%8E%86%E5%8F%B2%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7-part-2-part-3/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>), I have recalled my childhood experience of facing a “home raid” by Cultural Revolution Red Guards in 1966 at the dorm-apartment allocated to my middle-school teacher mother, located near Guangzhou City’s Second Workers Cultural Palace at 640 Tongfu East Road.</p> <p>Now in 1992 I happened to be living in a Vancouver apartment at 1640 West 11th Avenue, while the phone number of RCMP Sgt. Frank Kelley in charge of civil litigation was 264-2864.</p> <p>So many “64’s” already, not to mention over a decade later Maria Klawe’s honorary degree from Queen’s University on June 4, 2004!</p> <p>I should say it out loud, that June 4, 2004 happened to be the 15th anniversary of what the Western media refers to as the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, China, when democratic protests were ended by military force.</p> <p>The date of October 14, when Supt. D. G. Cowley issued his authorization against my civil lawsuit in 1992, is also interesting to me though somewhat more elusive. </p> <p>My most recent Chinese blog post, “<a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/%E5%BF%86%E5%BE%80%E6%98%94%EF%BC%8C%E5%AD%A6%E5%8E%86%E5%8F%B2%E6%99%BA%E6%85%A7%EF%BC%88%E5%85%AD%EF%BC%89%E9%9D%92%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4%E6%97%B6%E4%BB%A3%E5%AF%B9%E6%94%BF%E6%B2%BB/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧(六)——青少年时代对政治思想的一些兴趣</font></a>”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (Part 6) – some youthful interest in political thoughts”), was dated November 9, 2011, in memory of my late maternal grandfather who first taught me read and write, who had been born on October 14 in the Chinese lunar calendar around the turn of the 20th century. Grandfather was a retired ordained minister of a historical Presbyterian church in the eastern region of China’s Guangdong province, the first Christian church in that region’s history, and his grandfather had been the first ordained Chinese Presbyterian minister in the capital city of that region (prefecture).</p> <p>No one in his right mind here is trying to accuse Supt. D. G. Cowley of picking a similar but coincidental date to authorize political persecution of me, but just to get a better understanding by looking at other relevant events on that date in this context. </p> <p>There was another October 14 in this same Chinese blog post, where I quoted from an article by Vladimir Lenin, “<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/14.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution</font></a>”, written on October 14, 1921 (probably in the Julian calendar). This article is of special interest because some of China’s Chairman Mao Zedong’s writings strongly paralleled it, and a main theme of this Chinese blog post of mine is a critical review of  Mao’s writings which I had studied as a youth – and the subject matter is doubly interesting because my late father has been a noted Chinese academic in the history of Marxist philosophy.</p> <p>One may notice the coincidence that the Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski arrived in Vancouver on an October 14, to become a Canadian landed immigrant but unfortunately upon arrival was immediately tasered to death by RCMP.</p> <p>I can’t think of anything in my environments so tragic involving someone Polish, other than – as in Part 3 – when I was a Berkeley Math graduate student, that bomb attacks wounding two Berkeley Electrical Engineering persons and scores of others in the United States were secretly carried out by Theodore Kaczynski, Polish American and former Berkeley Math professor before my time there.</p> <p>But I find it intriguingly interesting that Maria Klawe is actually of part-Polish heritage. Her father had come from Peotrekow in Poland and worked as the chief cartographer for Thomas Nelson & Sons in Scotland, a Christian publisher and one of the oldest publishers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, while her British mother had served as an intelligence officer during World War II, prior to their settling in Edmonton, Canada. (“<a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/160462661?q=thomas+wareham&c=map#" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">West African secondary school atlas</font></a>”, ed. by J. W. Watson & A. K. Wareham, Maps by Cartographic Dept., Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., Janusz J. Klawe, chief cartographer, 1963; “<a href="http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/p126167871u8/?p=97e21bc70c284c26867decdd5b2172d3&pi=0" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The State of Canadian Children’s Atlases from a European Perspective</font></a>”, by Herbert A. Sanford, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 1987, Cartographica; and, “<a href="http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/economics2/pdfs/newsletter2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">In Memoriam – Kathleen Klawe</font></a>”, Newsletter 2003, Department of Economics, University of Alberta)</p> <p>These various dates and facts may have been coincidences, but there probably were undercurrents of politics that should not be ignored.</p> <p>Supt. D. G. Cowley’s main media profile has exemplified one such, exclusively focused on leading RCMP crackdown of native-activist blockades near Whistler-Pemberton just north of Vancouver – protests waged in 1990-91 by the Lil’wat Peoples Movement of the Mount Currie Band.</p> <p>On November 2-3, 1990, the press reported that RCMP Inspector Dave Cowley flew to the native blockade to warn them that the police may begin arrests and the future would be unpleasant for them (“Victoria heading to court to halt Indian blockade”, by Stewart Bell, November 2, 1990, <em><a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The provincial government was heading to court today to seek authority to take down a road blockade erected by Mount Currie Indians.</p> <p>Attorney-General Russ Fraser announced the government plan after members of the First Nations Congress and the RCMP got a chilly response when they met with the Mount Currie Indians Thursday to try to end the blockade on the Duffey Lake Road.</p> <p>…</p> <p>But the natives, who say they are a sovereign nation and do not recognize Canadian laws, drummed and sang "RCMP have no jurisdiction" after a brief meeting at the blockade Thursday with Vancouver RCMP Insp. Dave Cowley.</p> <p>…</p> <p>"I just can't help but worry that we're coming to some clash down the road," Cowley told the group of about 30 natives sitting around a campfire.</p> <p>"If there's some way we could discuss the issue today to avoid any unpleasantness, that's why I'm here."</p> <p>Cowley said he had come to the blockade simply to "patrol the neighborhood" and not because he had been instructed to do so by his superiors.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The authority for the crackdown came from Chief Justice William Esson of the B.C. Supreme Court, but the native protesters insisted they were sovereign and not subject to RCMP jurisdiction (“Blockaders get ultimatum: Arrests due if road not cleared; Indians get ultimatum to end road blockade”, by Phil Needham & Stewart Bell, November 3, 1990, <em><a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The blockade on the Duffey Lake road through the Mount Currie Indian Reserve must immediately be lifted or specific authorization for arrests and detention could be ordered next week, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Esson says.</p> <p>…</p> <p>Harvey Groberman, lawyer for the ministry of highways, said the judge "wanted to be absolutely certain that there was no confusion in the minds of the Indians."</p> <p>Lil'wat Peoples Movement spokesman Terri John sent a letter Friday to Vancouver RCMP Insp. Dave Cowley – who visited the blockade Thursday – saying police should not be sent in because the question of who owns the road is still being debated in court.</p> <p>Mount Currie Indian band lawyer Leslie Pinder plans to apply Monday for a hearing before the B.C. Court of Appeal to challenge the province's right to expropriate land from Indian reserves.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Then on November 7, Cowley was for the first time reported as RCMP Superintendent in charge of the police crackdown that began the day before (“50 arrested at Duffey blockade face supreme court appearance”, by Scott Simpson and Bart Jackson, November 7, 1990, <em><a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Most of the 63 natives arrested in the dramatic dismantling of the four-month-old Duffey Lake Road blockade Tuesday were to appear in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver today.</p> <p>About 50 of those arrested were bused to Vancouver from Whistler and Pemberton after they refused to sign declarations they would appear in court on Friday.</p> <p>…</p> <p>RCMP Supt. D.G. Cowley said the natives were to be held until today, when they were to appear in Supreme Court.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The dismantling of the roadblock by 75 RCMP officers from detachments in the Vancouver subdivision was an emotional and occasionally violent five-hour operation.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The protesters and their lawyer accused the RCMP of trying to escalate the situation by bringing semi-automatic weapons, but “RCMP Vancouver subdivision commander” Supt. D. G. Cowley denied it (“Duffey Lake weapons charges 'mindless,' RCMP leader says”, by Doug Ward, November 10, 1990, <em><a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>"Mindless accusations made to the media regarding the existence of semi-automatic weapons, body armor and assault dress are totally irresponsible and false and can only serve to inflame a sensitive community policing situation," said Supt. D.G. Cowley, Vancouver subdivision commanding officer.</p> <p>Cowley's comments came after lawyer Lyn Crompton, representing natives arrested in the dismantling of the roadblock, charged outside the courthouse Friday that the RCMP is turning the Mount Currie dispute into an Oka-style confrontation.”</p> </blockquote> <p>You see, D. G. Cowley was promoted within RCMP from Inspector to Superintendent in early November 1990, just in time to lead a crackdown on native protests on November 6 and appear victorious to the press on November 7, which happened to be an anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution – to commemorate it Vladimir Lenin had written an article 4 years afterwards on October 14, 1921.</p> <p>Maybe Supt. Cowley indeed liked to escalate conflicts to the demise of those who protest or complain.</p> <p>Anyhow, in October 1992 I had no knowledge of Supt. D. G. Cowley, but was told by my lawyer Brian Mason about a Justice Department lawyer phone call saying that the lawsuit pleading incorrectly named RCMP instead of the Queen. Mason soon filed an amended version.</p> <p>The <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot031 - RCMP statement of defence filed by Justice Dept, Nov 18, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Statement of Defence filed by Justice Department lawyer J. D. Bissell</font></a> on November 18 on behalf of RCMP was when Cpl. Nancy McKerry’s altered version of police report, with fabricated facts about the July 2 arrest, was filed at the court. The 2003 RCMP disclosure shows what looks like a copy (its contents have been withheld) of the typed version cited earlier, <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot030 - RCMP Cpl McKerry statement fax to Justice Dept, Nov 13, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">faxed on November 13 by S/Sgt. J. B. Jansen</font></a> to Justice Department lawyer Paul Partridge.</p> <p>So, what had begun in late August by the local RCMP after Valery Fabrikant’s murders at Concordia University, namely redefining my case as that of potential violence on my part, by mid-November became official with the legal filing from Justice Department.</p> <p>Moreover there was a new revelation in the RCMP statement of defence to support its claim of concern for violence: on July 2 before the police intervention, Cpl. McKerry had reviewed an RCMP report showing I had been “violent” on March 16 – the day when I had heated email exchanges with Christopher Healey as in Part 4 – by throwing a coffee mug at a UBC student.</p> <p>As mentioned in Part 4, to show my anger after he had tailed me in near darkness the day before, I did toss my plastic mug at the wall but not toward Healey. </p> <p>So now you see I could have been treated like Robert Dziekanski was 15 years later, had the RCMP chosen to do so on the basis of second-hand information about ‘similar’ physical behavior.</p> <p>But in November 1992 my focus was not on the lawsuit itself but trying to get publicity for it. To me, the lawsuit was an extended continuation of the dispute with Maria Klawe over her management style at UBC.</p> <p>Furthermore, for several months like many Canadians I had followed the events of the Charlottetown constitutional accord and national referendum campaign with great interest, and had begun to view Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in a similar vein as I did Head Maria Klawe, namely that both had used quite a bit of bullying tactics in their politics. So I decided to also take a modest shot at the issue of Mulroney’s leadership.</p> <p>My first two written press releases were sent on November 10 to British Columbia TV and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV in Vancouver, and included the issue of Mulroney’s leadership and that of the failure of the Charlottetown constitutional process. In my yet unfinished series of blog posts on Canadian politics, written during 2009, I have discussed some statements in them (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 5)</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In one of the press releases on this date, November 10, 1992, I called for B.C. Tory MPs to support their caucus chair Stan Wilbee who had publicly demanded a leadership review, … and I demanded that constitutional affairs minister Joe Clark give a public account of the damages to national unity and to the economy inflicted by the Tory government’s constitutional misadventure. The quote below is from a copy of my old press release – disclosed to me in an October 1, 2003 RCMP personal-information disclosure:</p> <p> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="487"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="34"> </td> <td valign="top" width="451">“Mr. Stan Wilbee, MP for Delta, B.C., has spoken out publicly, criticizing Mr. Mulroney’s leadership and requesting a province-by-province Tory leadership review. The B.C. Tory MPs should speak out now in support of Mr. Wilbee, reaffirm their confidence in him as the B.C. caucus chair, and defy Mr. Mulroney’s threats of retaliation by means of cabinet restructuring or by any other means. … the most pressing issue facing the country right now, that of Mr. Mulroney’s fitness as the prime minister. … Before taking up any new tasks, Mr. Joe Clark needs to give the people of Canada an adequate explanation for the recent Charlottetown constitutional fiasco and a satisfactory account of the full extent of damages the latest constitutional adventure of the Tory government has done to both national unity and the economy.”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>”</p> </blockquote> <p>It turned out that on the same day the Mulroney government made an intriguing international diplomatic move for the RCMP, winning Chinese government acceptance of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster’s nomination as the new president of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), i.e., unopposed. I discussed this in the above May 2009 blog post:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Even more intriguing is the fact that back on November 10, 1992 when Mr. Inkster was named president of Interpol, he got the job without competition: he became the only candidate when a second nominated candidate – from China – withdrew in favour of him.</p> <p>Now that’s worth pondering: with Mr. Mulroney’s diplomatic clout among western leaders, Mr. Inkster likely had been agreed upon by them; but a Chinese government non-compete gesture at a time when the June 4, 1989 violent military crackdown on Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests was still fresh in people’s minds? That had to be the result of some deal from Mr. Mulroney.</p> <p>What is personally interesting is that the day when Norman Inkster was acclaimed president of Interpol happened to be the day when I first sent written press releases to the media – especially CBC-TV in Vancouver – criticizing Mulroney’s leadership in general and his conduct in the Charlottetown constitutional process…”</p> </blockquote> <p>I can see this new Interpol primacy giving Supt. D. G. Cowley even greater confidence at the time in exercising police crackdown on protests and complaints.</p> <p>Three days later on November 13 – the same day when S/Sgt. Jansen sent Cpl. McKerry’s altered police statement to the Justice Department – Prime Minister Mulroney made another daring political move, the more subtle implications of which virtually gone untouched by the national media: he appointed Justice John Charles Major of Alberta to the Supreme Court of Canada in what turned out to be his last Supreme Court appointment before retiring in 1993.</p> <p>I also discussed this in the above quoted 2009 blog post:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Also note that Mulroney’s appointment of John C.  Major of Alberta – a lawyer in the law firm Bennett Jones Verchere headed by Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere and a friend of Karlheinz Schreiber – to the Supreme Court of Canada happened on November 13, 1992, i.e., amid the tension of Stan Wilbee’s call for a leadership review, and that back in 1983 Schreiber had been involved in political maneuvers to oust Joe Clark and bring in Mulroney as Tory leader (the topic has been discussed in previous Notes, with attention to the fact that Justice Major later took early retirement on Christmas Day 2005 ahead of his turning 75 on February 20, 2006 – a date when my late father would have turned 73).”</p> </blockquote> <p>More precisely, prior to being appointed to the Alberta Court of Appeal in 1991 John Major was a lawyer at the law firm Bennett Jones Verchere headed by Bruce Verchere, whose very limited media profile placed him as a lawyer and Canadian director for the Swiss Bank Corporation (mentioned in my earlier blog post in March 2009, <a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-11/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 2)</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>). </p> <p>There were press articles from critics who disagreed with Major’s Supreme Court appointment on the basis of legal perspectives and court-bench experience (“Albertan named to Supreme Court Long-time lawyer has Tory ties, less than two years on bench”, by Sean Fine, November 14, 1992, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>; “Still mostly middle-aged, rich, Christian, white men JUDGES " The faces on the benches of Canada's courts don't represent the country's real makeup. There are too few women and minorities”, by Allan Hutchinson, December 3, 1992, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>; and, “PROFILE A 'lawyer's lawyer' ascends to the top court The latest appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada has been greeted with much controversy. Here’s how the country’s legal community feels about the newcomer on the bench”, by Sean Fine, January 23, 1993, <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Globe and Mail</em></font></a>).</p> <p>But as far as I have searched for, not one person pointed out another real issue – whether anyone in the media knew in any official capacity is a related issue – that the prime minister was actually appointing a former underling of his personal financial manager and tax lawyer to be a supreme justice of the country.</p> <p>It was not until 1998 when the anti-corruption crusader and journalist Stevie Cameron published her book, <a href="http://steviecameron.com/blue-trust/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money</em></font></a>, that it became public knowledge Bruce Verchere had been Mulroney’s personal lawyer and financial trustee who then died of a gun-inflicted, reported suicide in August 1993 two months after his appointment as Board Chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited – where UBC Computer Science Acting Head James Kennedy had come from – by Mulroney a day before retirement as Prime Minister.</p> <p>Cameron said in 1998 that to write this book she had been encouraged by the prominent Canadian author, (the late) Mordecai Richler, who had also introduced her to many of her sources for the story (“Bumper fall crop of Canadian books”, by Judy Stoffman, June 22, 1998, <a href="http://www.thestar.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Toronto Star</font></em></a>).</p> <p>Yet to this day no one has raised a voice that Justice John Major had practiced law under Verchere in that law firm that served Mulroney, or that Justice Major had been a friend of Karlheinz Schreiber, the central figure in the Airbus Affair and the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair who laundered tens of millions of dollars in commissions from 1988 Airbus plane sale to Air Canada, including through bank accounts at the Swiss Bank for which Verchere was a Canadian director and lawyer while at the same time the financial trustee and lawyer for Prime Minister Mulroney.</p> <p>Some of the financial and political relationship between Mulroney and Schreiber has been discussed in Part 1. The official Canadian government inquiry into these has so far only focused on if Mulroney accepted $300,000 from Schreiber shortly after retirement and whether that was ethically appropriate – a scope so limited even Schreiber himself felt was far from the real picture, as discussed in Part 1.</p> <p>Looking back to November 1992, I get the sense that at the time Brian Mulroney was busy installing sufficient protective cushion, on both the law enforcement and legal justice fronts, for his and his political circle’s future, and that my attempt into public opposition to his leadership wouldn’t bode well for me.</p> <p>Ten days later on November 20, 1992, I sent out another press release that focused on some of Mulroney’s leadership behavior, as discussed in my September 2009 blog post (<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%e2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-4/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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 9)</font></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“On November 20, 1992, … I sent out another press release lambasting Mulroney’s “constitutional adventures” and his pushing Clark aside and resorting to “horse-trading” on constitutional negotiation:</p> <p> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="442"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="34"> </td> <td valign="top" width="406">“His constitutional adventures have done nothing but damages to both national unity and the economy. The horse-trading approach he employed during the final stage of the Charlottetown constitutional negotiation after he pushed Joe Clark aside (Poor Mr. Clark, he never failed Mr. Mulroney, not yet anyway), and discarded proposals based on the efforts of many experts, political leaders and ordinary people, together with his hardball tactics during the referendum campaign, caused the massive No votes across the country and the resulting division and resentments among people.”</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </p> <p>To single out Brian Mulroney for all the blames may have been overly simplistic, but in late 1992 it was done attempting to put pressure on the issue of his leadership future.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Another ten days later on November 30, I faxed all of these press releases, with a cover note, to the Canadian Member of Parliament in the riding where I lived, Vancouver Centre, in what would turn out to be a very self-devastating political move.</p> <p>At the time, my local MP was Kim Campbell, Justice Minister in the Mulroney government. I was hoping that Campbell would take my criticisms and allegations about Prime Minister Mulroney seriously, but as my review of the history in my 2009 blog posts indicates, she would soon be getting a political ‘inheritance’ from Mulroney to become the next leader of the Progressive Conservative party and the Prime Minister – the first women as the leader of Canada was a real tempting prospect.</p> <p>In my cover note to Kim Campbell I went as far as essentially alleging a scandal in Mulroney’s handling of the Charlottetown constitutional process. I also alleged that I was about to be politically persecuted, for the reason that CBC Television in Vancouver to which I had sent the press releases, had begun to threaten that if I did not stop contacting over these issues I would be criminally charged with harassment.</p> <p>Here is <a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot032 - Fax cover note to MP Kim Campbell, Nov 30, 1992.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">what I stated to Kim Campbell</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“These are press releases I have sent to CBC-TV. I have strong reason to believe the CBC regional management has informed against me and a political persecution ordered by the PM is underway. I need the immediate support of my MP and the B.C. Tory MPs. Charlottetown constitutional process was an elaborate setup by the PM to settle political scores and eliminate potential political opponents. I’ll get in touch later.”</p> </blockquote> <p>After the morning fax, in the afternoon I was at home attempting to speak on the phone with CBC-TV, and as with most of my other attempts was put on hold. Unexpectedly, there were polite knocks at my apartment door, and I opened it to find two plainclothes gentlemen who had been let in the building by a neighbor. They introduced themselves to me as Sergeant Brian Cotton, a detective, and his Constable companion, RCMP officers from the University Detachment.</p> <p>I of course had no idea that there was a Supt. D. G. Cowley who kept things under tight grip.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.ca/2012/03/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 6</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-42161044214749913002011-05-24T19:25:00.001-04:002012-02-24T15:24:17.685-05:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 4) — when power and control are the agenda<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2011/03/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 3</a>)</p> <p>On March 3, 1992, the British Columbia Court of Appeal ordered a new trial of Barry James Evans of Calgary, Alberta, for the 1989 murder of his friend Rick Sample, computer systems manager at the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia. Chief Justice Allan McEachern – later UBC’s Chancellor – viewed the investigation and prosecution as very strong (“Court orders new trial for man acquitted of friend's murder”, by Larry Still, March 4, 1992, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“There was no sign of forced entry or a struggle at the scene. And since the fatal shots were fired at extremely close range, police assumed the killer was known to the deceased.</p> <p>Although the murder weapon was never recovered, McEachern said, “meticulous police work” resulted in a match between shell casings found beside the body and casings known to have been fired from a gun bought by Evans.</p> <p>“In my view, the Crown had a very strong case,” the judge said. “Except for (some matters), the Crown’s case was almost an unanswerable one.””</p> </blockquote> <p>In Calgary, serial killer Charles Ng’s former lawyer Don MacLeod – Ng had been deported back to California in September 1991 – conferred with Evans on behalf of his lawyer Noel O’Brien who was vacationing in California, and told the media the defense likely would appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada (“Murder acquittal set aside”, by Helen Dolik, March 4, 1992, <em><a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Calgary Herald</font></a></em>).</p> <p>Around that time at the UBC Computer Science Department where I was a faculty member, I was involved in some confrontational incidents that had hints of danger of violence just as a political dispute was heating up with Department Head Maria Klawe.</p> <p>That politics was a mix of management and personal issues, wasn’t my preference but I reluctantly decided to pursue – much to my detriment as it would turn out.</p> <p>Part of the contexts for that political dispute had been in place when I came to Canada.</p> <p>In 1988 after my job interview acting Department Head Uri Ascher, once a scientist with the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (mentioned also in Part 3 of this blog article), offered me an assistant professorship that would be tenure-track if the new Department Head and her husband, both theoretical computer scientists offered tenured positions, chose not to come and otherwise a fixed-term of 3 years with future in the hands of the new Head Maria Klawe.</p> <p>Under Head Klawe my senior colleague David Kirkpatrick – Klawe’s jogging partner as in Part 3 of this blog article – also in the Theoretical Computer Science group, often acted as a mentor and go-between. David had played a role in my hiring, and his former master’s degree student Raimund Seidel was already a UC Berkeley professor when I was a Ph.D. student there.</p> <p>Having been from a math Ph.D. background with research interests partly in Theoretical Computer Science and partly in Ascher’s field of Scientific Computing, both older fields, I was of lesser priority for the new Head. </p> <p>In 1989-90 we saw the hiring of quite a few tenure-track faculty, like University of Washington Ph.D. Norm Hutchinson, computer-networking specialist moving back to Canada from Arizona, and Berkeley Ph.D. Rick McGeer, logic design specialist and son of former B.C. Social Credit government cabinet minister Pat McGeer; elite school Ph.D.s like Cambridge Ph.D. Jeffrey Joyce, programming language specialist and Stanford Ph.D. Jack Snoeyink, computational geometry specialist in computer graphics applications to arrive in 1991; and two Waterloo Ph.D.s, circuit design analyst Carl-Johan Seger arriving via Carnegie Mellon University and computer graphics specialist David Forsey whose animation modeling was based on spline functions – a type of math that had been a focus at the Army Math Research Center with automobile design applications and I had done work related to. </p> <p>The new, top-priority Computer Graphics group was led by two new, tenured professors, Kelly Booth from Waterloo and Alain Fournier from Toronto.</p> <p>In late spring of 1990 with hiring over for the year, David Kirkpatrick described to me the remaining open positions and suggested that I have lunch with Klawe to discuss my situation. It turned out Klawe had no time for lunch with me but quickly laid out her priorities for the remaining tenure-track positions – I noticed she told me one fewer than David did. </p> <p>Klawe then raised the alternative of a one-year extension to my 3-year job – with her help to convince Dean of Science Barry McBride about it. Intelligently I asked that my ongoing tenure-track application be withdrawn, and a few days later Klawe told me I would be given an additional year 1991-92 – as Lecturer instead of Assistant Professor due to UBC Faculty Association’s objection to a non-tenure-stream position lasting too long.</p> <p>The first 3 years of funding for my job had come from the B. C. Advanced Systems Institute, secured by former Department Head Jim Varah who then headed UBC’s Centre for Integrated Computer Systems Research. Klawe’s arrangement for the 4th year included our co-teaching a graduate course – her first teaching work as a busy Department Head.</p> <p>Soon there was malcontent among some faculty and staff members that every former Computer Science Head had served at most 4 of a 5-year term but Klawe, who thrived at using confrontational pressures and office-politics tricks, showed every intent to break with the tradition. Those who expressed it to me included Klawe’s friend David Kirkpatrick; and colleague Jim Little of the Artificial Intelligence group, a former MIT scientist, said that Ascher would make a better Department Head.</p> <p>Given my colleagues’ personal concerns and that I would be leaving, I expressed my willingness to help bring the issue to the table of discussion. </p> <p>In February 1991 there was a Department retreat, an occasion for faculty members to discuss issues they felt important. My colleague Gerald Neufeld of the Computer Networking group encouraged me to attend and raise the issue, but Kirkpatrick told me it was too early.</p> <p>Gerry had been a leader of the UBC EAN project – Canada’s first national networking initiative – while studying for his Ph.D. (“<a href="http://its.dal.ca/publications/history/CAnet/2E.PDF" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A Nation Goes Online: The Early Years of Internet in Canada, Chapter 2, Networking Takes Root</font></a>”, Historical Archives, Dalhousie University Information Technology Services), and had been supervising Rick Sample in the project and for a Ph.D. before Rick’s tragic death in 1989.</p> <p>A West Coast soft-spoken type, Gerry had been courted in 1982 by Sun Microsystems founders but opted to stay in British Columbia or could have become a Sun founding scientist. I presumed he was left-leaning like Rick and Rick’s successor John Demco, both politically active such as sponsoring a peace rally featuring James Anderton, New Zealand Labor MP and George Ignatieff, former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament under Liberal Prime Minister John Turner, or like his former colleague Raymond Reiter in opposing the Star Wars program  (“<a href="http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/pdfs/ubyssey/UBYSSEY_1985_04_03.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A Nuclear Freeze or a Nuclear Winter: The Choice Is Ours! End the Arms Race Walk for Peace</font></a>”, and “<a href="http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/pdfs/ubyssey/UBYSSEY_1985_04_03.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">UBC scientists protest Star Wars</font></a>”, April 3, 1985, <em>The Ubyssey</em>).</p> <p>In the summer of 1991 I entered my last year at UBC, so without naming anyone I spoke to Head Klawe about some sentiments against continuation of her Headship. She was surprised by my willingness to push her but agreed to include airing of criticisms of her in the new monthly Department meetings starting in the Fall.</p> <p>The theme I was raising went like this: Klawe was a great fundraiser for the Department in a period of major expansion she had been hired to oversee, and was good at handling relatively difficult situations, but her style of management wasn’t a good fit for an academic department in normal situations where faculty and staff would enjoy a high degree of autonomy. This theme had substantial input from David Kirkpatrick, and some from David Lowe of the Artificial Intelligence group who pointed out Klawe’s management was of a corporate style.</p> <p>Maria Klawe had in fact moved from IBM Research in California where she  had been group and department manager. Moreover, unlike most North American universities UBC’s academic departments were not run by elected chairmen, but appointed heads hired with the advice of departmental head-search committees. </p> <p>At the start of the first Fall 1991 faculty meeting, Head Klawe voluntarily expressed that I had brought to her attention existence of dissent about her leadership and she would welcome criticism. I was pleased, but no one aired anything during a few minutes of waiting and the meeting then moved on to other topics.</p> <p>Typical of Klawe’s trickery, from the next Department meeting on airing of criticism of her was no longer on the agenda – everyone had a chance already. I could see frustrations on the faces of some colleagues, like Kelly Booth, and even two Israeli postdoctoral researchers with MIT Ph.D. – one was Yossi Gil – working under Klawe’s husband Nicholas Pippenger who had multiple MIT degrees including Ph.D.</p> <p>It was now a stalemate. I had only promised to bring the issue up, not personally start the criticism, which I had not prepared for. I tried to remind Klawe but was politely reminded instead of the busy official agenda.</p> <p>Some colleagues, such as Jim Little, then said to me in private, “How about your tenure-track job application? Maybe Maria did something wrong.”</p> <p>Around the last Fall meeting Jack Snoeyink began to tell me about a dispute the mathematician Jack Edmonds – a recipient of the same von Neumann theory prize John Nash of “<em>A Beautiful Mind</em>” had received – was having with the University of Waterloo where the two sides disagreed on whether he had quit his job (“<a href="http://communications.uwaterloo.ca/Gazette/1992/Gazette,%20October%207,%201992/CAUT%20called%20in%20on%20Jack%20Edmonds%20case"><font color="#0000ff">CAUT called in on Jack Edmonds case</font></a>”, October 1992, <em>UW Gazette</em>; and, “<a href="http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/workplmobintro" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Editor's Introduction</font></a>”, in <em>Workplace Mobbing in Academe: Reports from Twenty Universities</em>, 2004, The Edwin Mellen Press).</p> <p>So I reluctantly decided to use my case as a ‘lightning rod’ and informed Head Klawe and others that I had a employment grievance. It was scheduled among the February 1992 Department retreat agenda.</p> <p>I had real reservation about mixing a personal employment case with general criticism of management style, and of course the former would be considered a harder subject. In hindsight it was a mistake but for a different reason: I should have focused on other problems of Klawe’s – there were including on handling job applications – until if and when my case became necessary, for hidden behind Jack Snoeyink’s enthusiasm and in David Kirkpatrick’s sensible advice was something akin to a “hidden cross” for me.</p> <p>Back in early 1990 I had submitted an application to convert to a tenure-track position, and David was quite supportive and wrote one of my letters of reference. Then sometime around March he initiated to bring in Jack from Stanford also in the Theoretical Computer Science field, for an interview and assured me it was only for a postdoc position. In early April I became nervous as quite a few candidates had interviews but there was no activity for me, yet David said not to worry as Maria had things in hand. At this time former UC Berkeley friend Paul Wright invited me to visit AT&T Bell Labs, so I did in mid-April and also went to the University of Toronto, with seminar presentations. After return I read an e-mail announcement that Jack was offered a tenure-track position, went to ask David, and was told the decision was based largely on the connection of Jack’s work to the Computer Graphics group. It was at this point David Kirkpatrick suggested I have lunch and discuss with Head Maria Klawe.</p> <p>So while Head Klawe then may have pressured and tricked me into giving up my tenure-track conversion effort, including misinforming me about the number of open positions for 1991, Kirkpatrick had already reneged on his words and possibly the last open position in Theoretical Computer Science had gone to Jack Snoeyink.</p> <p>Now going forward in the 1992 dispute I was to focus on my case as an instance of Klawe’s management problems but not draw attention to Kirkpatrick, how could I be sure these two old pals wouldn’t cut me out again behind my back? The wider Department’s involvement in the headship issue would be a safeguard in itself, or so I thought.</p> <p>Only in December 1992 when I was committed in a psychiatric ward by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after they had conferred with David Kirkpatrick’s wife, a former lawyer appointed a Justice in November, that I was given information that only 3 of the 5 letters of reference I had requested in the spring of 1990, namely Kirkpatrick’s, one by my Berkeley Ph.D. adviser and another by a Columbia University professor, were in the Department file. The other two requested from Berkeley professors were no shows, but the Department Head didn’t bother to inform me even if only three were required. </p> <p>One of the missing reference was to be from Berkeley theoretical computer scientist Richard Karp, who had told me on the phone he would write that my recent research was in Theoretical Computer Science, when my Ph.D. had been in Math. </p> <p>A meticulously commanding professor, Karp was also a close friend of Maria Klawe and Nicholas Pippenger, and in 1988 at Berkeley when I was wondering if Klawe and Pippenger were going to UBC and hence my job would only be fixed-term, “Dick” Karp confirmed it first. </p> <p>Kelly Booth, a leader of the Computer Graphics group, had received his Berkeley Ph.D. under “Dick” Karp years before, thus apparently the offer to Jack Snoeyink had to do with Jack’s research connection to Computer Graphics as well as lack of a key affirmation for me. Alain Fournier, the other leader of the group, unfortunately died of cancer in year 2000.</p> <p>After my withdrawal the 1991 tenure-track hires were University of Toronto Ph.D. Craig Boutilier and Cornell Ph.D. Denish Pai, both in the Artificial Intelligence group. Then also around year 2000 Boutilier moved back to Toronto, where Fournier had been before UBC.</p> <p>Richard Karp’s continuing influence can be seen in his receiving the 2008 Kyoto prize – Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel prize – with two Canadians, Toronto biologist Anthony Pawson and Montreal philosopher Charles Taylor (“<a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/533937" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canadians win Japan's Kyoto Prize</font></a>”, November 10, 2008, <em>Toronto Star</em>).</p> <p>The February 1992 Department retreat, held over two days in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, was larger than usual, attended by faculty, staff and representatives of graduate and undergraduate students. I remember sitting for dinner with the Computer Science undergraduate student society’s president, an Asian Canadian woman originally from the Philippines. </p> <p>David Kirkpatrick was absent from this retreat, who had begun to avoid being openly in the middle of a dispute where the boss was also his friend – especially now that my employment issue was at the center.</p> <p>My grievance was the last item on the retreat agenda, and Head Klawe had promised beforehand she would not stay for it so others could discuss freely.</p> <p>But at the prior session’s end Klawe refused to leave, instead insisting on hearing first what I wanted to say.</p> <p>It was threatening to be a stalemate again.</p> <p>So I said briefly to the effect that I felt Maria had committed wrongdoing in her handling of my tenure-track application, it was part of a pattern of political tricks possibly interrelated and potentially scandalous, and it reminded me of a former U.S. president of the 1960s and 1970s who had to resign early and unceremoniously.</p> <p>Some were a little taken aback by it. To the astonishment of everyone, the usually very competitive and assertive Maria Klawe suddenly started the motion of weeping, and said something like Feng I had been nice and helpful to you – it was in a sense not untrue other than her trickery which sometimes could be her way of hard bargaining. Sensing others’ impatience she now got up and left the room – with a rueful but vindictive expression on her face – but stayed outside.</p> <p>The last session was then led by Kelly Booth, who asked that I provide the facts to support my assertions.</p> <p>Now I made my second major mistake – the first being starting the dispute with a rather serious personal case instead of general criticism more likely for others to join in. I said that Maria was in tears, that considering the good things she had done for the Department it wouldn’t be a good time to push the details – unbeknown to me this was my only realistic chance as political and administrative counter-measures from her and the Dean would come immediately.</p> <p>At this time Jack Snoeyink, who had been especially eager to show interest including telling me the Jack Edmonds case at Waterloo, suddenly proposed a resolution to offer Maria sympathy, support and appreciation for her contributions to the Department.</p> <p>I didn’t know what to say to Jack – at this point he reminded me of my elementary and middle school buddy “Ling” (his given name 凌) as discussed in Part 3 of this blog article, encouraging political outspokenness and then ‘backstabbing’.</p> <p>Fortunately few people followed Jack so no such resolution was discussed, but the intent to stir it up and then quickly clam it down on the part of whoever was coming to the fore with Jack speaking.</p> <p>As we exited the room Head Klawe was waiting outside to inform me that Dean of Science Barry McBride had just ordered me to see him at the Dean’s office once back at UBC campus.</p> <p>Some of us were staying the second night at the retreat so Carol Whitehead, the Department’s administrative manager and I took a stroll on the beach in the late afternoon. Carol said to me that Jack might not be as mature as he seemed, to which I responded that Jack was entitled to his opinion. Carol then asked if I liked Seattle and what I would think of working there after UBC, and I said that I appreciated Maria’s giving me a one-year extension so I could fulfill my residency requirement to become a Canadian citizen, and that most academic jobs were in the United States but I didn’t particularly prefer Seattle.</p> <p>At the time Maria Klawe’s first graduate student, Brendan Mumey, wanted to go to Berkeley’s Ph.D. program and I provided a letter of reference, but he eventually decided to go to the University of Washington in Seattle.</p> <p>On our way back toward the retreat building along a short trail, Jack Snoeyink appeared at the other end walking toward us, carrying a neatly folded, tightly strapped long umbrella like a walking stick, which I had no idea why on a sunny afternoon. Jack appeared to be looking for us but then continued toward the beach, with a mysterious smile on his face.</p> <p>Originally American, around year 2000 Jack Snoeyink moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.</p> <p>Years later in early 2009 I began my political blogging, first on Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces as Hotmail had long been my primary e-mail. My first article, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/greeting-the-new-millennium-%E2%80%93-nearly-a-decade-late-part-1/"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a>”, appeared in two parts on January 29, stringing together some historical and current events in Canadian, American and Chinese politics, and my second, multipart article, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-10/"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”, began on February 20, focusing on Canadian politics and related, especially regarding former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.</p> <p>On March 9, Microsoft Corporation announced the appointment of Maria Klawe to its Board of Directors (“<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/mar09/03-09BODPR.mspx" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Microsoft Adds New Board Member and Declares Quarterly Dividend – Maria Klawe, Ph.D., leading computer scientist and educator, to join board; dividend of $0.13 per share payable in June</font></a>”, March 9, 2009, Microsoft News Center).</p> <p>Microsoft was of course influential. When I was teaching at the University of Hawaii in 1997-1999, my teaching assistant “Hu” (her family name 胡), a very smart girl, did her summer internship at Microsoft in Seattle, and my teaching assistant “Wang Lingwang” (王凌望), a thoughtful man, was hired by Microsoft in Seattle after his master’s degree and – like Carol Whitehead years before – suggested that I get a job in Seattle.</p> <p>Then in the New Millennium working in Silicon Valley in California, I received a phone call from engineering recruiter “Ken Button” on behalf of Microsoft in Seattle, an anecdote I later recalled in my November-December 2009 blog article, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html"><font color="#0000ff">“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a>”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“After my 10/11 layoff, a recruiter by the name of Ken Button phoned me, who was recruiting for Microsoft Corporation. Pitching the benefits of working for that company in Seattle, he said someday I could have a private office there (in the small San Jose company I had been allowed the privilege of a private office even though I was not a manager); but I was more interested in engineering-related computational issues, and had had a minor episode with Microsoft in Vancouver when I was in the early 1990s’ political activity which included a dispute with my boss at the University of British Columbia before the end of my computer-science faculty job there.</p> <p>Looking back, if Bill Gates was to launch a teacher into space, who do you think it would be?</p> <p>To be fair, I have been using the Windows computer operating system and a Hotmail e-mail account for many years, and when I started <a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com/"><font color="#0000ff">my first weblog I also chose Windows Live Spaces</font></a>.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Like UBC before, they would like you to be there and Maria Klawe there to rule over you – some things never changed.</p> <p>Back at UBC campus in late-February/early-March 1992 I met with Dean Barry McBride. Informed of my trying to pursue an employment grievance in relation to Head Klawe’s leadership, McBride said that as the Dean he was unaware of anything inappropriate by Head Klawe regarding my tenure-track application but I could raise the issue to the office of Vice President Academic and Provost Daniel Birch. McBride then instructed me to avoid disruption, not to raise the issues directly to Head Klawe or at Department meetings.</p> <p>Relaxing a little, Dean McBride then told me his son, a recent UBC graduate, had been visiting China to explore opportunities there, staying in Shenzhen, the special economic zone across from Hong Kong.</p> <p>I knew Barry McBride to be a friend of former acting Head Uri Ascher who had hired me. </p> <p>Back in 1988 while still in California my fixed-term appointment was to be for 2 years but after conferring with Canadian immigration authorities Uri increased it to 3 years. My roommate David Chin – mentioned in Part 3 of this blog article – had graduated and gone to teach in Hawaii and I had moved to a rented room in a Japanese-owned house being looked after by a Japanese student couple driving a new Honda Prelude, with the young man’s name “Masahiro Yautomi” as I recall, located on El Cerrito’s Ashbury Avenue only half a block, or one, from the home of my musician friend “Wei Li” (魏立).</p> <p>Just as my hiring was smoothed out by Head Ascher the Japanese owners put their house on the market so I had to move again. Walking into a two-bedroom Berkeley apartment advertised for summer sublet by “Susanna Cyril” as I recall her name as, I was surprised to see a Taiwanese businessman “Mr. Chang” also there – same family name as Chen (陈) in Part 3 of this blog article.</p> <p>Thus before leaving for Canada I was roommates for 2 months with this Vice President of a Taipei-based bank chaired by a senior figure of the Nationalist Party in Taiwan. “Mr. Chang” looked after a bank branch in San Jose and several daughters at UC Berkeley, and was also a lawyer interested in visiting Guangzhou if I could introduce him to my father – a Philosophy professor at Sun Yat-sen University as mentioned in Parts 2 & 3 of this blog article. I then introduced “Mr. Chang” to Ms. “Wei Li”, who was well connected in Beijing as her Taiwan-born, Tokyo-educated parents had been prominent Beijing medical doctors and she had graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music; but for some reason “Mr. Chang” still felt my father would be more helpful.</p> <p>So when UBC Dean of Science Barry McBride mentioned his son visiting Shenzhen – a city just south of my hometown Guangzhou and in a recurrent theme in my blog articles like “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html"><font color="#0000ff">“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a>” – I instinctively compared him to this Taiwanese banker “Mr. Chang”. </p> <p>But though I didn’t contradict the Dean in his office I was not about to give up trying to raise my issues in Department meetings. To me it was like a form of democratic exercise.</p> <p>I soon sent a e-mail to Head Klawe and copied to other faculty members, requesting my issues be put on the agenda of the next Department meeting. Immediately I received a <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot005 - Memo from UBC Dean of Science Barry McBride, March 11, 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">memo from Dean McBride dated March 11</font></a>, sternly reiterating his instructions not to raise the issues to Head Klawe or at Department meetings.</p> <p>It was in this type of repressed and frustrated mode that some nonphysical confrontations took place with a few persons in the Department, who had been agitators over this period if not actually looking for an occasion to do me physical harm.</p> <p>A few days after the March 11 memo from Barry McBride, at around 7 pm I was walking from the Computer Science building to a nearby parkade and Computer Science graduate student Christopher Healey appeared behind about to catch up with me. I knew about him only so continued walking into the parkade’s corner stairways leading to levels above. It was dark in the staircase but not enough for the lights to be on, no one else was around, and Healey caught up to only a foot behind and intentionally shook a chain of keys in his hand loudly and nonstop. I took it as a form of heckling, ignored him and went to my car, and as I drove down the ramp I saw him at his car so I raised my middle finger at him.</p> <p>The next day, March 16, I was walking from my office to the Department coffee room and Healey appeared in the hallway walking toward me. A few persons like him had for a while been intentionally agitating, but what Healey had done the day before I felt was about to cross the personal-safety boundary and needed to be responded to in public, so as we walked past I tossed my plastic coffee mug onto the side of the wall, away from him – several others in the hallway saw that.</p> <p>Getting back to my office with fresh tea I received an <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot006 - March 92 incident, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">e-mail with the subject line “What’s The Problem”</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> from Healey:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I am the person you just about beaned with your coffee mug a few minutes ago. I don’t know what it is you’re upset about. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken to one another before. At any rate, I neither need nor want you running around looking for an opportunity to take a shot at me.</p> <p>If you think I’ve offended you in some way, we should get together and talk about it. I’ve certainly never said anything to you or about you, so I have no idea why you’re so upset. Nothing is going to get resolved by swearing and throwing things.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Healey was clever in altering the facts, sounding as if I had “beaned” him with a baseball – a typical use of the word – or wanted to “take a shot” at him when he hadn’t had a baseball bat in his hands and my plastic mug hadn’t gone in his direction, and accusing me of swearing when no words had been exchanged and my finger gesture the evening before had been in response to his heckling which he pretended as nothing.</p> <p>To make Chris Healey and a few others like him take it more seriously about respecting people, I <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot006 - March 92 incident, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">e-mailed the following reply</font></a> and copied it to computer systems manager John Demco and Computer Science instructor Vince Manis:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It’s not me running around looking to take a shot at you. It’s you running around to look for me and so you deserve sh*t in your face. Who the f*cking you think you are that you have the qualification to talk to me?! Pretty ladies who don’t know how to make me happy I don’t even easily turn my head, and when I do I am only giving them an opportunity. Those your kind I ignore and I have said it before and that’s enough. I blast if my individual rights are violated, because blasting is the easiest way for me to respond to harassment. If a dog give me trouble, I kick his ass because it’s the easiest way to get him out my way, nothing worth bragging about because it’s too trivial. Anything you don’t dare to do to David Strangway or to George Bush or to Donald Trump, you don’t do it to Feng Gao. Not that I were big but everyone’s individual rights should be respected. When I blast I blast not just for myself but for all the good people who have been harassed. Some people thought I blast then I must be upset or have complaints so I should talk. No! They were dead wrong! I blast to carry out justice! Start respecting other people or you get “F*ck you!” in public.</p> <p>P.S. Sorry John. You have nothing to do with the content or the intent of this message. I just want a witness to this and this guy is in your lab. You can choose to ignore it.”</p> </blockquote> <p>My wordings were offensive, but the thrust of  my points were clear though not all explicit, and I would say fair: 1) it had been him who tried to provoke a confrontation; 2) I identified him as likely one of certain gay persons, and said I wasn’t; 3) my anger had nothing to do with sexual orientation but individual rights, i.e., was only a result of his provocation which I considered harassment; 4) I valued equality in individual rights so would mention a few big names whom I wasn’t important like, just to show that respect for everyone was important.</p> <p>There was a 5th, implicit point in my reply, that I actually felt Healey to be threatening, and unsafe to be with, but given his cleverness I had no direct evidence of such so chose to make some hostility public as a precaution: the word “witness” was to explain to John Demco why he also received this e-mail, whose predecessor Rick Sample had been shot dead in 1989 almost surely by a close friend and former roommate, UBC Computer Science graduate Barry James Evans as discussed in Part 3 of this blog article; so were my expressions stirred by Healey’s words “take a shot”, “Some people thought … I must be upset … so I should talk. No! They were dead wrong! I blast to carry out justice!”</p> <p>There was a specific context why I reacted to Christopher Healey’s tailing and heckling so fiercely: a year earlier in March 1991 on the same trail to the parkade I came across Rick’s former jogging partner “Moyra” – a women’s volleyball star as noted in Part 3 of this blog article – returning from the Barry Evans trial; right there “Moyra” told me she had just heard Barry’s testimony and realized he was a “crook” that she hadn’t known before – most of the computer systems staff were Evans’s fellow UBC grads and knew him quite well.</p> <p>The other colleague I also sent the e-mail to but without explaining why, Computer Science instructor <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot006 - March 92 incident, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Vince Manis quickly reported it to Head Maria Klawe</font></a>, proposing the sanction of revoking my e-mail and news privileges:</p> <blockquote> <p>“…the following message appeared (with no prompting) in my mailbox this evening. I have had virtually no interaction with Feng, other than casual greetings in the hall, in my entire time here, with one major exception, back last November when he appeared at my door and screamed imprecations at me. I reported that incident to Carol the next day. I would be quite prepared to make a formal statement on the matter should you deem it appropriate, but at the time, given Carol’s assurances that senior faculty had things in hand on the subject, decided not to push it.</p> <p>My assumption is that Feng cc’ed me because Chris is a TA in my course.</p> <p>… Computing Committee meeting tomorrow … may I make clear my vote that unless Feng undertakes to use Department facilities in a responsible manner (I would not, for example, permit a student in one of my classes to send a message of this sort), he should have his email/news privileges revoked.</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Like with the February Department retreat, Dean Barry McBride was immediately informed and <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot006 - March 92 incident, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">on March 18 issued a direct order revoking my e-mail privilege</font></a>, <font color="#333333">admonishing me</font> with his great sense of morality and indignation:</p> <blockquote> <p>“In one instance, you threatened a graduate student verbally and subsequently wrote him an abusive e-mail message. The University and indeed society will not tolerate this type of behaviour. I find it particularly reprehensible when it is directed at such a vulnerable target as a graduate student.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But McBride’s memo also altered the facts like Healey’s e-mail. </p> <p>For one, I didn’t “particularly” target, threatened or “verbally” abused that graduate student. Healey’s e-mail already stated we had never spoken, while colleague Vince Manis’s email stated he and I had had a verbal exchange several months earlier. So clearly if I had ‘targeted’ anyone it was persons I had problems with – faculty or student – and I never threatened any of them.</p> <p>For another, that grad student wasn’t vulnerable but I was. My ‘targeting’ was confined to the “abusive” mutual exchanges only, as my e-mail stated clearly I only wanted individual rights to be respected and if that didn’t happen I would yell louder – but without threatening to do any harm beyond it. I identified the student as in computer system manager John Demco’s lab yet only asked John to be a “witness” – fair and equal between two persons dueling – and ignore it otherwise; on the other hand, Vince Manis and now Barry McBride were using Committee and Dean powers to strip me of essential user privilege.</p> <p>Dean McBride would have been challenged to produce any real evidence that any UBC Computer Science person I had expressed anger with I had ever complained against – except of course Head Maria Klawe above me in authority – or used my faculty position to do harm to, such as in a grade or a reference.</p> <p>On the contrary, it was my vulnerability Dean McBride immediately “targeted” <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot006 - March 92 incident, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">in a separate memo to me on the same day</font></a>, making clear that I had no chance of further employment at UBC, implying also that I wouldn’t win the employment dispute, and suggesting counseling for me instead:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The only sure thing is that you will be leaving UBC no later than June 30, 1992. Given the uncertainty of your future and the obvious stress it is causing you, I would suggest that while you are still here that you seek the help of a counsellor who can help put your problems in perspective and provide you with the guidance to get on with developing the next phrase of your life.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The fact that Barry McBride subsequently <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot007 - March 92 incident, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">forwarded these e-mails to John Leslie</font></a>, a psychiatrist at Vancouver General Hospital, shows the so-called “counselling” as intended to be psychiatric, and therefore coercive and oppressive in nature.</p> <p>Another subtle fact is that when McBride wrote these admonishing memos to me on March 18 he did it without an official copy of my offending e-mail at hand, or at least not a copy he wanted; <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot007 - March 92 incident, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">it wasn’t until March 24 that a copy McBride wanted was faxed by John Demco to Maureen Douglas</font></a> in the Dean’s office, and forwarded the next day by McBride to Leslie.</p> <p>McBride also edited out Vince Manis’s e-mail when forwarding to the psychiatrist.</p> <p>So why should I have been reprehensible for something, risky perhaps, in others’ closet?</p> <p>Around that time both David Kirkpatrick and Uri Ascher began to suggest that I see a psychiatrist, that some in the Department have concern; then my e-mail privilege was indeed revoked and Demco relayed the Dean’s instruction I needed a psychiatrist’s clearance to get it back.</p> <p>Under the circumstances I accepted David’s advice, who being on the university senior appointments committee was friendly with former Dean of Medicine Dr. William Webber, then Associate Vice President Academic in charge of faculty affairs. Dr. Webber was willing to refer me to private psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Remick, former UBC Head of Psychiatry previously in a similar predicament – he had had a dispute with UBC, filed a lawsuit, settled it and was now in private practice. </p> <p>David specifically wanted me to consult Dr. Remick about filing a lawsuit, and I took it as both that resolving the dispute with Head Klawe was difficult and that his wife being a former lawyer David was more inclined to it in this respect.</p> <p>I met with Dr. Webber who wrote a note of referral, and had two sessions of consultation with Dr. Remick in late March and early April at his office across from St. Paul’s Hospital in Downtown Vancouver. Dr. Remick concluded that other than some stress I was normal, and strongly suggested that I filed a lawsuit against UBC.</p> <p>Dr. Remick also wrote a note for me to get my e-mail privilege back. But I was puzzled that <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot007 - March 92 incident, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. Remick’s note dated April 6</font></a> – still with UBC letterhead but his private office phone number – stated, “This man is a patient under my care and in active medical treatment”, even though neither medication nor further session was needed as I was normal.</p> <p>It turned out that on April 3 I had written a formal letter of grievance to Vice President Academic and Provost Dan Birch about Head Maria Klawe’s handling of my application for a tenure-track position. On the day April 7 when John Demco forwarded Dr. Remick’s note to Dean Barry McBride, McBride sent Vice President Birch a reply letter draft, which stated there had been nothing wrong on the part of Head Klawe. </p> <p>As UBC’s de facto chief executive on academic matters Dan Birch sent a letter to me on April 8, nearly identical to McBride’s April 7 draft, with some differences at the beginning and at the end.</p> <p>Start and end of <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot008 - April 92 Birch letter related, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">McBride’s draft</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“On April 3 you wrote expressing concern about the handling of your application for a tenure track position in the Department of Computer Science. I have discussed the issues you raised with Dr. Klawe and Dean McBride and am convinced that your application was handled in a fair and equitable manner.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In conclusion I find that Dr. Klawe and the Department dealt with your case in an appropriate manner. I urge you to put the past behind and to move on with establishing a career outside of UBC.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Start and end of <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot008 - April 92 Birch letter related, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Birch’s letter</font></a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Thank you for your letter dated April 3 expressing concern about the handling of your application for a tenure track position in the Department of Computer Science. I have discussed the issues you raised with Dr. Klawe and Dean McBride and am convinced that your application was handled in a fair and equitable manner.</p> <p>…</p> <p>In conclusion I find that Dr. Klawe and the Department dealt with your case in an appropriate manner, and I wish you well in your future endeavours.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The differences were that Vice President Birch thanked me for my letter, and didn’t say I would definitely be outside of UBC for my career.</p> <p>So there was a strong likelihood Dr. Remick’s referring to me as a “patient” made things easier for Dean McBride.</p> <p>I might not be the person UBC wanted at that point, but Dean Barry McBride’s righteous morality was somewhat suspect in retrospect.</p> <p>At the time I didn’t know McBride was behind the prompt negative conclusion from Birch, and so also took a shot at Birch besides Klawe and McBride in <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot008 - April 92 Birch letter related, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">an e-mail to Department members</font></a> to say goodbye – it went to Head Klawe also and her secretary sent a copy for Dean McBride to see.</p> <p>Some might feel the whole thing was a “storm in a tea cup” due to my self-damaging temper, but certain internet activity record of my then colleague Vince Manis, whose accusative action upon my e-mail started the chain of negative events, will show that his righteousness was hypocritical and highly politically motivated.</p> <p>In 2008 when UBC and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police went to the British Columbia Supreme Court to dismiss a lawsuit I had filed in October 1992 that had become inactive since April 1993, among the documents I filed to counter them was <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot009 - Vince Manis, BC Supreme Court lawsuit file 2008.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my compilation of pieces of internet information about Vince Manis</font></a>.</p> <p>The first piece is the March 11, 1980 edition of UBC student publication <em>The Ubyssey</em>, in which Vince Manis was cited speaking on behalf of an organization “Gay People of UBC”. As a local leader of the gay activist movement Vince obviously had a political reason to be upset about certain content in my e-mail as well as some in my earlier argument with him; but since my wording wasn’t explicit about “gay” he pretended it to be something else yet his initiation of punishment against me was swift and direct. </p> <p>The next several pieces were select messages Vince had posted on Internet chat groups in the two years leading up to the time of the March 1992 incident. They first show the kind of vulgar language he had regularly used on the internet – much worse than what outraged him in my e-mail.</p> <p>For instance on April 27, 1990, discussing the “value of ambiguity” in using “multiple meanings of ‘gay’”, Vince lambasted certain Vancouver area persons this way:</p> <blockquote> <p>“However, we have a suburb of Vancouver named Surrey (most cities have a similar such ‘burb). The inhabitants of Surrey tend to be largish men who come attached to 4X4’s, and similar vehicles. A typical inhabitant has taken Frank’s approach to the limit, with remarks such as ‘Fuckin fuckin fuckin fuckin’ [‘My engine needs a rebuild’], ‘Fuckin fuckin fuckin fuckin’ [‘Basically, Jean-Paul Sartre was quite wrong on the causes of anti-semitism’], and ‘Fuckin fuckin fuckin fuckin’ [‘I feel horny tonight’]. These people are just plain born poets.”</p> </blockquote> <p>And the signature of Vince’s messages all came with the following quote:</p> <blockquote> <p>“"There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist."   <br />-- A. Trevor Hodge”</p> </blockquote> <p>Already it had been much worse than my e-mail he later condemned so strongly in March 1992, and is evidence that what prompted Vince’s action to initiate official sanction against me was not so much my e-mail being on the Department’s computer systems but his fury over my particular “ambiguity” referring to a few possibly gay-oriented persons.</p> <p>Four days later on May 1, Vince made the following comment criticizing certain attitude of moral righteousness:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The problem with Kirk and Madsen is not that they make moral judgements, but rather that they set themselves up as moral arbiters, granting themselves some sort of cachet as guardians of moral truth. Their offense is the air of absolutism in which they enshroud their arguments: agree with us or you’re a low-life creep who deserves no special concern.”</p> </blockquote> <p>How fitting it would be for Vince’s criticism of others to apply to himself two years later in March 1992, and maybe also to Dean McBride who no doubt knew Vince Manis’s longtime activism in sexual politics – for their sense as “moral arbiters” with “the air of absolutism” in dealing with me.</p> <p>McBride’s cutting out Manis’s e-mail when forwarding my offending e-mail to psychiatrist John Leslie probably had to do with his knowing things Manis might say.</p> <p>Also ironic is that the above two messages appeared in late-April/early-May 1990, when a reasonable chance of a tenure-track position for me according to David Kirkpatrick turned out to be a job for Jack Snoeyink whom he brought in.</p> <p>One may suspect other considerations behind Vince’s action on my e-mail in March 1992, for the reason that he pretended not to know that the “ambiguity” in my wording referred to a few “gay” persons, quite atypical of his own outspokenness as shown in an August 7, 1991 message:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I’ll support a ‘scientific’ study to investigate the relationship between gays and child molestation, provided we can have companion studies to investigate blacks and rape, Jews and usury, Scots and stinginess, and politicians and the Bank of Credit and Commerce. </p> <p>Anything can be the subject of an experimental study, no matter how crazy the hypothesis. This one is crazier than most.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Around this time I had begun discussions with a number of faculty members interested in seeing Maria Klawe’s headship end as Department’s tradition had called for. Obviously Vince Manis was “crazier” than me when it came to politics he would support, yet it was me Dean McBride and others wanted to make a psychiatric patient.</p> <p>By the time I became public in the Department about Head Klawe’s management problems, Vince Manis was into political bashing that could include physical violence, as shown in this February 11, 1992 message he posted declaring himself a B.C. New Democratic Party member who wanted to bash the federal Progressive Conservatives like in a “national sport”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Here in Canada, we have a national sport called ‘fed-bashing’, practiced by politicians from all the provinces in Canada. Fed-bashing consists of blaming the Federal government for all of the problems a given province is experiencing. I love to fed-bash right now, as my provincial government is run by a party of which I am a member (the New Democratic Party), and the federal government is run by a party which about 86% of Canadians, according to recent polls, despise (the Progressive-Conservatives).  </p> <p>I think that, given the long history of ‘fed-bashing’, the notion of bashing as extending to verbal as well as physical abuse seems quite reasonable.”</p> </blockquote> <p>How could I not be worried in March about psychological craze like this on the part of Vince Manis and the young men I identified as associated with him in their activity?</p> <p>To show that Manis wasn’t alone, that such foul mood was probably quite common among some university gay activists, here is a message posted by Francis, a representative of “Gay & Lesbian Association of Dalhousie” on March 14, two days before my e-mail response to Chris Healey, coincidentally using the same phrase “your kind”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“For your information, gays and lesbians were routinely rounded-up and slaughtered by the Nazis in much the same way the Jews were at that time. The pink triangle was used to identify gay men in the same way the star of david was used to identify a Jew.  </p> <p>As far as being institutionalized, ignorant bigoted fools like yourself are the *real* menace to society, and your kind should be castrated (at the very least) to help rid society of this scourge of hatred and inhumane treatment of decent people perpetrated by morons like yourself.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Their cursing of others in political debate was much worse and had violent intents – even if it was responding to someone sympathizing with the Nazi’s ways – whereas I stood by the need to respect individual rights and my reaction to what I felt as violation remained nonviolent.</p> <p>On March 17, i.e., one day after he’d forwarded my e-mail to Head Klawe proposing revoking my e-mail privilege, Manis joined the above thread of group discussion on Nazis and gays, focusing on the execution of Ernst Roehm, the only openly gay man among the Nazi leadership:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The only significant Nazi who was (openly) gay was Ernst Roehm, the leader of the SA. Hitler and the leadership knew about his homosexuality (he made no effort to hide it), but did nothing about it until 1934, when, as part of the Night of Long Knives, Roehm was executed. … </p> <p>A number of Roehm's coterie were gay, and were dealt with during the Night of Long Knives. </p> <p>As for the rest of the Party leadership, they were all quite heterosexual (in Goering's case, exuberantly so). </p> <p>There certainly was a great deal of homosexuality in the lower levels of the Party, especially in the SA. There was, no doubt, as much in the Social Democratic Party, and in its storm troop, the Reichsbanner. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>It wouldn’t be a “crazy hypothesis” to second guess that leading the effort to punish me somehow made Vince Manis feel like getting even with the Nazis’ execution of their top openly gay man.</p> <p>The next day March 18, the day when Dean McBride wrote the two admonishing and punishing memos to me, Alberto Adolfo Pinkas, an Argentine Jew, complained in a message that half of his family had died in the Nazi concentration camp and now a Nazi bomb had just exploded at the Israeli Embassy at Buenos Aires (with 29 deaths the deadliest attack on an Israeli diplomatic mission, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_the_Israeli_embassy_in_Buenos_Aires" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>), and yet he was supposed to “respect” the Nazis and “their rights”. Vince Manis replied:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I, a gay Jew, would be very interested in watching a diseased goat piddle all over Adolfo Pinkas.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Lacking sympathy where sadly needed, to say the least. </p> <p>Vince Manis was apparently well known in the larger gay social circle, as among my compilation was a document from the <a href="http://www.qrd.org/qrd/misc/queer_quotes.txt" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Queer Resources Dictionary website</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font> listing a Vince Manis quote alongside his favorite quote of A. Trevor Hodge and quotes of other famous persons like Adam Smith, Abraham Lincoln, Adlai Stevenson, and even Adolf Hitler.</p> <p>The interest in violence for political goals among some of these gay activists, and the indifference to its other consequences, remind me of the Chinese Cultural Revolution discussed in Part 2 of this blog article.</p> <p>The moral righteousness exhibited by Vince Manis and Barry McBride against me over my offensive but individual-rights focused e-mail, in coexistence with the much nastier expressions and borderline behavioral intents in Manis’s own internet political discussions which were most likely aware of by McBride, reminds me of the psychological shock I recently felt when discovering that a favorite, inspiring 1961 Chairman Mao poem of my childhood enlightenment had most likely been adapted by Mao from traditional Chinese erotica – as discussed in my Chinese blog posts <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">“忆往昔,学历史智慧”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom”) and its English Synopsis</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font><font color="#0000ff"></font>.</p> <p>According to Dean McBride society wouldn’t tolerate my type of behavior – even though it accepted worse types.</p> <p>Where Christopher Healey has since been is also evidence of Healey’s political motivation back in 1992. After Ph.D. study under Alain Fournier in Computer Graphics, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley where I had done my Ph.D., and since has been professor at North Carolina State University at Raleigh where a feature research project of his is <a href="http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/US_election/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">visualizations of U.S. election results</font></a>, and also adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where <a href="http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/download/3dpvt_poster.06.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">he collaborates with Jack Snoeyink</font></a> – pretty cool graphics.</p> <p>Provocateur and trickster, I hope they weren’t especially valued for such in North Carolina, where at Greensboro my former Sun Yat-sen University roommate “Jie Wang” (王洁), a martial-arts expert like Rick Sample, also had a professor stint as discussed in Part 3 of this blog article.</p> <p>In April 1992 after the quick negative conclusion from Vice President Dan Birch I consulted David Kirkpatrick and on April 16 filed <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot010 - April 92 letter to Strangway, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">a grievance with UBC President David Strangway</font></a>, despite Strangway being really a ceremonial figure according to Kirkpatrick. My hope was that a formal grievance in place would allow me more attempts at getting my issues discussed in the Department.</p> <p>Given the oppressive rules set by the Head and the Dean unusual acts were necessary on my part, which could be disruptive but I worked carefully not to cause more disruption than needed. </p> <p>I sent out an e-mail to the Department faculty about putting my issues on meeting agenda, and immediately Head Klawe banned my attendance for the next Department meeting. I then announced in an e-mail to the entire Department my plan to sit in and protest to win the chance of a separate meeting for my case. Despite my friendly tones toward Klawe and expression of sorriness about e-mailing the entire Department which I had promised not to, <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot011 - two April 92 e-mails after letter to Strangway, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">both e-mails were reported by her to Dean Barry McBride</font></a> with a request to have Associate Dean David Measday monitor the Department meeting.</p> <p>The sit-in protest did not materialize, as Klawe “outfoxed me” by moving the meeting from 1 pm to 12 pm without my knowing, and when I arrived to find a presentation by her husband Nick Pippenger already in progress <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot012 - last attempts in April 92 for Dept meeting agenda, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I left instead of making a disruptive scene</font></a> which I had intended to make at the the meeting’s start.</p> <p>Apparently Head Klawe wasn’t content with “outfoxing” me for this April 24 meeting but had it also reached a “unanimous” agreement that my e-mails “constitute a form of harassment and should be stopped immediately”.</p> <p><a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot012 - last attempts in April 92 for Dept meeting agenda, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Below are excerpts from</font></a> an e-mail I then sent to Head Klawe requesting a special meeting, and from one my colleague David Lowe on the computing committee then sent me, with our contrasting interpretations of where my efforts stood:</p> <p>I said:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Even though I have taken my grievance to the President, in the long process of pursuing it my grievance has never been presented formally and in details to the dept. The only chance I was given was during the dept retreat, when I decided not to push hard out of my sympathy and concern for you because you didn’t feel well at that time.</p> <p>I believe that my request is a reasonable one. My colleagues in the dept are the ones closest to the decision making process of the dept to judge whether what you did in handling my job application was fair. Their opinions and the opinions of the staff and students in the dept could be influential on the final decision by Dr. Strangway. An approval from you for a formal meeting does not necessarily constitute an admission of guilt (although I myself believe you committed wrongdoing there). But it would be a vital sign that the dept is being run in a democratic manner, that mistakes are being corrected, and that cover-up is unlikely.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Lowe said:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I wonder why you keep wanting to have further meetings when it is clear that the department will not support your position even if there is a meeting. Everyone who is refused a job by the university would like to get the decision changed, but the university has a right to choose who it wants to hire. This is not an issue between you and Maria, but has been agreed to by the department and university as a whole. You have to accept these decisions even if you think they were quite mistaken.”</p> </blockquote> <p>If David Lowe’s view were final then no institution would need a formal grievance mechanism as any official decision would already represent the institution “as a whole”.</p> <p>In any case I stopped using e-mail for the purpose and distributed <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot013 - late April 92 fliers calling meeting on my own, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">a flier calling a Department meeting</font></a>, where the focus was now more on whether the Head had broken the rules than if I should have gotten a tenure-track job. Klawe responded that there “will NOT be” a department meeting but individuals were free to meet with me.</p> <p><a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot014 - late April 92 letter to Webber re Dept meeting, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">I also sent a letter to Associate Vice President William Webber</font></a> in charge of faculty affairs (who had referred me to private psychiatrist Ronald Remick) to request his approving a Department meeting. Among the perspectives I outlined to Webber is the fact that there once was a formal occasion at the Department retreat but due to my “genuine concern” for Klawe who had “stormed out of the room in tears” I didn’t push it at the time. </p> <p>It’s unclear to me today what then prompted me but in May 1992 I used e-mail again to broadcast messages to call my own meeting, and <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot015 - May 92 e-mails, May 13 final revoke of e-mail priv, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">on May 13 my e-mail privilege was revoked for good</font></a>. From this point on I relied solely on distributing fliers.</p> <p>In June my grievance was still with President Strangway, but I also took the issues to the Faculty Association – acting on a suggestion by phone from the office of Associate Vice President Webber in response to my letter to him. </p> <p><a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot016 - June 92 Faculty Assoc, McClean, van Hentenryck case, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A formal hearing by FA executive director and personal service committee</font></a> was scheduled for June 16, and postponed to June 17 then June 18 – on Head Klawe’s management style in general.</p> <p>I notified the Department of the FA hearing and called for a meeting, and <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot017 - June 92 McBride letter on vacating office, UBC disclosure in 2003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">on June 16 Dean McBride sent a job termination notice</font></a> ordering me to vacate my office by 4:30 pm, June 30. </p> <p>I was told by a secretary in the Department that newly hired tenure-track faculty member Raymond Ng would arrive soon and need to take over my office space.</p> <p>In my fliers to the Department, my presentation at the FA hearing, and a June 18 letter to Albert McClean, Associate Vice President Academic in charge of legal affairs who was reviewing my grievance on behalf of President Strangway, I raised the <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot016 - June 92 Faculty Assoc, McClean, van Hentenryck case, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">1990 incident involving faculty candidate Pascal van Hentenryck</font></a>, here as described in the letter:</p> <blockquote> <p>“During his seminar talk, Dr. van Hentenryck made some statements which were in my opinion not very accurate, and drew criticism from people in the audience including myself. And a small debate occurred during the question period of the seminar. the incident was in every sense a normal academic exchange of views and opinions, albeit a little heated, but as a result of it Dr. van Hentenryck incurred the wrath of Dr. Klawe. When in April 1990 the Department, after many discussions, finally made a positive decision on Dr. van Hentenryck’s application in the form of an offer doubled with another candidate of a higher priority, Dr. Klawe, I have every reason to believe, broke the rules of the University to prevent the offer from materializing at that time. She took the Department’s decision to the Dean, and came back with the following announcement, “The money in our assistant professor slots has been upgraded so we can make the three offers (Blau, Gibson and Seger) and we are allowed one double offer to Taylor (largely because she is female)”. Dr. van Hentenryck’s name was not even mentioned. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>I didn’t explicitly mention the fact that it was because Head Klawe’s husband Nicholas Pippenger had debated Pascal van Hentenryck and then showed great anger with the intention to deny him a job offer. I had sided with Nick in the debate but later sent in a balanced written assessment, and Nick became visibly upset with me as well so I cautioned David Kirkpatrick that Nick shouldn’t take the debate too personally.</p> <p>I was being quite fair at the time of the initial incident in February or March 1990 when my tenure-track application was also in there, and I was conscious of what “Dick” Karp had advised me at Berkeley in 1988 when letting me know Klawe and Pippenger were going to UBC so my job was only fixed-term: “Whatever Nick says must be right.”</p> <p>Not the least because Nick was a prestigious ‘IBM Fellow’.</p> <p>Overall few people attending the meetings I called in the spring of 1992 – I remember Jack Snoeyink attended once or twice, a few graduate students showed up sometimes, and I invariably called it off and announced another. </p> <p>The Faculty Association hearing was held and <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot016 - June 92 Faculty Assoc, McClean, van Hentenryck case, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">the committee members expressed concern</font></a> about Head Klawe’s handling of van Hentenryck’s job application; but they said no formal procedure could commence against her unless van Hentenryck himself complained, who in 1990 accepted a job at Brown University.</p> <p>Unbeknown to me after the FA hearing the next Monday, June 22, <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot018 - June 92 counter-grievance from Andrew Martin, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">graduate student Andrew Martin wrote to Associate Vice President McClean to counter my grievance</font></a>. Having headed the Department’s graduate student association and served as a student representative on some departmental committees, Martin vouched, “At no time have I observed any evidence of “Maria’s negative management style”.”</p> <p>Martin then complained about my “aggressive, inappropriate and often bizarre behaviour” and “an extremely negative impact” on his life, alleging:</p> <blockquote> <p>“During the last two years, he has, upon three separate occasions unleashed a tirade of verbal profane abuse upon me with absolutely no provocation.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Martin claimed that I was mentally ill and violent and he feared for his life:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I am convinced that Dr. Gao is suffering from some form of mental illness. I believe that there is legitimate concern that his violent behaviour may escalate. The result of all this, is that I do not feel safe in the building alone, either at night or on weekends. …”</p> </blockquote> <p>Martin then requested that McClean neither consider action against Klawe nor extend or renew my UBC job, or he would seriously consider going elsewhere.</p> <p>Only one part of Martin’s allegations was true: on possibly three occasions I did show temper tantrum toward him.</p> <p>Andrew K. Martin rather than me was an aggressive fellow who often walked up from behind and breezed past me in a subtly provocative manner when I was on my way to the Student Union building area on campus, but because it happened during the day on a main walkway it was tolerable unlike the time with Christopher Healey. </p> <p>Then when Martin also appeared to agitate me in the Department I got angry, but a few minutes later I went back to apologize to him, for the reason that he appeared politically more mature, less of a denier. I shook his hand and stated I wouldn’t discriminate against gays and if others did I would fight for the gays. But I became upset again when he resumed the agitation attempts.</p> <p>For Martin not to consider my past apology and what I had said on that occasion and instead accused me as mentally ill and violent was absolutely unconscionable. Even if he had a wife back in Ontario, privacy should not be a devious excuse for oppression – unless like Vince Manis said the Nazis were in power. </p> <p>A 1989 graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Andrew Martin had arrived before Rick Sample’s death, studied for a master’s degree under David Kirkpatrick and become a Ph.D. student under Carl Seger. After Ph.D. he went to the computer industry – at Motorola and IBM – in Austin, Texas, where several crucial persons crossing paths with me have been schooled (as in Part 3 of this blog articles): my old buddy “Ling”, and the founding president and engineering vice president of the Silicon Valley startup company I worked in ending with a “10/11 layoff”.</p> <p>When I got into the first verbal incident with Martin, Kirkpatrick was very worried and said Andrew might not be as mature as he seemed – a caution similar to what Carol Whitehead had given at the Department retreat about Jack Snoyeyink. </p> <p>Kirkpatrick also said to me, “they just wanted to get you angry so you would fight Maria harder”, and I replied I would look at the facts and handle the dispute professionally, and be angry only to whoever agitated me.</p> <p>But in my mind I was also saying to David: you had said to be helping me and gotten Jack hired instead, and Jack encouraged me to bring my own issue against Maria and then tried to get a retreat resolution supporting her; now getting angry against her would be like falling for those guys’ worse tricks.</p> <p>Similar to Dean Barry McBride’s drafting of a negative conclusion for Vice President Dan Birch to reply to me in April upon receiving psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Remick’s note calling me a “patient”, on June 23 one day after Andrew Martin’s letter accusing me of mental illness and violent behavior, <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot019 - June 92 UBC reply from McClean-Strangway, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Associate Vice President Albert McClean drafted a negative reply which President David Strangway immediately signed and sent to me</font></a>.</p> <p>As the reply only dealt with my employment issue, I wrote <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot020 - June 92 last attempt at Klawe's headship, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">another letter to Strangway</font></a> on June 25 to re-iterate my request for an investigation into the general conduct of Maria Klawe as Head of Computer Science, which McClean had told me was under consideration. Like before I also called a meeting in the Department, and <a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot020 - June 92 last attempt at Klawe's headship, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">even disrupted a faculty “brown-bag lunch” meeting</font></a><font color="#0000ff"> </font>to request a Department meeting.</p> <p><a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot020 - June 92 last attempt at Klawe's headship, UBC docs for UBC Hosp mental health review Dec 92.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On June 30 I still had a meeting called</font></a>. Only a few showed up like before but to my surprise Hugh Dempster, the senior faculty member leading undergraduate teaching, came and sat for the entire hour, and we chatted it away on other things.</p> <p>On my last day Hugh talked about his activity in the peace movement, and within it his friendship with John Spencer MacDonald, co-founder of the Canadian high-tech firm MacDonald Dettwiler.</p> <p>What a sharp contrast to my desolation, when Hugh’s name was known for the Dempster Highway in Canada’s far north honoring his RCMP Inspector father William, and Richmond, B.C. based MacDonald Dettwiler later would own the engineering for the robotic Canadarm in space.</p> <p>Several years later in 1995 Maria Klawe became a UBC Vice President, and on June 20 in the B.C. press was the following story revealing of Klawe’s management style – even when she acted for the university (“<a href="http://www.fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot021 - Maria Klawe, BC Supreme Court lawsuit file 2008.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">UBC slam dunk coach Thomas: Guard cries foul as abrasive coach let go</font></a>”, by Terry Bell, June 20, 1995, <em>The Province</em>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Technically foul.</p> <p>That’s the mood around parts of the University of B.C. campus following the apparent firing of women's basketball coach Misty Thomas.</p> <p>After arriving in 1989, Thomas revived the moribund UBC women's program, but school officials decided not to renew her contract after it expired May 31.</p> <p>Thomas, who was the Canada West coach of the year after her team won the division championship for the 1993-94 season, is the second head coach to be fired.</p> <p>Frank Smith was turfed as head football coach last winter and replaced by his son Casey.</p> <p>…</p> <p>No UBC official could be reached for comment. Athletic director Bob Philip and intercollegiate athletics co-ordinator Kim Gordon were on their way to a conference in P.E.I. Monday.</p> <p>Dr. Maria Klawe, vice-president of academic services, was also away from the office.</p> <p>But a source said Klawe told Thomas that “competition has no place in athletics at UBC.</p> <p>“She (Klawe) said she was doing Misty a favor because Misty would not want to stay in that kind of situation.”</p> <p>The move took at least one player by surprise.</p> <p>Starting point guard Lori Kemp of Richmond averaged 14 points per game last year. She didn’t like the way the situation was handled.</p> <p>…</p> <p>The day after the Thunderbirds lost in the Western Canada playoff to the University of Victoria, school officials sent questionnaires to players soliciting their views about Thomas.</p> <p>Officials then told Thomas that her players wanted her out and that the desire was unanimous.</p> <p>Kemp disagrees that the feeling was unanimous, and says several players have sent letters to university administration expressing disapproval of the move.</p> <p>“Some players weren’t surveyed and there was no indication that the survey could lead to a firing,” said Kemp.</p> <p>“If they’d said they were going to use the evaluation to determine her contract (status) then it (the results) would have been a lot different.”</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Like with my compilation of Vince Manis’s internet activity record, a copy of the above and another news story was filed by me in 2008 at the B.C. Supreme Court to counter a UBC and RCMP proceeding to dismiss my October 1992 lawsuit.</p> <p>That lawsuit attempted to cover the employment dispute as well as RCMP-led eviction of me on July 2, 1992, as in defiance of Dean Barry McBride’s order I did not vacate the office in the afternoon of June 30 following the unsuccessful meeting spent on conversations with Hugh Dempster.</p> <p>I understood that the Department’s office space was tight and new faculty member Raymond Ng was coming, but on June 30 I stood by the importance of the issues about Head Klawe’s management style, given that the university had not replied to the parts of my grievance on the Pascal van Hentenryck incident and on Klawe’s headship in general.</p> <p>Maria Klawe not only won to continue her headship into the 5th year, but apparently was later given further extension and continued until becoming vice president in charge of academic and student services.</p> <p>Normal UBC appointments began on July 1, so on August 11, 1993, Klawe had begun her 6th year as Head of Computer Science when Department programmer Martin Frauendorf, formerly student president of the 1990 Computer Science graduating class, was beaten to death – only days short of his 29th birthday on August 15 (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot022 - murders of UBC CS members, BC Supreme Court lawsuit file 2008.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">1,800 ride in memory of student slain on trail</font></a>”, by Eve Lazarus and Jes Odam, August 16, 1993, <em><font color="#333333">The Vancouver Sun</font></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Martin Frauendorf planned to spend his birthday riding in the Multiple Sclerosis Society’s annual fund raiser.</p> <p>His parents planned to cheer him on.</p> <p>Instead, Kurt and Anneliese Frauendorf stood by in silent tribute to their son as 1,800 people rode bicycles in the event dedicated to his memory Sunday.</p> <p>…</p> <p>A memorial service will be held at UBC next Saturday. …</p> <p>…</p> <p>Computer sciences department head Maria Klawe said: “It's not a denominational service, it's for people to come together and talk about Martin and remember him. He really was very special.””</p> </blockquote> <p>I agree with Maria Klawe that Martin Frauendorf really was a very special young man. Back in 1991-92 during my dispute with Klawe, Martin sometimes showed up where I happened to be like some of the agitators, but he never agitated and I always smiled and said “Hi” to him, guessing that he probably then told others, “see, Feng didn’t lose his temper on me.”</p> <p>It was sad that the Department had first lost an exceptional technical and managerial member when Rick Sample was shot to death in 1989 as discussed in Part 3 of this blog article, and now lost another exceptional technical member.</p> <p>Martin Frauendorf died of baseball-bat bashing. But he didn’t “bean” a baseball at anybody, was only riding his bicycle in the woods of the University Endowment Lands when with no provocation or warning he was suddenly bludgeoned several times over his head by a man in a baseball jersey wielding a baseball bat (“<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot022 - murders of UBC CS members, BC Supreme Court lawsuit file 2008.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Cyclist recalls seeing man beaten with baseball bat</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, by Larry Still, March 22, 1995, <em><font color="#333333">The Vancouver Sun</font></em>).</p> <p>The two newspaper articles referred above, along with two covering the Rick Sample case, have been filed at B.C. Supreme Court in 2008 as evidence that around the time I was with UBC Computer Science Department there were indeed incidents of social violence victimizing Department members but I had no connection to them.</p> <p>It turned out that like the Rick Sample case Martin Frauendorf was also a victim of circumstances involving a woman between two men.</p> <p>Japanese student Tamoko Imamichi had been tutoring Martin Japanese since her arrival in Canada in March 1991, then in 1992 began dating Alfred James Bailey of Port Coquitlam, B.C., but broke up with Bailey in the spring of 1993 when she and Martin fell in love. In June Bailey tried to hire his co-worker Martin Lynch as assassin but was laughed off, so he did it himself on August 11 with an accomplice, George Perry Crooks, as his lookout. Crooks pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1995 and served a short sentence while Bailey was convicted of first-degree murder, appealed, and was convicted of second-degree murder in 1998 and given a life sentence without parole for 12 years. (“Charged mom has bail date”, August 29, 1993, and, “dead man lives on for lover: She was his teacher, then his girlfriend”, by Clare Ogilvie, March 26, 1995, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Province</font></em></a>; “Accused tried to hire assassin, trial told: Man says he was offered $1,000”, by Larry Still, March 28, 1995, and, “Man sentenced to life in murder retrial”, February 6, 1998, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>)</p> <p>One just didn’t have the safety to get together with others without having to think hard about it.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2011/10/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 5</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-51514586151248700742011-03-29T18:52:00.000-04:002013-05-03T18:52:58.904-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2010/11/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 2</a>) </p> <p>For persons in China whose elementary and secondary education coincided with the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, schooling was two years less than normal. Of my ten years, the first five were at the July 1 Elementary School formerly attached to Sun Yat-sen University and located on its picturesque campus, the sixth was the first year of junior middle school spent in an extended program at the elementary school, and the last four – two more years of junior and two years of senior middle school – were at Guangzhou No. 6 Middle School a short distance east of the university campus.</p> <p>At the elementary school we had coed seating and for six years I shared a desk and bench with a poised, articulate and studious girl, our class section leader whose name differed from that of Chairman Mao’s famous wife of the 1920s by only the middle of three Chinese characters, Yang Junhui (杨俊慧) versus Yang Kaihui (杨开慧), which I also mentioned in my most recent Chinese blog post, “<a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%b8%89%ef%bc%89%e6%96%87%e9%9d%a9%e7%a0%b4%e6%97%a7%e7%ab%8b%e6%96%b0%e5%bc%80%e5%a7%8b/"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧(三)——文革“破旧立新”开始的记忆</font></a>”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (Part 3) – memories of the start of “destroy the old and erect the new” in Cultural Revolution”).</p> <p>Arriving at the middle school in 1972 was a sobering experience: it was like a men’s world now, the boys in the senior classes were muscular and intimidating, and within a few months several of my classmates were robbed – some while in the men’s room and once as I witnessed when bigger boys entered our classroom during noon break demanding money from some of us.</p> <p>For a short time in the 1960s this middle school was affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University, but it had originally been founded as an affiliated school of the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy <font color="#333333">in 1937 </font>, when<font color="#333333"> the Academy founded in 1924-25 had already relocated to the national capital Nanjing and this school was established at its former site to bear the name of founder Chiang Kai-shek. </font></p> <p><font color="#333333">In fact, today Guangzhou No. 6 Middle School is once again using the Whampoa Military Academy’s official motto and official song as the school motto and school song – probably the only school of any kind doing so in mainland China given that the motto “<font color="#333333">亲爱精诚</font>”(“Dear and Sincere”) approved by Sun Yat-sen and also in the lyrics of the song was originally proposed and calligraphed by the Academy’s founding President (Commandant) Chiang Kai-shek, who after Dr. Sun’s 1925 death in 1927 purged the Communists from a Nationalist-Communist alliance (“<a href="http://www.hpma.cn/hpjx/zlk_show.asp?article_id=61" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">校歌二首</font></a>”, January 19, 1927, 黄埔日刊, 黄埔军校旧址纪念馆; “<a href="http://blog.southcn.com/u/luolinhu/archives/2009/993.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">亲爱精诚</font></a>”, by 罗林虎, June 17, 2009, <em>南方网罗林虎博客</em>; “</font><a href="http://gcontent.oeeee.com/d/6e/d6ef5f7fa914c199/Blog/028/035c51.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州六中 重温中正校训 亲爱精诚</font></a><font color="#333333">”, by 梁艳燕 and 马强, March 31, 2010, <em>南方都市报</em>; and, “</font><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Chiang Kai-shek</font></a><font color="#333333">”, <em>Wikipedia</em>).</font></p> <p>A middle school like this wasn’t expected to be easy, even if in my days during Cultural Revolution the school practically made no reference to Chiang. </p> <p>One of the “Chen” (陈) family older boys in a neighboring house up the hill on university campus, who had either graduated from the middle school or in the last year and whose father was the most senior university official from my maternal family’s Chaozhou-Shantou region, told my mother that if I had any problem at school we should let them know right away so I could be protected.</p> <p>We were freshmen but no longer children, so from now on I would be seated with a boy. For the two junior years I seated with the stubborn “Fang Xiaoqiang” (方小强), whose father was a former junior army officer and a cadre at the university’s People’s Arms office supervising People’s Militia, and who often brought in a toy-size, battery-operated fan to play with below the desk.</p> <p>Being tall and skinny as always my seat was in the last row.  My old buddy “Ling” – his given name 凌 is the family name of Taiwanese American journalists Lisa and Laura Ling (凌志慧 and 凌志美), the latter of North Korea detention fame – who had sit in front of and liked to tease me in the elementary school years was now two rows ahead separated by a girl.</p> <p>Though most students of our class section were the same as at the elementary school there were a few new classmates. Most noticeable and troublesome to me was “Ling”’s new seatmate “Chen” (his family name 陈), whose dad worked in one of the factories across from the south side of the university campus and whose family lived in the Old Phoenix Village behind the factories – my father had stayed at the Village during university Red Guard militant conflicts in 1967-68 as mentioned in Part 2 of this blog article. </p> <p>“Chen” liked to playfully challenge me in a physical manner during class breaks and now it was more than “Ling”’s verbal teasing. Eventually one day in our last junior year during his aggressive physical hassling when I tried to push him away my left little finger ran into his lunging chest; after months of Chinese herbal treatment on the purple and swollen finger the pain faded but the finger’s normal growth was stunted – it remains shorter and less agile today.</p> <p>But that kind of youths’ ‘playfulness’ wasn’t a real problem, was it? It might be considered a subtle form of physical mischief or harassment, but not in the world I was in then with its ‘manly’ atmosphere – I told my parents the injury was from basketball.</p> <p>Having spent time in Vancouver, British Columbia, and begun my more serous political activism there I sometimes like to comment on things from that perspective; so in my November-December 2009 blog article “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html" target="_blank">“<font color="#0000ff">Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>” I mentioned how political psychiatry used to silence me in 1992-94 could carry health consequences resembling local favorite Michael J. Fox’s: </p> <blockquote> <p>“In fact, taking psychiatric medication such as Haldol (Haloperidol) for an extended period – I was forced to take on and off during a period of more than a year – could turn one into sufferer of degenerative and irreversible tardive syndromes – with uncontrollable behavior much like Michael J. Fox’s discussed in the preceding part of this blog article, if not actual Parkinson’s disease.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In fact, Fox wasn’t only a famous TV/movie star from the Vancouver region but his Parkinson’s disease symptom began with “twitches” in his left little finger – in 1990-91 and unfortunately for someone with what I called “a fabulous stereotype of a young Republican” his entire left hand and shoulder soon began to shake as well (“<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/11/michael-j-fox-parkinsons" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">'It's the gift that keeps on taking'</font></a>”, by Emma Brockes, April 11, 2009, <em>The Guardian</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1326832/Michael-J-Fox-Parkinsons-saved-life-better-man.html" target="_blank">Parkinson’s <font color="#0000ff">saved my life: Michael J Fox was plunged into drink and depression but now he says the disease has made him a better man</font></a>”, by Lina Das, November 5, 2010, <em>Daily Mail</em>).</p> <p>During this last junior year a more open and nasty act of violence – by the school authority – fell on my seatmate “Fang” and a small political drama ensued involving the four of us.</p> <p>“Fang” and I sat next to a back window, outside the window were a small strip of green lawn and some bushes in a slightly off-the-road area of the school ground, and “Fang” liked to sneak out of the window when the teacher was facing the chalkboard away from the class, play outside and then sneak back in.</p> <p>Then one day while he was playing like this outside the back of the classroom two senior student members of the school security team saw “Fang”, had an argument with him and took him into custody. An hour or two later “Fang” was released back to the classroom through the door in front of the entire class, with bruises all over his face – while in custody he was beaten up by a group of “security” senior students who apparently wanted to teach him a lesson.</p> <p>During the next class break we the four boys talked about it, and all felt it was unreasonable for “Fang” to have been beaten like that. “Ling” was the most vocal and suggested that we register a complaint about it, I agreed with him, “Fang” said okay and “Chen” agreed to participate also – but it was really up to “Ling” and I for a civil act like this when the norm was contemplating physical retaliation by one’s outside buddies like some other boys did. </p> <p>We decided to post a “Big-character Poster” (大字报) in school. “Ling” and I worked out the draft, stating that it was wrong and why it was wrong for school security to beat up a student, and demanding an apology from them to “Fang”; I then wrote up the poster with a calligraphy brush.</p> <p>“Ling” suggested that I sign first so I put down my name at the end, but to my surprise “Ling” then signed behind my name in considerably smaller characters and the other two followed his suit.</p> <p>Oh-oh, now my handwriting and name really stood out in this “Big-character Poster”, which was rare after the abusive and violent Red Guard activities of early Cultural Revolution was put down in 1968 by the military with the workers’ militia – in the case of Sun Yat-sen University as discussed in Part 2 of this blog article – and nearly unheard of in middle schools in this later period.</p> <p>Fortunately I had given some thoughts on what we wrote and genuinely felt we were reasonable.</p> <p>We put the poster up in the administration center area of school campus. The next day the school security team posted their countering “Big-character Poster”, stating to the effect that they would resolutely suppress bad student behavior such as in this case.</p> <p>I should have been more careful and anticipated “Ling”’s trickiness. Back in Grade 3 or 4 – 1968-70 – at elementary school, “Ling” once asked me if some quotations from Vice Chairman Lin Biao that we studied weren’t inconsistent with Chairman Mao’s quotations; I normally was careful not to say anything politically incorrect but that time it was only us two and “Ling” really wanted to hear my opinion so I said yeah some particular things weren’t the same. To my horror “Ling” then went to our head teacher, “Teacher Luo” (罗), and informed that I had said things against Vice Chairman Lin; an articulate and righteous woman teaching math (arithmetic), “Teacher Luo” called me in for a serious conversation and it took a lot of explanation and my normally very good behavior to convince her that I didn’t pose a political problem.</p> <p>Now in the 1973-74 academic year at the middle school, ironically our head teacher was again a “Teacher Luo” (罗) – this time a young man teaching physics who also had school security and administration ambitions.</p> <p>Even more ironically, it was now a time of national political campaign denouncing Lin Biao – together with Confucius (批林批孔) as ordered by Chairman Mao – who had died in 1971 at 63 with his family in a plane crash in Mongolia after a failed coup against Mao (Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, <em><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=Zhwh_bdzk-8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976</font></a></em>, 2009, M.E. Sharpe; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Biao" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lin Biao</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>). </p> <p>One of the most active scholars in this campaign, linking Lin Biao to Confucius, criticizing Confucius for defending ancient slavery, and receiving Chairman Mao’s praise was Professor Yang Rongguo (杨荣国), chairman of the university’s Philosophy department where “Ling”’s father and my father were lecturers – in <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%b8%89%ef%bc%89%e6%96%87%e9%9d%a9%e7%a0%b4%e6%97%a7%e7%ab%8b%e6%96%b0%e5%bc%80%e5%a7%8b/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my most recent Chinese blog post</font></a> I also noted that one of his daughters was our classmate.</p> <p>It so happened that of the over 100 middle schools in the city of Guangzhou there were a few, no more than 3 or 4, that were “focus schools” of this political campaign, each with an “Investigation Unit” (调查组) onsite from the city’s education bureau, and the No. 6 Middle School was one. The unit leader was Wang Pingshan (王屏山), a well-known, elusive and somewhat mysterious figure – with some interesting historical links.</p> <p>In 1951 when my parents entered Sun Yat-sen University as freshmen, Mr. Wang finished his graduate study in physics at the Christian, private Lingnan University. The next year the former absorbed the latter and moved to the latter’s campus, but the Engineering, Agricultural, Medical, and Teacher’s Colleges weren’t part of the move in a government-run comprehensive reorganization of higher education and instead became independent Institutes and Colleges: Sun Yat-sen Medical College (University) mentioned in Part 2 of this blog article, South China Institute of Technology and South China Agricultural College with between them most of the former Sun Yat-sen University campus (“<a href="http://quzhi.thnet.gov.cn/zjk/dqs/thwwz/200903/t20090317_281717.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">早期的中山大学</font></a>”, March 17, 2009, 广州市天河区地方志编纂委员会办公室), and South China Teacher’s College which took over Sun Yat-sen University’s affiliated middle school with Mr. Wang as its vice principal.</p> <p>In 1955 my parents graduated in Chinese Literature, my father entered graduate study and my mother – also a Wang – was assigned to Mr. Wang’s school for her very first teaching job, and a few years later Wang Pingshan became the principal – of one of the best middle schools in Guangdong province. </p> <p>So in 1973-74 at No. 6 Middle School the high-level “Investigation Unit” leader happened to be my mother’s former boss, but I didn’t know him personally because by the time I was born in 1959 my mother was reassigned to No. 33 Middle School (mentioned in Part 2 of this blog article) – a few times I happened to walk by as he was on his way to official business and my gesture of respect was greeted with a smile from the corners of Mr. Wang’s mouth.</p> <p>I was prepared to be denounced by school security although I doubted they would also beat me as I was never a physical problem. But neither our head teacher – the physic teacher “Luo” – or the security team called me in for reproaching; instead a member of the “Investigation Unit” interviewed me for details, so I described what I had seen and repeated the rationale for the “Big-character Poster”.</p> <p>A few days later there was a terse school announcement posted where the two opposing posters were, acknowledging that the security team had beaten a student and that it should not have happened. </p> <p>At semester’s end I received a pretty enthusiastic evaluation from “Teacher Luo”, who was now given part of the responsibility for school security; soon our class went to the countryside campus (every middle school in Guangzhou had such a campus during the second half of Cultural Revolution, where students spent about 1/4 of their middle school years doing half-time labor work) and “Ling” and I were included in the security team there – it was only a gesture to me as I was simply not physically strong for real but it was a great start for “Ling”.</p> <p>Into senior years “Ling” was transferred to another class section to become its leader, and also became a leader of the revamped school security team. After graduation he even got a job working in the middle school.</p> <p>In senior years our class section had a different head teacher, math teacher “Xie” (谢), a lady short in statue but strong on school principles. Somehow my performance on volunteer work wasn’t good enough for her and on updating her about student behavior wasn’t useful, so I almost didn’t get accepted into the Communist Youth League prior to graduation. “Teacher Xie” told my mother the reason, and it reminded me of my kindergarten teacher admonishing me for singing at a wrong time – a story told in my second-most recent Chinese post <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%ba%8c%ef%bc%89%e7%ab%a5%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e5%90%af%e8%92%99/"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧(二)——童年的启蒙</font></a> (“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (Part 2) – childhood enlightenment”) and its <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>.</p> <p>Good students were not only members but also cadres in the Youth League organization so it would have meant political and possibly career banishment: in 1977 when I was admitted into Sun Yat-sen University to study Computational Mathematics only 2 or 3 out of over 40 in our freshmen class were not members. </p> <p>A morale of this whole story from the teenage years is that violence should be opposed and stopped but oftentimes its motive is unclear – especially when some of the interpersonal and political factors are not in the open – and its outcome uncertain to the innocent.</p> <p>But there is a lot more relevant politics to mention here, on what happened since with some of the characters in this past event.</p> <p>In the senior years “Ling” was one of the boys who became personal friends with “Teacher Luo” in charge of security; “Luo”’s father was an official in one of the city’s industry bureaus and their family lived in the compound of the Guangzhou Electric Motors Factory across from the south side of Sun Yat-sen University campus – the two entities had had Red Guard militant conflicts as discussed in Part 2 of this blog article. </p> <p>“Teacher Luo” is today a math teacher with a degree from South China Normal University (formerly Teacher’s College) and a master’s degree from Macau, the Principal of Guangzhou No. 2 Middle School, a Model Principal of Guangdong province and an official Educational Inspector (督学) of the provincial government (“<a href="http://bk.baidu.com/view/3262106.html?fromTaglist" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">罗峻峰</font></a>”, Baidu; and, “<a href="http://www.gdgzez.com.cn/News/schoolNews/201005/1790.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">罗峻峰校长率队慰问汶川支教老师</font></a>”, by 曹亮敏, May 17, 2010, Guangzhou No. 2 High School).</p> <p>Those who have read <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%ba%8c%ef%bc%89%e7%ab%a5%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e5%90%af%e8%92%99/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my second-most recent Chinese blog post</font></a> or its <font color="#333333"><a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a> k</font>now that my childhood education had begun with my maternal grandfather teaching me Chairman Mao’s famous 1961 poem, "<em>The Immortals' Cave Inscription on a Photo Taken by Comrade Li Jin</em>”, which described “billowy clouds” and “lofty and perilous peak”, and that as a child I had found the poem dear to me because my father’s name had “cloud” and my name was a “peak” – now “Teacher Luo”’s name Luo Junfeng (<font color="#333333">罗峻峰) </font>had not only a "peak” but a “steep peak”!</p> <p>In <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%b8%89%ef%bc%89%e6%96%87%e9%9d%a9%e7%a0%b4%e6%97%a7%e7%ab%8b%e6%96%b0%e5%bc%80%e5%a7%8b/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my most recent Chinese blog post</font></a> and in its <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a> I mentioned that in 1956 my father was persuaded to end his Chinese Literature graduate study early to prepare for studying Aesthetics as part of Philosophy in the Soviet Union but then Chinese-Soviet relations soured and he was instead assigned to teach Marxist philosophy, I also mentioned that the founding president of South China Teacher’s College, “Du Guoyang” (杜国痒), was at the time a nationally known Marxist philosopher leading the Guangzhou branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and could influence my father in the new field but Du soon died of cancer in 1961 in his 72th year. </p> <p>Well, Wang Pingshan, my mother’s former boss at the affiliated middle school of South China Teacher’s College and leader of the high-level “Investigation Unit” in 1973-74 at my middle school, not only became a leader of the Teacher’s College but also became the Vice Governor of Guangdong province overseeing education, in the 1980s. </p> <p>Mr. Wang suffered from cancer since 1991 but was able to survive to his 80th year of 2006 (“<a href="http://www.ycwb.com/gb/content/2006-03/01/content_1078363.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">王屏山:一生为教育奔波的副省长</font></a>”, by 郝婧羽, 贺佳 and 李宇红, March 1, 2006, <em>羊城晚报</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.gd.xinhua.org/newscenter/2007-02/28/content_9382047.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">追忆敬爱的父亲王屏山同志</font></a>”, by 王磊, originally in <em>羊城晚报</em>, February 28, 2007, <em>Xinhua</em>) – my father died of long-term coronary diseases in 2005 at only 72.</p> <p>Part 2 of this blog article has mentioned that at 6-years old prior to Cultural Revolution I applied to an experimental school but was not admitted. The latest news out of China announces that in the Fall of 2011 Guangdong Experimental High School will open the first American branch of any Chinese high school, in Riverside, California, with former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as an official adviser (“<a href="http://news.xinhuanet.com/edu/2011-03/25/c_121232166.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广东首所中学出国赴美办分校 计划9月开学</font></a>”, March 25, 2011, <em>Xinhua</em>). </p> <p>This high school used to be part of the South China Teacher’s College’s affiliated middle school (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong_Experimental_High_School" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Guangdong Experimental High School</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>) where my mother once taught under Principal Wang Pingshan.</p> <p>What would Gov. Schwarzenegger advise best for a new high school from “out of country”, state politics or his gung-ho macho ways? I have told a juicier story – in <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%ba%8c%ef%bc%89%e7%ab%a5%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e5%90%af%e8%92%99/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my second-most recent Chinese blog post</font></a> and its <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a> – that Kung Fu superstar Jackie Chan had a daughter nicknamed “Little Dragon Girl” out of wedlock with Hong Kong actress Elaine Ng, 1990 Miss Asia crowned while a Vancouver high school student, who happened to be a distant maternal cousin of mine from the days in China.</p> <p>Past middle school my former seatmate “Fang” soon got into worse trouble: he and a group of guys went to the woods with one girl and they all had sex with her, who afterwards complained to the authority.</p> <p>One of the guys was the youngest son of “Auntie Zeng’, a university official living upstairs in the same house as our family – as in <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%ba%8c%ef%bc%89%e7%ab%a5%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e5%90%af%e8%92%99/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my two most recent Chinese blog posts</font></a> and the <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a> “Auntie Zeng” had come from Singapore to join the Chinese Communist revolution but then tragically her army-colonel husband in charge of cultural affairs at Guangzhou Military District died of suicide in early Cultural Revolution, and her youngest son was especially fond of a girl also of Singapore family history who visited our family.</p> <p>Well, “Auntie Zeng”’s youngest son was a Communist party member and a cadre of the Youth League organization in the factory where he worked, and for the scandal he was expelled from the Communist party and lost his Youth League post.</p> <p>“Fang”’s father quickly used his connection to enlist his son in the army so the son could get better discipline. Soon it was the 1979 war between China and Vietnam, “Fang” was a squad leader with the Chinese troops going into Vietnam, and he won official merit for killing an enemy soldier – the rumor mill had it that he and his squad were escorting an unarmed group (supply or medical type) and heard noise in the bushes with likely an enemy there so he opened fire, but the enemy soldier may have been unarmed and just hiding.</p> <p>By early 1980s when I was still a Sun Yat-sen University student “Fang” had left the military and become a firefighter at the university’s fire station, and later became its fire captain.</p> <p>In Part 1 of this blog article I have discussed attending a Canada-U.S. women’s national hockey game in San Jose, California, in October 2001, that during the game the Canadian consul Bernard Etzinger introduced me to Beth Lawlor, a new post-doctoral researcher at the University of California’s medical school in San Francisco, whose Ph.D. was from the University of British Columbia where she studied under a cancer-research scientist related to me; I’ve also mentioned that while teaching at UBC in 1992 I had a civil dispute with my then boss that turned nasty, that my experience grew nastier when I also circulated press releases critical of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and that I suffered from prosecution and political psychiatry at the hand of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police among others.</p> <p>So in October 2001 it was nice to meet someone with an interesting name and a link to an extended family member, but I wasn’t surprised that Beth was at UC San Francisco medical school because I had been ‘shadowed’ years ago by my old buddy “Ling” there: in the 1980s when I was in Math graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley, “Ling” was a Biology graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin; then about a year before my graduation “Ling” began to do research at UC San Francisco medical school, and after my move to Vancouver he became a postdoc researcher at UC San Francisco.</p> <p>In 1999 I went to Silicon Valley to look for a job in the computer industry and one of the old friends accommodating me there was “Ling”, who was now working in the biotech field in companies like Monsanto, and Maxygen.</p> <p>Didn’t I talk about it already in my <a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">November-December 2009 blog article</font></a> quoted earlier about Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease, that the software engineer job I got in Silicon Valley was with a startup company where both the founding president who hired me and the vice president of engineering who gave me the layoff notice on October 11, 2001 – exactly one month after 9/11 – had graduate degrees from the University of Texas, Austin? After layoff I had plenty of time to go to a hockey game and meet other Canadians.</p> <p>In 2002 I said goodbye to the Silicon Valley-San Francisco Bay Area, to old friends like “Ling” and new friends like Myra Marsh, research librarian at the mystical Rosicrucian Order headquartered across the street from Herbert Hoover Middle School in San Jose(“<a href="http://hermetic.com/stavish/alchemy/history.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The History of Alchemy in America</font></a>” by Mark Stavish, 1996, Hermetic.com; and, “<a href="http://open.salon.com/blog/myriad/2011/02/22/san_jose_surprise_-_hippo_goddess_pharoah_trees_-_pt_1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">San Jose surprise - hippo goddess, pharoah & trees - Pt. 1</font></a>”, Myriad’s Blog, February 25, 2011, Open Salon), and back to Canada I moved to Toronto, Ontario.</p> <p>In the summer of 2009 “Ling” appeared again, who was now a professor in Kentucky and was in Toronto for a meeting as a member of a biotech advisory panel for a Ontario government ministry. </p> <p>It was good to see my old buddy again and we had lunch in Toronto’s Chinatown together with another boyhood classmate, “You-Zhi Tang” (汤友志), a well-known environmental scientist in Canada as well as in China (“<a href="http://wx.toronto.ca/inter/it/newsrel.nsf/7017df2f20edbe2885256619004e428e/25ce769d8fbb0aa5852572c90059af27?OpenDocument" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Media Advisory: City to honour recipients of Green Toronto Awards</font></a>”, April 26, 2007, City of Toronto; and, “<a href="http://www.canadianwindfields.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Company Overview</font></a>”, DaoPower Canada). </p> <p>I had begun my political blogging in January 2009 and “Ling” was informed soon after, so after lunch the two of us had a chat, and two things “Ling” told me I took as significant.</p> <p>First, “Ling” said he hadn’t had the time to read the details of my blog posts but his ex-girlfriend “Angela Liu” read it and had some familiarity with it.</p> <p>That was very interesting, but not because “Angela” was a biotech expert like “Ling” – or because “Angela”’s work was into green apples whereas “Ling”’s research involved tobacco.</p> <p>It was because like “Ling” and I being kids of Sun Yat-sen University faculty members “Angela” was from the circle of kids at South China Institute of Technology – over at Sun Yat-sen University’s former campus adjacent South China Teacher’s College.</p> <p>In 1982 when I was going to graduate school at Berkeley, “Ling” was still in his undergraduate study at Jinan University in Guangzhou and asked me to bring a package of something to his classmate-girlfriend “Angela”; I did and met “Angela”, then a hardworking UC Berkeley undergraduate student waitressing part-time for a Taiwanese restaurant on Berkeley’s boisterous Telegraph Avenue.</p> <p>Later moving to work in Vancouver I found that Angela’s sister and mother had already immigrated there.</p> <p>It surely has been a small world, but in the summer of 2009 I felt more confident than before because in the several months of political blogging I had covered some important issues of the past, such as some of my activities in and views on Canadian politics including about former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and some of my opinions on U.S. politics and international politics (my blog articles, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/greeting-the-new-millennium-%E2%80%93-nearly-a-decade-late-part-1/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a>”, and, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-10/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”).</p> <p>In other words, I was now more prepared even if “Ling” would inform whoever what I said, or try to get me to front for something too much – the open internet has made it possible for everyone to see what a person writes.</p> <p>The second thing of significance “Ling” then told me was that his father, the very well-known Professor Yuan Weishi (袁伟时), my late father’s colleague mentioned in Part 2 of this blog article, was about to publish a new book tentatively entitled “<em>The Diaries of Chiang Kai-shek that I have read</em>” and that “Uncle Yuan” would gladly send me a copy as a present – a few months later there indeed was a publisher’s announcement of the plan (“<a href="http://publish.dbw.cn/system/2009/09/07/052096303.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">岳麓书社推出“袁伟时书系”</font></a>”, September 7, 2009, 东北网).</p> <p>Aha, my old buddy “Ling” must have gotten something from the founding president of Whampoa Military Academy and founder of our middle school, where his motto is once again official today and where “Ling” did so much better than I after the “Big-character Poster” incident.</p> <p>“Ling” explained that his father had spent months at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution studying Chiang’s diaries there, staying at the old house “Ling” and his wife owned where I had also briefly stayed near the university across the San Francisco Bay from Berkeley.</p> <p>I understand. But to this day I haven’t found any internet report on this new book of “Uncle Yuan”’s although there are reports on his speeches about Chiang’s diaries (“<a href="http://www.hw01.com/2270/33437/33459/20100331135015.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">袁伟时:中国档案存放在美国是不幸,更是幸事</font></a>”, March 31, 2010, 华网在线), so it confirmed what “Ling” later told me that due to the current political climate in China the book’s publication was put on hold.</p> <p>That I can also see, from facts in Part 2 of this blog article and in my February 2010 Chinese blog post, “<a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%b8%80%ef%bc%89%e4%bb%8e%e5%b9%bc%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e6%95%85%e4%ba%8b%e8%af%b4%e8%b5%b7/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧(一)——从幼年的故事说起</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (part 1) – starting from childhood stories”) and its <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a>. </p> <p>I’ll explain here.</p> <p>My father was a Sun Yat-sen University faculty member but unlike “Ling” and other elementary school classmates I wasn’t born on the university campus, didn’t begin to live there until early Cultural Revolution in 1966-67, and therefore would not have automatically warranted a berth at the No. 6 Middle School now upholding Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s official motto. </p> <p>Even if not all Sun Yat-sen University campus children were guaranteed such a berth, the chance for a faculty member’s child was better than 50%: our elementary school class had two sections of around 50 each, where more of our section were children of faculty members and all later went to No. 6 Middle School, and more of the other section were children of workers, administrators and officials and all later went to No. 52 Middle School across the street from the campus’s main Southgate.</p> <p>Instead, I was born in the former American Presbyterian Mission hospital in Guangzhou founded as the clinic of the first-ever women’s medical school in China, and my delivery doctor, whose medical-school boyfriend was a maternal cousin of my mother’s and had died tragically early, was the daughter of former Whampoa Military Academy Provost and left-wing Nationalist military and government leader Deng Yanda (邓演达) executed in 1931 by Chiang for organizing opposition. This hospital had nurtured or helped famous persons including future scientist Peng Jiamu (彭加木), in 1925 its first-ever “incubator baby”, who later got lost and died during a desert scientific expedition, and Deng Yingchao (邓颖超) in 1927 whose unborn baby had just died in her only pregnancy while her husband Zhou Enlai, former director of Whampoa Military Academy’s political department and later Premier of China, was being hunted by Chiang’s soldiers.</p> <p>Then after my involvement in Canadian politics in 1992 I did not work until 1996, and the businesswoman originally from Taiwan who gave me the new job told me that her late father had spent years in a Taiwanese jail due to his role as political secretary of General Sun Li-jen (孙立人) – legendary World War II hero and Virginia Military Institute graduate who himself suffered nearly lifetime house detention in Taiwan due to political opposition to Chiang Kai-shek.</p> <p>Life isn’t easy, and so it takes time to go from a middle school to something more, or from Taiwan to someplace bigger.</p> <p>Years after the middle school “Big-character Poster” incident when a high-level “Investigation Unit” led by Wang Pingshan happened to be around, a thread of life continued with connections to the South China Teacher’s College and its affiliated middle school.</p> <p>When I entered university in the spring of 1978 I found myself among 7 in a dorm room with 4 bunker beds, where three others surrounding me were physically imposing while I was the skinniest of the class: above me was “Lin”, an intimidating though sociable young man from the mountainous Shaoguan region of northern Guangdong where Sun Yat-sen university had sent faculty members for labor work in the second half of Cultural Revolution, who liked domineering roles on the basketball team from center to guard, bouncing the ball off the board real hard and yelling scarily loud; across the center-isle desk from me was “Wang”, at 16 the youngest in our Computational Math class who passed the university entrance exam easily and ‘leaped’ forward from the affiliated middle school of South China Teacher’s College where his father was a college physical education teacher and he himself a martial-arts expert already; and above “Wang” was “Lu”, a tall and strong boy from a region just outside Beijing who despite the Cantonese perception of northerners was quite genial and played basketball center with skills.</p> <p>None of them was a real physical threat but some sort of psychological contrast was likely intended in this dorm-room arrangement, and “Wang” sometimes liked to see if he could test his martial-arts acumen on me but I opted to only play badminton with him.</p> <p>Further background stories below will explain why the psychological contrast of their physical strengths versus my lack of was intended, namely that university life could be as physically nasty as middle school – albeit fortunately it didn’t turn out that way – and more political.</p> <p>After middle school I got an apprenticeship in the city’s corded telephone factory located near the No. 6 Middle School, close to home. It wasn’t a job of privilege of any sort but convenience: I was among ones allowed to get factory work in the city instead of farm work in the countryside, so my mother called her old university roommate “Auntie Shunming” in Beijing and her electrical engineer husband “Uncle Lin” happened to have a former colleague “Engineer Wang” at this Guangzhou factory – as discussed in <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%ba%8c%ef%bc%89%e7%ab%a5%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e5%90%af%e8%92%99/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my second-most recent Chinese blog post</font></a> the couple had come from Singapore to attend universities in China and were parents of the girl whom “Auntie Zeng”’s youngest son was particularly fond of.</p> <p>I began work in the fall of 1976 – Chairman Mao had died and Cultural Revolution had ended. Soon in 1977 the government changed its policies and rather than via political selections university admission would again be based on standardized annual entrance exam open to all who had received reasonable prior education, and I was thrilled that I would be able to try.</p> <p>Though I had various intellectual interests in social sciences and humanities as well as in natural sciences and math, I was pretty awkward at hands-on things while my parents were worried that my social-science side of attention could potentially cause me misery in life, so I was encouraged to study applicable math. </p> <p>“Auntie Zeng”, the university official living in the same house upstairs from us, was also very encouraging of this direction for me, and introduced me to “Teacher Hou” (侯), a Mathematics and soon-to-be Computer Science lecturer and an old friend of “Auntie Zeng”’s eldest son working in Beijing – from the days when they both studied in the Soviet Union. So “Teacher Hou” gave me two sessions of assessment/tutoring on basic math totaling about 3 hours.</p> <p>“Auntie Zeng” also told us two favorite stories about her son and “Hou”.</p> <p>The first was about how young “Hou” was: in early 1960s when “Auntie Zeng”’s son and his peers were at the Beijing airport about to board a plane for the Soviet Union, there came a boy of about 14 or 15 who claimed to be one of them, and the group leader wondered if the government had made a mistake and allowed a little kid to join them to go to university in the Soviet Union, which was a pretty important thing (as mentioned before my father was once selected to go to the Soviet Union to study but didn’t make it due to worsening diplomatic and political relations). Well there was no mistake, the kid “Hou” was a boy genius especially selected.</p> <p>The second was about how physically dangerous the Soviet Union could be when mixed with politics: in 1965 while participating in foreign student protests against the United States’ Vietnam War, none other than “Hou” and “Auntie Zeng”’s son were among the Chinese student protestors beaten by the Soviet police, with injuries requiring hospital treatment. This can be verified by the news of an official complaint lodged by the Chinese Ambassador to the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, reported on March 8, 1965, by <em>People’s Liberation Army Daily</em>; in this story the Chinese Ambassador also complained that during his visit with them these two hospitalized Chinese students were evicted (“<a href="http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/13961501" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">我驻苏使馆向苏联政府提出抗议</font></a>”, March 8, 1965, <em>PLA Daily</em>). </p> <p>Poor “Auntie Zeng”, by late 1970s she had suffered not only the fate of her army-colonel husband’s death in early Cultural Revolution and her youngest son’s indignant expulsion from the Communist Party due to a sex scandal, but also her eldest son’s prior beating by the Soviet police.</p> <p>In <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%ba%8c%ef%bc%89%e7%ab%a5%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e5%90%af%e8%92%99/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my two most recent Chinese blog posts</font></a> and the <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a> I have recalled how much it meant to me that my maternal grandfather, a noted amateur Chinese calligrapher, used a famous 1961 poem of Chairman Mao’s to begin my learning to read and write at 4-years old, where part of my father’s name and my name were words in the poem, and how much it has been a disappointment and shock to discover that the poem likely had been adapted by Mao from classical Chinese erotica.</p> <p>Around the time of preparing for the university entrance exam a tragic incident occurred to my factory apprentice partner “Chen” – “Chen” again! – and severely injured a finger of his: during the graveyard shift while looking away and chatting “Chen” put his hand – I can’t recall which – toward the automatic-turning lathe we attended churning out small copper gearwheels, and had half of a finger top peeled off to the bone; only a few of us were in the workshop and we bandaged his wound and rushed him to the hospital as quickly as we could waiting for and taking a bus; then at the emergency room he was asked to wait in the hallway despite our pleas that he had turned pale and shaking cold since on the bus – a total of over 2 hours lapsed by the time he was treated.</p> <p>So there was the unmistakable sense when I entered my class at Sun Yat-sen University in early 1978, that my new roommate “Wang” from South China Teacher’s College’s affiliated middle school where my mother “Wang” once taught under Principal “Wang” Pingshan, was an analog of the boy genius “Hou” in the old times of “Auntie Zeng”’s son, and that my roommate’s martial-arts skills were there for a reason.</p> <p>Any doubt on the part of others can be dispelled by the fact that later my roommate “Wang” indeed chose “Teacher Hou”’s field and also studied under “Teacher Hou” for a master’s degree, as well as the facts that subsequently he went to Boston University for his Ph.D. study, then specialized in computer-network security, has been a professor in Greensboro, North Carolina and Lowell, Massachusetts (“<a href="http://www.cs.uml.edu/~wang/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jie Wang, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science, Director, Center for Network and Information Security</font></a>”, University of Massachusetts Lowell), and as I recall has testified in front of U.S. politicians, such as at the North Carolina state legislature, on computer network security after 9/11.</p> <p>So in the end it wasn’t unlike the Red Guard days of Cultural Revolution – as discussed in Part 2 of this blog article – but in a relative sense for me, namely that university life was more civil than middle school life – no physical hassling by “Chen” or beating of “Fang” and even the martial-arts roommate’s future specialization of “security” wasn’t bodily security.</p> <p>Still, I am intrigued to see that “Jie Wang” has changed his name from “王洁” when we were classmates to “王杰” now, making him a namesake of a famous Chinese army engineer soldier, a squad leader who sacrificed himself in 1965 protecting People’s Militia members under his training from an accidentally ignited explosion. The very few elite Communist soldier martyr-national heroes of “Wang Jie”’s statue include Ouyang Hai (欧阳海) – also a squad leader – who sacrificed himself in November 1963 to avert a passenger train’s collision with a horse – a story made famous by the first grownup book I read as a child which happened to have been written by a military writer in the cultural affairs department led by “Auntie Zeng”’s army-colonel husband as discussed in <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%ba%8c%ef%bc%89%e7%ab%a5%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e5%90%af%e8%92%99/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my second-most recent Chinese blog post</font></a> and its <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a>.</p> <p>Nonetheless there were deadly events in my times, albeit in other related contexts. </p> <p>My special interests differed from “Jie Wang”s and when he was doing his undergraduate thesis under “Teacher Hou” I was doing mine under “Professor Li”, then chairman of Sun Yat-sen University’s new Computer Science Department. Professor Li had done graduate study in the Soviet Union before, explored a move from Northeast China back to his home province of Hunan neighboring Guangdong, and come to Sun Yat-sen University instead after “Teacher Hou” and others recommended him to the university leadership including “Auntie Zeng” – coincidentally the Ouyang Hai story happened in Hunan and the second grownup book I read as child, again a real-life based political novel, was about the Communist military in the Northeast before they marched south in late 1940s.</p> <p>When I applied for graduate study in the United States Professor Li seriously recommended the U. S. Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison – Dr. Carl de Boor there and his General Motors connection were Professor Li’s favorite and it also had Dr. Grace Wahba – but I preferred the Math program at the University of California, Berkeley, although Computer Science at Stanford was my first choice.</p> <p>Little did I know that the Army Math Research Center had been a target of deadly violence, by anti-Vietnam War students in the 1970 “Sterling Hall bombing”: led by the mathematician J. Barkley Rosser the Center survived the most powerful domestic bombing prior to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing but much of the Physic department’s laboratories were destroyed and a talented postdoc researcher, Robert Fassnacht, was killed; one of the perpetrators, university rowing athlete Leo Frederick Burt, escaped to Canada and remains one of America’s Most Wanted to this day (“<a href="http://www.amw.com/fugitives/case.cfm?id=47481" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Leo Frederick Burt – Domestic Terrorist Wanted</font></a>”, <em>America’s Most Wanted</em>; and, J. Chandra and Stephen M. Robinson, <em><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=Oh5uZfcgxSQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">An uneasy alliance: the Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, 1956-1987</font></a></em>, 2006, SIAM).</p> <p>Profiles of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police viewed rowing as one of Leo Burt’s most important connections (“<a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=WU0EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ask Doctor Rowing: Rowing’s Most Wanted</font></a>”, by Andy Anderson, Volume 6, Number 1, <em>Independent Rowing News</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Burt apparently reached Canada successfully despite being accorded FBI Ten Most Wanted status. There was a brief moment at the worlds in St. Catharines that summer (70) when Tim Mickelson, Burt’s old roommate who was rowing in the U.S.A. eight, received a couple of phone calls from an unidentified caller. Was Burt trying to get in touch with his old boatmate?</p> <p>“I came back to the dorm from the race course,” said Mickelson when I called him. “The caller wouldn’t leave a message, and except for my family, no one would have called me. I found out later that the Canadian Mounties were watching me carefully at the regatta, in case Burt called. …”</p> <p>“When I flew back from St. Catharines, the FBI was waiting at the airport for me,” Tim Mickelson said. “They told me about his part in the bombing. They thought that rowing had been his greatest connection at the University and he might try to seek help from one of his old rowing buddies. Every two or three months for the next few years they would call me up to check whether I’d heard anything.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Nothing did I or most people know that a former UC Berkeley Math professor with a University of Michigan Ph.D. – the same academic pedigrees as my later Ph.D. adviser at Berkeley who had been an anti-Vietnam War activist leader – by the name of Theodore Kaczynski, had secretly begun a serial bombing career just as I entered university study in 1978 – as what later the FBI codenamed the “Unabomber”. In May 1978 his first mail bomb listed Professor Buckley Crist of Northwestern University as the sender, and when returned to sender slightly injured the left hand of security guard Terry Marker opening it on Crist’s behalf; then not long before my arrival at Berkeley in 1982, on July 2 his first mail bomb targeting UC Berkeley-related persons wounded the right hand and face of Electrical Engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos (“<a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/SUSPECT'S+PATH+JIBES+WITH+UNABOMBER'S.-a083935977" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Suspect’s path jibes with Unabomber’s</font></a>”, by Richard Perez-Pena, April 7, 1996, <em>Los Angeles Daily News</em> (courtesy of <em>The Free Library</em>); “<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9404E7D9113CF932A25755C0A961958260" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Diogenes Angelakos, 77, Scholar Who Was Target of Unabomber</font></a>”, June 11, 1997, <em>The New York Times</em>; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ted Kaczynski</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>).</p> <p>I arrived in San Francisco and Berkeley on August 28, 1982. </p> <p>Among others taking the journey after English training together was “Yu”, a former peasant, soldier and then worker at the Guangdong Tractor Factory (as in Part 2 of this blog article Red Guards in this factory and in the Guangzhou Electric Motors Factory – where middle school “Teacher Luo” lived – across the south side of Sun Yat-sen University campus were the major local nemeses of the university Red Flag Red Guards in early Cultural Revolution); after a Statistics focus as a Math major he was going to UCLA (“<a href="ftp://ftp.math.binghamton.edu/pub/qyu/college.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">My College Dream – From a peasant, a soldier and a worker to a professor</font></a>”, by Qiqing Yu, May 6, 2006, Department of Mathematical Sciences, SUNY, Binghamton).</p> <p>There was also “Ron Chen”, one step more senior than me with already a master’s degree in Computer Science specializing in Computational Math; he was going to Texas A&M University at College Station (“<a href="http://www.issnip.unimelb.edu.au/participant-item/international/prof._ron_chen" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Prof. Ron Chen</font></a>”, ISSNIP, The University of Melbourne).</p> <p>At Berkeley I became the latest roommate of a senior Math graduate student, “Li”, one of the most active Chinese graduate students on campus, who would give me a considerable amount of help getting my studies on track. </p> <p>How could I have such luck? Another “Fang” (方), a computer systems technician at Sun Yat-sen university who was also a friend and South China Teacher’s College’s affiliated middle school alumnus of my roommate “Jie Wang”, was from the circle of kids at South China Institute of Technology and knew a professor there whose son was a fellow Berkeley Math graduate student and former roommate of “Li”’s, and so before my journey a new connection was already made.</p> <p>In <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%b8%80%ef%bc%89%e4%bb%8e%e5%b9%bc%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e6%95%85%e4%ba%8b%e8%af%b4%e8%b5%b7/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my February 2010 Chinese blog post</font></a> and its <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a> I mentioned an episode in 1984 when a Taiwanese visiting professor of Philosophy was about to go to teach at Beijing University, had “Li” deliver his new book to a Taiwanese author living across the San Francisco Bay not far from Stanford, and then not long after that the other author, Henry Liu (pen name Jiang Nan, 江南) who had recently written an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, president of the government in Taiwan and son of Chiang Kai-shek, was murdered at his home.</p> <p>Such reinforced the sense that it’s dangerous for Chinese and Taiwanese intellectuals to make an enemy of the Chiang father-and-son dynasty. </p> <p>But there were silver linings in this event’s unraveling: a highly political murder was quickly solved to the degree that not only the responsible Taiwanese gang members and leader in the United States were pinpointed but their links to the top of the Taiwanese military intelligence were uncovered; moreover, a crucial break in solving this unusual crime came by modern technology, from recording of telephone calls between the gang and Taiwanese military intelligence made by the U.S. National Security Agency specializing in electronic surveillance of international communications (“<a href="http://www.taiwandc.org/twcom/tc19-int.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Taiwan Communiqué: The murder of Henry Liu</font></a>”, April 1985, International Committee for Human Rights in Taiwan; and, “<a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41263.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Democratic Reforms in Taiwan: Issues for Congress</font></a>”, by Shirley A. Kan, May 26, 2010, U. S. Congressional Research Service).</p> <p>However according to author David E. Kaplan in his 1992 book, <em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=h60DAQAAIAAJ&dq=editions:h60DAQAAIAAJ" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Fires of the Dragon: politics, murder, and the Kuomintang</font></a></em>, the NSA had obtained the information before the assassination and sent it to the CIA, but the FBI with which Liu had a relationship was not informed:</p> <blockquote> <p>“The implications are troubling. The NSA had picked up someone in Los Angeles talking to KMT military intelligence about having to “finish the job” on a well-known Chinese writer and FBI asset—and yet the FBI was never told.</p> <p>Henry Liu would not have understood. Henry always saw his life in America—his U.S. citizenship, his relationship with the FBI—as the last and best line of defense against the KMT. Yet in the end his adopted homeland would offer no protection at all.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Another murder shocked UC Berkeley while I was there, revealing the state of race relations among the young and ambitious student body, an educated and integrating sector of the American society: An Asian American female student of petite physique, whose family name was “Lee” if I recall correctly, was found murdered in the woods up the Berkeley Hills behind university campus, and the killer turned out to be her white and athletic fraternity student boyfriend, who during a jog together attacked her with a rock, bludgeoning her and leaving her for dead; her parents sobbed with sadness and sorrow when they came to her memorial service from her hometown Boston.</p> <p>Others got a sense how far the weaker minority could go when it came to interracial relations, i.e., not far at all.</p> <p>By the spring of 1984 I had moved to an apartment in Richmond near Albany and my new roommate David (Ngi) Chin was a Computer Science Ph.D. student specializing in a subfield of Artificial Intelligence – focusing on the role of intelligent agents in natural language systems. An MIT grad from Boston, born in Hong Kong, David played some chess and softball but I only played tennis and volleyball regularly with him. His previous roommate and fellow Computer Science student Vincent Lau had left school early for the computer industry.</p> <p>By late spring I also passed the Ph.D. qualifying exam, marking the start of research-oriented Ph.D. study under my thesis adviser.</p> <p>In May 1985 the Electrical Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department was mail-bombed again, this time permanently severing four right-hand fingers and part of the right arm of graduate student John Hauser, an Air Force pilot and graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs; luckily, Professor Diogenes Angelakos was nearby and helped Hauser handle his severed arteries using a necktie. Despite the ensuing psychological shock and the ruining of his astronaut dream, Hauser completed his Ph.D. in 1989 and is a professor in Boulder, CO. (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/04/us/unabomber-s-track-victims-places-where-bombs-killed-day-for-memories-nervous.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On the Unabomber’s Track: the Victims; At the Places Where Bombs Killed, a Day for Memories and Nervous Optimism</font></a>”, By Neil MacFarquhar, April 4, 1996, <em>The New York Times</em>; “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/bkgrdstories.victims.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">To Unabomb Victims, a Deeper Mystery</font></a>”, by George Lardner and Lorraine Adams, April 14, 1996, <em>Washington Post</em>; and, “<a href="http://ecee.colorado.edu/fac_staff/vitas/Hauser_CV.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">John Hauser, Vita</font></a>”, ECEE Department, University of Colorado at Boulder.)</p> <p>The EE Division of EECS Dept. was located at Cory Hall while the Computer Science Division was housed in Mathematics Department’s Evans Hall along with Statistics Department and part of Economics Department, and so these mail-bombings weren’t that close to me. Despite the injuries and fears they also looked mild at the time compared to the outright murders mentioned above, and did not garner as much media coverage either.</p> <p>As for the possibility of a serial attacker, soon in June news headlines in the San Francisco Bay Area were dominated by the discovery of gruesome adventures of two former U.S. Marines in the area, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who had murdered at least 11 and possibly as many as 25 people in a year’s time, usually taking them to their property in Wilseyville in the Sierra foothills; Ng’s shoplifting brought them to police attention, and upon arrest on possessing missing persons’ items Lake committed suicide; originally from Hong Kong, Ng had joined the Marines lying about his citizenship and been posted to Hawaii, now took a flight to Chicago taking along a .22 caliber pistol, and fled to Canada where his sisters lived in Toronto and Calgary (“<a href="http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/ng/call_1.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Charles Ng: Cheating Death</font></a>”, by Patrick Bellamy, truTV Crime Library; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ng" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Charles Ng</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>).</p> <p>By the time I was getting my Math Ph.D. in 1988 my decision was to do Computer Science teaching and research at the University of British Columbia in Canada. The acting Department Head there who made the decision to hire me had told me that he heard about my visit to the University of Toronto in October 1987 and another to the University of Colorado at Boulder in February 1988, and that he himself was once a scientist at the Army Math Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin – a connection was extended.</p> <p>I arrived in Vancouver on August 24, 1988 – unaware that coincidentally it was an anniversary date of the 1970 Sterling Hall Bombing in Madison.</p> <p>At the new faculty orientation and get-to-know functions of the UBC Computer Science Department two couples really stood out: the new Department Head and her husband, both mathematical computer scientists hired from IBM Research in California for the same academic year, and our computer systems manager Frederick (Rick) Sample, a tall, athletic and handsome young man, who other staff whispered in my ear was a martial-arts expert, and his wife Linda, a recent Electrical Engineering graduate and former member of the UBC women’s rowing team according to these others – one of these others was “Theresa”, whose sister “Christine” was to be a friend of Elaine Ng’s mother “Auntie Liming” taking her daughter from Hong Kong to Vancouver to high school and sponsor Elaine for the 1990 Miss Asia Pageant, as discussed in <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/%e5%bf%86%e5%be%80%e6%98%94%ef%bc%8c%e5%ad%a6%e5%8e%86%e5%8f%b2%e6%99%ba%e6%85%a7%ef%bc%88%e4%ba%8c%ef%bc%89%e7%ab%a5%e5%b9%b4%e7%9a%84%e5%90%af%e8%92%99/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my second-most recent Chinese blog post</font></a> and its <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">English Synopsis</font></a>.</p> <p>The Fall semester soon got into rhythm, a senior colleague “David” (or “DGK” alternatively) who had taken part in hiring me liked jogging in the late afternoon and our new boss “Maria” (or “MMK”), whom he had known since late 1970s when she visited UBC as a new Ph.D., became his jogging partner. On one of the days I was invited to join them. </p> <p>Boy, how embarrassed was I, so out of shape jogging along a trail in the woods of the University Endowment Lands that “David” and “Maria” had to slow down so I could keep up with them, and then shorten the route – I never accepted to jog with them again so as not to erode the quality of their daily exercise.</p> <p>But on that only jogging trip together, about halfway we were surpassed by Rick and his jogging partner “Moyra”, a computer systems staff member tall and athletic just like Rick, a former member of the Canadian women’s national volleyball team and assistant coach of the junior women’s national team – my favorite women’s sport as in Part 1 of this blog article. They greeted and breezed by us – it’s night and day but I remember the good-natured and understanding smile I always got from Rick.</p> <p>Soon it was the spring of 1989, and mass protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing were one of the daily headline news topics. I did not even own a television set and normally rarely watched, and now showed up often in the department’s coffee room to catch the latest CNN and other reports on TV and chat with others. One of the persons who showed much interest in hearing my introduction on the political system in China and my opinions on where things might be heading was John Demco, the assistant computer systems manager under Rick.</p> <p>Those who follow the development of Canadian internet may know John Demco, sometimes touted as “the godfather of .ca” (“<a href="http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/media/releases/2008/mr-08-121.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Former UBC staff honoured for foresight of creating Canadian online identity</font></a>”, September 9, 2008, UBC Public Affairs; “<a href="http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=e46fd653-fde7-42ea-b2c2-a3a37ee5f640" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">UBC names learning centre after .ca 'godfather'</font></a>”, September 10, 2008, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>; and, “<a href="http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2008/09/11/the-demco-learning-centre-a-lesson-in-community-spirit/" target="_blank">John <font color="#0000ff">Demco’s lesson in volunteerism</font></a>”, by Jeff Rybak, September 11, 2008, <em>Maclean’s</em>), but few in the public know Rick Sample, John’s talented, all-around superior over twenty years ago, because Rick was soon dead – in a murder case that would go all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and yet end with no one held responsible for the crime.</p> <p>The basic framework of that murder was simple and narrow as summarized in the Supreme Court of Canada decision upholding the original jury acquittal of the accused, Barry James Evans, of first-degree murder after the Crown prosecution had won a new trial decision from the B.C. Court of Appeal (“<a href="http://scc.lexum.org/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1020/index.do" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">R. v. Evans, File No.:  22929</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, Judgment rendered orally March 22, 1993, Reasons for judgment rendered June 17, 1993, Supreme Court of Canada):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The victim was killed by a gun owned by appellant.  Appellant contended that he had flown from Calgary to Vancouver the day the victim was murdered to show the victim's wife, Linda Sample, how to shoot.  When she refused to take the afternoon off, he left the gun in her glove compartment and took a cab to visit the victim and from there he walked to the airport for the return flight to Calgary.</p> <p>Appellant and Linda Sample had had some form of relationship which had created tensions in the long friendship between the victim and appellant but these tensions seemed to have been resolved before the murder.  Linda Sample testified that she had not seen appellant the day of the murder, that she had been at work and that she had been swimming during her lunch hour.”</p> </blockquote> <p>For this murder that took place on December 28, 1989, a few weeks after the December 6 Montreal Massacre (discussed in Part 1 of this blog article) in which 14 women were selectively murdered, the final top court decision coincidentally saw a lone female and lone French Canadian Justice dissent from her four colleagues on the panel, which included new Justice John C. Major of Alberta whom I have profiled in my 2009 blog posts on Canadian politics in the context of his connections to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney who appointed him on November 13, 1992, and to German Canadian businessman Kerlheinz Schreiber – two persons at the center of the Airbus Affair (“<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-10/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”).</p> <p>Reading from the SCC summary quoted above one would think that either Evans obviously killed Rick Sample – his former roommate and mutual karate friend since the UBC computer science student days – or Rick’s wife Linda – a former UBC rower – had to do with Rick’s death. The acquittal though on technical basis to do with semantics of witness statements from Linda certainly left an air of doubt as to the woman’s innocence in this three-way relationship.</p> <p>The SCC Reasons for Judgment described the trial proceeding outcome quite clearly. The jury was instructed by the trial judge to consider the charge as a whole when reviewing the evidence, which included prosecution contention and evidence that Evans had wanted to play the  role of an assassin, supported by some of Linda Sample’s testimony. In the end the jury felt unsure about it or about Linda Sample’s testimony, and wanted to know if during the RCMP investigation Linda had actually given out Barry Evans's name as matching police profile of the suspect; the jury thought it was important not only for pinpointing Barry Evans but for ruling Linda out as a suspect: if Linda had taken the gun from Evans as alleged by Evans’s defense – a second-hand .22 caliber pistol bought on November 29 for gun club use and sneaked onto his Vancouver flight on December 28 concealed in a metal cookie tin inside a computer parts box (“Computer scientist's friend turned assassin, court told”, by Kayce White, February 21, and “Accused says he left his gun with victim's wife”, by Kayce White, March 5, 1991, <a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></em></a>) – she would not have easily given out his name.</p> <p>The prosecution offered to put Linda Sample on the witness stand again to find out from her what she had told police, but that was refused by the trial judge and the jury then delivered a verdict of acquittal.</p> <p>In the subsequent prosecution appeal a panel of the B.C. Court of Appeal – B.C. Chief Justice Allan McEachern and Justices Josieh Wood and David Hinds – ruled that the trial judge had erred in not allowing the prosecution to recall Linda Sample to the stand, and ordered a new trial, describing the prosecution case as “very strong … almost an unanswerable one”.</p> <p>While the Supreme Court of Canada agreed with the B.C. Court of Appeal that the trial judge had made an error, the majority of the SCC panel concluded that letting Linda Sample onto the witness stand again on that particular issue “could not have affected the outcome”, for the reason that RCMP investigator Cpl. Robert Doige already answered affirmatively in his testimony that at some point Linda Sample did give him the name of Barry Evans – the jury should have just used this evidence:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Q. Now, ultimately in the course of your discussion with her it's correct to say that the name Barry Evans came up; is that correct?</p> <p>A. Yes it did.   [Emphasis added.]”</p> </blockquote> <p>This was a rather intriguing case in how the trial verdict, and the appeals, turned out. I can understand the majority SCC Justices’ legal view but the discrepancy of the jury minds could be more subtle.</p> <p>One could be concerned about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s bias because Barry Evans was the son of a former RCMP officer (“Albertan acquitted of murder charge”, by Kayce White, March 11, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></a></em>). Given the affirmative answer in the RCMP investigator’s testimony when asked if Linda Sample had given Barry Evans’s name, wouldn’t lack of candidness in Linda’s testimony indicate worry rather than something wrong on her part?</p> <p>One could be concerned that the prosecution favored Linda Sample in pushing for an “assassin” explanation that was unconvincing, which the defense lawyer Noel O’Brien kept hitting on (“Evans murder trial closes”, by Kayce White, March 8, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank">The <font color="#0000ff">Vancouver Sun</font></a></em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Both Evans and Linda Sample testified they were strongly attracted to each other and exchanged love letters. Linda Sample told the court she believed Evans was "obsessed with assassination."</p> <p>"The whole concept (of Evans) being obsessed with assassination is ridiculous. It was part of a plot to generate movie scripts by computer," O'Brien said.”</p> </blockquote> <p>One could also be concerned that the trial judge – B.C. Supreme Court Justice John Anderson – capitulated to the high caliber of Barry Evans’s legal defense. The Calgary computer programmer of “whiz” reputation was represented by Noel O’Brien of the Calgary law firm O’Brien Devlin Markey MacLeod, whose partner Donald MacLeod had been representing the notorious Charles Ng in his legal fight to avoid extradition to face the death penalty in the United States. </p> <p>Back in July 1985 after a month on the lam Charles Ng was seen shoplifting in a Calgary department store; approached by two security guards Ng pulled out his .22 caliber handgun and in the struggle security guard John Doyle was shot in the left hand, but Ng was subdued and arrested by police (“<a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-07-07/news/8502130662_1_murder-suspect-charles-ng-leonard-lake-night-vision-rifle-scope"><font color="#0000ff">California Mass Murder Suspect Arrested In Canada</font></a>”, July 7, 1985, <em>Chicago Tribune</em>). </p> <p>As Canada did not have the death penalty and Canadians were generally opposed to extraditing someone to face that, Ng’s extradition was not easy, and he even planned to kill the prosecutors – among others in a 77-person ‘hit list’ – or failing that kill a prison guard so he could serve a murder sentence in Canada (“<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE5D61E38F932A35752C1A96E948260&pagewanted=all" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Edmonton Journal; With Death at Issue, Can Canada Wash Its Hands?</font></a>”, by John F. Burns, November 1, 1988, <em>The New York Times</em>; and, “Prosecutors seeking extradition top Ng's ‘hit list’”, September 28, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>).</p> <p>Paradoxically, such deadly plans coexisted with a ‘changed man’ in some sense: in the California murder spree he had enjoyed enslaving and torturing women, but in Canadian jail Charles Ng was now taking correspondence courses in Psychology since Fall 1989, and another on counseling girls and women beginning February 1990 (“Accused sex killer's university studies prompts protest by Edmonton taxpayer”, October 30, 1989, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>; and, Don Lasseter, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=X3iOcZ0rP2wC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Die for Me: The Terrifying True Story of the Charles Ng & Leonard Lake Torture Murders</font></em></a>, 2000, Pinnacle Books).</p> <p>Imprisoned at the Prince Albert penitentiary in Saskatchewan, Ng was taking Psychopathology courses at Alberta’s Athabasca University paid for by the government, but he bought his own computer and paid for the course on counseling women – at Simon Fraser University (“Ng held in special prison unit”, by Rick Mofina, February 21, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Calgary Herald</font></a></em>). That was the same university in the Vancouver area where according to Barry James Evans he met Linda Sample, showed her how to shoot and left it in her car on the day of the Rick Sample murder near the end of 1989.</p> <p>On February 20, 1991, the Barry James Evans trial at the B.C. Supreme Court began with prosecution argument, and on February 21 it heard testimony from Evans’s boyhood friend Jim Hutchison while on that same day the Charles Ng appeal began at the Supreme Court of Canada with Don MacLeod making his opening argument (“'Thrilled' with pal's wife: Evans cited special bond, murder trial told”, by Mark Edge, February 22, 1991, <a href="http://www.theprovince.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Province</font></em></a>; “Ng extradition would violate charter, Supreme Court told”, February 22, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></a></em>; and, “Evans murder trial closes”, by Kayce White, March 8, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.vancouversun.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Vancouver Sun</font></a></em>).</p> <p>But any concern that the B.C. trial judge had given leeway to the aggressive Evans-Ng lawyers was dispelled two years later by Supreme Court of Canada’s conclusion that the trial judge’s refusal to allow another testimony from Linda Sample should not have affected the jury verdict – even if by this later time new Justice John Major from Calgary was on the top court he was only one of four forming that majority opinion.</p> <p>Nonetheless, with all due respect for Justice Major I note that in February 1991 he was still a Calgary lawyer in a Canadian law firm headed by then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere, and he shared the February 20 birthday with my father (my 2009 blog posts, “<a href="http://fgaospace.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-myth-of-political-vendetta-in-the-royal-canadian-mounted-police%E2%80%99s-airbus-affair-investigation-the-politics-of-brian-mulroney-and-jean-chretien-and-some-social-undercurrents-in-canada-pa-10/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”).</p> <p>It was the trial jury’s decision, the SCC Reasons for Judgment explained, and the jury decision should be respected:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Among appellate courts there has always been a great deal of healthy respect for and deference to a jury verdict of acquittal.  This deferential approach is appropriate and correct.  The special significance of a verdict of acquittal by a jury has also been recognized by this Court in R. v. Kirkness, [1990] 3 S.C.R. 74.  There on behalf of the majority it was said at p. 83:</p> <p>     The verdict of the jury constitutes, in a very real way, the verdict of the <br />     community.  Trial by jury in criminal cases is a process that functions <br />     exceedingly well and constitutes a fundamentally important aspect of our <br />     democratic society.  It is not members of the judiciary, but rather the <br />     members of the jury, sitting as members of the community, who make <br />     decision as to guilt or innocence which is so vitally important both to the <br />     individual accused and the community.  <br />     . . .  <br />     It follows that only if there was a significant error made by the trial judge <br />     in the course of the charge should the verdict of acquittal be set aside. <br />     [Emphasis added.]”</p> </blockquote> <p>In other words, the jury represented the community and they already heard the RCMP testimony that Linda Sample had given out Barry Evans’s name, so now if they were still unsure of her innocence and Evans’s guilt it’s just being “a fundamentally important aspect of our democratic society”.</p> <p>The top court also pointed out that Canada was already better than the United States in allowing prosecution appeal – presumably that the earlier prosecution appeal to the B.C. Court of Appeal after the jury verdict could not have been possible in the U.S.:</p> <blockquote> <p>“In setting the standard for reversal, it is worth observing that, among the <br />major English-speaking common-law jurisdictions, Canada appears to possess the most liberal provisions for Crown appeals.  In some jurisdictions, particularly in the United States, the prosecution is limited to interlocutory appeals from unfavourable rulings made before a verdict is reached.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The jury verdict was a victory not only for the accused Barry James Evans whose link to the murder was so obvious with the evidence he admitted to, but also for lawyer Noel O’Brien; the <em>Calgary Herald</em> proclaimed it in a story headline, “Acquittal tops city lawyer's career” (by Tom Keiser, March 12, 1991, <em><a href="http://www.calgaryherald.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Calgary Herald</font></a></em>), with praise from Don MacLeod in particular:</p> <blockquote> <p>“O'Brien's partner Don MacLeod - who took the Charles Ng extradition case to the country's highest court - agrees: "His preparation is faultless."”</p> </blockquote> <p>From 1991 to 1993, every March there was a court decision on the Barry Evans case.</p> <p>By the time of the second one in 1992 when the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled in favor of a new trial, I was in a political dispute with my boss “Maria” at UBC Computer Science Department.</p> <p>By the time of the Supreme Court of Canada judgment in 1993 I had become engulfed in troubles due also to my attempts to air criticisms of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership and conduct. On February 24 Mulroney announced his decision to retire.</p> <p>When Mr. Mulroney stepped down on June 25 he had made a number of last-minute patronage appointments the day before, including that of his personal tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere as Chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.</p> <p>On August 11, a UBC computer science programmer, a good boy who had been president of his computer science student class, was clubbed to death with a baseball bat over his head while riding his bike in the woods of the University Endowment Lands.</p> <p>On August 28, Bruce Verchere died of a .22 caliber shotgun wound to his head in his Montreal home in what was ruled a suicide. Someone there from outside his family was Greg Williams, live-in boyfriend of Bruce’s son David and a McGill University rowing athlete, who showed the police investigators where the guns were stored in the house.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2011/05/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 4</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-5718350926932362912010-11-22T23:50:00.001-05:002011-08-08T20:00:22.782-04:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 2) – when violence is politically organized<p align="left">(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2010/10/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continued from Part 1</a>)</p> <p>In 2006 when <em>The Globe and Mail</em> Journalist Jan Wong made the allegation that Marc Lepine, Valery Fabrikant and Kimveer Gill, the killers in the three mass shootings on Montreal university and college campuses since 1989, were victims of marginalization of immigrant minorities “in a society that valued pure laine” (<em>pure laine</em> refers to a person from an established French family), and caused a firestorm of condemnations including from the Canadian Parliament, Wong also made a trip to Beijing, China, where she had once served as the newspaper’s bureau chief, from 1988 to 1994. </p> <p>In this 2006 China trip Jan Wong finally decided to look for an old Chinese acquaintance she had betrayed back in 1973 when – after she had gone to China as a 19-year-old “starry-eyed Maoist” in 1972 and become one of only two Beijing University foreign students – she informed the Chinese authority about a female student who sought her help to go to the United States. Only in 2006 did Wong realize that the girl was then sent to the countryside to do hard labor and suffered, and that during that difficult time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution most of the girl’s friends also had to denounce her; but Wong also felt relieved to see that the women was now doing quite prosperously. (Jan Wong, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Kg47KM0kn4cC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found</em></font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>, 2007, Random House, Inc.; <a href="http://www.macleans.ca/culture/lifestyle/article.jsp?content=200701031_1192_1192" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The one who didn’t get away</font></a>”, by Brian Bethune, October 31, 2007, <em>Maclean’s</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.canada.com/richmondnews/news/thebeat/story.html?id=00bc4fa2-185d-4fa5-b2ba-c334fcf6de56" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lunch table turns on Wong</font></a>”, November 13, 2007, <em>Richmond News</em>.)</p> <p>1972 had been an historic year when Jan Wong first went to China, if one gives it a little more thought.</p> <p>On February 21, 1972, Richard Nixon made a historic visit to China – the first by any U.S. President – and opened official dialogues between the two countries which had become staunch enemies after 1949 when the Communists triumphed in China. In his week-long visit Nixon met Chairman Mao Zedong and held extensive talks with Premier Zhou Enlai.(“<a href="http://millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident/events/02_21" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Events in Presidential History: President Richard Nixon Arrives in China -- February 21, 1972</font></a>”, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia; and, “<a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/DOC_readers/kissinger/nixzhou/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Record of Historic Richard Nixon-Zhou Enlai Talks in February 1972 Now Declassified</font></a>”, <em>The National Security Archive</em>, The George Washington University.)</p> <p>Then on May 22, 1972, Richard Nixon arrived in Moscow as the first U.S. President to visit the Soviet Union though it was the second visit for him – after one as Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President in July-August 1959 during which he had the famous “kitchen debate” with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The 1972 visit launched a period of genuine détente between the two superpowers, and included the signing of the first permanent nuclear arms reduction treaty SALT I. (“<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/24/newsid_2779000/2779551.stm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">On This Day, July 24, 1959: Khrushchev and Nixon have war of words</font></a>”, <em>BBC News</em>; “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/summit/archive/com1972-1.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Joint Communiqué, Moscow, 1972</font></a>”, <em>The Washington Post</em>; and, Raymond L. Garthoff, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=mGG-x_tuNUcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Détente and confrontation: American-Soviet relations from Nixon to Reagan</em></font></a>, 1994, Brookings Institution Press.)</p> <p>Later in September 1972, the aptly named “Summit Series” of men’s ice hockey games between the Soviet Union national team and the Canadian national team were held and won by Canada. These 1972 Summit Series were the first between the two hockey superpowers, and have become so famous that the jersey worn by Canadian player Paul Henderson when he scored the winning goal has recently fetched an incredible $1 million US in an auction – the highest price ever paid for a hockey item. (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_Series" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Summit Series</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; “<a href="http://www.thestar.com/sports/hockey/international/article/768644--summit-series-hero-paul-henderson-battling-leukemia" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Summit Series hero Paul Henderson battling leukemia</font></a>”, February 20, 2010, <em>Toronto Star</em>; and, “<a href="http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Henderson-s-1-2-million-Summit-Series-jersey-to?urn=nhl-272971"><font color="#0000ff">Henderson's $1.2 million Summit Series jersey to tour Canada</font></a>”, by Sean Leahy, September 28, 2010, <em>Yahoo! Sports</em>.)</p> <p>Shortly afterwards in October 1972, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a French Montrealer who had swept to majority power in 1968 in the mist of “Trudeaumania” and personal show of defiance against violent threats from Quebec separatists after ascending to the helm of the Liberal party, nearly lost an election amid “Trudeauphobia”, forming only a minority government propped up by the New Democratic party farther to the left. During his first term Trudeau had in 1969 shepherded in the Official Languages Act to establish French alongside English as Canada’s official languages, and in 1970 invoked the War Measures Act during the so-called October Crisis to handle the Montreal kidnappings of British diplomat James Cross and Quebec Cabinet minister Pierre Laporte by the leftwing separatist Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ). (“<a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/trud-o10.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Pierre Elliot Trudeau & the demise of liberal Canadian nationalism</font></a>”, by Keith Jones, October 10, 2000, World Socialist Web Site; “<a href="http://newsinreview.cbclearning.ca/wp-content/uploads/2000/10/trudeau.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Pierre Trudeau: Captivating a Nation</font></a>”, October 2000, <em>CBC Learning</em>; “<a href="http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/primeministers/h4-3375-e.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">First Among Equals: The Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1919-2000</font></a>”, updated January 29, 2002, Library and Archives Canada; and, “<a href="http://www.1972summitseries.com/trudeau.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Did Team Canada Save Pierre Elliot Trudeau?</font></a>”, by Joe Pelletier, 1972SummitSeries.com.)</p> <p>It was amid the atmosphere of historic East-West political thawing that Jan Wong travelled from Montreal to Beijing in 1972 – except that Montreal didn’t share that kind of warming and Jan Wong went to China to join the Cultural Revolution as a self-styled “Montreal Maoist”. </p> <p>Montreal had been ‘red hot’ – the kidnappers of James Cross and Pierre Laporte had trained with Palestinian militants, Laporte was killed one day after the War Measures Act was invoked, and the kidnappers received safe passage to Cuba in exchange for releasing Cross. Jan Wong showed that she was no less so when the year after in 1973 – the year of the first Canadian Prime Ministerial visit to China by Pierre Trudeau who had been there twice prior to entering politics – Wong voluntarily reported to the Chinese Communist authority the student friend who had confided in her the wish to go to the United States. (J. L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=taZ0pK71QikC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy</em></font></a>, 1991, University of Toronto Press; Jan Wong, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ng0Rr7FsoqQC&printsec=frontcover&vq=yin#v=onepage&q=yin&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now</em></font></a>, 1997, Random House, Inc.; and, “<a href="http://www.mta.ca/about_canada/study_guide/debates/october_crisis.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Great Canadian Debates: The War Measures Act</font></a>”, updated September 24, 2002, Centre for Canadian Studies, Mount Allison University.)</p> <p>In fact, it wasn’t only Jan Wong and whoever her comrades but Canada’s main Maoist political party were based in Montreal. (Robert Jackson Alexander, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=FjM-4ZG9iuMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Maoism in the Developed World</em></font></a>, 2001, Greenwood Publishing Group.)</p> <p>And it wasn’t until 33 years later in 2006, the same year she turned against the Quebec society’s “pure laine” attitude toward immigrant minorities, that Jan Wong bothered to find out what happened to, and reconcile with, the Chinese woman who and whose wish to go the United States she had betrayed in 1973.</p> <p>Or as Jan Wong herself characterizes it – about the political significance of her rare 1972 invitation from the Chinese government for study at Beijing University (Jan Wong, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Kg47KM0kn4cC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found</em></font></a>, 2007, Random House, Inc.):</p> <blockquote> <p>“When I arrived in China, I confused everyone, including myself. I was a Montreal Maoist who looked Chinese but couldn’t speak Chinese. …</p> <p>… Looking back on the mystery of it call, I believe I was accepted at Beijing University because I was in the right place at the right time. After six years of Cult Rev xenophobia, Beijing was trying to thaw relations with the West. In 1971, it had invited the U.S. table-tennis team to Beijing. In 1972, I was the logical next step, the first Canadian to study there since the Cultural Revolution.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I see! As a logical step of the time the Chinese government made sure to invite a “Montreal Maoist” before opening more widely to the outside world, and 16 years later in 1988 – it happened to be the year I came to Canada – <em>The Globe and Mail</em>, which had long considered itself “Canada’s National Newspaper” (“<a href="http://www.globelink.ca/about/history/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Globe and Mail History</font></a>”, 2010, <em>Globe Media</em>), chose this “Montreal Maoist” to represent Canadian journalism to the Chinese people – as its 13th Beijing correspondent.</p> <p>I can already imagine hearing the whisper – but how could <em>The Globe and Mail</em> have had anyone better when Jan Wong’s prerogative as the first Canadian to be a Beijing University student during the Cultural Revolution meant she got some of Chairman Mao’s geishas among her classmate friends? (Jan Wong, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ng0Rr7FsoqQC&printsec=frontcover&vq=yin#v=onepage&q=yin&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now</em></font></a>, 1997, Random House, Inc.)</p> <p>But then when Jan Wong lamented about the French Quebec society’s “pure laine” attitude having to do with ethnic immigrant minority resentment, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> made a 180-degree turn and gagged her – as discussed in <a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2010/10/team-canada-female-athletes.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Part 1 of this blog article</font></a>.</p> <p>Seeing this kind of journalistic calculation representing Canada by Jan Wong, one gets the idea that no Canadian story involving someone of Chinese heritage or origin is newsworthy until it can be for Chinese consumption. </p> <p>And so from my personal angle, an in-depth discussion I would like to have about politically motivated violence – particularly violence at institutions of higher learning – would have to begin with Chinese stories I witnessed as a child in China during the Cultural Revolution.</p> <p>My ten years of elementary and secondary education coincided with the duration of the Cultural Revolution, 1966 – 1976. Our class’s experiences were quite unlike those of another age group in recent Chinese history: schooling was interrupted several times in the first few years due to Cultural Revolution activities or school-safety concerns; most of the school curricula were watered down and filled with politically correct contents; regular political indoctrination sessions must be attended several times a week to study teachings of Chairman Mao and policies of the Communist party, where everyone was required to express gratitude and loyal support as well as conduct self criticism confessing one’s own mistakes or shortcomings; in addition, regular periods of labor work in the factory and the farm field were mandatory and became more demanding during secondary schooling.</p> <p>But already things were less tumultuous for us than for the older folks. Many of our older siblings or cousins became or had to become members of the Red Guards, who carried out organized anti-status quo activities, some violent, and our parents were likely targets of such activities, or at least endured a difficult time to avoid being targets and adjust to a physically and socially harder life demanded by the political correctness.</p> <p>Right from the start, my schooling didn’t actually begin until early 1967. </p> <p>My family – me, my parents, maternal grandparents and younger sister – had been living in a dorm-apartment allocated to my mother by the education bureau of the southern Haizhu District (海珠区) in the city of Guangzhou, where she was a middle school teacher. The elementary school entrance age was seven at the time, and at age six in 1965 I applied to a new school which I recall was named Haizhu District Experimental School, that was experimenting with admitting younger children, but I was quickly turned down after an interview. </p> <p>I am not sure what this school is today, definitely not Haizhu District Experimental Elementary School (<a href="http://www.hzqsyxx.com/material/commonJsp/plug_site/info/info.do?method=infoLook&param=,showcss=info_show_SumList,navigateId=1477,productId=35&infoId=11137" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州市海珠区实验小学</font></a>) founded in 1988 – the year I came to Canada – but possibly Haizhu Zhentai Experimental Elementary School (<a href="http://58.248.189.58/SchoolWeb/hzztsyxx/xxjj.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">海珠镇泰实验小学</font></a>) founded in 1963, which is located near the right location at Nanhua East Road (南华东路) near Tongqing Road (同庆路).</p> <p>When the Cultural Revolution began in the early summer of 1966, my mother was roughed up by her middle school’s student Red Guards, who came to our place ransacking and confiscating anything of hers that looked valuable, had her hair cut very short forcibly like her head had been shaved, and required her to attend daily regiment of critical self-reevaluation. In an age group with the combination of youthful restlessness, physically strength and enthusiasms for social experimentation, the middle-school student Red Guards were especially known for their nastiness and propensity for violence – with their teachers who unfortunately also had the role of behavioral counseling bearing the brunt of it during the early months of the revolution.</p> <p>In the fall of 1966 my father, then a junior faculty member at Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University, arranged for the family to move to the university campus, where the anarchy and violence were not as bad as in the middle school environment and were more targeted at officials and senior professors due to the intellectual focus of higher education.</p> <p>Me and Grandma were the exceptions at the time of moving – we had left for my first sojourn to the city of Shantou (Swatow), part of Grandma’s hometown she and Grandpa had not been back to since moving to Guangzhou in 1959 around the time of my birth, and didn’t return to Guangzhou until around the New Year of 1967 for my spring semester. (My Chinese blog-post series discussing personal experiences in the context of political events, <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">"忆往昔,学历史智慧" (“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom"),</font></a> has so far focused on the very earlier years to around age 5.)</p> <p>Both Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University and its campus were of reputations of prestige in Guangzhou (historically known as Canton), capital of Guangdong province: the university was founded in the 1920s as the national university for the province by the then Canton-based national government of Dr. Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan), father of the Chinese Republican Revolution, and after Sun’s death was renamed in his honor; then in the early 1950s the new Communist government of Mao Zedong had Zhongshan University take over the private Lingnan University, a Christian school, and move to Lingnan’s sprawling, Western-style campus. (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen_University" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sun Yat-sen University</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>There was another interesting yet often overlooked historical context about this merger of universities, which was only a part of the new Chinese government’s nationwide comprehensive revamp of higher education: Lingnan University had been founded in the 1880s as the Christian College in China by the American Presbyterian Church, but was separated from the mother church and became governed by a New York-based board of regents in the year 1893 amid anti-foreign sentiments in China – the year Chairman Mao was born. (“<a href="http://www.ln.edu.hk/info-about/history" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lingnan University: History and Development</font></a>”, Lingnan University; “<a href="http://drs.library.yale.edu:8083/saxon/SaxonServlet?style=http://drs.library.yale.edu:8083/saxon/EAD/yul.ead2002.xhtml.xsl&source=http://drs.library.yale.edu:8083/fedora/get/divinity:014/EAD&query=&altquery=*:*&filter=fgs.collection:%22Divinity%20Library%22&sortFields=fgs.title%2Basc&hitPageStart=101" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Guide to the Archives of the Trustees of Lingnan University</font></a>”, Yale University Library; and, “<a href="http://www.exeas.org/asian-revolutions/pdf/mao-timeline.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mao Zedong (1893-1976): Major Events in the Life of a Revolutionary Leader</font></a>”. <em>Expanding East Asian Studies</em>, Columbia University.)</p> <p>So unlike most of my new elementary classmates in 1967, I had not been born and raised on the Zhong Da (short for ZhongShan DaXue, i.e., Zhongshan University) campus of a wealth of history, and only one of my parents, i.e., my father, worked at ZD. But there was another family context that was not apparent at the time: my mother’s family had a long Christian history that had included Grandma’s paternal grandfather as one of the first-ever Chinese doctors of Western medicine in eastern Guangdong province – at the Swatow Mission Hospital founded in the 1860s by the English Presbyterian Mission. (My first blog article, <strong>"</strong><a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1ED043C52638635F!163.entry" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>", January 2009; and, my blog post on the history of Christianity in China, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2010/02/bangkok-to-kwangtung-and-back-to.html"><font color="#0000ff">Bangkok to Kwangtung, and back to America (Part 1) – Opening China to Christianity</font></a>”, February 2010.)</p> <p>As well, outside of the ZD campus I had been born and delivered in a Guangzhou hospital founded by the American Presbyterian Mission on December 12, 1899 as the affiliated medical clinic of the first women’s medical school in China. (My Chinese blog post, <font color="#0000ff">"<a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧" (“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom")</font></a></font>, February 2010.) </p> <p>Being new on ZD campus – except for one prior short stay at my father’s faculty dorm room beginning on the day the middle school Red Guards ransacked my mother’s dorm-apartment – I naturally did not know as much about what went on as my classmates at the university‘s affiliated elementary school also in Haizhu District, which was appropriately renamed “July1 Elementary School” in honor of the Chinese Communist Party’s birthday. </p> <p>Interestingly, 20 years after leaving the July 1 Elementary School in 1972, I became a Canadian citizen on July 1, Canada Day, 1992.</p> <p>For example, in early 1967 I had little awareness that as Grandma and I came to the family’s new dwelling on ZD campus (the basement of a house and then the first floor by the time Grandma and I arrived) and the new semester began, Zhao Ziyang, then Guangdong province’s Communist party leader, was also taken to Zhongshan University – on January 21 – for a short period of detention. Under pressure from the university student Red Guards, on January 22 Zhao agreed to a transfer of provincial party and government powers to a province-wide “Alliance” of Red Guard organizations, including handover of the official seals. (David L. Shambaugh, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?ei=wxfWTOTPC8L38AaA-PWQDA&ct=result&id=zzpxAAAAMAAJ&dq=red+guards+zhongshan+%22making+of+a+premier%22&q=red+guards+zhongshan#search_anchor" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The making of a premier: Zhao Ziyang's Provincial Career</em></font></a>, 1984, Westview Press, Chinese version, <a href="http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/4729970?lookfor=subject:%E8%B6%99%E7%B4%AB%E9%99%BD&offset=5&max=19" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>趙紫陽崛起與陷落</em></font></a>, translated by Xu Zerong (徐澤榮); and, Wei Zhao and Shibin Chen, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=VG8JAQAAIAAJ&q=zhongshan+university+zhao+ziyang&dq=zhongshan+university+zhao+ziyang&hl=en&ei=0hbWTIzSAYO88gb9qcisCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The biography of Zhao Ziyang</em></font></a>, 1989, Educational and Cultural Press.)</p> <p>It was a type of power transfer from the Communist party to the Red Guards where the Red Guards would not manage power but act as monitors. On the next day, January 23, an official announcement was issued for this power arrangement by the provincial party organ under Zhao Ziyang to all Communist party members in Guangdong province.</p> <p>This Guangdong approach to power transfer received immediate positive response from Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing, who was opposed to the full power takeover by Red Guards taking place in Shanghai. (“<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/3770409.html"><font color="#0000ff">一月夺权</font></a>”, by 叶曙明, December 4, 2005, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>.)</p> <p>At the time Liu Shaoqi, President of China and Deng Xiaoping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party had been branded “Capitalist Roaders” in 1966 and were in the process of being eliminated from the national leadership; there were tremendous pressures to do the same, from the revolutionary followers of Chairman Mao Zedong of the Communist Party, to the official powers at the provincial and regional levels.</p> <p>Unfortunately for Zhao Ziyang in Guangdong, Chairman Mao wanted a third type of power transfer to the Red Guards, one that would soon take place in Heilongjiang province in the northeast bordering the Soviet Union – a full power takeover with a key role for the military (and a role for some politically correct officials). In the evening of January 21 when Zhao Ziyang was taken to Zhongshan University, a next-day editorial in <em>People’s Daily</em>, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, was being broadcast calling for full power takeover by the revolution, and on January 23, the day Zhao Ziyang officially announced the Guangdong power transfer to under Red Guard monitoring, the Communist Party central issued a decision to use the military to support full power takeover in the provinces and regions. (“<a href="http://www.modernchinastudies.org/magazine%20data/mcs2001/mcs010211.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">文革中所谓的“上海一月革命”──毛泽东制造的一个“文革样板”</font></a>”, by 何蜀, 2001, <em>Modern China Studies</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.cass.net.cn/zhuanti/y_party/yc/yc_f/yc_f_093.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">对“文化大革命”中“三结合”的述评</font></a>”, <em>历史专题</em>, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.<font size="2">)</font></p> <p>Political differences with the local military and internal splits among the Guangdong Red Guards soon led to a March 1967 full military takeover – not Red Guard takeover – of Guangdong provincial powers by the Guangzhou Military Region, which was the military command center for several southern provinces and was loyal to their former boss, then Defense Minister Lin Biao, who had in 1966 become the sole Vice Chairman of the Communist Party and was effectively the henchman-leader of the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao. Zhao Ziyang lost his provincial leader job and was also branded a “Capitalist Roader”. (“<a href="http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E8%B5%B5%E7%B4%AB%E9%98%B3" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">赵紫阳</font></a>”and “<a href="http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/%E6%9E%97%E5%BD%AA" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">林彪</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; Ezra F. Vogel, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=NU2NLLjO1fUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform</font></em></a>, 1990, Harvard University Press; and, “<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/3809018.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州的夺权模式被中央否定</font></a>”, by 叶曙明, December 8, 2005, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>.)</p> <p>In this short-lived Guangdong political power experiment that began on January 21-23, 1967 at Sun Yat-sen University, was the same Zhao Ziyang who in the early 1980s became the Chinese Premier – several years after the 1976 deaths of Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai and the end of Cultural Revolution (Lin Biao had died in a 1971 plane crash in Mongolia trying to flee to the Soviet Union after a failed coup attempt against Mao). (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Ziyang" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Zhao Ziyang</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/arts/06iht-idbriefs7C.3055900.html?_r=1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Review: Mao's Last Revolution</font></a>”, by Judith Shapiro, October 6, 2006, <em>The New York Times</em>.)</p> <p>By the late 1980s Zhao was the reform-minded General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party – the official top leader as there was no longer the position of Chairman – and his ascent coincided with rapid growths of the Chinese democracy movement and related mass protests driven to a large extent by intellectuals and university students.</p> <p>In May 1989 Zhao Ziyang attempted to show empathy for the university students of the democracy movement on Tiananmen Square, expressing the view that their intentions were good and the situation was not a major problem, even after the movement was branded “a planned conspiracy and a turmoil” by an April 26 editorial of <em>People’s Daily</em>. In mid-May Zhao had serious clashes in Politburo Standing Committee meetings with the majority of the party’s top collective leadership who took a hardline against the “turmoil”. (Suzanne Ogden, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=WH3XaqdQvF0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>China’s Search for Democracy: The Student and the Mass Movement of 1989</em></font></a>, 1992, M.E. Sharpe; and, “<a href="http://news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2004-10/15/content_2093955_1.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">中国共产党大事记(1989年)</font></a>”, <em>Xinhua News (新华网)</em>.)</p> <p>Mikhail Gorbachev, then the reform-minded leader of the Soviet Union, was visiting Beijing during May 15-18, and was told by Zhao that despite Zhao himself being the official party leader all important decisions had to be referred to the behind-the-scenes paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who had survived the Cultural Revolution downfall and reemerged as the final arbiter of power in China. (Gordon White, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=tHwCaBIiR2kC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Chinese State in the Era of Economic Reform: The Road to Crisis</em></font></a>, 1991, M.E. Sharpe.)</p> <p>In the early morning of May 19, 1989, Zhao went to Tiananmen Square to try to persuade the students to end a hunger strike, having just attending a top-level meeting which decided, against his opposition, to use the military to suppress the mass protests. Here are some of what Zhao said to the students (“<a href="http://www.theasiamag.com/cheat-sheet/zhao-ziyangs-tiananmen-square-speech" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Zhao Ziyang’s Tiananmen Square Speech</font></a>”, By Dan-Chyi Chua, February 4, 2009, a<em>sia! Magazine</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Students, we came too late. Sorry, students. Whatever you say and criticise about us is deserved. My purpose here now is not to ask for your forgiveness. I want to say that now, your bodies are very weak. You have been on a hunger strike for six days, and it’s now the seventh day. You cannot go on like this. … I feel, our channel for dialogue is open, and some problems need to be resolved through a process. You cannot continue to – after seven days of hunger strike – insist on stopping only when you have a satisfactory answer.</p> <p>You are still young and have much time ahead of you. You should live healthily to see the day that the Four Modernisations (as proposed by China’s first premier Zhou Enlai in 1975 in the areas of agriculture, technology, industry and defence) of China are realised. You are not like us, we are already old, and do not matter. It was not easy for the country and your parents to nurture you to reach university. Now in your late teens and early twenties, you are sacrificing your lives! Students, can you think rationally for a moment? … You mean well, and have the interests of our country at heart, but if this goes on, it will go out of control and will have various adverse effects.</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Later that day army troops began to arrive in Beijing, and the next day accompanied by the hardline President Yang Shangkun, Premier Li Peng declared martial law for Beijing. </p> <p>On June 4 – exactly half a month (16 days) after Zhao Ziyang’s appearance on Tiananmen Square to show his empathy to the students – the military used force to clear the protests on the streets of Beijing and on Tiananmen Square. </p> <p>Estimates for the number of deaths in the June 4 military crackdown range from fewer than 200 confirmed to many thousands. (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Tiananmen Square protests of 1989</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/documents/index.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Tiananmen Square, 1989: The Declassified History</font></a>”, <em>The National Security Archive</em>, The George Washington University.)</p> <p>By then Zhao Ziyang was already under house arrest that would last the rest of his life, while Yang Shangkun – a longtime colleague of Deng Xiaoping – and his younger brother Yang Baibing, who had been put in charge of personnel arrangement and political indoctrination in the military, now played high-profile roles for the suppression and military disciplines. (Michel Oksenberg, Lawrence R. Sullivan, Marc Lambert and Qiao Li, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=jilcH_Zaqk4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Beijing Spring, 1989: Confrontation and Conflict: The Basic Documents</em></font></a>, 1990, M.E. Sharpe; Richard Baum, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=WszREB6v_1AC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Burying Mao: Chinese politics in the age of Deng Xiaoping</em></font></a>, 1994, Princeton University Press; “<a href="http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF160/CF160.ch1.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A Retrospective on the Study of Chinese Civil-Military Relations Since 1979: What Have We Learned? Where Do We Go?</font></a>”, by Thomas J. Bickford, in James C. Mulvenon and Andrew N.D. Yang, Ed., <em>Seeking Truth From Facts: A Retrospective on Chinese Military Studies in the Post-Mao Era</em>, 2001, RAND Corporation; “<a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1018129,00.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Prisoner of Conscience: Zhao Ziyang, 1919-2005</font></a>”, by Matthew Forney and Susan Jakes, January 16, 2005, <em>Time Magazine</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.economist.com/node/13688045?story_id=13688045" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The secret journal of Zhao Ziyang: Chinese whispers</font></a>”, May 21, 2009, <em>The Economist</em>.)</p> <p>It’s ironic that in the 22 years from the spring of 1967 in Guangzhou to the spring of 1989 in Beijing, the table had turned between Zhao Ziyang and university student protesters yet the end remained the same for both.</p> <p>At a level below the provincial power struggles, in 1966-67 at Zhongshan University (as at other educational institutions) most officials and senior faculty members were targets of the Cultural Revolution and suffered a great deal, some were beaten severely, some died of related health problems, and some committed suicide. </p> <p>Being newer on ZD campus I was not as familiar with the places, didn’t go as far and most likely did not see as much of the tough things as the other kids. But I attended school and what I saw or learned in that process I couldn’t avoid. </p> <p>A report had it that senior history professors were hung at trees and lynched near the south entrance to the ZD campus (Ezra F. Vogel, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=NU2NLLjO1fUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform</font></em></a>, 1990, Harvard University Press). I am not sure what the facts were, but that a big tree on a small hill beside the main road inside the south entrance was dubbed the “neck-hanging tree” by the kids for the reason that a known faculty member had been hung there.</p> <p>The father of “Ping”, one of the girls in our class, an associate professor of Physics more senior than most of the parents of our class, had been branded a “rightist” in the 1957 anti-rightist political campaign (“<a href="http://www.cfr.org/publication/13688/rightist_wrongs.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">'Rightist' Wrongs</font></a>”, June 26, 2007, by Jerome A. Cohen, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em>) and was now subjected to further political condemnation and cruel treatment. He leaped to his death from on top a campus building.</p> <p>Then there was the time when for several days something was floating in a pond on my way to and near the elementary school, that looked like a dead pig and had horrendously stenchful smell. It turned out to be, upon closer inspection by the more curious, the swollen belly of a man dead in the water for days before emerging.</p> <p>I sort of remember that it was a lecturer in the History department who couldn’t stand the cruel treatment suffered in the political sessions held to denounce the wrong views he had expressed and committed suicide. But recently the older brother of my old classmate buddy “Ling” tells me that it was a certain Communist party official in the department of Chinese Literature. </p> <p>The recent info about this dead man’s identity comes as somewhat shocking to me because my father, a lecturer in the Philosophy department during the Cultural Revolution, and my mother were both graduates of the Chinese Literature department; also, many years later around the New Millennium my parents moved into one of the apartment buildings built later overlooking that pond, where my mother still lives but my father died in 2005. (My blog article on Canadian politics has mentioned some circumstances at the time of my father’s passing in August 2005, "<a href="http://fenggao.org/the-myth-of-political-vendetta.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>", February 2009 –.)</p> <p>The types of violence that occurred in the early years of the Cultural Revolution targeting persons in positions of power or intellectual seniority, in some sense were not unlike the FLQ kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte in Montreal in 1970, which had inspirations from international political radicalism.</p> <p>A major difference between the FLQ violence in Canada and the violence during the Chinese Cultural Revolution was that part of the Chinese leadership sanctioned the Red Guards’ violent anti-status quo actions.</p> <p>Another type of violence raging during an early period of the Cultural Revolution was militant fighting, or violent battles, between different Red Guard organizations. In the spring of 1967 the various Red Guard organizations in Guangdong province quickly fell into two camps: the more radical “Red Flag” which had played a key role in the January power transfer from Zhao Ziyang, and the more pro-government “East Wind” which were more sympathetic to the subsequent military takeover and its law-and-order stability.</p> <p>In Guangzhou, most of the city and most of the nearby countryside were controlled by the East Winders, in particular most of the Red Guard organizations in the factories and farm villages were part of the East Wind alliance, while the universities and some of the middle schools were dominated by the Red Flaggers, with Zhongshan University’s organization, the Red Flag Commune, as their center (and possibly the origin of their nick name).</p> <p>In fact, on January 21-23, 1967 it was under detention by the Zhongshan University Red Flag Commune and their affiliated vanguard group, “August 31”, that Zhao Ziyang acceded to transfer of provincial power to under Red Guard monitoring, and the ZD Red Flag Commune became one of the official monitors of provincial power. Then on January 24 a top “August 31” leader, Mathematics student Huang Yijian (黄意坚), received a phone call from Premier Zhou Enlai and encouragements from Zhou for the Red Guards to be united and to keep good relations with the military. (“<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/3770409.html"><font color="#0000ff">一月夺权</font></a>”, by 叶曙明, December 4, 2005, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>.)</p> <p>But events did not follow Zhou Enlai’s wishes and the military took over full power in March in Guangdong. On April 14, accompanied by General Huang Yongsheng, Commander of the Guangzhou Military Region, Premier Zhou flew to Guangzhou from Beijing to meet with the leaders of the severely split Red Guards organizations, many members of which were also under military detention, to personally see that their activities would not turn violent and that the Spring 1967 Canton Fair due to open the next day on April 15 could go forward smoothly. (Lawrence C. Reardon, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=ELbMO5o5CysC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The reluctant Dragon: Crisis Cycles in Chinese Foreign Economic Policy</em></font></a>, 2002, University of Washington Press; “<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/4077243.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">周恩来亲赴广州</font></a>”, by 叶曙明, January 2, 2006, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>; and, “<a href="http://news.china.com/zh_cn/history/all/11025807/20061030/13709094.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">1967年广交会亲历者揭秘:周恩来说服造反派</font></a>”, October 30, 2006, <em>Yangcheng Evening News</em> (<em>羊城晚报</em>, courtesy of <em>China.com</em>).)</p> <p>The Canton Fair was very important for the Chinese economy and foreign relations as it was Chinese’s only export trade fair – held biannually in Guangzhou – during the first three decades of the Communist era, 1950s – 1970s. (My blog articles, <strong>“</strong><a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1ED043C52638635F!163.entry" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a>”, January 2009, and, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html"><font color="#0000ff">“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a>”, November and December 2009.)</p> <p>In the evening of April 14, 1967, Zhou Enlai attended and spoke at a rally of Red Guards totaling over 10,000 strong, held simultaneously at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall located in the city center and at the indoor City Sports Center, calling on the Red Guards to be united and help ensure a successful Spring Canton Fair. After midnight Zhou toured the about-to-open Canton Fair exhibition halls, and succeeded in persuading the Red Guards to let open some exhibits sealed off because of their accused political incorrectness – that had especially been the case with many of the traditional Chinese artisan crafts.</p> <p>Zhou Enlai ended up spending 5 days in Guangzhou at Chairman Mao’s request, meeting Red Guard representatives everyday and encouraging the Red Guards to be more open in their revolution and learn from past mistakes of not being so – the military and aligned East Wind Red Guards had accused the January 21-23 provincial power transfer as having been conducted in relative secrecy – but not to be violent, informing them the March military takeover had been Chairman Mao’s decision.</p> <p>Sadly, it had been in early February 1967 while working devotedly on the power transfer/takeover issues when Zhou Enlai was for the first time diagnosed with a heart problem, and it was then during these five grueling April days in Guangzhou in which he had no sleep for a period of 84 hours that Zhou’s heart problem worsened, to the point that from then on he would require daily oxygen aid and oral medications four times a day. Later in 1970 Zhou Enlai said to the famed American journalist Edgar Snow, “Cultural Revolution has defeated me when it comes to my health”; but then shortly after Richard Nixon’s historic visit, in May 1972 Zhou was also diagnosed with bladder cancer, which would in the end destroy him. (“<a href="http://www.chinanews.com.cn/cul/news/2009/06-04/1719907.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">周恩来晚年五次大手术:我还有61斤 请主席放心</font></a>”, June 4, 2009, <em>China News (中国新闻网)</em>; or, “<a href="http://news.cctv.com/history/20090605/100724.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">周恩来晚年五次大手术 自称身体被文化大革命打败</font></a>”, June 5, 2009, <em>CCTV.com</em>.)</p> <p>And unfortunately, past the Spring Canton Fair the conflicts between the Red Flaggers and the East Winders and between the Red Flaggers and the military continued to worsen. A “May 3” hunger strike was staged in front of the Guangzhou Uprising Martyrs Cemetery Park by about 2,000 Red Flaggers demanding the release of one of their leaders in military detention, and it ended only after Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing ordered the release on May 6. (刘国凯, <a href="http://www.difangwenge.org/read.php?tid=4933" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州红旗派的兴亡 (上)</font></a>, 2006, 博大出版社 (courtesy of <em>地方文革史交流网</em>).)</p> <p>On July 21 and July 23 – exactly half a year (6 months) after the January 21-23 Communist party-to-Red Guards power transfer by then provincial party leader Zhao Ziyang and with Guangdong under military rule since March – the first major deadly Red Guard militant battles took place in Guangzhou between the Red Flaggers and the East Winders, with the July 23 incident at none other than the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and the nearby outdoor City Sports Stadium.</p> <p>The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, built 1929-31, was designed by the Cornell University educated Chinese architect Lu Yanzhi, who had been born in the year 1894 when Sun Yat-sen began his revolutionary work. Lu had designed Sun Yat-sen’s Tomb and Mausoleum built 1926-29 in Nanjing, and in Guangzhou also designed the nearby Sun Yat-sen Monument, before his premature death at a tender age of 35 in 1929 – the year the Tomb and Mausoleum were completed and construction began for the Monument and the Memorial Hall. (“<a href="http://www.zschina.org/about/aboutnp.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">National Park of China-Dr.Sun Yat-sen's Mausoleum</font></a>”, Zhongshan Mountain National Park; “<a href="http://v2.guangzhou.gov.cn/node_464/node_468/node_635/node_637/2005-06/111862495252183.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">中山纪念堂</font></a>”, June 13, 2005, Guangzhou Municipal Government; “<a href="http://www.lifeofguangzhou.com/node_10/node_35/node_112/node_113/2006/03/20/11428383541075.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Memorial Hall</font></a>”, March 20, 2006, <em>Life of Guangzhou</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.yuexiupark-gz.com/zsjnb.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">孙中山纪念碑</font></a>”, Guangzhou Yuexiu Park.)</p> <p>Located on the site of the former Presidential Palace of which Dr. Sun Yat-sen had been the occupant before it was destroyed in civil warfare, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is a grand architectural marvel combining Byzantine architecture and Chinese imperial designs with the spirits of Sun Yat-sen’s egalitarianism and people orientation. It is the most important symbolic structure in Guangzhou and one that gets compared to the Forbidden City and the Great Hall of the People at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. (“<a href="http://www.gzlib.gov.cn/shequ_info/ndgz/NDGZDetail.do?id=317440" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">中山纪念堂 天下为公,终将万古长存</font></a>”, November 22, 2002, <em>Southern Metropolis Daily </em>(<em>南方都市报</em>, courtesy of Guangzhou Library website, July 2, 2009).)</p> <p>Dr. Sun Yat-sen is dear to the hearts of the people of Guangzhou. He was born in a village only 60 miles south and spoke Cantonese, and the southern national government he founded in Guangzhou in 1917 (after the government in Beijing betrayed the 1911 Republican Revolution and reverted to monarchy for short periods of time and the nation became fractured) has been the only national government of China ever located in this city. Several short years after his 1925 death at the age of 58 due to liver cancer, the southern government inheriting his heritage triumphed in military campaigns over the Beijing-based northern government, and the capital was moved back to Nanjing – the Yangtze River city with a history as national capital dating back to Ming dynasty’s founding in the 14th century – where the Republic of China had been proclaimed by Dr. Sun and where he now would be entombed, although at the time the Communists looked upon Wuhan – also on the Yangtze River – where the 1911 Revolution had begun, as the capital. (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sun Yat-sen</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; “<a href="http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E5%AD%AB%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">孙中山</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; “<a href="http://www.president.gov.tw/Default.aspx?tabid=1064" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">國父孫中山先生</font></a>”, Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan); “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_China" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">History of the Republic of China</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; and, my blog post, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2010/02/bangkok-to-kwangtung-and-back-to.html"><font color="#0000ff">Bangkok to Kwangtung, and back to America (Part 1) – Opening China to Christianity</font></a>”, February 2010.)</p> <p>Prior to the Cultural Revolution, the only violent conflict that had befallen the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou was during the Japanese invasion of China that subsequently became part of the Second World War, when on June 7 and 8, 1938 Japanese aerial bombing inflicted damages to some external structures but not to the Hall’s main structure. Eventually it was also in this Hall on September 16, 1945 that the Japanese army in Guangdong formally surrendered to the allied forces. (“<a href="http://www.zs-hall.com/education/history.asp" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">历史事件</font></a>”, Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Memorial Hall; and, “<a href="http://bjwb.bjd.com.cn/html/2010-11/15/content_337643.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">从革命烽烟中走来的羊城</font></a><strong></strong>”, November 15, 2010, <em>Beijing Evening News (北京晚报)</em>.) </p> <p>(During one of his frequent visits to Guangzhou in the 1950s when he was also President of China) Chairman Mao Zedong toured the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall on January 24, 1958, met with representatives of the local people and praised the Hall, “This is a great building designed and constructed by the Chinese ourselves, who says the Chinese are not good?”. (“<a href="http://www.zs-hall.com/education/history.asp" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">历史事件</font></a>”, Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Memorial Hall; “<a href="http://www.gznanwu.com/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=543&type=12&cid=269" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">百年南武知名校友录</font></a>”, by 林辉煌, 广州市南武中学; “<a href="http://v2.guangzhou.gov.cn/node_464/node_468/node_635/node_637/2005-06/111862495252183.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">中山纪念堂</font></a>”, June 13, 2005, Guangzhou Municipal Government; “<a href="http://www.ycwb.com/news_special/2010-11/10/content_3016091.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">中山纪念堂 葱茏静地缅先驱</font></a>”, November 10, 2010, <em>Yangcheng Evening News (羊城晚报)</em>.)</p> <p>Nonetheless, a little over three months after Premier Zhou Enlai’s speeches at a rally of over 10,000 Red Guard representatives in Guangzhou with around 5,000 of them at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (its seating capacity near the original design), a Red Guard militant battle took place around the Hall on July 23, 1967, pitching East Winders against Red Flaggers involving well over 10,000, possibly many more, of them.</p> <p>It all began on July 19 when the East Winders and the Red Flaggers had a dispute at the Guangzhou Overseas Chinese Sugar Refinery over posting of political banners, when a child was hurt. The next evening, over 1,000 Red Guards carrying spears, hoes, carrying-poles, etc., fought at the sugar refinery, and the refinery’s director became the first casualty of militant fighting in Guangzhou: he was being condemned in a workers’ rally and Red Guards from outside of the refinery came in with wooden bats and clobbered him over the head. What happened the day after was known as the “July 21 Incident”, when the two sides waged an all out battle around the sugar refinery, ending with the Red Flaggers’ announcement that 7 more people, all their comrades, were killed including some in a truck attacked and overturned down a hill. (“<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/ysm2001/4519951.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州武斗第一次出现死人</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, by 叶曙明, February 23, 2006, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.difangwenge.org/read.php?tid=4780" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州地区文革期间主要武装冲突事件</font></a>”, by 区国樑, August 2010, <em>地方文革史交流网</em>.)</p> <p>It so happened that on July 22, the day after the “July 21 Incident”, a call was made in Beijing by Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife and one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution, for the Red Guards not to put down their weapons when it came to defending themselves. Jiang Qing stated that the Red Guard slogan, “文攻武卫”(attack with intellectualism and defend with militancy) was politically correct, and her words were reported by the press on the next day, i.e., the day the militant battle took place at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou. (“<a href="http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/4162/64165/67447/68001/4619947.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">1967年7月22日 “文攻武卫”口号出笼</font></a>”, <em>News of the Communist Party of China (中国共产党新闻)</em>.)</p> <p>Two major mass events had been scheduled for July 23. One was a rally by the “Mao Zedong-ist Red Guards”, the most hardline East Wind organization made up mostly of youths from the families of politically correct officials and military officers, to celebrate the organization’s official establishment in Guangzhou, and the other was the memorial service by the Red Flaggers for their seven comrades killed at the sugar refinery. The Maoists’ rally had been planned at a meeting hall within the Guangzhou Military Region headquarters’ compound and the Red Flaggers’ at a sports field, when the city’s military control commission reassigned the Maoists to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and the Red Flaggers to the nearby outdoor Yuexiu Sports Stadium – both adjacent to the Yuexiu Park where the Sun Yat-sen Monument was located. (“<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/4606351.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">浴血中山纪念堂</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, by 叶曙明, March 6, 2006, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>)</p> <p>It may have been coincidental but the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall was in fact located at East Wind Road Center, or East Wind Middle Road – its present-day address is 259 East Wind Middle Road. However the title “Mao Zedong-ist” or “Mao Zedong-ism” (毛泽东主义) was never sanctioned by Mao himself. For instance, in his first review of Tiananmen Square Red Guard rally on August 18, 1966, Mao had accepted to wear a “Red Guard” armband presented by a young women but refused a “Mao Zedong-ist Red Guard” one from a young man. (“<a href="http://www.difangwenge.org/read.php?tid=4746" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">文革为什么分两大派?——广州两派红卫兵历史性对谈</font></a>”, May 11, 2009, <em>地方文革史交流网</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.txssw.com/newswrmzd/XiangGuanBaoDao/24056.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">毛泽东八次接见红卫兵 天安门内外两重天</font></a>”, June 11, 2010, <em>天下韶山网</em>.)</p> <p>Both rallies were supposed to be peaceful. But with several thousand Maoist youths attending the Memorial Hall and many thousands of Red Flaggers going to the Stadium, the two parade processions began to exchange heated arguments, including when some Red Flaggers served their memorial wreaths to the Maoists, and then the fighting began. Though the Maoists were much smaller in numbers, they had come dressed in paramilitary gears carrying spears and daggers and had the walled and gated Memorial Hall as their base, but the Red Flaggers quickly trucked hand-combat weapons to the area.</p> <p>Local military commanders sent several hundred soldiers to try to mediate, but they were attacked by the Red Flaggers and had to be evacuated by larger contingents of soldiers. General Huang Ronghai, Commander of the Guangdong Military District who also headed Guangzhou city’s military control commission, then came to the scene and he, too, could not contained the situation. Eventually several thousand troops arrived and formed walls of human chains to separate the warring sides. (“<a href="http://www.guangzhouwenyi.com/news/GUANGZHOUWENYIYIJIUJIUBANIANDIJIUQI/086110252403633792.asp" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">一九六七年大动乱(下)</font></a>”, June 11, 2008, <em>广州文艺</em>.)</p> <p>Like with the June 4 events on Tiananmen Square 22 years later, casualty estimates varied for this “July 23 Incident”.</p> <p>Right afterwards, the propaganda publications by the Red Flaggers and the East Winders, each headed by a banner featuring Chairman Mao’s supreme directive, “要用文斗, 不用武斗”(fight intellectually, not militantly), blamed members of the other side as the violent aggressors who caused the bloody mass debacle, calling them murderers in a premeditated massacre. </p> <p>The Maoists announced that 26 of them were killed or missing while the Red Flaggers put their death toll at 33 – a total of 59 – and of course hundreds more wounded on each side. (“<a href="http://www.gznf.net/forum/thread-60360-1-1.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">“文革”中广州的第一场特大型武斗</font></a>”, December 21, 2008, <em>羊城网</em>.) In one publication the Maoist Red Guards gave graphic descriptions of what happened even after some of their wounded had been hospitalized:</p> <blockquote> <p>“We learned afterwards that in the afternoon of the 23rd 6 Maoists and a teacher had been sent to City No. 1 Hospital for emergency rescue, and then on the 26th at around 3 p.m. several dozen Red Flaggers went to the hospital rooms, beat them to death and took the bodies away, leaving only blood splattered around in the room, that denounced to others the atrocity.”</p> </blockquote> <p>However a local military estimate put the number of dead at only 4, wounded at over 400, and the military’s own wounded at over 140. (“<a href="http://press.idoican.com.cn/detail/articles/20100105173214/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">从环江到珠江</font></a>”, January 5, 2010, <em>河池日报</em>)</p> <p>Then a book by Harvard University professor Ezra Vogel, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=NU2NLLjO1fUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform</font></em></a>, published in 1990, i.e., not long after the 1989 mass protests and military crackdown on Tiananmen Square, reported on this July 23, 1967 militant fighting at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall by saying, “when some from the stadium attacked those in the hall, many were injured” – without mentioning the deaths.</p> <p>The “July 21 & July 23 Incidents” plunged Guangzhou into a period of fear, semi-lawlessness and violence. In addition to fears for the various Red Guard groups’ attacks and counterattacks, fears for violent crimes also shot up. I remember that virtually every building or house in Guangzhou, including our dwelling, became fortified, with all doors and windows reinforced by metal or heavy-wooden bars and some simply sealed off with bricks. </p> <p>Zhongshan University, the most prominent entity in Guangzhou named in honor of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, would have its share of militant fighting, with a year-long escalation of tension between the Red Flaggers and the East Winders culminating in what became known as the “June 3 Incident” of 1968, before the military in Guangdong fully intervened and disarmed all the Red Guards.</p> <p>One day in 1967 – I recall it as in the summertime – I was walking in front of the north-facing entrance of the Small Auditorium – formerly Lingnan University’s YMCA building also known as Swasey Hall where Dr. Sun Yat-sen had given a speech in 1923 – in between it and a group of Red Guards on a break from militant drilling at the edge of the green lawn where farther north stood Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s bronze statue – a statue that for a couple of years in the 1950s had stood in front of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall until a new statue was made for the Hall (“<a href="http://eng.sysu.edu.cn/services/campustour2/placetovisit.20090824170248650773/placetovisit/New%20Document_files/rightarea2.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Swasey Hall</font></a>” and “<a href="http://eng.sysu.edu.cn/services/campustour2/placetovisit.20090824170248650773/placetovisit/New%20Document_files/rightarea2.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">中山先生铜像</font></a>”, Sun Yat-sen University; and, Dong Wang, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=3d9liEEIR4kC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Managing God's higher learning: U.S.-China cultural encounter and Canton Christian College (Lingnan University)</em></font></a>, 1888-1952, 2007, Lexington Books). One of the Red Guards chatting with another saw me and, in a mock but serious posture, turned toward me and imitated a ‘dagger throw’ at me – being only 8 years old I was quite scared but I was right in front of a target practice board! </p> <p>These Red Guards may have been East Winders, and the Small Auditorium one of the few buildings on ZD campus in their control before months later the Red Flaggers stormed it to take it over – an event I watched that wasn’t very violent if I remember correctly (or the takeover had happened before the simulated dagger throw by a Red Flagger).</p> <p>I recall that the Small Auditorium’s basement had been a weapons depot of the People’s Arms office of the University, which supervised the local People’s Militia but neither was functioning during Red Guards’ days, and so the Red Flaggers took over dozens of rifles which the East Winders had not armed themselves with but safeguarded on behalf of the old administration.</p> <p>My father at the time belonged to the East Winders – most of the junior faculty members had to be on one or the other Red Guard side in order not to be targeted as being un-revolutionary, and being not anti-government my father wrote some propaganda pamphlets for the East Winders.</p> <p>Not every junior faculty member went with it, though. My old classmate buddy “Ling”’s father, who was my father’s fellow lecturer at the Philosophy department but a little more senior, did not believe in the Cultural Revolution’s political correctness and refused to take part in it. He was denounced by his own students – an experience that appeared like my mother’s at her middle school from what “Ling” has told me:</p> <blockquote> <p>“My dad did not belong to either and was a target by his own students. I recalled one day he came home with his head half shaven. I did not dare to ask why but could see how angry, heartbroken and confused he was.”</p> </blockquote> <p>“Ling”’s father, Prof. Yuan Weishi, is today a very well-known intellectual in China, a prolific scholar in Chinese history and politics with influential independent views and public outspokenness. (“<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/24/AR2006012401003.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Leading Publication Shut Down In China: Party’s Move Is Part Of Wider Crackdown</font></a>”, By Philip P. Pan, January 25, 2006, <em>The Washington Post</em>; and, “<a href="http://news.xinhuanet.com/edu/2006-11/17/content_5341471.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">袁伟时教授访谈录:回望百年共和路</font></a>”, by 笑蜀, November 17, 2006, <em>Xinhua News (新华网)</em>.)</p> <p>In the Red Guard days the university had about 5,000 students, most of them members of one or the other side and majority of them Red Flaggers. But not all of them participated in the militant activities and only a small number of junior faculty members did. At the height of the turbulent militant period from around the “July 23 Incident” at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall to the early fall of 1968 when the military closed down the militant Red Guards, all the major campus buildings were controlled by the militant Red Guards armed with spears and guns, and most by the Red Flaggers who in addition to hundreds of rifles and grenades also had a collection of small cannons, anti-aircraft guns, etc. </p> <p>Many of the weapons, especially the heavy types, were from the military. In early 1967 some of the Red Guards, such as the ZD Red Flag Commune and “August 31”, went to preach revolution in the military compounds and had some political conflicts in that respect with the military leading up to the March military takeover in Guangdong. But some noncombat military personnel became politically organized also and a number of senior officers became targets. Then after Chairman Mao’s wife Jiang Qing called on the Red Guards to use militancy and weapons for defense (in July around the time of Guangzhou’s “July 21 & July 23 Incidents”), some military units allowed Red Guards from outside to seize some of their weapons. (Maurice J. Meisner, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=YpV7vbvclfgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic</em></font></a>, 1999, Simon and Schuster; “<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/3823491.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">“二•八事件”激怒了军区</font></a>”, by 叶曙明, December 9, 2005, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>; “<a href="http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4dc451b101000abd.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州六七反军和系列抢枪事件</font></a>”, by 余习广, September 3, 2007, <em>余习广的BLOG</em>; and, Andrew Langley, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=6-9FSrYgpgYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Cultural Revolution: Years of Chaos in China</em></font></a>, 2008, Compass Point Books.)</p> <p>On the ZD campus the Red Guards regularly practiced close combat skills, and as they gained control of nearly the entire campus the Red Flaggers began to conduct harder military training such as target shooting and cannon firing. </p> <p>On August 1, 1967, which happened to be the annual People’s Liberation Army Day, the ZD Red Flaggers successfully tested a chemical bomb on campus – quite a boisterous scene! But a death and an injury occurred from accidents in the experimental making of the chemical bombs. As well, the chairman of the Chemistry department, a professor who had earned his Ph.D. in Germany in the 1930s and taken part in Nazi Germany’s weapons program, had a role in developing the chemical bombs and later suffered political repercussions. (“<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/4810247.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">文攻武卫,武斗升级</font></a>”, by 叶曙明, April 4, 2006, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.gznf.net/forum/viewthread.php?tid=74850" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">“文革”一页:中山大学被迫害的教授们</font></a>”, November 12, 2009, <em>羊城网</em>.)</p> <p>August 11, 1967 saw one of the most deadly gunfire ambushes in Guangzhou. On that day, middle-school Red Flag leader Wang Xizhe and his followers first went to seize weapons at the air force compound across from his school, but found that the arms had been evacuated. Their car convoy then went on their way to the city’s Baiyun Airport to join a dispute over the kidnapping of Cultural Revolution representatives just flown in from the Communist Party central in Beijing. As they drove past the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall they encountered a hail of rifle fire and hurriedly changed their destination to the Sun Yat-sen Medical University (then a separate institution from but since part of Sun Yat-sen University) for emergency care – 5 of Wang’s comrades were killed and he was among the over a dozen wounded. (“<a href="http://www.difangwenge.org/read.php?tid=347" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">走向黑暗——王希哲自传(上)</font></a>”, by 王希哲, November 13, 2009, <em>地方文革史交流网.</em>)</p> <p>Today, Wang Xizhe (王希哲) is very well known as a Chinese democracy activist in exile after spending on and off many years  in jail in China for his political activities, and as a former collaborator of the jailed 2010 Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo – in 1996 the two jointly issued the “October Tenth Declaration” calling for a dialogue between the governments of Mainland China and Taiwan among other political changes. (“<a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/xiaobo-photo.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Nobel Peace Prize 2010: Liu Xiaobo – Photo Gallery</font></a>”, Nobel Foundation; “<a href="http://www.economist.com/node/144732?Story_id=144732" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A survey of China: Look, no dissidents; All critics have been silenced</font></a>”, March 6, 1997, <em>The Economist</em>; and, “<a href="http://en.rsf.org/chine-liu-xiaobo-biography-28-10-2010,38704.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Liu Xiaobo biography</font></a>”, by Jean-Philippe Béja, October 28, 2010, <em>Reporters without Borders</em>.)</p> <p>The first Zhongshan University casualty from the Red Guards’ actual militant conflicts may have come from a sniper shot originating from outside the campus – as I can recall.</p> <p>In 1967 and the first half of 1968 the Red Flag students gradually took over nearly all of the large (non-residential) campus buildings. Across the street from the campus south side were a number of factories controlled by the East Wind workers armed just like the ZD Red Flaggers. Several large buildings inside the ZD campus south wall were made into Red Flag fortresses, from where they would exchange nightly gunfire with the factory East Winders across the street. The two biggest ZD fortresses were the elegant Female Students Residence from the Lingnan University days, and the newer Biology Building – with the two biggest factories across the street being the Guangzhou Electric Motors Factory and the Guangdong Tractor Factory. (“<a href="http://news.xinhuanet.com/school/2003-03/24/content_795979.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">王永健:中山大学广寒宫</font></a>” (‘Guanghan Palace’ – Female Students Residence), <em>新华网</em>.)</p> <p>Normally gunfire did not occur during the daylight hours so people could go about their basic necessities such as work, grocery shopping, or schooling for us the kids (but of course no classes for the university students). But then one day at the elementary school a story circulated that a Red Guard standing watch on the rooftop of the Biology Building during the day, unarmed, was shot dead by sniper fire – origin of the gunshot assumed to be one of the two big factories across the street.</p> <p>By some time in 1967-68 only one major ZD campus building remained in the East Winders’ control, the Central Library. It was the university East Winders’ headquarters, where hundreds of them were barricaded inside. Their food supplies were brought in by East Wind workers and peasants from outside the campus, during regular intervals of ceasefire and going through checkpoint inspections by the university Red Flaggers. Threats from the East Wind workers and peasants to invade the campus to rescue their comrades served as a deterrent against any serious attack by the ZD Red Flaggers on the ZD East Winder headquarters.</p> <p>With the East Wind headquarters holed up and holding up in the Central Library till the time when the military came to restore order, most of the books there were saved. The stereotype story about burning and destruction of books I read in Western publications, such as in the following quote, is inaccurate as far as I can remember (although more serious damages including book burning did occur at a small number of departmental libraries):</p> <blockquote> <p>“At Zhongshan University in Canton, the Red Guards first burned all the books from the collection of Western classics; then they burned all texts not obviously Communist or Maoist; and then they burned the library building itself (Thurston 1987).”</p> </blockquote> <p>The book quoted above, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=d1deR-jiYJgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Libricide: The Regime-sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century</em></font></a>, published in 2003, was written by the University of Hawaii Library & Information Science professor Rebecca Knuth, an expert on book burning. (“<a href="http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Community/Featured/book-burning-knuth.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">75th Anniversary of the Nazi Book Burnings: Interview with Rebecca Knuth</font></a>”, <em>AbeBooks</em>.)</p> <p>I wish Rebecca had a better source of information for this story on the Cultural Revolution; during 1997-99 I taught Computer Science in the same department as Rebecca and we even went together visiting a U.S. military disaster assistance information center in the Camp Smith compound of the United States Pacific Command. (the trip with Rebecca and two other female professors has been mentioned in my Facebook comment on a Council on Foreign Relations article by Commander Michael L. Baker of the U.S. Navy, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/councilonforeignrelations/posts/128962623818314"><font color="#0000ff">http://www.facebook.com/councilonforeignrelations/posts/128962623818314</font></a>.)</p> <p>Nevertheless there was burning of a ZD campus building in a related storyline – after a group of East Winders broke free from the Central Library and took over the old Physics Building in the summer of 1968.</p> <p>On June 3, 1968, a deadly battle happened when the Red Flaggers waged an attack to retake the Physics Building, including using guns and explosives, and setting the building on fire in the end. Some of the kids watched it. (刘国凯, <a href="http://www.difangwenge.org/read.php?tid=4934" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州红旗派的兴亡 (下)</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>, 2006, 博大出版社 (courtesy of <em>地方文革史交流网</em>); and, “<a href="http://shihuiwang.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!78616BF431493778!480.entry" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">一个小学生眼中的中大“六·三”武斗</font></a>”, by Shihui Wang, November 11, 2007, <em>初级阶段 (shihuiwang.spaces.live.com)</em>.)</p> <p>I don’t remember witnessing this battle or hearing all the commotions, likely because I was out of ZD campus staying with some of my mother’s friends or relatives in Guangzhou. Whenever rumors circulated of imminent militant fighting on ZD campus, or imminent invasion by East Wind workers, my mother would take my sister and I, and sometimes our grandparents, to one of these places. </p> <p>I remember one time, probably in the winter of 1967-68, staying with my grandparents at their friends’ house in a city alleyway neighborhood, where the alley passage to the main street was barricaded at both ends and patrolled 24 hours by local watchmen armed with spears and iron bars. </p> <p>Another time, probably in the spring of 1968, my mother, sister and I stayed at the dorm-apartment of two of her friends, a career-training school teacher couple who had two daughters around the age of us the siblings, and with the same family name, too.</p> <p>This last time in June 1968, my sister probably joined my father who had been for months living in a village – the Old Phoenix Village (旧凤凰村) – behind the factories across from ZD campus south side – a price to pay for being sort of an East Winder in a Red Flag-dominated university when the going got tough. (My first blog article, <strong>"</strong><a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1ED043C52638635F!163.entry" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>", has some interesting facts about the area in upstate New York my sister and her family live today, that to me are relevant.)</p> <p>I probably stayed in the dorm room of Uncle Lin Weisan, my mother’s first cousin and a medical student at Sun Yat-sen Medical University, and soon afterwards left with him for my second sojourn to the Shantou region, this time to his home village in Jieyang (揭阳) County where I also got to visit Grandpa’s ancestral village. Uncle Weisan, son of Grandpa’s youngest sister and not directly related to Grandma even though also a “Lin”, is today a neurologist-doctor in another city in Guangdong, known for its petroleum production and the lychee fruits in its region. He and the others of my mother’s younger relatives and my parent’s younger friends helped us a lot – not the least getting big bamboos from the bamboo woods next to the Female Students Residence to barricade all the floor-to-ceiling foyer windows in our first-floor dwelling in a Western-style house.</p> <p>Despite the calamity of this violent “June 3 Incident” and the many injured, there were only two deaths, one Red Flagger in the attack, and a top East Wind leader, Ruan Xiangyang (阮向阳). When the fire was burning up the Physics Building Ruan escaped from the top floor by climbing out a window down the wall, and running to hide in a home nearby, but he was then caught by a group of pursuers. Unluckily for Ruan, the pursuers were mostly middle school Red Flaggers from outside the university who had come to re-enforce their comrades, and they practically beat him to death. (“<a href="http://shihuiwang.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!78616BF431493778!480.entry" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">一个小学生眼中的中大“六·三”武斗</font></a>”, by Shihui Wang, November 11, 2007, <em>初级阶段 (shihuiwang.spaces.live.com)</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.difangwenge.org/read.php?tid=347" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">走向黑暗——王希哲自传(上)</font></a>”, by 王希哲, November 13, 2009, <em>地方文革史交流网.</em>)</p> <p>Both the ZD “August 31” leader, Mathematics student Huang Yijian, and the middle school Red Flag leader Wang Xizhe, had roles directing this June 3 attack on scene.</p> <p>But neither Huang Yijian or Wang Xizhe were the top leader of the Red Flaggers. The No.1 Red Flag leader in Zhongshan University was Biology student Wu Chuanbin (武传斌), who was a member of the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee formed in February 1968 to integrate the politically correct officials and Red Guard leaders into the military rule, and composed of 9 military members, 10 officials, 6 workers, 4 peasants, and 4 students – for a total of 33. (“<a href="http://www.cnd.org/HXWZ/ZK02/zk287.gb.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">文革“七二五讲话”:不仅仅是广西造反组织的终结</font></a>”, by 闻于樵, April 12, 2002, <em>文革博物馆通讯(一二六)</em>, <em>华夏文摘增刊</em>; and, “<a href="http://ysm2001.bokee.com/5886581.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广东省革命委员会名单</font></a>”, by 叶曙明, November 22, 2006, <em>历史现场的黑白记忆 (ysm2001.bokee.com)</em>.)</p> <p>In any case, about two months after the “June 3 Incident” in 1968 the military and affiliated workers’ law-and-order militia entered the ZD campus and disarmed the Red Flaggers without meeting resistance, and the period of Cultural Revolution militant violence was over for Zhongshan University. </p> <p>This happened after a July 25 meeting in Beijing with Red Guard representatives in which both Premier Zhou Enlai and General Huang Yongsheng, by then Chief of the General Staff of the Chinese military but still heading the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee, called Wu Chuanbin a trouble maker, who then quickly fell from grace by early August. (“<a href="http://www.epochtimes.com/b5/6/11/17/n1525019.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">廣西「反共救國團」冤案始末 (3)——文革機密檔案揭密之一</font></a>”, by 小平頭(丹麥), November 18, 2006, and, “<a href="http://www.epochtimes.com/b5/6/11/19/n1527224.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">廣西「反共救國團」冤案始末 (4)——文革機密檔案揭密之一</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”, by 小平頭(丹麥), November 19, 2006, <em>Epoch Times</em>.)</p> <p>Wu Chuanbin lives in Toronto, Canada today, so I guess <em>The Globe and Mail</em> journalist Jan Wong, the self-style “starry-eyed Maoist”, isn’t the only Canadian in her adulation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. (“<a href="http://www.sysu.ca/wsb4007396201/5.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Alumni 中山大學多倫多校友名錄</font></a>”, February 8, 2005, Sun Yat-sen University Toronto Alumni Association.)</p> <p>I remember for a couple of weeks in August 1968 there were many hundreds of soldiers and thousands of workers’ militia on campus, some of them going from house to house searching for weapons. At least a dozen of the workers searched our dwelling, with several dozen more standing about in the yard and on the roads next to the house. I had a large slingshot made for me by one of my relative uncles, and a worker made a point of telling me that it was a “weapon” to be confiscated – much to my disappointment.</p> <p>For reasons I don’t know, after the “June 3 Incident” the dead East Wind leader Ruan Xiangyang’s body was preserved in the Biology Building, and so after the military had restored order the East Winders held a mass memorial service with his body on display. My old classmate buddy “Ling” claims he and other kids sneaked into the building and watched the makeup process for Ruan’s body the day before the memorial service.</p> <p>Ruan Xiangyang's sad end reminds me of my mother having been roughed up by her middle school Red Guards in 1966. His name, 阮向阳, also sounds like a bad omen to me as my Grandma Lin Zhenhua (林珍华), part of whose Christian family history I have discussed in my Chinese blog post, <a href="http://fenggao.org/reminiscing-the-past.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">"忆往昔,学历史智慧" (“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom")</font></a>, had a second name, Lin Ruanju (林阮菊). Soon at the July 1 Elementary School in 1970 we would have a new Mathematics (Arithmetic) teacher, a charming young women by the name of Ruan Jiabi (阮嘉碧 or 阮佳碧), whose name now many years later sounds exactly like ‘soft Canadian currency’.</p> <p>Grandma passed away in 1980 at the age of 82 (I believe she was born in 1898, the same year as Zhou Enlai), and I left China in 1982. But I find that my old teacher Miss Ruan might still be teaching elementary arithmetic in the same Haizhu District of Guangzhou, and with a prestigious ‘experimental school’ – Beijing University’s affiliated middle school’s Guangzhou Experimental School! (“<a href="http://school.bdfzgz.net:8080/xmaths/printpage.asp?ArticleID=639" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">四年级数学教师:阮嘉碧</font></a><font color="#0000ff"></font>”,  北大附中广州实验学校; and, “<a href="http://www.cn-teacher.com/fanli/jh/zj/200704/166921.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">数学组教研工作总结</font></a>”, April 10, 2007, <em>CN-Teacher (中国教师站)</em>.)</p> <p>My mother has retired from her Guangzhou No. 33 Middle School years ago. After leaving the July 1 Elementary School in 1972 I entered and four years later graduated from the Guangzhou No. 6 Middle School. This school had been Zhongshan University’s affiliated middle school for a couple of years prior to the Cultural Revolution, and before that had been founded in 1937 as the affiliated middle school of the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy established in the same year 1924 as Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University by an intellectual leader and a guiding light for military officers – Dr. Sun Yat-sen! (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen_University" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sun Yat-sen University</font></a>”, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whampoa_Military_Academy" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Whampoa Military Academy</font></a>” and “<a href="http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/%E5%B9%BF%E5%B7%9E%E5%B8%82%E7%AC%AC%E5%85%AD%E4%B8%AD%E5%AD%A6" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">广州市第六中学</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2011/03/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 3</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-47757453517937244742010-10-08T17:56:00.001-04:002010-11-23T19:37:38.692-05:00Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 1) — when democracy can be trumped by issue-based politics<p align="left">October 8, 2010 is an eventful day in my world of stories. </p> <p>News comes that the Canadian women competing in the 4x100 freestyle relay swim event in the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, India, have just won but then been disqualified from the silver medal, because one of the swimmers – not immediately clear if it was Montreal’s Victoria Poon, Geneviève Saumur, Calgary’s Erica Morningstar or Stratford’s Julia Wilkinson – leaped into the pool early thus committing an “illegal takeover”. (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/commonwealthgames/story/2010/10/08/spc-commonwealth-swimming.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Swimming DQ costs Canada a medal</font></a>”, by Jesse Campigotto, October 8, 2010, <em>CBC Sports</em>.)</p> <p>On the cheerful side of news, the Chinese intellectual and democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, who in a sense is a “prisoner of conscience” at the early stage of an 11+2-year jail sentence in China (an 11-year prison term plus 2 additional years without normal citizen’s political rights), is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee based in Oslo, a city Liu had visited in 1988 as a scholar before the 1989 Chinese democracy movement thrust him into the spotlight – during its final days on Tiananmen Square in late May and early June of that year. (“<a href="http://www.pencanada.ca/media/liu-xiaobo-dec25-09.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">International PEN calls Liu Xiaobo’s sentence a grievous betrayal of inalienable human rights</font></a>”, December 25, 2009, <em>International PEN</em>; “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/world/09nobel.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Nobel Peace Prize Given to Jailed Chinese Dissident</font></a>”, by Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield, October 8, 2010, <em>The New York Times</em>; “<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010-10-08-liu-nobel-peace-prize_N.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel Peace Prize</font></a>”, October 8, 2010, <em>USA Today</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/liu-a-champion-for-political-change-with-a-heart-of-gold/article1750918/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Liu: A champion for political change with a heart of gold</font></a>”, by Mark MacKinnon, October 8, 2010, <em>The Globe and Mail</em>.)</p> <p>To confess my relative lack of patriotism as a Canadian without others’ sporting fervor, and my relative lack of political correctness as someone who had grown up and received university education in China but did not become a more righteous human-rights campaigner, I admit that I feel more interested in, and intrigued by, another news story the meaning and morale of which is not so crystal clear: U.S. President Barack Obama announces the resignation of National Security Adviser James L. Jones, who will be replaced by his deputy Thomas Donilon. (“<a href="http://www.leaderpost.com/news/Obama+national+security+adviser+resigns/3645610/story.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Security adviser Jones the latest to leave Obama's White House</font></a>”, by Sheldon Alberts, October 8, 2010, <em>Leader-Post</em>.)</p> <p>Ah, Mr. Donilon’s brother, Mike, is Vice President Joe Biden’s adviser, and his wife Catherine Russell is Mrs. Jill Biden’s Chief of Staff – I can see the point of it. (“<a href="http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/10/08/jones_out_donilon_in_announcement_coming_today" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jones to announce resignation today, Donilon to replace him</font></a>”, by Josh Rogin, October 8, 2010, <em>Foreign Policy</em>.)</p> <p>I am thinking about the Joe Biden who before assuming the vice presidency was this curious yet assertive chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during much of the short time in the New Millennium, providing the necessary scrutiny on George W. Bush’s War on Terror, and earlier had been the aggressive chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee known for his opposition to George H. W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas for the United States Supreme Court – Justice Thomas won in 1991 despite Biden and moreover despite Anita Hill who accused him of sexual harassment. (“<a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/biden-and-anita-hill-revisited/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Biden and Anita Hill, Revisited</font></a>”, by Kate Phillips, August 23, 2008, <em>The New York Times</em>; “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/joe-bidens-the-man-on-gua_b_120900.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Joe Biden's the Man on Guantanamo, Iraq and the “War on Terror”</font></a>”, by Andy Worthington, August 24, 2008, <em>The Huffington Post</em>; and, “<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2DA1338F93AA15752C1A96F9C8B63&pagewanted=all" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">After Cheney</font></a>”, by James Traub, November 29, 2009, <em>The New York Times</em>.)</p> <p>What else, i.e., beside the Biden connections? Donilon was just in Beijing in early September, in a visit during which he and White House Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers met with at least five Chinese Communist Party Politburo members, eager to pressure China to let its Yuan currency appreciate. But soon after the visit Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration and ex-President of Harvard, tendered his resignation, and now less than three weeks later General Jones, ex-Commandant of the United States Marine Corps and former Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, follows. (“<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-08/summers-discussed-world-economy-with-hu-wen-before-debate-on-yuan-policy.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Summers, Donilon Get Unusual China Access as Yuan Debate Looms</font></a>”, September 8, 2010, <em>Bloomberg News</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/sep/21/top-obama-economic-adviser-summers-step-down/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Summers resigns as adviser on economy – Follows exits by Romer, Orszag</font></a>”, by Kara Rowland, September 21, 2010, <em>The Washington Times</em>.)</p> <p>Donilon and Biden are the men now, and we are talking about probably “back to the future”  in Biden’s way, who for decades took the commuter train daily from Wilmington, Delaware to the Union Station in Washington, D.C. to work at the Capitol, and whose favorite sport is women’s lacrosse! (“<a href="http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/biden-first-nominee-be-regular-amtrak-rider" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Biden First Nominee To Be Daily Amtrak Commuter?</font></a>”, By Tom Acitelli, August 25, 2008, <em>The New York Observer</em>; “<a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/04/20/biden.title.ix/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Biden announces change in Title IX women's sports policy</font></a>”, by Jill Dougherty, April 20, 2010, <em>CNN</em>; and, “<a href="http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Joe-Biden-No-1-Fan-of/23311/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Joe Biden, No. 1 Fan of Women's Sports</font></a>”, by Libby Sander, April 20, 2010, <em>The Chronicle of Higher Education</em>.)</p> <p>Hopefully the changes of President Obama’s advisers and the increase of Joe Biden’s influence will lead to revisiting some important issues without falling into the danger of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease – something I discussed in an earlier blog article, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html"><font color="#0000ff">“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a>”.</p> <p>I actually am a sports fan, but not the type bitten by the ice hockey bug Canadians are supposed to be – as just reaffirmed by the installation of the new Governor General of Canada David Johnston, the British Queen’s vice-regal representative in Canada, in this case a former two-time hockey All-American at Harvard praised by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper as “a true all-rounder”. (“<a href="http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/mobile/david-johnston-set-to-take-over-as-new-governor-general-in-ottawa-104137229.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">For new GG David Johnston, being vice-regal is a family affair</font></a>”, by Heather Scoffield, October 2, 2010, <em>Winnipeg Free Press</em>.)</p> <p>For a long time Canada’s only national sport was actually lacrosse – a game first invented by the aboriginal people – until 1994 when the Parliament officially designated hockey the national winter sport, and lacrosse the national summer sport albeit by this time lacrosse has only a small following. (Alain Bairner, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=tyruTIHJJIMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Sport, nationalism, and globalization: European and North American perspectives</font></em></a>, 2001, State University of New York Press; and, “<a href="http://pch.gc.ca/pgm/sc/legsltn/n-16-eng.cfm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">National Sports of Canada Act</font></a>”, 1994, <em>Canadian Heritage</em>.)</p> <p>So if Mr. Biden is looking to Canada, he is a little late and the glass is not even half full – unless global warming works in his favor. </p> <p>For me though, when I was younger I dabbled in various sports recreationally but lacking the physical build and strength I could only wish I had really been competitive – so I’ll choose lacrosse if I were to play.</p> <p>I am also a fan of women’s sports, and when it gets to the right level of skills versus physical power I can like women’s more, such as in the case of international volleyball. I remember when I was a Berkeley grad student I once volunteered to drive some of the visiting Chinese junior women’s volleyball players around sightseeing; and the only other time at Berkeley when I drove for anyone of celebrity type was when the actress Joan Chen – later of the movie “The Last Emperor” fame – and her all-boys entourage came to town – an anecdote I mentioned in my earlier blog article, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html"><font color="#0000ff">“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a>”.</p> <p>Many years later on October 23, 2001, the Canadian women’s national hockey team came to San Jose for an exhibition game with the American women’s, a warm-up for the Salt Lake City Olympics in which the two were expected to be the ultimate rivals (“<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/cdnclub/news.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">News</font></a>”, <em>Stanford Canadian Club</em>). I had just established connection with Bernard Etzinger, then Canadian Consul and Trade Commissioner in Silicon Valley (“<a href="http://www.washdiplomat.com/04-08/a7_08_04.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canada Plans Legislative Secretariat in Washington, D.C.</font></a>”, by Larry Luxner, August 2004, <em>The Washington Diplomat</em>), and through him to Paula Fairweather and the local Canadian club she headed, Digital Moose Lounge (“<a href="http://www.mit.edu/~gil/pub/Alterovitz%202000-%20Canada25-%20final%20report.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A New Magnetic North – How Canada Can Attract and Retain Young Talent</font></a>”, July 1, 2001, <em>Canada25</em>), and was very glad to go with the other transplanted Canadians to cheer for the girls.</p> <p>It was a good hockey game, and an even more interestingly enjoyable experience when at game’s start Bernie brought over and introduced to me Beth Lawlor, a newly arrived post-doc researcher at the University of California medical school in San Francisco, who so happened had just received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia and studied with a cancer-research scientist to whom I am related – albeit on the downside I had been kicked out of UBC by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on July 2, 1992 at the end of my faculty job there when a civil dispute with my then boss, “Maria”, had turned politically charged.</p> <p>But somehow there was something unsettling on this occasion of an exciting girls’ hockey game, to me anyway: the Canadians’ coach who later would lead the women to Canada’s first Olympic hockey gold in 50 years, was Sergeant Danièle Sauvageau, a Montreal police officer sometimes undercover in narcotics and formerly with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“<a href="http://www.speakers.ca/sauvageau_daniele.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Danièle Sauvageau – Former Canadian Olympic Hockey Coach</font></a>”, <em>Speakers' Spotlight</em>); then after the game, three Canadian players came to meet with us the local Canadians and the one towering above the other two was goalie Kim St. Pierre, a student at McGill University in Montreal (“<a href="http://www.canoe.ca/2002GamesTeamCanadaBiosN2Z/stpierre.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">2002 Games Team Canada – Kim St. Pierre</font></a>”, <em>Canoe.ca</em>).</p> <p>So it would take a Montreal police sergeant to lead the Canadian girls to make history, but was it just hockey – Sauvageau had distinguished herself as the founding coach of the Canadian junior women’s team (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dani%C3%A8le_Sauvageau" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Danièle Sauvageau</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>) – or had there been safety concerns haunting the girls, like ghosts of the Montreal Massacre?</p> <p>I hadn’t talked to Bernie (Etzinger) much after becoming acquainted with him only days earlier, but he was a friendly and no-nonsense guy, and at one point during the game he turned to me and said, “Last year I was invited to the wedding of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s daughter, and it was very nice, in 2000. It was Caroline. Or was it someone else?” (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2000/08/23/mulroney000823.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mulroney wedding to be a who's who</font></a>”, August 23, 2ooo, <em>CBC News.</em>)</p> <p>Ah hah, an unforgettable moment. I certainly knew only little about the Canadian liberal <em>Frank </em>magazine’s contest of “Deflower Caroline Mulroney” back in 1991, about then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s reaction to the joke about his only daughter, “I wanted to take a gun and go down there and do some serious damage to those people”, or about Caroline’s new husband Andrew Lapham, son of the famously liberal Lewis Lapham, editor of <em>Harper’s Magazine</em>. (“<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/mar/05/usa.iraq" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lion of the US left</font></a>”, by Gary Younge, March 5, 2003, <em>The Guardian</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Malloy.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mulroney’s Shadows: The Many Images of Canada’s Eighteenth Prime Minister</font></a>”, by Jonathan Malloy, June 2008, Carlton University.)</p> <p>But sitting with Mr. Etzinger the diplomatic consul on this occasion I was fully aware that Kim Campbell, Mulroney’s successor as the Progressive Conservative party leader and the first female Canadian Prime Minister, before that Justice Minister and my Member of Parliament in the Vancouver Centre riding during that earlier era, had just been the Canadian Consul General in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2000, overseeing several states including California, and Hawaii where I worked from 1997 to 1999. (“<a href="http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/miembro/kim_campbell" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Campbell, Kim – Prime Minister of Canada (1993)</font></a>”, Club of Madrid.)</p> <p>Back in November 1992 I was politically active circulating press releases critical of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership and conduct; then on November 30 several hours after I’d faxed the press releases to Campbell’s Vancouver MP office, RCMP Sergeant Brian Cotton led another officer arrived at my apartment, and he took me to UBC Hospital for a psychiatric assessment whereby I was involuntarily committed into the psychiatric ward. (I have mentioned some of this and related experiences in another blog article, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/the-myth-of-political-vendetta.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”.)</p> <p>In fact, I was more than aware when Bernie suddenly so casually mentioned Mulroney: in the no more than ten days or so since first meeting him at the San Jose Consulate and Trade Office I had enquired about Kim Campbell, told by him that he hadn’t worked with Campbell much because until recently he had been dealing with Peru matters within foreign affairs, nevertheless received Campbell’s Harvard e-mail address from him, and on October 22 – the day before this hockey game – I had sent an e-mail letter to Kim Campbell asking if she could revisit my political case.</p> <p>Women are better than men in positions of authority only when they can use the law better and not just cloak themselves in the aura of womanhood. Whether that had been the case in Canada is not clear to me, only that most of Kim Campbell’s contemporary female political leaders did poorly in elections – Campbell herself especially whose leadership bid had possibly involved a deal for Mulroney’s endorsement. (My blog article, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html">“<font color="#0000ff">Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a>”.)</p> <p>But sitting here with Mr. Bernard Etzinger the Canadian diplomatic consul – who several months later became deputy director of public relations and official spokesman at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. – and watching the Canadian girls play hockey under their coach who was a former RCMP officer and active-duty Montreal police sergeant, I wasn’t a suspect in anything diabolically deadly, was I? No way, out of others’ minds but not mine.</p> <p>But you never know in politics.</p> <p>The Montreal Massacre that came to mind refers to an event on December 6, 1989 at École Polytechnique, the engineering school of the University of Montreal, where a young man Marc Lepine carried a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle into the building and killed 13 female students and one female staff. Lepine, the son of a Algerian father and a former Canadian nun mother, had allegedly been rejected by this school but on this occasion he picked out the women to shoot at. He yelled “I hate feminists”, and expressed his intent to kill them in a suicide note found on his body. (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_L%C3%A9pine" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Marc Lépine</font></a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">École Polytechnique massacre</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>Canadians have generally been outraged by the atrocity. Gun-control law was soon strengthened by Justice Minister Kim Campbell, although it was not until the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien in 1995 that a more general gun registry and more stringent restrictions were brought in – something I discussed in my blog article, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/the-myth-of-political-vendetta.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”.</p> <p>To the feminists and many others, Lepine’s act was clearly that of anti-feminism and he chose this school to target because it was a training ground for women in engineering (“<a href="http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2009/12/05/12057751.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Remembering the Montreal massacre</font></a>”, by Terri Saunders, December 6, 2009, <em>Canoe.ca</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Investigators and sociology experts tried to understand why Lepine did what he did and why he chose to do it at Ecole Polytechnique. The overwhelming conclusion was Lepine felt the school, which offered non-traditional trades training to women in fields such as engineering, would be a good place to find women he labeled as feminists.”</p> </blockquote> <p>But I think Sgt. Danièle Sauvageau of the Montreal police probably knows more details than most of us, like for instance, why Lepine had written the following in his suicide note claiming that he was “forced to take extreme acts” (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_L%C3%A9pine" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Marc Lépine</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts.”</p> </blockquote> <p>As a matter of fact Sgt. Sauvageau and many of her police colleagues may have also known Lepine’s last victim personally: Maryse Leclair, shot and then knifed to death by Lepine before he committed suicide, was the daughter of Pierre Leclair, director of public relations and chief spokesman for the Montreal police. Maryse Leclair’s name was actually on a list of 19 women Lepine had intended to kill, found with his suicide note. (“<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/08/world/montreal-gunman-had-suicide-note.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Montreal gun man had suicide note</font></a>”, by David E. Pitt, December 8, 1989, <em>The New York Times</em>; Kevin Dwyer and Juré Fiorillo, <em><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=8GpnqiGTAS0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">True Stories of Law & Order: The Real Crimes Behind the Best Episodes of the Hit TV Show</font></a></em>, 2006, Berkley Books; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">École Polytechnique massacre</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>Many readers of the media stories about the Montreal Massacre may not have noticed an intriguing tale, that Maryse Leclair was a first cousin of Dominique Leclair, a friend of Marc Lepine’s from working together at a Montreal hospital where Lepine’s mother Monique was the nursing director and Dominique Leclair’s father was the hospital head who gave Marc Lepine the food-service job (“<a href="http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/features/rapidfire/story.html?id=bd7367a7-1f49-4c5d-949d-7e5a85941b40" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Montreal massacre</font></a>”, February 8, 1990, <em>Canada.com</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Dominique Leclair was 19 when she met Lepine that summer in the kitchen at St. Jude’s. Her father runs the hospital and was good friends with Monique Lepine when she was his nursing director. He gave Marc his job.</p> <p>But that’s not why Dominique befriended Marc Lepine.</p> <p>“I was kind to him because he was so hyperactive and nervous, nobody would talk to him at lunch or break time... Everyone else tried to avoid him because he was a bit strange because of his shyness.”</p> <p>Lepine’s hyperactivity and his job didn’t mix either.</p> <p>“He was always rushing things. He would never be calm.”</p> <p>He raced the food carts the same way he did everything else. Always in a hurry. Soup got spilled. Dishes got broken.</p> <p>Everytime he made a mess of something, his reaction was always the same: “Ah shit.”</p> <p>Finally, he was put on food-serving duty in the cafeteria where his pace would at least be tempered by the task. But the steamy kitchen atmosphere had festered his already unsightly acne problem.</p> <p>Dominique recalls: “The employees would say they didn’t want him to serve them their lunch because of his acne. They were mean.”</p> <p>Lepine was stuffed back in the kitchen where no one would have to look at his pimples.</p> <p>He tried growing a beard to hide the acne, but it was scraggly and seemed to make the rest of his complexion worse. He would cut it off and grow it again like a suburban lawn.</p> <p>No matter how hard he might have tried, Lepine just couldn’t shed his shyness. Even with Dominique, he would stir his food and stare at the floor when he was speaking.”</p> </blockquote> <p>So much about the Montreal Massacre being a random act of extreme violence. Although from China I have many second cousins born and raised in North America, including those in the successful Ling family in Canada (my blog article, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/the-myth-of-political-vendetta.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”); now if a colleague of one of them pulled a stunt or played a trick on me, would I consider it “random”, not “institutional”?</p> <p>We see that even though Marc Lepine eventually became a monster of a human being and a “Mad Killer”, he had also endured a lot of emotional abuse over the years not just from his father as the media like to emphasize but from others in the community. The fact that in the end he lost it not only in an extreme manner but in a planned and premeditated manner makes Marc Lepine’s case worth further scrutiny.</p> <p>It reminds me of a former Berkeley math professor I once studied briefly with. Prof. Andrew Majda was known for his strong temperament, and the year I was auditing a graduate class from him he was in the process of moving to Princeton which had made him an important job offer. Near the Berkeley classroom there was construction work going on at the time and the noise sometimes got really loud, and Majda would burst into tantrums like, “It’s driving me crazy, they are driving me out of Berkeley.”</p> <p>Andrew Majda’s wife, Prof. Gerta Keller, an expert in the study of dinosaur evolution, has told of a tale of travelling in Algeria as an adventurous 20-year-old Swiss woman in 1965, not being let go by Algerian soldiers at the border, and exhorted by a 24-year-old or so looking French commander of the soldiers as possibly “the obstinate female I can’t get rid of”. (“<a href="http://blog.nj.com/iamnj/2008/01/keller.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Gerta Keller</font></a>”, by Donna Gialanella, January 27, 2008, <em>The Star-Ledger</em>.)</p> <p>I don’t know if anyone was trying to drive Prof. Majda out of Berkeley, but there have been others who questioned some of the feminist political agendas in the context of the Montreal Massacre.</p> <p>University of Toronto computer science professor Charles Rackoff – someone in my professional field with whom I had at least some passing acquaintance – stirred a major controversy in December 2000 when he wrote some comments in an e-mail about a memorial service to mark the Montreal Massacre, comparing the feminist agenda to the Klu-Klux-Klan’s (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2000/12/07/massacre_email001207.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Professor criticizes Montreal massacre memorials</font></a>”, December 7, 2000, <em>CBC News</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“It is obvious that the point of this is not to remember anyone. The point is to use the death of these people as an excuse to promote the feminist/extreme left-wing agenda.”</p> <p>“It is no different, and no more justified, than when organizations such as the Klu-Klux-Klan (sic) use the murder of a white person by a black person as an excuse to promote their agenda.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Fortunately I am by no means cynical like, or so universal in doubting about political agendas as, my respected senior Prof. Charles Rackoff, whose remarks touched off a wave of condemnations from within the university (“<a href="http://www.mcgilltribune.com/2.12363/campus-briefs-1.1638650" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Campus Briefs</font></a>”, January 8, 2001, <em>The McGill Tribune</em>).</p> <p>The city of Montreal in French-speaking Quebec has been one of the North American cities with an unusually high profile of social violence – in Montreal’s case at universities and colleges. After the 1989 Montreal Massacre, in August 1992 there was a multiple-murder shooting at Concordia University that killed 4 male engineering professors and wounded a female secretary. </p> <p>After a more recent occurrence of multiple shooting in Montreal, in September 2006 at Dawson College killing a female student and wounding scores of men and women, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> newspaper published a front-page article in which columnist Jan Wong expressed the view that these killings had resulted from social resentment due to marginalization of immigrant minorities (“<a href="http://www.vigile.net/Get-under-the-desk" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Montreal Shootings – ‘Get under the desk’</font></a>”, by Jan Wong, September 16, 2006, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> (courtesy of <em>Vigile.net</em>)):</p> <blockquote> <p>“What many outsiders don’t realize is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city. It hasn’t just taken a toll on long-time anglophones, it’s affected immigrants, too. To be sure, the shootings in all three cases were carried out by mentally disturbed individuals. But what is also true is that in all three cases, the perpetrator was not pure laine, the argot for a “pure” francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial “purity” is repugnant. Not in Quebec.</p> <p>In 1989, Marc Lepine shot and killed 14 women and wounded 13 others at the University of Montreal’s École Polytechnique. He was a francophone, but in the eyes of pure laine Quebeckers, he was not one of them, and would never be. He was only half French-Canadian. He was also half Algerian, a Muslim, and his name was Gamil Gharbi. Seven years earlier, after the Canadian Armed Forces rejected his application under that name, he legally changed his name to Marc Lepine.</p> <p>Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor, was an immigrant from Russia. In 1992, he shot four colleagues and wounded one other at Concordia University’s faculty of engineering after learning he would not be granted tenure.</p> <p>This week’s killer, Kimveer Gill, was, like Marc Lepine, Canadian-born and 25. On his blog, he described himself as of “Indian” origin. (In their press conference, however, the police repeatedly referred to Mr. Gill as of “Canadian” origin.)</p> <p>It isn’t known when Mr. Gill’s family arrived in Canada. But he attended English elementary and high schools in Montreal. That means he wasn’t a first-generation Canadian. Under the restrictions of Bill 101, the province’s infamous language law, that means at least one of his parents must have been educated in English elementary or high schools in Canada.</p> <p>To be sure, Mr. Lepine hated women, Mr. Fabrikant hated his engineering colleagues and Mr. Gill hated everyone. But all of them had been marginalized, in a society that valued pure laine.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Jan Wong probably hadn’t anticipated the furor her article would cause. It was roundly criticized by many in Quebec including Quebecois journalists, and called a “disgrace” by Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who questioned why French culture was singled out to blame (“<a href="http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=7558331f-14b9-4b1a-bfc1-e5a68dbe3999&k=47772" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Charest blasts Toronto reporter</font></a>”, September 19, 2006, <em>Montreal Gazette</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The recent events at Dawson College seem to defy all logic. These events have brought back painful memories-for all of us in Québec, as well as people in the US, France, Ireland, Russia and to all other nations-who have experienced similar tragedies in recent years. This tragedy is certainly reminiscent of the shootings that took place in downtown Toronto on December 26, 2005.</p> <p>In this kind of situation, anyone who ventures to put forward explanations or comparisons at the very least risks making a fool of himself. Jan Wong has certainly discredited herself with her gamble.</p> <p>I was shocked and disappointed by the narrow-minded analysis published in the Saturday, September 16 edition, in which Ms Wong sought to identify the affirmation of French culture in Québec as the deeper cause of the Dawson College shootings and the killings at the Polytechnique in 1989.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In the above quote, Charest stated that the Dawson College shooting reminded him of the shootings in downtown Toronto, on December 26, 2005. In that  Boxing Day incident a white teenage girl, Jane Creba, out shopping with her family, was critically shot – and later died in hospital – when two groups of mostly black youths had an argument in front of a Foot Locker store and exchanged gunfire. (“<a href="http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/toronto011106.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">If Jane Creba had been black</font></a>”, by Arthur Weinreb, January 11, 2006, <em>Canada Free Press</em>; “<a href="http://www.thestar.com/Article/534433" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Doctor only steps away from Creba</font></a>”, by Peter Small, November 11, 2008, <em>Toronto Star</em>; “<a href="http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20091123/creba_charges_091123?hub=Toronto" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Four suspects acquitted in Creba shooting</font></a>”, November 23, 2009, <em>CTV Toronto</em>; and, “<a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/08/26/judge-sentences-final-two-men-in-creba-killing/#ixzz13DEz7L7t" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Judge sentences final two men in Creba killing</font></a>”, by Megan O’Toole, August 26, 2010, <em>National Post</em>.).</p> <p>Premier Charest had a reason to be incensed that Jan Wong had picked out Quebec’s French language law to blame, but one should not ignore the fact that in all of the three multiple-shooting cases in Montreal as cited by Wong the perpetrator was a member of an immigrant-minority culture while the victims tended to be more mainstream white and better educated, and likely had not been picked at random. Even in the case of Jane Creba’s death in Toronto, the “accidental” nature of her being caught in the crossfire between black gang members should not be presumed – at least I would not – until the undercurrent of its circumstances is adequately assessed without prejudice.</p> <p>But then what the Canadian Parliament, which essentially represented the country in such a situation of public controversy, and <em>The Globe and Mail</em> newspaper did were excessive in my opinion, amounting to letting democracy be an institutional means to suppress a vital function of democracy that in this instance had incurred the wrath of some: the House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution calling for an apology to Quebec, and <em>The Globe and Mail</em>’s editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon who had cleared Wong’s article for publication, fired her and also imposed a gag order that she not speak publicly – in exchange for money, which she agreed to for a set period of time. (“<a href="http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/280561" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Gagged No Longer: Controversial Journalist Breaks Silence</font></a>”, by Jason Li, October 16, 2009, <em>Digital Journal</em>.)</p> <p>It’s true that the journalist Jan Wong had a history of small acts of radical behavior that smack of ambitious opportunism (“<a href="http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=77be0dbb-49b2-4470-aa66-f6e7d7da1cf9&sponsor=" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jan Wong, disgrace to journalism</font></a>”, by Warren Kinsella, September 28, 2006, <em>National Post</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.macleans.ca/culture/lifestyle/article.jsp?content=200701031_1192_1192" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The one who didn’t get away</font></a>”, by Brian Bethune, October 31, 2007, <em>Maclean’s</em>), and in this case her logic of deduction to blame Quebec’s French language law was probably not sound. But if each time something like this happens the journalist has to apologize and retract simply because her criticism is directed at part of the political/legal institution, then any part of such institution when cloaked in the veil of secrecy or deception, and with the official appearance of democracy, would be untouchable by the media or the public, and thus become an organ of authoritarianism rather than democracy.</p> <p><em>Montreal Gazette</em> Columnist Hubert Bauch pointed out that this was exactly the outcome when it came to the French language law (“<a href="http://www.vigile.net/Jan-Wong-was-misguided-maybe-But" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jan Wong was misguided, maybe. But why the fuss?</font></a>”, by Hubert Bauch, October 1, 2006, <em>The Gazette</em> (courtesy of <em>Vigile.net</em>)):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The worst thing about what’s being called “l’affaire Wong” is that it makes it more difficult to rationally discuss what is in fact a very real problem, the integration of non-francophone immigrants and visible minorities into the mainstream of Quebec, said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies and former Quebec regional director of the Canadian Jewish Congress.</p> <p>Racism is no more prevalent in Quebec than anywhere else, he is quick to say. But because of the particular nature of Quebec society and the complications of the language situation, the problem of integrating newcomers is more acute than elsewhere.</p> <p>“They’re not being included in the decision-making fabric of Quebec,” Jedwab said. “If you look at the nominations process, to boards, committees, to various positions, Quebec has an absolutely abysmal record. Its public service by all standards has the lowest representation of visible minorities of any province or state in North America.””</p> </blockquote> <p>Whether some of these high-profile cases of violence have been connected to gender politics, race politics, or other politics, my experience tells me that political agendas do often attempt to take control of issues of public debate and force outcomes in a direction wanted by powerful interests.</p> <p>Thus I find it regrettable when the Canadian House of Commons recently intervened again to condemn, once more unanimously, a September 2010 <em>Maclean’s Magazine</em> cover story that calls Quebec the most corrupt province in Canada.</p> <p>When this recent article came out, Liberal Member of Parliament Marc Garneau characterized it as “sensationalism”, “unworthy of a Canadian magazine” and “divisive” for the magazine’s use of the Quebec symbol Bonhomme Carnaval on its cover (“<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/spector-vision/will-house-demand-macleans-apologize-to-quebec/article1725472/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Will House demand Maclean’s apologize to Quebec?</font></a>”, by Norman Spector, September 25, 2010, <em>The Globe and Mail</em>), but then the parliamentary motion was introduced, and Mr. Garneau expressed some concern that it might be overreacting (“<a href="http://www2.macleans.ca/tag/censure/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Parliament rebukes <em>Maclean’s</em></font></a>”, by John Geddes, September 30, 2010, <em>Maclean’s Magazine</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“If in two weeks, another magazine writes something that’s considered excessive,” Garneau said, “we can’t make a habit of putting out a motion every time we’re not happy about what’s written in the media.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In my opinion, the “corrupt” label may be offensive to Quebec but the facts cited in the <em>Maclean’s</em> article cannot be denied out of hand, and Quebec Premier Jean Charest has inherited dubious political connections to some past practices perceived as corrupt by the public. (My Facebook comments and links posted to Andrew Coyne, national editor of <em>Maclean’s Magazine</em>, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/walltowall.php?id=1761327938&banter_id=712680225"><font color="#0000ff">http://www.facebook.com/walltowall.php?id=1761327938&banter_id=712680225</font></a>, and to David Frum, Canadian-American columnist, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=164721990204765&id=555811580"><font color="#0000ff">http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=164721990204765&id=555811580</font></a>.) </p> <p>(A week after the initial posting of a draft in progress for this blog article, on October 15 <em>Maclean’s Magazine</em>’s Facebook page announced that its national editor Andrew Coyne’s Facebook account was hacked and was then removed by Facebook: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/MacleansMagazine/posts/157752344258228"><font color="#0000ff">http://www.facebook.com/MacleansMagazine/posts/157752344258228</font></a>. The comments I left with Andrew who was a Facebook friend of mine are therefore gone, but the earlier cited Facebook “wall-to-wall” link is kept in this article as a record – I hope Andrew Coyne is not suffering like Jan Wong was.)</p> <p>The mentality that every time someone in the media says something terribly offensive the person and the message need to be condemned is rather old and should be considered outdated, but unfortunately civility is often equated with democracy – even in modern Canadian politics – and that serves to suppress meaningful discussions and debates. Columnist David Frum puts it somewhat cynically when he compares it to the old English law of “seditious libel” (“<a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/Truth+defence/3613440/story.html#ixzz11Oma4mIy" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Truth is no defence</font></a>”, by David Frum, October 2, 2010, <em>National Post</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Some may wonder: What specifically about the Maclean’s piece gave such offence? The piece was built upon uncontested facts, including such nuggets as the information that to build a highway in Quebec costs 30% more per mile than anywhere else in Canada. It quoted acknowledged experts, including Quebec politicians. Nobody has detected -- or even suggested --any important errors of fact or interpretation in the piece.</p> <p>But to ask the question is to misunderstand the problem.</p> <p>In the old law of England, there existed a crime of “seditious libel” -- a libel that specifically affected the reputation of the sovereign. In a case of seditious libel, truth was not a defence. Very much to the contrary: As the saying went, truth compounded libel.</p> <p>If you said the king was an imbecile, when he was not an imbecile, that would be bad. But if you said the king was an imbecile and he actually was an imbecile -- that would be very, very much worse.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In his article accompanying the <em>Maclean’s</em> cover story, columnist Andrew Coyne points out that power and impotence are among the important factors in politics that can corrupt the political process (“<a href="http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/24/what-lies-beneath-quebecs-scandals/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">What lies beneath Quebec’s scandals</font></a>”, by Andrew Coyne, September 24, 2010, <em>Maclean’s Magazine</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Fighting corruption has often proved the best opportunity for it. The young Maurice Duplessis made his name denouncing the venality of Louis-Alexandre Taschereau’s government (Taschereau was eventually forced from office on charges of abusing public funds, the third Quebec premier to suffer this indignity), much as Brian Mulroney rose to fame for his work on the Cliche commission—and just as Jean Chrétien came to power promising to clean up the mess left by Mulroney. Sponsorships, Shawinigate, the ghostly voters of the Gaspésie, Airbus: there’s a pattern here, and it’s useless to deny it.</p> <p>What explains Quebec’s unusual susceptibility to money politics? Deeply entrenched deference to authority? A worldly Catholic tolerance of official vice? There is no grand unified theory: at different times and in different situations, different forces have come into play. Nevertheless, a few broad factors emerge:</p> <p><em>Power corrupts, but so does impotence</em>. Healthy political cultures are marked by contestability: results are unpredictable, success is incremental, and neither victory nor defeat are ever far from view. But the tendency, in federal politics, for Quebecers to throw their support to one party or another <em>en bloc</em>—and the province’s outsized importance, therefore, in deciding elections—has given rise to a peculiar set of pathologies.</p> <p>…”</p> </blockquote> <p>Power can control, and impotence may mean reliance on that power of control and hence the <em>en bloc</em> approach in electoral politics that when unchecked can have the tendency to encroach on other vital parts of a democracy.</p> <p>Returning to my personal story earlier, but fast forward from the Team Canada-Team USA women’s hockey game in San Jose, California, on October 23, 2001, which as said earlier was one day after my sending an e-mail letter to Kim Campbell enquiring about my old political case first presented to her through her Member of Parliament constituency office on November 30, 1992, when RCMP officers soon came to take me to a psychiatric committal.</p> <p>In February 2003 I was now in Toronto, Canada, and through Lori Dawe, constituency director for then Progressive Conservative party leader Joe Clark, I requested a meeting with Mr. Clark, who had been the Minister of Constitutional Affairs in 1992 overseeing the Charlottetown constitutional process under then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. I submitted a number of questions to Joe Clark, under four categories:</p> <p>a) “Western alienation” and the Charlottetown constitutional campaign;</p> <p>b) Bring Quebec into the constitution, and the balance between the interests of <br />Quebec and those of the western provinces;</p> <p>c) Your contributions to the Charlottetown constitutional process, vs. contributions <br />by former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney; and</p> <p>d) Distinct Society, Aboriginal self-government, and ethnic minority cultures.</p> <p>These topics had been part of my interest back in 1992 when I circulated press releases critical of Brian Mulroney’s leadership and conduct, and Joe Clark’s role in constitutional reform was mentioned in some of them. But by the time in 2003 when I tried to connect directly to Clark, I had shifted my attentions away and back to computer science and software engineering, working in Hawaii and California from 1997 onward, and so my memory in 2003 of the earlier politics was a little faulty. Later during 2009 I took the time to review some of these constitutional and political issues, and my survey and analysis – including copies of some of the old press releases – can be found in my blog article, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/the-myth-of-political-vendetta.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”.</p> <p>Nonetheless, the questions I raised to Joe Clark in early 2003 were meaningful, and some of them are excerpted here (My document, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot001%20-%20Questions%20for%20honorable%20Joe%20Clark,%20Feb%2012,%202003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Questions for honorable Joe Clark, February 12, 2003</font></a>”).</p> <p>From under a):</p> <blockquote> <p>“It is somewhat puzzling to me that the Charlottetown accord, formed on the basis of broad nationwide consultations, and backed up by a strong group of political leaders from the west including yourself and Ms. Kim Campbell, faired rather disappointingly in the national referendum in the western provinces.</p> <p>Is there a clearly identifiable explanation(s) for this? Could it be that the western populace found the referendum a good occasion to vent their angers, regardless of the substances in it for the west’s interests? Or could it be that the final form of the accord was perceived as relatively weak for the interests of the west, and therefore did not satisfy the voters? If the latter were the case, what would be your view of what to blame, the difficult-to-satisfy appetite of the west (analogous to what former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau commented on about the popular mood in Quebec), or certain aspects of the accord desire to be improved?”</p> </blockquote> <p>From under b):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Therefore, when the Charlottetown accord did not do well in the national referendum in the western provinces and in the referendum in Quebec, it appeared to be evidence of regional conflicts being hard to resolve.</p> <p>What is your opinion on this issue, that the gaps between the interests of the two regions were indeed difficult to bridge and the Charlottetown accord did as much as could be done at the time, armed with the knowledge and wisdom gained through expert and grass-root consultations? Could it be, instead, that some elements of the accord may not have been very good in this area, even in your judgment?”</p> </blockquote> <p>From under c):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Another major intervention by Mr. Mulroney, I remember, was with the final form of the accord (the consensus report). I cannot remember the details of the points by now, and would have difficulty finding the old media coverage stories on it (The Vancouver Sun newspaper had a long article on this during that time). The thrust of the story was that the accord draft in its pre-final form was completed by you after committee discussions and several rounds of inter-provincial negotiations. At the time Mr. Mulroney was busy with other governmental affairs and went on a foreign trip near the end. When he returned, he was displeased with some aspects of the accord and made several changes before taking it to the last round of negotiation with the premiers.</p> <p>What were the main changes made by Mr. Mulroney at that time? I seem to <br />remember things about the senate (natural resources?) and about manpower control for Quebec, in particular.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Under d):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The French people of Canada, being one of the two European groups to first settle in the land that is now Canada, and the aboriginal people who by most historical accounts were the first to inhabit this land and were the inhibitors [correction: inhabitants] when the Europeans came, are certainly unique in their (powerful) positions in the Canadian society. But they are not unique in their desires to integrate with the rest of the Canadians but at the same time to preserve their native languages and cultures. Should the constitution address these issues for the other ethnic groups in a more definitive manner, beyond the ethnic minority rights in the charter? Would something like the Canadian Mosaic thinking be a good thing in formal language in the constitution? The Canadian constitutional experiments are interesting in an international sense as they may provide valuable lessons and precedence to a big part of the world.”</p> </blockquote> <p>My document with the above and other questions were sent via e-mail to Lori Dawe on February 12, 2003. It took quite a while before Joe Clark sent me an e-mail reply, on April 3, 2003, the content of which is as follows (My document, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/Documents/Bspot002%20-%20E-mail%20reply%20from%20Joe%20Clark,%20Apr%203,%202003.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">E-mail reply from Joe Clark, April 3, 2003</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Dear Dr. Gao:</p> <p>Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning Western alienation and the Charlottetown Accord. I appreciate your having taken the time to contact me.</p> <p>Once I cease to be Leader of the PC Party, I am hoping to have more time to adequately reflect upon that period of our collective history and perhaps, at some point in the future, I will put pen to paper and write my memoirs. Until then, however, I must deal with the present and as such, unfortunately, I am not be able to meet with you to discuss the issues you have raised.</p> <p>Sincerely,</p> <p>Joe Clark”</p> </blockquote> <p>At the time, Joe Clark had in August 2002 announced his intent to resign as PC party leader, and in November 2002 a party leadership convention was set for May 29-31, 2003 in Toronto. (“<a href="http://www.nanosresearch.com/news-FRE/in_the_news/Citizen%20August%207%202002.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Clark agrees to give up leadership</font></a>”, by Tim Naumetz, August 7, 2002, <em>Ottawa Citizen</em>; “Tories set tentative dates: Leadership convention in late May or early June”, by Maria Babbage, October 6, 2002, <em><a href="http://www.thetelegram.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Telegram</font></a></em>; and, “How Eves can thwart the Liberals and (maybe) avoid humiliation”, by Adam Radwanski, November 7, 2002, <em><a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Ottawa Citizen</font></a></em>.)</p> <p>But why was Joe Clark not only unwilling to discuss the constitutional issues with me – not that he had to – but essentially stating that he would not discuss them until when he wrote his memoirs? </p> <p>To this day Clark has not published any memoir and has been largely inactive in public when it comes to Canadian constitutional issues. It is a far cry from his first departure from electoral politics in 1993 when he wrote and published the book, <em>A Nation Too Good To Lose: Renewing The Purpose of Canada</em>, in 1994 (“<a href="http://www.uni.ca/dialoguecanada/book_reviews.html#6" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Talk about Renewing Canada – A summary of books and articles relating to the question of national unity</font></a>”, <em>Dialogue Canada</em>), and a far cry even from Brian Mulroney who has published an 1152 page memoir in September 2007 focusing just on his earlier years to the time of his 1993 retirement from politics (“<a href="http://www.mcclelland.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780771065361" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Memoirs 1939-1993,</em> Written by Brian Mulroney</font></a>”, McClelland).</p> <p>When I scrutinize Joe Clark’s terse reply more carefully and ponder about any hidden meanings, there appears to be an answer emerging as in the following:</p> <p>1) “that period of our collective history” – it means Clark hadn’t made all his decisions alone – there was Mulroney and there was the party at the least – and now it’s not that straightforward he could discuss them at his own will;</p> <p>2) “Once I cease to be Leader of the PC Party, I am hoping to have more time to adequately reflect” – at this time Clark was also the party leader so his current consideration for the “collective” was more than just about the past;</p> <p>3) “perhaps, at some point in the future, I will put pen to paper and write my memoirs. Until then, however, I must deal with the present” – only until when he writes his memoir that he would not be dealing with the present, i.e., even after retirement as the party leader it still wouldn’t be the future but the present, and that ‘later present’ may include his own reflection but not open discussion on the collective past.</p> <p>The message was constant as I understand it: the past had been “collective”, the present was “collective”, and the future without Joe Clark would still be the “collective” present; the barometer of change to the real future is when Clark himself “perhaps” writes his memoir and touches on some of these topics – that so far hasn’t happened.</p> <p>Brian Mulroney had been the boss of a big party during that “collective” past, Joe Clark was the boss of a small party in April 2003 when he sent me this reply, and Peter MacKay became the boss in late May 2003 when he replaced Clark as leader; then a few months later in December MacKay led the Progressive Conservative party to a merger with the Reform party (then called Canadian Alliance) under Stephen Harper to form the Conservative party. (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/conservativeparty/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Conservative Party of Canada</font></a>”, January 30, 2006, <em>CBC News</em>.)</p> <p>Now with Stephen Harper as the leader of this new party, and especially with Brian Mulroney having played a patriarchic role to help bring about the merger, Joe Clark is entitled to none of the “collective future” if it ever comes. In fact, Clark and the progressive wing of the PC party strongly opposed the merger, with Clark sitting out the remainder of his Member of Parliament term as an independent as well as declaring his support for then incoming Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin; Harper doesn’t like Clark at all if only for this reason, although he has also maintained some degree of skepticism about Mulroney. (“<a href="http://www.davidorchard.com/online/nomerger/progressivesatbrink-joeclark-031114.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Progressives at the brink</font></a>”, by Joe Clark, November 14, 2003, <em>The Globe and Mail</em> (courtesy of <em>davidorchard.com</em>); “<a href="http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20040426/qp-clark040425/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Joe Clark says he’d choose Martin over Harper</font></a>”, April 26, 2004, <em>CTV News</em>; “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/clark_joe/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Right Honourable Joe</font></a>”, May 14, 2004, <em>CBC News</em>; and, “<a href="http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071110.close10/BNStory/National/home" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mulroney casts long shadow in Harper circle</font></a>”, by Jane Taber, November 10, 2007, <em>The Globe and Mail</em>.)</p> <p>I have wondered why Joe Clark chose to use the word “cease” to describe the end of his party leadership – a rather archaic and unflattering usage in this situation – and whether it gave away a sense that his party could “cease” to exist soon (a more typical use of the word).</p> <p>I think Clark had a sense that the party was going to cease its presence soon, even though at the time the leadership frontrunner Peter MacKay denied any such intention (<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/conservativeparty/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Conservative Party of Canada</font></a>”, January 30, 2006, <em>CBC News</em>); and I have also come to think of the merger prospect at that point as probably linked to the future plan of the former party leader in between Kim Campbell and Joe Clark – Jean Charest the once young rising star. It was Charest who was generally believed to have a future to lead the Progressive Conservative party back to government after it had nearly been eliminated in the 1993 election under Campbell when many of the MP seats in western Canada were taken over by the upstart Reform party and the Quebec ones taken over by the upstart Bloc Quebecois. But after the 1997 election the PC party was still far behind either the opposition Reform party or the separatist Bloc Quebecois in its standing in the House of Commons, and in 1998 Charest bolted to become leader of the Quebec Liberal party, which was also in opposition. (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charest" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jean Charest</font></a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Conservative_Party_of_Canada" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Progressive Conservative Party of Canada</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; and, “<a href="http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/rss/article/1015346" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Former Quebec minister accuses Charest Liberals of major ethics violations</font></a>”, April 13, 2010, <em>The Daily Gleaner</em>.)</p> <p>On February 12, 2003 when I sent my list of questions to Joe Clark with a request for a meeting, there was no election in Quebec, then in March the Parti Quebecois government there called an election. The polls in Quebec during March mostly put the separatist party ahead of Charest’s Liberal party, until Jean Charest’s performance in a leaders’ debate at the end of March brought a sudden surge of popularity for him and for his party. (“<a href="http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/27472/pq_takes_lead_in_quebec_provincial_election/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">PQ Takes Lead In Quebec Provincial Election</font></a>”, March 30, 2003, and, “<a href="http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/27450/liberals_take_lead_in_quebec/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Liberals Take Lead In Quebec</font></a>”, April 3, 2003, <em>Angus Reid Public Opinion</em>.)</p> <p>The first poll results clearly in favor of Charest and his party went public on April 3, the same day Joe Clark sent me the earlier-quoted e-mail reply. (“<a href="http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/27445/quebec_charest_won_election_debate/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Quebec: Charest Won Election Debate</font></a>”, April 3, 2003, <em>Angus Reid Public Opinion</em>.)</p> <p>In the April 14 election Jean Charest won a majority government, defeating the PQ under Premier Bernard Landry.</p> <p>My sense is that during the February-April 2003 period Joe Clark waited until the Quebec election prospect and situation became clear, that Jean Charest would stay in Quebec as the next Premier, to send me a response conveying his feeling that the future did not look good for his federal PC party.</p> <p>After all, Peter MacKay is the son of Elmer MacKay, a former senior figure in the Mulroney government, also known as one of the prominent Canadian friends of German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, the central figure in the Airbus Affair regarding tens of millions of dollars he distributed in Canada for the 1988 sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada, some of which may have gone to officials and politicians in government, possibly including Prime Minister Mulroney personally. (“<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/12/06/schreiber-mulroney.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Former Mulroney aide denies Schreiber’s allegations</font></a>”, December 6, 2007, <em>CBC News</em>; and, my blog article, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/the-myth-of-political-vendetta.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Peter MacKay had all the reason to agree to a merger, and Brian Mulroney all the reasons to ferment one: the Reform party enjoyed a squeaky-clean image, and as long as the leadership of the new party went to a Reformer – it should given the Reform party’s much larger size and stronger position in the House of Commons – whatever collective past and unsavory past of the Progressive Conservative party would be buried and considered dealt with.</p> <p>The timing of it was also critical: in August 2002 a few weeks after Joe Clark’s announcement of his retirement intent, then Prime Minister Jean Chretien of the Liberal party did it also – after winning three back-to-back majority government terms that earned him a place in history and outlasting Brian Mulroney in the length of time served as Prime Minister; eventually Chretien stepped down in December 2003 (my blog article, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/the-myth-of-political-vendetta.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”). The merger of the Progressive Conservative party with the Reform party came only days before Chretien’s stepping down and presented a stronger party of the right ready to take on Chretien’s party on the left after his departure.</p> <p>These motives were quite likely behind what happened in the December 2003 merger and then with the new Conservative party, except that Karlheinz Schreiber, who had begun to turn against Brian Mulroney in 1999, also stepped up his efforts to expose Mulroney and win his fight to avoid extradition to his native Germany where he faced criminal charges of fraud and tax evasion. The first media report of some murky $300,000 Schreiber had given Mulroney during the 1990s came in November 2003 – just before the party merger. </p> <p>My blog article, “<a href="http://fenggao.org/the-myth-of-political-vendetta.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">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</font></a>”, has touched on some of these topics about Karlheinz Schreiber and Brian Mulroney. The Mulroney-Schreiber squabble became known as the Mulroney-Schreiber affair, and was the subject of a 2008-09 public inquiry led by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant; however, under mandates recommended by Dr. David Johnston – as earlier mentioned now the new Governor General of Canada appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper – and adopted by the Harper government, the inquiry would only examine the business and financial relationship between the two – mostly focusing on the $300,000 as conducted by the Oliphant Commission. </p> <p>In the end, Justice Oliphant’s inquiry report has given Brian Mulroney a slap on the wrist, a very light one, concluding that Mulroney’s business and financial dealings with Schreiber were inappropriate and violated the ethics rules set by his own government in 1985 (“<a href="http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/pco-bcp/commissions/oliphant/2010-07-20/english/reports/oliphant%20commission%20vol%201%20english.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Oliphant Commission Report</font></a>”, May 31, 2010, <em>Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations Respecting Business and Financial Dealings Between Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“… I found that the business and financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate. I also found that Mr. Mulroney’s failure to disclose those business and financial dealings was inappropriate.</p> <p>Simply put, Mr. Mulroney, in his business and financial dealings with Mr. Schreiber, failed to live up to the standard of conduct that he had himself adopted in the 1985 Ethics Code.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Karlheinz Schreiber wasn’t that dumb, at least not as to let himself be the fall guy hung out to dry for so little. Schreiber wrote and talked extensively in the last few years about the matters involving Mulroney. He stated unequivocally to the Oliphant Commission that his relationship with Brian Mulroney had begun with his helping depose then Progressive Conservative party leader (and former Prime Minister) Joe Clark and install Mulroney as the party leader in 1983 (“<a href="http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/pco-bcp/commissions/oliphant/2010-07-20/english/documents/exhibits/schreiber/summary/summary.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Summary of Interview of Karlheinz Schreiber</font></a>”, March 24, 2009, <em>Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations Respecting Business and Financial Dealings Between Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney</em>):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Mr. Schreiber recalled that in the late 1970s, he was approached in Germany by Walter Wolf and told that Canadian conservatives were seeking support. According to Mr. Schreiber, Mr. Wolf invited him to Newfoundland to meet with Frank Moores, who had just left office as Premier of Newfoundland. At the time, Mr. Moores was president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada [sic] (the “PC Party”), and he and Mr. Wolf were looking for support for Mr. Mulroney.</p> <p>Mr. Schreiber stated that soon after his introduction to Mr. Moores, he met Mr. Mulroney who was president of Iron Ore, for the first time. Subsequent to this meeting, Mr. Moores asked Mr. Schreiber for funding, which was initially to be used for the 1983 party convention in Winnipeg. Mr. Schreiber was told that delegates were to be flown from Quebec to Winnipeg by Max Ward to ensure there would be sufficient votes against then party leader Joe Clark. Mr. Schreiber donated $30,000 or $50,000 CAD to this cause through his Alberta company MLE Industries. He gave the donation directly to Mr. Wolf (through his lawyer Michael Cogger) who may have claimed the donation as his own.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Twenty years later, in the evening of the first day of the 2003 Tory (PC) party convention to elect a new leader to replace him, May 29, 2003, a tribute was held for Joe Clark at the convention venue, Toronto Metro Convention Centre. Joe Clark and his family were there. </p> <p>Brian Mulroney wasn’t there, not arriving at the convention until the next day, but he did send a videotaped message full of praise for Joe Clark, especially for Clark as his government’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and full of boasts about their friendship.</p> <p>I was there at the tribute for Joe Clark, even though I have never been a Tory. The tribute gathering was open to the public and I attended as a small gesture of respect for Mr. Joe Clark. I don’t know how many in the public like me at the time anticipated – probably a lot more among the party delegates in the packed convention hall – that in a few months Mulroney would become a guiding patron of a newly merged party without Joe Clark, one that would return to governing in another two years or so – obviously without Joe Clark.</p> <p>When it comes to his political image Brian Mulroney is a control freak where his influence can extend to, and from time to time quite a few journalists have looked upon him as a sort of Richard Nixon of Canadian politics. (“WASHINGTON NOTEBOOK”, by Susan Chung, December 1, 1995, <em><a href="http://www.timescolonist.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Time – Colonist</font></a></em>; “<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE3D61430F936A1575AC0A9639C8B63&pagewanted=all" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Free Speech; Canada Still Has Mulroney to Kick Around</font></a>”, by Clifford Krauss, September 25, 2005, <em>The New York Times</em>; “<a href="http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2008/Malloy.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mulroney’s Shadows: The Many Images of Canada’s Eighteenth Prime Minister</font></a>”, by Jonathan Malloy, June 2008, Carlton University; and, “The Mulroney show; Canadians are reminded why they dislike him so much”, by Don MacPherson, May 16, 2009, <a href="http://www.montrealgazette.com/" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">The Gazette</font></em></a>.)</p> <p>It was thus not surprising to see Brian Mulroney talk forcefully, and quite intimidatingly, before and during the Oliphant inquiry about defending his “father’s good name”, asserting that he kept his business dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber secret because he feared the Airbus Affair events of 1995-97 that “scarred me and my family for life”. (“<a href="http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=d37c39b2-ecb0-4e11-a55f-3f6e4736a0db" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Whatever did Mulroney expect after taking the cash?</font></a>”, November 27, 2007, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>; “<a href="http://www.fftimes.com/node/222993" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mulroney says he feared renewed Airbus attacks</font></a>”, May 12, 2009, <em>Fort Frances Times</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/Living/World/2009-05-12/article-1304121/Mulroney:-Bear-Head-deal-kept-secret-to-avoid-another-Airbus-controversy/1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mulroney: Bear Head deal kept secret to avoid another Airbus controversy</font></a>”, May 12, 2009, <em>The (Charlottetown) Guardian</em>.)</p> <p>But the logic really should be the opposite, that if Mulroney hadn’t done anything wrong false allegations could stick only temporarily yet nondisclosure on his part would keep them persist.</p> <p>I remember commenting in a press release in November 1992, just after the Charlottetown constitutional referendum, somewhat cynically about then Constitutional Affairs Minister Joe Clark:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Poor Mr. Clark, he never failed Mr. Mulroney, not yet anyway”.</p> </blockquote> <p>Well, has Joe Clark ever, or ever will.</p> <p>That time over a decade earlier I was muzzled when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police sent me to the psychiatric ward only hours after I had faxed press releases critical of Mulroney to Kim Campbell’s Member of Parliament constituency office. This time I communicated with Joe Clark through his constituency office and received a polite but “perhaps” revealing reply. Maybe – just maybe – this time Joe Clark was muzzled also but to a lesser degree. </p> <p>The RCMP officer taking me to psychiatric committal on November 30, 1992 was appropriately named “Brian Cotton”. Later in 1993 another RCMP officer acting as liaison with some other psychiatric institutions over my case was identified as “Corporal Libel”.</p> <p>I wonder if the “cotton” was clean, and whether the “libel” was considered “seditious”.</p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2010/11/team-canada-female-athletes.html">Continuing to Part 2</a>)</p> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-65786205694621118202010-02-19T00:47:00.000-05:002022-12-08T03:01:20.562-05:00Bangkok to Kwangtung, and back to America (Part 1) – Opening China to Christianity<p>The title of this blog article shows obvious influence from that of my last two blog posts, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a>”, dated November 22 and December 15, 2009, which had its inspiration from the story of the book, “<em>Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East</em>”, about a young man of African heritage originally from Nairobi, Kenya, establishing a very different kind of family life and career in Shenzhen,  a fast-growing metropolis in southern China across from Hong Kong.</p> <p>Mark Ndesandjo’s life has been that of international, cultural and social mobility. I added the name Guangzhou to the title of my two blog posts to wish him greater success, after he had chosen to unveil his book to the international media in the city a short distance north that happens to be the economic center of southern China and a center of international trade from its historical days when it was known as the port of Canton to its  modern status as the host of Canton Fair – one of the largest trade fairs in the world from where trade with Africa has been booming lately.</p> <p>But Mark Ndesandjo’s life has also been a story of retreat. Born to parents educated in America, Mark received international education during his childhood in Nairobi, was sent to attend several elite universities in the United States, including Brown, Stanford, and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and then embarked on an ambitious marketing career in the telecommunication industry. His life direction took a dramatic turn when he moved to China in 2002, but only after an unexpected layoff by the Canadian telecommunication giant at the time, Nortel Networks, shortly after 9/11, 2001.</p> <p>Not to mention that Mark Ndesandjo is a half-brother of today’s U.S. President Barack Obama.</p> <p>As interesting and intriguing as the Ndesandjo story was, and as was some of Obama’s politics and history which served as the backdrop for me to explore certain political issues of international interest, in this article I delve into a different type of cultural and social exchanges, one that had been practiced for many centuries in history, proliferated worldwide during the 19th century and become part of the international establishment by the dawn of the 20th century, but that ultimately went into retreat – the proselytizing of Christianity and its cultural and social dimensions.</p> <p>From a personal perspective my focus will be on the arrival and evolution of Christianity in China, with special attention to certain stories about Protestant missionaries from Britain and America.</p> <p>In this context, my choice of the title for this blog article has been influenced by Pace University historian Joseph Tse-Hei Lee’s article, “<a href="http://www.docstoc.com/docs/20653607/02---Overseas-Chinese-Networks-in-Early-Baptist-Movement" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Chinese Christian Transnational Networks Of Bangkok-Hong Kong-Chaozhou in the 19th Century</font></a>” (2004, and a preceding 2001 article, “<a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119928515/abstract" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Overseas Chinese Networks and Early Baptist Missionary Movement Across The South China Sea</font></a>”), which reviewed the historical growth of Protestant Christian missions in southern China through influences from Christian missionary work among Chinese living in Siam (Thailand) and in Hong Kong. Dr. Lee is one of the first to paraphrase this part of  Christian mission history in the notion of “Transnational Networks”, while some scholars have begun to emphasize the influences on America, Europe, the Muslim world, Asia and Africa by economic migrations and cultural interactions across multinational regions. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.oslo2000.uio.no/program/papers/m1b/m1b-hamashita.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A History of Maritime Asia and East Asian Regional Dynamism 1600-1900 – Maritime Asia from the Ryukyu-Okinawa to the Hong Kong Networks</font></a>”, by Takeshi Hamashita, <em>International Congress of Historical Sciences</em>, August 2000; <em><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=yOkYAzCl2bEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Muslim World after 9/11</font></a></em>, by Angel Rabasa, Rand Corporation, 2004; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=IAmdggo3hh4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Religion+Across+Borders:+Transnational+Immigrant+Networks&source=bl&ots=UOF2G2gpXH&sig=A0pPVIBXp-haCzKMf5G22HJwJso&hl=en&ei=hwJ7S6CVMtKWtgfj-4iYCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Religion Across Borders: Transnational Immigrant Networks</em></font></a>, edited by Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Altamira Press, 2002; “<a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200506080608.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Africa: New Book Examines Yoruba Religion in Nigeria and the Diaspora</font></a>”, by Vicki L. Brennan, <em>allAfrica.com</em>, June 8, 2005; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=DTzdwiN490UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=wolfram+kaiser&cd=8#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union</em></font></a>, by Wolfram Kaiser, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 2007; “<a href="http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.print&event_id=480850&stoplayout=true" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Transnational Networks, Domestic Democratic Activists and Defeat of Dictators: Slovakia, Croatia and Serbia, from 1998 to 2000</font></a>”, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, November 5, 2008; and, “<a href="http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/3/1/2/2/6/pages312261/p312261-1.php" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Is there an Eastern Way to Practice Human Rights? A Comparison of Christian and Buddhist Transnational Networks in China</font></a>”, by Yun Wang, <em>International Studies Association 50th Annual Convention</em>, February 2009.)</p> <p>Multinational, and presumably grassroots-oriented movements, that is.</p> <p>Long before the Bangkok-Hong Kong-southern China route of the Protestant missions’ first inroad into China beginning in the 1830s, there had been a history of Christianity in China – dating back to as early as the 7th century when Nestorian missionaries came via the Middle East and then the 13th century around the time of Marco Polo when Franciscan missionaries came to a Mongolian-ruled China. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://ricci.rt.usfca.edu/hist.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">History of Christianity in China</font></a>”, <em>The Ricci 21st Century Roundtable on the History of Christianity in China</em>.)</p> <table align="right"><tbody> <tr> <td><a href="http://www.nestorian.org/the_nestorians_in_china___the_.html"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" title="7th-century Nestorian Monument in China" border="0" alt="7th-century Chinese Nestorian Monument" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf-kMUL1HsTS4GCpc142LjpuvpoBrWOBdgI9uegEd93EZ9tRDbZ5Slotj-Qzv2I_BycX10wgdp6UaIkQ3jKxq64M4almihAeGLxBQAY6js9VseZr7V-q-D_f-fPOCRulYPUraoYovLN5w/?imgmax=800" width="207" height="403" /></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td width="207"><a href="http://www.nestorian.org/the_nestorian_monument_in_chin.html">781 A.D. Chinese Nestorian Stele discovered in 17th century (Nestorian.org)</a></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p>The Nestorian Stele erected in China in the year 781 A.D. during the Tang (唐) dynasty recorded imperial reception granted by the second Tang Emperor, the Taizong Emperor (太宗) Li Shimin (李世民), in the year 635 A.D. for the religion and three years later the building of a church in the capital of Xi’an (Xian) with imperial blessing. </p> <p>In this document the Roman Empire was referred to as “大秦”, (the Great Ch’in, or Qin – name of the first unified imperial Chinese dynasty in history), and Nestorian Christianity was referred to as “景教”, sometimes translated as “the Brilliant Teaching” or “the Luminous Religion” – although in my view a more appropriate translation would be “Religion of Scenes” and together “大秦景教”would mean “Religion of the Great Ch’in Scenes” or “Teaching of Great Ch’in’s Scenes”. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://jesus.tw/Nestorian_Stele" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Nestorian Stele: 唐景教碑頌正詮--陽瑪諾註</font></a>”, Jesus Taiwan; “<a href="http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/clarc/projects/chinesenestorian/index.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Chinese Nestorian Documents from the Tang Dynasty</font></a>”, Centre for Late Antique Religion & Culture, Cardiff University; “<a href="http://www.aina.org/articles/dasotns.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Description and Significance of the Nestorian Stele, “A Monument Commemorating the Propagation of the Da Qin Luminous Religion in the Middle Kingdom” (大秦景教流行中國碑)</font></a>”, <em>Assyrian International News Agency</em>; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorian_Stele" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Nestorian Stele</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>The reference to Nestorian Christianity as a religion of the “Great Ch’in” could have some additional significances: the Taizong Emperor who granted it the first imperial reception in the 7th century had held the title of the Ch’in Prince (秦王) prior to his succession to the throne – following a power struggle in which he deposed his elder brother the Crown Prince – and the imperial reception came in the same year 635 A.D. when his father, the retired Gaozu Emperor (高祖) Li Yuan (李渊), died. (See, e,g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=KiNEB0H6S0EC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts</em></font></a>, by Meir Shahar, <em>University of Hawaii Press</em>, 2008.)</p> <p>Nonetheless at the end of each historical era in China the Chinese Christian community the foreign missionaries had founded, and its culture, simply disappeared from the society, typically as a result of bans imposed by the officialdom. Thus Christianity had to be reintroduced to China at another time later, and its earlier heritage rediscovered by a new generation of foreign missionaries and their Chinese disciples.</p> <p>Religious or intellectual prohibition and persecution were common in Chinese history. Both Buddhism and Nestorian Christianity were targeted during the late Tang dynasty in the 9th century but the prohibition did not succeed in eliminating the former as it did the latter. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.globalchinacenter.org/analysis/christianity-in-china/the-legacy-of-chinese-christianity-and-chinas-identity-crisis.php" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Legacy of Chinese Christianity and China's Identity Crisis</font></a>”, by Carol Lee Hamrin, <em>Christianity in China</em>, Global China Center, March 19, 2006.)</p> <p>Meanwhile, Islam which had arrived in China in the mid-7th century – not long after its birth and shortly after Nestorian Christianity’s arrival – flourished, although initially the first mosque sanctioned by the Tang-dynasty emperor was built in Canton in southern China rather than in the capital Xi’an in western China – by a maternal uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.muslimheritage.com/topics/default.cfm?ArticleID=518" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Islam in China</font></a>”, by Mohammed Khamouch, <em>Muslim Heritage</em>, March 31, 2006.)</p> <p>The most notorious official act of anti-religion and anti-intellectualism in Chinese history had come with the first unified imperial Chinese dynasty, the short-lived Great Ch’in (Qin) dynasty (circa 221–207 B.C.), ordered by the founding emperor Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇) famous for the construction of the Great Wall and for the Terracotta Warriors unearthed from his tomb. To enforce imperial centralized standards, the emperor ordered burning of most books and in that process buried alive hundreds of Confucian scholars. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/07/dayintech_0711" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">July 11, 1975: Unearthing Qin Shi Huang’s Terra-Cotta Army</font></a>”, by Tony Long, July 11, 2007, <em>Wired</em>; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of_scholars" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Burning of books and burying of scholars</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.) </p> <p>But then in the other ‘Great Ch’in” – as the Chinese referred to the Roman Empire – such episodes of forced conformity and intolerance had also occurred beyond the Crucifixion of Jesus. Forcing conversion to Christianity was a cause for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt in the 4th century, where the conversion was ordered by the Roman emperor and the enforcement carried out by Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria; this happened only several decades after the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity by Emperor Constantine and the founding of the empire’s eastern, Christian capital, Constantinople – previously the Greek colony of Byzantium – in today’s Turkey. Bishop Theophilus’s nephew and successor, Bishop Cyril, later in the 5th century was responsible for the Roman Catholic Church’s declaration of Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople and the Nestorian Christianity, which had initially arisen from Syria, as heretic. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=RmsPAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 2</em></font></a>, by Edward Gibbon, <em>Harper & Brothers</em>, 1845; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=TLyjrU3LPlUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Doctrine and Practice in the Early Church</em></font></a>, by Stuart George Hall, <em>Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing</em>, 1992; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=-qvIyvAJDy8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Library of Alexandria</em></font></a>, by Kelly Trumble and Robina MacIntyre Marshall, <em>Houghton Mifflin Harcourt</em>, 2003; and, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=PN8TMJPugsIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Constantine and the Christian Empire</em></font></a>, by Charles Matson Odahl, <em>Routledge</em>, 2004.)</p> <p>During the early historical period most of the foreign religions coming to China, including Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Nestorianism and Islam,  did so moving along the famous Silk Road to reach China’s northwest – although Islam in Canton arrived via the ocean in the south. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.jaas.org/edocs/v11n1/Nestorianism.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Nestorianism in Central Asia during the First Millennium: Archaeological Evidence</font></a>”, by Maria Adelaide Lala Comneno, <em>Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society</em>, Volume 11, No. 1; and, “<a href="http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/exhibit/religion/religion.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Religions of the Silk Road</font></a>”, <em>Silk Road Seattle</em>, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington.)</p> <p>Many nomadic tribes or nations of various ethnicities dotted the regions along the Silk Road, and that included the Ch’in (Qin) ancestors who had once been a nomadic tribe in the region of Tianshui (天水) in today’s Gansu (province) corridor through which ran the Chinese section of the Silk Road, just west of Xi’an. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_(state)" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Qin (state)</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; “<a href="http://www.ccpit-shaanxi.org/english/jieshao.asp?id=1100" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Brief Introduction to Shaanxi – History</font></a>”, Shaanxi Sub-Council, China Council for the Promotion of International Trade; and, “<a href="http://www.cnto.org/silkroad-gansu.asp#tianshui" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Welcome to The Silk Road – Gansu Province</font></a>”, China National Tourist Office.)</p> <p>Today’s history literatures sometimes list the Han (汉) dynasty (206 B.C. - 220 A.D.) that followed the short-lived Ch'in as when the Silk Road began in China based on official records of it as a route of diplomatic exchanges between China and countries to the west including the Roman Empire. But archaeological finds have given strong indications of mutual influences in ancient crafts, from potteries to bronze tools to iron making, between Central Asia and China dating further back for centuries and millenniums, including along the Silk Road regions in China. Some scholars believe iron had been introduced to China from Central Asia. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sino-Roman Relations</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; “<a href="http://www.appstate.edu/~elorantaj/world1130lecture9.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Themes in Global History: Trade, Economy, and Empires – Lecture 9: China I: Early Origins</font></a>”, by Jari Eloranta, Department of History, Appalachian State University; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=GXzycd3dT9kC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume 1: The Dawn of Civilization: Earliest Times to 700 B.C.</em></font></a>, by Ahmad Hasan Dani and Vadim Mikhaĭlovich Masson,  <em>Motilal Banarsidass Publishers</em>, 1999;  “<a href="http://www.staff.hum.ku.dk/dbwagner/EARFE/EARFE.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The earliest use of iron in China</font></a>”, by Don Wagner, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen, 1999; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=M5Wvw2i84DAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe</em></font></a>, by Victoria Tin-bor Hui, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 2005; and, <a href="http://www.sss.net.cn/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=25046&BigClassID=9&SmallClassID=23&SpecialID=0&belong=sky" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">从考古看丝绸之路祁山道的形成</font></a>”, by 苏海洋 and 雍际春, <em>Sichuan Social Science Online</em>, September 23, 2009.)</p> <p>Moreover, of the seven Chinese states that existed during most of the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.) prior to Ch’in’s annexation of the other six, Ch’in had grown from a state of modest size whose territory included the Chinese section of the Silk Road at the time to occupying the entire western China, even though China’s technological innovation centers at the time – from silk textiles to bronze and iron weaponries – were in the Yangtze-River region state of Chu (楚) according to both historical literatures and archaeological discoveries. (See, e.g., Don Wagner, referred to earlier; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=C_F4Y93n3l0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Defining Chu: image and reality in ancient China</em></font></a>, by Constance A. Cook and John S. Major, <em>University of Hawaii Press</em>, 2004; Victoria Tin-bor Hui, referred to earlier;  “<a href="http://www.jzda.gov.cn/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=740&BigClassName=%BE%A3%D6%DD%CA%B7%BB%B0&SmallClassName=%BE%A3%B3%FE%D6%AE%D7%EE&SpecialID=32" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">楚国丝绸——我国古代工艺水平最高的丝织品</font></a>”, by 朱振汉, <em>荆州市档案信息网 (</em><a href="http://www.jzda.gov.cn"><em>www.jzda.gov.cn</em></a><em>)</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.confucianism.com.cn/html/junshi/8815842.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">战国时期的武器装备</font></a>”, <em>中国国学网 (confucianism.com.cn)</em>, July 9, 2009.)</p> <p>When Nestorian priest Alopen (阿罗本,  or Aluoben) came in the 7th century and was received by the Tang Taizong Emperor, the Chinese referred to the religion as “the Iranian religion”; only until the mid-8th century not long before the Nestorian Stele’s erection in 781 A.D. that the name was changed to refer to the “Great Ch’in”. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=czVRPa7GxrUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Religions of the Silk Road: Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century</em></font></a>, by Richard Foltz, <em>Palgrave Macmillan</em>, 2000; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alopen" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Alopen</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>The Chinese name change for Nestorian Christianity thus coincided with the start of the Tang dynasty’s decline following a 7-year civil war in the mid-8th century when two military generals, An Lushan (安禄山, or Aluoshan) and Shi Siming (史思明), with ethnic origins from nomad tribes in Central Asia and the former an adopted son of the Tang emperor, launched a coup from their bases in today’s Beijing region in northern China, sacked capital Xi’an and named themselves the Yan (燕, Swallow) dynasty. It was the worst instance of treachery and destruction associated with the nomads to that point in recorded Chinese history. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">An Lushan</font></a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Shi_Rebellion" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">An Shi Rebellion</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.upiasia.com/Bookshelf/1041/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">China’s Cosmopolitan Empire – by Mark Lewis</font></a>”, by Stephen Maire, <em>United Press International</em>.)</p> <p>490 years after the Nestorian Stele. the Mongolians conquered China, founding the Yuan (元) dynasty in Beijing in A.D. 1271. That brought a comeback of the Nestorians – and also the arrival of Franciscan missionaries sent by the Pope in Rome. But in another century or so the Yuan dynasty was overthrown and the Mongolians driven out, and with them the Christians. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/beijing/30785.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Beijing – A guide to China’s Capital City: Beijing’s History</font></a>”, China Internet Information Center; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=kL5-5Z2QGFsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>A World History of Christianity</em></font></a>, by Adrian Hastings, <em>Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing</em>, 2000; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Dynasty" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Yuan Dynasty</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>The 8th-century Nestorian Stele was rediscovered in the 17th-century after the Jesuit missionaries came to China and were officially received in the imperial court of the Ming (明) dynasty which had replaced the Mongolian Yuan two centuries earlier.</p> <p>This time and onward, Christianity came primarily via the ocean route in the south rather than overland from the west or the north.</p> <p>The Ming-dynasty era in Chinese history began with a southern focus not seen before in any other unified Chinese dynasty, partly due to such a preference by its founder Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋), the Hongwu Emperor (洪武). As a general in the White Lotus Rebellion in the Yellow-River region in northern China, Zhu Yuanzhang had moved south and taken the Yangtze-River city of Nanjing – at the time called Yingtian (应天) – as his base in the year 1356; and when he eventually defeated the other contenders, drove the Mongolians out of Beijing (Peking, 北京, “Northern Capital”) and back to Mongolia, and founded the Ming dynasty in 1368 A.D. he made Nanjing (Nanking, 南京, "Southern Capital") the national capital. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=I7Pf-X2VuokC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History</em></font></a>, by Patricia Ebrey, Anne Walthall and James Palais, <em>Cengage Learning</em>, 2008; “<a href="http://www.ichina.org.uk/news.asp?type=1&id=675" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Zhu Yuanzhang</font></a>”, <em>Impression of China</em>, September 20, 2009; and, “<a href="http://english.nanjing.gov.cn/zx/szyw/201002/t20100220_289963.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Strength of Nanjing’s Bid for Hosting the Youth Olympics: A Long Historical & Cultural Link</font></a>”, Nanjing Municipal People’s Government.)</p> <p>One ancient legacy of the Nanjing region that is often overlooked as it had not occurred in Nanjing city itself, had had to do with Xiang Yu (项羽), a crucial leader of the rebellions against the short-lived Ch’in dynasty after Ch’in’s founder Qin Si Huang’s death in 210 B.C. Xiang Yu was instrumental in defeating the Ch’in army in 207 B.C. and deciding Ch’in’s final fate, and he later committed suicide at the north bank of Yangtze River about 35 miles outside today’s Nanjing city, while being pursued by the forces of Liu Bang (刘邦), soon-to-be founder of the Han dynasty. Xiang Yu, Liu Bang and later Ming-dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang were all from regions in the former Yangtze-River Chu (楚) State of the Warring States Period before Ch’in’s unification of China, but all from some distances north of today’s Nanjing. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiang_Yu" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Xiang Yu</font></a>”, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Emperor Gaozu of Han</font></a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongwu_Emperor" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Hongwu Emperor</font></a>”, W<em>ikipedia</em>; “<a href="http://suqian.jiangsu.net/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Suqian</font></a>”, <em>Jiangsu.NET</em>; and, “<a href="http://english.pukou.gov.cn/cps/site/enpk/enpk4-5_mb_a20080416263.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Joyous Selected Trip to the North Bank of Yangtze River──The Direct Bus of North Bank Outing Started Running from April 5th!Nanjing Outing──Pukou</font></a>”, Pukou Nanjing City (www.pukou.gov.cn).)</p> <p>This southern focus of the Ming dynasty lasted from 1356 to only the end of the 14th century. One year after Zhu Yuanzhang’s death, from 1399 to 1402 his grandson and successor Zhu Yunwen (朱允炆), the Jianwen Emperor (建文), tried to establish a more civil regime but was militarily challenged and usurped by his uncle Zhu Di (朱棣), then the Yan Prince (燕王), whose dominion was based in the former Yuan-dynasty capital of Beijing. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jianwen_Emperor" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jianwen Emperor</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=aU5hBMxNgWQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle</em></font></a>, by Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, <em>University of Washington Press</em>, 2002.)</p> <p>If the name Yan appears similar to that of the Yan dynasty earlier – an 8th-century imperial-throne pretender proclaimed by the nomad rebellion of An Lushan and Shi Siming just before renaming of Nestorian Christianity as the “Religion of the Great Ch’in Scenes” in Tang Dynasty – that is because the northern region of China around Beijing was once the traditional territory of the Yan (Yen, 燕, Swallow) State prior to Ch’in’s unification of China. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenching_University" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Yenching University</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>The victorious Yan Prince Zhu Di who became the Yongle Emperor (永乐), viewed himself as the second founder of the Ming dynasty and decided to move the national capital back north to Beijing, going against the trend of economic and population growths in the Yangtze-River region and declines in the northern region, which was making the south far more prosperous. The official move took place in October 1420 after a brand-new capital – today’s Beijing city – was constructed not far from the old Yuan-capital site. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=tyhT9SZRLS8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Cambridge history of China, Volume 7: The Ming dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1</em></font></a>, by Frederick W. Mote, Denis Crispin Twitchett and John King Fairbank, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 1988; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=SQWW7QgUH4gC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Imperial China 900-1800</em></font></a>, by Frederick W. Mote, <em>Harvard University Press</em>, 2003; and, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=O4fntFtSxGgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Chinese Spatial Strategies: Imperial Beijing, 1420-1911</em></font></a>, Jianfei Zhu, <em>Routledge</em>, 2004.)</p> <table align="left"><tbody> <tr> <td><a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/feature2/images/mp_download.2.pdf"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" title="Zheng He map" border="0" alt="Zheng He map" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLuJjuLLRf_MA60nYSkO2R7rQCTEHMq1Wud5bkSqYmSDkaG21sfDJgVS3vm3ghm4SLWFgFhrPW1JJfOT4FrS_7D-zvMuv8GbdymQWJtvCVVtuEKx2vEExdxOh8UinYYzUCP1U7hK_0p80/?imgmax=800" width="364" height="280" /></a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="364"><a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0507/feature2/map.html">Map of Zheng He’s seven voyages, 1405-1433 A.D. (“China’s Great Armada”, <em>National Geographic</em>, July 2005)</a></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p>But even with the move back to Beijing the Ming dynasty still had another southern focus during the first half of the 15th century, that of sending large naval expeditions to visit countries in Southeast, South and West Asia and in East Africa – something never done before by a Chinese dynasty. From 1405 to 1433 A.D., a total of seven official envoys, each consisting of tens or hundreds of large ships, with crews totalling tens of thousands including sailors and soldiers,  sailed under the command of Admiral Zheng He (郑和).</p> <p>From a family that had been Muslim for generations whose family name was Ma (马, Horse), a name common among Chinese Muslims, Zheng He’s heritage can be traced to a Central Asian Muslim nobleman and the Prophet Muhammad’s descendant, who joined the Mongolians under Genghis Khan (成吉思汗), later served as the governor of the Yuan-dynasty capital of Beijing (Yenching, 燕京) and was given a dominion in the southwestern province of Yunnan. When the Mongolian Yuan dynasty was overthrown, Zheng He became a child captive of the Ming forces in Yunnan, was made a eunuch, and later became a protege of the Yongle Emperor. Zheng He’s voyages reached countries no less than Indonesia,  Sri Lanka, Yemen and Somalia, and on his last voyage he made pilgrimage to the holiest city of Islam, Mecca in Saudi Arabia, before passing away during the return sail to China. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200504/the.admiral.zheng.he.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Admiral Zheng He</font></a>”, by Paul Lunde, <em>Saudi Aramco World</em>, Vol. 56, No. 4, 2005; “<a href="http://www.islamfortoday.com/zhenghe.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Zheng He (1371-1433), the Chinese Muslim Admiral</font></a>”, Islam for Today; “<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sultan/explorers2.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ancient Chinese Explorers, Part 2: Exploits of the eunuch admiral Zheng He</font></a>”, <em>NOVA Online</em>, PBS; “<a href="http://www.da.gd.gov.cn/webwww/gcjp/gcjpView.aspx?Type=1&ItemID=5299" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">朱棣缘何派郑和下西洋</font></a>”, by 陆元, <em>档案大观</em>; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Zheng He</font></a>” and “<a href="http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%B5%9B%E5%85%B8%E8%B5%A4%C2%B7%E8%B5%A1%E6%80%9D%E4%B8%81" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">赛典赤·赡思丁</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>Nanjing during this time enjoyed a boom of its big shipyards building many of the ships for Zheng He’s voyages. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=10387" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Zheng He’s Voyages of Discovery</font></a>”, by Richard Gunde, UCLA International Institute, April 20, 2004; and, “<a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-11/07/content_492109.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">China showcases nautical hero Zheng He's shipyard in Nanjing</font></a>”, <em>China Daily</em>, November 7, 2005.)</p> <p>There were persistent rumours that one of the objectives of these Ming naval expeditions was to hunt for Yongle Emperor’s nephew, the previous Ming emperor, who when usurped by the uncle in 1402 might not have died but escaped elsewhere, possibly overseas. (See, e.g., Frederick W. Mote, referred to earlier; “<a href="http://www.chinatownology.com/ming_emperor_overseas.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ming Emperor overseas?</font></a>”, <em>Chinatownology</em>; and, “<a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/654961/Yongle/8092/Foreign-policy" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Yongle (emperor of Ming dynasty): Foreign policy</font></a>”, <em>Encyclopaedia Britannia</em>.)</p> <p>The rumours may not have been completely unfounded, considering that later when Ming was conquered by the Manchurian Qing dynasty in the 17th century the last claimant of the Ming imperial throne, the Yongli Emperor of South Ming, who by then had converted to Christianity and sought the support of Rome through Jesuit missionaries in China, fled to Burma before a Chinese military invasion captured and executed him. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=-cWJq9JjoYMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier</em></font></a>, by Charles Patterson Giersch, <em>Harvard University Press</em>, 2006; and, “<a href="http://www.pacificrim.usfca.edu/research/pacrimreport/pacrimreport43.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Medicine and Culture: Chinese-Western Medical Exchange (1644-ca.1950)</font></a>”, <em>Pacific Rim Report</em>, University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim.)</p> <p>The military expedition to capture the last South Ming emperor was launched from Yunnan province and led by Wu Sangui (吴三桂), a former Ming military general who had played the crucial role of opening the gate of the Great Wall to let the Manchurians in to attack Beijing, been rewarded with a princely title for that and put in charge of Yunnan– not unlike Zheng He’s forefather with the Mongolians though in a much bigger role. (See, e.g., Frederick W. Mote, referred to earlier.)</p> <p>Legends never die. In 1999 before the New Millennium, Nicholas D. Kristof of <em>The New York Times</em> wrote a long article about visiting some of the places of significance in the history of Zheng He’s voyages, and trying to discover, on the island of Pate at the Kenyan coast, descendants of rumoured survivors of a Chinese shipwreck from long ago – feeling intrigued by similarities between some local customs and traditional Chinese customs. (See, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/06/magazine/1492-the-prequel.html?pagewanted=1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">1492: The Prequel</font></a>”, by Nicholas D. Kristof, <em>The New York Times</em>, June 6, 1999.)</p> <p>After Zheng He’s death the Ming-dynasty government ended further naval expeditions and, rather inexplicably, by around the year 1479 official records of Zheng He’s voyages were destroyed and building of large ships was banned. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=nBDC2cqb6I0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>China: A New History</em></font></a>, by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, <em>Harvard University Press</em>, 2006.)</p> <p>Perhaps other matters called for preoccupation and for caution against the southern focus, matters such as continuing warfare in the far north against the Mongolians, and setback in the south where Vietnam won recognition of independence after a short period of Chinese occupation, or perhaps the objectives of the naval expeditions had been achieved: some of Zheng He’s crews stayed behind in places like Malacca in Malaysia and formed overseas Chinese communities there; the influences from his voyages were now enabling more Chinese to emigrate to these regions; and many of the countries the envoys visited established diplomatic relations with China and sent delegations to pay “tributes” for trade privileges with the largest country on earth – where the government preferred a Confucian hierarchical, authoritarian official-control approach to trade. (See, e.g., Frederick W. Mote, Denis Crispin Twitchett and John King Fairbank, referred to earlier; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=08b6HCoCCaAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Admiral Zheng He & Southeast Asia</em></font></a>, edited by Leo Suryadinata of International Zheng He Society, <em>Institute of Southeast Asian Studies</em>, Singapore, 2005; John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, referred to earlier; and, “<a href="http://news.cultural-china.com/20091118151439.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Museum tells past stories of overseas Chinese</font></a>”, <em>Global Times</em>, November 18, 2009.) </p> <p>John King Fairbank (费正清) and Merle Goldman, prominent scholars in Chinese history, even go as far as asserting that “Ming China almost purposely missed the boat of modern technological and economic development” (see, John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, referred to earlier).</p> <p>The decline of maritime power led to serious deterioration of piracy problems from the early 16th century on, with a mixture of Chinese and Japanese pirates plaguing the eastern and southern Chinese coasts, from which the Ming government had to retreat further as it no longer had a strong navy. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.iias.nl/nl/36/IIAS_NL36_07.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Piracy in early modern China</font></a>”, by Robert Antony, <em>International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter</em>, The Netherlands, March 2005; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wokou" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Wokou</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>Meanwhile, other important events were happening in what China considered the West. </p> <p>20 years after Zheng He’s seventh and last voyage during which he is thought to have made a Mecca pilgrimage fulfilling a Muslim’s wish in life, in 1453 A.D. the Muslim Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, center of Eastern Christianity originating from which Nestorianism had officially reached China in the 7th century. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=E9-YfgVZDBkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Volume 1</em></font></a>, by Stanford J. Shaw, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 1976.)</p> <p>In 1479-80 when Chinese official records of Zheng He’s voyages were destroyed, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand ascended to the Spanish throne after a war of succession, and began the Spanish Inquisition to purify the Catholic churches in Spain, rooting out Jews, Muslims and heretics. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Spanish Inquisition</font></a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Monarchs" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Catholic Monarchs</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>Then in 1486 A.D., 130 years after the Ming-dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang’s conquer of Nanjing, Christopher Columbus, an Italian maritime explorer in Portugal, was granted an audience with Queen Isabella of Spain on his proposals to sail to China and India by circumnavigating the world from the Atlantic in the hope of establishing a new route to compensate for the loss of land routes due to the advance of the Muslim conquers. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=syQdCfbj5DkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Discovering Christopher Columbus: How History Is Invented</em></font></a>, by Kathy Pelta, <em>Twenty-First Century Books</em>, 1991; “<a href="http://www.osia.org/documents/Columbus_Bio.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Christopher Columbus: Biography</font></a>”, The Order Sons of Italy in America; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Christopher Columbus</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>Columbus reached and ‘discovered’ America in 1492.</p> <p>Some scholars have since argued that Christopher Columbus’s true identity had been that of a young Greek prince in the Byzantine Empire who had fled when the Byzantine capital Constantinople fell to the Muslims in 1453,  and who identified himself as from Genoa, Italy for the reason that his true birth place had been the Greek island Chios, under Genoese rule at the time. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/82946" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Christophoros Columbus: A Byzantine Prince from Chios, Greece</font></a>”, by Ruth G. Durlacher-Wolper, Australian Macedonian Advisory Council, <em>American Chronicle</em>, November 27, 2008.)</p> <p>But there is also the contention, by former British naval officer and author Gavin Menzies, that part of Zheng He’s fleets during his sixth voyage, 1421-1422 (or 1423), actually went in the direction of and reached America. (See, <a href="http://www.gavinmenzies.net/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>1421 The Year China Discovered America</em></font></a>, by Gavin Menzies, <em>HarperCollins Publishers</em>, 2003.)</p> <p>In any case, history as written and known today is that Christopher Columbus’s discovery marked the start of a new world era with the Portuguese in the role of global maritime traders and the Spanish as international colonizers. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=lZ4u4wwtQG4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Emergence of the Global Political Economy</em></font></a>, by William R. Thompson, <em>Routledge</em>, 1999.)</p> <p>By 1509-1511 overseas Chinese traders hooked up with the Portuguese who took Malacca under their control, and by 1513-16  Portuguese ships from Malacca were in Canton to trade, one of them led by Rafael Perestrello, a cousin of Christopher Columbus’s wife. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=tVhvh6ibLJcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Cambridge history of China, Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 2</em></font></a>, by Denis Crispin Twitchett and John King Fairbank, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 1978; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=mY7McxJl7jYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>World Civilization: A Brief History</em></font></a>, by Robin W. Winks, <em>Rowman & Littlefield</em>, 1993; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Perestrello" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Rafael Perestrello</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>During the 16th century the commercial island of Macao off the southern Chinese coast near Canton was allowed de facto Portuguese control by the Ming government. (See, e.g., Denis Crispin Twitchett and John King Fairbank, referred to earlier; and, “<a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1110" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Historic Centre of Macao</font></a>”, <em>UNESCO World Heritage</em>.)</p> <p>The Portuguese were setting up trade posts not only from Europe to Asia, but also from Africa to Europe and later to America where black salve trade was involved; they had built a permanent trade post in the Gold Coast of West Africa, i.e., today’s Ghana, during the 15th century – a subject related to the topics of my last two blog posts, “<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/11/nairobi-to-shenzhen-onto-guangzhou.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou</font></a>”.  (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=GCYrLnzeuZwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415-1825: A Succinct Survey</em></font></a>, by C. R. Boxer, <em>University of California Press</em>, 1972; and, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=1rHLyC2yHQ8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Atlantic Slave Trade: New Approaches to the Americas</em></font></a>, by Herbert S. Klein, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 1999.)</p> <p>Catholic missionaries, most notably Jesuit priests (members of the Society of Jesus), began to arrive in China in the late 16th century via Macao, and establish missions in Kwangtung (Guangdong) province. The Jesuits who came to China were of diverse European national backgrounds, ranging from Italian to Belgian, German to Polish, and the Jesuit influences, with their emphasis on the Western knowledge of mathematics, science and astronomy,  would grow to reach Beijing and other regions of China. (See, e.g.,  “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_China_missions" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jesuit China missions</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia<font color="#0000ff"></font></em>.) </p> <p>The first Jesuit missionaries to China were Father Michele Ruggieri (罗明坚, Luo Ming-jian) who arrived at Macao in 1579, and Father Matteo Ricci (利玛窦, Li Ma-dou) a few years after. The two founded missions in Kwangtung during the late 16th century, before Ricci went on to Beijing. </p> <p>Before reaching Beijing, Ricci wrote a treatise to explain the “Memory Palace” to the sons of the governor of Jiangxi province (Guangdong’s neighbour to the northeast), about an old intellectual method of memorizing through identifying objects and subjects to remember with various parts of a palace or various structures of different sizes, styles and functionalities. Ricci pointed out to the Chinese that these palaces were not necessarily meant to be in the real world. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1226.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Engines of Our Ingenuity, No. 1226: Ricci’s Memory Palace</font></a>”, by John H. Lienhard, University of Houston, 1997; and, “<a href="http://riccistreet.net/riccigreen/patron/palace.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Building the Palace</font></a>”, by Douglas Anderson, <em>Ricci Street – an online MBA community</em>, Medaille College, Buffalo, NY, March 20, 2000.)</p> <table align="right"><tbody> <tr> <td><a href="http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/Ren/Ren1/441.html"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" title="world map" border="0" alt="Matteo Ricci world map" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVkr1lsNCDwCnABbZ8Z6H6LOp1Aacfubs9zEclTkp20mKD5uL7qqeGvEa3jhgZXVfmV6xxaGQYYFUvNgOmNc7x_T14EBDuissOPK0MwAvNslS_eljcx2bygAGNZPZO47UIfPrMu08Ll_k/?imgmax=800" width="364" height="210" /></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td width="364"><a href="http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/Ren/Ren1/Reno.html">World Map by Matteo Ricci, 1602 A.D. (Henry Davis Consulting)</a></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p>In the imperial court in Beijing, Ricci produced world maps – the first Chinese maps to utilize Western knowledge of the world – on which he placed China near the center of the view. That caused quite a bit of controversy back in Europe. (See also, e.g., “<a href="http://www.theharvardadvocate.com/content/cartography-and-memory" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Cartography and Memory</font></a>”, by Alexander Fabry, <em>The Harvard Advocate</em>, Winter 2009; and, “<a href="http://www.speroforum.com/a/26207/China--Hong-Kong---Matteo-Ricci-maps-did-not-put-China-at-centre-of-the-world" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">China: Hong Kong: Matteo Ricci maps did not put China at centre of the world</font></a>”, January 26, 2010, <em>Spero News</em>.).</p> <p>Among other Jesuits who came to China during the 17th century was Father Johann Schreck (邓玉函, Deng Yu-han), a noted astronomer, physicist, friend of Galileo and Kepler, and the 7th elected member of the Lincean Academy – Galileo being its sixth member; Schreck brought the telescope to China. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=jfQ9E0u4pLAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, </em></font></a>, by Joseph Needham, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 1959; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accademia_dei_Lincei" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Accademia dei Lincei</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <table align="left"><tbody> <tr> <td><a href="http://www.automotogaleria.pl/historia.html"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" title="Steam Machine Of Verbiest in 1678" border="0" alt="Steam Machine Of Verbiest in 1678" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC1kYR_83CajQ9z7kOB-YuLyNAMn4uCnikacMl_f1ULtY4CRWZKsG0ZOHlMZdsk29IXSrxv3EL7Up9ginmLndzb4XP2G7Jg0_59W0FhIyGHDQAWTVoSBHVRUdH2klM9lv0RplIrlKoH30/?imgmax=800" width="224" height="162" /></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td width="224"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Verbiest">World's first car designed by Ferdinand Verbiest in China, 1672 A.D. (<em>Wikipedia</em>)</a></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p>Other noted Jesuit innovators in China included Father Ferdinand Verbiest (南怀仁, Nan Huai-ren), who is now credited with designing and building the world’s first (model) automobile, in the year 1672 in China. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.busstop.usfca.edu/ricci/research/lectures/mechanics.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Mechanics of Heaven: Jesuit Astronomers at the Qing Court</font></a>”,<strong> </strong>by<strong> </strong>Mark Stephen Mir, The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, University of San Francisco, August 14, 2004; “<a href="http://www.busstop.usfca.edu/ricci/research/lectures/mir.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Jesuits and Sino-Western Technology</font></a>”, by Mark Mir, The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, University of San Francisco; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Verbiest" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ferdinand Verbiest</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>From the time of Schreck to the time of Verbiest China changed, through great upheavals: the same year 1630 when Schreck died a peasants’ rebellion began, led by Li Zicheng (李自成) of Yan’an (Yanan, later the center of the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong during World War II), which eventually overthrew the Ming dynasty but was then overcome by the Manchurians from the northeast who established the Ch’ing (清, Qing) dynasty, in 1644. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zicheng" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Li Zicheng</font></a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_Dynasty" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Qing Dynasty</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>Geographically, it was not a long distance for the Manchurians to come south to take Beijing and claim it as their capital, after Wu Sangui opened the gate of the Great Wall to them. After all, the first Chinese regime making Beijing the capital had been their ancestral Jin (金, Jurchen) dynasty in the 12th and 13th century, which had conquered northern China and forced the Song (宋, Sung) dynasty to retreat south and become South Song – prior to conquers of both by the Mongolian Yuan. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=iN9Tdfdap5MC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368</em></font></a>, by Denis Twitchett and Herbert Franke, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 1994.)</p> <p>Like last time, resistances to the Manchurian rule from forces loyal to the Ming dynasty retreated to southern China under the banner of South Ming dynasty, and they were not put down until the early 1660s. </p> <p>By this time, the Jesuit missionaries had converted about 100,000 Chinese to Christianity, with the highest concentrations in Beijing, in the Shaanxi region where the old capital of Xi’an is located, and in southern China. The last emperor of South Ming, the Yongli Emperor (永历), or at least his family, was among newest Chinese converts, and after retreating to Nanjing, then Canton, and then Guangxi province in the southwest, he sent Jesuit missionary Father Michał Boym (卜弥格) to lobby Portugal, France and Rome for support to counter Qing military offensives and re-establish the Ming dynasty; but by the time Boym returned to China in 1659 Yongli was near complete defeat and soon to flee into Burma, and Boym died on the way to reach the South Ming emperor – sick and exhausted. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ming_Dynasty" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Southern Ming Dynasty</font></a>”, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_Youlang,_Prince_of_Gui" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Zhu Youlang, Prince of Gui</font></a>” and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micha%C5%82_Boym" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Michał Boym</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>; “<a href="http://form.nlc.gov.cn/sino/show.php?id=2" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">卜弥格 (Michel Boym, 波兰, 1612—1659)</font></a>”, National Library of China; “<a href="http://www.pacificrim.usfca.edu/research/pacrimreport/pacrimreport43.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Medicine and Culture: Chinese-Western Medical Exchange (1644-ca.1950)</font></a>”, <em>Pacific Rim Report</em>, University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=sOGSvo4VMPkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Journey to the East: the Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724</em></font></a>, by Liam Matthew Brockey, <em>Harvard University Press</em>, 2007.)</p> <p>During this time, in 1658 the Jesuit society in Rome redrew its map and transferred its jurisdiction of the southern China regions of Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan island from the “Vice-Province” of China to the “Province” of Japan, boosting the status of Macao as an international Jesuit missionary center.  (See, e.g., Liam Matthew Brockey, referred to earlier.)</p> <p>During the 1660s some of the Jesuit missionaries in Beijing suffered severe prosecutions by the Qing government: Ferdinand Verbiest first arrived in Beijing only to find jail, with Father Johann Adam Schall von Bell (湯若望, Tang Ruo-wang), the chief astronomer of the imperial court, already in prison in the so-called “Calendar Case” (历狱), accused of “falsifying the calendar, promoting a heterodox sect, and preparing an invasion by Europeans”. Schall von Bell was given the death penalty but it was later commuted, and he died after several years of prison life. Several of his Chinese assistants were executed, and most of the Jesuit missionaries in Beijing were exiled to Canton – with Verbiest one of the few exceptions during this period of “Canton exile”. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1994QJRAS..35..463U/0000472.000.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jesuit Astronomers in Beijing, 1601-1805</font></a>”, by Agustin Udias, <em>Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society</em>, December 1994; Mark Stephen Mir, referred to earlier; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=9RLH18MQXGUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe</em></font></a>, by N. Standaert, <em>University of Washington Press</em>, 2008; and, “<a href="http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%9B%86%E7%8D%84" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">历狱</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>At the time there had indeed been European invasions, but not the kind of Portuguese administration of Macao for trade purposes agreed to by the Ming government, or possible promises of military assistance to the South Ming dynasty from some European countries, which came too late anyways. </p> <p>It was the occupation and attempted colonization of the island of Taiwan (Formosa) off the southeast coast, by the Netherlands (the Dutch East India Company) and Spain beginning in the 1620s, at a time when the Manchurians in the northeast were also in their early stage of proclaiming hostility and insurrection against the Ming government. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=vI1RRslLNSwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Search for Modern China</em></font></a>, by Jonathan D. Spence, <em>W. W. Norton & Company</em>, 1991; <a href="http://www.gutenberg-e.org/andrade/index.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century</em></font></a>, by Tonio Andrade, <em>Columbia University Press</em>, 2008; “<a href="http://www.roc-taiwan.org/ct.asp?xItem=122249&CtNode=2243&mp=1&xp1=&timer=18040.78" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">History</font></a>”, Portal of Republic of China (Taiwan) Diplomatic Missions; and, “<a href="http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/864" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">How Taiwan became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century</font></a>”, by Anne Gerritsen, <em>Reviews in History</em>, March 2010.)</p> <p>By the 1660s when the victorious Qing dynasty began to prosecute the “Calendar Case” in the imperial court in Beijing, the colonial rules in Taiwan was actually ending after Chinese pro-Ming forces – under the command of the legendary Zheng Chenggong (郑成功, also known as Koxinga) from the family of a pirate-kingpin father and a Japanese mother – in 1662 captured Taiwan as their base of anti-Qing operations. Prior to that, in 1659 they had laid an offensive siege to Nanjing unsuccessfully. (See, e.g., Jonathan D. Spence, referred to earlier; and “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Koxinga</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>As a matter of fact it was the Qing government that then cooperated with the Dutch to try to conquer Taiwan, but Qing’s attempts did not succeed until the battle of Penghu (Pescadores) in 1683.</p> <p>Over a century after Matteo Ricci’s arrival in Beijing, in the early 18th century Father Giuseppe Castiglione (郎世宁, Lang Shi-ning) arrived at the imperial court of Qing. Born in the year 1688 in which Ferdinand Verbiest died, Castiglione was an accomplished artist when he went to China. Infusing his knowledge of Western arts and architecture with the Chinese arts and architecture, Castiglione became an imperial-palace painter, depicting several generations of emperors, their palaces and their lives in grandeur. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.npm.gov.tw/exh96/newvision/introduction_en.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">New Visions at the Ch’ing Court – Giuseppe Castiglione and Western-Style Trends</font></a>”, National Palace Museum, Taipei.)</p> <p>Castiglione also helped design the Yuan-Ming Palace (圆明园) – finally an ambitious imperial palace with rich architectural styles from both the East and the West! (See, e.g., “<a href="http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/04/18th-century-chinese-garden.html"><font color="#0000ff"><em>18th Century Chinese Garden Architecture</em></font></a>”, BibliOdyssey (blog), April 28, 2006; “<a href="http://www.chinaartnetworks.com/traditional/langsn/article1.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Giuseppe Castiglione and Court Art in Qianlong’s Reign of Qing Dynasty</font></a>”, <em>Century Online Chinese Art Networks</em>; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Summer_Palace" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Old Summer Palace</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>The name of the Yuan-Ming Palace, 圆明园, is sometimes translated as the “Garden of Perfect Splendour” or the “Garden of Perfect Brightness”. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/editorial.php?issue=008" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Yuanming Yuan, The Garden of Perfect Brightness</font></a>”, <em>China Heritage Quarterly</em>, China Heritage Project, The Australian National University, December 2004; and, “<a href="http://www.yuanmingyuanpark.com/zy/ymyjj-e.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfect Splendor)</font></a>”, Yuanmingyuan Park.)</p> <p>But my preferred translation for the name 圆明园 would be the “Perfect Ming Garden” or the “Perfectly Round Ming Garden”, for the reasons that the Chinese word “圆”can mean ‘perfect’ or ‘round’ and the word “明”which means ‘bright’ is also the name of the Ming dynasty preceding Qing (清, Ch’ing).</p> <p>Others may dismiss my interpretation offhand simply because of official Qing taboos on things related to the previous Ming dynasty, taboos that needed to be taken seriously such as in the infamous “Case of Ming Dynasty History” (明史案) in the 1660s – thus use of the same word “明”in naming the new imperial palace could not possibly refer to the Ming dynasty. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=uGZIziWmlmsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics</font></a>, by Zhengyuan Fu, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 1993; and, “<a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=YXR8oHuHgZsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">元明清史</font></a>”, by 王天有 and 成崇德, <em>五南圖書出版股份有限公司</em>, 2002.)</p> <p>My argument for the merits of my interpretations is based on reading of the Yongzheng (雍正) Emperor’s essay, “圆明园记”(“Yuan-Ming Garden Notes”): Yongzheng states in his very first use of the word “明”outside of the Garden’s name, that the land had originally been expropriated by his father (the Kangxi Emperor, 康熙) from a site of dilapidated old mansions of former Ming-dynasty families – through reducing the size of their lots – for the construction of the spring garden Chang-Chun Yuan (畅春园, one of the gardens that formed the Yuan-Ming Palace) – “就明戚废墅,节缩其址,筑畅春园”; Yongzheng then states that he asked for a garden also and was granted a section of the land; later in the essay, to explain the meanings of the Yuan-Ming name granted by his father, Yongzheng composes the phrases “圆而入神”, meaning “round as to enter ecstasy”, and “明而普照,达人之睿智”, meaning “bright as to universally illuminate, reaching man’s wisdom”. (See, “<a href="http://www.yuanmingyuan.cn/info/qdsw.html#" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">圆明园记</font></a>”, by 雍正, Yuan-Ming Palace (<a href="http://www.yuanmingyuan.cn">www.yuanmingyuan.cn</a>); or, “<a href="http://www.yuanmingyuanpark.com/zy/yuanmingwenyuan/yuanmingshici/sishijingtuyong/ymyji.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">圆明园记</font></a>”, Yuanmingyuan Park.)</p> <p>In other words, in his essay on the Yuan-Ming Palace the Ch’ing emperor did not try to avoid the use of the word “明”as a reference to the Ming dynasty, on the contrary used it specifically referring to the origin of the palace site, and in doing so in effect made a contrast between the high ideal he saw as embedded in the “brightness” meaning of the word “明”to that of the dilapidated state of the former-“Ming” mansions.</p> <p>Thus in my view the Ch’ing emperor had an aspiration for “perfection” and “illumination” not only in the physical senses but in the social and intellectual senses, and quite possibly viewed it as an imperial dream the previous Ming-dynasty circles – if they had harboured it – had failed to achieve.</p> <p>Such goals of “perfection” and “illumination” may indeed have been quite remote in Chinese history to that point, or at least to the point when the Ch’ing dynasty first arrived, despite the impressive accomplishments of the Chinese civilization.</p> <p>When the Nestorian Stele was erected in the 8th century to record 7th-century imperial reception given to Nestorian Christianity by the Tang-dynasty Taizong Emperor – roughly one millennium before the Yuan-Ming Palace’s construction – the name “大秦景教”was used; I have expressed my view earlier that the meaning of the word “景”was more about the conveyance of the religion through presenting the  “scenes” of the Western “Great Ch’in”, than about the religion being “brilliant teaching” or “luminous religion”.  </p> <p>An important point is that the cultural exchanges between China and the West at the time of Nestorian Christianity did not bring the advanced knowledge of the West to China, knowledge otherwise disseminated among the various Western cultures.</p> <p>Take for instance mathematics – something of personal interest to me as a mathematician by training. The books of <em>Elements</em>, written by the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century B.C. on the fundamentals of mathematics, not only represented a crowning achievement of ancient mathematics but also a mathematical foundation for studying other scientific subjects such as the Ptolemy theory of astronomy about the universe rotating around a round, stationery earth. Euclid’s books were translated to Latin in the 5th or 6th century A.D., received by the Arabs around 750 A.D. and translated into Arabic around 800 A.D. – close to the time of the Nestorian Stele! Yet the first Chinese copy of <em>Elements</em> did not appear until 1607 – translated by none other than the pioneer Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and his Chinese collaborators – and it was only the first 6 books of the 15 volumes. The rest were not translated into Chinese until the 1850s – first published in 1859. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=wKsYrT691yIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, Volume 1</em></font></a>, by Morris Kline, <em>Oxford University Press</em>, 1990; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=aKLr5duAiwMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=elements+euclid+chinese+translations&source=bl&ots=m6AdNBL2pg&sig=LuQfMMCYEO8hinfh0hFF4IFogFs&hl=en&ei=2RSbS8CMMMH88Ab8_rShDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=elements%20euclid%20chinese%20translations&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Euclid in China: The Genesis of the First Chinese Translation of Euclid’s Elements in 1607 & Its Reception up to 1723</em></font></a>, by Peter M. Engelfriet, <em>Brill</em>, 1998; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=M_6oB0cHGf0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus</em></font></a>, by Edward Grant, <em>JHU Press</em>, 2006; “<a href="http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/35342998/A-Study-of-the-Translation-and-Fate-of-the-Elements-in-Different-Civilizations" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A Study of the Translation and Fate of the Elements in Different Civilizations</font></a>”, by F. C. Chen, <em>Journal of Chinese Studies</em>, 2008; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid's_Elements" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Euclid’s Elements</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>As discussed, after some initial southern focuses – particularly Zheng He’s voyages in the first part of the 15th century – the Ming dynasty turned isolationist, and self-limiting rather than innovative; and by the early 17th century when Jesuit missionaries began to arrive and bring scientific and technological knowledge to China, European colonial powers, i.e., the Portuguese, the Dutch and the Spanish, were also at the door.</p> <p>No wonder the Qing’s Yongzheng Emperor could think of the Ming circles as failures.</p> <p>Even with the Jesuit missionaries’ natural bend toward the scientific disciplines, some important Western knowledge, in astronomy, anatomy and medicine in particular, was either not transmitted to or not accepted in China, during the Ming and Qing eras.</p> <p>In astronomy, despite the presence of many Jesuit astronomers in the imperial Qing court, for over a century until 1760 the Jesuits misrepresented the Copernicus theory to the Chinese, not telling them it was about a sun-centered planetary system. They did so in accordance with a ban on teaching Galileo’s theory, issued by the Roman Catholic Church in 1616 and in force till 1757. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1994QJRAS..35..463U/0000472.000.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jesuit Astronomers in Beijing, 1601-1805</font></a>”, by Agustin Udias, <em>Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society</em>, December 1994; and, “<a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~nsivin/cop.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Copernicus in China or, Good Intentions Gone Astray</font></a>”, in <em>Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections</em>, by Nathan Sivin, <em>Variorum</em>, 1995.)</p> <p>The Jesuit astronomers did so despite their closeness to the center of European astronomy: Johann Schreck had been a contemporary and friend of Galileo and Kepler, Johann von Bell had been a Roman College student learning Galileo’s new discoveries that substantiated a sun-centered planetary system, and when Michał Boym first went to China, at Kepler’s request he brought along the latter’s mathematical tables on the Copernicus theory.  (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=jfQ9E0u4pLAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, </em></font></a>, by Joseph Needham, <em>Cambridge University Press</em>, 1959; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=l3xBcPvVJpUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the collapse of Ptolemaic cosmology</em></font></a>, by James M. Lattis, <em>University of Chicago Press</em>, 1994.)</p> <p>In fact in the year 1610 when Galileo made his discoveries using a modernized telescope, Jesuit missionary Father Manuel Dias, Jr. (阳马诺) arrived in China, where in 1614-15 – the year before the Church’s ban on Galileo’s theory – he published a Chinese book, “天問略”(“Epitome of Astronomy”), on European astronomy and mentioned Galileo and the latter’s new discoveries. (See, e.g., Agustin Udias, referred to earlier; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=-Om1o2fJVJsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome: Descriptive Catalogue: Japonica-Sinica I-IV</em></font></a>, by Albert Chan, <em>M.E. Sharpe</em>, 2002; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=_4PKSfOH1kgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Jesuits, the Padroado and East Asian science (1552-1773)</em></font></a>, by Luis Saraiva and Catherine Jami, <em>World Scientific</em>, 2008.)</p> <p>Dias became friends with celebrated Chinese scientist and scholar Xu Guangqi (徐光启) – a collaborator of Matteo Ricci’s in the translation of Euclid’s <em>Elements</em> – and served for many years as the leader of the Jesuits in China, and later in 1644 – the year the Ming dynasty was ended and Qing dynasty came – published an influential commentary on the 781 A.D. Nestorian Stele rediscovered after the Jesuits arrived in China. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://jesus.tw/Nestorian_Stele" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Nestorian Stele: 唐景教碑頌正詮--陽瑪諾註</font></a>”, Jesus Taiwan; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=XAH-CA3iHaEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625-1916</em></font></a>, by Michael Keevak, <em>Hong Kong University Press</em>, 2008; and, “<a href="http://archives.catholic.org.hk/books/author/emmanuel.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">陽瑪諾, 作者生平</font></a>”, Hong Kong Catholic Diocesan Archives.)</p> <p>The Chinese might have only gotten the “scenes” the first time around (i.e., with Nestorian Christianity), and they weren’t “illuminated” this time, either.</p> <p>The orthodoxy by the Roman Catholic Church in controlling dissemination of scientific thought was unfortunate during an era when transformational scientific discoveries and progresses – especially Newton’s work on the mathematics and physics of motion – were taking place in Europe.</p> <p>In anatomy and medicine, efforts by the Jesuits to convince the Kangxi Emperor (Yongzheng’s father) about the Western system of universal human anatomy – instituted since the ancient Greek time of Aristotle – met with great scepticism and indifference. For instance, in a published lecture to his sons, the Kangxi Emperor admonished the food and drink south of the Yangtze River, stating that the southern cuisine would make northerners soft and weak like the southerners, and that following of the southern trend must be avoided. The anatomical knowledge brought by the Jesuits was not disseminated outside the imperial court during that time. By as late as the 19th century noted Chinese scholar Yu Zhengxie (俞正燮) still wrote an essay to refute the Jesuits’ illustrations of the human body two centuries earlier, arguing that the Chinese human organs were of different structures from the Westerner’s, and that it explained the differences in religious beliefs. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.pacificrim.usfca.edu/research/pacrimreport/pacrimreport43.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Medicine and Culture: Chinese-Western Medical Exchange (1644-ca.1950)</font></a>”, <em>Pacific Rim Report</em>, University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=mEaiOk7HdqsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s-1990s</em></font></a>, by Lillian M. Li, <em>Stanford University Press</em>, 2007; and, “<a href="http://epaper.jfdaily.com/jfdaily/page/1/2008-12/05/15/2008120515_pdf.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">西风东渐的轶闻趣事</font></a>”, by 周真真, <em>Jiefang Daily</em>, December 5, 2008.)</p> <p>Medicine is also something of personal interest as I have discussed in some of my earlier blog posts and in my Chinese blog post, “<a href="http://blog.ifeng.com/article/4339758.html"><font color="#0000ff">忆往昔,学历史智慧(一)——从幼年的故事说起</font></a>”(“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom (Part 1) – starting from childhood stories”), that my maternal grandmother’s grandfather became one of the first doctors of Western medicine in Kwangtung’s Shantou (Swatow) region when in the 1860s the region’s first hospital, the Swatow Mission Hospital, was founded by Dr. William Gauld of the English Presbyterian Mission and my great-great grandfather was fortunate enough to study medicine there.</p> <p>Such huge gulfs in contemporary knowledge and understanding between the West and China serve as a backdrop to my glimpse into the thoughts it might have taken for the Yongzheng Emperor (who reigned from the early 1720s to the mid-1730s) to articulate a dream of perfect, universal illumination as embodied in the name of the Yuan-Ming Palace.</p> <p>Among Giuseppe Castiglione’ paintings for the Yuan-Ming Palace was a portrait of a Western palace lady – one of six portraits on the “separation wall” in the back-corridor of the Four-Convenience Hall, completed in the 4th year of Yongzheng’s reign, circa 1726 (coincidentally, Yongzheng himself was the fourth son of his father Kangxi). The portraits were adapted from Western portrait prints provided by court officials, with the horses in the prints omitted at the emperor’s order. </p> <p><a href="http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4b1a177e0100gfok.html"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" title="Lang Shining painting" border="0" alt="Lang Shining painting" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZxJ4TvUqsOPEaDfCl47WxFQeCINN69oGLfXLK1qvQ7wUrR1vEq2qlni-xU1OAHHu35BO93IXgb1jZZsAJFvO0dhVREUMpX9BtVPRuin9jtNmqP01saL11G_mwGUaJKoGiu1YP4Ys2ZzU/?imgmax=800" width="564" height="772" /></a> </p> <p>After viewing this portrait, the Yongzheng Emperor issued an edict: the appearance was painted well but the several steps behind were too high, too difficult to walk on, and their gradation too close; Castiglione should repaint with the background adjusted to the depth of the three rooms in the Hall, and leave this one for entertainment use in the backroom. (See, “<a href="http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4b1a177e0100gfok.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">圆明园四宜堂隔断贴画:西洋仕女</font></a>”, by 苏金成, <em>中国美术研究 (Journal of Chinese Fine Arts)</em>, Number 3 (May-June) 2009).</p> <p>Unfortunately, while Castiglione was working on artistic projects such as the portrait above and on designing  expansions of the Yuan-Ming Palace, Western missionaries were beginning to be banned from proselytizing in China following escalations of a nearly century-old dispute between Beijing and Rome over whether to allow Chinese Christians to practice Confucian rites which included ancestor worship, i.e., if the rites were not idolatry. </p> <p>From the start of the Jesuit missionary work in China in the early 17th century, there were strong oppositions from Dominican missionaries who were closely associated with Spanish rule in the Philippines, against the Jesuits’ eclectic positions on Confucian rites. Throughout the 17th century different popes in Rome took different positions on the issue. The Kangxi Emperor’s 1692 edict of tolerance toward Christianity and his approval, in the year 1700, of the Jesuit interpretation of the rites failed to change Rome’s hardening position on the issue: in 1715 Pope Clement XI published an apostolic constitution requiring all missionaries to take an oath abiding by directives against the Chinese rites. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://s-space.snu.ac.kr/bitstream/10371/5165/1/religiousstudy_v23_185.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">George Minamiki, S. J., The Chinese Rites Controversy from Its Beginnings to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985)</font></a>”, by Paek-seop Shim, <em>Journal of Religious Studies</em>, Vol. 23, 2004; “<a href="http://ricci.rt.usfca.edu/institution/view.aspx?institutionID=436" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Order of Preachers (OP) 聖多明我會</font></a>”, <em>The Ricci 21st Century Roundtable on the History of Christianity in China</em>, and, and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Chinese Rites controversy</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>In 1721 Kangxi issued a ban prohibiting foreign missionaries from preaching in China, specifically referring to it as a response to the Pope’s directives against Chinese Confucian rites. </p> <p>Two years after taking over the throne upon winning a power struggle following his father’s death, in 1724 (i.e., two years before the Castiglione painting shown in this blog post) Yongzheng issued an edict banning Christianity in China altogether. The ban was enforced during the long reign of his son, the Qianlong Emperor (乾隆), which lasted to near the end of the 18th century. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=5jfVmF6MX7IC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions</em></font></a>, by Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin, <em>Brookings Institution Press</em>, 2004; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=sOGSvo4VMPkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Journey to the East: the Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724</em></font></a>, by Liam Matthew Brockey, <em>Harvard University Press</em>, 2007.)</p> <p>By the time of the ban in 1724 there were several hundred thousand Chinese Christian followers of the Jesuits. </p> <p>The Jesuit missionaries were exiled to Canton and then to Macao. Of course a person as talented and helpful as Giuseppe Castiglione in the imperial court, and other missionaries who had technical skills and scientific knowledge were treated as exceptions.</p> <p>In contrast to the ban on Christianity, Yongzheng tried to lessen the traditional, harsh capital punishments on breaching of official intellectual taboos, instead ordered publication of his writings to debate and indoctrinate on the issues – including on the issue of whether he had “usurped” the throne. But the new approach was abruptly ended with his 13-year rule upon his death, and those not receiving the capital punishment under Yongzheng were given it by his son Qianlong. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=vI1RRslLNSwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The search for modern China</em></font></a>, by Jonathan D. Spence, <em>W. W. Norton & Company</em>, 1991; and, “<a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=YXR8oHuHgZsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">元明清史</font></a>”, by 王天有 and 成崇德, <em>五南圖書出版股份有限公司</em>, 2002.)</p> <p>By the mid-18th century foreign trade with the West was also banned in China except within the Canton System, i.e., at the port of Canton on the Pearl-River Delta near the southern coast. In contrast, Yongzheng and Qianlong gradually relaxed restrictions previously in place on Chinese traders engaging in overseas trade with Southeast Asia. (See, e.g., <em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=7_Jvbezbe9QC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Canton trade: life and enterprise on the China coast, 1700-1845</font></a></em>, by Paul Arthur Van Dyke, <em>Hong Kong University Press</em>, 2005; and, “<a href="http://history.cultural-china.com/en/183History6499.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canton System - A Complement to the Old China Trade</font></a>”, <em>Cultural China</em>; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=VkwuTyHu60YC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing</em></font></a>, by William T. Rowe, <em>Harvard University Press</em>, 2009.)</p> <p>Giuseppe Castiglione died in Beijing on July 17, 1766, nearly an exact century from Johann Adam Schall von Bell’s death on August 15, 1666, having born in the same year 1688 when Ferdinand Verbiest died. Several years later the Jesuit society was disbanded by the Catholic Church – coincidentally when the Church had finally lifted its ban on Galileo’s system of astronomy – until the year 1814.  “<a href="http://www.threeemperors.org.uk/index.php?pid=28" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Christianity and the Jesuits in China</font></a>”, the Royal Academy of Arts, London; and, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Jesus" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Society of Jesus</font></a>”, <em>Wikipedia</em>.)</p> <p>A British delegation to Beijing led by Lord Macartney in 1792 failed to lead to more open official trade or official diplomatic relation – with the ineptitude magnified in an anecdote where the official speeches by Macartney had to be first translated from English to Latin for the benefit of the Chinese interpreter who in turn translated them to Chinese for the Qianlong Emperor. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://webs2002.uab.es/sgolden/docencia/doctorat/jesuits.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">From the Society of Jesus to the East India Company: A Case Study in the Social History of Translation</font></a>”, by Sean Golden, in <em>Beyond the Western Tradition. Translation. Perspectives XI</em>, edited by Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Centre for Research in Translation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000; and, “<a href="http://shangaiexpress.blogspot.com/2009/11/83-macartney-embassy-to-china.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Macartney Embassy to China: a diplomatic failure</font></a>”, by Paulo Roberto Almeida (source: New World Encyclopedia), Shanghai Express (blog), November 13, 2009.)</p> <p>At the time the British East India Company had a monopoly control of the British official trade with China, and a large part of its actual trade was the illegal trafficking of opium from India – opium sale other than for medicinal purposes having already been banned in 1729 by Yongzheng and trafficking banned in 1735 by Qianlong. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=zAPQV-u9eOcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>China’s Drug Practices and Policies: Regulating Controlled Substances in a Global Context</em></font></a>, by Hong Lu, Terance D. Miethe and Bin Liang, <em>Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.</em>, 2009.)</p> <p>The aspiration to achieve a “Perfect Ming”, if the Qing emperors indeed had that in mind where the Ming dynasty had failed, was going down in a pattern similar to the Ming’s before them. By the time China re-opened again in the mid-19th century, it would literally be forced to do so under the guns of European powers.</p> <table align="right"><tbody> <tr> <td><a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/rise_fall_canton_04/gallery_places/images/cwC_1805_E78680_Flags.jpg"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" title="cwC_1805_E78680_Flags" border="0" alt="cwC_1805_E78680_Flags" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0UxL1MKlld1V5qtUt8cQ5UZ5cLjnRRU9JJAR7-8NRbso_X7ny_b5_ISak_rPOSdxdeEypQ5Qp1u3ODVeBUri-mlAYfFfDKUytUwlDHFu18Rne2PtUc24PjMOs2dmidil9cKqBETkOfDw/?imgmax=800" width="364" height="241" /></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td width="364"><a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/rise_fall_canton_03/cw_essay01.html">The Thirteen Foreign Factories of Canton, circa 1805 (MIT Visualizing Cultures)</a></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p>In the early 19th century, the first Protestant missionaries began to arrive in China. They were sent by the London Missionary Society, starting with Rev. Robert Morrison (马礼逊) in 1807 and Rev. William Milne (米怜) in 1813. Affiliated with the British East India Company, the missionaries were very limited in their reach into the local Cantonese, let alone the majority of the Chinese. Distributing the Bible and pamphlets was a main method of preaching, and the printer who did work for Morrison, Liang Fa (梁发), became one of the first Chinese Protestants when he was baptized by Milne in Malacca, where they could conduct Christian printing operation legally. (See, e.g., “List of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese”, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=UQAMAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Chinese repository</em></font></a>, Volume 20, by Elijah Coleman Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams, 1851; “<a href="http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/1998/jul98/story-1.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Religion and rebellion in China: the London Missionary Society collection</font></a>”, by Andrew Gosling, <em>National Library of Australia News</em>, July 1998; “<a href="http://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/l/liang-fa.php" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Liang Fa (Ah Fa, Leung Faat, Leong Kung Fa) 1789 ~ 1855</font></a>”, <em>Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity</em>; and, <span style="color: red"><font color="#000000">my first blog posts dated January 29, 2009</font></span>, “<a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1ED043C52638635F!163.entry" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a>”.) </p> <p>The German Lutheran missionary Rev. Charles Gutzlaff (郭士立, or 郭实猎, Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff) was a singular pioneer in the early formation of the Protestant transnational networks from Southeast Asia to China. Sent by the Netherlands Missionary Society, Gutzlaff was the first Protestant missionary to reach Siam (Thailand), arriving in 1828, and is also considered the first non-British Protestant missionary to China – ahead of American missionary Rev. Elijah Bridgman (裨治文). (See, e.g., “The death of the Rev. Charles Gutzlaff at Hong Kong, August 9” and “List of Protestant Missionaries to the Chinese”, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=UQAMAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Chinese repository</em></font></a>, Volume 20, by Elijah Coleman Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams, 1851.)</p> <p>Gutzlaff’s first Chinese convert in Bangkok, Boon Tee, was an immigrant from the Chaozhou region (a prefecture, later also known as Swatow for the port city of Shantou in the region) in eastern Kwangtung (Guangdong) province neighbouring southern Fujian (Fukien) province. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.docstoc.com/docs/20653607/02---Overseas-Chinese-Networks-in-Early-Baptist-Movement" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Chinese Christian Transnational Networks Of Bangkok-Hong Kong-Chaozhou in the 19th Century</font></a>”, by Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Department of History, Pace University, May 2004; and, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3aGTjRsnTeEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Opening China: Karl F.A. Gützlaff and Sino-Western relations, 1827-1852</em></font></a>, by Jessie Gregory Lutz, <em>Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing</em>, 2008.)</p> <p>The Chaozhou-speaking were the largest group of Chinese in Siam at the time. Their dialect is similar to that in southern Fujian and different from Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou (Canton) where I grew up, and the ancestors of many of them had originally come from Fujian. </p> <p>Gutzlaff was apparently fluent in the Fujian dialect.</p> <p>The Chaozhou region’s Christian heritage would include that of my maternal family’s, as I have mentioned earlier my great-great grandfather studied medicine at the Swatow Mission Hospital during the 1860s and became one of the first Chinese doctors of Western medicine in that region. He later also became an ordained Presbyterian minister. </p> <p>The date of February 19, 2010 for this blog post and for my first Chinese blog post on <a href="http://fgaoblog.wordpress.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">高峰的博客</font></a> (and its companion blog in China, <a href="http://blog.ifeng.com/2867801.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">高峰的凤凰博客</font></a>) has been chosen for the reason that in the Chinese Lunar Calendar it happens to be the sixth day of the Chinese year – my maternal grandmother’s birthday. My father’s birthday happens to be on February 20, which I discussed last year in another context in <a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1ED043C52638635F!196.entry" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my ongoing, multi-part blog article on Canadian politics</font></a>.</p> <p>In the early 1830s at Charles Gutzlaff’s initiation, the American Baptist Missionary Union sent its first missionaries to Thailand and China, Rev. John Taylor Jones in 1832 and Rev. William Dean (憐为仁) in 1835, who set up a base in Bangkok to preach to the local Chinese community – with the objective of expanding into China. (See, e.g., Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, referred to earlier).</p> <p>Gutzlaff also undertook a number of important journeys along the Chinese coasts and into inland China, on most of them working as an interpreter for opium traders. Gutzlaff’s mastery of various Chinese dialects and customs grew to a point that starting in late 1834 (shortly after the death of Robert Morrison) he became an official Chinese interpreter for the British administration in China. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=wkYNAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Journal of three voyages along the coast of China, in 1831, 1832, & 1833: with notices of Siam, Corea, and the Loo-Choo Islands</em></font></a>, by Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff and William Ellis, <em>F. Westley and A.H. Davis</em>, 1834; and, “<a href="http://bansuklee.com/xe/libms/100" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The legacy of Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff</font></a>”, by Jessie G. Lutz, <em>International Bulletin Of Missionary Research</em>, Vol.24, No.3, July 2000.)</p> <p>In Macao in 1835, Gutzlaff met several Japanese persons who on their ship had been blown off course by a typhoon to the Oregon coast, taken slaves by North American natives, and rescued by the Hudson Bay Company and sent from Canada to Macao. With their help Gutzlaff produced the first Japanese translation of a part of the Bible. (See, e.g., Jessie Gregory Lutz, referred to earlier; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=0r0-PmZ2YXUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Bible and Missions</em></font></a>, by Helen Barrett Montgomery, <em>BiblioBazaar, LLC</em>, 2009.)</p> <p>In his official role with the British, Gutzlaff was a key negotiator when the Chinese government brought in an opium ban that was resolutely enforced by Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu (林则徐, Lin Tse-hsu). The conflict led to an 1839 letter from Commissioner Lin to Queen Victoria to protest the opium trade, and the dispatch of the British navy to China in the Opium War (1839-1842) to protect British commercial interests, which Gutzlaff participated in. That led to the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, signed with the British laying siege to the former Chinese capital at the Yangtze River near the eastern coast; Gutzlaff acted as one of 3 interpreters for the treaty negotiations, and in 1843 became the official Chinese Secretary to the British administration now based in the colony of Hong Kong, upon the island’s cession to Britain as part of the treaty. (See, e.g., “The death of the Rev. Charles Gutzlaff at Hong Kong, August 9”, by Elijah Coleman Bridgman and Samuel Wells Williams, referred to earlier; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=72dXcjTQLqMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Opium War through Chinese eyes</em></font></a>, by Arthur Waley,<em> Stanford University Press</em>, 1958; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=XjSsAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854</em></font></a>, by John King Fairbank,  <em>Stanford University Press</em>, 1964; “<a href="http://www.midley.co.uk/Nanking/NANKING_JICH.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Treaty of Nanking: Form and the Foreign Office, 1842-43</font></a>”, by R. Derek Wood, <em>Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History</em>, Vol. 24 (2), May 1996; <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=2zHcSTL_DMgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Foreign mud: being an account of the opium imbroglio at Canton in the 1830's and the Anglo-Chinese war that followed</em></font></a>, by Maurice Collis, <em>New Directions Publishing</em>, 2002; and, “<a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/eas/documents/linzexu.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Lin Zexu (LinTse-hsu) writing to Britain's Queen Victoria to Protest the Opium Trade, 1839</font></a>”, <em>USC-UCLA Joint East Asian Studies Center</em>.)</p> <p>During the 1830-40s, Gutzlaff was intimately involved in many private meetings and formal negotiations between the British and the Chinese officials. His indispensability to the British could mean the difference between peace and confrontation in a situation, as seen in an episode during the Opium War when he served as the British-appointed magistrate of Zhoushan (舟山, Chusan), a strategic east-coast island-city the British captured and held for a time, which they really liked (but reluctantly accepted only cession Hong Kong, then a barren island near Canton and Macao in the south) (see, John King Fairbank; referred to earlier):</p> <blockquote> <p>“When Gutzlaff was transferred from Chusan to take the place of J. R. Morrison as Chinese secretary in the superintendency of trade at Hongkong, the military government of Chusan was left without an interpreter; and when Chinese authorities came to take a register of fishing vessels late in 1843 the British army officers in charge drove them summarily away under the Anglo-Saxon misapprehension that they were trying to hold court and flout the Queen. When translated at Hongkong, their communications were found to be both polite and innocuous.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The J. R. Morrison referred to in the above quote was the son of Robert Morrison– the first Protestant missionary to China. The junior Morrison was the official Chinese secretary to the British authority – a job he had taken over when his father died in 1834 – and acted as the chief interpreter for the Treaty of Nanking negotiations, but when he soon died in 1843 around the one-year anniversary of the Treaty – at a young age of only 29 – Gutzlaff was given the job. (See, e.g., R. Derek Wood, referred to earlier; and, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=TGUMAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The China Mission: Embracing a History of the Various Missions of All Denominations among the Chinese, with Biographical Sketches of Deceased Missionaries</em></font></a>, by William Dean, <em>Sheldon</em>, 1859.)</p> <p>Organization was another of Gutzlaff’s strengths, though it would ultimately become his Achille’s Heel. Continuing as a Christian missionary while holding the official Chinese Secretary position in the British colonial government, in 1844 Gutzlaff formed his own Chinese missionary organization, the Chinese Union.</p> <p>In the next several years Gutzlaff’s organization reached far and wide into the various regions of southern China; of particular interest, in the year 1847 a person of Chaozhou (Swatow) background, “Ming”, became president of this organization. (See, e.g., Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, referred to earlier).</p> <p>But the authenticity of the Chinese Union members’ Christian belief and Gutzlaff’s own ‘double duties’ were matters of concern among other Western missionaries. </p> <table align="right"><tbody> <tr> <td><a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/Search/Search.aspx?contractUrl=2&language=en-US&assetType=image&p=HMS%20Cornwallis"><img style="border-right-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px" title="3296724" border="0" alt="3296724" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg64WL_o8myqe6yptPFNfVufaxA0BaTI2-MgsmvkDy1vfKx50lZcV3VAgkM1vV4gJ6g79DKNjCudefAZpklaYtZqR9BXwDNQf7nCXONIn2boD6-VG2HcMfMYzexIqKx68Fr2NoC2GGaPdE/?imgmax=800" width="364" height="265" /></a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="364"><a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/3296724/Hulton-Archive">Signing of the Treaty of Nanking aboard HMS Cornwallis, August 29, 1842 (Getty Images)</a></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p>It would not be difficult to see why other missionaries hesitated: the Treaty of Nanjing Charles Gutzlaff and J. R. Morrison had taken part in negotiating made no mention of protecting Christian missions, but was preoccupied with reparations for the war and for damages to the British merchants including for the opium destroyed, with future trade privileges at the port of Canton and the additional ports of Amoy (Xiamen) and Foochow (Fuzhou) in Fujian province in the southeast and Ningpo (Ningbo) and Shanghai in the eastern coast, and with cession of Hong Kong to Britain. (See, e.g., “<a href="http://www.international.ucla.edu/asia/article.asp?parentid=18421" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking), 1842</font></a>”, UCLA Asia Institute.)</p> <p>Following the Opium War, in 1843-45 a number of other Western powers sent their navy ships to the coasts of China, in the hope of obtaining similar legal trade privileges granted Britain by the Qing government. Although the primary objectives in the showing of military might and in the subsequent treaty negotiations were commercial, both the United State and France asked for and received treaty concessions for limited rights and protection of foreign missionaries.</p> <p>With a small naval fleet, the U.S. negotiated and won the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia (Wanghia, 望厦条约), receiving permission for American missionaries to preach Christianity and establish churches in the five open ports. The Americans also won extraterritoriality for their citizens in China, i.e., any American accused of a crime would be handled by the American consul under the U.S. law, but with an explicit exception on anyone caught smuggling opium or contraband goods. (See, e.g.,  <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=RYGw2QYA3swC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Modern China: An Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism</em></font></a>, by Ke-wen Wang, <em>Taylor & Francis</em>, 1998; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=sTlVP0u7JmsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Westerners in China: A History of Exploration and Trade, Ancient Times through the Present</em></font></a>, by Foster Stockwell, <em>McFarland</em>, 2003; and, “<a href="http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/dwe/82011.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Opening to China Part I: the First Opium War, the United States, and the Treaty of Wangxia, 1839-1844</font></a>”, U.S. Department of State.)</p> <p>Closely following, in the 1844 Treaty of Whampoa (黄埔条约) France won privileges similar to what the Americans received, including the rights to preach Christianity and establish churches in the five open ports.</p> <p>But with the backing of a large naval fleet, the French Ambassador Theodore de Lagrene, who was also a high-ranking Jesuit, decided to also demand Chinese imperial lifting of the ban on Christianity, which had been in place since the Yongzheng Emperor’s 1724 edict. After many months of bargaining and pressures by the French, the Daoguang Emperor (道光) issued a number of edicts in 1844-46, making Christianity legal in China and ordering the return of church properties confiscated over a century ago. (See, e.g., <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=LSR2PEpOtqUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>China: Political, Commercial, and Social; In an Official Report to Her Majesty’s Government, Volume 2</em></font></a>, by R. Montgomery Martin, <em>J. Madden</em>, 1847; <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=BOopmtvrsOAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>France Overseas: A Study of Modern Imperialism</em></font></a>, by Herbert Ingram Priestley, <em>Routledge</em>, 1967; and, Ke-wen Wang, referred to earlier.) </p> <p>In an 1847 official report to the British government in London, Robert Montgomery Martin, the treasurer for the British colonial government and diplomatic services in China, lamented about Britain’s focus on opium trade and not on Christianity (see, R. Montgomery Martin, referred to earlier):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Our Government appear ashamed of Christianity as if its principles were poison and its professors demons. At the treaty of Nankin we made less mention of our religion than any heathens would have done; we did not require permission to erect a place of worship at the consular ports, or even to form a Christian burial-ground; thanks to the French and Americans, these two points since been obtained. We do not appear to have given ourselves the least trouble on the subject; it is as well we did not: we were far more solicitous about licensing opium smoking at Hong Kong, than of building even a Protestant church there. <em>Even the circular to our consuls in China, from Her Majesty’s government in England, was hostile to English missionaries at the consular ports!</em>”</p> </blockquote> <p>Though Christianity was now legal in China, foreign missionaries were still restricted from freely venturing into China outside of the five open ports.</p> <p></p> <p>(To be continued in Part 2)</p> <div style="padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: none; padding-top: 0px" id="scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:fe694404-0e80-46aa-a7df-27b4a7a669f6" class="wlWriterEditableSmartContent">del.icio.us Tags: <a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Chinese+history" rel="tag">Chinese history</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Chu+State" 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color="#0000ff">Continued from Part 1, previous blog post</font></a>)</p> <p>Needless to say, to do what Barack Obama envisioned isn’t easy when much worse is common in Africa.</p> <p>As I am writing this blog post,  news comes on a deadly bombing on December 3 in the Somali capital of Mogadishu targeting a graduation ceremony for medical, computer science and engineering students at Benadir University, an educational institution recently founded in October 2002 in the hope of providing modern education – especially medical education in cooperation with the World Health Organization – to young Somalis in order to keep the current and future generations from being lost in the ravaging civil war in Somalia. The terrorist attack killed students, journalists and the three government cabinet ministers responsible for health, education and higher education. (See, e.g., <em>Cleveland.com</em>, December 3, 2009, by Mohamed Olad Hassan, “<a href="http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2009/12/22_dead_after_suicide_bomb_att.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">23 dead after suicide bomb attack in Somalia</font></a>”; <em>Fox News</em>, December 3, 2009, “<a href="http://origin.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,579005,00.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Bomber Dressed as Woman Kills 22 Somalis</font></a>”; and, Benadir University, “<a href="http://www.benadiruniversity.net/BU_President_Msg.aspx" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Message of The President, Dr. Mohammed Moallim Muse</font></a>”.)</p> <p>The suicide bomber, one of the 23 dead, was a man disguised as a woman.</p> <p>The Somali government called the tragedy “a national disaster”.</p> <p>Only eight days before, relieving news arrived in Canada about the freeing of Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout, taken hostage in Somalia since August 2008. But amid the glee and joy some Canadians also expressed concern that the release came only after a large ransom of $600,000 (initially reported as a possible $1m) had been paid to the kidnappers for the freedom of Lindhout and her companion, Australian journalist Nigel Brennan, that the money was from their families and friends in Australia and in Calgary, Canada, some of whom had sold their homes and cars to raise the fund. (See, e.g., <em>CBC News</em>, November 25, 2009, “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/11/25/amanda-lindhout-free.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canadian Amanda Lindhout freed in Somalia; $1M ransom demanded, family pays for reporter's freedom</font></a>”; and, <em>The Daily Telegraph</em>, December 3, 2009, “<a href="http://www.news.com.au/world/ransom-for-journalists-nigel-brennan-and-amanda-lindhout-came-from-australia/story-e6frfkyi-1225806388495" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ransom for journalists Nigel Brennan and Amanda Lindhout came from Australia</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Such an exorbitant price on those who could barely afford it for them to save the life of their dear Amanda Lindhout – all because of her enthusiasm to visit and report on Somalia, a predominantly Muslim nation, after working in Iraq for Arab news organizations.</p> <p>In <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/summary-new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my January 29, 2009 blog article</font></a> I referred to several Canadians taken as international hostages, namely journalists Amanda Lindhout and Beverly Giesbrecht and Canadian-UN diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay, as “persons of conscience”; Giesbrecht is the only one of them not yet freed at this point.</p> <p>But then one realizes that these Canadians are lucky to be alive. While the Canadian Amanda Lindhout and the Australian Nigel Brennan are leaving Somalia, among the dead at Benadir University’s graduation ceremony were a British citizen,  Somali health minister Qamar Aden Ali, and an American citizen, Somali minister for higher education Ibrahim Hassan Adow.</p> <p>What has filled some people with such hatred toward others’ progress which ultimately would benefit them as well? It seems to be the very opposite of a new way of seeing the world, opposite of a faith in other people, which Barack Obama had called for.</p> <p>No wonder in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech delivered in Oslo, Norway a week after the Benadir University bombing, President Obama singled out Somalia as the example of a “failed state” (see, The White House, December 10, 2009, “<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize</font></a>”).</p> <p>Somalia has been anarchic in recent history, continuously plagued with ethnic strife, civil war and mass starvation since the early 1990s, and during the last days of the George H. W. Bush administration in 1992, the United States decided to lead peacekeeping forces to Somalia under the auspices of the United Nations after having assisted Pakistani-UN operations there with limited success (see, e.g., Air Force Historical Research Agency, May 6, 2004, by Daniel L. Haulman, “<a href="http://www.afhra.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-070912-041.pdf"><font color="#0000ff">A Country Too Far: U.S. Military Operations in Somalia, 1992-1994</font></a>”).</p> <p>Treachery and betrayal in international politics then became entangled with the anarchy in Somalia.</p> <p>It was the second major UN-sponsored American military operation for the Bush White House, the first having been the 1991 Gulf War after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded Kuwait in 1990. April Catherine Glaspie, the controversial former U.S. ambassador in Baghdad at the time of the Iraq-Kuwait crisis, was now sent to Somalia by incoming President Bill Clinton as the UN mission’s second-in-command, to reprioritize the humanitarian mission into one that would capture the defiant Somali warlord leader, General Mohamed Farrah Aidid, and restore order in that country. (See, e.g., <em>The Atlantic</em>, August 1992, by Robert D. Kaplan, “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199208/arabists/4" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Tales From the Bazaar: April Glaspie</font></a>”; World Somali Congress, September 15, 2007, “<a href="http://www.somalicongress.org/article1052.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">SOMALIA AND IRAQ SHARED SIMILAR STRATEGIES</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>In the UN’s first major move to reign in Aidid, twenty-five Pakistani-UN soldiers perished on June 5, 1993 during an operation to inspect Radio Mogadishu, making it the worst one-day massacre of UN peacekeepers since the deaths of 44 Ghanaian-UN soldiers in the Congo in 1961 (<em>The Guardian</em>, May 20, 2000, by Victoria Brittain, “<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/may/20/politics" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Continental rifts: Victoria Brittain laments the west’s failures of nerve in Africa</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“Glaspie authorised the June 5, 1993 mission by a Pakistani UN unit to inspect Radio Mogadishu, source of anti-UN propaganda and a known weapons site. When Aidid’s men were notified of the impending inspection, the message “this means war” came back. The Pakistanis were not given that message, and went to their doom with minimal security precautions. Peterson sums it up: “The result of this American-approved ‘inspection’ was the largest single-day massacre of UN peace-keeping troops since 1961, when 44 Ghanaians were killed in the Congo.””</p> </blockquote> <p>In <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/summary-new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my January 29, 2009 blog posts</font></a>, I mentioned several interesting facts to do with Vancouver, Canada: controversies surrounding April Glaspie’s performance in Iraq, and the fact that she was originally from Vancouver; Bill Clinton’s first summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin held in Vancouver in April 1993 soon after he had become U.S. president (and around the time when Glaspie was sent to Somalia); and Vancouver businesswoman and journalist Beverly Giesbrecht’s kidnapping in November 2008 in Pakistan near the Afghan border while doing jihad propaganda work and reporting for Al Jazeera.</p> <p>It’s quite possible that people go by the old and familiar ways when they feel others are not instilling trust in them, i.e., they remember lessons from the past more than trust words about the future.</p> <p>Prior to the June 5 debacle at Radio Mogadishu, in March – around the time when the Clinton-Yeltsin summit was announced for Vancouver – the Canadian Airborne Regiment, which had gone with the U.S. military to Somalia in December 1992, were in several incidents of brutality involving killings of Somali civilians, the most infamous of them the torture and murder of teenager Shidane Arone. (See, e.g., National Defence and the Canadian Forces, 1997, “<a href="http://www.forces.gc.ca/somalia/vol1/v1c1e.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Report of the Somalia Commission of Inquiry: Introduction</font></a>”.)</p> <p>There were wild allegations, including that the Canadian soldiers had been given some sort of experimental drug which caused them paranoia and other bad mental behaviour (see, e.g, National Defence and the Canadian Forces, 1997, “<a href="http://www.dnd.ca/somalia/vol5/v5c41e.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Report of the Somalia Commission of Inquiry: The Mefloquine Issue</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia_Affair#cite_note-ogle-15" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>).</p> <p>The Canadian Minister of National Defence at the time happened to be Vancouver’s Kim Campbell, a leading contender to succeed Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney – host of the Clinton-Yeltsin Vancouver summit. In June 1993, Campbell became the first-ever female Canadian prime minister, then during the campaign for the national election she soon called Campbell was accused of trying to cover up the Somalia scandal. (See, e.g., <em>Los Angeles Times</em>, October 6, 1993, by Mary Williams Walsh, “<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1993-10-06/news/mn-42831_1_canadian-soldiers" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Canada Is Shaken by Impending Trials of 6 Soldiers in Somali Death</font></a>”; and, <em>Esprit de Corps</em>, November 1997, “<a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6972/is_3_6/ai_n28701077/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Somalia cover-up: a commissioner’s journal, By Peter Desbarats</font></a>” (courtesy of <em>findarticles.com)</em>.)</p> <p>As I have earlier mentioned, in the (October) 1993 election Campbell suffered the worst electoral defeat in Canadian history – and that was only one of the generally poor showings during that era by the pioneer record-setting female political leaders in Canada. </p> <p>The Canadian military’s misadventure in Somalia certainly added to Kim Campbell’s bad luck.</p> <p>During Campbell’s time in Canadian federal politics prior to her ascent to the very top, I was a resident in the Vancouver Centre riding where she was the Member of Parliament, and in November-December 1992 I had communicated with her local constituency office as part of my political activity. </p> <p>A public inquiry, independent of the Canadian military’s investigation, into the “Somalia Affair” was eventually called in March 1995 by the government of Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien who had defeated Kim Campbell, but it did not run its full course before it was cut short by the government in 1997. The Airborne Regiment was also disbanded. (See, e.g., <em>The New York Times</em>, February 11, 1996, by Clyde H. Farnsworth, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/11/world/the-killing-of-a-somali-jars-canada.html?pagewanted=1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Killing Of a Somali Jars Canada</font></a>”; National Defence and the Canadian Forces, 1997, “<a href="http://www.forces.gc.ca/somalia/vol1/v1c1e.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Report of the Somalia Commission of Inquiry: Introduction</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canadian_Airborne_Regiment" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>Nine Canadian soldiers and officers faced court martial over the Shidane Arone killing and other incidents. </p> <p>One of them was Clayton Matchee, a brash Canadian Airborne soldier who faced torture and murder charges, who in March 1993 had reportedly tried to hang himself and clearly suffered severe brain damage; in 2008 Matchee was declared permanently mentally fit for court and had his  charges dropped. Kyle Brown, a more low-key soldier also facing torture and murder charges, was convicted and spent several years in prison, while Sergeant Mark Boland pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and also spent time in jail. (See, e.g., <em>The New York Times</em>, February 11, 1996, referred to earlier; <em>The Star-Phoenix</em>, September 16, 2008, “<a href="http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/news/story.html?id=86547d97-90d8-4f56-a69e-de1c35eb29c7" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Charges dropped for Matchee</font></a>”; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Matchee" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>; and, National Defence and the Canadian Forces, 1997, “<a href="http://www.forces.gc.ca/somalia/vol1/v1c14e.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Report of the Somalia Commission of Inquiry: The Somalia Mission: Post-Deployment</font></a>”.)</p> <p>The United Nations peacekeepers have since left Somalia, but only after the ‘Black Hawk Down’ episode that killed 18 U.S. Army Rangers in October 1993 (see, e.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>); the lawlessness continued and has been spilling over to the nearby international shipping routes near the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean – in the form of piracy. </p> <p>In 2009 while Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan were still in Somali kidnappers’ custody, the deaths of the fellow pirates of Somali teenager Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, in April at the hand of the American warship U.S.S. Bainbridge after the pirates had attempted to hijack the U.S. cargo ship Maersk Alabama, illustrated the peril of either stubborn ambition or blind distrust.</p> <p>In early April 2009, Muse and three others took Maersk Alabama hostage in the Indian Ocean, and after some confrontations and negotiation left on a lifeboat, with ship captain Richard Phillips as hostage. Then U.S. warships arrived, the lifeboat soon ran out of fuel, and the pirates agreed to be towed to a port by the U.S.S. Bainbridge. It was not a surrender by the pirates, and they continued to hold Captain Phillips hostage on the lifeboat, until suddenly a coordinated burst of gunfire from Navy Seal snipers killed the three pirates guarding Phillips, freeing him unharmed and leaving the teenager Muse as the only surviving pirate, who had gone over to the U.S. warship – to negotiate with the Americans or to get medical treatment and in effect surrender depending on the version of the story. (See, e.g., <em>The New York Times</em>, by Robert D. McFadden and Scott Shane, April 12, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/world/africa/13pirates.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">In Rescue of Captain, Navy Kills 3 Pirates</font></a>”; and<em>, New York Daily News</em>, April 21, 2009, by Thomas Zambito, Christina Boyle and Tracy Connor, “<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/04/21/2009-04-21_is_somali_pirate_that_helped_hijack_maersk_alabama_an_adult_or_just_a_kid_hearin.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Somali pirate's smile turns to tears; charged with crimes that could send him to jail for life</font></a>”.)</p> <p>In recent years Somali pirates have routinely hijacked international ships for ransom, in many cases bringing the ship – cargo as well as crew members – back to Somali ports; and so these four pirates leaving the ship with only one person as hostage made them appear less nasty than some of the others and thus the three eventual deaths more unusual. </p> <p>One may wonder, for instance: After the arrival of the U.S. Navy did the pirates continue to hold Captain Richard Phillips hostage for ransom, or did they at this point merely keep him as a bargaining chip to avoid arrest by the American military? Were the pirates given any promise by the FBI negotiators which had they trusted might have saved their lives?</p> <p>Ironically, the only surviving pirate Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse was then sent to New York City to stand trial and he arrived there and appeared in court on April 21, and one day later Canadian-UN diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay were released in the city of Gao in Mali, who had been kidnapped in neighbouring Niger in December 2008 and held in detention by Al Qaeda North Africa. (See, e.g., <em>The Times of London</em>, April 22, 2009, by James Bone, “<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6143653.ece" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Somali pirate Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse in US for Maersk Alabama hijack trial</font></a>”'; and, <em>National Post</em>, April 29, 2009, by Steven Edwards, “<a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/story.html?id=1547077" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Freeing of Fowler, Guay may have diplomatic price</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Robert Fowler happened to be the (former) Deputy Minister of National Defence – including serving under Kim Campbell in early 1993 – when the Canadian military took part in the UN mission in Somalia and became tainted by incidences of civilian killings (see, e.g., <em>Esprit de Corps</em>, November 1997, referred to earlier; and, <em>The Toronto Star</em>, December 16, 2008, “<a href="http://www.thestar.com/Article/554395" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Robert Fowler no stranger to conflict zones</font></a>”). </p> <p>My own experience has taught me that trust is indeed not easy to come by in politics. </p> <p>In 2002-03 after I had returned to Canada and settled in Toronto (an event discussed in the preceding part of this blog article), I encountered a problem that set me back in my career plan – something unexpected and negative that I viewed as either repercussion still occurring following my early-1990s’ political activity in Vancouver or calculated new act of political oppression. </p> <p>As part of my efforts to overcome the problem, in May 2003 I e-mailed some documents about my political activity and the related matters to “RMA”, a former mentor and professor at Berkeley, who was Canadian with a Yale Ph.D., had been a Princeton University faculty member and besides doing mathematics had also headed the Department of Economics  at UC Berkeley, an academic department that has provided all the chairwomen for the Council of Economic Advisers in the Democratic White House: Bill Clinton’s Laura D’Andrea Tyson and Janet Yellen – and now also Obama’s Christina D. Romer. </p> <p>“RMA” responded on May 25, saying:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I am also very concerned about your mental state. I think you need to be under the care of a psychiatrist. If you are not currently receiving psychiatric care, please make arrangements to get care immediately.”</p> </blockquote> <p>I was taken aback by his response.</p> <p>Part of my experiences in the early 1990s in political activity in Vancouver had included suffering under oppressive measures involving psychiatric incarceration and forced anti-psychotic medical treatment, which were first brought in by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and lasted on and off from the end of November 1992 to February 1994. Various psychiatrists gave different opinions during that time, but none diagnosed any real medical symptom, instead taking my political views as symptoms of a “delusional” or “paranoid” mental disorder. (<a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/airbus-affair-canadian-politics-and-social-undercurrents/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">My ongoing other blog posts, February 20, 2009 – present</font></a>, have been reviewing politics related to that part of the history.)</p> <p>The forced psychiatric measures tapered off  from February 1994 when the correctional officer supervising my one-year probation on a conditional discharge and several peace bonds – all due to minor troubles with lawyers who didn’t want to assist me or to do well in that and helped set entrapments against my civil disobedience – wrote a letter to the prosecution counsel at the court, relaying my intention not to take more medication and stating his opinion that psychiatric medicine could not be enforced by court order outside of psychiatric committal (and every time I had been committed a mental-health review panel soon ordered my release if the institution hadn’t done so).</p> <p>In fact, taking psychiatric medication such as Haldol (Haloperidol) for an extended period – I was forced to take on and off during a period of more than a year – could turn one into sufferer of degenerative and irreversible tardive syndromes – with uncontrollable behaviour much like Michael J. Fox’s discussed in the preceding part of this blog article, if not actual Parkinson’s disease (see, e.g., <em>American Family Physician</em>, by Rosabel Young, April 15, 1999, “<a href="http://www.aafp.org/afp/990415ap/2155.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Update on Parkinson’s Disease</font></a>”; and, Andrea C. Adams, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=37PdNdh0q24C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Mayo Clinic Essential Neurology</em></font></a>, Mayo Clinic Scientific Press, 2008). </p> <p>The danger of reliance on medicine to control human thought and behaviour was obvious.</p> <p>The probation officer I was very thankful to went by the name of Fred Hitchcock. </p> <p>It’s a real story and real name, even if it might remind one of the great horror-film director Alfred Hitchcock. Fred Hitchcock was the director of the Vancouver disordered offender unit in the B.C. correctional service.</p> <p>Nonetheless, further along the theme of the earlier discussions on some actors and movies (in the preceding part of this blog article), I could probably characterize that part of my experience as a movie scene in which I was peeking out from hiding in someone’s closet and hearing a narrating voice, “In light of Jason’s time in Justine’s space …”.</p> <p>And speaking of the Justine Bateman-lookalike  student I had come across often at Berkeley in the 1980s, I returned to Berkeley in the summer of 1990 for a research stay when I was already teaching at UBC in Vancouver, and one evening a Berkeley old-time friend “Dar” who was also from Guangzhou, and I went to a Telegraph Avenue pub for a drink, and “Shawna” was sitting right there with a boy friend.</p> <p>“Dar” has since finished his post-doctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego and at Stanford, and now works in Houston, Texas.</p> <p>In late 1994 Fred Hitchcock also wrote a letter for me, dated November 22, to let me visit my family in Guangzhou, China (ahead of the end of the conditional period in February 1995); in that letter he also recorded my intention to move to Ontario afterwards to seek employment. The Guangzhou trip did not materialize, as my mother was with me in Vancouver and stayed until early 1996, and soon afterwards I began working with businesswoman Liza Chiang – originally from Taiwan with a tale of Sun Li-jen’s near life-time house arrest as recounted in the preceding part of this blog article. Then I moved to Hawaii to work in 1997 and did not move to Ontario until 2002 – when I returned to Canada from California after a post-9/11 layoff in Silicon Valley.</p> <p>When things got unexpectedly ugly in Toronto in 2002-03 I sought advice on politics from former mentor “RMA” at Berkeley, who was active in academic and local politics. </p> <p>And when I received the May 25, 2003 e-mail reply from “RMA” suggesting that I seek psychiatric care, I said to myself, “It’s already in the New Millennium. Forget it.” </p> <p>In any case, I wasn’t John Nash, i.e., not as obsessive or stubborn as the Princeton mathematician and 1994 Nobel Economics Laureate who had a long and mysterious psychiatric history starting in 1959 when he was on the faculty of MIT in Boston, and whom most people know about through the Oscar-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind”, or the book of the same title it was adapted from (see, e.g., <em>Slate Magazine</em>, December 21, 2001, by Chris Suellentrop, “<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2060110/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">A Real Number: A Beautiful Mind’s John Nash is nowhere near as complicated as the real one</font></a>”; and, <i>The New York Times,</i> December 21, 2001, by A. O. Scott, “<a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A0CE7D6103EF932A15751C1A9679C8B63"><font color="#0000ff">Film review; From math to madness, and back</font></a>”<i>).</i></p> <p>In <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my January 29, 2009 blog posts</font></a>, I have discussed some intriguing links between that old era’s politics and John Nash’s mental-illness diagnoses and life misery. </p> <p>As for the rather shocking feedback in 2003 from “RMA”, someone who had headed a place with people the likes of White House chief advisers Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Janet Yellen and Christina D. Romer, I certainly hadn’t lacked faith in him when I sought his advice.</p> <p>Time changes, and so do people, or at least so does the way crucial duties are entrusted for people’s sake. I particularly emphasize the New Millennium, as its arrival has also marked the coming of the era of globalization of humanity – a historical calling that requires a new way to view the world.</p> <p>My political activity for which I went through repercussions first began when I pitted myself against the management style of my boss “Maria” at the University of British Columbia, and then against the conduct of then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in his handling of constitutional reform and in his leadership more generally.</p> <p>At the time I had hoped that the Member of Parliament in whose riding I lived, Kim Campbell, known for her up-and-coming ambition, could be of help. Instead, on the same day at the end of November 1992 several hours after I had faxed some documents to Campbell’s Vancouver constituency office, RCMP officers came to my apartment to take me to my first-ever psychiatric committal, and by early December Kim Campbell, then Justice Minister, would secure behind-the-scenes support from Brian Mulroney to succeed him as the Progressive Conservative party leader and prime minister, although Mulroney’s decision to step down was not announced until February 24, 1993. (See, <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/airbus-affair-canadian-politics-and-social-undercurrents/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my ongoing other blog posts, February 20, 2009 – present</font></a>.)</p> <p>The first Clinton-Yeltsin summit, in April 1993 hosted by outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (as also discussed in <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my January 29, 2009 blog posts</font></a>), marked the departure of the old and the coming of the new, with Clinton having defeated George H. W. Bush and riding high on his liberal agendas, among them the Goals 2000 project for progress of education toward the New Millennium. </p> <p>But it appears the pitfall of obsession with women soon caught up with both the old and the new – in Canadian politics in the form of obsession with female leadership and for Bill Clinton more personally: in 1993 Mulroney’s party under Kim Campbell suffered the worst election defeat in Canadian history and into the New Millennium was folded (merged into a newer party in 2003); and Clinton’s Goals 2000 achieved only meagre results – while he became embroiled in a sex scandal involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky and was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives ahead of the New Millennium’s arrival.</p> <p>And on New Year’s Eve 2000 when the New Millennium was knocking at humanity’s door, there were few lofty yet well-defined and well-publicized goals for the world community to stride for befitting the euphoria, but instead fears about Y2K which turned out to be over-worrying. Then soon hard-to-believe destructions happened to the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, and the world saw that at least Al Qaeda was likely real.</p> <p>The 2000 U.S. presidential election was hotly contested between Al Gore in the Clinton White House and George H. W. Bush’s son George W., and the outcome of this vote at a historic time was determined only after an appeal from the Bush campaign to the United States Supreme Court. The lawyer who did it, Theodore Olson, originally from Chicago and a UC Berkeley graduate, later became Solicitor General for the Bush administration; but Olson soon lost his wife Barbara Olson, a former federal prosecutor and former legal counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives who was originally from Houston, Texas, on the plane that plunged into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. (See, e.g., <em>The New York Times</em>, February 15, 2001, by Neil A. Lewis, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/us/man-in-the-news-prize-job-for-a-bush-rescuer-theodore-bevry-olson.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Man in the News; Prize Job for a Bush Rescuer; Theodore Bevry Olson</font></a>”; <em>National Review</em>, September 13, 2001, by Ann Coulter, “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/coulter/coulter.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">This Is War: We should invade their countries</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_K._Olson" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Wikipedia</font></em></a>.)</p> <p>September 11 happened to be Ted Olson’s birthday and Barbara had stayed the night in Washington, D.C. in order to have breakfast with her husband for the occasion, then took the flight back to Los Angeles where she had a busy schedule as a national TV commentator on high-profile and celebrity legal issues, including on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the past (see, e.g., <em>The Telegraph</em>, September 14, 2001, “<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1340454/Barbara-Olson.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Barbara Olson</font></a>”).</p> <p>Despite the unprecedented threat of global terrorism, at the local community level things have been changing in America, albeit slowly. </p> <p>Take for example, a missing-person case that was recently solved - ‘accidentally’ at Berkeley.</p> <p>Not unlike many Berkeley activists of various stripes who proselytized there everyday, Phillip Garrido, a middle-aged looking man living in Antioch north of Berkeley, brought his two teenage daughters Starlet and Angel to UC Berkeley campus on August 24, 2009 after a trip to the FBI in San Francisco, for the same goal he had – advertising for his new book, “<em>Origin of Schizophrenia Revealed</em>”, as part of a religious crusade. In this book Garrido described, with personal experience as a former convicted kidnapper and rapist, how human behaviour could change. (See, e.g., <em>Antioch Grove</em>, August 28, 2009, by Jeremiah Peterson, “<a href="http://www.antiochgrove.com/2009/08/28/garridos-spiritual-manifesto-released-by-the-fbi-new-details-about-18-year-abduction-of-antioch-woman-jaycee-lee-dugard/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">FBI Releases Garrido’s Spiritual Manifesto; New Details About 18 Year Abduction of Antioch Woman Jaycee Lee Dugard</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Lee_Dugard" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>While Garrido was applying for a permit for a special event for his group “God’s <br />Desire”, some personality signs indicating a possible unusual relationship between him and the two girls caused suspicions on the part of two female Berkeley campus police officers, Allison (Ally) Jacobs and Lisa Campbell, who immediately related their concerns to Garrido’s probation officer, and the latter verified that Garrido did not have daughters on record. (See, e.g., <em>UC Berkeley News</em>, August 28, 2009, by Cathy Cockrell, “<a href="http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/08/28_ucpd.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Arrest of kidnap suspect Phillip Garrido hinged on instincts and diligence of two members of UC Berkeley police force</font></a>”; and, <em>Examiner.com</em>, August 30, 2009, by Charisse Van Horn, “<a href="http://www.examiner.com/x-12837-US-Headlines-Examiner~y2009m8d30-How-Jaycee-Lee-Dugard-was-found-UC-Berkeley-Police-describe-Dugards-children-Starlite-and-Angel" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">How Jaycee Lee Dugard was found: U.C. Berkeley Police describe Dugard’s children Starlet and Angel</font></a>”.)</p> <p>It turned out that Phillip Garrido did have the two daughters, Starlet and Angel, but that he had fathered them with Jaycee Lee Dugard, a well-known missing teenager in California since eighteen years ago, whom he had kidnapped. Jaycee Lee had become part of Garrido’s household with his wife Nancy, been renamed Allissa (or Allyssa), and for a while lived with her two children in makeshift tents and a shed in the Garrido family’s backyard. Allyssa had also taught herself to become a computer-graphics designer and been helping with Garrido’s business and activities. (See, e.g., <em>KCRA Sacramento</em>, August 27, 2009, “<a href="http://www.kcra.com/news/20591281/detail.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kidnap Suspect: ‘Wait Until You Hear The Story’ Phillip Craig Garrido Accused Of Kidnapping Jaycee Lee Dugard</font></a>”; <em>The Daily Record</em>, August 31, 2009, by Ryan Parryin, “<a href="http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/2009/08/31/kidnap-victim-jaycee-lee-dugard-helped-run-business-for-abductor-86908-21637091/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard helped run business for abductor</font></a>”; and. <em>The Times of London</em>, November 5, 2009, by Philippe Naughton, “<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6904207.ece" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jaycee Lee Dugard ‘tried to hide identity from police’</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Some people called Jaycee Lee Dugard’s mentality “the Stockholm Syndrome”, into which, in addition to sex slavery, she had fallen victim. It could have been fears earlier, and some sense of shame later, but thanks to the alertness of female Berkeley campus police officers Allison Jacobs and Lisa Campbell, it finally unravelled in 2009.</p> <p>I have also found some interesting personal coincidences with this Phillip Garrido-Jaycee Lee Dugard story: media reported that Garrido approached Berkeley campus police on August 24, and was arrested on August 26, exactly 21 years from August 26, 1988 when he had first made parole for his 1976 kidnapping and rape that had netted him prison terms of 50 years plus 5-years-to-life; if I remembered correctly, moving from Berkeley to Vancouver I happened to arrive in Canada on August 24, 1988; and in that year I was 29, the same age as when Jaycee Lee Dugard is freed this year in 2009, while 29 and 2009 happen to be magical numbers for me as also alluded to in my <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my January 29, 2009 blog posts</font></a>.</p> <p>Broader coincidences, more generally interesting, are about the year 1991 in common in the various topics discussed in this blog article: the Gulf War; Michael J. Fox’s first symptoms of Parkinson’s disease; the fall of the Social Credit party whose Bennett father-and-son dynasty had ruled British Columbia during most of the 1950s-1980s, from where Fox had come to Hollywood; the first anti-stalker law in the United States taking effect in California, a law spurred by incidents such as the stalking of Michael J. Fox’s “Family Ties” sister Justine Bateman in Berkeley in 1989; Jaycee Lee Dugard’s kidnapping in California, and the start of my political activity at the University of British Columbia, over the management style of my then boss, “Maria”.</p> <p>UC Berkeley had substantially contributed to his ensemble of female academic and political stars in the White House, but all that did not prevent Bill Clinton from being officially tainted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.</p> <p>But Clinton’s public problem from alleged sexual obsession with women had not begun with Monica Lewinsky but with Paula Jones when he was still the Governor of Arkansas – and also in 1991 (see, e.g., <em>The New York Times</em>, 1998, “<a href="http://partners.nytimes.com/library/politics/clintonjones-chronology.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">CHRONOLOGY: Paula Jones Civil Suit</font></a>”).</p> <p>Has the Monica Lewinsky scandal also contributed to Hilary Clinton’s loss of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidacy, who had tried to keep the lid on the subject early in her campaign? (See, e.g., <em>Washington Post</em>, February 25, 2007, by Anne E. Kornblut, “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/24/AR2007022401166.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Clinton Fights to Keep Impeachment Taboo; After Spat, Campaigns Know to Expect Swift Reprisal for Any Hint of the Scanda</font></a><font color="#0000ff">l</font>”; <em>The Times of London</em>, January 19, 2008, by Tim Reid and Tom Baldwin, “<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3213302.ece" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Hillary Clinton speaks of her pain and shame at the Monica Lewinsky scandal</font></a>”; and, <em>The Atlantic</em>, April 10, 2008, by Ross Douthat, “<a href="http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/the-monica-question.php" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Monica Question: Campaigning for her mother on college campuses, Chelsea Clinton has faced repeated questions from students about the Monica Lewinsky scandal</font></a>”.)</p> <p>I’d like to think Barack Obama won it in 2008.</p> <p>In his second book, “<em>The Audacity of Hope</em>”, published after he had become U.S. Senator, Obama criticized some politics of the Bill Clinton era (including the Monica Lewinsky scandal though Obama did not refer to it directly), that it had been like a “psychodrama” of old grudges and plots hatched on college campuses and played out on the national stage, instead of growing trust and fellowship built on the civil-rights and other political progresses of the 1960s; these comments strike a chord with me that my experience has led me to feel a similar way also (Barack Obama, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=fu5ugX-XxB0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream</em></font></a>, Crown Publishers, 2006):</p> <blockquote> <p>“In the back-and-forth between Clinton and [House Speaker (Republican) Newt] Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played out on the national stage. The victories that the sixties generation brought about—the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions—that quality of trust and fellow feeling—that bring us together as Americans.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Genuine steps toward progress would require breaking away from the conventional mindset on behaviour, life and goals, and from the socially enforced outlooks toward the future, and require thinking more about what one can do while less about what is there for one – to modestly paraphrase John Fitzgerald Kennedy in his presidential inauguration speech on January 20, 1961.</p> <p>Obama campaign’s slogan, “Yes we can”, can be viewed as a modest attempt at inspiring the way JFK did, while another campaign slogan, “Change we can believe in”, reflects an updated sense of realism about what that faith pertains to.</p> <p>But Obama’s naysayers may point to what he has done for Africa – or hasn’t done – as a counterargument, that as the first African-American U.S. president traveling around the world he has officially visited Africa only once and to only one country, Ghana – not even to Kenya where his family roots are from (see, e.g., <em>The Times of London</em>, July 10, 2009, by Jonathan Clayton and Tristan McConnell, “<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6677303.ece" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Barack Obama’s visit to Ghana is snub to Kenya, his ancestral home</font></a>”).</p> <p>How is Obama different from his half-brother Mark Ndesandjo in this respect? – His critics may ask.</p> <p>The disappointment among some people in Africa about Obama seemingly not taking a broader, more intensive approach to issues on their continent is understandable. However a comparison between Africa and China may be of greater relevance here, and I’ll attempt to show why and in the process also answer the more personal question posed above.</p> <p>Both Africa and China are regions of expansive geographical confine and large population, both are part of the developing world, and in the second half of the 20th century both went under strongly nationalist and fervently independent sentiments and through a period of relative isolation from the developed world in the West. (See, e.g., <em>BBC World Service</em>, “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index_section14.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Story of Africa: Independence</font></a>”; and, Council on Foreign Relations, April 23, 2008, by Jayshree Bajoria, “<a href="http://www.cfr.org/publication/16079/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Nationalism in China</font></a>”.)</p> <p>With the changes in international politics in recent decades, both Africa and China are now gradually opening itself up in their efforts to develop, to modernize and to integrate with the rest of the world economically and socially (see, e.g., <em>International Trade Forum</em>, January 2001, “<a href="http://www.tradeforum.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/41/Africa's_Export_Success_Stories.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Africa’s Export Success Stories</font></a>”; <em>America.gov</em>, July 19, 2007, by Jim Fisher-Thompson, “<a href="http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2007/July/20070719121708ndyblehs0.377453.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Sub-Saharan Africa Benefits from Expanded International Trade; U.S. trade representative says trade is an effective anti-poverty weapon</font></a>”; <em>Business Economics</em>, October 1993, by John H. Park, “<a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1094/is_n4_v28/ai_14604469/?tag=content;col1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Impact of China’s open-door policy on Pacific Rim trade and investment - International Perspective</font></a>” (courtesy of <em>findarticles.com</em>); and, <em>ChinaCulture.org</em>, 2009, “<a href="http://www.culturalink.gov.cn/focus/2009-09/10/content_347641.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Reform, opening up bring change in people’s thinking</font></a>”).</p> <p>But the difficulties and challenges Africa faces and China faces in interfacing and integrating with the rest of the world are quite different, in fact opposite in a sense, as Africa needs to overcome the prevalence of anarchy and extreme violence, first and foremost, whereas China needs to overcome the fear of it.</p> <p>China has taken tremendous strides in reforming its economic system, opening or building up its markets for international trade in investment, labour, goods and services, gradually but steadily. The process started 30 years ago with a few southern and southeastern coastal economic zones such as Shenzhen and Zhuhai, and have extended to entire provinces, including especially the southern province of Guangdong in which Shenzhen, Zhuhai and (the provincial capital) Guangzhou – the historic port of Canton – are located, and a large region in eastern China around the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, which in the first half of the 20th century (the pre-Communist era) had been a leading international center of finance in the Far East. (See, e.g., <em>Fortune</em>, January 1935, “<a href="http://www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/library/fortune/t-fortune2.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Shanghai Boom</font></a>” (courtesy of <em>earnshaw.com</em>); <em>Economic History Association</em>, December 2001, by Andrea McElderry, “<a href="http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/0425" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Western Capitalism in China: A History of the Shanghai Stock Exchange | Book Reviews</font></a>”; <em>China Daily</em>, May 23, 2006, “<a href="http://english.people.com.cn/200605/23/eng20060523_267861.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Out of Guangzhou, Africa trade booms</font></a>”; <em>News Guangdong</em>, November 20, 2008, “<a href="http://www.newsgd.com/specials/30yearsreform/milestones/content/2008-11/20/content_4717182.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">1979: Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou Special Economic Zones</font></a>”; <em>People’s Daily</em>, March 26, 2009, “<a href="http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90778/90857/90862/6623230.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">State Council: Making Shanghai a new global financial center</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my January 29, 2009 blog posts</font></a>.)</p> <p>A curious anomaly among China’s special economic zones for international trade, one that hasn’t done well, is the city of Shantou (in Guangdong province) which happens to be where my maternal family heritage was from as discussed in the context of early Protestant Christianity in China in <a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my other blog posts in 2009</font></a>.</p> <p>Overall, the economic reform and opening-up process first begun in the late-1970s/early-1980s under then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping has survived doubts and any possible “mocking fate” and flourished. In southern China the process is also benefiting from integration with the market-based economies in the former Western colonies of Hong Kong and Macau, which were returned to China during the late 1990s with special autonomy for their commercial-market and administrative systems. (See, e.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_reform_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>; United States Congress Joint Economics Committee, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=RCS3nl7U1BcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">China’s Economic Dilemmas in the 1990s: The Problems of Reforms, Modernization, and interdependence</font></em></a>, M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992; <em>News Guangdong</em>, March 6, 2009, “<a href="http://www.newsgd.com/news/chinakeyword/2009TwoSessions/content/2009-03/06/content_4964379.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Chinese political advisors call for free trade zone between Hong Kong, Shenzhen</font></a>”; <em>China Daily</em>, August 11, 2009, by You Nuo, “<a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2009-08/11/content_8553816.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Where there is a political will, there is reform</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Politically though, it has been harder, not the least because China as one large country – the most populous in the world – has struggled with maintaining balances among the various regions and sectors disparate in their experiences and/or expectations of loss and gain in the economic reform and opening, and the Chinese leadership in 1989 opted for the safety of orthodoxy when it came to power and political control. (See, e.g., <em>CNN</em>, 1999, “<a href="http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/china.50/inside.china/profiles/li.peng/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The man who took on the dissidents: Li Peng (1928-)</font></a>”;<em>Time Magazine</em>, June 24, 2001, by Johanna McGeary, “<a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,137928,00.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">INSIDE CHINA</font></a>”; and, <em>Slate Magazine</em>, November 25, 2009, by Daniel Gross, “<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2236703/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Karl Who? China is a Communist country, but I have yet to meet an actual Communist</font></a>”.)</p> <p>For Africa, however, the disparities among the different regions and countries are not threatening to tear up a pre-existent, nation-like ‘African Union’, or through such threat to severely constrain the economies of various parts of the continent. While the importance of African unity should not be underestimated, greater flexibility and thus greater opportunities exist in this regard when it comes to international trade and development.</p> <p>For his first presidential visit to Africa, Obama chose Ghana for its adhering to the principle of democracy and achieving political and social stability within that principle, as <em>The New York Times</em> commented prior to Obama’s visit (<em>The New York Times</em>, May 17, 2009, by Peter Baker, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/us/politics/18prexy.html?_r=1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Calculus Behind Obama’s Ghana Stopover</font></a>”):</p> <blockquote> <p>“The White House passed over Kenya, where Mr. Obama’s late father was from, in favor of the small nation of Ghana as the site of his first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa. A year after Kenya exploded in political violence, it remains a tense and unsettled place. Ghana, by contrast, is an outpost of democracy and civil society in a volatile region.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Alternately I reason that in choosing Ghana Obama remained faithful to the vision for Africa he had outlined in his 1995 book “<em>Dreams From My Father</em>”, namely that for Africa’s future a type of unity through native faith born out of hardship is needed to absorb the power of the modern world.</p> <p>Ghana – the Gold Coast in its former colonial name – fits part of that bill as being the first place in black, sub-Saharan Africa (as opposed to North Africa populated by Arab Muslims) the Europeans came to settle and trade in recent history, during the 15th century; at the time it became a centre of trade in West Africa. (see, e.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_exploration_of_Africa" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>; <em>BusinessGhana</em>, “<a href="http://www.businessghana.com/portal/aboutghana/index.php?op=arrivaleuro" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">History of Ghana: European Influence</font></a>”;  <em>The Crawfurd Homepage</em>, by Jacob Crawfurd, “<a href="http://crawfurd.dk/africa/ghana_timeline.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">GHANA TIMELINE – THE GOLD COAST</font></a>”; and, <em>The International Artists’ and Writers’ Workshops</em>, 2007, “<a href="http://www.theinternationalworkshops.com/ghana/index.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ghana</font></a>”).</p> <p>Ghana was also the first country in black Africa to achieve independence from European colonial rule, in 1957 under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, leader of a self-government movement since the late 1940s, whose greater vision and legacy for African unity have been an inspiration to many in the continent and around the world – as witnessed by his having been voted Africa’s Man of the Millennium by African listeners of the BBC (see, e.g., <em>BBC World Service</em>, September 14, 2000, “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/highlights/000914_nkrumah.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kwame Nkrumah’s Vision of Africa</font></a>”; <em>The International Artists’ and Writers’ Workshops</em>, referred to earlier; <em>Journal of Pan African Studies</em>, March 15, 2008, by Ama Biney, “<a href="http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol2no3/LegacyOfKwameNkrumah.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The legacy of Kwame Nkrumah in retrospect</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Nkrumah" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>).</p> <p>Ghana also has a stable multiparty constitutional democracy, instituted since 1992. That might not seem a great deal but it has made Ghana stand out as an exception in a volatile part of the world. (See, e.g., Sergio Pereira Leite, Anthony Pellechio, Luisa Zanforlin, Girma Begashaw, Stefania Fabrizio, and Joachim Harnack, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=8e2H_6n4vD0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Ghana: economic development in a democratic environment</em></font></a>, International Monetary Fund, 2000; <em>Peace FM Online</em> (Ghana), November 20, 2009, “<a href="http://elections.peacefmonline.com/parliament/200911/32336.php" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">African countries are confident in Ghana’s democracy – Dery</font></a>”.)</p> <p>And Ghana also thrives as a showcase of independent and indigenous African cultures to other peoples, a window to interact with the world (see, e.g., <em>The International Artists’ and Writers’ Workshops</em>, referred to earlier; <em>The Power of Culture</em>, May 2008, by Brennan Leffler, “<a href="http://www.powerofculture.nl/en/current/2008/April/ICACD_culture_development_agenda_Africa+" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">ICACD puts culture on the development agenda in Africa</font></a>”; and, <em>Arts in Africa</em>, “<a href="http://www.artsinafrica.com/news-about-cultural-developments-in-africa" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Cultural Developments in Africa</font></a>”).</p> <p>The history and the recent experiences of exchanges with the modern world, mean that Ghana has been able to achieve what Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango, had once been skeptical about that it would be possible for Africans.</p> <p>In <font color="#000000">my continuing blog posts on Canadian politics</font>, I mentioned the late Canadian journalist Christopher Young, former editor of the<em> Ottawa Citizen</em> newspaper, whose background of being born in Ghana – even in the pre-independence era (his father Norman Young was a history teacher there) – contributed to his sense of pride, integrity and independence, and carried him to a height of political journalism with a breath of international perspective few in Canada would speak from during a difficult time in Canadian politics, when on February 20, 1988 Young was virtually alone in warning Canadians that then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s adventure in constitutional reform – the 1987 Meech Lake constitutional accord – risked bringing Canada to a Yugoslavian-style national crisis. Mulroney, whose wife Mila’s family happened to be from Serbia, continued on that path but his constitutional plan was later defeated in 1990 by the combined efforts of Aboriginal politician Elijah Harper in Manitoba – a province with a unique history of ethnic-autonomy streak starting with Louis Riel’s Red River rebellion of 1869 – and Premier Clyde Wells of Newfoundland – Canada’s newest province which left Britain and joined the confederation only in 1949. (See, e.g., <em>Expo 67 in Montreal</em>, June 27, 1967, by the Canadian Press, “<a href="http://expo67.ncf.ca/canada_first_one_hundred_years.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Major Events In Canada’s First 100 Years</font></a>”; <em>Embassy</em> (Canada’s Foreign Policy Newspaper), March 29, 2006, by David Kilgour, “<a href="http://embassymag.ca/issue/view/2006-03-29" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Christopher Young: Newspaperman. In Memoriam: 1927-2006</font></a>”; Peter C. Newman, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=HLN8pGjUAqQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister</em></font></a>, Random House of Canada, 2006; and, <a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Feng Gao’s Space: analysis of Current Affairs, Politics & History</em></font></a>, by Feng Gao, “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”.)</p> <p>To me, the Elijah Harper-Clyde Wells connection in the Meech Lake constitutional saga in Canada bore some resemblance to Barack Obama’s notion of a faith “that pulsed at the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead”, envisioned in his 1995 book “<em>Dreams from My Father</em>” (as previously quoted).</p> <p>In its stride toward modern progress Ghana has given certain distinctively unique and positive influence to the world: Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan rose through the UN hierarchy to become the first Secretary General of the United Nations from black Africa in 1997; and Annan not only was the UN Secretary General at the historic time of the arrival of the New Millennium, but has been the only recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize representing the United Nations, in 2001. (See, e.g., <em>UN News Centre</em>, October 12, 2001, “<a href="http://secint24.un.org/apps/news/storyAr.asp?NewsID=1795&Cr=Nobel&Cr1=Prize" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Welcoming Nobel Peace Prize, UN officials praise Annan’s leadership</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Very notable recognition for very laudable achievements, and I also note that the announcement came that year on North America’s traditional Columbus Day – albeit from a personal angle the good news was travelling around the world while I happened to be on my first day of idle life at home after layoff in Silicon Valley (as discussed in the preceding part this blog article).</p> <p>In fact, if there was something to read from Barack Obama’s July 2009 Ghana visit being his first and only official visit to Africa so far, it might be the following: Obama had actually visited Egypt on June 4 to present his first major speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University, but according to the White House the Ghana visit was the first visit to address African issues; Egypt is an Arab Muslim country that happens to be located in North Africa and is the home country of Kofi Annan’s UN predecessor, Butros Butros-Ghali, who had served one 5-year term on the job before Annan’s 10 years. (See, e.g., <em>The New York Times</em>, May 24, 1999, by Paul Lewis, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/24/world/boutros-ghali-s-book-says-albright-and-clinton-betrayed-him.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Boutros-Ghali’s Book Says Albright and Clinton Betrayed Him</font></a>”; <em>MSNBC</em>, May 15, 2009, “<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30769881" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Egypt wants Obama to speak from mosque: Historic mosque makes short list of venues for president’s June 4 speech</font></a>”; <em>BlackAmericaWeb</em>, May 20, 2009, by Michael H. Cottman, “<a href="http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/moving_america_news/9495" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">President Obama and the First Lady to Travel to Ghana in July</font></a>”; <em>The Daily News Egypt</em>, May 31, 2009, b<a><i>y Tamim Elyan, </i></a>“<a href="http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=22093" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Cairo University Staff, Students Weigh in on Obama’s Visit</font>”</a>; and, <em>The Washington Times</em>, July 9, 2009, by John P. Krudy, “<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/09/peaceful-vote-draws-obama/print/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Peaceful vote draws Obama to Ghana</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Also worth noting is the fact that Ghana’s transition to a stable democracy had restarted only from 1992 and progressed essentially paralleling the increase of Kofi Annan’s visibility in world politics, but it has been peaceful and genuine. </p> <p>After leading the country to independence in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah pursued a nonaligned though left-leaning foreign policy, but also started a transition to a one-party state under him; then on February 24, 1966 while he was on an official visit to (North) Vietnam and China his government was overthrown by a military coup supported by the CIA. (See, e.g., <em>The Journal of Pan African Studies</em>, March 2008, by Boni Yao Gebe, “<a href="http://www.jpanafrican.com/docs/vol2no3/GhanasForeignPolicyAtIndependenceAnd.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ghana’s Foreign Policy at Independence and Implications for the 1966 Coup D’état</font></a>”; <em>The Monitor</em> (Kampala), October 31, 2009, by Ali A. Mazrui, “<a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/200911020064.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Uganda: Kwame Nkrumah in the Destiny of Global Africana</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Nkrumah" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>Something personally interesting to me in the above history is that the date, February 24, later happened to be when Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced his resignation in 1993 – prior to that I had gotten into political activity critical of his leadership as mentioned earlier (also see, <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/airbus-affair-canadian-politics-and-social-undercurrents/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my ongoing other blog posts, February 20, 2009 – present</font></a>).</p> <p>Following the fall of Nkrumah a long period of mostly military rule ensued in Ghana, until 1988 when transition to a multiparty electoral system began with low-level elections, and finally April 1992 when a democratic constitution was approved in a national referendum.  The military ruler who presided over the transition was an intellectually oriented Flight-Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, leader of the “June 4 Movement” that had waged a successful coup on June 4, 1979 to overthrow previous military rulers and restore democracy, but then re-intervened and reverted to military rule in 1981; Rawlings retired from the military in 1992, and won the 1992 and 1996 elections in which opposition parties were allowed to campaign in relatively free environments, though there were boycotts. Entering the New Millennium, Jerry Rawlings announced his retirement, abiding by the two-term constitutional limit of presidency, and his party lost and ceded the 2000 election to the opposition. (See, e.g., <em>BBC News</em>, January 2, 2001, by Mark Doyle, “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/1097628.stm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Rawlings: A hard act to follo</font></a><font color="#0000ff">w</font>”; <em>Center on Democracy, Development, and The Rule of Law</em>, Stanford University, October 2007 (revised March 2009), by Antoinette Handley, ““<a href="http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/22208/No_82_HandleyGhana.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The World Bank Made Me Do It?” International Factors and Ghana’s Transition to Democracy</font></a>”; <em>The Courier Magazine</em>, June/July 2008, by Hegel Goutier, “<a href="http://www.acp-eucourier.info/Modern-Ghana-far-from-An.337.0.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Modern Ghana, far from Ancient Ghana: Ghana History</font></a>”; <em>Ghana Business News</em>, June 16, 2009, “<a href="http://ghanabusinessnews.com/2009/06/16/call-for-review-of-ghana%E2%80%99s1992-constitution-made/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Call for review of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution made</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rawlings" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>The change in political power through a democratic election was  accepted, honestly and peacefully; and when Barack Obama visited Ghana in July 2009 welcoming him was new President John Atta Mills, a British and American educated legal scholar and Jerry Rawlings’s former vice president and successor, who lost both the 2000 and 2004 elections to the former opposition. (See, e.g., <em>Kent’s Diaries – From Anything to Everything Read</em> (weblog),  January 7, 2009, by Kent Mensah, “<a href="http://kentgh.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/ghana-new-president-takes-office/"><font color="#0000ff">Ghana: New President Takes Office</font></a>”; and, <em>J. J. Rawlings - Ghana’s former President J.J. Rawlings in the spotlight</em> (weblog), July 10, 2009, by J. J. Rawlings, “<a href="http://jjrawlings.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/thanks-rawlings-for-bringing-obama/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Thanks Rawlings For Bringing Obama</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Obama said at the time, “Ghana has now undergone a couple of successful elections in which power was transferred peacefully, even a very close election.” (See, e.g., <em>The Independent</em>, July 21, 2009, by Melina Platas, “<a href="http://www.independent.co.ug/index.php/reports/world-report/74-world-report-/1296-yes-africa-you-can"><font color="#0000ff">Yes, Africa, you can</font></a>”.) </p> <p>The Ghanaian transition to multiparty democracy can probably serve as an example of peaceful and pragmatic democratic reform – as controversial as it might seem – for other countries, even ones beyond Africa.</p> <p>In its heritage as the oldest European colonial-trade outpost in black Africa and its long history of cultural interactions with the West, Ghana reminds me of Guangdong province in China where I came from. However, it remains to be seen whether Ghana’s integration into the world economy will truly usher in a modern future, and whether in an Africa lacking unity Ghana can become a modern economic hub in West Africa it once was – something the city of Guangzhou (the port of Canton in the old days) was and is in a China run by a central government.</p> <p>In contrast to his half-brother Mark Ndesandjo’s disillusionment with Africa, who now lives in Shenzhen just south of Guangzhou in China, Barack Obama’s choice of Ghana for his first visit to black Africa reflected careful political considerations; and Obama wasted no time campaigning for democracy there and in Africa (see, e.g., <em>America.gov</em>, July 11, 2009, “<a href="http://www.america.gov/st/peacesec-english/2009/July/20090711153505WCyeroC3.853351e-02.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Obama: Ghana Shows Democracy Can Thrive in Africa; Says visit was particularly meaningful to him</font></a>”).</p> <p>When Ghana was achieving independence in the 1950s, Kenya on the opposite side of the African continent also began a process for independence. Though both British colonies, Kenyans took to a more militant approach toward that goal, and achieved it six years later than Ghana, in December 1963 under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), who had been in jail most of that time for leading the Kenyan African Union (KAU) and allegedly guiding the Mau Mau movement that had waged a militant rebellion against British colonial rule. (See, e.g., <em>The New York Times</em>, December 12, 1963, by Robert Onley, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1212.html#article" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Joyful Kenya Gets Independence From Britain</font></a>”; <em>BBC World Service</em>, “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/14chapter8.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Story of Africa Independence – Case Study: Kenya</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jomo_Kenyatta" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>Barack Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango’s doubt that independence would work for Africans – quoted in the preceding part of this blog article – was expressed in the context of skepticism about what the KANU party could achieve in their struggle for Kenyan independence, even though Onyango agreed with many of their demands; Onyango also spent some time in a detention camp, suspected of being a KANU supporter, and became physically weak after that. (See, Barack Obama, <em><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=NKTi9wT_NkcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance</font></a></em>, <em>Crown Publishers</em>, 1995 & 2004.)  </p> <p>After independence, President Kenyatta institutionalized a one-party system which then ruled Kenya through his time and the time of his successor, Daniel arap Moi; Moi had been leader of the Kenyan African Democratic Union (KADU) and merged that party with KANU to form a one-party government shortly after independence (see, e.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_arap_Moi" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>).</p> <p>It was Barack Obama’s contention in his 1995 book, “<em>Dreams from My Father</em>”, that the airing of opinions critical of the policies of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s founding President, led to Barack Obama, Sr.’s firing – by Kenyatta personally – from a senior civil-service position in the Kenyan government, and the career setback in turn led to Obama, Sr.’s descent into the grip of alcoholism, poverty, failure of intellectual goals, physical disability, and ultimately early death in an auto accident in November 1982. (See, Barack Obama, referred to earlier; and, <em>CBS News</em>, April 15, 2008, by Ben Smith and Jeffrey Ressner, “<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/15/politics/politico/main4015307.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Obama’s Father Authored Long-Lost Article</font></a>”.)</p> <p>In 1992 when a democratic constitution and the multiparty system were instituted in Ghana,  a multiparty system was also instituted under President Moi in Kenya. Moi then won two five-year terms in the 1992 and 1997 elections, and retired in 2002, choosing the late Jomo Kenyatta’s son as his successor, who then lost the 2002 election to the current president, Mwai Kibaki, and in 2007 led KANU to become a coalition supporter of Kibaki’s presidency. (See, e.g., University of Tampere, 2000, by Francis P. Kasoma, “<a href="http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/951-44-4968-1.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Press and Multiparty Politics in Africa</font></a>”; <em>Third World Quarterly</em>, 2001, by Stephen Brown, “<a href="http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~brown/pages/Stephen_Brown_TWQ.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Authoritarian leaders and multiparty elections in Africa: how foreign donors help to keep Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi in power</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uhuru_Kenyatta" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>Whereas Ghana went through long periods of pro-Western military rule following Kwame Nkrumah’s downfall after installation of a one-party system several years past independence, Kenya was governed by a one-party system during the entirety of a similar historical period, 1960s – 1992. Therefore it doesn’t appear obvious why Ghana’s transition to democracy has been hailed as a success while Kenya’s isn’t as much.</p> <p>One major difference is between the general peacefulness of the situation in Ghana since its transition to a multiparty democracy in 1992, and an intense, violent electoral dispute in Kenya in 2007 between incumbent President Mwai Kibaki and his main opponent Raila Odinga – the latter’s father was once Jomo Kenyatta’s vice president before Daniel arap Moi. Although the Kenyan electoral dispute was subsequently resolved in 2008 through a power-sharing, coalition-government arrangement brokered by Ghana’s former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the widespread post-election violence in 2007 and early 2008 left more than 1,200 people dead. (See, e.g., <em>The Statesman</em> (of Ghana), November 24, 2006, by Mary Morgan, “<a href="http://www.thestatesmanonline.com/pages/news_detail.php?newsid=1496&section=1" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ghana’s ‘hybrid’ democracy</font></a>”; <em>World Politics Review</em>, January 13, 2009, by Michelle Sieff, “<a href="http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=3156" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Ghana’s Democracy Continues to Mature</font></a>”; United Nations, March 19, 2008, “<a href="http://blog.ushahidi.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/final-ohchr-kenya-report-19-march2008.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Report from OHCHR Fact-finding Mission to Kenya, 6-28 February 2008</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_Kenyan_crisis" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>Among the dead were Lucas Sang, a 1988 Olympic-finalist runner, stoned to death and his corpse burned, and Wesley Ngetich, international marathon athlete and two-time champion of the Grandmas Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, killed by a poison arrow. (See, e.g., <em>Daily News </em>(South Africa), January 23, 2008, “<a href="http://www.dailynews.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=3532&fArticleId=nw20080123072822504C426043" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kenyan athletics star killed by poison arrow</font></a>”; <em>Christian Today</em>, February 22, 2008, “<a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/kenya.athletes.deny.helping.rift.valley.killings/16996.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kenya athletes deny helping Rift Valley killings</font></a>”; and, <em>The New York Times</em>, May 13, 2008, by Jere Longman, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/sports/othersports/13runners.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">In Kenya, Violence Shakes Running Community</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Tribal ethnic conflicts in electoral politics appeared to be a major cause of the violence (see, e.g., <em>openDemocracy</em>, January 7, 2008, by Gerard Prunier, “<a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/democracy_power/kenya_roots_crisis" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kenya: roots of crisis</font></a>”).</p> <p>Though not as chaotic as the violence in its northeastern neighbour, Somalia, the spur of violence in Kenya has shaken international confidence in the country.</p> <p>Earlier in 2006, Barack Obama had visited Kenya as a U.S. Senator representing Illinois, but the 2007 election violence would become a thorn in the face of his vision for Africa were Obama to include Kenya on his itinerary for his first presidential visit to black Africa (see, e.g., <em>Los Angeles Times</em>, August 22, 2006, by Edmund Sanders, “<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2006/aug/22/world/fg-obama22" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Senator’s Kenya Visit Inspires Obama-Mania</font></a>”; <em>The New York Times</em>, August 29, 2006, by Jeffrey Gettleman, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/world/africa/29obama.html?_r=1&fta=y" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Obama Urges Kenyans to Get Tough on Corruption</font></a>”; and, <em>Thaindian News</em>, July 4, 2009, “<a href="http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world-news/obama-not-to-visit-fathers-undemocratic-kenya_100213301.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Obama not to visit father’s undemocratic Kenya</font></a>”).</p> <p>An international challenge lies ahead for Kenya, and in it as an example for much of Africa that are still in the grip of worse violence and political extremism: the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has made a request to the court for an official inquiry into the 2007 post-election violence in Kenya, and for criminal charges against those found responsible. Previously, The Kenyan government promised in December 2008 – not long after Obama’s historic electoral victory in the United States – to fully address the issue themselves and bring those responsible to justice, but nothing has been done after a year’s time, and a proposed special Kenyan tribunal mechanism to prosecute the crimes was rejected by the Kenyan Parliament in February 2009. (See, e.g., <em>BBC News</em>, February 12, 2009, “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7886395.stm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kenyan MPs reject violence court</font></a>”; <em>Human Rights Watch</em>, November 26, 2009, “<a href="http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/11/26/icc-prosecutor-seeks-ok-kenya-inquiry"><font color="#0000ff">ICC: Prosecutor Seeks OK on Kenya Inquiry</font></a>”; and, <em>GlobalPost</em>, December 15, 2009, by Tristan McConnell, “<a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/kenya/091123/icc-kenya-political-killings" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">ICC prosecutor says Kenya must press charges</font></a>”.)</p> <p>While I would hesitate to compare the developmental potential of Nairobi and Kenya to that of Shanghai in China, since 2002 the city and the country have emerged from decades of economic stagnation under the one-party system and are looking forward to ambitious economic modernization: after several years of privatization, Nairobi is now a major business hub in East Africa, and one in 18 Kenyans holds some company stock shares listed at the Nairobi Stock Exchange, which is the largest in East Africa and the fifth largest in Africa (behind stock exchanges in South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria, one of which was developed under British colonial administration while two of which are really in Arab countries in North Africa); in 2007-08 the Kenyan government also unveiled the Kenya Vision 2030 plan aiming to move Kenya forward to the position of a “rapidly industrializing middle-income nation” in the world by the year 2030. (See, e.g., Government of Kenya, October 2007, “<a href="http://safaricomfoundation.org/fileadmin/template/main/downloads/Kenya_VISION_2030-final_report-October_2007.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kenya Vision 2030: A Globally Competitive and Prosperous Kenya</font></a>” (courtesy of the Safaricom Foundation); <em>The Courier Magazine</em>, August/September 2008, by Debra Percival, “<a href="http://www.acp-eucourier.info/Kenya-Seeking-to-become.374.0.html?&L=0" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kenya: Seeking to become a regional hub</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenya" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff"><em>Wikipedia</em></font></a>.)</p> <p>Unexpectedly, the 2007 election violence and political crisis, as well as global recession, have brought Kenya’s economic growth rate down from 7.1% in 2007 to 1.7% in 2008, partly as a result of losses in the tourism industry. (See, e.g., <em>The Courier Magazine</em>, August/September 2008, referred to earlier; and, <em>allAfrica.com</em>, November 27, 2009, by Jevans Nyabiage, “<a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/200911270930.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kenya: Economy On Path to Recovery, Says Central Bank</font></a>”.)</p> <p>If Barack Obama wasn’t coming, no one should take it lightly.</p> <p>Closer to home in Cranbrook, British Columbia, on May 13, 2008 – exactly one month after a Grand Coalition Cabinet was unveiled in Kenya following the post-election violence and the subsequent power-sharing agreement – a rare, freak accident killed business student Isaiah Otieno originally from Kenya, who happened to be the son of Dalmas Otieno, banker, former cabinet minister in the Daniel arap Moi era before the 1992 election and now the newly installed Kenyan Minister of State for Public Service from the new Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s former opposition party, Orange Democratic Movement. (See, e.g., <em>allAfrica.com</em>, April 14, 2008, by Patrick Wachira, “<a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/200804140009.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Kenya: Kibaki Names New Cabinet</font></a>”; <em>Mars Group Kenya</em>, April 14, 2008, “<a href="http://www.marsgroupkenya.org/multimedia/?StoryID=222056&p=Kisumu+Rural&page=5" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">President Offers Mix Of Youthful Faces And Experienced Hands In New Line-Up</font></a>”; and, <em>MajimboKenya</em>, May 14, 2008, “<a href="http://majimbokenya.com/home/2008/05/14/the-son-of-kenyan-minister-hon-dalmas-otieno-killed-in-helicopter-crash-in-canada/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The son of Kenyan Minister, Hon Dalmas Otieno, killed in Helicopter crash in Canada</font></a>”.)</p> <p>It turned out that Isaiah Otieno was walking on a street near his home while listening to iPod music, and a helicopter above inspecting hydro-power lines suddenly crashed into him, killing him and the three crew members. The cause of the helicopter engine-power loss that led to the crash remains uncertain. (See, e.g., <em>CTV British Columbia</em>, December 2, 2009, “<a href="http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20091203/bc_tsb_helicopter_091203/20091203/?hub=BritishColumbiaHome" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">TSB hasn’t pinpointed cause of fatal chopper crash</font></a>”.)</p> <p>Isaiah Otieno’s father, mother, sister Lillian Otieno and Kenyan government officials attended the memorial service in Canada, and brought their beloved home for a proper burial (see, <em>CTV British Columbia</em>, May 23, 2008, “<a href="http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20080523/chopper_victim_080523?hub=BritishColumbiaHome" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Hundreds of mourners remember chopper victim</font></a>”).</p> <p>Then it was reported that during the burial ceremony in Kenya, Member of Parliament Edwin Yinda was ejected from his seat, for the reason that he did not wear formal attire for the solemn occasion (see, <em>African Press International</em>, June 4, 2008, by Jeff Otieno, “<a href="http://africanpress.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/mp-humiliated-during-burial-ceremony/"><font color="#0000ff">MP humiliated during burial ceremony</font></a>”).</p> <p>Family values apparently are important in Africa.</p> <div style="padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: none; padding-top: 0px" id="scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:8b8f9cdb-ad59-4319-a1c4-f2b0dc6fe533" class="wlWriterSmartContent">del.icio.us Tags: <a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Somalia" rel="tag">Somalia</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Benadir+University" rel="tag">Benadir University</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Amanda+Lindhout" rel="tag">Amanda Lindhout</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Mohamed+Aidid" rel="tag">Mohamed Aidid</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/April+Glaspie" rel="tag">April Glaspie</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Canadian+Airborne+Regiment" rel="tag">Canadian Airborne Regiment</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Clayton+Matchee" rel="tag">Clayton Matchee</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Kim+Campbell" rel="tag">Kim Campbell</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Robert+Fowler" rel="tag">Robert Fowler</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Maersk+Alabama" rel="tag">Maersk Alabama</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/9%2f11" rel="tag">9/11</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Barbara+Olson" rel="tag">Barbara Olson</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Monica+Lewinsky" rel="tag">Monica Lewinsky</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Ted+Olson" rel="tag">Ted Olson</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Berkeley" rel="tag">Berkeley</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Jaycee+Lee+Dugard" rel="tag">Jaycee Lee Dugard</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Bill+Clinton" rel="tag">Bill Clinton</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Barack+Obama" rel="tag">Barack Obama</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Ghana" rel="tag">Ghana</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Kwame+Nkrumah" rel="tag">Kwame Nkrumah</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Kofi+Annan" rel="tag">Kofi Annan</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/New+Millennium" rel="tag">New Millennium</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/African+democracy" rel="tag">African democracy</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Kenya" rel="tag">Kenya</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Jomo+Kenyatta" rel="tag">Jomo Kenyatta</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Hussein+Onyango" rel="tag">Hussein Onyango</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Daniel+arap+Moi" rel="tag">Daniel arap Moi</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/election+violence" rel="tag">election violence</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Raila+Odinga" rel="tag">Raila Odinga</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Isaiah+Otieno" rel="tag">Isaiah Otieno</a></div> Feng Gaohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03574553604123138188noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7401074578662786609.post-51730451761926885512009-11-22T16:29:00.001-05:002010-03-17T18:46:25.878-04:00“Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou (Part 1)<p>“<em>Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East</em>”, is the title of a new book that has graced the front pages of several major Chinese newspapers including <em>China Daily</em> and <em>South China Morning Post</em>, since the beginning of November 2009. The book tells, in an autobiographical and novelized style, the life journey of a young man from Africa to America and then making it home in China. Born in Nairobi, Kenya and educated at elite universities in the United States, Mark moved to China after losing his marketing job in the American high-tech field, and has carved himself a nice niche in Shenzhen, China’s boisterous and rapidly-growing metropolis across the border from the capitalist, former British colony of Hong Kong, as an English teacher, pianist, internet-businessman, and charity sponsor. </p> <p>Not that African businessmen in China are  rare these days, or that they always receive favourable attention. When I was working in 2001 in California’s Silicon Valley as a software design engineer, a young African-American sale representative in our small company in San Jose had a Chinese girlfriend who was a secretary in Shanghai, and he was always looking forward to visiting her in China but was not always sure what the girl really wanted. </p> <p>I don’t know what has happened to this former colleague’s cross-continent romance after  October 11, 2001, when I was notified of my immediate layoff effective mid-month, given a reason of economic downturn due to an unexpected event one month earlier. I insisted on a grace period for adjustment and the vice president of engineering who gave me the layoff notice was kind enough to allow me 3 months of nominal status with the company (during which I was not really welcomed at the company and showed up only once).</p> <p>I suspect the VP granted the grace period as a kind gesture given that I had worked directly under him after joining the start-up company – here I refer to as “MS” – around the start of the New  Millennium, and had been hired personally by the company’s founding president, both of whom held graduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D. and M.S., respectively). But for the last year-and-a-half  I had been reporting to our algorithm-development manager Bill,  the VP’s former colleague recruited from another company who held an engineering Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. </p> <p>The story of the young man from Nairobi to Shenzhen was remarkably similar to mine, even if it isn’t by now. Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 in the United States, Mark was also laid off – in Atlanta by the Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel Networks – despite his impeccable education pedigrees, which included an MBA from Emory University in Atlanta (that surely beat my mathematics Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, just north of  Silicon Valley), an Ivy-league degree in physics and mathematics from Brown and another Master’s from Stanford. </p> <p>I had grown up in Guangzhou, China, the provincial capital only 80 miles north of the city Shenzhen in the title of Mark’s book, “<em>Nairobi to Shenzhen</em>”. Back in August 1988 after my Berkeley education I had moved to work in Vancouver, Canada, and become a Canadian; so in 2002 I moved back to Canada , this time settling in Toronto. </p> <p>A change of location was logical for me returning after leaving Canada in 1997 for work in the United States – if not enough which I did not realize at the time – for the reason that in 1991-94 I had been involved in political activity attempting to air certain views critical of certain important figures, some then in the academia in British Columbia and some in leading role in Canada, and for several years afterwards had trouble finding employment (see <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/airbus-affair-canadian-politics-and-social-undercurrents/" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">my other blog articles, February 20, 2009 – present</font></span></a>, for some of the circumstances of the politics I had become involved in in the early 1990s). </p> <p>I began working again in Vancouver in 1996 only when I was introduced to a businesswoman who had moved from Taiwan, who also told me her late father had been the political secretary of General Sun Liren (Sun Li-jen) in Taiwan when (in August 1955) the Virginia Military Institute graduate and World War II hero was put under house arrest by strongman President Jiang Jieshi (Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek), which then lasted for almost the rest of Sun’s life until March 20, 1988, shortly after the death of Jiang’s son/President of Taiwan (for the history about Sun Li-jen, see, e.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Li-jen" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><em><font color="#0000ff">Wikipedia</font></em></span></a>). </p> <p>That tale of family connection to the dark and tragic politics of a fading era from Liza Chiang (no relation to Chiang Kai-shek, her family name in Chinese is actually the same as at the time President Jiang Zemin of China when I met and work for her), was not a good omen for me. I had wanted to move to Toronto as early as in 1994-95 but for some family reason, and in 1997 when my former Berkeley roommate David phoned from the University of Hawaii about a teaching job I packed and left Vancouver.</p> <p>For the young man originally from Nairobi, after his post-9/11 Nortel Networks-layoff experience in Atlanta he moved on to another new world in the same year 2002: spurred by whims many undoubtedly wouldn’t understand about someone in his circumstances, i.e., already sitting on an impressive education and work resume in America, Mark moved to China to find opportunities. There, settling in Shenzhen, the first Chinese city to reopen to Western capitalism in recent history, Mark fell in love with a Chinese girl and made a remarkable adjustment in a country previously unfamiliar  to him to say the least. </p> <p>Not that his education, experience and ambition would not have counted, but to strike it rich in the Chinese marketplace of phenomenal economic growth and chaotic entrepreneurial activities,  Mark likely lacked the type of connections expected of someone from America (wait, from Africa?). Sure, he had a half-brother who had been born in America, was a black-community organizer and regional politician in Illinois who also taught at the University of Chicago, but that was probably it – when Chinese entrepreneurs thought of opportunities abroad and it had to be Africa, they more likely thought of selling jeans there (several years back a Chinese friend told me her ex-husband did just that in Africa and not much else, though making good money). </p> <p>I am not sure what Mark’s experience was in 2001-02 looking for another marketing job in a telecommunications company in the United States after his post-9/11 layoff.  For me, before 9/11 while still employed I had some contacts with job recruiters and one of them, Beth Evancheck, called me from Indiana on behalf of Scientific Placement in Austin, Texas, and several times recommended the company MathWorks in Boston. I had some familiarity with that company, whose chairman Cleve Moler taught part-time at Stanford in one of my fields of graduate study, but felt that with my background it would be somewhat ‘inbreeding’; but of course it wasn’t for Canadian telecommunications engineer Maher Arar.</p> <p>The Maher Arar story that would not go away because of U.S. government’s refusal to settle with him for his ‘rendition’ experience in Syria, has become more controversial as time goes by (see, e.g., <em>Flaggman’s Canada (</em>Weblog), March 18, 2007, by Neil Flagg, “<a href="http://flaggman.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/maher-arar-why-the-us-wont-and-shouldnt-let-go/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Maher Arar: Why the US won’t (and shouldn’t) let go</font></a>”; <em>Georgia Straight</em>, November 6, 2008, by Charlie Smith, “<a href="http://www.straight.com/article-168992/was-maher-arar-linked-fbi" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Was Maher Arar linked to the FBI?</font></a>”; and, <em>MetroWest Daily News</em>, November 2, 2009, by The Associated Press, “<a href="http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x1312009670/Appeals-court-Former-Framingham-man-detained-by-mistake-cannot-sue-the-US" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Appeals court: Former Framingham man, detained by mistake, cannot sue the US</font></a>”).</p> <p>After my 10/11 layoff, a recruiter by the name of Ken Button phoned me, who was recruiting for Microsoft Corporation. Pitching the benefits of working for that company in Seattle, he said someday I could have a private office there (in the small San Jose company I had been allowed the privilege of a private office even though I was not a manager); but I was more interested in engineering-related computational issues, and had had a minor episode with Microsoft in Vancouver when I was in the early 1990s’ political activity which included a dispute with my boss at the University of British Columbia before the end of my computer-science faculty job there. </p> <p>Looking back, if Bill Gates was to launch a teacher into space, who do you think it would be?</p> <p>To be fair, I have been using the Windows computer operating system and a Hotmail e-mail account for many years, and when I started <a href="http://feng701.spaces.live.com" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my first weblog I also chose Windows Live Spaces</font></a>.</p> <p>In January 2009 when I started my first (political) blog, I was surprised and pleased to discover a small number of press stories about Mark Ndesandjo, the young African-American man originally from Nairobi, Kenya, after his Nortel Networks experience enjoying successful business and charity activities and a quiet family life in Shenzhen. </p> <p>In <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">my first blog posts dated January 29</font></span></a> and titled, “<a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late</font></a>”, I discussed two newspaper articles dated January 16. One was a Canadian story (<em>The Toronto Star</em>, by Nicole Baute, “<a href="http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100020475&docId=l:911783631&start=5" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Mrs. K.I.'s kids are singing Obama's tune; His story electrifies multicultural Brampton school</font></a>”<span style="color: red"><em></em></span>) about my landlady’s daughter, local high-school principal Kyra Kristensen-Irvine, organizing “Obama committee” activity for her students celebrating the November 2008 election of the first African-American U.S. president in history – it has been a long way considering the favourite claim of “Mrs. K.I.”’s mother about her daughter in the past had been that of teaching Shania Twain (the pop singer) years ago in the small city of Timmins, Ontario. </p> <p>The other January 16, 2009 newspaper story I discussed in my first blog post was about Mark Ndesandjo, President Elect Barack Obama’s half-brother living in the Chinese city of Shenzhen just south of  Guangzhou where I had grown up (<em>Chicago Sun-Times</em>, by The Associated Press, “<a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/obama/1382533,w-obama-half-brother-china.article" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Obama's half brother performs in China</font></a>”<span style="color: red"><em></em></span><em>)</em> .</p> <p>At the time, Mark Ndesandjo was refusing media-interview requests but was wiling to be reported for his fundraising piano concert to benefit local orphans in Shenzhen. </p> <p>Another ten months has passed and in early November, Mark finally made his first official media interviews, for the publicity of his new book “<em>Nairobi to Shenzhen</em>”. The location of the press conference was – a surprise to me – Guangzhou, which used to be the center of China’s foreign trade when the country was first opened to the Western world in the 19th century and earlier, and in recent decades has been the site of one of the world’s largest annual international trade fair – the Canton Fair (also China’s only permanent foreign-trade fair during its Communist isolation period in the 1950s-70s) – but lately has been overtaken in capitalist experimentation by the special economic zones Shenzhen and Zhuhai located directly across from Hong Kong and the former Portuguese colony of Macau. (<a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">My January 29, 2009 blog posts</font></span></a> had references to part of this Chinese history.)</p> <p>In his first media appearance, Mark Ndesandjo garnered much attention from the Chinese and international media: on November 16, China’s leading official newspaper, <em>People’s Daily</em>, comfortably proclaimed, “<a href="http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6814772.html"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">The other Obama, already at home in China</font></span></a>”, referring to the arrival of the U.S. president for his first official China visit during which he was also meeting Mark and his wife in Beijing, while the day after <em>TIME Magazine</em> exclaimed from Guangzhou, “<a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1939695,00.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">Obama’s Half Brother Makes a Name for Himself in China</font></span></a>” (November 17, 2009, by Ling Woo Liu). </p> <p>For some other American and international media venues, the intense interest has been on something else: the story of abuse suffered or witnessed by Mark Ndesandjo growing up under the brothers’ alcoholic and physically abusive father, Barack Obama, Sr. It is a main topic in Ndesandjo’s book, “<em>Nairobi to Shenzhen</em>”. </p> <p>For instance, in a <em>The Huffington Post</em> article on November 4, “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/04/mark-ndesandjo-obamas-hal_0_n_344824.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">Mark Ndesandjo, Obama’s Half Brother, Recalls Their Abusive Father</font></span></a>”, William Foreman of The Associated Press reported: </p> <blockquote> <p>“In his first interview, Mark Ndesandjo told The Associated Press that he wrote “Nairobi to Shenzhen” in part to raise awareness of domestic violence. <br />“My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don’t do that,” said Ndesandjo, whose mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.’s third wife. “It’s something which I think affected me for a long time, and it’s something that I’ve just recently come to terms with.” <br /></p> </blockquote> <p>Barack Obama, Sr. had left Kenya at age 23 to study at the University of Hawaii (the same age also for me when I went to study in the U.S., but I later taught at the University of Hawaii, from the fall of 1997 to the end of summer 1999 after which I moved to Silicon Valley in California), where he met and married President Obama’s mother and produced a future U.S. president – the only one from Hawaii; he then went to study at Harvard, met Mark Ndesandjo’s mother and returned to Kenya with her, where Mark was born. (See, e.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama,_Sr." target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><em><font color="#0000ff">Wikipedia</font></em></span></a>) </p> <p>The childhood abuse was apparently a reason Mark Ndesandjo felt little attachment to either Kenya or Africa: the <em>Time Magazine</em> article quoted Barack Obama, Jr.’s 1995 memoir, “<em>Dreams from My Father</em>”, describing the brothers’ first meeting during which Mark professed it to Barack. </p> <p>In that book, Obama also recorded that when they first met in Nairobi his half-brother was a physics student at Stanford but Obama had thought it was Berkeley, and then he heard from Mark the latter’s lack of attachment to Africa (see, Barack Obama, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=NKTi9wT_NkcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance</font></em></a><span style="color: red"></span>, <em>Crown Publishers</em>, 1995 & 2004) </p> <p>The theme about the difficult life experiences of some of the Obama family clan in Kenya – including that of his father’s – stands in stark contrast to the idyllic images one sees of President Barack Obama’s immediate family and their lives, such as of his graceful and gracious wife Michelle and their lovely daughters Malia and Sasha, and of the relaxed vacations at Kailua Beach and Martha’s Vineyard – hard-earned after Obama’s string of important and/or historic political victories  (the only black U.S. Senator at the time when he went to Washington in 2004, the first black presidential candidate of a major political party in June 2008 and then the president-elect in November) yet not out of place compared to the lifestyles of ones before him (see, e.g., <em>Star-Bulletin</em>, August 9, 2008, by Craig Gima, “<a href="http://archives.starbulletin.com/2008/08/09/news/story06.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">Celebs find serenity on cool Kailua Beach</font></span></a>”; <em>MSNBC</em>, August 23, 2009, “<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32528831" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">Obama family vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard</font></span></a>”; and, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><em><font color="#0000ff">Wikipedia</font></em></span></a>). </p> <p>In 1963 when his father left him and his mother Stanley Ann Dunham, a white student at the University of Hawaii born in Kansas and grown up in various parts of the continental United States, Barack Obama was only two-years-old; neither side of his parents’ families had approved of the interracial marriage, which at the time was legally permitted in Hawaii but not in 22 other states in the United States. Barack’s mother later remarried an Indonesian student and took Barack to that country after her husband was summoned back to his home country following the rise to power of military strongman Suharto, sending Barack back to Hawaii to live with the grandparents when she wanted a good education for her son at the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu, which Barack liked better than schooling in Indonesia. (See. e.g., <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><em><font color="#0000ff">Wikipedia</font></em></span></a>; <em>The Washington Post</em>, December 14, 2007, by Kevin Merida, “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/13/AR2007121301784.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">The Ghost of a Father</font></span></a>”; <em>The New York Times, </em>March 14, 2008, by Janny Scott, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/politics/14obama.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">The Long Run: A Free-Spirited Wanderer Who Set Obama’s Path</font></span></a>”; and, <em>History News Network</em>, February 23, 2009, by Peggy Pascoe, “<a href="http://hnn.us/articles/60057.html#" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">The Election of Barack Obama and the Politics of Interracial and Same-Sex Marriage</font></span></a>”.) </p> <p>It could be Kenyan presidential politics as Barack Obama described in his 1995 book, or the economy of life in Africa, or still something more, that his ambitious, U.S.-educated economist father later suffered career setback in Kenya and became an alcoholic and physical abuser; but growing up in apparently better family environments in Indonesia and Hawaii, and then going to college and university in the U.S. mainland, Barack the son also had a period of life during which he experimented with things like drug use (see, e.g., <em>The New York Times</em>, March 14, 2008, referred to earlier, and, October 24, 2006, by Katharine Q. Seelye, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/americas/24iht-dems.3272493.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">Barack Obama, asked about drug history, admits he inhaled</font></span></a>”.) </p> <p>But in America Barack Obama was able to transcend life’s traps. He felt strongly about racial discrimination from which he suffered as a school boy, became active in anti-discrimination activities as a university student and then a community organizer. After becoming the first black president of the <em>Harvard Law Review</em> in 1990 (see, <em>The Boston Globe</em>, January 28, 2007, By Michael Levenson and Jonathan Saltzman, “<a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/01/28/at_harvard_law_a_unifying_voice/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">At Harvard Law, a unifying voice: Classmates recall Obama as even-handed leader</font></a>”), and before entering Illinois state politics in 1997, Obama embarked upon the task of connecting his family’s past to some of the larger political issues, through his 1995 memoir, “<em>Dreams</em> <em>from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance</em>”. </p> <p>In that book, Obama talked about his childhood idolization of his father (whom he met only one more time in his life), of his father’s intellectual brilliance and ambitions as told him by his family, about his visit to Kenya to discover his family roots there and about his eventual cry, at the graves of his father and grandfather buried next to each other, over the “mocking fate” from which his Kenyan grandfather could not escape, and from which his father tried but failed in the end.</p> <p>That notion of their father’s intellectual ambitiousness and goal orientation is now being contradicted by Mark Ndesandjo’s stories in his new book, “<em>Nairobi to Shenzhen</em>”, who emphasizes his personal experience of parental abuse and domestic violence (see, e.g., <em>Bloomberg.com</em>, November 11, 2009, by Le-Min Lim, “<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601094&sid=amoBRv5kE6fo#" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">Obama’s Half-Brother Recalls Father’s Drunken Beatings in Book</font></span></a>”; and, <em>The Telegraph</em>, November 14, 2009, by David Eimer in Guangzhou, “<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/6569816/Our-alcoholic-father-beat-me-says-Barack-Obamas-half-brother-Mark.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">Our alcoholic father beat me, says Barack Obama’s half brother, Mark</font></span></a>”). </p> <p>President Obama no doubt realizes the importance of this issue, who had said in his 2004 speech “<a href="http://www.america.gov/st/usg-english/2009/January/20090114124845jmnamdeirf0.5620996.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The Audacity of Hope - 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address</font></a>”, that “my story is part of the larger American story”. When one looks at the larger African-American story from Mark Ndesandjo’s angle, one sees that over half of African-American boys live in fatherless families, with 40% of these households impoverished (see, <em>The Washington Post</em>, December 14, 2007, referred to earlier). </p> <p>Before Ndesandjo’s book, Obama’s detractors have been trying to hammer home this issue, with stories gathered from his family members and friends that contradicted some of the political claims in “<em>Dreams from My Father</em>”: his parents’ marriage had not been destroyed by racism from their respective families but by his father’s “bigamous double life”, and his father’s career downfall in the Kenyan government civil service should not be blamed on corrupt Kenyan politicians who had “taken the place of the white colonials” but on his father’s “weak character”, they said (see, <em>Daily Mail</em>, January 27, 2007, by Sharon Churcher, “<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-431908/A-drunk-bigot--US-Presidental-hopeful-HASNT-said-father-.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">A drunk and a bigot - what the US Presidental hopeful HASN'T said about his father...</font></span></a>”). </p> <p>Now Mark Ndesandjo is adding fuel to the fire with his own take from his experience living in China that has taught him the importance of family life and family goals – things he hopes President Obama will come to an understanding of (<em>The Telegraph</em>, November 14, 2009, referred to earlier): </p> <blockquote> <p>More than anything, living in China seems to have helped him come to terms with his traumatic childhood. He will be passing on what he has learned to President Obama when they meet. “I’d encourage my brother to understand that China is really about family,” said Mr Ndesandjo. “Families here have a tremendous bond. That’s why people in China work so hard and have the goals they do. You have to understand that if you want to understand China.” </p> </blockquote> <p>Having been away from China for so many years now, and visited only a few times to see my family during all this time, I do not know if I should agree with Mark that “China is really about family”. </p> <p>Here are some differences in perspectives.</p> <p>Mark went to graduate school at Stanford whereas I went to Berkeley across the San Francisco Bay – although applying from Guangzhou my first choice had been Stanford. Berkeley’s math program was the largest in North America and a leading international one, but the popularity of Stanford’s computer science program is undisputed: for a number of years until recently the building that has housed it was the only university building in the world named after Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (another at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh has just been completed, while the computing laboratory at Cambridge in England has had its building named after his father William Gates; see, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gates_Building" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><em><font color="#0000ff">Wikipedia</font></em></span></a>). </p> <p>Berkeley was known for its leftwing activities that were quite opposite of family orientation. That however might get something done if family orientation couldn’t. Shortly after I received my Ph.D. and left for Vancouver, it worked for 23-year-old actress Justine Bateman, star of the popular TV sitcom series, “Family Ties”: beginning in March 1989, a man repeatedly approached Bateman at the show’s set in Los Angeles using false premises, such as bringing her new music cassette by John Lennon’s son Julian, but each time was escorted off by security guards; finally in September that year at the premiere of “Lulu” at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre – a play starring Justine Bateman in a lead role – the same man came asking for her, and eventually brandished a gun and threatened suicide unless Bateman would see him, claiming he had met and dated her seven years earlier (and had even been raped by her); after several hours of standoff with Berkeley police the man, John Thomas Smetek of Texas, surrendered and was taken to a psychiatric assessment and dealt with by law. (See, e.g., <em>Spokane Chronicle</em>, September 8, 1989, “<a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1345&dat=19890907&id=O8gSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=9PkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4365,1093231" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Police arrest an obsessed Justine fan outside theater</font></a>”; <em>People Magazine</em>, September 25, 1989, By Bill Hewitt and Dianna Waggoner, “Justine Bateman Becomes the Latest Celebrity to Be Menaced by An Obsessive Fan”; and, Linden Gross,  <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=yThDTU0ushMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Surviving a Stalker: Everything You Need to Know to Keep Yourself Safe</font></em></a>, Marlowe & Company, 1994, 1998 & 2000).</p> <p>The Berkeley incident involving actress Justine Bateman took place only two weeks after the stalking-murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer in LA (by a man named Robert Bardo); it propelled Bateman to the occasion of testifying in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about stalking, and her efforts also contributed to the enactment of an anti-stalker law in California in 1991 – the first in the United States (see, e.g, Linden Gross, referred to earlier).</p> <p>The Justine Bateman incident is sometimes compared to a 1981 incident when former child actress and Yale University student Jodie Foster was receiving persistent love letters and phone calls from a young man, John Hinckley, Jr., who supposedly wanted to do something big to demonstrate his love for her (see, Linden Gross, referred to earlier; and, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, “<a href="http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/jfostercommun.HTM" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">THE HINCKLEY TRIAL: HINCKLEY'S COMMUNICATIONS WITH JODIE FOSTER</font></a>”).</p> <p>Later after Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity for attempting to murder President Ronald Reagan and wounding several people, and was psychiatrically committed, he reportedly also developed an infatuation for Jeannette Wick, the Officer in Charge at St. Elizabeths Hospital where he was incarcerated, who had the reputation of being a tyrannical manager but also a petite blonde with resemblance to Jodie Foster. (See, e.g., <em>Washington City Paper</em>, May 1-7, 1998, by Laura Lang, “<a href="http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=14927" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Doctor’s Orders: At St. Elizabeths Hospital, a tough manager is driving employees mad</font></a>”;  Robert I. Simon, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=FdtZf_Ns9QwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Bad Men do what Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illustrate the Darker Side of Human Behaviour</font></em></a>, American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., 2008; and, J. Reid Meloy, Lorraine Sheridan and Jens Hoffmann (editors), <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=2ODOTxgmJgEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Stalking, threatening, and attacking public figures: a psychological and behavioral analysis</font></em></a>, Oxford University Press, 2008)</p> <p>But had Jodie Foster alerted the authorities sooner President Reagan might not have taken a gun shot that nearly killed him, the idealist would imagine. </p> <p>Justine Bateman did just that. in September 1989 in Berkeley she immediately phoned LA security expert Gavin de Becker, a personal-security agent whose clients included Bateman’s “Family Ties” brother Michael J. Fox; back in 1988 de Becker had warned Bateman about this man, and this time he promptly verified Smetek’s profile and advised Berkeley Repertory Theatre on security measures. Gavin de Becker had also developed a computer-assisted threat assessment system, MOSAIC, that was used by California law enforcement, U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Capitol Police, U.S. Marshals Service, and the CIA. (See, Linden Gross, referred to earlier.)</p> <p>This is not to say that anyone with a concern, whether substantiated or not, should act on it. On the contrary, it’s about doing the right thing and not the wrong thing.</p> <p>In <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/new-millennium-and-politics/" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">my first blog posts dated January 29</font></span></a>, I told of staying New Year’s Eve 2000 – the Y2K night – in a Hong Kong hotel, on my way to Guangzhou to see my parents; not knowing the future that someone like Mark Ndesandjo would move to live in Shenzhen just across the border, my mind was only at pondering about the look of the hotel owner’s daughter who reminded of a student girl I had come across often on Berkeley campus back in the old days: </p> <blockquote>“When the New Millennium began, I and others didn’t know that in a couple of years, in 2002, a young American man by the name of Mark Ndesandjo, originally from Kenya, would move to Shenzhen and make his life there as a businessman and piano performer, and that – something many people today still don’t know – this young man is half brother of 2008 U.S. President Elect Barack Obama.<sup>  </sup>Honestly, at the night of the New Year’s Eve on December 31, 1999, I found it more interesting that the hotel owner’s daughter emceeing the countdown celebration in the hotel lobby looked like a certain student girl I had come across frequently on UC Berkeley campus during the 1980s.” <br /></blockquote> <p>Well, this Berkeley student girl I had a crush on looked just like Justine Bateman’s twin. </p> <p>Hmm, interesting. What would have happened had I tried to approach her more seriously? I guess as long as one did the right thing … but wait … others saw him as an obsessed fan at best yet John Thomas Smetek imagined himself Romeo courting Juliet!</p> <p>And then of course I went to work in Vancouver, though choosing UBC instead of the adjacent Simon Fraser University in Burnaby – a top Canadian university in education nowadays but in those days probably not as famous as the city being where Justine Bateman’s “Family Ties” brother Michael J. Fox had grown up and attended school – high school, mind you (see, e.g., <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>, May 23, 2008, <em>“</em><a href="http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=411f8372-c535-49fc-bf38-2145f5e5cb7c" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Michael J. Fox ‘deeply moved’ by honorary degree from UBC</font></a>”; and, <em>The Province</em>, November 9, 2009, “<a href="http://www.theprovince.com/health/Michael+named+Canada+most+influential+expatriate/2201012/story.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Michael J. Fox named Canada's most influential expatriate</font></a>”). Fox was born in Edmonton, Alberta, which happened to be also the original hometown of my then manager at UBC, “Maria”, who also relocated from California (IBM Almaden) in 1988.</p> <p>I didn’t even know Fox had dropped out of high school.</p> <p>There is more to add to the Justine Bateman lookalike story. During the years at Berkeley I had gone to only one show at the Repertory Theatre, as I wasn’t really into theatre plays (but I hung out at the Zellerbach Hall numerous times for classical music performances); and in that only time to Berkeley Repertory Theatre I went accompanying a movie actress – well not exactly accompanying but acting as a guide to lead her entourage there.</p> <p>My roommate, “KZL”, was a Chinese student association organizer and on that occasion was contacted to have someone give direction to Joan Chen, who and her all-boys entourage had come up from California State University at Northridge where she was a student. I eagerly volunteered. </p> <p>In hindsight, if anything I had unwittingly volunteered for it must have been the role of a eunuch – with Joan Chen’s fame to come as the Empress in the 1987 Oscar-winning movie “The Last Emperor” (see, e.g., All-China Women's Federation, Profiles – Celebrities, November 4, 2007, “<a href="http://www.womenofchina.cn/Profiles/Celebrities/7293.jsp" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Joan Chen: An Actress with Exploring Spirit</font></a>”).</p> <p>The Joan Chen episode was probably before “Shawna” (or “Shauna”) began to show up at Berkeley campus – I mean the Justine Bateman lookalike (sorry that I remembered how someone once called her, but like I say, to me it’s about doing the right thing).</p> <p>Berkeley wasn’t a family town and the China from where I came in the 1980s wasn’t family oriented, either. My then roommate’s previous roommate “ZWM”, i.e., the guy before me sharing the apartment, from China had stayed for only one summer and gone to Stanford’s MBA program – not exactly family orientation but making money was closer to it in the minds of many, especially if they spoke another language. </p> <p>After I moved out I became roommates with David, who later went to Hawaii a few months before I went to Vancouver.</p> <p>British Columbia, on the other hand, was well-deserving of having been the home of the most famous “Family Ties” star, Michael J. Fox, who through his many movie/TV roles cultivated a fabulous stereotype of a young Republican who was incredibly smart and creative with making money but often crossed path with unsavory and ruthless characters – usually prevailing in the end thanks to his down-home sense of doing the right thing.</p> <p>For several decades, B.C. had been under the influence of pro-business and family-coalition type of politicians: the rightwing Social Credit party’s Bennett father-and-son dynasty from Kelowna in the interior Okanagan region, premiers W.A.C. Bennett and Bill Bennett, had ruled the province for most of the 1950s-1980s – 1952-1986 except 1972-75 when New Democrat David Barrett was premier in between father and son –  coinciding with Michael J. Fox’s (backward) time-travel span 1955-1985 in the original “Back to the Future” movie (see, e.g., <em>BBC Movies</em>, October 5, 2000, “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2000/10/05/back_to_the_future_1985_review.shtml" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Back to the Future (1985)</font></a>”; and, <em>The</em> <em>Globe and Mail</em>, November 24, 2009, by Ian Bailey, “<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-bc-ndp/article1376348/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">The rise and fall of the B.C. NDP</font></a>”).</p> <p>But locally in Vancouver when I lived there, Michael J. Fox wasn’t even the big star: the local icon was Jason Priestley of the hit TV series about superrich kids, “Beverly Hills, 90210” (see, e.g., <em>People Magazine</em>, September 9, 1991, by Tom Gliatto, “<a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20115871,00.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">High School Confidential: Beverly Hills, 90210 Gets Its Heat from a Dangerously Cute Cast of TV’s Hottest New Stars</font></a>”; and, <em>Western Living Magazine</em>, 2008, by Neal McLennan, “<a href="http://www.westernlivingmagazine.com/FD/wine_priestley.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Black Hills 90210: Actor Jason Priestley is behind the scenes of the Okanagan’s top cult wine</font></a>”).</p> <p>It so happened that Jason Priestley had an actress sister, Justine Priestley, just like Justine Bateman having an actor brother, Jason Bateman, whose early roles included that of an orphan in the TV series “Little House on the Prairie” (see, e.g., <em>People Magazine</em>, May 16, 1988, by Susan Toepfer and Michael Alexander, “<a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20098960,00.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Riding Out a Storm of Rumors, Justine and Jason Bateman Battle Their Image as Showbiz Brats</font></a>”; <em>The Internet Movie Database</em>, “<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0697364/bio" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Biography for Justine Priestley</font></a>”; and, <em>Femail Magazine</em>, by Paul Fischer, “<a href="http://www.femail.com.au/jason-bateman-the-kingdom-interview.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Jason Bateman The Kingdom Interview: Jason Bateman Adds Laughs To A Kingdom</font></a>”).</p> <p>Doing the right thing might not be enough in Vancouver after all.</p> <p>It was not surprising that a very smart Michael J. Fox went to Hollywood – dropping out of high school – and did so with an American dream that was convertible between art and life: he even married his “Family Ties” girlfriend, Tracy Pollan, in real life in July 1988. What was tragically surprising has been his incurable Parkinson’s disease, which started around 1991 and has all but ruined his acting career, turning him instead into a high-profile spokesman for awareness of the disease – uncontrollably restless, fidgety and shaky in his appearance and broken in his speech though as smart, optimistic and unrelenting as ever. (See, e.g., <em>People Magazine</em>, December 4, 1989, by Michael Alexander, “<a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20116124,00.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Getting Back to His Future: Hard at Work on the Final Episode of the Time-Travel Trilogy, Michael J. Fox Walks the Line Between Career and Family</font></a>”; and, <em>The New York Times</em>, November 11, 2008, by Joe Nocera, “<a href="http://michaeljfox.org/news_pdfs/18107-NYT-MJFox1.pdf" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Taking Science Personally</font></a>”.) </p> <p>What a pity that such human tragedy struck Fox, despite him being so proud of doing “the next right thing” and not the “next thing right” (see, e.g., <em>Zimbio Magazine</em>, May 8, 2009, by Caryn Gottlieb FitzGerald, “<a href="http://www.zimbio.com/Michael+J.+Fox/articles/12/Optimism" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Optimism</font></a>”; or, <em>Embracing My Journey – Living with passion!</em> (weblog), May 8, 2009, by Caryn FitzGerald, “<a href="http://embracingmyjourney.com/?p=44" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Optimism</font></a>”).</p> <p>In British Columbia, the rightwing Social Credit party also disappeared from the political scene, around 1991 – the year Fox first had symptoms of Parkinson’s – not long after the reigning Bennett dynasty had come down. </p> <p>In <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/airbus-affair-canadian-politics-and-social-undercurrents/" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">my ongoing other blog posts, February 20, 2009 – present</font></a>, I mention links between my early-1990s’ political activity and some prior efforts by others to challenge Bill Bennett’s successor, Socred premier Bill Vander Zalm, before he resigned due to the Fantasy Gardens scandal. </p> <p>That political party then collapsed when Vander Zalm’s  successor Rita Johnston, the first-ever female provincial premier in Canadian history, lost the 1991 election in a landslide. Two years later in 1993 on the national scene, Vancouver Member of Parliament Kim Campbell succeeded Brian Mulroney as the Progressive Conservative party leader and became the first-ever female Prime Minister of Canada, and then suffered the worst electoral defeat in Canadian federal political history, losing even her own Parliament seat; in that same election Audrey McLaughlin, the first-ever female leader of a major Canadian national political party when in 1989 she became leader of the national New Democratic party, also took her party to one of the worst defeats in its history. (See, e.g., R. K. Carty, <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=O8zRDD1C64AC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><em><font color="#0000ff">Politics, Policy and Government in British Columbia</font></em></a>, UBC Press, 1996; International Women’s Democracy Center, 2008, “<a href="http://www.iwdc.org/resources/timeline.htm" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Women in Politics: A Timeline</font></a>”; <em>Georgia Straight</em>, May 12, 2009, by Charlie Smith, “<a href="http://www.straight.com/article-220160/can-ndps-carole-james-break-jinx-female-canadian-leaders" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Can NDP's Carole James break the jinx on female Canadian leaders?</font></a>”; and, <a href="http://feng701.wordpress.com/category/news-and-politics/airbus-affair-canadian-politics-and-social-undercurrents/" target="_blank"><span style="color: red"><font color="#0000ff">my other blog articles, February 20, 2009 – present</font></span></a>)</p> <p>The pitfall of obsession with women could extend to that in politics with female leadership – a notion of historical progress that turned out not necessarily welcomed by the voters even in a country with a progressive reputation.</p> <p>Then in 2001 when the B.C. Liberal party came to power, Bill Bennett’s son Brad was invited to become the chair of that year’s B.C. Liberal party convention, and has for several years now been the chair of the Board of Governors of the University of British Columbia. The university’s president, Stephen J. Toope, on the other hand had been the founding president of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the family foundation started in 2002 in memory of the most revered leftwing (Liberal) prime minister in Canadian history. (See, e.g., <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>, May 9, 2001, by Petti Fong, “<a href="http://www.llbcnews.leg.bc.ca/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1260I3P8274O7.7052&profile=newsp&uri=link=3100006~!735~!3100001~!3100055&aspect=subtab23&menu=search&ri=3&source=~!llbcnewsp&term=Where+transformed+Socreds+rule.&index=PALLTI" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Where transformed Socreds rule: The sun-drenched Okanagan still remains Bennett country, where the legacy of two former premiers remains alive, but this time ex-Socreds have banded together under a Liberal banner</font></a>”; <em>The Province</em>, May 25, 2003, by Ashley Ford, “Well past peaches and beaches”; University of British Columbia, March 22, 2006, “<a href="http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/media/releases/2006/mr-06-035.html" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA NAMES NEW PRESIDENT</font></a>”; and, <em>The Vancouver Sun</em>, November 20, 2008, “<a href="http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/columnists/story.html?id=d2f32272-3f66-4c75-8bd1-0d03e01b1b9f" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Liberals all a-bustle in the happy hunting grounds of the Okanagan</font></a>”).</p> <p>Go figure. </p> <p>In the real world people of different stripes sometime cohabitated or cooperated, and when the society became entangled in a complex web of social and political connections – knitted with family relations – it might acquire a degree of sophistication and civility that would reduce savagery and overt violence. </p> <p>But if as a person originally from Africa, and living in today’s China after his American experiences through Brown, Stanford, Emory and layoff at Nortel Networks, Mark Ndesandjo has acquired any similar perspective on the merit of family to the society, it is at odds with President Barack Obama’s view of what is important for Africa – regardless of Obama’s own happy family time Americans see on television.</p> <p>In “<em>Dreams from My Father</em>”, Barack Obama quoted his Kenyan grandfather as saying the difference between the white world and the black world had been due to all the whites working together whereas the blacks working individually with own family or clan.</p> <p>The problems of violence, poverty and lack of family values in Africa – which as commented earlier are also prevalent among the black communities in America – cannot be overcome simply by orienting toward family values per se, or at least not according to Hussein Onyango, Obama’s Kenyan grandfather. Onyango was quoted as telling his son, i.e., Obama’s father, that the success of the white world had come from collective power and organization (Barack Obama, <em><a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=NKTi9wT_NkcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false" target="_blank"><font color="#0000ff">Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance</font></a></em>, <em>Crown Publishers</em>, 1995 & 2004):</p> <blockquote> <p>“And he would say that the African could never win against the white man because the black man only wanted to work with his own family or clan, while all white men worked to increase their power. “The white man alone is like an ant,” Onyango would say. “He can be easily crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together. His nation, his business—these things are more important to him than himself. He will follow his leader and not question orders. Black men are not like this. Even the most foolish black man thinks he knows better than the wise man. That is why the black man will always lose.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In this 1995 memoir after quoting his grandfather, Obama also records his own thoughts – thoughts he had while visiting the graves of his father and grandfather – on what Africans need to do to see progress: they need to end mutual silence and mutual betrayal, and instil a native faith in other people. Obama’s wisdom is no longer as hostile or confrontational towards the whites, or as much stereotyping about the whites being collectivist, as his grandfather’s was, but nevertheless is expressed through a sense of optimism based not on individualism but on genuinely cooperative efforts by the people – something close to his 2008 presidential campaign slogan, “Yes, we can”:</p> <blockquote> <p>“It was the silence that betrayed us. If it weren’t for that silence, your grandfather might have told your father that he could never escape himself, or re-create himself alone. Your father might have taught those same lessons to you. And you, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed at the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead– a faith in other people.”</p> </blockquote> <p>In these thoughts, Obama mentions not only industrial and technological power as indispensable to progress, but also – due to the power’s danger – certain social conditions for its absorbance, namely a new way to view the world and a collective native faith – born out of hardship – in other people. </p> <p>(<a href="http://feng701.blogspot.com/2009/12/nairobi-to-shenzhen-and-on-to-guangzhou.html"><font color="#0000ff">Continuing to Part 2, next blog post</font></a>)</p> <div style="padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: none; padding-top: 0px" id="scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:c8989c9f-5510-4854-a5e2-aa84253bb4a1" class="wlWriterEditableSmartContent">del.icio.us Tags: <a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Mark+Ndesandjo" rel="tag">Mark Ndesandjo</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/domestic+violence" rel="tag">domestic violence</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Nairobi" rel="tag">Nairobi</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Kenya" rel="tag">Kenya</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Shenzhen" rel="tag">Shenzhen</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Guangzhou" rel="tag">Guangzhou</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/China" rel="tag">China</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/9%2f11" rel="tag">9/11</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Maher+Arar" rel="tag">Maher Arar</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Sun+Li-jen" rel="tag">Sun Li-jen</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Barack+Obama" rel="tag">Barack Obama</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Hawaii" rel="tag">Hawaii</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Berkeley" rel="tag">Berkeley</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Family+Ties" rel="tag">Family Ties</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Justine+Bateman" rel="tag">Justine Bateman</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/John+Thomas+Smetek" rel="tag">John Thomas Smetek</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/John+Hinckley" rel="tag">John Hinckley</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Jodie+Foster" rel="tag">Jodie Foster</a>,<a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/Michael+J.+Fox" rel="tag">Michael J. 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