The Best Laid Plans (37 page)

I unclenched as the last vestiges of parliamentary decorum disintegrated on the floor of the Commons.

The broadcast news Monday night and the papers Tuesday morning were filled with stories on the Government’s about-face budget and the Angus ejection escapade. The Tory strategy was clear. Bribe Canadians with our own money and then dare the Opposition to bring down the Government and its tax-cutting mini-budget along with it. The success of the Government’s gambit turned on one of society’s pernicious and persistent forces – greed. The mini-budget bore all the hallmarks of a cynical, manipulative, and desperate political ploy to help the Tories cling to power just a little longer. I had no doubt that the Prime Minister’s Office had numbers showing significant public support for tax cuts. I also had no doubt that the
Globe and Mail
or the
National Post
would be in the field within 24 hours, giving us all access to public-opinion research, saying exactly the same thing.

But there was something big missing from the Tories’ analysis and from the initial media coverage of Chartrand’s speech. The mini-budget threatened to compound the Government’s moral bankruptcy with financial insolvency. Giving the people what they thought they wanted would exchange short-term gain for long-term pain. But three weeks before Christmas, the Tory strategists gambled that the Liberals and the NDP wouldn’t dare defeat the Government over a budget that promised to give Canadians back some of their hard-earned money – a reasonable view, to be sure. But a marked paucity of reasonable people existed in federal politics.

According to Standing Order 84, the mini-budget would be debated in the House for not more than four sitting days, culminating in a vote. The House Leaders had agreed on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for the first three days. About a dozen MPs from all parties would be on an extended weekend Inter-Parliamentary Union junket in Victoria from Friday to Monday, so the final day of debate and the vote itself were scheduled for the following Tuesday, December 10. The Whip and the House Leader put out the call to clear the decks and be in the House for the Tuesday vote, come hell or high water.

Ever transparent, and mindful of his commitment to open communications, Angus asked me to organize a public constituency town-hall meeting on the mini-budget. Now, I felt quite confident that the people of Cumberland-Prescott wanted the money promised them in the Tory mini-budget. Conversely, their newly elected MP wanted to kill their tax cuts and their windfall. So Angus and I argued for a time over his town-hall idea. I could see little point in inviting dozens of irate voters to dump all over us in person when we could simply read their nasty letters in the comfort and security of our own office. But as usual, he was insistent, and I was respectful. I stopped after observing that hosting a town hall meeting on the mini-budget was tantamount to sitting atop a carnival dunk tank in Riverfront Park and giving each constituent five baseballs.

We’d organized no such open meeting since the election, so I was forced to concede we were due. I suggested he might consider wearing a raincoat and a catcher’s mitt in case cantaloupes were still on special at the Cumberland Food Mart. I booked the West Assembly Hall of the Cumberland United Church for Friday evening. I then called André Fontaine, and he hooked me up with the advertising manager. I placed a quarter-page ad in
The Crier
, selecting a virtually unreadable font and the most boring layout imaginable in the hopes that no one would notice it. Luckily, André Fontaine wrote an entire article, promoting the upcoming meeting. Bless him.

At nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, Sid Russell, the unofficial leader of the workers at Ottawa River Aggregate Inc., arrived in our Centre Block office. He was tall and lean – about 50 years old – and styled his hair in a brush cut. He appeared to be solemn and tense. In the past five years, he and a few others had attempted to organize the workers but had not been successful. Through threat and intimidation, the management at head office had quashed the fledgling union drive well before it had left the starting blocks. We got him seated with coffee in hand before Angus took over.

“Well, Mr. Russell, I’m precious little good at gildin’ the lily, so let me deliver the blow bare knuckled so it’s quick and clear.”

Sid Russell was fishing in his backpack for something, but stopped when he processed what he’d heard.

“Mr. Russell, I regret to say that I dinnae think yer aggregate operation will be foulin’ the river for much longer. We’ve heard from the rogue who runs it that someone sittin’ at head office in Cleveland has his finger on the button. ’Tis only a matter of time before the place closes. I’m sorry, but I cannae support suspendin’ the effluent discharge rules just to keep the doors open or even to expand the facility. It just isnae right.”

I braced myself for the reaction, and by the look of Angus, he did, too.

“Mr. McLintock, I’m way ahead of you. I brought this to show you,” he said, waving a VHS tape he’d finally extricated from his pack. “This has gone on long enough. Someone’s going to get hurt, and I’m tired of shoveling dead fish into the dumpster.”

Sid Russell had shot the tape himself with a Hi8 video camera concealed in a gym bag he had carried around the site. Grainy but clearly discernible images flashed across the screen. The scene was the interior of the facility, perched on the shores of the Ottawa River. It looked like my old residence common room at university after Homecoming weekend. Well, perhaps not quite that bad. We were looking at a workplace out of the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Workers straddled large holes in what appeared to be a rotting floor as they monitored the large and loose conveyor belt that bore mud and rocks from the riverbed. Windows were boarded up, leaving the workspace dim. Some workers wore hard hats and safety boots, but most did not. Sid Russell shook his head as he watched.

“We combine river water with chemical cleansers to wash the mud and sediment off the aggregate we excavate from the shoreline. Then, we dump the waste water right back into the river. The process has been approved by Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, but only if we limit our effluent discharge to a provincial standard set when the operation was first certified,” Sid explained.

“So what’s the problem if MOE has approved it?” I asked.

He pointed back to the screen. At that moment, a pair of hands opened a padlocked door, and the gym-bag cam descended a rickety set of stairs. The camera steadied in front of a large-diameter pipe that angled down through the floor and into the ground below just at the northern wall.

“Well, we’re pumping way too much shit into the river,” he said matter-of-factly. He then pointed to the screen. “That there, gentlemen, is what we call the
shadow pipe
. We discovered it a month ago when a set of keys was ‘borrowed’ and copied so we could
open that mystery door. The suits are so thick over there that they still don’t know we’ve discovered their dirty little secret.” He pointed again to the screen. “That there 24-inch pipe feeds effluent right into the river. There’s another 24-inch pipe that runs along the outside wall of the building that also delivers crap to the water. The outside pipe is the one the Environment Canada guys test every month or so. They know nothing about the shadow pipe running beneath the floorboards right under their noses.”

“Are you telling me you’re dumping twice as much chemically laced waste water into the river as you’re permitted to?” I inquired.

“More than three times the limit,” replied Russell. “The shadow pipe empties at twice the flow rate of the approved pipe. Every morning, three of us gather the dead fish before it gets light. Besides that, one of my guys tore up his knee pretty good last week when he went through the floorboards again. The place is a workers’-comp commercial waiting to be shot.”

“Can you leave us the tape, Mr. Russell?” asked Angus. “We’ll need it to show the environment officials. You do realize we have to take it to them, don’t you?”

“You can have the tape. That’s why I brought it. It’s just gone too far. What do you figure’s going to happen?”

“Well, I cannae imagine they’ll let the plant operate after seein’ yer little documentary. I am sorry,” Angus said. “But dinnae fret yourself just yet. You may not be out of a job for long if providence is with us.”

I wasn’t sure what Angus had in mind, but held my tongue.

Sid Russell left half an hour later. He gave us the tape and agreed to bring the workers together that night for a clandestine meeting at Cumberland United Church. I called as soon as he left, and the elderly woman in the office was able to move the weekly senior’s tae-kwon-do lesson to the Minister’s lounge. She’d taken a shine to me when I had called earlier about the mini-budget town-hall meeting. This liberated the West Assembly Hall for our impromptu gathering of aggregate workers. If we survived the
next month, I pledged to visit the church for a Sunday service and not just to book another room.

Angus and I spent the rest of the morning at the Department of the Environment in Hull. Our meeting with the director general of regional enforcement was arranged on very short notice. There’s nothing like the promise of a whistle-blowing videotape to advance a meeting that might normally take weeks to coordinate. Our session with the director general started off slowly, but gathered steam when we played the tape. They’d known something was amiss on the river but hadn’t been able to prove it. Their frequent effluent test readings all fell within acceptable limits. They were stumped. The videotape revealed the smoking gun – a parallel but hidden effluent-discharge system that tripled the chemical concentrations released into the river.

The director general smacked his forehead in self-flagellation. He admitted his whole department had been duped by one of the oldest scams in the environmental degradation handbook. He looked angry.

The health and safety violations revealed on the videotape were sufficient alone to shut down the company, but the legal procedures through the Department of Labour would take a couple of weeks. So we opted for the much shorter environment route. Pending the signature of the Minister on a shutdown order, which they expected to secure by late afternoon, the gates to Ottawa River Aggregate Inc. would be padlocked the following morning – indefinitely. There’d be no warning. Cleveland would not be pleased with Mr. Haldorson. And Mr. Haldorson would certainly not be coming to the McLintock New Year’s levee.

When we made it back to the Hill, it was nearly time for question period and the first day of debate on the mini-budget. Awaiting me was a voice-mail message:

“Addison, it’s Bradley Stanton. Look, one of our more generous corporate donors is holding onto a big cheque for us until we clear up a little misunderstanding they seemed to have had with your
boy, Angus. This has got to stop, Daniel. I’m now officially calling him ‘Anguish’ ’cause that’s all he’s meant to me since he arrived. Just sort out this aggregate company’s environmental problem so they’ll release the cheque, okay? You know we’ve got a big-ass debt to pay off from the campaign. Don’t make me come down there, Danny boy. Are you reading me? Peace. Out.”

Fabulous, just fabulous. I had just flushed what little was left of my political career down the secret secondary effluent-discharge pipe.

On Tuesday afternoon, debate resumed in the House on the following motion as dictated by Standing Order 84.(1): “That this House approve in general the budgetary policy of the Government.” As a budget motion, it was, in fact, a vote of confidence in the Government. Defeat the motion and the Government would fall.

The Leader’s office had already decided to try to bring down the Government based on its opportunistic, economically devastating, and utterly deceitful mini-budget. Christmas be damned and tax cuts, too. I knew of few, if any, dissenters in the Liberal camp.

During the debate, Angus spoke with passion for the full 20 minutes allotted to each speaker under the Standing Orders. It was not difficult for him to muster emotion when ripping the Government for leading us all on with the progressive Throne Speech only to pull the carpet out from under us with the tax-cutting mini-budget. He called it “duplicity of the first order.” Tory MPs heckled like loud drunks at a down-market strip show. Hansard ensured the accuracy of my memory:

Ah, the high dignity of parliamentary debate. We should all be so proud.

While Angus made some last-minute calls, Pete2 and I arrived at the church early to make sure it was set up as I’d requested. In other words, we set out the 75 chairs in theatre style and laid out four boxes of doughnuts on arthritic trestle tables at the back. We put another table at the front of the room from which Angus would preside over the proceedings. The fluorescent lighting buzzed above. By seven o’clock, 53 of the 82 workers had arrived, the most we could expect, as the remaining 29 employees were toiling on the four-to-midnight shift. Most of the workers were men, but about a dozen women attended, too. The workers consumed the coffee but not the doughnuts. Anxiety and appetite were not very compatible.

Sid Russell and Angus were among the last to arrive and at 7:20 took their places at the front table. The murmuring died away. Much to my surprise, Norman Sanderson slipped into the room and stood at the back. He was smiling as he surveyed the room. So was Angus. He gave me a quick thumbs-up and got to his feet. Pete2 and I stood along the east wall, working our way through the doughnuts.

“Good evenin’, all. I’m Angus McLintock, and I’ve finally accepted that I am, in fact, the Member of Parliament for Cumberland-Prescott. We’re here this evenin’ through the courage of Sid and many of you. We’re here this evenin’ to blow the whistle on an unsafe and irresponsible industrial operation that jeopardizes yer health and yer lives, not to mention our beloved Ottawa River. Now, I ask only one thing of you tonight. I need you all to wait until I’ve finished what I have to say before you rush to judgment. Can I count on yer patience to stay with me until I’m done?” A hum of assent accompanied nodding heads. “Very well, I’ll not sugarcoat our news tonight. Yer lives are goin’ to change tomorrow mornin’. You may not believe me straight off, but yer lives are goin’ to change for the better. At
eight o’clock tomorrow mornin’, officials from Environment Canada will arrive at Ottawa River Aggregate Inc. and shut it down, probably forever.” Angus paused to let that sink in. A smattering of gasps and head shaking ensued, but no one leaped up to challenge Angus.