Party of One (61 page)

The National Day of Honour went ahead as planned. Family members of fallen soldiers received letters inviting them to the memorial event in Ottawa. But the letter included a stunning piece of information: it advised that attendance “would be at your own expense.” The letter was obtained by CTV News and the story broadcast April 2, 2014. The father of Captain Nichola Goddard, the first female Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan, said from his home in Charlottetown what a lot of Canadians were thinking after seeing the letter on television: “It was kind of like, ‘we’re having this big special event and you can come if you want, but you have to buy your own ticket.’”

When the story became public, the Harper government resorted to the usual tactic—blame the bureaucrats. Defence minister Nicholson said the letter telling family members they had to pay their own way to the tribute “had absolutely nothing to do with [his] office.” When the blowback increased, his parliamentary secretary, MP James Bezan, said in the House of Commons that the letter was “premature, incorrect and contained false information.” Outed and embarrassed, the government had decided to pay after all. Then corporate sponsors stepped forward to provide funding for transportation and accommodation for the families. The prime minister caused a protocol flap when he decided to receive the last Canadian flag flown in Afganistan from a relay team of injured vets, rather than our real commander-in-chief, Governor General David Johnston. It was a Harper event: A twenty-one-gun salute, parades, helicopters landing, planes overhead, tanks in the street, and, having closed the file on Afghanistan, photo ops for 2015.

The problem was, returning veterans with mental and physical wounds inhabit a harsh and ongoing reality: how to push your kid on a swing minus an arm or a leg, or how to fill a war-weary heart with good human emotions again. The party that had courted, lionized, and used the military now turned its back on them when priorities changed.

nineteen

A WALK WITH FARLEY

L
ike that magical line where a fog bank meets the incandescent brilliance of a summer day, the Strait of Canso divides elementally different worlds: mainland Nova Scotia and the rugged island of Cape Breton. In days gone by, as you approached Cape Porcupine—half its enormous rock face blasted away for the 10 million tonnes of granite that built the causeway—there was a toll booth and a modest wait before crossing to the other side. But the link to Cape Breton has long since been paid for and the toll booths have disappeared. Now you drive unimpeded across the green swing bridge on the island side, with the words “Welcome to Cape Breton” painted in yellow on one of the crossbeams. The only delay might be an amber flashing light, signalling that the bridge is about to swing open so that a sailboat, its mast rising surrealistically above the girders, can glide silently through.

It is said that the Canso Causeway is the deepest and among the longest in the world. But like all great feats of engineering, it has had unintended consequences. The tourists came, but the
herring and lobster left, cut off from their traditional migration routes by the causeway. No one had thought to ask the fishermen their opinion of a structure that would forever seal off a large part of the strait from the open ocean. The lobster traps are no longer on the ocean floor in the old places, but fastened to the roof racks of cars from Ontario and Quebec—tourists headed home with a memento of their visit.

The last time I passed over that bridge was in the late summer of 2009. I was on my way to St. Anthony Daniel Church in Sydney to attend the funeral of a remarkable person, Donald Marshall Jr. I had written my first book,
Justice Denied
, about his wrongful imprisonment of eleven years for a murder he had not committed. The case of the young Mi’kmaq Indian became a national
cause célèbre
, a black mark against the courts and police, and a reminder that Canada had its own version of racism to worry about. It was also my personal schooling in the fact that everything that can go wrong in the justice system sometimes does go wrong. Marshall had been so confused at his one-day murder trial, he later told me he couldn’t tell the difference between his own lawyers and the prosecutors. Since then I have never discounted a story, however improbable, without looking into it.

A few years after the publication of the Marshall book, a young waiter, Shane Earle, told me about the decades-old cover-up of sexual and physical abuse of boys at Newfoundland’s Mount Cashel Orphanage. He had read an editorial I had written in
The Sunday Express
¹
entitled “Justice for All” and asked why there had been none for the boys of Mount Cashel. The scandal was not that no one had known about it; it was that many powerful people officially covered up the story because it involved a lay order of the Roman Catholic Church. Earle’s story, told barely above a whisper, became my next book,
Unholy Orders
. When I found myself explaining the tragedy of Mount Cashel on
Oprah
with Shane
beside me, I was thinking of the lesson Donald Marshall Jr., had taught me: listen to everyone, lift every rock, because you never know where the truth might be hiding.

And I learned one other thing. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things, no matter what personal torments or travesties they have endured. Years after his release from prison, remarkably unbroken by his ordeal, Marshall was charged with catching and selling 220 kilograms of eels out of season and without a licence. On Maliseet and Mi’kmaq reserves, where unemployment stands at 85 percent, making an extra $787.10 from illegal fishing, as Marshall did, is an attractive proposition. Donald Marshall Jr., the shy and unlikely icon of indomitable survival, was headed back to court, but this time with a very different result. In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada brought down a landmark decision that held that Marshall had the right to fish under a 1761 treaty the British had signed with the Mi’kmaq. The boy who had been sent to prison at seventeen for something he hadn’t done, and came out as a graduate of Dorchester Penitentiary at twenty-nine, had successfully extended native fishing and treaty rights for an entire people.

But this day I was not headed to Marshall’s home reserve, Membertou, a journey I had made so many times while working on his story. My destination was not Sydney, but a place where I had never been, River Bourgeois, to interview a man I had never met, though he was very famous: Farley Mowat. Yes, I wanted to interview Farley Mowat for a book about Canadian politics, Mowat the ninety-two-year-old author. Over the years, I have observed that official sources, party spokespeople, and now computer-assisted journalism, have left a hole in the telling of our national story. Where were all the other people in the newspaper articles and on television: the non-experts, the non-insiders, the thinkers, the painters, the eccentrics?

Writing a book about the Harper government carried its imperatives to be sure—talking to a great many people in politics and public service, and gathering as many documents, secret or otherwise, as one could. But to me, it also meant listening to different voices with a unique point of view: an eighty-year-old former student of Stephen Harper’s grandfather; a Stockwell Day delegate who claimed the Harper team had cheated at the convention that chose Harper to be leader of the Canadian Alliance party; a girl who went to university with Harper and has never forgotten that cold, blue stare.

And then there was “Dennis.” He did not make his living writing about politics. But he was still an expert on the prime minister in a totally original way, for Dennis was Stephen Harper’s hairstylist. His recollections ran from the banal to the hilarious. Starting with the banal, it takes half an hour to cut the prime minister’s hair, which Dennis does every three to four weeks. Sometimes this special customer only wants it thinned. Although Opposition leader Harper used to come to Rinaldo’s, the elegant salon on George Street in Ottawa’s Byward Market, Dennis now travels to 24 Sussex Drive and cuts the PM’s hair in an alcove under the stairs on the ground floor.

One day, Dennis forgot his barber’s cape. The prime minister whipped the cloth off the breakfast table, threw it around his shoulders, and Dennis was back in business. “I was shocked at how shabby the table was when he took the table cloth off. It was shocking to see cracks in the baseboards that didn’t seem to get fixed,” he told me. Only once in their working relationship did Harper ever make a special request—a haircut on a Saturday. The rest of the time, it was early mornings, right after the PM had breakfast with the children. When Harper was in Opposition, Dennis had told him that one day he would be prime minister. “Harper liked that,” Dennis remembered. “A lot of people hate
Stephen Harper, but I think he’s a smart guy.” Dennis also noted another important thing about his famous client: Stephen Harper was apparently a good tipper.

Dennis also cuts Laureen Harper’s hair. According to the stylist who has a cleaning business on the side, the prime minister’s wife never asks for a particular style, is most comfortable in blue jeans and a T-shirt (like her husband), and is unpretentious. When he asked her where she was going for her vacation when Parliament rose, she replied, “Into the woods.”
²

Finally, the improbable and hilarious. As Dennis explained to me in the salon, cutting the hair of powerful people has its unexpected benefits. Margaret Trudeau arranged for Dennis to meet President Jimmy Carter—and even Fidel Castro on his secret trip to Canada to attend Pierre Trudeau’s funeral. “Fidel Castro’s security detail really impressed me—female, Russian, and the meanestlooking people I ever saw.”

The only person guarding Farley Mowat this August day was his handyman, Mark, the maintenance chief at the local fish-plant. Mark explained how to get to Farley’s place, but contrived to show up a little later to make sure that the local legend was not being pestered by unwanted camp followers from the mainland. The Mowat homestead sits on 80 hectares of unspoiled wilderness overlooking the ocean, a fitting location for the writer of forty-four books and Mother Nature’s first, big-time, Canadian bodyguard. He calls the property the Mowat Research Institute. Hyperbole is his first instinct, winning a laugh from you, his highest pleasure. I had been told to arrive at a certain hour and not to interfere with his needed rest. Don’t come too early and don’t stay too late. In the end, I was invited to stay overnight, an invitation I foolishly declined.

I drove down the long lane to the farmhouse, which he later claimed “was rotting from the top down”—Farley’s explanation
of how the ants got in. The famous writer was standing there with his hands on his hips, wearing Bermuda shorts and looking like a boy dressed up as an old man for Halloween. The expression on his face was a mixture of delight and canny curiosity. I could see the skinny kid who so worried his librarian-mother when, at age ten, the “Shrimp” barely looked six. I could also see the shrewd assessor.

I passed his sniff test and was offered a tour of the Mowat Research Institute. He showed me how he had rigged up a water system from two ponds—which he called the White and the Blue Nile. The ponds were not spring-fed, but depended entirely on rainfall. I noticed that there were frogs in Farley’s drinking water. He laughed: “They have a language with just one word in it—harrrumph. That one-word language can keep you awake all night.”

Back down the lane was the guest house, which Farley had once used to shelter a “fugitive from injustice,” his friend Paul Watson. The anti-whaling, direct-action environmentalist has faced two “red alerts”—international arrest warrants issued by Interpol— over allegedly obstructing Japanese whaling vessels. Farley claimed that Watson’s only crimes were stopping the Japanese from whaling in designated sanctuaries. “No one in Canada knows this, but I entertained Paul recently when the authorities didn’t officially know where he was. Those same authorities used to listen to my phone calls. I was one of the Friends of Cuba and a known “left-wing rebel.” I just laughed about it and said ‘good morning chaps’ to the listeners when I used my phone.”

From the crest of the hill where the white frame house sits, no other domicile or building is visible—just the unspoiled land, a crescent beach below, and the ocean stretching all the way to the horizon. As we passed a well-chewed tennis ball, Farley stopped and said, “My old dog, Chester, died last year. The night before we
were about to head back to Port Hope, he crawled in his bed and went to sleep. He didn’t want to go back to Ontario.”

The boyish old man talked for a moment about his latest crusade—keeping oil rigs out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He saw the gulf as the last, vital internal body of salt water on the East Coast that could support the restoration of endangered species. And if that happened, it could also support traditional human activities. But he was well aware of the potential cost to him. “I am doing this against my will in a way, getting involved at this time in life, when I might get the Big Call tomorrow. But the bastards who have set this thing in motion are taking a perverse pleasure in doing it and must be opposed . . . to exploit what’s left of the gulf will be the dagger driven into the corpse.”

If a
Deepwater Horizon
–type of event were to take place in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the results could be catastrophic.
³
The channels and straits that make up the gulf move in a counterclockwise direction, which means that the vast area is only flushed into the wider ocean once a year. Spilled oil would ride the mostly landlocked gulf currents for a long time. Worse, the site of the proposed development is the Laurentian Channel, the deep main artery in and out of the gulf for 2,200 marine species.

Listening to Farley talk, I am surprised at the discouragement in that clear, quick voice, stating and restating his thoughts until the words were just right. His heart told him that drilling for oil in the Gulf of St. Lawrence was wrong; his head said it would almost certainly happen. His convictions told him that environmentalists were doing Gaia’s work, but his head understood that the forces lined up against them were all but invincible. Farley was profoundly worried. “We don’t elect pacifists. We admire the killer instinct in leaders. It’s genetic. It is inevitable that people in high positions like Harper reach out for a bloody stick or sword. The people who run the world today are psychopaths. Everybody
can see it, so why are we so obedient? All they care about is the economy because that means money. A virus is sweeping through the human race. At the top, all over the world, we are rotting away as a species from the top down. The leaders have gone beyond greed to the sheer amassing of power. There is no effective morality, just power.”