A first year of blogging in 2009 – penning on the tenth anniversary of my first blog article (Part 3)

(Continued from Part 2)

In February-March 2009 in the first three Parts of my second blog article, I analyzed some tantalizing facts reflecting certain matters of ethics in Canadian politics that had been playing out in the public eye as two related “affairs”.

There was the ongoing Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, about a disputed business relationship between German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber and former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney; and there was the older but broader Airbus Affair, about possible kickbacks Mr. Mulroney had received from Airbus Industrie for its 1988 sale of planes to Air Canada, which had been the subject of a criminal investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Central to the two affairs was not only Mr. Mulroney’s ethics and conduct, but also business lobbying by Mr. Schreiber who had distributed Airbus commissions in Canada, and his connections to prominent Canadian political figures including, in Mulroney’s circle, Mr. Peter MacKay, then cabinet minister in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, the deceased Mr. Frank Moores, former Newfoundland Premier and former Air Canada board member, Justice John C. Major, Prime Minister Mulroney’s appointee to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the deceased Mr. Bruce Verchere, formerly Prime Minister Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee who also represented the Swiss Bank where Schreiber had accounts for Airbus commissions as well as for a disputed $300,000 he had given Mulroney in their subsequently-disputed financial relationship.

In Parts 1 & 2, dated February 20 & March 8, 2009, respectively, I discussed a key fact linking the two affairs, in the form of an allegation Schreiber included in a court document filed during the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair in 2007, that could be central to the Airbus Affair; it regarded possible roles by Moores and Verchere in getting the Airbus money to Mulroney, here partially re-quoted as in Part 2 of my current review article:

“And yet by early November 2007 when he was trying hard to avoid extradition to Germany, railing against “abuse of power” by Mr. Mulroney earlier when the latter was prime minister, Mr. Schreiber took an extra legal step to try to expose Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, a role that was connected to the company Government Consultants International, an Ottawa lobbying firm during the Mulroney era founded by Frank Moores, Mr. Mulroney’s appointee to the Air Canada board, according to a report in The Globe and Mail newspaper: ²⁶

“An adviser to former prime minister Brian Mulroney asked Karlheinz Schreiber to transfer funds, made in connection with Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of Airbus airplanes, to Mr. Mulroney’s lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland, according to an affidavit sworn by Mr. Schreiber and filed Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

The affidavit states that Mr. Schreiber informed Mr. Mulroney during a meeting at Zurich’s Hotel Savoy on Feb. 2, 1998 that one of Mr. Mulroney’s closest friends and advisers, Fred Doucet, had asked him to transfer funds “related to the Airbus deal” from the lobby firm, Government Consultants International, or GCI, to Mr. Mulroney’s Swiss lawyer.”

…”

And,

“The reason for then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Canadian lawyer to be referred to as his lawyer in Switzerland is that Bruce Verchere was also the Canadian lawyer representing the Swiss bank where (in a branch in Zurich, Switzerland) Mr. Schreiber opened bank accounts for Airbus commissions and other funds including his now famous $300,000 given to Mulroney in 1993-94.^{59, 60, 61}”

As in the above two quotes, Prime Minister Mulroney’s close friend and advisor Fred Doucet once asked Schreiber to send money “related to the Airbus deal” to Mulroney’s lawyer Bruce Verchere.

In 2009 I noted in Part 1’s footnote that, according to Norman Spector, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Mulroney, Fred Doucet, also a former Chief of Staff, often brought visitors to see Mulroney without formally going through the Prime Minister’s Office:

“27. … Mulroney’s former chief of staff Norman Spector has also revealed that after leaving a former chief of staff position Fred Doucet became a lobbyist in Ottawa and from time to time would bring persons to meet with Mulroney, and that those appointments were not booked through or recorded by the Prime Minister’s Office…”

(“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)”, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Doucet also had a key role in the financial relationship between Mulroney and Schreiber that was at the center of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, having arranged the meetings during which Schreiber gave Mulroney envelopes containing cash:

“Mr. Doucet, a former chief of staff for Mulroney, told the Commons ethics committee that he only remembers arranging two of four meetings between his old boss and Schreiber, including one in a New York City hotel in 1994 where he saw Mr. Schreiber hand the former prime minister an envelope at the end of a 90-minute meeting.

He said Mr. Schreiber told Mr. Mulroney the money was to pay for expenses and services rendered by the former prime minister after hearing a presentation on his lobbying efforts in China, Russia and France. Mr. Doucet said he did not know at the time that the envelope, which Mr. Mulroney put in his briefcase, contained cash.

…

“Mr. Mulroney reported on a meeting he had had with the presidents of Russia, France, and the Chinese leadership, and his view that these countries . . . could play an important role in the United Nations peacekeeping initiatives and where the use of Thyssen military vehicles might be very appropriate,” said Mr. Doucet.

In early December, Mr. Doucet released a statement denying allegations by Schreiber that he asked for the transfer of money “for Airbus” into a Swiss bank account destined for the former prime minister.”

(“Former Mulroney staffer didn’t know envelope contained cash”, By Jack Aubry, February 12, 2008, Ottawa Citizen)

As discussed in Part 2 of my current review, Spector later stated in June 2009, during a public inquiry presided over by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant into the Mulroney-Schreiber business relationship, that Schreiber had been a frequent visitor to Prime Minister Mulroney, enjoying more access than any other lobbyist.

That public inquiry capped the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair that had first been brought forward by Schreiber and received intense public attention in the 2000s. But as recently reviewed in Part 2 of my current article, it was likely only the tip of a much larger iceberg that had been the Airbus Affair of the 1990s.

In February-March 2009, I then reviewed the historical political contexts of these affairs as they relate to government leadership ethics, in particular, some basic historical facts relating to Mr. Mulroney’s rise to power in the 1980s, and the various ethics and corruption problems dogging his government and him.

In reviewing the historical ethics and corruption problems associated with Mulroney, I highlighted the key roles of the left-leaning Canadian media in investigating and exposing them, and the important roles of women journalists, especially anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron who conducted wide-ranging investigative journalism work over a long period of time and whose efforts led to the intensification of the RCMP’s Airbus Affair criminal investigation in 1995.

I remarked in my post on February 20, 2009, that back in November 1995 – when the criminal investigation of Mulroney became publicly known – the RCMP’s lead investigator, Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, acknowledged that it had been media reports that led to the police’s intensified efforts:

“This particular controversy about what the RCMP have or have not done in its Airbus Affair investigation is hardly unique. When the Airbus Affair first broke into news headlines in November 1995, the RCMP investigator at the time, Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, actually revealed that although the criminal investigation had been first set up in 1988-89 soon after the Air Canada-Airbus Industrie deal, not much was done until March 1995 when he received some media reports containing intense allegations against former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on the matter of kickbacks. ³¹”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Then in my post on March 8, 2009, I noted in a footnote that Sgt. Fiegenwald singled out several media venues, including the German news magazine Der Spiegel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate TV program, and Stevie Cameron, as his source of information:

“44. RCMP investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald stated in November 1995 that it was stories in “the German news magazine Der Spiegel and the CBC-TV current affairs program Fifth Estate” that prompted him to look into the allegations, starting in March 1995; Fiegenwald later also identified Stevie Cameron as an early source of information…”

(“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)”, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In that March 8 post, I also noted that over a decade later during the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, Ms. Cameron personally acknowledged her own leading role in investigating Mr. Mulroney’s problems, as well as the key role of Justice Minister Allan Rock in then Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s government in the 1990s, citing Schreiber’s letter to Mulroney dated January 29, 2007, here as previously quoted in Part 2 of my current article:

“Ms. Cameron herself is also sure that the persons she has been chasing view her in this way as well, as she has been quoted as saying on November 13, 2007: ⁵⁷

“Would I be at the top of Mulroney’s list of journalists? You bet. In a letter Schreiber wrote to Mulroney on Jan. 29 this year, he said, ‘All my personal problems began with Stevie Cameron’s book On The Take and Allan Rock’s political witch hunt with the RCMP against you.’”

”

Nonetheless, as discussed in February 2009 and reviewed in Part 2 of my current article, the RCMP closed its Airbus Affair criminal investigation in April 2003 without finding sufficient incriminating evidence against Mulroney, but it had not been a thorough investigation and the RCMP later expressed the willingness to conduct a new one if new information became available.

As I have discussed in Part 2 of my current review, the much more limited Mulroney-Schreiber Affair did have an official outcome, a report released in May 2010 with findings by Justice Oliphant who had conducted a public inquiry, concluding that Mr. Mulroney’s conduct in his financial dealings with Mr. Schreiber had been “inappropriate”.

But before Justice Oliphant’s inquiry and conclusions, in the spring of 2009 after reviewing some key facts and evidence and the media’s expository work on the subject, in my article’s Part 4 dated April 29 I commented on a huge gulf in perception between Mulroney’s ethics problems and the lacklustre, fruitless efforts on the part of the RCMP and the former Chretien government to uncover the truth:

“The legacy of Brian Mulroney, in his known propensity to associate with persons of corrupt or unsavoury repute and in the yet-unclear depth of his political problems of ethics and conduct relating to business interests close to or lobbying his government, may in the end be compared to some of the more notorious in the recent history of the western, Judeo-Christian, democratic world. Yet, as have been previously shown, neither the RCMP nor the Liberal government of Jean Chretien during its 10-year tenure from 1993 to 2003 really went after Mr. Mulroney: in public they were merely reacting to, and maintaining a continuing interest in, issues in the Airbus Affair as brought forward by members of a left-leaning Canadian media – particularly by Stevie Cameron and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate – and supported by those in the federal government system opposed to Mr. Mulroney’s rightwing agendas.

The conclusion would again appear to be that not only there was no political vendetta against Mulroney on the part of the RCMP or the Liberal government, which he has alleged, but that the long-running saga was mostly a media circus despite that – as previously shown – very serious and nagging questions still exist as to the nature of the Airbus Affair, the depth of corruption and Mr. Mulroney’s real role in them.”

(“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 4)”, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As commented above, the Airbus Affair appeared more of a “media circus” than being driven by the police criminal investigation or by the government.

But I then immediately added, in the above April 2009 blog post, that in order to understand the agendas of the RCMP and of the Chretien government I would review more facts relating to what the government, particularly then Justice Minister Allan Rock, had been aware of and what priority the government gave to the corruption investigation:

“However I am not ready to conclude such but would next illustrate that the Chretien government and the RCMP did likely have their own agendas in seeing the criminal investigation against Mulroney be launched and be ongoing for an extended period of time (from 1995 to 2003), and that although neither wanted to get to the bottom of the Airbus Affair both had an interest to see it hound Mr. Mulroney through to the end of the Chretien political era.”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted, my assertion was that the Chretien government and the RCMP did not want to get to the bottom of the Airbus Affair matters but rather wanted to “see it hound Mr. Mulroney through to the end of the Chretien political era”.

As a matter of fact, it was Mr. Mulroney himself who asserted in November 1997 that the Chretien government and Rock had been behind the criminal investigation since 1993, especially behind a criminally accusatory letter to the Swiss authorities – dated September 29, 1995 as mentioned in Part 2 of my current review – as I noted in my April 2009 post:

“In November 1997 in his first media interview after winning a legal settlement with the federal government over the libel issue, Mr. Mulroney alleged that there had been pressure from Liberal justice minister Allan Rock to prosecute him since 1993: ¹⁵²

“Allan Rock arrives (in Ottawa) in 1993. The first thing he does as minister of justice is to write to the RCMP, conveying gossip about me personally to the commissioner of the RCMP requesting an investigation. Out comes (Stevie) Cameron’s book (On The Take), Herb Gray, the solicitor general, gives a copy of it to the commissioner of the RCMP, asking that he look into it. These are clear signals by a new government to a national police force, and the signals say, it’s all right for open season on Mulroney”.

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:

“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”.

”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted in the above from Mr. Mulroney, “the first thing” the new Justice Minister Allan Rock did in 1993 was to convey some “gossip” about him to the RCMP commissioner, “requesting an investigation”; and then when Stevie Cameron’s book on corruption in the Mulroney era was published, Solicitor General Herb Gray gave a copy to the RCMP commissioner, “asking that he look into it”. Mulroney called it “open season on Mulroney”.

That’s very interesting. What could the “gossip” be about Mr. Mulroney in 1993 that Mr. Rock knew?

I contended that it could be information from the family of Bruce Verchere, formerly Prime Minister Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee, given to Liberal Party-friendly lawyers by Mrs. Lynne Walters Verchere during a family legal feud before Mr. Verchere’s sudden death in August 1993 due to suicide:

“They might have some evidence. According to Stevie Cameron, during 1993 lawyers closely affiliated with the Liberal Party had in fact been provided with documents pointing to fraud and financial mismanagement on the part of Bruce Verchere, then tax lawyer and financial trustee for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney: when Verchere’s wife Lynne Walters Verchere had a fallout with her husband whose fraud had gotten to the point of defrauding her and their children, Mrs. Verchere made the point of specifically retaining notable lawyers with distinction in the Liberal Party to represent her in the legal proceedings against Bruce Verchere, and she gave copies of many important documents she found in their home to these lawyers. ^{165, 166, 167}

Note that this Bruce Verchere, who then died in an gunshot suicide in August 1993 only two months after being appointed board chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited in one of Mulroney’s patronage appointments on his last full day as prime minister, as previously discussed had been the “Swiss lawyer” of Mulroney’s who Karlheinz Schreiber alleges wanted Schreiber to transfer Airbus money to Mulroney; then later in the RCMP investigation, the September 29, 1995 Canadian government letter accusing Mulroney of criminal activity was written to the Swiss authorities to investigate the Airbus money.

If Liberal-affiliated lawyers indeed had access to documents containing clues of possible mismanagement in Brian Mulroney’s finances related to Airbus money, the issue would be how seriously, or not, during 1993-95 the Liberals push the RCMP to pursue those aspects, rather than that they had Mulroney accused without any evidence; in particular, did the “gossip” Allan Rock conveyed to the RCMP in 1993 right after he became justice minister – something Mulroney has alleged – include stuff to do with Mulroney’s former lawyer and trustee Bruce Verchere?

…

166. Other sources of information indicate that Raynold Langlois, the lead lawyer for Lynne Walters Verchere from around March 1992 to the time of her husband’s death in August 1993, recovering money from her husband Bruce Verchere, was son of a former Liberal senator, was himself a former chairman of the constitutional committee of the Quebec Liberal Party, and had earned a lot of legal fees from the former Trudeau government…”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted earlier, Verchere not only was Prime Minister Mulroney’s lawyer but also represented the Swiss Bank where Schreiber had accounts for Airbus commissions as well as for the $300,000 he gave Mulroney that would later become a focus of dispute in the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

As noted above, two months after Mulroney’s stepping down and appointing Verchere as chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited, Verchere died of a gunshot-inflicted suicide.

Taking into account this intriguing Bruce Verchere facet, in my April 2009 post I concurred with Mr. Mulroney’s facts about the Chretien government’s encouraging the RCMP to investigate him since 1993, but countered his view about the Chretien government’s “open season on Mulroney”. I asserted that the criminal investigation of Mulroney had likely been a part of the Liberal government’s law-and-order agendas:

“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, and that the Liberal brand of law-and-order may at least partially explain the criminally accusatory language in the September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss authorities.”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As I remarked above in 2009, “the Liberal brand of law-and-order may at least partially explain the criminally accusatory language in the September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss authorities”.

In other words, in my assessment, if the Canadian government letter to the Swiss authorities referred to “criminal activities carried out by the former prime minister” as previously quoted in my current review’s Part 2, then the “gossip” Justice Minister Allan Rock had been aware of likely suggested such.

Regarding Mr. Mulroney’s use of the word “gossip” to refer to certain information, an important point that I later emphasized in a blog post dated July 6, 2012, from a multipart article written after 2009, is that practically all of what had gone on among Schreiber, Mulroney, Verchere and Major had been shielded from the public during the Mulroney government era, and even later at the height of the Airbus Affair publicities in 1995-1997:

“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.”

(“Team 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”, July 6, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Hence a counterpoint to Mr. Mulroney’s complaint about “gossip” would be that, when what mattered to the country’s interests were the prerogative of a higher few, “gossip” was what ordinary members of the public could learn only.

As for my contention cited earlier that the Chretien government and RCMP used the long-lasting criminal investigation to “haunt Mr. Mulroney through to the end of the Chretien political era”, as circumstantial evidence I noted that the day the RCMP announced closure of the fruitless investigation, April 23, 2003, happened to be the 10-year anniversary of the Chretien Liberal Party’s unveiling of its law-and-order platform for the 1993 election that would turn out to be “the worst federal electoral defeat in Canadian history” for Mulroney’s Tories, namely the Progressive Conservative Party:

“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. ¹⁵⁸”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, I mentioned “Mr. Chretien’s liking of anniversary dates and milestones”. I especially compared the above 10-year anniversary date to Chretien’s euphoric celebration, as Prime Minister, of the most significant and related 10-year anniversary in 2003, that of his October 25, 1993 election victory, at “the sacred Sikh Golden Temple in India on a day that happened to be Diwali”, as he held on to the country’s leadership to beyond the 10-year mark despite being challenged by his rival, incoming Liberal leader Paul Martin:

“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; but Mr. Chretien was still planning to attend the Commonwealth summit in Nigeria in December, and he survived the motion, notifying new leader Paul Martin on November 18 that he would leave office on December 12 after returning from Africa – an unusually long time for a new Liberal leader to wait (for anything more than 10 days). ¹⁵⁵”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I further reasoned that the Chretien Liberals in government wanted to take a strong stand when it came to Mulroney’s “criminal activities”, because Chretien had previously been accused of being weak on law and order by the Reform Party that had siphoned away votes from the Tories formerly under Mulroney:

“Behind and beyond any symbolism of a 10-year law-and-order milestone regarding Brian Mulroney was likely a Liberal view of Mulroney – like a criminal who should be subjected to law and order, even if the Liberals did not openly say such. Back in early 1993, the Liberal Party under Jean Chretien was criticized as weak on crime, a reputation to do with Chretien’s stint as justice minister under Pierre Trudeau before the Mulroney era; in 1993 the new Reform Party which was going to siphon off much of the Tory votes in Western Canada, ran on a strong law-and-order platform, and so Chretien responded by putting forward a law-and-order platform to make him look respectable. ¹⁶¹”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

However, a difficulty for the RCMP criminal investigation to uncover the Airbus money trail could be that certain Swiss bank accounts identified as containing Airbus money for Mulroney and Frank Moores turned out not to have it, as I noted in a footnote on February 20, 2009:

“27. Several months before his filing at court of an affidavit alleging that Mulroney had asked him for Airbus money, Karlheinz Schreiber wrote a letter to Mulroney in May 2007 threatening to expose Mulroney for accepting Airbus-related money (i.e., in addition to the $300,000 from Schreiber) from Government Consultants International… Schreiber’s allegations have been partially corroborated by his former accountant, Swiss businessman Giorgio Pelossi, in the latter’s testimony in front of the parliamentary ethics committee, who stated that Schreiber opened Swiss bank accounts for Airbus commissions for Mulroney and Frank Moores although money was never transferred into these particular accounts…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In other words, the Airbus money trail could be craftier and more elaborate. Still, as pointed out in Part 2 of my current article, in its investigation the RCMP missed the fact that some $300,000 from one of Schreiber’s accounts in this Swiss Bank did reach Mulroney in cash envelopes; and, following the RCMP investigation’s closure, that money became the focus of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

Moreover, the persons involved, such as Mr. Mulroney’s close friend the late Frank Moores, almost always denied any role. In Moores’s case, despite his having received Airbus money from one of Schreiber’s Swiss bank accounts, his public denial was lifelong, contradicted by Schreiber only later – over two years after Moores’s death:

“From the first whiff of an Airbus controversy in 1988 until he died 17 years later, Frank Duff Moores and all of the lobbyists from his firm were adamant: Mr. Moores had nothing to do with Airbus and its sale of $1.8-billion worth of airplanes to Air Canada.

The denials came from everywhere and everyone, such as his third wife, Beth Moores: “He has frequently, in previous statements, said that he has never, ever had anything to do with Airbus, ever,” she told The Globe and Mail in 1995.

Mr. Moores’ partner at his lobby firm Government Consultants International used equally strong language in 1988 shortly after Air Canada announced its purchase. “We never received any mandate … to work for Airbus,” the late Gary Ouellet told the Toronto Star. “We have not lobbied Air Canada.”

However, a letter written by Mr. Moores and obtained during months of research by The Globe and Mail and CBC’s fifth estate, shows the opposite.

On Feb. 3, 1988, only two months before the board of directors at Air Canada agreed to make the largest civilian aircraft purchase in the country’s history, Mr. Moores wrote to the chairman of Airbus Industrie, the late Franz Josef Strauss, about the financing agreement for the sale.

“I would like to bring to your attention a situation that has developed regarding the sale of aircraft to Air Canada,” Mr. Moores wrote, explaining that Air Canada required a “deficiency guarantee” before proceeding with the sale.

…

In 1995, his firm made headlines when Mr. Moores, along with Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney, was accused in a letter to the Swiss government of conspiring to defraud Canadians on the Airbus sale.

The federal government later apologized to all three.

In recent interviews with The Globe and CBC, Mr. Schreiber has acknowledged paying Mr. Moores for his lobbying services in cash. In fact, Mr. Schreiber created a sub-account in Switzerland with a codename for Mr. Moores – “Frankfurt” – from which numerous cash withdrawals were made.”

(“Despite denials, Moores worked on Airbus file”, by Greg McArthur, November 14, 2007/April 26, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

It has been confirmed by investigative journalistic work that Moores received at least $1.3 million Airbus commissions from Schreiber, out of around $20 million the latter received from Airbus, here partially re-quoted as in Part 2 of my current review:

“… 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…”

Nonetheless, I pointed out in my April 2009 post that, when it came to law and order, the Chretien Liberals’ more serious interest was in gun control; the criminal investigation of Mr. Mulroney was thus, in a sense, an also-ran for the Liberal government in a way befitting its overall objectives:

“But in hindsight, Chretien was only testing the political water: his real brand of law and order would go against the political rightwing, and to him it was not so much harder penalties on crime, which the Reform Party championed, but more stringent gun control, about which Chretien stated on April 22, 1993 that he wanted to wait and see. ¹⁶² Gun control subsequently became the most high-profile law-and-order legislative issue of the Liberal government throughout the 1990s, and on that agenda both the Reform Party and the Tories put forth fierce opposition. ¹⁶³

For the Liberals, why not deploy the same tack, as they did with gun control, on Brian Mulroney who had the reputation of a political “bully boy” and whose party had been so soundly trounced in the election? ¹⁶⁴”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In the subsequent several blog posts in 2009, starting with Part 5 dated May 27, I reviewed Mr. Chretien’s politics in government, especially the Chretien Liberals’ law-and-order politics.

I first highlighted RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster’s resignation early in the Chretien era, announced by Prime Minister Chretien, as being crucial due to Inkster’s long tenure under the Mulroney government since 1987 at the helm of the national law-enforcement agency that exhibited highly publicized political biases in favor of Mulroney, in particular in the “Richard Grise affair”:

“At the beginning in late 1993/early 1994, the politics of targeting Brian Mulroney would have been understandably tricky to the incoming Liberal government given that Mulroney had just served for nearly nine years as a majority-government leader; however the new government soon got a change of guard at the helm of the RCMP when in February 1994 Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced the resignation of RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster to take effect in June, while justice minister Allan Rock was busy with other Liberal priorities such as banning discrimination of homosexuals. ¹⁶⁹

Appointed by Mulroney in 1987, Commissioner Inkster largely enjoyed a trouble-free seven years leading the RCMP, with a big part of the blames for controversies the RCMP was entangled in – particularly during 1988-90 over possible political biases in the Richard Grise affair (about certain timing in corruption investigation near the 1988 election time) and in the Doug Small affair (investigation into a 1989 federal budget leak) – shouldered by his second-in-command, deputy commissioner Henry Jensen. ¹⁷⁰

But within the RCMP, Inkster was perceived by some as uninterested in political investigations or even yielding to high-level political pressures: when the Airbus Affair investigation broke into the news in late 1995 it was revealed that back in 1990 when Commissioner Inkster ordered an inquiry by Ontario Judge Rene Marin into RCMP handling of a corruption investigation on Tory Senator Michel Cogger, at the time part of the initial 1989 Airbus-Mulroney investigation had been hidden under the Cogger case for fear of Mulroney government interference. ¹⁷¹”

(“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)”, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Besides his having been appointed by and served under Mulroney, I noticed that Inkster had never publicly endorsed gun control by the time when his resignation was announced in early 1994:

“On the other hand, by early 1994 Mr. Inkster never publicly expressed support for stricter gun control (as a quick survey of the press archives would reveal) despite passion for it from the new prime minister expressed during the election campaign; Allan Rock’s first public talk of tougher gun-control law started in April 1994 two months after announcement of Inkster’s resignation, and in contrast to Inkster the new RCMP commissioner Philip Murray in June on the day before taking over the job publicly expressed strong support for a full handgun ban suggested by Allan Rock. ¹⁷⁴”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, the incoming RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray publicly expressed “strong support for a full handgun ban” before taking over the job.

In my assessment, Inkster’s departure made easier not only the Chretien government’s gun control agenda but also the criminal investigation of Mulroney:

“It is also interesting to note that Commissioner Inkster’s intent to resign was announced in February with departure in June, much like Mr. Mulroney had done a year prior as prime minister. ¹⁷⁵

The point is that if the change of guard at the RCMP gave the Liberal gun-control drive crucial momentum, it likely also bolstered whatever Liberal plan there was to pursue Airbus Affair investigation against Mulroney.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

On the other hand, the cost of Inkster’s departure was high for Canada in an international context, as I remarked, that it came with the premature loss of the prestigious Interpol presidency that was in Canadian hands for only the second time in history:

“The price of Inkster’s resignation was high in early 1994: in November 1992 Mr. Inkster who had served from 1988 to 1991 as vice president for the Americas in the International Police Organization (Interpol), was elected as president of Interpol for a 4-year term – only the second Canadian to ever hold the top international police job. ¹⁷²”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, Inkster had been elected Interpol president in November 1992. As I later noted in a blog post dated October 26, 2012, another part of my later article from which I have quoted a July 6, 2012 post, after leaving the RCMP in June Inkster quit the Interpol presidency in September 1994, having served less than 2 years of a 4-year term:

“Inkster was hoping to keep his INTERPOL presidency, but later gave that up in September …”

(“Team 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”, October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It remains unclear for what reasons Inkster also soon left the Interpol presidency, whether he was pressured to resign.

The only other Canadian president of the Interpol, William Léonard Higgitt from 1972 to 1976, retired from his RCMP Commissioner position in 1973 but continued to serve as Interpol President for another 3 years to the end of his full term. (“Former RCMP Commissioners”, March 31, 2018, Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and, “Former Presidents”, INTERPOL)

A media story at the time when Inkster’s RCMP departure was announced,  dated February 5, 1994, and quoted by me in October 2012, reported, “he could stay on as president of the international police organization Interpol”:

“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, The Vancouver Sun):

“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.

…

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.

…

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.

Another was last year’s suicide of Insp. Claude Savoie, who was under investigation for leaking information to a Montreal drug kingpin.

“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.””

”

(October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted in the above, in early February 1994 Inkster planned to discuss “with his replacement as commissioner and the world body’s executive” about the prospect of staying on as Interpol president.

As indicated above, in February 1994 when Prime Minister Chretien announced Commissioner Inkster’s retirement from the RCMP, I was under forced psychiatric committal at FPI – the British Columbia Forensic Psychiatric Institute – that suppressed my political activism.

But back in November 1992 when Inkster first ascended to the Interpol’s helm, there already was an intriguing facet that may have had relevance to my political activism:

“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. ¹⁷⁶

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? ¹⁷⁷ That had to be the result of some deal from Mr. Mulroney.

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, which had recently ended with the failure of the Charlottetown accord in a national referendum (an accord and failure previously discussed in the context of the role of David Cameron, husband of Stevie Cameron, in the Diane Wilhelmy affair).”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In short, as above, Inkster was “acclaimed” Interpol president when the only other candidate, representing China, withdrew in his favor; moreover, it took place on the same day – November 10, 1992 – when I happened to send out my first press releases to the media, criticising Prime Minister Mulroney’s leadership and conduct.

In relation to this history quoted above, in my blog post in May 2009 I reviewed the start of my political activism in November 1992 – in the context of relevant Canadian politics around that time, namely the transition from the era of Brian Mulroney’s Tories in power to that of Jean Chretien’s Liberals in government.

I quoted from one of my first press releases, sent out on the day when RCMP Commissioner Inkster became Interpol president, to demonstrate the matters of my pursue starting my activism on Canadian politics in November 1992:

“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, I stated that a cabinet restructuring proposed by Mr. Mulroney should not be the priority but rather the priority was Mulroney’s fitness as prime minister, 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: ¹⁷⁸

“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.”

”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The substance of the above excerpt from one of my first press releases dated November 10, 1992, can be summarized as the following two topics:

A) criticising Mulroney’s leadership as the prime minister, expressing support for British Columbia Member of Parliament Stan Wilbee’s call for a Tory party leadership review, and demanding other B.C. Tory MPs’ support for Wilbee; and,

B) criticising the recent Charlottetown constitutional reform “fiasco”, and demanding that Mr. Joe Clark – responsible for constitutional affairs as noted in Part 2 of my current review – give a satisfactory account for the damages caused by the Tory government’s latest constitutional adventure.

In my May 2009 post I also noted that, in addition to my first press releases coinciding with RCMP Commissioner Inkster’s being acclaimed Interpol president, three days later on November 13 Prime Minister Mulroney appointed Justice John C. Major to the Supreme Court of Canada; Justice Major had been a lawyer in the law firm headed by Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere, was a friend of Karlheinz Schreiber who had helped Mulroney defeat Joe Clark in 1983 to become Tory leader, and happened to have the same annual birthday as my father:

“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).”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

By 2009 when I reviewed the above history, the installations of Mr. Inkster at the helm of the Interpol and Mr. Major at the Supreme Court of Canada back in November 1992 very much looked like crucial measures by Prime Minister Mulroney to protect his rule and his legacy.

Thus, in hindsight it wasn’t surprising that, despite my efforts communicating to and interacting with the media in November 1992 and afterwards, no changes happened directly as a result of my activism; but that might not matter as much, given the disastrous defeat the Tories soon suffered in the next election:

“History as it happened has been that Mulroney’s leadership never became an issue of debate within the ruling Progressive Conservative party, though a few short months later in February 1993 Mulroney announced his resignation to take place in June; no accounting of the party’s constitutional policy was ever done, or if it mattered, as in the coming election the party was nearly wiped out.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In 2009 I cited the example of interacting with BCTV after sending the earlier-quoted press release to the media venue, that my efforts brought to their attention the leadership politics going on in British Columbia within Mulroney’s party:

“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, ¹⁷⁹ 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.

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.^{180, 181}”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As recalled above, I was told by BCTV that it sent a TV crew to a B.C. Tory caucus meeting in Capital Ottawa after being alerted by me of its potential importance; the meeting outcome was encouraging but was not as great as I had suggested it might be, and the TV network never reported it.

The encouraging outcome from that B.C. Tory caucus meeting, which to me partially validated my active efforts, came in the caucus’s rejection of Wilbee’s offer to resign his caucus chair position as recalled above, and also in Dr. Wilbee’s being able to launch a new parliamentary project in his capacities as a medical doctor and the chair of the House of Commons subcommittee on health issues.

Wilbee had been requested to quit his B.C. caucus chair position by B.C. MP Kim Campbell, at the time Justice Minister; even though the caucus let him keep the chair position, as a compromise Wilbee then refrained from further criticising Mulroney’s leadership; however another B.C. Tory MP, Al Horning, took over the role of doing so:

“Immediately, Kim Campbell, MP for B.C. Vancouver Centre, requested Wilbee to resign his B.C. caucus chair position for the reason that Wilbee’s view on leadership did not represent other B.C. caucus members. ¹⁸³

But then the November 17 B.C. caucus meeting rejected Wilbee’s offer to resign as caucus chair; after that, Wilbee no longer called for a leadership review and would only state that Mulroney was unpopular in Western Canada but was better than leaders of the other parties: ¹⁸⁴

“He is unpopular in the West, but once you get into an election campaign, where people start to compare leaders, I think that he comes out far and away above the rest.”

Wilbee said the above on January 31, 1993 after a national caucus meeting in which all were read “the riot act” not to speculate on leadership, by Mulroney personally. ¹⁸⁵

But before that, in early January there was a cabinet shuffle and Joe Clark indeed kept his constitutional affairs job (and was given a new cabinet-committee position), and the press wondered why he was staying on a “nothing job”; Kim Campbell got the best “plums” to become defence minister and veterans affairs minister. ¹⁸⁶

Also before that on January 18, Al Horning, Tory MP for B.C. Okanagan Centre (Kelowna), who earlier had praised Mulroney (“still head and shoulders ahead of” other party leaders) in a way similar to what Wilbee now did, took over as the only Tory MP to publicly challenge Mulroney, saying Mulroney should step down and predicting so. ¹⁸⁷”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, another encouraging sign in late 1992-early 1993 that I viewed as partial validation of my active efforts was Joe Clark’s being kept at his Constitutional Affairs Minister position in a cabinet shuffle by Prime Minister Mulroney in January 1993 – when the Charlottetown Constitutional Accord had just been defeated in a national referendum on October 26, 1992 as mentioned in the context of the Diane Wilhelmy Affair in Part 2 of my current review.

The situation then persisted in January 1993 as more Tory MPs, not just in British Columbia, asked Mulroney to make his future leadership intention clear, though not openly opposing his staying as the leader:

“The discontent was spreading in January before it was gagged by Mulroney at month’s end, as a The Vancouver Sun article, “Minority dreaming of a Blue heaven after purge-a-Tory”, quoted Tory House leader Harvie Andre as stating on January 25 that there was a minority in the party and among the MPs who wanted Mulroney to step down: ¹⁸⁸

““There is no grassroots sense that the leader must go, but they all read polls too and certain people are undoubtedly worried about whether we can win or not,” Andre said in an interview Monday.

”However, I don’t think that’s anywhere near the majority, that’s a minority at this point.”

Andre adds that given Mulroney’s unpopularity and the government’s standing in the polls, the prime minister is no doubt contemplating his future.

”Goodness knows, he’d be inhuman if he weren’t thinking about it.””

The news article reported that a dozen Tory MPs during a caucus meeting over the weekend actively called for Mulroney to make his intention clear – though apparently in early 1993 as in late 1992 only one Tory MP (in each case from B.C.) openly challenged Mulroney’s staying as leader.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Mulroney continued to display the intent and the enthusiasm to lead and win another election; then in late February 1993, major changes suddenly happened – even though there is no clear evidence that my activism had direct effects on them – in the form of retirement/resignation announcements by Joe Clark on February 20 and then by Brian Mulroney on February 24:

“His warning to Tory MPs apparently worked, Mulroney became feisty and fiery during much of February, predicting a third-term majority under his leadership, calling it “triple crown” and taunting opposition leader Jean Chretien with it in the House of Commons. ¹⁸⁹

On February 20, just one day after Mulroney said he would seek re-nomination of MP candidacy in his riding, Mulroney’s long-time leadership rival Joe Clark, a former prime minister originally from Alberta, announced he would retire by the next election but in the meantime would continue with constitutional affairs – he had been hoping to negotiate a self-government accord for the Metis people. ¹⁹⁰

On February 24, Brian Mulroney announced his intent to step down in June after a new leader was chosen.

Stan Wilbee immediately resumed his criticism, stating Mulroney “has become a lightning rod for everything that’s bad”, and, “Sometimes you have to start with a clean sheet”; as well, Kim Campbell confirmed that she had been harbouring leadership ambition while Mulroney pondered his future: ¹⁹¹

“People have approached me and my staff offering support. My position is that there wasn’t a campaign until the prime minister made a decision to retire”.

”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, following Mulroney’s announcement of resignation to take effect in June, B.C. Tory MP Stan Wilbee immediately resumed his criticism of Mulroney’s leadership – in words even more critical and frank than before.

After Clark’s retirement announcement, something happened that I considered as another partial validation of my activism; the former prime minister and constitutional affairs minister, and his wife Maureen McTeer, soon became professors at my alma mater of graduate study, the University of California, Berkeley – a university known for its reputation of left-wing politics:

“Despite “attractive” private-sector job offers, and turning down Mulroney’s offer for him to become Canadian ambassador to the U.S., Mr. Clark (who was still an MP) and wife Maureen McTeer soon became professors at the University of California, Berkeley – my alma mater of graduate study as previously mentioned in the context of author Chalmers Johnson – with Mr. Clark at the same political science faculty Dr. Johnson had been in and Mrs. Clark joining the public health faculty; within a few short months an election-defeated Campbell would join Clark in the academic world, going to teach at Harvard University. ¹⁹⁹”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, later after losing the election – in October 1993 – to Jean Chretien, Kim Campbell also joined the academia, teaching at Harvard University.

I remarked in the above May 2009 post, that in the end Kim Campbell was “the biggest winner” as well as “the biggest loser” from the sudden major political changes, becoming the first female Canadian prime minister but then suffering a historically worst electoral loss, with even her own parliamentary seat swept away in a wave of advances by ethnic minorities in Canadian politics:

“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 ¹⁹² – a real “triple crown” – but she would also suffer the worst electoral defeat in Canadian history at the hand of the Chretien Liberals.

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. ¹⁹³”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Succeeding Mulroney in June 1993, Campbell relied on many of the political figures who had helped Mulroney’s ascent to power, including Frank Moores and others with links to the scandals of the Mulroney era, such as Peter White of the “Richard Grise affair ”, for her election campaign:

“For the core of her campaign team Campbell used many of the controversial figures who had helped Mulroney win his 1983 leadership, persons such as Frank Moores, who as discussed in previous Notes had served on the Air Canada board and whose role in the 1988 Airbus purchase had been questioned by the media, Guy Charbonneau, Tory senator and a known central figure dealing with money in Mulroney’s political circle, David Angus, another Mulroney appointee on the Air Canada board who had also provided Tory party funds for Mulroney family’s expenses exposed during the 1987 “Guccigate” publicity, and Peter White, a Conrad Black associate who had had a hand in the Richard Grise affair as Mulroney’s principal secretary in 1989 – a scandal regarding possible RCMP political bias in favour of Mulroney at the time of the 1988 election. ¹⁹⁵ ”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Stan Wilbee, within the Tory party a leading critic of Mulroney’s leadership, also lost in the election; and he pinned the blame on Mulroney and on Campbell’s having “inherited” Mulroney’s old political associates, as I remarked in Part 7 of my 2009 article, dated July 23:

“But Wilbee’s willingness to take open stands opposite Mulroney’s wasn’t enough to save him later from the nationwide tide sweeping away the Tories during the 1993 election, when he would come in third in his B.C. Delta riding behind Reform party’s John Cummins and Liberal party’s Karen Morgan; Wilbee placed the blame for his and the Progressive Conservative party’s election losses at Mulroney, and at “Mulroney’s campaign team” Kim Campbell inherited: ²⁸²

“She started off well but one of her problems was she inherited Mulroney’s campaign team”.

”

(“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)”, July 23, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

A reason that Campbell “inherited Mulroney’s campaign team” as pointed out by Wilbee in the above, was likely because – according to revelations by author Murray Dobbin in a 1993 book entitled, “The politics of Kim Campbell: from school trustee to Prime Minister” – Prime Minister Mulroney had secretly begun to cultivate Campbell as his successor, in an arrangement between them, since no later than early December 1992:

“According to author Murray Dobbin, no later than in early December 1992 Kim Campbell had actually made a ‘secret’ arrangement with Mulroney to succeed him, while Canadians were in the dark about whether Mulroney would leave: ¹⁹⁷

“When Brian Mulroney met in early December 1992 with his Quebec lieutenant Marcel Masse… Mulroney asked Masse to take on the task of chaperoning Campbell around Quebec and organizing a few private dinners to introduce her to key business people, journalists, artists and other opinion makers. Masse agreed. And Campbell’s silent run for the leadership was underway.”

“… at a time when Canadians were still wondering whether Brian Mulroney would really resign, the man himself was already preparing Campbell for the crown and offering her the entire palace entourage. Masse would not only organize a series of private dinners for Campbell, but he would bring with him to Campbell’s side the entire organizing team that had helped Mulroney win the leadership of the Tory party.”

”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

To me that was quite intriguing, i.e., the timing of early December 1992 when Mulroney began to cultivate Campbell as his successor could be a significant validation that my activism had some effects.

On November 30, i.e., the day before early December, I had faxed my press releases – with two dated November 10 and another dated November 20 – to Campbell’s MP constituency office in her Vancouver riding, in which I happened to be a resident; later that same day two RCMP officers, one of them introducing himself as Sergeant Brian Cotton, arrived at my apartment and the suppression of my political activism began:

“It turned out that in the morning of November 30 I had faxed several previous press releases – attached to a cover note – to the local constituency office of MP Kim Campbell in whose riding I was a resident, and in the afternoon two RCMP officers, one of whom introducing himself as Sgt. Brian Cotton, a detective from the UBC detachment, were in my city apartment to take me to UBC Hospital for a psychiatric assessment (and committal), citing something related to my prior dispute with my former employer UBC and the RCMP (a lawsuit by me had been mentioned at the start of the above-mentioned press release) as well as concern with my persistent communications with the CBC.

To the hospital, Sgt. Brian Cotton accused me of having “paranoid ideation”, and some UBC Hospital psychiatrists then determined my thinking as “delusional” and of “persecutory type”. But as everyone can read a copy of my fax received by Kim Campbell’s local MP office got into the hand of the RCMP on that same day – and not even by fax as there isn’t a second fax-mark line on this RCMP copy.

Police simply would not act this closely and quickly on a non-emergency mental-health case in apparent disregard for proper rules or conflict of interest: the officers were outside their normal jurisdiction area of UBC, the RCMP and UBC were defendants in a civil lawsuit by me over that prior dispute, and Sgt. Brian Cotton also rejected my response of going to the nearby Vancouver General Hospital for a ‘neutral’ assessment, citing pre-arrangement at UBC.

…

Within three weeks a mental-health review panel ordered my release. But in mid-January 1993 (days before Tory MP Al Horning came out saying Mulroney should step down), I was again under psychiatric committal – this time by Vancouver Police action – and again within a few weeks I was released by a review panel, in mid-February with Brian Mulroney still talking about winning a third majority.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted earlier when first discussing my old press releases, many years later on October 1, 2003, the RCMP provided a copy in a personal-information disclosure to me; and as above, the RCMP copy showed that a copy of my fax received by Campbell’s MP office in Vancouver on November 30, 1992, went into the hands of the RCMP on that same day.

Also as told above, Sgt. Brian Cotton took me to the hospital of the University of British Columbia for a psychiatric assessment, where I was then committed, partly because of a prior dispute I had with the university involving the RCMP.

I had been a UBC faculty member. But Ms. Campbell had a deeper root there as a UBC graduate, law graduate and former faculty member, and by that time was the federal justice minister. (“The Right Honourable Kim Campbell: From Brock Hall to Parliament Hill”, by Veronika Bondarenko, January 19, 2015, The Ubyssey)

Upon reviewing the relevant history in the late 1992 and early 1993 – selectively quoted so far – that included the start of my political activism critical of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership, the ascent of then RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster to the Interpol presidency and a Chinese facet to his achieving it unopposed, the promotion of Justice John Major to the Supreme Court of Canada and his relationships to Karlheinz Schreiber and Bruce Verchere, the RCMP-led suppression of my political activism, and Prime Minister Mulroney’s sudden resignation less than three months later, I commented in regard to the RCMP’s and Commissioner Inkster’s possible political roles at the time:

“To refer here to this part of history of personal efforts to help bring down Mr. Mulroney is not to accuse then RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster of having-forged/forging deals with the devils, but to show that the RCMP played political roles – in my personal experience in particular.”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

That brief period of history, in particular what went on behind the scenes in the suppression of my political activism, is of special relevance and importance to me, and more generally of significance as an integral part of Canadian history – especially relating to the departure of then Prime Minister Mulroney, and also to Canada’s leading role in international policing.

When Inkster was acclaimed Interpol president in November 1992, some in the media, also citing opinions within the RCMP, recalled historical controversies about the Interpol and its presidency, mainly their links to authoritarianism and corruption, here as I remarked in May 2009:

“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. ¹⁷³”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

It was “a great honour for Canada” and for the RCMP. However, from the viewpoints of those expressing reservations about the Interpol as above, later Inkster’s premature departure from its presidency in September 1994 could easily be shrugged off, or even explained as ‘better off’.

But the real truth matters, especially when it comes to about Canada’s history in international policing.

Interestingly, and in an ironic sense fortunately, history can sometime repeat and in a way more in the open such that the shrouded past may be forced to surface as well.

Practically an exact 24 years after ceding to Canada’s Norman Inkster without a contest, on November 9-10, 1016, a candidate of the People’s Republic of China, Vice Minister of Public Security Meng Hongwei, was elected Interpol president. (“China’s Meng Hongwei elected President of INTERPOL”, November 10, 2016, INTERPOL)

Mr. Meng Hongwei was the first Chinese person to become president of the International Criminal Police Organization, the second-largest international organization after the United Nations; also elected was Mr. Alexander Prokopchuk, a candidate of Russia, as vice president – at a time when American business tycoon Donald Trump had just been elected President of the United States:

“Donald Trump isn’t the only president-elect sparking controversy this week. The International Criminal Police Organization elected a former Chinese paramilitary police force deputy as its president, and many human rights observers are up in arms about it.

Interpol announced the election results for its new chief, China’s Vice Minister for Public Security Meng Hongwei, on Twitter on Thursday. Meng is the first Chinese official to take the helm of the organization. Hongwei’s career history, and his country’s questionable human rights and policing record, have already drawn criticisms from day one.

…

Before Meng became vice minister since 2004, he was deputy director of the armed police forces Beijing would send to quell unrest in Tibet, Xinjiang, and other unstable outskirts of China.

…

Interpol’s president is primarily a symbolic figurehead, but Meng can still drive the organization’s strategy and set guidance for its general assembly body. Interpol also has a secretary general; that job currently is held by Jürgen Stock, who chairs the organization’s executive committee. With 190 members, Interpol is the second-largest international organization after the U.N.

And just to round things out, Interpol also elected a Russian official, Maj. Gen. Alexander Prokopchuk, as its vice president on Thursday. Russia, like China, isn’t known for having a particularly fair and just police force. Prokopchuk has been with Russia’s Interior Ministry since 2003.”

(“China and Russia Take the Helm of Interpol”, by Robbie Gramer, November 10, 2016, Foreign Policy)

Understandably, as noted above, human rights observers were concerned, especially since Mr. Meng had served as a deputy director of China’s armed police forces responsible for suppressing unrests.

Moreover, Meng’s Chinese public security job placed Communist Party politics above other regards, and his government ministry was in charge of cracking down on political dissent, such as arresting the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo:

“The day-to-day operations of Interpol are run by the secretary general, Jurgen Stock, who is from Germany. From 2000 to 2014, Interpol’s secretary general was an American.

…

Mr. Meng is a top official in the world’s biggest internal security force, tasked with clamping down on dissent and maintaining stability in an authoritarian, one-party state. Mr. Meng’s ministry arrests and interrogates political dissidents like the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, rounds up suspected separatists in restive areas such as Xinjiang, and arrests people protesting against environmental pollution or official corruption.

Mr. Meng, who turns 63 this month, is deeply immersed in Communist Party politics, in contrast with most police officials in Western nations, who are expected to be apolitical on the job.

In his public statements, Mr. Meng has made it clear that he places the politics of the Communist Party above any other considerations, as would be expected of any senior Chinese official. Speaking in October 2014, Mr. Meng told police officers preparing to go to Syria to put “politics first, party organization first and ideological thinking first.””

(“Interpol Names Chinese Police Official as Its New President”, by Michael Forsythe, November 10, 2016, The New York Times)

As described above, most police officials in Western nations were “expected to be apolitical” on the job, but not Mr. Meng or “any senior Chinese official”.

However, as mentioned earlier, at the time of Mr. Inkster’s ascent to the Interpol presidency there had previously been questions in the Canadian media, in particular regarding the “Richard Grise affair”, about whether the RCMP – the federal police in a Western nation – had political biases in favor of then Prime Minister Mulroney.

In other words, in reality the Western police officials were not always “apolitical”.

In a more positive light, Meng’s election was expected to give international credibility to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive:

“Li Wei, head of the anti-terrorism centre at China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said: “As the head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei will deepen the fight against transnational crime.”

Since taking power in 2012, China’s President Xi Jinping has launched a sweeping crackdown on corruption, punishing more than a million officials. But critics say the anti-graft drive is merely a way for Xi to take down his political enemies.

China has worked through Interpol to bring back officials it says fled overseas and last year issued 100 “red notices”, a type of international arrest warrant.

It says about a third have been returned to China, but many western countries are wary of complying with extradition requests given China’s harsh treatment of prisoners, use of the death penalty for economic crimes and a lack of concrete evidence.

Most officials on the list had fled to the US or Canada, and China does not have extradition treaties with either country. But in a surprise move in September, Canada announced it would start negotiating a treaty.

Li said: “We see people who China has issued red notices for are still very active in Europe.” With Meng at the head of Interpol “there will be closer cooperation between countries in fighting crime,” he added.”

(“New Interpol head is Chinese former deputy head of paramilitary police force”, by Benjamin Haas, November 10, 2016, The Guardian)

As reported above, from 2013 to 2016 over a million Chinese officials had been punished in President Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, and in 2015 China had issued 100 “red notices”, a type of international warrant, through the Interpol.

Especially worth noting is that most of these corrupt Chinese officials wanted by the Interpol had fled to the U.S. or Canada, and it wasn’t until September 2016 – only two months before Meng’s ascent to the Interpol helm – that the Canadian government announced it would negotiate an extradition treaty with China.

Most significantly, Mr. Meng’s taking the helm at the Interpol highlighted the integration of Chinese policing with international policing, as well as China’s growing importance in that international community, with the 2017 Interpol general assembly to be held in Beijing:

““We currently face some of the most serious global public security challenges since World War II,” Mr. Meng said in a statement following his selection at an annual meeting of the group in Bali, Indonesia. “Interpol, guided by the best set of principles and mechanism to date, has made a significant contribution to promoting international police cooperation.”

Next year’s general assembly will be in Beijing.

…

Lu Kang, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters on Thursday that China had expressed its “heartfelt thanks” to Interpol member states for Mr. Meng’s election. “China will continue to support Interpol with all its strength and will continue to support Interpol’s work, to deepen cooperation with member states on cracking down on multinational crimes, and to build a good and safe environment for prosperity and development for every country of the world.””

(Michael Forsythe, November 10, 2016, The New York Times)

The future appeared bright for Mr. Meng at the Interpol, just as it had appeared for Mr. Inkster in November 1992.

Where history repeated was not so much in their elections but in what turned out to be their abnormally brief tenures.

Less than two years later in September-October 2018, Meng was detained in China for corruption and resigned his Interpol position:

“The head of Interpol, who vanished after taking a flight to Beijing, is being held and investigated for corruption, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security said in a statement Monday.

Meng Hongwei, who also was a vice minister of public security in China, has been accused by the Chinese government of accepting bribes and committing unspecified other crimes.

“(Meng) insisted on taking the wrong path and had only himself to blame (for his downfall),” the country’s top law enforcement official, Zhao Kezhi, was quoted as saying in the statement.

Authorities had previously remained tight-lipped about the whereabouts of Meng, following his sudden disappearance last month after he flew from France to China.

In an earlier statement released on Sunday, the Chinese government said Meng was “under investigation” by the National Supervisory Commission, the country’s top anti-corruption unit, but gave no further details on whether he was in custody or what the charges might be.

Concerns over Meng’s whereabouts were first raised by wife, Grace, who reported him missing to French authorities in the city of Lyon, where the couple live, last Thursday.

…

In a separate development, Interpol said it had received Meng’s resignation from the international police agency with “immediate effect” according to statement posted Sunday. It made no mention of the former president’s whereabouts or the Chinese investigation.”

(“Head of Interpol Meng Hongwei accused of corruption, Chinese government says”, by Ben Westcott and Steven Jiang, October 8, 2018, CNN)

In March 2019, the Chinese authorities announced that Meng would face criminal charges:

“Meng Hongwei, the former Chinese head of Interpol, will be prosecuted in his home country for allegedly taking bribes, China’s Communist Party says.

He has also been expelled from the party and stripped of all government positions, according to the party’s watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

…

Mr Meng is said to have abused his position for personal gain, misusing state funds to finance his family’s “extravagant lifestyle” and disregarding Communist Party principles.

These charges amount to “serious violation of law and discipline”, according to the CCDI, which said it had referred the case to state prosecutors.”

(“Meng Hongwei: China to prosecute former Interpol chief”, March 27, 2019, BBC News)

Recently in June, Meng pleaded guilty, in court, of taking over $2 million in bribes:

“Former Interpol President Meng Hongwei has pleaded guilty to accepting more than $2 million in bribes and expressed regret for his crime, China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily reported Thursday.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of China’s Communist Party charged Hongwei with abusing his posts within the Communist Party between 2005 and 2017 to garner special benefits, promotions for his wife, and to collect bribes totaling more than 14 million yuan.

…

Before Meng was elected as Interpol’s president in 2016 — the first Chinese person to hold the post — he served as head of the China Coast Guard and as vice-minister of public security, a position he kept until his arrest.

…

As NPR’s Bill Chappell reported, “He’s now stripped of that role, which he had gained under Zhou Yongkang, the former security czar who is now serving life in prison on bribery charges, snared in President Xi’s anti-corruption campaign.””

(“Former Interpol President Pleads Guilty To Bribery In Chinese Court”, by Vannessa Romo, June 20, 2019, National Public Radio)

So, very ironically, the international police leader turned out to be corrupt himself; and some of the concerns expressed in the Canadian media about the Interpol when Inkster ascended to its helm in November 1992 has turned out to be still quite relevant 24 years later.

Or Meng’s downfall could also be due to political conflicts with the Chinese leadership, according to some Western critics:

““Meng’s arrest seems like a powerful demonstration of China’s commitment to rooting out corruption, even when it can cost them the directorship of an important international vehicle,” Dimitar Gueorguiev, who teaches Chinese governance at Syracuse University, told The Guardian.

But critics say the anti-corruption campaign is also used as cover for political purges intended to strengthen Xi’s grip on power. There are hints of a political element in Meng’s detention; when announcing the charges against Meng, Chinese authorities also stressed the need for “absolute loyal political character.” Meng is now being held in a custody system notorious for torture, abuse, and denial of access to lawyers or a fair trial. It is certainly normal for any country to prosecute government officials for corruption; it is not normal to detain them without notice or charge, then thrust them into a system without fair representation or transparency.”

(“Can the Chinese Be Trusted to Lead Global Institutions?”, by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, October 11, 2018, The Atlantic)

Political power conflicts leading to a powerful figure’s downfall can be common in any country. It is also an important facet in my current review about the departure of Inkster from the RCMP and subsequent early departure from the Interpol, that is, soon after formerly Mulroney’s Tory party was trounced in an election and Liberal leader Chretien became the prime minister.

Mr. Meng served only weeks, if not only days, longer than Mr. Inkster at the top of the Interpol, stepping down in October compared to Inkster in September – ahead of the November mark of two full years in both cases.

In any case, without making light of the harsher punishments in law and order routinely handed down by the Chinese authorities compared to punishments by the justice system in a Western democracy, or of the obvious perception of more rampant corruption among Chinese officials than among their Western counterparts, about 24 years earlier Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had been involved in ethically suspect, potentially corrupt and possibly criminal activities, and my political activism criticising his leadership was suppressed forcibly by oppressive means.

Yet, reviewing the Canadian press archives I have barely come across open comments relating Mr. Inkster’s departure to Mr. Mulroney’s, whether back around that earlier time, afterwards, or even during the times of the Airbus Affair and Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

So unsurprisingly, my activism was coercively cast aside, rather easily with the involvements of the RCMP, and the damaging consequences of the suppression and oppression were then ignored.

But Inkster and Meng have not been alone, as Meng Hongwei has not been the only Interpol president officially caught and prosecuted for corruption.

Jackie Selebi, then South African police commissioner and former leading anti-apartheid activist, served at the Interpol’s helm for a little over three years of his 4-year term that began in 2004, was officially arrested and prosecuted in South Africa for “corruption, fraud, racketeering”, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison; related health problems led to Selebi’s death in January 2015 at the age of 64:

“The long saga of trials, prison and parole has ended for disgraced former police chief Jackie Selebi, who died after a long illness on Friday morning.

Selebi would have turned 65 on 7 March.

…

The former head of Interpol started serving a 15-year jail sentence in 2011, after being found guilty of corruption in 2010.

He was released on medical parole from Pretoria Central Prison after serving less than a year of his sentence.

…

In the apartheid-era 1980s, he served in Budapest, Hungary, as a representative of the World Federation of Democratic Youth.

In 1987, he was elected head of the ANC Youth League and was a member of the party’s national executive committee.

…

After the first democratic elections in 1994, he was elected to Parliament.

His stature grew further after he left, in 1995, to serve as the South African permanent representative at the United Nations in Geneva.

Three years later, he was presented with the International Service for Human Rights Award for his chairing of the 54th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, and for the way he presided over a 1997 diplomatic conference on anti-personnel mines in Oslo.

In 1999, Selebi returned to South Africa and took up the post of foreign affairs director-general.

…

It is believed to be his strong performance in this department that prompted former president Thabo Mbeki to ask him to take over the role of police commissioner, despite his having no background in law enforcement.

He stepped into the post in 2000. Two years later, he was made vice president of Interpol’s African region. In 2004, he was elected president of Interpol.

His fall from grace came swiftly. On 10 September 2007, the National Prosecuting Authority issued a warrant of arrest for Selebi for corruption, fraud, racketeering, and defeating the ends if justice.

Within months, Mbeki placed him on an “extended leave of absence”, essentially a suspension, and he resigned his Interpol position.

…

In 2007, Selebi was criticised for responding to concern about South Africa’s rising crime rate with: “What’s all the fuss about crime?”

But it was his friendship with convicted drug dealer Glenn Agliotti that brought about his downfall. In a three-month trial in mid-2010, nearly two years after charges were first laid against him, Selebi was found guilty of corruption and having received money from Agliotti.

…

Ahead of his trial, Selebi told journalists that claims he was corrupt were “garbage, total and unadulterated garbage”.

He famously remarked of Agliotti that “he is my friend, finish and klaar”.

Agliotti testified during the trial that he had handed him envelopes stuffed with cash and bought handbags for Selebi’s wife.”

(“Jackie Selebi: A spectacular fall from grace”, January 23, 2015, News24)

As told above, Mr. Selebi took cash in envelopes from a convicted drug dealer, Glenn Agliotti whom he called a “friend” – in a manner reminiscent of Mr. Mulroney’s taking cash in envelopes from Karlheinz Schreiber who was later convicted of fraud in Germany.

The trial of Jackie Selebi started in October 2009, and the guilty verdict was delivered at the beginning of July 2010. (“Ousted South African police chief’s corruption trial begins”, by David Smith, October 5, 2009, and, “Former South Africa police chief convicted of taking bribes”, by David Smith, July 2, 2010, The Guardian)

The time scheduling made that South African justice process overlap with, but run somewhat behind, the Canadian public inquiry on the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair: as in Part 2 of my current article, that inquiry’s hearings had taken place by mid-June 2009 when they were reviewed in the press by Mulroney’s former chief of staff Norman Spector, and Justice Jeffrey Oliphant’s report was published in May 2010.

Cash given Selebi by Agliotti included an amount for an Interpol dinner related to Selebi’s election to its presidency, and was handed over at a meeting of the two – much like between Mulroney and Schreiber:

“Another way in which Selebi allegedly gained financially was when he was up for the presidency of Interpol. He was to attend an Interpol dinner in France, to rally votes, in 2004.

Selebi needed money and “I was happy to sponsor this dinner,” said Agliotti. “We worked out a figure of R30 000 and I handed it over in cash at Europa coffee shop in Sandton.” Selebi was soon after elected as head of Interpol.”

(“Agliotti: ‘I paid Selebi R1-million’”, by Adriaan Basson and Ilham Rawoot, October 6, 2009, Mail & Guardian)

Through drug dealer Glenn Agliotti as the intermediary, Jackie Selebi also received bribes from South African mining tycoon Brett Kebble:

“Agliotti told the court that his payments to Selebi started with small amounts in envelopes and escalated to large amounts being “packed” into thick envelopes and collected by Selebi from his former fiancée, Dianne Muller’s, Midrand office.

…

When slain mining magnate Brett Kebble and his business partners wanted to meet Selebi, Agliotti was hesitant to expose his source to them.

“I didn’t want them to have easy access to the accused because then they would no longer need me or my services.”

Agliotti also explained the racket allegedly set up to pay Selebi. He bought a shelf company, called Spring Lights 6, from Muller’s father, Martin Flint, and used it to pocket the payments from the Kebble companies, mainly JCI and CMMS.

Agliotti also testified how he convinced the Kebbles to replace their head of security, Paul Stemmet, with Clint Nassif, another key state witness, who was convicted of drug dealing in 2007.

Agliotti estimates that the Kebbles deposited a total of R26-million to Spring Lights 6, of which he used R2-million as cash pay-outs.”

(Adriaan Basson and Ilham Rawoot, October 6, 2009, Mail & Guardian)

The tales, told by news stories reviewed above, of the falls from grace of onetime Interpol presidents Meng Hongwei and Jackie Selebi showed that corruption at the helm of international policing was by no means isolated. They also served to demonstrate that the shrouded Canadian past involving Mulroney, Schreiber and Inkster had most likely not been accidental, either.

But the sobering reality has been that, despite their abnormally short stints at the Interpol’s helm, the times of Mr. Inkster, Mr. Selebi and Mr. Meng were not the worst for the Interpol in its nearly century-long history.

Established in 1923, the international criminal police organization was a part of the German Nazi regime for a number of years during the 1930s and 1940s, beginning in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria:

“The International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL, helps police departments around the world communicate with each other. It was established in 1923 at a meeting of the International Police Congress.

And, during World War II, it was a part of the Nazi war machine.

During the Anschluss of 1938, when Germany effectively conquered Austria, all Austrian police and military forces were absorbed by the Nazi party–and Interpol, which was headquartered in Vienna, came right along. The United States, encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover (who was in charge of the FBI at that time), joined Interpol in 1938–two weeks after the Nazis installed Otto Steinhäusl, an SS officer, as Interpol’s president.

Although Hitler promised to maintain the “strictly nonpolitical character” of Interpol’s mission statement, it was effectively absorbed as an arm of the Nazi regime–with Nazi leaders, Nazi money, and Nazi priorities. In fact, its list of presidents during that era includes prominent Nazis such as Otto Steinhäusl, Arthur Nebe, and the infamous Reinhard Heydrich–the latter of whom was one of the architects of the Holocaust.”

(“When the Nazis Ran Interpol”, by Jewniverse, May 17, 2012, Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

In particular as above, one of the Nazi-era presidents of the Interpol was Reinhard Heydrich, “one of the architects of the Holocaust”.

Also as above, encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI, i.e., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States joined Interpol in 1938 soon after Nazi Germany had conquered Austria and Otto Steinhäusl, a Nazi member, had been installed as Interpol’s president.

In March 1938 to install Steinhäusl, then head of the Vienna Police and a tuberculosis sufferer, at the Interpol, at the time called the International Criminal Police Commission, or ICPC,  the German Nazis demanded the resignation of the sitting president Michael Skubl and then imprisoned him:

“On March 12, 1938, German troops invaded Austria. At noon that day, the President of the ICPC, Michael Skubl, was called to the building of the Austrian federal chancellery where he was told that Himmler demanded his resignation. Skubl was arrested and imprisoned until he was freed by Allied Forces in 1945 …With the annexation of Austria, nothing would prevent the Nazis from taking full control of the ICPC. By implication of the appointment procedure of the ICPC presidency decided upon in London, the Nazi-approved President of the police at Vienna, Otto Steinhäusl, became the new ICPC President in April 1938. Not only was Steinhäusl’s loyalty to Nazi Germany secure, the Germans also reckoned he would be but an interim figure, as he was known to suffer from tuberculosis … The first meeting under Steinhäusl’s Presidency, in Bucharest in 1938, produced only one unanimous decision: that the next meeting was to be held in Berlin. …”

(“The Logic of Nazification: The Case of the International Criminal Police Commission (‘Interpol’)”, by Mathieu Deflem, Volume 43, Number 1, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Steinhäusl died of tuberculosis in June 1940. By no later than August of that year Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the German Security Police, became the ‘elected’ president of the Interpol through manipulated vote counting, and one of Heydrich’s first presidential decisions was to move the Interpol headquarters to the German capital of Berlin:

“… In June 1940, the FBI received an ICPC circular letter with the notice that Reinhard Heydrich, the Chief of the German Security Police, had accepted the presidency of the Commission …

…

Following the death of Steinhäusl in June 1940, Secretary General Dressler sent a report to all ICPC members which specified that he and other police, including Nazi officials Nebe and Zindel, had decided “to request the Chief of the German Security Police” to accept the Presidency of the ICPC …. Reportedly, twenty-seven police officials representing 15 states consented with the suggestion … Because this was less than two-thirds of the total ICPC membership, the countries that could not be addressed were not counted and those that had abstained were considered as not voting against the motion, so that, the Nazi-controlled ICPC leadership reasoned, the necessary majority was reached. In a circular letter of August 24, 1940, Reinhard Heydrich declared–in a manner all too characteristically familiar of Nazi officialdom–that he had been informed that his candidacy as ICPC Presidency had “passed unanimously.” Heydrich continued that he would “lead the Commission into a new and successful future” and that the ICPC headquarters would “from now on be located in Berlin” …”

(“The Logic of Nazification: The Case of the International Criminal Police Commission (‘Interpol’)”, by Mathieu Deflem, Volume 43, Number 1, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Back in 1938 not long after the annexation of Austria, the Nazis launched a campaign of mass violence against Jews in Germany and Austria; as a top Nazi security leader, Heydrich was responsible for its start in a widespread event known as “Kristallnacht”, or Crystal Night, a precursor to the Holocaust, on the night of November 9-10, destroying Jewish buildings and businesses:

“At 1:20 a.m. on Nov. 10, 1938, Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal Nazi security boss, sent an urgent telegram to German police nationwide.

The subject was: “Measures against Jews tonight.”

“Places of business and apartments belonging to Jews may be destroyed but not looted,” he wrote. “Non-Jewish businesses are [to be] completely protected against damage … the demonstrations are not to be prevented by the Police.”

“As many Jews in all districts — especially the rich — as can be accommodated in existing prisons are to be arrested,” Heydrich added.

“For the time being only healthy male Jews, who are not too old, are to be detained,” he instructed. “After the detentions have been carried out the appropriate concentration camps are to be contacted immediately for the prompt accommodation of the Jews in the camps.”

These were the official Nazi orders for the wave of savage anti-Semitic attacks that became known as Kristallnacht — Crystal Night, the night of the shattered glass. It was so called because broken glass littered the streets of many German and Austrian cities. The attacks are widely seen as a violent turning point in what would become the Holocaust.

It was a massive upheaval across Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia that killed scores of Jews and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses. In total, 267 synagogues were destroyed. Torahs were burned. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated.

Houses were ransacked, often by neighbors and acquaintances of the victims.”

(“Kristallnacht: The night Nazis killed Jews and destroyed synagogues 80 years before Pittsburgh”, by Michael E. Ruane, October 30, 2018, Washington Post)

As mentioned above, Kristallnacht also took place in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. That region had been annexed by Nazi Germany in September. (“Sept. 30, 1938 | Hitler Granted the Sudentenland by Britain, France and Italy”, by The Learning Network, September 30, 2011, The New York Times)

In light of this history of Nazi anti-Jewish violence, it is worth noting that, very ironically at the Interpol’s helm, both the acclamation of Norman Inkster in 1992 and the election of Meng Hongwei 24 years later fell on an anniversary of Kristallnacht.

In general, a new Interpol president was elected during an annual general assembly, the time of which varied in the later part of the year, such as in October when Jackie Selebi was chosen in 2004. (“New INTERPOL President chosen by General Assembly”, October 8, 2004, INTERPOL)

After Kristallnacht and following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, at Heydrich’s order Nazi death squads were formed and began physically killing Jews and Communist party officials, resulting in the deaths of over a million Jews in two years:

“The Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing efforts did not begin as a specific plan to gas Jews and others in concentration camps, but rather evolved over time, beginning with systematic persecution aimed in part at encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany to other countries. It grew from spontaneous murders to planned massacres of Jewish communities, to the establishment of an industrial apparatus for the efficient, wholesale slaughter of a people.

…

Kristallnacht marked the transition of the Nazi policy vis-a-vis Jews from social ostracism, abrogation of legal rights and economic boycotts, to organized physical violence including murder. As such, some consider the November ‘38 pogrom as marking the actual beginning of the Holocaust – the date when anti-Jewish persecution in Germany began moving toward genocide.

Mass killings of Jews became commonplace following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Death squads called Einsatzgruppen, formed at the order of Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Reich Main Security Office at the time, were tasked with murdering Jewish civilians and Communist Party officials with the help of local citizens. Historians estimate that between June 1941 and May 1943, these roaming death squads killed over 1 million Jews.”

(“When Did the Holocaust Begin? A Genesis of Genocide”, February 17, 2014, Haaretz)

As above, Heydrich was also the director of the Reich Main Security Office.

Then in January 1942, Heydrich led the start of planning for the “Final Solution”, that is, the extermination of Jews in Europe, by convening the Wannsee Conference:

“Industrial-scale murder of Jews, known as the Final Solution, was approved by the senior Nazi leadership on January 20, 1942 at the Wannsee Conference, held just outside Berlin. At the meeting, called by Heydrich, he presented the plan to transport Jews from Eastern and Western Europe to extermination camps located in Poland.”

(February 17, 2014, Haaretz)

More accurately, the Wannsee Conference plan called for the estimated 11 million Jews in Europe to be deported to labor camps in “the East” where most would work till their deaths, and the “possible final remnant” would be “treated accordingly” so that any future “Jewish reconstruction” could not happen. The following are two excerpts from a “top secret” Nazi document, the Wannsee Protocol, produced by that conference.

Prior to introducing the “final solution”, the Wannsee Conference document reviewed past “accelerated emigration” of Jews, enforced under Heydrich’s authority since January 1939:

“By order of the Reich Marshal a Reich Central Office for Jewish emigration was set up in January 1939 and the Chief of the Security Police and SD was entrusted with the management. …

…

The aim of all this being that of clearing the German Lebensraum of Jews in a legal way.

All the Offices realized the drawbacks of such enforced accelerated emigration. For the time being they had, however, tolerated it on account of the lack of other possible solutions of the problem.

…

The Jews themselves, or rather their Jewish political organizations financed the emigration. In order to avoid the possibility of the impoverished Jews staying behind, action was taken to make the wealthy Jews finance the evacuation of the needy Jews, this was arranged by imposing a suitable tax, i.e. an emigration tax which was used for the financial arrangements in connection with the emigration of poor Jews, and was worked according to a ladder system.”

(“The Wannsee Protocol (January 20, 1942)”, German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute)

As described above, the Nazi German government had taxed the Jews to obtain the funds to send them abroad on a large scale, regardless of their being wealthy or poor.

The next step, according to the Wannsee Protocol, would be the “final solution”:

“Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.

Approx. 11,000,000 Jews will be involved in this final solution of the European problem…

…

Under proper guidance the Jews are now to be allocated for labor to the East in the course of the final solution. Able-bodied Jews will be taken in large labor columns to these districts for work on roads, separated according to sexes, in the course of which action a great part will undoubtedly be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, as it must undoubtedly consist of the toughest, have to be treated accordingly, as it is the product of natural selection, and would, if liberated, act as a bud cell of a Jewish reconstruction (see historical experience).

In the course of the practical execution of this final settlement of the problem, Europe will be cleaned up from the West to the East. Germany proper, including the protectorate Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first because of reasons of housing and other social-political necessities.

The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, into so-called transit-ghettos from which they will be taken to the East.

SS-Obergruppenfuehrer HEYDRICH went on to say that an important provision for the evacuation as such is the exact definition of the group of persons concerned in the matter.

It is intended not to evacuate Jews of more than 65 years of age but to send them to an old-age-ghetto – Theresienstadt is being considered for this purpose.

…

Through such expedient solution the numerous interventions will be eliminated with one blow.

…”

(German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute)

As shown in the above Wannsee Protocol of January 20, 1942, and earlier in his telegram order to German police nationwide for Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938, at each stage of escalation against the European Jews Reinhard Heydrich not only supervised the initiation and implementation of the Nazi anti-Jewish measures, but methodically engaged in the specifics of their planning and execution.

In Heydrich’s vision, which he had advocated through his writings in the mid-1930s, the cleansing would not be confined to the Jews alone but would also include those racially, socially, politically or intellectually influenced by the Jews:

“The enemies themselves were “eternally the same”: “the Jew, the Freemason, and the politically-oriented cleric.” The “invisible,” submerged, camouflaged ideological wellsprings of these “enemies” lay in the “infectious residue” of “Jewish, liberal and Freemasonic spirit,” modes of thinking (democracy, communism, Christian and liberal individualism) that were outgrowths of allegedly inherited racial characteristics. Only the complete destruction of the “biological sources” of such thinking would eliminate the danger presented by such influences.

Ultimately, “invisible” Jewish opponents were the Jewish people themselves—as the Nazis defined them—and those who “thought like Jews”: Communists, liberals, democrats, champions of minority rights, Freemasons, Christian clerics who opposed the regime, Soviet communists, and the US and British leadership classes who opposed the “natural” expansion of Nazi Germany. To be absolutely safe, the Nazis had to destroy the members of the so-called Jewish race, whose genetic makeup created the basis for such thinking, as well as the Slavic and Asiatic leadership classes, whose heredity incorporated a propensity to follow that Jewish leadership.

Heydrich developed some of these themes in his writings of the mid-1930s and used them to advocate Security Police and SD leadership in “solving the Jewish Question.” …”

(“Reinhard Heydrich: In Depth”, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Prior to the Wannsee Conference, in late 1941 Reinhard Heydrich had been given the additional responsibility of overseeing the Nazi rule in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, then referred to as “the protectorate Bohemia and Moravia” as in the Wannsee Protocol quoted earlier, and treated like a part of the German proper to be of top priority in the cleansing of Jews.

It began on September 27, 1941, when Heydrich became “Reichsprotektor” of Bohemia and Moravia, with the objectives of eliminating local resistance to Nazi German occupation, increasing arms production for the Nazi war operations, and planning for the eventual “Germanization” of Czechoslovakia:

“Exactly 70 years ago, on 27 September 1941, Reinhard Heydrich came to Prague on Hitler’s orders to take up the position of Reichsprotektor. He was 37 years old. At a gathering of Nazi officials several days before his arrival in Prague, he clearly expressed how he wanted to handle the population of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A “final solution” awaited Jews, Roma and others in the death camps, while the Slavs were to be either murdered or Germanized and moved as far east as possible. “The Bohemian-Moravian area must never be left in such a state that the Czechs might be able to claim it as theirs… This space must be German once and for all so the Czech will have no claim to it in the end,” Heydrich said in that speech.

Reinhard Heydrich was one of the direct co-authors of the Holocaust – both of the idea of murdering homosexuals, Jewish people, mentally or physically disabled people, Romani people and others, as well as of the methods for pursuing genocide – death camps, Germanization, and racial/ethnic pogroms. The tragic fate of the Czech and Moravian Jews and Roma began under his rule.

…

Heydrich was sent to Prague for both military-economic and political reasons. After a significant rise in resistance activity and sabotage in 1941, Konstantin von Neurath, then-Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, was sent on medical leave “at his own request” by Hitler. The ambitious SS General Heydrich was sent to Prague to replace him. At the end of July 1941, Heydrich was entrusted with preparing “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.

The other reasons were economic. In addition to the Ruhr district, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had become an important center of the German arms industry during the second year of the war. At the Škoda factories in Plzeň and the Brno-based Zbrojovce armament factory, the Germans had access to some of the highest-performing metalworking shops for arms manufacturing in the world. The Nazis also frequently transferred production from the west of Germany to the Protectorate. One-third of German tanks and 40 % of their light artillery were being produced there at the time.

…

Heydrich’s short-term aim was the liquidation of the domestic resistance for the purpose of “pacifying” the situation in the Protectorate. On the day after his appointment, he announced a state of emergency and immediately took Czechoslovak Prime Minister Alois Eliáš into custody (who was sentenced to death in October for espionage and treason and executed on 19 June 1942). During this period of martial law (the second announced in the Protectorate; the first was announced in June 1939), representatives of the illegal leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the National Defense (Obrany národa), and the Sokol organization were executed between 28 September 1941 and 20 January 1942.

Heydrich gave a speech on solving the “Czech problem” at Černín Palace in Prague on 2 October 1941 that listed the following: deportation to the east, Germanization, and the physical liquidation of all who resisted. In the interim, the majority of the Czech population should be maximally exploited for the war effort.”

(“70th anniversary of Reichsprotektor Heydrich’s rule over Bohemia and Moravia”, September 27, 2011, Romea.cz)

As told above, prior to arriving in Czechoslovakia, “at the end of July 1941” Heydrich had already been “entrusted with” planning for the Final Solution for European Jews; and in Heydrich’s vision of “Germanization”, the eventual fate awaiting other non-Germans in Czechoslovakia would not be that much better than the Jews.

Immediately upon arrival, arresting Czechoslovakian Prime Minister Alois Eliáš and sentencing him to death were an integral part of Heydrich’s crackdown on resistance; Eliáš had had secret involvements in the resistance movement – on one occasion even personally offering poisonous sandwiches to some pro-Nazi journalists, resulting in the death of the most prominent of them:

“Since the first days of occupation a home resistance movement began to be formed. Unfortunately, expectations of some members of the movement concerning their activities were rather naive. Germans were quite different opponent than the Austrian authorities in the period of the First World War. Lots of resistance fighters paid dearly for their experience and lost their lives. It is surprising that the information on the Eliášs involvement in the resistance movement did not leak right in the very beginning. He became a member of so-called Council of Seniors of a military resistance movement group “Defence of the Nation”. The staff of this organization had its seat in the premises of the Presidium of Ministerial Council which was similar institution like the Office of the Government nowadays. The Prime Minister also maintained radio connection with newly formed exile government in London and was trying to follow their instruction. However, it was not always possible as the exile government had rather distorted notion on the everyday life in the protectorate and its policy.

…

At that time Eliáš was also involved in a significant action of the resistance movement – the removal of activist journalist. These collaborationists were received by Eliáš and during the audience they were offered poisonous sandwiches. The most prominent journalist, editor of “České slovo” daily, eventually died of the poisoning. Thus the Czech collaborationist journalism was got rid of one of the most prominent representatives.

The turn of the situation was the removal of Konstantin Neurath from the position of the Reich Protector. It was Reinhard Heidrich who was appointed to this position and he was decided to make short work with the Czech resistance movement. In the framework of measures taken, also Prime Minister Eliáš was arrested. After that, President Hácha formally dismissed him from the position of the prime minister. … Several days later a speedily arranged lawsuit was held and Eliáš was sentenced to death. The entire lawsuit was trumped-up as it had been decided before about the punishment.”

(“Alois Eliáš (29.9.1890 – 19.6.1942)”, September 29, 2010, Government Information Centre, Government of the Czech Republic)

As described above, when Heydrich replaced Konstantin Neurath as the Reich Protector of Czechoslovakia, the Nazi crackdown on local resistance was immediately intensified and hardened.

Despite the goal of Germanization, in order to increase arms production in Czechoslovakia to support Nazi Germany’s ongoing wars Heydrich adopted a pacification approach toward the working population, and soon achieved remarkable results:

“Heydrich as acting Reich Protector then courted Czech industrial workers and farmers, whose productive capacity was necessary to the German war effort, with wages and benefits packages equivalent to those of their German counterparts. The result of his policies was a 73% reduction in acts of sabotage within six months. By spring of 1942, the German authorities could boast of a pacification of the Protectorate. Some have speculated that Heydrich aimed next to assume a newly created top civilian position in occupied Northern France and Belgium.”

(Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

As noted above, Heydrich may have also planned to expand his pacification rule to Northern France and Belgium.

As quoted earlier, at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 – a few short months after taking over the Nazi rule in Czechoslovakia – Heydrich mentioned a particular “old-age-ghetto”, “Theresienstadt”, for the Jews.

The Theresienstadt ghetto was established on November 24, 1941, by Heydrich in Czechoslovakia:

“Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS (the Nazi paramilitary corps), established the camp at Theresienstadt on November 24, 1941. It soon became the home of Jews from Prague and other parts of German-occupied Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). In 1942 the Nazis expelled 7,000 Czechs who lived in Terezín and isolated the Jewish community in a closed environment. The Nazis intended the camp to house elderly, privileged, and famous Jews from Germany, Austria, the Czech lands, and western Europe. As the home—and the place of death—of some of the most prominent Czech, Austrian, and German artists, writers, scientists, jurists, diplomats, musicians, and scholars, Theresienstadt had a rich cultural life.

Some 15,000 children passed through Theresienstadt, and the community ensured that their education continued with a rigorous daily routine of classes, athletic activities, and art. They painted pictures and wrote poetry. By war’s end, however, no more than 1,100 (according to some estimates, no more than 150) of these children survived.

Conditions were harsh. At times, over 50,000 Jews lived in the space once inhabited by 7,000 Czechs. Food was scarce. In 1942, 15,891 people died, more than half the average daily population of Theresienstadt at the time.”

(“Theresienstadt: Concentration Camp, Czech Republic”, by Michael Berenbaum, Encyclopaedia Britannica)

As described above, in addition to the old-age Jews incarcerated there, including “some of the most prominent Czech, Austrian, and German artists, writers, scientists, jurists, diplomats, musicians, and scholars,”, around 15,000 Jewish children passed through Theresienstadt during its time and were allowed to continue their education and cultural activities; however, in the end no more than 1,100, or maybe no more than 150, of these children survived the Nazi concentration camps.

But any broader Nazi machination, on the “Final Solution” or on the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”, did not fully materialize while under Heydrich’s supervision, as he would soon die in the Czechoslovakain capital Prague in June 1942, after an assassination effort by the Czechoslovakian resistance.

Almost from the start of his arrival in Prague, the Czechoslovakian resistance to Nazi German occupation planned to assassinate Heydrich.

The operation, code-named Operation Anthropoid, was initiated by the Czechoslovak government in exile in Britain and supported by the British Special Operations Executive; a team of resistance agents received training in Britain and parachuted into Czechoslovakia on December 28, 1941:

“The operation was instigated by František Moravec, head of the Czech intelligence services, with the knowledge and approval of Edvard Beneš, head of the Czechoslovak government in exile in Britain, almost as soon as Heydrich was appointed Protector. Moravec personally briefed Brigadier Colin Gubbins, who at the time was the Director of Operations in the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and who had responsibility for the Czech and Polish “country” sections of the organization. Gubbins readily agreed to help mount the operation, although knowledge of it was restricted to a few of the headquarters and training staff of SOE. The operation was given the codename Anthropoid, Greek for “having the form of a human,” a term usually used in zoology.

Preparation began on October 20, 1941. Moravec had personally selected two dozen of the most promising personnel from among the 2,000 exiled Czech soldiers based in Britain. They were sent to one of SOE’s commando training centers at Arisaig in Scotland. Warrant Officer Jozef Gabčík (Slovak) and Staff Sergeant Karel Svoboda (Czech) were chosen to carry out the operation on 28 October 1941 (Czechoslovakia’s Independence Day), but Svoboda was replaced with Jan Kubiš (Czech) after a head injury during training. This caused delays in the mission as Kubiš had not completed training, nor had the necessary false documents been prepared for him.

…

Gabčík and Kubiš, with seven other soldiers from Czechoslovakia’s army in exile in the United Kingdom, were flown in two other groups named Silver A and Silver B (who had different missions) from RAF Tangmere by a Halifax of No. 138 Squadron RAF at 22:00 on December 28, 1941. They landed near Nehvizdy east of Prague. …”

(“Operation Anthropoid”, Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)

Meanwhile, Heydrich became so confident of his success in pacification of the Czechoslovakian population that he travelled around Prague in an open-top vehicle without extra security protection:

“Heydrich was so confident that his pacification program had succeeded that he flagrantly disregarded measures for his own security and traveled around Prague in an open vehicle. …”

(Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Heydrich even moved to live in a Château outside the city, commuting daily to and from his office and in so doing making himself an even easier target for assassination:

“The paratroopers devised various plans for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. At the beginning of April 1942 Heydrich himself contributed to the options for his own assassination when he moved from his temporary quarters in Prague Castle to a Château in Panenské Břežany. In the end a sharp right-hand curve, straddling the streets Kirchmayerova and V Holešovičkách, below a school in Kobylisy, was chosen for the attack. It was known that his car was driven through this curve daily on the way to Prague Castle and that his chauffeur, SS-Oberscharführer Johannes Klein, had to slow down significantly.”

(Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík, ASSASSINATION: Operation ANTHROPOID 1941–1942, 2002, Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic)

On May 27, 1942, exactly 8 months from his taking over the Nazi rule in Czechoslovakia, a resistance assassination took place out and a wounded Heydrich died 8 days later on June 4:

“… On May 27, 1942, as he traveled on a familiar route to the airport to fly to Hitler’s headquarters, two Czech parachute agents succeeded in rolling a hand grenade under Heydrich’s transport vehicle. Though not mortally wounded by the blast itself, the grenade splinters in his leg and lower back led to an infection that killed him on June 4, 1942.”

(Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

As told above, On that day Heydrich was supposed to fly to Berlin to see the Nazi supreme leader Adolf Hitler, and the attempted assassination was not immediately successful – he was “not mortally wounded”.

As described in the last two quotes above, Heydrich was in a convertible Mercedes with only his chauffeur, “SS-Oberscharführer Johannes Klein” as named in the 2002 Czech Republic Ministry of Defence paper quoted, but the gunshots fired at him by the resistance agents all missed, except that, as in the Holocaust Encyclopedia article quoted, a “hand grenade” rolled toward Heydrich’s car succeeded in exploding on the ground and wounding him in the leg and lower back.

The “hand grenade” that wounded Heydrich was more precisely a “modified anti-tank grenade”, as in the following story of the assassination attempt:

“… Gabčík stepped in front of the vehicle and tried to open fire with his Sten submachine gun, but it jammed. Heydrich ordered his driver, SS-Oberscharführer Klein, to stop the car, then stood up to shoot Gabčík with his Luger pistol. Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade (concealed in a briefcase) at the vehicle. Its fragments ripped through the car’s right rear bumper, embedding shrapnel and fibers from the upholstery in Heydrich’s body upon detonation. The grenade also injured Kubiš.

Following the explosion, Gabčík and Kubiš fired at Heydrich with their Colt M1903 pistols but failed to hit him, as they were shocked by the explosion as well. Heydrich staggered out of the car, apparently unaware of his shrapnel injuries, returned fire, and tried to chase Gabčík, but he soon collapsed. Klein returned from his abortive attempt to chase Kubiš, who fled the scene by bicycle. Now bleeding profusely, Heydrich ordered Klein to chase Gabčík on foot, saying, “Get that bastard!” Klein chased him into a butcher shop, where Gabčík shot him twice with his pistol, severely wounding him in the leg, and then escaped to a local safe house via tram. Gabčík and Kubiš didn’t know that Heydrich was badly wounded and were convinced the attack had failed.”

(Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)

As told above, after carrying out the attack the two resistance agents responsible, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, were convinced that the assassination attempt was a failure.

In particular, I note that the agents’ shooting accuracies were so poor that only the last two shots eventually hit someone, far away from Heydrich – in the leg of Heydrich’s chauffeur Johannes Klein after Klein had chased Gabčík into a butcher shop.

Ironically, at the time Heydrich was called “Butcher of Prague” by the Czechoslovakians. (“Son of detested Nazi leader sparks outrage after announcing he wants to restore castle where ‘Butcher of Prague’ ruled”, by Allan Hall, March 28, 2011, Daily Mail)

The error-prone assassination of Reinhard Heydrich was the “only successful assassination” of a senior German Nazi leader in history:

“The attack on Heydrich would be the only successful assassination of a high-ranking Nazi functionary during the party’s 12-year rule.”

(“Reinhard Heydrich Biography: The First In-depth Look at a Nazi ‘God of Death’”, by Georg Bönisch, September 19, 2011, Spiegel Online)

But as already noted, it did not immediately kill or even mortally wound Heydrich. Rather, he died eight days later in the hospital.

After a surgery on the day he was wounded, performed by experienced German medical surgeons, Heydrich appeared to be recuperating in the hospital under German protection and under the medical care of Dr. Karl Gebhardt, the private physician of Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich’s superior Nazi security leader. However, on the seventh day while eating a meal, Heydrich suddenly fell into a coma and died the next day, June 4, due to blood poisoning as concluded by the official autopsy:

“… The patient was then transferred to the operating room and surgery was performed by thoracic surgeon Walter Dick and abdominal surgeon J. Hohlbaum, both experienced German practitioners. … The Czech personnel
were prohibited from entering the operating room or the floor
where Heydrich was taken after his operation [6].

… During the course of treatment Heydrich received several blood transfusions as well as anti-gangrene and anti-tetanus injections. Within two days the patient was recovering well; there is no record that postoperative X-rays were performed.

From this point, SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s private physician, Dr. Karl Gebhardt, an orthopedic surgeon from Berlin, was in charge. Gebhardt bypassed all the other surgeons, preventing the use of sulphonamide (Prontosil®*) when Heydrich’s temperature rose, and forbidding the transfer of the patient for re-operation at any other hospital [6]. The omission of treatment with Prontosil was particularly noteworthy since “the SS and Hitler insisted on believing that sulphonamides were a ‘miracle drug’ (Wundermittel) which could prevent all infections if only correctly administered” [1]. In the postoperative days, a gradual fever developed. On the seventh day the patient was able to sit up in bed to eat, but he collapsed suddenly and remained in a coma until the early hours of 4 June when he died. …

…

The official autopsy report by pathologists Herwig Hamperl and Gunther Weyrich, both professors at Prague University, determined the cause of Heydrich’s death to be “septicaemia due to virulent Bacteria that led to parenchymatous intoxication of the liver, kidney and myocardium” [7]. The management of Heydrich’s care and the autopsy findings have been disputed. …”

(“The Attempt on the Life of Reinhard Heydrich, Architect of the “Final Solution”: A Review of his Treatment and Autopsy”, by George M. Weisz MD FRACS MA and William R. Albury BA PhD, Volume 16, Number 4, April 2014, Israel Medical Association Journal)

As noted above, following the surgery Heydrich gradually developed a fever, probably due to Dr. Gebhardt’s preventing the use of sulphonamide, which Hitler and the Nazis considered a “miracle drug” that could prevent all infections. Gebhardt’s treatment approach was controversial, and the exact medical cause of Heydrich’s death has been disputed.

Some medical experts have suggested that Himmler, through his own personal physician, may have caused Heydrich’s death. This has been the conclusion of the above quoted review by Dr. George M. Weisz and Prof. William R. Albury, published in 2014; it cited the precedent of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath’s death at the hands of Hitler’s private physician Karl Brandt after an assassination attempt in 1938:

“In 1938, Ernst vom Rath, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Paris, was shot by a protesting Jewish adolescent. The medical attention that he received was supervised by Hitler’s private physician (Begleitarzt), Karl Brandt. The required treatment was withheld for political reasons. Indeed, his death was politicized in Germany and used as an opportunity to launch
a nationwide pogrom, known as Kristallnacht [2]. By acting in this way the leaders of the Third Reich sacrificed vom Rath, in accordance with the principle that Dr. Brandt later cited at his trial in Nuremberg, using him “in the interest of [Nazi] society.”

The present article reviews the surgical management of a much higher ranking officer of the Reich, SS ObergruppenfÜhrer Reinhard Heydrich (1904–42), who was attacked by partisans in Prague in 1942. The documented medical response to his injuries and the record of the autopsy reveal a number of parallels with the Rath case and raise the possibility of similar political interference in his medical treatment.

…

It is our conclusion that the cause of death was pulmonary embolism, originating in the pelvic plexus (or in the unexamined lower limbs), due to pulmonary insufficiency and to a multi-system septic failure. Since the autopsy investigation did not examine the head, the possibility of anoxic brain damage cannot be excluded.

In legal terms, the medical approach of the German doctors provided substandard medical care to one of their highest officers. …

It is well known that Himmler, as SS chief and Heydrich’s immediate superior, had begun to feel that his own position was threatened by the ruthless ability and repeated successes of the younger man, such as the pacification of Bohemia/Moravia. Could Himmler have taken advantage of the unexpected wounding of Heydrich by sending his physician Gebhardt to hasten the Reichsprotektor’s death?

The evidence from Heydrich’s medical treatment and autopsy suggests that Himmler may well have used Gebhardt as his instrument to dispose of a rival who Himmler feared would eventually supplant him. …”

(George M. Weisz MD FRACS MA and William R. Albury BA PhD, April 2014, Israel Medical Association Journal)

As above, previously in 1938 the Nazis had withheld necessary medical care for German diplomat Ernst von Rath who had been wounded by a Jewish assassin, in order to use his death to rally political support for launching Kristallnacht – Nazi Germany’s first nationwide violent anti-Jewish campaign, directed by Reinhard Heydrich on November 10, 1938, as earlier reviewed.

Thus, one can suspect that in May-June 1942 it may have become Heydrich’s own turn to fall victim to the Nazis’ premeditated medical malpractice – as per the medical opinions of experts like Dr. Weisz and Prof. Albury, quoted above.

In an earlier review, published in 2009, Dr. Ray J. Defalque and Prof. Amos J. Wright cited facts showing that after the attempted assassination Heydrich was mentally conscious and still physically abled to some degree, and appeared normal throughout the surgery:

“… While Klein pursued Gabèik, Heydrich, in severe pain, staggered back to the car and collapsed on the hood.

After 20 minutes of confusion, he was placed face down among cans of wax and polish in the rear of a passing commercial van and driven to Bulovka hospital, one and-a-half miles away. Bulovka, with 1,400 beds, was at the time the second largest Czech hospital.

…

Heydrich reached the Bulovka emergency room shortly after 11:00 a.m. and was registered under the number 12.555/42. Summoned by the emergency room nurse, Dr. Snadjr arrived at once and found Heydrich seated on the examining table, bare-chested, silent and aloof, profusely bleeding from his left lower back. While checking the injury, Dr. Snadjr had the nurse call Dr. W. Dick, the Sudeten German chief of surgery at Bulovka since 1940 and an experienced thoracic surgeon. …

Heydrich was taken to the radiology suite in a wheelchair but walked
unassisted to the X-Ray machine. The film showed a left pneumothorax, a fracture of the left eleventh rib, a diaphragmatic tear and a metal fragment in the spleen. The left kidney and spine were intact.

Told that he needed immediate surgery, Heydrich refused and insisted on a Berlin surgeon. Dr. Dick repeated that the operation was urgent and offered to call Professor J. Hohlbaum, the chairman of the Surgery Department at the nearby Charles V University. Dr. Hohlbaum was a Silesian German. Heydrich accepted after a few minutes of hesitation and Professor Hohlbaum was summoned. …

…

The operation started around noon and ended shortly after 1:00 p.m. Drs. Dick and Slalina had started scrubbing when Professor Hohlbaum walked in with two assistants. As he was ready to scrub, Dr. Hohlbaum noticed that in his haste he had forgotten his glasses and an aid was sent to fetch them. He told Dr. Dick to start the procedure and that he would assist him until he had his glasses. Dr. Mach gave the patient a transfusion of type A blood at the
beginning of the operation and another at the end, along with tetanus and gas gangrene antitoxins.

…

… Dr. Hohlbaum, now wearing his glasses, made an incision from sternum to
mid-abdomen. As he was reaching the umbilicus, Dr. Honek noticed that he was perspiring profusely.¹ Dr. Dick reacted at once, and in his usual quiet and courteous manner whispered, “Professor Hohlbaum, you are not well, allow me to take over.” He then extended the incision under the left costal margin and finished the procedure with Drs. Hohlbaum’s and Slalina’s assistance. … Heydrich tolerated the surgery well, with normal vital signs.”

(“The Puzzling Death of Reinhard Heydrich”, by Ray J. Defalque, M.D. and Amos J. Wright, M.L.S., Volume 27, Number 1, January 2009, Bulletin of Anesthesia History)

As told above, the actual surgery was performed not by the German surgeon whom Heydrich had agreed to, namely Professor Dr. J. Hohlbaum, because Hohlbaum acted nervous and also forgetful, but by the German surgeon Dr. W. Dick who had examined Heydrich and decided on an urgent surgery.

The anti-tank grenade damaging Heydrich’s car and causing his injuries had been modified in a way for it to be “easier to handle” – albeit with substantially reduced power:

“… The weapon was a powerful British number 73 anti-tank grenade, the lower two-thirds of which had been removed to make it lighter (1 lb.) and easier to handle (4 in.). The bottom of the remaining upper one-third had been sealed with adhesive tape and the whole body was wrapped in more tape. German experts judged its powerful explosive, polar ammon gelatin, to be dangerous to handle.¹⁰ ¹¹ …”

(Ray J. Defalque, M.D. and Amos J. Wright, M.L.S., January 2009, Bulletin of Anesthesia History)

Both the review by Dr. Weisz and Prof. Albury and the review by Dr. Defalque and Prof. Wright remarked on the disagreements between Hitler and Himmler over Heydrich’s medical treatments.

Weisz and Albury noted that Hitler’s “genuine dismay” over Heydrich’s death, with Hitler’s personal physician Dr. Theodor Morell accusing Himmler’s personal physician Dr. Gebhardt of “negligence”, led to Himmler ordering Dr. Gebhardt to conduct “barbaric medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners”:

“… A complicating factor for both Himmler and Gebhardt, however, was Hitler’s genuine dismay when he learned of Heydrich’s death. Worse still, Gebhardt was accused of negligence by Dr. Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician (Leibarzt). Morell owned a factory that produced sulphonamides and argued that Gebhardt should have treated Heydrich with the drug. Gebhardt, on the other hand, insisted that sulphonamides were of little use and had not been required in Heydrich’s case.

To maintain his standing in Hitler’s eyes, Himmler ordered Gebhardt to demonstrate the correctness of his position, and so began Gebhardt’s barbaric medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Septic wounds were deliberately inflicted on male inmates at Sachsenhausen and then on female inmates, mostly Polish political prisoners, at Ravensbrück. Some of these victims were then treated with sulphonamides while others were not. …”

(George M. Weisz MD FRACS MA and William R. Albury BA PhD, April 2014, Israel Medical Association Journal)

Defalque and Wright described how Dr. Gebhardt had Dr. Morell from Heydrich’s medical care, Dr. Morell later complained to Himmler about Gebhardt’s “gross negligence” that “had caused Heydrich’s death”, and Himmler instead thanked and promoted Gebhardt:

“Himmler, at Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg (East Prussia) was immediately notified of the incident and ordered Dr. K. Gebhardt, his personal physician and professor of orthopedics in Berlin, to fly at once to Heydrich’s bedside. Gebhardt landed in Prague the evening of May 27, accompanied by his SS deputy, Dr. L. Stumpfegger, and the renowned Berlin surgeon F. Sauerbruch. Professor Sauerbruch had been Gebhardt’s teacher and was a close friend of the Heydrich family. Dr. Morell, Hitler’s physician, never came to Prague.² Gebhardt followed Heydrich closely and phoned Himmler twice a day to report on his patient’s progress. …

…

… At his 1947 trial, Gebhardt testified that he did not prescribe sulfonamides for Heydrich because of his medical training in Munich and his 1940 experience as a frontline surgeon had convinced him of their futility in gunshot wounds.¹⁵ ¹⁶ He had refused Morell’s offer to fly to Prague as well as his recommendation to try the new thiazole sulfonamides (e.g., ultrasept) in the production of which Morell had large financial interests.

Gebhardt added that Morell had later told Himmler that this gross negligence
had caused Heydrich’s death. This accusation had estranged him from his SS superior.

Gebhardt’s testimony, however, is contradicted by the warm letter of thanks that Himmler sent him on October 19, 1942, praising Heydrich’s surgeons and especially Gebhardt’s for easing his patient’s suffering.¹⁷ Over the following months Gebhardt was promoted to SS Major General and to “Supreme SS Physician” and was awarded the rare “Knight’s Cross with Diamonds.”¹⁵ At his trial, Gebhardt implied that he had accepted his superiors’ order to test sulfamides on concentration camp inmates partly to vindicate his treatment of Heydrich.”

(Ray J. Defalque, M.D. and Amos J. Wright, M.L.S., January 2009, Bulletin of Anesthesia History)

As in the above quote, after Heydrich’s death his superior Himmler seemed pleased that the doctors had eased this “patient’s suffering”.

If there had indeed been “gross negligence” in Reinhard Heydrich’s death on the part of the Nazis under Heinrich Himmler’s direction, it may not have been limited to, as Weisz and Albury suggested in their medical review quoted earlier, Himmler taking advantage of “the unexpected wounding of Heydrich” “to dispose of a rival”.

The Nazi security forces under Heydrich in Czechoslovakia had most likely been aware of a resistance assassination team in Prague, sent from Britain, and that Heydrich was at risk, because a secret radio-transmitted message from the Czechoslovakian local resistance to persuade the leadership in exile in Britain to abort the assassination of Heydrich, so as not to incur a severe reprisal by the German Nazis, had been intercepted by the Gestapo, i.e., the German Nazi secret police, two weeks before the assassination attempt:

“The home resistance movement’s representatives realised from the preparations of the paratroopers that they were trying to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich. Fearing a major reprisal, they decided to contact London through the LIBUŠE transmitter, with a dispatch warning not to continue with assassination plans. In an operation directed against the SILVER A group, the Gestapo intercepted one of these warnings on May 12, 1942: “From the preparations that Ota and Zdeněk are working on and the place where it is happening, we guess, despite their silence, that they’re preparing to assassinate H. This assassination would not help the Allies and would bring immense consequences upon our nation… we ask you to give an order through SILVER not to carry out the assassination. There is a danger of delay, issue the order immediately. If necessary, for international reasons, assassinate a local Quisling… the first choice would be E(manuel) M(oravec).””

(Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík, 2002, Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic)

Intriguingly, and fatefully, Nazi security protection for Heydrich was not beefed up despite the assassination threat the Gestapo discovered on May 12, before it materialized on May 27.

If Heydrich’s Nazi security boss Himmler had indeed harboured the idea of possibly disposing of this rival, as suggested in the medical experts’ recent reviews I have discussed, then under his direction the Gestapo might have withheld notifying Heydrich, even though he had authority over them, of the communication intercept signalling danger to him.

The “EM” in the intercepted radio message cited above, Emanuel Moravec, the substitute target of assassination suggested by the local resistance, was Minister of Education in the Czechoslovakian government collaborating with the Nazis and a favorite Czech official of Heydrich’s, even though prior to the German occupation Moravec had been a leading advocate of defending Czechoslovakia against Nazi Germany:

“On January 19, 1942, a new Protectorate government was named, replacing the old government (entirely according to Heydrich’s ideas), which was in effect non-functional from September 27, 1941, onwards. The reason behind the reorganization of the government was the destruction of the Protectorate’s autonomous administration. The number of ministries was reduced to seven. A single German minister in the Protectorate government, SS-Oberführer Walther Bertsch, directed a newly created key ministry of economy and labour. The greatest change to take place, apart from changes in personnel, was the establishment of the Office for People’s Enlightenment. The affairs of the press, theatre, literature, art, film and foreign tourism were subordinate to this office. The ministry, in turn, was subordinate to the newly named Minister of Education, Emanuel Moravec. This former Czechoslovak legionnaire and later General Staff Colonel and a professor of war history and strategy at the University of War Studies in Prague was – prior to Munich – the most ardent defender of fighting against Nazi Germany. After the occupation, however, he sided with the Nazis entirely and became a symbol of extreme collaboration. Moravec was, in Heydrich’s opinion, unusually well suited for collaboration. …”

(Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík, 2002, Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic)

One may wonder, had the Nazis beefed up security protection for Heydrich after intercepting the secret radio message referring to assassination, whether it might not have occurred to the Czechoslovakian Nazi-collaborator Emanuel Moravec instead of the leader of Nazi German occupation.

On the other hand, Reinhard Heydrich was such a self-confident man that, bolstered by the success of his pacification policy, he did not believe the Czechoslovakians would try to kill him, even once saying, “Why should my Czechs shoot at me?”:

“… he almost always rode without a bodyguard, confident that the cowed Czechs would never make an attempt on his life. “Why should my Czechs shoot at me?” Heydrich loftily responded when another Nazi official chided him for his recklessness. His chauffeur—a brawny six-foot, five-inch SS guard—was his only protector.”

(Lynne Olson, Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War, 2018, Random House)

Ironically, the musical son of a German composer, in his “pacification” and “Germanization” measures Reinhard Heydrich had personally and actively planned the establishment of “Prague Musical Weeks” as a new cultural tradition for the Czechoslovakian capital; and one day before his assassination he had announced a “reform” plan to educate all Czech youth, and that evening attended an extraordinary music performance featuring his favorite violin music by G. F. Handel and the Piano Concerto in C-minor by his father, Bruno Heydrich:

““Prague’s Musical Weeks” were to start a new cultural tradition, with Reinhard Heydrich himself planning the first opening of the event. He personally invited Protectorate celebrities to the Opening Concert.

On May 26, 1942, on the eve of the assassination, an extraordinary performance was given by the String Quartet of Arthur Bonhardt accompanied by the pianist Kurt Sanke. The highlight of this evening concert in Valdštejn Palace was the Piano Concerto in C-minor by composer Bruno Heydrich, the father of the Reich Protector.

One of the last photographs of Reinhard Heydrich. The Acting Reich Protector, only a few hours before the assassination, listening attentively to his favourite violin composition of G. F. Händel. …

On the same day, May 26, 1942, Heydrich was appointed to the Protectorate government and announced the establishment of a Curatorium for the Education of Youth. He had begun to plan setting up this organization as early as 1942. With the help of the Curatorium, all Czech youth between the ages of 10-18 were to be “reformed”. The Curatorium was subordinate to Minister of Education Moravec and inherited the gymnasiums of the Sokol organization.”

(Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík, 2002, Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic)

The human costs of Heydrich’s assassination, i.e., the “immense consequences upon our nation” that the Czechoslovakian local resistance had feared and communicated to the government in exile in Britain in the secret radio message quoted earlier, were indeed immense.

Infuriated, the Nazi supreme leader Adolf Hitler wanted to kill 10,000 Czechoslovakians as retaliation, but was persuaded not to by Heydrich’s deputy, Karl Hermann Frank:

“Heydrich’s assassination infuriated the Nazi leadership, particularly Adolf Hitler. The Führer demanded the murder of 10,000 Czechs in retaliation for the killing. He was dissuaded by Heydrich’s deputy, Karl Hermann Frank, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the Protectorate, Frank argued that such action might interfere with long-term plans for the region. …”

(Lidice, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

In the end, over 13,000 Czechoslovakians were arrested and an estimated 5,000 people were killed by the German Nazis in revenge, in atrocious acts that included the killing of practically the entire team of resistance agents from Britain, and the destruction of two villages, Lidice and Ležáky, suspected of links to the agents:

“The assassination had immediate reprisals. More than 13,000 people were arrested, and 5,000 people were killed according to estimates.

A Gestapo report suggested the village Lidice was the hiding place of the assassins, but this was not true. Germans massacred the residents of Lidice on June 9, 1942. Some 199 men were executed, 195 women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and 95 children taken prisoner. Most of the children died in concentration camps. The village of Ležáky was destroyed because a radio transmitter was found there.

The paratroopers took refuge in Karel Boromejsky Church near Karlovo náměstí. The Germans found out their location after one of the paratroopers, Karel Čurda, betrayed them.

Kubiš, Adolf Opálka, and Jaroslav Svarc were killed in the prayer loft after a two-hour gun battle. Gabčík, Josef Valcik, Josef Bublik and Jan Hruby committed suicide after fire brigade trucks started to flood the crypt.”

(“Heydrich assassination took place 75 years ago”, by Raymond Johnston, May 27, 2017, Prague.TV)

In a symbolic act of retaliation, the Lidice village was razed to the ground, turned into wheat fields and covered with “German” soil:

“NAZIS employed some 100 labourers for almost a year from mid 1942 to clear rubble, then shovel tonnes of “German” soil carted at least 200km into Czechoslovakia for wheat fields outside Prague.

The soil was laid over razed remains of Lidice, a village that until June 9, 1942 was home to about 503 people.

On that day 75 years ago, they bore the wrath of Hitler and his Nazi leadership for the death of German Reich protector Reinhard Heydrich…”

(“Death of ‘Butcher of Prague’ sparked Hitler to order destruction of entire Czech village at Lidice”, by Marea Donnelly, June 9, 2017, The Daily Telegraph)

The priests and lay leaders of the Karel Boromejsky Church in Prague, who let the resistance agents took refuge at the church after the assassination as described in the second last quote, and the Orthodox Bishop of Prague, were executed:

“Naturally, the cathedral priests and lay officers held responsible for harboring Heydrich’s killers were themselves executed. Bishop Gorazd, the Orthodox prelate of Prague, accepted responsibility in a bid to spare others, gaining Nazi torture and execution for himself, later deservedly declared a martyr by his church. His cathedral survived the war and is today a bullet-ridden memorial to the slain freedom fighters who died there and to their protectors.”

(“An Assassinated Nazi & a Church Martyr”, by Mark Tooley, August 18, 2016, Providence Journal)

Among the people executed in revenge was former Czechoslovakian Prime Minister Alois Eliáš, who as discussed earlier had been arrested and sentenced to death when Heydrich first arrived in Prague in 1941, but had not yet been executed:

“The last months of his life, the former Prime Minister spent in the prison in Pankrác. The execution was postponed and Eliáš had a status of a prominent prisoner. He managed to send several secret messages to his family. It was the death of somebody else which decided on the death of Alois Eliáš. Reinhard Heidrich was that person. After the assassination performed by parachutists dispatched from the Great Britain, the occupation authorities decided to vigorously frighten the Czech nation. Parts of that warning were also executions of number of condemned persons and former Prime Minister was among them. …”

(September 29, 2010, Government Information Centre, Government of the Czech Republic)

Among the 5,00o Czechoslovakians killed in revenge were 3,000 Jews, and some 300 of the family relatives of those who had helped the assassination agents:

“An estimated 5,000 Czechs paid for Heydrich’s death with their lives, including 3,000 Czech Jews who were immediately sent to Nazi death camps in occupied Poland. Eduard Stehlík is a historian for the Czech Army’s historical institute.

“The reprisals were truly terrible. Some 300 people were murdered because they were relatives of those who helped the commandoes. Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, who carried out the assassination, were certainly brave soldiers but they could have never achieved this without the help of these ordinary people.””

(“Czechs Mark 70th Anniversary of Heydrich Assassination”, by Jan Richter, May 28, 2012, Radio Praha)

The assassination of Heydrich also led to hardening resolves on the part of the German Nazis to accelerate the extermination of European Jews, i.e., the Final Solution, and its implementation in Poland was now named “Aktion Reinhard” – after Reinhard Heydrich:

“… Speaking on the day of Heydrich’s funeral, 9 June 1942, Himmler declared, in the context of a broader discussion of forced population movement, that the extermination of the European Jews would be completed within one year.³⁷ The final solution was accelerated in various directions thereafter, but it is unlikely that the assassination itself provided significant impetus beyond further strengthening the security rationale.³⁸ One thing Heydrich’s death did provide was a name for the continuing murder of the Jews of the Generalgouvernement: it was dubbed ‘Aktion Reinhard’ in his honour. …”

(Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide, 2009, Oxford University Press)

The “Generalgouvernement” in the above quote referred to central Poland, where the German Nazis planned to send Jews to work and eventually be exterminated:

“(General Government), territorial unit in Poland with its own administration, created by the Nazis on October 26, 1939. When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, they split the country into three parts: the western third was annexed to the Third Reich; the eastern third was occupied by the Soviet Union; and the central third was made into the Generalgouvernement, a semi-independent unit which the Nazis intended to use as a place to do all their racial “dirty work.” The Generalgouvernement was to serve as a “racial dumping ground,” an endless supply of slave labor, and ultimately, as a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry.”

(“Generalgouvernement”, Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies)

I should point out that, as per the above description, “Generalgouvernement” was a part of “the East” that Heydrich had envisioned in the Wannsee Protocol, discussed earlier, as the land to implement the Final Solution.

At the time of his death Heydrich was Interpol’s president – a job he had taken over after Otto Steinhäusl’s death in June 1940 as mentioned earlier:

“On June 4, 1942, ICPC President Reinhard Heydrich died and was provisionally replaced by Arthur Nebe …”

(Mathieu Deflem, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Thus, it was while as the Interpol president that the Nazi security police leader Reinhard Heydrich started death squads in June 1941, killing over one million Jews within two years as discussed earlier.

And it was also while as the Interpol president that Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 to plan for the “Final Solution” to exterminate European Jews.

At the time of the Wannsee Conference, there was in fact indication that Heydrich might have envisioned a role for the Interpol in the Final Solution, as he had initially designated the Interpol headquarters as the Wannsee Conference venue:

“Wiesenthal and others have also claimed that the infamous conference at which Reinhard Heydrich and other Nazi officials discussed the practical aspects of the implementation of the “Final Solution” was held in the headquarters of the ICPC (Wiesenthal 1989:253). This is inaccurate. The Wannsee Conference, as the meeting has come to be known, was held on January 20, 1942, in a villa located at “Am Grossen Wannsee, No. 56-58.” However, the meeting was originally planned by Heydrich to be held “on December 9, 1941, at 12:00 p.m., in the headquarters of the International Criminal Police Commission, Berlin, Am Kleinen Wannsee No. 16” (Heydrich to Luther, in Friedman 1993). The planned meeting was postponed because of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the American entry in World War II. There is no evidence to determine whether Heydrich had scheduled the meeting in the ICPC headquarters because he conceived of the extermination of European Jewry as a matter of international criminal police.”

(Mathieu Deflem, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

As told above, roughly interpreted, Heydrich had scheduled to hold the Wannsee Conference in the Interpol headquarters located at the ‘Small Wannsee’ lake, but later changed the location to a villa located at the “Big Wannsee” lake.

However, the assertion in the above quoted passage that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to the change of the conference’s time and location is inaccurate. The original meeting venue at the Interpol headquarters was first announced on November 29, and several days later on December 4 was changed to the villa that was a Nazi police guesthouse, still for the same scheduled December 9 date. In other words, the surprise international events  – the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941 – postponed the conference but did not affect the venue:

“The invitations went out between 29 November and 1 December. The meeting, followed by a buffet, was to be held on 9 December at an address given as the ‘offices of Interpol, 16 Am Kleinen Wannsee’.³ A subsequent memo of 4 December altered the venue to an SS guesthouse, 56-58 Am Großen Wannsee.⁴ …”

(Mark Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, 2003, Penguin Books)

It should be noted that even before Reinhard Heydrich’s rule, in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria and the International Criminal Police Commission fell under Nazi control, enforcing racial laws against ethnic minorities had already immediately become an official Interpol agenda:

“The annexation of Austria left little in the way of the nazification of the ICPC. Austrian police officials were either dismissed or allowed to remain in place when considered sufficiently loyal to the Nazis. For Oskar Dressler, Secretary General of the ICPC since 1923, the consequences of the “Anschluss” provided no main obstacles. Dressler cooperated with the Nazi-appointed ICPC President and as Editor of the ICPC periodical, which contributed to the growing prominence of Nazi viewpoints. Since 1938, the renamed periodical “Internationale Kriminalpolizei” (International Criminal Police) published articles on racial inferiority and crime, praiseworthy reviews of books on racial laws, and reports concerning preventive arrests …”

(Mathieu Deflem, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Nevertheless, the number of cases handled by the Interpol during the Nazi era was relatively small – compared to the mass detentions and executions carried out directly by the Nazis in Germany and in the Nazi-occupied countries – and so some history experts, such as Prof. Mathieu Deflem quoted above and here, have viewed the Interpol’s role in the Nazi crimes and atrocities as insignificant:

“… Several commentators have suggested that the Commission no longer functioned after the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, or that at least the nations of the free world then ceased participating in the organization … Others, however, have argued that the Nazi regime took control of the ICPC with the express and consequential purpose of using the organization to further its own goals … This debate was additionally fueled when it was discovered in the early 1970s that Paul Dickopf, President of Interpol from 1968 until 1972, had been a member of the SS until 1943, when he fled to Switzerland to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA … The Dickopf affair then also led to question the involvement of other police officials in the years before 1945. …

In 1975, when U.S. participation in Interpol was evaluated by Congress, the famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal declared that the ICPC had been used by the Nazis to track down fugitive criminals and force them to provide information on (fellow) Jews …

… Effective use of the ICPC headquarters to advance the nationalist agenda of Nazi rule is improbable because the files were few in number and could not be of much practical benefit, especially not relative to the extensive collections of the national police systems in the Nazi-occupied countries.⁹ Also, based on available evidence, it is unlikely that the ICPC achieved any of the Nazi-aspired continuity in investigative work or international cooperation, especially across the Atlantic …

…

9 Before the war, the ICPC headquarters contained less than 4,000 investigative … case files. And, although the number rose rather dramatically to 18,000 at war’s end …, it is still negligible relative to the files available to the Nazis through the occupation of Europe.”

(Mathieu Deflem, 2002, International Journal of Comparative Sociology)

Still, as the history relating to Reinhard Heydrich, a top Nazi security leader, architect of the “Final Solution” and president of the Interpol, that I have reviewed highlighted, nothing was impossible.

In particular, even the above-quoted opinion by Deflem, who viewed the number of cases handled by the Interpol during the Nazi era as “negligible”, noted that as late as of 1968-1972 the Interpol president, Paul Dickopf, was a person with a hidden Nazi past, once a member of the Nazi security apparatus before defecting to work for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services – the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.

I note that Dickopf was the immediate predecessor to William Higgitt, the first Interpol president from Canada.

My long digression into several periods of the Interpol presidency in history has shown that, be it corruption at the top such as with recent Interpol presidents Jackie Selebi and Meng Hongwei, or political oppression such as in the era of German Nazi domination, especially under Interpol president Reinhard Heydrich, characters at the helm of the Interpol can be far more controversial than what the Canadian media reported in 1992 when RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster became its president and was later referred to in my May 2009 blog post as quoted earlier.

Thus, concerns relating to Interpol history could be, if it had indeed been taken into consideration, a rationale behind Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s announcing, in February 1994 only a few short months after winning power, the resignation of Norman Inkster from the helm of the RCMP, given that the prestigious Interpol presidency held by Inkster wasn’t necessarily as glorious as it might appear.

On the other hand, in my 2009 review I pointed out that – unless Inkster had indeed been involved in corrupt activities or in covering them up – the move, with the resulting premature loss of the Interpol presidency, could be viewed as Canada’s retreat from, or setback in, international political engagement, and that there were other signs of such a tendency with the new Chretien government:

“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. ²⁰¹”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, in March 1994 – the subsequent month after the announcement of Inkster’s RCMP resignation – Chretien broke a tradition by making Mexico, not the United States, the destination of a new Canadian prime minister’s first official foreign visit.

Here is the full press story I cited in 2009 that referred to Chretien’s breaking a tradition by not officially visiting the U.S. first, a terse report but one of the very few referring to the tradition breaking:

“(CP) – Prime Minister Jean Chretien will make an official visit to Mexico City on March 23 and 24.

The visit will be Chretien’s first official state visit to another country, an honor traditionally reserved for the United States.

Chretien will be travelling to Mexico with a full contigent of cabinet ministers, though who and how many was also not known. He will be received with full ceremony, including a state dinner.

Credit: CP”

(“PM picks Mexico for first visit”, February 24, 1994, The (Kitchener-Waterloo) Record)

At that point as Prime Minister for only a few months, Chretien had actually travelled to several leading Western countries and met their leaders, but none in an official-visit capacity:

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien makes his first official foreign visit this week when he travels to Mexico City to hobnob with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and attend a Canadian trade fair.

Chretien has been outside Canada a handful of times since his October election victory. He met U.S. President Bill Clinton in Seattle in November, British Prime Minister John Major in London in January and French President Francois Mitterand later that month. But they were courtesy calls.

This one is different. Although the distinction of “official visit” may be lost on those not schooled in diplomatic niceties, it is significant to the Canadians and their Mexican hosts.

Its importance is also not lost on government critics, who complain the Liberals have downplayed human and democratic rights in Mexico in the quest for greater export sales.”

(“Trade and rights issues on Mexico visit”, by Shawn McCarthy, March 22, 1994, Toronto Star)

However, shockingly, as I noted in the last quote from my May 2009 post, Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had ruled Mexico uninterruptedly for 65 years, was gunned down just before Chretien’s arrival, and an angry mob then prevented Chretien from paying respect to the slain.

Also as I noted, a well-known Mexican figure, Subcomandante Marcos of the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico, publicly criticized Chretien’s notion of democracy.

I especially commented that, in this respect, the rights of the Mexican Mayan people enjoyed the support of Canadian native leaders:

“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. ²⁰²”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Despite such international political dimensions as Mexico and Chretien’s tradition-breaking diplomatic goodwill gesture, as also noted in the last two quotes from my May 2009 post the incoming Chretien government quickly turned its focus to “the economy and business”, illustrated by its “swift acceptance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)”.

Here are more details from a press article I cited in May 2009, showing the new Chretien government’s inability to renegotiate NAFTA with the U.S. government as Chretien had promised during the 1993 election campaign:

“During the federal election campaign, Prime Minister Jean Chretien said a Liberal government would “renegotiate” improvements to the 1989 Canada-U.S. free trade deal and the North American pact extending free trade to Mexico.

Yesterday, Chretien announced that Canada will proclaim the North American Free Trade Agreement by Jan. 1 without negotiating any changes to the two trade deals.

What he got from the Americans and Mexicans were add-ons, but none that added up to greater protection for Canada from U.S. harassment, critics charge.

Others, however, insist Chretien got what he could.

Maude Barlow, head of the nationalist Council of Canadians, said the most glaring retreats from Chretien’s campaign promises were on the energy and water fronts.

“Chretien is substituting meaningful changes to NAFTA’s energy and water provisions for empty ceremonial gestures,” Barlow said.

…

But Gordon Ritchie, former deputy chief negotiator of the Canada-U.S. deal, said Chretien got what was “politically possible” given Washington’s adamant refusal to reopen the free trade deals.

…

“It was a deft political move.”

…

Officials in Ottawa and Washington had agreed there is “absolutely nothing” in the North American or Canada-U.S. free trade agreements that require Canada to export bulk water to the United States.

So the Americans and Mexicans were only too happy to comply with Chretien’s request to clarify the issue in a joint agreement.

In Canada, Chretien can expect the most political flak over the energy issue.

The Liberal campaign Red Book, now the government’s political bible, said Canada must obtain “the same energy protection as Mexico” under a “renegotiated” North American pact.

The Liberals have always objected to provisions in the Canada-U.S. deal that require Canada to share energy supplies with the United States, even during a serious shortage, and which preclude Canada from charging Americans a higher price than it would Canadians if world oil prices soar.

When Mexico negotiated an exclusion from similar terms in the NAFTA energy provisions, Chretien said it was a blatant example of trade rules putting Canada on an unequal footing.

However, Chretien hit a made-in-America brick wall over reopening NAFTA’s energy section.

With the Americans unwilling to renegotiate the issue, Chretien issued a unilateral declaration to “clarify the limits of Canada’s obligations to export energy to the United States.””

(“Did Chretien get a good deal? PM caved in, critics say; others hail a ‘deft move’ on improving energy and water provisions in NAFTA”, by Jonathan Ferguson, December 3, 1993, Toronto Star)

In short as above, Chretien had wanted to renegotiate NAFTA but the U.S. government was unwilling to, so the Chretien government settled on making improvements on water and energy issues in the agreement: on water, Chretien’s demand did not contradict the agreement so the U.S. and Mexican governments agreed to additional clarifications; but on energy, his demand conflicted with the established arrangement between Canada and the U.S., and the Chretien government was able to only make a “unilateral declaration”.

I note that all of this “swift acceptance”, as I called it in 2009, had taken place by the end of 1993, with the Chretien Liberals having just won the election on October 25. Therefore, in this sense, when Chretien began his first official foreign visit to Mexico in March 1994, his government’s course had already been ‘set in stone’ for “the economy and business” in North America – namely, through the NAFTA free-trade framework negotiated by a previous government of an opposite political stripe.

The goal of making Mexico the country of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s first official foreign visit, from the Canadian government’s perspective, was to highlight trade and NAFTA, even though the Mexican government hoped for it to be broader – as reported at the time:

“Mexico’s ambassador in Ottawa, Sandra Fuentes-Berain, says it is “very important that the Prime Minister has chosen Mexico as the first country to visit in this capacity.

“And I think the reason for his decision is the new relationship that has been established between Mexico and Canada that is, of course, somehow revamped by the signing of NAFTA but goes well beyond NAFTA.

“For Canada, a whole continent opens up in the south of the United States, starting with Mexico.”

Senior aide to Chretien Peter Donolo says that Chretien is making Mexico his first official visit to highlight the importance of NAFTA, which the Liberal government proclaimed into law just before the new year.

“Trade is really important to this government and to the Prime Minister in particular,” Donolo says. “He sees expanded Canadian trade as one of the main contributors to economic growth and jobs.”

So the visit is planned to coincide with Canada Expo ’94, one of the largest international trade shows Canada has ever mounted. The show will feature 450 Canadian companies and about 1,000 business people, representing industries such as automotive, telecommunications, food, environmental products and medical supplies.

Chretien will make a brief stop at the trade fair, while Trade Minister Roy MacLaren and Industry Minister John Manley will be front-and-centre there.”

(Shawn McCarthy, March 22, 1994, Toronto Star)

As reported above, Chretien’s visit was planned to coincide with Canada Expo ’94 in Mexico, featuring 450 Canadian companies and about 1,000 business people representing a broad spectre of Canadian industries.

But how would NAFTA really impact Mexico, the newcomer to the free trade that had been in place between Canada and the U.S. since 1989?

Here are some discussions from a press article that I cited in May 2009, that had appeared on October 16, 1993, i.e., nine days before the Chretien Liberals’ election victory:

“Until a decade ago, about the only thing that recommended Tijuana for a visit was cheap tequila and a taste of something exotic just 20 minutes away from downtown San Diego.

But in the early 1980s, foreign-based corporations began to take advantage of the maquiladora program that had been set up in the 1960s to allow companies to bring materials for assembly into the country duty-free, manufacture them and export them back again still without paying duty.

The allure was that labor was — and remains — cheap in Mexico. It was an experiment that laid the groundwork for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to push for free trade.

Maquiladoras — assembly plants — have doubled Tijuana’s population in a decade and turned it into Mexico’s second richest city.

But the average salary here is $100 a week.

In September, two workers died in Calinor’s foam rubber plant. The men were using industrial solvents in an enclosed space without proper safety equipment. Fernando Briseno was 23. Armando Romero Meraz was 24. A third man, Hugo Javier Cardenas, was sent to hospital in critical condition.

In the suburban town of Chilpancingo, which sits below one of the large maquiladora areas, all of the wells are contaminated by runoff from various factories, including heavy metals from a lead smelter that has since been closed.

Women from that suburban slum have given birth to six anencephalic babies — without brains.

No one has been able to establish a link between the babies and the pollution here. But in Matamoros, where more anencephalic babies have been born, workers are suing their employers.

Last month, Canadian and U.S. trade unionists were detained by police for three hours after they met with workers who are trying to organize an independent union at the Plasticos Bajacal plant.

Last year, 531,689 Mexicans were apprehended by the 995 U.S. Border Patrol agents along the rugged 110-kilometre stretch between Tijuana and San Ysidro, Calif., just south of San Diego. An estimated one million
Mexicans cross illegally into California each year.

…

In Canada, NAFTA hasn’t caused the kind of sound or fury of the 1988 debate over the Canada-U.S. agreement. Trade Minister Tom Hockin calls it “an elaborate defence mechanism” for two reasons: The United States was determined to go ahead anyway, and Canada has already eliminated most tariffs on trade with Mexico, while Mexico has maintained theirs.

“We’re playing hockey without a goalkeeper and they have a goalkeeper,” Hockin said.

Although the Conservatives say NAFTA will create about 30,000 jobs in Canada, Reform party leader Preston Manning opposes NAFTA as it stands because there aren’t enough safeguards for Canadian jobs.

The Liberals’ NAFTA policy is fuzzy. At the beginning of the campaign, leader Jean Chretien had said he would renegotiate it. Now he says he’ll wait to see what the U.S. Congress does in its vote Nov. 17.

The New Democrats and the National party want the deal squashed. Their leaders point to the 450,000 jobs that have been lost because of the bilateral trade deal and say NAFTA will be worse.”

(“On the border: The free-trade deal is intended to improve the lot of Mexicans. But critics worry it will bring more poverty, pollution and health problems: Mexico: despite new industry and promises, old problems remain”, by Daphne Bramham, October 16, 1993, The Vancouver Sun)

As described above, there had been serious problems of environmental pollution and of lack of worker protection with the industrial plants set up by foreign companies in Mexico for its cheap labor; but when it came to trade with Mexico through the NAFTA agreement, Canada did nearly all it could to give Mexico an advantage, according to Trade Minister Tom Hockin of the Kim Campbell government; the smaller Canadian opposition parties all opposed NAFTA, and the leading opposition Chretien Liberals talked about renegotiating, but in the end would follow the U.S. Congress – other than adding some “declarations” to meet the Liberals’ perspectives as earlier discussed.

I should note that the NAFTA agreement had been negotiated under the Mulroney government in Canada and the George Bush administration in the U.S., whereas the Chretien government in Canada, as I have reviewed, assured its enactment on January 1, 1994. (“NAFTA negotiations: Timeline of rocky negotiations of the world’s largest free trade area”, by David Alire and Michael O’Boyle, September 1, 2017, Global News)

Ironically, just like the Canadian Chretien Liberals had wanted in 1993 during the election campaign, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico also wanted changes to NAFTA, in order to attain better protections and better future economic prospects for the indigenous Mayan people, here as reported on February 24, 1994, about a month before Chretien’s official visit to Mexico:

“The leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army guerrillas in southern Mexico demanded changes Wednesday to the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it is destroying indigenous peoples.

Subcomandante Marcos, on the third day of peace talks with the Mexican government, said the Zapatistas are also demanding political change at a national level.

As both sides began focusing on the Zapatistas’ specific demands, Marcos said NAFTA needs to be altered.

“There must be a side agreement that takes into account the indigenous people because, if not, they are going to destroy us without bullets,” he said.

“We are destined to disappear . . . How can we compete (with U.S. and Canadian farmers) when we can’t even compete with death?”

The Zapatistas said changes made to Mexico’s land-reform law under NAFTA will make it nearly impossible for indigenous peoples to become owners of land.”

(“Rebels want NAFTA changes”, February 24, 1994, Edmonton Journal)

The Zapatista uprising led by Subcomandante Marcos had in fact been prompted by the incoming NAFTA, and also by issues of serious human-rights abuses; it had begun on the same day as NAFTA’s start on New Year 1994, and met by “brutal response” from strong government forces that bombed these peasant rebels and killed hundreds; the new violent conflict posed new human-rights issues for the visiting Chretien who wanted to focus his attention on trade, especially Expo ’94, a $1.9-million exhibit of Canadian products that was the largest export trade fair the Canadian government had ever organized:

“When Canada and the United States included Mexico in their free-trade area at the end of 1993, the new partner was hailed for its vast economic potential and its attempts at political restructuring.

Since then the political system has been rocked by the uprising in the state of Chiapas and the economy has declined for two consecutive quarters.

That’s the environment that will greet Jean Chretien when he arrives in Mexico City on Wednesday for his first meeting as prime minister with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

The ostensible reason for Chretien’s trip is to visit Expo ’94, a $1.9-million exhibit of Canadian products that the government claims is the largest export trade fair it has ever organized.

…

“The question before Mexico’s North American partners is whether they can support positive change toward greater democracy and respect for human rights, and if so, how?” a Library of Parliament Research Branch analysis of the Chiapas uprising concludes.

“Quite obviously all three parties to the NAFTA would have preferred a more auspicious backdrop to the beginning of the intergovernmental co-operation required for implementing the treaty.”

The uprising, which saw several towns occupied by armed rebels, began on New Year’s day in the poor southern state of Chiapas where Mexican economic reforms have brought hardship rather than improvement.

The brutal response of the Mexican government quickly undermined its repeated claims during the free-trade talks that the corner had been turned on human rights abuses.

More than 15,000 troops were brought in and bombs were dropped on the peasant rebels. Several hundred people – the exact number still isn’t clear – died before the government unilaterally declared a ceasefire and began conciliation talks.”

(“Political climate in Mexico is rocky as Chretien prepares to meet president”, by Ian Austen, March 21, 1994, The Gazette)

For the Chretien Liberals the Mexican violence, including what no doubt shocked Chretien personally in his first official foreign visit in late March, regardless of its political stripe highlighted the need for security, which would be reviewed by Solicitor General Herb Gray, RCMP Commissioner Inkster and Foreign Affairs Minister Andre Ouellet, with the focus on improving Prime Minister Chretien’s security without impeding his ‘people-oriented’ politics:

“To the Chretien Liberals who were shifting governing focus from human rights to trade, the concern from all this Mexican violence seemed to be security – in Canada there had already been similar angry crowd of unemployed construction workers in his hometown (riding) of Shawinigan shouting at Chretien and smashing a window of his constituency office – but on the other hand the security should not hinder a prime minister who took pride in being “close to the people”, according to solicitor general Herb Gray who would review the PM’s security arrangements with RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster and foreign affairs minister Andre Ouellet. ²⁰³”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Here from a press article I cited in May 2009, is what Chretien proudly said about his being “close to the people”, or being “a populist” as the press characterized it, all while Gray was very concerned about security:

“Solicitor-General Herb Gray has ordered a review of security arrangements for Jean Chretien after the prime minister was jostled by an emotional mob in Mexico this week.

“I was concerned by what I saw on television and also the photographs that appeared in the newspapers,” Gray told reporters Friday.

“I’m going to ask for a report on what happened there and I’m going to see if changes should be made in the (security) arrangements.”

Chretien was surrounded by thousands of angry mourners when he tried to enter a funeral home Thursday to pay his respects to assassinated Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

Wrapping up his Mexico trip on Friday, Chretien dismissed the incident as the price a politician pays for being a populist.

“I was close to the people. I didn’t feel in danger a minute.”

Gray said the incident might not have been as risky as it appeared on film. “It certainly looked troubling on television . . . (But) I was told that there were actually Mexican security people all around him.”

Although some RCMP security agents always travel with Chretien, security abroad is primarily the responsibility of the host country.

Still, Gray said he’ll review the arrangements with RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster and Foreign Affairs Minister Andre Ouellet. He would not reveal how many RCMP agents travel with Chretien or whether his security contingent has been reduced.

Noting that Chretien was also jostled last week by several hundred, angry, unemployed construction workers in his hometown of Shawinigan, Gray said such incidents can’t be avoided entirely.

“The prime minister’s the type of person who wants to be in touch with people and doesn’t believe his role should keep him away from people, wherever he goes.

“So there has to be a balance between security and his and our view of the role of the prime minister or a cabinet minister being in touch with people.””

(“PM’s security to be reviewed following incident in Mexico: Solicitor-general concerned after viewing TV footage, newspaper pictures”, by Joan Bryden, March 26, 1994, The Vancouver Sun)

As reported above, Chretien said, “I was close to the people. I didn’t feel in danger a minute”, whereas Solicitor General Gray said, “It certainly looked troubling on television”.

As mentioned in the last two quotes, even in Canada, of all places in Chretien’s own hometown, some low-level, politics-related violence was also demonstrated toward Chretien personally – by unemployed construction workers in his hometown of Shawinigan, Quebec.

But for Prime Minister Chretien and Justice Minister Allan Rock, the need for more security translated foremost to the need for stricter gun control – especially, I would add, when Chretien did not care as much about “Subcomandante Marcos” as the Canadian native leaders did – as I noted:

“Such could only add momentum to the gun-control drive being launched by justice minister Allan Rock, and prime minister Chretien personally announced on the last day of a high-profile Liberal party convention in mid-May in Ottawa that he would instruct Allan Rock to proceed with stricter gun-control legislation to be introduced in parliament in the fall, after the convention unanimously endorsed a resolution on tougher gun control – sponsored by the National Women’s Liberal Commission. ²⁰⁴””

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, in May 1994 when the Liberal Party convention was held in the national capital Ottawa, it unanimously endorsed a resolution sponsored by the National Women’s Liberal Commission calling for stricter gun control, and Chretien instructed Justice Minister Rock to introduce a legislation in the parliament in the fall of that year.

A few days later, when Chretien was attending a Liberal fundraiser at the convention centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, while hundreds of native demonstrators protested outside chanting “we want jobs”, there was a man carrying a crossbow and arrows who wanted to see the prime minister – a curious but serious incident that caught my attention while I was studying the press archives in 2009:

“Several days afterwards Chretien was at the Winnipeg convention centre attending a high-profile Liberal fundraiser, and there were not only around 200 native demonstrators outside chanting “We want jobs”, but also 29-year old Earl Kevin Jans wandering about in the convention centre and arrested for wanting to see the prime minister while carrying a pistol-like crossbow and three arrows²⁰⁵ – proof that a handgun is not always necessary, given the precedent that with crossbow and hunting arrow Montreal student and author Colin McGregor had killed his estranged wife Patricia Allen (a Revenue Canada lawyer and daughter of retired RCMP assistant commissioner George Allen), on November 13, 1991, i.e., one year before the Stan Wilbee and John Major events near the end of the Mulroney era, and nearly two years before the Chretien era began. ²⁰⁶”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As with the above, I made the point that the case of 29-year-old Earl Kevin Jans carrying a crossbow and three arrows looking for the prime minister served to remind others that guns were not always necessary to commit deadly violence, because there had been a high-profile precedent on November 13, 1991, when Montreal author Colin McGregor used such a weapon to kill his wife Patricia Allen, a Revenue Canada lawyer and daughter of retired RCMP assistant commissioner George Allen.

Here are more details from a press article I cited in May 2009 on the Jans incident that occurred on May 19, 1994:

“A man with a small crossbow entered the Winnipeg Convention Centre Thursday night shortly before Prime Minister Jean Chretien was to arrive for a speech.

Police say the man, who indicated he wanted to see the prime minister, was arrested on the second floor of the centre, carrying a pistol-grip bow and three small metal arrows.

Police and security staff descended on the man within minutes of entering the convention centre. RCMP in charge of security for the prime minister were also alerted.

The type of crossbow the man was carrying is about a foot long.

Earl Kevin Jans, 29, who gave his address as “Canada, the world,” was charged with carrying a weapon to a public meeting and possession of a dangerous weapon.”

(“Man with crossbow nabbed at PM’s speech”, May 21, 1994, The Gazette)

That was ambitious, that 29-year-old Earl Kevin Jans gave his address as “Canada, the world”.

Police noted that Jans carried the crossbow and arrows openly:

““He was wandering around with it quite openly — the darts in one hand and the bow in the other hand,” police spokesman Eric Turner said yesterday.”

(“Man disarmed before PM’s speech”, May 21, 1994, The Spectator)

With such a weapon in open display, Jans would quickly attract public attention and security response. In such manner, he probably only intended to make a point and ‘send a message’ to Prime Minister Chretien – at least that was my interpretation as in the last quote earlier from my May 2009 post.

But now, with the more detailed reviews I have conducted since after 2009 on the Airbus Affair and Canadian politics, as well as in my current article on the history of the Interpol presidency, some of the earlier-cited facts of these past Canadian incidents involving crossbow-and-arrow, namely Patricia Allen’s death in November 1991 and Earl Kevin Jans wanting to see Chretien in May 1994, appear more intriguing and concerning in the additional contexts.

First of all, in November 1991 the dead victim of the crossbow-and-arrow attack was a lawyer for Revenue Canada, the government agency managing taxation and in the process often dealing with matters of fraud and corruption – like Karlheinz Schreiber’s fraud case later in Germany.

Furthermore, this lawyer happened to be the daughter of a retired RCMP assistant commissioner, a former senior leader of the Canadian federal police responsible for investigating corruption, including possible corruption on the part of then Prime Minister Mulroney relating to Airbus commissions – although this particular criminal investigation had not been in full swing at the time and was not known to the public.

Now, with the information since coming to light about the Airbus Affair and the RCMP criminal investigation, could a murder like this have been an act of intimidation or retaliation against those in the government and the RCMP who might be uncovering something wrong?

Regarding this, any political facet would not be obvious due to the seemingly domestic nature of this 1991 murder: the attacker was the estranged husband and thus it was a case of domestic violence.

Publicly reported facts seem scant when it came to the professional work of Patricia Allen, or of her father George Allen.

A University of Ottawa philosophy graduate and 1987 McGill University law graduate, Patricia Allen worked at Revenue Canada as “an authority on the legal ramifications of the goods-and-services tax”; her estranged husband Colin McGregor was a 1987 McGill philosophy graduate and a reporter “always picking fights in print with various lobby groups”; the two were introduced in the summer of 1987 at the “plush lounge” of McGill’s graduate student building Thomson House. (“THE CROSSBOW KILLING; They were in love. She left him. Now she’s dead”, by Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

George Allen had worked for 35 years in the RCMP and retired in 1987 as the assistant commissioner in charge of organization and personnel, and had in January 1988 become “commissioner of Canada Elections”, “in charge of election law compliance and enforcement”. (“Bureaucracy’s pension problem haunts victim with nightmarish persistence”, by Frank Howard, January 15, 1988, The Ottawa Citizen; “No spending limit set for groups”, by Jes Odam, August 11, 1988, The Vancouver Sun; and, “George Allen”, December 20, 2005, Obituaries, Ottawa Citizen)

The basic facts gathered above did not appear directly related to the Airbus Affair per se, given that Patricia Allen’s specialty wasn’t income tax or property tax, and that George Allen had already retired from the RCMP and then started working at Elections Canada in the year of the Airbus sale of planes to Air Canada.

When it comes to the May 1994 Jans incident, with my latest review of Interpol history I notice two intriguing, albeit secondary coincidences.

Firstly, Earl Kevin Jans’s name bore some similarities to one of the two World War II Czechoslovakian resistance assassins of Interpol president Reinhard Heydrich, also in May in 1942, namely Jan Kubiš discussed earlier.

And secondly, when Earl Kevin Jans carried a crossbow and three arrows to want to see Prime Minister Jean Chretien, Norman Inkster was not only still the RCMP commissioner, albeit leaving – his departure would come in June – but also the Interpol president, undecided about stepping down but later quitting in September.

Whatever transpired in the Earl Kevin Jans incident, and whether or not Jans had been inspired by Jan Kubiš in history, no actual violence occurred – in contrast to the Patricia Allen case.

Still, it was a sign that not only violent protests but deadly violence could potentially get to the Canadian prime minister and not just to a political leader in a country much more violent than Canada that Chretien happened to visit.

In 2009 I noted a timing coincidence in Patricia Allen’s case, that her death occurred only several weeks before the second anniversary of the Montreal Massacre which had seen the shooting deaths of fourteen women at École Polytechnique, the University of Montreal’s engineering school, and that on the eve of that second anniversary the Mulroney government’s gun-control legislation, originally prompted by that tragedy, was approved by the Canadian parliament:

“Back in 1991 several weeks after Patricia Allen’s death, the Mulroney government’s weaker gun-control law that had been stimulated by the December 6, 1989 Montreal massacre – killing of 14 women at Ecole Polytechique (engineering school of the University of Montreal) by gunman Marc Lepine – passed the Senate on the eve of the massacre’s two-year anniversary (after it had passed the Commons earlier). ²⁰⁷”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But again, the timing of Allen’s murder was incidental in this instance: since no gun was involved, her death did not inspire anything in gun control.

Nonetheless, there was a similarity that could relate Allen’s murder to the Montreal Massacre of December 6, 1989, though in some hazy sense. One of the women killed was Maryse Leclair, daughter of Montreal Police director of communications Pierre Leclair, who found her daughter’s body at the scene:

“As Pierre Leclair girds himself for the 10th anniversary of the massacre at École Polytechnique, he is coming to a sorrowful realization: The tragedy didn’t end when the crazed gunman stopped firing.

…

Mr. Leclair was head of communications for the Montreal Urban Community police when he reported for duty at the university on Dec. 6, 1989. He was standing outside the engineering building briefing reporters when he decided to gather information inside.

“Hold on, I’ll go see what’s happening and I’ll come back and see you,” he told them.

He knew his daughter was at the university that day delivering her term-end presentation. But with hundreds of students in the school, he wasn’t worried. Then, as Mr. Leclair slowly made his way through the university’s eerie hallways, the sickening scale of the carnage began to sink in.

In one room, he saw the bodies of six young women. In another, he saw a woman who had been shot through the glass of her office.

“I was getting more and more worried,” Mr. Leclair recalled.

Then he came to a classroom on the third floor. He looked inside and saw before him what no parent ever wants to behold.

“I saw my daughter on the ground. I recognized her right away. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to react. It was her.”

Maryse, 23, had been giving her presentation on a podium at the front of the class when she was shot. “She fell on the podium, crying, but she didn’t die. Maryse was crying out, ‘Help me, help me,’” her father said.

The gunman stalked the classroom, shooting three more women before returning to a moaning Maryse Leclair. He pulled out a knife from a sheath on his belt and stabbed her to death.

…

Maryse Leclair was the final victim. …”

(“The awful echoes of Marc Lépine”, by Ingrid Peritz, December 6, 2004/April 21, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

So as above, the public were told the grizzly tale of his daughter’s murder, by the heartbroken father ten years later, informing the public that his daughter had been the only victim not just shot but stabbed to death, and the final victim of the killer who then committed suicide.

Sadly, but ironically, Maryse Leclair could still be alive today had violence been committed only in its most commonly feared form, i.e., by guns.

Nonetheless, assessing what has been publicly reported it remains unclear to me whether, like the other victims, Maryse Leclair and her Montreal police-official father were strangers to the killer Marc Lépine. This is because the intelligent young man, a former reject by École Polytechnique and a failure at other schools and at the workplace, had for a time been a friend of Maryse Leclair’s cousin Dominique:

“… At age thirteen, sick of being called “Arab” and having to explain about his loathed Algerian father, Gamil Gharbi officially changed his name to Marc Lépine.

…

What remaining close relationships Marc had established perished in the summer of 1982, when his mother sold the family home in Pierrefonds and moved with her two children to a rented two-storey row house in the suburb of Saint-Laurent. Life at 2675 Marlborough Court had the advantage of being closer to St. Jude’s Hospital in Laval, where both Monique and Marc were employed; the former as a nursing director and the latter washing dishes in the hospital kitchen. By September, Marc had finished his summer job and was entering his first semester of a two-year CEGEP program in Pure Sciences at Saint-Laurent Junior College. …

…

Without the benefit of hindsight, in 1983 Marc Lépine seemed angelic compared to his sister, Nadia, whose habitual disobedience had landed her in a boarding school for troubled teens. Lépine was not sorry to see her go, For years she had constantly taunted him in front of his friends, exacting a devastating toll on his fragile self-esteem. Though Lépine had fared poorly in his fall 1982 term at CEGEP, by winter 1983 he had revitalized his academic performance, earning grades which ranged from the seventies to the nineties. His boyhood dream of entering the engineering program at École Polytechnique was now close to becoming a reality.

In the meantime, he continued to work part-time as a custodian at St. Jude’s Hospital, and was also responsible for serving meals to patients. Here his social shortcomings became increasingly evident. Considered weird and loud, Lépine was judged to be seeking attention. Though he made friends, he argued with them constantly, a trait which some found annoying. Nicknamed “James Bond” for his high IQ and puzzle-solving abilities, sadly Lépine lacked 007’s confidence and easy charm with the ladies. He would routinely take meals and breaks with female co-workers, but was stifled in his efforts to court them by his crippling shyness. …

When autumn of 1983 came, Lépine suddenly changed academic direction, dropping out in the middle of his two-year Pure Sciences program in favour of a three-year vocational trade program in Electronics Technology. He continued to achieve good grades, including an 82 in Industrial Electronics and an 87 in Control Systems. However, in both the school and the workplace, he was regarded as high-strung – a bundle of nerves who was always “in a hurry.” Lépine would often slam meal carts, spilling soup, which his co-workers interpreted as aggression…  Unsurprisingly, when Nadia returned to living at 2675 Marlborough in 1986, Lépine’s behaviour took a turn for the worse. With only nine courses left before graduating CEGEP in Electronics Technology, on January 31, 1986, the twenty-one-year-old simply stopped attending classes. He applied for the engineering program at École Polytechnique and was predictably rejected. …

Lépine’s habitual clumsiness resulted in him being transferred to the cafeteria at St. Jude’s, but the constant steam from the kitchen only worsened his repulsive acne. Fellow employees mocked him and refused to let him serve their meals. …

That summer, Lépine befriended nineteen-year-old Dominique Leclair, the daughter of the man who ran the hospital. “I was kind to him because he was so hyperactive and nervous,” Dominique recalled. “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. …”¹³ Regarding his co-workers, she readily admitted, “They were mean.” If Lépine ever had any romantic interest in Dominique, she did not pick up on it. …

“I’ve asked a lot of girls out, but they have all refused,” he once confessed to her. “I know so many girls, but they won’t go out with me. I’m not good-looking. . . .” The two finally went their separately ways in September 1987, when Dominique returned to school. Lépine was fired from his job at the hospital and attended a CEGEP in Montmorency. Although he received a $2,400 severance package, he was infuriated. One witness remembers him threatening to go on a killing rampage that would culminate with his own death. In a chilling coincidence, the last victim of the Polytechnique massacre would turn out to be Dominique’s cousin Maryse. He had repaid her kindness with a lifetime of agony.”

(Lee Mellor, Rampage: Canadian Mass Murder and Spree Killing, 2013, Dundurn)

Ten years later recalling the sad history, rather than revealing any crime-solving insight into the horrific Canadian mass murder that claimed his daughter Maryse and her follow university women, the former communications director of the Montreal Police and still-grieving father Pierre Leclair spoke with mystique about his “theory”, which I interpret as of the ‘consecration of flesh’, that is, his daughter Maryse’s:

“The mystery of why Maryse was the only victim to be stabbed haunted Mr. Leclair for years. But he has come up with a theory over time, and it has nurtured his deep belief in gun control.

“He was forced to touch her,” he said. “With a bullet, there’s no contact with the person. But when you touch someone, you feel them, you feel their warmth.

“Maybe all of a sudden he realized the magnitude of what he’d done. It was as if he woke up.”

Maryse Leclair was the final victim. The killer uttered, “Oh, shit,” then turned his gun on himself.

…

Mr. Leclair, a solidly built man who speaks about his daughter with nervous intensity, said he’s decided to talk about her death after years of silence in the hope that something – he’s not sure what — will come of it. But events over the past 10 years haven’t been encouraging: Dunblane, Scotland; Littleton, Colo.; Taber, Alta.,; Honolulu — every other week, someone seems to go berserk and fire on innocent people.

“Ten years later, do incidents like this happen any less? No,” he said. “Its causes are still not settled. Did it happen because Mr. Lépine was deranged? Well there are still lots of deranged people out there. Was it because he was a misogynist? There are still others out there today, too.

“I’m not so sure we’ve learned anything.”

But Mr. Leclair, now the chief of police in the Quebec City suburb of Ste-Foy, is remarkably free of anger. He described the killer, the son of a brutally violent father, as a victim himself. And he spoke lovingly of his deceased daughter, finding solace in the memory of a determined young woman and good student in her final year in metallurgy who wanted to make it in a man’s field.”

(Ingrid Peritz, December 6, 2004/April 21, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

I suppose that in Mr. Leclair’s mind, the need for gun control was due not so much to the efficacy of guns as lethal weapon, but to the lack of close human touch in using such a weapon.

Leclair expressed indignation at not being able to reach the truth, and peace for more people, even after ten years. But in my view truth, or the science of something, cannot be reached if those who hold the keys to it are consumed by the piety of blood or preoccupied with the sacredness of prayer.

For a first question of a practical inquiry, could it not have been that Lépine knifed Maryse because she was unique to him, that in his murderous crime spree he knew exactly who she was?

While the two deaths share the common dimension of a police official as the victim’s father, in the case of Patricia Allen murder the seemingly incidental, indirect link between the killer and the only stabbed victim in the earlier École Polytechnique gun-shooting spree was replaced with a passionate romance turning sour and ending with a crossbow killing, also acted out in public view:

“Even in the beginning, Colin McGregor believed relationships between men and women were doomed to end in failure – sometimes, with what he called “a terribly cruel vengeance.”

Last week, the 30-year-old author of those chilling words was charged with the murder of his estranged wife, Patricia Allen, a 31-year-old lawyer.

Allen, who worked in Ottawa, was shot through the heart with a steel-tipped hunting arrow as she left her dentist’s office at 8:30 on the morning of Nov. 13. The 18-inch bolt had been fired at close range from a crossbow.

The last thing she saw was probably the massive stone facade of Christ Roi Church, across the street.

Her dentist later told Allen’s parents he was the last person to see her alive. He said she had been in a happy, optimistic mood when she left his downtown Ottawa offices.

It was 12 weeks since Allen had initiated legal-separation procedures against McGregor.

Five people witnessed the killing on Argyle St.

Minutes later, McGregor calmly walked through the main entrance of an Ottawa police station two blocks from the scene. He was interrogated for less than an hour, charged with first-degree murder and remanded to the Royal Ottawa Hospital for a 30-day psychiatric examination.

…

Inspector Ronald Lamothe, the Ottawa police officer in charge of the case, won’t discuss the evidence for fear of jeopardizing the trial’s outcome.

…

Lamothe refused to discuss the nature of items police seized in an apartment McGregor had rented on Chapel St. in downtown Ottawa.

He said McGregor drove a rented Dodge Shadow and parked it near Allen’s Toyota Tercel. The Dodge was later found abandoned at the scene.

McGregor, a graduate of Selwyn House, an exclusive Westmount school, moved into his low-rent Ottawa apartment after his wife changed the locks on her house and got an unlisted telephone number.

She lived on Prince Albert St., about 2 kilometres away.

Just landed promotion

The daughter of George Allen, a retired RCMP assistant commissioner, Patricia worked for Revenue Canada, where she was an authority on the legal ramifications of the goods-and-services tax.

“She loved tax,” one of her friends said, “but you had to pry it out of her that she worked for the dreaded GST branch.”

Allen, a witty and bright conversationalist, had recently landed an important promotion that put her in charge of five people.”

(Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

Before his relationship with and then marriage to Patricia Allen, there had been no sign that Colin McGregor, whose writings could be antagonistic, had any physical tendency toward violence:

“Ron Seltzer, publisher of the Downtowner, said McGregor joined his staff in 1985 after spending some time at a small weekly in Halifax.

“He was fine to work with,” Seltzer said.

He said he was shocked to hear that McGregor had been charged.

“I have no recollections of his having had a bad temper,” Seltzer added. “No incidents of desk-kicking to report.”

Brian Todd, now a political aide to Phil Edmonston, the New Democratic Party MP for Chambly, remembers that McGregor loved to debate issues.

“I knew him at McGill as a right-leaning contrarian” – someone who says black is white just for argument’s sake.

“He was a professional debunker, always picking fights in print with various lobby groups,” Todd said.

But McGregor didn’t seem a violent fellow “in any way,” he said.

Indeed, some of McGregor’s columns in the McGill Tribune show he had a keen sense of humor but was generally cynical. He was also a fairly accomplished writer.”

(Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

However, after they were introduced and their romance instantly blossomed, McGregor became extremely and obsessively possessive of Allen:

“In McGregor’s mind, unhappy endings weren’t unusual. He had lost his mother to cancer when he was only 12.

His views on relationships between men and women are contained in yellowing copies of the McGill Tribune, a weekly student newspaper for which he wrote while he attended McGill University, starting in 1982.

In a column on sex in the Nov. 2, 1982, issue, McGregor wrote:

“Most sex does not last forever. Relationships go wrong, they end up on the rocks, and often they do so with a terribly cruel vengeance. The vast majority of affairs on this planet have ended in that fashion. Failure. Heartbreak. Bad news.”

…

But it was love at first sight on that summer evening in 1987 when Allen and McGregor met.

Allen had effortlessly sailed through her third year of law school. McGregor, who had just got his BA in philosophy, had a job with the Montreal public-relations firm of Gervais, Gagnon, Frenette &Associes. He had just completed a year-long stint as a reporter with the Downtowner, a Montreal weekly newspaper.

…

Allen’s friends say she and McGregor were introduced by mutual acquaintances at Thomson House, a building for graduate students, located across from the law faculty on McTavish St.

The 10 male and female students who belonged to what they jokingly called the “rat pack and cat pack” liked to frequent the building’s plush lounge.

Pack members agreed to be interviewed on condition that their names not be used.

“We used to hang out there,” one of the women recalled. “One night Colin showed up and in a matter of weeks Patricia had him pegged as ‘Colin-the-man-I’m-going-to-marry-Gregor.’ It was as quick as that.”

Allen’s friends say she was lonely when McGregor arrived on the scene.

Allen’s family was in Ottawa and she lived in a downtown Montreal apartment. She had several close friends, but there was no man in her life.

…

But in the midst of it all, there were disquieting signs.

A woman friend remembered being at Allen’s apartment one evening before the two married.

“I swear I’m not exaggerating. In the space of three hours, he called 10 times. He wanted to be reassured she loved him.

“I found it sick. I thought nobody should call you that many times.”

Thane Burnett, a friend of McGregor, said Colin didn’t make friends easily.

“But when you were his friend, you were his friend for life.”

As the relationship progressed, Allen’s friends felt themselves shunted aside by McGregor’s growing possessiveness.

“I couldn’t even go to their home,” one woman said. “And whenever I called Pat, he’d be on the extension clicking the phone.”

McGregor was an incredible snob, she added.

“He wanted everyone to think he was upper crust and he didn’t want Pat to associate with anyone who wasn’t worthy.””

(Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

As reviewed earlier, the normal friendship between Marc Lépine and Dominique Leclair tapered off in September 1987 when Leclair returned to school after a summer at the hospital where her father was the boss, Lépine’s mother a manager and Lépine a worker; in timeline, that was soon after Colin McGregor and Patricia Allen becoming romantically involved in the summer of 1987, though the two cases were unrelated.

But the two pairs were heading in opposite directions, with McGregor and Allen’s relationship growing into a marriage a year later.

After their marriage, McGregor became financially dependent on Allen and then also fell off his career and education tracks; the predicaments led to quarrels between them and Allen’s decision to separate from McGregor, viewing McGregor as violent but not anticipating any violence toward her:

“McGregor moved to Ottawa at the end of 1987 to join the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada as media relations officer. It was a significant move up the corporate ladder for a young man who by all accounts was obsessed with impressing people. He held the post from January till the fall of 1988.

On Oct. 1, Allen and McGregor married.

After that, McGregor registered at Carleton University for the master’s degree program in public administration.

With Allen supporting him, McGregor attended classes on a part-time basis. And he quarrelled with his wife.

Lost track

Their next-door neighbor, Debbie Monette, told the Ottawa Sun:

“He would be yelling, saying he wanted to stay in school and she would be telling him he had to pull his own share.”

After the couple separated on Aug. 20, Allen lost track of McGregor.

“She couldn’t do anything with him, and he wouldn’t do anything for himself,” one of her friends said.

By the end of August, McGregor had dropped out of school and was unemployed.

“I asked her how he was supporting himself,” a friend said, “and she didn’t have a clue.”

If the marriage broke down, it was McGregor’s fault, the friend added.

“Pat was a very determined person. And when she married him she intended for it to work.”

One friend who was in touch with Allen three days before her death said she asked Patricia if she was afraid of McGregor.

“She thought he was violent, but she didn’t think he would hurt her,” the friend recalled.”

(Claude Arpin, November 23, 1991, The Gazette)

In a sense of irony, though, as I can perceive, the all-consuming romance between Colin McGregor and Patricia Allen and McGregor’s obsessive possession of Allen – in contrast to Marc Lépine’s persistent failures in intimate socialization and the numerous ridicules heaped on his personality in public settings – may have prevent the victimization of others when McGregor’s inner violence was eventually unleashed.

Perhaps not irrelevant to that contrast was the different choices of weapon for the murders, that a rather humble crossbow with arrow was sufficient for McGregor’s purpose.

The same choice of weapon clearly could not be adequate for Earl Kevin Jans several years later in May 1994 – at a security-protected public gathering where the prime minister was to be his target. But as I have commented earlier, that weapon’s real use may not have been Jans’s purpose.

By the early fall in 1994, several months after the Liberal Party convention that launched a stricter gun-control drive and the Earl Kevin Jans incident, both in May, there was still no action for gun control by the Chretien government on the legislative front.

Around that time in late August, Stevie Cameron’s book on corruption in the Mulroney government era, On The Take: Greed And Corruption In The Mulroney Years, was being eagerly anticipated, along with several other books on Canadian politics, including the second volume of Trudeau And Our Times, subtitled The Heroic Delusion:

“Fortunately for Chretien, by the fall of 1994 gun control would not be the only political issue stirring controversy with passion as Stevie Cameron’s major book exposing corruptions in the Mulroney years was scheduled for the same fall season; there were both excitement and nervousness awaiting for the upcoming fall books on Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney: ²⁰⁸

“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)”.

…

208. Judy Stoffman, “New books season full of promise Excitement from CanLit favorites and newcomers”, August 31, 1994, Toronto Star”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As discussed earlier, investigating corruption on the part of former Prime Minister Mulroney was a part of the Chretien Liberal government’s law-and-order agenda, if not of the same high priority as stricter gun control. With Cameron’s new book coming out, both law-and-order issues were expected to enjoy public attention.

As noted earlier, around this time in September, former RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, who had retired from the RCMP in June, also stepped down from the Interpol presidency.

Cameron’s book came out in late October 1994, and became an instant bestseller. However, even though it portrayed Mulroney as turning a blind eye to the corruption around him, disappointingly it showed little hard evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Mulroney himself, in the Airbus Affair in particular:

“In late October 1994 Stevie Cameron’s book on the Mulroney years came out and became an instant bestseller: it portrayed a damning picture of the greed, crime and corruption in the political circle associated with the Mulroney government, and of Mulroney turning a blind eye to the grease around him while living his extravagant lifestyle at the expenses of the party and the government; coming out around the anniversary of the Tories’ historic election debacle it served as a reminder how democracy could go wrong. ²¹⁰

But Cameron presented little hard evidence Mulroney himself had done anything seriously crooked or criminally wrong: a story about a $4-million trust fund set up by some Montreal businessmen for Mulroney’s retirement was categorically denied by Mulroney and by Tory senator Marjorie LeBreton, while a brief section on the Airbus Affair went unnoticed by the media. ²¹¹”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I noted that there may have been personal safety concerns on the part of the author, as well as on the part of some of those cited in the book, including a police informant:

“Nonetheless, controversies over risks of publicizing the Mulroney-era problems abounded: publisher Gary Ross went public about break-ins at the publishers’ offices attempting to steal Cameron’s manuscripts, Cameron was reported to have received intimidation through a family member, and a Vancouver man, Michael Lee Mitton, quoted in the book as a former fraudster in a sting operation for an RCMP investigation into the Mulroney government’s Mafia link, also told the media he feared for mob revenge on his life. ²¹²”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Nevertheless, the RCMP announced that it was studying Cameron’s book, and Solicitor General Gray also discussed the subject:

“The RCMP also announced they were studying the book, much to the delight of solicitor general Herb Gray. ²¹³”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As reviewed earlier, Mulroney later complained about “open season on Mulroney”, referring to this time, as quoted earlier, “Out comes (Stevie) Cameron’s book (On The Take), Herb Gray, the solicitor general, gives a copy of it to the commissioner of the RCMP, asking that he look into it.”

By November 1994, both of these major Chretien government law-and-order agendas were getting public attention. But just like Cameron’s new book lacking in evidence of personal corruption on the part of Mulroney, in the fall of 1994 the Chretien government was weakening its gun-control plan:

“While Cameron’s book was proving to be lacking hard material on Mulroney, around that time the Chretien government was retreating from a possible handgun ban due to opposition in the Liberal party to tougher gun control, and to stronger homosexual-rights protection; a universal gun registry, expanding from an existent one for handguns and restricted weapons, now became the main gun-control issue Chretien was stumping for, and even that did not appear assured. ²¹⁴

…

214. Sarah Scott, “Rock mulls total ban on handguns”, September 22, 1994, The Gazette; Bob Cox, “Liberal MPs demand freedom: Promises of free votes have been forgotten”, October 11, 1994, The Record; and, Tim Harper, “Every gun will be registered Chretien vows”, October 22, 1994, Toronto Star”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, by October 1994 there did not appear to be any gun ban in the Chretien government’s stricter gun-control legislation, which instead would primarily be an expansion of the existing gun registry on “handguns and restricted weapons” to cover all guns.

At this critical juncture, an unusual gun-shooting crime occurred in Vancouver in early November, and garnered nationwide public attention:

“At this juncture, a critical shot in the arm turned out to come from the shooting of an abortion doctor in Vancouver: while reading a Time magazine and waiting for breakfast at home Dr. Gary Romalis, a gynaecologist who performed abortions at the Vancouver General Hospital but who did not consider himself an abortion activist, was seriously wounded in the thigh by one of two AK-47 assault rifle shots  fired from the alley through the kitchen window on November 8, 1994. ²¹⁵ ”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told, the victim in this case, wounded in the leg by an AK-47 assault rifle bullet from outside his home kitchen window while he was reading a Time magazine, was gynaecologist Dr. Gary Romalis who performed abortions at the Vancouver General Hospital.

It was the first-ever shooting of an abortion doctor in Canada, and drew public condemnations from Prime Minister Chretien and British Columbia Premier Mike Harcourt; the public attention enabled Justice Minister Rock to rally support in the medical community for stricter gun control, and strengthen the proposed legislation to include a ban on military-style assault weapons:

“The shooting of an abortion doctor was the first of its kind in Canada – after several recent shootings that had killed two U.S. doctors – and it drew condemnations from prime minister Chretien and B.C. premier Mike Harcourt who were on an Asian trip in Shanghai, and got justice minister Allan Rock to rally the medical community to support tougher gun control; momentum from the public outcries contributed to the inclusion of a ban on military-type assault weapons in the gun-control measures unveiled by Rock on November 30, 1994 (a military-type assault weapon, Ruger Mini-14, had also been responsible for the deaths of the 14 women in the Montreal massacre in December 1989). ²¹⁶”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, a military-type assault weapon had been used in the Montreal Massacre that killed fourteen women in December 1989 – but apparently the Mulroney government’s gun-control legislation two years later in 1991 did not include a ban on such weapons – and now with the wounding of Dr. Gary Romalis, again by such a weapon, a ban was added to the Chretien government’s new gun-control measures unveiled on November 30, 1994.

Here is some of what Prime Minister Chretien said on the eve of unveiling the new gun-control measures, referring to Dr. Romalis:

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien says the gun lobby won’t stop him from pushing through “the toughest gun control measures in Canadian history.”

Justice Minister Allan Rock will unveil a package of reforms in Parliament today “to crack down on criminals who have guns and to ban the kinds of weapons we have seen kill young students in Montreal and that seriously wounded a medical doctor in Vancouver a few weeks ago,” Chretien told a Liberal fundraiser last night at the Metro Convention Centre.

“I know that some in the gun lobby will scream when Allan introduces our gun control package,” he said. “But Canadians don’t want special interests to keep us from doing the right thing – in any area.

“And I pledge to the people of Canada that we will not let that happen.”

Although the reforms are to be unveiled today by Rock, Solicitor-General Herb Gray and Revenue Minister David Anderson, enabling legislation won’t be introduced until February.

The Prime Minister said last night Canadians want decent neighborhoods and safe streets.

“People here in Toronto and in communities across Canada are tired of all the guns on the streets – the violence, the murders,” he said. “They don’t want their communities to become combat zones like some American cities.””

(“PM vows not to yield to foes of gun control Canadians ‘tired of the violence, murders,’ he says”, by Rosemary Speirs, November 30, 1994, Toronto Star)

As quoted above, “the toughest gun control measures in Canadian history”, “to crackdown on criminals who have guns”, and “to ban the kinds of weapons we have seen kill young students in Montreal and that seriously wounded a medical doctor in Vancouver”, were among Chretien’s words. Chretien also referred to some American cities as “combat zones”, stating that people in Canada do not want their communities to become such.

Gun control appeared somewhat like a ‘blood sport’ in Canada, didn’t it?

But if it was any consolation, unlike the fourteen Montreal women slain in 1989, in 1994 Romalis was only shot in the leg – kind of like Interpol president Reinhard Heydrich’s driver Johannes Klein in 1942.

In my 2009 article I mentioned some interesting coincidences in my past political activism with Dr. Gary Romalis’s case. To make the presentation easy to understand they are summarized here in a list, as from my May 2009 post:

1. When I started my political activism in November 1992, besides to media venues I also sent my press releases to the local Member of Parliament, Justice Minister Kim Campbell; though shot two years later in November 1994, Romalis had received threats during the Mulroney government era and complained to Justice Minister Kim Campbell.
2. After my faxing documents to Campbell’s Vancouver constituency office on November 30, 1992, RCMP officers came to my apartment to suppress my activities; it was then exactly two years later on November 30, 1994, when Justice Minister Rock unveiled the Chretien government’s gun-control legislation that included a military-type assault weapons ban partly stimulated by the shooting of Romalis earlier that November in Vancouver.
3. When RCMP officer Brian Cotton took me to a psychiatric assessment on November 30, 1992, he rejected my suggestion of going to the nearby Vancouver General Hospital for a “neutral” assessment, stating that it had been arranged at the hospital of the University of British Columbia; Dr. Romalis practised at the VGH.
4. In subsequent occasions of being sent to psychiatric assessments and committals, the assessments at VGH were more favorable to me, and the release sooner, than at other institutions including UBC Hospital.
5. In January 1993 when I was sent to my second psychiatric committal, through an arrangement by the prosecution with Judge William J. Kitchen, for the criminal charge of “harassing phone calls” from me to staff at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I was supposed to be sent to the B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute, where persons with harder criminal offences were sent to – as mentioned earlier, later I was committed there in February 1994 when Chretien announced Inkster’s resignation from the RCMP – but a Vancouver police officer suggested that I get a referral from my family physician, Dr. James K. Lai, so I could be sent to the VGH instead; according to a personal-information disclosure I later obtained, on at least one occasion Dr. Lai stated his opinion that I was “very healthy”.
6. Years later on July 11, 2000, Dr. Romalis was physically attacked a second time, by a man yielding a knife, and a caller to The Vancouver Sun claimed responsibility on behalf of the “Baby Liberation Army”; by this time Romalis was no longer with VGH but with the Seymour Medical Clinic headed by Dr. Lai, where he was attacked – it was my “former” medical clinic as I had left Vancouver in 1997 to work in the United States.

To further clarify Point #1 above, namely communicating to Justice Minister Kim Campbell during the Mulroney era, for his abortion work Dr. Romalis had been threatened in very physical manners:

“The threat of violence was not new to Dr. Romalis, who has been a gynecologist in the city for almost three decades. Anti-abortion advocates had previously demonstrated in front of his house and office, throwing roofing nails on his driveway and harassing him at the Vancouver General Hospital. Dr. Romalis had warned Kim Campbell of his concerns when she was federal justice minister, said one of his colleagues, Lynn Simpson.”

(“B.C. doctor hit by sniper Gynecologist who does abortions had received threatening call”, by Robert Matas and Miro Cernetig, November 9, 1994, The Globe and Mail)

About Point #6 above, namely Dr. Romalis working at my former medical clinic headed by my former doctor James K. Lai, when he was stabbed, here is what I wrote in 2009:

“In the New Millennium, Dr. Gary Romalis again received a threatening call though he was no longer based in Vancouver General Hospital, and was attacked with a knife and wounded on July 11, 2000 in the Seymour Medical Clinic where he worked. ²²⁰

If the reader has guessed again now you may be right: this time Dr. Romalis was a member of my (former) medical clinic chaired by my family physician Dr. James Lai; the day after the attack a phone call was placed to the Vancouver Sun newspaper on behalf of a “Baby Liberation Army” claiming responsibility ²²¹ – but by the fall of 1997 I had left Vancouver and in 2000 I was working in Silicon Valley in California …”

(Part 5, May 27, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Neither of the two seriously violent attacks on Gary Romalis has ever been solved by the police. But, interestingly, the main suspect of the 1994 shooting was not a Canadian but American James C. Kopp, as I remarked in my 2009 article’s Part 6:

“American James C. Kopp, long-time anti-abortion activist serving a life sentence since 2007 for the 1998 murder of Amherst, N.Y. abortion doctor Barnett Slepian, is a main suspect in the 1994 shooting of Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) abortion doctor Gary Romalis; a Canadian warrant for Kopp was issued for the 1995 shooting of abortion doctor Hugh Short in Ancaster, Ontario, though the prosecution has recently decided to stay the charges; Kopp is also a main suspect in the 1997 shooting of abortion doctor Jack Fainman of Winnipeg.²²²

In the New York case, two anti-abortion activists harbouring and helping Kopp, Loretta Marra and Dennis Malvasi, received light penalties. ²²³

As previously discussed, the Romalis shooting incident in November 1994 turned the Canadian medical community into showing strong support for justice minister Allan Rock’s stricter gun-control legislation, which was unveiled on November 30, 1994 and included a ban on military-type weapons, one of which – an AK-47 – had been responsible for wounding Dr. Romalis.

There has been no press report of any identified suspect in the second, knife attack on Dr. Romalis in July 2000, which took place at my former medical clinic headed by my family physician Dr. James K. Lai, where Dr. Romalis practiced after retiring from the VGH.”

(“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)”, June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, James C. Kopp was an American who took out his military-style assault weapon and aimed it at abortion doctors in the U.S. as well as in Canada – convicted of killing a U.S. doctor and suspected of wounding three Canadian doctors.

I have always felt intrigue with the similarities in the names James K. Lai and James C. Kopp. But now with the review of Interpol history in this current article, it’s worth mentioning in light of the name similarities between Earl Kevin Jans, who brought a crossbow and arrows to want to see Prime Minister Chretien, several months before the shooting of Gary Romalis, and Reinhard Heydrich’s assassin Jan Kubiš in history.

As I wrote in June 2009, I also noted that the active shooting of abortion doctors had not ended but had, just in May 2009, claimed the life of Dr. George Tiller, an American peer of Dr. Romalis’s:

“But recently on May 31, 2009, only days after the Canadian charges were dropped against Kopp in the Dr. Short case, American abortion doctor George Tiller, who had previously been shot and wounded and who had lectured to abortion providers in Vancouver at the invitation of Dr. Romalis, was gunned down in the lobby of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, becoming the first dead doctor of anti-abortion violence in the U.S. after Kopp’s killing of Dr. Slepian; the main suspect, Scott Roeder, had been a member of an extreme Christian militia group, the Freeman movement. ²²⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Nevertheless, I feel somewhat relieved that, though as painful and potentially as deadly, the second attack on Dr. Romalis used only a knife.

I don’t know if the Chretien government’s stricter gun ban deserved credit for the ‘curtailed’ choice of weapon against Dr. Romalis in the second attack in 2000, but I notice a different kind of similarity: while in March 1994 Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was gunned down just before Chretien’s official Mexican visit, two months later in Canada Earl Kevin Jans carried only crossbow-and-arrows; likewise, Dr. Romalis was shot when he was a doctor with Vancouver General Hospital, but later with my former physician Dr. Lai’s clinic he was only stabbed.

Returning to my review of the Chretien government’s stricter gun-control drive that received a boost of public support due to the shooting of Dr. Gary Romalis, the legislative process began in February 1995, on St. Valentine’s Day, which happened to have some relevant history in regard to gun violence, in the U.S. but also related to Canada:

“When the gun-control bill was officially put to the legislative process in February 1995, it was on St. Valentine’s Day, “known as the day of the St. Valentine’s Massacre”, noted John Perrochio, president of the Canadian Firearms Action Council, referring to a rival-gang slaughtering in 1929 Prohibition-era Chicago, in which the killers dressed as policemen, and behind which control of illegal liquor from Canada by the notorious gangster boss Al Capone was apparently a motivating factor. ^{225, 226, 227}

…

226. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre in which gangsters believed to be from Al Capone’s organization dressed as policemen, lined up 7 members of a rival bootlegging gang at a Clark Street garage in Chicago and machine-gunned them to death, was never solved although Capone’s bodyguard and successor Anthony J. Accardo was thought to be responsible…

227. After 13 female engineering students and one female employee were gunned down at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, the media noted that it was twice as bad as the St. Valentine’s Day massacre; later the school’s student association president Alain Perrault chose the day before St. Valentine’s Day 1990 to unveil a gun-control petition signed by over 200,000 people, starting a campaign pushing Mulroney government’s justice minister Kim Campbell toward gun-control efforts…”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Immediately, the legislation won praise from U.S. President Bill Clinton who happened to visit Canada and give a speech at the Canadian Parliament:

“The Chretien Liberal government’s gun-control bill immediately won praise from U.S. president Bill Clinton, whose own 1994 legislation on banning assault weapons had been lauded in Canada by Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, in the wake of the Dr. Romalis shooting in Vancouver; in a speech to the Canadian parliament, Clinton compared Canada’s move “to outlaw automatic weapons designed for killing and not hunting”, to universal healthcare Canada had – something Clinton had also tried to introduce in the United States but failed. ²²⁸”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Around the same time, the efforts to investigate possible corruption on the part of former Prime Minister Mulroney was getting into international action.

In January 1995, two RCMP officers, Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald and Inspector Carl Gallant, visited Stevie Cameron to discuss her new book published in October 1994, and she recommended interviewing persons in Europe, who in her experience had been more helpful than the Canadian government and police; then in March, partly based on Cameron’s book, the CBC’s The Fifth Estate in Canada and the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and der Spiegel magazine in Germany reported Karlheinz Schreiber’s secret Airbus commissions and Swiss bank accounts for Canadian politicians:

“During that same spring of 1995, efforts by the media and by the RCMP to pursue former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s possible corruption were also expanding, following the October 1994 publication of Stevie Cameron’s book exposing Mulroney-era corruption. Cameron’s book had become not only a bestseller alongside books such as Open Secrets by Alice Munro, but a favorite Christmas gift. ²³¹

In January, the press reported that author Peter C. Newman living in a “Kitsilano tower” in Vancouver was writing a revealing book on the Mulroney era to be published in September 1995, that Newman had collected materials from Mulroney himself and persons in his circle including Frank Moores and Fred Doucet, and also obtained “proof” about certain controversial episodes involving Mulroney in the late period of the Meech Lake accord …

Also 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 The House; 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. ²³³

In March, CBC’s The Fifth Estate aired an episode on the Airbus story, alleging that Airbus Industrie paid secret commissions to Karlheinz Schreiber to smooth the 1988 sale of Airbus A320 planes to Air Canada, and that Swiss bank accounts were opened by Schreiber for Frank Moores and for an unidentified Canadian politician; part of the information aired came from Cameron’s file she had gathered for her book, and all of the materials in her file were also reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and the der Spiegel magazine in Munich, Germany. ²³⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, in the beginning in 1988 there had been an U.S. FBI investigation into the Airbus sale to Air Canada. The Canadian government and police had been uncooperative until now when RCMP officers visited Cameron in early 1995.

On the gun-control front, the Chretien government’s legislation would eventually become law, but not before overcoming some unexpectedly strong oppositions in the Parliament through 1995.

The legislation needed to pass several votes in the lower chamber, the House of Commons, and similarly in the upper chamber, the Senate. In the House, Liberal internal dissents would take stern measures by Jean Chretien as the party leader to keep under control, which when I first reviewed in 2009 prompted comparisons of Chretien to other political party leaders and to Brian Mulroney in the past, as to whether Chretien acted less, rather than more, democratically in parliamentary politics. In the Senate,, the governing Liberal Party did not even have a majority.

The legislation easily won the first vote in the House in April 1995; but a large number of Liberal Members of Parliament, 49 of them, were purposely absent from the voting, causing serious concerns for Chretien:

“The size of the Liberal internal opposition was a concern for Jean Chretien: in the first vote in the House of Commons which the Liberals easily won, 3 Liberal MPs voted against the bill, 49 of the 177 majority Liberal MPs (in a parliament of around 300 MPs) were absent and as many as 30 of them stayed away to show their opposition…

…

Bob Speller, chair of the rural Liberal caucus who had advised rural Liberal MPs inclined to vote ‘no’ to skip the first vote instead, was reported as saying the 49 Liberal MPs who had not shown up for the first vote could vote ‘no’ in the final vote…”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As the head counts in the above showed, if most of those 49 Liberal MPs absenting from the first vote, many of them from rural regions, were to vote “no” in the final vote, which they could, then the Liberal government’s majority 177 seats in a chamber of around 300 could fail to get the legislation through.

Immediately, Chretien enforced disciplines on the very few – only three – of Liberal MPs who voted “no” the first time, stripping them of all their parliamentary committee positions:

“… at a caucus meeting before the vote Chretien had warned his MPs to vote with the party, and after the vote he quickly stripped all parliamentary committee positions from the 3 Liberals Benoit Serre, Paul Steckle, and Rex Crawford who had voted no regardless – despite their claims that they represented the anti-gun-control sentiments of their rural riding constituents. ²³⁷

Chretien also planned to enforce party discipline in the same manner with the hate-crime bill protecting minority rights (including homosexual rights) that was being processed through the parliament in parallel to the gun-control bill.”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, Chretien would not accept the argument by any Liberal MP who voted “no” that his constituents were opposed to the gun-control legislation.

Also as above, at the time the Chretien government was also pursuing a hate-crime legislation to protect minority rights, and Chretien stood firm on requiring Liberal MPs to vote for this other legislation being pushed through in parallel to the gun-control bill.

The major opposition parties at the time were the separatist Bloc Quebecois and the Reform Party, the latter the main opponent to gun control:

“Like the Bloc Quebecois led by Tory-breakaway MP Lucien Bouchard taking many formerly Tory seats in Quebec, the Reform party formerly represented by only one MP Deborah Grey and led by party leader Preston Manning outside the parliament, took most of the western Canada rural ridings (particularly in Alberta) from the Tories in the 1993 election, also winning over 50 seats and just two fewer than Bloc Quebecois. ²⁴¹ On conservative issues such as against gun control, the Reform party became the Liberals’ main opposition in the House of Commons – even though Reform had championed an anti-crime platform …”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But the Reform Party allowed its MPs to vote according to their constituents’ wishes and one of them, Stephen Harper, voted “yes” on the gun-control legislation in the first vote:

“Across the aisle from among the opposition Reform party, a lone MP (and future prime minister) Stephen Harper voted for the gun-control legislation in this first vote, as did one of the only two Tory MPs, Elsie Wayne. ²⁴⁰

…

… but the Reform party allowed its MPs to vote their constituents’ wishes …”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told in the above two quotes, in the 1993 election most of the past electoral support for Mulroney’s Tory party had gone to the two new parties, Bloc Quebecois and Reform Party; the old party by this time had only two MPs, one of whom, Elsie Wayne, voted for the legislation.

In my June 2009 post, I compared the way Chretien disciplined Liberal Party dissenters on gun-control in April 1995 to how B.C. Tory MP Stan Wilbee had faired in November 1992 after demanding a Tory party review of Mulroney’s leadership, concluding that Chretien seemed harsher, i.e., less democratic in this respect:

“Compared to the previously discussed case of Stan Wilbee in November 1992, i.e., the lone Tory MP publicly calling for a leadership review on Brian Mulroney and asked to resign his B.C. caucus chair by justice minister Kim Campbell, that Wilbee in the end not only retained the caucus chair and kept his chair at the Commons committee on health issues but also got to embark on leading a new parliamentary probe into the HIV-tainted blood-supply issue, Chretien’s measures in April 1995 seemed harsh.

Comparison to Mulroney – on lack of democracy within the party – was evident: it was acknowledged by Liberal party whip Don Boudria who had often criticized Mulroney for “muzzling independent thought” in the Tory caucus…”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Nonetheless, Chretien probably felt strongly that his government’s stricter gun-control measures had the support of a majority of Canadians, given that polls had consistently shown support nationwide, especially for the universal gun registry:

“Since before the 1993 election polls had consistently showed that a majority of Canadians, including most Albertans, supported stricter gun control, including mandatory gun registration: nationally, support for a gun registry was 86% in September 1993, and by late May 1995 with the legislation near final vote it was still 71% and higher than support for the full bill at 64%. ²⁴²”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

However, among the Liberal MPs from rural regions, and from some influential persons and groups in the Canadian society, including the Canadian Medical Association that strongly supported the military-style assault weapons ban, there was considerable opposition to the universal gun registry:

“Despite the high poll numbers supporting it, besides the Reform party and the pro-gun groups there were other public shows of opposition to the gun-control bill.

One high-profile act of opposition came from Justice Jean-Claude Angers of the New Brunswick Court of Appeal, who wrote an open letter to prime minister Jean Chretien and the MPs, calling the gun-control proposal ”serious infringements of the rights to security and enjoyment of the person and to own property”; two law professors complained about his conduct to the Canadian Judicial Council, and Angers received a public reprimand from council chair, B.C. Chief Justice Allan McEachern, about his “highly partisan attack” on a proposal that could become law which he would often need to interpret and enforce…

Another high-profile act of opposition, that of backtracking from supporting, curiously came from the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), which had become a strong public supporter of gun control after the shooting of Dr. Gary Romalis in November 1994: the association still stood by its support for banning military-type assault weapons, one of which had wounded Dr. Romalis, but changed its position on the gun registry – also the main point of contention for the dissident rural Liberal MPs – and questioned its effectiveness for violent-crime reduction; the reversal caught justice minister Allan Rock by surprise, but the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians continued to support the gun registry. ²⁴⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, the Canadian Medical Association retracted its support for the gun registry, although the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians continued to support it.

Some of the concerns about the gun registry regarded penalties being potentially too harsh for people failing to register their guns, and Justice Minister Rock responded by suggesting some lighter alternatives:

“Within the notion of a universal gun registry a key point of contention was whether failure to register would be treated as a serious criminal offence or closer to a motor-vehicle registration violation; Allan Rock had earlier hinted at the possibility of a compromise, and after the CMA expressed to the Commons justice committee its new doubts on the gun registry, Rock suggested to the committee adding a category of lighter criminal penalties – outside of the Criminal Code – for some situations, and the committee quickly endorsed it. ²⁴⁵”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The final House vote on the gun-control legislation came in June 1995. Leading up to the vote, Chretien continued to clamp down on Liberal dissents to try to ensure no internal revolt would happen.

Several days before the final vote, Liberal MP and justice committee chair Warren Allmand voted “no” on a budget-related bill, and Chretien moved to strip Allmand of his committee chair position; but Chretien’s disciplinary action hit a snag when Reform Party whip Jim Silye refused to give his signature, stating publicly that the Chretien government was no better than the Mulroney government when it came to “quashing internal dissent or rewarding friends with patronage”:

“… several days earlier there was also a lone Liberal no vote on the government’s budget-implementation bill, from justice committee chair Warren Allmand protesting budget cuts that reminded him of the Mulroney Tories’ cuts on spending for social programs…

After the budget vote in early June, Chretien had immediately moved to take Warren Allmand off his chair position at the justice committee, but unexpectedly Reform party whip Jim Silye refused to give his signature to expedite the removal, and also went public accusing the Chretien government of doing no better than the Mulroney government when it came to quashing internal dissent or rewarding friends with patronage. ²⁵⁰”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Jim Silye not only spoke his mind but acted accordingly as days later, despite being the opposition Reform Party whip, he announced that he would vote for the gun-control legislation because his constituents supported it even though he himself was opposed to it; Reform MPs Ted White and Ian McClelland also announced similarly:

“In early June prior to the final Commons vote after which the gun-control bill would be sent to the Senate if passed, the Liberals were bolstered by announcement of voting for the bill from 3 Reform MPs, Ted White, Ian McClelland and Jim Silye, who made their decisions based on polling their constituents; Jim Silye’s position was especially significant because he was the Reform party whip in charge of enforcing party line on MP votes, but the Reform party allowed its MPs to vote their constituents’ wishes and though Silye was opposed to the bill his constituents at the riding of Calgary Centre favoured it. ²⁴⁶”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

On the other hand, Stephen Harper who had been the lone Reform MP to vote “yes” in the first vote, now flip-flopped to a “no” in the final vote because his constituents, though showing 64% support for the legislation, showed 60% opposition to a potential 10-year jail penalty for failing to register guns:

“On the other hand Stephen Harper, MP for Calgary West who had been the lone Reformer voting for it in the first vote based on a poll of 64% constituent support, now would vote no because a second polling of his constituents showed that although most still supported the gun registry, 60% of them did not like a potential 10-year jail penalty still in there for failure to register. ²⁴⁷”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

On June 13, the gun-control legislation passed the final vote in the House, and on June 15 the hate-crime legislation did, both with the support of the Bloc Quebecois; the Liberal MPs largely followed the party line, though nine of them voted “no” on June 13 and four voted “no” on June 15:

“On June 13, the gun-control bill easily passed the Commons, with support from Bloc Quebecois; two day after, the hate-crime legislation also passed, with Bloc Quebecois support, ensuring tougher criminal penalties for crimes “motivated by hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, or mental or physical disability”. ²⁴⁸

The yes votes on gun-control from Jim Silye and the other two Reformers had been expected to compensate for the loss of votes from the 3 rural Liberal MPs who had voted no the first time, but the number of Liberal MPs casting final no vote increased to 9, and 4 other Liberal MPs voted no on the hate-crime bill…”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The three key votes in the first half of June 1995 came to a total of fourteen Liberal MPs – fifteen if counting Rex Crawford, who was absent due to illness but had voted “no” on the gun-control legislation in the first vote – disobeying party instructions, the highest number since the Chretien Liberals had come to power in November 1993:

“… that came to a total of 14 Liberal MPs who openly dissented on important votes – in fact 15 had MP Rex Crawford not suffered a heart attack and missed the final gun-control vote – and a record high of vote dissent since the Chretien government began in November 1993. ²⁴⁹”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Chretien’s uncompromising demand for loyalty in these votes led to criticism from Liberal MP Warren Allmand – his justice committee chair position Chretien had failed to take away as discussed earlier – that Chretien was less democratic than his leadership predecessor and old rival John Turner:

“Chretien was unfazed by the setback in demoting Warren Allmand, and unbending in demanding party loyalty. He praised the Liberal MPs who voted for the gun-control bill “against the very strong wishes of constituents who fiercely opposed the firearms law”, he declared that a vote against the government was a vote against him personally, and he told his MPs that if they did not follow the party line he might refuse to sign their nomination papers for the next election. ²⁵¹

Warren Allmand countered that back in April 1988 when 22 Liberal MPs signed a letter asking then party leader (and Chretien’s rival) John Turner to resign, they did not receive any punishment, and many of the Liberal MPs who had opposed Turner were now in Chretien’s cabinet; Allmand said Chretien was going too far in demanding loyalty. ²⁵²”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

So, on these key legislative votes, under Jean Chretien the Liberal Party was less democratic than under former leader John Turner, than the opposition Reform Party and in some sense than the old Tory party under Brian Mulroney.

Moreover, Chretien’s rule enforced the party line not only on these key votes but on government legislation votes in general; in doing against the Liberal MPs’ constituency wishes, Chretien actually broke a written promise he had made for his party during the 1993 election:

“A public-relations problem for prime minister Chretien in his hard-line stand on loyalty within the party caucus was that it had been his election promise in 1993 as party leader – written in the Liberals’ election Red Book – to allow more free votes by Liberal MPs following their constituents’ wishes, but that afterwards no free vote was allowed on government legislations; there were many other unfulfilled Red Book promises such as, according to Warren Allmand, protecting spending that helped disadvantaged Canadians. ²⁵³

The 13 Liberal MPs dissenting on the gun-control or hate-crime legislation had won the 1993 election in their ridings with promises of parliamentary voting to reflect the constituents’ wishes, and had been hailed as heroes at the time; it had been a Liberal Red-Book promise but now in 1995 they were condemned as “trained seals” by the party. ²⁵⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told, those Liberal MPs who voted against the gun-control or hate-crime legislation did so to reflect their constituents’ wishes as they had promised during the 1993 election.

But Chretien was unfazed in enforcing the party line in disregard of his past electoral promise. After the summer recess when the Parliament reconvened in September 1995, committee memberships were assigned anew and Chretien demoted the Liberal MPs who had shown dissent on those key votes:

“… in absolute-control mode over his Liberal MPs, Chretien wasted no time when the parliament reopened on September 18 for its fall session, at which time committee memberships were assigned anew: Warren Allmand was stripped of his justice committee chair on a day that happened to be one day before his 63th birthday, a move seen as signalling the start of a lonely end for a veteran Liberal who had once been Chretien’s cabinet colleague under Pierre Trudeau – as the solicitor general who ended capital punishment – and who had just shepherded gun control through the justice committee but voted against the budget; Dan McTeague, an ambitious young Liberal MP who had voted against the hate-crime law, was transferred from the heritage committee to the obscure Library of Parliament committee; and rural Liberal caucus chair Bob Speller who had advised the dissident rural Liberal MPs to skip the first vote on gun control, and warned they might vote no in the end, was stripped of his agriculture committee chair. ²⁶⁰”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

A few years later in October 2000, former Liberal leader John Turner spoke out and praised the Canadian Alliance – the Reform Party with a new name – as being more democratic:

“John Turner in fact shared some of the other Liberals’ misgivings about Chretien’s intolerance of democratic debate or dissent, and he later would also start to speak about it, in October 2000 less than 3 weeks after the death of Pierre Trudeau whom both Turner and Chretien had wanted to succeed and Turner did in 1984; Turner even praised the opposition Canadian Alliance – the Reform party with a new name in 2000 – for being more democratic: ²⁵⁷

““The Alliance is debating the issues,” Mr. Turner said.

“Whether or not you agree with the result of the debate or even the scope of the debate or even the subject of the debate, they are debating the issues.

“They’re opening up the system. And I believe the system needs opening up – beginning with the democratization of Parliament.””

”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In relation to Turner’s opinion, quoted above, expressed right after former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s passing, I remarked in 2009 that back in October 2000 Prime Minister Chretien had been more interested in winning a third electoral majority by capitalizing on Canadians’ sympathy for Trudeau:

“In October 2000 when Turner heaped the above praise on the Reform party as a subtle criticism of Chretien, 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. ²⁵⁸

Chretien would win his third majority handily on November 27, 2000, garnering 41% of the popular vote – highest of his 3 times. ²⁵⁹”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, Chretien did win a third majority government in 2000 with 41% of the popular vote, and that was the highest for the Liberal Party under his leadership.

It is worth noting that even though the total popular vote won each time in three consecutive elections was far below 50%, under Chretien’s leadership, the Liberals won House of Common seats in a majority of the ridings each time.

That kind of electoral outcomes might lead one to ponder the rules of parliamentary democracy as it was practiced in Canada.

In my June 2009 post, I discussed various opinions voiced by political commentators, among them William Thorsell, about party discipline and about the prime ministerial power in a majority government, expressed following the several important House votes in June 1995:

“At this point of record-high Chretien Liberal internal dissent, John English, historian and Liberal MP for Kitchener, believed party discipline to be important to national unity for a country as diverse as Canada, but Newfoundland Liberal MP George Baker suggested that the British model should be adopted in which government MPs, like opposition MPs, were allowed to question the government during the Question Period in the Commons; in contrast, the rightwing Reform party MPs, including leader Preston Manning, were during this time practicing free votes or at least freely discussing their opinions on the issue. ²⁵⁵

Some political commentators, e.g., William Thorsell, noted that the Canadian parliamentary system vested too much power in the prime minister of a majority government, more than any other industrialized democracy did in the government leader, and that in most Canadian political party constitutions the party leader’s authority could not be easily challenged unless a full party convention was held; they also noted that democratic rights and freedoms as guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (crowning achievement of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1982 Canadian Constitution) as the only reduction of the political power of the government – and “the single most “Americanizing” event in Canadian history” according to some – merely put the power in the hands of court justices appointed by the prime minister. ²⁵⁶”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Here is some of what William Thorsell actually wrote in June 1995 that I cited in 2009:

“CANADA is among the most decentralized federations in the world, but Canada also has one of the world’s most centralized political power structures. A Canadian prime minister with a majority of seats enjoys more personal power than any elected leader among the industrialized democracies. We saw robust evidence this week in Jean Chretien’s military-style disciplinary threats against dissident members of his own parliamentary caucus. L’etat, c’est lui. This reflects several basic factors:

• We conduct “first-past-the-post” elections in a multi-party system. A majority of seats is almost always delivered by a minority of votes – as small as 37 per cent in recent Ontario and Quebec elections. So Canadian democracy is based on the practice that the minority rules.
• We govern through a parliamentary system that is unicameral in all the provinces, and where the appointed Senate in Ottawa exercises minimal authority over the elected House of Commons.
• Membership in the cabinet exists entirely at the discretion of the prime minister or premier.
• The rules and conventions in our legislatures enforce strict party discipline in an environment where free votes or the initiation of bills are discouraged. Government majorities on most committees ensure political control through all phases of legislation.
• Most party constitutions require full party conventions to vote on a leader’s status before he or she can be ousted. As a result, parliamentary caucuses are neutered as immediate threats to the leader’s authority.

…

Other than public opinion (including the media), the only real check over Canadian first ministers comes from the courts, especially since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. The Charter has been described as the single most “Americanizing” event in Canadian history, which is to say that it is the only event that has structurally reduced the political power of the prime minister and premiers. It has done so not by distributing political power more broadly, but by enhancing the power of the appointed judiciary.

…”

(“Freedom of expression gets short shrift in Canada’s parliamentary caucuses”,  by William Thorsell, June 17, 1995, The Globe and Mail)

As noted by Thorsell, the Canadian parliamentary system vested too much power in the prime minister of a majority government, whose authority as the governing party leader also could not be easily challenged within the party, while the constitutionally-protected democratic rights and freedoms were dependent on court justices who were appointed by the prime minister.

Thorsell thus characterized a Canadian government with the prime minister heading a parliamentary majority as “one of the world’s most centralized political power structures”.

In 1995 after the gun-control legislation passed the House of Commons in June, it headed for the Senate of Canada.

Recall as cited earlier, Reform Party whip Jim Silye had stated publicly that the Chretien government was no better than the Mulroney government when it came to “quashing internal dissent or rewarding friends with patronage”.

In this regard, having illustrated Prime Minister Chretien’s suppressing dissents within the Liberal caucus in the House, in my June 2009 post I then examined his government’s maneuvering in the Senate, including political appointments, or patronage, that in this case he viewed as needed to get the gun-control legislation through.

In Canada, senators have been appointed by the government, namely by the prime minister. At the time in 1995, a slim majority of the sitting senators had been appointed by the Mulroney government years ago – even though there were now only two elected MPs in Mulroney’s old party in the House – and these Tory Senators were unwilling to cooperate with the Chretien government on gun control; political opponents of the gun-control legislation, from various directions, wanted the Senate to block its passage or make substantial changes to weaken it, as I reviewed in 2009:

“The gun-control bill was now in the Senate for the parliamentary session of fall 1995. Canadian senators were not elected but appointed, and the Senate at this point was controlled by a slim majority of Tories appointed by Brian Mulroney years ago; it was predicted that it could be 1996 before the Senate would begin to consider the bill, or as Calgary Senator Ron Ghitter, the Tories’ designated person on the gun-control bill in the Senate, had put it while the bill was still in the Commons: ²⁶¹

“It’s not like this is an issue of national urgency; that crime is going to stop the moment we have registration. Homicides aren’t increasing. The statistics do not show this registration is going to solve any crime problems”.

Opponents of the gun-control bill, noticing a gradual decline in the poll numbers for it even though a majority of Canadians still supported gun control, began to mount vigorous lobbying campaigns to have the Senate force the Liberal government to withdraw part of the bill or accept substantial changes to water it down; in addition to the gun-owner groups, the opponents included the powerful provincial governments of Ontario and the Prairies, i.e., Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the governments of the Northern Territories, where there were large rural populations; they also included critics such as columnist David Frum who blasted the legislation for allowing justice minister’s discretion to exempt native people from gun-control requirements, and curiously the Assembly of First Nations representing the native people, who complained that mandatory gun registration would intrude on their traditional lifestyle of hunting protected by their constitutional and treaty rights, and that a ”back-door” exemption was not good enough for them. ²⁶²”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Because the Senate was not an elected body, it usually did not obstruct legislations arduously; and Tory party leader Jean Charest, one of the only two Tory MPs, struck a compromising tone in this case, promising only to use the Senate to make changes to the legislation and would not indefinitely obstruct its passage:

“But despite the sabre-rattling of the opponents who aimed to scuttle national gun registration in the Senate, few observers believed the demise of stricter gun control. One reason is that, being unelected – and labelled a “mixed blessing” on such issues by Reform party leader Preston Manning – the Senate usually did not dig in its heels to block legislations passed by the Commons, and with the Tories nearly wiped out in the Commons the Tory-controlled Senate did so only twice after the Chretien government took power: on a bill cancelling the Mulroney government’s privatization of Toronto Pearson Airport, which prevented the developers from going to court to sue for punitive damages, and on an election-boundaries bill which was viewed as thinly disguised gerrymandering in favor of the Liberals. ²⁶³

Moreover, Tory leader Jean Charest (who had lost to Kim Campbell in the 1993 leadership contest and then taken over after Campbell’s electoral defeat) was rather conciliatory on gun control: he was absent during the final Commons vote, and also stated that the Tory-controlled Senate would only propose changes to the bill to send it back to the Commons, and that if the Commons then rejected the changes the Senate would not block it further. ²⁶⁴”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As told above, Charest was consistently willing to compromise, having himself already absented from the House’s final vote on the gun-control legislation, i.e., instead of voting against it.

Still, Chretien did not like to tolerate the prospect of a long, drawn-out parliamentary maneuvering, which could not only alter the legislation but also delay its passage long after 1995; he decided to fill all the vacancies there were in the Senate, 4 of them, with Liberal appointments on September 22, 1995:

“Still, the complexity of parliamentary maneuvers meant that the Senate could hold long public hearings on the matters, that any changes approved by the Senate would require re-examination and vote by the Commons where politics involving the rural MPs was always volatile, and that if the legislation could not be approved by both chambers during this fall session it might have to be reintroduced in a new session in 1996. ²⁶⁵

Several days after punishing some of the key Liberal MPs for straying from the party line, Chretien moved on Friday, September 22 to appoint 4 new Liberal senators – including 3 women for a record-high 23 women in the upper chamber – to fill the Senate to its full size of 104 and bring the total number of Liberals to 50 versus the Tories’ 51, with 3 independent senators leaning toward the Liberals. ²⁶⁶”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Very importantly as noted above, three of the four newly appointed Liberal Senators were female and the resulting total of 23 women in the Senate were a record high.

These might not be really “patronage” appointments but as above they were highly partisan, and now the fully-filled Senate had 50 Liberals vs. 51 Tories, with an additional 3 independents leaning toward the Liberals. Consequently, the Liberals were now in a better position to defeat Senate opponents of the gun-control legislation.

In 2009 I commented that the timing of the gun-control legislative process in the Senate was also entangled with the publicity of the Airbus Affair, namely the RCMP criminal investigation of former Tory prime minister Mulroney:

“Chretien’s appointment of new senators would eventually lead to passage of the gun-control legislation but not after several more months of bickering and maneuvering, including amid a heightened public atmosphere due to revelation of an RCMP Airbus Affair probe in which the Canadian government informed Swiss authorities former (Tory) prime minister Mulroney was being investigated for criminal activity.”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Here I note that, more specifically as previously mentioned, the date of the Canadian Justice Department letter to the Swiss authorities to seek cooperation for the criminal investigation of Mulroney, in relations to Airbus commissions, was September 29, 1995 – exactly one week after all Senate vacancies were filled with Liberals for the gun-control legislation contest in the upper chamber.

In 2009 I did not quote any details from the press about the coincidental timings of the late-stage parliamentary maneuvering on gun control and the publicity of the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney. Here now are some passages from a news story on November 21, 1995 – with the gun-control legislation still in the Senate and the Airbus Affair publicity just started:

“WHAT DO you say when the former prime minister of the country sues the government he used to lead for $50 million for defamation of character?

You say you hope the RCMP checked the rumors out very carefully before naming Brian Mulroney as a possible suspect in the Airbus story.

If they did check, they could be on to the scandal of the century.

If they didn’t, the national police force will have disgraced itself even more. RCMP bumbling on the night when Jean Chretien’s wife faced an armed intruder at 24 Sussex will be nothing compared to this potential foul-up.

…

Chretien cancelled the Tory deal at Pearson airport in late 1993, partly to demonstrate he was in charge and the old ways were changing. He backed Rock’s gun-control bill to prove a Liberal government could deliver for Canadians. Both those matters still are hung up in the Senate, and the Prime Minister cannot prorogue Parliament and write a new Throne Speech until the old business is finished.

…

In this vacuum, Chretien and his cabinet are proving prone to errors, which is the real danger of Mulroney’s lawsuit. It, too, will drag on, becoming a problem for a Liberal government that had nothing at all to do with the 1988 Airbus purchase. When political problems drag, they have the potential, as we’ve seen in the Somalia inquiry, to do damage to sitting governments whose hands are clean but whose handling errs.

Tory Senator Marjorie LeBreton already is suggesting the RCMP’s Airbus investigation really is a Liberal witch hunt. She says Chretien’s government is seeking political revenge for the Tory senators’ stalls of the Pearson and gun-control bills.

It’s difficult to see why Liberals would want more revenge than that already inflicted by Canadian voters, who reduced the Tories to two seats. This smacks less of revenge than of bureaucratic error, either here or overseas,
which may yet hurt the Liberals along with Mulroney.”

(“Mulroney case holds danger for Liberals”, by Rosemary Speirs, November 21, 1995, Toronto Star)

As journalist Rosemary Speirs reported above, Tory Senator Marjorie LeBreton was alleging that the RCMP’s criminal investigation of Mulroney really was a “Liberal witch hunt”, and a “political revenge” for the Tory senators’ stalls of the Liberal government’s gun-control legislation and another legislation reversing the Mulroney government’s privatization of Toronto Pearson International Airport.

That was in November 1995 when the RCMP investigation of Mulroney had just become news. On the basis of newer allegations by Mr. Mulroney two years later in November 1997, quoted and discussed earlier, in my April 2009 post I did an analysis concluding that both stricter gun-control and investigating possible criminal corruption on the part of the former prime minister were important law-and-order agendas of the Chretien government from the start.

Thus, what coincided, and alleged as “revenge” by Tory Senator LeBreton publicly in November 1995 was only the timing, i.e., the timing of the onset of Airbus Affair publicity with the timing of the gun-control legislation’s stalls in the Senate – the stage had already been set by the Chretien government in September 1995 when it filled the Senate vacancies with Liberal appointments and had a letter sent out to Swiss authorities for the criminal investigation of Mulroney.

Nonetheless, in a blog post dated September 29, 2013, a part of of a later article in my blogging after 2009, I was able to show that Mr. Mulroney’s side, in connection to Karlheinz Schreiber, his friend at the time, was likely partly responsible for the public disclosure in November 1995 that he was the subject of an RCMP criminal investigation into Airbus commissions.

The first news stories about a criminal investigation into the Airbus commissions came on November 11-12, 1995, in Europe, without mentioning any Canadian politician by name; in the several days after, the Swiss and Canadian authorities, including the RCMP, confirmed the existence of an ongoing criminal investigation without naming any person being investigated:

“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…

…

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…

…

Frank Moores immediately denied everything…

…

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…

…”

(“Team 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”, September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

I commented, in this September 29, 2013 post, that the Tory leaders after Mulroney, namely Kim Campbell and Jean Charest, had either distanced or was now distancing from a potential scandal related to the Airbus commissions and from Mr. Mulroney’s legacies, but again without mentioning Mulroney:

“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”

…

The current Tory leader decided not to stand by Brian Mulroney’s legacies.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The first news story referring to Mr. Mulroney as being investigated by the RCMP came from reporter Philip Mathias of The Financial Post on November 18, 1995, who quoted from the September 29 Justice Department letter to the Swiss authorities:

“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 The Financial Post 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, The Financial Post):

“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.

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.”

The Justice Department sent the 13-page demand to Switzerland, written in German, at the request of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

A “persistent plot/conspiracy by Mr. Mulroney” – serious accusations.

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:

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

On that same day when the Justice Department letter was first quoted in the media as in the above, about a “persistent plot/conspiracy by Mr. Mulroney [and others] … who defrauded the Canadian government in the amount of millions of dollars”, lawyers representing Mulroney held a news conference to announce that Mr. Mulroney was filing a $50 million lawsuit against the Canadian government and several officials:

“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.

The Canadian government didn’t disclose contents of the letter, however The Financial Post’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, Times – Colonist):

““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.

…

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.

…

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.”

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.

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. …

…”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted above, RCMP Commissioner Phil Murray; investigator Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald, and Justice Department lawyer Kimberly Prost who wrote the September 29 letter to the Swiss authorities, were named in Mulroney’s lawsuit.

Also as above, several lawyers for Mr. Mulroney, namely Harvey Yarosky, Gerald Tremblay and Roger Tasse, spoke at the November 18 news conference. Tremblay, as discussed in Part 2 of my current article, had represented legal maneuvering, during the 1992 Diane Wilhelmy Affair, attempting to suppress publicity critical of then Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, which happened to be also critical of David Cameron, an Ontario government official and husband of anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron.

As earlier quoted from a November 21 news report by journalist Rosemary Speirs, Tory Senator LeBreton immediately made the allegation that the RCMP investigation of Mulroney was the Chretien government’s “political revenge for the Tory senators’ stalls of the Pearson and gun-control bills”.

Thus, the question of timing coincidence boils down to who had given journalist Philip Mathias a copy of the Justice Department September 29 letter which had named Mulroney, which Mathias then quoted in a news story on November 18, when Mulroney’s lawyers also held a news conference announcing a lawsuit against the government for damages to his reputation.

Subsequently in 1996, testimonies and disclosures in the court proceedings for Mulroney’s $50 million lawsuit revealed that Philip Mathias’s copy of the Justice Department letter was a copy of a German-to-English translation that Karlheinz Schreiber had ordered for Mulroney. Therefore, as I remarked, the source for the journalist Mathias was likely related to Schreiber, who had been given a German copy of the Canadian letter by the Swiss authorities, ordered an English translation for Mulroney in early November, and that version was the one cited by Mathias:

“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, The Globe and Mail):

“The Financial Post and the reporter who wrote the story, Philip Mathias, say that they have no intention of revealing their source.

“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.”

…

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“Rather, it is identical to the Blum translation, made at the request of Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney.”

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.”

…

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.”

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.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As above, the Canadian government lawyers essentially argued that if Mulroney’s side had leaked the letter to the media then they were responsible for damages to Mr. Mulroney’s reputation.

As stated by Mr. Mulroney and cited in the above, he learned of the RCMP criminal investigation of him on November 2 when Schreiber phoned him, and the later-leaked German-English translated copy was then produced for him. If as Mathias stated as quoted in the above, that his source wasn’t “Mr. Mulroney or his entourage”, then it likely was related to Schreiber.

One week after the initial news of an RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney and Mulroney’s legal counteroffensive of a $50 million lawsuit, on November 26 the Chretien government’s gun-control legislation passed the Senate – and thus clearing all Parliamentary hurdles – in a rather lopsided vote of 64 to 28:

“Senator Joyce Fairbairn wasn’t certain she’d won, but Senator Ron Ghitter had a gut feeling he’d lost.

Fairbairn, the Lethbridge Liberal, and Ghitter, the Calgary Conservative, had been working behind the scenes for days to convince colleagues to back their respective sides in last week’s crucial gun control vote.

…

The Senate’s public gallery was filled with mothers and friends of people killed in gun violence, sitting shoulder to shoulder next to representatives of law-abiding, albeit angry, gun owners.

And the two Alberta senators were among the main players.

Fairbairn, government house leader in the Senate, pressed for passage of the bill, while Ghitter fought for amendments he’d personally worked on for months.

…

A Tory victory would send the bill back to the House of Commons for further debate, and possibly its demise.

…

Most news media reported the bill passed easily by a margin of 64 to 28. …”

(“Senate vote was closer than it seemed”, by Sheldon Alberts, November 26, 1995, Calgary Herald)

Hence, while the news about Mr. Mulroney was bad on November 18, 1995, it came at a worse time, undermining the morale of the Senators of his old Tory party, most of whom appointed by him years ago, in fighting against the Liberal gun-control legislation.

Mr. Mulroney and his Airbus-connected business friend, Mr. Schreiber, had quite a lot to blame for that bad timing coincidence noted by Tory Senator LeBreton. But at the time, Mulroney’s mind had likely been preoccupied with launching the $50 million lawsuit for personal reputation damages.

Even worse in timing coincidence, at that time there had just been another incident potentially very violent and threatening to the lives of Prime Minister Chretien and his wife, in timeframe two or three days after Mulroney had learned, from Schreiber, of being the target of an RCMP criminal investigation.

As earlier quoted, in her November 21 story journalist Rosemary Speirs noted the Mulroney lawsuit timing coincidence also with a break-in at Prime Minister Chretien’s official residence not long before, and speculated that the RCMP could be mishandling both the criminal investigation of Mulroney and the protection of Chretien:

“WHAT DO you say when the former prime minister of the country sues the government he used to lead for $50 million for defamation of character?

You say you hope the RCMP checked the rumors out very carefully before naming Brian Mulroney as a possible suspect in the Airbus story.

If they did check, they could be on to the scandal of the century.

If they didn’t, the national police force will have disgraced itself even more. RCMP bumbling on the night when Jean Chretien’s wife faced an armed intruder at 24 Sussex will be nothing compared to this potential foul-up.”

Also as earlier quoted, in my September 2013 blog post I mentioned that the media publicity for the Airbus Affair started amid the “media frenzies” of the break-in incident:

“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; …”

The intriguing timings of these politics-related events have never been publicly acknowledged by the Canadian government, or by the police, as of any significance.

The night-time break-in by a jackknife-wielding intruder at the official Prime Minister’s Residence occurred in the early morning of November 5, 1995, just as Chretien was to depart later that day for the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had been assassinated the day before on November 4:

“… 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…

…

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, The Ottawa Citizen):

““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.

“I think that I’m lucky that she was there. And I’m grateful.”

…

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.

“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.

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.

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.

…

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As Chretien acknowledged in the above, he was lucky that his wife reacted quickly, locked their bedroom doors and called the RCMP guards, who came and arrested the intruder.

After Rabin’s funeral, Chretien told reporters about his harrowing experience of grabbing an Inuit carving as a defence weapon, in the end not having to fight and noticing, after the intruder’s arrest, that it was “a good-looking guy”:

“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, Toronto Star):

““He was about six feet away from my bed,” Chretien said in shedding more light on the 3 a.m. incident.

“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.”

…

Chretien had grabbed a soapstone carving of a bird and he was ready to defend his wife and himself if necessary.

“He’d have had a headache,” Chretien said.

…

“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.”

A good-looking guy looking for a headache.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As Chretien reflected in the above, had the intruder had a gun instead of a knife, Chretien himself “probably would not have survived” – just like Rabin the day before.

That was one more intriguing timing coincidence, that the prime minister and his wife suddenly faced a knife-wielding man in their home, without their police security present, just before taking a trip to attend the funeral of an assassinated prime minister of a foreign country.

But that timing, namely immediately following Rabin’s assassination, could be purely coincidental. The intruder’s subsequent media interview did not suggest any Israeli or international link, who instead talked about his unhappiness with the Quebec separatists’ recent loss in a Quebec sovereignty referendum on October 30 – as I reviewed in September 2013:

“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, The Gazette):

“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.

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.

“In my case, too, some adjectives were used that might have excited deranged minds.”

Chretien was in Jerusalem on Monday for the funeral of Rabin, who was assassinated by a gunman on Saturday.”

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, Edmonton Journal):

““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.

Dallaire said he felt that Premier Jacques Parizeau’s Parti Quebecois should have moved more strongly toward founding a separate country.

“I am much better than Parizeau,” he said. “I would like an independent state like France or Germany.”

…

He faces charges of attempted murder, breaking and entering, being unlawfully in a dwelling and possession of a weapon.

But said he would be “very surprised” when he offers his explanation of events.

“I’ll speak the truth in the courtroom,” he said. “I am a gentle man and I am a good man.”

Dallaire will plead not guilty to the charge of attempting to kill the prime minister, his lawyer said Monday.

John Hale argued Dallaire did not have the intent to kill, nor did he take steps toward committing murder.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As above, Dallaire’s lawyer argued that he did not have the “intent to kill”.

The Canadian police and justice system apparently agreed that Dallaire did not pose a serious threat to Chretien and his wife; even though he was then convicted of the serious charge of “attempted murder”, Dallaire was declared “not criminally responsible” due to “Paranoid Schizophrenia”, and soon was even allowed to live in the same neighborhood where Chretien’s family lived, i.e., to live not far from the prime minister’s residence he had broken into:

“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, Edmonton Journal).

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, Star – Phoenix):

““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.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The second last quote above cited Dallaire as saying in November 1995 that he would offer his explanation of events and “speak the truth in the courtroom”. However, when I reviewed the press archives in 2009, I did not find further substantial information about Dallaire’s motives.

The last quote above reported that Dallaire was declared as suffering from “Paranoid Schizophrenia” during his trial in 1996. That could be a reason further press coverage of his thinking was limited.

My own personal experience in the 1990s in political activism, discussed earlier, demonstrated that the police and the justice system could use mental health as a means to suppress certain things from becoming public.

For Chretien, the timing coincidence with Rabin’s assassination must have made the break-in incident especially eerie, given a previous assassination timing coincidence he had experienced in March 1994, reviewed earlier, that just before his arrival in Mexico for his first official foreign visit the Mexican ruling party presidential candidate was assassinated and then Chretien was prevented by an angry mob from paying respect to the slain:

“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 …:

“… 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…”

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The following press story in March 1994 indicated that Chretien might have already arrived in Mexico when the assassination occurred on that same day of March 23, and a scheduled next-day meeting with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was then cancelled:

“Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was shot twice Wednesday during a campaign appearance in the border city of Tijuana.

…

An official at the Tijuana General Hospital said Colosio had been successfully operated on for the abdominal wound and was undergoing surgery for the head wounds. The bullet entered his brain behind the left ear and exited.

Hospital officials described Colosio’s condition as ‘extremely delicate.’

…

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari called the shooting ‘a vile act,’ describing Colosio as a ‘good, noble man who was seeking to serve others and his country.’

Salinas canceled a planned meeting Thursday with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who arrived in Mexico earlier Wednesday on a three-day official visit.”

(“Mexican presidential candidate shot during campaign”, March 23, 1994, United Press International)

I guess the Mexican government would have postponed Chretien’s official visit had he not already arrived in, or at least departed Canada for, Mexico.

The second-time coincidence in November 1995 was much scarier because this time Chretien was specifically targeted in his home, without his venturing into the atmosphere of an emotional crowd.

Also, the November 1995 break-in incident was at least the second time that Chretien was threatened with a deadly weapon, albeit not a gun, in Canada – after a May 1994 incident at the Winnipeg convention centre when Earl Kevin Jans, carrying a crossbow and arrows, wanted to see him as discussed earlier.

Even if these offenders were not deadly serious, I would think that there were reasons for them to make gestures of potentially deadly violence toward the prime minister of the country.

I have mentioned earlier that the break-in incident happened only two or three days after Mulroney had learned from Schreiber, on November 2, that he was under an RCMP criminal investigation.

There was a more specific timing relation between the two events. Several hours before the break-in at Chretien’s residence, Mulroney’s legal team had made its first move, with lawyer Roger Tasse phoning Justice Minister Allan Rock at home to discuss about the RCMP investigation, as I connected these two threads of events in a blog post on January 26, 2014:

“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.

…

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’.”

(“Team 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”, January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It was, at least in the timing, “so conspicuous” as I said above; but no actual link between the two has been publicly known as far as I am aware.

As earlier quoted from my September 2013 blog post, referring to the first new conference by Mulroney’s lawyers, Harvey Yarosky, Gerald Tremblay and Roger Tasse, on November 18, 1995, that announced Mulroney’s $50 million lawsuit against the government, Tasse was “a former justice minister in Ottawa”:

“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.”

In the above, Tasse probably referred to his phone call to Justice Minister Rock a few hours before Chretien’s residence was broken into, as when the Justice Department refused to listen to him.

Obviously, a former deputy justice minister would have been familiar with the the inner workings of the government, and would be a good person to make contact with the sitting justice minister in November 1995 on behalf of Mulroney.

But Tasse was not the typical former deputy justice minister: he had been the deputy justice minister under Jean Chretien, the justice minister in the government of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and had also been a partner of Chretien’s in private law practice.

As I reviewed in January 2014, a few days after a legal settlement was reached between Mulroney and the Chretien government in January 1997, the above key facts about his lawyer Roger Tasse were proudly discussed by Mulroney’s side in a press story:

“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, The Gazette):

“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.

“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.”

The former prime minister took a sip of tea, and leaned back in his chair. “Life is good again,” he said. “Life is good.”

Tremblay is chairman of McCarthy Tetrault in Quebec, and its rainmaker. …

…

… 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.”

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!

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?

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…

…

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As I remarked above, through the duration of Mulroney’s lawsuit against the government and Tasse acting as a lawyer for him, the Canadian media did not mention the special relationship Tasse had previously had with Prime Minister Chretien in private law practice.

There were a few caveats about the private law practice of Chretien and Tasse in Ottawa during the first half of the Mulroney era when John Turner was the Liberal leader, as I reviewed and quoted from the press archives:

“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…

…

… 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…

…

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, The Globe and Mail):

“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.

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.

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.

…

… 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.

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.”

…

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…

…”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As one can see in the above, in 1986 the Liberal Jean Chretien, temporarily retired from politics, was the most popular politician in Canada; and yet his law practice with his former government deputy Roger Tasse employed a well-known Tory, Kent Plumley, as their managing partner, and was so successful in the Mulroney era’s national capital when even some Tory-inclined law firms – in particular some with close links to Mulroney government minister, former Prime Minister Joe Clark – weren’t, that it raised eyebrows in Ottawa and drew the scrutinizing attention of anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron.

In 1987 Tasse also became a legal adviser of Prime Minister Mulroney’s on constitutional law issues – that in a sense set the stage for his later serving as Mulroney’s private lawyer in the Airbus Affair lawsuit – as I reviewed in 2014:

“The opening section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states, concerning the limits of rights and freedoms:

“1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 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.”

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…

…

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, The Ottawa Citizen):

“Tasse wrote much of the 1982 Constitution when Pierre Trudeau was prime minister and Jean Chretien the justice minister.

Tasse later became Chretien’s law partner.

But that did not stop Mulroney from turning to him in his hour of need.

…

“Roger Tasse’s views satisfied prime minister Trudeau in 1982,” Mulroney told a Conservative caucus meeting May 4 in Mont-Tremblant, Que.

“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.””

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

But the cosiness with the Tories in the private law practice of Chretien and Tasse wasn’t even the most delicate caveat in the complicated links between Chretien and Mulroney. That, as I summarized in January 2014, was in the family and business coalesced around Canadian billionaire Paul Demarais and his Power Corporation:

“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, The Ottawa Citizen):

“One of the few constants in Canadian politics is that regardless of who is prime minister, Paul Desmarais is never far away.

…

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.

…

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.”

…

Mulroney, now in political retirement, is a hired gun, lobbyist, legal counsel and trophy director for several big corporations, including Power Corp.”

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.

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Additionally, the patronage and influence of Demarais and his Power Corp. in the political world went beyond Mulroney and Chretien:

“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, The Ottawa Citizen):

“…

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.

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.

…

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.

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.”

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As cited above, the Chretien government’s finance minister Paul Martin in 1995, touted as a possible Chretien successor, had been employed by Desmarais.  As discussed earlier Martin, later a leadership rival, in 2003 would indeed succeed Chretien as Liberal leader and prime minister.

As I reviewed in January 2014, these were pertinent matters back in November 1995 when a key lawyer for one side, handling a legal dispute for former Prime Minister Mulroney against Prime Minister Chretien’s government, was also a close personal confidante of the other side.

Unfortunately, these important relevant facts were not mentioned by the media or by the politicians during the period of Mulroney’s libel lawsuit proceedings against the Chretien government but were in essence avoided, as I noted and lamented:

“… 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” …

…

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 …

…

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As described in the above in 2014, my review of the press archives shows that, specifically, during the time of Mulroney’s libel lawsuit the media reported his lawyer Roger Tasse’s as a former deputy justice minister under Chretien in the Trudeau government and a law partner of former Mulroney government solicitor general James Kelleher, government minister overseeing the RCMP – even though Tasse had only worked at Kelleher’s law firm for about 6 months since June 1995, but had previously been a close law partner of Chretien’s for several years.

In other words, the Canadian media may have knowingly turned a blind eye to a probable conflict-of-interest situation in the Chretien government’s handling of the lawsuit by Mulroney over the RCMP criminal investigation of him.

To present a fuller picture by taking into account pertinent and important facts that were not given necessary attention in the Airbus Affair, is the reason why in my current review of my first year of blogging in 2009 I have gone beyond the scope of my decade-ago article on Canadian politics, and have been discussing, quite extensively, some of my reviews and analyses in my later blog posts in 2013 and 2014.

In particular, these pertinent and important facts provide strong evidence for why after many years of a criminal investigation the RCMP found no sufficient evidence against former Prime Minister Mulroney and why, as I asserted in my blog post on April 29, 2009, quoted earlier, that still did not substantiate Mr. Mulroney’s innocence because “neither the RCMP nor the Liberal government of Jean Chretien … really went after Mr. Mulroney”:

“… Yet, as have been previously shown, neither the RCMP nor the Liberal government of Jean Chretien during its 10-year tenure from 1993 to 2003 really went after Mr. Mulroney: in public they were merely reacting to, and maintaining a continuing interest in, issues in the Airbus Affair as brought forward by members of a left-leaning Canadian media – particularly by Stevie Cameron and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate – and supported by those in the federal government system opposed to Mr. Mulroney’s rightwing agendas.”

The above was one of the core themes of my 2009 article on Canadian politics.

Now, what I reviewed and presented in 2013-2014, namely the delicate and complicated links between Chretien and Mulroney, by way of mutual and close relationships the two had to some influential and powerful Canadians, and the fact that Mulroney masterfully utilized some of these key links for his libel lawsuit in 1995-1997 against the Chretien government, provides additional strong evidence that, and an explanation why, under Mr. Chretien the Canadian government was unlikely to rigorously pursue Mr. Mulroney’s misdeeds, if any, because the outcome could embarrass the politically active Prime Minister Chretien as much as the already retired Mr. Mulroney.

As I also showed in 2013-2014, during Mulroney’s lawsuit from November 1995 to January 1997 the media, and even the opposition politicians, knowingly and carefully kept silent about these links.

In my above-quoted comment in 2009, I criticized the RCMP in the same breath as I did the Chretien government, about their not pursuing Mr. Mulroney’s possible wrongdoing vigorously. My study posted in 2013-2014 also provided additional strong evidence in this regard.

The RCMP being the federal police agency, its criminal investigation was supposed to be conducted independently of the government leadership. What I uncovered and presented in 2013 and 2014 were not so much about the investigation of Mr. Mulroney per se, but more generally biases on the part of the RCMP – in favoring Prime Minister Mulroney when Mulroney was in power, and then in acting as a thorn in the side of Prime Minister Chretien when the criminal investigation of Mulroney became more serious.

In particular, media reports following the Andre Dallaire break-in incident clearly pointed to the RCMP’s negligence, very likely wilful, that allowed the incident to happen as it did in early November 1995, here I elaborate on what I reviewed in 2013-2014.

Above all, security at the Prime Minister’s residence was extremely lax. Most of the several RCMP officers stationed on the ground, outside the house, had not received training for VIP protection; and they treated warning signals of intrusion as anomalies, as a result allowing the intruder plenty of time to try and finally break into the house undetected, as I reviewed in my September 2013 post:

“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…

…

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:

“…

RCMP officers who guard 24 Sussex Drive are members of a detachment assigned to protect the residences of the prime minister and governor general.

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.”

…

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…

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Then during the incident when Mrs. Aline Chretien, after locking the bedroom doors, phoned the RCMP guards in urgency about an armed intruder in the house, the guards merely surrounded the house, not rushing in as required:

“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…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It turned out that the RCMP guards had never been inside the house, and they were waiting for their unit commander, stationed at another guard post at the Governor General’s residence, to come over and enter the house alone to confront the intruder, as I reviewed in my January 2014 post:

“… 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.

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

If, say, the frontline officers guarding Chretien’s residence did their duty in a ragtag manner, then the senior supervising officers acted like off-duty, or worse, in managing the crisis, and their prior records in policing had been awful.

Firstly, as I noted in my September 2013 post, the senior RCMP officer in charge of VIP protection, Chief Superintendent Al Rivard, had a poor recent prior record of responding to crisis at that job:

“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, Toronto Star):

“Questions about security in federal buildings were raised yesterday after a homemade bomb was smuggled into a Department of Indian Affairs office Tuesday.

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.

…

Police later arrested a man from Kuujjuaq, Que., and charged him with illegal possession and use of explosives and mischief.

Pierre Claude Dufresne, 41, entered no plea in a Hull courtroom yesterday and was remanded in custody.

…

Sergeant Yves Martel of Hull police said federal security is generally the responsibility of the RCMP and security branches of individual departments.

…

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.

“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.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As told above, federal security was the RCMP’s responsibility and yet when a homemade bomb was smuggled into a Department of Indian Affairs office on May 24, 1995, it was the Hull municipal police that handled the incident while Rivard admitted he was “not informed”.

Secondly, learning of C/Supt. Rivard’s gravely dismal prior record working in the province of New Brunswick would make it hard for anyone to believe that he could even have been put in charge of VIP protection.

With a force of over one hundred police officers led by then Superintendent Rivard, it took seven months to hunt down an escaped killer, Allan Legere, in 1989, with Legere hiding in the area of the police search and murdering four more people, and later even writing to the media to taunt Rivard and the RCMP:

“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, Toronto Star):

“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.

“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.

…

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. …

…

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.

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.

In his letter, Legere shows just how closely he followed the news by refuting claims about him and mocking police comments.

“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.””

…

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.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It had been “a human-safety disaster waiting to happen”, as I gasped above, wondering why Rivard was later entrusted with protecting Canadian government leaders and foreign diplomats.

Thirdly, as I noted, immediately following the break-in at Chretien’s residence, Chief Superintendent Rivard, a subordinate officer Inspector Jean Dube and a superior officer, RCMP “A” Division commanding officer Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, all failed to act in an acceptable manner, with none attending the incident site or making immediate remedy to increase security for Prime Minister Chretien and his wife:

“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, Toronto Star):

“The sources told The Star that one member of a senior management quartet, Inspector Jean Dube, has already been suspended.

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.

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.

Dube is the easiest target because he is the lowest-ranking among the four senior officers.

…

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.

Instead, he called to the site and reported Dube was on his way.

But Dube was at least two hours away – even though he was supposed to be within easy response time of 24 Sussex Dr.

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.

He stayed at headquarters instead.

“Security had been breached,” a source said. “It’s basic. You don’t leave VIPs on unsecured premises.

“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.”

…”

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.

But why didn’t McConnell attend the scene himself then?

He went to the RCMP headquarters “to oversee damage control”. …”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In addition to Rivard, Dube and McConnell, the above-quoted news story mentioned “an unnamed superintendent in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards”, as failing in their duty that night.

That superintendent was probably Claude Sweeney, who was in the process of retiring, “taking a government buyout”, according to another news story:

“RCMP management took actions to suspend 4 officers onsite that night, and reassigned 3 of their supervisors, as A/Comm. Bryan McConnell announced…

…

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, The Ottawa Citizen):

“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.

…

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.

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.

…

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.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted above, the immediate supervisor of the RCMP guards was Staff Sgt. Frank Trottier, the detachment commander.

Finally, whoever the senior officers on 24-hour call the early morning of November 5, they did not answer their cellphones and, as a result, the lowly-ranked and inexperienced guards improvised the way they did dealing with the intrusion:

“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…

…

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, The Globe and Mail):

“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.”

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.

…”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The appalling performance, or behavior if one can put it that way, by both the frontline and supervising RCMP officers responding to the break-in at Prime Minister Chretien’s residence in November 1995 was especially concerning in light of the revelations afterwards that woeful inadequacy of security for that official residence had been a problem known to, and proposed improvements refused by, the RCMP or the Prime Minister’s Office since 1989:

“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, The Globe and Mail):

“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.

…

The association says it has heard that:

• 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;
• Officers responsible for security had never been allowed in the house before that night and were therefore unfamiliar with the layout;
• 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.

…”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As above, at least four reports recommending security upgrades had been submitted by on-site security staff since 1989, to no avail.

Before the November 1995 break-in, there had been the assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in March 1994 as Chretien arrived for an official visit and the Mexican crowd’s hostility toward the visiting Chretien who tried to pay tribute, an incident that caused the concern of solicitor general Herb gray, and then the incident of a man with a crossbow and arrows looking for Chretien in May 1994, both incidents, reviewed earlier, were raised by the media in November 1995 in light of the break-in and quoted in my September 2013 blog post.

Then in July 1995, a man actually entered the ground of the Prime Minister’s residence before he was discovered by the RCMP:

“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 …”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Here are more details from a December 1995 news story that I cited in September 2013 about that prior breach of security on July 28, 1995, exposing the area behind the house as a security blind spot:

“An RCMP officer warned a supervisor about a security gap at 24 Sussex Drive months before a knife-wielding intruder broke into the prime minister’s house.

The Canadian Press has also learned that a 1989 RCMP report recommended sweeping improvements to security at 24 Sussex. But it appears only some of the changes were made.

“The level of security at the back of the residence is very low,” says a classified report.

“The likelihood of someone trespassing on the property from the rear is high. The consequences of this could range from insignificant to extremely serious, depending upon the intentions of the intruder(s).”

A man broke into 24 Sussex early on Nov. 5.

…

Other documents show that a few months earlier, on July 28, a Mountie apprehended a man who wandered onto the grounds from behind the house. No charges were laid.

But one constable involved said in a three-page report to a superior, S.Sgt. Frank Trottier, that “this incident has identified a blind area” in the RCMP’s closed-circuit TV — or CCTV — surveillance.

“This area has no CCTV coverage,” says the constable’s report. “A camera in this area would probably assist in coverage.”

Copies may also have gone to other RCMP officials.

Sgt. Andre Guertin, an RCMP official, said Tuesday the July incident was included in an overall review of security conducted after last month’s break-in.

But as recently as this month, RCMP supervisors were unsure whether the constable’s warning had been followed up.

An urgent Dec. 8 memo from Supt. Carl Gallant to an RCMP inspector says: “Please pursue the paper trail on this matter with a view to presenting me with a report as to whether or not the appropriate follow-up was conducted by all members involved.”

An RCMP briefing note to the solicitor general, dated the same day, says the force “is reviewing this matter to determine what action was taken as a result of this intervention by the constable.”

The 22-page 1989 report said the ground-level doors and windows of the residence did not offer much security.”

(“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, The Vancouver Sun)

As told above, on December 8 over a month after the break-in, Superintendent Carl Gallant suddenly sent an “urgent” memo to find out if the security blind spot exposed back in July had been properly dealt with.

With several incidents threatening Chretien or raising concern about inadequate security for him in only about two years since he had become the prime minister, the RCMP management’s apparent apathy, as described above, was troubling; and when a break-in was actually carried out by a knife-wielding man, the RCMP guards and management, as reviewed, did not seem to respond with a sense of emergency and seriousness that the lives of the prime minister and his wife might be in danger. They were clearly negligent.

As I have said earlier, my review in 2013-2014 showed that the RCMP negligence in this case was “very likely wilful”.

No doubt the fact that an officer with a gravely dismal prior record like Chief Superintendent Al Rivard’s was even put in charge of VIP protection influenced my thinking; but the conclusion of ‘wilfulness’ came foremost from my review of the conduct and prior record of Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell – as quoted earlier the highest ranked of the senior officers criticised in the media for their mishandling of the break-in incident.

A/Commissioner McConnell’s response to media questioning in that afternoon after the break-in showed that, as the commanding officer of the RCMP “A” Division responsible for the security of the Capital Ottawa region, he exemplified the belief, or attitude, that there was no real violence toward Chretien and his family:

“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, Toronto Star):

“Responding to a reporter’s suggestion that the Chretiens could have been murdered, McConnell seemed to downplay the danger.

“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.”

Rational calculations of a veteran cop deciding whether to pull the trigger, whoever it was to protect, or it seemed.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

See, if one followed McConnell’s logic, then back in May 1994 when a man with a crossbow and arrows looked for Chretien at a convention center, the RCMP probably assessed that had he meant real harm he would have gone to an outdoor event where the prime minister met people outside; then in July 1995 when a man wandered onto the ground of the prime minister’s residence, the RCMP probably assessed that had he meant harm he would have carried a weapon; and now, a man wielding a knife broke open a door, got inside the house and came face-to-face with Mrs. Chretien, McConnell said “the individual did not attempt to get into the private quarters” – but that was because Mrs. Chretien ran back into the bedroom and locked its doors.

Had Andre Dallaire broken a bedroom door and entered as well, what would Bryan McConnell’s reasoning be then, that the individual did not actually stab Mr. or Mrs. Chretien? Arguing to the last moment about a doomsday scenario not really happening could be too late for anybody’s protection.

As it had turned out in the early days of my political activism, after my faxing documents to local MP Kim Campbell and RCMP officers taking me to a psychiatric committal at UBC hospital on November 30, 1992, my press releases and a cover note to Campbell found their way to Solicitor General Doug Lewis, and in January 1993 an RCMP British Columbia “E” Division’s reply to me acknowledged receiving a complaint by me, at the internal directive of Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell, RCMP director of enforcement services.

A/Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell defined my documents as a complaint about RCMP’s role in arresting me in a prior academic dispute at UBC, and thus, from my perspective, excluded the issues about Prime Minister Mulroney that I raised in my press releases and in the note to Ms. Campbell. Later in my blogging I discussed this issue in a post on March 25, 2012, and then in the January 2014 post extensively cited earlier, of the same multipart article.

Here are some of what I recalled in March 2012:

“I had never sent any complaint to the Solicitor General who supervised the RCMP, about the July 2 arrest or anything else.

The only things I had sent to the Canadian political high level had all been sent to local Member of Parliament Kim Campbell.

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…

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.

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.

…

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.”

(“Team 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”, March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

So in my later review in January 2014, I set out to determine that the Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell handling the Chretien residence break-in incident was most likely the same as J. W. B. McConnell – an RCMP leader with a bias in favor of Brian Mulroney.

Firstly, the RCMP director of enforcement services had also been reported in the press as Bryan McConnell:

“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…

…

So J. W. B. McConnell was also named Bryan McConnell.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Secondly, the RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell who was commanding officer of the “A” Division in November 1995 responsible for security of the Capital Ottawa region, by February 1997 had retired from the RCMP and become the executive director of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, as I reviewed in September 2013:

“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 (“EVIDENCE Sub-Committee on the DRAFT REGULATIONS ON FIREARMS of the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affair”, Chairman: Russell MacLellan, Meeting No. 13, February 4, 1997, House of Commons, Parliament of Canada):

“The Chairman: We’re ready now to resume our hearings on the proposed regulations under the Firearms Act.

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.

…

Chief Ford: …

…

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.

…”

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.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

And thirdly, in an online copy of the 2002-2003 membership directory of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, I found one and only one Bryan McConnell: J. W. Bryan McConnell; given that a former executive director of the organization should be among its members, and there was only one such name in the directory and it also perfectly matched that of the former RCMP director of enforcement services, the most likely conclusion is that they were the same person:

“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 2002-2003 membership directory 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 downloaded copy, which shows there was one and only one McConnell in that year’s directory: “J. W. Bryan McConnell”.

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.

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As noted above, my own experience, in political activism criticising former Prime Minister Mulroney’s leadership, with an RCMP decision directed by J. W. B. McConnell already gave me a sense of RCMP bias in favor of Mulroney, i.e., before my studying the Chretien residence break-in incident.

In the above two quotes, I noted that McConnell became the CACP executive director, leaving the RCMP, right after the January 1997 legal settlement in Mulroney’s lawsuit against the government and the RCMP over the criminal investigation of him. The timing was very interesting because as the “A” Division commander, McConnell had supervised not only security of the Capital Ottawa region, in particular of Prime Minister Chretien’s residence, but also the criminal investigation of Mulroney, as RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray’s spokesman, Sgt. Andre Guertin, stated in January 1997 that it had not been the commissioner but the “ranking officer” in the “A” Division who was responsible for the controversial letter to Swiss authorities:

“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:

“His spokesperson, Sgt. Andre Guertin, said Murray cannot be expected to take a hands-on approach to every criminal investigation undertaken by the force.

…

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.”

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted in the above, according to Sgt. Guertin, “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”.

Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer cited above was an RCMP leader in rank just under Commissioner Murray in the RCMP headquarters, and above Assistant Commissioner McConnell commanding the “A” Division.

That dual responsibilities shouldered by the RCMP “A” Division for both high-profile events in the fall of 1995 were also reflected by the facts that Inspector Carl Gallant had been one of the RCMP officers visiting investigative journalist Stevie Cameron in January to discuss her book on Mulroney-era corruption, and then in December Superintendent Carl Gallant – most likely the same person, given the uncommon name – sent out an urgent memo to inquire about a past security blind spot at Chretien’s residence.

As quoted earlier, in November 1995 journalist Rosemary Speirs exclaimed about possible RCMP incompetence in both cases:

“WHAT DO you say when the former prime minister of the country sues the government he used to lead for $50 million for defamation of character?

You say you hope the RCMP checked the rumors out very carefully before naming Brian Mulroney as a possible suspect in the Airbus story.

…

If they didn’t, the national police force will have disgraced itself even more. RCMP bumbling on the night when Jean Chretien’s wife faced an armed intruder at 24 Sussex will be nothing compared to this potential foul-up.”

However, my assertion is that the mishandling in each case worked in Mulroney’s favor, putting Chretien’s life at risk while giving Mulroney a better chance in suing the government – this dual responsibilities were especially troubling when that RCMP “A” Division was commanded by Bryan McConnell who had had a role in restraining my activism regarding Mulroney’s leadership conduct:

“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.

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.

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Moreover, my experience in political activism also suggests that in Deputy Commissioner Palmer, Assistant Commissioner McConnell had a superior in the RCMP headquarters who likely acquiesced with his ways.

That is because back in January 1993 when Commissioner McConnell, then RCMP director of enforcement services, sent a directive to the B.C. “E” Division about my complaint, excluding my criticisms of Mulroney from its scope, that internal letter was sent to the attention of the “E” Division officer in charge of criminal operations, that happened to be Assistant Commissioner Frank Palmer, with a lawyer pedigree and a prior history of stern attitude toward activism, as I reviewed in a blog post dated April 30, 2012:

“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.

…

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…

…

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.”

(“Team 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”, April 30, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Palmer was promoted to become the RCMP’s second-in-command when Commissioner Norman Inkster retired in June 1994, which I noted in a blog post dated October 26, 2012:

“Upon Inkster’s retirement The Vancouver Sun 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, The Vancouver Sun).”

(“Team 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”, October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, later in January 1997 it was under Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer’s supervision that the RCMP lost a court decision in the legal process defending against Mulroney’s lawsuit, and the Chretien government immediately settled with Mulroney, offering him an apology and paying his legal expenses, as I reviewed in my September 29, 2013 post:

“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 …

…

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” …

…

Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie noticed the difference:

“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.”

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 The Financial Post quoted from the Schreiber-Mulroney translation on November 18, 1995 …

…

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, The Windsor Star):

“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.”

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.

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

With the facts and evidence reviewed in several blog posts, in January 2014 my reasoning thus reached the question of whether the RCMP intentionally, or ‘wilfully’ as I have asserted earlier, did what they did in relation to politics of “Brian Mulroney versus Jean Chretien” – putting Chretien’s safety at risk and going easy on Mulroney in the Airbus Affair:

“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.

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’.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In my January 2014 post, my review of historical press coverage of politics prior to my activism which began in 1992, revealed that RCMP senior officer J. W. B. McConnell had had a bias in favor of then Prime Minister Mulroney dating back to the 1980s.

J. W. B. McConnell was sometimes also referred to as “Brian McConnell”, particularly when he was in charge of RCMP criminal operations in Quebec, in 1990 and prior:

“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…

…

Besides in The Ottawa Citizen, for this case “Chief Supt. J. W. B. McConnell” was also cited in The Gazette…

…

But my search of the newspaper archives led to the spectre of a possibly different type of “mistaken identity”.

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.

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”.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The “many newspaper articles” referring to “Brian McConnell”, mentioned above, reported on what became known as the ‘Richard Grise affair’, that was probably the most significant political affair during the Mulroney government era and possibly the biggest scandal relating to Mr. Mulroney prior to the Airbus Affair in November 1995.

In brief, in mid-November 1988 during an RCMP criminal investigation of Richard Grise, a Member of Parliament in Mulroney’s governing party, Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell made the decision of delaying the execution of search warrants against Grise until after the November 21 election, a decision RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster was unaware of until finding out a year later and publicly admitting it on November 21, 1989, making it an instant major scandal:

“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.

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, Toronto Star):

“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.

…

Until today the RCMP insisted that it was simply coincidence that search warrants were delayed until the day after the Nov.21 election.

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.”

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, The Vancouver Sun):

“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.

But Inkster said today that he had been misinformed by aides.

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.

…

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.

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.

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.

Inkster, testifying on a range of issues, said he is not aware of any improper political influence by the government in any RCMP investigations.”

…

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, The Ottawa Citizen):

“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.

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.””

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As noted above, the complainant against Grise’s corruption activity was a political opponent contesting his parliamentary seat, New Democratic Party candidate Phil Edmonston, who had filed the complaint in August 1988.

It turned out that Prime Minister Mulroney’s principal secretary Peter White had sent a letter to the RCMP about a week before McConnell’s decision on November 14 to postpone the warrant searches, and about two weeks before the November 21 election. Opposition politicians cried foul, accusing the RCMP of playing politics:

“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, The Gazette):

“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.

Inkster refused at the time to make public the letter because, he said, it involved a case still before the courts.

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:

“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.

Edmonston said in an interview yesterday that he felt “betrayed” by the RCMP decision to delay the searches until after the election.

“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.””

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, The Vancouver Sun):

“…

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.”

Turner rejected that explanation in the Commons, saying “the public interest demands prompt and impartial investigations . . . whether or not there’s an election on.”

Noting that McConnell’s decision came just after the Mounties received White’s document, Turner demanded: “What was in that document?””

Turner viewed it as a part of a wider pattern of government misusing RCMP for political purposes…

…”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The RCMP explained that the letter from the Prime Minister’s principal secretary had helped police prosecute Richard Grise:

“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, The Gazette):

“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.”

…

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.

The investigators then interviewed White.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

White’s statement was used to support demands for four search warrants obtained Nov. 21, 1988, and Jan. 16, 1989.

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.”

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As indicated in a press article quoted above, White’s letter, dated November 7, 1988, had not been sent directly to the RCMP but through Ward Elcock, who at the time had been assistant secretary in the Privy Council but when the scandal broke in November 1989 was deputy clerk of intelligence and security of the Council – a job timeline that can be independently verified (“Ward Elcock”, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa)

Analyzing the sequence and timings of the relevant 1988 events, I concluded that it likely had been Mulroney himself who delayed giving the incriminating info to the RCMP until two weeks before the election, and McConnell in turn delayed the police searches until after the election:

“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.

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.

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The delay was critical because at two weeks before the election, opposition Liberal leader John Turner was leading in a major nationwide polling, and so new corruption revelations about this Mulroney party politician, Richard Grise, could have sustained the temporary Liberal lead toward a majority victory instead of the loss that actually occurred. But McConnell stressed, a year later, that it had been his decision without interference from politicians, and approved by an RCMP superior in Ottawa, Assistant Commissioner Marcel Coutu:

“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, The Vancouver Sun):

“… McConnell told Southam News he informed assistant commissioner Marcel Coutu last Nov. 14, the same day he decided to postpone the search.

“I made my decision and then I advised Ottawa of a decision I had already taken,” McConnell said in an interview.

“The decision was accepted at that time. The decision was made, the searches were delayed and that was that.”

…

“The RCMP is an independent agency run by an independent career officer,” Mulroney said.

“It is a profound disservice by the opposition to even suggest anything to the contrary.”

Mulroney is on an official visit to the Soviet Union.”

…

McConnell disclosed that the investigation delay in November 1988 also applied to Tory politician Joseph Hamelin…

…

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, The Gazette):

“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.

Informed later of McConnell’s comments, Inkster said: “This is news to me.””

McConnell reassured that no politician had tried to contact him about the matter:

“Yesterday, McConnell told The Gazette he was never contacted by any political official during the Grise and Hamelin investigations.

He said he made the decision to delay the searches at a meeting with chief investigating officer Yves Berube and two senior officers.

He said everyone at the meeting agreed “nothing would be lost to delay the searches for a few days.”

“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.”

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, Toronto Star):

“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.”

Instead, Mulroney won his second majority in a row…”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

C/Supt. Brian McConnell made the decision in November 1988 and RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster did not know until a year later; but as McConnell explained as quoted above, a superior in the RCMP headquarters did accept his decision at the time.

Did it not look like the same situation again in 1995 when the Justice Department letter to the Swiss authorities for the criminal investigation of Mulroney was approved at the “A” Division and RCMP Commissioner Philip Murray had no role in it? From my vantage point knowing the RCMP’s earlier handling my political activism, I would think that the RCMP second-in-command, Deputy Commissioner Frank Palmer noted earlier, likely was informed of, and accepted, what the “A” Division did under McConnell in this regard.

Thus, as represented by J. W. B. McConnell, certain RCMP bias in favor of Mulroney dated back to the Prime Minister Mulroney era and lasted to well into the Prime Minister Chretien era; and in the Chretien era there was also, in addition, negligence in the security for Chretien and his wife.

I should note an interesting closeness in timeline, that the Richard Grise affair became major national news starting on November 21, 1989, with Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell, the Montreal-based senior officer in charge of RCMP criminal operations in Quebec, as a central figure in the highly political controversy, and about two weeks later on December 6 the Montreal Massacre occurred.

Nevertheless, as reviewed earlier, that mass murder took place within the jurisdiction of the Montreal Police and was handled by that municipal police force.

Reading my current review to this point, a serious reader could become very sceptical that in November 1995 the Canadian media did not even question it, i.e., if the Assistant Commissioner McConnell speaking for the RCMP over the Chretien residence intrusion might not be the controversial Chief Superintendent McConnell of the Richard Grise affair in 1988-1989.

But why should the media question, when the earlier one had been “Brian” and the recent one was “Bryan”?

At first, I was quite taken aback when I verified the two senior RCMP figures to be most likely the same person, that in November 1995 the media didn’t even have a healthy degree of scepticism as to do some fact-checking and questioning.

But then I thought about that, two weeks after the Chretien residence incident when the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney became news and Roger Tasse, a former close friend and private law partner of Chretien’s showed up in public as one of the top lawyers for Mulroney’s lawsuit against the Chretien government and the RCMP, the media did not bother to say anything about that history of Tasse’s even though it had been reported in the past.

So, the problem might not be the lack of fact-checking, but rather, that the Canadian media was not as free-reporting as it seemed. And if so, the “Brian” vs. “Bryan” difference in the names of these two seemingly different senior officers as presented by the RCMP was convenient for those in the media who chose not to take the risk of finding out and reporting the truth.

In fact, I noted in January 2014 that while in the 1989 Richard Grise affair McConnell was always reported in the press as “Brian”, on the 1995 Chretien residence incident there were two press reports I found, both in The Globe and Mail newspaper, that used the name “Brian”, instead of “Bryan”:

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, The Globe and Mail 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, The Globe and Mail):

“Really hot – Aline Chretien, who remains calm and collected, locking doors and phoning police.

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.”

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”.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As I had noted in an earlier post of the same multipart article as the above, dated November 22, 2010, “The Globe and Mail… had long considered itself “Canada’s National Newspaper””. (“Team 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”, November 22, 2010, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

So when such a most venerable and influential Canadian media venue reported Bryan McConnell, the leading RCMP officer handling an unprecedented incident dangerous to the prime minister’s life, as Brian McConnell, chances would be that this media venue knew about this person also by the other name.

In this case, I found that The Globe and Mail had itself in 1988 done something similar to C/Supt. Brian McConnell; the newspaper had a news story to report on the Richard Grise corruption matter, but decided to postpone it until after the November 21 election:

“If some at The Globe and Mail 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.

If so, then it had to do with the fact that back in November 1988 The Globe and Mail 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, Above the Law: The Crooks, the Politicians, the Mounties, and Rod Stamler, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1994 over a year before November 1995:

“… 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.

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 Globe and Mail, 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.”

Unfortunately, in his 1994 book Paul Palango neglected to refresh his readers the name of RCMP officer Brian McConnell from the 1988 events.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As I remarked above, author Paul Palango’s book on corruption in the Mulroney era and the RCMP, which mentioned the Richard Grise affair as well as The Globe and Mail’s similar decision to postpone action until after the November 1988 election, did not even mention McConnell; it was published in 1994, i.e., not that long before the events of November 1995, and had it done so could have refreshed its readership about that controversial RCMP figure.

And so, as I opined above, some in the media “likely were aware of things worse than reported to the public”.

Besides RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell of November 1995 being the same person as Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell of the Richard Grise affair in 1988-1989, an intriguing sign of something worse, more complex and unexplained in the break-in incident at Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s residence, was in a key background of the intruder Andre Dallaire that matched the Richard Grise affair.

In 1988 Richard Grise was a Mulroney government party Member of Parliament based in Longueuil, Quebec, where his office was searched by the RCMP, here as reported in a The Gazette news story dated November 29, 1989, previously quoted from my January 26, 2014 post:

“…

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.

…”

In November 1995 right after the Chretien residence break-in, the media reported that the intruder Andre Dallaire was a convenience store worker in Longueuil, Quebec, with a psychiatric history and recently reported missing by his family, here as reported in a The Ottawa Citizen news story dated November 6, 1995, previously quoted from my September 29, 2013 post:

“…

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.

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.

…”

So, this armed intruder who came out of nowhere was actually from the town of the Richard Grise affair fame, when the RCMP commanding officer supervising both the Airbus Affair criminal investigation of Mulroney and the security of Capital Ottawa and especially Prime Minister Chretien’s residence, had previously in the Richard Grise affair favored Prime Minister Mulroney.

Was Andre Dallaire really a “paranoid schizophrenic”, or he knew, and got into, some things that others didn’t?

While one needs not be too ‘conspiracy theory’-minded, this case is a good example showing that one cannot always count on the police to solve a crime, because the police might have something to hide.

J. W. B. McConnell’s RCMP history may have been even more elaborate.

In my January 26, 2014 blog post, I pieced together some facts previously reported in the media before November 1995, on some “worse” things in crime and policing that were revealing about McConnell – outside of the Chretien residence break-in incident and the Airbus Affair.

Here, I discuss some of the key facts presented in that blog post.

First of all, McConnell’s intriguing key RCMP history timeline was most likely more than Brain McConnell in Montreal and then Bryan McConnell in Ottawa.

In the archives of press coverage there was an RCMP Inspector Bryan McConnell in 1982-1986, whose duties ranged from prosecuting misappropriation of government funds to heading RCMP’s National Capital drug squad; that was prior to the 1988-1990 press reports of Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell and J. W. B. McConnell in Quebec, and then the press appearances of Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell in Ottawa from 1991 onward. There was no overlap of times in these different McConnell appearances to indicate the presence of more than one person.

Since Quebec was Prime Minister Mulroney’s home region and Montreal his main power base, who had won his first election in 1984, my view is that Bryan McConnell’s move from the national capital to Quebec, with a rapid rise in his RCMP rank before Mulroney’s 1988 second election campaign and with his handling of related corruption politics as Brian McConnell, and then his return to the national capital after the Richard Grise affair and into the leadership echelon of the RCMP as Bryan McConnell again, together provide a fuller picture of McConnell’s RCMP role playing politics in favor of Mulroney.

Secondly, in supervising RCMP criminal work dealing with street-level crimes in Ottawa, including drug trafficking, Insp. McConnell had grossly under-reported to the media the severity of certain crimes, thus giving the public a false sense of what the RCMP were dealing with.

Some of the street-level crimes involved “Allan” Strong, originally from Cantley, Quebec, a man wanted in 1986 by McConnell’s Ottawa RCMP drug squad for trafficking “the amphetamine speed”, who had sold some to an undercover agent and then disappeared out of the RCMP’s reach, according to McConnell telling the media.

But Allan Strong was actually a leader of the infamous Montreal West End Gang, and a fugitive from Canada living in Florida and wanted for a murder there in 1985, and was eventually arrested in the Netherlands in 1993, as reported in other media stories.

In my January 2014 post, I quoted the December 1986 news story that cited Inspector Bryan McConnell about Allan Strong wanted for trafficking “an estimated $75,000 worth of the amphetamine speed”:

“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, The Ottawa Citizen):

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the arrest warrant was issued, McConnell said Strong is reported to have been seen in the Ottawa and Montreal areas.”

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In a glaring contrast, here is a May 1992 news story cited in my January 2014 post, about a U.S. trial on drug smuggling into the United States by the Montreal gang, referring to the scope of the gang’s drug trafficking as, “more than 10,000 kilograms of cocaine and more than 300 tonnes of marijuana from 1975 to 1991 into the United States”, also mentioning a 1985 murder for which an Allan Strong was a fugitive:

“Lawyers for one of Montreal’s most notorious mobsters, Alan (the Weasel) Ross, announced yesterday they will present no evidence in their client’s defence.

After three weeks of fast-track testimony from a parade of more than 100 prosecution witnesses, defence lawyer Robert Sheketoff told U.S. federal judge Maurice Paul he would not be calling any witnesses.

…

Jurors will be considering testimony by Ross’s former associates that, among other things, Ross smuggled 6,000 kilograms of cocaine in one shipment through the Port of Montreal.

The close of the government’s case brought to an end one of the most complex investigations ever worked on by the Montreal Urban Community police in conjunction with law-enforcement agencies in the United States.

“Nowhere will you find a case where law enforcement from so many places has got together with one common goal,” Det.-Sgt. Michel Amyot, of the MUC anti-gang squad, said outside the courtroom.

His partner, Det.-Sgt. Kevin McGarr, noted that 11 law-enforcement agencies took part in the investigation.

These included the RCMP, Surete du Quebec, FBI, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the U.S. Marshal Service, and police from the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

Amyot said that while he has always believed Ross was involved in criminal activities that were international in scope, this case has suggested enormous quantities of drugs have been smuggled since 1975.

Ross is charged with leading a continuing criminal enterprise that imported more than 10,000 kilograms of cocaine and more than 300 tonnes of marijuana from 1975 to 1991 into the United States.

If he is convicted, he could be sentenced to life imprisonment.

He is also awaiting trial on the murder of associate David Singer in Florida in 1985. Florida practices capital punishment.

…

Allan Strong, who is also alleged to have taken part in the murder, is a fugitive.

…”

(“Lawyers to offer no evidence in Ross’s defence”, by William Marsden, May 13, 1992, The Gazette)

Wow, really ‘day and night’, what McConnell said of Allan Strong and what the Allan Strong in this Montreal gang was involved in!

But where is the evidence that the two Allan Strongs were the same person?

I could not find any in the press archives; however, I found a crucial piece of it in a more recently published, 2011 book on the Montreal West End Gang:

“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, Montreal’s Irish Mafia: The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang (March 2011, John Wiley & Sons):

“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.

…

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.

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.”

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In short, both McConnell’s “amphetamine speed” dealer Allan Strong and the Montreal West End Gang’s No. 2 leader and wanted murderer Allan Strong were originally from Cantley, Quebec, and were of about the same age as reported, one at 40 in December 1986 according to Insp. McConnell quoted earlier, and the other at 27 in March 1974 as in the above.

Though not unquestionably conclusive, this evidence is very convincing.

That was horrible! The No. 2 leader of one of Montreal’s most notorious gangs, a former convicted armed robber and gun battler with police resulting in a bystander death, and an international drug trafficker with ties to Colombia’s Cali cartel, after his 1984 prison release escaped the RCMP’s watch; and looking for this dangerous man in December 1986, who by this time had murdered another gang member in May 1985, Insp. Bryan McConnell told the media it was a person wanted by the police for selling some “amphetamine speed”.

And thirdly, regarding “worse” things in crime and policing that were revealing of McConnell, the Allan Strong case was also an instance in which the person was reported in the media by different versions of his given name, “Allan” or “Alain” depending on the story, with the result of misleading others – just like McConnell himself as “Brian” or “Bryan”.

This misrepresentation, as described next, is perhaps a piece of potentially incriminating evidence, given certain RCMP involvement with the Montreal West End Gang, that Assistant Commissioner McConnell by this time in 1992-1993, possibly again resorted to the ‘different name’ gimmick to avoid media scrutiny into his role in certain RCMP misconduct.

The crisis-like situation arose in December 1992, when RCMP Inspector Claude Savoie committed suicide in his office, at a time when he was under investigation for having leaked police information to the Montreal West End Gang, and was to be the subject of a CBC The Fifth Estate investigative story:

“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, The Gazette):

“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.

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.

Savoie was alone in his office at the time and all indications point to suicide, Ottawa coroner James Dickson confirmed.

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.

…

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.

…

It also airs a widely held belief that Ross was never prosecuted in Canada because he had high-placed informants within Canadian police departments.

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.

The report, titled The Weasel, was ready for broadcast when producer Julian Sher heard about Savoie’s suicide.

…

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.

…

Ross’s main pilot was veteran U.S. smuggler Bert Gordon. …

…

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.”

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.

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?

Quite possibly.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The above news story on RCMP Insp. Claude Savoie’s cosiness with the infamous Montreal criminal and international drug-trafficking gang did not mention McConnell. But as above, it reported “a widely held belief” that the West End Gang leader Allan Ross was never prosecuted in Canada because he had “high-placed informants within Canadian police departments”.

Was it not already evidence more than “belief”, that, as reviewed earlier, back in December 1986 Insp. McConnell minimized to the media the seriousness of the fugitive his RCMP drug squad was looking for, Allan Strong who sold “about one pound” of “amphetamine speed”, not disclosing that the fugitive was the Number 2 leader of the Montreal West End Gang under Allan (The Weasel)Ross?

But now in what had become national news in December 1992 with an investigative story by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate and with Insp. Savoie’s unexpected death, “Allan” Strong was reported as “Alain” Strong as in the above-quoted news story; as a result, the public would not link the person to the one A/Commissioner McConnell had dealt with back in December 1986.

As told in the above, Savoie had been head of the RCMP Montreal drug squad in 1989-1991 before his transfer to Ottawa, and was assistant director of RCMP criminal-intelligence service when he died; while it is unclear if in Ottawa Savoie worked under McConnell, director of enforcement services, it is obvious that back in 1989-1990 Savoie had been an “underling” – as I called him in the above quote – of Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell in charge of criminal operations in Montreal.

The public never knew that Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell, later of the Prime Minister Chretien residence break-in publicity in November 1995, was the same as the Chief Superintendent Brian McConnell in the 1988-1989 Richard Grise affair protecting the electoral prospect of Prime Minister Mulroney’s party.

However, in the press archives there was a The Ottawa Citizen story dated December 15, 1986, quoted earlier from my January 2014 post, reporting that RCMP Inspector Bryan McConnell wanted to arrest “amphetamine speed” dealer Allan Strong, who somehow disappeared.

Now, if the media’s investigative effort expanded further from December 1992, it could go beyond the relationship between Insp. Claude Savoie and the Montreal West End Gang, and into the roles of even more, and more senior, RCMP persons in that regard, such as by this time Assistant Commissioner McConnell.

But then in December 1992 the West End Gang’s No.2 leader Allan Strong became known to the media as “Alain” Strong, obviously not “Allan” Strong, just like later in November 1995 “Bryan” McConnell not “Brian” McConnell, the media presumably would not make any connection between the two.

“Worse” things really had happened, as later the media reported in February 1994 when “Alain” Strong was arrested in Europe, that “between 1988 and 1991” – thus under C/Supt. Brian McConnell’s watch in Montreal most of the time – Insp. Savoie leaked criminal investigation information to and received $200,000 payment from the West End Gang:

“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, The Gazette):

“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 Montreal drug squad who committed suicide in 1992.

The RCMP says Savoie received about $200,000 between 1988 and 1991 from the West End Gang for information about police investigations.”

”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The RCMP Quebec regional drug squad boss had it both ways.

As quoted above from a Montreal The Gazette story dated February 16, 1994, it was “the corruption of police officers and specifically Inspector Claude Savoie” – presumably not Insp. Savoie alone, but he was already dead.

Just days before in early February 1994, RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster’s resignation was announced by Prime Minister Chretien, and at the time the media reported a comment by Inkster about low points in his tenure, referring to Savoie’s suicide as one of them, here as previously quoted from my October 2012 post:

“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.

Another was last year’s suicide of Insp. Claude Savoie, who was under investigation for leaking information to a Montreal drug kingpin.

“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.””

On a personal note, I noticed that Claude Savoie’s suicide on December 21, 1992, occurred on the same day when I was released from my very first psychiatric committal, that had begun on November 30 when I had faxed documents to local MP and Justice Minister Kim Campbell and within a few hours RCMP officer Brian Cotton and another had come to take me to UBC hospital:

“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 The Vancouver Sun articles on the Savoie story mentioned Alain Strong…”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

I should note that, in my case, I wasn’t let go by UBC hospital but by an independent mental-health review panel, which ordered my release after a hearing on the day of December 21. In the same multipart article as the above, I discussed some of that history in my blog post dated March 25, 2012, noting that the supervising psychiatrist, Dr. Laura Chapman, opposed my release even though there was no real medical symptom of a psychiatric illness:

“…

A delayed Review Panel hearing was held on December 21 and the decision was for my discharge. Psychiatrist Dr. Laura Chapman prepared a discharge report, which contained interesting details.

The evidence in it showed that I was in fact quite normal:

“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.”

…”

(March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As discussed earlier, soon on January 6, 1993, A/Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell sent a directive to the British Columbia “E” Division, specifying the documents I had sent to Kim Campbell and forwarded to Solicitor General Doug Lewis as only a complaint about RCMP in regard to academic politics at UBC.

When the Chretien residence intrusion occurred in November 1995, the prior record of Chief Superintendent Al Rivard, as previously discussed, was unsettling, that despite his inability leading a 100-strong police force to search for an escaped killer during a period of seven months in 1989, resulting in four more deaths, Rivard was given the responsibility of protecting the safety of Canadian government leaders and foreign diplomats and was in that role at the time of the Chretien residence break-in.

On the other hand, the prior record of Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell was so much more masterfully and deceptively crafted, both at a political level and at a criminal-operations level, such that, whatever he had been up to – while some within the RCMP under him, such as Inspector Claude Savoie, had been up to not good – by November 1995 he was entrusted with the security of the Capital Ottawa region, including with handling the Chretien residence break-in incident and supervising the criminal investigation of Mulroney.

Therefore, it was most likely not a coincidence that the armed breach at Prime Minister Chretien’s residence could, and did, happen, whether or not one agrees with my use of the word “wilful” to describe the RCMP negligence.

Earlier, I have discussed a prior violent threat against Prime Minister Chretien, in May 1994 by Earl Kevin Jans who openly carried a crossbow and arrows wanting to see Chretien at a Liberal fundraiser at the Winnipeg Convention Centre, and also reviewed a high-profile deadly crossbow-and arrow precedent, namely the November 1991 crossbow killing of Revenue Canada lawyer Patricia Allen by her estranged husband Colin McGregor, where Allen happened to be the daughter of retired RCMP Assistant Commissioner George Allen.

As earlier reviewed, the Patricia Allen murder was known as a case of domestic violence, without apparent links to a possible corruption matter like the Airbus Affair because her professional specialty was on the Goods-and-Services Tax, not income tax or property tax that would be more relevant to criminal fraud cases such as Karlheinz Schreiber’s, and her father George Allen had already retired from the RCMP in 1987 and become Commissioner of Canada Elections in January 1988 – the year the Airbus sale to Air Canada was made that would result in around $20 million commissions privately distributed by Schreiber, a figure previously cited.

Now, in light of the fact that electoral politics had been a matter of contention between then Prime Minister Mulroney and the opposition parties in the November 1988 election, in the form of the “Richard Grise affair” that became public a year later in November 1989, I would have to consider if the Patricia Allen murder had a political dimension, given that her father was at the time a top Elections Canada official, “in charge of election law compliance and enforcement” as quoted earlier.

Elections Canada was and is the independent and non-partisan parliamentary agency administering federal elections. (“The Role and Structure of Elections Canada”, Elections Canada)

A 1988 press article cited earlier about George Allen’s role at Elections Canada mentioned prosecution of “collusion” in electoral advertising as a part of it:

“Anti-abortionists, right-wingers, free-trade advocates and any other special interest groups will be allowed to spend any amount they like to support or oppose candidates in the upcoming federal election, Canada’s chief electoral
officer said Wednesday.

And the money will not be counted as spending by either candidates or parties, he added.

Jean-Marc Hamel said in a Vancouver interview the ruling is based on an Alberta court case deemed applicable across the country.

…

George Allen, Elections Canada commissioner in charge of election law compliance and enforcement, said it has been reported already that the right-wing National Citizens Coalition has raised $250,000 to oppose the New
Democratic Party.

He said he expects spending also from anti-abortionists and those for or against free trade with the U.S.

He said any complaints of spending by third-party groups will be investigated with a view to prosecution if any collusion or connection with candidates or parties is indicated.”

(Jes Odam, August 11, 1988, The Vancouver Sun)

As told above, even though a new Alberta court ruling allowed any special interest group to spend as much as it wanted on advertisements supporting or opposing an electoral candidate, they could do so only independently of the candidate – or would be considered in “collusion” and could face prosecution according to Commissioner Allen.

Clearly, if any of the opposition parties or politicians brought the “Richard Grise affair” matter to Elections Canada, the agency would likely have had to review and investigate any illegal or unlawful aspects of it, i.e., whether the RCMP “colluded” with the Prime Minister’s Office in delaying a corruption investigation for an election, and George Allen would have been the top official supervising the review and investigation.

With that scenario in mind, here I note a curious similarity between former RCMP Assistant Commissioner J. W. B. McConnell and former RCMP Assistant Commissioner George Allen: for McConnell, sometime in 1986-1988 he was transferred from Ottawa to Montreal, promoted from Inspector in charge of the Capital Region drug squad to Chief Superintendent in charge of criminal operations in Quebec, such that he was there to make decisions when the Richard Grise corruption case came up before the November 1988 election; and for Allen, he retired from the RCMP in 1987 and became Commissioner of Canada Elections in early 1988, such that he was the official in charge of enforcing the election rules when the November 1988 election arrived.

Given what McConnell then did in favor of Prime Minister Mulroney for that election, I would not be too optimistic about how Allen had gotten there and what he would do in a similar political situation.

Indeed, in the press archives the Elections Canada cases George Allen was known for handling and prosecuting, in the aftermath of the November 1988 election, showed consistent favors for Prime Minister Mulroney and members of his party but little or no tolerance for members of the opposition parties.

In late November 1989, about a week after the Richard Grise affair had become news, there was another controversy reported by the media, about leaked Elections Canada internal memos that showed George Allen forgiving several November 1988 election over-spending violations committed by senior Tory MPs who were government officials, including Prime Minister Mulroney:

“Elections Canada did not investigate two Quebec Conservative MPs even though internal memos leaked to the news media allege they overspent their legal limit in the Nov. 21, 1988, general election.

George Allen, Commissioner for Elections Canada, said he did not order an investigation because he did not have a case that would stand up in court.

Yesterday the Quebec daily newspaper Le Soleil reported that it had obtained an exchange of internal memos from the officials at Elections Canada which examined the election spending reports of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Transport Minister Benoit Bouchard – who was reported as being $9,244.59 above his limit – and Pierre Vincent, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance, who was reported as being $6,763.14 above his limit.

The director of Election Financing, Frederick (Bud) Slattery, whose staff is responsible for examining the election spending reports of every candidate, wrote to Mr. Allen that Mr. Mulroney was $739.33 above his limit.

Mr. Allen interpreted the controversial election law in another way and by his figuring Mr. Mulroney came in at $614 under his limit of $53,942.95. Mr. Mulroney told reporters yesterday that the Elections Canada report had completely absolved him of any wrongdoing.

The memos are authentic, Mr. Allen confirmed in an interview yesterday.”

(“Allegations of overspending not probed by elections body”, by Richard Cleroux, November 28, 1989, The Globe and Mail)

So you see, with Chief Superintendent McConnell ‘guarding the scene’ ahead of time and Commissioner Allen ‘whitewashing’ it afterwards, Prime Minister Mulroney could do no wrong but win the November 1988 election flawlessly.

Furthermore, the reasons Allen cited for his decisions on Mulroney’s case were especially favorable, compared to on the cases of Transport Minister Benoit Bouchard and Pierre Vincent, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance.

Allen redid the official analysis and concluded that Mulroney’s $739.33 overspending, as discovered by the director of Election Financing Frederick (Bud) Slattery, was actually still $614 under limit; in other words, there was nothing wrong at all with Prime Minister Mulroney.

In the other two cases, Allen did not disagree with the conclusions of other Elections Canada officials but decided not to prosecute because he felt the agency could not win the cases in court.

So no need to even try in court, if Commissioner of Canada Elections George Allen decided that the cases could not be won.

But would Commissioner Allen be as generous when the offenders were from the opposition parties? Not at all, but quite the opposite.

Soon it was announced that four other MPs were under investigation for violations in the November 1988 election and one of them, a Liberal MP, would be prosecuted; Allen felt obliged to enforce the law despite admitting that, “there was no chance of getting a conviction”:

“Angry MPs have summoned Canada’s elections commissioner to explain why he ordered charges against a Liberal member.

A special committee of the Commons studying MPs’ duties and privileges will cross-examine George Allen on Tuesday about the charge laid against Montreal MP David Berger.

The committee will also ask whether three other MPs under investigation for alleged infractions of the Canada Elections Act will be charged.

Allen told the committee Jan. 17 that “there was no chance of getting a conviction” against four MPs under investigation for Elections Act violations. He based the comment on a recent Alberta court ruling which acquitted candidates charged under the act.

But despite the court setbacks, Allen said he is obliged to enforce the law, and declared MPs won’t get any special favors from him.

“Some of them seem to think there should be another set of rules for members of Parliament,” he said in an interview. “If that’s what they’re saying, I think they’re wrong.”

The Alberta case, now under appeal, involved the advertising blackout period before an election.

Berger has been charged under the same blackout provision. He is to appear in Quebec Superior Court March 1.”

(“MPs angered by charge; Elections commissioner summoned before committee”, by Iain Hunter, February 2, 1990, The Ottawa Citizen)

As above, identities of the other three MPs were not disclosed because they were not charged. But it was revealing to know that the MP charged, David Berger, was an opposition Liberal.

David Berger at first pleaded “not guilty” to the criminal charges of violating the Canada Elections Act. (“ACROSS CANADA MP pleads not guilty to Elections Act charges”, March 2, 1990, The Globe and Mail)

Nevertheless, eventually Berger changed his pleas to “guilty”, and he received an absolute discharge by the judge:

“St. Henri-Westmount Liberal MP David Berger received an absolute discharge after pleading guilty yesterday to three charges of contravening the Canada Elections Act.

The charges stemmed from three advertisements placed in local weekly newspapers at the start of the 1988 federal election campaign before the permitted date.

Quebec Court Judge Jean-Charles Hamelin said a royal commission is reviewing the law under which Berger was charged, and such technical infractions may be removed from the Criminal Code. He noted the advertisments were placed without Berger’s knowledge by a campaign worker.”

(“MP Berger gets absolute discharge”, June 16, 1990, The Gazette)

As above, the Quebec judge, Jean-Charles Hamelin, noted that the law was being reviewed by a royal commission and so in the future such “technical infractions” – placing electoral advertisement too early, in this case done by a campaign worker without Berger’s knowledge – might not be treated as criminal.

In any case, George Allen’s rigorous prosecution of Liberal MP David Berger succeeded in winning a “guilty” plea from Berger for Elections Canada, even though Allen had publicly stated that “there was no chance of getting a conviction”.

As in the February 2, 1990 The Ottawa Citizen story quoted above, Allen had discussed Berger’s case in the context of a similar violation in Alberta where the court had ruled in favor of the person being prosecuted; still, Allen continued to appeal that case to the higher court.

That case was against an opposition Reform party candidate, Ken Copithorne; Allen acknowledged publicly that the offence was “a relatively silly thing”, but still emphasized that the electoral candidates had an “absolute liability” under the law:

“The acquittal of a Reform Party candidate charged with federal campaign violations is being appealed by Canada’s elections commissioner.

Ken Copithorne, Reform candidate in Macleod in the Nov. 21, 1988, election, was found not guilty of violating the Canada Elections Act in provincial court in High River last fall.

But an appeal has been set for a hearing before the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench on May 3, says Copithorne’s lawyer, John Davison of Calgary.

The Reform candidate was charged with violating the advertising blackout in the early stages of the 1988 campaign. His supporters had bought an ad in the Nanton Times to publicize a meeting.

The judge found the candidate couldn’t be held responsible for actions of his supporters that he was unaware of.

The case has caused a stir on a House committee examining MPs’ duties and privileges. Committee members were upset that MPs remain under investigation for similar actions after the Alberta judge issued the acquittal.

The committee has asked Elections Commissioner George Allen to appear before it next week to explain why a charge was laid against Montreal Liberal MP David Berger for an apparently similar blackout violation.

Allen told the committee on Jan. 17 that the charge against Copithorne was “for a relatively silly thing, really.

“The party knew there was a blackout period. The candidate knew . . . . The official agent knew. All the top brass knew. But they did not tell the person in a particular area who was responsible for publicity.”

Yet the act is written so that there is an “absolute liability” of candidates, and they must be held responsible for the actions of their supporters, Allen said.”

(“Elections boss appeals acquittal of Reformer”, by Geoff White, February 3, 1990, Calgary Herald)

The several cases reviewed above, namely the cases of Progressive Conservative MPs and government officials Brian Mulroney, Benoit Bouchard and Pierre Vincent, Liberal MP David Berger and Reform candidate Ken Copithorne, are what I have found in the major press archives directly reflecting George Allen’s handling of the November 1988 election rule-violation cases.

Commissioner Allen’s unrelenting prosecution of an opposition Liberal MP and an opposition Reform candidate stood in sharp contrast to his decision not to prosecute two Mulroney government senior MPs and government officials, not to mention his ‘altering’ official Elections Canada analysis in a way such that Prime Minister Mulroney’s violation wasn’t wrong at all.

When it comes to the November 1988 election-related Richard Grise affair, I have not found any press coverage or public information on whether the affair was scrutinized by Elections Canada.

Given the enforcement record of the Commissioner of Canada Elections at the time as reviewed above, namely that no one in Mulroney’s governing party was prosecuted for violations in the election, I seriously doubt that anything would have been done if the matter was indeed raised to Elections Canada – especially when the matter involved not only a Tory government MP as well as Prime Minister Mulroney’s principal secretary, but also senior RCMP officers like Brian McConnell who were George Allen’s former colleagues.

Regardless of the truth, when Colin McGregor killed Patricia Allen with a crossbow-and-arrow several years later in November 1991, his mind was filled likely not only with rage against his wife but also fury about her father’s stand – whatever that might be – on the Richard Grise affair, as a Montreal The Gazette news story extensively quoted earlier in reviewing the incident, written by Claude Arpin and dated November 23, 1991, contained some intriguingly revealing information:

“Brian Todd, now a political aide to Phil Edmonston, the New Democratic Party MP for Chambly, remembers that McGregor loved to debate issues.

“I knew him at McGill as a right-leaning contrarian” – someone who says black is white just for argument’s sake.

“He was a professional debunker, always picking fights in print with various lobby groups,” Todd said.

But McGregor didn’t seem a violent fellow “in any way,” he said.”

Wow! One of the persons interviewed by the media in the wake of the savage and heartless murder, who had known the killer Colin McGregor since the McGill university days and gave the media some insightful info about the killer’s personality and professional profile, was at the time of the incident a political aide to Phil Edmonston, “the New Democratic Party MP for Chambly”.

As discussed and quoted earlier about the Richard Grise affair, the corruption complaint against Tory MP Grise was filed by his “main opponent in Chambly, New Democratic Party candidate Phil Edmonston”, in August 1988; subsequently, Grise won the November 21 election, but later due to the RCMP prosecution resigned on May 30, 1989, “after pleading guilty of fraud and breach of trust”.

So by November 1991, the complainant Edmonston had won that parliamentary seat vacated by Grise and was the MP.

Given that McGregor, as described by his acquaintance Brian Todd, was a fierce debater and prolific reporter of politics-related issues, that this acquaintance who had known him well and spoke to the media in considerable details about him was now Edmonston’s political aide, and that the father of his estranged wife whom he had just murdered was the top Elections Canada official “in charge of election law compliance and enforcement”, almost without a doubt the Grise affair issue had been an issue of discussion between McGregor and his old acquaintance Todd, and very likely an issue of debate between McGregor and his father-in-law.

Why then, did the media not investigate such possible political facets to the Patricia Allen murder?

I notice that the detailed The Gazette story I have quoted did not refer to George Allen as an Elections Canada official, only “a retired RCMP assistant commissioner”.

Perhaps in November 1991 the media, just like around the time of the November 1988 election and later in the publicities of the Chretien residence intrusion and the Airbus Affair in November 1995 as I have reviewed, pointedly avoided certain sensitive political matters.

Another news story, written by Mike Blanchfield and published on several newspapers two days after the murder, i.e., days earlier than the above-quoted story, mentioned George Allen also as “former chairman of Canada Elections”:

“Patricia Allen graduated from law school the intellectual superior of her peers, and moved on to a life of emotional degradation, and finally death.

Allen, 31, was shot to death with a crossbow on an Ottawa street Wednesday morning. Her estranged husband, Colin McGregor, 30, has been charged with first-degree murder.

Her friends say there was nothing that could have prevented the fate she met on Argyle Street.

“We can’t come to terms with this. It is so violent and so brutal,” said Cheryl Buckley, a Montreal lawyer who graduated from McGill University law school in 1988 with Allen. “One friend cried for four hours. We’re all having a hard time.”

“None of us could keep up with her. She was brilliant,” said Janet Henchey, another classmate who is now a Toronto lawyer.

Allen graduated at the top of her class in 1988, winning the Caron Prize for the highest achievement in civil law courses.

But Henchey and Buckley said Allen’s life took a downturn when she married in the summer of 1988. It marked the beginning of degradation and emotional abuse. She planned to get a divorce, but delayed leaving until a few months ago in an effort to convince her husband that a separation was the best thing.

“The marriage was a nightmare from the beginning,” said Henchey. “I’m sure we would have all broken down after the treatment . . . it was mental cruelty.”

…

Allen was the daughter of George Allen, a retired RCMP assistant commissioner and former chairman of Canada Elections.

Allen and her husband separated Aug. 20, said Sgt. Robert Campbell, an Ottawa police homicide detective.”

(“Brilliant woman, brutal death”, by Mike Blanchfield, November 15, 1991, The Ottawa Citizen)

That was a misquote of George Allen’s job title, as “chairman” rather than “commissioner” of Canada Elections. But the word “former” suggested that by mid-November 1991 he had left that job, although, unlike with his former RCMP title, it was not described as “retired”.

Or perhaps not quite “retired” yet, but definitely on the way out if not already out, because in a later, year 2000 document of Elections Canada I find the term of George M. Allen described as “1988-1991”, and his successor Raymond A. Landry’s starting date as April 13, 1992. (“SPECIAL INVESTIGATORS’ MANUAL”, June 2000, Commissioner of Canada Elections)

Whether it was already “former” in November 1991, the year 1991 was a very sad ‘double ending’ for retired RCMP assistant commissioner George Allen, i.e., end of his job and end of his daughter’s life!

It was actually a ‘triple ending’ but in a broader sense, i.e., also in relation to the RCMP.

In history before George Allen, the first Commissioner of Canada Elections, then called Commissioner of Election Expenses, was John P. Dewis, 1974-1976, appointed directly from his position as Assistant Chief Electoral Officer of Canada; Dewis was succeeded by Joseph Gorman, 1976-1987, a former RCMP assistant commissioner with 33 years of RCMP service, similar to his successor Allen, 1988-1991, a former RCMP assistant commissioner with 35 years of RCMP service. After Allen, his successor Raymond Landry continued in that capacity as of the time of the above-cited Elections Canada document in year 2000; but Landry was not known for any RCMP background, but as a former University of Ottawa law professor and Dean, and a former Canadian Superintendent of Bankruptcy. (“Election Law Takes Effect”, by Peter Lloyd, August 1, 1974, Winnipeg Free Press; “Special Voting Rules, SOR/78-148, CANADA ELECTIONS ACT”, February 14, 1978, Government of Canada; “M. RAYMOND LANDRY, C.M., LL.L.”, Order of Canada, The Governor General of Canada; “Compliance Agreements as an Alternative Enforcement Mechanism in Canada’s Federal Election Law”, by David M. Brock, June 1-4, 2005, Paper for Canadian Political Science Association Annual Meetings, Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities; December 20, 2005, Obituaries, Ottawa Citizen; “Joseph Gorman, November 16, 1920 –”, August 24, 2011, Ottawa Citizen; and, “Obituaries”, October 2, 2011, Ottawa Citizen)

Hence, the end of Allen’s short term of only three years – longer only than the term of the very first person in history at this position and much shorter than the terms of the others – also ended a long period spanning most of this position’s history up to that point, when former senior RCMP officers were appointed as Commissioner of Canada Elections.

Unfortunately, as I have reviewed, George Allen’s flawed record as Commissioner of Canada Elections coincided with his being the last former RCMP assistant commissioner to serve in that role.

And as reviewed, it was also a sorrowful end for George Allen personally, losing his intellectually brilliant lawyer daughter Patricia to murder in the year his job ended, and in circumstances that may have been related to his possible mishandling of election violations.

In a delicate contrast to George Allen, who passed away at 71 according to his obituary of December 20, 2005 cited above, his predecessor Joseph Gorman, who lived to 90 as per his obituary of August 24, 2011 cited above, had earned a unique distinction in RCMP protective service for Royal and preeminent visitors to Canada, such as none other than Queen Elizabeth the Monarch and also French President Charles de Gaulle, during the historically glorious times of the 1960s:

“Gorman, a former assistant RCMP commissioner, was one of the bodyguards for the Queen on her visits to Canada, in 1964 and 1967, Canada’s Centennial Year. It’s believed that he so impressed Buckingham Palace on the Queen’s Royal visit in 1964 that they asked for him again for her 1967 visit.

“My father would never say a word, he was pretty tight-lipped,” said his daughter Lucy Gorman. She said the family learned about the special request only after the Queen’s visits.

“But I’m sure it is true because other people spoke about it afterwards,” she said.

She said her father enjoyed shadowing Queen Elizabeth and expressed great admiration for her, but French president Charles de Gaulle was another matter. The French president caused a diplomatic stir in 1967 when from the balcony of Montreal City Hall he shouted the famous words: “Vive le Quebec libre” to the large crowd.

“He had much more trouble with Charles de Gaulle,” said Gorman, about her father’s time with the RCMP in the ’60s during the time of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec.”

(October 2, 2011, The Ottawa Citizen)

Another retired RCMP assistant commissioner who passed away in a December and in his 70s, like George Allen, was none other than J. W. B. McConnell, who along with Allen had been a highly-positioned protector of Prime Minister Mulroney for the 1988 election, and who died recently in December 2017 at 74:

“MCCONNELL, Bryan Ass’t Commissioner RCMP (ret) The McConnell family is saddened to announce the passing of Bryan on Friday, December 22, 2017 at the age of 74. … Bryan has left a legacy of family, community and service before self. From his first RCMP post in Penticton where he met Beverly, Bryan quickly rose through the ranks to his final position as Assistant Commissioner and Commanding Officer at ‘A Div’ in Ottawa. After retirement, Bryan became the Executive Director for the CACP where he continued to have an impact on policing across Canada. …”

(“Bryan McConnell”, December 22, 2017, Obituaries, Ottawa Citizen)

For the proud Royal Canadian Mounted Police, not all ended well.

But as my current review has illustrated, the Canadian media tended to appear oblivious to what really happened with the RCMP – perhaps other than on the case of Inspector Claude Savoie, who then suddenly died just when the media got to a major gang story he was in.

When the Chretien government took over power in late 1993, the records of the RCMP senior officers who would be responsible for his security, as I have reviewed Chief Superintendent Al Rivard and Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell especially, including their handlings of various law-enforcement situations, must have been known among the RCMP top management, and thus would, or at least should, not be a secret to the new government leadership – at least not to Prime Minister Chretien, a former justice minister.

Therefore, it is unclear why Chretien tolerated such a unfriendly security arrangement before the residence break-in scare – especially in light of the Earl Kevin Jans incident prior, that would be a reminder about the Patricia Allen murder.

But how Chretien responded to the break-in incident and its aftermath showed a ‘pacifist’, or perhaps even ‘appeasing’, posture toward the real and potential antagonists.

A revealing moment of Chretien trying to handle the personal crisis situation in the early morning of November 5, 1995, was told by Chretien himself, here as reported by journalist David Vienneau in a November 8 Toronto Star story, earlier quoted from my September 2013 post:

““He was about six feet away from my bed,” Chretien said in shedding more light on the 3 a.m. incident.

…

Chretien had grabbed a soapstone carving of a bird and he was ready to defend his wife and himself if necessary.

“He’d have had a headache,” Chretien said.

…

“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.”

As told, Chretien had taken up an art sculpture as defence weapon in case the knife-wielding intruder broke into the bedroom, but after the intruder was arrested and handcuffed Chretien went to “see the individual” and later said to  reporters, “he was a good-looking guy …”.

Rather than expressing outrage for the violent threat to the personal safety of him and his wife, and denunciation befitting his statue as the country’s leader, Chretien made a personal gesture to calm the situation and not escalate any animosity on the part of the intruder. It should be considered a ‘pacifist’ gesture compatible with, at the governing level, his government’s ongoing legislative efforts to ban military-style assault weapons and institute stricter gun control.

But there was a historical context to Chretien’s joke of “a good-looking guy”, here as discussed in my September 2013 post:

“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, The Ottawa Citizen):

“…

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.

“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.

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. …

…”

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.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As told, an intrusion had taken place when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife Margaret lived there but that intruder, a woman, went to hide in Trudeau’s bedroom closet waiting for romance.

Perhaps, given the Chretien government’s parallel legislative efforts to also bring in an anti-hate crime law to protect minority rights, including homosexual rights, Chretien’s joke to the reporters could be interpreted as intimating that this man could have been looking for him for a sexual tryst – “a good-looking guy” being quite complimentary in a homosexual-friendly context.

On the other hand, when this intruding man had held “an open jackknife” in his hand, the “good-looking guy” flattery might just be beyond ‘pacifist’ but on the ‘appeasist’, namely appeasing, side – with or without the homosexual intimation.

Dealing with the RCMP’s lax security for his residence, Chretien took a similarly non-confrontational approach, expecting his security to be adequately improved but otherwise conciliatory toward the police force regardless of malfeasances there might have been in their negligence, as my review of the follow-up events would show, as described below.

After the incident, there were some serious complaints by an RCMP employee representative about the RCMP senior management’s handling afterwards:

“RCMP management took actions to suspend 4 officers onsite that night, and reassigned 3 of their supervisors, as A/Comm. Bryan McConnell announced…

…

An RCMP employee representative, Staff Sergeant Joe Brennan, complained that the disciplinary actions favored the senior officers…

…

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, The Globe and Mail):

“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.

…

…

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.

…

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.

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.

…”

…

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.

…

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, The Vancouver Sun):

“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.

…

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.

…

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As above, an open disagreement emerged on November 16 between “A” Division commander Assistant Commissioner Bryan McConnell and “A” Division elected staff representative Staff Sergeant Joe Brennan, over the disciplinary measures against the junior versus senior officers.

S/Sgt. Brennan’s criticisms led to an RCMP announcement of security personnel improvement on November 17, most likely a decision by the RCMP leadership, that included not only the reassignment of some senior officers such as C/Supt. Al Rivard as in the above, but also the transfer of security supervision for Chretien’s residences away from the “A” Division – commanded by Bryan McConnell – and to the national headquarters; immediately on November 18, Chretien expressed satisfaction with the changes and announced, “There’s no need for a public inquiry into that matter”:

“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:

“The RCMP announced tighter security measures Friday for the prime minister:

* Security for prime minister and his residences (24 Sussex Drive and nearby Harrington Lake) put under one unit, reporting to national headquarters.

* Levels of supervision reduced to three from five, shortening chain of command.

* RCMP responsible for PM’s personal protection now guard residences on rotating basis.

* Unit to be comprised of Mounties with specialized VIP training.

…”

Now Chretien’s security everywhere was overseen by A/Comm. Wayne Martel, presumably.

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, The Ottawa Citizen):

““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.”

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.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Without initiating any measure to uncover and resolve problems in the RCMP that let this violent security breach and nearly violent personal encounter happen, Chretien made the gesture of personally thanking the RCMP corporal who had come over from the Governor General’s residence and acted alone to arrest the armed intruder:

“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, Toronto Star):

“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.

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.

…

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.

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.

The staff association alleges the four senior officers erred that night and none came to the scene to take charge.”

”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The November 24 news story by Tim Harper, quoted in the above, showed that Chretien did not go through the RCMP senior management to express his gratitude to the corporal, and the “A” Division commander, A/Commissioner Bryan McConnell, was informed of Chretien’s gesture only later by the employee representative, S/Sgt. Joe Brennan, as evidence of the corporal’s good conduct in a bid to end his suspension reprimand.

In doing so, the politically active Prime Minister Chretien opted for a ‘people-oriented’ populist gesture praising the heroism of an exemplary junior police officer, as a stand-in for accountability, i.e., not dealing with the negligence shown by almost everyone else responsible for security, as I commented:

“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.”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Of course, to Prime Minister Chretien’s expressed satisfaction, RCMP security measures for him and his wife had just been improved as described earlier. However, accountability would have been meant, at least in its objective, to improve security not only for the leader but for the country.

Nevertheless, other major stories in the news by this time, November 17-19 as reviewed earlier, namely coming out of the RCMP criminal investigation of former Prime Minister Mulroney over possible Airbus sale kickbacks, and Mulroney’s legal counteraction suing the government and RCMP, were taking Chretien’s Liberal populism to a magical new height – without most of the public even being aware that one of Mulroney’s top lawyers in the media spotlight for his lawsuit, Roger Tasse, was actually Prime Minister Chretien’s long-time close friend and former private law partner.

Thus, as I have shown, the more detailed reviews and analyses I have conducted and posted after 2009, particularly from 2012 to 2014, were able to validate major issues about the Airbus Affair and possible corruption of former Prime Minister Mulroney, first studied during my first year of blogging in 2009, and place them in broader political and longer historical contexts – including the history of political contests between Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative party on the political right and the Liberal and New Democratic parties on the left, as well as certain political roles the Royal Canadian Mounted Police played.

In particular, with some elaboration in my current review, a number of links I have analyzed since 2009 about several incidents of violence, especially the crossbow-and-arrow murder of Patricia Allen and the knife-armed intrusion of Prime Minister Chretien’s residence, revealed that it was a real possibility violence and violent threat had been involved in relation with politics in the Mulroney and Chretien eras – including the politics of the Airbus Affair and of the criminal investigation of Mulroney.

I especially reasoned as follows in my January 2014 post, about the RCMP’s possible, critical role in relation to the links I uncovered between the criminal investigation of Mulroney and the break-in at Chretien’s residence:

“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.

Such simultaneous timing would normally have been unrelated, but in this instance it appeared conspicuous and suggestive of a possible connection, for several reasons.

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.

…

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.

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.

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.”

(January 26, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

That and more having been illustrated, I should acknowledge that my past reviews and analyses have not really dug into the international dimensions of these high-profile Canadian events of political relevance.

In particular, the recurring theme that worse political violence in which foreign political leaders were gunned down coincided in timing with something about Jean Chretien the Canadian prime minister, is not yet understood.

These included, as previously discussed: the assassination of Mexican ruling party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio on March 23, 1994, the day when Chretien arrived in Mexico for his first official foreign visit, and Chretien then encountered an emotional mob when trying to pay tribute at the funeral home; and Andre Dallaire’s knife-armed break-in of Chretien’s residence in the early-morning darkness of November 5, 1995, after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated the day before and Chretien would leave for the funeral later that day.

The expansion in my current review, on the history of the International Criminal Police Organization and some of its former presidents, first touched on by me in 2009 regarding the November 1992 ascent of RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster to the leadership of international policing at a time when I was starting my activism in Canadian politics and Prime Minister Mulroney was maneuvering to protect his rule and legacies, has come across a small, seemingly random, coincidence between violent assassination in foreign land and violent threat in Canada: the name of the man carrying a crossbow and three arrows looking for Prime Minister Chretien in May 1994, Earl Kevin Jans, had some similarities to that of Jan Kubiš, one of the heroic Czechoslovakian resistance agents attempting to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, German Nazi police leader, overseer of “Germanization” in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and president of the Nazi-controlled Interpol, in May 1942.

If Jans’s name is taken as a ‘hint’, i.e., someone of his name might have been inspired or stimulated by that part of history, then Commissioner Inkster’s unfinished Interpol presidency, which he left in September 1994 less than two years into an elected 4-year term, after the Chretien Liberals’ trouncing of the former Mulroney ruling party under Kim Campbell in an October 1993 election and Prime Minister Chretien’s announcing in February 1994 his RCMP resignation to take effect in June, may have been a result of relevant politics.

As already reviewed, in November 1992 when Inkster was acclaimed Interpol president after the opposing candidate proposed by China withdrew in favor of him, the Canadian media mentioned some controversial Interpol history in reporting Inkster’s ascent, citing RCMP Inspector Claude Sweeney, head of Interpol’s Canadian branch, here as quoted earlier:

“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. ¹⁷³”

As told, in November 1992 the RCMP praised Inkster’s new Interpol presidency as “a great honour for Canada” and Insp. Claude Sweeney was enthusiastic about computerized information the Interpol would bring about, but others expressed caution due to certain Interpol history involving oppression, narcotics and corruption.

Here are more of the details of the RCMP’s praises about Inkster’s elevation to the top of international policing and Insp. Sweeney’s enthusiasm about the Interpol, from the news story I had cited in my May 27, 2009 blog post:

“The election of Mr. Inkster, who will continue to head the RCMP, came by acclamation at Interpol’s 61st general assembly in Senegal, where 124 of the 158 member states were represented.

“It’s a great honour for Canada, for the RCMP and for Commissioner Inkster,” said RCMP Inspector Yves Juteau, who co-ordinated Interpol’s 59th general assembly in Ottawa two years ago. “And it’s testimony to the credibility of all three.”

Solicitor-General Doug Lewis praised Mr. Inkster as “an outstanding police officer whose expertise and experience will be of benefit to police forces around the world.”

Contrary to popular myth, Interpol – an acronym for International Criminal Police Organization – does not conduct investigations or make arrests. Rather, its approximately $100-million budget provides an international information conduit from its base in Lyon.

… Mr. Inkster will work closely with Interpol’s secretary-general, Raymond Kendall of Britain.

Mr. Kendall has been candid about Interpol, which dates back to 1914. Three years ago, he told an international policing symposium in Kentucky that “it’s difficult to get even two countries to exchange information on an agency basis.” As an example, he cited the trouble that investigators had in tracing the route of the handgun used in the assassination attempt against the Pope in 1980. The gun had been bought and sold in several countries.

Many of those obstacles may disappear next year when a computerized linkup is to connect Interpol members, not only to the approximately 260 staff members in Lyon, but to each other. Written material, fingerprints, pictures of suspects and a host of other data will be available at the push of a button.

RCMP Inspector Claude Sweeney, whose staff of 35 work at Interpol’s Canadian branch in Ottawa, is enthusiastic about the hookup, which he hopes will happen by April. “It’s going to make a big difference.” About 12,000 requests for information currently flow back and forth between Ottawa and Lyon every year, compared with a million-plus checks between U.S. and Canadian police computers.

What may not alter, however, is a widespread wariness about dropping too much data into the Interpol pool, police say.

…

Insp. Sweeney agreed. “There’s concern all the time, so it’s done on a need-to-know basis.” In some instances, he said, a member will communicate directly with a particular country, or with a select few, bypassing Interpol.

At other times, Insp. Sweeney said, the RCMP will make inquiries through one of its own officers scattered in 18 countries around the world.”

(“Inkster acclaimed as Interpol head; RCMP leader takes over troubled agency trying to combat global crime”, by Timothy Appleby, November 11, 1992, The Globe and Mail)

As reported above, Inkster was acclaimed Interpol president at the organization’s 61st general assembly in Senegal where 124 of the 158 member states attended, and his ascent was praised by RCMP Inspector Yves Juteau who had coordinated Interpol’s 59th general assembly hosted by Canada in Ottawa, and by Solicitor General Doug Lewis, the Canadian government official overseeing the RCMP.

Also as described above, the Interpol did not practise law enforcement but was the official venue of information sharing and exchange for police agencies around the world. Its secretary-general, Raymond Kendall, had previously remarked that it was difficult for police agencies to exchange information directly due to the international nature of certain activities: e.g., the gun used in the 1980 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II had been bought and sold in several countries.

It was in this context that Insp. Claude Sweeney, who headed Canada’s Interpol branch of 35 staff members, expressed his enthusiasm about the computerized information hookup in the works with the Interpol, that would allow law-enforcement data such as “written material, fingerprints, pictures of suspects”, etc., to be made available to Interpol members around the world “at the push of a button”.

“It’s going to make a big difference”, as Insp. Sweeney said.

In my review of the Chretien residence intrusion incident, as previously quoted from my September 29, 2013 post, there was an “unnamed superintendent in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards”, who was one of the senior RCMP officers failing to fulfill their duties the night of the break-in:

“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, Toronto Star):

“The sources told The Star that one member of a senior management quartet, Inspector Jean Dube, has already been suspended.

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.

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.

…

”

As previously quoted from my same blog post, that “unnamed superintendent” was Claude Sweeney according to a different news story:

“RCMP management took actions to suspend 4 officers onsite that night, and reassigned 3 of their supervisors, as A/Comm. Bryan McConnell announced…

…

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, The Ottawa Citizen):

“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.

…

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.

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.

…

Sweeney is taking a government buyout. …”

”

Now, the intriguing question is: was Superintendent Claude Sweeney in charge of Chretien’s bodyguards in November 1995 the same person as Inspector Claude Sweeney heading the Canadian Interpol branch in November 1992?

I did not know and am still not sure. Unlike with Al Rivard, whose name was rare and so most likely unique among the senior management of the RCMP, or with Brian, J. W. B. or Bryan McConnell, whose name history I was able to trace through the press archives, I have not found sufficient information to determine whether the two Claude Sweeneys were the same person.

As a result, I have not included more discussions of Claude Sweeney in my reviews, that is, until now.

Now that I have reviewed old Interpol history with Reinhard Heydrich as president, and noticed that the man using crossbow-and-arrow as a gesture of potential violence toward Prime Minister Chretien in 1994, Earl Kevin Jans, had name similarities to one of Heydrich’s assassins, Jan Kubiš in 1942, I can at least guess that there may have been an Interpol-related facet in the break-in incident, and therefore, there is a real possibility that the two Claude Sweeneys were the same RCMP officer.

If that’s true, then besides Al Rivard who epitomized lack of diligence and lack of competence on the part of the RCMP, and J. W. B. McConnell who epitomized certain hidden political, and perhaps even criminal, agendas within the RCMP, there was Claude Sweeney who most likely symbolized the unhappiness of those RCMP members who saw that Chretien’s takeover of the government led to the premature loss of “a great honour for Canada, for the RCMP and for Commissioner Inkster”.

For Sweeney personally, his Interpol involvement went beyond involving with the 59th general assembly in Ottawa in 1990 and helping the organization modernize, and dated back to his working at the Interpol headquarters in the mid-1980s when Norman Inkster was still Deputy Commissioner of the RCMP:

“History compounds its image problem: Interpol was once Nazi-controlled. It later refused to hunt war criminals.

Until recent years, it has been in a technological backwater. Many of the organization’s files at its European headquarters had to be retrieved manually by clerks stationed in front of antiquated rotating storage racks. Morse code is still the only way to communicate with some of the agency’s more far-flung outposts, from Addis Ababa to Yaounde. …

As a result, Interpol has had to modernize quickly to survive. It recently built a multi-million-dollar headquarters in Lyon, France, automated and updated its data-processing and communications network, formed an anti-terrorist unit and trimmed its two million-odd criminal files to 250,000 — more than half of those related to drug traffickers  and money launderers.

And the 67-year-old agency, a co-operative comprising representatives of 150 national police forces, is struggling to get police to flex the long arm of the law in a world where criminals increasingly operate on a planetary scale.

“We’ve been going to all the police colleges in Canada to demystify the organization,” says RCMP Supt. Claude Sweeney, chief of Interpol Canada’s operations. …

About 500 members of the world’s most elite constabulary, including first-time observers from the Soviet Union and Poland, will come to Ottawa in late September for a week-long Interpol general assembly at the city’s Congress Centre and the Government Conference Centre. Planning for the assembly is being handled by a special task force at RCMP headquarters. A similar, but much smaller, gathering was held here in 1971.

The issues delegates will debate are expected to help chart the destiny of the global police body, as well as bolster Canada’s already prestigious image in the international police community.

…

“Interpol’s potential is tremendous,” says Sweeney.

While the organization’s aura of international intrigue is somewhat misleading, it has survived some momentous incidents.

In 1986, members of the French extreme leftist group, Direct Action, attacked Interpol’s former headquarters in St. Cloud, a Paris suburb, where Sweeney was then working as head of organizational development.

The building was sprayed with bullets, injuring one police officer, and a powerful bomb was detonated on the floor above Sweeney’s office.

Although no one was inside the office at the time, the bomb blew a large hole in the cement and steel-reinforced ceiling.

Days earlier, RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster, then deputy commissioner of criminal operations for the RCMP, had been standing in the same spot during a visit.”

(“Interpol: Dealing with an identity crisis”, by Ian MacLeod, June 18, 1990, The Ottawa Citizen)

Remarkably as told above, when Claude Sweeney was the head of organizational development at then Interpol headquarters in St. Cloud in the suburb of Paris, there was a French extreme leftist group Direct Action attack, and a bomb blew a large hole in the ceiling at a spot where Inkster had stood in a visit days before.

As I had commented in 2009, quoted earlier, the RCMP resignation of Inkster in 1994 and the subsequent loss of the Interpol presidency for Canada was merely a part of the Chretien Liberals’ retreat from parts of the international arena:

“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…”

In contrast to Supt. Claude Sweeney’s long and significant service improving Interpol and Canada’s “prestigious image in the international police community”, as quoted from the 1990 news story above on the Interpol, in November 1995 – if it was indeed the same Claude Sweeney – he found himself at the critical job of supervising the bodyguards of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, a recently elected, ‘people-oriented’ populist political leader within Canada.

Somehow, Sweeney wasn’t that enamoured by his latest uniquely “prestigious” and all-important job, and as previously discussed was “taking a government buyout”, i.e., taking incentivized early retirement.

So imagine, for whatever reasons, that some of these senior RCMP officers found themselves facing an unpleasant scenario of “direct action” – to borrow the terminology of the French militant group Sweeney had had experience with in 1986 in St. Cloud, France – namely that certain figures wanted to give Prime Minister Chretien a lesson in Canada, a much more peaceful country. In that scenario, from his professional perspective Sweeney might not be that dead set against it – if real personal harm did not occur to the Chretiens.

But could Sweeney be really confident in such a scenario, with his many RCMP years focused on the modest number of files going through the Interpol system compared to the huge number of crimes the Canadian police regularly handled? For instance, if an underling of Assistant Commissioner McConnell knew of some local “amphetamine speed” seller wanting “direct action”, could Superintendent Sweeney let him pass?

The above question is not a far-fetched imagination, considering that Yigal Amir, who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, just one day before the Chretien residence intrusion, was a Israeli political extremist with security intelligence links, and that as reviewed earlier Andre Dallaire professed to be an hardline Quebec separatist. (“Israeli security services under scrutiny after Rabin’s death”, by Walter Rodgers, November 21, 1995, CNN)

Therefore, whatever the real truth, in the early morning of November 5, 1995, Prime Minister Chretien found his best protection to be his wife Aline who, when confronted by a knife-wielding intruder, quickly retreated into the bedroom, locked the doors from inside and phoned security, as later The Globe and Mail complimented her while chiding McConnell, quoted earlier:

“Really hot – Aline Chretien, who remains calm and collected, locking doors and phoning police.

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.”

A very relevant truth, emerging from my reviews and analyses up to this point, could be that the unwillingness on the part of the Chretien government to get to the bottom of the Airbus Affair, through the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney, had been a major factor for Canada’s premature loss of “a great honour for Canada, for the RCMP and for Commissioner Inkster”.

As earlier reviewed, when his departure from the RCMP was announced in February 1994, Inkster hoped that he might not have to relinquish the Interpol presidency, and planned to discuss “with his replacement as commissioner and the world body’s executive” about the prospect of staying on, but then he quit in September; I have also noted that the previous Interpol president from Canada, William Higgitt, served out the remainder of his 4-year Interpol presidency after retiring from the RCMP in the early 1970s; and I have commented on the timing of Inkster’s Interpol resignation, that Stevie Cameron’s book on corruption in the Mulroney era, with some discussion on the Airbus Affair, was coming out in October 1994.

Now imagine that former RCMP Commissioner Inkster had continued as Interpol president to the end of his elected term in late 1996; and in September 1995, instead of sending a letter directly to the Swiss authorities requesting cooperation to investigate “criminal activities” on the part of Mr. Brian Mulroney, the former Canadian Prime Minister who had promoted Inkster to the RCMP’s helm and helped his ascent to the Interpol’s helm, the Canadian government and the RCMP had sent the letter through the Interpol, and the information had been quickly communicated and become “available at the push of a button” – as quoted earlier, about the modernized international police information exchange, from a November 11, 1992 The Globe and Mail story reporting on Inkster’s acclamation as the Interpol president.

Or would the Canadian government and the RCMP have done as above?

As reported, Canadian police worried – and no doubt persons in criminal activities worried even more – and Inspector Claude Sweeney agreed with their concerns, as earlier quoted:

“What may not alter, however, is a widespread wariness about dropping too much data into the Interpol pool, police say.

…

Insp. Sweeney agreed. “There’s concern all the time, so it’s done on a need-to-know basis.” In some instances, he said, a member will communicate directly with a particular country, or with a select few, bypassing Interpol.”

So, Canada might just bypass Interpol on the Mulroney file in any case, with or without Inkster at its helm at the time, as the Canadian government in fact did, sending the letter to only “a particular country”, the very select and prestigious Switzerland.

But had Inkster been at Interpol’s helm at the time, bypassing the organization most likely would have drawn international criticisms for him and the Canadian government, that the Canadian guidance for modernization of the Interpol would not apply to this important Canadian police criminal case, and that neither would the new Chretien government leadership’s ‘people-oriented’ populism apply in this instance.

In a less optimistic scenario, this could even turn Inkster’s tenure at Interpol into a failure by public perception, especially considering that he had been promoted to the top by Mr. Mulroney. Alternatively, the Chretien government could delay its major law-and-order agendas for a significant period of time, i.e., from 1994 to the end of Inkster’s normal 4-year term at the Interpol in late 1996, and endure lost political momentum and growing public doubts wondering why the new government did not take major steps on law and order.

Hence, Inkster’s 1994 departure from the helm of not only the RCMP but also the Interpol preempted potential international and domestic political and public-relations problems for the Chretien government – as long as all was quiet, i.e., the Canadian media did not dig deeper into his departure, which as it turned out the media did not, almost not reporting his Interpol departure at all.

The remaining two years of Inkster’s term, 1994-1996, was then taken over by Swedish police commissioner and Interpol vice president Björn Eriksson, who was a former budget director of the Swedish Ministry of Finance, former head of the Swedish Customs Service and of the Swedish Coast Guard, and former Chairman of the World Customs Organization. After successfully completing the job left early by Inkster, Eriksson became the first-ever Honorary President of the Interpol. (“Björn Eriksson (civil servant)”, Wikipedia)

What a ‘greater honor’ for Sweden and Björn Eriksson that Canada and Norman Inkster did not get, what a stellar prior record of accomplishments Mr. Eriksson had that could have been a help in the investigation of Mr. Mulroney’s “criminal activities”, and what a ‘quitter’ Mr. Inkster was!

Nevertheless, Canadians may argue that in Mulroney’s case the Interpol did not really matter because Karlheinz Schreiber had funnelled the Airbus commissions through a specific bank in a specific country, Switzerland, to which the Canadian government did send a letter to request investigative assistance.

That was what the media spotlights focused on in November 1995, and also in the years afterwards when it came to the Airbus Affair. But that was only because the media dutifully focused on the RCMP investigation.

Not unlike the gun used to shoot Pope John Paul II, Schreiber was actually a widely travelled international businessman and international arms dealer, i.e., operating in quite a few countries, and Mulroney’s close circle of friends also travelled internationally in pursue of opportunities.

The following review of the broader international links to the Airbus Affair is from my September 29, 2013 post, citing reports on German investigations into Schreiber and his activities, particularly surrounding commissions for the sale of German armoured carriers to Saudi Arabia during the 1990-91 Gulf War:

“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, The Gazette):

“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.

…

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.

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.

…

The paper claims his commissions were funneled through three companies: ATG Investments in Panama, Kensington-Anstadt and International Aircraft Leasing (IAL), both in Liechtenstein.

…

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.

…”

…

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…

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 (“Pfahls/ Kiep/ Luethje/ Weyrauch”, Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative, The World Bank):

“Thyssen paid 24.4 million DM into a Swiss account with the Swiss Bank Corporation held by Schreiber’s Panama registered firm “ATG”.””

…

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.

…

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 Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money, 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”.

As Stevie Cameron explained, Verchere had moved money from Panama to Switzerland for his family and for some clients…

…”

(September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As reviewed above, Schreiber’s international companies were based in Liechtenstein and Panama, with some of the bank accounts in Switzerland; and Mulroney’s financial trustee and lawyer Bruce Verchere also had a company in Panama, and moved money from there to Switzerland.

As above, the German arms sale of 36 Fuchs-type tanks in German army service to Saudi Arabia, for which Schreiber distributed commissions, had been initiated by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, a subject previously discussed in Part 1 of my current article – in the context of that war’s origin and the controversial involvement of an underling of Secretary Baker, Canadian-born U.S. diplomat and senior Arabist April Catherine Glaspie.

Also as above, the German government and justice system then investigated the arms deal and prosecuted the related financial crimes accordingly, and Holger Pfahl, former German state secretary for defence and head of the secret service, was found guilty and jailed for taking bribes.

In contrast, in the Airbus Affair the Canadian government and RCMP wrote a letter to Switzerland, only, and then Mr. Mulroney’s libel lawsuit took more of the spotlights.

As already reviewed, in the end the RCMP did not even uncover the $300,000 cash Schreiber gave Mulroney – unrelated to Airbus commissions according to Schreiber – from one of his Swiss bank accounts.

Like the Airbus Affair, the German prosecution of Holger Pfahl was discussed from the start of my political blogging, in the Notes of my first blog post reviewing Canadian politics, dated February 20, 2009, about its timing proximate to the passing of my father and also Mulroney’s friend Frank Moores. The reference to the deaths was partially quoted in Part 2 of my current review, and here now is the reference to Pfahl:

“21. 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: … 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^thbirthday 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…”

(February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Of the various international subjects broached in my current review, the Interpol dimension seemed to have the most direct relevance to the Canadian incidents involving Earl Kevin Jans and Andre Dallaire, i.e., hostile violent threats toward Prime Minister Chretien, that were likely partly related to the Chretien government’s handling of Inkster’s Interpol position. In particular, the Interpol facet probably factored into Dallaire’s act of intrusion into Chretien’s residence, and its timing – barely a day after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in Israel, and only hours after Mulroney’s lawyer Roger Tasse phoned Justice Minister Allan Rock at home over the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney.

Nonetheless, I should point out that the Interpol dimension as I have reviewed did not seem to exhibit clear relevance to the harder violence in foreign countries, or their timings. In particular, it has not shed light on whether the timings of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio’s assassination and Chretien’s arrival in Mexico for his first official foreign visit were related.

I have not studied the harder topics in-depth. Still, here I would comment further on some of the Mexican sentiments noted in my May 2009 blog post, when I wrote, as previously quoted:

“… 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. ²⁰¹”

Instead of officially visiting the United States first as new Canadian prime ministers had traditionally done, Chretien chose Mexico, which I note was and still is a Third-World developing country, and so he had good reasons to anticipate friendliness toward him by his hosts.

But to his shock no doubt, Chretien’s visit ran into an assassination of a top Mexican leader, then for his mourning gesture he was instead booted out by an angry crowd, and his notion of democracy was also criticized, through the media, by the Mexican rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

Here are further details from the press report I cited on the Mexican funeral home crowd’s hostility toward Chretien and his Canadian entourage:

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien was jostled and driven away from a funeral home by a mob of angry Mexicans yesterday as he attempted to pay his respects to slain presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

The Prime Minister, on a three-day visit to Mexico, was confronted by thousands of angry and mourning Mexicans when he tried to view Colosio’s body in a gesture of sympathy.

Chretien tried to bypass a giant lineup and was rebuffed by the emotional crowd.

“Out, out, out,” some in the crowd shouted as Chretien’s entourage pushed through a packed hallway.

The Prime Minister finally retreated, shaken but unharmed, without reaching the coffin.

A Canadian Press photographer, Fred Chartrand, was knocked to the ground but was unhurt except for a scraped knee.

Chretien’s aides said they had expected more Mexican security at the funeral home.”

(“PM jostled by Mexican mourners: Angry crowd mobs Chretien at funeral home”, by Shawn McCarthy, March 25, 1994, Toronto Star)

As told, it was a crowd of thousands of angry and emotional mourners who shouted “Out, out, out” and blocked Chretien’s entourage from getting past a hallway to reach the dead, and Canadian Press photographer Fred Chartrand was knocked to the ground and suffered a craped knee.

I would imagine that Chretien was only one of many government and foreign dignitaries who showed up at the funeral home to mourn the dead without waiting in the long line. But why were the Mexicans especially hostile toward the Canadian leader who skipped the United States to visit them, even knocking to the ground Fred Chartrand, a photographer in his entourage?

And here are further details from the press report I cited on Subcomandante Marcos’s criticisms, even ridicules, of Chretien’s notion of democracy, after Chretien’s Mexican visit when Marcos met the media in the rebels’ jungle base:

“Mexican guerrilla leader Subcomandante Marcos wants Prime Minister Jean Chretien to explain what democracy means in Canada, and why he thinks it should be different in Mexico.

And he says Canadian politicians and business people who think trade and human rights can be separated are sitting on a “time bomb” that will blow up in their faces.

Marcos, who believes Mexico is on the brink of civil war, led the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation in a New Year’s Day uprising against the government in the southern state of Chiapas.

He made the comments in a jungle interview last week after being told of recent remarks by Chretien in Mexico City. The prime minister was there to meet with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and to promote Canadian business in the wake of the recent North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and the U.S.

Chretien’s comments came shortly after the assassination of presidential election frontrunner Luis Donaldo Colosio. Colosio represented the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for the past 65 years.

Chretien said Canada cant do much to ensure the August elections are clean. “They have a democracy that is not our type of democracy in many ways,” he said.

In the jungle, Marcos asked: “How many kinds of democracy are there? (That) is my question to the prime minister.

“Democracy that looks like democracy but is not democracy? That is democracy in Mexico: It looks like democracy but nobody believes in it.”

He laughed, and added: “I love the political people.

“Democracy means government of the people for the people by the people

…”

(“Marcos has a few words for Chretien”, April 16, 1994, The Vancouver Sun)

In reference to Subcomandante Marcos’s remarks, I would comment that my reviews reveal Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to have understood the importance of people in a democracy: that is why he worked masterfully to cultivate his ‘people-oriented’ populist image.

In this sense, Chretien’s statement, that Canada couldn’t do much to ensure Mexican elections were clean because the Mexicans “have a democracy that is not our type of democracy in many ways”, in my view could be a tacit admission, i.e., a concession to the Mexican ways of thinking, that while as the leader of Canadian democracy he was much more ‘pacifist’, even he would not be that easy when it invovled the interests of his political party or of his own, be it political, economic, financial or family-related – facets that my current review has touched on.

Whatever Chretien’s ‘maverick’ thinking was to attain political populism, his straying away from the Canadian tradition of keeping a uniquely close relationship with the United States could be another factor underlying some of the violent threats displayed toward him that I have reviewed.

There were some press materials, published in the Winnipeg Free Press following the May 1994 crossbow-and-arrows threat incident, that, for whatever reasons, I have not found in the main press archives I utilized, the ProQuest Canadian Major Dailies and Canadian Newsstream, and were thus missed in my 2009 review of Canadian politics and are only now coming to light from my standpoint.

Earl Kevin Jans, the man who openly carried the unusual but deadly weapon to the Winnipeg convention centre wanting to see Prime Minister Chretien, claimed that he was linked to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, here as in the May 21, 1994 Winnipeg Free Press article in its entirety:

“A psychiatric examination has been ordered after a man carried a crossbow to a speech by Prime Minister Chretien and claimed a connection with the Central Intelligence Agency.

A man with a crossbow was arrested Thursday at the Winnipeg Convention Centre before Chretien arrived to speak at a Liberal party fundraiser.

“‘When the CIA finds out police are holding me you’ll find out how many laws you’ve broken’,” Crown attorney Janice LeMaistre said the man told police.

Yesterday morning, as LeMaistre sought a psychiatric exam for Earl Kevin Jans, 29, Jans beseeched provincial court Judge Charles Newcombe to dial a long-distance phone number and ask for James Olson, who would put him through to a Col. Masterson.

When a reporter dialled the number, a Virginia-based CIA switchboard operator answered.

Seconds later, James Olson came on the line.

“I have no idea how he would have gotten my number and name,” said Olson, who wouldn’t say what position he holds in the American spy organization. Olson said he has no idea who Jans is. He would not say if he knew a Col. Masterson.

“Our phone number isn’t hard to get,” David French, a CIA spokesman said later. “We don’t confirm or deny employment here to reporters. But I can tell you, we’ve been used this way before by people of sound or unsound mind.”

Newcombe ordered Jans to see a psychiatrist and appear in court again next week.

LeMaistre said Jans first came to police attention when a man began harassing Premier Gary Filmon’s assistants two weeks ago.

The Crown said a man phoned the RCMP, warning them to stay away from the legislature because “something big was going to happen,” and claimed he had plastic explosives. Jans, of no fixed address, is charged with possessing a dangerous weapon and carrying a weapon to a public meeting.”

(“Crossbow toter claims link to CIA; judge orders a psychiatric exam”, by Kevin Roliason, May 21, 1994, Winnipeg Free Press)

At first glance, Jans’s claim appeared a tall tale, pleading with the judge to call a long-distance phone number that would connect to CIA persons; and the Crown prosecution sought a psychiatric exam for him.

That could be a reason why the above storyline did not seem to get reported by the rest of the major Canadian newspapers, even though the date of this story, May 21, was the same as the other news stories I have earlier quoted – from the Montreal Gazette and the Hamilton Spectator – reporting on the Jans incident of May 19.

Inspecting the above reported facts carefully, I would infer that when Jans gave the judge a phone number claiming it to be a CIA number at which a “James Olson” could be reached who could redirect to a “Col. Masterson”, verification of these pieces of information would mean a degree of credibility for his claim: it would mean that Jans had at least some indirect links to the CIA, even if they might not be as important as he claimed – after all, how else could such information come to his mind?

Indeed, as reported above, when a reporter dialled that phone number the call reached a Virginia, U.S.-based CIA switchboard operator and “seconds later, James Olson came on the line”.

However, when reached at that CIA phone number Olson refused to say if he knew a “Col. Masterson”, and so only two of the three pieces of information Jans had given to the judge were verified. Olson also said he had no idea who Jans was and how Jans had gotten his name and phone number.

If Olson was truthful, then Jans probably had some link to the CIA that was only indirect, in my reasoning: the information was probably passed on to Jans indirectly, such as through a network of persons where some had direct CIA connections and some were helping Jans; as a result, the CIA person Jans cited to prove his own credibility did not know who he was.

On the other hand, denying knowledge of someone or something must be quite common for those in the intelligence arena I would imagine, and so some of Jans’s direct connections could actually be involved with that agency.

As noted earlier, the Earl Kevin Jans incident and the Andre Dallaire incident involved, and probably had intended to be, threats of violence rather than actual violence, and thus were likely meant to ‘send a message’ to Prime Minister Chretien. Therefore, one can deduce that whoever initiated furnishing the CIA information to Jans had a purpose of ‘sending a message’ in mind.

A prior incident cited in the above-quoted story also corroborated a send-a-message scenario: Jans had recently harassed Manitoba Premier Gary Filmon’s assistants, and phoned the RCMP to warned them to “stay away” from the provincial legislature because “something big was going to happen”, claiming to possess plastic explosives; but the story did not report any real explosives found, and most importantly, had Jans wanted to launch a real attack he likely would not have warned the police beforehand, or would not have carried the crossbow and arrows in open view – as discussed earlier – while seeking to see Chretien.

An interesting piece of the puzzle would have been who James Olson was within the CIA organization, which he refused to disclose. My guess is that Olson wasn’t an unimportant person, given that he and Col. Masterson were very important to Jans’s efforts at the Manitoba provincial court to prove his credibility, and the Colonel rank is a senior one in the military.

Currently known to the public there is a high-profile former CIA officer of the name Pearl Kevin Jans had raised, James M. Olson, a Professor of The Practice at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, who has the following descriptions of his former CIA work in his online academic resume:

“Born in Le Mars, Iowa. B.A. (mathematics and economics), University of Iowa. J.D. (international law), University of Iowa. Member of Iowa Bar. U.S. Navy (attained rank of Lieutenant Commander, USNR).

Career officer in the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, serving mostly overseas in clandestine operations. Served as Chief of Counterintelligence at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Overseas assignments in the U.S.S.R., Austria, and Mexico. Foreign languages: French, German, Russian, and Spanish.

Recipient of the Intelligence Medal of Merit, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the Counterintelligence Excellence Medal, the Donovan Award, and several distinguished achievement awards. Awarded the Silver Star Award at the Bush School for excellence in teaching.

Experience in international affairs, economics, trade negotiations, intelligence support to the military and the law enforcement community, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and technical collection systems; senior intelligence advisor to several U.S. ambassadors; extensive liaison with the State Department, Treasury Department, FBI, Pentagon, NSC, NSA, DEA, INS, and U.S. Congress.”

(“James M. Olson”, by James Olson, Professor of The Practice, The Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University)

As in the above, Prof. James Olson’s resume described his CIA time as “serving mostly overseas in clandestine operations”, listing only one job at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia: “Served as Chief of Counterintelligence at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.”

Oh my gosh! Could it have been the CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James M. Olson that the Winnipeg Free Press reporter reached in May 1994, dialling a phone number and asking for James Olson as demanded by the arrested Earl Kevin Jans?

Prof. Olson’s resume did not provide a job timeline on when he held the Chief of Counterintelligence position at the CIA headquarters.

In a newly published book by him, James M. Olson mentioned a general timeframe of his “active duty in the CIA”, which was, “in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s”:

“… When I was on active duty in the CIA in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, I had no illusions about the nature of our main counterintelligence adversary. The KGB (which translates as “Committee for State Security”) was a ruthless and vicious organization that oppressed its own people, crushed religion, sent political dissidents to gulags or psychiatric hospitals, and killed its enemies.¹”

(James M. Olson, To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, 2019, Georgetown University Press)

The 1990s were the senior years of this James Olson’s active CIA duty. Thus, the most distinguished CIA job on his academic resume, “Chief of Counterintelligence”, likely fell into this period – a potential match with Jans’s James Olson.

As an aside, I comment that, in the above quote from his book, Prof. Olson pointed to psychiatric hospitals as one of the main tools of oppression by the KGB against political dissidents in the former Soviet Union, and that interestingly in my Canadian political activism I was also sent to psychiatric committals, as earlier discussed, except that each time the independent mental-health review mechanism allowed me to get released before long.

Prof. Olson’s resume outlined the time when he began teaching, which in my inference would likely be when he moved out of “active duty in the CIA”. It was 1997-2000:

“Senior faculty member at the Joint Military Intelligence College, Washington, D.C, 1997; taught courses on counterintelligence and military intelligence.

Assigned by the CIA to the George Bush School of Government and Public Service in College Station, Texas, as an officer-in-residence in December 1997. Teaching courses on Cold War Intelligence, U.S. National Security, and International Crisis Management. Frequent guest lecturer at other courses, conferences, and symposia. Appointed a permanent faculty member of the Bush School in August 2000.

Author of “The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence” and “Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying.””

(James Olson, Professor of The Practice, The Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University)

As above, in August 2000 Prof. Olson became a permanent faculty member of the Bush School at Texas A&M University. So, his departure from active CIA duty would have been no later than 2000.

Also as above, Olson began teaching in 1997 at the Joint Military Intelligence College as a senior faculty member, and in December of that year became an officer-in-residence at the Bush School. Because Chief of Counterintelligence was unquestionably a key CIA executive position, when he started his teaching faculty role Olson likely was moving out of real counterintelligence work.

1997 was about three years past May 1994, the time of the Earl Kevin Jans incident. James M. Olson should normally be at the top of his active CIA career, i.e., working as Chief of Counterintelligence at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, shortly before moving on to his teaching career. The question is if he had reached his highest point in May 1994.

“The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence”, a publication by Prof. Olson listed in his academic resume quoted above, stated that he had been appointed to that position in 1991:

“When I joined the CIA, one of my first interim assignments was with the old CI Staff.  I found it fascinating.  I was assigned to write a history of the Rote Kapelle, the Soviet espionage network in Nazi-occupied Western Europe during World War II.

With its expanded computer power, NSA was breaking out the actual messages sent between the NKVD center in Moscow and the clandestine radios of the various cells in Western Europe.  Incredibly, these messages came to me.

There I was, a brand new junior officer, literally the first person in the CIA to see the day-to-day traffic from these life-and-death operations.  I was deeply affected by the fear, heroism, and drama in these messages.  Above all, I felt privileged to have been given such an opportunity.

Building on an earlier study of the Rote Kapelle by the CI Staff, I completed a draft several months later that incorporated the new material.  To my great surprise, this study was well received by my immediate superiors, and I was told that I was to be rewarded with a personal interview and congratulations from James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of the CI Staff from 1954 to 1974.

…

I nervously briefed Angleton on my study, and he listened without interrupting, just nodding from time to time.  When I finished, he methodically attacked every one of my conclusions.  Didn’t I know the traffic was a deception?  Hadn’t it occurred to me that Leopold Trepper, the leader of the Rote Kapelle, was a German double?  He went on and on, getting further and further out.

Even I, as a brand new officer, could tell that this great mind, this CI genius, had lost it.  I thought he was around the bend.  It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my career.

When the meeting was over, I was glad to get out of there, and I vowed to myself that I would never go anywhere near CI again.  I did not keep that vow.  In my overseas assignments with the Agency, I found myself drawn toward Soviet CI operations.  Nothing seemed to quicken my pulse more, and I was delighted when I was called back to Headquarters in 1989 to join the new Counterintelligence Center (CIC) as Ted Price’s deputy.  When Ted moved upstairs in early 1991 to become the Associate Deputy Director for Operations, I was named chief of the Center.

Today, many years after that initial disagreeable encounter with CI, I find it hard to believe that it is actually my picture on the wall of the CIC conference room at CIA Headquarters, where the photos of all former CIA counterintelligence chiefs are displayed.  There I am, number seven in a row that begins with Angleton.”

(“The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence: A Never-Ending Necessity”, by James M. Olson, Fall-Winter 2001, Studies in Intelligence, Center for the Study of Intelligence, United States Central Intelligence Agency)

As recalled by James M. Olson in the CIA publication above, he was the 7th Chief of Counterintelligence in CIA’s history, appointed in early 1991, after he had become Deputy Chief in 1989 helping then Chief Ted Price start the new Counterintelligence Center; as Olson recalled, back when he first joined the CIA it was called the Counterintelligence Staff, and his early unpleasant experience with the first Chief in history, James Jesus Angleton, led to his leaving the CI field until returning in 1989.

The facts pieced together thus far suggest that, almost surely, James M. Olson was the CIA’s Chief of Counterintelligence in Langley, Virginia in May 1994, at the time of the Earl Kevin Jans incident.

The critical question here is if the CIA person James Olson whose phone number Jans provided to the court after his arrest was James M. Olson.

In my assessment, there is a real likelihood, and I would think it was a fairly high one, that Jans’s James Olson was someone at a quite senior level within the CIA like James M. Olson: Jans implored Manitoba provincial court Judge Charles Newcombe to dial that phone number – not the reporter, who then dialled on his/her own initiative – and ask for James Olson, stating that Olson would put him through to Col. Masterson; the caller was supposed to be an important senior person, namely a court judge, and the end person to be reached was also a senior figure, of the Colonel rank in the U.S. military, and so the specific person in-between was very likely also a senior figure, either Counterintelligence Chief James M. Olson or another James Olson of a considerably senior role in the CIA.

If Jans’s James Olson was indeed James M. Olson, then the fact itself was intriguing, that someone of his senior CIA position would come to answer when the Winnipeg Free Press reporter phoned: the call reached an CIA switchboard operator first, and so Olson had the option of personally taking or not taking the call; now, if as he asserted he had no idea who Jans was and what it was about, he likely would not have answered such a call from a newspaper reporter; as the original news story quoted earlier suggested, such media enquiries normally would be forwarded to a CIA public-relations person, in this case CIA spokesman David French who spoke with the reporter later.

So, the scenario of CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James M. Olson taking the phone call from a newspaper reporter at a Canadian courtroom would put into doubt his denial of knowing anything about Earl Kevin Jans, and raise the question of what kind of ‘message’ he was sending through such a seemingly unintentional and almost unnoticed appearance.

According to Prof. Olson’s academic resume quoted earlier, he had spent most of his CIA career “overseas in clandestine operations”. For someone of his background, Olson must have known well in May 1994 that a CIA connection channel to anyone in Canada, a foreign country, was “clandestine” and should not be easily admitted to the media; hence, the CIA Counterintelligence Chief’s answering a phone call and having a conversation with the Canadian reporter, even though Olson did not disclose his CIA position at the time, would itself be a ‘message’ of seriousness meant for Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien – if that was a main objective of the Earl Kevin Jans incident.

An irony of the above serious and quite probable scenario, in my view, is that the CIA used a “clandestine”, intelligence operation-like incident to send a “counterintelligence” reminder to the Canadian government. It was, if only in principle, a threat of potentially deadly violence to a foreign leader, and so I would guess that the CIA apparatus treated what concerned them on Chretien’s part as at least a serious intelligence threat to them.

Within the scopes of my 2009 review and my current review, a logical inference would be, if the Jans incident indeed involved a CIA gesture, that it was related to Chretien’s official foreign-visit initiative to befriend Mexico in a manner downgrading Canada’s traditional special relationship with the United States, to do with the concern that it could lead to some hostile elements in Mexico gaining a foothold in Canada – such as through the NAFTA mechanism – which enjoyed much better access to the U.S. than Mexico did.

However, something else Jans said to police, reported in the original Winnipeg Free Press story quoted earlier, suggested that it could be about more: “When the CIA finds out police are holding me you’ll find out how many laws you’ve broken”.

It was clearly appropriate police response to arrest Jans when he carried a weapon to want to see the prime minister. So, Jans’s accusing the police of breaking “many laws” raised the spectre of whether he was “of a sound or unsound mind”, a phrase coined by CIA spokesman David French, quoted earlier.

But Jans could, alternatively, be referring to something broader and prior to his threatening action, such as, ‘the CIA would tell you that you have broken many laws of the CIA’s concerns’.

That would have been about the new Chretien government’s policies more generally than with respect to Mexico, most of which have not been covered in depth, if at all, by my reviews.

But in May 1994 the Chretien government had been in power for less than seven months since the late October 1993 election. So how many laws could it have already broken?

On the other hand, as has been noted in various contexts in my current review, in 1994 Jean Chretien already had a long and distinguished prior history working in the government, particularly as the justice minister under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

I note that compared to the Mulroney government, both the Trudeau government before and the Chretien government after have shown to be more independent of U.S. interests. In March 1994 when Chretien was going to Mexico instead of the U.S. for his first official foreign visit, the Canadian parliament led by the majority Chretien Liberals was also launching a broad review of Canadian foreign policy, “the most comprehensive review since Pierre Trudeau”, aiming for Canada to be “more active, independent, internationalist” in foreign affairs:

“How does Canada protect its interests in the new world disorder? That’s the key question as Ottawa launches a sweeping review of our foreign policy, as well as defence and aid programs.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s Liberals are making good on their election pledge to chart a “more active, independent, internationalist” role in foreign affairs – by consulting with the public.

Canadians will get a chance to air their views on how best to:

* Safeguard our cultural, economic and territorial sovereignty.

* Define our political ties with other countries and regions.

* Shape our armed forces.

* Organize foreign aid.

* Promote global security.

Two special parliamentary committees, one on foreign affairs and aid, the other on defence, will travel the country over the summer, and report their findings in the fall.

The public should make itself heard. The issues are too important to be left to the entrenched interests in the defence, foreign affairs and aid communities. This, after all, is the most comprehensive review since Pierre Trudeau struck an independent policy by cutting our military presence in Europe and recognizing China.

…

Foreign policy: In addressing the perennial question of Canada-U.S. relations, we need to debate what policies can best preserve Canada’s culture, social programs and industry, as well as our territorial sovereignty.

Abroad, we need to ensure that our promotion of global security through democracy, good government and human rights is consistent and not sacrificed for either trade or powerful lobbies at home. And, going beyond our traditional links to the U.S. and Europe, we need to forge closer ties to Latin America, Asia and the former Soviet states.

Defence: Is NORAD, the Canada-U.S. defence pact, still relevant? And what should be our role in NATO, now that we’re pulling our forces out of Germany? Do we need to maintain an army, navy and air force ready for a major shooting war? Does defence need $11.5 billion a year in this post-Cold War world?

…”

(“How does Canada protect its interests in the new world . . .”, March 18, 1994, Toronto Star)

As characterized above, it was “the most comprehensive review since Pierre Trudeau struck an independent policy by cutting our military presence in Europe and recognizing China”.

Though Jean Chretien hadn’t supervised foreign policy in the Pierre Trudeau government, when it came to Trudeau’s China policy the Canadian business tycoon Paul Desmarais had played a leading role in the business arena; even the marriage of of his son Andre, then Justice Minister Chretien’s press secretary as discussed earlier, to Chretien’s daughter France had the blessing of, among others, the Chinese officialdom as I reviewed in a blog post dated June 7, 2014:

“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.

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.

Indeed, from an early stage the Chinese Communist officialdom invested high hopes in Paul Desmarais’s patronage of the Canadian politicians.

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, The Globe and Mail):

“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.

…

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.””

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.

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, The Globe and Mail):

“…

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.

Maureen Forrester sang Meine Glaubiges Herzen by Bach, Ave Maria by Bach-Gounod, Agnus Dei by Georges Bizet and Notre Pere by Malotte.

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.

”

(“Team 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”, June 7, 2014, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

With the above broader contexts brought into the picture, I can say that the Earl Kevin Jans case, about a crossbow-and-arrows threat displayed in public intended for Chretien, may have indeed involved certain reactions on the part of the U.S. CIA apparatus to Chretien’s independent foreign policy streak, concerned that it could weaken the dominant position of the U.S. and its close allies in the world.

That CIA-link possibility was probed to some degree, albeit in a very limited context, by the Winnipeg Free Press as reported in its May 21, 1994 story quoted earlier.

However, I have not seen the potential CIA-link storyline in the Jans incident news coverage by other major Canadian press venues, and so I would conclude that, probably due to lack of interest since it appeared like the bravados of a local ‘weirdo’ in Winnipeg, one who not only had no explosives that he had bragged to police about but walked around with only a crossbow and arrows – not even a gun that could have made him a trendier news topic given the Chretien government’s new gun-control initiative.

Whether the reasons were like I speculate, the fact that the major media venues outside Winnipeg did not pick up the CIA-link storyline was in rather odd contrast to what some of them had reported four years earlier in May 1990, a ridiculously minor story about Earl Kevin Jans and his pitbull terrier:

“WINNIPEG (CP) — A Winnipeg man has been charged with theft after a pitbull terrier was taken from the city pound.

Earl Kevin Jans, 25, was charged with theft under $1,000 after his pitbull disappeared after a Sunday visit.

The two apparently scaled a two-metre fence topped with barbed wire. Jans was arrested Monday night.

Hector will be destroyed if a June 15 appeal is denied. In September, a provincial judge ordered the dog killed, a month after he bit a man’s cheek. The man required plastic surgery.

The pound is reviewing its policy of allowing owners to exercise condemned dogs.

Credit: CP”

(“Owner charged in pitbull’s pound-break”, May 30, 1990, The Ottawa Citizen)

In addition to the Ottawa Citizen story fully quoted as above, the Montreal Gazette also did a similar story on the same day of May 30, 1990.

Uh oh! Jans’s nasty dog had bitten a man’s cheek, been condemned to death by a Manitoba provincial court judge and then helped by Jans to escape, and it was news-worthy for the major newspapers in Ottawa and Montreal, but not Jans’s talking about his CIA connection four years later.

A sad early omen, wasn’t it? Back in May 1990, Brian Mulroney was still the prime minister, and Patricia Allen of Capital Ottawa and Montreal was still alive and well, not yet falling victim to the November 1991 crossbow-and-arrow murder, which then became a deadly precedent to the May 1994 Earl Kevin Jans threat to Jean Chretien.

I would question why the Winnipeg Free Press story of May 21, 1994, with a seemingly unbelievable claim of CIA connection but not without some decent circumstantial substantiation by Jans, not of broader national reader interest than his act of rescuing his condemned pitbull terrier.

Regardless, even this Winnipeg Free Press story may have omitted a key piece of what Earl Kevin Jans said, presumably, I would guess, after the reporter called the CIA phone number brought up by Jans in court and reached a CIA person named James Olson, but not a Col. Masterson about whom Olson refused to disclose anything.

The intriguing missing information was later mentioned in that newspaper in a much less noticeable way. The Manitoba provincial court apparently decided that Jans had a psychiatric problem, or “unsound mind” in CIA spokesman David French’s words as previously quoted, and he was sent to a psychiatric committal. Months later in January 1995, Winnipeg Free Press columnist Gordon Sinclair, Jr. reported the missing piece of detail:

“Now, some memorable words about the most important local story of Crime and punishment, Winnipeg style.

…

“When the CIA finds out police are holding me you’ll find out how many laws you’ve broken.” – Psychiatric patient Earl Kevin Jans after telling police he took a crossbow to the Convention Centre because he was under orders from the American military to arrest Prime Minister Chretien.”

(“Now, a few words about justice”, by Gordon Sinclair, Jr., January 2, 1995, Winnipeg Free Press)

Aha! It had not been the CIA apparatus but the American military, hence a “Col. Masterson”, presumably acting with CIA information and assistance, that wanted to “arrest Prime Minister Chretien”.

That would mean, if Jans wasn’t insane, that from the U.S. military’s point of view some of what Chretien had done posed an armed violent threat, on a military scale, to the United States.

That would be an incredibly tall tale indeed, given my current review so far indicating that Chretien was very much a ‘pacifist’ in his approach to potentially violent conflicts – as I have commented several times – even if his independent foreign policy streak could potentially weaken the unity of the U.S. and its close allies.

But, as I have also noted, some of Chretien’s ‘pacifist’ gestures in his efforts striving to become an even greater political “populist”, or sometimes just to avoid more danger, exhibited a tendency toward ‘appeasement’.

Maybe, just maybe, could that cause potential problems involving violent-conflict threats for others?

Consider the case of the Andre Dallaire intrusion into Chretien’s official residence, about which I have commented that Chretien reacted more than “pacifist” but “appeasist” in his later words describing Dallaire to reporters, “He was a good-looking guy but he had a strange look in his eyes”.

A pacifist more likely would have said, ‘he did not look like a bad person …’. The praise “good-looking guy” from the Prime Minister, on the other hand, could really increase the offender’s sense of confidence while decreasing the offender’s particular aggression toward Chretien who turned out to be so ‘nice’ to him.

Consider another case discussed earlier, where the officially visiting Chretien unexpectedly encountered an “emotional mob” at a funeral home blocking him from paying respect to the assassinated Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio; afterwards, Solicitor General Herb Gray expressed concern to the media and stated he would review Chretien’s security arrangements with RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster and foreign minister Andre Ouellet; but a rather cheeky Chretien said, “I was close to the people. I didn’t feel in danger a minute.”

No doubt Chretien enjoyed being a populist close to the people, but in practice was there not a difference whether the people around him were angry towards him? Of course there was, and that was why Chretien and his entourage then retreated from the funeral home without succeeding in paying proper tribute.

If Chretien really believed it was about being “close to the people” and thus feeling safe regardless of the crowd’s attitudes, then he was lucky to be in Mexico for only a few days of visiting – unlike the Mexican politicians, including Colosio who had been alive and “close to the people” in his presidential political campaign just one or two days ago.

While the two cases above reflected Chretien’s attitude using political populism as a way forward and out of danger, to the point of appeasing those showing threats, hostility or angers toward him, the political positions he took in March 1994 on democracy in Mexico, amidst violence, was a much more major case and illustrated his taking the same tack at the foreign policy level.

As reviewed earlier, in March 1994 in Mexico City explaining why Canada could not ensure the Mexican election to be clean, Chretien said, “They have a democracy that is not our type of democracy in many ways”, which then drew scolding questioning from Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista rebels, “How many kinds of democracy are there? (That) is my question to the prime minister.”

Indeed, for a country where elections had not led to a change of the ruling political party for 65 years by that time, where the ongoing presidential election was marred by extreme violence that Chretien had just had a close encounter with, and where serious human-rights problems persisted as shown by the heavy government forces response to the Zapatista uprising, killing hundreds of poor peasants of indigenous Mayan heritage, Chretien’s simply calling Mexico’s political system another “type of democracy” compromised a great deal in the principles of democracy.

No doubt, the Canadian government’s interests in trade with Mexico were very important as evidenced by, discussed earlier, the $1.9 million Canada Expo ’94 in Mexico, “the largest export trade fair” organized by the Canadian government. But I would reason that as the leader of Canada, Jean Chretien’s motive in making the above-noted controversial statement was in politics more than in trade per se.

As reviewed earlier, a prime objective of the Chretien Liberals in foreign policy was for Canada to take a “more active, independent, internationalist” role in foreign affairs. Therefore, as the leader of the Canadian democracy, Chretien’s showing a generous stance accepting Mexico’s political system as another “type of democracy” could potentially propel him to the rank of an “internationalist” leader of democracy.

In fact, in his Mexico visit Chretien expressed an independent foreign policy desire to his hosts, emphasizing their differences from the Americans:

“Prime Minister Jean Chretien used every opportunity he could during a three-day trade-promotion tour to tell Mexicans that they share with Canadians a certain wariness about dealings with the United States.

…

Mexico and Canada can pull together as a counterweight to their enormous U.S. neighbour in trying to improve the functioning of the North American free-trade agreement, Mr. Chretien said at a news conference before his departure for an Easter-week holiday break in the Caribbean.

“There is always the problem that the very friendly Americans are so big,” he said.

…

The fact that Canadians haven’t had bad relations with Mexico, in contrast with sometimes hostile Mexican-U.S. relations, may well be an advantage for Canadians trying to do business in this growing market, he said.

“When I have an advantage, I will use it. . . . We’ve decided to be aggressive.”

A senior aide to the Prime Minister said Mr. Chretien pressed Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari hard on three possible business deals to help reduce the huge trade imbalance that favours Mexico by a 4-to-1 ratio. Mr. Chretien wanted the President’s support for the sale of Canadian de Havilland Dash 8 aircraft to Aeromexico, the Mexican flag carrier; the opening of an equipment and technology purchasing office in Calgary by Pemex, the state oil company; and the purchase of nuclear fuel from Saskatchewan for a power reactor. The fuel sale can go ahead if the Mexican government signs safeguard agreements to guarantee that the spent uranium will not be used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Chretien was greeted at city hall yesterday morning by municipal officials, who complained that their city has major problems with air pollution and street crime. He then laid a wreath at a national monument.

Even the wreath-laying ceremony provided symbolic punctuation to Mr. Chretien’s message about the importance for Mexicans to remember Canadians are different from Americans.

The monument commemorates a low point in U.S.-Mexican relations, a battle in 1847 between American invaders and Mexican patriots. During the battle, a group of children jumped to their deaths from a castle wall rather than surrender.

…

Mr. Chretien drew attention several times to the French fact in Canada, which distinguishes Canadians from Americans. He joked yesterday that maybe it is common “Latin blood” that helped him get on so well with his Mexican hosts.

It might also have been that he said exactly the right things in public to bolster the prestige of a Mexican government that has been shaken by the assassination of Mr. Colosio.

…

Mr. Chretien said that he is sure Mexicans will come through this tragic period of mourning renewed and that Mexican political and economic reforms will not be turned back.

The Prime Minister said he raised the issue of human rights with Mr. Salinas, particularly the rights of aboriginal insurgents in the poor southern state of Chiapas. The Zapatista rebels staged an uprising in January to coincide with the implementation of NAFTA, but have since negotiated a peace agreement with the central government that includes promises of improved economic and social conditions.

Mr. Chretien seemed satisfied with what Mr. Salinas had to say about the government’s efforts to assist the aboriginal people.

He said he offered to send Canadian observers to monitor the Mexican election in August, but received no response to the offer. Allegations of vote fraud have been a hallmark of Mexican elections.

…”

(“PM calls for united front with Mexico: Both countries need each other to deal with U.S., Chretien says”, by Jeff Sallot, March 26, 1994, The Globe and Mail)

One can determine from what he said and did as above, that if he could Prime Minister Chretien would not mind to have his Canada displace, or at least counterbalance, the U.S. in an international role; even the select Canadian technologies and materials he tried hard personally to market to Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari illustrated the competitiveness.

Of course it was very business and trade minded; but being politically friendly with Mexico in its self-image as well as its reality, diplomatically saying what he had to say and graciously accepting his Mexican hosts’ replies, was Chretien’s approach to forge closer bilateral relations independent of the U.S.

Jean Chretien’s diplomatic adventure to Mexico as the new Canadian prime minister at the beginning of the NAFTA era demonstrated that he was interested in and capable of charting “more active, independent, internationalist” foreign policy courses, moving Canada to not only becoming more independent of the United States but also acting as an “internationalist” counterweight to the U.S. if that worked to Canada’s interests.

In doing so, Chretien showed that as the national leader he was willing to be not only an active political populist but more “aggressive” than a ‘pacifist’ type, to flex his muscles in an independent way, and to appease internationally those in political realities very dissimilar to Canada’s – especially those with common “Latin blood” as he said jokingly in Mexico.

Nonetheless, the Mexico visit example, and other cases studied within the scopes of my blogging and reviews since 2009, have not revealed any obvious indication of Prime Minister Chretien and his Liberal government in active, independent and internationalist foreign policy adventures that posed, implied or could lead to military-level armed-conflict threats to the United States – presumably threats by some of the foreign or international players in the adventures.

Hence, what Earl Kevin Jans alleged in May 1994 was the U.S. military’s intent to arrest Jean Chretien, if the CIA and U.S. military connections he claimed indeed had some credibility, remains an intriguing mystery from the perspectives of my analyses in my blogging on politics thus far.

Given that Chretien and the Liberal government, and Canada in general, were largely ‘pacifist’ rather than a cause of international conflicts, whether certain foreign policy adventures ‘appeased’ and abetted the violent-conflict intent on the part of others is more of the issue here, and is relevant also in relation to the history of Nazism and the Second World War, particularly Nazi Germany’s conquer of Czechoslovakia, that my current review has touched upon.

In the history of modern democracy, the best-recognized example of “appeasement” to international aggression was Britain’s diplomacy toward Nazi Germany during the 1930s prior to World War II:

“APPEASEMENT
Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War
By Tim Bouverie

Three months after Hitler came to power in Germany, the British ambassador in Berlin dispatched a prescient 5,000-word report to London. Having just read “Mein Kampf,” Sir Horace Rumbold correctly saw the book as Hitler’s master plan for the conquest of Europe. To his superiors, Rumbold outlined how the German leader planned to pick off countries one by one, all the while promising that his latest victim would be his last.

In “Appeasement,” Tim Bouverie notes that Rumbold’s April 1933 dispatch caused a momentary stir in the Foreign Office. But the ambassador’s warning, like later admonitions from Winston Churchill and others, made no dent in the British government’s unflagging commitment to come to terms with Hitler, no matter the consequences.

Bouverie, a former British television journalist, offers few fresh details or insights into Britain’s disastrous appeasement policy — a subject that has been exhaustively mined in a plethora of previous books. Nonetheless, living as we do in an era with uncomfortable parallels to the political turmoil of the 1930s, “Appeasement” is valuable as an exploration of the often catastrophic consequences of failing to stand up to threats to freedom, whether at home or abroad. Particularly timely is the book’s examination of Neville Chamberlain. It highlights the dangers to a democracy of a leader who comes to power knowing little or nothing about foreign policy, yet imagines himself an expert and bypasses the other branches of government to further his aims.

Throughout his minutely detailed survey, Bouverie rightly rejects the arguments of revisionist historians who claim that Britain’s lack of military preparedness, as well as the strength of pacifist public opinion, justified its determination to offer repeated concessions to Hitler. In fact, from the early 1930s, British leaders, fearful of further damaging their Depression-afflicted economy, fought to keep military spending to a minimum. They then used the country’s military deficiencies as an excuse to turn a blind eye to Germany’s increasing aggression and explosive rearmament, a flagrant violation of the 1919 Versailles Treaty.”

(“Neville Chamberlain: A Failed Leader in a Time of Crisis”, by Lynne Olson, June 10, 2019, The New York Times)

As summarized above, from the early 1930s on British leaders, fearful of further damaging their Great Depression-afflicted economy, kept military spending to a minimum and then used Britain’s military deficiencies as an excuse to turn a blind eye to Nazi Germany’s increasing aggression and explosive rearmament.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain practiced the appeasement policy  personally and publicly, reaching its climax with the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, proclaimed by him as “peace for our time”, that forced Czechoslovakia to accept the Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler’s demand of ceding the Sudetenland, an ethnic German region, to Germany; subsequently in only six months, Germany broke the agreement and occupied the entire Czechoslovakia:

“On 30 September 1938, Germany, Britain, France and Italy reached a settlement that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. The area contained about three million people of German origin and in May 1938 it became known that Hitler and his generals planned to occupy the country.

The Czechoslovak government hoped that Britain and France would come to its assistance in the event of an invasion, but British Prime Minister Chamberlain was intent on averting war. Between 15 and 30 September he made three trips to Germany to see Hitler. The final one in Munich resulted in large swathes of Czechoslovakia coming under Nazi rule. Britain and France would not support any Czech resistance.

Returning from Munich, Chamberlain told an excited crowd at Heston Airport, ‘It is peace for our time’, and waved the agreement he had signed with Hitler. This was the climax of the appeasement policy. Six months later, Hitler reneged on his promises and ordered his armies to march into Prague. Within a year, Britain and France were at war with Germany.”

(“The Munich Agreement – archive, September 1938”, September 21, 2018, The Guardian)

As described above, the Czechoslovakian government had hoped that Britain and France would come to its assistance in the event of a German invasion, but Chamberlain was intent on averting war.

In timeline, the September 1938 Munich Agreement came after Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in March, and before the widespread anti-Jewish Kristallnacht campaign in November when the violence also occurred in the annexed Sudetenland – both other events discussed earlier.

Most notably, the agreement by Britain and France with Germany – and Italy – was a betrayal of the only democracy in Eastern Europe, a nation willing and ready, and in fact mobilized its army, to defend itself against Nazi German military aggression:

“Although Britain’s appeasement toward Germany began before Chamberlain became prime minister in 1937, he was its high priest throughout. As chancellor of the Exchequer for most of the 1930s, he oversaw the government’s strict budgetary limits on rearmament. According to one associate, Chamberlain, a former businessman who had spent two years as mayor of Birmingham, thought of Europe as simply “a bigger Birmingham.” He convinced himself that if he dealt with Hitler in a “practical and businesslike” way, he could convince the Führer of the efficacy of peace and bring him to heel.

Chamberlain clung to that delusion even as Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 and, two months later, demanded that Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe’s only democracy, surrender the Sudetenland, a vital area containing most of the country’s formidable defense fortifications and major centers of industry. Czechoslovakia refused and mobilized its highly trained, well-equipped army to counter a German invasion; France, which had a military treaty with the Czechs, did the same.

But when Chamberlain refused to join the French premier, Édouard Daladier, in confronting Hitler, Daladier fell into line. At the Munich conference in September 1938, the British and French leaders strong-armed the Czechs to give in to German demands. In defense of his betrayal of a fellow democracy, Chamberlain, like later defenders of appeasement, argued that Britain was not ready to fight a major war at the time. True enough, but as Bouverie points out, neither was Germany. When asked at his postwar trial whether German forces could have defeated a united front of Britain, France and Czechoslovakia in 1938, Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the German Army, replied, “It was out of the question.””

(Lynne Olson, June 10, 2019, The New York Times)

As has been reviewed in the context of Interpol history, later during World War II the courageous and proud Czechoslovakian resistance achieved a remarkable feat that no others accomplished, namely assassinating a senior German Nazi leader, Interpol president Reinhard Heydrich.

In pursuing his appeasement policy, Chamberlain forced the government to go along, used his Conservative majority to crush dissent in the British Parliament, and pressured the media to follow the government line and keep the British public in the dark:

“In his handling of the Sudetenland crisis, Chamberlain steamrollered his own government just as he had the Czechs. The prime minister did not inform his cabinet or seek its approval before making plans to negotiate personally with Hitler — an action that flouted the conventions of the British governmental system. Nor did he ever consult Parliament.

For his part, Hitler took advantage of the year after Munich to accelerate his country’s rearmament. Urged by members of his government to do the same, Chamberlain retorted, “But don’t you see, I have brought back peace.”

The British people, meanwhile, knew virtually nothing about the deplorable state of British rearmament or their government’s behind-the-scenes activities. Using tactics that have striking resonance today, Chamberlain and his men badgered the BBC and newspapers to follow the government’s lead on appeasement, restricted journalists’ access to government sources and claimed that critics of Chamberlain’s policies were disloyal to him and to Britain. Most of the news media did what the prime minister demanded. The BBC barred Winston Churchill and other opponents of appeasement from the airwaves, while newspaper editors refused to print articles on Britain’s unpreparedness and letters to the editor critical of the government’s concessions to Germany.

Bolstered by his Conservative Party’s huge majority in the House of Commons, Chamberlain also worked to crush dissent in Parliament. “To question his authority was treason: to deny his inspiration was almost blasphemy,” recalled Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister and one of a small band of Conservative M.P.s who, like Churchill, strongly opposed appeasement. The Conservative Party, in its efforts to silence Chamberlain’s parliamentary opponents, was “even stronger than the Nazi party machine,” a member of Chamberlain’s cabinet commented. “It may have a different aim, but it is similarly callous and ruthless.””

(Lynne Olson, June 10, 2019, The New York Times)

Even after Germany’s full occupation of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain continued with a passive defence policy until the start of Western Europe’s full fall to Nazi Germany when he then resigned:

“When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Chamberlain had no choice but to declare war against Germany, but he remained committed to finding a peaceful way out. During the next seven months of “phony war,” there was little sense of national emergency in the country. Britain launched no military offensives against Germany, nor did it show much interest in mobilization.

In April 1940, however, Germany invaded Norway and Denmark, and Chamberlain’s campaign of secrecy and misinformation finally rebounded on him. Caught off guard by the surprise attacks, the British government scrambled to dispatch troops to aid the Norwegians. Barely two weeks later, Chamberlain made a stunning admission to Parliament and the nation: The badly armed and equipped British forces had been routed by the enemy and were being evacuated from Norway.

…

On May 10, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister. That same day, Hitler launched his blitzkrieg of Western Europe. …”

(Lynne Olson, June 10, 2019, The New York Times)

Clearly, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s “more active, independent, internationalist” foreign policy approach cannot be easily compared to the historic British diplomatic failure under Neville Chamberlain, for at least two reasons: there were no apparent signs of Chretien appeasing a foreign or international entity in regard to it military strength and aggression toward Canada, or toward the United States for that matter, whatever the Earl Kevin Jans intrigue might be related to in this context; on the other hand, Chretien had thoughtfully planned foreign policy objectives, beyond merely peace like in Chamberlain’s imagination and beyond Chretien’s own acts of populism, as rationalization where standards of democracy might be compromised – compromised they were even in Canadian parliamentary politics under Chretien as earlier reviewed.

Another significant example of “appeasement”, which has been discussed at considerable length in Part 1 of my current article, was the conduct of April Catherine Glaspie, the Canadian-born American diplomat and senior Arabist whose conveyance of continuing U.S. noninterventionism in Arab-Arab conflicts to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, in the face of massive Iraqi military mobilisation against Kuwait, emboldened Hussein to carry out his objective of conquering Kuwait.

In the case of Kuwait-Iraq conflict, though, the American diplomacy was conducted in private and therefore unknown to the public, until nearly two months later after Iraqi forces had completed the occupation of Kuwait, when a Iraqi government transcript of the Glaspie-Hussein meeting was supplied to the American media and published.

Hopefully, future information disclosures by governments, agency and institutions may shed light on the relevance, with respect to Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his Liberal government relating to possible violent-conflict threats to the United States, of any CIA and U.S. military connections in the Earl Kevin Jans intrigue in May 1994 in Winnipeg, Canada.

Returning to my review of the Chretien government’s domestic law-and-order legislative efforts, as earlier noted that about a week after the RCMP criminal investigation of former Prime Minister Mulroney became news in November 1995, the stricter gun-control legislation passed the Senate in a lopsided vote of 64 to 28.

Also noted earlier, Jean Charest, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party that by this time had only two MPs but still more Senators – most of them appointed by Mulroney – than the Liberal Party, had said they would try to make some changes to the legislation.

The Tory senators did make a real attempt to make amendments to the legislation, failing in a tight vote of 53 to 46, before many of them then followed the unelected Senate’s tradition and voted for the legislation already passed by the House, here as from a press story cited earlier describing the political intrigues:

“Senator Joyce Fairbairn wasn’t certain she’d won, but Senator Ron Ghitter had a gut feeling he’d lost.

Fairbairn, the Lethbridge Liberal, and Ghitter, the Calgary Conservative, had been working behind the scenes for days to convince colleagues to back their respective sides in last week’s crucial gun control vote.

…

Most news media reported the bill passed easily by a margin of 64 to 28. True, but those reports are deceiving, because there was more than one vote that night.

The real vote, on the proposed Conservative amendments, was held moments earlier and was much closer. The Conservatives lost narrowly, 53 to 46.

“In some calculations, even two or three days before, it looked like it could be a tie,” Fairbairn admits. “Until the vote was actually called, I wasn’t certain.”

So what turned the tide?

Ghitter tips his hat to Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Justice Minister Allan Rock, who used personal influence to persuade Liberal and Tory senators.

“Some of our senators were getting calls from Rock. I know of some senators who got called by Chretien,” says Ghitter. “There was a full-court press on.”

The Senate, on paper, is almost evenly divided between Grits and Tories.

The Tories now have 51, the Liberals 50, and there are three independents.

The Liberals managed in the final hours to sway the few undecided Tories and to get as many people in their own Senate seats as possible, Ghitter says.

“One of the Liberal senators, I’d never seen before. They dragged everybody out that they could.”

Liberal insiders suggest the Tory loss had less to do with Liberal pressure than internal bickering in the Conservative caucus.

Ghitter was shocked when Senator Gerald Beaudoin voted against the Tory amendments. Beaudoin is chairman of the Senate’s legal and constitutional committee and had worked with Ghitter on the amendments.

“(Beaudoin) was in favor of them,” Ghitter says.

“It was disappointing that the chairman of a Senate committee — who tabled the report and signed the report — votes against it. I don’t know why.”

Beaudoin said his conscience told him to support the bill unamended.

…

The Liberals were missing only one senator for the vote — Calgary Senator Earl Hastings, who is recuperating from an illness.

The Tories had three absentees, including 89-year-old John Michael Macdonald, the Senate’s oldest member.

Seven Tories ultimately voted the Liberal position, but only four Liberals broke ranks and voted with the Conservative majority.

Four of the renegade Tories were from Quebec and three others were women. “I don’t think (the women) had a sense or understanding of the other side of the gun culture issue that’s out there and had a natural abhorrence to guns, which I understand,” Ghitter says. “From the Quebec point of view, I still think the (1989 L’Ecole Polytechnique) tragedy in Montreal has a strong impact.”

Once the amendments were defeated, the lopsided final vote was inevitable. It reflects the general belief among senators that they should not veto legislation approved by the elected members of the House of Commons.

“If four people on our side had voted differently, we would have won the amendments,” says Ghitter who “didn’t shed any tears” over the loss. He does not own a gun, but he does not believe the bill — particularly its requirement for universal registration — will help reduce crime.”

(Sheldon Alberts, November 26, 1995, Calgary Herald)

As discussed earlier, among the Liberal MPs in the House of Commons there was serious internal dissent, especially from MPs representing rural regions, over the gun-control legislation. As above, so was there Liberal internal dissent in the Senate vote on Tory amendments, with four Liberals voting for them.

What made the difference for the Liberals, as described above, was their winning over seven Tory Senators who had been emotionally affected by the 1989 Montreal Massacre – four from Quebec and three additional women – with intense persuasion including by Chretien and Justice Minister Rock personally.

As a result, the four Senators appointed by Chretien back in September to fill all Senate vacancies with Liberals, three of them women as earlier discussed, turned out to be only an insurance, i.e., not necessarily needed in the vote tally of 53-46 defeating the Tory amendments.

In my June 2009 post reviewing this part of history on the Chretien government’s gun-control legislative work, I then certain prior history in the Mulroney era, when the table had been set the other way round between the Tories and the Liberals.

In 1988 and 1990, the Liberal Senate majority previously appointed by Pierre Trudeau fought hard to block the Mulroney government’s legislations on Canada-U.S. free trade and on the Goods and Services Tax:

“In September 1995 Prime Minister Chretien did not think unelected senators should thwart the will of the elected government, but in recent history it had been the Liberals, under John Turner in 1988 and Chretien in 1990, who used the Senate controlled by Trudeau appointees to ferociously block the 1988 U.S.-Canada free trade pact and the 1990 Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill that would replace the old manufacturers’ tax with a national sales tax. ²⁶⁷”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The problem in 1990 when Chretien was the opposition Liberal leader, as I commented in 2009, was that he and his Liberals were not so much against the GST but playing politics against it to gain electoral popularity; that prompted Prime Minister Mulroney to not only fill all the Senate vacancies with Tories, but invoke a rare rule to get the British Monarch’s approval for him to appoint eight extra ones to ‘overload’ the Senate, at a wrong time as his government was considering constitutional reform of the Senate; then after their 1993 election victory, the Chretien Liberals just kept the GST despite their prior fight against it and their promise to abolish or replace it:

“When Chretien was contesting the Liberal leadership in early 1990 he was noncommittal on the GST, believing that some sort of national consumption tax would not be bad; but later in the year when the prospect presented to him that the tax was unpopular and he might be able to use the Senate to block it to force prime minister Mulroney to call an election, something Turner had done in 1988 with the free-trade bill, Chretien led his Senators down that path – with Mulroney the one railing against “the undemocratic practice of appointed senators thwarting the will of the elected government” but his popularity low after recent failure of the Meech Lake constitutional accord. ²⁶⁸

With only two years into his second majority term and low poll numbers, Mulroney did not want an election; instead, he abandoned the prudence of leaving vacant Senate seats untouched while pursuing Senate reform – the Meech Lake accord would have required Senate appointments be made from lists of candidates submitted by the provincial governments although the candidates need not be elected – and over several weeks added 15 new senators to fill the Senate to its full size of 104. ²⁶⁹

At that point in late September 1990 it was still a Liberal-controlled Senate, so Mulroney invoked a never used section of the Constitution to ‘overload’ the Senate, namely getting approval from the Constitutional Monarch to add 8 more senators for a majority in an oversized Senate, in order to break the logjam between the elected Commons and the unelected Senate; the PM’s wish was readily granted by Queen Elizabeth II via Governor General Ray Hnatyshyn, even though the last time when prime minister Alexander MacKenzie requested in 1874 it was denied by Queen Victoria. ²⁷⁰

…

Indeed, after the Senate fight the Liberals never put forth a plan to deal with the GST, until January 28, 1993 when Chretien said Canadians had to wait till after he won power to find out how he would replace it; subsequently during that election year Chretien or someone under him would float an idea or two from time to time as if a real change might be in the works. ²⁷⁶

After the 1993 election Chretien talked about replacing the GST for several years, and then told others he liked the tax. ²⁷⁷

In 1996 deputy prime minister Sheila Copps, the Liberal MP who in 1990 had put the most pressure on Chretien to fight the GST, resigned and ran for her MP seat one more time in a by-election to make up for her brash 1993 promise to abolish the GST or quit. ²⁷⁸”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The purpose of comparing the two historical periods of Senate legislative fights, in the Mulroney era and then in the Chretien era, as I have done is to highlight its being cycles of heightened political maneuvering that, at each turn, justified the governing party’s cramming the Senate with its partisan, if not patronage, appointees.

In 2009 concluding my review of these partisan Senate appointments in history, at the start of Part 7 of my article on Canadian politics I marvelled at the exemplary record of British Columbia Tory MP Stan Wilbee in speaking his mind publicly, whose opposition to Mulroney’s leadership in late 1992 had significantly influenced the press releases I sent out to begin my political activism as previously reviewed.

Two years earlier in 1990, Wilbee had spoken out against a controversial Senate patronage appointment by Mulroney:

“When Mulroney appointed 15 senators during August-September 1990 on his way to acquire a Tory majority in the Senate in order to defeat Liberal resistance to his unpopular GST bill, in typical Mulroney style some of his patronage appointments caused not just controversies but outrage.

Leading the patronage controversies was the appointment of then Nova Scotia premier John Buchanan, (not because Buchanan was the first-ever sitting provincial premier to be appointed senator but) because the Buchanan government was under active RCMP investigation for his alleged accepting kickbacks and giving government work to his friends. ²⁷⁹

One politician who came out strongly against Mulroney on the Buchanan appointment was, surprisingly, rookie Tory MP Stan Wilbee – two years before his 1992 leadership-review call when by that time he would be B.C. Tory caucus chair and chair of the Commons committee on health issues (as previously discussed). Wilbee said in 1990: ²⁸⁰

“… this (Buchanan’s appointment) is a flouting of a tradition of Canadian government and just a throwback to the days of (former Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliott) Trudeau, who had complete disregard for the people of Canada.”

”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Aha! taking into account Wilbee’s view expressed in 1990, quoted above, the partisan cycles of Senate appointments went back further in history, to the Pierre Trudeau era.

Wilbee then announced that he would quit the Tory party and become an independent, but he was personally persuaded to stay as a Tory by Prime Minister Mulroney; despite that, as already reviewed, two years later Wilbee publicly demanded a party leadership review:

“Prior to attending a Tory caucus meeting in September 1990, Wilbee had announced he was ready to quit the party over the Buchanan issue and sit in the Commons as an independent; but Mulroney held a meeting with him and Wilbee backed down, stating that he realized the difficulty of getting re-elected as an independent and that he could be more effective working within the Tory caucus.²⁸¹

So by the time when I got involved in the issue of Mulroney’s leadership in November 1992, being a B.C. MP and a medical doctor Stan Wilbee was actually sitting in pretty good parliamentary positions, albeit outside the government, considering his previous, highly publicized intent to quit the Tory party; and he was for a second time speaking out against Mulroney (not counting his opposition of the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional accord).”

(June 26, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Dr. Stan Wilbee was a good parliamentarian, and a good medical doctor – as was Dr. Gary Romalis who refused to be intimidated into abandoning the work he believed in as earlier discussed, and so, in that relation, was my physician Dr. James K. Lai.

After 2009, in my later multipart article expanding my review of the Airbus Affair and Canadian politics, extensively quoted earlier, I also discussed more issues related to and details about my political activism.

In particular, in a blog post dated July 6, 2012, cited earlier, I recalled a meeting I was given with an elected politician and British Columbia provincial cabinet minister. It was in August 1993 with B.C. Advanced Education Minister Thomas Perry, also a medical doctor, to discuss some academic politics and my grievances on some management issues with the University of British Columbia, where I had been a faculty member:

“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.

In my 1992 UBC internal grievance 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” …

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 my November 1992 press releases discussed in Part 6.

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.

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… By this later time Maria Klawe was already UBC Vice President as mentioned in Part 4.

After Hedy Fry’s defeat of Campbell in October, in November 1993 I also sent the documents to Dr. Fry’s constituency office.

No known positive result has come out of these political lobbying efforts by me.

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.”

(July 6, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The UBC Vice President Maria Klawe mentioned above was my former boss with whom I had disputes in academic politics about her management, before I got into Canadian political issues regarding then Prime Minister Mulroney. The above multipart blog article, started in 2010, discussed some details of that earlier academic politics which in 2009 I had not focused on.

Dr. Tom Perry, the B.C. Advanced Education Minister who met with me and listened to my grievances was, in fact, the only elected politician who bothered to do so in my experience of political activism in the 1990s. But no result came out of it, he soon lost his cabinet position and left electoral politics in 1996.

In contrast, as cited above, Maria Klawe who had been the UBC Computer Science Department head at the time of our dispute in 1992 became a vice president in 1995, and later in the same year of 2004 she, Jean Chretien and Brian Mulroney’s in-law Lewis Lapham received honorary degrees from Canada’s Queen’s University in Kingston.

But there was some intriguing prior history about Dr. Perry, the B.C. elected politician and cabinet minister whom I met in August 1993; he had been a UBC faculty member and medical doctor at UBC hospital, entered electoral politics for the New Democratic Party in 1989 to win the B.C. legislative seat vacated by none other than Kim Campbell, formerly a provincial conservative Social Credit politician who had just moved to federal politics and become a Mulroney government cabinet minister:

“In upper-middle-class Point Grey, which had been a Social Credit stronghold from 1975 until the NDP’s Darlene Marzari captured one of its two seats in the 1986 provincial election, Dr. Thomas Perry, 37, polled more than twice the votes of Socred Michael Levy. The seat had belonged to Socred Kim Campbell, who ran successfully as a Conservative in the Nov. 21 federal election and is now minister of state for Indian affairs and northern development. In the industrial, working-class riding of Nanaimo, a University of Victoria graduate student of history, Jan Pullinger, 42, defeated Socred Larry McNabb by more than 5,000 votes to hold the seat vacated by New Democrat David Stupich, elected on Nov. 21 as the MP for NanaimoCowichan. Perry, an attending physician at Vancouver’s University Hospital and lecturer at the University of British Columbia, said that the byelections were part of a trend. Said the father of two: “It will culminate in the defeat of the Social Credit government, which is perhaps the most incompetent, most corrupt and dishonest, and the least compassionate government this wonderful province has ever seen.””

(“A New Democrat sweep: Byelection losses feed B.C. Socred dismay”, by Hal Quinn, March 27, 1989, Maclean’s)

That was interesting, wasn’t it? As already reviewed, Ms. Campbell was the first elected politician whom I brought my political activist issues to, in November 1992 but, RCMP officers came instead to take me to UBC hospital for a psychiatric committal; then months later, it was the elected politician from the political opposite who had taken over Campbell’s provincial legislative seat,  who held a meeting with me.

Also interesting was the fact that, after retiring from politics, Dr. Perry returned to teaching medicine at UBC but not practising medicine at UBC hospital as before; instead, he now practised medicine at Vancouver General Hospital, i.e., where Dr. Gary Romalis did. Here is a short profile of Dr. Thomas Perry in the press in July 2013, mentioning his history as a Member of Legislative Assembly and cabinet minister, as well as a one-year Canadian Medical Research Council fellowship with which he studied at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden:

“Thomas Perry Jr., M.D., FRCP

Chair, education working group

• Clinical assistant professor, department of medicine, UBC

• Clinical pharmacologist, general internist, Vancouver Hospital

• One year Medical Research Council fellowship to study metabolism of tricyclic antidepressants at the Karolinska Institute’s department of clinical pharmacology in Stockholm, Sweden.

• Practice focuses on pharmacological treatment of chronic pain and high blood pressure.

• Involved in many of the TI drug-review letters sent to doctors.

• NDP MLA from 1989 to 1996, serving as advanced education, training and technology minister.”

(“The lead researchers and scientists at the Therapeutics Initiative”, July 12, 2013, The Vancouver Sun)

Ironically, as indicated by his profile above, after leaving politics, back at UBC Dr. Perry was only an assistant professor not unlike what I had been, where the president was David Strangway whom he had publicly disputed, and where Maria Klawe was a vice president.

Like Dr. Stan Wilbee, Dr. Tom Perry was a good parliamentarian and a good medical doctor with whom my political activism had some connections to.

As reviewed earlier, in April 1995 when the Chretien Liberal government’s gun-control legislation was put to the first vote in the House of Commons, there was a lone “yes” vote from the opposition Reform Party by MP Stephen Harper on the basis of his constituents’ wishes; but Harper later cast a “no” in the final vote in June 1995, on the ground that though most of his constituents supported the legislation, a majority did not like a potential 10-year penalty in it for failure to register guns.

Here are more details of what Harper said in the House of Commons on June 12, 1995, on the eve of the final vote, regarding his constituents’ and his own concerns about universal gun registration:

“It is my intention to oppose the bill at report stage and at final reading unless substantive amendments are made. I have mentioned before that in the last election I made certain commitments to represent Calgary West in the House of Commons and to do so on the basis of Reform principles and policies. All Reformers ran on those principles.

Among those principles and policies is a commitment to ascertain the views of our constituents and to vote those views where they can be ascertained. Specifically, on moral issues and on the issue of gun control, I have made a particular commitment to discover and to vote the wishes of my constituents. I have followed a process in attempting to do that.

…

While some elements of the bill remain strongly supported by the population I should say that both my householder survey and the scientific survey I have conducted have indicated that there is still broad support for the general principles of the bill. However there are some very severe concerns about specific matters, about some of the penalties for non-registration, the confiscatory elements of the legislation and the cost concerns.

…

From my own personal standpoint I believe there are elements of gun control and specifically of this bill that could be helpful. The government has over reached in a number of areas of the bill and it is unfortunate that we cannot get a more modest package.

…

My own feeling, having talked to many people in my riding about this, people who own guns and do not own guns, people who are for the bill and who are against the bill, gun owners who are for and gun owners who are against, non-gun owners who are for the bill and non-gun owners who are against it, is that there is a fairly broad consensus on the kind of gun and crime control that is needed.

Many citizens would be more than willing to register their weapons and co-operate with police if they felt that in so doing this would affirm the legitimacy and respect for their responsibly used property rights and for responsible gun ownership.

Unfortunately there has been a pattern of legislation in the past decade where registration has been followed by increased regulation, ultimately by restriction, prohibition and then by confiscation, often without compensation. This has led to fears that some may say are unfounded but which do have their grounding in people’s experience with gun laws.

…

I will be the first to admit that it is very difficult to measure public opinion on this bill. Certainly when this bill was originally brought before the House my constituents were overwhelmingly in favour of its general direction. There has been a shift in public opinion. That shift has been away. The fact of the matter is that no clear consensus now exists for many of the measures in this bill. I will be supporting a wide range of the amendments to the bill, and if those amendments are not adopted I will oppose the bill on the final vote.”

(“Debates (Hansard)”, June 12, 1995, House of Commons Canada)

As quoted, Harper had pledged that on gun control his vote would reflect “the wishes of his constituents”, which I note was a reason he had voted “yes” in the first vote because “when this bill was originally brought before the House my constituents were overwhelmingly in favour of its general direction”.

But Harper noted that as it evolved, there was no longer “clear consensus” for many parts of the bill, and the shift of public opinion was away from supporting the bill.

On the basis of the above reasons as he explained, for the final vote Harper would take into account more of his view on universal gun registration, stating that there had been increasingly restrictive legislated rules on guns in the past decade, “where registration has been followed by increased regulation, ultimately by restriction, prohibition and then by confiscation, often without compensation”, which caused “fears” among gun owners for the latest gun-control measures.

Harper concluded that the government had “over reached in a number of areas of the bill”,  and declared that “I will be supporting a wide range of the amendments to the bill, and if those amendments are not adopted I will oppose the bill on the final vote.”

Certain particular statements Harper made, “I believe there are elements of gun control and specifically of this bill that could be helpful”, and, “it is unfortunate that we cannot get a more modest package”, clearly showed that he was not against gun registration in principle.

As reviewed in Part 2 of my current article, by the early 2000s Harper was leader of the Canadian Alliance and in 2009 at the height of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair he was the prime minister.

So, did the Harper government propose changes, i.e., belated amendments in a sense, to address those concerns Harper expressed in June 1995? Harper could do this so that he and his constituents, much larger as he now led a Conservative national government, could support some of the “helpful” “elements” of gun registration.

I commented in April 2009 that, by that time, there was indeed a cost overrun with the universal gun registry – a concern, as in the quote above, Harper had expressed back in June 1995:

“Time and again in the surveys in this blog article, the controversy about the long and fruitless RCMP Airbus Affair investigation has come down not to why it took so long when the RCMP found nothing incriminating, but to why it took so long with the RCMP not disclosing what it really did or found. The investigation appeared to have run its course in the same vein as the Liberal gun-control drive: initially in 1994 then justice minister Allan Rock wanted a full handgun ban, but by 1995 it became only a gun registry, and by 2007 the running cost of the national registration topped $2 billion. ¹⁶⁸”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But to answer my own question earlier, no, Prime Minister Harper did not introduce modifications so that gun control would become acceptable as he viewed it in June 1995.

Rather, it was now Harper’s turn to “over reach” – to borrow his old words – by simply undoing the entire Chretien government gun registration, here as reported in a February 15, 2012 news story just hours before the deciding House vote on ending the universal gun registry:

“Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told reporters Wednesday, hours before the vote, that the government’s actions are long overdue.

“It does nothing to help put an end to gun crimes, nor has it saved one Canadian life,” he said.

“It criminalizes hard-working and law-abiding citizens such as farmers and sport shooters, and it has been a billion-dollar boondoggle left to us by the previous Liberal government.”

…

Meanwhile, opposition MPs and supporters of the registry are expected to say the government’s actions are a step backwards, because the registry has been useful in keeping the country’s streets safe.

Bill C-19, the Ending the Long Gun Registry Act, is guaranteed to pass through the House of Commons, thanks to the Conservative government’s majority, but more political wrangling is expected to follow.

…

Gun control has been ferociously debated in Canada for decades, particularly since the Montreal massacre of 1989, when a gunman shot and killed 14 women with a rifle. This event prompted the Liberal government of Jean Chretien to tighten gun controls and create Canada’s first mandatory long-gun registry in 1995.

Hunters and sport shooters reviled the registry, and dismantling it became a central plank of Reform, and later, Conservative party policy.

…

The Harper Conservatives now have a commanding majority in the Senate, so while Liberal senators may succeed in slowing down the passage of C-19, it will ultimately pass.

According to Bill C-19, all data pertaining to non-restricted firearms will be deleted.”

(“Conservatives and enthusiasts cheer the end of the long-gun registry”, by Jeff Davis, February 15, 2012, National Post)

As above, the universal gun registry brought in by the Chretien government was sometimes called the “long-gun registry”, because prior to it there had been a registry for handguns and restricted weapons, as mentioned earlier. It was the Chretien government’s expansion of registration, i.e., for the long guns, that would be terminated by the Harper government, and the existing registry data on these firearms would be deleted.

One can call it a further step of a public-opinion“shift”, “away” from gun control, that the “scientific” Harper had observed in June 1995 and spoken about; or call it “a step backwards” as the opposition MPs, no doubt the Liberals included, now asserted in February 2012.

From my vantage point of observation, it was another public flip-flop by Mr. Harper on gun control, the first time in 1995 from the only ‘dove’ among Reform parliamentary opposition ‘hawks’ against universal gun registration to a moderate opponent willing to accept some elements of it, and now the second time further to the Conservative government leader set to fully dismantle the expanded registration.

In any case, one of the Chretien Liberal government’s major achievements on law and order as earlier reviewed, and indeed of the Chretien era overall, would be abolished and no longer.

I should note that any legislation needed to pass the Senate, and back in late November 1995 the Chretien Liberals had been in power for only two years whereas in February 2012 the Harper Conservatives had been in power for six years, thus having had plenty more time to appoint partisan, i.e., Conservative senators.

Therefore, one can compare the news story quoted above to the news story dated November 26, 1995, quoted earlier: Harper had a “commanding majority in the Senate”, in contrast to the tireless work of persuasion the Chretien government had had to do to eventually win over, from among the Tory senators, four Quebecers and three more women who had emotional memories of the 1989 Montreal Massacre.

As reviewed and commented on earlier about the Canadian political system, a parliamentary majority commanded by a prime minister less committed to democratic practice made all things easier for the government’s objectives.

But there was always the court, and so legal recourses, in a democratic system with the rule of law.

In this case, the province of Quebec wanted to create its own gun registry. The federal government was set to destroy all old records for firearms that no longer needed registration, the Quebec government legally challenged that decision but ultimately lost in the Supreme Court of Canada; and this time, even more emotionally symbolic than in the Senate in November 1995, all Supreme Court Justices from Quebec dissented on the decision that sided with the federal government:

“By a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court upheld an earlier Quebec Court of Appeal ruling that sided with the government on its controversial decision to abolish the federal registry for long guns in 2011.

…

In a dramatic show of solidarity, all three Quebec judges on the Supreme Court — Clement Gascon, Richard Wagner and Louis LeBel — put their names on a dissenting opinion.

With Ontario’s Rosalie Abella concurring, the minority of four upheld the legal right of the provinces to make laws in relation to property and civil rights.

They lost to the majority, which ruled that the order to destroy the data was a lawful exercise of Parliament’s legislative power to make criminal law under the Constitution.

“In our view, the decision to dismantle the long-gun registry and destroy the data that it contains is a policy choice that Parliament was constitutionally entitled to make,” wrote Thomas Cromwell and Andromache Karakastanis for the majority, a group that included Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.

…

The Harper government abolished the registry for long guns in 2011 as part of a long-standing campaign promise — a controversial political move that also emphasized Canada’s rural-urban divide.

The federal government ordered the provinces to destroy all the data they collected for the registry, something the Quebec government challenged in the courts.

…

The issue of firearm registration is a political hot potato for the Harper Conservatives, who see rural long-gun gun owners as a core political base.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently created a stir when he said guns provide “a certain level of security” to rural residents who live far from police stations.

The Liberal government created the gun registry in 1998 in response to the murder of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. They were targeted by a gunman because of their gender.”

(“Supreme Court rules Ottawa can destroy Quebec’s gun registry data”, The Canadian Press, March 27, 2015, The Record)

As cited above, Harper’s comment seemed to suggest, though the press story did not interpret it that way, that for rural residents living in remote places, the guns that they had that the government and police did not know about could make them feel more secure.

Studying the list of Supreme Court of Canada judicial appointments and retirements, I can determine that by the time of the above final court decision in March 2015 on Quebec’s challenge of the federal government’s order to destroy gun registry data, Prime Minister Harper had appointed seven of the nine sitting justices on the high court – starting with Justice Marshall Rothstein in March 2006 and ending with Justice Suzanne Côté in Decmeber 2014 – including three from Quebec but the last of them replacing the recently retired Justice Louis LeBel who had already been involved in this legal case as reported above. (“Current and Former Judges”, Supreme Court of Canada)

Thus, the four non-Quebecers appointed by Harper, together with Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, were exactly the court majority protecting the Harper government’s right to not only abolish the long-gun registry but destroy all existent data.

That was a perfect example showing that, as reviewed earlier, when the judiciary was also appointed by the prime minister the Canadian political system was, in political commentator William Thorsell’s words, “one of the world’s most centralized political power structures”.

All wasn’t lost, though, in this case. It turned out that during that time, the Canadian Information Commissioner was conducting a related investigation, and copies of the gun registry data as it existed on April 3, 2015, were provided courtesy of the RCMP and the Harper government; after the end of the Harper era, under a Liberal government – of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre Trudeau – it was disclosed that those copies were being utilized for that particular, limited purpose; pro-gun groups expressed their outrage against the RCMP:

“Canada’s gun registry isn’t gone after all.

Despite a clear vote in Parliament to destroy it, despite a Supreme Court ruling that it could be destroyed and despite assurances from politicians and top bureaucrats – including a senior Mountie – that the data was all destroyed, it turns out there are two copies left of the Quebec portion of the registry.

Questions about the existence of backup copies of the registry surfaced last week after Liberal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale tabled a bill that would give the Quebec government all the records that existed from the registry on April 3, 2015. The bill would also allow the Information Commissioner to review the records in order to settle an outstanding claim.

…

Goodale’s press secretary, Scott Bardsley, confirmed to me via email that two copies of the registry still exist all thanks to Harper era Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney.

“Under the previous administration, a complete copy of Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) from April 3, 2015 was maintained by the RCMP in a secure location due to an investigation by the Information Commissioner into an Access to Information request received in March 2012,” Bardsley said.

Another copy, this one just containing the Quebec gun registry records requested by the Information Commissioner is kept under seal by the court while the case is being heard.

…

Groups representing gun owners are furious.

Canada’s National Firearms Association, which is suing to block a Quebec registry, said this goes against a law passed by Parliament.

“It is disturbing that the records of the Quebec portion of the firearms registry have remained intact despite the clear will of Parliament to have them destroyed,” president Sheldon Clare of the NFA said.

“It is outrageous that this type of behaviour by the RCMP is tolerated in a modern democracy,” said Tony Bernardo of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association.”

(“The gun registry still exists, despite a vote to destroy it”, by Brian Lilley, June 15, 2017, Toronto Sun)

Well, a hardline prime minister who had once claimed to be a moderate could still show courtesy deferment to the democratic system.

In regard to the other major law-and-order issue of the Chretien Liberal government that I have reviewed, namely the investigation of possible corrupt, criminal activities on the part of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, as discussed in Part 2 of my current article, in 2008 Prime Minister Harper ordered the first-ever public inquiry into matters of a former or sitting prime minister, over Mulroney’s business dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber, which officially concluded that Mr. Mulroney’s conduct had been “inappropriate”.

Small that it was, or to borrow Harper’s old words, “a more modest package”, the verdict of “inappropriate” prime-ministerial conduct should stand the test of time following a long and fruitless criminal investigation under the Chretien government lasting many years into Mulroney and Airbus money.

I should also note that, at the time of Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant’s 2009-2010 inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, Harper had only a government of a parliamentary minority, and its stability was sometimes shaky; but as discussed in Part 2, Prime Minister Harper found Dr. David Johnston, President of the University of Waterloo, to advise him on the scope of the inquiry, it worked for him and Johnston was later appointed as the next Governor General of Canada.

Right after becoming the new Governor General, Dr. Johnston spoke with the media about his relationship with Prime Minister Harper:

“Canada’s new Governor General says he needs to foster a certain compatibility with the prime minister in order to fulfil his duties.

For David Johnston, the governor general is not a referee who makes calls on every play in the game, he says, but a thoughtful, apolitical adviser with a keen appreciation for Canada’s political history.

In order for his advice to be heard and heeded, he says he needs to maintain a solid relationship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

“It does require a rapport of a kind, between the prime minister and the cabinet and the governor general,” Johnston said in a wide-ranging interview at Rideau Hall Wednesday.

Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament rather than face certain defeat of his government in December 2008 compelled former governor general Michaelle Jean to make a precedent-setting decision that led to the survival of the Conservative government a scant few weeks after it had been elected to a minority mandate.

…

Johnston was installed as the Queen’s representative in Canada last Friday. He was most recently the president of the University of Waterloo, and has spent most of his adult life in academia.

The 69-year-old was friendly and relaxed while chatting in a small, formal sitting room in Rideau Hall for his first interview with print media on Wednesday. He made frequent references to his main sources of inspiration: his family and his books.

…

Johnston was selected by a committee of constitutional experts chosen by the prime minister – a new process meant to ensure the viceregal is not directly beholden to the country’s top politician.

Still, Johnston has worked close to Harper in the past. The prime minister named him to define the terms of the politically charged inquiry into Brian Mulroney’s relationship with German businessman Karlheinz Schreiber – terms that many observers argue were favourable to the Conservatives.

With his long list of academic accomplishments, his youth spent playing hockey, his background in law and his contacts in government, Johnston might be exceedingly well-prepared for the life of a viceregal.”

(“‘Not a referee, but a thoughtful, apolitical adviser’: Governor General opens up about his plans for his new role to the media”, by Heather Scoffield, October 7, 2010, The Record)

As above, Johnston considered the governor general to be “a thoughtful, apolitical adviser with a keen appreciation for Canada’s political history”, emphasizing that “he needs to maintain a solid relationship with Prime Minister Stephen Harper”, but many observers argued that the terms he had defined for the Oliphant inquiry were “favourable to the Conservatives”.

The most notable fact about Dr. Johnston’s recommended terms for the Oliphant inquiry being favourable to Mr. Mulroney and the Harper government, as discussed in Part 2, was the exclusion of the much more serious Airbus Affair from the scope of the inquiry, leaving its focus on the modest Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

Dr. David Johnston was an accomplished legal academic with a “thoughtful” and “favourable” sense of modesty, and a talented hockey player, albeit not a medical doctor.

(Continuing to Next Part)

Who could have murdered billionaire Barry Sherman and wife Honey, two of Canada’s leading philanthropists? – Part 2: antagonists in the family and community circles

 

(Continued from Part 1)

Of the brand-name pharmaceutical companies that have tussled with businessman Barry Sherman and his generic drug maker Apotex, Canada’s largest pharmaceutical company, the Canadian company Deprenyl Research stood out in my review in Part 1 for the reasons that their conflicts highlighted the aggressive competitiveness of Sherman and Apotex in wrestling market share from a small Canadian company – as opposed to from international Big Pharma as in the public-relations image Sherman and Apotex carefully projected.

The case of Deprenyl Research stood out also because of the unique predicament and character of its owner, Dr. Morton Shulman, a former Ontario provincial Chief Coroner, member of the legislature and media personality, and Parkinson’s disease sufferer who used the drug deprenyl, obtained its Canadian rights and started the company to sell it under the name Eldepryl. Shulman engaged in very public, but ultimately futile, personal and legal struggles to try to fend off the aggressive drive by Sherman to take the deprenyl market through a much cheaper generic version developed by Apotex.

As cited in Part 1, Shulman became so critical of Sherman that he once described Sherman as, “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever”, cited from an April 2018 Maclean’s magazine article investigating the unsolved December 2017 double murder of Sherman and his wife.

That comment was in fact made in a media interview in the early 1990s in relation to Shulman’s dispute with Sherman, here quoted from a news story not long after:

“Sherman contends that the Eldepryl rights held by Deprenyl Research Ltd., the company Shulman founded in 1987, are invalid. Sherman expects federal approval early this year to sell his copycat version.

Shulman, having retired from Deprenyl Research, has had to resort to guerrilla tactics to get back at Sherman. When writing prescriptions last year he began to specify that Apotex medicines could not be used to fill them. Apotex sued for $1 million for defamation. Shulman then modified his manoeuvre so that his prescriptions could be filled only by brand-name or drugs made by Apotex’s rival, Novopharm. But Shulman quit doing even that because of the lawsuit. While a recent settlement forbids him to talk about Sherman, he made his feelings clear in an earlier interview. “Barry Sherman,” he said, “is the only person I’ve ever met with no redeeming features.””

(“A hard pill to swallow”, by Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

Shulman also hurled an even more demeaning expression at Sherman, referring to Barry Sherman’s initials:

“Just ask Morton Shulman, the Toronto multimillionaire physician, investor and drug entrepreneur. He has viewed Sherman as the sum of his initials since tangling with him over Eldepryl, a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Shulman, who suffers from the illness, bought the Canadian rights from the the patent-holder in Hungary seven years ago. Sherman wants to copy it. “Let me tell you why I’m upset,” Shulman said last year. “I took five years of my life to bring this drug in. Saved my life, saved the lives of tens of thousands of others. And then this son of a bitch comes along.””

(Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

Now, while the notion of Sherman having “no redeeming features” was personally offensive but understandable – as reviewed in Part 1, in his drive to take the deprenyl market Sherman made aggressive threats to Shulman and escalated the dispute in manners that were degrading toward Shulman – the “son of a bitch” invective, for someone of Shulman’s cultural creed and social achievements – both he and Sherman were distinguished members of the Jewish community and the Canadian society – was rather off-base.

Barry Sherman, in fact, had a shy and reserved personality since childhood, in contrast to his aggressiveness in business. Joel Ulster, a friend from his high school days who at Sherman’s funeral in December 2017 called himself Sherman’s “oldest friend” as in Part 1, had known it well and talked about it decades ago in 1992:

““It’s always been remarkable for me to see him speaking in public or in business, because socially he’s so much different,” said Joel Ulster, Sherman’s oldest and closest friend. The two met in high school.

Sherman, the younger of two children, was born in 1942 in Toronto and grew up near Bathurst north of St. Clair.

His parents wanted to call him Barry, but thinking that didn’t sound formal enough, registered his name as Bernard.

“He was shy. That’s still true of him today. He’s always very intense, hard-working, highly focused, the most intelligent person I’ve ever come across,” Ulster said in an interview.

And other acquaintances confirm that the same Barry Sherman who now regularly bites the heads off government bureaucrats will show up at a party and stand by himself, barely speaking unless spoken to.

“But in business he didn’t care if it were 1,000 people against one, as long as he thought he was right. He has supreme confidence . . . and there has been personal animosity toward him because he’s direct, aggressive and confident.””

(“One in an occasional series: Brash upstart builds firm into generic drug empire”, by Allan Thompson, February 11, 1992, Toronto Star)

As Ulster said, Sherman had a personality of “supreme confidence” and became aggressive when he thought he was right.

That “supreme confidence” had been validated and boosted early by Sherman’s own experience.

Sherman had graduated from high school as the Ontario province’s top student:

“Not every kid is so fortunate, as Sherman well knows. Look up his picture in the 1959 – ’60 yearbook of Forest Hill Collegiate Institute in Toronto, and you see a shy, studious teenager who listed his activities as the electronics club and the camera club. Even then, though, he was driven to succeed, graduating as the province’s top student.”

(Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

Such a pinnacle of achievement at high school was attained by Sherman despite having lost his father when he was only 10 years old and having to earn his living during his school years:

“Where did his ambition come from? Let Sherman take a stab at answering: “If you asked a psychologist, they would look into my background. And one thing that stands out is that my father died suddenly when I was 10 years old, [leaving] our family in a quite insecure position.”

In fact, their provider’s heart attack left Sherman, his older sister and his mother with virtually nothing, he recalls, except the mortgage on the house they had moved into a few years earlier in Upper Forest Hill Village, a well-off neighborhood in Toronto. After the death, “my mother went to work right away and I got part-time jobs and my mother took boarders into the house,” Sherman says. “We had someone living in the basement and in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and it was all my mother could manage to hold onto the house and try to put us through school.”

Sherman worked as a stockboy at Honest Ed’s, a discount retail emporium that is Toronto’s contribution to global kitsch. During the summers, he helped out at his Uncle Lou Winter’s small generic-drug company, Empire Laboratories Inc. With this money and scholarships, “I was not a financial burden to my mother,” he says.”

(Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

The most notable of Sherman’s teenage odd jobs mentioned above was at Empire Laboratories Inc., a small generic drug company owned by his uncle Lou winter, where Sherman worked during the summers.

It shows that Sherman’s generic drug business success had early family influences.

Next, the academically exceling Sherman graduated top of his class in engineering physics from the University of Toronto, and then in only two-and-a-half years completed both a Master’s degree in astronautics and a Ph.D. degree in systems engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before returning to Toronto and became an owner of Empire Laboratories at only 25 years old, prior to founding his own Apotex:

“SHERMAN WAS A VERY BRIGHT student. He went to the University of Toronto to study engineering physics and again graduated first in his class. Then he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a master’s in astronautics and a PhD in systems engineering. He earned both degrees in two and a half years — about half the normal time.

In the meantime, Uncle Lou had died and Empire Labs was up for sale. The 25-year-old Sherman teamed up with a group of investors to buy it in 1967.  They sold out in 1973, and a year later Sherman founded Apotex.”

(Rob McKenzie, February 1994, Canadian Business)

Now one may wonder: why did the young Barry Sherman, with a bright scientific and engineering future ahead of him, return home to take over a small generic drug company that had been his uncle’s and where he had only done summer work as teenager?

Surely his excellent performances in years of engineering science studies and his graduate degrees from a world-leading academic institution must have opened up a whole new world in his horizon.

Precisely. Decades later in 1996 Sherman began to write an autobiography, and he recalled his impressive academic achievements in considerable details:

“I did not excel as a student either in primary school or in the earlier years of high school. However, as time went on, not only did I become more motivated and competitive, but I discovered that I had unusually strong skills in mathematics and the sciences. When in grade 13, I won first place in a national physics contest for high school students, and I graduated from high school with thirteen “firsts” (i.e., subjects with an “A” grade), more than any other student in the province of Ontario. …

…

In September 1960, I began undergraduate studies in Engineering Physics (now Engineering Science) at the University of Toronto. I specifically chose Engineering Physics because it was reputed to be the most difficult of programs related to mathematics and the physical sciences.

Grade averages of all students were published annually by the University. Among all students in the Faculty of Engineering, I ranked fourth in first year, third in second year, second in third year, and first in the fourth and final year. Upon graduation, I was thus awarded the Wilson Medal for standing first in Engineering Physics and the Gold Medal of the Association of Professional Engineers for standing first in the entire faculty. It seems that the tougher the going got, the better I did.

…

In 1963, while in my third year of Engineering Physics, I was one of two Canadian students selected by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for its summer program for promising undergraduates. I spent several weeks in classes at Columbia University in New York City, followed by a several week tour of major NASA installations throughout the U.S., including the launch facility at Cape Canaveral.

After completing the fourth and final year of Engineering Physics in May 1994, I went to work for the summer at the Spar Aerospace Division of DeHavilland Aircraft in Toronto. My assignment related to analysis of the vibrational dynamics of the ISIS satellite, which was then being designed.

My first choice of a university for graduate work was M.I.T. (The Massachusetts Institute of Technology). I was accepted into the graduate program in M.I.T.’s Department of Aeronautics of Astronautics and was awarded a fellowship which covered both tuition and living costs. I thus set out for Boston and M.I.T. in September 1964.

I had expected that graduate work at M.I.T. would be much more challenging than undergraduate studies at the U. of T., and that competition would be much tougher. I was surprised to find otherwise.

… My gradepoint average on leaving M.I.T. was a perfect 5.0.

My Ph.D. thesis was entitled Precision Gravity Gradient Satellite Altitude Control.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, A Legacy of Thought, Preface dated December 27, 1996, posted online by The Globe and Mail)

I especially note that Sherman earned his achievements in exceptional precision and remarkable progression: winning a national physics contest in Grade 13 and graduating high school with a province-leading 13 “firsts”; and ranking 4th in 1st year, 3rd in 2nd year, 2nd in 3rd year and first in final year at university, winning 2 medals and being one of 2 Canadian students selected to travel U.S.-wide with NASA.

More importantly, to understand why he then left the academics to take over a small business back home, I note that Sherman had thought MIT studies would be tough but it turned out to be easy for him. This meant that the aura of aerospace science and engineering was not that “challenging” anymore for Sherman once he had breezed through MIT.

Add to the above point the fact that doing summer work for his Uncle Lou Winter years earlier had given the young boy a taste of ‘business success’, an experience he later told in his memoir in more vivid details than about any of his academic achievements, describing his work there as “of critical importance in my future career”:

“The summer of 1960, 1961 and 1962 were spent working for my mother’s younger brother, Louis Winter. Uncle Lou was a biochemist. He had, some years earlier, founded Winter Laboratories which was a medical testing laboratory, located on Barton Street in Toronto, the bulk of its work being pregnancy tests done on urine samples picked up from drug stores. He had also more recently started Empire Laboratories, which was a small distributor of generic prescription drugs. Empire Laboratories operated out of a converted house on Ossington Avenue. The operation at that location consisted of the repackaging of tablets and capsules purchased in bulk from American generic manufacturers.

I spent the summer of 1960 and 1961 as a driver, picking up urine samples from and delivering pharmaceuticals to pharmacies.

In 1962, Lou established his first pharmaceutical manufacturing operation at 77 Florence St. That summer, I worked at the plant helping set up operations.

Earlier that year Lou’s wife, Beverly, had been diagnosed as having leukemia, and he decided to take off several weeks for a vacation with her in Bermuda. The staff was small and Lou left no one in particular in charge. He was also unreachable by telephone. Before he left, Empire had been awarded a contract to supply ASA tablets under the private label of the recently established Towers Department Stores. Lou had arranged the production of what he thought was ample inventory, but, a few days after he left, the Towers office phoned to advise that sales were larger than expected to ask us to supply much larger quantities.

I took it upon myself to phone Mrs. Pani Relle, at Atlantic Chemicals, who was the supplier of ASA, and negotiated with her purchase a substantially increased quantity at a substantially lower price. I also organized around-the-clock production to fill the orders. Upon his return, Uncle Lou was very pleased with what I had done.

Although I did not know it at the time, these summers at Empire Laboratories would later prove to be of critical importance to my future career.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As recalled above, even though Empire Laboratories was only a small generic drug company, working his summer job there Sherman had taken part in starting its manufacturing operation, and then when his Uncle Louis Winter and sick wife Beverly was away on vacation and an opportunity arose for substantially increasing production for a major contract, the young man took charge to lead all the necessary work, successfully.

And so, after completing his MIT Ph.D., at which time his Uncle Lou and wife Beverley had both died, Sherman found it more alluring to give up astronautical engineering and explore the prospect of taking over Empire Labs, which he referred to as “a scientific business”:

“In the first week of November 1965, during my second year at M.I.T., I received a phone call in the middle of the night. On hearing the phone ring, I expected that it would be a call to tell me that Beverly Winter, my Uncle Lou’s wife, had died, as she was then terminally ill with Leukemia. I was astounded to be told by my sister, Sandra, not that Beverly had died, but that Lou, who was then forty-one years of age had died. He had suffered a heart attack at his office and been taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital where he died soon after arrival. St. Joseph’s was the very hospital in which his wife, Beverly, lay terminally ill. I went to Toronto for Lou’s funeral, and I visited Beverly at St. Joseph’s Hospital. … Three weeks later, I had to return to Toronto again for Beverly’s funeral.

Lou and Beverley Winter left behind four sons, all of whom were subsequently adopted by Dr. Martin Barkin and his wife, Carole.

In their wills Lou and Beverly had appointed as executors and trustees of their estates the Royal Trust Company and two lawyers, David Ward and Martin O’Brien. By the time I obtained my Ph.D. in January 1967, I had decided that I did not want to seek employment as an astronautical engineer. I was interested in both science and business, and I also wanted to return to Toronto to live. Thus, in January 1967, I returned to Toronto to seek out an opportunity in a scientific business.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As one can see, his early family influence and experience were important. Without his Uncle Lou’s business, Sherman might not have had the idea of a generic drug business future in his mind when he completed his academic studies and began his working career.

Going beyond the narrative of Sherman’s memoir  A Legacy of Thoughts, a 2008 Toronto Life magazine story republished in December 2017 after the unexpected deaths of Barry Sherman and wife Honey, quoted in Part 1, intimated that Sherman had been made his Uncle Lou Winter’s legal heir until the Winters’ own children came along – adopted son Tim in 1958, and sons Jeffery, Kerry and Dana respectively in 1960, 1961 and 1962:

“If there’s a science gene, Barry inherited it. Two of his mother’s brothers were doctors. A third, Lou Winter, a biochemist with a keen business sense, was the relative he most resembled. After Herbert Sherman’s death, Lou became Barry’s father figure and mentor, bringing him into his drug business, Empire Laboratories, when he was 18.

Barry was made his uncle’s legal heir when it seemed that Lou and his wife, Beverley, couldn’t have children. Then, in 1958, Lou and Beverley adopted a baby boy, Tim, and, as sometimes happens, Beverley became pregnant. She gave birth to Jeffrey in 1960, Kerry in 1961 and Dana in 1962. Shortly after the last birth, Beverley was diagnosed with leukemia, and the couple escaped to Bermuda for a last vacation. Barry, still an undergrad, took charge of the plant. He did an admirable job.”

(“Bitter Pill”, by Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

With that pre-history of having at one time been the Winter family heir, after the deaths of Uncle Lou and his wife Empire Laboratories was, in a sense, a ‘family business’ Sherman could feel entitled to.

But Sherman, by this time an MIT Ph.D., considered Empire Labs a “scientific business” that he had working knowledge of, one that in 1967 he and his friend Joel Ulster wanted to acquire:

“When I returned to Toronto in early 1967, Joel Ulster was working toward Certification as a Chartered Accountant and was employed at a firm of accountants. We had an understanding that, if we could arrange and finance a suitable acquisition, he would leave accounting and join me as my partner.

The obvious target was Empire Laboratories, the generic pharmaceutical firm which had been founded by my Uncle Lou. Not only was it a scientific business, but I had knowledge of it, having worked for Lou in the summers of 1960, 1961 and 1962.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

I note the curious coincidence that the three years when Sherman worked the summer for his Uncle Lou’s Empire Labs, 1960-1962, were also the years when the Winters’ biological sons were born.

The perspective above, “a scientific business”, was from Sherman’s 1996 memoir.

Ten years later, in an interview for a January 29, 2007 The Globe and Mail story, Sherman recalled a different perspective in his efforts to take over Empire Labs, one that was quite ‘family special’:

“On Nov. 5, 1965, Mr. Winter died suddenly at the age of 41. His wife, Beverley, died a few days later. Their four young children — Dana, Kerry, Paul, Jeffery — were adopted by another family, the Barkins. Royal Trust was appointed executor of Mr. Winter’s estate and took control of Empire.

Shortly after Mr. Winter’s death, Mr. Sherman offered to buy the company but Royal Trust turned him down. Two years later Royal Trust put the business up for sale, and Mr. Sherman and a partner submitted an offer. “I said if you are going to sell it and there are other buyers, I suggest you give me first right of refusal because that’s something my uncle would have wanted,” Mr. Sherman recalled in an interview, adding that the company was facing insolvency. Royal Trust received two offers, according to court filings, and Mr. Sherman’s bid won.”

(“At Apotex, a family feud comes to the fore”, by Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

In the above, one of the Winter sons, the adopted “Tim”, was referred to as “Paul”.

As above, “that’s something my uncle would have wanted”, was an argument that Sherman recalled in 2007 he had made in 1967 to Royal Trust which oversaw his late Uncle Lou Winter’s estate, on why he should be given preference over other suitors of Empire Laboratories.

In other words, when he saw the need, Sherman did not hesitate to emphasize his special family relationship with the deceased owner of that “scientific business”.

Similarly to his knowledge of generic drug business, Sherman’s interest in using lawyers and legal litigation to sustain and further his business – critical for Apotex’s success as reviewed in Part 1 – was also acquired early when he was an owner of Empire Labs.

In his memoir, Sherman detailed two critical legal episodes during that time.

The first was a criminal prosecution of Empire Labs that needed to be fought off.

It came as Empire Labs had just entered a rapid expansion period following the 1969 enactment of a legislation by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government to let generic drug companies compete more easily with the brand-name drug companies:

“Another major step forward for the generic industry came in 1969. Prior to that time, Section 41 of the Canadian Patent Act provide for compulsory licensing under pharmaceutical patents, only if the licensee produced the chemical in Canada. Few licenses had been issued, because the costs of setting up chemical synthesis were high and the potential generic sales in the Canadian market were relatively small.

In 1969, the Liberal Party was in power in Ottawa, and Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister. Bill C-102 was introduced by John Turner as Minister of Consumer Affairs. When the Bill was passed and given royal assent, Ron Bassford was Minister of Consumer Affairs and Turner has been moved to Justice. Pursuant to Bill C-102, Section 41 was amended to provide that compulsory licenses could now be obtained for importation of pharmaceuticals.

We promptly incorporated S & U Chemicals Limited as a subsidiary of Sherman and Ulster Limited, and, through that subsidiary, we applied for and obtained numerous compulsory licenses.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

In Sherman’s recollection above, the passing of Bill C-102 by the Trudeau government was a “major step forward” for the Canadian generic industry.

In light of this earlier history, it was natural that decades later in 2015 Barry Sherman played a prominent role in Toronto hosting election campaign fundraising for Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau, the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s son who would win and become also prime minister.

Back in the Empire Labs days, the criminal charge the company soon faced in 1970 resulted from a complaint that some of the generic ampicillin capsules newly marketed by the company were subpotent, i.e., they did not contain a sufficient amount of the required active ingredient:

“It turned out that getting the licenses was the easy part.

Pursuant to the Regulations under the federal Food and Drugs Act, it was unlawful to sell a “new drug” without first filing a submission with the Food and Drugs Directorate (“FDD”) to satisfy the Directorate as to safety and effectiveness. A “new drug” was defined as one that had not been sold in Canada for long enough and in sufficient quantity to be generally accepted as safe and effective.

The Directorate began to take the position, somewhat arbitrarily, that if a brandname product was on the market before 1963, a generic equivalent would not be considered to be a new drug, but, if the original brandname product had been introduced more recently, a generic product could not be sold unless the generic manufacturer filed and obtained approval of its own New Drug Submission.

The most significant patented product which was not then considered to be New Drug was ampicillin capsules, sold under the brandname Ampicin and Penbrittin by two brandname manufacturers pursuant to an agreement between them.

At Empire Laboratories we worked quickly to ensure that we could be the first to launch generic ampicillin capsules, and we succeeded to do so in 1970.

A few months later we received a visit by an inspector from the FDD. He advised us that one of the brandname manufacturers had purchased and tested several lots of our ampicillin capsules and found one to be subpotent, the minimum acceptable potency being ninety percent of the amount per capsule stated on the label. The FDD laboratory had confirmed the low potency. The inspector suggested that we recall the lot from all pharmacies to which it had been shipped. We asked the inspector to give us one day to retest the product ourselves. Our retesting indicated the potency to be within the required limits. We so advised the inspector, but he stated that, nevertheless, we would be well advised to recall this lot in view of the low result found by the FDD laboratory and the “politically sensitive” nature of this product, which was the first introduced under the new expanded compulsory licensing provisions.

The inspector assured us, although not in writing, that, if we did the recall, there would be no action against us by FDD. In any event, recalls were commonly done when some problem was detected after sale, and there had never been a prosecution in such a case so long as the manufacturer acted responsibly.

A few weeks later, an RCMP officer served us with a summons informing us that Sherman and Ulster Limited, operating as Empire Laboratories, had been charged with a criminal offence under the Food and Drugs Act for having sold a subpotent product.

It became clear that, notwithstanding the passage of Bill C-102, the brandname companies still had strong influence over the workings of government.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As told, the allegation had originated from a brand-name drug company, and according to Sherman the incident showed that the enactment of Bill C-102 was an exception in a government regulatory system otherwise still strongly influenced by the brand-name drug companies.

On the other hand, I note that, as reviewed in Part 1, lacking sufficient active ingredients has been a repeated deficiency of Apotex generic drugs as found by government health regulators and noted by the court over the years. In the above case in the earlier Empire Labs days, it was also alleged to be a problem and led to a rare criminal charge.

In this case, the legal defence representing Empire Labs was able to prove the prosecutorial evidence’s weakness and win an acquittal, thanks to Willard (“Bud”) Estey, a prominent attorney the company retained:

“To defend us, we retained Willard (“Bud”) Estey, a prominent attorney who subsequently became a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. When the matter eventually came to court we were acquitted. The Crown had relied on a single test by a junior chemist, who was shown on cross-examination to have made several errors.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

The second major legal case fought by Empire Labs under Sherman was a lawsuit the company launched against a government agency in order to stay in business.

At the time in the early 1970s, the province of Ontario had a PARCOST program, instituted under the leadership of Assistant Deputy Health Minister Dr. Alan E. Dyer in 1968 – a year before the federal government’s enactment of Bill C-102 – allowing generic drugs to be used as substitutes for brand-name drugs:

“Prior to 1968, in every province except Alberta, when a prescription was written by a physician using a brandname, a pharmacist was required by law to use only the brand as written, and could not substitute an equivalent generic product.

In 1968, Dr. Alan E. Dyer was an Assistant Deputy Minister in the Ontario Ministry of Health, and responsible for pharmaceutical policy. Dr. Dyer understood that drug prices of brandname products were excessive, and that, if they were to be reduced, it would be necessary to substitute generic products for brandname products.

However, there was substantial concern about whether or not all generic products were of good quality, as the regulations under the Federal Food and Drugs Act were weak, and did not include sufficient requirements to ensure good manufacturing practices.

Dr. Dyer designed a program entitled PARCOST, which was an acronym for Prescriptions at Reasonable Cost. The Ontario Ministry of Health would establish an expert committee, entitled the Drug Quality and Therapeutics Committee. The Committee would inspect all manufacturers, review product documents and test results, and decide which brandname and generic products were of satisfactory quality. The products meeting the requirements would be listed in a Parcost Formulary. Pharmacists would be entitled to use any product listed in the Formulary in place of an equivalent brandname product, unless the physician specified “no substitution”.

The necessary amendments to the Pharmacy Act were passed by the Ontario Legislature in 1968.

Dr. Dyer and his Committee came to inspect Empire Laboratories. …

…

Despite my apparent gaffe, the first edition of the Parcost Formulary included most of our products, as well as some from Novopharm, along with most brandname products. The products of several generic manufacturers, not deemed to have adequate quality controls, were excluded. Some brandname products were also excluded by reason of inadequate quality control.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

A serious problem arose for Empire Labs in 1971 when a large number of complaints against it lodged to a federal government Department led to a government board decision to delist the company’s products from the Ontario Parcost Formulary, and Sherman’s attempt to try to resolve the problem with the official in charge, Dr. G. Showalter, did not help:

“Our most significant crisis in the “the Empire Years” arose on January 25, 1971. On that date, we received a letter from Dr. G. Showalter, an employee of the federal Department of Supplies and Services, who purported to act as Chairman of a board which selected drug suppliers acceptable to his Department. Dr. Showalter’s letter included a list of about fifteen complaints about Empire products that had been received by the Board, and stated that the Board had reviewed the complaints and found them to be valid, and that for this reason and “other reasons”, the Board had removed Empire Laboratories from the list of approved suppliers. The letter further stated that notice of our delisting had already been sent to all users of the list.

It appeared that Dr. Showalter and his Board had never heard of the principles of natural justice with which, according to common law, all judicial and quasi-judicial bodies must comply.

…

We immediately panicked. Listing by the Showalter’s Board was a prerequisite for becoming and remaining listed in the Ontario Parcost Formulary, and was also a prerequisite to being a supplier to most hospitals and other major customers.

Dr. Showalter had already left his office for the day. I obtained his home phone number from Ottawa Information and phoned him at home. … He told me that the decision would not be changed by threats from me and he hung up the phone.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Empire Labs again retained the prominent attorney Willard Estey, launched legal court proceedings, and was able to force the government board to back down from its decision against the company:

“The next day we met with Willard Estey and instructed him to initiate legal action against Dr. Showalter of the Board. Within a few days, Estey filed in the appropriate Court an application for a Writ of Certiorari quashing the Board’s decision and a Writ of Mandamus compelling relisting.

Estey also drafted for us a letter to Dr. Dyer at the Ontario Ministry of Health cautioning him not to delist our products on the basis of the Board’s decision as the validity of that decision was before the Courts. Dr. Dyer agreed to refrain from any steps pending the outcome of our attack on the Board’s decision.

Within two weeks, and before the matter could come to a hearing in the Court, Dr. Showalter and his Board backed down and relisted our company. Dr. Showalter and the Board did not bother us again thereafter.

This was the first time in my career that I found it necessary to initiate a legal action. It was to be the first of many.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As recalled by Sherman, the above case was the first that he found necessary to initiate a legal action, and would become “the fist of many”.

In this critical case, as in the previous case of defending against a criminal charge, the lawyer whom Sherman’s Empire Labs relied on to fight the legal battles was Willard (“Bud”) Estey, described in an earlier quote from Sherman’s memoir as “a prominent attorney who subsequently became a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada”.

Sherman wasn’t quite accurate in that description, though.

Here is a chronology of Justice Willard Estey’s academic pedigree, law practices and judgeships quoted from his Supreme Court of Canada biography:

“… He studied at the University of Saskatchewan, obtaining a B.A. in 1940 and an LL.B. two years later. In 1942 he was called to the bar of Saskatchewan but served with the armed forces during the Second World War rather than practising law. He then went to Harvard Law School and completed an LL.M. in 1946. He taught law at the University of Saskatchewan for a year then was called to the bar of Ontario in 1947 and joined the Toronto firm of Robertson, Fleury & Lane, later named Robertson, Lane, Parrett & Estey. In 1973 he was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal and two years later was named Chief Justice of the High Court of Justice of Ontario. He became Chief Justice of Ontario in 1976 and was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada on September 29, 1977. In 1985 he chaired the Commission of Inquiry into the Collapse of the CCB and Northland Bank. Justice Estey served on the Supreme Court for 10 years and retired on April 22, 1988. …”

(“The Honourable Willard Zebedee Estey”, September 4, 2008, Supreme Court of Canada)

More precisely, in 1970-1971 working on the Empire Labs cases Mr. Estey was a prominent attorney in law practice, and he “subsequently” became a Justice in Ontario in 1973, then became Chief Justice in two Ontario courts successively, before being appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in September 1977 – a full six years after representing Empire Labs in its two cases against the government.

But I also notice that Justice Estey was actually the son of an earlier Supreme Court of Canada Justice, James Wilfred Estey:

“Willard Zebedee Estey was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on October 10, 1919. He is the son of James Wilfred Estey, a Supreme Court of Canada justice, and Muriel Baldwin. …”

(September 4, 2008, Supreme Court of Canada)

Thus, at the time when Barry Sherman utilized Willard Estey’s legal expertise in Empire Labs’ critical legal disputes with the government, Estey was not close to becoming a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

On the other hand, Estey was prominent in the legal field no doubt not only as an attorney but also as a son of a former justice of Canada’s highest court.

Therefore, Morton Shulman who in the early 1990s had fierce disputes with Barry Sherman, as reviewed in Part 1 and refreshed at the start of Part 2 of this blog article, was quite unapt airing his anger by calling Sherman “son of a bitch”, not only because Sherman’s aggression did not come from bad behaviour per se but rather from his competitiveness when he believed he was right – as discussed earlier.

That invective by Shulman was unapt also because, as the above review of history reveals, shrouded behind Sherman’s intellectual brilliance was considerable attention to preference for family distinction, be it that of his generic drug company founder uncle, that of a former Justice of the Court of the land, or that of a former Prime Minister of the nation.

The other contemptuous expression Shulman used to describe Sherman, “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever”, that I deem more reasonable given Shulman’s experience with Sherman as reviewed in Part 1, is quoted there from Maclean’s investigative article in April 2018 on the Shermans’ deaths. Here is a fuller quote in the context of Sherman’s reputation in general:

“… A renowned risk-taker, disruptor and pitbull professionally, Sherman was a polarizing figure—regarded as a softie with a heart of gold by those in his proximity and loathed by those who claim they were outfoxed or betrayed by him. The man who learned weeks before his death of his nomination to the Order of Canada was also called out as unethical in business dealings. The late physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Morton Shulman, who did battle with Sherman, called him “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever.””

(“The other side of Barry Sherman”, by Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As described, Sherman was “regarded as a softie with a heart of gold by those in his proximity and loathed by those who claim they were outfoxed or betrayed by him”.

As a general characterization, such could suggest a personality relying on nepotism and favouritism to operate like in a tight-knit cult, but using deception and manipulation to deal with others more generally, and that Shulman’s impression came as a result of having been met with intransigent deception and manipulation.

I have commented in Part 1 that the media coverage of Shulman’s pharmaceutical business disputes with Sherman in the 1990s was like a “beacon of light” – a well-documented example of Sherman’s behaviour in business dealings with others, which has been criticised like in the above quote but usually not reported in details.

Right after the Shermans’ deaths in December 2017, Toronto Life magazine’s republished article, previously appearing in July 2008, noted that in his autobiography, i.e., the 1996 memoir quoted extensively earlier, Sherman described his “logical” views on morality, asserting that it isn’t an intrinsic human value:

“In his autobiography, he described himself as recognizing no God and rejecting religion and free will in favour of “logical deduction.” He wrote about the instinct to co-operate with others, particularly relatives, when it was to “mutual advantage.” There can be no such thing as “altruism, kindness, generosity or morality,” he says, because humans act only in pursuit of their own happiness.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

As cited above, the view that there can be no “altruism, kindness, generosity or morality” could well be Sherman’s justification of his own personality and behaviour that incurred others’ criticisms and hostility.

So let’s look at what exactly Sherman wrote in his memoir:

“I cannot see that human behaviour differs in any fundamental way from that of numerous species on the savannahs of Serengeti. We are all driven by our instincts to eat, drink, copulate, protect ourselves and our young, and cooperate with others, particularly those most closely related to us, if and when it is to our mutual advantage. Happiness is, I believe, best defined as satisfaction of these drives, and it is that which we all pursue.

…

Although we all share the same drives, it is clear that individuals exhibited these drives in different proportions, be it as a result of genetic differences, differing environmental influences, and differing opportunities.

Individuals who help others to an unusual extent, are considered to be “kind”, “moral” or “generous”, although, if my thesis that everything is done in pursue of happiness is correct, then there can be no such thing as altruistic, kindness, generosity or morality.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Sherman’s thesis in the above was that personality attributes such as altruism, kindness, generosity and morality, namely unusual extents of willingness to help others, are actually driven by the person’s pursue of happiness.

In his memoir, following the above quoted passages Sherman immediately trained his unsparing criticism on organized religion, and on the notion of “salvation” through religious practice:

“I have always felt disdain for organized religion and for the foolishness or hypocrisy of clergymen who sell religion as a source of morality or everlasting life. Undoubtedly, there are many persons who are both committed to religion and generous, but I see no general correlation. Indeed, countless clergymen and others who espouse religion live in relative opulence while much of humanity languishes in squalor. If anything, from my experience in fundraising for charitable organizations, I have sensed a reverse correlation. Atheists often are enormously more generous than persons obsessively committed to seemingly absurd religious rituals. It may be that persons who believe that they get salvation from observance of rituals feel less need to derive happiness from helping others.

Voltaire said that: “Nobless Oblige”; with power and wealth comes obligation. I do not see any rational basis for that pronouncement. There is no objective basis to hold that anyone is obligated to do anything not required by law. Each person can be expected only to pursue personal happiness in whatever manner he sees best from his own perspective.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

In reading the above, I find that Sherman’s “logical deduction” did not quite explain why the atheists’ generosity was “enormously more” than the religiously committed, and hence did not quite rule out that their generosity came, if only partly, from “obligation” – even if he did not view that as necessary.

Nevertheless, in his philosophizing in the two quotes above was, I find, Sherman’s answer to Shulman’s proclamation that Sherman was “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever”.

Simply put, Sherman did not need to show “kindness” in the concrete toward Shulman’s predicament nor did he need redemption, but like everyone else only needed to be law-abiding – I should however point out that, as in Part 1, Sherman’s mail marketing of drugs into the U.S. market was viewed illegal by Shulman and confirmed so by an FBI criminal investigation in 1993-1995.

For Sherman, his greater pursue of personal happiness led him to become one of the “leading”, “most active” and “most generous” philanthropists in Canada – praises of Sherman, quoted in Part 1, by some top politicians and community leaders after his death – in contrast to the many clergymen and others who pursued salvation through religious observance.

These philosophical musings by Barry Sherman in his unfinished memoir, the preface of which was marked as written in Serengeti, Tanzania, on December 27, 1996, could indeed have begun as an intellectual response to the moral contempt and dismissive publicly aired by his nemesis Morton Shulman just a few years earlier around 1993 at the height of their business disputes.

As quoted earlier, the memoir also extensively recalled Sherman’s academic years and his early years in the pharmaceutical industry.

From what I have found in the press archives, it was about ten years later in 2006 that Barry Sherman began to tell the media about this unfinished and unpublished memoir of his, which he envisioned to be turned into a full account of his history but that had yet to be done.

At the time, Sherman was preoccupied with a major legal fight with the international Big Pharma companies Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, over Apotex’s push in the U.S. market for its generic version of the heart drug Plavix as detailed in Part 1; and so Sherman mentioned his memoir in this context, stating that a chapter on the present could include “certain things” that would “end them up in prison”:

“The opening chapters of a draft autobiography sit amid the hundreds of pill bottles and mound of legal documents in Dr. Bernard Sherman’s office. It will be the story of a brainy kid born in Toronto who becomes Canada’s richest generic drug mogul.

Though a work in progress, it has the makings of a page turner. One chapter will recount how an employee from a brand-name drug company offered to sell him secret files. Another, he says, will describe how Dr. Sherman caught a rival stealing the recipe for a blockbuster generic developed by his company, Apotex.

But what promises to be the book’s most riveting chapter is still unfolding. It is the part where Dr. Sherman seemingly outsmarts two big drug companies, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, to market the first generic form of the big-selling heart drug Plavix five years before its patent expires. And it could conceivably end with someone in jail.

“They couldn’t see that maybe certain things were going to end them up in prison,” Dr. Sherman said during an interview in the Toronto building where his generic Plavix copy is being made.”

(“Generic drug, specific issue: Apotex fights Plavix”, by Stephanie Saul, August 16, 2006, National Post)

Such a vindicating victory envisioned above did not happen for Sherman, at least not to the extent of Part 1’s review on the Plavix dispute.

Neither did Sherman memoir’s chapters for his recent history actually happen: a total of 13 chapters were planned but only the first five have been fully or partially written.

The year after in 2007, Sherman submitted his unfinished memoir as a part of legal files for a civil lawsuit case in his family, and it received some media attention on its contents. The media wondered who Barry Sherman really was, “a cutthroat businessman?”, “a strings-attached benefactor?”, etc., as in a November 24, 2007 The Globe and Mail story:

“So who, exactly, is Barry Sherman? Is he a cutthroat businessman? A strings-attached benefactor? Or just a munificent, self-confessed workaholic?

In 1996, the drug baron asked himself some of those same questions. During a family trip to the Serengeti, he stepped back for a moment of reflection and
started writing a memoir called A Legacy of Thoughts. It has never been published – in fact, it sat in his desk until it surfaced in the family’s recent legal fight. But his biographical notes shed light on one of the country’s more reclusive business icons.”

(“The real Barry Sherman”, by Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Citing from the memoir, the above news story reported Sherman’s childhood experience and academic excellence – some of it discussed earlier quoting from his memoir:

“Barry Sherman’s mother named him Bernard, thinking that it sounded distinguished. But he was so slow, his Grade 5 teachers called him “grandpa.”

The shy, awkward child, born in 1942, also had few friends growing up and difficulty keeping up with students in the classroom. Summer camp wasn’t much better – he hated it so much that one year he enrolled in a military program instead, only to find he loathed the mindless drills.

But, according to his memoir, there were early flashes of the future tycoon’s work ethic.

The only son of a zipper manufacturer, Barry would occasionally join his father at the factory. One Saturday, as his dad, Herbert, worked in his office, the 10-year-old packed so many more zippers into boxes than the paid employees that his father actually checked each box to make sure he had counted correctly.

While this impressed Barry’s father, there wasn’t much time to brag. He had a heart attack at work later that year and died instantly.

This forced his mother, Sara, back to work. A trained occupational therapist, she was now the sole support for Barry and his older sister, Sandra. It also fundamentally changed “grandpa.” Young Barry threw himself into his studies. And he discovered that his skill at mathematics and logic extended well beyond efficiently packing zippers into boxes.

By the end of high school, he had won a national physics contest and graduated with more A’s than any other student in Ontario. He enrolled in engineering physics at the University of Toronto and did a summer program at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This led to a fascination with space. So, after working briefly on a satellite project in Toronto, he headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study aeronautics on scholarship.

His PhD thesis was a 200-page mathematical analysis of a system he invented that could control satellites in orbit. The invention so captivated him that he took out a patent on it.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

There were more interesting details, about Sherman’s special relationship with his uncle Louis Winter, reported not from his memoir but from an interview with Sherman:

“Louis Winter trained in biochemistry, but he was a born entrepreneur. By the 1960s, he had built a $1-million business called Empire Laboratories by churning out cheaper versions of Aspirin, saccharin and Valium.

Mr. Winter was not a big spender. But he did well enough to afford a house in a fashionable part of Toronto, a used Rolls-Royce and even a small fleet of
sailboats.

After his brother-in-law died, Lou took his nephew under his wing, occasionally taking him out on the water.

Mr. Sherman says he “got seasick easily.” But he did better behind the wheel of a car. His uncle hired him to drive his company’s truck, picking up urine samples and delivering drugs to pharmacies. And he soon showed the same devotion to work and attention to detail on the job that Lou saw in himself.

“He was so impressed with Barry’s intelligence,” says Wayne Rockcliffe, Mr. Winter’s brother-in-law.

By the time Mr. Sherman was in university, he would take charge when his uncle was away. When one huge order came in, the 20-year-old not only filled it but negotiated a lower price from a supplier. This duly impressed Mr. Winter, and family members speculate that he saw his nephew as his successor.

“We had a small family and I was close to him. He was sort of a father figure to me,” Mr. Sherman said in an interview. “I think he considered me to be a son.”

Still, he returned to university that year. Which is where he was when his uncle, waiting for a colleague in his office, felt a sharp pain in his head. He collapsed and was rushed to the hospital.

He died the next morning – the same month Barry’s father had passed away 13 years earlier – of an apparent aneurysm. His wife, Beverley, who had been
fighting leukemia in the hospital, died 17 days later.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As above, “I think he considered me to be a son”, was how Sherman described his relationship with his Uncle Lou in an interview cited in the November 24, 2007 The Globe and Mail story. In contrast to in his 1996 memoir, Sherman placed greater emphasis on the special family relationship between him and his Uncle Lou.

This was much like in a January 29 The Globe and Mail story in the same year 2007, where Sherman recalled what he had said to Royal Trust in 1967 in his effort to acquire Empire Labs from his late uncle’s estate, as quoted earlier:

“… “I said if you are going to sell it and there are other buyers, I suggest you give me first right of refusal because that’s something my uncle would have wanted,” Mr. Sherman recalled in an interview…”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

In the interview for the November 24 story, Sherman said something further, that he had told Royal Trust his uncle would have wanted him to own the company so that he could help his uncle’s young sons:

““You know, if all things are equal, you ought to give me first right because I am the boys’ natural cousin and my uncle would have wanted it,” he told the
trustee. “These are my cousins, and if some day these boys want an opportunity or need help, I will be there.””

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Why did Sherman in 2007 suddenly emphasize his special family relationship with his Uncle Lou and what he had said to Uncle Lou’s estate trustee about taking over Empire Labs for that reason, and not just for it being this familiar “scientific business” as in his 1996 memoir?

That is because his uncle’s sons, now grown up, in early 2007 filed a lawsuit alleging that Sherman denied them 20% of business ownership they were entitled to. The media interviews Sherman did at this time was in response to their lawsuit, besides including his unpublished memoir with the legal documents.

The January 29, 2007 The Globe and Mail story was the first major media report that I have found on this family feud that came in the form of a $1.5 billion lawsuit filed by Sherman’s Winter cousins:

“Barry Sherman has spent a long career building a multibillion-dollar drug firm, becoming one of Canada’s wealthiest men and keeping his personal life private.

But a simmering family feud has erupted in court, and a group of relatives is suing Mr. Sherman, alleging he violated a 40-year-old agreement that entitled them to 20 per cent of his company, Apotex Inc. , Canada’s largest generic drug-maker.

The relatives, who are Mr. Sherman’s cousins, say they found out about the agreement only a few years ago and when they started asking Mr. Sherman questions about it, he stopped supporting them financially. They are seeking $1.5-billion in damages from Mr. Sherman and Royal Trust Co., which was involved in drafting the agreement.

In an interview, Mr. Sherman called the allegations “bizarre” and said the lawsuit “has no substantive basis whatsoever.”

“I’ve spent millions of dollars trying to help these kids but they’ve got a lawyer who smells money, it seems,” he said. “It’s just an unbelievable story. It’s actually very distressing to me.”

“I’m saddened that it has come to this,” said Kerry Winter, one of the cousins who is suing. “It’s a tragedy.””

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Strictly speaking, the 40-year-old agreement cited above, between Royal Trust and Sherman when Sherman acquired Empire Labs, involved a possible 5% of Empire Labs’ ownership for each of the Winter sons:

“The terms of the sale included a provision to give Mr. Winter’s four children an opportunity to work for the company once they turned 21. And, after two years employment, they could buy 5 per cent of the business.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

From the Winter sons’ point of view, Sherman owed them 20% of Apotex ownership because Sherman’s business success at Apotex had originated from their father’s Empire Labs, which they were owed when Sherman later sold the company and started Apotex:

“Kerry and Tim claim their father’s company made Barry’s success possible. But with the sale of Empire, they lost any interest they might have had in it. Or did they? They maintain that without Empire there could be no Apotex, therefore Barry has a legal obligation to hand over five per cent of his present assets to each of Lou’s sons or heirs. That’s what he promised when he bought Empire Labs. They claim that Barry sold it to weasel out of his commitment to them.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

To put it simply, family business would have family obligations: as discussed, a key argument Sherman used to sway his Uncle Lou’s estate trustee Royal Trust was, “These are my cousins, and if some day these boys want an opportunity or need help, I will be there”; and so the above agreement became a provision for his ownership of Empire Labs.

Two years earlier in 1965 right after the death of Uncle Lou, Sherman had pitched the same argument to Lou Winter’s wife Beverley, about taking over Empire Labs to “protect its value for the benefit of the children”; but she did not make a decision before her own death days later:

“… Barry attended Lou’s funeral, then visited Beverley in the hospital, where they talked about what might happen to Empire and the children’s future interests. He said that if she and the executors wished, he would take over the business and protect its value for the benefit of the children. In return, they would have to grant him the right to purchase the company if it came up for sale. Beverley discussed the idea but made no decision. Seventeen days later, she was dead.

Three days after her death, Barry made the same proposal to trustees of the Winter estate. They said no, that they would continue to run the business. And so the children’s legacy—Empire Labs and a trust fund—remained in the hands of two lawyers, an accountant and Royal Trust.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Instead, what could have become Sherman’s family obligation became a business ownership provision to protect the Winter children’s future interests when two years later he and Joel Ulster acquired Empire Labs on their own efforts – but using the same ‘special relationship’ argument to persuade Royal Trust:

“The pitch worked. Mr. Sherman and Mr. Ulster bought Empire for about $250,000 – thanks, in part, to a $100,000 bank loan secured by everything Mr. Sherman’s mother owned.

…

The purchase agreement also included specific provisions for the four Winter boys: They had the right to work at Empire as soon as they turned 21 and they could buy a 5-per-cent stake after two years of employment – as long as Mr. Sherman was still in charge.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

The provision was that each of the four Winter sons be given employment at Empire Labs starting at the age of 21, and after two years of employment be given the option to purchase 5% of the ownership. That would be a potential 20% total.

Here is a more accurate summary, from the Toronto Life story first published in July 2008:

“Two options were added to protect the Orphan Children—the phrase that the surviving sons, now in their late 40s, still use to describe themselves. The first states that all of Lou Winter’s sons would be given the opportunity to become “responsible full-time employees” once they turned 21 or completed their formal education. Second, any employed child who worked two years with the company would “have the right to purchase five per cent of the issued shares of the company or companies owning the purchased business.” However, the option could be exercised only if Sherman, Ulster or Ulster’s father kept control of the business.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Agreeing to such a provision would matter, because at the time there was at least one competitor bidding for Empire Labs, as also quoted earlier:

“… Royal Trust received two offers, according to court filings, and Mr. Sherman’s bid won.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

However, the provision had conditions. It was enforceable only if the company was under family control and only if a Winter son was capable of “being a responsible employee”, as Royal Trust pointed out in 2007 in response to the Winter sons’ lawsuit:

“However, in court filings, Royal Trust alleges the agreement included several conditions. For example, it was only enforceable so long as the company remained under family control and provided each of the children was capable of “being a responsible employee.”

In 1972, Mr. Sherman sold the company to ICN Canada, a subsidiary of a U.S. company that was publicly traded. A year later, Mr. Sherman started Apotex.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As in the above, a few years later in 1972 Sherman sold the company before the Winter children reaching their adulthood, and a year later started Apotex.

In his court filing and disposition in response to the lawsuit, Sherman asserted that the provision became “unenforceable” when he sold Empire Labs in 1972, and that at that time he expressed the willingness to help his cousins:

“The Winters had four children; one son has died, his widow and two sons are suing Mr. Sherman, and one son has stayed out of the battle altogether. The children were raised by another family and Mr. Sherman bought their father’s drug business shortly after his death.

The cousins allege the purchase included a provision giving them an opportunity to work in the business when they were older as well as an ownership interest.

They allege Mr. Sherman never told them about the provision and they only discovered it a few years ago.

Mr. Sherman said in his filings that the arrangement concerning the children contained a number of conditions that became unenforceable when he sold the Winter business in 1972. Apotex was a completely separate entity, he added.

However, he vowed at the time to help the others. “I said also, ‘These are my cousins, and if some day if these boys want an opportunity or need help, I will be there,’” Mr. Sherman said in a deposition.”

(“Apotex founder hits hard in legal family feud”, by Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

I note that Sherman’s 1996 memoir had emphasized his interest in Empire Labs because it was a familiar “scientific business”, and it did take a lot of work and skills on the part of Sherman and his partner Ulster to efficiently operate Empire Labs.

More of the efforts needed and risks involved in acquiring and owning Empire Labs were discussed in Sherman’s memoir, and are reviewed here next.

Sherman began by looking into Empire Labs’ operation and product sales, found that the company had declined since Lou Winter’s death, and argued that the decline was due to mismanagement under Royal Trust, before Royal Trust became willing to sell and to consider a low-price offer from Sherman and Ulster:

“I phone the Royal Trust Company, which was one of the executors and had been allowed by the other two executors, David Ward and Martin O’Brien, a free hand in managing the estate. They told me that they were not yet interested in selling.

Because the acquisition appeared ideal, I did not back off. I went to visit the offices of Empire Laboratories to talk to some of the staff. The operations were now located in a five storey building, at 301 Lansdowne Ave. in Toronto, to which the company had moved before Lou Winter’s death in 1965. I learned that the Royal Trust Company had appointed as president on a part-time basis Dr. George Wright, who was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Toronto and had previously been a consultant to Lou Winter. I learned from the staff that they considered Dr. Wright to be incompetent to manage the business, that sales had declined from over a million dollars per year in 1965 to about eight hundred thousand dollars per year, and that the company would likely soon be insolvent.

I phoned David Ward and Martin O’Brien to tell them what I had learned, to suggest that the trust company might be more interested in continuing to manage Empire Laboratories to earn fees than in a prudent sale, and to point out that, if the company went insolvent, Lou’s children might some day hold them liable for negligence as executors and trustees.

Within days I received a phone call from the Royal Trust Company advising that they were ready to negotiate a sale. We were given full access to the books and records, as a result of which our suspicions of imminent insolvency were confirmed. We offered to purchase the assets at net book value, which would require payment of about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars after deduction of the liabilities to be assumed.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As Sherman recalled, since Lou Winter’s death in 1965 the annual drug sales of Empire Labs had declined from $1 million to about $800,000 in 1967, and the company might be near insolvency. As a result of his finding out about the decline, the trustees agreed to consider selling the company and Sherman and Ulster offered a price for the value of the assets, which came to about $250,000 plus assumption of the company’s liabilities.

The offer, which I note was more like in a liquidation sale, was too low for the trustees because when Lou Winter had just died in 1965 there were much higher offers; so Royal Trust decided to look around for other potential buyers:

“Royal Trust was reluctant to accept. There had been eager buyers at much higher prices upon Lou’s death in 1965, and Royal Trust thus now franticly sought out other potential buyers.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Around this time, two distinguished Toronto generic drug business owners sought out Sherman for discussions.

One of them, Jules Gilbert, advised Sherman of the potential risks in owning Empire Labs, and suggested that Sherman instead purchase a minority ownership in his company:

“While awaiting an answer from Royal Trust, I received a phone call from Jules Gilbert. Jules was the founder and owner of Jules R. Gilbert Limited, another generic manufacturer that he had founded in the mid 1950s. Jules is considered to be one of the fathers, if not the father, of the Canadian generic drug industry. Jules asked that I visit with him at his offices and factory on Dundas Street in West Toronto, and I obliged.

He gave me a tour of the premises and introduced me to his son-in-law, Fred Klapp, who was then endeavouring to expand sales through telemarketing.

Jules told me that he had heard that Joel and I were negotiating to buy Empire Laboratories, and he wanted to warn me that the purchase would be a great mistake. He said that he had just completed formulating a new plan that would make his company very successful and would put Empire Laboratories out of business within months. He told me that he required some further funding for his new plan and thought it would be best for both of us if I were to purchase a minority position in his company instead of buying Empire Laboratories. He said: “If you do so, I will be the king, but you will be the crown prince.”

…

It appeared to me that Jules Gilbert, although a very nice gentleman and very knowledgeable, could not distinguish between what was practical and what was not.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As told, was considered one of the fathers of the Canadian generic drug industry, and he called himself “the king” and wanted Barry Sherman to be “the crown prince” if Sherman would join him.

Jules Gilbert was foresightful, wasn’t he, in light of Barry Sherman’s eventual great success in his own right?

The other generic drug businessman, Lou Craig, advised Sherman not to get into the generic drug industry, at all, because of the risks:

“Within days after that meeting, Ben Ulster, Joel’s father, told us that his friend Lou Craig wanted to have lunch with Ben, Joe and me, to also try to talk us out of proceeding with the purchase.

Lou Craig was a brother-in-law of Jules Gilbert. They had originally been in business together but had parted company some years later. At lunch, Lou Craig explained that he had recently sold his generic drug company, which he had operated under the name Bell-Craig, to an American company, Denver Laboratories. He said that the generic drug business was a commodity business that was and always would be highly competitive. He said he was glad to be out and that if we proceeded to buy Empire Laboratories we would inevitably fail and lose our investment.

He also advised us against investing with Jules Gilbert, and stated that we should entirely refrain from investing in this industry.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Both Gilbert and Lou Craig, who each invited Sherman for a discussion, warned that this field was highly competitive and Sherman could lose.

Jules Gilbert was leading the Canadian generic drug industry’s lobbying for the Canadian government’s help to reduce American drug companies’ dominance, and his efforts led to the enactment of Bill C-102, with the introduction of “compulsory licensing”, by Prime Minister Trudeau’s government in 1969 – as in Sherman’s memoir it was a major boost for the nascent Canadian generic drug industry, including for Empire Labs under Sherman and Ulster. That history was recalled recently in a 2014 book by another pioneering Canadian generic drug businessman, Morris Goodman:

“A little-known fact about the generic industry in Canada – it had an American father. Jules R. Gilbert, then in Toronto, … on his own, set out to have the patent laws governing drug manufacture and distribution changed in Canada. At that time, American drug firms dominated the Canadian market and eventually Canada’s federal government, lobbied in large part by Gilbert, looked into drug distribution in this country. The government report … led to the passage, in 1969, of Bill C-102, which introduced “compulsory licensing.” New legislation made it possible for any company in Canada to produce a patented drug, paying a royalty of four percent to the company that had introduced the drug. In other words, it was compulsory for a company that introduced a new drug to license its distribution as a generic drug to a Canadian company that was prepared to pay the royalty. Suddenly, generic drugs were not only legal and protected by the Canadian government, companies like mine were being encouraged to delve into the generic market. This change dramatically altered the situation for Winley-Morris. …

The passing of Bill C-102 also had a dramatic impact on how much Canadians paid for many of their medications, which proved to be much less than their neighbours south of the border were paying. Bill C-102 gave Canadian a break on prescription costs and opened the door for considerable growth among companies producing generic drugs in this country. This legislation made it possible for Canadian-owned generic companies not only to exist but to thrive.”

(Morris Goodman, To Make a Difference: A Prescription for a Good Life, 2014, McGill-Queen’s University Press)

However, Gilbert’s own company later went bankrupt due to the large number of patent infringement lawsuits it faced from international brand-name drug companies:

“In June 1958, I contacted Jules Gilbert and Winley-Morris became his distributor in Quebec and Newfoundland. I eventually formed a company to handle Gilbert’s generic products, calling it Julius R. Gilbert (Quebec) Limited. … But while we did very well, Gilbert was kept busy and broke, pouring his income into fees for patent lawyers. The multinationals bled him dry with patent infringement lawsuits and eventually his company went bankrupt. Gilbert’s son-in-law, Fred Klapp, bought up the assets and ran a successful business developing creams and ointments under the label K-Line Pharmaceuticals. Later, he sold to Taro, …

Jules Gilbert lost his business, but, in the end, his cause was not lost. He was a bright, aggressive man, who changed the patent laws in Canada. He also paid the price for a number of us – Lesley Dan of Novapharm, Barry Sherman of Apotex, and me at Winley-Morris, ICN, and finally Pharmascience, not to mention all the other generic companies. Gilbert was a crusader and the Canadian public owes him a great debt because of his efforts to ensure that Canadians benefit from lower drug prices. The entire Canadian generic industry is also beholden to him for his unrivalled leadership. He opened the door for all of us. …

(Morris Goodman, 2014, McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Here, a larger and longer cautionary tale seems to emerge from my review of the history up to this point, including in Part 1.

Like the pioneering Jules Gilbert described above, Barry Sherman was also a “bright, aggressive man”, whom in 1967 Gilbert tried to recruit to become “the crown prince” for “the king”; Gilbert’s lobbying of the government soon led to major changes in the Canadian patent laws in 1969, but his company later went bankrupt because too much money was spent on patent lawyers to fight the international brand-name drug companies; in 1967 Sherman bought Empire Labs, went on to found and grow Apotex to be Canada’s leading pharmaceutical company and compete with Big Pharma internationally, but unlike Gilbert’s, Sherman’s company was big enough to sustain the huge legal expenses on patent lawyers.

Nonetheless, in the end, Sherman and his wife were brutally killed in a double homicide, and the scenario of brand-name drug companies having a role in it cannot be ruled out – as concluded in Part 1.

In any case, in 1967 Sherman and Ulster used the opportunity offered by Gilbert as a leverage in his negotiation to acquire Empire Labs, and won Royal Trust’s acceptance of their offer, as told in Sherman’s memoir:

“Despite the warnings of Jules Gilbert and Lou Craig, Joel Ulster and I decided to proceed to try to complete the purchase, although not without substantial trepidation.

…

I phoned David Ward and Martin O’Brien again. I told them that we were about to pursue another opportunity, and that if our offer to purchase Empire were not accepted within two days it would be withdrawn. Within the two days Royal Trust advised that they would accept our offer, and our solicitors began to draw up the formal agreements.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

While Sherman got a good deal for Empire Labs – paying only for the value of its assets – it was still a lot of money for someone who was fresh out of graduate school and whose family had been of modest means ever since his father’s death when he was in his early teens.

To raise the $250,000 to purchase the company, Sherman’s mother put up all her assets as collateral to obtain a $100, 000 bank loan, and his partner Joel Ulster’s father Ben provided a $150,000 loan and arranged a line of bank credit for the company’s operating use:

“It remained to arrange the financing. We required about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to complete the purchase, plus an operating line of credit.

At that time, my mother had investments totalling about one hundred thousand dollars. She offered to put up all of her assets as security for a bank loan. The Bank of Montreal, at which my mother and I both banked, agreed to lend me one hundred thousand dollars against my mother’s assets, which was the full face value. It still seems surprising that both my mother and the Bank were prepared to take that risk, as we easily could have failed. Fortunately, we did not fail.

The remaining one hundred and fifty thousand dollars was advanced by Ben Ulster, Joel’s father. Ben also arranged for an operating line of credit at Toronto-Dominion Bank.

We completed the asset purchase in September 1967. For that purpose, we incorporated Sherman and Ulster Ltd., so that the business became Empire Laboratories, a division of Sherman and Ulster Limited.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

As told, by the time of writing his memoir in December 1996 Sherman still felt surprised that his mother and Bank of Montreal had taken the risk to do the $100,000 loan in 1967 – in fact, it was really his mother’s risk to lose all her investments to the bank while the bank would lose only the loan interests.

And the risk of losing was real, as Sherman recalled in 2007:

“… Mr. Sherman and Mr. Ulster bought Empire for about $250,000 – thanks, in part, to a $100,000 bank loan secured by everything Mr. Sherman’s mother owned.

“It was a crazy thing to do. We almost went broke in the first few months,” Mr. Sherman says. “I’m an entrepreneur and one has to take risks to get ahead. I was lucky.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

When one learns of the efforts and risks undertaken, as extensively told in his memoir and I have reviewed, for the acquisition and owning of a “family business” that had belonged to none other than a brother of Sherman’s own mother, one can see that it indeed was about business – except for the close-family factor as a favour in agreeing to consider Sherman’s takeover pitch and eventually accepting the offer of assets value he estimated from the company’s books and records.

More importantly, even at that favourable price the business venture risked the life savings of Sherman’s mother, who could have lost all had her son not turned out to be so bright, diligent and industrious, and a little lucky, too.

That business reality, despite his special relationship with his late Uncle Lou that he cited to sway the Winter estate trustees, in my analysis probably made Sherman less straightforward and less willing later when it came to materializing the ownership-share provision for his Uncle Lou’s sons.

As already reviewed, the enactment of Bill C-102 by the Pierre Trudeau government in 1969 gave a major boost to the Canadian generic drug industry, and in particular to Empire Labs, which under Sherman’s leadership worked hard to produce generic drug products sooner and better than many other companies.

But furthering the risks in this process of progress were the drug quality-related legal problems the company encountered; fortunately, they were expertly resolved in Empire Labs’ favour by the prominent attorney Willard Estey, son of a former Supreme Court of Canada Justice and later a justice himself in that high court.

According to some media reports, in 1969 two years after acquiring Empire Labs, Sherman swapped its shares with its largest customer, so that the customer rather than he and Ulster became the company’s controlling shareholder:

“The agreement protecting Winter’s sons didn’t survive. A 1969 share swap initiated by Sherman gave control of Empire to its largest customer…”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

However, Sherman’s memoir did not mention such a share swap.

Instead, it referred to Sherman and Ulster Limited as the owner of Empire Labs in 1973 at the time of its acquisition by a large U.S. pharmaceutical company; under Sherman and Ulster, by the end of 1972 Empire Labs had more than doubled its annual sales from the 1967 level, and attracted the interest of takeover from ICN Pharmaceuticals:

“In the years 1971 and 1972, the sales of Empire continued to grow, and by the end of 1972 sales had reached a level of a little under two million dollars a year.

In early 1973, we received a phone call from a young man named Gil LeVasseur. He was a Harvard MBA type who was working on acquisitions for ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc., a public U.S. company, of which the founder and chairman was Milan Panic.

ICN had recently purchased Winley-Morris, another small generic drug company located in Montreal, from Morris Goodman. Winley-Morris had been renamed ICN Canada Limited, and Morris Goodman had stayed on as president. LeVasseur told us that ICN wanted to buy Empire Laboratories (i.e., Sherman and Ulster Limited) and to merge it into ICN Canada Limited.

Joel Ulster and I were ambivalent about selling, but decided to let ICN evaluate out company and make an offer to us.

Although we had done reasonably well over the previous few years, we had concerns…

…

We were able to negotiate a selling price of a little under two million dollars, which we decided to accept.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

That was a big success, receiving an acquisition offer of “a little under two million dollars” after five years of ownership and more doubling Empire Labs’ annual sales to “a little under two million dollars” – from about $800,000 when Sherman and Ulster took over in 1967, as cited earlier.

The offer figure was at the same level as the company’s annual sales, compared to when Sherman and Ulster bought it for the assets value of $250,000 on annual sales of $800,000.

Also fortunate was the fact that, as told above, the purchaser was not only a U.S. drug company and thus had American financial strength, but also had patriotic Canadian leadership as ICN Pharmaceuticals had recently acquired Morris Goodman’s Winley-Morris and renamed it ICN Canada Limited with Goodman as president; as quoted earlier from his 2014 book, Goodman was a Canadian generic drug pioneer and had worked with Jules Gilbert, “father” of the Canadian generic drug industry who had tried to recruit Sherman in 1967 and whose lobbying had led to the passage of Bill C-102 in 1969.

However, American finance had its ‘proverbial’ risk, if it can be said that way, which Sherman could not help but tell a tale about.

The nearly $2 million offered to Sherman and Ulster by ICN was not in cash but in ICN stock shares, and it took much agonizing for Sherman and Ulster to decide to take the chance, and then, during a required waiting period of about six months watched the stock value went up and then down, and finally hurriedly cashed in just before the stock price crashed:

“There were only two flies in the ointment (pun intended).

…

The second was that ICN was prepared to pay only with ICN share and not cash. Moreover, we would have to agree to hold the shares until they were registered, which would take up to six months, before we could sell them. We considered the ICN shares to be a hot potato. They were priced at about twenty U.S. dollars per share, having risen from only a few dollars per share a year or two earlier on the strength of a string of acquisitions all using shares. The net book value per share and earnings per share clearly did not justify the price of ICN’s stock.

After much agonizing, we decided to take the risk and make the deal. The transaction closed in September 1973. In the following few months while we were holding the ICN shares, the share price continued to climb to about forty U.S. dollars per share, and we were, of course, ecstatic. However, the price then began to fall just as rapidly. By the time our shares were freed for sale, the price was down to U.S. twenty dollars per share again, and we quickly sold all our shares at about that price. The price then continued to tumble down to about U.S. two dollars per share. We were very fortunate, indeed, to have gotten out in time. After payment of relevant taxes and all of our debts, Joel and I each netted several hundred thousand dollars.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

The scenario of losing their worth from selling their company would have been unbearable. But Sherman and Ulster were lucky and netted several hundred thousand dollars each in profit.

In the second previous quote above, Sherman named the founder and chairman of ICN that bought Empire Labs by offering only its stocks was Milan Panic.

The risk taken by Sherman and Ulster was probably quite common for those doing business with Panic, a former Yugoslavian Olympic athlete and defector to the West, and a famous character who rode the wave of ICN acquisitions to become, by 1992, Serbia’s richest man and Prime Minister, with his wealth on roller-coaster rides with the ICN stock value:

“As with many such transient figures on the world scene, there are fresh-minted official biographies, and Mr Panic’s is largely supplied by himself. Born in 1930, of poor parents; peddled vegetables in the Thirties; joined Tito’s partisans in 1944 (when he would have been all of 14); trained as a chemist (at an unspecified university); became national cycling hero, depicted variously as Yugoslav champion and as an Olympic competitor (he was actually an reserve); defected to the West in 1956 on the way to a race in the Netherlands, finding his way, with his family, to the United States in 1960.

…

… His entire past is anything but free of difficulties with the law, not to speak of his stockholders. He is widely described as ‘Serbia’s richest man’; there cannot have been much competition, except for the likes of the noted New York publisher Bill Jovanovich, of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Mr Panic’s company’s current worth, on which his own personal fortune – dollars 101.6m ( pounds 53m) on 3 July – is based, is, depending on the value of its stock and assets, dollars 460m. …

His company, founded in 1966, was originally called International Chemical and Nuclear, and was recently described by Business Week in America as being ‘mostly a ragtag collection of acquisitions, selling everything from generics to laboratory supplies’. ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc, as it became, is basically a holding company with subsidiaries, some profitable, some not.

The difficulty for Mr Panic and for the company is that its most profitable part is Yugoslav – the result of a deal a year ago when ICN’s drug and marketing subsidiary, SPI Pharmaceuticals Inc, bought 75 per cent of the country’s biggest drug company, Galenika. In six months, Galenika was accounting for 61 per cent of all of SPI’s revenues of dollars 364m, and 96 per cent of its dollars 53m net profit. Cynics on Wall Street, with access to Mr Panic’s long record of optimistic forecasts and spirited marketing, believe he may well have accepted his Yugoslav post at least partly to bolster Galenika, for the company, which, for instance supplies Yugoslavia with its penicillin, is dependent on the United States for two-thirds of its raw materials – supplies that are currently blocked by the sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia.

Galenika is part of a long-term plan to acquire pharmaceutical plants in Russia, Poland, Hungary and Czechslovakia. But there, too, there are problems, because (a) many Eastern European drug companies are operating on pirated clones of international pharmaceuticals, and (b) all of them have, to date, operated in a controlled economic environment, meaning that there is no way to ascertain their profitability, nor to know whether they will be allowed, in a market economy, to continue with their pirated drugs.

Even then, all might be well were it not for other troubles facing Mr Panic, who has a long record of stockholder revolts and battles with the government, not to speak of his company’s long-range debt, which requires some dollars 19m a year just to service.

These troubles go back a long way, and suggest that Mr Panic is stronger on salesmanship, acquisition, wheeling-and-dealing and political contacts than on research and development. His first failure was in 1970 with L-dopa, the Parkinson’s disease ‘miracle drug’ – until its severe side-effects became known. ICN invested heavily, and its stock price (which has varied between dollars 72 a share and dollars 1.50, highly volatile even for pharmaceutical stocks) fell sharply.

…

This is not to say that he is considered dishonest. Rather, he is described as ‘visionary’, ‘creative’ and a ‘juggler’. In many ways, then, Mr Panic is as American (an American of the Eighties) as he says. He is one of the many who seem to have parlayed something out of nothing. And in the primitive form of capitalism now obtaining in Eastern Europe, he may do the same again. Not too many of his stockholders, and not too many Wall Street analysts, however, would bet on it.”

(“Who is this man Milan Panic?: How did an American millionaire become Prime Minister of Yugoslavia? And what’s in it for him? Keith Botsford reports”, by Keith Botsford, July 23, 1992, The Independent)

As reported in the above July 1992 story, ICN stock had varied between a high of $72 U.S. and a low of $1.5 U.S. over the years, and not many of Milan Panic’s shareholders or Wall Street analysts would easily bet on him winning in business in his native home of Eastern Europe.

But Barry Sherman bet on Milan Panic for six months in 1973-1974, and with some luck came away with several hundred thousand dollars – after paying Empire Labs loans and debts – that he could use to start Apotex, and the rest is history.

Just after Sherman had cashed in his ICN stocks, ICN Canada president Morris Goodman fired him. In his memoir Sherman said Goodman was the “only person ever to fire me from a job”, but after Sherman’s death in December 2917 Goodman recalled Sherman once saying that the firing was “the best thing that ever happened to him”:

““He was a force by himself. Is it possible to replace Barry Sherman? Not in 24 hours,” said Morris Goodman, 86, who founded Pharmascience Inc. in Montreal in 1983 and has competed with Sherman ever since.

“He was a fierce competitor in the marketplace. And he was more aggressive in fighting Canadian patents and disqualifying them than I was.”

…

Goodman remembers being Sherman’s boss after his employer at the time, California-based ICN Pharmaceuticals, bought Empire from Sherman in the early 1970s. After about six months, he was ordered to fire Sherman and reluctantly did so.

“I fired him. He would tell me later that was the best thing that ever happened to him,” said Goodman. “He says, ‘Don’t worry about it, Morris, I was planning to quit anyhow.’ And he started Apotex (in 1974).”

“So we stayed competitors and more or less friends. He was a very competitive guy.””

(“Competitors and critics agree Apotex founder Barry Sherman will be tough to replace”, by Dan Healing, December 21, 2017, Toronto Star)

Well, not that simple for Sherman just to start a new company.

Sherman would have had to wait for five years before starting another generic drug company, had he not cleverly evaded ICN’s attention to a detail of his Empire Labs – namely Sherman and Ulster Limited – ownership. Sherman later boasted about his foresight and shrewdness in his memoir:

“There were only two flies in the ointment (pun intended).

The first was that the contracts drafted by ICN required that the vending shareholders agree to not compete for five years. I wanted to be free to go back into the same business. Fortunately for me, I was not a shareholder directly, but only through my holding company, Berman C. Sherman Limited. I hoped that, if we withheld the schedule of shareholders until the last minute, ICN would not pick up this technicality and I would thus not be personally bound not to compete. This worked out exactly as I hoped.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

That was when Sherman sold Empire Labs, hiding a key piece of info about his ownership – he did not own directly but Bernard C. Sherman Limited did – “until the last minute”, so that ICN would not realize that the five-year ban on “the vending shareholders” could not prohibit Sherman personally from returning to generic drug business right away.

This is an important point, because it seemed that there was similar shrewdness on Sherman’s part in handling the Empire Labs ownership provision for protecting the Winter children’ future interests described earlier.

Not only did Sherman sell Empire Labs within a few years so that the company was no longer under family control, but for many decades he did not tell his Winter cousins about this historical provision between him and Royal Trust, “until the last minute” in the sense that by the time they found out it might be too late for them to resort to legal means.

Sherman’s cousins “waited far too long to sue”,  was what Royal Trust asserted in 2007 when their lawsuit was filed:

“In court filings, Toronto-based Royal Trust denied the allegations and said the agreement expired long ago. The company added that the cousins have waited far too long to sue.

…

In their lawsuit, the cousins allege Mr. Sherman never told them about the agreement and “turned his back on the orphaned children.” They claim that the roots of Toronto-based Apotex can be traced back to Empire and that Mr. Sherman owed them royalties on products Mr. Winter developed.

In an interview, Mr. Sherman said the sale to ICN was straightforward and that he did not use Mr. Winter’s products at Apotex. Royal Trust said in court filings that since the sale involved a public company, ICN, the agreement relating to the children couldn’t be enforced. And none of the children were 21 at the time.

…

Around 2000, the cousins allege they first became aware of the sale agreement and began asking Mr. Sherman questions. In 2001, they went to court and won an order requiring Royal Trust to turn over documents relating to the deal.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As they alleged in their lawsuit, as above, Sherman’s Winter cousins were never told of the provision protecting their interests, until they became aware of it in around 2000 – by this time they were all around 40 years old, nearly doubling the age of 21 when they would have become eligible to work at Empire Labs.

And even at this later time, they still had to go to court to force the former Winter family estate trustee Royal Trust to give them the relevant documents.

But I should say that, other than the deceptive and everlasting avoidance of the Winter children protection provision – thus denying them the opportunity to build a better financial future through their late father’s former company, or another related to it – Barry Sherman did work hard and diligently in acquiring Empire Labs, developing generic drugs, increasing product sales, and later selling it to an American firm, along the way taking considerable risks as did his mother, i.e., the Winter boys’ aunt, in helping finance the venture – even though it was her late brother’s business and her son had once been a legal heir.

In other words, Sherman, and to some degree his mother, worked hard and risked much to make the success happen.

Sherman also began Apotex in a hard-working and well-planned manner, this time without Joel Ulster who would not take part further, and with only the several hundred thousand dollars he made from the Empire Labs sale; accordingly, he devised a ‘minimalist’ business plan:

“When I set out in late 1973 to found a new generic pharmaceutical company, I was acutely aware of the possibility of failure.

…

As the intended products were the very ones being sold by Empire Laboratories, Novopharm and others, there was no doubt that the market size was adequate to support a viable business.

As to efficiency, I was now, as a result of my experience at Empire, well qualified to design and manage an efficient pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprise. …

Joel Ulster had declined to join me in the new venture. Unless I was to take in other partners, which I did not wish to do, the only available funds would be the several hundred thousand dollars of profit that I had made on the sale of Empire to ICN.

I needed to design a business that would get to break-even with minimum equipment, minimum floor space, minimum personnel, and in minimum time. …

….

I estimated that it would be possible to have the initial product line developed, the required stability studies done, and sales initiated within a year of start up.

Phase 2, would be initiated when and only when significant sales were achieved. In Phase 2, all revenues derived from sales as well as borrowed funds would be invested in expansion of capacity and development of the new generic products requiring New Drug Submissions to FDD. The development of these new products would be done as aggressively as possible in order to build the company rapidly.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Following his “minimum” start-up plan, Sherman began Apotex with only two employees and 5,000 square feet of space, making only compressed tablets for a dozen or so generic versions of established drugs that could be sold cheaply by mail order and telemarketing:

“Business boomed, thanks to a combination of lucky timing and entrepreneurial savvy. Barry started with 5,000 square feet, employed two people and made only compressed tablets. He selected about a dozen established products with an eye to getting them to market quickly, then sold them cheaply by mail order and telemarketing. …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

By the 1990s, Apotex had grown to become Canada’s biggest generic drug company:

“… Further changes in the law during the Trudeau years allowed greater scope and removed some advantages of brand name companies. By the ’90s, there were a dozen generic drug companies in Canada. Apotex was the biggest.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

But the first two years of Apotex were actually quite difficult, as Sherman recalled in 1992 about “seeing bankruptcy on the horizon” after a couple of years; he credited Apotex’s eventual success to – just like the media and others have described him as, reviewed in Part 1 – being “very aggressive”:

“In 1974, Sherman founded Apotex with two employees in a 5,000-square-foot building on Ormont Dr. in Weston, right around the corner from today’s corporate headquarters on Signet Rd.

As Sherman recalled, the company that now employs more than 1,000 people in several locations had a rocky start.

“I remember after a couple of years in business we still weren’t selling anything,” Sherman said.

“Losses were getting up to $10,000 a month and I was seeing bankruptcy on the horizon. But just before we got to the end of our resources, we got some acceptances.”

The real breakthrough came with Propranolol, a generic version of the blood pressure treatment Indaral. Propranolol was approved in 1980.

More than a decade later, Apotex revenues are upwards of $250 million and with Sherman’s other companies, top $500 million, he said.

Sherman credits a corporate aggressiveness that mirrors his business personality.

“One of my primary strategies was to be very aggressive . . . We had to find some major products that we could do the research on quickly and be the first generic (producer), so we could convince pharmacies to stock our products.””

(Allan Thompson, February 11, 1992, Toronto Star)

The picture for the other side in Sherman’s family legal dispute had been much bleaker, and rather sad.

While Sherman was working hard to grow Empire Labs and then found and grow Apotex to national success, his late Uncle Louis Winter’s much younger sons fell into troubled lives at young ages.

After the deaths of their parents in 1965, following their late mother Beverley’s wish the Winter boys were adopted by a Jewish family:

“Before she died, Beverley Winter left instructions that her children not be adopted by any relatives. Her brother, Wayne Rockcliffe, still wonders why she didn’t choose him and his wife. At that time they had no children. They were willing to move into the Winter home and send the boys to Upper Canada College. But Beverley, a convert to Judaism, wanted her sons to be raised as Jews. Rockcliffe thinks that his sister “just didn’t want us to have what was hers. What a shame that was!” Beverley’s rabbi found a home for the boys with Martin Barkin, a highly regarded urologist, and his wife, Carol, a schoolteacher.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Beverley Winter’s brother Wayne Rockcliffe, as cited above, felt the Jewish adoption of the Winter sons was a sign of social snobbery toward him, was “a shame”.

Kerry and Dana became unhappy with their adoptive parents beginning in their early teens; they later turned to living life with illegal narcotic use and narcotic drug dealing; and Jeffrey suffered from bipolar mental problems:

“By 1973, the year Sherman sold Empire, Kerry, then 12 years old, and his closest brother, 11-year-old Dana, were extremely un­happy. They found Barkin difficult and their adoptive mother cold. By age 15, Kerry had left home and moved into a rooming house. He continued to attend school, where he was arrested for selling hash and marijuana and sentenced to six months in the Mimico Correctional Centre. In what would become a recurring theme, a relative came to his rescue. Uncle Wayne used his connections to get Kerry accepted into Ottawa’s tony Ashbury College. He graduated and took honours English at Richmond College in London, England, with fees paid by the family trust. He enrolled in San Diego State University for a masters but never finished. Instead, he travelled around the world; while in Peru, he began to experiment with crack cocaine and heroin.

Two of Lou’s other sons had their own problems. Jeffrey was diagnosed as bipolar and was in and out of treatment. And Dana, like Kerry, got into drugs. …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Recall that the provision for the sale of Empire Labs to Sherman and Ulster, reached with Royal Trust in 1967 to protect the Winter children’s interests, had two conditions that each of them had to meet in order to get the options of working at the company and acquiring 5% ownership: if the company was still under family control, and if each was capable of “being a responsible employee”.

In 2007 when the Winter sons launched the $1.5 billion lawsuit against Barry Sherman and Royal Trust, Royal Trust responded that the Winter children’s “significant personal issues”, including “criminal activity”, made them unsuitable to be involved in Apotex:

“Court filings and interviews with relatives reveal a bitterly divided family that has been beset by a series of troubles. One cousin, Dana, died of a heroin overdose in 1995 shortly after being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Royal Trust alleges in court filings that one reason the cousins could never become involved in Apotex was because of “significant personal issues, which included criminal activity, incarceration, serious drug addictions and mental health issues.””

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Uh, Dana died of a heroin overdose in 1995 after being charged with “conspiracy to commit murder”. That was clearly totally contrary to good behaviours expected of a “responsible employee”.

In his legal deposition on the lawsuit, Sherman also stated a similar point, namely that their troubled lives meant that none of the Winter sons could have become “a suitable employee at Apotex Inc.”:

“Mr. Sherman said in his filings that the arrangement concerning the children contained a number of conditions that became unenforceable when he sold the Winter business in 1972. Apotex was a completely separate entity, he added.

However, he vowed at the time to help the others. “I said also, ‘These are my cousins, and if some day if these boys want an opportunity or need help, I will be there,’” Mr. Sherman said in a deposition.

Mr. Sherman said in the deposition the children led troubled lives. “There is no way that any of these boys would have ended up being a suitable employee at Apotex Inc., but I have tried to just help them do what they wanted to do.””

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

After the Shermans’ deaths, in an media interview in early 2018 Kerry Winter also admitted that the brothers all led troubled lives at one point or another, Tim being an alcoholic and others similar to earlier mentioned:

“Winter’s childhood would prove abusive and damaging and though he has reconciled with his adoptive family, neither he nor his siblings emerged unscathed.

Eldest brother Tim is an alcoholic, Jeffery has been diagnosed bi-polar, Winter is open about his struggles with addiction to heroin and crack and Dana, died of a heroin overdose at 33.”

(“EXCLUSIVE: ‘My gut tells me he killed her. He asked me twice to whack her. He hated his wife.’ Billionaire and wife found hanged beside their pool was murder-suicide NOT a targeted hit their cousin tells DailyMailTV”, by Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

What a sad and disappointing, but perhaps not unfamiliar tale: an academically brilliant, business goal-driven and socially high-achieving Barry Sherman had these younger cousins, sons of his business-founder uncle and mentor, Louis Winter; after their parents’ early deaths, the cousins were made to live unhappily with a “difficult” and “cold” adoptive family, and their future went downhill ever since and even became unsalvageable, all the while when their cousin Sherman went from one success to another.

The Winter sons’ misery happened despite their late mother’s best intention, wanting her children raised as Jews; as quoted earlier from the Toronto Life article, the appropriate adoptive parents, “Martin Barkin, a highly regarded urologist, and his wife, Carol, a schoolteacher”, were found by her rabbi – despite her brother Wayne Rockcliffe’s feeling of it being ‘social snobbery’ toward him.

But wait. The name of the “highly regarded urologist” adoptive father, Martin Barkin, sounds a little familiar in my review thus far.

Sherman’s memoir had a mention the couple, quoted earlier:

“Lou and Beverley Winter left behind four sons, all of whom were subsequently adopted by Dr. Martin Barkin and his wife, Carole.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

There have been earlier instances of this name. In Part 1, a Dr. Martin Barkin, had been brought into the management of his company Deprenyl Research in 1992 by Morton Shulman, and ran the company in 1993 while Shulman was in bitter legal disputes with Barry Sherman and Apotex, here partially quoted again:

“Dr. Morton Shulman, officially retired but still proud father of Deprenyl Research Ltd., and Barry Sherman, president and owner of Apotex Ltd., are doing battle, armed with legal briefs, affidavits and reports from private investigators.

…

“This is a true crusade,” Shulman said in an interview in his Roncesvalles Ave. office. “I’ve got nothing to do (but fight with Sherman.) I’m delighted. It was a godsend that this came along.”

The battle started this spring, about the same time Shulman, 68, was being eased into retirement from Deprenyl Research, the company he founded to import a drug to combat Parkinson’s disease.

…

Shulman became his company’s best advertisement as the drug alleviated his symptoms for years. Now, his condition is deteriorating and his speech is slurred and movements are jerky.

Shulman’s son Geoffrey and Dr. Martin Barkin, who was brought in last year to run Deprenyl, now manage the company as it tries to expand its range of products and defend its Eldepryl turf.”

(“Shulman vs. Sherman; The drug entrepreneurs face off”, by Art Chamberlain, July 11, 1993, Toronto Star)

That couldn’t be the same person, could it, that the adoptive father of Barry Sherman’s Winter family cousins was also a top manager for the company of Morton Shulman, Sherman’s bitter public nemesis?

This Dr. Barkin was then the president of Shulman’s company, in 1994 changing its name to Draxis Health as well as its focus – away from the Parkinson’s disease drug Eldepryl as its Canadian market was threatened by Sherman’s aggressive push for a generic version, here partially as quoted in Part 1:

“Deprenyl Research Ltd. has taken some final steps to put the Morton Shulman era behind it.

The company emerged from its annual meeting yesterday with a new name – Draxis Health Inc. – a new corporate structure and a new share option program for senior management.

President Martin Barkin said the name change reflects the company’s new focus on products other than Eldepryl, a treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

Draxis recently lost a court battle and expects generic drug maker Apotex Ltd. to have a cheaper version of Draxis’s main product on the market later this year.”

(“Deprenyl change ends Shulman era; Company to be called Draxis and get new focus”, by Art Chamberlain, May 27, 1994, Toronto Star)

Then, in a 1997 news story about Draxis’s new drug for treating dogs for Cushing’s disease, this Dr. Martin Barkin was cited as its president and CEO, and as a “former Ontario deputy minister of health”, here again partially as in Part 1:

““We are very excited to have received the FDA approval,” said Martin Barkin, company president and chief executive officer.

…

“The United States is one-third of the worldwide pharmaceuticals market,” said Dr. Barkin, a former Ontario deputy minister of health. He sees Anipryl as Draxis’s first big step into the U.S. market.”

(“Stock in the news: Analysis Draxis looks to U.S. market for sales; Canine drug Anipryl launched south of border following FDA approval”, by Andrew Poon, June 11, 1997, The Globe and Mail)

Perhaps there were two Dr. Martin Barkins, namesakes, in the healthcare field in Toronto, Ontario. I should either confirm or disprove it.

Let’s see who Shulman company’s Dr. Martin Barkin was, per Shulman’s autobiography, Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up? – a book previously extensively cited in Part 1:

“Barkin is a Toronto urologist and medical academic whose CV rolls richly off the page: President and CEO of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, vice-chairman of the Ontario Hospital Association, president of the Ontario Council of Teaching Hospitals. Deputy minister of health for the Province of Ontario from 1987 to 1991, where he established, and was secretary of, the premier’s council on Health Strategy, and chaired the deputy cabinet committee on social policy.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

That Martin Barkin was also a Toronto urologist, like the Winter sons’ adoptive father. Well, the likelihood that they were the same person is high.

A prominent University of Toronto urologist Dr. Martin Barkin died on January 21, 2018 – a little over a month after the unexpected double murder of Barry and Honey Sherman. This is the one associated with Morton Shulman, because the long and distinguished record cited includes “President and Chief Executive Officer of DRAXIS Health Inc.”, and reads just like above from Shulman’s book – it also includes endowing the “Martin Barkin Chair in the Division of Urology at the University of Toronto”:

“Faculty of Medicine is remembering Dr. Martin Barkin, who passed away January 21, 2018 after a brief illness.

Dr. Barkin was a leader in academia, medical administration and business. He held the rank of Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto in both the Departments of Surgery and Health Administration. He also endowed the Martin Barkin Chair in the Division of Urology at the University of Toronto.

He was President and Chief Executive Officer of DRAXIS Health Inc., and served on the Boards of Viventia Biotech Inc. and Bone Care International, Inc. Dr. Barkin went to DRAXIS in 1992 from KPMG where he served as Partner and National Practice Leader for Health Care. Before that, he was Deputy Minister of Health for the Province of Ontario, Secretary of the Premier’s Council on Health and Chair of the Deputies’ Cabinet Committee on Social Policy for the Province of Ontario.

Dr. Barkin was President and Chief Executive Officer of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Vice Chair of the Ontario Hospital Association and President of the Ontario Council of Teaching Hospitals.

He served as Chief of the Division of Urology, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Professor of Surgery (Urology) at U of T and Project Director at the Research Institute of the Hospital for Sick Children as well as a member of the Grants Review Committee of the Medical Research Council of Canada.”

(“Remembering Dr. Martin Barkin”, March 2, 2018, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto)

There was an obituary in the National Post newspaper for a Martin Barkin, who died on that same day January 21, 2018. This Martin Barkin’s family profile fits that of the Winter sons’ adoptive father, namely he was a Jewish man, with his wife named Carol, and two of his sons named Tim and Jeffrey – as discussed, the other two Winter sons Kerry and Dana were unhappy with their adoptive family, Kerry left home at 15 and Dana died in 1995. At the same time, this Martin Barkin’s medical profile has a match with the other Martin Barkin in “the Martin Barkin Chair in Urological Research at U of T”:

“BARKIN, Martin

On Sunday, January 21, 2018 at Toronto General Hospital. Beloved husband of Carol. Loving father and father-in-law of Tim and Nancy Barkin, Jeffrey and Karen Barkin, Risa Barkin Worth, and Robert and Lisa Barkin. Dear brother and brother-in-law of Miriam Marks, and Sharon and Mel Shiffman. Dear brother-in-law of Joel and Catherine Kohm. Devoted grandfather of Jack, Ethan, Daniel, Slater, Jake, Halle, and the late Eden Worth. At Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel, 2401 Steeles Avenue West (3 lights west of Dufferin) for service on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at 1:00 p.m. Interment in the Temple Sinai section of Pardes Shalom Cemetery. Shiva 54 Old Forest Hill Road, Toronto. Memorial donations may be made to the Martin Barkin Chair in Urological Research at U of T, 416-978-4296, Sunnybrook Hospital Foundation, 416-480-4483 or to a charity of your choice.”

(“Martin BARKIN Obituary”, January 23, 2018, National Post)

Without a doubt, the two  Dr. Martin Barkin were the same man.

Wow, 15 years before a “family feud” between Barry Sherman and his late Uncle Louis Winter’s sons went public with their $1.5 billion lawsuit against him and former Winter family estate trustee Royal Trust – over his denying them an alleged 20% business ownership by reneging on an agreement reached 40 years earlier with Royal Trust – the Winter sons’ adoptive father had already become a top executive in the company of Morton Shulman, Sherman’s public nemesis in bitter legal disputes with him.

Dr. Barkin was much more than just a “highly regarded urologist” as the Toronto Life story said in the context of the Winter sons’ adoption. He was a pillar of the medical professional community and a leader in the field of healthcare in the city of  Toronto, the province of Ontario, and even nationally in Canada.

But Dr. Barkin’s record of adoptive parenting was rather disappointing, to say the least, and even terrible. Several of his adoptive Winter sons were very unhappy with him and his wife, one leaving home while in the mid-teen, and all descended into troubled lives.

Morton Shulman’s 1993 autobiography coauthored with writer Susan Kastner, while boasting much about his own achievements, mentioned Martin Barkin quite extensively and thus can be a source of information for understanding Barkin’s personality that could be relevant to the adopted sons’ experiences.

Shulman noted that Martin Barkin was known for his ego and temper:

“… Martin Barkin is a tall, portly and dignified 54-year-old with a distinguished background in medicine and health administration, and a tendency to flush dark red in temper. His interest in the business of medicine is as broad, and his ego as wide, as that of his diminutive new boss.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Barkin’s ego and temper could be one reason that some of his adopted sons found him “difficult” – as described in the Toronto Life story quoted earlier.

There is also an issue of possible parental negligence, on the part of someone with such an exceptionally high professional standard – negligence with serious and long-lasting ramifications for those adversely affected.

The provision reached between the Winter estate trustee Royal Trust and Barry Sherman in 1967, for the protection of the Winter children’s interests once each of them reached adulthood, would have been, and definitely should have been, made known to the adoptive parents, though it did not seem to have been conveyed to the adopted sons at any time – until they learned of it approaching their middle age in around 2000.

As quoted earlier from the Toronto Life story, some of the Winter sons’ unhappiness with the adoptive Barkin family began in their early-mid teens, as early as 1973. That was the time when Barry Sherman and his partner Joel Ulster were selling their company to the American firm ICN Pharmaceuticals following their successful run of Empire Labs taken over from the Winter estate, and Sherman was then about to start Apotex.

At that time, if those Winter boys were not well behaved from an adult’s standpoint, their prospect with Empire Labs, and subsequently Apotex, would not have looked good.

In any case, not long afterwards Sherman no longer kept in touch with them. What led to their losing touch, besides his late Uncle Lou’s old company no longer in the picture, was the passing of his mother, i.e., the Winter boys’ aunt who while alive, along with her son, had regularly visited them at the Barkins’ home:

“In her will, Mrs. Winter specified that she did not want the boys raised by relatives. She had converted to Judaism after marrying Lou and insisted that her four sons – Tim, Kerry, Jeffrey and Dana – be taken in by a Jewish family.

Within a year, Martin Barkin and his wife, Carol, became the boys’ guardians. Mr. Barkin was still studying to be a doctor, but the couple had already adopted two children, had a house in Toronto and the support of family, so they added the boys to their household.

…

… During his time at Empire, Mr. Sherman had dropped in on the Barkins with his mother – who used to give each boy crisp dollar bills for his birthday. But in the early 1970s, after the ICN deal closed and Mrs. Sherman died, the families lost touch.

“I wanted to help with the transition, so I visited them frequently when they were first adopted,” Mr. Sherman recalls. “We drifted apart. I had no reason to contact them. They were young and with their new family.”

And Mr. Sherman was about to have a family of his own. Just before selling Empire, he had met Honey Reich on a blind date. The attraction was almost
immediate – “call it love at second sight,” Mr. Sherman says – and the two were soon married by a judge.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Sherman and the Winter sons lost touch for over a decade until 1988 – I note that by this time they were all in their late 20s:

“The cousins and Mr. Sherman lost touch for more than 10 years after he started Apotex. It wasn’t until 1988 that contact was re-established. …”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Regardless of the fallacy of their adoptive father Martin Barkin, let’s see how Sherman related to his cousins after re-establishing contact at a time of, after all, their prime age for starting a working career.

Here is an account from the July 2008 Toronto Life story republished in December 2017:

“… One night in 1988, while eating at Bemelmans on Bloor, Dana bumped into a man named Stan Garden, who struck up a conversation. It happened that Garden had greatly admired Dana’s mother, Beverley (“beautiful, like Lana Turner”). At her deathbed, she asked Garden to keep an eye on the boys, but he’d lost touch. Now he could make amends. He got Barry’s number from someone he knew and phoned him. He told him about Dana’s situation and was invited to bring him to the Apotex office the following Saturday.

Until then, Barry knew nothing of the cousins’ struggles. Now he became involved in the lives of Dana, Jeff and Kerry, providing money and moral support. (Tim Winter, now a chef, never asked for help.) His motives? If you believe Barry, he was just trying to help Lou’s children. If you believe Kerry and Tim, he intended to make them dependent. That way, if they ever discovered the option agreement that could make them rich, they’d be too incapacitated or beholden to Barry to sue.

For whatever reasons, Barry bankrolled three of the Winter children in their ventures. Dana started a jewellery business; Jeff moved from a travel company into custom CDs; Kerry launched a construction company. Barry bought them homes and cottages, paid Visa bills and gave out allowances, lending millions on dubious security. Behind his back, Dana called him “Bank Sherman.””

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

A told above, a former family friend Stan Garden happened to meet Dana at a Toronto restaurant, Bemelmans, and reconnected him to Sherman. As told above, at that point Sherman “knew nothing of the cousins’ struggles”, i.e., troubles, and now he began to provide “money and moral support” to all of them – except the Winter adopted Tim who did not ask for help.

There was no mention of getting any of them a job at Apotex, which could be a start to potential ownership shares if Sherman had wanted to honour the old provision in some way.

Here is another account about their reconnecting, from the January 29, 2007 The Globe and Mail story:

“The cousins and Mr. Sherman lost touch for more than 10 years after he started Apotex. It wasn’t until 1988 that contact was re-established. Dana was facing trouble and turned to Mr. Sherman for financial help. Mr. Sherman gave him money, bailed him out of jail and helped him land various jobs. But Dana’s drug problem worsened and he died seven years later.

Soon Mr. Sherman was providing substantial support to the other children. Apotex had become a major generic drug company with roughly $1-billion in annual sales and Mr. Sherman, married with four children, was a billionaire.

He bought his cousins homes, cottages, financed various business ventures and gave them millions of dollars, according to court filings. Kerry received up to $15,000 a month for years, according to court filings. After Dana died, Mr. Sherman bought his widow a home and sent monthly cheques to her two children.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Whatever mention of the help Sherman provided, for getting out of trouble or for making a substantially better living, none was about any of them being offered a job at Apotex – even though they reconnected through Dana being brought to Sherman’s Apotex office by mutual family friend Stan Garden.

But I note that the state of life Dana was in when reconnected with Sherman was problematic, that his facing criminal trouble and wanting help in that context may have easily made Sherman determine the prospect to be dismal for someone like that to work in his company.

What Sherman did beginning in 1988 was consistent with his later statement in in a 2007 court deposition over the Winter cousins’ lawsuit, previously quoted:

“There is no way that any of these boys would have ended up being a suitable employee at Apotex Inc., but I have tried to just help them do what they wanted to do.”

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

In any case, at this time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the now grown-up Winter sons were unaware of the old Empire Labs provision that Sherman had agreed with Royal Trust in 1967 for their future benefits. As quoted earlier, years later after they found out, they alleged that the financial help from Sherman was intended to make them less likely to pursue the Empire Labs ownership matter, as earlier quoted:

“… His motives? If you believe Barry, he was just trying to help Lou’s children. If you believe Kerry and Tim, he intended to make them dependent. That way, if they ever discovered the option agreement that could make them rich, they’d be too incapacitated or beholden to Barry to sue.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

But there may have been another motive, one not yet probed by the media, in Sherman’s being so helpful and generous toward his Winter cousins – short of putting them on a path toward possible Apotex ownership interests.

They were the adopted sons of Dr. Martin Barkin who, according to Morton Shulman’s 1993 autobiography quoted earlier, was Ontario Deputy Minister of Health from 1987 to 1991 – during the time when Dana and Sherman reconnected in 1988.

My quite extensive review of his 1996 memoir has shown that Sherman had a sharp mind when it came to how persons in positions influential in or with the government could help and hurt businesses: he marvelled about the crucial legislative role of the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, about the expert legal help he repeatedly sought from the prominent attorney Willard Estey, a future Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada – at that point the son of a former Justice of that Court – and about Dr. Alan E. Dyer, Ontario Assistant Deputy Minister of Health who established the PARCOST (Prescriptions at Reasonable Cost) program in 1968.

There is no reason that in 1988 Sherman would have overlooked that point when his Winter cousins’ adoptive father, Dr. Martin Barkin whom he had known back in the years when at whose home he and his mother regularly visited the boys, was now Ontario’s Deputy Minister of Health, the second-highest official in the government health ministry – just below the Minister who must be a member of the legislature in the Canadian government systems.

That could be a valuable connection far outweighing any hassle from Dana’s criminal trouble, one that Sherman only needed to revive. As a comparison, during the early 1990s Morton Shulman was also trying to connect to Deputy Health Minister Dr. Martin Barkin to obtain government approval for his “Hungarian wonder drug” – a term quoted in Part 1 referring to deprenyl which he named Eldepryl – for treating Canadian Parkinson’s disease patients. Shulman made eight phone calls to Barkin, and Barkin “didn’t even return a single call”:

“Through the whole Deprenyl approval thing with Ontario I never met him. I kept phoning him and he wouldn’t return my phone calls. I phoned him eight times. He didn’t even return a single call. Finally I got pissed off and I wrote him and said, “Come on down, let’s fix this damned thing up.” He wouldn’t. Even at that point I didn’t meet him.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As recalled by Shulman, during the years when Barkin was the deputy health minister, Shulman contacted him many times and Barkin never bothered to respond.

During this period, Barry Sherman was ‘luckier’ in the sense that he had the opportunity to, and did, shower Barkin’s adopted sons with all kinds of help, worth “millions of dollars” as quoted earlier.

But unlike Shulman eventually, Sherman did not recruit Barkin to work for his company, or if he did it did not happen and that I can understand: Barkin’s gong to Apotex could revive the decades-old, conveniently forgotten issue of the Empire Labs ownership provision and potentially cost Sherman up to 20% of his now billion-dollar company Apotex.

Barry Sherman’s holding back was Morton Shulman’s gain.

But one may say that Shulman’s small brand-name drug company Deprenyl Research was no Canada-leading generic drug maker Apotex, which could be too challenging a pharmaceutical giant for Martin Barkin.

The answer, besides in the different types of management positions there exist in a large corporation, is that Barkin’s academic and professional reputation was no inferior to Sherman’s – even if as a billionaire Sherman was much wealthier.

Be it in his academic study years or in his professional career, Barkin was excellent like Sherman, here as quoted from a 1990 article by Dr. Brian Goldman:

“… Now in his 30th year as a physician, his career accomplishments are impressive. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1960 – he shared the Gold Medal that goes to the top student with a classmate – Barkin specialized in urology, completing his postgraduate training at Harvard University and in England. He returned to Canada to practise urology at Sunnybrook, where he quickly rose to the top of his field.

As a researcher, he developed innovative techniques for correcting anatomical abnormalities of the genitourinary system. An expert in this relatively narrow and highly specialized field, he was courted internationally as a consultant, author and lecturer.

His career as an administrator moved on a parallel path.

While serving as CEO at Sunnybrook he turned the hospital’s annual operating deficit into a surplus within 1 year. Earlier, he was a well-connected member of Ontario’s medical elite, serving as chairman of the Ontario Council of Teaching Hospitals and on several committees of the OMA and the District Health Council of Metropolitan Toronto. Somewhere in the middle of these career twists and turns, Barkin found time to own and operate a company that developed computer software for physicians’ offices.”

(“What makes Martin Barkin run?”, by Brian Goldman, MD, 1990, 142 (6), Canadian Medical Association Journal)

As cited above and earlier, whereas Sherman won a Wilson Medal and a Gold Medal from the University of Toronto, Barkin, a few years more senior, won a Gold Medal as well; and whereas Sherman excelled at his graduate studies at MIT, Barkin did so not only at Harvard – also a world-leading academic institution in Boston in the United States – but also in England; and whereas Sherman led his Apotex to become the leading generic drug company in Canada, Barkin rose to the top of his medical field of Urology internationally, in addition to holding various leadership positions in the healthcare field in Toronto and Ontario, and even owned and operated a computer software company for medical applications.

Besides working at the helm of the healthcare field in Ontario, Barkin also had an influential reputation in the healthcare field in North America, here – like the previous quote – as reported in 1990 by Dr. Goldman in the Canadian Medical Association Journal:

“It was yet another juicy rumour. Once again, Dr. Martin Barkin was supposed to be quitting his job as Ontario’s deputy minister of health to head for greener pastures south of the border. There have long been rumours that Barkin, perhaps the province’s most controversial physician, would be tapped to head Humana, the giant American health care conglomerate.

In typical fashion, he outdid the rumour. CMAJ has learned that George Bush, the president of the United States, has spoken to Barkin. The topic? Would Barkin help him create a national health insurance plan for Americans.

Doctors at the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) and hospital administrators across the province listen to the Barkin rumours with interest. They wonder if the man who brought the saying “Just say no!” to hospital budgets is finally going to go away and leave them alone.

At least for now he won’t be, but some say it took a last-minute plea from Premier David Peterson to keep Barkin in Ontario. In any case, the game of rumour and denial continues. Love him or hate him – they all respect him – Barkin watchers across the country agree that he is the most fascinating character to enter the Canadian health care scene in years.”

(Brian Goldman, MD, 1990, Canadian Medical Association Journal)

See, according to rumours circulating among medical professionals, the American healthcare giant Humana wanted to recruit Barkin to be its top leader, and according to information obtained by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, then U.S. President George Bush had spoken with Barkin about helping him “create a national health insurance plan for Americans”.

Wow, anything was possible for Dr. Martin Barkin, “the most fascinating character to enter the Canadian health care scene in years”!

But what were rumoured or even spoken were not necessarily what happened. Soon President Bush was out of a job and there has been no ‘Bush Healthcare’ for Americans; and in the end, Dr. Barkin did not go to the American giant Humana but the small Canadian Deprenyl Research.

In any case, Barkin’s joining Deprenyl Research was a major coup, a steal, for Morton Shulman.

But what made it happen, besides Barkin having left his government post, was Shulman’s offering Barkin stock options worth potentially multi-million dollars:

“I pursued Martin Barkin for three years, then persuaded him to come to work for me in half an hour. I told him in a year I would make him very, very rich.

…

He got stock to come into the company, and an option on a million shares at $7. He’ll get very rich from this. I think in five years he’ll be a multi-millionaire.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

In addition to the large stock option offer Barkin was given the job of executive vice president, and he came only after reaching agreement that he would be promoted to president and Chief Operating Officer in three months; that was at a great time in March 1992, when the stock price of Shulman’s Deprenyl Research had recently had a record high, and old and new media glories came upon Shulman:

“Well then. Can 1992 possibly be anything but even purer gold than the year before?

Surely not.

In the beginning, all augurs well. Canguard backs off – drops plans for its undercutting generic. The stock cruises at the $21 mark; before the month is out, it will hit a psychedelic high of $23.50 Canadian. And the company has expanded. There’s a series of brand new horses racing for profit carrying the colors of Deprenyl Research. There is DAHI: Deprenyl Animal Health; and there is Bone Health, with a new be-all and end-all osteoporosis medication in trials – both US subsidiaries of Deprenyl Research. There is another subsidiary, Memorial, conducting trials for Alzene, for treatment of Alzheimer’s. And soon there will be Deprenyl USA – DUSA – with its 5-ALA PDT; a new photodynamic treatment being tested for skin cancer, quietly rumoured to have spectacular possibilities for other cancer treatment as well.

And a lengthy negotiation is on the point of paying off – with a gold-plated Dr. Respectable to head up the burgeoning company and counterbalance Dr. MortyMouth.

Morty woos and wins as executive vice president of Deprenyl Research Dr. Martin Barkin, the eminent ex-deputy minister of health for Ontario.

…

In March, 1992, Barkin agrees to join the jolly ship Deprenyl as second officer if he is moved up to president and chief operating officer in June. it is a fascinating – not to say demonically inspired – joining of forces. …

…

When Morty first began his recruiting campaign, Barkin had moved from government to the very bosom of the private sector as partner at the heavyweight brokerage firm of Peat Marwick Stevenson and Kellogg, as National Practice Leader for Health Care.

While at Deprenyl he will continue to chair Peat Marwick’s Health Care Advisory Committee. He is frequently called upon by the editorial boards of both the Star and The Globe & Mail to expound on questions of health management, policy and marketing.

…

Remembers Barkin: “He called my partner at Peat Marwick and told him, ‘I want to hire him as president of my company.’” …

…

On March 14 the stock closes up 25 cents, at $17.50. On March 15 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation announces Wojeck is back on TV, in a new two-hour special.

That day brings a major newspaper profile of Shulman, with a glowing account of Deprenyl’s profit picture: shares that have “gone up 18 times and split twice, despite the naysaying of skeptics,” a company which with its subsidiaries has a market value of “almost half a billion dollars.” A pipeline of exciting products, including Alzene, and the exciting new Canadian discovery ALA PDT, the new photodynamic therapy for skin cancer uncovered by Geoff at that dermatology conference in Kingston.

…

So mesmerized is the reporter that she hurries back to her office to persuade all her friends to snap up the DUSA, quicker than quick. …”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As told, Deprenyl Research’s stock price reached a record high of $23.50 Canadian dollars in late January 1992, and was at $17.50 on March 14, in the month when Martin Barkin joined the company, with the option to buy one million shares of the stock at $7 – it meant Barkin could make $10.50 per share or a total of $10.50 million if he could purchase and sell those stocks right away.

Also as told, on March 15 the CBC announced a TV re-airing of the show Wojeck – as mentioned in Part 1 it was a TV drama inspired by Shulman’s past work as the chief coroner of Ontario and Toronto – and a major newspaper profile of Shulman also appeared, in which he boasted that his company and its subsidiaries now had a market value of “almost half a billion dollars.”

“Almost half a billion dollars” was not quite Apotex and Barry Sherman’s billionaire status, but Morton Shulman’s company was very promising in its market showing, even though it had only one proven drug deprenyl, named Eldepryl, for treating Parkinson’s disease – discussed in details in Part 1 – and other drugs only at various planning and research stages within the company’s subsidiaries – the person Geoff mentioned in the above story was Shulman’s son Geoffrey Shulman.

Very exciting, and even the reporter doing the newspaper profile of Shulman went to “persuade all her friends” to buy the stock shares of Deprenyl Research’s U.S. subsidiary DUSA.

But as it has been shown in the story of Sherman’s getting ICN Pharmaceuticals stocks for selling Empire Labs and holding them for six months in 1973-1974, and in the story of the volatile ventures of ICN’s owner, Serbian-American tycoon Milan Panic, these stocks were not cash and anything could happen to their value over a period of time.

Like those businesses, Deprenyl Research’s business was also volatile.

Shulman’s propensity for publicly bragging about his business soon led to serious media criticisms of Eldepryl’s high brand-name price; the company’s stock value went into rapid decline soon after Barkin’s joining:

“… But underneath it all, the ground is crumbling away, and the January cloudlet builds to a thunderhead.

…

Indeed, in the third week of March, seemingly out of the blue, James Reynolds, key West Coast analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, had flown in the face of his New York vice president David Saks’ unabated devotion to all things Morty. Reynolds issued a sell advisory on Deprenyl stock.

Morty announces he is furious, hints Deprenyl may take the West Coast guy before the regulatory authorities.

It doesn’t happen. Deprenyl stock sinks $2.62 to $15.25, flutters back up to $16.50. The ever-faithful David Saks continues to recommend Deprenyl.

But by the beginning of April, there has been a $10 slide from the January heights, and things start to get nasty.

A huge front-page Toronto Star piece in mid-April luridly paints Morty as Dr. Venal: rich, greedy and scamming the poor with unconscionable pill profits.

“Angry Parkinson’s patients pay $2.31 for 6c pill” the headline shouts. Morty is said to be shamelessly blocking production of cheaper generic versions while sitting on “a whopping $10-million before-tax profit” and displaying hypocritical hypersensitivity to criticism, “repeating over and over again he isn’t in the drug business to make money but to help people, followed with several phone calls and faxes of documents showing evidence of his good works.”

A Newfoundland Parkinson’s sufferer is found to have complained about Eldepryl’s price to the Patent Medicine Prices Review Board. “Why,” the lady rages, “should we have to beg some rich man in Toronto for something that shouldn’t be that expensive anyway?”

…

Here, the reporter briefly explains that Deprenyl is only doing exactly the same as every other pharmaceutical company. The difference is that the big private companies can keep it secret.

…

“The only thing different about Deprenyl is that the true costs – and true profits – have slipped into the public eye. It’s only because Deprenyl Research was a new company with a single product that the factors behind the price of Eldepryl could be deduced by patients – and reporters.”

The message in all this: you might say that Morty was once again paying the price he has paid all his life, for the same reason he has always paid it. He’s getting zapped for letting it all hang out.

…

The newspaper is obliged to print first a correction, then a retraction and an apology for two major factual errors which alter the thrust of the whole story: “… Those figures were incorrect. The company says the 36c it pays for a deprenyl pill does not include its overhead and administration costs. According to the company’s annual report, the after-tax profit on pharmaceuticals is only 15%. The Star regrets the errors and apologizes to Dr. Shulman.”

Yes, the bloom is off.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As cited above, in March 1992 just one week after a major newspaper profile citing Shulman’s company as having a market value of “almost half a billion dollars”, a key West Coast stock market analyst recommended that investors sell – instead of buy – the stock, and by the beginning of April his company’s stock price had a “$10 slide” from its January heights – its record high in late January being $23.50 as cited earlier, and so the stock price by early April was only around $13.50.

Then, as told above, in mid-April in a Toronto Star story both a Parkinson’s disease patient and the reporter accused Shulman of making excessive profit on a cheap drug: “patients pay $2.31 for 6c pill”. It turned out to be inaccurate, because the cost was 36 cents/pill buying from the foreign manufacturer but that still did not include the company’s operating costs.

Still, at $2.31/pill a drug was being sold at a high price over 6.416 times of its purchase cost of 36 cents/pill; the real costs for the company depended on how much the operating costs were, as the profit was as reported, “a whopping $10-million before-tax profit”.

On the other hand, the above story also shows that there was something too ‘lofty’, if one can put it that way, that a company cheaply importing a foreign drug to sell and getting a “$10-million before-tax profit” – as surprising as the number was – while its other drug projects were not yet productive, could be worth “almost half a billion dollars”.

Also significant in the Toronto Star story was the accusation of Shulman “shamelessly blocking production of cheaper generic versions”. As reviewed in detail in Part 1, Shulman and his company would soon be in fierce legal battles in 1993 against Barry Sherman and Apotex, who wanted to introduce a much cheaper generic version of Shulman’s brand-name drug.

As told in Shulman’s autobiography, in 1992 after joining Deprenyl Research, Martin Barkin immediately played a sobering role to provide clarity over business publicity, trying to calm down the volatility:

“There is news of another major breakthrough. On April 22 Eldepryl is approved by HPB for treatment of early Parkinson’s; it is no longer officially restricted, as in the past, to be prescribed in conjunction with other anti-Parkinson’s drugs for advanced stages of the disease.

This marks several large steps forward. …

Martin Barkin projects a doubling of revenue over next 24 months. He announces revenues of $13.9 million for the year ended December 31, 1991, and a profit of $6.5 million.

In May, the company announces the launch of its new star project. Bone Health, its new Massachusetts-based drug subsidiary, has begun a major clinical trial of its osteoporis drug One-Alpha D(2).

Results will be published in September. But the prognosis is so promising that, on May 22, Deprenyl Research issues to its investors a dividend in the form of one Bone Health warrant for each Deprenyl share. The warrant is good for the purchase of one Bone Health share for 30 cents, from March 1, 1993 to May 7, 1993; or may be traded at that time for 20 cents cash.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As in the above, there was good news in late April 1992, that the company’s main drug Eldepryl was approved for broader use, the new U.S.-based subsidiary Bone Health showed early promise in its drug trial, and Deprenyl shareholders were issued options to buy the new Bone Health shares or get cash dividends.

The company’s 1991 revenue and profit figures announced by Barkin, in my understanding, clarified over the newspaper reported “a whopping $10-million before-tax profit” and the company’s correction that “the after-tax profit on pharmaceuticals is only 15%” – as in the second last quote above.

I note that $6.5m profit on $13.9m revenue was much higher profit than the 15% after-tax profit “on pharmaceuticals” on a revenue that was not large.

The seemingly conflicting figures would imply that part of the revenue, and more importantly most of the profit, did not come from pharmaceuticals.

As quoted earlier, as planned Barkin would soon become president and COO in June 1992.

Shulman’s 1993 autobiography continued to describe more media criticisms in August 1992.

One critical story, in the Wall Street Journal, reported that Shulman’s company were selling a new Alzheimer’s drug Alzene that had not been officially approved, by mail to the U.S.:

“And now, the storm begins to break.

The Wall Street Journal returns to the scene with a vengeance, turning both barrels on Alzene, and Morty, in the last week of August, 1992.

 

PROBLEMATIC PILLS

An unapproved drug for Alzheimer’s gets a big marketing push. Proof Alzene helps is scant but that doesn’t deter Deprenyl Research Ltd. Promoters defend methods.

Many Alzheimer’s researchers doubt that Alzene, which hasn’t been approved for sale in the U.S., helps the dozens of U.S. families who buy it by mail through a crack in U.S. import laws. But nobody doubts the promotional prowess of two young drug companies, a flamboyant Canadian entrepreneur and an obscure Israeli inventor that are touting the drug and investments in its prospects.

. . . Most users buy the pills on faith from Deprenyl Research Ltd., a small Toronto drug company. . . .

…

It seems Morty has been cutting through layers in his favorite time-tested ways to get Alzene into U.S. circulation ahead of the official approval process. There have been letters to American neurologists from Deprenyl Research, that warn “overwhelming demand” for the drug has caused a shortage.” The FDA is no happier about this Mortyescapade than was Canada’s Health Protection Branch before them. It issues a reprimand ordering Deprenyl Research to stop promoting Alzene. Morty again denies exaggerating or law breaking. He faxes the FDA to assure them of the potential efficacy of Alzene.

…

He stops sending letters to U.S. doctors; asserts, “I have done nothing more than inform my shareholders of events that might affect the stock.”

The formula for having it both ways was working fine, for the second drug in a row. The publicity will speed the approvals process while letting Deprenyl Research do business by dealing the drug during the pre-approvals gap. For about a year before Eldepryl was approved for sale in the U.S. Deprenyl Research has sold it to American patients through the mail.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Uh-uh, Shulman seemed to be doing what he accused Sherman of doing illegally.

As in Part 1, Barry Sherman and his brother-in-law Allen Barry Shechtman had been selling Apotex drugs by mail since 1989, with magazine advertising by a Bahamas-based company, to U.S. consumers without the necessary prescriptions or approvals; it led to an FBI criminal investigation in 1993 and a $500,000 fine on one of Sherman’s companies in 1995.

Also as in Part 1, responding to Sherman’s pressure in 1990 to let Apotex develop and sell a generic version of his Parkinson’s disease drug Eldepryl, Shulman hired private detectives to investigate Sherman’s businesses, and discovered Sherman’s mail selling of drugs, which Shulman viewed as illegal.

Now it turned out that Shulman also sold drugs by mail to the U.S. without proper approvals. That was hypocritical, was it not?

Selling a medication before receiving official approval was obvious problematic as reviewed in Part 1 in Sherman’s case. But here Shulman seemed to suggest that promoting a drug by sending a letter to U.S. doctors, but without public advertising that Sherman’s companies had been doing, would not be illegal.

Another critical media story in August 1992, in The Globe and Mail, revealed that Sherman’s company was actually doing currency trading on a unusually large scale, much larger in monetary amount than its pharmaceutical operations:

“The Journal story runs Tuesday, August 25, 1992; the next day, Wednesday the 26th, the Globe reprints the whole thing on the front of its Business section.

It is not a happy time in Deprenylville.

Dan Westell of the Globe follows with a close look at Morty’s dollar-hedging activities.

He reports that Deprenyl’s currency transactions top $514 million in a six-month period; that Danny Gordon, Deprenyl’s broker at currency traders Friedberg Mercantile Group affirms: “He’s on top of things. He’s on the phone with me almost before I’m in the office.”

Deprenyl, which reported revenue of $7.3 million in the six months ended June 30, did more than $514 million worth of securities transactions in the same period.

Martin Barkin says Dr. Shulman deals with Deprenyl’s investments and then reports back on what he has done.

“We’re not gambling on foreign exchange,” Dr. Shulman says. “We hedge our net assets [of somewhere between $5 million and $20 million] because Deprenyl expects the Canadian dollar to fall.”

This open avowal sits uneasily. Canada is stumbling towards a national referendum that is being bannered as the harbinger of its almost certain disintegration.

…

But for Morty, as for hedgers and floggers the world over, the shaky economic and political situation comes to a focuspoint in the gleaming golden four-figure number that shows the downticking state of the Canadian dollar. As far as he’s concerned politics is bunk, politicians are bonkers, and he couldn’t be happier. Each tick is worth $1,000, every time the buck falls a point.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

A truer picture was revealed in the above story. Back in March when Barkin joined, Deprenyl Research with its subsidiaries was touted by Shulman as worth “almost half a billion dollars” on the stock market as earlier quoted, but now in this August story its real net assets was revealed to be “somewhere between $5 million and $20 million” – much, much smaller.

Moreover, Shulman was using this modest amount of assets to play the currency market, buying and selling by hedging on the Canadian dollar, raking up a huge amount of transactions – $514 million within 6 months – because of the frequency of his trading.

So how much did Shulman’s company make from pharmaceuticals, really, versus from other trading activities such as currency hedging?

Barkin again provided some clarity by announcing more financial figures, also pointing out that Shulman talked too much at the detriment of the company, while the company’s stock price continued to drop to $7.63:

“DEPRENYL PRICE SLIDES AFTER CRITICAL STORY IN U.S. PAPER

The stock dropped 38 cents to $7.63, bringing to 9 per cent the decline so far this week. The tumble began Tuesday after publication of a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal that was critical of Deprenyl and its marketing of Alzene. . . .

 

Martin Barkin has used all his political savvy to smooth the waters. “The only thing that’s happened in the last two weeks is that Morty has been the subject of news articles,” he tells reporters. Barkin also issued a press release which took the unusual step of predicting Deprenyl’s pre-tax net income from pharmaceutical operations would be $1 million in the 3rd quarter compared with $728,000 in the same quarter a year earlier.

But notwithstanding, analyst Michael James, Health Care analyst with Montreal-based Dlouhy Investments, expects the stock price to keep falling . . .”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As Barkin reported, Deprenyl’s pre-tax net income from pharmaceutical operations was $728,000 in the 3rd quarter of 1991, and would be $1 million in the same quarter of 1992 so there was steady progress.

On the other hand, recall that Barkin had in April announced the total revenue in 1991 as $13.9 million and profit $6.5 million, and a Toronto Star story reported “a whopping $10-million before-tax profit”; and if one multiplies $728,000 by 4 as an estimate of the full year pre-tax profit, it would come to $2.912 million, suggesting that only about 29% of the company’s pre-tax profit came from pharmaceutical operations – while the vast majority, around 70%, came from other trading activities unrelated to medicine.

Recall as quoted in Part 1, Shulman was sometimes accused of “stock manipulation”:

“… Then he turns the drug, Deprenyl, into a pharmaceutical company that at one time was worth $100 million. Along the way he is accused of stock manipulation, quackery and worse. …”

(“Another look at what makes Morty run”, by Edward Trapunski, January 15, 1994, Toronto Star)

As reviewed, Shulman was boasting a market value of far more than “$100 million” cited above, but “almost half a billion dollars” for his company and its subsidiaries. While the facts reviewed did not constitute “stock manipulation”, they did show an unhealthy degree of preoccupation with, even addiction to, the stock and currency markets – for someone who claimed his company to be at the forefront of developing and marketing new medical drugs.

September 1992 marked the sixth month of Martin Barkin joining Morton Shulman’s company since March 1992.

In September, two major international pharmaceutical companies ended their cooperation with Deprenyl Research. One came as a huge disappointment when the U.S. subsidiary Bone Health’s promising new drug trial, mentioned earlier, was abandoned by the leading brand-name drug company SmithKline Beecham:

“On the 5th comes the announcement that Purdue Frederick, the Canadian division of a U.S. drug company, is ending an 18-month-old agreement to market Eldepryl in Canada.

The official announcement says this is a mutual decision [with Deprenyl Research] because Deprenyl Research is acquiring the expanded sales staff it needs to market all of its own growing product pipeline.

On September 18th Bone Health gets a huge kick in the shin.

SmithKline Beecham announces it is dumping One-alpha D(2) because it feels preliminary data from the clinical trials did not demonstrate a significant difference between patients treated with the drug and those taking placebo. SmithKline transfers its marketing rights back to Bone Care International.

Deprenyl has a 14 per cent interest in Bone Care and holds 381,500 shares of Lunar Corp., the U.S. pharmaceutical company associated with Bone Health. The announcement knocks Deprenyl shares from just above $7 to $6.63. The future of Bone Health is pronounced “uncertain.”

If Deprenyl investors bail out of their Bone Health warrants, it could cost Deprenyl $3.4 million, instead of the $5 million it was counting on reaping. On September 19th, Deprenyl shares hit a 52-week low of $5.38.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Recall that Shulman had offered Barkin 1 million shares of stock options at $7 per share to get the latter to join the company in March. By now in September, those stock options were essentially worthless because one could just buy the shares on the stock market at the cheaper price of $5.38.

Barkin again blamed it on Shulman for getting too much publicity. As the stock value continued to slide, a special company board meeting was convened and a decision was made for Barkin to replace Shulman as the CEO, with Shulman remaining as company board chairman. Barkin immediately reined in the other trading activities and kept the company’s focus on medical drugs:

“Barkin tells the press the company is “paying the price for Morty’s seeking – and getting – so much publicity. Deprenyl sure gets a lot of press attention,” Barkin says ruefully.

The company has decided to “tone down its image notably by keeping its chairman and founder, the flamboyant Morton Shulman, out of the limelight. “There is no question that Morty Shulman has tried to keep the media eye on this company and that has not always been the best policy for this or any other company.”

Barkin added that the evidence on which SmithKline based its pullout from Bone Health is “pretty flimsy.”

“Two days later Deprenyl shares clunk down to $4.70, totter back to $5.38. DUSA lurks around $6.75. Chief Financial Officer Ed Foster emphasizes the company is still in great shape financially, well able to come up with cash to redeem the Bone Health warrants if need be.

On September 23rd a special Deprenyl Research Limited board meeting is called.

…

The official press release comes the next day: “Martin Barkin Named CEO of Deprenyl Research. Morton Shulman to Remain Chairman.”

…

Barkin tells reporters there will be a brake on Morty’s currency activities, which will be supervised by two outside advisors. … And, “While Shulman’s health is good, the company is definitely looking at succession planning. We accept the fact that Morty is 67 years old . . . and we are taking a look at succession planning as it deals with his son Geoff.”

The king is dead; long live the kings.

The shares close up 13 cents that night: $5.50. The industry analysts express their approval. Confidence reigns, sort of.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

It had been a nightmarish six months for Martin Barkin; and now he was finally the man in charge.

But just when he thought there was a big CEO salary for him now, he found out that Shulman had literally lived on the stock market and had no CEO salary – a discovery that would turn Barkin’s face “dark red in temper” like described earlier about his ego and temper:

“The day after Dr. Barkin is elevated to CEO, he sends a letter to Shulman asking to have Shulman’s salary as CEO diverted over to himself. Shulman gleefully replies that he is happy to turn it over in full, “But, as I have never drawn a salary as CEO, it will not be of much help to you”. Morty personally takes the letter over to Barkin. Barkin reads it, turns red in the face and rips it into little pieces.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

With the dust settled, Martin Barkin had an unlucky 6 months of the stock market compared to Barry Sherman and Joel Ulster in 1973-1974, who held for 6 months the shares they had gotten from selling Empire Labs to the famous Milan Panic’s ICN Pharmaceuticals and watched the ICN stock go up and down, but in the end did cash in at about the same price as when they first received them – before the stock value really sank like Deprenyl Research’s that rendered Barkin’s stock options worthless.

As reviewed in Part 1, less than two years later under Barkin, the company lost its legal battle with Apotex over Sherman’s plan for a generic version of Deprenyl Research’s drug Eldepryl.

Then in May 1994, the company changed its name to Draxis Health – taking one of the “final steps to put the Morton Shulman era behind it” – and most likely by this later time enhanced share options were made available for Barkin, as reported in a Toronto Star story quoted earlier and in Part 1:

“The company emerged from its annual meeting yesterday with a new name – Draxis Health Inc. – a new corporate structure and a new share option program for senior management.”

(“Deprenyl change ends Shulman era; Company to be called Draxis and get new focus”, by Art Chamberlain, May 27, 1994, Toronto Star)

Despite the burst of the big stock bubble in his first six months, Barkin continued as the company’s president and CEO until the end of 2007 when he retired; by that time the company was into completely different pharmaceutical products and was a global supplier for those specialized ones:

“DRAXIS Health Inc. (TSX: DAX) (Nasdaq: DRAX) announces that Dr. Martin Barkin today informed the board of directors that he will retire as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company effective December 31, 2007.

Dr. Barkin joined the senior management of DRAXIS in 1992. Over the last fifteen years, he has been instrumental in guiding the Company through a period of significant growth from a small Canadian pharmaceutical marketing company to its current position as a provider of specialized pharmaceutical and radiopharmaceutical products in markets globally.

…

DRAXIS Health, through its wholly owned operating subsidiary, DRAXIS Specialty Pharmaceuticals Inc., provides products in three categories: sterile products, non-sterile products and radiopharmaceuticals. …”

(“DRAXIS Health Inc. Announces Retirement of Dr. Martin Barkin as President and Chief Executive Officer”, October 31, 2007, Cision)

While my review above of the history gives a good glimpse into Martin Markin’s joining and succeeding Morton Shulman at the small pharmaceutical company the former Ontario Chief Coroner founded, an intriguing question remains.

Did Shulman recruit Barkin to his company just because Barkin was a distinguished medical professional, healthcare leader and former provincial deputy health minister, or that it had something to do with Barkin being the adoptive father of the Winter family cousins of Barry Sherman?

Sherman was one of Shulman’s most hated enemies, as he told the media to that effect in 1993, quoted earlier and in Part 1:

“This is a true crusade,” Shulman said in an interview in his Roncesvalles Ave. office. “I’ve got nothing to do (but fight with Sherman.) I’m delighted. It was a godsend that this came along.”

…

Shulman’s son Geoffrey and Dr. Martin Barkin, who was brought in last year to run Deprenyl, now manage the company as it tries to expand its range of products and defend its Eldepryl turf.”

(“Shulman vs. Sherman; The drug entrepreneurs face off”, by Art Chamberlain, July 11, 1993, Toronto Star)

Most likely, at some point in time Martin Barkin and his wife Carol had learned of the 1967 provision between Royal Trust and Sherman for protecting their adopted Winter boys’ future financial interests, which Sherman conveniently dodged in 1973 when he sold Empire Labs. By this time in 1992-1994, Sherman had reacquainted with the Winter cousins, and no doubt with Barkin, and showered the cousins with help worth millions of dollars but apparently did not raise the issue of that old provision.

Morton Shulman, a former chief coroner and politician, could also have learned about that provision through the private investigation he had done on Sherman’s various businesses, previously discussed in Part 1.

If Shulman’s invitation for Barkin to join his company had the motive in mind of politically countering Sherman, then Barkin could well have a compatible motive, namely using Shulman as a leverage to get more from Sherman – given Barkin’s own masterful experience playing politics as a leadership figure in the healthcare field and in government.

As discussed earlier, Barkin was as bright and as competitive as Barry Sherman. The 1990 Canadian Medical Association Journal’s profile of Barkin, cited earlier, also portrayed him as a shrewd and money-interested man with his own agenda:

“Before joining the government his career was built on enlightened self-interest. As a urologist he was a staunch defender of extra-billing, charging up to 10 times more to reverse a vasectomy than the slightly more than $200 now paid by the provincial health insurance plan.

…

Doctors don’t hesitate to complain either. “The biggest knock against Martin that I am aware of is that he really doesn’t want to listen to anybody else”, says one high-ranking OMA officer. “He has his prearranged agenda, which he’s going to blow through, come hell or high water. . . . He is undoubtedly the Machiavellian mind behind the attempts to force physicians into alternate payment schemes.””

(Brian Goldman, MD, 1990, Canadian Medical Association Journal)

As told, Barkin liked to make a lot more money whenever he could. Thus, if he viewed Sherman’s friendly gestures to his adopted sons as not enough because of the existence of the old Empire Labs provision, he would likely explore other ways to pursue it.

As also referred to above, Barkin was known as a “Machiavellian mind”, and so such an ‘other’ motive in joining and taking over Shulman’s company would have been compatible with his interests and his personality nature.

The last chapter of Shulman’s 1993 autobiography described Shulman’s being notified, in May 1993, of his appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada; it was supposed to be confidential before the official announcement, but Shulman couldn’t wait to tell his friends, and a celebratory brunch with the “Morty circle” was held at the home of their friends Roma and Denny Dzerowicz in the Halton Hills on May 16, 1993.

At the end of that Chapter 10, The Bestowal, on the way home Shulman said something and became emotionally teary-eyed, and the interactions with his friends at that time revealed a subtle relationship between Shulman and Barkin regarding Barry Sherman:

“May 16, 1993

From the four corners of Metropolitan Toronto, the Morty circle is gathering.

The impossible has happened.

Morty is to be inducted into the Order of Canada.

He has just gotten the news and of course it is all strictly confidential, but . . .

…

The circle, three-quarters of whom are directors of Morty companies past, present and future, have grown to, for none of them was born to, savor the subtle delights of opera and the silken joys of extremely expensive wines, many of whose names they happily admit they cannot pronounce.

…

The brunch is to mark two milestones.

The first is the news of Morty’s impending induction, at last, into the Order of Canada.

The second is his final break with the company that he and Parkinson’s built, the rift of which, finally and inescapably leaves him on one side of the canyon and, on the other, Martin Barkin and Geoff Shulman.

…

After lunch there is an ad-hoc partial board meeting downstairs in the gym. Arnie, Kingham, Morty: Arnie wants to know if Safety Corp. is going to be in competition with Deprenyl. He also wants to know just where Safety Corp. is at.

Sam Sarick stays at the table, where the golden sauternes shimmers in the glasses, nodding and seeming to doze, and missing nothing.

There are dragons to be slain, wicked witches and wizards to be overcome. On the drive home Morty is hyped, up and down.

Viola McMillan, whom he once dubbed the Boadicea of mining promotions, one of his targets in the Windfall mining scandal of the ’60s, has breathtakingly transcended a 1967 conviction for stock skulduggery and received an Order of Canada, too, at the spring ceremonies just past. They moved the date of the presentation to April 21, to coincide with her 90th birthday, April 21.

…

Thus do laurels wreath the brows of those who make markets.

“She was supposed to spend nine months in prison; I swear she never spent a day! I railed against her in the Legislature, I went to see her in prison and I couldn’t find her; they took her in the front door and out the back. It was an unbelievable scandal.”

Will anyone, anyone at all listen?

Sam focuses serenely on the highway, seems not to be paying attention, until Esther pricks up at something Morty has just said: medication smuggled from Canada and abroad, for illegal resale in the States; imminent rack, ruin for the generic king …

“Does Martin Barkin know about this? Esther asks.

“Martin won’t talk to me,” Morty says.

“Martin won’t talk to you? Oh, nonsense. Whatever gives you that idea? Everything has been taken into account.” Sam has been listening, after all. Morty twitches his shoulders, turns to the window his wide and watering eye.

“Nothing will be done. Won’t make any difference,” he mutters.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As in the above anecdote, at the end of celebrating with friends his Order of Canada appointment just notified him by the government of Canada, Shulman’s thoughts were, interestingly, in his old modes as chief coroner and provincial legislator, “dragons to be slain, wicked witches and wizards to be overcome”.

Coincidentally, the previous chapter of his book being discussed here, Chapter 9, is titled, “Slaying the Generics Dragon”. It has been a primary source of my quotes in Part 1 from the book.

Shulman was unhappy that a businesswoman who was a convicted criminal, Viola MacMillan, had already received the Order of Canada before him.

Then he mentioned medication smuggling for “illegal resale in the States”, and “imminent rack, ruin for the generic king” – none other than Barry Sherman who, in the next month June 1993, as in Part 1, would be reported by the media to be under FBI criminal investigation.

One of a couple of friends with Shulman in the ride home, Esther, immediately asked, “Does Martin Barkin know about this?”, and Shulman replied that “Martin won’t talk to me”.

Esther’s husband Sam immediately interjected, “Martin won’t talk to you? Oh, nonsense. Whatever gives you that idea? Everything has been taken into account.”

But Shulman was in tears, muttering, “Nothing will be done. Won’t make any difference”.

See, even before the FBI criminal investigation of Sherman and Apotex became news in June 1993, Shulman already knew it was about to happen, but also knew that it would not lead to any real result – as reviewed in Part 1, after the initial major media publicity about the FBI criminal investigation, by late January 1994 it did not seem to exist anymore, and eventually the end result was a fine in 1995 for one of Sherman’s companies.

When Shulman said, “Martin won’t talk to me”, it could have meant that Martin Barkin was no longer listening to, or even on speaking terms with Shulman. But when Sam replied that, “Whatever gives you that idea? Everything has been taken into account”, it showed that Sam did not think of Barkin as not speaking with Shulman, and that even if Barkin did not he had already taken into account what Shulman wanted to say.

Sam and Esther in the above conversation were Toronto businessman Sam Sarick and his wife. Sarick was not only a Shulman friend but also a board director of Deprenyl Research, as alluded to in the above passages as well. (“About Us”, Samuel Sarick Limited, Eastwood Developments Inc.; and, “Samuel Sarick Independent Director, DRAXIS Health Inc.”, S&P Global Market Intelligence, Bloomberg)

Coincidentally, Sarick died recently in late March 2018, i.e., about two months after Martin Barkin who had died over a month after the Shermans, and his funeral service and burial site were in the same venues as Barkin’s. (“Sam SARICK Obituary”, March 28, 2018, Toronto Star)

Whatever Barkin would not speak with Shulman on was most likely some specific topic, given that Sarick, a director of the company, did not view the two as not on speaking terms.

And if it was only a specific topic, Shulman already said it was about “imminent rack, ruin for the generic king”

This meant that when it came to a matter like prosecuting Barry Sherman, Martin Barkin refused to discuss with Shulman. It caused Shulman to become teary-eyed because it was very personal to him.

The legal patent dispute between Deprenyl Research and Apotex over Shulman’s Parkinson’s disease drug was business that Barkin must handle as the company CEO. But he refused to listen to Shulman’s further ideas regarding Sherman, i.e., criminal prosecution.

There was one obvious reason Barkin would not take a harder stance: Sherman was his adopted sons’ billionaire cousin and since 1988 had been giving them help that has been reported to be worth “millions of dollars”.

I note that, as in Part 1, this was an especially emotional time for Shulman since in May 1993 he was making a personal gesture of excluding Apotex drugs from his prescriptions as a doctor for his patients.

Shulman’s becoming teary eyed when saying that Barkin would not talk to him, also could mean that he felt sad that he failed to win over Barkin at this personal level.

It is therefore a probable scenario that this personal level of thinking had been in Shulman’s mind when first recruiting Barkin to his company, i.e., he could win more to his side including the situation with Barkin’s adopted sons – or “everything” as Sarick might be alluding to.

But Barkin was a mastermind of his own as earlier reviewed and he most likely only used, in my analysis, the animosity between Shulman and Sherman as a leverage for his own interests, rather than pursuing Sherman’s criminal problem as Shulman wanted to see happen.

Barkin’s cousin Jack, also a medical doctor, described Martin Barkin as “extremely aggressive” and doing everything “with a purpose” – not unlike Barry Sherman in a sense:

“He says that his cousin has always used strategy – everything is done with a purpose. “Martin was always a gentleman who knew where he wanted to go. He was extremely aggressive in whatever he was doing, whether it be business, family relationships, or medicine. He always wanted to excel.”

According to past associates, Barkin has few close friends except for his wife Carol, a former fashion model who now sells real estate. The Barkins adopted six children, the last four coming from a single family when the parents died suddenly.”

(Brian Goldman, MD, 1990, Canadian Medical Association Journal)

The first paragraph above, in my analysis, gives additional credence to the scenario that, besides succeeding a high-profile Morton Shulman at the helm of the latter’s company, Barkin had an aggressive strategy of using Shulman as a leverage in his and his adopted sons’ attempts to get more from Sherman – but not siding with Shulman to the point of losing potential gains from Sherman.

Reading also the second paragraph quoted above, I would pose a broader question: what could, or would, Martin Barkin’s “purpose” have been, to begin with, in adopting the Winter sons “when the parents died suddenly?”

From what Beverly Winter’s brother Wayne Rockcliffe recalled, quoted earlier from the Toronto Life story, the late Winters’ home could be available to the adoptive parents. But could there be more that was in Barkin’s “Machiavellian mind”?

One direction to look into, in the context of my review, is that Sherman, an MIT Ph.D. student whose University of Toronto accomplishments had been even more stellar than Barkin’s, in the days between the death of Louis Winter and that of Beverley Winter in November 1965 had expressed a keen interest in taking over Empire Labs.

Then the Winter children were adopted by the Barkins.

Thus, more specifically in my questioning, when Sherman and Ulster acquired Empire Labs in 1967, could the terms of it, in particular the provision between Royal Trust and Sherman for the future interests of the children, be influenced by the adoptive parents?

If Martin Barkin did have a role in the addition of that provision in the Empire Labs purchase agreement between Royal Trust and Barry Sherman, that would befit his cousin Jack’s description of him as a man of “strategy” and “purpose”.

On the other hand, the paradox, or contradiction to it, is that Barkin soon failed to provide good parental care or guidance to at least half of the four Winter sons, and then for decades up to this time in 1993 failed to let them know about that historical provision.

From this perspective, the following year 1994 when Barkin cemented his leadership at Shulman’s former company, changing its name and guiding it to new focuses, was when Barkin and Sherman reached a sort of power balance, albeit an uneasy one: Barkin assumed full control of Shulman’s mantle, or as Sarick said about Shulman’s animosity toward Sherman, “everything has been taken into account”, whereas Sherman poured “millions of dollars” worth into helping Barkin’s adopted sons but doing so without yielding ground that could revive the old Empire Labs provision.

The year after, 1995, then saw the reality of human frailty, or possibly human cost, highlighted in the death of Dana, Louis and Beverley Winter’s youngest son – in a context related to Sherman’s help:

“But no amount of money could set things right. In 1995, Barry sent Dana to a remote fishing village in B.C. to get clean. Dana decided to settle in B.C., married a woman named Julia Zwicker, fathered two children and slipped back into drugs. He would later be charged with conspiracy in the murder of a fellow drug dealer. From a holding tank in Vancouver, he called Barry to arrange bail. While he was out, Dana, then 33 years old, died of a heroin overdose. At the time of Dana’s death, Kerry was in the final chapter of his marriage to Elee Scarlett, a lawyer. The living allowance that Barry gave Kerry would eventually reach $20,000 a month.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

On can reason that had Sherman not sent Dana to British Columbia to “get clean”, Dana would not have instead become a drug dealer there, been charged with conspiracy to murder a “fellow dealer” and died of a heroin overdose in Vancouver.

As above, at the time Sherman was providing a living allowance to Kerry, and so Dana probably received one also. Sherman could not have easily sent one of them to another place had he not provided financial assistance.

One may wonder if Dana’s unexpected death, or otherwise the serious criminal trouble ahead, shocked Sherman or hardened him more. The next year, 1996, was when Sherman had a family Christmas vacation in Africa where he penned his unfinished memoir.

Now, I can re-read some of Sherman’s words in the context of the recent history just prior to it, namely that he had re-connected with his Winter cousins, given them help that was generous but at the same time held them at bay, while their adoptive father Barkin had joined and now led the company of his nemesis Morton Shulman.

Sherman wrote:

“I cannot see that human behaviour differs in any fundamental way from that of numerous species on the savannahs of Serengeti.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Yep, Dana’s behaviour and life existence that Sherman knew well, including frequent illegal narcotic involvement and repeated incarceration, exemplified what was “on the savannahs of Serengeti”.

Sherman then asserted, as a philosophical truth:

“We are all driven by our instincts to eat, drink, copulate, protect ourselves and our young, and cooperate with others, particularly those most closely related to us, if and when it is to our mutual advantage.”

(Bernard C. Sherman, Preface dated December 27, 1996)

Dana was, incidentally or not, the example of “instincts to eat, drink, copulate”, having in 1988 met at a restaurant the old family friend Stan Garden who reconnected him to Sherman, was sent by Sherman to B.C. in 1995 where he decided to marry Julia Zwicker and father children.

But when it came to “instincts to … protect ourselves and our young, and cooperate with others, particularly those most closely related to us”, Sherman himself was a master of the art. From the start, his agreeing to the provision protecting the future interests of his Winter cousins was important for his acquiring Empire Labs on good financial terms, and since 1988 to this time in 1996 he had provided generous help to the cousins he had re-connected with.

However, all the protection that Sherman agreed to and help that Sherman provided were not without conditions as Sherman made it very clear in his philosophizing, “if and when it is to our mutual advantage”.

The old Empire Labs provision had two crucial conditions that Sherman invoked so as not to owe financial interests to these cousins whose late father had been his uncle and mentor: if and when selling Empire Labs was to his advantage, or if these cousins could not be responsible employees at his Apotex, then it would not matter to him whether ownership shares might be good for them.

Earlier, I’ve concluded that answering Morton Shulman’s accusation of his having no “redeeming features” may have been a motivation for Sherman to pen this memoir in 1996; and I’ve noted that Sherman made this memoir available to the media in 2007 as a part of his legal defence against the $1.5 billion lawsuit filed by his Winter cousins.

Now my above review of the relevant history leading up to Sherman’s writing this memoir would suggest that in 1996 Sherman also anticipated that, sooner or later, his Winter cousins would find out and ask about the old Empire Labs provision and what it could mean to the Apotex ownership – because two influential men, namely their adoptive father Martin Barkin and his nemesis Morton Shulman were now together and had the interest in pursing it.

Further development of events beginning in 1999 was consistent with the above conclusion of my review and analysis, namely that Barkin and Shulman were important factors behind the Winter sons’ pursuing this matter:

“The relationship between Barry and the cousins started to sour in 1999 when Jeffrey began seriously investigating aspects of the Empire Labs sale. He was convinced that he and his siblings had been cheated out of years of royalties, and out of their promised share of the successor companies, including Apotex. When Royal Trust failed to hand over key documents, saying they were mislaid, Jeffrey took them to court, and a judge ordered the company to hand them over. …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Jeffrey was the first to begin “seriously investigating aspects of the Empire Labs sale” in 1999 and sued Royal Trust to get the key documents.

The fact that Jeffrey started the “family feud” saga is symbolically and logically important. From the various facts discussed, in particular Barkin’s January 2018 obituary, we know that Tim and Jeffrey have been the Winter sons with a close family relationship with the adoptive Barkin family; of the two, Tim had originally been adopted by the Winter family and that may have had to do with the fact that he never asked for Sherman’s help; Jeffrey, therefore, was the only Winter biological son who also called himself a Barkin.

That the first salvo in the old Empire Labs provision dispute came from Jeffrey meant that Barkin likely provided some clues; also, that it happened a year before Shulman’s death, which was in August 2000 as quoted in Part 1, suggests that the Parkinson’s disease-stricken Shulman’s long-time wish to go hard against Sherman helped to make it happen – in a way that would be positive for Barkin’s interests.

As further evidence that preparing for his Winter cousins’ eventual legal feud with him had been a motivation in Sherman’s writing the memoir, I note that the timeline of Sherman’s telling the media about the unfinished memoir closely matched the timeline of the Winter sons’ taking legal recourses to claim major financial interests owed them.

Here is a timeline of the Winter sons’ lawsuits for financial claims against Royal Trust and Barry Sherman:

“… Then, in March 2006, Tim, Jeffrey, Kerry and Dana’s widow, Julia, filed a claim against Royal Trust for $500 million, accusing them of failing to protect their interests. Royal Trust argues that it had acted properly and the claim should be dismissed.

That summer, Apotex was embroiled in the Bristol-Myers Squibb debacle. A U.S. judge ordered Apotex to stop sales of a generic version of Plavix while the case proceeded through the courts—but not before Sherman had flooded the market, made a fortune, and paid out $6 million in bonuses to his entire staff. While Sherman battled over Plavix, he also sought and received assurance from the cousins that they wouldn’t launch a suit against Apotex.

In January 2007, Kerry, Tim and Julia nevertheless filed a claim against Sherman and his former partners for $1 billion. …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

As told, the first lawsuit, with financial claims of $500 million against Royal Trust, was filed in March 2006; and in the summer while battling Bristol-Myers Squibb over the Plavix drug Sherman privately persuaded his Winter cousins not to sue Apotex; then in January 2007, they nevertheless filed a $1 billion lawsuit against him – the two suits’ claims totalled $1.5 billion.

As reviewed earlier, the first major media story referring to his unpublished memoir was a National Post article in August 2006 – in the summer of 2006 – on the Plavix dispute, entitled “Generic drug, specific issue: Apotex fights Plavix”, here partially quoted again:

“The opening chapters of a draft autobiography sit amid the hundreds of pill bottles and mound of legal documents in Dr. Bernard Sherman’s office. It will be the story of a brainy kid born in Toronto who becomes Canada’s richest generic drug mogul.

Though a work in progress, it has the makings of a page turner. One chapter will recount how an employee from a brand-name drug company offered to sell him secret files. Another, he says, will describe how Dr. Sherman caught a rival stealing …

But what promises to be the book’s most riveting chapter is still unfolding. It is the part where Dr. Sherman seemingly outsmarts two big drug companies, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis…”

(Stephanie Saul, August 16, 2006, National Post)

The above quote reveals that when Sherman began telling the media about his memoir, the chapters he talked about – on disputes with brand-name drug companies – had not really been written.

Why did Sherman talk about these business disputes, especially the ongoing one against Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, by telling through empty chapters of an unfinished memoir? A logical explanation is Sherman wanted to show off what was already in the memoir, but not quite yet because his cousins had launched a lawsuit against Royal Trust but not yet one against him.

Then, after his cousins’ lawsuit against him was filed in 2007, Sherman’s memoir was prominently featured in a The Globe and Mail article on him and his history, entitled, “The real Barry Sherman”, quoted earlier and here again partially:

“So who, exactly, is Barry Sherman? Is he a cutthroat businessman? A strings-attached benefactor? Or just a munificent, self-confessed workaholic?

In 1996, the drug baron asked himself some of those same questions. During a family trip to the Serengeti, he stepped back for a moment of reflection and
started writing a memoir called A Legacy of Thoughts. It has never been published – in fact, it sat in his desk until it surfaced in the family’s recent legal fight.”

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, November 24, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As told, the memoir was Sherman’s medium to answer the question of who Barry Sherman really was, and “it sat in his desk until it surfaced in the family’s recent legal fight”.

In other words, the family legal feud was the first occasion when Sherman really made use of his memoir. My conclusion from reviewing the relevant history points to the likelihood that when he wrote it in 1996 Sherman had thoughtfully planned for exactly this use – also with the consideration that his moral accuser Morton Shulman was now bonded with his Winter cousins’ adoptive father.

But Sherman did not want to concede anything before it was publicly raised by his cousins, and so instead of talking about his special relationship with his uncle, the memoir boasted about how excellently he did work for his uncle at Empire Labs in the summers of 1960, 1961 and 1962.

Now in 2007 as the family feud began, his cousins struck hard with a billion-dollar financial claim, and Sherman responded hard by also disclosing in his legal deposition what verbal exchanges had occurred between them:

“In the deposition, he said the family dispute arose around 2002. Mr. [Kerry] Winter accused him of being “involved in some conspiracy to murder their father and deprive them of their inheritance in the 1960s.”

Mr. Sherman said he was “totally flabbergasted at this untrue allegation.”

In an affidavit, Mr. Winter denied making the murder allegation. …”

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Aha, the Winter sons had learned or taken cue from the criminal charge of “conspiracy to commit murder” levied against their late brother Dana, or were so angry that Sherman’s sending Dana to British Columbia had led to their brother’s fatal heroin overdose, that when they started arguing in 2002 the allegation Kerry levelled against Sherman was about past involvement “in some conspiracy to murder their father and deprive them of their inheritance”!

It was unlikely that Sherman fabricated this anecdote, since being accused of such a criminal terror was not a pride and would not help himself. Winter’s denial was also understandable because one needed to be extra cautious in a legal setting about making such a serious allegation.

But how likely was it true, i.e., Sherman having been involved in a conspiracy to murder his uncle and mentor Lou Winter and deprive his cousins the inheritance, or alternatively to get access to it for himself?

The elementary facts and basic logic would suggest that it was not likely unless a very broad social conspiracy existed. The reason is that at the time of Louis Winter’s death, Sherman was a Ph.D. student studying in MIT at Boston, and the intensity of academic studies expected of an aspiring young scholar, not to mention Sherman’s own hard drive for academic excellence, meant that during that time he was likely somewhat detached from the social and family happenings in Toronto – even if there had existed a conspiracy of the alleged type.

But when it came to attaching conditions, i.e., attaching strings onto benefits for the Winter children, Sherman was every bit as smart in the generous help that he provided since 1988 as he had been with the old Empire Labs provision.

In their lawsuit, the Winter sons alleged that Sherman’s monetary help “made them dependent” on him, he “used it to keep them under control”, and he often required “security for financial gifts”:

“He bought his cousins homes, cottages, financed various business ventures and gave them millions of dollars, according to court filings. Kerry received up to $15,000 a month for years, according to court filings. After Dana died, Mr. Sherman bought his widow a home and sent monthly cheques to her two children.

The cousins allege the money made them dependent on Mr. Sherman and he used it to keep them under control, often requiring security for financial gifts.

Around 2000, the cousins allege they first became aware of the sale agreement and began asking Mr. Sherman questions. In 2001, they went to court and won an order requiring Royal Trust to turn over documents relating to the deal.

The cousins allege Mr. Sherman demanded that they drop the legal action or he would cut off financial support. When they filed a suit against Royal Trust last year, Mr. Sherman allegedly told Kerry to sell his cottage and slashed his monthly stipend to $2,000. He also allegedly cut off monthly support to Jeffery and Dana’s widow. The cousins aren’t backing down and in the court filing they claim Mr. Sherman has illegally interfered with their rights by not telling them about the agreement and withholding royalties.

Not all the cousins agree. Jeffrey has backed out of the lawsuit and, according to Mr. Sherman, he is furious at the others. They claim he is fearful of Mr. Sherman.

Mr. Sherman, 64, can’t understand how it has all come to this. “To suggest that I was trying to keep control and cover up information is ridiculous,” he said exasperated. “When I found out these kids had problems I did everything I could to help them. So you’ve got an extraordinary and bizarre situation here.””

(Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, January 29, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

The facts in the above early story in January 2007 on the Sherman-Winter family legal feud did show that the Winter children were dependent on the monthly stipends he provided: when they filed the lawsuit against Royal Trust their allowance amounts were cut off or slashed to a minimum; such countermeasures created difficulties for them and as a result Jeffrey – the first Winter son to begin seriously investigating the old Empire Labs provision in 1999 as reviewed earlier – withdrew from the $1 billion lawsuit due to fear.

Ironically, Kerry Winter and Dana’s widow Julia Zwicker, with their lifestyles more ‘street-hardened’, so to speak, were more able to withstand Sherman’s pressure of slashing monetary help than Jeffrey who had lived his life closer to his “loving father” – as from the January 2018 obituary quoted – the adoptive Martin Barkin.

But the Winter children’s dependence on Sherman’s money does not mean that Sherman had purposely used it as a means of controlling them as they alleged; also, in the above story no facts were presented regarding Sherman’s “requiring security for financial gifts”, which would have rendered the “financial gifts”, well, not really gifts.

Subsequently in February 2007, the media reported on a $7.9 million countering lawsuit that Sherman filed against Kerry Winter, showing that outside of the monthly allowance much of the financial help by Sherman had been in the form of loans – namely security and repayment required:

“The cousins have acknowledged in court filings that Mr. Sherman, 64, gave them money. Mr. Winter received as much as $15,000 a month and Dana’s widow has been given money to support her two children, according to court filings. However, they have alleged that Mr. Sherman used the money to control them. In court filings, Mr. Winter said his monthly payments dropped to $2,000 a month after the relatives filed a suit against Royal Trust Co. last year.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Sherman alleges that Mr. Winter, 45, signed a promissory note last November agreeing to repay $7.9-million on demand. Mr. Winter had borrowed the money over the years to finance a home renovation business and purchase several properties, according to family members. Mr. Sherman is seeking repayment of the promissory note, plus interest, as well as possession of a house in Fenelon Falls, Ont.

Court filings show that Mr. Sherman sent Mr. Winter a letter demanding repayment about a week before the cousins filed their lawsuit.

“It’s simply to protect my interests,” Mr. Sherman said yesterday. “I’ve got to realize on the security. But the value of it is far less than I’ve lent him.””

(“With ‘disgust,’ Apotex head strikes back”, by Paul Waldie and Andy Hoffman, February 10, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As anyone can read what Sherman said in the above, that when it came to the money for doing business and purchasing properties, Sherman had “lent” it to Kerry, over the years totalling $7.9 million; when Kerry had the intent to pursue a lawsuit, he needed to sign a “promissory note” agreeing to repayment “on demand”; and when the lawsuit was about to be filed, Sherman demanded immediate full repayment.

Kerry lost a legal battle to keep the properties, including his family home; a house Sherman had helped Dana’s widow Julia buy had a mortgage provided by Sherman, and Sherman now revoked it, according to an October 2007 media story:

“Mr. Sherman has also appointed a receiver to seize four houses he helped Mr. Winter buy, including his family home in Toronto.

Mr. Winter is fighting to hang on to the houses. He recently lost a legal battle and is now appealing.

A fifth house in Vancouver belongs to Julia Winter, the wife of a cousin who died in 1995. According to allegations filed in court, Mr. Sherman has moved to revoke a $321,000 mortgage he holds on that house because Ms. Winter joined the others in the lawsuit.”

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

Losing a legal battle in the $7.9 million counter-lawsuit by Sherman meant Kerry had to surrender his properties, including his family home:

“In January 2007, Kerry, Tim and Julia nevertheless filed a claim against Sherman and his former partners for $1 billion. Sherman, acting with the same lethal cool he brings to his fights over patents, turned down an offer to settle. He then sued Kerry for $8 million in outstanding loans. In Vancouver, Sherman took Julia to court to have the terms of his mortgage on her house clarified so he could collect his money immediately rather than when the house was sold.

In August 2007, the court heard the suit against Kerry. His lawyer, Malcolm Kronby, argued that Sherman was acting vindictively. The judge still ruled in Sherman’s favour and Kerry had to surrender two business properties, a cottage and his home on Bellwoods Avenue. Kerry agreed to stay on as a tenant, paying $2,500 a month. Even this sum could be hard to come by. His construction company was shrinking while he continued to obsess over justice and riches.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

The facts as reviewed were indeed that much, probably most, of the financial help provided by Sherman had not been “financial gifts” as much as “loans”, was not free, and was dependent on the Winter children being on good terms with Sherman.

But of course, the cash Sherman provided for the Winter cousins’ allowances and paying their Visa bills, over the eighteen years or so from 1988 to 2007, probably did come to millions of dollars.

The way Sherman conditioned these loans and the manner in which he later revoked them or demanded repayment, show that he had in mind his “control” of the Winter cousins’ financial predicaments, methodically considered years in advance in preparation for the likelihood of their discovering the old Empire Labs provision and demanding substantial financial interests.

Kerry Winter called Sherman’s controlling tactics “bullying” that could cause him and his family “irreparable harm”:

“Kerry Winter has alleged that Mr. Sherman is bullying the family and that he has gone back on a promise not to retaliate financially while the lawsuit over Toronto-based Apotex proceeded. “If he is permitted to continue, Mr. Sherman will cause me and my family irreparable harm,” Mr. Winter said in an affidavit filed in court.

Mr. Sherman denied that his actions were tied to the lawsuit. “I’m doing it to enforce the security [of the properties], it’s as simple as that,” he said in an
interview. In court filings, he said that a couple of the houses have been vacant and property taxes on three have not been paid for years.

Mr. Sherman began backing Mr. Winter in 1994 by arranging a $1.2-million line of credit to help him start a home renovation business. More money followed to Mr. Winter and others.

Mr. Sherman, who is much older than his cousins, said in court filings that he felt obliged to help the Winter children after their parents died in 1965.”

(Paul Waldie, October 26, 2007, The Globe and Mail)

As in the above, the more substantial finance by Sherman for Kerry and the others, i.e., business loans, began in 1994. That was the year when Martin Barkin cemented his leadership at the brand-name drug company Morton Shulman had founded, changing its name as well as its focus.

The timing coincidence could be an instance of Barkin’s leveraging Shulman’s animosity toward Sherman to get benefits for his adopted sons, in this case some major career-oriented help from Sherman. Sherman claimed to the court that he felt obliged to help them, but despite such feeling his help at this business level started only 6 years after their reconnecting.

In the above, in 2007 Sherman said he was simply “enforcing the security [of the properties]”. But the fact that in the several media stories quoted above there was no mention of Sherman demanding money repayment from Jeffrey, who coincidentally at some point withdrew from the $1 billion lawsuit, indicates that the security was enforced selectively – as a condition “to keep them under control” as alleged in the Winter cousins’ lawsuit.

So, those aware of this high-profile family legal feud have witnessed the costly price of attempting to claim a share of the family business ownership from the prominent Canadian billionaire and leading philanthropist Barry Sherman: it was awfully steep for the Winter family cousins feuding with Sherman, whose late father had been his mentor, that within months their comfortable lifestyles were gone when he withdrew his favours and demanded payback through “enforcing the security” in the conditioned help he had provided.

This onerous outcome for the Winter sons was probably important for Sherman. His unfinished memoir which he publicized in 2007 as a part of this family legal fight, showed how central the notion of “mutual advantage” was in his philosophy – without exception even for those close to him.

According to Geraldine Sherman, writer of the July 2008 Toronto Life article later republished in December 2017, when she interviewed Barry Sherman for that article, the latter reiterated that he had no intent to compromise with his Winter cousins – he might have been too good to them already:

“Even at his stage of life, he’s committed to expanding his business and shoring up his legacy, more concerned with the judgment of the courts than with public opinion. As for the Orphan Children, he remains steadfast in his belief that he did all he could for them, perhaps too much. He argues that at the time of the Empire sale, the boys, ages 11 to 15, were too young to benefit. And after so many years, it’s too late to file a claim.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

It wasn’t easy even just to stay in the family legal dispute against Sherman. Kerry Winter’s lawyer Malcolm Kronby did not want to publicize the case, and for a while Kerry communicated with the media sneakily. Finally, he decided to fire his lawyers, blaming their being Jews as the reason that they did not fight hard publicly for his “revenge” but instead tried to shut him up, as he told the Toronto Life writer:

“Kerry winter admits that for many years Sherman was “like a surrogate dad and I was like an adopted son.” Now, perhaps because he feels most betrayed, he leads his family litigation and, going against his legal advice, feeds stories to the press. His lawyers told him not to talk to me, and for more than a year we communicated like spies. He would secretly transmit documents if I promised not to tell Kronby. He’d call me with various rants: “For me it isn’t about shekels, it’s about revenge!” Dozens of emails passed between us. He accused me of falling for “Sherman’s spin” if I hesitated before contacting people he recommended. Once, when I didn’t reply fast enough, he accused me of being out for dinner with Honey and Barry. Twice, after I sent questions in advance to both Kerry and Kronby, Kerry backed out of our scheduled interview. Finally, last March, we met.

…

Sipping his coffee, Kerry explained that he was firing his lawyers. “They always tried to shut me up. Well, they’re finished.” He drew his finger across his throat. He thinks that because his lawyers are Jewish they hesitated to go after Barry in the press, afraid of being shunned by their community. He claims there was a breakdown of trust.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

The Winter sons’ uncle Wayne Rockcliffe, who as reviewed earlier had a grudge about Beverley Winter’s decision for the children’s Jewish adoption, expressed his support for Kerry Winter:

“He arrived at the Starbucks near his Trinity Bellwoods home, a tall, ruddy-faced, boyish-looking 46-year-old. He had just come from seeing his uncle, Wayne Rockcliffe, who had once again come to his aid, promising to cover Kerry’s $2,500 rent that month if needed. I was surprised. A recent Globe and Mail article had reported Rockcliffe’s advice that the cousins move on with their lives. Later, when I spoke with Rockcliffe, he complained that the reporter had omitted a crucial qualifier: “Perhaps if I’d had their terrible start in life, I’d think differently.” Rockcliffe has his own reason to dislike what he calls “Barry’s cold heart.” Forty-three years ago, when they shared a limo at Beverley’s funeral, Rockcliffe said it would be a shame if the Orphan Children were adopted separately. Sherman’s reply, he claims, was, “So what? Worse things could happen.” Rockcliffe says he can’t forgive him. Sherman denies ever having said anything to that effect.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

As recalled by Rockcliffe, back in 1965 the young MIT Ph.D. student Barry Sherman’s attitude toward his Winter cousins’ facing adoption was rather “cold” hearted. That attitude apparently had not changed over the decades, and if anything was further rationalized by Sherman’s articulation of his moral philosophy in his 1996 memoir.

In his interview with Toronto Life’s Geraldine Sherman, Kerry Winter also spoke of support for him from Barry Sherman’s “business enemies”:

“According to Kerry, Stan Garden and Rockcliffe aren’t the only people on his side. He says several of Sherman’s business enemies want him to win. As he spoke to me, his face reddened and his voice rose. “If Barry had his way, I’d be eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC. Well, Barry, that’s just not going to happen.” …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

As my review of facts, many of which not yet given attention by the media in investigating the Shermans’ deaths, has shown that their adoptive father Martin Barkin and his business partner Morton Shulman for many years had considerable clouts in the pharmaceutical business field, and so the Winter sons at least had the option of utilizing some of those professional and business links.

In this logical context, the first guess of who those “Sherman’s business enemies” were as Kerry called them would be the ones in the brand-name drug business field – versus Apotex’s generic drug business field – as reviewed in Part 1.

What Kerry said in the above can be interpreted as that he had to up the ante and involve some of Sherman’s business enemies on his side – even if he and his siblings were legally claiming shares of Apotex ownership – because otherwise he could end up “eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC” as Sherman intended.

In other words, Sherman’s harshness toward persons who legally disputed him could make them feel necessary to act harder in response.

Even with such broader backing from the presumably influential in business, Kerry had no illusion that it would be a easy fight, and vowed of being Sherman’s “nemesis”, as “a lifelong mission”:

“… He rapped his knuckles on the table and leaned in close. He vowed he’d be Sherman’s “nemesis,” saying that for him this was “a lifelong mission.” …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

In his interview with Toronto Life for the same 2008 article, Barry Sherman clearly indicated that he would not compromise on the Winter cousins’ lawsuit:

“No one can say when the $1-billion suit will be heard in court. It will probably take years. Will Barry settle? Not likely. He’s a lion, a stranger to the notion of compromise.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

The lion is the king of the Serengeti. Isn’t that the metaphor?

Kerry Winter also expressed fear for his own safety, as well as for that of the Toronto Life writer interviewing him:

“… He expressed fear for his personal safety and, pointing a finger in my face, warned: “By the way, sweetie, you’re next.” By this time, he was shouting. He imagines Sherman at the courtroom door, begging to settle. “I’ll go to trial, sweetie,” he growled. “I’m not going away.” Then he put on his coat and walked out without another word.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Real or imagined, the street-hardened Kerry Winter would naturally think that such a high-profile and high-stake legal feud against a powerful business leader could mean personal danger, and he himself was also quick to talk in that term about others – not merely about the reporter – as well, like with his gesture about firing his lawyers, as earlier quoted, ““… Well, they’re finished.” He drew his finger across his throat.”

Recall as in Part 1, a “Mr. Jones”, who headed a private investigative agency working for the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, once said about Barry Sherman, as recalled by another private investigator Paul Whybrow:

“… Jones is thinking about how he can get Sherman. This is no longer just business, this is personal. He doesn’t just want to compromise him in a corporate way. He’s talking about playing hardball with Barry Sherman. It was very direct. He said to us, ‘We have to get this bastard Sherman.’ He said to us, ‘What are we going to do about him? Let’s take him out of the game. Take him out.’ …”

(Jeffrey Robinson, Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

And so, in his connecting to Barry Sherman’s business enemies, if Mr. Kerry Winter ever became in touch with Mr. Jones, no doubt there would be a lot of fireworks, verbally and possibly more.

Kerry Winter’s “lifelong mission” turned out to be indeed so – as in Sherman’s life, so far.

Over a decade after the initial lawsuit filing in 2007, in September 2017 an Ontario judge made a ruling on the Winter sons’ $1 billion lawsuit. Siding with Barry Sherman, Justice Kenneth Hood dismissed the lawsuit’s claim as “wishful thinking and beyond fanciful”. Then in early December 2017 – a week before Barry and Honey Sherman were last seen alive – the judge also ordered the Winter sons to pay $300,000 of Sherman’s legal costs:

“On Sept. 15, 2017—three months to the day before Sherman and Honey were discovered dead—an Ontario judge sided with Sherman, dismissing the suit as an abuse of process and calling the cousins’ claim “wishful thinking and beyond fanciful.” On Dec. 6, one week before the Shermans were last seen alive, Justice Kenneth Hood issued another ruling, ordering the cousins to pay $300,000 of Sherman’s legal costs.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

The judge again ordered Kerry Winter to pay back the $7.9 million loans he owed Sherman – as reviewed earlier it had been ordered by a judge in 2007, resulting in Winter losing all his properties:

“As part of the court’s decision, Winter not only lost his claim on his cousin’s fortune, but he was also ordered to pay Sherman back $8 million. …”

(“Barry Sherman’s cousin fails lie detector test over allegation of plot to kill Honey Sherman”, by Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

At this point, a curious reader may wonder: could Barry Sherman’s Winter cousins, particularly Kerry, have something to do with the Shermans’ murder, having lost the legal battle for their $1 billion lawsuit and slapped with more financial burdens?

The media was equally curious, for example, asking a similar question in the Maclean’s April 2018 investigative article:

“The timing of those two judgments triggered inevitable suspicions. Could they have been a motive for murder?”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

It is a good question, namely about the Winter cousins’ possible roles in the double homicide, for at least three reasons.

Firstly, the Maclean’s article quoted above and more extensively in Part 1, also asked a related question , “why now?”, about Sherman’s murder. Here that question is quoted along with facts previously quoted in Part 1:

“The question to be answered is not only why was Sherman murdered alongside his wife, but why now, at 75? It’s no secret the drug executive had amassed a long list of enemies in his 50-year career. A renowned risk-taker, disruptor and pitbull professionally, Sherman was a polarizing figure—regarded as a softie with a heart of gold by those in his proximity and loathed by those who claim they were outfoxed or betrayed by him. The man who learned weeks before his death of his nomination to the Order of Canada was also called out as unethical in business dealings. The late physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Morton Shulman, who did battle with Sherman, called him “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever.””

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

By this logic, if one ponder the question of why the murder happened at this time when Sherman was at a senior age of 75, then Mr. Winter would look more suspect than Mr. Jones and the brand-name drug companies competing with Sherman as reviewed in Part 1. The hypothetical answer, or scenario, is that the Ontario judge’s dismissal of the Winter son’s lawsuit triggered the Shermans’ murder, and so the timing of the murder was determined by the court ruling’s timing.

Secondly, suspecting the Winters is reasonable because Kerry has publicly admitted that, because of the timing coincidence, people may view him as a suspect even if there has not been physical evidence for it:

“Speaking to Maclean’s, Winter says he understands why some may consider him a suspect, given the timing of the lawsuit’s dismissal and the subsequent costs award. “People can think: ‘Oh, Kerry lost his summary judgment motion and he went out and—some way, somehow—got into Barry’s house on Old Colony and did the dirty deed, and now he’s acting like a loon on The Fifth Estate. He is the main suspect,’ ” he says. “Come on. Would I be walking around, six, seven weeks after the murder? If I’m a suspect, where is my DNA? Where is my hair? Where are my fingerprints?””

(“Barry Sherman’s legal battle with his cousins goes on weeks after his murder”, by Michael Friscolanti and Anne Kingston, February 8, 2018, Maclean’s)

Winter even admitted that he had no alibi for his own whereabouts on the day when the Shermans were believed killed:

“Winter says no one can verify where he was at all times on Dec. 13, the day Barry and Honey Sherman were last seen alive. 

“No, no alibi,” he told The Fifth Estate. He said after a Cocaine Anonymous meeting, he went home and fell asleep.

“Very easy for me to have left work at any time because I’m not on the clock. … I could easily have driven over to [the Sherman home] and did the deed.

“I admit to that, but I didn’t, I didn’t, and that’s why I’m not nervous.””

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

But he said that police told him he was not a suspect:

“Winter said he planned to meet police for an interview and that he was told he was not a suspect.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

The lack of evidence tying Kerry Winter to the actual crime could mean that he was not a killer in this case. That could be what the Toronto Police meant telling him that he was not a suspect.

But as in the case of his late brother Dana in 1995 and the example of what he once accused Barry Sherman of as Sherman stated to the court in 2007, involvement in a “conspiracy to commit murder”, or the perception of such, would be harder to absolve for Kerry.

Finally, suspicion of Kerry Winter is natural because he even told the media about fantasizing killing Barry Sherman in the past, in “very graphic” terms:

“In a wide-ranging interview with The Fifth Estate, Winter said he told his psychiatrist that in the past, he had fantasized about murdering Barry Sherman.

“I would talk about killing Barry, and it was very graphic,” Winter said. “He would come out of the parking lot of Apotex, and I’d be hiding behind a car, and I’d just decapitate him. I wanted to roll his head down the parking lot, and I’d sit there and wait for the police.””

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

Nonetheless, besides emphasizing the lack of evidence against him, Kerry also firmly stated, in an interview with Maclean’s, that he “had nothing to do with their demise”:

“Speaking to Maclean’s, Kerry insists he had nothing to do with the slayings. “I admit that I have utter disdain and hatred for Barry Sherman,” he says. “He wronged me. He didn’t honour my father. He didn’t honour the option. He pulled a sleaze move. He stopped visiting me. He lied to me. He betrayed me. I have every reason to hate this man, but I had nothing to do with their demise.””

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

In another interview, with the CBC’s The Fifth Estate program, Kerry also asserted that he did not know “who did it”:

“Winter admits he could be seen as a suspect in the Sherman killings.

“I probably had reasons to lash out to do the dirty deed,” he told The Fifth Estate’s Bob McKeown. “I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know who did it.””

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

Kerry Winter’s statements above amounted to a flat denial of any role in, or even knowledge of, a “conspiracy to commit murder”.

Nevertheless, other things Kerry said and did in the same circumstances show that the above denial should not be easily taken as truthful.

Here I review two serious concerning facets of what Kerry Winter said and did in the same circumstances: one, Kerry’s street-hardened background gave him ready access to the hard-core criminal sector, and in the above interview with The Fifth Estate as well as other media venues, he made a relevant claim of once arranging for a would-be murder wanted by Barry Sherman; and two, Kerry was prone to lying, and while making his denial in the above-quoted interview he also failed a polygraph test about this other claim of murder planning, and even admitted to lying about it.

Relating to the first facet, namely his criminal connection and intent, Winter dropped a bombshell in the media by claiming that about two decades ago in the mid-1990s, Sherman asked him to arrange for the killing of Sherman’s own wife Honey:

“Though he cannot remember the date, Winter said that in the 1990s, on two separate occasions during a visit to Barry Sherman’s office at Apotex, he recalls Sherman asking him to make arrangements to kill Honey. At the time, by his own admission, Winter said he was heavily into drugs and the street culture.

“Back in the mid ’90s, we had a discussion in his office at Apotex,” Winter said. Asked what led to the discussion, Winter said: “His disdain for his wife, Honey. His unhappiness in his marriage and that he couldn’t stomach to be in the same room as her.”

Asked by the Star if he believes the comments he alleges were made in the 1990s held true in 2017. “They could have kissed and made up,” he said.

Winter said he never told police, but told two close friends.

“I was quite surprised. I wasn’t surprised that he had this idea, I was quite surprised that he was asking me if I knew someone who would do that,” Winter said, though he later conceded he was likely asked because “I was on the street, I was on drugs at the time and I knew a lot of bad people.””

(“‘I had absolutely nothing to do with it,’ Barry Sherman’s cousin says”, by Kevin Donovan, January 31, 2018, Toronto Star)

According to his interview with The Fifth Estate, Kerry did find a “hit man” but at the last minute persuaded Sherman not to do it:

“Winter’s bizarre allegation of the plot to kill Honey Sherman includes the claim that he lined up a hit man to do the job two decades ago.

“He said, ‘I want you to whack my wife,’” Winter claimed. Winter then claimed the plan was aborted at the last minute.

“I called him and said: ‘You know, there’s no turning back, Barry, if I push the button,’” Winter said.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

In these media interviews Kerry essentially provided witnesses, saying that at the time, i.e., in the mid-1990s, he told two close friends about it. The Fifth Estate managed to contact those two people and verified the authenticity to some degree, namely that two decades ago Kerry had indeed told them about the murder plot:

“The Fifth Estate interviewed two of Winter’s friends who said they were told of the plot two decades ago, but neither had any direct knowledge of such a plot ever happening.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

The Fifth Estate arranged a polygraph test for Kerry Winter, to see if it can affirm the truthfulness of his claim through the lie detector, a claim of past involvement in a “conspiracy to commit murder” by both him and Sherman:

“Some of Winter’s claims were reported this week by Canadian and U.K. media outlets, but The Fifth Estate could find no direct evidence to support Winter’s claim that he and Barry Sherman were involved in a conspiracy to commit murder.  

Winter and his lawyer agreed to a lie detector test on the question of whether or not Barry Sherman had asked him to arrange the killing of his wife.

The test, filmed by The Fifth Estate, was conducted by former Quebec police officer and veteran polygraph expert John Galianos.  

Galianos determined that Winter was not being truthful about the alleged plot and that he “failed” the test.

While not admissible in court because of possible inaccuracies, polygraphs are commonly used by police officers to determine truthfulness.

Winter told Galianos on camera that he “embellished” part of the scheme. He also said he fabricated other parts of the story.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

As above, the polygraph test showed that Kerry was not being “truthful”, and on the spot he explained it as due to embellishing part of the plot and fabricating other parts.

Kerry then arranged for another polygraph test without involving The Fifth Estate, and those results were “inconclusive”; but he refused to take a polygraph test directly on whether he killed the Shermans: 

“Late Thursday, Winter sent The Fifth Estate results of another polygraph test he says he arranged himself that showed the results were “inconclusive.”

On the advice of his lawyer, Winter also declined to take a lie detector test on the question of whether he killed the Shermans.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

Thus, Kerry Winter who had a criminal past including illegal narcotics dealing and time in jail, had quite likely told some friends two decades ago about arranging to murder Honey Sherman for Barry Sherman, but what he has told the media now was not reliable and he has admitted to lying about the it.

Can the denial of someone like that, with a criminal past and prone to lying, about any involvement in or knowledge of the murder of the Shermans be easily trusted? After all, the shocking double homicide occurred two decades after his talking to others about one wanting to kill the other with his help.

Criminologist Michael Arntfield, who observed The Fifth Estate’s polygraph test, posed the question why Kerry Winter went through the test, “this whole song and dance”, when he clearly was lying: 

““He was lying, and the test results — the polygraphist — confirms that,” said Michael Arntfield, a criminologist at Western University in London, Ont., who observed the polygraph test.

“I mean, why go through this whole song and dance? That’s really the underlying question here.””

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

The criminologist’s question is a very meaningful one because it regards Kerry Winter’s objectives.

In his interview with The Fifth Estate, Kerry asserted that his objective was to “hurt” Sherman’s legacy:

“Winter told The Fifth Estate he was going public now with the allegations because he wanted to “hurt” Barry Sherman’s legacy.

Winter and his siblings had been locked in a protracted, decade-long lawsuit launched in 2007 seeking a piece of the Apotex fortune. Last September, an Ontario Superior Court judge dismissed the case as “fanciful.” The cousins have since appealed.

“I was betrayed. My cousin hurt me, and now I want to hurt him,” Winter told The Fifth Estate.”

(Harvey Cashore, Scott Anderson, Ronna Syed and Joseph Loiero, February 1/2, 2018, Fifth Estate, CBC News)

In order to hurt Sherman’s “legacy”, or reputation, the alleged murder plot Sherman had wanted needs to be credible, i.e., seen as credible by others. That has been partially achieved when Kerry Winter’s two close friends confirmed to The Fifth Estate that they had heard about it from him two decades ago – at least it isn’t a newly fabricated story.

But in a legal sense, this was about planning for a would-be murder, and any solid confirmation would carry potential criminal-law implications for Kerry Winter, alone among he and Barry Sherman now that Sherman is dead. As some of the above quotes from The Fifth Estate story indicate, police pay attention to polygraph results and lawyers would advise not taking such tests.

For this reason, my explanation is that Kerry lied so that the polygraph results could not fully confirm the murder plot; but when the results were concluded as false, he did another test on his own to show that it might not be all false. In other words, Kerry wanted some degree of credibility for the old murder plot so as to hurt Sherman’s reputation, but not full confirmation that could cause himself trouble.

In my view also, Kerry Winter’s objective was not just hurting Sherman’s “legacy”, but had practical motivations.

For one motivation, such negatives in Sherman’s legacy, namely the bad deeds he had done, have ramifications to his business ownership reputation.

Sherman had been adamant, on several occasions as reviewed earlier, that his Winter cousins were simply not suitable to work at Apotex and thus would not qualify for ownership interests.

But now, if both the prominent businessman and leading philanthropist Barry Sherman and the sometimes criminal Kerry Winter were at one time would-be murderers, or co-conspirators in a would-be murder, the notion of business ownership suitability could change in favour of Winter.

However, a main weakness of this murder plot claim by Winter, in my opinion given that The Fifth Estate had partial verification from his two close friends, is the alleged murder motive – that Sherman was unhappy in the marriage.

In my quite lengthy review of the various media profiles of Barry Sherman and his memoir, I have not noticed such a deadly facet in his personality traits.

When the media first reported that the Toronto Police suspected the deaths as murder-suicide, there were stories about the “clashing personalities” of Barry and Honey Sherman:

“‘Yin and yang’ is how family described Honey and Barry Sherman. They complemented each other, yet had clashing personalities.

Reserved, socially awkward and a workaholic, Barry was a pugnacious man who never backed away from a courthouse or corporate fight.

As an entrepreneur, he hired private detectives to rummage through his competitor’s garbage, then got a court order so he could barge into their head offices and seize their papers. He didn’t hesitate to foreclose on the homes of people who owed him money, even relatives.

“Free will is an illusion . . . Life has no meaning or purpose,” he said in his unpublished memoirs.

Honey was outgoing, with a cutting wit and salty tongue. Feted for her philanthropic work, she had the mettle of someone who survived throat cancer and took part in a charity dance contest after undergoing surgeries for her crippling arthritis.

…

Friends close to the couple describe signs of discord in the Sherman’s marriage, such as public ribbing about Barry’s devotion to work, but they viewed it as shtick. Everyone the Globe and Mail spoke with over the past week has been incredulous at the police’s initial theory that it could be murder-suicide. There have been no further details from police about the case.

Interviews with friends, court records, Barry’s memoirs and public tributes at the couple’s memorial Thursday paint a portrait of two people with outsized personalities who were polar opposites.

Back in 1970, Honey Reich was volunteering at Mount Sinai Hospital when she told a nurse that she was looking for a nice Jewish doctor. That nurse was married to Joel Ulster, a friend and business partner of Barry, a budding pharmaceutical magnate. He was not a medical doctor, but he did have a PhD. The two were introduced.

…

Honey was a socialite philanthropist, and loved nothing more than an excuse to celebrate. Holiday get-togethers were one area of their lives where the otherwise frugal couple loved to go all out. What began years ago as a modest family dinner evolved over the years into an 80-person feast, with a banquet table cutting across the entire length of their mansion. In the kitchen, Honey – in her sweatpants and flip flops – would be cooking for everyone.

…

Despite their busy household, Barry spent most of his time at the Apotex offices – six days a week, in the company’s early years, often working longer than 12-hour shifts. At night, he slept with a pad and pen by his bedside in case he woke with an idea.”

(“Who were Barry and Honey Sherman?”, by Tu Thanh Ha, Molly Hayes and Rachelle Younglai with reports from Andrew Willis, December 22/23, 2017, The Globe and Mail)

As told, the couple were opposite personalities with contrasting life focuses, the husband being aggressively driven in business while the wife immersed in social events and philanthropy, and Barry was not the medical-doctor husband Honey Reich had looked for.

But there were no outward signs of anything really “clashing” between them in their marriage, and so as in the above story their friends scratched their heads trying to substantiate Toronto Police’s “initial theory” of murder-suicide.

Thus, media reported facts about the couple do not support Kerry Winter’s claim about Barry Sherman’s animosity toward his wife.

For another motivation on Kerry’s part, a hidden history on the part of Barry Sherman involving a plan to murder his wife Honey could bolster the “murder-suicide” scenario of their shocking deaths, in a way befitting Kerry’s interests.

Using his sensational tale of hiring a hit man for Sherman two decades ago as evidence, Kerry firmly stated, in an interview with Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington, his “belief” that the deaths were the result of Barry killing Honey and himself, exactly as the Toronto Police initially suspected:

“… He believes the Shermans, who were found dead of ligature neck compression hanging from an indoor pool railing, was a murder-suicide as police originally suspected.

“If you believe (family lawyer) Brian Greenspan, if you believe it was a targeted hit and it was up close and personal, let’s find out when they charge the person responsible for Honey and Barry’s death,” Winter said.

“Well that day is never going to come sir because I said it, and I will say it again, Barry killed her and committed suicide,” he said. “That’s my belief and it will never change. The only way it will change if someone admits to doing it.”

…

“I am a recovering addict, six years sober, buddy,” said Winter. “I believe in the Lord. I am not an evil person. I had nothing to do with Honey and Barry’s death.”

But he does allege participating in a conversation with his cousin Barry Sherman in which he claims the Apotex founder asked him to arrange for his wife to be “whacked.”

Winter said “this business about Barry asking me to kill someone …“could be misconstrued as a conspiracy to commit a murder.”

He’s trying to balance that fine line between it not being a conspiracy he was involved in but one that Barry Sherman was allegedly spearheading.

“This idea that Barry never asked me is laughable,” he said. “Barry didn’t love Honey.”

He said the truth will eventually come out — which includes him looking to hire an underworld friend.

…

“You will see I am not a kook, I am not a nut,” he said. “All I said was there was a murder-suicide and I kept my mouth shut. But when Brian Greenspan starts spinning this (double murder) yarn, I am not going to keep my mouth shut anymore.

“The idea that Barry could not harm a hair on her head, Joe, is not true,” Winter said. “Barry hated her. That’s what I am trying to tell you.””

(“WARMINGTON: Cousin claiming Sherman deaths murder-suicide fails lie detector”, by Joe Warmington, February 2, 2018, Toronto Sun)

Basically, Kerry Winter wanted others to accept that he is a decent person but Barry Sherman was once a would-be murderer of wife Honey and now has really killed Honey and himself.

In another interview with the British newspaper Daily Mail, Winter talked in very graphic language about his “gut” feeling that Barry Sherman killed his wife:

“Winter, 56, told DailyMailTV: ‘My gut tells me he killed her.

‘That’s my feeling [and] I don’t believe somebody out there is going to be found because… Barry did the deed.

Winter’s own immediate reaction on learning of their deaths, he said was: ‘F***ing hell he finally did it. Barry finally killed the b****.’

…

Winter says that Sherman had ‘many enemies’ and that over the years people may have wanted him dead – but says the simplest explanation and the one he believes is that he did it himself.

‘Is it plausible that somebody out there had an ax to grind and arranged for them to be targeted?’ he told DailyMailTV. ‘Absolutely, because of the manner in which he did business and the many enemies he had.’

But he said: ‘There is no doubt, sitting in front of you here, that Barry killed her. I’m not surprised. Actually I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.’

…

Winter insisted this is legal feud with Sherman has no bearing on his conviction that his cousin killed first his wife and then himself or his decision to speak out now.

‘It’s not so much I’m saying negative things,’ he said. ‘I’m saying truthful things.’

And in reality, Winter said, the man mourned by Trudeau was a ‘pathological liar’ who was obsessed with accumulating wealth and held his wife in ‘disdain’.

Winter said: ‘He couldn’t stomach to be around her. He used to say to me, ‘There’s love and hate in every marriage. But there’s just so much hate in mine.’

‘And all these people who sit back and say, “Barry would NEVER have harmed her…he adored her,”’ Winter shook his head, ‘Barry wasn’t capable of love.’”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

To show how bad Sherman could be, Kerry told Daily Mail other anecdotes, including that the generous help Sherman gave the Winter sons not only were mostly loans – as my earlier review has shown – but also deceptively stripped off their remaining family inheritance, and that the Royal Trust documents on the Winter estate had information about their mother’s worry shortly before her death that Sherman would steal Empire Labs from her children:

“He bankrolled three of the brothers in business ventures. He paid visa cards, allowances, bought them homes, cottages, cars and speedboats. Only, in a detail they would later come to rue, Sherman didn’t actually ‘give’ them any of these things.

He signed lines of credit contingent on them handing over the remainder of the inheritance left to them by their parents.

At the time, twice-married Winter, was developing houses and losing himself to the drug addiction which very nearly killed him.

Sherman co-signed to millions of dollars of credit, mortgages and loans supposedly to help Winter expand his business and he provided him with $20, 000 – $30,000 a month.

Then, older brother Jeffery started asking questions about the sale of their father’s business and everything changed.

The siblings sued Royal Trust in 2001 for access to documents relating to the sale. In 2002 they discovered the option that Sherman had buried.

On one document, Winter said, a handwritten note from a trustee who visited Beverly shortly before her death noted she was ‘visibly upset’ and, ‘worried that Barry is trying to steal the company from the children.’

…

The last time Winter spoke to Sherman other than in a lawyer’s office was a telephone call he made on learning about the existence of the option some 15 years ago.

Winter said: ‘It was a short phone call and I was emotional. I remember crying and I remember saying, “Barry you lied to me.”

‘He said, “I know.” I said, “Why did you lie so much to me?” And it broke my heart.’”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

Winter stated to Daily Mail his conclusion that Sherman had never wanted to let the cousins share the ownership of the company he had taken over from their family estate:

“Today, Winter said, his older cousin ‘never had any intention of honoring that option.’

Certainly he never told Martin and Carole Barkin, the couple who adopted the Winter orphans, that it existed.”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

As Kerry Winter confirmed in the above media interview published at the end of January 2018, shortly after his adoptive father’s death, that Barry Sherman never mentioned the Empire Labs ownership provision to the Barkins.

But as I have pointed out before, Royal Trust would have and certainly should have informed the adoptive parents.

In concluding his Daily Mail interview, Kerry said something showing that he wasn’t that absolutely convinced of the deaths being a murder-suicide:

“But for all the unknowns he has no doubt about one thing: Sherman was capable of murder and wasn’t bound to his own life by anything that brought him joy.

Winter said: ‘If Barry Sherman hadn’t been an entrepreneur and a CEO he would have been a serial killer.’ 

He reflected: ‘Either way he had a terrible end. He either killed his wife and hung himself or he was targeted and Honey was punched out in front of him and his last moments must have been horrific.

…

‘But my feeling is he killed her. Barry did this. And all the tea in China doesn’t change that fact.’”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

As above, the mindset shown was consistent with my analysis earlier. Kerry Winter was not really so absolutely convinced that Sherman killed his wife, but that he was very capable of it and had wanted it at one time and so nothing is more certain than if he “finally did it” – a degree of wishful thinking has been embedded in this definitive belief even though Kerry knew Sherman might have been “targeted” after all.

While painting a picture of Barry Sherman as a murderer the best he could, Kerry also portrayed himself as now clean, well-behaved, and no longer involved in illegal drugs or with the criminal world like in the past:

““I’m six years sober, I’m a wonderful father, I work full time, I haven’t done a drink or drug in six years. I view myself as rehabilitated and recovered. I no longer associate with street people, drug dealers, criminals.””

(Kevin Donovan, January 31, 2018, Toronto Star)

That would be a perfect outcome in Kerry Winter’s imagination, that in the end Barry Sherman is a dead murderer whereas he himself is a born-again good citizen ready for some serious business ownership.

Kerry’s attempts to rehabilitate his own image had begun at least as early as 2008 in his interview with Toronto Life’s Geraldine Sherman, stating at the time that he no longer did illegal drugs except marijuana, and that had he known the prospect of becoming rich he would have changed earlier:

“We met a second time, same place. I asked Kerry about the effects of drugs on his life. He said he’s been clean for the past four years, “except for weed.” He said he once told Barry that he might have given up the drugs earlier if he’d known it might have made him a multimillionaire.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

But as reviewed in Part 1 and acknowledged by Kerry Winter in some of the quotes above, by the time of these media interviews he did in late January-early February 2018, the private investigators hired by the Sherman family had found evidence of “multiple killers’” in the killings, and the Toronto Police had also announced as “double homicide”. These conclusions were reported by the Daily Mail alongside Winter’s sensational opposite assertions:

“Toronto police initially treated the Shermans’ ‘suspicious’ deaths as murder-suicide after autopsies returned the cause of death as ‘ligature neck compression’ – strangulation caused by a cord or rope.

Then private investigators hired by the Shermans’ children concluded that the couple were murdered by multiple killers two days before the 75-year-old and his wife were found hanging from their poolside railings in a ‘semi-seated’ position. They had been strung up by belts.

Sherman was honored in death by Justin Trudeau, who publicly mourned him at a memorial service and tweeted a tribute to the couple’s ‘vision and spirit’.

Last Friday, after six weeks of investigation during which 127 witnesses had been interviewed, thousands of hours of surveillance camera footage recovered, 150 items removed from the couple’s 12,000 square foot home and even sewers searched in a bid to recover evidence, cops announced that they too were viewing the deaths as double-homicide.”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

Nonetheless, there could be some credit in Kerry Winter’s insistence that Honey Sherman had been a murder target two decades ago and the real murder target this time. Author Jeffrey Robinson, who had interviewed Barry Sherman for his 2001 book, Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry, following the Shermans’ deaths also voiced the opinion that Honey Sherman could have been the real target:

“Another possibility that the writer entertains is that it was Honey Sherman who was the real target.

“She was well-known as a pain in the ass, maybe somebody had something against Honey,” Robinson said.”

(“SHERMAN MURDERS: Did organized crime kill billionaire?”, by Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

In that case, I suppose if and when the killers also came upon Barry Sherman in the Sherman home they might find it necessary to neutralize him.

In response to Kerry Winter’s talking to the media about his strong belief in a murder-suicide, the Sherman family issued a statement denouncing him and his “outrageous and baseless claims about our father”:

“We are deeply hurt, shocked, and angered that Kerry Winter is using the tragedy of our parents’ homicides to make outrageous and baseless claims about our father. The family accepts the conclusion of the Toronto Police Service, and finds it regrettable that the media would give a platform to these completely absurd allegations.”

(“Statement from the Sherman Family: Allegations by Kerry Winter”, Apotex Inc., February 1, 2018, Cision)

After Kerry Winter’s high-profile media interviews with sensational claims about Barry Sherman intending to kill Honey two decades ago, and stating his strong belief in their deaths being a murder-suicide, it was reported that Julia Winter, widow of Kerry’s brother Dana, asked the court to conduct a mental-health assessment of Kerry while the Winter family appealed the 2017 court ruling against their $1 billion lawsuit:

“In a newly-unsealed court document obtained by the Sun, a relative contends the controversial cousin who’s made outlandish allegations surrounding the murder of Barry and Honey Sherman suffered “some sort of nervous breakdown” after the billionaire couple was discovered dead in their home last December.

Kerry Winter’s “perplexing media campaign” has also cast him as a murder suspect, worries his sister-in-law in the filed affidavit.

“Although I have no formal training regarding mental or emotional disorders, I have known Kerry for approximately 25 years and based on his recent conduct, it is my opinion that he has suffered some form of nervous breakdown,” says Julia Winter, widow of Kerry’s brother Dana.

…

“I did not approve of Kerry’s recent statements to the press. I attribute it to his illness,” his Vancouver sister-in-law wrote in her affidavit.

…

Winter outraged many by blaming Sherman, telling the Sun’s Joe Warmington, “Barry killed her and committed suicide.”

Instead, people believe Winter is involved, his sister-in-law said in her affidavit, due in part to his “recent perplexing media campaign concerning his relationship with Barry. Kerry even recently appeared (involuntarily) on the cover of the National Enquirer with the caption “The Cousin Did It.”

His children are now being harassed at school. “In particular, they are being told that their father (Kerry) is a murderer.”

While he’s spearheaded the lawsuit on her behalf, as representative of her late husband, as well as his brother Tim Barkin, Julia Winter said her brother-in-law is now “unable to provide instructions” to their lawyer Brad Teplitsky or “participate in joint decision-making regarding the litigation with me and Tim.”

Teplitsky asked the court to require Winter to undergo a mental health examination to see whether the Office of the Public Guardian should be appointed as his litigation guardian. He’s now agreed to the assessment.”

(“MANDEL: Barry Sherman’s cousin Kerry Winter suffered nervous breakdown, sister-in-law tells court”, by Michele Mandel, May 4 , 2018, Toronto Sun)

The real world is much more complicated than in his self-interested idealization of what happened, Kerry Winter being familiar with the criminal world and well aware of his own life exploits and adventures.

In any practical scenario it is unlikely that Barry Sherman actually killed Honey, and although Kerry said he did not know “who did it” he also admitted to lying in The Fifth Estate’s polygraph test; even if he really did not know who, with the hard-core criminals and street characters he knew the killers may well have known Kerry Winter; and even if they did not know him, with the way he liked to talk about Sherman’s enemies and about his fantasy of killing Sherman, they may well have been aware of him and felt inspired by his anger and hate.

In my view, perhaps one of the strongest arguments against the murder-suicide scenario is the timing, namely the wrong timing of the deaths. Not only that the timing coincided with an Ontario court ruling shortly beforehand against the Winter sons on the $1 billion lawsuit they had filed in 2007, ordering them to pay $300,000 legal costs to Sherman, thus making a bold man like Kerry Winter extremely angry, but it also coincided with the Senate of Canada having just awarded a 150 Anniversary Medal to the Shermans and the government of Canada having just made a decision to appoint Barry Sherman to the Order of Canada – both in November 2017 as discussed in Part 1.

For Barry Sherman, as it had been for his old nemesis Morton Shulman in May 1993 as reviewed earlier, such was a time to celebrate, to rejoice, to be ecstatic and to be jubilant, rather than to kill his wife Honey and end his own life.

But Barry Sherman’s enemies were not limited to the brand-name drug companies as reviewed in Part 1, and his Winter family cousins and their adoptive family as reviewed up to this point in Part 2.

When the April 2008 Maclean’s investigative article asked the question why the murder happened now when Sherman was 75, it stated, here quoted again, that Sherman “had amassed a long list of enemies in his 50-year career”:

“The question to be answered is not only why was Sherman murdered alongside his wife, but why now, at 75? It’s no secret the drug executive had amassed a long list of enemies in his 50-year career. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

My review next will look at some well-publicised cases of Sherman’s disputes with others more generally in business, and in the community that he was a part of.

Note that in his 2008 interview with Toronto Life, as quoted earlier, Kerry Winter claimed that “several of Sherman’s business enemies” wanted him to win in the $1 billion lawsuit.

Those “Sherman’s business enemies” might not be limited, at all, to only those in the pharmaceutical business field which the Winter sons’ adoptive father Martin Barkin was a member of, given Winter’s past lifestyle dabbling in illegal narcotic dealing activities as well as various small business ventures, some of which supported by loans from Sherman.

In his business career, Barry Sherman has also made a broad mix of investments outside of the pharmaceutical industry, as Maclean’s reported:

“… Sherman’s wealth saw him cross paths with high society and low—from business and political elites to shady characters out of a Coen brothers movie. His investments outside of Apotex were both extensive and, at times, perplexing—a list that includes a failed casino bid, a money-losing gold mine, an outfit that produced therapeutic pads for horseshoes, a stake in the hottest commercial real estate venture in the country, a now-bankrupt jewellery company that dealt in “loose diamonds,” an investment in a yacht named The Great Gatsby that never existed and his backing of B movies Real Gangsters! and Sicilian Vampire.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

It looks like, from the above, that Sherman had some fascination in stories of gangsters and mobsters. Perhaps it had to do with the business ventures he had interests in.

As previously noted in Part 1, Author Jeffrey Robinson, who had interviewed Sherman for his 2001 book on the pharmaceutical industry, did not think the brand-name drug companies were behind the killing of the Shermans; Robinson also mentioned “Russian and Chinese organized crime syndicates” as examples of who could do such a murder job:

“But Robinson doubts one of Sherman’s Big Pharma enemies took out a contract on him.

“Big Pharma doesn’t take out hits on people, at least not in North America,” Robinson said. “They’ll plant a kilo of cocaine in the trunk of your car or embed kiddie porn on your computer but they won’t murder you.”

Russian and Chinese organized crime syndicates, on the other hand, play by different rules. Robinson said some Russian hitmen “fly in on Monday, do the job, then they get on a plane and disappear on Tuesday morning.””

(Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

Something like what Robinson said in the above, an international professional criminal hit, would be harder to solve. But presumably only the powerful would have the capability to easily arrange such an international assassination. The Big Pharma is certainly among the powerful.

Robinson thinks Sherman’s problem was “winning” at all cost:

“Now, investigators are working on the why and who.

“Barry was a prick, if he needed you to pay $150,000 he wouldn’t hesitate to spend $3 million in court. It was all about winning for him,” Robinson said.

“People really hated him in the business.””

(Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

As said, “People really hated him” because in a dispute Sherman must win through legal means.

On the other hand, it may not be winning that was what Sherman went after but that putting his opponent down was his need or satisfaction, as Kerry Winter said in 2008, quoted earlier:

“… “If Barry had his way, I’d be eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC. Well, Barry, that’s just not going to happen.” …”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Rather interestingly, the April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article referred to such a vindictive trait of Sherman’s as “righteous certitude”:

“… A hard-nosed strategic genius who built Canada’s largest pharmaceutical company, Sherman also conducted business with known criminals. He’d generously bail out someone in need—but often with a longer, self-interested view. He was a billionaire driven to litigation less by money than something more primal: a sense of righteous certitude that propelled him to prevail at any cost.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Whether that kind of “self-interested” stiffness should be described as “righteous”, conducting business with “known criminals” while having such a “righteous certitude” could be a deadly mix.

So let’s look at the case the Maclean’s article referred to when referring to Sherman’s “righteous certitude”, to see if it could offer any clue:

“In the summer of 1988, Barry Sherman received an urgent phone call—from a prison in Oregon. On the other end was a familiar voice: that of Harvey Rubenstein, a notorious Toronto stockbroker convicted of fraud on both sides of the border. Though Rubenstein’s financial scams garnered plenty of headlines, few people had any idea his victims included the founder of Canadian generic drug giant Apotex Inc. Mere weeks before taking that call, Sherman had launched a lawsuit against Rubenstein, his former investment adviser, claiming he’d been duped out of millions.

Now the disgraced broker, recently extradited to the United States to face another slew of fraud charges, was asking for even more of Sherman’s money: US$100,000 so he could post bail. He told Sherman if he weren’t behind bars, he could focus his efforts on recovering his lost money. Sherman agreed. “I couldn’t see any benefit, from my viewpoint, of having him languish in jail,” Sherman later testified in a sworn deposition.

The story didn’t end there. After Rubenstein pleaded guilty, Sherman agreed to loan him half of the $100,000 bail money so he could pay restitution to his victims. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Wow, Sherman seemed uncharacteristically generous in this case. Harvey Rubenstein, a notorious stockbroker who had been convicted of fraud in both Canada and the U.S. and who had as investment adviser defrauded Sherman “out of millions” and was being sued by Sherman, phoned Sherman from a U.S. prison asking for the help of $100,000 U.S. dollars to get out of jail; Sherman decided to post the $100,000 bail to secure Rubenstein’s release, and then loaned him half of the $100,000 bail money – in cash – so that Rubenstein could pay restitution to his victims.

That did not look like winning at any cost. Rubenstein had “duped” Sherman “out of millions”, and yet Sherman did not want to let him linger in prison but would lend him an additional $100,000 as bail, and after Rubenstein was released let him use $50,000 of the $100,000 to compensate the fraud victims.

In this case, Sherman was not only kind toward the fraudster Rubenstein but also considerate toward the other victims of Rubenstein’s fraud. Sherman being generous like this, a criminal likely would not want to kill him.

But then a related dispute arose:

“… But when another creditor stepped forward to claim rights to the remaining $50,000, Sherman spent the next four years fighting in U.S. court to eventually recoup what, for him, was essentially pocket change.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As told, when another creditor, i.e., someone to whom Rubenstein owed money, laid claim to the remaining $50,000 of bail money, Sherman switched to the ‘winning at any cost’ mode, spending 4 years fighting in the U.S. court to recover that money – for a person of his wealth $50,000 was very small, and the legal costs of fighting in the U.S. court over the four years probably cost him more.

The story did not say that the other creditor was a “criminal”. U.S. court records show that it was City National Bank. (“UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff, v. Harvey RUBENSTEIN, Defendant. Bernard C. SHERMAN, Claimant-Appellant, v. CITY NATIONAL BANK, Cross-Claimant-Appellee.”, July 24, 1992, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Court Listener)

It seems to me to be a mindset where when it was a small amount of money Sherman would be willing to make a kind gesture, but he could not stand his sense of authority being challenged – especially when the other creditor was a large financial institution.

Thus, in this case Sherman was rather generous to the difficult plight of a known criminal who had defrauded him, but unrelenting in fighting a financial institution just like fighting Big Pharma in his pharmaceutical business world.

Such a must-win attitude was obviously “certitude”, i.e., a sense of having the absolute right.

But it would not have been “righteous” but rather ‘ungenerous’ had the other creditor not been a bank but an individual victim of Rubenstein’s – just like, as in Part 1, when Sherman’s target of aggressive generic drug push was not a major international brand-name drug company but the small Canadian company owned by Morton Shulman selling a brand-name drug that treated himself as a patient.

I note that the bail and restitution money Sherman provided for Rubenstein were only lent to the latter, and so Sherman did not go beyond the norm as with the help given his Winter cousins – namely helping Dana get out of jail by posting bail, but giving financial help mostly in loans.

In fact, the fact that the $100,000 bail money for Rubenstein was a loan was central for Sherman’s winning the legal fight in the U.S. court not to let City National Bank take the other half not intended for restitution. When the court determined that the money’s ownership was Sherman’s, it was ordered to be returned to him:

“13   Rubenstein spent 1989 vacillating with regard to the federal criminal charges pending against him. In February he withdrew his not guilty plea and pleaded guilty. In June, he changed his plea again. In January 1990, he again pleaded guilty. Sometime during this period, Rubenstein learned that he might avoid a long prison sentence by making restitution to victims of his fraudulent schemes. Rubenstein then convinced Sherman in late 1989 to assign half of the deposited funds, $50,000, to the district court clerk solely for use in paying restitution on behalf of Rubenstein. Rubenstein also assigned to the district court clerk whatever interest he retained in the bail funds.

14    When Rubenstein was sentenced on March 23, 1990, he was ordered to pay restitution. To assure performance, the district court set aside $50,000 of the bail funds for distribution to Rubenstein’s victims. The court then turned its attention to City National Bank’s recently-filed motion to compel the district court clerk to comply with the bank’s newly-obtained writ of garnishment. Because ownership of the remaining $50,000 in bail funds was unclear, the district court instructed the bank to apply to the state court “for [a] determination of who the balance of the bail money belongs to.”

15    At this point, Sherman and City National Bank returned to state court, where Sherman filed a claim of exemption alleging that he, not Rubenstein, owned the bail funds. …”

(July 24, 1992, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Court Listener)

The Harvey Rubenstein example was one of several cases mentioned in the April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article where persons who had done work for Barry Sherman did something wrong and Sherman pursued them in court rigorously – note that Sherman did have a lawsuit against Rubenstein for the fraud, despite bailing him out of the U.S. jail.

One of the other examples in the Maclean’s article involved Sherman’s accountants who failed to alert him of potential problems in his investments into luxury yachts Elegance and The Great Gatsby:

“Sherman, being Sherman, was often aggressive in seeking restitution. In the 1980s, he was one of many high-profile Canadians burned in what’s considered the biggest tax fraud in the country’s history—limited-partnership tax shelters involving luxury yachts Elegance and The Great Gatsby. When it was revealed that no yachts existed, Sherman tried, unsuccessfully, to sue his accountants for negligence, claiming he lost more than $600,000. The Ontario Court of Appeal said Sherman was an “astute businessman” and “experienced investor” who should have known better.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

According to a judgment by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on September 3, 2003, The Great Gatsby and Elegance were two of 79 limited partnerships for luxury yachts in the Mediterranean and Caribbean marketed as tax shelters by businessman Einar Bellfield, 36 of which fully purchased by around 600 Canadian investors, including the two by Sherman alone. In most of the cases, no yacht turned out to exist and the investment’s tax benefit was denied by Revenue Canada – both were contributing factors to the financial losses suffered by Sherman and other investors:

“1. Background

4    Great Gatsby and Elegance were two of 79 limited partnerships registered by Einar Bellfield between 1984 and 1991 – ostensibly for the purpose of acquiring, and chartering, luxury yachts in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Thirty-six of the partnerships were fully subscribed – their limited partnership units having been acquired by approximately 600 investors. The general partner of each limited partnership was Overseas Credit and Guarantee Corporation (“OCGC”) of which Bellfield was the sole shareholder.

5   The partnerships were marketed to investors in Canada as tax shelters and, for the plaintiff, this was certainly their primary – and, probably, their only – attraction. In 1987 Revenue Canada commenced an audit and investigation into their activities and, in a letter of June 15, 1989, the plaintiff was informed that the partnership’s tax losses, and interest deductions he had claimed in 1985, 1986 and 1987 in respect of his investment in Great Gatsby, would be disallowed. …

6    Ultimately, all of the losses and deductions claimed by the plaintiff in connection with the limited partnerships were disallowed and tax was assessed on that basis. …

7    At the trial of this action it was not disputed that the limited partnerships promoted by Bellfield were part of a scheme in which he obtained funds from investors by way of fraudulent misrepresentations. No yachts were ever chartered and the very few that were acquired may have been intended only to give an appearance of legitimacy to the scheme. …

8    On November 16, 1999, Bellfield was indicted on charges of defrauding the Crown of the tax payable in respect of losses of $ 118 million claimed on behalf of the 36 limited partnerships, and of defrauding their unit holders. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and a fine of $1 million.”

(“Sherman v. Orenstein & Partners”, Cullity J., September 3, 2003, Ontario Superior Court of Justice, JD  Supra)

Sherman then sued his investments’ accountant firm for negligence, asserting that at some point the firm should have sent him a “going concern note” to alert him of the risk. The lawsuit was dismissed by the Ontario Superior Court for the reasons that the accountant firm did not breach the standard of care in this case, and that Sherman himself did not give sufficient care to the investments – here as summarised in a judgement of the Ontario Court of Appeal on December 2, 2005:

“A. OVERVIEW

1    The issues in this lawsuit are whether the respondent chartered accounting firm, Orenstein & Partners (“Orenstein”), breached the standard of care required of it in performing a review engagement; and, if so, whether its breach caused the loss claimed by the appellant Bernard Sherman.

2    Sherman is an astute businessman, an experienced investor, and the chair of Apotex Inc., Canada’s largest generic drug manufacturer. In the mid 1980s, Sherman invested in two tax shelters by purchasing all the units of two Limited Partnerships: the Great Gatsby and Elegance. These and seventy-seven other similar limited partnerships were formed to invest in luxury sea-going yachts. Overseas Credit and Guarantee Corporation (“OCGC”) was the general partner of all the limited partnerships.

3    OCGC loaned Sherman the money to buy the units in Gatsby and Elegance. Sherman made monthly interest payments on the loans, which he deducted along with other expenses and losses for Gatsby and Elegance on his income tax returns for 1985-89.

4    The Limited Partnerships turned out to be a sham. They did not conduct the business they claimed to conduct. OCGC became insolvent and its principals were convicted of fraud. After an audit, Revenue Canada disallowed the tax losses and interest deductions that Sherman had claimed for the years 1985-88.

5    Orenstein performed review engagements of the financial statements of twenty-two of the limited partnerships, including Gatsby and Elegance. …

6    Sherman sued the respondents for negligence. He claimed that they negligently failed to include in the financial statements of Gatsby and Elegance a “going concern” note. He claimed this note would have alerted him that the Limited Partnerships would not likely become operating businesses. He alleged that had the respondents included a going concern note, he would have stopped making interest payments much sooner than he did. He quantified his loss at more than $600,000.

7    In comprehensive reasons, Cullity J. dismissed the action. He concluded that the respondents did not breach the standard of care required for a review engagement. He also concluded that even if the respondents had included a going concern note, Sherman either would not have noticed it, or, if he did, would not have stopped making interest payments.”

(“Sherman v. Orenstein & Partners”, J.I. Laskin, E.A. Cronk and E.E. Gillese JJ.A., December 2, 2005, Ontario Court of Appeal, JD Supra)

As cited above, the Ontario Superior Court judgment concluded that even if the accountants had sent Sherman a “going concern note” it would not have made a difference.

The primary reason for Sherman’s lack of attention to these investments was his reliance on the businessman Bellfield’s personal guarantee of the desired tax-shelter benefits:

“95    The plaintiff evidently decided that it would be a fruitless exercise to attempt to recover on the guarantees he had extracted from OCGC and Bellfield and that the defendants were likely to possess a more capacious pocket. He was, of course, entitled to do this but, to succeed, the fact that he may have been defrauded by Bellfield is not to the point. He was required to prove negligence in the performance of the defendants’ professional responsibilities and not merely an exercise of judgment with which reasonable accountants might disagree. In the light of the evidence of accounting principles applicable to review engagements in the period in question, I believe the area in which reasonable accountants might reach different decisions was not negligible. …

…

105   I should add that, if it were necessary to consider the question of reliance, I would not have accepted Dr. Sherman’s evidence that he relied on the absence of a going-concern note in the financial statements of the limited partnerships. I am not satisfied that he ever read – let alone relied on an implied representation in – the financial statements. He had obtained advice from his personal advisers before subscribing for units of Great Gatsby and they had secured for him a personal guarantee of Bellfield that he would receive the desired tax results. He referred to the existence of this guarantee as a reason for never asking to see the financial statements of OCGC even though, pursuant to the settlement agreement of April 1986, these were to be provided to his accountant annually. There was no persuasive evidence that, after making the investments, he paid any further attention to them before 1989. The burden of proving reliance was on him and, in my judgment, it was not discharged.”

(Cullity J., September 3, 2003, Ontario Superior Court of Justice, JD  Supra)

As Justice Cullity asserted in the above, Sherman lost his investments and tax benefits, felt he could not recover the money from the fraudster and so sued the accountants in the hope of getting paid by them for the loss. One can sense that the judge stopped just short of scolding the wealthy Sherman for going after not necessarily so rich accountants to pay for investment losses in businesses about which he cared only for their tax-shelter benefits.

This last point is significant regarding these “tax shelters”, as the judge pointed out that Sherman probably did not even read the financial statements from the businesses once he had been given “a personal guarantee” of “the desired tax results”.

The fact that Sherman himself could be ignorant of his own finances – when he felt they were secure – is also shown in the Rubenstein case when he told the U.S. court that he did not know where his $100,000 bail money for Rubenstein actually came from, relying on his staff to get the money:

“His financial interests, conducted through a web of private companies, trusts and foundations were so Byzantine that even he had trouble keeping them all straight. During his Rubenstein deposition in 1990, a lawyer asked him where he got the bail money. “I don’t know,” he replied. “My banking is very, very complex. I simply instructed my staff to have the money forwarded.””

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

On can understand that when he found out that his staff or adviser failed him or even defrauded him, Sherman would become legally tough on them.

But it would not have been easy to manage money for Sherman, because like he said above, “My banking is very, very complex.”

The Maclean’s investigative article cited above mentioned the labyrinth of companies Sherman set up for his family investments:

“When the Shermans put their house on the market, they did what many rich people do to protect privacy: they used a numbered company as the seller. Sherman had a library to choose from; the one that was chosen listed him as president and his sister-in-law, Mary Shechtman, as a director.

That Sherman had a numbered Ontario company with his sister-in-law named as an officer wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with his labyrinthine holdings outside of Apotex—ventures that put the test to Sherman’s claim he didn’t care about making money. Relatives pop up in the records of Sherman’s non-Apotex ventures held through “Sherm”-prefixed companies—including Shermco Inc., Sherfam Inc., Sherfam Industries Inc., Sherfam Holdings Inc.—as well as Bernard C. Sherman Limited and numerous trusts and private foundations. The Shermans’ real estate holdings—apartment buildings, condos, commercial properties, rumoured private islands—were held via Sherfam Inc., Signet Realty and Weston, Fla.-based Sherm Realty, as well as trusts. At one point, Sherman owned Deerhurst Inn, an Ontario resort, but sold it after failing to obtain a casino licence. Just months before he was killed, he partnered with a prominent Toronto developer to provide $61.5 million in financing for the most buzzed-about condominium project in the country: The One, an 85-storey structure to be built at the corner of Yonge and Bloor.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

It was not easy to provide service to Sherman in general: it could be complex or Sherman was just demanding, and he might not pay much attention himself; but when he discovered problems he would unleash his lawyers hard on the service provider.

Sherman really hit hard legally to get compensation for damages. If this point was not so clearly exhibited in the above example of the failed tax-shelter yacht businesses because the Ontario courts ruled against him, it was very glaring in another case of service that was unsatisfactory for him: the case of the architects and builders who designed and constructed his home.

The Shermans budgeted $2.3 million in 1985 to build their dream home. After moving in in 1991 they found a lot of problems with their new home, “a disaster” as Barry Sherman called it; so they sued the architects and builders, and recouped $2 million of the design and construction costs:

“When Barry and Honey Sherman bought their North York property in 1985, they planned to spend $2.3 million to build their dream home.

But they noticed problems with the home within months of moving in, in 1991, with Barry describing it as “a disaster.”

After litigation against the house’s designers and builders, they wound up recouping $2 million of the contracted amount to construct the home, according to a 2006 judgment.

The civil litigation that involved both the Shermans, who were found dead in the house on Friday, was one of many Barry was embroiled in, and offers a rare glimpse into the couple’s private life.”

(“Barry and Honey Sherman sued builders of North York home”, by Tamar Harris, December 19, 2017, Toronto Star)

A luxury “dream home” that took $2.3 million to design and build ended up costing the Shermans only $300,000, after a legal battle recouping $2 million.

That must have been a prime example of Barry Sherman’s legal prowess, although his lawyers would have cost money, too.

The house was an “architectural modern masterpiece” – despite all the problems when it was first built – according to a $6.9 million real estate listing in December 2017 when it was put on the market for sale by the Shermans shortly before their unexpected deaths:

“The house near Bayview Ave. and Highway 401 was listed for sale this month at $6.9 million.

The 12,000 square foot house is an “architectural modern masterpiece of poured concrete and steel construction,” according to an online real esate listing. The home has indoor and outdoor pools and hot tubs, a tennis court and underground parking for six cars with a heated ramp. The five-plus-one bedroom, nine-bath home is two storeys and features hardwood floors and a balcony.”

(Tamar Harris, December 19, 2017, Toronto Star)

Wow, what a bargain for $300,000! It was a 12,000 square-feet house with both indoor and outdoor pools, hot tubs, a tennis court and underground parking.

Let’s look at more details of this legal case:

“They went on to sue at least five of the people and companies involved in the home’s design and construction, including Jack Winston Designs, Thomas Marzotto Architects and Ewing Construction.

All but two settled.

The remaining two defendants, 21 Degrees Heating and Air Conditioning and Walter Kenyon of Walter Kenyon Designs, had designed the home’s heating and air conditioning system.

The Shermans sued 21 Degrees and Kenyon for negligence related to the design of the HVAC system, and 21 Degrees for breach of contract.

According to the judgment, “Mr. Sherman testified that there were so many things done wrong with respect to the construction of the house that it was a disaster.”

…

In their statement of claim, the Shermans asked for $500,000 in undefined damages for breach of contract or negligence from 21 Degrees and Kenyon. By the end of the trial, they sought nearly $34,000 in special damages and general damages of an unspecified amount.

…

In 2006, the judge presiding over the case found that 21 Degrees breached their contract and that both 21 Degrees and Kenyon were negligent.

But because the Shermans failed to prove they suffered any damages, the judge awarded them no damages and dismissed the case.

Two years later, an appeal to the Divisional Court was quashed.”

(Tamar Harris, December 19, 2017, Toronto Star)

As told, the Shermans’ sued at least five of the parties in the design and construction of the house, and all but two of the parties settled – that accounted for all the money recouped, so it would have been around $2 million. The Shermans continued to sue the remaining two defendants, asking for $500,000, and won their legal arguments in court; but because they failed to show the damages, the courts did not award them money from these last two defendants.

Had they shown serious damages with the last defendants, that magnificent home could have cost the Shermans absolutely nothing – other than any legal expenses for their own lawyers.

The problem, on the other hand, in my opinion given the home being an “architectural modern masterpiece of poured concrete and steel construction”, is how these architects, designers, builders and workers could make their living – with all the materials and parts, and time and work they had spent creating it and then the money paid them nearly all taken back.

But no doubt, these companies and persons learned a hard lesson of Mr. Barry Sherman’s “righteous certitude”.

I wonder now. In 2008 when Kerry Winter told Toronto Life as quoted earlier, “If Barry had his way, I’d be eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC”, did he only grieve his own plight after filing the $1 billion lawsuit against Sherman then seeing his properties and home taken away due to the loans he owed Sherman, or did his sentiment also reflect a perception by the community, including those who had created Sherman’s magnificent home?

It seems that, from my review thus far, it is the combination of his aggressiveness in competition and his vindictive certitude in winning that has been a formula of Sherman’s business success, but that also led to harsh outcome for the losers.

Here, let’s consider the examples of using private investigators.

In Part 1, we have seen the German pharmaceutical giant Bayer hire private investigators to loiter around Apotex company grounds, pose as employees to try to uncover anything illegal; and we have also seen Morton Shulman hire private investigators to look into Sherman’s businesses, and Sherman’s illegal mail-marketing of Apotex drugs into the U.S. was somehow conveyed to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

But neither matched the tenacity of Barry Sherman’s use of private investigators, here quoted like previously on the contrasts between his personality and Honey’s:

“As an entrepreneur, he hired private detectives to rummage through his competitor’s garbage, then got a court order so he could barge into their head offices and seize their papers. He didn’t hesitate to foreclose on the homes of people who owed him money, even relatives.”

(Tu Thanh Ha, Molly Hayes and Rachelle Younglai with reports from Andrew Willis, December 22/23, 2017, The Globe and Mail)

Rummaging through a competitor’s garbage to find something and then getting a court order to barge into its head offices to seize the papers – how many gentlemen would go to such lengths of breaking the social norms in order to achieve more successful business?

The above several cases of disputes between Sherman and others outside of the pharmaceutical field were all about persons who provided Sherman with service that went sour.

The following is a case where the other person was a convicted criminal getting some money from Sherman, allegedly to start his own business, but otherwise had no service relation or other business relation with Sherman.

Not long after the Shermans’ deaths, the media reported the story of a small investment Barry Sherman had made to a convicted Fraudster, Shaun Rootenberg, that then led to a legal dispute. Shaun Rootenberg, a convicted fraudster also known as Shaun Rothberg, wanted investment from Sherman in August 2015, intending to defraud him. Despite knowing the person’s criminal background, Sherman eventually made a $150,000 investment into Rothberg’s project, an app named “Trivia for Good”, as a result of lobbying by Sherman’s own friend Myron Gottlieb, a well-known convicted fraudster himself, on Rootenberg’s behalf:

“Many of Sherman’s non-Apotex ventures were coordinated within his company and listed the same address as his drug-maker: 150 Signet Dr. So it’s unsurprising that Apotex is where Sherman’s friend Myron Gottlieb showed up on Aug. 15, 2015. He went there to meet with company executives to vouch for Shaun Rootenberg, a convicted fraudster looking for Sherman to invest in an app he was developing, Trivia for Good. According to court documents, Gottlieb met Rootenberg (a.k.a. Shaun Rothberg) in prison when he himself was incarcerated for fraud related to Livent Inc., the theatre company he co-founded with Garth Drabinsky. Sherman would ultimately invest $150,000, at Gottlieb’s urging, but would later sue Rootenberg, alleging he and others defrauded him. (Gottlieb is not named in the suit.)”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As told above, Rootenberg had been in jail for fraud, where he met Gottlieb, also jailed for fraud. It was after they had been freed that Gottlieb visited Sherman’s office to “vouch for” Rootenberg who was pitching an app business idea to Sherman.

Rootenberg had been convicted of defrauding family, friends and business associates out of “millions of dollars”, and would continue his fraudulent ways:

“Thornhill fraudster Shaun Rootenberg — aka Shaun Rothberg — has defrauded family, friends and business associates out of millions of dollars over the years.

Now it’s alleged the convicted scam artist may even have cheated murdered billionaire Barry Sherman.

…

As reported in 2017 by Toronto Sun crime writer Chris Doucette, Rootenberg was most recently arrested in June for allegedly defrauding the romantic partners he found on eHarmony.

He was in the cooler for a while after pleading guilty back in 2009 to fleecing friends and family out of $2.5 million.

Somehow, by 2014, he had talked his way into a Chief Financial Officer position with Algoma Pubic Health in Sault Ste. Marie. There, he kept an eye on the public health agency’s $23 million annual expenditures and $25 million in capital assets.

The long con appeared to developing the waterfront in the Sault, but it all ended after city officials were informed of Rootenberg’s past.”

(“Fraudster surfaces in Sherman case”, by Liz Braun, January 27, 2018, Toronto Sun)

As described above, after serving jail time, in 2014 Rootenberg became Chief Financial Officer at Algoma Pubic Health in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, where he supervised public budgets and investments.

It was only an interim position for Rothberg. But in January 2015 when he came again as part of a business trying to win approval for a development project, it was found out that he was actually Rootenberg with a criminal fraud background, and the region public health agency launched an independent audit to see if any money had gone missing under his management:

“Rothberg was introduced as part of a delegation from Canal Village Development Corp., unveiling big plans for the Sault’s Gateway properties.

In an adjoining media room, one reporter quipped that City Council appeared to have been hit that Monday by a pandemic of “infectious enthusiasm” for the project.

By Thursday, that enthusiasm was rather less infectious.

The City of Sault Ste. Marie had advised Canal Village’s lawyer that it now wanted nothing to do with Shaun Rothberg or any corporate entity in which he was involved.

Canal Village principal Paolo Rovazzi quickly provided assurances that neither Rothberg nor Henry Cole (another member of the Canal Village team with whom the city had issues) would be involved in the Gateway deal.

And Algoma Public Health announced that Dr. Kim Barker, its medical officer of health and chief executive officer, had been “shocked” Thursday to receive information about Rothberg that had prompted the health unit’s board to hire an independent audit firm to investigate a six-month period during which Rothberg had served as its interim chief financial officer.

Why all this fuss over a mind-mannered, bespectacled number-cruncher?

Dr. Barker, City Solicitor Nuala Kenny and Ron Hulse, the Toronto consultant who recommended Rothberg to Algoma Public Health, all insist he is actually Shaun Rootenberg, who did time at Beaver Creek Institution in Gravenhurst after pleading guilty to multiple counts of fraud involving more than $2 million.

…

So how does a convicted fraudster get hired to oversee Algoma Public Health’s $23 million annual expenditures and $25 million in capital assets?

The short answer, Dr. Barker says, is that Algoma Public Health (APH) didn’t check out Rootenberg’s credentials because he was hired through a third-party consultant, Ron Hulse of Toronto.

…

APH has certainly had difficulty with its financial operations in recent years.

In July, 2013, Jeffrey Holmes departed as chief financial officer and was subsequently charged with breach of trust and theft over $5,000.”

(“How on earth did this man end up overseeing Algoma Public Health’s cash?”, by David Helwig, January 21, 2015, SooToday)

As told above, Jeffrey Holmes, a previous chief financial officer who had left in July 2013, was charged with breach of trust and theft, and then the agency hired this interim chief financial officer who turned out to have a criminal fraud past. Rothberg’s background was not checked at the time of the hiring because he was recommended by a third-party consultant, Ron Hulse of Toronto.

Fortunately, no money was missing when it came to Rootenberg, and the former Ontario deputy health minister who led the independent audit, producing a report critical of the Algoma Public Health board, in June 2015 actually praised Rootenberg for his work there:

“Marchy Bruni has so far not resigned as chair and a member of the Algoma Public Health board, as he was asked to do this afternoon by Dr. Eric Hoskins, Ontario’s minister of health and long-term care.

“If that’s what they request from the ministry, I have to consider [that],” Bruni told SooToday after a news conference at the Sault Ste. Marie Civic Centre by Hoskins and Graham Scott (shown), the former deputy minister of health who conducted a governance assessment of the APH board.

Scott’s assessment concluded that the board failed to meet its legal obligations.

Hoskins demanded the resignations of all members appointed to the APH board prior to the 2014 municipal election.

Notwithstanding his sharp criticisms of Algoma Public Health’s governance, Scott spoke well of Shaun Rootenberg, APH’s former interim chief financial officer, whose criminal background helped prompt the provincial assessment.

“There was no loss of cash. There was nothing inappropriate or illegal. Mr. Rootenberg did, in fact, quite a credible job during the time he was there,” Scott told SooToday.”

(“Will Marchy Bruni resign?”, by David Helwig, June 16, 2015, SooToday)

As told above, Health Minister Dr. Eric Hoskins demanded the resignations of all members of that regional public health board, while at the same time the lead auditor, former deputy health minister Graham Scott, told the media that “Mr. Rootenberg did, in fact, quite a credible job during the time he was there”.

So, even though he previously had defrauded, and would continue to defraud family, friends and business associates, Shaun Rootenberg was recently praised for “quite a credible job” for interim work as chief financial officer of a public health agency, when in August 2015 his prison-acquainted friend Myron Gottlieb approached Barry Sherman, a pharmaceutical business billionaire, to vouch for investment for Rootenberg’s app business idea.

Such a business company was set up and the mobile app produced. However, the public announcements did not cite Rootenberg or Rothberg, but named Ronald Hulse, i.e., the person who had recommended Rothberg to Algoma Public Health, as its co-founder, president and chief operating officer:

“Trivia For Good is a Canadian start-up company in the digital advertising platform space that will give away $500,000 in its first five contests over the next ten weeks, with $400,000 of that going to winners and the rest donated directly to charity.

“We hope to unleash a ‘phenomena of kindness’ as we provide cash windfalls to our top contestant weekly, while paying forward large donations to our charity partners, Right To Play, Els for Autism and Jays Care Foundation,” said Ronald Hulse, President and COO.

…

“I don’t believe you’ll find another free game where someone can play and win that much cash while also directly helping charities,” said Steven Glaser, CEO of Trivia For Good.

“The prize pools will increase to USD$1Million per contest as the company expands to a global audience.  We also have plans for even larger prizes and donations centered around the Olympics later this year,” said Glaser.

The idea for Trivia For Good came about when the company’s founders were discussing the difficulties brand advertisers face as they attempt to reach individuals without being seen as an intrusion through social programs and in-app mobile advertising.

“Trivia For Good rewards individuals for their time and offers them financial incentive to play trivia, a game everyone enjoys,” said Hulse, one of the founders.”

(“$500,000 in Prize Money to be won as Trivia For Good Launches its first FREE TO PLAY Contest in Canada”, May 9, 2016, Trivia For Good Inc., Cision)

Trivia For Good Inc. was a part of a larger company, Keek, of which Hulse was a former board member, and the mobile trivia game and advertising app’s launch campaign was featured on the Cineplex Theatre Network and Tim Horton T.V. across Canada. (“Keek Announces Restructuring of Its Social Trivia Division and TriviaForGood Announces Its First Contest and Market Launch Through the Cineplex Theatre Network”, March 2, 2016, Keek, Marketwired)

Whatever the marketing glitz, the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or potentially millions of dollars, of prizes given away and money donated to charities, Barry Sherman knew that it was a fraud and that he was defrauded of $150,000 in the process, and took legal action in May 2017:

“Ontario Superior Court documents show Sherman, founder of the Canadian pharmaceutical giant Apotex, intended to invest in an app called Trivia For Good, billed as a “mobile-trivia app that offers huge cash prizes.”

Sherman launched his lawsuit in May 2017 against Shaun Rootenberg and other parties. The lawsuit alleged “a fraudulent scheme” had cheated Sherman out of his investment.

Court documents show that Rootenberg, a previously convicted fraudster also known as Shaun Rothberg, came up with the Trivia For Good concept. The idea was to make money by selling advertising displayed on the app.”

(“Barry Sherman allegedly duped by convicted fraudster”, by Scott Anderson, Harvey Cashore, Joseph Loiero and Ronna Syed, January 27/28, 2018, CBC News)

Eric Paul, CEO of CannTrust Holdings, a company partnered with Apotex to develop a cannabis-based painkiller pill, has commented that various types of business figures went to Sherman for help and most of the time he would “loan or give them money”:

“Sherman trusted his gut and was willing to take risks, says Paul, who met Sherman 27 years ago when he approached him with a pharmaceutical-related venture. He was surprised at how quickly Sherman signed on. “Barry liked the story and said, ‘Let’s do it,’ ” Paul recalls. “Usually, people say: ‘Send the financials and we’ll do an analysis.’ ”

Such willingness made Sherman a target for people down on their luck or shilling a deal, says Paul: “He was well known in the community, so anyone who had a need—say a business going sideways—would go talk to Barry. Nine times out of 10 he would loan them or give them money.”

Shashank Upadhye, who worked as Apotex’s chief counsel from 2007 to 2012, heard many stories about Sherman’s quiet charity, whether it was covering someone’s tuition or helping an employee pay for a parent’s medical bills. “He was a real generous guy,” Upadhye says. “Now, anecdotally, I do know there probably were some people who took advantage of him, especially in business ventures, people he thought were his friends.”

Paul says he was familiar with the inner workings of these deals, and some left him aghast: “He was giving people money when there was no opportunity for success.””

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As told, “Nine times out of 10 he would loan them or give them money”.

But many of these instances were not necessarily about business of Sherman’s own interest, but about the community he being a billionaire businessman in, that others in the community sought his help – often in the form of business deals.

The various examples reviewed thus far have shown that Sherman could give some money in small amounts, such as for living allowances or paying Visa bills for his Winter family cousins, but when it came to a larger amount he might lend to or invest in the business, but seldom give the money, be it Kerry Winter, fraudulent financial adviser Harvey Rubenstein or fraudulent businessman Shaun Rootenberg.

And Sherman would use his lawyers to enforce whatever the conditions he smartly devised for these loans and investments.

But as Paul pointed out as quoted above, that some of “these deals” had “no opportunity for success”. Worse, some deals were intended to rip off, period, when they were pitched by fraudsters. So now what would happen when Sherman unleashed his lawyers on them? Confrontations became inevitable.

For the case of the convicted fraudster Shaun Rootenberg, there was an even closer timing in relation to the Shermans deaths than the Winter family’s $1 billion lawsuit being struck down by the court in late 2017; Sherman’s lawyers made a legal motion on December 13 – the day the Shermans were last seen alive – to move the lawsuit more promptly to trial:

“On the day he was last seen alive, Barry Sherman’s lawyers filed documents in court supporting a lawsuit against a convicted fraudster who had allegedly duped the billionaire philanthropist out of a $150,000 investment, CBC News: The Fifth Estate has learned.

…

It was in the final week of his life that Sherman stepped up his legal efforts to recover the $150,000 he said he had lost, a relatively small amount for a man reportedly worth nearly $5 billion. Still, on Dec. 13 his lawyers filed an aggressive motion to the court — with the goal of moving the case more promptly to trial.”

(Scott Anderson, Harvey Cashore, Joseph Loiero and Ronna Syed, January 27/28, 2018, CBC News)

That similar timing also caused suspicion.

The CBC story reported that Sherman had given a statement to the police after Rootenberg’s arrest again for new criminal fraud in June 2017 – in a month after the May filing of Sherman’s lawsuit against him – but clarified that CBC did not know of any connection between the Shermans’ murder in December 2017 and Rootenberg:

“Rootenberg was arrested again last June on criminal charges. Toronto Police allege Rootenberg defrauded two women with whom he had intimate relationships. The Fifth Estate has learned that Barry Sherman provided a statement to police in the criminal case against Rootenberg.

Rootenberg was held at Toronto South Detention Centre after his arrest. He was released on bail earlier this month. The Fifth Estate was unable to reach Rootenberg for comment after leaving an email and phone message.

In his statement of defence filed in October, Rootenberg said he “disputes the claim … that he contributed to the loss” and requested that the lawsuit be “dismissed in its entirety.”

Sherman and his wife, Honey, were found dead in their Toronto mansion on Dec. 15 by their real estate agent. Toronto police say they were last seen alive two days earlier. Police said on Friday they believe the Shermans were murdered. CBC has no evidence that there is a connection between the lawsuit and the murder, nor that Rootenberg is a suspect.”

(Scott Anderson, Harvey Cashore, Joseph Loiero and Ronna Syed, January 28, 2018)

What I would wonder is whether Sherman clearly displayed partiality when he launched a legal action against Rootenberg and others and pushed it forward aggressively, but not naming his friend Myron Gottlieb, also a convicted fraudster who not only vouched for Rootenberg but actively procured for his investment, in the lawsuit:

“Gottlieb emailed officials at Sherfam Inc. in August 2015 to thank them for the promised $150,000 investment.

“You advised that Barry Sherman will purchase 750,000 units,” Gottlieb wrote on Aug. 19, 2015.

Gottlieb then provided instructions for how Sherman’s $150,000 should be wired to the trivia company’s bank account. But according to the allegations filed in court, Rootenberg was a participant in a scheme “to defraud” Sherman and divert the funds partly for his own benefit.

…

Gottlieb was convicted along with Livent co-founder Garth Drabinsky in 2009 for defrauding their now-defunct musical production company Livent Inc.

In an email to The Fifth Estate, Gottlieb noted, “I am not a party to the action commenced by Barry Sherman.” He declined further comment except to say he was “privileged to be a friend of Barry and Honey Sherman.”

Rootenberg was arrested again last June on criminal charges. Toronto Police allege Rootenberg defrauded two women with whom he had intimate relationships. The Fifth Estate has learned that Barry Sherman provided a statement to police in the criminal case against Rootenberg.”

(Scott Anderson, Harvey Cashore, Joseph Loiero and Ronna Syed, January 28, 2018)

As above, it was Gottlieb who lobbied Sherman’s family company Sherfam Inc., received the promise of purchase of 750,000 units of investment for $150,000, and then provided instructions for wiring the money to Trivia For Good’s bank account.

This may have been Rootenberg’s fraud scheme. But in the case of Sherman’s investment, it was Gottlieb who visited Sherman’s office at 150 Signet Drive on August 15, 2015, to urge Sherman’s company to invest, as previously quoted from the Maclean’s article, and then on August 19 emailed instructions for sending the investment to the Trivia For Good company’s account as reported in the above CBC story.

Yet, Gottlieb was not named in the Sherman lawsuit against Rootenberg just because, as Gottlieb alluded to and quoted in the above, that he was “privileged to be a friend of Barry and Honey Sherman”?

When Gottlieb met Rootenberg in prison, he was there along with Garth Drabinsky as co-founders of Livent Inc., known for producing popular theatre shows like Phantom of the Opera in Canada and internationally, after having been convicted of fraud, with Drabinsky also losing his Order of Canada honour as a result:

“Gottlieb and Garth Drabinsky, the co-founders of now-defunct Livent Inc., were convicted of two counts each of fraud in a scheme to falsify financial statements so they could keep pace with lofty earnings projections.

Livent, behind such hits as Phantom of the Opera, filed for bankruptcy soon after the fraud was discovered in 1998. Its demise is estimated to have cost investors about $500-million.

The parole board says the courts clearly found Gottlieb was active in arranging and facilitating the fraud, and expresses dismay that Gottlieb says he is guilty only insofar as he didn’t properly oversee those working below him.

Gottlieb was granted day parole from Beaver Creek Institution in Gravenhurst, Ont., to a halfway house in Toronto in July after serving about 11 months of his four-year sentence.

…

Since Gottlieb was released on day parole he has been unable to find work, the board said, but noted that was likely due to his age – he’s 69 years old – and notoriety.

…

Gottlieb apologized for his crime at his July parole hearing, saying he should have spoken up in August 1997, when he said he realized the second-quarter financial report was off by about $24-million.

“I spent a lifetime trying to build a reputation and I blew it very fast,” he told the hearing. “When I knew it was happening, it was like hitting a brick wall and I can’t forgive myself.”

Gottlieb said he has a negative net worth now.

Drabinsky, who was granted day parole in October after serving about 14 months of his five-year sentence, is in the process of fighting a decision to strip him of his Order of Canada appointment.”

(“Livent’s Gottlieb gets full parole, despite ‘abject refusal’ to own up to fraud”, by Darren Calabrese, March 28, 2013/May 11, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

As told in the above, at this point in his life Myron Gottlieb no longer had wealth, was unable to find work, and likely had little money to live on when in August 2015 he persuaded his privileged friend Barry Sherman to invest in Shaun Rootenberg’s Trivia For Good app idea, procuring and securing the investment in a way he knew how; and he succeeded.

Most likely Sherman spared Gottlieb – but not Gottlieb’s prison acquaintance Rootenberg who likely had no wealth either – in the ensuing legal fight to recover the $150,000 due to consideration of the difficult predicament this friend was in.

But Gottlieb was most likely tied to Rootenberg and his Trivia For Good business in far more than getting Sherman’s investment. A press release, quoted earlier, from Trivia For Good Inc.’s former parent company Keek on March 2, 2016, mentioned a Canada-wide advertising campaign at the Cineplex Theatre Network and Tim Horton T.V.; and Gottlieb and his ‘co-0fraudster’ Garth Drabinsky had once been leading executives at Cineplex prior to co-founding Livent:

“In 1979, Mr. Drabinsky co-founded Cineplex Odeon Corp. with the creation of a 21-theatre complex in Toronto’s Eaton Centre. By 1989, Cineplex had amassed more than 1,800 screens in more than 500 locations. On “Black Friday” (Nov. 27, 1989), Mr. Drabinsky and business partner Myron Gottlieb were booted from the company by the Hollywood conglomerate MCA and Montreal’s Bronfman family. Mr. Drabinsky and Mr. Gottlieb hung on to Cineplex Odeon’s tiny live-theatre division.

…

From Cineplex’s live-theatre division, Livent was born. Mr. Drabinsky and Mr. Gottlieb were awarded control of the Canadian rights to The Phantom of the Opera, and the newly restored Pantages Theatre, where the mega-musical had opened a few months before. Soon, Livent was mounting big-budget shows such as Showboat, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime. During his Broadway career, Mr. Drabinsky’s productions captured 19 Tony Awards.

…

On June 30, 1995, Mr. Drabinsky was awarded the Order of Canada. David Mirvish, of Livent rival Mirvish Productions, received the award on the same day.

…

In 1998, Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz offered to buy a controlling stake in the Toronto company and inject some needed cash. A few weeks later, though, his accountants alerted authorities to some alleged “irregularities” in the books. Mr. Drabinsky and Mr. Gottlieb were suspended from the company, which later filed for bankruptcy and sold off its assets.”

(“The many roles of Garth Drabinsky”, March 26, 2009/April 28, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

As summarized above, the Livent debacle beginning in 1998 was not the first time Drabinsky and Gottlieb were ousted from the helm of a spectacularly successful entertainment company, by a Hollywood-based business partner – earlier from Cineplex in 1989 also by Montreal’s Bronfman business family.

I would guess that in 2015 the financially rather desperate Myron Gottlieb went back to his friends and old acquaintances, not only Barry Sherman but also some at Cineplex, to try making what he could out of the Trivia For Good idea.

For example, Ellis Jacob, the Calcutta, India-born and Montreal- and Toronto-educated Cineplex Chief Financial Officer at the time of the 1989 ouster of his bosses Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb from the North American theatre chain originally founded by Drabinsky in Toronto, stabilized the company, then founded a small company Galaxy Entertainment just as Livent went down in fraud, and by the early 2000’s was at the helm of a newly acquired, restructured and expanded Cineplex chain in Canada:

“… Hollywood narratives don’t fizzle without some prospect of redemption, and the hero of this tale is Cineplex’s Calcutta-born CEO, Ellis Jacob. Both here and abroad, he’s known as the man who’s not just reviving the flagging theatre industry but reinventing it. The average Cineplex-by far, Canada’s largest chain, with more than 1,337 screens at 132 theatres nationwide-moonlights as sports emporium, rock concert venue, arcade, lecture hall, food court and, yes, opera house. In some cases, it’s also a bowling alley, a watering hole, a billiards hall and a daycare centre-a cacophonous fusion of high and low culture. …

…

After graduating from McGill in commerce, he got his CA designation and went to work for an auditing firm. Unsatisfied with life as a lowly bean counter, however, he returned to school, earning an MBA from York University, as well as a CMA title. … Growing up in Calcutta, he’d regularly attended the Globe Theatre, a four-screen venue that hosted everything from Bollywood to live shows. In 1987, he got his entree into the movie biz when he was hired as the VP of finance at Cineplex Odeon, the chain started by Drabinsky in 1979, with a flagship 21-screen multiplex at Toronto’s Eaton Centre.

On his first day, Jacob had no desk or telephone. The place was in chaos; Drabinsky was in the midst of a worldwide buying spree that would eventually push the company $750 million into debt. In 1989, shortly after Ellis ascended to CFO, his impresario boss (along with his sidekick, Myron Gottlieb) was ousted. As Drabinsky and Gottlieb mounted an ultimately unsuccessful bid to take the company private, Jacob was left to right the ship. For four years, Cineplex Odeon flirted with bankruptcy. Negotiating day and night, Jacob managed to mollify all 19 banks banging at Cineplex’s door, and in 1998, the company completed an arduous path to solvency, merging with the massive Loews chain in the U.S. The combined business offered Jacob a new position outside Canada, but he and his wife, Sharyn, didn’t want to leave Toronto.

… Showing some of Drabinsky’s brass, Jacob left Cineplex in 1998 to start Galaxy Entertainment. …

Jacob had a lot of cred in the industry, and his promise to waive his salary for Galaxy’s first two years impressed investors. Former Alliance chairman Robert Lantos and Cineplex exec Steve Brown signed on. So did Onex head Gerry Schwartz, who became majority owner.

In 2001, Loews Cineplex, which by then owned more than 2,800 screens worldwide, filed for Chapter 11. Onex snapped up its Canadian assets. Schwartz persuaded Jacob to merge his 20-theatre Galaxy chain with Cineplex in 2003, and spun the movie assets into the Cineplex Galaxy Income Fund, with Jacob at the helm. …

…

Two years later, Onex and Jacob launched a $500-million bid for Canadian rival Famous Players, then owned by Viacom. Today, the combined company-23% owned by Onex-controls two-thirds of the screens in Canada.”

(“The dame stays in the picture”, by Patrick White, September 26, 2008/April 27, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

I would imagine that if Myron Gottlieb visited Cineplex to solicit help, like he did at Sherman’s company, Ellis Jacob would be glad to show his old boss the latest big-screen advertising powers for, well, anything goes probably.

‘All that glitters is not gold’, and in the ensuing legal dispute Trivia For Good had to face and Barry Sherman would not miss, Sherman’s partiality in “righteous certitude” may have been interpreted differently by different persons on the receiving end.

In any case, the scenario of the Shermans’ murder having connection to criminals who had money disputes with Barry Sherman appears credible or at least should not be easily dismissed, just like the scenario of possible connection to Sherman’s Winter family cousins, and the scenario, reviewed in Part 1, of connection to some of the brand-name pharmaceutical companies that Sherman called “the monopolies”.

Moreover, the possibility of links between these criminals and some of Sherman’s Winter cousins, particularly Kerry Winter with his criminal past and outrageously accusatory attitude in the legal and publicity feuds with Sherman, should not be overlooked.

Now, I should point out that there was a context to Sherman’s unsparing certitude towards even small acts of disputing him on the part of others when it came to money: Barry Sherman was once well known for frugality.

The July 2008 Toronto Life article republished in December 2017 pointed out that, at that point in time, Sherman had owned only four cars in his life:

“Barry Sherman parks his 2005 Chrysler Sebring convertible in the spot closest to the main door of the Apotex headquarters in Weston. Although Sherman, the CEO and founder, is the country’s 10th richest man, with a personal wealth of about $3.7 billion, he’s notoriously thrifty. He’s owned only four cars in his life, driving them until they’re ready to junk.”

(Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

Considering that Sherman became an owner of Empire Labs in 1967, that was four cars only for a timespan of over four decades.

In his Daily Mail interview, Kerry Winter seemed to suggest that Sherman’s frugality – in contrast to Honey’s love of extravagance – could be a cause of the misery for others like the Winter cousins:

“But, for all that, he recognized Sherman as a ‘kook’ with ‘a bolt missing,’ who seemed to have everything but took pleasure in nothing.

Sherman was an atheist who only donated to largely Jewish causes because Honey chose to and it was a tax write off, and Winter said was an atheist who ‘couldn’t give a s*** about the State of Israel’.

Winter said: ‘He couldn’t enjoy life. I asked him if there was anything in life he enjoyed. He said “making f***ing money.”’

Yet he couldn’t bear to spend it. His favorite restaurants were McDonald’s and budget chain, Swiss Chalet – where he always ordered the special.

He drove a clapped-out old car, refused to buy a new television when his old one barely worked, bought cheap shoes and clothes and would sneak back into the theater when he went so that he could see a second movie for free.

In stark contrast, Winter said, Honey was rumored to have one of the world’s largest diamond collections.”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

Kerry Winter’s speaking, in 2008 to Toronto Life, of the unbearable prospect of “eating cold french fries out of a Dumpster at KFC” seemed quite possible when Barry Sherman’s own favorite restaurant was McDonald’s.

In the Daily Mail interview, Kerry also discussed, in contrast to Barry Sherman’s thriftiness, how “enviable” the Winter family life had been when his father Louis was alive:

“The seeds of the feud were sown back in 1951 when Sherman’s father, Herbert, died from a heart attack age 46.

Sherman was nine and Winter’s father, Louis Winter, stepped into the role as a surrogate father, partly because he and his wife, Beverley, didn’t think they could have children of their own.

In 1958 they adopted a son, Tim. Then, two years later, Beverly fell pregnant with Jeffery. In 1961 Kerry was born and in 1962 brother, Dana, followed.

Winter’s father Louis, a biochemist, was the founder of generic drug manufacturer, Empire Laboratories.

Winter recalled: ‘We lived in a mansion overlooking the Humber River. We were enrolled in a posh private school. He drove a Rolls Royce. He had two yachts. He was a self-made millionaire.’

Pictures of the family at the time show an enviable existence. But those golden days were short lived.”

(Laura Collins, January 31, 2018, Daily Mail)

That good life was unfortunately short-lived for Kerry Winter as a child; and then he did not enjoy life in the Barkins’ home, either.

The April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article told of Honey Sherman’s shocked reaction once upon a time, and quick action to admonish her husband, when the couple visited the home of Barry Sherman’s Apotex underling Jack Kay and saw a swimming pool, something Barry had told her they could not afford:

“Where her husband could be frugal to the point of ostentation, Honey, herself known to fly economy, enjoyed a few upper-middle-class trappings: nice jewellery, a Lexus SUV, getaways with “the girls,” shopping in New York with her sister, Mary. At their funeral, long-time Apotex executive Jack Kay recalled Honey and Sherman visiting his house in the early days of Apotex. Taken aback when she saw a swimming pool, Honey called out her husband for telling her they couldn’t afford one. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

But in 1991 the Shermans moved into a luxurious custom-built home with both indoor and outdoor swimming pools and a tennis court, and if Barry still did not want a new car for his 50th birthday, well, that had become secondary anyway:

“… The differences were showcased at a 50th birthday party Honey threw for Sherman. Guests were guided outside to see a new sports car with a big red bow. “Barry was not happy with the gift,” says Rubin. “ ‘Take it back,’ he told Honey.” She did.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

By December 2017 when the Shermans were murdered, they were hung by their killers at the side of the indoor swimming pool, at their home that was on the market for sale as the couple were in advanced planning for the custom-building of an even grander, brick-and-stone home, here as described in the Maclean’s article:

“In the last months of 2017, Honey’s time was also focused on the construction of a grand new house; the move would see a couple known for their relatively low-key lifestyle upsizing at an age most people are doing the opposite. Honey purchased a prime corner property, held in her name, in the city’s exclusive Forest Hill neighbourhood in November 2016. (The purchase price is not disclosed in land registry documents.) The intent was to demolish the existing house and build a stunning structure. Architectural drawings filed with the city reveal a 16,000-sq.-foot brick-and-stone home with a separate pool house, a 41-foot retractable skylight over a central swimming pool, an event room, an elevator and a space for live-in staff. Sherman’s need for privacy was reflected in the “large shredder” planned for an upstairs office.

The ambitious plans called for 15 variances in the building code, some sizable, including increasing the maximum building depth to 47.6 m from the allowable 19 m, and a car stacker in the three-car garage. All the variances were approved on June 28, less than six months before the murders.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

The last day the Shermans were seen alive, on December 13, 2017, they appeared together to meet with the builder for their new home to discuss some design changes:

“Sherman wasn’t keen on moving from the house on Old Colony Road, but was doing it for Honey. “He just said: ‘You know, I wish I was staying here, but my wife wants to move so we’re moving,’ ” says Frank D’Angelo, Sherman’s close friend and business partner in non-Apotex ventures.

On Nov. 27, their house was listed for $6.9 million, described as an “architectural modern masterpiece.” Why the Shermans were selling when contractors hadn’t begun to build their new home isn’t clear. What is certain is that listing meant disruptions and privacy incursions—and a lockbox on the house, a rarity for such a high-end property.

Planning the house brought Honey to Apotex on Dec. 13, a day after she missed the Baycrest meeting. It was the last time the couple was seen alive. They were meeting with the builder to go over some design changes, Greenspan tells Maclean’s. Everything was going as planned. Or so it appeared.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

A potential problem, as pointed out earlier, is that in contrast to the luxury upgrades over the years to the Shermans’ lifestyles, Honey’s wishes as they might be, Barry Sherman’s overly stern and vindictive certitude toward those who he had trouble with in money matters continued to the last moment of his life.

Back in late 2017 after Ontario Justice Kenneth Hood struck down the Winter sons’ $1 billion lawsuit against Barry Sherman, the Winter family decided to appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal. The decision was announced by their lawyer just days after the Shermans’ deaths, at a time when intense publicity was given to matters about the Shermans:

“The family of the Shermans released a statement over the weekend slamming media reports speculating that police are probing the theory that the pair died in a murder-suicide. CBC Toronto has not independently confirmed details about what led to the Shermans’ deaths.

The Winter brothers’ lawyer, Brad Teplitsky says his clients will be moving forward with their appeal because they believe the judge made legal errors in dismissing the case.

Teplitsky has been in contact with Kerry Winter since the Shermans’ deaths and says Winter has “no comment at this time other than to express his sincere condolences to the Sherman family and is requesting that the media respect their privacy during this period.”

Teplitsky told CBC Toronto his clients will not be attending the funeral Thursday, and have had no contact with the Shermans since they’ve been “in litigation for many years.””

(“Barry Sherman’s orphaned cousins fight for cut of Apotex fortune in lawsuit appeal”, by Nicole Brockbank, December 20, 2017, CBC News)

As in the above, the Winter family’s lawyer Brad Teplitsky mentioned the Shermans’ funeral to be held the next day.

On the part of the deceased Shermans, the matter was also gravely urgent; in that morning after their funeral, Barry Sherman’s lawyers filed an appeal of the judge’s decision ordering the Winter sons to pay them $300,000 legal costs – Barry Sherman had wanted a lot more legal costs from the Winters, over $980,000:

“One of Sherman’s final decisions, it turned out, involved the fractious lawsuit with his cousins. Unhappy that the judge ordered the brothers to pay him only $300,000 in legal costs (he wanted $984,813.73), Sherman appears to have instructed his lawyers to appeal the ruling. They did, the very morning after his funeral—a move that saw Sherman litigating from the grave.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

On August 29, 2018, the Ontario Court of Appeal issued a ruling against the Winter sons’ appeal for their $1 billion lawsuit, and ordered them to pay an additional $60,000 legal costs to Sherman’s lawyers:

“A three-justice panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that a lower court’s decision that there was no need for a trial in the case was correct. The justices also upheld the lower court’s decision last September that the decades-old fight was an “abuse of process” by the Sherman cousins.

The cousins have now been ordered to pay $60,000 to the Sherman side to cover its legal costs in defending the appeal, on top of the $300,000 in costs awarded Sherman in September 2017 when Justice Kenneth Hood of the Superior Court of Justice made the ruling that the court of appeal adjudicated.

“It would be unfair and an abuse of process” to allow the cousins to take the matter to trial, the court of appeal justices state in their reasons. (The court of appeal panel was made up of justices Robert Sharpe, Russell Juriansz and Lois Roberts.)”

(“Sherman cousins lose appeal for piece of drug company’s billions”, by Kevin Donovan, August 29, 2018, Toronto Star)

Kerry Winter immediately announced that the Winter family would take the matter to the Supreme Court of Canada – their final legal option – and asked the media to “wish us luck”:

“Kerry Winter, who has been the most vocal of the cousins in the court battle, said Wednesday that they will “seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court” of Canada. “Wish us luck,” Winter said. Their claim has long been that it was Sherman’s involvement in their father’s company that gave him the leg up that allowed him to start Apotex. That’s why the cousins say they are deserving of part of the Apotex wealth, roughly a $1-billion share.

If the Supreme Court refuses to hear an appeal, the case will be over.”

(Kevin Donovan, August 29, 2018, Toronto Star)

If the Supreme Court of Canada refuses to hear the Winter sons’ appeal, their legal recourses would appear to be over.

It was not the first time the Winter family had something to do with Canada’s highest court. In 1964, just a year before their father Louis’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1965, his own Empire Laboratories won a landmark case at the Supreme Court of Canada, defeating the court appeal of an American brand-name drug company, Parke, Davis and Company, which alleged that Empire Labs’ generic drug packaging appeared too similar to the brand-name drug’s and thus infringed on their registered trade marks.

(“Parke, Davis & Co. v. Empire Laboratories Ltd.”, March 23, 1964, Supreme Court of Canada, Lexum)

Now, nearly a year after the Shermans’ gruesome deaths in a yet unsolved, “targeted” double homicide, led by Kerry Winter the Winter children have asked for the Supreme Court of Canada to intervene so that they would be awarded a total of 20% ownership of Canada’s leading pharmaceutical giant Apotex, which they claim had been denied them when Empire Labs was acquired and then sold by their father’s protégé and their cousin – and a brilliant young academic scholar and ultimately successful billionaire – Barry Sherman.

They have made this legal claim despite a condition in the over 50-year-old provision that to get such a chance each must be capable of being “a responsible employee” of the company – a condition their past troubled lives have been in sharp contrast to.

Will the Supreme Court of Canada even be willing to hear them?

(To be continued in Next Part)

A first year of blogging in 2009 – penning on the tenth anniversary of my first blog article (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

Ten years ago today, on February 20, 2009, I began posting my second blog article, which consisted of a series of posts written through the course of 2009, focusing on Canadian politics and entitled, “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”.

It was a long title that was not self-evident. Nonetheless, one can ponder about key words like: Airbus Affair, Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s investigation, myth of political vendetta in the investigation, politics of Brian Mulroney and of Jean Chretien, and Canadian social undercurrents.

In writing the posts, I first focused on the title’s first part, namely the “Airbus Affair”, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s investigation relating to it, and the “myth of political vendetta” in the police investigation.

I began by reviewing the current state of matters in early 2009:

“The long awaited, long-overdue Canadian government inquiry into the Airbus Affair involving former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, and millions of dollars in commissions rumored to have included kickbacks to Mr. Mulroney personally from a 1988 sale of European Airbus planes to Air Canada – a hot topic of Canadian federal politics for well over a decade, ^{1, 2} – is finally getting started at the end of this March 2009. How exciting it is for the Canadian political scene.

Or is it?”

(“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)”, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Okay, the opening reads like, that, after having been a “hot topic” of Canadian politics for nearly two decades, the Airbus Affair regarding “millions of dollars in commissions” given by the European company Airbus Industrie that may have included kickbacks to then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney for the sale of planes to Air Canada in 1988, might finally be getting a Canadian government public inquiry though I was not sure of it.

Well, that was the rhetorical style in which I began.

What was happening in 2009 was much less in scope; and I immediately answered in the negative to my own question quoted above:

“Not really. A Canadian government public inquiry headed by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant of Manitoba is indeed underway in its preliminary stage and the first phase of the inquiry into the facts will begin in late March in Ottawa. ³ But this inquiry is not about the Airbus Affair, only into allegations made by Mr. Schreiber in a civil lawsuit against Mulroney and during hearings held by the Canadian parliamentary Ethics Committee, in 2007-08, that he had a business service agreement in 1993 with Mr. Mulroney while the latter was still the prime minister, that he then in accordance gave Mr. Mulroney three cash payments totalling $300,000 during 1993-94 shortly after the latter had stepped down, and that Mr. Mulroney subsequently did nothing, or very little, to justify the payments. ⁴…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As described above, the public inquiry headed by Justice Jeffrey J. Oliphant would only focus on allegations made by the German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, that he and former Prime Minister Mulroney had had a $300,000 business service agreement before the latter’s stepping down and he made the payments afterwards but Mr. Mulroney subsequently did not do the work needed.

Mr. Mulroney, on his part, asserted that the amount of money he had received was only $225,000, he had then done the work and there was no need for an inquiry:

“… Mr. Mulroney however stated during the Ethics Committee hearings that he got into some sort of business consulting arrangement with Mr. Schreiber only after he had left the prime minister position, that he has fully done his part in the agreement despite receiving only $225,000 (rather than the promised $300,000) from Mr. Schreiber, and that there is no need for a public inquiry. ⁵”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As in the above two quotes, in 2007-08 there had been hearings by the Canadian parliamentary Ethics Committee, and Schreiber and Mulroney had each told their side of the story.

So there were various kinds of official fanfares, but weren’t they just about some small potatoes when compared to the “millions of dollars in commissions” involved in the Airbus Affair?

In the sense of the money involved, yes, small potatoes. In comparison, the Airbus Affair felt like a classic case of government corruption scandal as I noted in the article’s first footnote. The Airbus sale to Air Canada had been brokered by Schreiber and Prime Minister Mulroney’s close friend, former Newfoundland Premier and former Air Canada board member Frank Moores, and the two would then privately distribute the Airbus commissions:

“1. Air Canada’s purchase of European Airbus planes in 1988 smelled of a possible scandal from the beginning, as the purchase deal by then government-owned Air Canada had been brokered by controversial German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber and (former) Air Canada board member Frank Moores who was a former Newfoundland premier and a close friend of then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and as commissions of millions of dollars from Airbus Industrie were planned right from the start, to be distributed in private by Schreiber and Moores…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But not small potatoes in politics. In 2009 it was the first time in history a Canadian government Commission of Inquiry would be conducted on matters about a sitting or former prime minister. (“Commissions of Inquiry”, August 28, 2018, Privy Council Office, Government of Canada)

That was precedent-setting importance when it came to government leadership ethics and conduct.

Ironically, the credit for this public inquiry’s happening was Mr. Schreiber’s, as I noted that it came about after Schreiber’s filing a lawsuit against Mulroney and speaking to the media about the matter, at a time when he faced the prospect of deportation to Germany to be prosecuted there for fraud in a corruption scandal involving former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl:

“In fact, there might not have been any inquiry scheduled on any question about the ethics and conduct of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, at all, despite the kind of things that have dogged him since shortly after he became national leader and continued through when he was leaving office in 1993 and making decision to accept money from businessman Karlheinz Schreiber. ^{6, 7, 8} Represented by renowned Toronto criminal lawyer Edward Greenspan, Mr. Schreiber has been under increasing pressure since after he became a criminally accused fraudster in Germany in 1999 (a far cry from the earlier days when he was once a district court judge in Munich) related to a corruption scandal dogging former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as well as to the Airbus Affair, facing deportation by Canadian authorities; but initially he continued to deny having any role in the Airbus Affair (or having given any money to Mulroney). ^{9, 10} Schreiber however began to realize that Mulroney was publicly turning negative toward him just as his political-connection fortune started declining … and he decided to file a lawsuit to get $300,000 “compensatory damages” from Mulroney; that led to a media report in late 2000/early 2001 about Schreiber having paid Mulroney $300,000, and finally to November 2003 when Schreiber talked to one of the leading experts on the Airbus Affair, author William Kaplan, nonetheless emphasizing that the money was not part of any Airbus commission. ¹¹ …”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As described, Schreiber had been tight-lipped about the Airbus Affair but when he faced deportation and saw that Mulroney was turning unfriendly, he brought forth this ‘small money’ dispute.

When Schreiber did his first major interview on this matter in November 2003, with author William Kaplan as cited above, the RCMP had recently closed its criminal investigation of Mr. Mulroney in the Airbus Affair; Schreiber then became a sort of ethics crusader on this new matter while he fought legal battles to avoid deportation, and even wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

“… The breaking of silence by Mr. Schreiber came about seven months after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who had spent years investigating Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, had announced in April 2003 that the Airbus Affair criminal investigation against Mulroney was terminated without finding evidence for a criminal proceeding against Mulroney. ¹²

Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber then became more and more indignant as his lost one after another legal battle to avoid extradition to Germany where he is to face criminal charges; he made appeals to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he was adamant that he is not going back there without being given the opportunity to account how he was ‘ripped off’ $300,000 by the (former) Canadian prime minister he has been dealing with in his second homeland since the early 1970s, and he talked about “public trust”, “clean up” and “fundamental justice” versus “abuse of power”, “criminal activity” and “totalitarian Governments”. ¹³”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As described above, the sentiment Schreiber expressed was that the Canadian government should not simply deport him back to Germany to face criminal charges there when a former Canadian prime minister had “ripped off” him in business dealings here.

I noted that it was not an “easy” situation for Prime Minister Harper, that Mulroney was “some sort a patron” for Mr. Harper, having helped with the 2003-2004 merger of his old, “practically unelectable” Progressive Conservative Party with Harper’s “up-and-coming” Canadian Alliance:

“But it would not be an easy demand for Prime Minister Stephen Harper for whom Mr. Mulroney has been some sort of a patron since 2003-04 when Mulroney encouraged a merger between Harper’s up-and-coming but largely western Canada-based Canadian Alliance and his old, practically unelectable Progressive Conservative Party; ¹⁴ …”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Also, Mr. Peter MacKay, a top Harper cabinet minister whose father had been in Mulroney’s political circle and was a friend of Schreiber’s, and who led the Progressive Conservatives’ merger with Harper’s party, in 2003 publicly vouched for Mulroney’s innocence in the Airbus Affair:

“… when the RCMP in April 2003 announced termination of its Airbus Affair investigation, then Progressive Conservative MP, justice critic and leadership contender Peter Mackay, son of former Mulroney government’s solicitor general Elmer Mackay who has been a personal friend of Karlheinz Schreiber, commented, “It’s a sad comment that it took the RCMP this long to come to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to proceed”, and declared, “I see it as a total, unqualified vindication of Mr. Mulroney and his complete innocence in this entire affair”. ^{22, 23} …

…

22. Mr. Peter MacKay’s father, former Mulroney government solicitor general Elmer MacKcay and former Pierre Trudeau Liberal government justice minister Marc Lalonde guaranteed part of a $1 million bail for Karlheinz Schreiber’s release from extradition detention…

23. Peter MacKay later became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and agreed to merge the party with Stephen Harper’s Canadian Alliance to become the new opposition Conservative Party, in government today…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Prime Minister Harper then turned to an eminent Canadian, University of Waterloo President Dr. David Johnston, for advice. In 2008, Dr. Johnston advised that there should be a limited public inquiry on the Mulroney-Schreiber dispute – referred to as the Mulroney-Schreiber affair by the media – but it should not include the Airbus Affair, which according to Dr. Johnston was “this well-tilled ground” investigated by the RCMP for years already:

“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 conducting a criminal investigation into that, found “insufficient evidence” and closed its file; Dr. Johnston referred to the Airbus Affair as “this well-tilled ground”. ¹⁶”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I should clarify that Prime Minister Harper publicly announced the inquiry prior to consulting Dr. Johnston on its scope. (“The investigations: 2007-2009”, March 27, 2009, CBC News)

So that was the current state of affairs in February 2009 when I began my second blog article – prior to the start of the public inquiry.

Still, I noted that Airbus Affair-related matters were not explicitly excluded in the written rules for the inquiry but were left for the Oliphant Commission’s discretion:

“But wait. It turns out the Oliphant inquiry could still be more than only about the $300,000 or $225,000 in dispute between the two gentlemen, Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney. The Terms of Reference of the inquiry, as decided by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on the recommendations of Dr. David Johnston, say to examine the “business and financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney”, and that what those dealings were is within the matters the Oliphant Commission will determine. ¹⁷”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Justice Jeffrey Oliphant could still look into related matters if he so wished, I felt. But my sense was that he likely would not, given Dr. Johnston’s assessment that the Airbus Affair was “this well-tilled ground”; and so I opined that it would be up to Mr. Schreiber’s telling more for those matters to be heard:

“… Mr. Mulroney however stated during the Ethics Committee hearings … that there is no need for a public inquiry. ⁵

How boring it is to do something there is no need, or only insignificant need for – even Justice Oliphant makes more than the money in question for his honourable work on the matter.

…

And so more of a bore it will be if others do not hear more surprises from Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber during these upcoming hearings of the Oliphant Commission.”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

To counter the perception of the Airbus Affair being “this well-tilled ground” as expressed by Dr. Johnston, I analyzed reported facts from the press archives to try to debunk the notion that the RCMP had satisfactorily investigated the Airbus Affair and found nothing wrong with Mr. Mulroney; and I was able to demonstrate that the RCMP had not done a thorough job at all, in particular did not even get to the $300,000 that Schreiber had given Mulroney. On the basis of the facts analyzed, I concluded:

“…

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.

Nowhere near “a total, unqualified vindication of Mr. Mulroney and his complete innocence in this entire affair” that Mr. Peter MacKay confidently declared in April 2003 after the RCMP announced termination of the Airbus Affair investigation.”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I pointed out that, in fact, the RCMP continued to express an interest in investigating the Airbus Affair provided new information became available:

“As a matter of fact, as late as of 2006 an RCMP spokeswoman, Sgt. Nathalie Deschenes, still stated that “anybody” could bring new information on the Airbus Affair to the RCMP and a new investigation could be commenced, though some felt the agency had become intimidated by Mr. Mulroney’s past legal action. ³³”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I also pointed out that, the last time at the height of the Airbus Affair publicities in 1995-1997, the RCMP’s lack of resolve or candour had been the main reason that the government in January 1997 settled with Mr. Mulroney on his libel lawsuit:

“But either the RCMP have indeed been this impotent, or regarding the Airbus Affair the agency has had leads it was unwilling to pursue, or information it was unwilling to disclose. The last of these scenarios, namely the RCMP’s unwillingness to disclose certain information (the particular information in question was not about Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair but about the extent of the RCMP investigation, and was wanted by Mr. Mulroney’s lawyers), was in fact instrumental behind the Canadian government’s decision to settle a civil lawsuit with Mr. Mulroney in January 1997, paying his legal expenses on his November 20, 1995 defamation lawsuit over a September 29, 1995 Airbus-Affair investigation letter sent to Swiss authorities containing criminally-accusatory language against him. ³⁴”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In any case, in the subsequent months in 2009 following my several blog posts on these matters, Justice Oliphant stayed clear of the Airbus Affair in the public inquiry hearings, to the point that political commentator Norman Spector expressed his regret in a The Globe and Mail article:

“… Regrettably, notwithstanding some intriguing evidence, Mr. Justice Jeffrey Oliphant made clear that the sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada was not within his mandate.

And he quickly shut down any questioning that may have helped reveal what Mr. Schreiber did with the $20-million in commissions he received.”

(“The Oliphant inquiry was an almost perfect Ottawa case study”, by Norman Spector, June 11, 2009/April 28, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

Mr. Spector, a former Mulroney government official and Prime Minister Mulroney’s chief of staff, no doubt knew as well as anyone – except Schreiber and Mulroney themselves – the extent of Schreiber’s official contacts with Mulroney, having personally witnessed Schreiber’s unparalleled lobbying access; in his disappointment, Spector wrote that the limited public inquiry matter was, well, “small potatoes compared to the Airbus Affair”:

“During the Oliphant commission hearings, we learned that Mr. Mulroney met with Mr. Schreiber – a German-Canadian arms dealer – as many as a dozen times while in office. These meetings included breakfast at 24 Sussex Dr. and a private meeting at Harrington Lake, the prime minister’s summer residence. Both Privy Council clerk Paul Tellier and I testified that we could think of no other example of such access to Mr. Mulroney.

…

Mr. Schreiber continued to shell out hefty lobbyist fees, but in the end, the cost to taxpayers of the matter being considered by the Oliphant commission comes down to the waste of public servants’ time – small potatoes compared to the cost of the sponsorship program, and small potatoes compared to the Airbus affair.”

(Norman Spector, June 11, 2009/April 28, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

So, “small potatoes” when it came to the matter being examined, but precedent-setting inquiry for its public scrutiny of matters of a former prime minister, were the state of affairs in 2009 when the Oliphant Commission examined the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

With the Oliphant Commission at work, in August 2009 Schreiber was deported back to Germany, and was later convicted of tax evasion and sentenced on November 14, 2013, to 6 and 1/2 years in jail. (“Arms lobbyist deported: Figure in CDU party donations scandal returns to Germany”, August 3, 2009, Spiegel Online; “Karlheinz Schreiber gets 6½ years for German tax evasion”, November 14, 2013, CBC News; and, “Decree in Karlheinz Schreiber trial”, Photo by Karl-Josef Hildenbrand, November 14, 2003, Getty Images)

In May 2010, Justice Oliphant released his public inquiry’s findings, concluding that Mr. Mulroney’s conduct in his “financial dealings” with Mr. Schreiber had been “inappropriate”:

“The conduct exhibited by Mr. Mulroney in accepting cash-stuffed envelopes from Mr. Schreiber on three separate occasions, failing to record the fact of the cash payments, failing to deposit the cash into a bank or other financial institution, and failing to disclose the fact of the cash payments when given the opportunity to do so goes a long way, in my view, to supporting my position that the financial dealings between Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were inappropriate. These dealings do not reflect the highest standards of conduct, nor do they represent conduct that is so scrupulous it will bear the closest public scrutiny.”

(“The Schreiber-Mulroney affair: Key quotes from Justice Jeffrey Oliphant”, by Mary Vallis, May 31, 2010, National Post)

Hmm, accepting cash stuffed in envelopes on three different occasions, not recording them, not depositing them into bank accounts, and not disclosing them when asked about his relationship with Schreiber. One wonders what Mr. Mulroney had been thinking.

Whatever that money was for, Mr. Mulroney has never been a “close friend” of Mr. Schreiber’s, concluded Justice Oliphant:

“My perspective of the relationship is markedly different from that of Mr. Schreiber. To put it bluntly, I hold the view that Mr. Schreiber is deluding himself if he believes that Mr. Mulroney was ever a close friend.”

(Mary Vallis, May 31, 2010, National Post)

In my February 20 post in 2009, I had noted in a footnote that Schreiber’s relationship with Mulroney dated back to 1983 when he and Frank Moores helped Mulroney depose Progressive Conservative Party leader Joe Clark and become the leader:

“23. … in April 2003 the PC party leader was former Prime Minister Joe Clark, a former leadership rival, long-time partner in government and ideological opposite of Brian Mulroney; Mr. Clark had been deposed in his earlier stint as PC party leader in 1983, by Mr. Mulroney with the help of, among others, former Newfoundland premier Frank Moores and German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber – two personalities later at the centre of the Airbus Affair after Mulroney became prime minister…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Following the public inquiry’s completion, in July 2010 Dr. David Johnston was named by Prime Minister Harper to become the Governor General of Canada. The appointment made political commentator and Airbus Affair observer Andrew Coyne wonder what might be in it:

“It’s true that it was Johnston, as adviser to the Prime Minister on the terms of reference for the Oliphant inquiry, who recommended against including the Airbus scandal in its mandate, a decision that looks all the more baffling in light of the judge’s findings: not only that Brian Mulroney took hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, shortly after leaving office, from the very man from whom he was accused of taking bribes while in office, but that he lied about it, up to and including his appearance before the inquiry. Regardless of whether Mulroney was personally involved, the circumstances surrounding the Airbus deal are so suspicious that, even 22 years later, they cry out for an inquiry — not in spite of the passage of time but because of it. Johnston’s reasoning, that Airbus, having once been the subject of an RCMP investigation, was “well-tilled ground,” is simply unsupported by the facts: the RCMP had only just begun their investigation when it was shut down by the leaking of the infamous “Swiss letter,” a calamity from which it never recovered.”

(“That David Johnston scandal, in full”, by Andrew Coyne, July 12, 2010, Maclean’s)

In 2009 for my blog writing, though, I did not get bogged down with following the money trail.

Being more interested in politics and in government leadership ethics than in the details of commercial kickbacks to a prime minister per se, I proceeded in the blog post series to review broader issues in relevant Canadian politics during a longer historical period – beginning from Mr. Mulroney’s ascent to power in the early 1980s – with the hope that they would shed revealing lights on the Airbus Affair in particular.

Consequently, “the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada”, became a part of this long 2009 article’s title.

But in my article’s first post, I did not get to what the “myth of political vendetta” was in the RCMP investigation of the Airbus Affair, nor did I really discuss that bigger affair, except noting:

“Earlier, in August 1999 over two-and-a-half years after the Canadian government had settled a civil lawsuit with Mulroney, Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie made the accusation that there was a “political vendetta” behind the continuing RCMP criminal investigation (probably seeing that the investigation was going to continue well into the New Millennium). ²⁴”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In the blog post series through 2009, these various matters were looked into as the broader politics was reviewed.

I began Part 2 by showing that some key basic facts about Mr. Mulroney’s politics would shed light on why allegations of corruption, in particular the Airbus Affair about possible commercial kickbacks, arose.

For one key fact, Mr. Mulroney’s politics emphasized economic privatization and free trade, and was closely identified with that of Ronald Reagan’s in the United States and Margaret Thatcher’s in Great Britain; in relation to that, “the connections between the conservatives’ politics and their business and personal lifestyles” were regularly scrutinized by the left-leaning Canadian media, as I noted:

“When the Mulroney conservatives ascended to power in 1984 on a platform of economic privatization and free trade with the United States, and were perceived as practising politics more closely identified with that of the rightwing Mr. Ronald Reagan in the United States and Mrs. Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, the connections between the conservatives’ politics and their business and personal lifestyles naturally became subjects of scrutiny by the traditionally left-leaning Canadian media. ³⁷ Since that early days the press media have regularly exposed facts as well as innuendos, while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Fifth Estate TV program has relentlessly pursued some of the harder topics. ³⁸”

(“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)”, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

For another key fact, Mulroney’s politics and policies proved “extremely unpopular with most Canadians” in the end, and after his handing over the government to his successor Prime Minister Kim Campbell in 1993 the party, “once led by the founding prime minister of Canada Sir John A. MacDonald”, was nearly obliterated in the October 25 election:

“Mulroney’s approach to politics in the end proved extremely unpopular with most Canadians. The Progressive Conservative Party he had led for ten years, 1983-1993, nine of which as prime minister with two consecutive terms of parliamentary majority, a party once led by the founding prime minister of Canada Sir John A. MacDonald, in the October 25, 1993 election under his successor, the first female Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell, won only two parliament seats. ³⁹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

With the above two key basic facts in mind, I reasoned that the subsequent government of Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien would be willing to “take a hard line” when approached by the RCMP to initiate cooperation with the Swiss authorities to investigate the Airbus Affair; and I noted that, like the first female Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell, Kimberly Prost, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss authorities, referring to “criminal activities carried out by the former prime minister”, was also a woman:

“Given this background of history it is obvious that it was politically appealing in 1995 for the Justice Department to take a hard line when it was approached by the RCMP to initiate cooperation with the Swiss authorities in the Airbus Affair investigation; 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. ⁴¹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Compatible with my reasoning about the key basic facts regarding the Mulroney government, Norman Spector’s article in 2009 at the end of the Oliphant Commission’s public hearings, cited earlier, also clearly demonstrated the contrasting responses by Prime Minister Mulroney earlier and by Prime Minister Chretien later to Schreiber’s “aggressive” business lobbying:

“Still, one group of Canadians is sure to get value for the millions the commission will spend examining another of Mr. Schreiber’s projects, Bear Head. Since that project was considered both by Liberal and Conservative governments, political scientists will find buried in the Oliphant commission transcripts and exhibits an almost perfect case study of how Ottawa really works.

Under Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, the project was put to death in less than two years; during the Conservative era, it proved impossible to kill. How can one explain the differing response to Mr. Schreiber’s aggressive lobbying?

…

Frank Moores and Fred Doucet under the Conservatives and Marc Lalonde under the Liberals had no difficulty making contact and arranging meetings with powerful ministers. And they all had easy access to the PMO. The principal difference between the Conservative and Liberal eras was Mr. Mulroney’s personal involvement – and the personal involvement of his successive chiefs of staff, including me – which created the widespread perception in Ottawa that Bear Head had friends at the highest levels of government.

Under the Liberals, Marc Lalonde wrote to Mr. Chrétien – his former cabinet colleague – about Mr. Schreiber’s project, but neither Mr. Chrétien nor his chief of staff took a personal interest in it. …”

(Norman Spector, June 11, 2009/April 28, 2018, The Globe and Mail)

That kind of cosiness with business lobbyists was likely a reason not only for the Mulroney government’s being dogged with corruption scandals exposed pursued by the media, but also for Mr. Mulroney’s taking cash stuffed in envelopes soon after leaving government – as the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair finally revealed decades later.

Also interesting is where the word “vendetta” originated regarding the RCMP criminal investigation of Mulroney, that as alleged by Mulroney’s associates it had involved not only the police, but also the media and especially a number of female journalists.

In August 1999, Mulroney’s spokesman Luc Lavoie called the RCMP criminal investigation a “political vendetta” only days before Schreiber was first arrested for deportation, as I noted in a footnote of Part 1:

“24. Mr. Mulroney spokesman Luc Lavoie’s calling the continuing RCMP criminal investigation a “political vendetta”, came in August 1999 just days before the RCMP would arrest Karlheinz Schreiber in Toronto to try to deport him to Germany to face criminal charges there; it would take almost another 4 years before the RCMP would close the investigation without finding sufficient evidence against Mulroney…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But several years earlier, in 1996 for his libel lawsuit against the RCMP and the government, Mulroney’s side already alleged that there was a “vendetta” against him in the Canadian media, and subpoenaed three top journalists, all female, along with Justice Minister Allan Rock’s executive assistant by the name of Cyrus Reporter, for testimony, as I described in Part 2:

“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 The Fifth Estate host Stevie Cameron, The Globe and Mail newspaper columnist Susan Delacourt, and Maclean’s 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). ⁴²”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As cited above, the three female Canadian journalists subpoenaed by Mr. Mulroney were author and former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation The Fifth Estate TV program host Stevie Cameron, The Globe and Mail newspaper columnist Susan Delacourt, and Maclean’s magazine writer Mary Janigan.

Of the three, at least Stevie Cameron was very well known for her anti-corruption writings with a focus on Mr. Mulroney and his associates since the early time of the Mulroney government era, and was also viewed as a key person for the RCMP’s Airbus Affair investigation, having cooperated with the police since soon after the 1988 Airbus plane deal:

“It is also known that media materials provided to the RCMP had been crucial in the agency’s 1995 decision to revive the Airbus Affair investigation, and that author and journalist Stevie Cameron has been generally viewed as a key person in a tireless media campaign driving the investigation, not only through her articles, books and public speaking but also her communications with the RCMP, cooperating with the RCMP since 1988 and was later officially designated a “confidential informant” by the agency. ^{44, 45} …

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. …”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In 2007 during the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, Ms. Cameron reflected on her past role in exposing Mulroney by citing Schreiber’s lament to Mulroney about her on January 29 of that year:

“Ms. Cameron herself is also sure that the persons she has been chasing view her in this way as well, as she has been quoted as saying on November 13, 2007: ⁵⁷

“Would I be at the top of Mulroney’s list of journalists? You bet. In a letter Schreiber wrote to Mulroney on Jan. 29 this year, he said, ‘All my personal problems began with Stevie Cameron’s book On The Take and Allan Rock’s political witch hunt with the RCMP against you.’”

”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In this 2009 article’s Part 2, I presented a concise overview of Stevie Cameron’s anti-corruption writings, from the early time of the Mulroney era in the mid-1980s to the time of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair in 2007-2009.

Initially, in the mid-late 1980s, Cameron reported extensively on the “lifestyles and related problems” of the Mulroney family, namely extravagance paid for by the Canadian government and by his Progressive Conservative Party; what she exposed became a “hot topic” before the 1988 election – Mulroney nevertheless won it despite the negative publicities:

“… 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. ⁴⁸

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. ⁴⁹

The Gucci-gate and related topics of lavish personal spending (of government and party money) by then Prime Minister Mulroney and his family became a hot topic before the 1988 election, pounded upon by opposition parties and journalists alike. …

…

49. 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…”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Then, in the early 1990s, Cameron was the host of the CBC’s hard-hitting The Fifth Estate TV program; also, beginning from the late 1980s, she specialized in writing books investigating corruption in the Mulroney government and the Mulroney circles:

“Moving on from her 1987 lifestyle stories on then prime minister Brian Mulroney and his family, journalist Stevie Cameron hosted the flagship broadcast program of Canadian investigative journalism, The Fifth Estate, in 1990-1991. ⁵⁵

After the 1987 Mulroney-lifestyle stories Cameron also began to concentrate on a career as a book writer, specializing in investigative political journalism, and she has been growing her reputation ever since in this field, through a series of bestselling or award-winning books on subjects centred at corruptions in the era of the former Mulroney government, starting with, Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital (1989; an introduction to political life and business lobbying in Ottawa, with a focus on the years of Mulroney’s first term in government, 1984-1988), then after the Mulroney era had ended, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years (1994; a book credited with bringing to public attention the Airbus Affair and contributing to the revival of the RCMP criminal investigation), then after the government’s 1997 legal settlement with Mulroney on his defamation lawsuit, Blue trust: the author, the lawyer, his wife, and her money (1998; the real-life stories of Montreal tax lawyer Bruce Verchere, whose father had been a British Columbia supreme court justice, and who was entrusted with supervising Brian Mulroney’s personal business affairs while Mulroney was prime minister, stories about Verchere’s manner of business, his Swiss and Vatican bank connections, his marital infidelities and dispute with his wife who was a successful computer-software businesswoman, and his ultimate suicide in August 1993 – only two months after his appointment as chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited by Mr. Mulroney the day before Mulroney was to step down as prime minister), and finally, The last amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the anatomy of a scandal (2001; a book co-authored with then CBC The Fifth Estate producer Harvey Cashore, describing various international business and political-bribery activities of German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber). ⁵⁶

The last in the above series of books from author Stevie Cameron has been proven very credible by Karlheinz Schreiber’s own disclosures and revelations of facts in the last few years. …”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Cameron’s books listed above, published from 1989 to 2001, were respectively on the subject of: power and scandal in Canada’s capital Ottawa; crime and corruption in the Mulroney years, including the Airbus Affair; the life and death of a lawyer who supervised Mulroney’s personal business affairs; and Schreiber’s international business and political-bribery activities.

Especially worth noting was the influence Cameron’s books exerted, as quoted above. While the first book introduced the reader to politics and business lobby in Ottawa, the second book was credited with bringing the public’s attention to the Airbus Affair and leading to the RCMP’s intensified criminal investigation of Mulroney in 1995; and the fourth book was an introduction to Karlheinz Schreiber’s international activities and in some sense anticipated the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair.

In other words, several times Cameron’s books were galvanizing factors for, or forerunners to, major Canadian political affairs about corruption or ethical misconduct.

Thus, in praise of Cameron’s achievements, I wrote:

“… Ms. Cameron’s reputation as a courageous and solid investigative journalist doggedly on the money trails of former prime minister Brian Mulroney and German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber has been firmly established.”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The third book of Cameron’s listed above is perhaps the exception, in the sense that it has not foreboded a scandalous affair so far.

But that book is perhaps the most interesting, or most intriguing, of them as I wrote:

“For Stevie Cameron, the story of Bruce Verchere, former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s tax lawyer, has continued to be a subject of intense interest, as Ms. Cameron posted a blog article about him as recently as on February 26, 2008; in her blog article, Cameron made it clear that when Mulroney was the Prime Minister he had a “lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland” (something Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman denied when Karlheinz Schreiber first said it in 2006-07, as mentioned in an earlier part of this blog article), and that as explained the day before on February 25, 2008 by Mr. Schreiber in front of the parliamentary ethics committee this lawyer was Mulroney’s tax lawyer Bruce Verchere, who was also his financial trustee while he was serving as prime minister. ⁵⁸

The reason for then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Canadian lawyer to be referred to as his lawyer in Switzerland is that Bruce Verchere was also the Canadian lawyer representing the Swiss bank where (in a branch in Zurich, Switzerland) Mr. Schreiber opened bank accounts for Airbus commissions and other funds including his now famous $300,000 given to Mulroney in 1993-94.^{59, 60, 61}”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As described above, the central figure in Cameron’s third book, lawyer Bruce Verchere, was once Prime Minister Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee and, at the same time, a lawyer representing the Swiss bank where Schreiber had accounts for the Airbus commissions as well as the $300,000 he later gave Mulroney.

In other words, Verchere, who died of a suicide in August 1993 soon after Mulroney’s departure from government, could have been a key to the mysteries of Airbus Affair, namely to the possible Airbus kickbacks to Mulroney that the RCMP failed to uncover in its long-running and fruitless criminal investigation.

Karlhienz Schreiber has alleged something nearly to that effect. In Part 1 of my 2009 blog article I quoted from a 2007 media story referring to Schreiber’s allegation about Mulroney’s “lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland”:

“And yet by early November 2007 when he was trying hard to avoid extradition to Germany, railing against “abuse of power” by Mr. Mulroney earlier when the latter was prime minister, Mr. Schreiber took an extra legal step to try to expose Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, a role that was connected to the company Government Consultants International, an Ottawa lobbying firm during the Mulroney era founded by Frank Moores, Mr. Mulroney’s appointee to the Air Canada board, according to a report in The Globe and Mail newspaper: ²⁶

“An adviser to former prime minister Brian Mulroney asked Karlheinz Schreiber to transfer funds, made in connection with Air Canada’s 1988 purchase of Airbus airplanes, to Mr. Mulroney’s lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland, according to an affidavit sworn by Mr. Schreiber and filed Thursday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

The affidavit states that Mr. Schreiber informed Mr. Mulroney during a meeting at Zurich’s Hotel Savoy on Feb. 2, 1998 that one of Mr. Mulroney’s closest friends and advisers, Fred Doucet, had asked him to transfer funds “related to the Airbus deal” from the lobby firm, Government Consultants International, or GCI, to Mr. Mulroney’s Swiss lawyer.”

Such new and shocking revelation would make one wonder what else important Mr. Schreiber may have yet to disclose (even if in the case of the above accusation Mr. Mulroney’s spokesman denied it, stating that Mr. Mulroney never had a lawyer in Geneva, Switzerland). ²⁷”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As above, in 2007 in information formally provided to the court, Schreiber alleged that Mulroney’s adviser Fred Doucet had once asked him to send funds “related to the Airbus deal” to Prime Minister Mulroney’s lawyer in Geneva – namely Bruce Verchere.

After that 2007 court filing, in February 2008 Schreiber explicitly stated to the Canadian parliamentary Ethics Committee – as in the second last quote above – that Prime Minister Mulroney’s “lawyer in Geneva” had been Bruce Verchere, and Cameron also wrote a blog article to explain who Verchere had been.

In a footnote in Part 2 of my blog article, I noted not only Verchere’s close relationship with Mr. Mulroney but also close professional link with lawyer John C. Major, who on November 13, 1992 was appointed by Prime Minister Mulroney to the Supreme Court of Canada:

“60. There are several crucial facts in Cameron’s 1998 book on Bruce Verchere that are worth commenting on here: one, Bruce Verchere’s Montreal law firm Verchere, Noel & Eddy, in 1989 (i.e., when he was the financial trustee for then prime minister Brian Mulroney) merged with Calgary law firm Bennett Jones to form a national law firm Bennett Jones Verchere, and one of the lawyers in this law firm was John C. Major, who had represented Karlheinz Schreiber in Alberta, and who later in 1991 was appointed to the Alberta Court of Appeal and then on November 13, 1992 was appointed by Mr. Mulroney to the Supreme Court of Canada; two, although Verchere and his Montreal law firm also represented the family of murdered Italian banker Roberto Calvi – dubbed “God’s Banker” for his close ties to the Vatican and the Vatican Bank – after Italy’s biggest banking scandal and the unsolved murder, the Calvi family’s Canadian lawyer initially was Arthur Campeau at Brian Mulroney’s law firm Ogilvy Renault, and changed to Verchere’s law firm when Campeau came over in August 1983 just two months after Mulroney had defeated Joe Clark to become leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in June 1983; and three, Verchere was not only tax lawyer and financial trustee for the prime minister but enjoyed extremely close friendship, accompanying Mulroney in a 1988 White House visit for President Ronald Reagan’s farewell, and was appointed chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited in June 1993 one day before Mulroney was to step down, and just two months before Verchere’s own suicide in August 1993…”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But obviously, by the time of the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, or even a decade earlier at the height of the Airbus Affair, a man already dead could not cause a scandal, or at least could not do anything to cause one.

Still, Stevie Cameron has been very effective keeping journalistic tabs of the key figures and their activities related to former Prime Minister Mulroney’s ethical problems.

A reason for Cameron’s ability and effectiveness investigating scandals could be the intelligence background in her and her family’s past, which I mentioned:

“… From a family of some background in the intelligence field, Stevie Cameron had apparently worked for a short time at the Communications Security Establishment – a Canadian intelligence agency she discussed at length in her 1989 book Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital – before becoming a food and lifestyles journalist; ⁴⁷…”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In addressing certain media criticisms of Cameron’s writings, specifically that of her having a “conspiracy theorist” mindset, I discussed more about the intelligence background of hers and her father’s, and his tragic death when she was only 12 years old:

“One major category of criticisms levelled at Cameron has been that she collected all kinds of information she could get, including innuendos, rumors and gossips, and presented them as facts against Mulroney, and that she was a “conspiracy theorist”, “gratuitous” or even “mean-spirited” targeting Mulroney; varying degrees of this view have been expressed by many of her critics, notably author William Kaplan, columnist Philip Mathias of the National Post/Financial Post newspapers and Tory Senator Marjorie LeBreton. ⁶²

…

Regarding her “conspiracy theorist” mindset and her relatively liberal use of materials, Ms. Cameron’s background and interest in the field of intelligence may have given her a sense of liberty to include some innuendos and rumors with the facts in her documentation of corrupt activities.

Reading her books I have had the impression that Ms. Cameron did have a liking in quoting or citing persons in the social environment of a main character in a book, where the opinions or statements were not always verified with sufficient facts; and she did have a tendency to suggest the existence of regular patterns as well as of collaborations among persons behind the scenes, especially as they relate to corrupt practices, without presenting, or possibly even being in possession of, evidence to substantiate them.

That brings to mind that Ms. Cameron’s father, Whitey Dahl, had a colorful and adventurous life with some intriguing mysteries possibly to do with working with the CIA (including playing golf often with former CIA director Allen Dulles and befriending others in that agency), who died in an airplane crash when Stevie Cameron was only 12 years old, and that she has had a genuine fascination for her father’s life story and had even chosen to become a member of the “spy” community early in her career, dropping out only when she found out that she wasn’t good at her job of technical code-breaking of Russian radio communications. ⁷²

It is entirely possible that someone with Ms. Cameron’s background, knowledge and experience has the tendency to suspect more, to try to get at more, and to suggest that there was more, than has met the eye. The point is where a line should be drawn in the judgment of the writer in investigative journalist documentation; and on that Ms. Cameron has been at least as much a political journalist as she was an investigative journalist.”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Because of her journalistic work exposing corruption, Stevie Cameron had concerns for her family’s safety, and she was especially unwilling to be viewed as cooperating with the police, also because of her sad experience with the RCMP at the time of her mother’s death:

“… Cameron however has been unwilling to be treated or viewed as in cooperation with the law enforcement – the RCMP in particular – out of safety concern for her family as well as concern about some of the ways in which the RCMP have operated. ⁴⁶

…

46. Some of the reasons author Stevie Cameron has minimized to the public her role in cooperating with the RCMP in the Airbus Affair criminal investigation can be found in an article on the author’s website; two of these reasons I have found both sad and intriguing: one reason is her stated fear for safety of her two daughters, as around the time of publication of her 1994 book, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years, one of them, Amy, then a Concordia University student in Montreal, was followed and threatened, and one of her publishers’ office and the typesetting company were vandalized; another reason has to do with how she was treated insensitively by the RCMP investigators around the time of her mother’s final days in hospital in Toronto when she had to be on her mother’s bedside, a story reminding me of my unintended absence during my own father’s final days at a turbulent time in 2005 when his passing happened exactly one month after the death of Frank Moores (discussed in the Notes of an earlier part of this blog article) – the RCMP got Stevie Cameron away for an interview in the morning of January 14, 1997 and at the end of the interview when she phoned the hospital she learned that her mother had already died in the middle of the interview hour; …”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As in the above, around the time of the publication of her 1994 book on corruption in the Mulroney years, Cameron’s daughter Amy was threatened, and her publisher’s office and her book-typesetting company were vandalized; and, worse in some sense, in January 1997 when she had to be on her ailing mother’s hospital bedside, the RCMP got her away for an interview – doubtlessly about Mulroney and the Airbus Affair – and in those hours her mother died without her knowing.

I note here that Cameron mother’s death happened in the same month in 1997, mentioned earlier, when the government settled with Mulroney on his libel lawsuit against RCMP and the government.

In the above quote, I also mentioned the resemblance of “my unintended absence during my own father’s final days at a turbulent time in 2005 when his passing happened exactly one month after the death of Frank Moores (discussed in the Notes of an earlier part of this blog article)”.

Those relevant facts about my father and the time of his death – including coincidences with Frank Moores, and with former Supreme Court of Canada Justice John Major – which was unexpected to me in 2005, had been in the footnotes of the 2009 blog article’s Part 1 dated February 20:

“2. Amid the Airbus Affair publicity there were some influential Canadians who took exception to the prevalent negative view about Karlheinz Schreiber’s way of doing business; one such notable person was then Supreme Court of Canada Justice John C. Major, who had previously acted as Schreiber’s lawyer in an Alberta provincial government inquiry into questionable real-estate dealings involving Schreiber in the city of Edmonton; Justice Major was quoted at the height of the Airbus Affair frenzies in December 1996 that his dealings with Schreiber had been “very honorable”, and that Schreiber had been “badly treated in the accusations” in Edmonton…

…

20. Mr. Frank Moores, the crucial middle man in the Airbus Affair, is dead and therefore cannot be questioned by the Oliphant Commission in the upcoming limited public inquiry or by any broader investigation/inquiry processes that might be conducted in the future; Mr. Moores died of liver cancer on July 10, 2005; not long afterwards on August 3, 2005, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlan of the Supreme Court of Canada announced the early retirement of Justice John C. Major who happened to be one of the rare influential Canadians personally positive about Karlheinz Schreiber, to take place on Christmas Day 2005 two months ahead of his mandatory retirement at 75; …

21. 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. 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^thbirthday on July 29, died of lung cancer…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, Frank Moores, another key man who may have possessed crucial knowledge about possible Airbus kickback to former Prime Minister Mulroney, i.e., besides Bruce Verchere who had committed suicide in August 1993, died of cancer in July 2005.

In another footnote, I discussed Moores’s role in the Airbus Affair:

“19. Despite his lifetime denial to the contrary, former Newfoundland premier Frank Moores, a close friend of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, lobbied for and helped complete the 1988 $1.8 billion Air Canada purchase of European Airbus planes; Moores had to resign from the Air Canada’s board of directors to which he had been appointed by Mulroney, ahead of the completion of the deal because of political controversy; 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…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Moores’s death happened at a crucial time, around halftime from November 2003 when Schreiber did his first major interview – with author William Kaplan as mentioned earlier – about the $300,000 he had given Mulroney, to March 2007 when Schreiber filed a lawsuit against Mulroney and the controversy became the full-blown Mulroney-Schreiber Affair. (“Background on the Mulroney-Schreiber affair”, November 29, 2007, National Post)

The deaths of Bruce Verchere and Frank Moores, if they were not purely incidental, added to earlier mysterious deaths – suicides that have been disputed – related to Prime Minister Mulroney’s circles and money, discussed in Cameron’s 1994 book on corruption in the Mulroney years and cited in Part 3 of my 2009 blog article:

“Some persons had already died in mysterious circumstances after they had become entangled in the web of the former Mulroney government’s money, according to Cameron’s 1994 book, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years: besides what have been mentioned in this blog article about the story of Bruce Verchere (and his suicide), there had been other mysterious deaths of Tory associates of Brian Mulroney’s (that had also been ruled as suicides but were disputed), namely the deaths of John Grant and Roger Nantel who in different capacities had been in charge of dispensing federal government money. (In the Notes of the earlier parts of this blog article I have also mentioned the premature deaths of Frank Moores and Gary Ouellet, noting that my own father passed away in 2005 exactly one month after Moores.)”

(“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)”, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

On the anti-corruption side, the personal costs were particularly demonstrated in the case of Ottawa-area businessman Glen Kealey, a crusader who became “financially broke and penniless”:

“A better example of the consequences of anti-corruption crusade, one Cameron as a journalist also wrote about extensively, is the personal experiences of Glen Kealey, an Ottawa-area businessman who had had a dispute with some of the Mulroney associates during the early years of the Mulroney government – regarding an alleged 5%-kickback request from Mulroney cabinet minister Roch LaSalle especially – and subsequently embarked on a campaign to publicize, and to criminally prosecute corruptions in the Mulroney government: he became financially broke and penniless. ⁹³”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Kealey’s case, which Cameron reported as a journalist, also illustrated the difficulty to achieve any tangible result, at all, in anti-corruption crusades; same was true of my own experience in political activism over Mulroney’s leadership and conduct:

“As mentioned in some of the earlier Notes, I myself was once in peaceful political activity, in late 1992 in Vancouver, attempting to publicly air criticisms of then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership in general and especially his conduct during the Charlottetown constitutional process, sending press releases to some media outlets. … But my efforts at airing criticisms brought nothing but personal misery.

…

Glen Kealey not only lost all his business and money, but after years of hard campaign – including daily protests outside the national parliament lasting through the end of the Mulroney era – achieved only meager results: only one person out of 13 Tory politicians and 3 senior RCMP officers Kealey had wanted to prosecute, namely the former Mulroney cabinet minister Roch LaSalle, was charged by the Ontario Provincial Police (but not by RCMP); the OPP then missed the deadline for proceeding with the criminal charges …

In one of her first newspaper articles reporting on the Glen Kealey story, Cameron even quoted what was written on Kealey’s protest placard outside the House of Commons in the capital: ⁹⁵

“RCMP always get their man – but not their politicians”.

”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted by Cameron, above, from Kealey’s protest placard about police catching criminals, “RCMP always get their man – but not their politicians”.

Apparently, the Airbus Affair turned out to be more of the same, as was my experience as noted above in activism over government leadership and conduct.

It wasn’t until the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair and the public inquiry in 2009-2010, that someone of authority, in this case Justice Jeffrey Oliphant, finally concluded that Mr. Mulroney’s conduct had been “inappropriate” – as already discussed.

In the 1990s when Cameron was writing to expose corruption and matters related to the Airbus Affair, some particularly strong criticisms of her came from the Canadian media baron Conrad Black, who accused her of “journalistically” assaulting Mulroney, of avoiding the court and ‘double-crossing’ the RCMP investigator; such aggressive assertions prompted a journalist to say that Black wanted to have Cameron “put in jail”:

“A most interesting, rather lengthily outspoken and contemptuous attack on Stevie Cameron has come directly from Conrad Black, who was owner of the National Post newspaper in 1998 when he penned a review of William Kaplan’s book, Presumed Guilty: Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair, and the Government of Canada. Mr. Black referred to the RCMP Airbus Affair criminal investigation as “a disgraceful abuse of police and ministerial powers”, stated that Stevie Cameron’s “pathological hatred of Mulroney was notorious”, and described certain controversy about Cameron to do with leaked RCMP information – which the government had used as reason for settling Mulroney’s libel lawsuit – as that Cameron “febrilely promoted” the RCMP criminal investigation and then “double-crossed” the investigator Staff Sgt. Fraser Fiegenwald as well as the RCMP legal defence for the lawsuit because she was not willing to “identify her source under oath or alternately face contempt charges” in court: ⁶⁷

“Because she didn’t wish to have to identify her source under oath or alternately face contempt charges, she destroyed the feeble defence the government had against the man she had obsessively assaulted journalistically for years and she ratted on her police informant. Eventually, impartial history will have to record that for Brian Mulroney to have had such enemies was a badge of honor.

Justice was ultimately done, in that Mulroney was vindicated but most of the wrongdoers went unpunished. Only the RCMP sergeant paid with his job, doublecrossed by Ms. Cameron, the beneficiary of his misconduct, retiring the day before his disciplinary hearing, (with a full pension).”

Black also unabashedly declared that his notion of media ownership had much to do with power struggles directly related to the issue of how former prime minister Brian Mulroney should be treated by the media:

…

Such barely veiled warnings from the powerful press baron Conrad Black prompted newspaper columnist John MacLachlan Gray to comment unambiguously that Black wanted to have Stevie Cameron “put in jail” and turn Canadian journalists into “toy soldiers”. ⁶⁸ Also in reaction to Conrad Black’s comments, The former RCMP Airbus Affair investigator Fraser Fiegenwald sent a letter to Stevie Cameron issuing a denial that he had been betrayed by Cameron in anyway. ⁶⁹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Conrad Black’s public attack of Cameron in the media and praise for Mulroney received Cameron’s public response, calling Black “Brian Mulroney’s new champion”, as I quoted:

“Even though Stevie Cameron had not always answered her critics directly she took Conrad Black very seriously, and she took steps, fierily and determinedly, to answer Mr. Black’s accusations. Cameron wrote an article in which she called Conrad Black “Brian Mulroney’s new champion” and recounted the kind of denigrating language Black had used in his criticisms of her and the RCMP: ⁷⁰

“Black has emerged as Brian Mulroney’s new champion and the old contempt and patronizing dismissals of Mulroney which litter his autobiography have vanished. But not his contempt for investigative journalists, whom he has described as “swarming, grunting jackals” and police officers he calls “gasconading dupes” and “fascistic palookas.””

Cameron then publicly denied that any leaked information in question had come to her from Fraser Fiegenwald or anyone in the RCMP:

…

Cameron also stated clearly that contrary to Black’s assertion she was ready and willing to testify in court:

…”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Concerned about potential suppression of press freedom by such a powerful media owner, Cameron also brought a complaint about Black to the journalist organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression:

“In addition to replying to Conrad Black’s scathing criticisms through her newspaper articles, Stevie Cameron took an unusual step to counter what she felt was a “smear campaign” against her coming from Black’s media ownership power, by bringing a complaint to the journalist organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression; Cameron accused that Conrad Black had put “his attack dogs at the National Post“, which had published several stories attacking her, and that Black had used his power as “chairman of Hollinger Inc. and chairman and CEO of Southam Inc., who owns some 58 Southam and Hollinger newspapers in Canada”, to have those newspapers in an organized effort not publish review articles on her 1998 book, Blue trust: the author, the lawyer, his wife, and her money; the board of directors of the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression responded to Stevie Cameron’s concern by deciding that the organization would “monitor” Conrad Black’s actions. ⁷¹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I noted the irony that Conrad Black’s wife, journalist Barbara Amiel, had been a fierce critic of Prime Minister Mulroney in the 1980s when Cameron was exposing Mulroney’s extravagant lifestyle funded by the government, and even predicted that Mulroney would be brought down in the 1988 election because of his excess, a prediction that, unfortunately, did not come true:

“The Gucci-gate and related topics of lavish personal spending (of government and party money) by then Prime Minister Mulroney and his family became a hot topic before the 1988 election, pounded upon by opposition parties and journalists alike. One of the journalists who expressed outrageous opinions at the time was Canadian columnist Barbara Amiel based in Ottawa and in London, England, who commented with considerable disdain: ⁵⁰

“The problem with the Mulroneys, who are certainly bright enough to know this, is that they are still a little too lower-middle class, culturally speaking, to be able to accommodate their hungry social ambitions to this reality.”

Ms. Amiel even made a bold prediction that the many Gucci shoes would end Mr. Mulroney’s political career:

“It is an understandable failing but a failing that will bring them down. The ludicrous thing about Canada is that it is not the dreadful politics of Brian Mulroney nor his lack of principle in foreign and domestic policy that will be his undoing, but one pair of Gucci loafers too many.”

Well, Canadians all know that Mr. Mulroney was a tough leader who could not be so easily brought down by one pair of Gucci shoes too many, not in 1988 anyway, and apparently thus far has never personally lost in a general election or in the court of law.”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Even more ironically, I noted, that ten years later when Mr. Black had become a member of the British House of Lords it was Ms. Amiel’s husband, Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, who was brought down:

Rather, and quite ironically, recently in 2007-08 it has been by this time Ms. Barbara Amiel’s dear husband of intellectual and trans-Atlantic fames, Canadian and international press baron Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, who was brought down for having – together with his associates – tens of millions of dollars too many in a way that constituted criminal fraud and not just lifestyle excess. ⁵¹”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I also commented on a similar irony with Black versus Cameron, noting that it was the American justice system that brought down Lord Black:

“Apparently, as of today nothing really bad has occurred to Stevie Cameron in this contest of journalistic wills between ‘the David and the Goliath’, i.e., between her and Conrad Black.

On the other hand, Conrad Black is currently sitting in a U.S. jail serving time for fraud and obstruction of justice that have taken place within his media ownership. The irony is that it has been the American justice system, which the leftwing Canadian journalists tended to belittle, that has done Lord Conrad Black in.”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As in the second last quote above, by 2007-2008 Conrad Black was prosecuted for criminal fraud in the “tens of millions of dollars”.

I commented that it was a case of “Chicago corruption”, mentioning that Black was defended by Edward Genson, the same Chicago lawyer as for former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich:

“The Conrad Black case is an instance of ‘Chicago corruption’, which has been discussed in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, and which included the ongoing case of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who is represented by the same Chicago lawyer Edward Genson who defended Conrad Black. The standard views on the Black case are different, however, and they included opinions that Black’s was a case of American justice for a Canadian crime, as well as opposite opinions that Black was harshly targeted because he was non-American. ^{52, 53}

In any case, Ms. Barbara Amiel is fortunate that Lord Black’s high lifestyle with her as Lady Black, personally more extravagant than the lifestyle of the family of former prime minister Mulroney while in office, hasn’t contributed further misery to the life of Mr. Conrad Black in prison. ⁵⁴”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I should note here, that I had mentioned Black’s media business and criminal case, along with assorted well-known figures related to Chicago – including Barack Obama, Rod Blagojevich, John Nash and Oprah Winfrey – in my very first blog article dated January 29, 2009:

“… Now retuning to contemporary politics and looking at history from one side to another one notes that, being a Democratic politician from the state of Illinois, Senator Barack Obama was very careful during his recent 2008 presidential campaign, avoiding controversies by distancing himself from some of his old acquaintances on the political left such as his (former) pastor, the flamboyant Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his former Chicago Annenberg Challenge colleague, the defiant Prof. William Ayers, each step of the way. ⁶⁰ But the November election outcome has indicated that most American voters would not mind viewing such past connections of Obama’s as no more than a sort of error in ‘judgment’. ⁶¹ And it was when the story came of Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois asking for favor in return for appointment by him to President Elect Obama’s U.S. Senate seat, that the American media had a collective exhalation of understanding: That’s Chicago, isn’t it? ⁶²

…

Mysteries aside, some of John Nash’s brash but cryptic statements in those old days are nonetheless food for thought: if John Nash was to be the “Emperor of Antarctica” as he claimed in 1959 when declining to take up a prestigious academic position at the University of Chicago, then how should the modern-time, outspoken Oprah Winfrey be referred to as, whose media empire is based in Chicago? ⁸⁷ Queen of the Arctic who happened to have been born exactly 55 years before the day of this blog article? ⁸⁸ What about President Barack Obama, who from 1992 till becoming United States Senator in 2004 was on the faculty of the University of Chicago? ⁸⁹

…

The Canadian-British media baron Conrad Black did not mind Chicago either, owning the Sun-Times. His 2008 fraud trial in the Windy City was however not up to him, nor was the outcome up to his lawyer Ed Genson. ⁹⁴

Now you may say that for someone so brash and confident as to give up his Canadian citizenship to become a British lord, Conrad Black probably did not think he would lose in Chicago; but my question is what did he have to gain? ⁹⁵

…

95. Despite his massive international newspaper holdings at one time or another and many U.S. media properties, the Chicago Sun-Times has been the only major U.S. newspaper among Conrad Black’s possessions; Black also began his U.S. business empire in Chicago, in the mid 1990s, from there controlling his worldwide holdings…

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I wrote then, as in the above, about Lord Conrad Black’s Chicago venture, “what did he have to gain?”

But for a Canadian willing to give up his citizenship to become a British Lord, it likely had been about the glory and allure of power and conquer rather than about media.

Besides the attack by Conrad Black and the criticisms about her “conspiracy theorist” mindset, as already discussed, during her vigorous journalistic pursue of corruption related to former Prime Minister Mulroney Stevie Cameron faced other types of criticisms of note in the media – some of special interest to me.

One type of these other criticisms that I reviewed with special interest referred to Cameron’s husband, former government official and Canadian constitutional expert David Cameron, implying that she had a grudge against Prime Minister Mulroney because his rise to power ended her husband’s federal government career:

“A second type of criticisms of Stevie Cameron has implied that she had a personal (i.e., family) grudge against Brian Mulroney because when Mulroney became prime minister in 1984 it ended the career of her husband David Cameron as a federal government official in Ottawa, “an assistant under-secretary of state” (i.e., assistant deputy minister) specializing in constitutional and federal-provincial relation issues. ^{64, 65}”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In my blog article’s Part 3, I reviewed some key history relating to David Cameron’s government work on Canadian constitutional matters.

Mr. Cameron had been an official in Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government, with a role in Prime Minister Trudeau’s enactment of Canada’s first Constitution in 1982, and following the arrival of the Mulroney government became a vice president at the University of Toronto:

“As pointed out in an earlier part of this blog article and the Notes, in the early 1980s Ms. Cameron’s husband David Cameron was a federal official handling constitutional and federal-provincial relation issues in the Liberal government of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and as such he played a role in Mr. Trudeau’s enactment of the first Canadian Constitution in 1982; he was apparently let go when the Mulroney government came to power.

Ms. Stevie (Dahl) Cameron apparently had married (in the mid-1960s) an exceptionally able intellectual and civil servant – regardless of how he would have faired within the Mulroney government – for very soon after he had been let go David Cameron became the vice president of institutional and governmental relations at Canada’s leading university, the University of Toronto.⁷⁷”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Then, as Stevie Cameron engaged in her journalistic crusade exposing the excess of Prime Minister Mulroney and the corruption of his associates, her husband worked as a constitutional and intergovernmental affairs official in the Ontario government of Liberal Premier David Peterson, and also as Ontario’s representative to the province of Quebec:

“Then in 1987 only several months after Stevie Cameron’s series of newspaper articles had become famous about Mr. Mulroney’s 50 pairs of Gucci shoes as well as other lifestyle trappings of the Mulroney family, David Cameron was appointed deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs in the Liberal provincial government of then Ontario premier David Peterson. ⁷⁸

Further along, in early 1989 when Stevie Cameron’s first book, Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital, was to be published in the fall and “most insiders” were expecting it to become a bestseller, David Cameron was appointed special adviser to Ontario Premier Peterson on constitutional reform as well as Ontario’s senior representative to the province of Quebec. ⁷⁹”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As just mentioned, Canada had introduced the country’s first national constitution only in 1982. Subsequently in the 1980s during the Mulroney era, constitutional issues were another major area of media and public interest, i.e., besides corruption-related topics. Hence, I explained, David Cameron’s role in this period somewhat paralleled his wife’s, i.e., opposing the Mulroney government but in the constitutional-reform arena:

“To better understand that the differences between the Trudeau Liberals and the Mulroney Conservatives were fundamental, one needs to take into account that Mr. Mulroney brought in not only the policies of economic privatization and free trade to dismantle the core of the Trudeau government’s socialist, government control-centered economic and social doctrines, ⁸⁰ but also a set of agendas of decentralization and regionalization of government power, which included aligning with some of the Quebec sovereigntists-separatists (such as Lucien Bouchard, Mulroney’s old friend from his law school days), that were aimed at radically changing the orientation and the scope of the Canadian Constitution which the staunchly federalist Mr. Trudeau had brought in not long before without the agreement of the French-speaking province of Quebec; Mr. Trudeau would become dead set against these agendas during the entire Mulroney era. ^{81, 82}

Thus, from 1987 to 1990 as a key Ontario official-adviser on intergovernmental and constitutional affairs under then Liberal premier David Peterson, David Cameron was in an important position during the period of the Meech Lake constitutional reform, sitting across the table from representatives of the Mulroney Conservative federal government; ⁸³ this the general public knew less than they knew about the newspaper articles and a book from Stevie Cameron outing the Mulroney lifestyles and chronicling Mulroney government scandals.”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As explained above, Mr. Trudeau had enacted the Canadian Constitution without the agreement of the French-speaking province of Quebec, and Mr. Mulroney then embarked on the Meech Lake constitutional-reform process in the late 1980s, with “a set of agendas of decentralization and regionalization of government power, which included aligning with some of the Quebec sovereigntists-separatists”, which Mr. Trudeau strongly opposed.

After the Meech Lake constitutional reform’s failure, the Mulroney government embarked on a new round of constitutional consultations and negotiations led by former Prime Minister Joe Clark, and David Cameron again served as a special constitutional adviser for the province of Ontario, this time under New Democrat Premier Bob Rae:

“After the Meech Lake constitutional accord ultimately failed in 1990, Mr. Mulroney proceeded to give former Prime Minister Joe Clark a leading role on constitutional affairs within his government and bring on the Charlottetown constitutional reform, and Mr. Clark brought the aboriginal people of Canada into the constitutional process. ⁸⁴ At this time, the even more leftwing, recently elected Ontario government of New Democrat premier Bob Rae turned to David Cameron once more who had returned from his posting in Quebec and was acting in his former job of deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs, again naming Cameron the special constitutional adviser to the premier. ⁸⁵”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

That led to the widely-publicized Diane Wilhelmy Affair in September-October 1992, when a phone conversation between Quebec’s deputy intergovernmental affairs minister Diane Wilhelmy and Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa’s constitutional adviser Andre Tremblay, was leaked to the media. The conversation was very critical of the tactics deployed by some Ontario officials – including David Cameron – opposite Quebec in the Charlottetown constitutional-reform negotiations:

“That David Cameron played a key role for Ontario in the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional reform, has been recorded in a rather controversial way – at the centre of the Diane Wilhelmy affair in September-October 1992 about a taped phone conversation between Diane Wilhelmy, then Quebec deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs, and an unnamed official (later identified as Andre Tremblay, constitutional adviser to Premier Bourassa); the tape recorded the other official using very nasty language to say things about three Ontarians, one of them David Cameron; the Ontarians were blamed for ‘ripping off’ Quebec in the constitutional negotiations in which Premier Bourassa did not perform well under pressure: ⁸⁶

“XX: 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. And those Ontarians, they’re the worst sons of bitches you can imagine. Worse than that. It’s terrible.

DW: That’s what we were saying last year. It hasn’t gotten any better, eh?

XX: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. They are truly, to use a bad word … and Jeff Rose is a perfect one. Bornstein is double-faced, triple-faced. And David Cameron: there’s a guy who’s profoundly hypocritical. And who tells us things that are unbelievable …

DW: Phew, what madness. But when I saw yesterday on television that it was starting all over again. And that they were even going back on the Supreme Court and immigration. Then I said to myself, it’s a national disgrace. We should leave. Mr. Bourassa should take the plane right away and come back here. What a humiliation to arrive at that point.”

”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Here are some selected, from the above, of what David Cameron’s Quebec counterpart Andre Tremblay said regarding the Ontario officials:

“We were aggressed, badgered, fatigued.”

“And those Ontarians, they’re the worst sons of bitches you can imagine.”

“And David Cameron: there’s a guy who’s profoundly hypocritical.”

And here is what Diane Wilhelmy said of the humiliation to Quebec Premier Bourassa:

“Then I said to myself, it’s a national disgrace. We should leave. Mr. Bourassa should take the plane right away and come back here. What a humiliation to arrive at that point.”

There was a real problem that time. Quebec Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa had a history of skin cancer dating back to the Meech Lake constitutional reform era; this time he was again invited by Prime Minister Mulroney to the negotiation table, and he did not perform well; soon afterwards it was discovered that his cancer was already spreading. Thus, the physical and psychological exhaustions were hard on Mr. Bourassa, and a few years later he died from the disease:

“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. ⁸⁸

…

87. Quebec boycotted further constitutional negotiation after the failure of the Meech Lake accord in 1990, and the initial package of the Charlottetown accord was reached in July 1992 – without the official participation of Quebec – by other provincial, territorial and aboriginal leaders and the federal government negotiators led by Joe Clark; Quebec was then invited to join the negotiation process, and it hesitated, until Robert Bourassa was given personal assurances from Brian Mulroney (overruling part of the initial deal)…”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The Diane Wilhelmy Affair became a critical factor swaying Quebecers’ sentiments against the Charlottetown Constitutional Accord, which was soon defeated in a national referendum on October 26, 1992:

“Premier Bourassa himself at the time of the Wilhelmy affair acknowledged that the affair, involving national publicity on negative opinions from the Quebec government’s top two constitutional experts, ⁸⁹ swayed public opinion in his province against the Charlottetown constitutional accord he had helped negotiate. ⁹⁰ In the end, the Wilhelmy affair became one of the major factors contributing to the accord’s defeat in Quebec in the October 26, 1992 referendum held across Canada. ⁹¹

…

89. Diane Wilhelmy’s background had been considered pro-separatist, and she had also been the top constitutional expert responsible for Quebec’s part in the Meech Lake accord; she was then again (with Andre Tremblay)  given the responsibility for the Charlottetown accord negotiations – under the premier who personally attended the final negotiations…”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Prior to the national referendum, Ms. Wilhelmy went to court to try to legally prevent the leaked phone conversation from airing by Quebec media. Later during the Airbus Affair when Mr. Mulroney filed a libel lawsuit against the RCMP and the Canadian government in November 1995, he chose the same lawyer Wilhelmy had used in 1992, Gerald Tremblay of the law firm McCarthy Tetrault, as his lead lawyer. I related the two in the following observations:

“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, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years, 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). ⁹²”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

These Canadian constitutional issues have been of special interest to me. In particular, in November 1992, Prime Minister Mulroney’s constitutional reform processes were among the first topics I commented on when I began my Canadian political activism critical of his leadership, as I recalled in a footnote of my 2009 blog article’s Part 1:

“18. A long time ago – during 1992-1993 – while a faculty member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and afterwards, I was involved in some activities related to academic politics and Canadian politics (briefly alluded to in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”); in a press release I wrote and sent to some media outlets, CBC-TV Vancouver especially, dated November 20, 1992, I made the following statement regarding some of what I viewed as then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s misconduct during the Meech Lake and Charlottetown constitutional processes: “They like to say Mr. Mulroney never learns. Well, he can’t be that dumb, can he?” I note that a ‘legal guardian’ of a sort for German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber then in Alberta, Justice John C. Major, was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada around this time – on November 13, 1992…”

(Part 1, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Another type of media criticisms of Stevie Cameron and her anti-corruption journalism, that I reviewed with special interest, insinuated that her crusade was socially biased, insincere and possibly with hidden agendas, dismissing her with terms like “ancient sycophants”, “self-righteous self-flatterer”, and “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment”:

“National Post columnist Gerald Owen went as far as comparing Cameron (and the American prosecutors in the Conrad Black case) to “ancient sycophants” bent on persecuting the rich and powerful out of envy more than out of justice. ⁶³

…

Another category of criticisms of Cameron has touched on her Presbyterian background, hinting that she was a “self-righteous self-flatterer”, and yet in another view was of “Victorian sensitivity” and “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment” – and that some of her writing sounded like “a Presbyterian spinster’s detailed account of an orgy in the choir loft”. ⁶⁶”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In regard to this line of criticism, I first pointed out that, although viewed in Canada as “hard-hitting”, Cameron’s exposés were “quite tame” compared to some by American left-wing intellectuals:

“On the lighter side of a serious note, as much as her books are viewed as hard-hitting in Canada, Stevie Cameron has been quite tame, albeit sensationalist, when compared to some of the American intellectuals who had similar backgrounds in the apparatus of the state before turning to leftwing politics. …”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

For comparison, I referred to American political scientist Chalmers Johnson, who also had an intelligence background prior to becoming a left-wing writer, and who delivered his criticisms of imperialist aspects of U.S. foreign policies in broader and greater strokes, warning of the consequence of “blowback” by terrorism in his book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, published a year before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.:

“… One such scholar I have mentioned in the Notes of my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late” (in the context of the story of the ‘mad’ mathematician John F. Nash), is Dr. Chalmers Johnson, who was a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, when I was a mathematics Ph. D. student there. Like Cameron, Johnson had a background in the intelligence arena, having done consultant work for the CIA for a number of years in the past; also like Cameron, Johnson has published a series of books developing his views on a set of related topics, in his case critiques of what he viewed as the imperialist aspects of American foreign policies based on dominance through global presence of the U.S. military; in particular, Johnson considered dangers of terrorism against the United States as a type of “blowback” counter-effect to such policies, and warned the public about such and others in the first book (of this series), Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, published in year 2000, i.e., prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on American soil. ⁷³”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

This is a topic of timely interest now, in light of what I have recently elaborated on regarding the subject of war and peace, in Part 1 of my review of 2009 blog posts.

In 2009, I especially quoted Dr. Johnson from a newspaper article in which his comments critical of the “axis of evil” speech of President George Bush, Jr.’s on January 29, 2002, recalled certain history that in my review is relevant to Cameron’s Presbyterian background but contrary to her “puritanism”:

“For the interest of readers of this blog article, though, that also befits the more common type of alienation displayed by Canadians toward the U.S., I quote here from an article of Dr. Chalmers Johnson’s for The Japan Times newspaper – written in March 2002, i.e., after 9/11 and the world’s responses to the terrorist attacks but before the Iraq war – in which he made a comparison of president George W. Bush’s hawkishness and notion of “faith” with certain disgraceful deeds of a 19^th-century pioneering European Protestant missionary in East Asia, the Rev. Karl Gutzlaff of Germany: ⁷⁴

“In his “axis of evil” speech of Jan. 29, 2002, Bush succeeded in scuttling the emerging hopes for peace on the Korean Peninsula. In Seoul, amid pomp and obfuscation, while he blathered on about Laura, terrorism, democracy, worship, and “the family,” South Koreans may have wondered what he really had in mind. They no doubt feared that they had entrusted their fate to the village idiot.

It was in China, however, that the president gave an Olympic gold medal demonstration of insensitivity and cultural rudeness. In a speech to students of one of China’s most distinguished universities, he said: “America is a nation guided by faith. Someone once called us ‘a nation with the soul of a church.’ Ninety-five percent of Americans say they believe in God, and I’m one of them.”

Bush apparently has no knowledge of the role Christian missionaries played in the imperialist exploitation of China. Missionaries were active in the opium trade. It was a German Protestant, Karl Gutzlaff, who introduced opium to north China. The British and Americans, who pioneered the illegal import of opium into China, used the doctrine of “free trade” as a cover for their activities. One of the reasons the Chinese empire resisted reform for so many decades was that toleration of Christianity, as the Western powers demanded, meant surrendering to the purveyors of filth and crime.”

”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I emphasized that Dr. Johnson wrote the above-quoted passages a year before the U.S. launch of the Iraq War that has been discussed in Part 1.

To describe the passages in brief, Dr. Johnson asserted that President Bush’s speech scuttled “the emerging hopes for peace on the Korean Peninsula”; commenting on President Bush’s notions of “faith” and “the soul of a church” in a related speech, Dr. Johnson referred to history when “filth and crime” also came with Christianity to China, mentioning German Protestant missionary Karl Gutslaff, “who introduced opium to north China”.

This part of history was of personal interest to me because of its connection to my maternal family’s historical Chinese Christian heritage mentioned in Part 1 of my current review.

Specifically, my maternal family’s Christian history can be traced to a pioneering church founded by a 19th-century German Swiss Basel missionary recruited to China by Rev. Karl Gutslaff, a prominent leading Protestant missionary in Asia; and when this Swiss missionary and his Swedish Swiss Basel colleague then discovered the involvement of Gutslaff’s organization in the opium trade, they broke ties with him and expose some of the problems:

“I hasten to say that although some of Rev. Karl Gutzlaff’s mistakes in mixing the opium trade with missionary work in China have long been recognized by the Christian community – for someone Rev. Gutzlaff’s statue and distinction who in history was also the first to bring the Bible to Thailand and to Japan in their native languages – I owe part of my maternal family cultural heritage to a (German) Swiss Basel missionary who and whose (Swedish) Swiss Basel fellow missionary were the first to China in the history of their organization, founding a pioneering church in my maternal grandmother’s ancestral village in southern coastal China in 1849 after having been recruited to China by Rev. Karl Gutzlaff; but the Swiss Basel missionaries were among the first missionaries to break with Guztlaff and expose some of his problems once they realized, and got a handle on, the prevalence of opium-trade deception in Guzlaff’s Christian organization – the Chinese Union. ⁷⁵”

(Part 2, March 8, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

A relevance of this particular history to Stevie Cameron’s Presbyterian background, and also to some critics’ use of phrases like “ancient sycophants” and “inbred puritanism” to describe her and her anti-corruption writings, is that Cameron not only wrote to expose corruption but also practiced helping the poor in living her life, and has been praised as “street-side saviour of Canada’s destitute”:

“If, as we have seen, that the criticisms of author Stevie Cameron about her adventurousness in investigative journalism and about possible influence of her marriage on her professional work, when examined carefully, actually served to highlight the seriousness of some of the context and backgrounds to her anti-Mulroney-corruption crusade, then the criticisms about the cultural peculiarity of her religious background (Presbyterian) could threaten to turn her into a ‘saint’ of the society in the eyes of the poor, and justify her crusade in a way that a “sycophant” label on her alone cannot achieve.

Or at least that has been how a ‘progressive’ sector in the Catholic Church in Canada want others to see Stevie Cameron as, i.e., a saint for the poor; they have been hailing her as “street-side saviour of Canada’s destitute”, not so much for her anti-corruption journalistic crusade but for her work helping the poor since 1990-91 when she co-founded the “Out-of-the-Cold” program as an elder at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto, personally doing gourmet cooking for the homeless on a regular basis (at a time when she already had a solid journalistic reputation that included her 1987 Mulroney-lifestyles articles, her 1989 book on Ottawa politics and her hosting of the CBC’s The Fifth Estate), as well as for her work on behalf of missing prostitutes in Vancouver Downtown Eastside when in 1999 while at the helm of the Elm Street magazine she and writer Daniel Wood publicized the story of the missing prostitutes, which according to this progressive Catholic view “sparked public interest and a subsequent police investigation”, eventually leading to the prosecution of Robert William Pickton. ⁹⁶”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, one special deed of Cameron’s helping the poor was her writings to publicise the story of missing prostitutes in Vancouver Downtown Eastside, that helped lead to the prosecution of the killer, Robert William Pickton.

Cameron herself, in fact, once lamented that writing about a serial killer were easier than writing about corrupt politicians:

““Among those reasons? While writing about a serial killer, I wasn’t afraid for the lives of my children. I wasn’t afraid for the job of my husband. I didn’t worry that my phones were tapped or that somebody was going to break into my house or my publisher’s office.

“I didn’t look behind me when I crossed the street. I didn’t have to drive carefully on the highway so nobody could run me off the road.

“And the numberone reason why I prefer serial killers? Serial killers don’t sue.”

Litigious politicians make life hell for a writer. Cameron describes how, at her peak as a political scribe, verything was heavily lawyered, and even then publishers might back away from releasing a book for fear of legal reprisals.”

(“Stevie Cameron prefers serial killers to crooked politicians”, by Susan G. Cole, February 15, 2011, NOW)

My goodness, would not some of those intimidation tactics against her, also discussed earlier, have been illegal?

As in the last quote from Part 3 of my 2009 blog article, another of Cameron’s special deeds helping the poor was her co-founding of the “Out-of-the-Cold” program as an elder at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto and her personally doing gourmet cooking there regularly for the homeless.

While it would be misguided to associate such good deeds with labels like “sycophants” or “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment”, Cameron’s actions were extra special when her family history and her church’s history were also taken into account.

Cameron’s family tradition had been political conservative, I noted:

“There indeed had been conservative influence in Stevie Cameron’s family background, and she has been open about it: a great-great-grandfather, a grandfather and an uncle of hers had been Tory politicians, and in the 1970s she once campaigned for Tory candidate Duff Roblin (a name which I suspect could be related to her mother, Eleanor Roblin Bone Dahl) in Peterborough, Ontario.¹⁰⁵ But that background had not prevented Cameron from developing her passion for anti-corruption investigative journalism focused on the former Mulroney Conservative government.”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I would think that in choosing such a career departing from her family tradition, Stevie Cameron was very much motivated by what she felt would be right, would be fair and would be just.

Likewise, Cameron’s church where she co-founded the “Out-of-the-Cold” program, the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto, was historically one of the oldest and richest Presbyterian churches in Toronto and Canada. I briefly reviewed that history:

“With or without praises from some on the Catholic Church side, the Out-of-the-Cold program started by Cameron at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto has been very widely praised and has been an inspiration for people from other walks of life, including professional chefs, lawyers and healthcare professionals, to participate in or start various charity programs helping the homeless. ¹⁰⁶

Perhaps it’s best to take a look at how the Presbytery of Eastern Toronto has described the Out-of-the-Cold program founded by Stevie Cameron at St. Andrew’s Church in this presbytery – in a September 2005 article titled, “A united effort crowns righteousness”, written by staff writer Amy MacLachlan of the Presbyterian Record. ¹⁰⁷

Its opening passage is about the area of the presbytery:

“As one of the church’s largest and richest presbyteries, East Toronto occupies an interesting spot on the landscape. Even though it was only created in 1949 (when the Presbytery of Toronto was divided into east and west), its history includes some of the oldest churches of the denomination in Canada. …”

…

Further in this article, about the Out-of-the-Cold program:

“The presbytery is also ministering to groups who are marginalized because of poverty, various disabilities, or sexual orientation. Many of the presbytery’s congregations support Evangel Hall, an inner-city mission providing food and shelter to the city’s homeless. The presbytery also runs several Out of the Cold programs. Known as “the church with a heart in the heart of Toronto,” St. Andrew’s, King Street, was one of the first Toronto congregations to operate this program, led by congregation member and journalist Stevie Cameron. Out of the Cold offers warm meals, and sometimes a warm bed, during the winter months to those who have nowhere else to go. The initiative at St. Andrew’s has been so successful that it is often used as a model and training centre for other congregations wanting to develop their own homelessness projects. St. Andrew’s is one of the oldest Presbyterian congregations in Toronto, established in 1830.”

…

If you say Stevie Cameron’s gourmet cooking probably made the difference, I would have to guess you are right, but St. Andrew’s Church established in 1830 is not only one of the oldest Presbyterian congregations in Toronto, but also a historic downtown church located at King Street and Simcoe Street only two blocks from the Toronto Stock Exchange on King Street between York Street and Bay Street, i.e., it has been one of the very richest, and this church says so about its own history: ¹⁰⁹

“The present building was opened for worship in 1876. At that time the King and Simcoe Streets location was a busy place and most of the congregation lived within easy walking distance of the church. Across the street stood Government House, the official residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. Upper Canada College stood on a second corner and on a third was a popular tavern. With St. Andrew’s, the four corners were known locally as Legislation, Education, Damnation and Salvation!!”

”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

To summarize the above from a 2005 article in the Presbyterian Record and from St. Andrew’s Church’s own history account, led by Stevie Cameron one of the oldest and richest historical church, originally built across the official residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and today situated only two blocks from the Toronto Stock Exchange, was transformed into a place of warmth and comfort for the poor and destitute.

No doubt, Stevie Cameron family’s older generations and her church once had a lot like, if not in common with, “the old Ottawa establishment” albeit in different cities; but Cameron’s courage and work brought about remarkable changes as I remarked:

“This church tells you that it used to be the place where, in-between their other activities carrying important future implications to Ontario and Canada and themselves, rich and powerful people went to reflect on their sins.

From this point of view, and as earlier pointed out also, it has been Stevie Cameron’s willingness and courage to break with traditional societal taboos and stereotypes that have underscored her success, including as a journalist and author exposing topics from about the imperious Brian Mulroney to about the down-and-dirty Robert Pickton.”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Now, not just Cameron’s ‘puritan’ Christian background but her specific Presbyterian background had links to my family’s Christian background.

Specifically, my family’s early Chinese Christian heritage mentioned earlier, namely dating back to the era of a German Swiss missionary who broke with and exposed the opium-trade involvement of the leading Protestant missionary Karl Gutzlaff, also had historical as well as modern links to Stevie Cameron’s Presbytery in Toronto, Canada.

The 2005 Presbyterian Record article quoted in my second last quote above, written by staff writer Amy MacLachlan, discussed not only Stevie Cameron and her “Out-of-the-Cold” program for the homeless, but also the ethnic churches in the same Presbytery, including a “Chinese, Toronto” church led by Rev. Thomas Eng, and Celebration North led by Rev. Peter Ma:

“… Despite its fabled past, the presbytery is in the midst of change. Encompassing a downtown portion of the city as well as its northern and eastern outskirts, the demographics of East Toronto aren’t quite what they once were. Originally a destination for immigrants from the United Kingdom, the bustling city has grown to include immigrants from non-European countries, changing the community’s makeup as well as the people in the pews. Toronto is the most multicultural city in Canada and the presbytery’s 25 congregations reflect that fact.

East Toronto includes five ethnic congregations – two Chinese, one Mandarin, one Formosan and one Taiwanese. (Geographically speaking, there are also several Korean congregations in the area, but formally they belong to the Western Han-Ca Presbytery.) Chinese, Toronto, holds English and Chinese services with music in both languages, and two Sunday schools. It also offers a long list of fellowship programs for all ages and stages of life, including a sports group and a drama group called ACTS – Acclaiming Christ Through Stage, that performs in the church and in the community.

It was through the vision of Thomas Eng, minister at Chinese, Toronto, that Celebration North was born. Celebration has a large Asian contingent, but is English-speaking. Although they don’t have their own building, the church’s minister, Peter Ma, has led the congregation of about 75 adults since its inception in 1996. Ma is devoted to reaching those who do not go to church. He proclaims that attendants need not worry about violating protocol. …”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The building of the “Toronto, Chinese” church led by Rev. Thomas Eng, namely the Toronto Chinese Presbyterian Church, had been built on efforts spearheaded by Rev. Edward Ling; about Rev. Ling, I quoted a Toronto Star article titled, “Community leader also man of faith”:

“He was born in the manse of a Presbyterian Church in Kuangtung Province in China. His father was a Presbyterian minister, his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, and so Edward Ling became a Presbyterian minister, too.

But it happened in Canada, 56 years after his birth, and after he had helped build the Chinese Presbyterian Church, Toronto’s oldest Chinese church, as a thriving cultural and spiritual centre on Beverley St.

A successful importer and exporter, he put all his business dealings on hold for two years in the late 1950s, while he went to every Chinese restaurant and business in the city and suburbs to cajole them for cheques and cash to build a new church. At the time, the congregation was using a room at the Young Men’s Christian Institute, located in two houses at 474 University Ave., but had long outgrown it.

As the church elder heading the building fund, Rev. Ling was determined Toronto’s Chinese community would have a building that would become central to their lives. “My father had a vision and he made it happen,” said his eldest son, Alex.

The lieutenant-governor of the province was on hand for the laying of the cornerstone at 177 Beverley St. in 1960. …”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

That was the story of the first real Presbyterian church building for the Chinese community in Toronto.

I commented that though it did not compare to Stevie Cameron’s St. Andrew’s Church it was a good start for an ethnic community:

“A school-style church building was no St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church of Toronto, in wealth or in physical endowment, where church elder Stevie Cameron has served many gourmet dishes to the homeless; but it was a good start for a community, i.e., the Chinese community, that had to be much more frugal, by and large. …”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Rev. Edward Ling is a brother of my maternal grandmother, and their grandfather mentioned in the Toronto Star article in the second last quote had been an origin of their, and thus my, family Christian heritage:

“Rev. Edward Ling was a younger brother of my maternal grandmother. Their grandfather had been not just a Presbyterian minister but one of the first doctors of Western medicine in the eastern region of Guangdong province of China, and was originally from a humble village in which the first Protestant church in that region had been founded in 1849 by a Swiss Basel missionary (as discussed in an earlier part of this blog article and in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”).”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As noted above, my great-great-grandfather was not only a Presbyterian minister but also “one of the first doctors of Western medicine in the eastern region of Guangdong province of China”.

Rev. Peter Ma is a grandson of the late Rev. Edward Ling, and their family branch’s modern Christian heritage is closely associated with Knox College of Toronto, as I described:

“Rev. Ling’s sense of diligence, frugality and servitude to the church and to the community have been inherited by his successful children and grandchildren, particularly by his son Alex who had succeeded him in small business, serving as the founding president of the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas as well as an adviser to Toronto Mayor David Miller… and by his son Winston, vice president of finance at Tyndale University College & Seminary in Toronto who, following the father’s example, in 1995 moved from the corporate world to work for the Christian community; ¹¹⁶ both are elders at the Chinese church.

…

Rev. Ling’s grandson Peter Ma is a graduate of Knox College at the University of Toronto; Rev. Ling’s daughter-in-law Stephanie, i.e., Winston Ling’s wife, holds a Ph.D. degree from and has been a governing board member of Knox College, and she has been active in Christian charity activities as a board member of the Scott Mission in Toronto …”

(Part 3, March 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In my 2009 blog article’s Part 4, I went on to discuss the heritage of Toronto’s Knox College, a heritage rooted in the 19th-century Scottish Free Church movement and closely affiliated with the anti-slavery movement in Canada:

“In its history, the renowned Knox College founded in 1844-45 by the Presbyterian Church in Canada once had a prominent leading role in the free-church and anti-slavery movements in Canada.

A main founder of Knox College was Rev. Dr. Robert Burns, a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of the leaders of the 1843 Free Church movement in Scotland (the “Great Disruption”), who was invited to Toronto in 1844 to start the Free Church movement in Canada, became minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto and led the founding of Knox College. ¹¹⁸

The first Principal of Knox College – a position begun in the 1850s – was Rev. Dr. Michael Willis, a colleague of Burns and also from Scotland, who when became the principal was already the founding president of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. ¹¹⁹ The anti-slavery history in Canada at the time was mainly known for the “Underground Railroad” – a network of anti-slavery Americans and Canadians who smuggled black slaves from the American South to freedom and settlement in Canada. ¹²⁰”

(“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 4)”, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I also discussed Knox College’s Presbyterian namesake founded seven years earlier in Illinois in the United States, which awarded its first honorary doctorate to Abraham Lincoln that was also his first:

“As much as being a part of the anti-slavery history, though, Knox College of Toronto is not related to (and should not be confused with) Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Located at a town that was the centre of anti-slavery activity in the state of Illinois and a “Freedom Station” on the Underground Railroad, this liberal-arts Knox College had been founded seven years earlier in 1837 by a group of anti-slavery advocates led by Presbyterian minister George Washington Gale, starting out as a bible-training college with an odd name, Knox Manual Labour College, for the reason that students worked on the farm to support their educations; this Knox College’s establishment had the approval of Abraham Lincoln among other state legislators, and subsequently it was the ‘historic’ site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate – one of a series of political debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas – for election to the U.S. Senate; Lincoln lost the election but the debates propelled him to national fame and in two years’ time election to the U.S. presidency, defeating Douglas this time. ¹²¹  Abraham Lincoln also received a honorary degree from this Knox College – his first and the college’s first honorary doctorate. ¹²²”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The Scottish Free Church movement and its historical Toronto association were a second component of my Chinese Christian family heritage – the Swiss Basel Mission being the first, noted earlier – through Rev. William Chalmers Burns.

Rev. William Burns, historically famous “revival preacher of Kilsyth” in Scotland, and the first official missionary of the Presbyterian Church of England Foreign Missions, was a nephew of Toronto Knox College founder – and one of the Scottish “Great Disruption” leaders mentioned above – Rev. Dr. Robert Burns; in China, Rev. William Burns revived my maternal family village church originally founded by Swiss Basel missionary Rev. Rudolf Lechler, and tutored and baptized my great-great-grandfather, then a young pupil:

“… my great-great-grandfather, namely Rev. Edward Ling’s medical-doctor-and-Presbyterian-minister grandfather (as discussed earlier in the context of a Toronto Star article about Rev. Ling, and in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”), who had been born in or around 1849, the year the first Protestant church in his home region of China was founded in his humble village by Swiss Basel missionary Rev. Rudolf Lechler, in around 1860-61 became a Christian when he was a young pupil tutored by Rev. William Burns at the school of that church and was baptized by Rev. Burns ¹³⁰…

The Rev. William Burns in China in 1861 was the person Canadians had known as Rev. Robert Burns’s young nephew, William Chalmers Burns, who in 1844 had accompanied Robert Burns to visit Canada, where Robert Burns stayed to lead the free-church movement and found Knox College. They and William Chalmers Burns’s fellow young preacher Robert Murray M’Cheyne were enthusiastic members of the Scottish Free Church movement led by Thomas Chalmers, and when visiting Canada the young W. C. Burns was already internationally known as the remarkably incredible revival preacher of Kilsyth, having drawn crowds as large as 10,000 to his spiritual-revival sermons in 1839.¹³²

William Chalmers Burns was born in 1815 in the same year the Swiss Basel Mission was founded in Basel, Switzerland, which as a Lutheran foreign mission subsequently had strong influence over British foreign missionary work – particularly that of the Anglican Church – for the next several decades. ¹³³ In 1847, Burns became the first official foreign missionary sent abroad by the Presbyterian Church of England Foreign Missions, going to China in the same year as the two first Basel missionaries to China, Theodore Hamberg and Rudolf Lechler. ¹³⁴ In 1860-61, Rev. William Burns was invited to the Ling family’s home village in the Shantou (Swatow) region of Guangdong province to visit the first Protestant church of the region founded by Rev. Lechler in 1849, which had been left with only 13 disciples on their own in 1852 when Rev. Lechler was expelled by the regional government and returned to Hong Kong. ¹³⁵ Rev. Burns preached and taught school in the same house where Rev. Lechler had done so, and revived and took under his spiritual wing this local church. ¹³⁶

Rev. William Burns died several years later in 1868 at the age of 53, up in the unfamiliar Northeast of China (i.e., Manchuria, homeland of the imperial Qing-dynasty ethnic people), exhausted, nearly alone amongst a small group of Chinese worshipers but still full of the spirit that had set him apart. ¹³⁷”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Before going to China, Rev. William Burns visited Toronto and Canada with his uncle Rev. Robert Burns, and while in Canada he baptized a newborn baby who turned out to become Canada’s first Presbyterian foreign missionary, a famous one by the name of Rev. George Leslie MacKay:

“Prior to his life journey in China, William Chalmers Burns was in Canada from 1844 to 1846, preaching in churches in different part of the country. In the Woodstock area of Ontario (Oxford County) Rev. Burns baptized a baby born in 1844 – the year he arrived in Canada – by the name of George Leslie Mackay. ¹⁴⁰ Little Mackay grew up with W. C. Burns as his idol, studied at Knox College in Toronto and at other Presbyterian institutions, became the first foreign missionary sent abroad by the Presbyterian Church in Canada (and became a medical doctor), following the example of his idol to China and following his idol’s footsteps to do missionary work in the Shantou (Swatow) region; but after arrival Mackay decided to sail across the sea to take a look first at the island of Taiwan, and once he saw the Tamsui town in Taiwan he knew instantly Taiwan would be his home, where today a large Mackay Memorial Hospital (in the capital city Taipei with branches including in Tamsui Township) stand in testimonial of his contributions to his adopted homeland – even if the hospital originally was not named for him but after a Captain Mackay of Detroit whose wife donated money for his clinic on the condition that the hospital be named that way. ¹⁴¹

Rev. Dr. Mackay died at the age of 57 in 1901 in Taiwan, after a fruitful and fulfilled life, whose achievements beside the medical hospital included founding around 60 churches with thousands of coverts, founding the Oxford College – forerunner of Taiwan Theological College and Seminary where in the 1960s Rev. Edward Ling studied to become a preacher – and serving as the elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1895…”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In that early historical time, there was a sort of a ‘puritan’ episode in Knox College’s prehistory and history, that separated this Presbyterian branch from the established St. Andrew’s Church – well over a century before Stevie Cameron’s work to transform the latter as I noted – over the Free Church movement and the related anti-slavery movement:

“The purpose, or morale, of the preceding, long-winded family history digression in this blog article about Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair and Stevie Cameron, is the illustration that in the proud history of Canadian Presbyterians there was a long period from 1843-44 to the end of the 19^th century when, inspired by Scottish Presbyterians, the Church was split into two, the Established Church and the Free Church, with the former then overseen by and beholden to the government and the landownership, while the latter independent and democratic in its religious affairs, governing, and finance: ¹⁴⁸ in this historical division, the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto where Stevie Cameron has been an elder and founded the Out-of-the-Cold program, was the centre of the Established Church in Canada, from which the Free Church led by Rev. James Harris, broke off, founded Knox Presbyterian Church as its new centre, ¹⁴⁹ brought over Rev. Robert Burns and Rev. Michael Willis (among others) from the Scottish Free Church, founded Knox College, and became active also in anti-slavery activity.

The Chinese Presbyterians in Toronto have been associated with the Free Church tradition, and with the heritage of William Chalmers Burns from Scotland and in China. They have also been associated with the early heritage of Swiss Basel missionaries in China, who made efforts to separate missionary work from the state of being tainted by unscrupulousness under German missionary Karl Gutzlaff – who had taken part in the opium trade himself and in the Opium War as a British colonial official – and to expose some of the problems in Gutzlaff’s organization Chinese Christian Union. ¹⁵⁰”

(Part 4, April 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As I have discussed in the present Part 2, the Mulroney-Schreiber Affair, the Airbus Affair and anti-corruption journalist Stevie Cameron’s career crusade to investigate corruption and ethical problems related to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, have had various broader aspects and connections that are of special and even close interest to me.

(Continuing to Part 3)

Who could have murdered billionaire Barry Sherman and wife Honey, two of Canada’s leading philanthropists? – Part 1: the brand-name drug companies

Who murdered Canadian billionaire Barry Sherman and his wife Honey in December 2017?

Police do not have an answer.

The couple were found dead in their mansion in Toronto, Canada, on Friday, Dec. 15, 2017. By the next day, media reports said that their bodies were discovered “hanging side by side” next to the indoor swimming pool, by Judi Gottlieb, a real estate agent and the couple’s friend who was helping them sell their home, which was listed on the market for $6.9 million. A police source told the media:

“Forensics need to be done and post-mortems on the bodies, but at this stage it appears there was no forced entry and no evidence of anybody else in the house”.

(“Billionaire Couple Found Dead in Toronto Mansion”, by Tom Ozimek, December 16, 2017, The Epoch Times)

Oddly, police initially referred to the deaths as a “medial incident”, describing them as “suspicious” but did not call them homicides:

“Two bodies were found at 50 Old Colony Road in the North York area of the Canadian city on Friday after police received a call around 11:45 a.m. detailing a medical incident at the home, Toronto Police Constable David Hopkinson said at a press conference Friday afternoon.

Investigators described the deaths as “suspicious” but said it is too early to deem them homicides, Hopkinson said. The homicide unit has not yet been called in, he added.”

(“Billionaire Barry Sherman, wife found dead in their Toronto mansion, officials say”, by Julia Jacobo, December 16, 2017, ABC News)

Though police initially did not disclose the identities of the deceased, the Shermans’ deaths were immediately confirmed by Dr. Eric Hoskins, the province of Ontario’s Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, on Twitter. Hoskins described Barry and Honey Sherman as “my dear friends”:

“I am beyond words right now. My dear friends Barry and Honey Sherman have been found dead. Wonderful human beings, incredible philanthropists, great leaders in health care. A very, very sad day. Barry, Honey, rest in peace.”

(Julia Jacobo, December 16, 2017, ABC News)

In that evening also on Twitter, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed condolences by him and wife Sophie to the Shermans’ family and friends:

“Sophie and I are saddened by news of the sudden passing of Barry and Honey Sherman. Our condolences to their family & friends, and to everyone touched by their vision & spirit.”

(Julia Jacobo, December 16, 2017, ABC News)

Barry and Honey Sherman had played a prominent local role in Toronto supporting the ultimately successful election campaign of the Canadian Liberal Party, hosting a $1,500 per person fundraising party for then party leader Trudeau on August 26, 2015 at their home – the very house where they were later found dead in 2017 – despite boycott and protest by some of their Jewish community friends opposing the Liberal Party’s policies on Iran:

“About 30 protesters from the Jewish Defence League lined the street out front of Sherman’s lavish north Toronto home, holding Israeli and Canadian flags.

“Enjoy the food,” a man holding an Israeli flag yelled as guests walked up the driveway, past a line of valets. Tickets for the party and opportunity to meet leader Justin Trudeau reportedly went for $1,500 each.

One guest stopped and smiled at a protester in the picket line. “Joel? What are you doing here?”

The protester, Joel Goldman, said he was there because he didn’t support the Liberals’ position on the Iran nuclear deal.

“They’re just coming to see Mick Jagger tonight,” Goldman said after his friend went inside. “They’re coming to see a rock star.”

…

The Liberals have pledged to reopen diplomatic ties with Iran and have welcomed the new Iranian nuclear deal.”

(“Justin Trudeau fundraiser picketed by Jewish group over Liberals’ support for Iran nuclear deal”, by Jake Edmiston, August 26/27, 2015, National Post)

Two days after the deaths were discovered, on December 17 police confirmed the identities of the deceased in a statement that also corroborated earlier media reports of hanging, describing the cause of deaths as “ligature neck compression”, stating that homicide detectives had now taken the lead in the investigation:

“Police issued a brief statement on Sunday saying the couple, whose bodies were found on Friday, both died from “ligature neck compression,” but the department refused to comment further.

“That is what the post-mortem indicates and that is the terminology that they give us,” Const. Michelle Flannery said when asked to elaborate on findings from autopsies performed over the weekend.

Police also said homicide detectives have taken the lead on investigating the deaths, which have been classified as “suspicious.”

The statement contained no other details, except to formally identify the Shermans as the two people found dead in a Toronto home on Friday.”

(“Police are investigating the ‘suspicious’ deaths of Toronto billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman”, by Adrian Humphreys and Jake Edmiston, December 15/17, 2017, National Post)

A Toronto Police source told The Globe and Mail that “investigators are working on the theory that Mr. Sherman killed his wife, hung her body and then hanged himself at the pool’s edge”, citing the fact that there was no sign of forced entry into the house:

“A Toronto police source told the Globe investigators are working on the theory that Mr. Sherman killed his wife and then took his own life.

…

Police services spokesman Mark Pugash would not confirm details of the case, only stating the homicide squad is in overall charge of the investigation because it has better resources than the local police station, 33 Division.

“Homicide is working with 33 Division on this until we get the post mortem. When we get the post-mortem result, that should give us a good indication of where the investigation goes from there,” he told The Globe.

There was no sign of forced entry to the home. There was no note left behind to explain what had happened, the source said.”

(“Family urges ‘thorough’ investigation into deaths of Apotex CEO Barry Sherman, wife Honey”, by Tavia Grant, Kelly Grant and Jeff Gray, December 16/17, 2017, The Globe and Mail)

The Sherman family members were outraged by the media-reported police notion of “murder-suicide”, rejecting it in a statement issued by the four children of Barry and Honey Sherman:

“The family of Canadian-Jewish billionaire couple Barry and Honey Sherman, found dead at their home in Toronto on Friday, have slammed the police for allegedly circulating rumors that their death was a murder-suicide.

…

In a statement, the family rejected the account – attributed to “police sources” in the local media – that Barry Sherman may have murdered his wife, hanged her body and then himself from a railing that surrounded their basement pool.

The Shermans’ four children said their parents “shared an enthusiasm for life and commitment to their family and community totally inconsistent with the rumors regrettably circulated in the media as to the circumstances surrounding their deaths.”

They added: “We are shocked and think it’s irresponsible that police sources have reportedly advised the media of a theory which neither their family, their friends nor their colleagues believe to be true.”

(“As Canada’s Jewish Community Mourns, Sherman Family Slams Police for ‘Murder-suicide’ Rumor”, by Allison Kaplan Sommer and Reuters, December 19, 2017, Haaretz)

The Sherman family hired experts, including former Toronto Police homicide detectives, to conduct a independent investigation. In late January 2018, a source with direct knowledge of the private probe told the media that the probe found evidence of the Sherman couple having been murdered by “multiple killers”, likely on December 13, the last day they were seen alive:

“Private investigators believe that the billionaire Toronto couple found dead at their home in December were murdered by multiple killers, a source with direct knowledge of the parallel probe into their mysterious deaths told CBC Toronto.

The new information contradicts a widely circulated theory that Barry and Honey Sherman died as a result of a murder-suicide — a notion that is regarded as fiction by those who knew the Shermans well.

…

The Sherman family has hired a team of experts, which includes a number of former Toronto homicide detectives, to conduct a separate, independent investigation.

…

Their wrists showed evidence that they had been, at one point, bound together. No rope or other materials that could have been used to tie their wrists were discovered, the source told CBC Toronto.

…

The team of private investigators believes that the Shermans were, in fact, killed on Dec. 13, two days before they were found. This conclusion is based on the fact that Honey was wearing the same clothes she was last seen in, on Dec. 13, according to the source.

Private investigators also believe that Honey struggled with her killer or killers. She had cuts on her lip and nose, and was sitting in a pool of her own blood when she was discovered. …”

(“Barry and Honey Sherman were murdered by multiple killers, private investigators believe: source”, January 20/23, 2018, CBC News)

Only after media reporting of the private investigation findings did the Toronto Police confirm that the deaths were now being investigated as a “double homicide”, and a “targeted” attack. The Sherman family issued a statement saying that this was the family’s conclusion “from the outset” and was “consistent” with the private investigation’s findings:

“Toronto police believe Barry and Honey Sherman were victims of a targeted attack and are treating their deaths as murders, the lead investigator said Friday afternoon.

…

The Sherman family released a statement after the police news conference.

“The announcement by the Toronto Police Service that the tragic deaths of their parents are being investigated as a double homicide was anticipated by the Sherman family,” the statement read. “This conclusion was expressed by the family from the outset and is consistent with the findings of the independent autopsy and investigation.”

(“Double homicide investigation: Barry and Honey Sherman ‘targeted’, police confirm”, by Kevin Donovan, January 26, 2018, The Hamilton Spectator)

So who were billionaire Barry Sherman and wife Honey, a wealthy and prominent Canadian couple who met such a brutal and indignant end?

75-year-old Barry Sherman was the founder and owner of the Canadian pharmaceutical giant Apotex Inc., which he founded in 1974 and grew into the largest Canadian-owned pharmaceutical company, producing and marketing more than 300 generic drug products.

According to the December 2017 National Post story by Adrian Humphreys and Jake Edmiston cited earlier, Canadian Business magazine had recently assessed Sherman’s fortune at $4.77 billion CAD, ranking him the 15th richest in Canada. The earlier-cited December 2017 Haaretz story by Allison Kaplan Sommer reported Forbes magazine’s ranking of Sherman as the 12th richest Canadian and 660th among the world’s wealthiest billionaires.

But in reporting their deaths, the media emphasized the praises given to the Shermans by prominent politicians and community leaders, for their renowned generosity – “incredible philanthropists” as Ontario Health Minister Hoskins was quoted as saying.

Canadian Senator Linda Frum, a family friend of the Shermans, said of Barry Sherman the businessman and philanthropist:

“He liked to make money because he loved giving money away — and he did, he gave away very generously”.

(Adrian Humphreys and Jake Edmiston, December 15/17, 2017, National Post)

70-year-old Honey Sherman was a board member of several notable non-profit organizations, including the York University Foundation and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Their deaths were a devastating loss to both the Jewish community and the broader community in Toronto because the couple were “among the most active and generous philanthropists”, said Senator Frum: 

“The Jewish community and the broader community in Toronto are going to be devastated by this loss because they were among the most active and generous philanthropists. For them, community involvement wasn’t just about giving their money, they took a profound and deep interest in almost every institution and organization they supported”.

(Adrian Humphreys and Jake Edmiston, December 15/17, 2017, National Post)

Indeed, Toronto’s Jewish community was stunned by the Shermans’ deaths. Flags were lowered to half-mast at Toronto’s Sherman Campus, which houses a United Jewish Appeal Federation headquarters, a Jewish community center, the community’s Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and Jewish family services and other agencies.

Eli Rubenstein, national director of March of the Living Canada, described the Shermans as “among the leading philanthropists in Canada”, maybe “the most generous” and “definitely among the most generous”:

“The Shermans are among the leading philanthropists in Canada. They may be the most generous in the country, and definitely among the most generous”.

(Allison Kaplan Sommer and Reuters, December 19, 2017, Haaretz)

Rubenstein noted that in addition to their donations to Jewish charities, the couple supported a “host of universal causes”, especially “Holocaust education” because Honey Sherman had been born in a European displaced persons camp to parents who had survived the Holocaust.

(Allison Kaplan Sommer and Reuters, December 19, 2017, Haaretz)

According to an August 2017 story in The Canadian Jewish News, Barry Sherman had donated a record amount of $50 million to the United Jewish Appeal, his Apotex Foundation had donated more than $50 million worth of medicines internationally in the past 10 years, and he was proud that Apotex was “recognized as the No. 1 pharmaceutical company in Canada for total corporate donations”:

“Over the years, Sherman has demonstrated that community is as important to him as success in business. He has been a community leader and shared his wealth generously with the community. He is a major contributor to Jewish organizations, including the UJA – to which he has donated a recorded amount of $50 million – and the Joint Distribution Committee.

He and his wife, Honey, have donated millions to medical research and health-care facilities – including an important addition to Baycrest – and community centres in Toronto and elsewhere.

Sherman also gives through his company, Apotex, and the Apotex Foundation. “One of our major community contributions are to the United Way,” Sherman states on the Apotex website. “We are proud to be recognized as the No. 1 pharmaceutical company in Canada for total corporate donations, being one of the few companies in the country to raise over $1 million.”

The Apotex Foundation is a privately held charitable organization, which has donated more than $50 million in medicines over the last 10 years. Critical medicines have been shipped to every disaster zone around the globe to provide assistance to humans in need.”

(“Barry Sherman ranks High both in wealth and philanthropy”, by Myron Love, August 19, 2017, The Canadian Jewish News)

The Shermans’ “legacy of giving and selfless dedication” was also the focus of their public funeral in December 2017, which was “attended by more than 6,500 and live-streamed”, including many of the business and political elite.

(“The other side of Barry Sherman”, by Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Prime Minister Trudeau, Senator Frum, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, Ontario Health Minister Hoskins and Toronto Mayor John Tory were among the attendees. In her eulogy, Premier Wynne urged all to follow the example of the Shermans’, who had been “full of compassion, hope and generosity”:

“Wynne urged mourners to follow the Shermans’ example: “May we all be inspired to live as they did. Full of compassion, hope and generosity.””

(“‘Painful and so bizarrely surreal’: Thousands mourn deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman”, by Andrea Janus and Nick Boisvert, December 21, 2017, CBC News

In their eulogies, Sherman family members and friends, including Senator Frum and Mayor Tory, reminisced about the couple’s generosity, like Mary Shechtman recalled about her sister Honey, “She wanted to give everything to everybody”:

“Tory told mourners he was “profoundly saddened” by the deaths of the Shermans, and paid tribute to their dedication to bettering their city, and their country.

Long before he was in politics, Tory would ask the couple for support for various charitable projects, “and rarely if ever went away without some support,” he said.

…

Joel Ulster, who called himself Barry Sherman’s oldest friend, described him not only as “the smartest person, but much more importantly, he had the biggest heart.”

The Shermans not only gave millions to charities, he noted, they also helped many people quietly and privately, he said.

“Our hearts are broken.”

Sen. Linda Frum, said it was “a privilege” to call the Shermans friends, and reminisced about Honey Sherman’s kindness. …

“It was easy to love Honey and everybody did.”

Honey Sherman’s sister, Mary Shechtman, tearfully recalled how her relationship with her sister was marked by two favourite things: laughing and shopping.

…

“She just wanted to make everybody happy,” Shechtman said through tears. “She wanted to give everything to everybody.””

(Andrea Janus and Nick Boisvert, December 21, 2017, CBC News)

At the funeral, the Shermans’ son Jonathan announced the creation of a new philanthropic foundation in their parents’ name: The Honey and Barry Foundation of Giving.

Such exemplary spirits of giving!

Shortly before their unexpected and shocking deaths, the Shermans had been prominently honoured by the Canadian parliament and government.

On November 29, Honey and Barry Sherman had been awarded a Senate 150 Anniversary Medal for their being “among Canada’s most generous philanthropists” – as a couple given one of “twelve medals to twelve individuals” awarded by Senator Frum.

(“Senate 150 Anniversary Medal”, November 29, 2017, Senator Linda Frum)

Also in November 2017, the Canadian government had made the decision to name Barry Sherman to the Order of Canada, with the appointment signed by Governor General Julie Payette before their deaths. That prior timing turned out to be necessary for this high honour to be bestowed posthumously:

“In a statement issued on Saturday evening, the family of Barry and Honey Sherman said that news that their late father has been appointed to the Order of Canada, which was made public on Friday, provides them some comfort during a “most difficult time.”

…

“To receive this honour posthumously speaks volumes about our father and confirms what we have always known, he was a true humanitarian and a great Canadian,” the statement from Sherman’s family reads. “We take comfort knowing that his countless contributions to healthcare and philanthropy have been memorialized in such an enduring manner.”

The Order of Canada cannot be awarded to someone after their death but the committee charged with deciding who gets the award actually granted it to Barry Sherman at a meeting in November and Governor General Julie Payette signed the appointment prior to his death.

In their statement, Sherman’s family note that the Order of Canada is “one of this nation’s highest honours.””

(“Family of Barry Sherman say Order of Canada appointment ‘speaks volumes’ about father”, by Chris Fox, December 30, 2017, CP24 News)

The Sherman family had reasons to be appreciative, or at least “take comfort” as they said, cited above. Had these Canadian official gestures not been made in November 2017, these two leading Canadian philanthropists would have forever missed the high and enduring national  honours several weeks later when their “targeted” double homicide occurred in December.

One cannot help but wonder: Who could have committed such a cruel and heinous crime? Who could have murdered the beloved Barry and Honey Sherman, who had been – as praised by Senator Linda Frum and Jewish community leader Eli Rubenstein – among “the leading philanthropists” and “the most active and generous philanthropists” in Canada?

According to a Maclean’s investigative article published in April 2018, police did not have an easy answer about this crime and were thus also looking into the broader circumstances:

“The ongoing investigation into the Shermans’ deaths now casts a harsher spotlight on their lives as police try to answer why the couple were victims of a “targeted” attack…”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

The article mentioned the huge amount of police resources allocated to the case:

“… The mystery deepens as each day passes, with no arrests or known suspects. An affidavit filed in court by a Toronto police officer detailed resources being deployed: 51 officers working the case, combing through more than 2,000 hours of security footage, with “474 investigative actions” being “vigorously pursued,” 240 people interviewed or identified to be interviewed. More warrants and “covert tactics” to track down the killers are expected. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Intriguingly, when considering the broader, albeit hypothetical, question of “who could have murdered” the Shermans, it will become clear – as I review the relevant media coverage, past and present – that, despite all the high praises the couple have received, there have also been no shortage of persons and organizations that hated Barry Sherman.

The Maclean’s investigative article pointed out that two decades ago Sherman himself had said he could be a murder target for his work in the pharmaceutical industry, and that since then his list of enemies has grown even longer:

“Two decades ago, Sherman himself admitted he could be a target for murder. “For a thousand bucks paid to the right person, you can probably get someone killed. Perhaps I’m surprised that hasn’t happened,” he told author Jeffrey Robinson in the 2001 book Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power Inside the Pharmaceutical Industry. After that, his list of adversaries only grew, as privately held Apotex expanded into more than 100 countries, including Mexico and India, and began developing a cannabis-based pill. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

A paradoxical and unpleasant scenario to contemplate, that Sherman may have been a murder target for his work when his pharmaceutical company benefited people in so many countries.

A potential explanation is that, while he was adored by those close to him Barry Sherman was also loathed by others and was accused by some as “unethical in business dealings”, according to the Maclean’s article:

“… A renowned risk-taker, disruptor and pitbull professionally, Sherman was a polarizing figure—regarded as a softie with a heart of gold by those in his proximity and loathed by those who claim they were outfoxed or betrayed by him. The man who learned weeks before his death of his nomination to the Order of Canada was also called out as unethical in business dealings. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Hmm, so the Order of Canada was bestowed on a businessman who had been regarded as “a softie with a heart of gold” by some but had also been “called out as unethical in business dealings” by others, and who was soon murdered alongside his wife in what the police have called “a targeted attack”!

While such an alternative depiction would be unflattering of Sherman, interestingly in his eulogy at the Shermans’ funeral Apotex president and COO Jack Kay said something subtly that could be interpreted similarly, that Barry Sherman was “kind of a teddy bear in real life, but with a mind like a steel trap and the stubbornness of a bull”:

“Apotex president and COO Jack Kay, his voice breaking numerous times, reminisced about 35 years of both a business and personal relationship with Barry Sherman and his family. In 1982, Sherman interviewed Kay in Montreal for a vice-president’s job at Apotex, and ended their conversation by saying: “Come move to Toronto and we will build this company and have a lot of fun and make a lot of money.”

He noted Sherman’s vast intellect, devotion to hard work and love of his family and friends.

“Barry was just a regular guy,” Kay said. “He was kind of a teddy bear in real life, but with a mind like a steel trap and the stubbornness of a bull. He changed my life, and I’m so very grateful to have shared those years with him.””

(Andrea Janus and Nick Boisvert, December 21, 2017, CBC News)

Still, at first glance at the facts as recently reported in the media, it isn’t immediately obvious how unethical Sherman was in his pharmaceutical business practice, other than that he was a man in many legal disputes.

Sherman’s privately-owned Apotex has launched an astonishingly large number of lawsuits over the years, more than 1,200 in the Federal Court of Canada alone since 1990:

“Launched in 1974, it was a corporation in constant battle mode: against Big Pharma, against government regulators, against anyone who dared question the founder’s pure intentions. He touted himself as a patent-busting underdog, the courtroom crusader bravely suing the Mercks and Pfizers and Bayers of the world so he could provide needy patients with cheaper generics. “If we’re thieves, we’re Robin Hoods,” he once claimed. Winning in the courts was so crucial to his success that he liked to tell his employees they worked for a legal company that happened to sell medications.

Sherman railed against “incompetent” bureaucrats who had the audacity to disagree with his interpretations of federal drug law—and he dragged them to court, too. In Federal Court alone, Apotex has launched more than 1,200 legal actions, including 83 against Health Canada since 1990. A ministry spokesman says “because of the high volume of cases,” officials can’t even begin to calculate how many millions Sherman’s litigation has cost Canadian taxpayers. …”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

As told above, Sherman prided himself and his company as “Robin Hoods” expanding the consumer reach of their cheaper generic drugs; he and his company were in “constant battle mode” using legal litigation as a mighty weapon, against Big Pharma – the international pharmaceutical giants that dwarf his Canadian generic drug company – government regulators, and anyone who dared to stand in their way.

Sherman’s litigations have cost Canadian taxpayers “many millions”, according to a government spokesman. But while that may have been true, from the standpoint of Barry Sherman and Apotex the many legal battles were a necessity.

When Sherman admitted he could be a murder target, as cited earlier from a Maclean’s investigative article, he did so to Jeffrey Robinson, author of the book Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry, who interviewed him.

As excerpted from the 2001 book, an enormous amount of legal litigation is what a generic drug company had to endure to be successful because a generic drug is a “copycat” of a brand-name drug, the generic drug company must not infringe on existing drug patents and the determination is through legal battles:

“A generic drug is a copycat version of a branded drug, permitted to come onto the market as soon as the branded drug goes off patent, but only on the condition that the copycat is “bioequivalent” with the original, which means the generic version must be more than just a chemical copy. It has to be as safe and effective as the branded drug and act in exactly the same way. It must contain an identical amount of active ingredient and must be in the same dosage. A generic must also meet standards for “bioavailability,” meaning that it must deliver the same exact amount of the active ingredient into the bloodstream and in very nearly the exact same time, within a narrowly defined margin of difference.

…

Because the generic manufacturers have not had to undergo huge R&D expenses or vastly complicated clinical trials, building a generic costs considerably less than developing a branded drug. Where Merck may spend $300 million on researching and developing a drug, Apotex can get its generic version on the market for around $1 million.

But first the generic company has to get past the branded companies’ lawyers.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, Prescription Games: Money, Ego and Power inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

I find that author Jeffrey Robinson’s very precise definition of the technical requirements for a generic drug, quoted above, needs to be clarified, namely that in practice an Apotex generic drug may not necessarily contain “an identical amount of active ingredient” as the brand-name drug.

In the following example in a legal dispute between GlaxoSmithKline and Apotex in 2003, that Big Pharma company was unable to prove to the court that Apotex’s generic version of the brand-name drug Paxil actually contained sufficient amounts of the patented active ingredient:

“Barry Sherman, chief executive of privately held Apotex, said the company is “elated” with the ruling of the U.S. federal court in Chicago, but could not pinpoint a launch date for its version of Paxil.

…

Federal court Judge Richard Posner found that while Glaxo’s patent is valid, the Middlesex, England-based company could not prove that Apotex’s version contains sufficient amounts of patented active ingredient hemihydrate to constitute an infringement.

The ruling says TorPharm Pharmaceuticals did not infringe the Glaxo patent with its own drug. TorPharm is a subsidiary of Apotex Inc.

Glaxo said it would appeal while it continues to defend the Paxil patent in a separate case.”

(“Apotex wins dispute with Glaxo: Legal action over Paxil still pending”, by Michael Lewis, March 5, 2003, National Post)

Clearly, if a generic version did not contain sufficient amounts of a key active ingredient of a brand-name drug, the generic quite likely would not be as “effective as the branded drug”, let alone “act in exactly the same way” as stipulated in the earlier quote from Robinson’s book.

Also quoted in Robinson’s book, Barry Sherman extensively lamented about how difficult it was to invest in the health-care industry in Canada, pinpointing the main unfavourable factors as the anti-competitive government regulations and the brand-name drug companies’ “pseudogenerics”, as well as the brand-name drug companies’ legal tactics:

“The entire generic industry is, Sherman says with obvious frustration, “Unsustainable. The combination of the anti-competitive regulations and the pseudogenerics, those two factors make it impossible to continue to invest in the health-care industry in Canada. As a result of which, the monopolies will go on forever. No one will invest in new products because you won’t be able to get it onto the market.”

Pseudogenerics are the branded companies’ own drug, repackaged as a generic, brought to the market a few months before the generic company can launch its own version.

“Or they hang us up in court. … Whether you’re right or wrong, when you get to court it’s fifty-fifty. You’ve got a non-infringing process and they’ll get a Nobel laureate to swear that the moon is made of cheese. So even if you’ve got 99 per cent certainty that you’re not infringing, you know they’re going to sue you anyway and so you’re off the market for that period of time with no revenue to pay for the litigation. Under any normal scenario, you just launch the product, then you litigate, and if you lose at the end of the day you give up your profits. In this country it’s rigged against us. We have to carry all the expenses, have no sales to deduct that from, and if we’re stopped because the court rules against us, then we’ve lost all of our investment, not just the profit but all of our investment. And that means we can’t invest.””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

I find it interesting that Sherman’s view of leading scientists was so unflattering, that the branded companies would get a Nobel laureate “to swear in court that the moon is made of cheese”, i.e., to speak totally without scientific integrity.

Here are some of my interpretations of Sherman’s words quoted above: one, upon the launch of a generic drug the company would be sued by the brand-name drug company regardless of whether patents were infringed, and so Sherman’s company chose to “just launch the product” first and then litigate; and, two, in Canada the “anti-competitive regulations” kept the generic drugs off the market during a legal dispute, and so his company also sued the government for that reason.

Barry Sherman sounded very competitive but not exactly “unethical”, or at least not like “a Nobel laureate” that he belittled.

Shortly after the Shermans’ murder, Amir Attaran, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa, disputed the public image of Barry Sherman and Apotex as legal fighters bringing cheaper drugs to Canadians. Generic drugs in Canada are among the most expensive generics in the world, according to Attaran:

““I think he was probably the most active litigant in any industry in Canada,” said Amir Attaran, a professor in the faculties of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa.

“I practise in Federal Court, and there’s no one else in Federal Court whose name is attached to more cases that I know of.”

…

“That’s how they spin it. He was always in court fighting for Canadians to get cheaper drugs,” Attaran said.

“That is outrageous fabrication. Because for all his efforts being the biggest generic drug company in Canada, having the greatest influence of any company in Canada over generic drugs, Canada pays among the highest prices in the world for generics. And that has been documented again and again.””

(“When it came to launching legal battles, Apotex founder Barry Sherman was ‘absolutely singular’”, by Victoria Gibson and Jacques Gallant, December 22, 2017, Toronto Star)

That public image was “outrageous fabrication” because “Canada pays among the highest prices in the world for generics. And that has been documented again and again.”

Now that begins to look not so ethical about Barry Sherman, i.e., fighting many legal battles to push his company’s generic drugs onto the market but not passing on the gains to the Canadian consumers – not a “Robin Hood” if Attaran’s view is right.

Attaran also called Sherman “unethical in business”:

“Apotex has been involved in more than a thousand court cases in Canada, using the legal system to aggressively challenge drug patents.

“It definitely makes it the most litigious pharma company in Canada and probably the most litigious company period,” says University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran.

“It’s fair to observe the way he did business he would have had many enemies,” he says.

Canadians pay some of the highest prices in the world for generic drugs, and Attaran argues Sherman’s business practices contributed to that.

“He was unethical in business. His drugs were overpriced and gouged Canadians,” he said on Twitter.

(“Barry and Honey Sherman: The mystery of the strangled billionaires”, by Jessica Murphy, February 4, 2018, BBC News)

As Attaran observed about Sherman in the above, “the way he did business he would have had many enemies”. This observation points to a possible connection between the Shermans’ murder and Barry Sherman’s way of conducting business.

But “price gouging” as Attaran accused Sherman of would have been ripping off many more Canadians.

Nonetheless, again, the perspectives from Sherman’s standpoint were quite the opposite. In the last quote earlier from Robinson’s 2001 book, Sherman was quoted as saying that it was difficult to invest in the Canadian health-care industry to make a profit.

Here is a more objective description by Robinson in his book, of Apotex’s drug prices and profitability:

“… Sherman brought generic drugs to market, charged 70 to 80 per cent of the brand price, took half the market share, and steered Apotex through sixteen years of strong growth.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

No doubt Apotex’s half share of the entire Canadian market and “sixteen years of strong growth” indicated strong profitability. Perhaps 70-80% of the brand-name drug price was still, as Attaran has said, “among the highest prices in the world for generics”, which would mean that Sherman and Apotex did not pass enough of the profits to the Canadian consumers.

But if one reads more carefully his words earlier quoted from Robinson’s book, Sherman’s main preoccupation did not seem to be on cheaper drugs, but on breaking “the monopolies” of the brand-name drug companies.

Another quote of him here from Robinson’s book confirms that Sherman’s higher priorities were expanding the Canadian drug industry and creating pharmaceutical jobs in Canada:

“The generic industry is vital to Canada. When I say vital I’m talking about high-tech employment, research, and saving money for the health-care system. I’ve spent thirty years building this fantastic industry in Canada, we employ thousand of people, we save billions of dollars for the health-care system, we’ve done all the right things…”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

I can interpret Sherman’s priorities stated above as: this fantastic generic industry in Canada, high-tech employment, research and – then – cheaper health-care.

And I would not be surprised if Sherman indeed directed Apotex’s business strategies and finance in that priority order.

In fact, after Sherman’s murder, author Jeffrey Robinson again restated Sherman’s agenda in that order, “creating jobs in Canada” and “protecting the little guy against big pharma”:

““Barry Sherman was constantly at war with everybody and when I talked to him, he had an agenda, ‘I’m creating jobs in Canada’, ‘I’m protecting the little guy against big pharma’,” Robinson recalled.

“He was basically saying, ‘it’s me against the world.’””

(“SHERMAN MURDERS: Did organized crime kill billionaire?”, by Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

So, it wasn’t fully ethical when Barry Sherman and Apotex emphasized so much to the public – probably in their advertising mode – as noted by Attaran, that they fought hard in court to bring cheaper drugs to Canadians. But when he was interviewed for a book on the pharmaceutical industry, Sherman did carefully phrase his objectives.

Now, all that legal fighting must have also come with huge legal costs, which would have reduced the amount of savings that could have been passed on to the Canadian consumers.

Shortly after the Shermans’ murder, Toronto Life magazine republished a 2008 article on the Shermans, that included a succinct description of what Apotex achieved and how it did it, citing a few telling numbers:

“When Sherman founded the company in 1974, generic drugs were generally dismissed as flawed imitations of the real thing. Since then, Apotex has become Canada’s largest drug manufacturer, filling 75 million prescriptions a year. Most of the company’s 300 products are versions of such widely used drugs as the antidepressant Paxil, the antihistamine Claritin and the antibiotic Tetracyn. Apotex tests and develops its products with a staff of 2,100 scientists, who run a 105-bed clinical hospital for human guinea pigs.

Sherman also spends a small fortune on litigation—a full 50 per cent of what he invests in research. Generic manufacturers like Apotex live or die by the speed with which they can plunge into the market­place with copycat versions. So they make it their business to shorten the duration that brand name companies hold on to drug monopolies, weighing potential profits against the risk of lawsuits. It’s not unusual for Apotex—probably the country’s biggest litigator—to be engaged in 100 court cases simultaneously.”

(“Bitter Pill”, by Geraldine Sherman, December 18, 2017, Toronto Life)

The above recount of Apotex’s history included at least three matters worth digging into for their relevance to Sherman’s business practice: one, Apotex had a staff of 2,100 scientists who run “a 105-bed clinical hospital for human guinea pigs”; two, Sherman had an astonishing amount of business spending on legal litigation, equal to 50% of his investment on research; and three, Apotex typically began marketing a generic drug when the brand-name drug patent was still in effect – trying to cut the patent short, taking the risk of getting into legal disputes.

Firstly, how bad were Sherman’s drug trials using “human guinea pigs”? That could involve issues of ethics.

A 2006 news story on Aotex’s generic version of the heart drug Plavix mentioned the human experiments at that 105-bed Apotex hospital, but revealed no detail as to any risks they could pose to the patients’ health:

“Apotex has more than 6,300 employees and fills one in every three prescriptions in Canada, Sherman said. Sales of Plavix this year may double his annual revenue to $2 billion, he said.

The Apotex complex covers several city blocks in the Toronto suburb of Weston. Sherman owns just about everything that touches his drugs, from the chemistry labs to the plants that produce capsules, pill bottles and labels.

To speed drug development, he opened a 105-bed hospital three years ago to conduct drug trials. The beds are filled with paid participants from a database of 30,000 pre-screened people. Blood drawn there can be analysed in labs around the corner, and medications can be rapidly modified and sent back to the hospital for additional tests.

For more than a week now, Apotex equipment has been churning out copies of Plavix pills at a rate of six million every 14 hours. The product, used to prevent heart attacks and strokes, keeps platelets from clumping together and forming clots. Plavix last year was the world’s second-biggest selling drug behind Pfizer Inc.’s cholesterol medicine Lipitor.”

(“Apotex CEO vows he’ll best Sanofi, Bristol-Myers in battle over Plavix rights; ‘I don’t ever shy away from a fight,’ says Barry Sherman”, by Lisa Rapaport, August 19, 2006, Telegraph-Journal)

It certainly sounded like very high-intensity patient drug trials at Apotex’s hospital purposely built for drug trials, a hospital owned, like “just about everything” of Apotex’s, by Barry Sherman.

Nevertheless, reviewing the press archives I have not come across news about these drug trials and so, I guess like others say, ‘no news is good news’.

Secondly, how could Apotex sell a generic drug before the original patent’s expiration and what were the legal risks like? This obviously had much to do with his company’s huge legal spending.

Consider the example of Plavix here. The above quote mentioned that Apotex was mass-producing and mass-selling its generic version of the heart drug Plavix at the time in 2006.

The patent for the brand-name Plavix was still in effect and would be for another five more years; predictably, Sherman’s move got Apotex into a serious legal battle in the U.S.:

“His latest battle, which played out in a U.S. court Friday, is over Plavix, the world’s second-best selling drug, with $6.2 billion US in sales last year. If Apotex prevails, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and Sanofi-Aventis SA will lose their exclusive right to market Plavix five years earlier than planned and Apotex will get a windfall selling a cheaper version of the $4-a-day blood-thinning pill.

Sherman is at the centre of a storm involving drug prices. Apotex and generic-drug makers are challenging the validity of product patents so they can sell less-expensive copies sooner than scheduled. …

…

… In a hearing Friday in U.S. court in New York, Bristol-Myers and Sanofi
asked a judge for an injunction to halt sales of Apotex’s generic copy of Plavix and for an order that the Canadian drugmaker recall inventory already sold. Apotex has argued the Plavix patent was invalid and that an injunction would cause irreparable harm by forcing a recall of millions of dollars in medication already distributed.”

(Lisa Rapaport, August 19, 2006, Telegraph Journal)

As the story told, “Apotex and generic-drug makers are challenging the validity of product patents so they can sell less-expensive copies sooner than scheduled”.

So, Apotex wasn’t the only generic-drug makers who challenged existing brand-name drug patents.

But Apotex also put its generic version of Plavix on the market five years before the patent’s expiration, doing so by simply arguing that the patent was invalid. It was Barry Sherman’s battle and not just Apotex’s, as the above news story stated univocally.

The court injunction being sought by the Big Pharma companies in this case, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, while the existing drug patent was being contested in a broader court battle, would force Apotex to immediately stop sale of the generics and recall the sold products.

That would mean absolutely no income for Apotex at this point in time while having to pay the costs of developing and selling the generics.

Getting the injunction was critical for these Big Pharma brand-name drug companies, because Sherman’s move caused them major financial losses:

“Sanofi and Bristol-Myers “lost $10 billion in market capitalization since” Apotex began selling the generic Aug. 8, said Evan Chesler, the companies’ lawyer, during opening arguments.

“You can never put our Humpty Dumpty back together again if this thing isn’t stopped.”

Apotex attorney Robert Silver said during opening arguments that removing generic Plavix from the market would harm consumers by driving up prices. “If we’re off the market, then they have the entire market again and they can charge whatever they want.””

(Lisa Rapaport, August 19, 2006, Telegraph Journal)

As Evan Chesler, lawyer for Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb, was quoted telling a U.S. court on August 18, 2006, the two companies lost $10 billion in their stock market worth since August 8 when Apotex began selling its generic version with the original patent still in effect – only about 10 days of Apotex’s sale of generics already made these Big Pharma companies feel like a broken “Humpty Dumpty”.

In response, U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein ordered an injunction to halt Apotex’s sale of the generics while the legal litigation was in process, but refused to order Apotex to recall the sold products:

“… On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein agreed and issued an injunction that prevented Apotex from producing generic versions of the drug until the case has concluded. However, Judge Stein refused to order Apotex to recall pills that it had already shipped.”

(“Apotex rolled the dice on Plavix and they came up snake eyes”, by Paul Waldie, September 2, 2006, The Globe and Mail)

So, Sherman’s aggressive, risk-taking strategy, putting the generic Plavix on the U.S. market in violation of the drug patent, got Apotex a 10-day sale revenue that it could keep for the time being.

That 10-day market damage inflicted on Bristol-Myers Squibb was enough to see the Big Pharma company’s CEO be forced to step down:

“Bristol-Myers loss of Plavix was only temporary, but the impact of Apotex’s aggressive strategy was devastating.

…

Bristol-Myers’ earnings stagnated and its share price plummeted. For getting outmaneuvered by Apotex, Bristol-Myers’ chief executive was
forced to resign. And it’s not over yet. The two sides are back in court fighting over whether the Plavix patent is valid once again. …”

(“Apotex’s jagged little pills”, by John Greenwood, January 29, 2007, National Post)

I also note that compared to, as discussed earlier, Apotex’s generic drug prices at 70-80% of the brand-name prices in Canada, in the U.S. in 2006 Apotex’s generic Plavix was in great demand even at 80-90% of the brand-name price:

“Apotex’s generic version is selling for about 10% to 20% less than typical US$4-a-day Plavix, which is widely used to prevent recurrences of heart attacks and strokes. Bristol-Myers announced this week it was giving rebates to its customers in an attempt to counter Apotex’s generic price.”

(“Generic drug, specific issue: Apotex fights Plavix”, by Stephanie Saul, August 16, 2006, National Post)

With such a heated head-to-head competition between Apotex and the two international pharmaceutical giants, and the Apotex generic version selling briskly despite only at a modest discount, I guess there would be less ground for the legal and medical expert Amir Attaran to accuse Barry Sherman of gouging, in this case, U.S. consumers.

And now, thirdly, how large in reality was Sherman’s spending on legal costs, that equalled 50% of his research investment?

The Plavix case illustrated that serious legal spending was necessary to ensure a high-stake and fierce dispute over the right to sell drugs in a lucrative market to stay within the legal realm and be properly adjudicated, and not get carried away.

A 2008 news story cited a few interesting numbers about Canadian lawyers earning generic drug litigation money and their gratitude toward Sherman, especially in the context of patent litigation generally in Canada:

“Harry Radomski of the law firm Goodmans in Toronto is lead generic drug counsel for Apotex inc. He’s driving a litigation train.

Notice of compliance cases — a method pharmaceutical companies use for obtaining approval of a new drug — constitute some 90% of the firm’s IP litigation, generating between $10-and $20-million in annual billings for Mr. Radomski and his colleagues.

The truth is that pharmaceutical litigation of the kind known as generic drug litigation is a docket hog. Such cases make up at least 60% of all patent cases in the Federal Court and consume at least 75% of the legal fees. Indeed, on one summer day, 17 of the 20 motions on the Federal Court list in Toronto were pharmaceutical cases.

“IP litigation lawyers should erect a monument to Barry Sherman,” says Scott Jolliffe, managing partner of Gowling Lafleur Henderson in Toronto.

…

“The pure profit of the generics is one thousandfold that of the brands, so there’s huge money at stake for both parties,” Mr. Jolliffe says.

It pays the generic companies, then, to take on litigation with slim chances of success in the hope that one suit will pay off in spades.

“Barry Sherman will tell you that he needs to win only one case in 100 in order for his company to stay very profitable,” Mr. Jolliffe says.”

(“Litigation train keeps rolling on; Patent Lawsuits”, by Julius Melitzer, September 24, 2008, National Post)

As reported, Goodmans, the law firm of Apotex’s lead generic drug counsel Harry Radomski, brought in $10-20 million annually from just one type of generic drug cases – Notice of compliance cases – and that at the Federal Court of Canada, generic drug cases made up 60% of the patent cases and consumed 75% of the legal fees.

And as lawyer Scott Jolliffe pointed out, the pure profit of generic drugs is a thousand times of the brand-name drugs and Barry Sherman only needed to win one in 100 cases for Apotex to be very profitable. So, in taking the legal risks and counting on litigation, to the Canadian Intellectual Property litigation lawyers – many of whom undoubtedly enriched by the Apotex legal cases – Sherman was a hero deserving “a monument”.

From the press’s portrayals of his generic drug business ambitions and drive that I have reviewed to this point, I would describe Barry Sherman’s business practice as commercially and legally very aggressive, probably to the point of being reckless, and possibly with some misplaced priorities.

But I can’t quite call Sherman a “pitbull” that the Maclean’s investigative article has termed, or “unethical” as law and medicine professor Amir Attaran has also alleged.

In Robinson’s 2001 book, Sherman explained why his company had a better focus on producing and selling drugs than Big Pharma did, which spent a lot of its money on marketing and advertising, in Canada:

“Apotex employs some thirty-five hundred people, compared with Big Pharma’s total in Canada of around fifteen thousand. But Sherman points out that Apotex produces more than Big Pharm does. “They have all these people in marketing and 30 per cent of their income goes to these glossy ads to doctors. The purpose of the ads, of course, is not to get the best therapy but to get the doctors to prescribe those things on which the drug companies make the most profit. …Then, as soon as there’s generic competition, they move on to promoting something that’s more expensive, even though it’s not necessarily better.””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

Barry Sherman sounded a lot like a Canadian industry hero, a patriot, didn’t he – even if Apotex’s generic drugs weren’t that cheap for the Canadian consumers as pointed out by Amir Attaran?

With my review thus far of various media-reported facts, there is an emerging picture of how Barry Sherman and Apotex competed with the international brand-name drug companies to grow and establish his company as the leading Canadian generic drug company, and in the process became financially successful.

Thus, one can can ponder a more specific question about “who could have murdered” the Shermans: driven by unrelenting ambitions, could Sherman’s Canadian pharmaceutical business practice have been a cause of the “targeted” brutal murder of him and his wife – regardless of his being “unethical in business”, facts about which I have not yet encountered in my review?

Surprisingly, the answer is affirmative because, as cited earlier from the Maclean’s investigative article, Sherman was quoted in Robinson’s book as having entertained that thought, and here a fuller quote from that book shows what exactly Sherman pointed his accusing finger at:

“The branded drug companies hate us. They have private investigators on us all the time. The thought once came to my mind, why didn’t they just hire someone to knock me off? For a thousand bucks paid to the right person, you can probably get someone killed. Perhaps I’m surprised that hadn’t happened.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

“The branded drug companies” could “just hire someone to knock me off”, and “I’m surprised that hadn’t happened”, said Sherman as above.

Interestingly, at the time of their conversation, Jeffrey Robinson thought Barry Sherman wasn’t really serious about the possibility of being targeted; and now the author has professed to be “stunned” by the murder:

“Jeffrey Robinson — author of Prescription Games – Money, Ego and Power Inside the Global Pharmaceutical Industry — interviewed Sherman for the 2001 book.

He said he was stunned when he heard the generic drug dynamo had been murdered.

…

However, the writer said that when Sherman said he was surprised he hadn’t been bumped off by his slew of enemies, he was being glib.

“Barry said it like, ‘I bought another baseball mitt mom,’” Robinson said. “Neither of us took it seriously and it has nothing to do with what’s going on right now.””

(Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

But Sherman’s “targeted” murder has happened, whether or not Robinson took it seriously when Sherman said it could have happened. Without a more thorough analysis, any investigation should not dismiss the scenario that it may have involved Big Pharma.

For instance, Apotex’s aggressive generic drug selling would readily, as in the case of the heart drug Plavix discussed earlier, breach an existing patent, i.e., illegally while it was still in effect, and the unpleasant market surprise could cause substantial financial losses and made the brand-name drug companies and their dependents feel like a broken “Humpty Dumpty”. Consequently, the thought of “knocking off” such a competitor could have come to the minds of some who suffered losses, as it had come across this competitor’s own mind.

Along this line of contemplation, one would be looking at international pharmaceutical giants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb, and the likes of Pfizer, Merck, Bayer and AstraZeneca – to cite a few mentioned in Robinson’s 2001 book – for culpability.

However, to be fair, even if brand-name drug companies were somehow connected to the Shermans’ murder, one should still consider issues on Barry Sherman’s part – such as his “unethical” business dealings – that could have contributed to his bloody end.

The Maclean’s April 2018 investigative article has cited a specific person, Morton Shulman, who had been a pharmaceutical business battle with Sherman and who regarded Sherman with utter contempt:

“… The late physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Morton Shulman, who did battle with Sherman, called him “the only person I have ever met with no redeeming features whatsoever.”

(Anne Kingston and Michael Friscolanti, April 5, 2018, Maclean’s)

Jesus Christ, “no redeeming features whatsoever”!

The article did not cite any concrete facts in relation to such a derogatory comment on Barry Sherman by “the late physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Morton Shulman”. Nonetheless, when one learns who Morton Sherman was, his characterization of Sherman could well be damning, or even condemning:

“Morton Shulman, OC (25 April 1925 – August 18, 2000) was a Canadian politician, businessman, broadcaster, columnist, coroner, and physician.

…

In exchange for his involvement in the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, he was appointed Ontario’s chief coroner in 1961. In 1963, he was named Chief Coroner of the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto. Shulman was outspoken and used the coroner position to crusade on a number of issues such as enacting tougher regulations on lifejackets for small boats, having government regulate car safety, the introduction of breathalysers into Ontario, and against then-restrictive abortion laws after he investigated the deaths of women who had died while trying to terminate their pregnancies. … His years as a coroner became the inspiration for the Canadian television drama Wojeck.

…

After embarrassing the provincial government by revealing its inaction in enforcing the fire code in a recently built hospital, he was fired, in 1967, as Ontario’s Chief Coroner and decided to avenge himself by running for the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. … Despite his strong capitalist beliefs, he decided to run for the democratic socialist party because they gave him a free hand in choosing his own riding, and because their views in support of public safety were compatible with his own. He ran as a candidate in High Park and was elected as Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for the riding in the 1967 provincial election.

…

From 1977 until 1982, he hosted a hard-hitting television show on CITY-TV called The Shulman File which featured confrontational interviews, sensationalist and risque topics and outrageous opinions. … At the same time, he began writing a regular column in the Toronto Sun which continued into the 1990s. …”

(“Morton Shulman – Biography”, JewAge)

The late Dr. Shulman once served as the Chief Coroner of the province of Ontario and also of the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, his crusades for human safety inspired a Canadian TV drama, and he later became a politician, a newspaper columnist and the host of a hard-hitting TV interview and opinion show.

The experience of examining human deaths and determining the causes should give Shulman the ability to judge personality and character. Hence, if Shulman did not exaggerate in his “hard-hitting” opinion of Sherman, the latter must have been quite “unethical” in at least some of the many business and legal battles he and Apotex fought against others, including Shulman and the brand-name drug companies.

In the press archives, there is a reasonable amount of past coverage on legal disputes in 1993-1994 pitching Sherman and Apotex against Shulman and his company, Deprenyl Research.

Their disputes originated from Apotex’s plan to develop and market a generic version of a brand-name drug, deprenyl, also known as selegeline, for Parkinson’s disease, which Shulman suffered from and as a result started a company owning the drug’s Canadian right, selling it under the trademark name Eldepryl.

It was a David vs. Goliath battle, except not pitching Sherman and Apotex against Big Pharma like in most of the media-reported legal cases involving Sherman and Apotex, but in a role reversal pitching them against a small Canadian company and its owner Morton Shulman, who was a practising medical doctor:

“Apotex, in documents filed in the Ontario Court’s General Division, claims Dr. Shulman has defamed it by using a stamp on his patients’ prescriptions that instructs pharmacists not to fill them with drugs made by Apotex.

In its statement of claim, Apotex said it wants $1-million in damages …

…

Dr. Shulman said in an affidavit that he has concerns about the safety of Apotex products because of reports about legal problems Apotex and an associated company in the United States are having with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He said he has an obligation to protect the interests of his patients.

…

The drug is used for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, which affects the central nervous system.

Dr. Shulman, who suffers from Parkinson’s, is a former chief coroner for Metropolitan Toronto, former New Democratic Party member of the Ontario Legislature, author of several best-selling books on how to accumulate wealth, former host of a television public-affairs program and a millionaire who still practices medicine.

… In an interview last year, Apotex president Bernard (Barry) Sherman said the company made 109 different generic drugs, had annual sales of more than $200-million in Canada and almost $500-million world wide.

“In April, 1993, Deprenyl became aware that Apotex intended to develop and market its (own) brand of selegeline,” Mr. Sherman said in an affidavit filed with the court. “Competition by the Apotex generic brand of selegeline would pose a very serious threat to Deprenyl.””

(“Drug firm sues Shulman for defamation; Apotex seeks damages over MD’s orders on prescriptions against use of its products”, by Peter Moon, July 2, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

As told in the above, Sherman wasn’t shy about the prospect that his big company’s generic drug could pose “a very serious threat” to the small company of Shulman’s, but was quite blunt telling the court about it.

When Shulman first learned of that unpleasant prospect in April 1993, he asked, through an intermediary Arnold Polan, for Sherman’s consideration not to introduce the generic, as he recalled in a court affidavit in defence against the above-cited $1 million Apotex lawsuit, “Deprenyl produces but one drug, whereas Apotex has many”:

“In their affidavits, Mr. Sherman and Dr. Shulman agree that Arnold Polan, a Toronto stockbroker who has traded stocks for both men, met with Mr. Sherman at Dr. Shulman’s request.

“I asked Mr. Arnold Polan to speak to Mr. Sherman to see if he would not develop and introduce (a generic version of selegeline),” Dr. Shulman’s affidavit said. “Deprenyl produces but one drug, whereas Apotex has many.””

(Peter Moon, July 2, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

Sherman flatly rejected Shulman’s request. Shulman then began to instruct pharmacists to exclude Apotex’s drugs from the medicines he prescribed as medical doctor, and that action incurred the Apotex lawsuit:

“I refused,” Mr. Sherman’s affidavit said. “It appears that, as a result of (my) refusal to accede to (Dr. Shulman’s) request, (he) determined that he would attempt to intimidate me into withdrawing development and sale of Apotex’s generic selegeline, or alternatively, to punish Apotex for my refusing to do so.

“Commencing some time in the week of May 3, 1993, on prescriptions which he wrote, and without regard to whether Apotex even manufactured the particular medicines being prescribed, (Dr. Shulman) placed the following stipulation: ‘Do not fill this prescription with an Apotex product.’” As a result of protests by Apotex, court records show, Dr. Shulman stopped using the stamp. But he replaced it with another one that instructed pharmacists to fill patients’ prescriptions with “Original brand or Novapharm. No sub.”

The stipulation meant pharmacists could dispense only higher-priced brand-name products or generic drugs manufactured by Novapharm Ltd., Apotex’s chief competitor in the manufacture of generic drugs.

Dr. Shulman’s affidavit says a physician has a right to prescribe whatever brand of drug he wishes. “I believe that if I have reason to doubt the efficacy of a particular product, then it is my responsibility to my patients to make sure that that brand is not taken. I have such reasonable doubts with respect to (Apotex) and its products.””

(Peter Moon, July 2, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

The Sherman-Shulman dispute is a good example showing that Barry Sherman and Apotex were not merely focused on fighting Big Pharma but also keen on pushing a generic drug even when it could threaten the wellbeing of a small Canadian-owned company.

In this case, the owner of the small company the Apotex generics would pose “a very serious threat to” – in Sherman’s own language in a court affidavit – was also a medical doctor and a former chief coroner, and thus had first-hand professional expertise on medicines and their effects. As Shulman stated in his court affidavit, that “if I have reason to doubt the efficacy of a particular product, then it is my responsibility to my patients to make sure that that brand is not taken. I have such reasonable doubts with respect to (Apotex) and its products.”

Most uniquely in this case, the small brand-name drug company owner himself was also a sufferer of Parkinson’s disease that the drug was for the treatment of, and he tried to appeal for Sherman’s compassion – since Shulman’s Deprenyl Research company produced only that one drug – to stop Apotex from marketing its generic version.

Sherman’s firm refusal and brash attitude, as shown by quotes from his court affidavit, were in my view quite in stark contrast to his reputation projected to the public as a compassionate and generous philanthropist.

Sherman was ungenerous and unkind to refuse to consider Shulman’s unique and difficult personal predicament, and then showed lack of compassion for compromise with his stern and unabashed pursue of Shulman in court in order to stamp out Shulman’s individual gesture of protest as a doctor about Apotex drugs.

Particularly abominably, Sherman and Apotex chose a time when Shulman’s Parkinson’s disease had begun worsening, after years of successful treatment with that drug, to announce their plan to make the generic version:

“Dr. Morton Shulman, officially retired but still proud father of Deprenyl Research Ltd., and Barry Sherman, president and owner of Apotex Ltd., are doing battle, armed with legal briefs, affidavits and reports from private investigators.

…

Allegations, insinuations and downright slanderous statements are flying in both directions. Despite attempts to negotiate a truce, it seems likely this war will continue.

“This is a true crusade,” Shulman said in an interview in his Roncesvalles Ave. office. “I’ve got nothing to do (but fight with Sherman.) I’m delighted. It was a godsend that this came along.”

The battle started this spring, about the same time Shulman, 68, was being eased into retirement from Deprenyl Research, the company he founded to import a drug to combat Parkinson’s disease.

Shulman, who last week was made an officer of the Order of Canada for his contributions in health care, won fame and fortune as a crusading Metro coroner in the 1960s, an outspoken MPP, opinionated investment counsellor, television talk show host and drug company founder.

He suffers from Parkinson’s disease and set up Deprenyl in 1987 to import the drug Eldepryl from Europe.

Shulman became his company’s best advertisement as the drug alleviated his symptoms for years. Now, his condition is deteriorating and his speech is slurred and movements are jerky.

Shulman’s son Geoffrey and Dr. Martin Barkin, who was brought in last year to run Deprenyl, now manage the company as it tries to expand its range of products and defend its Eldepryl turf.”

(“Shulman vs. Sherman; The drug entrepreneurs face off”, by Art Chamberlain, July 11, 1993, Toronto Star)

At that particular time, Barry Sherman was literally adding insult to Morton Sherman’s injury.

And the insult could mean more: the above July 11, 1993 Toronto Star story noted that Shulman “last week was made an officer of the Order of Canada for his contributions in health care” – likely on July 1, Canada Day – but I notice that his Order of Canada appointment may have been made on April 22, i.e., in the same month when Shulman became of Apotex’s plan to make a generic version of his drug – a timeline stated in Sherman’s court affidavit cited earlier earlier from a July 2, 1993 The Globe and Mail article.

(“Honours, Order of Canada, Morton Shulman, O.C., M.D.”, updated March 26, 2018, Archives, Governor General of Canada)

In deciding to produce a generic version, Sherman and Apotex disregarded the existing patents covering Shulman’s drug brand:

“Shulman says he met Sherman a few years ago when Sherman made an unsuccessful offer to buy Deprenyl, but their paths have not crossed since.

Once a drug patent expires, or is legally defeated, companies such as Apotex and Novopharm Ltd. can make generic copies and earn a healthy profit selling them at a fraction of the brand-name’s cost.

In April, Apotex announced it felt Deprenyl’s patents wouldn’t stand up in court, and it planned to begin selling a copy soon.

Deprenyl and Apotex have a separate legal action over the patent protection that hasn’t come to court yet.”

(Art Chamberlain, July 11, 1993, Toronto Star)

As cited above, besides the lawsuit by Apotex against Shulman which Sherman played a personal role in, there was a separate legal patent case between Shulman’s Deprenyl Research and Sherman’s Apotex.

I note that, like later in 2006 selling a generic version of Plavix in the U.S., without first legally contesting the existing patents but by only asserting its own opinion, Apotex would produce and sell the generics. This was a tact Apotex used whenever it could as Sherman discussed its pros and cons in Jeffrey Robinson’s 2001 book, quoted earlier.

It seemed that nothing could affect Sherman’s single-minded, strong-willed and boorish drive pursuing his monumental generic drug ambitions.

But in Shulman’s case, something did seem to stop Sherman from pushing ahead with the generic version according to a January 1994 Toronto Star article reviewing Shulman’s autobiography, Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?; maybe it had to do with former Chief Coroner Shulman’s law enforcement connection, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation  launched a criminal investigation of Apotex and it changed Sherman’s mind:

“Although Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up? claims to be about his whole life, it focuses mostly on his latest life, the life he created for himself after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 11 years ago when he was in his mid-50s. Sentenced to death by the disease, (or worse, a life of helplessness) he discovers a Hungarian wonder drug that can treat his symptoms. Then he turns the drug, Deprenyl, into a pharmaceutical company that at one time was worth $100 million. Along the way he is accused of stock manipulation, quackery and worse. Among the claims he makes for Deprenyl is that it has strengthened his libido (never weak, in any case): “My wife was quite amazed and what had been a twice weekly activity became and has remained a daily delight.”

…

Shulman acknowledges that he has a thirst for revenge. This book is his opportunity to get back at those he perceives as his enemies. One enemy is
Canadian generic drug king pin Barry Sherman, the founder of Apotex, Inc., who matches Shulman in tenacity and aggressiveness. Not long after
tangling with Shulman, the FBI investigated Sherman’s company for mail fraud, money laundering and illegal drug dispensing; Sherman, not
surprisingly, gave up the idea of producing a generic version of Shulman’s wonder drug.”

(“Another look at what makes Morty run”, by Edward Trapunski, January 15, 1994, Toronto Star)

It took two to tango. As told above, Morton Shulman clearly liked to exaggerate and he also manipulated his company’s stocks; on the other hand, Barry Sherman could be an even more “unethical” businessman if some of the FBI allegations, “mail fraud, money laundering and illegal drug dispensing”, were true.

The July 11, 1993 Toronto Star story quoted earlier mentioned “reports from private investigators” that were used in the legal dispute between Apotex and Shulman. Specifically, Shulman hired private investigators to look into Sherman’s business practice, and that may have helped him reach a settlement in the end:

“Two years ago, he and former coroner and MPP Morton Shulman waged a public dispute that entertained the pharmaceutical industry for months with charges and counter charges over a drug to treat Parkinson’s disease.

Shulman even had private investigators digging into Sherman’s complicated corporate world, which includes operations in Bermuda and a host of American companies.

In the end, they negotiated a truce and dropped the lawsuits.”

(“Taking heart from court victory Drug stockpile a gold mine for Apotex”, by Art Chamberlain, May 23, 1995, Toronto Star)

The settlement, with Sherman and Apotex dropping the $1 million lawsuit and Shulman agreeing not to exclude Apotex from prescriptions he wrote as a doctor, was reported by the media in November 1993:

“The two bad boys of the pharmaceutical business have called a truce in their public spat.

Barry Sherman, president of Apotex Inc., has dropped a lawsuit for a little matter of $1 million. And Morty Shulman, doctor and founder of Deprenyl Research Ltd., has agreed to stop stamping his prescriptions with a note telling pharmacists not to use Apotex drugs.

Shulman was not too happy about Sherman’s plans to sell a copy of Deprenyl’s main product. But the medical multi-millionaires have agreed to patch things up.

“He’s stopped,” Sherman said this week. “He doesn’t want to be confronted with a lawsuit for damages because he knows he’d lose.”

“I haven’t used the stamp for a long time,” Shulman said. He added: “One of the terms is that I’m not allowed to say anything.”

That’s a bit of a problem for a man with a new biography called Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?

The answer seems to be no: Shulman did go on to talk about the settlement. But he called back with a chuckle two minutes later. He said his lawyer told him his comments would be in contempt of court.”

(“Medical multi-millionaires stamp out their drug row”, November 6, 1993, Toronto Star)

As reported above, as of November 1993 with the legal settlement, Shulman was still unhappy because it did not stop Apotex’s plan to develop and sell a generic version of the brand-name drug he owned the Canadian right of.

In an earlier quote from a review of Shulman’s new autobiography, in the Toronto Star on January 15, 1994, it was reported that Sherman “gave up the idea of producing a generic version of Shulman’s wonder drug” due to an FBI criminal investigation of him:

“Not long after tangling with Shulman, the FBI investigated Sherman’s company for mail fraud, money laundering and illegal drug dispensing; Sherman, not surprisingly, gave up the idea of producing a generic version of Shulman’s wonder drug.”

(Edward Trapunski, January 15, 1994, Toronto Star)

That was probably Shulman’s view by January 15, 1994, a few months after the legal settlement.

Ironically, Shulman’s autobiography was entitled Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?. Obviously, Shulman did not like to shut up and in his new autobiography he bragged about his battle with Sherman.

Unfortunately in this case, Sherman did not really give up. Thirteen days later on January 28, another Toronto Star story cited Sherman as stating that “Apotex is developing a generic version of deprenyl to sell in Canada”:

“Sherman has said Apotex is developing a generic version of deprenyl to sell in Canada.”

(“Apotex chief must testify, judge rules U.S. civil lawsuit over deprenyl sale set for April trial”, by Art Chamberlain, January 28, 1994, Toronto Star)

Clearly, an FBI criminal investigation and Shulman’s private investigation, both digging into his business practice, weren’t enough to change Sherman’s mind, after all.

That history looks even more ironic today, that currently there are also a police criminal investigation and a private investigation, the latter launched by Barry Sherman’s family, into the Sherman couple’s own double murder – bear in mind that Morton Shulman was a former Chief Coroner!

It was logical from Sherman’s standpoint in 1994 that he and Apotex did not give up. They had planned to produce a generic for Shulman’s drug ever since the early days of Shulman’s drug business. Shulman’s autobiography, co-authored with Toronto writer Susan Kastner and published in late 1993, recalled some prior history:

“One fine day in May 1993, Barry Sherman announced he was bringing out a 40 percent lower-priced generic version of Eldepryl, and that there was nothing Morty and his folks could do to stop him.

What made it particularly galling for Morty was the fact that only two weeks earlier, Deprenyl had confidently announced that Eldepryl would be safe for nearly three more years from the depredations of the generics – protected by a brand-new regulation that gave extra teeth to Bill C-91, the Patent Protection Act.

…

Barry Sherman has had his sights trained on selegeline, the chemical generic of Eldepryl, for a long time, and now he means to bag it for Apotex.

Within months of Eldepryl’s HPB approval as a recognized Parkinson’s medication, in January 1990, Apotex signalled its interest in cloning the drug.

Morty had, of course, earmarked the generic threat from the very start. As part of his push for HPB sanction he hooked into the pharmaceutical industry fight for the passage of Bill C-91, a new law to beef up patent protection against the accursed generics.

…

In February [1993], the Morton and Gloria Shulman Centre for the study of Movement Disorders opens in a modestly gala ceremony at Toronto Western Hospital.

In March, 1993, a Private Member’s Bill is introduced to buy Eldepryl patent protection until 1997.

“What, no statue? No horse, no sword?” quips a delighted Morty.

Late in April, 1993, he scoots a flyer to pharmacists, bearing on its cover APO – the Apotex logo – with a big X through it:

“It’s time to Substitute. If it has APO in the name it comes from Apotex. Apotex is owned by Barry Sherman.””

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, Can’t Somebody Shut Him Up?, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

As in the above from his autobiography, Shulman began sending a flyer to pharmacists in late April 1993, to ask them not to use Apotex drugs. It indicates that this was the time when his negotiation with Sherman through an intermediary, cited earlier, failed to stop Apotex’s plan for the generic version. Within two weeks, Sherman publicly announced Apotex’s plan to introduce the generic version.

A 40% discount from the brand-name drug appeared lower than the usual 20-30% discount of Apotex generics as reviewed earlier, although it’s not clear if the price Sherman announced in this case was specifically targeted.

Sherman’s announcement, barely two weeks after Shulman invoking a new legislative protection for the brand-name patent, also presented Apotex’s opinion why the new legislation could not protect the brand-name drug from Apotex’s generic:

“On April 27, 1993, Morty sends “A Letter to My Friends” on stationery of The Safety Corporation.

…

The Globe story that day describes a new federal regulation that extends the drug-patent protection extended by Bill C-91. It closes a loophole that allowed generics to quietly begin development of patent drug copies before a patent has expired, and go on working while the whole thing is battled in court.

Now the generic company must give notice of intention to the patent holder, and will be prevented from selling its copy for up to 30 months after court action is commenced.

This is the 30-month safety shield Deprenyl has happily invoked.

But barely two weeks later, here is Barry Sherman making a counter-pronouncement that Apotex means to produce Eldepryl by a process that has nothing to do with the patented Deprenyl method.

This means war.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

From Sherman’s perspective, this was an example of an “anti-competitive regulation” as he referred to in Robinson’s 2001 book, that was an obstacle to Apotex’s generic drug drive, except that the provisional brand-name protection in this case would benefit a small Canadian drug company, not Big Pharma.

In Shulman’s failed negotiation with Sherman, his intermediary Arnold Polan received Sherman’s reply that it would take a $10 million payment from Shulman – the amount of profit that Sherman estimated he would make from the generic – for Apotex not to produce and sell the generic:

“Mr. Polan asked him what would it take for Apotex to stop developing and producing in competition to Deprenyl. Mr. Sherman said that likely he would make about $10 million profit and so if Dr. Shulman wanted to stop him, it would cost $10 million.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Regardless of which of the two was winning their battle – apparently Sherman and his giant Apotex were much more resourceful, both legally and technologically – one thing is clear about their comparison, that the Canadian official reputation of Shulman’s has been better than that of Sherman’s.

Morton Sherman was an Officer of the Order of Canada, whereas Barry Sherman became, at a lower rank, a Member of the Order of Canada posthumously; while both lived to the age of 75, Shulman received the honour in 1993, the year of his dispute with Sherman, and then lived for another 7 years.

(updated March 26, 2018, Archives, Governor General of Canada; and, “Appointments to the Order of Canada”, December 29, 2017/January 11, 2018, The Governor General of Canada)

Nonetheless, for someone with Sherman’s achievements and official honour, one obviously cannot easily agree with Shulman that this man was of “no redeeming features whatsoever”.

While I have not found detailed media coverage of Shulman’s private investigation into Sherman’s business practice, which may have influenced his opinion of Sherman, media coverage of the FBI criminal investigation beginning in June 1993, and of a related lawsuit filed by a U.S. drug company, did show the extent of illegal marketing activities Sherman and one of his family members engaged in to sell Apotex drugs to the U.S.

These drugs made for Canada did not have the approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the U.S. market; they were provided by Apotex to some small companies – Interpharm, Silver Bullet Marketing and others – controlled by Sherman and his brother-in-law, Allen Barry Shechtman, operating from the Apotex company site, and sold by mail to the U.S. consumers without the necessary prescriptions:

“Canada’s largest pharmaceutical drug manufacturer, Apotex Inc., is being probed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to find out how its generic drugs are reaching U.S. residents who do not have prescriptions for them.

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore are looking for evidence of violations of U.S. federal laws involving mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and the unlawful distribution of unapproved drugs. The RCMP have been helping the FBI with its investigation.

…

Besides Apotex, the FBI probe includes the company’s president, Bernard (Barry) Sherman, 50; his brother-in-law, Allen Barry Shechtman, 45, and Mr. Shechtman’s company, Silver Bullet Marketing.

Interpharm Inc., a Bahamian company whose ownership remains obscure, and several other Canadians and Canadian companies are also part of the investigation.

…

A spokesman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration confirmed that the agency had passed its file on the matter to the U.S. Justice Department.

…

Papers filed as part of civil suits with the Federal Court of Canada in Toronto and the U.S. District Court in Atlanta set out the way in which drugs manufactured in Toronto by Apotex are mailed to U.S. consumers.

…

It has used the mail-order method to sell about 60 generic drugs to U.S. consumers, including anti-AIDS drugs and naproxen, an anti- inflammatory used by arthritis patients.

…

But because the drugs are not approved in the United States, authorities there have no mechanism for applying quality controls or prescription restrictions.

…

The Apotex drugs are promoted by Interpharm in the United States by means of direct mailings and advertisements in newspapers and magazines aimed at groups such as the elderly, people with AIDS, veterans, the arthritic and heart patients.

The material says the drugs may be legally imported into the United States for personal use, and offers savings of as much as 60 per cent off the price of U.S. name-brand equivalents.

Bahamian records list the directors of Interpharm as two local trust-company officials, but its ownership is clouded in the secrecy provided by Bahamian law.

Court records show that one Interpharm direct mailing reached 500,000 U.S. households. Canadian telephone records show that between May, 1991, and February, 1992, Interpharm’s 1-800 telephone number – which was answered at the Silver Bullet premises in Toronto – received 12,812 calls. (The 800 number was originally listed to Apotex, but it was later transferred to Silver Bullet, the records show.) Financial records showing how much Apotex and Silver Bullet made from drug sales in the United States through Interpharm have been sealed by the court in Atlanta.

But evidence filed there showed that Apotex provided generic drugs it manufactured or bought in Canada to Silver Bullet.

The company operates out of premises owned by Apotex, less than 50 metres from the Apotex plant on Signet Drive in the Metro Toronto municipality of North York. Silver Bullet then acted as a marketing agency for Interpharm.”

(“FBI probes big Canadian drug firm Apotex products sold to U.S. residents without prescriptions”, by Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

There indeed was a real problem of ethics here. The owner of Canada’s leading pharmaceutical company was also, along with a family member, conducting direct mail-marketing of drugs into another country in disregard of that country’s government health regulations.

But I note that in such a illegal direct sale scheme the generic drugs could indeed be cheap, as much as 60% off the U.S. branded drug prices as Interpharm advertised, claiming it to be legal.

It appeared that Apotex had earlier done the mail selling when it was allowed by the U.S. FDA, and then stopped after an FDA policy change:

“Apotex said in its release it did supply generic drugs to companies selling to the U.S. market “when it was the policy of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration … to allow Americans to import drugs for personal use.”

That policy was issued July 23, 1988, by FDA Commissioner Frank Young at the National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference and AIDS Forum in Boston, said Apotex, so that people with AIDS could get drugs that might combat the disease.

But Apotex stopped supplying products after the FDA changed its policy so that personal imports were no longer allowed, the company said.

“Apotex asserts that at no time has it, or any of its officers or directors, done anything unlawful,” the release said.

The Globe reported the FBI probe includes Mr. Sherman’s brother-in-law, Allen Barry Shechtman, 45, and his company, Silver Bullet Marketing.”

(“It’s harassment, Apotex says of FBI probe”, June 21, 1993, The Hamilton Spectator)

As asserted in the above, Sherman’s big company Apotex may have followed the U.S. government policy properly in its direct-mail selling; however, Sherman and his brother-in-law then used small companies operating at the fringe of this business field to continue the selling in violation of the U.S. regulations – that was most likely why the Interpharm-Silver Bullet 1-800 phone numbers for mail drug ordering had previously been Apotex’s as in the June 19, 1993 The Globe and Mail story quoted earlier.

As early as in January 1992, the U.S. FDA had sent letters warning of serious illegality to Sherman and Shechtman, and Bahamas-registered Interpharm with undisclosed ownership, stating that “these drugs and their solicitation are in serious violation of United States law, specifically the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act”:

“The FDA, in warning letters sent to Mr. Sherman, Mr. Shechtman and Interpharm in January, 1992, said Interpharm “falsely represented the legitimacy” of its activities in labels and advertisements sent to U.S. residents.

The FDA said its review “has revealed that these drugs and their solicitation are in serious violation of United States law, specifically the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. . . . We are taking steps to warn our citizens that these drugs may not be legally marketed in this country.””

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

Then in March 1993, i.e., a few months before media reporting of the FBI criminal investigation, a U.S. District Court judge in Atlanta ruled that Sherman’s mail selling of drugs to the U.S. market represented a “threat to public health”:

“A U.S. District Court judge ruled in Atlanta in March that the export of the drugs from Canada to the United States involved “false representations in furtherance of . . . business interests” and represented a “threat to public health.”

…

In an affidavit sworn in February, Mr. Sherman said he believed that the Atlanta lawsuit was launched to punish him for making cheaper drugs available. “I believe the real motive for the present suit is to inflict revenge on Apotex and me as an officer of Apotex because of Apotex’s actions in providing low-price, safe and effective drugs to the public.””

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

I note that the U.S. judge’s ruling of “threat to public health” came after reviewing a sworn affidavit by Sherman in February making his point of “providing low-price, safe and effective drugs to the public.”

As quoted from the June 19, 1993 The Globe and Mail story, the FBI criminal investigation was already a next step – following the FDA’s – in the U.S. government’s efforts to stop Barry Sherman’s illegal mail-selling of drugs to the U.S. market.

Perhaps this next step was influenced by Morton Shulman, who bragged about it in his autobiography according to a January 15, 1994 Toronto Star article quote earlier.

Certain details of the drug mailing reported by the FBI showed that these small companies of Sherman’s were well aware that it was illegal activity requiring hiding of their identities and evading U.S. Customs inspections:

“The process worked as follows: Silver Bullet in North York answered calls made by U.S. residents who dialled a 1-800 number advertised in the United States by Interpharm of the Bahamas.

Silver Bullet then mailed the drugs in blister packets to the U.S. addresses. The drugs were sent in hand-addressed envelopes with no return address on them. Instead of using a postage meter, which would include an identification number, Silver Bullet employees stuck Canadian postage stamps on the envelopes.

The FBI report noted that after the FDA warning letters were sent Silver Bullet changed the colour of the envelopes it used to mail the drugs to the United States.

“It should be noted that the envelopes used are a very nondescript type that will bear three Canadian stamps and reflect no return address,” the FBI report said.

“The average customs inspector would be unable to recognize the parcel as a commercial piece of mail containing a ‘blister pack’ with approximately 100 tablets inside. Because of this tactic, FDA efforts to interdict the product at the Canadian border have met with little success.””

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

Due to its potential health risks, both the FBI and the FDA also declared – even more gravely than the U.S. District Court judge cited earlier – that the mail selling of drugs “constitutes a significant threat to the health of the U.S. consumer”:

“The report said that “any time a call is made to purchase these drugs, the consumer is asked for the name of his or her doctor and doctor’s phone number. It has been documented in every single case (investigated) that no confirmation call is ever placed to the consumer’s physician by the subject after an order is received.

“Because of this, the FBI and FDA believe that the continued sale of unapproved generic drugs into the United States constitutes a significant threat to the health of the U.S. consumer.””

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

This direct-mail selling case also showed how unrelenting Barry Sherman was in advancing his generic drugs’ reach. Even after Judge Horace Ward, the U.S. District Court judge in Atlanta overseeing a civil lawsuit from the U.S. drug company Syntex, ordered an injunction against Interpharm in March 1993, Sherman told the judge he wanted to continue selling through a “sister” company named Medicine Club International:

“On March 18, U.S. District Court Judge Horace Ward issued a preliminary injunction in Atlanta against Mr. Sherman, Mr. Shechtman, Apotex and Interpharm.

They were defendants in a civil action brought by Syntex (USA) Inc. Syntex is the U.S. manufacturer of naproxen, which is sold under the brand name of Naprosyn.

Syntex is alleging unfair competition, trademark infringement and violations of the Georgia Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act.

All four defendants contend in their brief to the court that they have broken no U.S. laws. They note that Syntex has sued Apotex unsuccessfully several times in Canada, and they say the U.S. action is an attempt to accomplish in that country what it failed to do in Canada, “namely destroy Interpharm.”

The injunction ordered the defendants to stop claiming that their naproxen meets U.S. standards, has been approved by the FDA and may be imported legally into the United States for personal use.

“The court has found that defendants’ representations that the quality of their products is identical to United States standards are literally false,” Judge Ward said.

Evidence presented to Judge Ward showed that the export of Apotex’s drugs to the United States began in 1989, soon after Mr. Shechtman left the entertainment and publishing business. Mr. Sherman placed him on the Apotex payroll at $1,400 a week and provided him with company insurance. A few weeks later, the marketing scheme involving Silver Bullet and Interpharm was begun.

Mr. Sherman, Mr. Shechtman and Interpharm recently told Judge Ward that they want to continue exporting drugs through a “sister” company called Medicine Club International Inc. They have filed an advertisement they want to use and asked the judge whether it can be used without contravening his injunction order.

Syntex has filed an objection, saying the continued importing of drugs into the United States without FDA approval is a breach of U.S. law.”

(Peter Moon, June 19, 1993, The Globe and Mail)

As cited above – and not unlike in Apotex’s patent dispute with GlaxoSmithKline in 2003, discussed earlier – the U.S. judge found that the Apotex generic version marketed by Interpharm did not meet the U.S. quality standards.

One can see from what a U.S. civil lawsuit proceeding revealed, that with or without Morton Shulman’s involvement, Barry Sherman’s aggressive push, despite warnings of it involving “serious violation of United States law”, could sooner or later lead to a U.S. criminal investigation of him and his companies.

In contrast, in the Canadian court as noted in the above story, the U.S. company Syntex had filed lawsuits several times but had been unsuccessful every time – a top favourable factor in the Canadian court was no doubt the Canadian lawyers whom Sherman and Apotex spent a lot of money on.

In the case of Shulman’s drug for Parkinson’s disease, Apotex actually had a generic version selling by mail to the U.S. market as of early 1994, and was facing a lawsuit from the U.S. company Somerset Pharmaceuticals that owned the patent:

“The head of Canada’s largest generic drug maker has been ordered to testify as part of an American lawsuit against him and his company.

Barry Sherman, president of Apotex Inc., can’t escape testifying in the civil lawsuit by Somerset Pharmaceuticals Inc., Judge Ellen Macdonald of the Ontario Court of Justice, general division, has ruled.

Somerset argues Apotex and related companies are illegally selling deprenyl in the United States by telephone and mail order.

Somerset has a patent on the drug in the United States. It alleges Apotex, through a variety of related companies, has been selling a selegiline hydrochloride, the chemical name for the product it sells as Eldepreyl.

The drug is used to treat Parkinson’s disease and is sold in Canada as Eldepreyl by Deprenyl Research Ltd., a company founded by Morty Shulman.”

(Art Chamberlain, January 28, 1994, Toronto Star)

As the above news story told, Sherman as Apotex president did not want to testify in court on this U.S. company lawsuit, and Ontario Judge Ellen Macdonald ruled that he must testify.

In my guess, a topic Sherman may have wanted to avoid testifying in court about could be the difference between the companies Interpharm and Apotex:

“The judge rejected arguments that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should protect Sherman and the others. The case is a private matter, so the Charter does not apply, she said.

Somerset said the Apotex drugs were being sold by a Bahamian direct mail company with a telephone link to Toronto.

Sherman told The Star’s Tracey Tyler his company stopped selling generic drugs to international firms for distribution in the U.S. out of concern the practice might offend U.S. law.”

(Art Chamberlain, January 28, 1994, Toronto Star)

As told above, Sherman asserted that his company had stopped selling drugs to international firms for distribution in the U.S.; that company was Apotex as reviewed earlier. But a “Bahamian direct mail company”, namely Interpharm, with 1-800 phone numbers answered by Silver Bullet Marketing at the Apotex site as reviewed earlier, continued to sell to the U.S. market.

Apotex’s huge expenditure on lawyers to tangle with the brand-name drug companies gave Sherman the luxury of trying to evade undesirable legal consequences or inconveniences resulting from his business practice; even though he had to testify in a U.S. civil lawsuit as a Canadian judge ruled in January 1994, the FBI criminal investigation might not be that serious anymore as noted by Judge Macdonald:

“The Somerset case is set to go to trial in Florida in April, but Sherman and the other parties had refused to be examined by Somerset’s lawyers.

They argued before Macdonald that Somerset was simply on a fishing expedition, but she rejected that suggestion.

Sherman also argued there have been reports that he is subject to a criminal investigation and should not be ordered to testify against himself.

Macdonald said that “aside from media reports, there is no evidence that a criminal investigation is being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.””

(Art Chamberlain, January 28, 1994, Toronto Star)

I wonder if, as a part his settlement with Shulman reported in November 1993, discussed earlier, Sherman got Shulman’s agreement to get the FBI to ease the criminal investigation of him and his companies.

If so, the former crusading Chief Coroner of Ontario and Toronto was a little too easy to settle, and too quick to brag about it to the media, because soon in this above news story dated January 28, 1994, Sherman was cited – as quoted earlier – that Apotex was “developing a generic version of deprenyl to sell in Canada”.

As mentioned earlier, besides a high-profile $1 million lawsuit by Apotex against Morton Shulman reviewed earlier, there was a separate legal case between Shulman’s Deprenyl Research and Sherman’s Apotex regarding the latter’s generic drug move. Soon in April 1994, Shulman’s company lost that legal dispute in the Federal Court:

“Parkinson’s disease sufferers could soon save “millions of dollars” as a result of a Federal Court of Canada decision, a generic drug manufacturer says.

The court dismissed an application by Deprenyl Research Ltd. of Toronto, a brand name manufacturer, to prevent the government from licensing a cheaper generic version of one of its most profitable drugs.

Deprenyl officials say the company is planning an appeal of the Federal Court ruling as well as other unspecified legal action.

Deprenyl argued in its court application that any move to licence a generic equivalent would violate its patent.

…

But Associate Chief Justice James Jerome ruled the patent applies only to the process used to produce Eldepryl.

He said it does not cover the essential ingredient, selegiline hydrochloride, or the use of the medicine itself.

The decision means Apotex can proceed with its application to have its cheaper version of the drug licensed.”

(“Parkinson’s boon: Federal licence OK for generic Eldepryl”, April 29, 1994, Times – Colonist)

I note that Associate Chief Justice James Jerome’s ruling essentially sided with Sherman and Apotex, whose main argument as earlier quoted from Shulman’s autobiography was that they would use a different method than Shulman’s company’s to produce the drug.

The above news story quoted Deprenyl Research officials as saying that the company would appeal the court decision that favoured Apotex.

But barely a month later in May 1994, Shulman’s company decided to change its name to Draxis Health from Deprenyl Research – now that it would have a generic drug competitor to its drug deprenyl, marketed as Eldepryl – and readjust its focus:

“Deprenyl Research Ltd. has taken some final steps to put the Morton Shulman era behind it.

The company emerged from its annual meeting yesterday with a new name – Draxis Health Inc. – a new corporate structure and a new share option program for senior management.

President Martin Barkin said the name change reflects the company’s new focus on products other than Eldepryl, a treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

Draxis recently lost a court battle and expects generic drug maker Apotex Ltd. to have a cheaper version of Draxis’s main product on the market later this year.

To reduce losses, Draxis has joined forces with Novopharm Ltd., Canada’s other major generic drug maker, to produce a cheaper version before Apotex does.”

(“Deprenyl change ends Shulman era; Company to be called Draxis and get new focus”, by Art Chamberlain, May 27, 1994, Toronto Star)

As the above story exclaimed, the name change was a part of “some final steps” to the end of “the Morton Shulman era”.

Then in 1995, there was a sort of consolation for Shulman in his crusade against Sherman – from the FBI criminal investigation, but no longer targeting Sherman personally.

Medicine Club International, as cited earlier the Bahamas-based Interpharm’s “sister” company that in 1993 Sherman and his brother-in-law Shechtman had told U.S. Judge Horace Ward would continue to sell drugs by mail in the United States, pleaded guilty to “illegal interstate commerce” and agreed to pay the maximum fine of $500,000:

“A Bahamian company has been fined $500,000 (U.S.) for selling a Canadian-manufactured generic drug in the United States without government approval.

The fine, the maximum allowed under U.S. law, is the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into how U.S. residents were obtaining generic drugs from Canada, without prescriptions and without the drugs having been approved for sale by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration.

According to a plea agreement filed with the U.S. Federal Court in Greenbelt, Md., last Thursday, the drugs were manufactured by Apotex Ltd. of Toronto, Canada’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, and distributed illegally in the United States by Medicine Club International Inc., a Bahamian trading company whose ownership was not filed in court documents.

Medicine Club, which pleaded guilty to one count of illegal interstate commerce, also agreed to pay $339,074 toward the U.S. government’s investigative costs.

In addition, Medicine Club established a $1-million letter of credit that would be forfeited to the U.S. government if it, Apotex or several other Canadian or Bahamian companies became involved again in the manufacture or distribution of unapproved drugs in the United States during the next five years.

The court ruled that the $1-million would also be forfeited if Bernard (Barry) Sherman, Apotex’s president, his brother-in-law, Allen Barry Shechtman, or six other directors or employees of Apotex became involved in the illegal distribution of drugs in the United States during the five-year period.”

(“Firm fined for illegally distributing Canadian-made drug”, by Peter Moon, January 11, 1995, The Globe and Mail)

Nothing was wrong, Sherman proclaimed, just “a business decision” to pay a fine:

“Mr. Sherman said in an interview that the FBI investigation and the subsequent criminal charge against Medicine Club occurred only because “the FDA was under immense pressure from the American drug companies to stop the personal imports (to U.S. residents from Canada).”

He noted that U.S. government tests showed that Apotex drugs that reached the United States through Medicine Club passed all the FDA’s safety tests.

Medicine Club’s guilty plea “was a business decision,” he said. “In fact, there’s no basis for any suggestion that anything improper was done, in my view.””

(Peter Moon, January 11, 1995, The Globe and Mail)

In 1997, Apotex received Canadian government approval to sell its generic version of Shulman’s drug, whereas Shulman’s former company refocused its business onto selling Anipryl, a new drug for treating dogs for Cushing’s disease, in Canada as well as entering the U.S. market:

“Management at the Mississauga-based company has high hopes that Anipryl, a drug approved last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating canine Cushing’s disease, could eventually fetch the bulk of the company’s sales.

“We are very excited to have received the FDA approval,” said Martin Barkin, company president and chief executive officer.

Since last September, monthly sales of Anipryl have shown “steady growth,” and annual sales in Canada are projected to reach $1-million.

The drug was launched this week in the United States, where the veterinary sales market is estimated to be 15 times larger than Canada’s.

“My expectation is that we will be doing 50 per cent of our business in the United States by the end of 1998 — and at least two-thirds of that from Anipryl,” Dr. Barkin said.

…

“The United States is one-third of the worldwide pharmaceuticals market,” said Dr. Barkin, a former Ontario deputy minister of health. He sees Anipryl as Draxis’s first big step into the U.S. market.

“We’ve gone with a much larger launch [for Anipryl] than we’ve ever had in Canada,” Dr. Barkin said. “There’s 250 reps in the field for the launch and 150 telemarketers to market it in the U.S.”

…

Aside from developing and marketing animal health products, Draxis sells pharmaceutical products for humans that treat disorders of the central nervous system, skin and bones. One of the company’s better known products is Eldepryl, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease.

…

In 1993, in an attempt to fend off competition from generic manufacturers, Draxis forged a distribution alliance with Novopharm Ltd. of Toronto to market Novo-Selegiline, Draxis’s own generic version of Eldepryl. In February, Apotex Inc. of Toronto announced it had received Canadian regulatory approval to sell a generic version of Eldepryl.”

(“Stock in the news: Analysis Draxis looks to U.S. market for sales; Canine drug Anipryl launched south of border following FDA approval”, by Andrew Poon, June 11, 1997, The Globe and Mail)

With my review, to this point, of the past media coverage I can now apprehend why Morton Shulman once described Barry Sherman as a person “with no redeeming features whatsoever”. It was clearly a sentiment from his very personal experience, but it was not illogical.

In a first-person account from his co-authored autobiography, Shulman told of a deeply personal and emotional story about Barry Sherman’s brazenness and nastiness exerting pressure on him to give up his brand-name drug patent protection, and about his fighting back by hiring private detectives to investigate Sherman’s illegal cross-border direct-mail drug selling:

“Did I ever tell you my story of Barry Sherman?

I was summoned by him in 1990, a few months after we got approval from the HPB for Eldepryl, one of my brokers called – Arnie Polan from Scotia McLeod – and said, “Barry Sherman would like to see you.”

I said, “Who’s Barry Sherman?”

“Sherman is one of the richest men in Canada. He makes more money than anydody else. He’s got the biggest generic drug company. He wants you to see him. He wants you to come to his office.”

He took me and Arnie on a tour of the place. It was wonderful. State-of-the-art; it’s a monstrous place, and he said, “I want Deprenyl and I want you to sign a contract with me and give me the rights to produce a generic competitor in June of 1993.”

This was February 1990.

I said, “Why should I give it to you?” And he said, “Because, if you don’t, I’m going to knock you off.” I said, “What’s this crap I always read in the paper where you’re saying you’re a patriotic Canadian, and you drive down the price for the multi-nationals?” And he said, “Never mind that bullshit; I want it and I’m going to have it and you’ll get a 5 per cent royalty and I’ll give you $50,000 in advance, or you’ll get nothing and I’ll take it.”

So, I went and hired Percy Parks, who went to work on him. Sherman made a lot of money legitimately, but he was greedy, and he was running an operation from Nassau called Silver Bullet Pharmaceuticals, and he was advertising in American magazines – “Prescription drugs at half price, no prescription necessary, send your check to Silver Bullet” – and when detectives traced Silver Bullet back to Toronto, it was just a mail drop.

The money was sent there, came back to Toronto and was given to D.

D. took it over to Apotex and he would take shipment of all the drugs from Apotex.

And, somehow, the situation went into the hands of the FDA, just – somehow!

You don’t know how delighted we were. And he had problems and he was too busy to worry about me.”

(Dr. Morton Shulman and Susan Kastner, 1993, Warwick Publishing Group)

Again, as recalled by Morton Shulman, Barry Sherman’s behaviour conducting business negotiation in private was in stark contrast to his public image as a compassionate and generous philanthropist, in this occasion referring to his crafted media image of “a patriotic Canadian” as “bullshit”, and making such threats to the small businessman Shulman as, “I’m going to knock you off” and “you’ll get nothing and I’ll take it”.

A different kind of “Robin Hood”, perhaps, who had no problem threatening to “knock off” a small Canadian business owner, but who also had the thought of himself being “knocked off” by Big Pharma – “the monopolies” as Sherman called the brand-name drug companies, as quoted earlier from Jeffrey Robinson’s 2001 book.

Irrespective of Apotex’s legal victory over Shulman’s company, my review thus far of some high-profile legal cases involving Sherman’s practice in the generic drug business field – including the very personal Sherman-Shulman dispute – has come upon matters of serious concern regarding the ethics of Sherman’s schemes and tactics.

So at this point, I can say that the use of the label “unethical” by some to describe Barry Sherman’s conduct in business, such as “unethical in business dealings” according to the April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article, and “unethical in business” as asserted by the law and medicine professor Amir Attaran, is justifiable.

Similar to it has been the opinion of U.S. Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks stated in 2013, who referred to Sherman’s behaviour as “egregious misconduct”:

“Canada’s generic drug king found himself on the wrong side of several shaking fingers in the past year. After Health Canada demanded a recall of Apotex’s mispackaged birth control pills (they contained too many placebos and not enough medication), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration threatened to block Apotex products for “repeated deficiencies,” including bacterial contamination. Meanwhile, a Florida judge ruled against the pharmaceutical company in a lawsuit where Apotex claimed Brussels-based UCB infringed on its patent for a manufacturing process for a blood pressure medication. United States District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks had some harsh words for Sherman, who took the stand himself. “Dr. Sherman engaged in affirmative and egregious misconduct” throughout the patent prosecution, Judge Middlebrooks wrote.”

(“A great year for billionaires”, December 9, 2013, Canadian Business)

The brief press summary above also reported that some Apotex generic drugs had serious defects, such as “too many placebos and not enough medication”, and “repeated deficiencies”, that have drawn disciplinary responses from both Canadian and U.S. government health regulators.

The Apotex drugs’ deficiencies were “repeated” according to the U.S. FDA.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the deficiencies were quite persistent, because in my review so far there were also a 2003 court ruling on a dispute with GlaxoSmithKline and a 1993 court ruling on a dispute with Syntex, stating that Apotex drugs might not contain sufficient active ingredients or did not meet U.S. quality standards; furthermore, as already discussed in detail, in a 1993 court affidavit for a civil case former Ontario Chief Coroner Morton Shulman, then a practising MD, expressed his “reasonable doubts with respect to (Apotex) and its products” – doubts regarding their “efficacy”.

As for Sherman’s “affirmative and egregious misconduct” censured by Judge Middlebrooks, I have not found media coverage of the details.

Barry Sherman may have qualified as a Canadian business legend, and a Canadian industry hero, but if and when the conduct by him and his company could carry serious ramifications to many medicine consumers around the world, the media should not avoid the controversy – not in a mature democracy with a genuine degree of press freedom.

The Sherman-Shulman dispute, due to Morton Shulman’s long-time popular public profile, received considerable media attention in 1993-1994 as did, in that same atmosphere, the FBI investigation of Barry Sherman and his companies. Media coverage of these events has served as a ‘beacon of light’ in my review to understand some history of consequential relevance.

Medicines that were developed and sold in violation of existing patents, and medicines that did not satisfy required quality standards, were typically viewed by brand-name drug companies, especially Big Pharma with its bias, as “counterfeits”, admitted author Jeffrey Robinson in his book:

“As the market for legitimate prescription drugs has grown to a colossal size, the market for illegal prescription drugs has grown alongside it.

These are illicit generics made by companies in direct violation of patent protection; counterfeit drugs that contain no active ingredients but are packaged and priced like the real thing; and substandard drugs that contain some active ingredients and are sold as the real thing but do not meet pharmacopoeial standards. Because it serves Big Pharma’s interests, illegal prescription drugs get grouped together under the heading of counterfeits. When the word “generic” can be tossed into the pot, they deliberately tar legitimate generics with the same brush as counterfeits, trying to confuse the issues of bioequivalence and counterfeit drugs to create the impression that the two words are interchangeable.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

As my review has shown, the repeated deficiencies of Apotex drugs, coupled with Barry Sherman’s law-breaking aggressive push of generics – putting them directly on the market in violation of existing patents and mail selling them across national border in violation of relevant regulations – have put some of Sherman’s and Apotex’s pharmaceutical business practice into the “counterfeit” domain – from the brand-name drug companies’ perspective.

It wasn’t only Morton Sherman who once hired private detectives to investigate Sherman’s businesses, but also some in Big Pharma who viewed Sherman and Apotex as “counterfeiters”.

Robinson’s book told of a story where Paul Whybrow, a former London police officer and the British police’s first undercover detective specifically dealing with financial fraud, joined a leading private investigation agency working, under a man named only as “Mr. Jones”, on counterfeit drugs and patent violations in the pharmaceutical industry, a field that offered big money to private investigation agencies in Europe – not unlike it did law firms in Canada as discussed earlier:

“Because it worked so well the first time, Whybrow was sent undercover a second time. Within a few months, his superiors realized that he had a real talent for this. So they gave him a new identity, a passport to match, a credit card and a bank account in his new name, and a safe-house address. Just like that, the City of London Police had the first official undercover officer in the entire country specifically to deal with financial fraud.

…

So Whybrow decided to call it a day. … Within one week, Carratu International, one of Europe’s leading private investigation agencies, offered him a job. He was taken to lunch by a man – call him Mr. Jones – who said the firm needed someone to work undercover in its pharmaceutical division to collect evidence of counterfeit drugs and of patent and trademark infringements.

At Carratu, just as they are in so many private detective agencies, pharmaceuticals are a big money market.

…

There were jobs for AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Glaxo Wellcome, Bayer, and Roche. After that, there were also jobs that took him through the back door. While he insists that no one ever asks anyone to do anything illegal, everyone who plays this game knows what evidence is needed. …”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

When Mr. Jones became the lead private investigator for the German brand-name drug giant Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Whtbrow and another ex-cop Mick Flack were recruited to set up their own agency, which they called Temple Associates, to work for Mr. Jones and one of their first cases was to investigate Barry Sherman and Apotex:

“One of Carratu’s clients, the German giant Bayer Pharmaceuticals, started finding these so-called grey market drugs in pharmacies only a few blocks from its factory in Leverkusen. So Whybrow was dispatched to Switzerland to gather evidence against the culprit.

…

What Whybrow didn’t yet know was that Jones had a serious falling out with the management at Carratu. One day, just like that, Jones was gone. Whybrow, together with another ex-cop working at Carratu named Mick Flack, went to see Jones and found him very down in the dumps. They did whatever they could to encourage him, to assure him that he’d find another job somewhere. A few months later, Jones seemed to land on his feet, employed by Carratu’s own client, Bayer AG.

Remembering the guys who’d stood by him, Jones offered Whybrow and Flack the opportunity to leave Carratu and form their own agency. He told them he was controlling all of Bayer’s investigations, had a budget worth around £1.4 million for patent protection, and that Carratu would never get a penny of it. He told them, “You two start a business and you can have the lot.”

They were reluctant at first, but the offer was simply too good to turn down. So Whybrow and Flack set up a company called Temple Associates in Covent Garden, and went back to work for Jones.

One of the first cases he put them on to was Barry Sherman and Apotex.”

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

Mr. Jones was “obsessed with Sherman”, viewing him as “a real thorn”, “a major infringer” to be “taken down”:

““As far as Jones was concerned, Barry Sherman was a real thorn in his side. He was obsessed with Sherman, convinced that he was a major infringer, and he wanted him taken down. I’d been out to Canada on behalf of Carratu, gone through the front door of Apotex, and had an interview. Mick and I then went out to Canada together, and sat around watching the trucks going into the loading bays at the rear of the plant. We dressed in overalls and carried clipboards and walked around the loading bays to see what was coming in and going out. Sometimes we even carried a box with some stuff in it, just in case someone asked us what we were doing there. …

Not far from the Apotex loading bay was an area with picnic tables where employees would have lunch. So Whybrow and Flack sat there eating hot dogs for a couple of days, always taking notes.

“Maybe we did a week’s surveillance around the back. But the security is pretty tight at Apotex and you can forget about getting in there after hours. …””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

Fortunately for Sherman and Apotex, in this particular private investigation the covert onsite surveillance turned up nothing incriminating. But Mr. Jones did not give up, and pressured Whybrow and Flack on the prospect of planting evidence to frame Sherman, to “get this bastard Sherman” and “take him out of the game”:

“They reported back to Jones that they didn’t yet have what he wanted. He asked them to try to get a mole inside the company, and they felt they could arrange that. But that wasn’t enough for Jones. Now he came to England to meet with Whybrow and Flack.

“We had lunch together at a country pub,”, Whybrow alleges, “and all the time, Jones is thinking about how he can get Sherman. This is no longer just business, this is personal. He doesn’t just want to compromise him in a corporate way. He’s talking about playing hardball with Barry Sherman. It was very direct. He said to us, ‘We have to get this bastard Sherman.’ He said to us, ‘What are we going to do about him? Let’s take him out of the game. Take him out.’ Mick and I both knew enough not to say anything. He could have been wired. We weren’t going to commit ourselves to anything. But Jones was suggesting everything.”

According to Whybrow and Flack, the conversation then went like this:

Jones: “What can we do?”

Whybrow: “What do you want us to do?”

Jones: “What about your contacts with the police in Canada? Could you get him stopped?’

Whybrow: “Anything’s possible.”

Jones: “Let’s say he had half a kilo in his boot.”

Whybrow insists that neither he nor Flack said anything about this.

Jones: “What’s his sexual preference? Could we get him hooked up with little girls, or even underaged boys?”

Again, Whyborw says, he and Flack refused to get drawn into this. They knew better. But, Whybrow maintains, Jones was adamant.

Jones: “We’ve got to take him off the scene. Got to take him out.””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

Mr. Jones stated that getting Sherman was not just business, but “personal”. So it looked like that he, or much more likely his employer Bayer Pharmaceuticals, had some serious grudges against Barry Sherman – much like Morton Shulman who took his drug business dispute with Sherman very personally.

It was in this context, i.e., when author Robinson told him about these European private investigators’ story, that Sherman made his comment on the prospect of being “knocked off”, i.e., “killed”, that has previously been quoted partially from the April 2018 Maclean’s investigative article and fully from Robinson’s book; and here once again, Sherman’s words are quoted but in the broader context:

“In fairness, Whybrow adds, Jones never actually asked him to do anything illegal. All he wanted them to do, they insist, was “whatever it takes.” Whybrow thought Jones a bit reckless. But Jones never said to them, do it. Jones never asked them to commit a crime.

Whybrow now thinks Jones was really on some sort of fishing expedition. “He was looking to find out from us what we could do. He wanted Sherman taken out, but I don’t know what his solution was. He might not even have had one. Even if he did, it wasn’t going to be easy because Sherman is a very sharp operator.”

When the conversation was repeated to Sherman, he didn’t seem surprised. “The branded drug companies hate us. They have private investigators on us all the time. The thought once came to my mind, why didn’t they just hire someone to knock me off? For a thousand bucks paid to the right person you can probably get someone killed. Perhaps I’m surprised that hasn’t happened.””

(Jeffrey Robinson, 2001, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.)

As the ex-police detective Paul Whybrow noted, Barry Sherman was a “very sharp operator”. In the interview with author Robinson, Whybrow listed the schemes Mr. Jones had once suggested to use to frame Sherman, such as planting banned narcotics as evidence, or using “little girls” or “underaged boys” to trap him, and yet Whybrow still claimed that he did not know what Mr. Jones’s “solution” was; later when told of this story, Sherman quite probably would think of something worse. 

In spite of Barry Sherman’s flaws, author Jeffrey Robinson of the intriguing 2001 book has expressed his opinion that the Shermans’ double murder was not carried out by his “Big Pharma enemies”, because “Big Pharma doesn’t take out hits on people, at least not in North America”:

“… Robinson doubts one of Sherman’s Big Pharma enemies took out a contract on him.

“Big Pharma doesn’t take out hits on people, at least not in North America,” Robinson said. “They’ll plant a kilo of cocaine in the trunk of your car or embed kiddie porn on your computer but they won’t murder you.””

(Brad Hunter, February 1, 2018, Toronto Sun)

Mr. Robinson’s argument is learned and persuasive – he cites means similar to what Mr. Jones once suggested to the Temple Associates investigators according to the latter, as what Big Pharma would do only – but in my opinion should not be taken as conclusive. This double murder was so rare that it could well be an exception to the norm – considering how “egregious” Barry Sherman’s schemes and tactics had been in his business moves and legal battles.

When this businessman, in the drive to realize his generic drug ambitions and expand his businesses, relentlessly and aggressively flouted the laws and regulations, and yet his gargantuan business expenditures on lawyers ensured the steady growth of his success and fortune with barely a scratch of consequences for his “egregious misconduct”, who knows what some of the brand-name drug enemies of Barry Sherman’s could resort to?

(Continuing to Part 2)

A review of postings about scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, with observations regarding elite centrism – Part 3: peeking into the academic hierarchies

(Continued from Part 2)

A notable case of an elite academic’s lack of academic integrity and intellectual honesty has been that of Leslie Berlowitz, former president and CEO of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose 17-year long reign ended in 2013 upon revelations of her untruthful resumes that falsely claimed a Ph.D. degree. I reviewed the case in a September 5, 2014 post titled, “The end of Leslie Berlowitz’s reign at American Academy of Arts and Sciences – about academic integrity, management style, and?”, on the Facebook community page, History, Culture and Politics:

“On July 31, 2013, Leslie Berlowitz, president and chief executive of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, resigned following reports she had embellished her resume.

…

In June, The [Boston] Globe had reported that in at least two applications for federal grants over the past decade, Berlowitz had stated she received a doctorate in English from New York University in 1969. …

The nonexistent doctorate was also in a draft of an obituary the Academy prepared for use in the event of her death. The obituary praised her as “a scholar of American literature” who “received undergraduate and doctoral degrees from New York University”.

NYU spokesman James Devitt said the university had no record of Berlowitz receiving a doctorate or completing her dissertation. A resume on file at NYU from when Berlowitz worked there indicated she was still working on her doctorate in the late 1980s or early 1990s.”

(“The end of Leslie Berlowitz’s reign at American Academy of Arts and Sciences – about academic integrity, management style, and?”, September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

The non-existent Ph.D. was the official reason for Berlowitz’s resignation, as a leading academic explained that “academic integrity is what we hold most dearly”:

“Academics typically have little tolerance for people exaggerating their educational credentials. At other academic institutions, people who fabricate degrees have often faced severe consequences. Marilee Jones, a popular admissions dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, left in disgrace in 2007 after she admitted falsifying her degrees, and Doug Lynch, a vice dean at the University of Pennsylvania, resigned in 2012 after revelations that he had falsely claimed to have a doctorate from Columbia University.

“In most situations at a university, lying about a professional degree would be grounds for instantaneous dismissal”, said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. “In academia, academic integrity is what we hold most dearly.””

(September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

Without a doctoral degree, had Berlowitz cheated to get the top job at one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies and was then unexposed for a long 17 years?

It hadn’t been such a flagrant foul. Prior to the Academy, Berlowitz had been a vice president in charge of fundraising at her alma mater New York University, one of the world’s best private universities, although her untruthful Academy resume also made it appear she had been in charge of academics:

“The NYU record indicates a fast career launch and smooth rise for Berlowitz within NYU, on an administrative track: in 1970 as a graduate student she became an assistant to the Dean, and a year later was on the faculty and 2 years later Assistant Dean for Administration. From 1981 on, she was a university-level executive as Assistant Vice President, Associate Vice President, and Deputy Vice President for Academic Affairs, and in the 1990s prior to moving to the Academy she was Vice President for Institutional Advancement.

Others noticed that her Academy resume had identified herself as former NYU vice president for academic advancement – her most senior NYU position – when it was actually vice president for institutional advancement – management of fund-raising rather than academic programs.”

(September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

So Berlowitz was an elite academic administrator; but her lack of a doctoral degree suggests that she was not an elite scholar.

Reviewing the press coverage, I pointed out that the case involved more serious issues about Berlowitz’s management style:

“Berlowitz also came under fire for harshly treating staffers, micromanaging the Academy’s affairs, barring scholars from viewing the Academy’s historic archives, and receiving an outsized pay package—more than $598,000 in fiscal year 2012 alone for an organization with only a few dozen staffers, several times what her peers at other institutions were paid.

…

In 1997, the first year at the helm of the Academy, Berlowitz was almost fired because of her heavy-handed management style, according to a former member of the governance council. Robert Haselkorn, a professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago, told the press in 2003, “I have been trying to get rid of her for the past seven years.”

…

Then Academy president Dan Tosteson, a former dean of the Harvard Medical School, had hired Berlowitz in 1997 along with commissioning a strategic plan to transform the Academy into a broader, more diverse national organization. But by 2003 Tosteson and Dudley Herschbach, a Nobel Prize-winning Harvard Chemistry professor, “made a thorough investigation of her performance and found it to be very uneven”, Tosteson said. “Everyone told us the same story”, Herschbach said. “She was an incredibly nasty person who chewed people out in unacceptable ways. She kisses up and kicks down.””

(September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

Berlowitz “was an incredibly nasty person who chewed people out in unacceptable ways”, and “kisses up and kicks down”.

These are damning characterizations of her management style, but they also point to the reality that a rather stern hierarchy must have existed in Berlowitz’s domain of operation so that acting in such manners were useful, or at least meaningful for her.

That hierarchy seemed to be a pro-business one:

“In 2000, Roger Myerson, an Economics professor at the University of Chicago and vice president of the Academy’s Midwest Center, tried to get the council to move Berlowitz out of administration to concentrate on her forte, raising money. Myerson also opposed the appointment of Boston businessman Louis W. Cabot to the Academy’s vice presidency. According to Myerson, “The administration was not being monitored full time by somebody who really cares about scholarship”.”

(September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

So Berlowitz was initially hired for her ability to raise money, especially from the business community, and she then wrestled power toward the latter.

There were more controversial matters, as my post title’s question mark “and?” suggested, regarding Berlowitz’s rule at American Academy of Arts and Sciences, especially her role in the selection of Academy memberships.

Her own induction into the Academy without going through the normal election process, and her taking over the president title traditionally reserved for an honored scholar – an instance of her power grab – were controversial:

“… The 2004 election took place in the spring, but shortly before the October induction ceremony the 17-member governing council decided to add one more name of its own: Leslie Cohen Berlowitz.

The Academy then quietly inserted Berlowitz’s name into the original 6-month-old announcement, making it look as though she had been voted in by the around 4,000 members in the spring. “It was a terrible thing to do”, Stanford University History professor emeritus Peter Stansky, a former council member, said. “It’s a lie.”

An Academy spokesman noted that the council had the option of electing one candidate a year on its own (since increased to two) under the Academy’s bylaws, and that Louis W. Cabot nominated Berlowitz based on her service to the Academy.

In 2009, Louis W. Cabot became chairman of the governing council, and in 2010 Berlowitz consolidated control of the Academy by also taking over the title of president, a position previously reserved for an honored scholar from outside the administration, such as Dan Tosteson who had hired Berlowitz and then tried unsuccessfully to remove her.”

(September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

Berlowitz’s propensity to interfere with the selection and election of memberships was even more controversial, to the point that an Academy member called for a “complete inquiry” into her management:

“Still, some critics felt that Berlowitz had also become overly involved in the member-election process, acting as a gatekeeper for who gets in and who stays out based on her friendships or other reasons. Several former employees said she pushed committees to add or drop candidates, and demanded to see all the ballots before they were tallied by the membership office.

“There needs to be a complete inquiry into how the academy has been managed, across the board, including how the academy chooses fellows”, demanded Jean Strouse, a Biographer inducted into the Academy the same year as Berlowitz.”

(September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

The original press article from which I cited these troubling allegations had cited their sources as Academy members and former staff members, including Berlowitz’s former executive assistant Carla MacMillan:

“Some academy members and former staff members worry that Berlowitz has become overly involved in the process, acting as a gatekeeper for who gets in and who stays out based on her friendships or other reasons.

Several former employees said Berlowitz pushed committees to add or drop candidates. And Berlowitz demanded to see all the ballots before they were tallied by the membership office, recalls former executive assistant Carla MacMillan.”

(“Academy’s council added its chief to honoree list: 2004 selection, executive’s role in annual process draw criticism“, by Todd Wallack, June 18, 2013, Boston.com)

As quoted, Berlowitz acted as a gatekeeper deciding “who gets in and who stays out based on her friendships or other reasons”, and demanded to see all the ballots before they were officially tallied.

I hope she did not purposefully falsify or even destroy some ballots in order to enforce her decisions on “who gets in and who stays out”!

Under Berlowitz, the Academy grew increasingly fond of granting honors to wealthy business persons and corporate executives, often for their donations to the Academy:

“… She helped to energize a once-sleepy institution by stepping up fund-raising and launching new initiatives, such as modernizing the categories of fellows, including adding the fields of Computer Science and Philanthropy.

…

During that time, the number of business executives and philanthropists inducted annually rose from roughly 7 to 11, including philanthropist Teresa Heinz Kerry, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and former Liberty Mutual chief Edmund F. Kelly. In fact, for 5 of the Academy’s 6 biggest donors, accounting for more than 1/3 of the $39 million the Academy raised from 2006 to 2010, either they were inducted into the business and philanthropy category or their foundation heads were.

For example, Boston Scientific Corp. cofounder Peter Nicholas, who became a member in 1999, gave $2.4 million during the period. John Cogan, a Boston investment executive who joined the Academy in 2005, gave $1.9 million. And Gershon Kekst, who founded a prominent Wall Street communications firm and was elected in 2006, gave $1 million through his family’s foundation.

“Honoring the mere accumulation of wealth taints the honor of authentic achievements in the arts and sciences”, said James Miller, former editor of the Academy’s scholarly journal, Daedalus. “It’s supposed to be an academy, not a highfalutin club for the leisure class.”

An Academy spokesman, however, noted that the institution has always included business leaders. Ray Howell said that philanthropists and business leaders are typically among the most generous donors for nonprofits, but he declined to say who picked the executives to appear on the Academy’s ballot or what criteria they used. Several members said they did not know either.”

(September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

As quoted, a former editor of the Academy’s scholarly journal opined that the academy should not be a “highfalutin club for the leisure class”, but the Academy spokesman explained that business leaders had traditionally been included – that is, before the Philanthropy category (and also Computer Science) was added under Berlowitz.

Even so, the criteria for membership selection were not open, and as quoted earlier could be “based on her friendships or other reasons”.

The 2012 selection of a prominent wealthy businessman, Sanford “Sandy” Weill, drew scorching criticism from journalist Robert Scheer, Editor-in-Chief of Truthdig:

“In 2012, Hillary Clinton, Melinda Gates and Sanford “Sandy” Weill, a prominent New York businessman and corporate executive, were among the new members of the Academy.

…

 

Honorary Chairman of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, a nonprofit forum of CEOs and Chairpersons, Sanford Weill and his wife Joan had donated more than $800 million to non-profit organizations, especially for healthcare, including to Weill Cornell Medical College and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Noted political journalist Robert Scheer became really indignant about this one, writing:

“How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

…

Citigroup went on to be a major purveyor of toxic mortgage-based securities that required $45 billion in direct government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets in order to avoid bankruptcy.”

(September 5, 2014, Facebook page History, Culture and Politics)

Scheer’s accusation that “Sandy” Weill was “the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse” has been further reviewed in my September 2014 post. But that is a topic in the politics of business and economics, outside the focus of the current blog article on science, academia and related politics.

I note that, as in Part 2, as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, Robert Scheer was a leftist political activist connected to mathematics professor Stephen Smale, Berkeley anti-Vietnam War movement leader and later my Ph.D. adviser.

In fact, Sheer was a member of the 1965 Vietnam Day Committee co-chaired by Smale and Jerry Rubin, and was the most ambitious in mainstream politics:

“VDC member Bob Scheer was contemplating a candidacy for Congress in the Democratic primary. Scheer was an intellectual journalist who had visited Vietnam in 1964. His monograph How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam was a VDC-recommended primer on the issues.”

(Steve Batterson, Stephen Smale: The Mathematician Who Broke the Dimension Barrier, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Scheer’s most widely-known journalist work is probably a 1976 Playboy magazine interview with then Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, in which Carter admitted to adultery in his heart:

“I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes that I will do–and I have done it–and God forgives me for it.”

(“Hullabaloo Over Lust Lasts 20 Years”, by Robert Scheer, December 17, 1996, Los Angeles Times)

Carter then asserted that he would not be lying and cheating like Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson:

“I don’t think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did–lying, cheating and distorting the truth. . . I think that my religious beliefs alone would prevent that from happening to me.”

(Robert Scheer, December 17, 1996, Los Angeles Times)

As I write this blog post, 90-year-old President Carter, an American Academy of Arts and Sciences member since 1993, is undergoing treatments for skin cancer that has spread to his lever and his brain; but he remains in high spirits, asking God for strength and continuing work at his home church, at the Carter Center, at Emory University where he has been a Distinguished Professor, and at Habitat for Humanity.

(“Jimmy Carter’s cancer fight puts new meaning in familiar message at Sunday school”, by Kathleen Foody, August 23, 2015, U.S. News & World Report; “Jimmy Carter, Fresh Off First Cancer Treatments, Teaches Double Sunday School to Record Crowd”, by Sara Hammel, August 23, 2015, People; and, “American Academy of Arts and Sciences”, Office of the Provost, Emory University)

In the case of the induction of Sanford “Sandy” Weill into the Academy, no doubt Weill’s excellent philanthropy record was a positive factor. But since others have pointed out that Leslie Berlowitz used her friendships as grounds for selection, I would infer that Weill’s induction involved “friendship” that went back a long way.

Berlowitz’s daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Tuttleton, in 2000 married Joseph Richard Arron, son of the late Judith Arron, executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall in New York City:

“Sarah Elizabeth Tuttleton, the daughter of Leslie Cohen Berlowitz of Cambridge, Mass., and the late Dr. James W. Tuttleton, was married on Friday to Joseph Richard Arron, a son of Ronald D. Arron of Chappaqua, N.Y., and the late Judith H. Arron. Justice Marjory D. Fields of State Supreme Court officiated in her chambers in New York. Yesterday, Rabbi Leonard Diller led a religious ceremony at the Century Club in New York.

The bride, 25, a cum laude graduate of Harvard University, and the bridegroom, 26, who graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, are in a joint M.D.-Ph.D. program of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University and Rockefeller University. They are also biomedical fellows…

…

The bridegroom’s mother was the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, and his father is a violist in the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera.”

(“WEDDINGS; Sarah Tuttleton, Joseph Arron”, July 2, 2000, The New York Times)

Weill Cornell Medical College where Sarah Tuttleton studied for her MD and Ph.D. had been named after Sanford Weill and his wife Joan.

(“Cornell Names Medical College in Honor of Joan and Sanford I. Weill”, April 30, 1998, New York-Presbyterian Hospital)

From 1995 till her cancer death in 1998, Berlowitz’s future late in-law Judith Arron ran a successful Carnegie Hall fundraising campaign under the watchful eyes of Sanford Weill, Carnegie Hall’s chairman:

“…

The cause was breast cancer, Carnegie Hall officials said yesterday.

Ms. Arron presided over probably the most momentous years of Carnegie Hall since its rescue from the wrecking ball in 1960. The exhaustive $60 million renovation of the hall in 1986 happened on her watch, as well as the seasonlong and highly festive centennial celebration of 1990-91.

Ms. Arron used the refurbishment of Carnegie Hall’s smaller Weill Recital Hall as an opportunity to transform it from a rental space to an important venue for events produced by the Hall. …

Under Ms. Arron, the Hall promoted and extended educational programs, with workshops overseen by musicians like Robert Shaw and Pierre Boulez. In partnership with the Hall’s president, the violinist Isaac Stern, and its chairman, Sanford Weill, Ms. Arron began an endowment campaign in 1995 and had raised $87 million to date.”

(“Judith Arron, 56, Who Led Carnegie Hall’s Rebirth, Dies”, by Bernard Holland, December 21, 1998, The New York Times)

Weill has since retired from the Carnegie Hall board of trustees chairmanship in early 2015 and become its president, a title former held by the late legendary violinist Isaac Stern.

(“Perelman to Succeed Weill as Head of Carnegie Hall Board”, by Jennifer Smith, February 19, 2015, The Wall Street Journal)

Billionaire Ronald Perelman took over the chairman position and soon controversies engulfed the organization, over possible past mismanagement:

“But soon after taking the reins at Carnegie, Mr. Perelman began encountering problems. In the letter that he emailed to the board on Wednesday, he wrote that he had initially grown concerned over “an inability to obtain a full picture of Carnegie Hall’s financial operations, especially as it related to profits and losses involving performances,” according to a copy obtained by The New York Times. And he raised concerns about whether Carnegie was adequately vetting transactions with potential conflicts of interest.”

(“Ronald Perelman’s Bitter Departure Shocks Carnegie Hall Trustees”, by Michael Cooper, September 17, 2015, The New York Times)

Elite family networking was natural for Berlowitz, given her former vice-president fundraising role at NYU, located near Wall Street and the Financial District in Manhattan. In the context of Part 2, NYU has included the world famous Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where in the 1950s the mathematician John Nash hung out and did research work suggested by Louis Nirenberg there, that contributed to the pair’s jointly receiving the 2015 Abel Prize awarded by the King of Norway – and unwittingly to the terrible deaths of Nash and wife Alicia in the devastating last leg of their return.

For me, a more personal case of the Academy’s membership selection that displayed management-centrism was the 2009 induction of Maria Klawe and others.

As mentioned in Part 1, in 2009 I was taken aback to learn that Klawe was appointed a board director of Microsoft Corporation, given the timing of the March 9 announcement – only about 40 days from my political blogging’s start on January 29.

The importance of my first blog article, in two parts, to my blogging has been far more than a start: it was from themes begun in that article that major themes of Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog article have arisen.

My second blog article, a multi-part one, had a significant start in its first Part, dated February 20, focusing on issues of ethics and conduct concerning former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, surrounding the Mulroney-Schreiber affair of 2007-2009 and the Airbus Affair that had become public in 1995. With reasoned arguments, I countered political attempts to brush off the old Airbus Affair and vindicate Mulroney, refuting the punditry of Peter MacKay, son of former Mulroney cabinet minister Elmer MacKay, and cabinet minister in 2009 under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

(“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)”, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As in Part 1, back in the early 2000s while working in Silicon Valley in California a Microsoft recruiter, Ken Button, had phoned to recruit me to work for Microsoft.

Long before that, in 1994 while in a political dispute with Klawe, then University of British Columbia computer science department head, and in political activism attempting to expose Brian Mulroney’s leadership misconduct, I approached Microsoft’s Vancouver office regarding possible employment and my UBC dispute was noted by Microsoft:

“To shift my focus, [probation officer] 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. On December 30 Hitchcock told me Microsoft was hiring in Vancouver.

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.

According to Vancouver Police record on January 11, 1994, 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.”

(“Team 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”, October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

So in 2009 I had reasons to think that when Klawe was made a Microsoft board director in March, a senior level of the company was aware of my political blogging.

About 40 days later in April 2009, Maria Klawe was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

(“Distinguished Professor of Psychology Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences”, April 19, 2009, University of California, Riverside)

On October 9 – exactly 7 months after Microsoft’s announcement of Klawe’s joining its board – American Academy of Arts and Sciences officially announced its October 10 ceremony, with Maria Klawe among those featured in the press release:

“Pioneering research and scholarship, artistic achievement, and exemplary service to society will be celebrated here on Saturday, October 10, as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences officially welcomes its 229th class of new members.

As part of the Induction ceremony, five members of the new class will address their colleagues: ground-breaking mathematician and Fields Medal recipient Terence Tao; Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health Elizabeth Nabel; Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California Ronald George; celebrated ballet dancer and choreographer Edward Villella; and former Northrop Grumman Corporation Chairman and CEO Kent Kresa.

The ceremony will also include actor James Earl Jones and singer-songwriter Emmylou Harris reading from the letters of John and Abigail Adams.

“The Induction ceremony celebrates the Academy’s mission and the accomplishments of its newly elected members,” said Chief Executive Officer Leslie Berlowitz. “Through three centuries of service, the Academy and its Fellows have been dedicated to intellectual leadership and constructive action in America and the world.”

The 212 new Fellows and 19 Foreign Honorary Members are leaders in research, scholarship, business, the arts, and public affairs. They come from 28 states and 11 countries and range in age from 33 to 83. They represent universities, museums, national laboratories, research institutes, businesses, and foundations. This year’s group includes Nobel laureates and recipients of the Pulitzer and Pritzker prizes, MacArthur Fellowships, Academy, Grammy, and Tony awards, and the National Medal of Arts.

Among this year’s inductees are geochemist Stein Bjørnar Jacobsen, who used radioisotopes to date the formation of the Earth’s core; U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III; authors Gish Jen, Jamaica Kincaid, and James Salter; Civil War historian James McPherson; green technology investor and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Partner John Doerr; Exelon Corporation CEO John Rowe; and actor Dustin Hoffman.

Other new Fellows who will be inducted are mathematician and founder of modern complexity theory Michael Sipser; environmental policy expert Edward L. Miles; innovator in developmental economics Esther Duflo; and university presidents H. Kim Bottomly (Wellesley College), John Casteen III (University of Virginia), Ronald Daniels (John Hopkins University), James Wagner (Emory University) and Maria Klawe (Harvey Mudd College).

This year’s Foreign Honorary Members come from Europe, Canada, and Asia and include microbiologist Lelio Orci; ecologist Spencer Barrett; paleontologist Jennifer Clack; entomologist H. Charles Godfray; Professor of Psychology Claes von Hofsten; economist Mathias Dewatripont; and Hong Kong-based filmmaker Wong Kar Wai.

…”

(“American Academy Inducts 229th Class of Scholars, Scientists, Artists, Civic, Corporate, and Philanthropic Leaders”, October 9, 2009, American Academy of Arts and Sciences)

Reading the announcement carefully, I find it an example of how Leslie Berlowitz gave her thought not only to “who is in and who stays out” in the name mentions, but also to their order in accordance with certain unspoken hierarchy understood by insiders.

Leading the names were 5 inductee speakers for the official ceremony. The first was mathematician Terrence Tao, a Field Medalist with the reputation of a rare math genius, professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and son of Hong Kong immigrants to Australia.

(“Terence Tao: the Mozart of maths”, by Stephanie Wood, March 7, 2015, The Age)

Despite Nobel laureates being among this new class of 212 fellows and 19 foreign honorary members, a Fields Medalist topped the announcement. The Fields Medal is the mathematics community’s highest honor, which my Ph.D. adviser Stephen Smale had received in 1966 as in Part 2. In 1967 Smale was also inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

(“Honors: Steve Smale”, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley)

Of the 5 inductee speakers, Tao was followed by Elizabeth Nabel, a U.S. government research institute director, Ronald George, the chief justice of California, dancer-choreographer Edward Villella, and Kent Kresa, former chairman and CEO of a top U.S. aerospace and military technology company.

Berlowitz’s emphasis on honoring the management is evident: depending on how Nabel is counted, only 2 or 3 of the 5 were artists/scientists, whereas 3 of the 5 were senior management figures.

Elizabeth Nabel has been at several institutions of special interest for this blog article; she is or was:

1) a graduate of Weill Cornell Medical College, i.e., Bewlowitz daughter Sarah Tuttleton’s alma mater named after Sanford Weill;

2) a former professor at the University of Michigan, i.e., the university where Stephen Smale and William Ayers joined leftist student movements, as discussed in Part 2;

3) when inducted into the Academy in 2009, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, a leading U.S. government research institution and funding agency for medical research as quoted in Part 1; and

4) since January 2010, professor at Harvard Medical School and president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a center of the 2014 Haruko Obokata-Charles Vacanti scandal discussed in Part 1.

The last is especially pertinent because, as in Part 1, Japan’s RIKEN institute has conducted investigations, taken disciplinary actions and initiated reforms over its researcher Obokata’s role in the scandal, but Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have not taken any step regarding the conduct of Vacanti, a prominent scientific research leader there who mentored and collaborated with Obokata.

(“Board of Directors: Elizabeth Nabel: President, Brigham and Women’s Hospital”, Broad Institute)

Mentioned after the 5 inductee speakers were 2 entertainment stars who would perform at the ceremony.

The next group were the main samples of the inductees. Mentioned were a scientist, a judge, 3 authors, a historian, an investment firm partner, a corporation CEO, and an actor – 6 artists/scientists versus 3 senior management figures.

Maria Klawe was mentioned in the next group, as the last of 5 “university presidents”, of Wellesley College, University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins University, Emory University, and Harvey Mudd College – Harvey Mudd is not a university but Klawe was not alone as Wellesley College headed the 5.

Taking into consideration political, social and cultural factors, I can interpret the order of these 5 as an order of the 5 institutions: the elite private leading American women’s college, with Hillary Clinton among its alumni and located in New England as the Academy; followed by the public university founded by U.S. founding father Thomas Jefferson, located in the Washington, D.C.-Virginia area; then by the elite private first research university in U.S. history, also located near the U.S. capital; then by the elite private academic home of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter; and then by the elite private college headed by Klawe.

(“Life with Hillary: Portraits of a Wellesley Grad, 1969”, by Ben Cosgrove, February 15, 2014, Time; “Johns Hopkins Fact Book: Everything you wanted to know about America’s first research university”, March 2015, Johns Hopkins University; “America’s Top Colleges Ranking 2015”, by Caroline Howard, July 29, 2015, Forbes; and, “Short History of U. Va.: Founding of the University”, University of Virginia)

If such an inexplicit, pre-ordained hierarchy of the academic institutions had any significance to the Academy and Berlowitz – I would have to think it had – then America’s bright and industrious young minds would have been attracted to them accordingly, or young minds there would have been moulded industrious and bright accordingly.

That has been true for at least one famous case, Hillary Clinton, in 1969 new Wellesley graduate Hillary Diane Rodham, who was considered so phenomenal that she and 4 other new U.S. college graduates were featured in a June 20, 1969 Life magazine article – even more pre-destined for success than, as in Part 2, MIT professor John Nash at 30 featured by Fortune in 1958:

“Long before Yale Law, before Arkansas, before her marriage to Bill, before the Senate, the White House, her own (first?) run for the White House, the State Department, the “texts from Hillary” meme that just keeps on giving and so many other highlights (and lowlights) of her remarkable life, she was Hillary Diane Rodham, the older sister of two brothers and the over-achieving daughter of loving, politically conservative parents from suburban Park Ridge, Ill.

Intelligent, intensely curious and, from a young age, driven to find a way to somehow contribute to the world around her, Hillary Rodham enrolled at Wellesley College in the fall of 1965. It was there, in Massachusetts, that the moderate Republican underwent her transformation (she might characterize it as “an evolution”) to committed Democrat.

By the time she graduated from Wellesley in May 1969, Hillary Rodham was already such a notable figure that she was featured, along with four other speakers from four other schools — and excerpts from their commencement addresses — in the June 20, 1969, issue of LIFE, in an article titled, simply, “The Class of ’69.”

Her speech was, perhaps not surprisingly, less strident and confrontational than those of the other student speakers quoted in the issue; as early as 1969, Hillary was showing signs of that phenomenal ability to modulate her message — without diluting or compromising it — that helps explain so much of her success in public life. The other student speakers featured in that June 1969 issue included Yale’s William Thompson; Justin Simon at Brandeis; Mills College’s Stephanie Mills, now an author and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute; and Brown University’s Ira Magaziner — a high-profile student activist … Today, Magaziner works for the Clinton Foundation.”

(“LIFE With Hillary: Portraits of a Wellesley Grad”, by Ben Cosgrove, February 15, 2014, Life)

I can similarly interpret the order of the 5 schools as listed above that were featured in Life magazine in 1969, if only to make a point that the arrangement of names in American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ 2009 induction announcement wasn’t a freak and my interpretation of it isn’t a fluke. But sometimes something is better left unmentioned.

Nonetheless, I would point out that Ira Magaziner, the last of the 5 listed above, has been the CEO of and the brains behind the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

(““This Is Not Charity””, by Jonathan Rauch, October 2007, The Atlantic; and, “Top Clinton Foundation Official: “This Is Not Charity””, by Sean Davis, April 28, 2015, The Federalist)

The 5 “university presidents” in the Academy’s 2009 announcement was preceded in the same paragraph by 3 scientists, headed by Michael Sipser, “mathematician and founder of modern complexity theory”.

That to me is also intriguingly interesting, just like the mathematician Terrence Tao heading all names, because complexity theory is a part of theoretical computer science which Maria Klawe’s research has been in, intersecting mathematics.

But I am very perplexed that Sipser was called “founder of modern complexity theory”. Modern complexity theory has been around for well over a decade before Sisper. who studied for his UC Berkeley computer science Ph.D. under Manuel Blum – husband of Lenore Blum mentioned in Part 2 – whose 1964 MIT Ph.D. thesis already had a title in complexity theory, “A Machine-Independent Theory of the Complexity of Recursive Functions”, and whose “contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory” was honored by the 1995 A. M. Turing Award – computer science’s highest honor – of the Association for Computing Machinery and by his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that same year.

(“MANUEL BLUM”, A. M. Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery; “Manuel Blum”, by William L. Hosch, Encyclopaedia Britannica; and, “Michael Fredric Sipser” and “Manuel Blum”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

Three academics mentioned in Part 1, whom I knew, had done work in complexity theory, all considerably more senior than Sipser in their time in the field: my former UBC colleague David Kirkpatrick – husband of B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick who in November 1992 collaborated with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to suppress my political activism as in Part 1 – Klawe’s husband and my former UBC colleague Nicholas Pippenger, and Richard “Dick” Karp, a friend of Klawe’s and a prominent computer science professor and mentor figure when I was at Berkeley.

Karp was the Turing Award winner and an inductee of the Academy in 1985 – 10 years ahead of Sipser’s adviser Manuel Blum.

(“Richard Manning Karp”, by William L. Hosch, Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Pippenger received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1973 – 7 years before Sipser from Berkeley – with a thesis title, “The Complexity Theory of Switching Networks”.

(“Nicholas John Pippenger”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

The most junior of the three, Kirkpatrick, received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1975 with a thesis title, “Topics in the Complexity of Combinatorial Algorithms”.

(“David Galer Kirkpatrick”, Mathematics Genealogy Project)

So it is unlikely that Michael Sipser was “founder of modern complexity theory”.

Karp, Sipser and Pippenger co-wrote a paper in complexity theory that appeared in 1988 in Journal of Computer and System Sciences, titled “Expanders, randomness, or time versus space”.

(Sanguthevar Rajasekaran and John Reif, Handbook of Parallel Computing: Models, Algorithms and Applications, 2007, CRC Press)

An odd man out among these mentioned, and unlike even his wife inducted as a university president, Pippenger is not an Academy member – Kirkpatrick isn’t either but he is not of a leading status in the field – despite that he was a prestigious IBM fellow while working there, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Association for Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and American Mathematical Society.

(“Nicholas Pippenger”, Department of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College; and, “Nick Pippenger”, Wikipedia)

I recall a comment by Beresford Parlett, a UC Berkeley professor in mathematics and computer science, that on one occasion Pippenger and Klawe presented seminar talks at Berkeley and the faculty formed the impression that Pippenger was ‘two notches” above Klawe.

Having had some basic familiarity with the research and lecturing by each at UBC, I would have to agree that Pippenger’s work was considerably more substantial, in technical depth and in scientific relevance.

As previously quoted in Part 1, in 1980 while teaching at the University of Toronto, Klawe’s marrying Pippenger brought her into the corporate world, where she then rose in the management hierarchy:

“… When they announced their engagement, “IBM Research was so afraid of losing Nick that they made me an offer to join either Yorktown Heights or a new theory group in San Jose.” Klawe and Pippenger married in May 1980 and moved to California in July.

… In 1985, she was promoted to head all mathematical research within the computer science division at what became the IBM Almaden Research Centerr—leading what was regarded as one of the three best theoretical computer science research groups in the world …”

(“Maria M. Klawe: Welcoming the Excluded”, by Trudy E. Bell, Fall 2012, The Bent of Tau Beta Pi)

While at IBM Research in the 1980s, Pippenger and Klawe did some research together, including with my future UBC colleague David Kirkpatrick and with H. James Hoover, a University of Toronto Ph.D. student, later computing science professor and department chairman at the University of Alberta – Klawe’s alma mater as in Part 1.

(Raymond Greenlaw, H. James Hoover and Walter L. Ruzzo, Limits to Parallel Computation : P-Completeness Theory, 1995, Oxford University Press; “CURRICULUM VITAE: MARIA M. KLAWE”, February 7, 2014, Harvey Mudd College; and, “Department History”, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta)

But now her academic management role has brought Klawe much farther ahead of her scientist husband in societal honor and media recognition: induction by American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and Fortune magazine’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders at No. 17 in 2014 as in Part 2.

The seeds for the great surge in honor and recognition for Klawe had been planted in Canada. Back in March 2009 when she was elevated to Microsoft’s board of directors, Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper noted that it was a transplanted Canadian with many honorary Canadian university degrees:

“The latest addition to Microsoft Corp.’s board of directors is a transplanted Canadian who was once dean of science at the University of British Columbia. … Ms. Klawe spent 14 years at UBC as a computer science professor and administrator. Ms. Klawe previously taught at the University of Toronto and holds honorary degrees from five Canadian universities.”

(“Microsoft names Canuck to its board of directors”, by Matt Hartley, March 12, 2009, The Globe and Mail)

I am not aware of any honorary degree for her scientist husband Pippenger.

As for Michael Sipser, currently MIT dean of science, he was head of the MIT mathematics department from 2004 to 2014 – the position once held by former Communist Party member Ted Martin, who in that role took part in suppressing John Nash’s political activism in 1959 as in Part 2.

(“Michael Sipser”, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

As the Academy under Leslie Berlowitz gave great priority to honoring the management, it could be a reason that its 2009 induction announcement exaggeratedly described Sipser as “founder of modern complexity theory”, namely that his MIT department head position warranted the Academy’s consideration but was not senior enough to secure his entrance – unlike Klawe’s “university president” position.

In addition, MIT is located near Harvard, on the property ground of which the Academy has been housed, and thus closer to the Academy in both proximity and elite perspectives than even Wellesley College.

(Todd Wallack, June 18, 2013, Boston.com)

The Academy was originally founded during the American Revolution by John Adams and other Harvard graduates:

“… [American Academy of Arts and Sciences ] was founded during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, and other Harvard College graduates as Boston’s answer to Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.”

(“No record of academy head’s doctoral degree: Where deeds are honored, one is in doubt”, Todd Wallack, June 4, 2013, Boston.com)

I can further interpret the subgroup of names in the Academy announcement paragraph that included Sipser and the “university presidents”, as an expanded hierarchy including the 5 institutions represented by their presidents: starting with an MIT department head, followed by a senior professor – Edward L. Miles – of the University of Washington, the leading university of a state named for the founding U.S president and located where Microsoft Corporation is, then by a more junior MIT professor – Esther Duflo – and then by the order of the presidents of the 5 universities/colleges interpreted earlier.

With the math genius Terrence Tao of Hong Kong immigrant parental origin topping the 2009 announcement, in what looked like a balancing act the last of all the names – in the last group that was foreign honorary members – went to the only Hongkonger mentioned, “Hong Kong-based filmmaker Wong Kar Wai”.

The selection and placing of names in this Academy induction announcement formed a carefully thought out, socially “appropriate” yet highly preferential hierarchy, that overwhelmingly favored the management class: not counting the foreign honorary members, there were 11 featured as in senior management, and 13 – including Michael Sipser – not described as in management.

Add to the existence of such an hidden hierarchy structure the fact that a special and prominent new foreign member was omitted in the mention, and the bias exhibited in this 2009 induction announcement by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under Leslie Berlowitz was evident: Nobel Peace Prize laureate, former South African president Nelson Mandela.

When the new members were elected in April 2009, many academic institutions reported the election of their own faculty members and mentioned some others, variously. For instance, the University of California, Riverside, mentioned a more detailed sample of new members, including Klawe, than the Academy’s October 9 announcement, while the University of Texas at Austin mentioned only a small number, without Klawe. But both mentioned Mandela, as well as another new member the Academy might want to avoid controversy about: then U.S. secretary of defense Robert Gates.

(April 19, 2009, University of California, Riverside; and, “University of Texas at Austin engineer elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences”, April 22, 2009, University of Texas at Austin)

No wonder in 2013 so many Academy members and former staff members had so much to complain about their strong-willed chief executive.

Having worked for several years under Maria Klawe I am well aware of her sense of academic hierarchy, social class and business orientation. American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ honoring of her under Leslie Berlowitz in 2009 in the manner revealed by my review above, gives a context for a review of issues about Klawe’s academic management as well.

In Part 2 I have discussed the year-2000 illness deaths of both Alain Fournier and Peter Cahoon, 1989 founding faculty member and founding researcher, respectively, of UBC’s computer graphics field, expressing concern about the unusual coincidence of the timing.

Recently, I came across the “In Memoriam” page of UBC computer science department and noticed that Cahoon is not included in the tributes for Prof. Hugh Dempster (1928 – 2002), Fredrick (Rick) Sample, Prof. Alain Fournier (1943 – 2000), Prof. Jim Kennedy (1928 – 2004), and Prof. John Peck (1918 – 2013).

(“In Memoriam”, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia)

The “In Memoriam” does not only memorialize late professors since former computer facility manager Rick Sample is on the list. On the other hand, Sample had a master’s degree but not a Ph.D. that Cahoon had.

I am sure the omission is not an oversight. But could it be a “who gets in and who stays out” decision, like Leslie Berlowitz’s at American Academy of Arts and Sciences, because Cahoon was not a faculty member or a manager?

I should clarify that I have had genuine respect for Rick Sample, whose untimely death I discussed in a March 2011 blog post:

“Those who follow the development of Canadian internet may know John Demco, sometimes touted as “the godfather of .ca”, 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.”

(“Team 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”, March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Of particular interest in the Sample murder case is the fact that the accused killer, Sample’s former UBC student roommate Barry James Evans, was former Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer’s son, who on the day of Sample’s death took a commercial flight with a handgun aboard from Calgary, Alberta, to visit Sample in Vancouver, and Sample was killed by that gun. No one has been held responsible for the murder as a jury-acquittal decision at the B.C. court was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Nonetheless, I have no obvious facts to support the guess that academic hierarchy propriety is behind a ‘Sample is in and Cahoon stays out’ situation for the “In Memoriam” page, since I had left the department long before Cahoon’s death and had not been an insider while there. Given that Klawe had left UBC in 2003 as in Part 2, it obviously isn’t her decision as of now.

But when it comes to Alain Fournier, there were more known facts with which I can reason that a “stays out” decision may well have been applied to him regarding press coverage, when he was the founding faculty member of the trendy computer graphics field in UBC from 1989 to 2000, when Klawe was regularly in the major Canadian newspapers not only for her management role but in relation to UBC computer graphics.

In the fall of 1988 soon after our arrival at the UBC computer science department, she and her husband professors, she also the new head, and I an assistant professor on a fixed term, Klawe began her ambitious efforts to start and build up a computer graphics group.

Bill Reeves, a Canadian animator at Pixar whose credits included an Oscar for the short film “Tin Toy”, was invited to visit, with Klawe telling us that her goal was to convince Reeves to come as the founding professor for computer graphics. Reeves came and gave a talk, but understandably did not express interest in a job. Nonetheless, a part of the story was told by Klawe to the press, reported in The Province newspaper and as quoted below in The Ottawa Citizen, in November 1989:

“Days before a delicate operation, a fledgling neurosurgeon goes through the paces by watching an expert perform the procedure.

Instead of looking over the veteran doctor’s shoulder, though, the novice watches a computer simulation on TV — from a vantage point inside the patient’s skull.

Across town, an engineer wants to see how his 100-storey skyscraper would hold up in an earthquake. He presses a button and an animated model of the building on his TV monitor begins to tremble and sway.

It’s scenes like those that computer scientists at the University of British Columbia and IBM Canada hope will result from a new $5-million joint project.

IBM has contributed $1 million in equipment and know-how to start the project, appropriately called Grafic, short for graphic, film and computers project.

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.

Reeves worked closely with former Disney animator John Lasseter in developing Tin Toy, considered one of the most advanced examples of computer animation ever created.

“Talking to Bill, it made realize that our society needs exactly this kind of interaction in many areas where computer animation graphics can have an enormous impact,” said Klawe, head of the faculty of computer science at the University of British Columbia.

“We want to broaden the applications. We think by doing this we will also drive the technology in the same way the film industry has driven animation by their needs. We’ll drive it by applications to medicine, to education, to architecture.”

…”

(“IBM teams with university in $5M computer project; confusion reigns when calculating charges”, by Michael Bernard, November 27, 1989, The Ottawa Citizen)

In short, inspired by Bill Reeves as she stated, Klawe wanted to build up computer graphics in the mode of Pixar animation, aiming to “drive it by applications to medicine, to education, to architecture”, with a $5 million joint project with IBM which gave a $1m contribution “in equipment and know-how” to start “Grafic, short for graphic, film and computers project”.

The IBM funding demonstrated Klawe’s clout with her former employer. In fact, for their first year at UBC Klawe and Pippenger were on sabbatical from IBM where Pippenger was an IBM fellow, something she often emphasized. 

The above press story mentioned only two names, Maria Klawe and Bill Reeves. But what experts were there at UBC to actually start the field? Alain Fournier had arrived in 1989.

Fournier moved from the University of Toronto after his wife, Adrienne Drobnies, had received a job offer at Children’s Hospital in Vancouver; while not an original expert in animation, Fournier had collaborated with Bill Reeves on a special project:

“Upon graduation he returned to Canada, and accepted a position in the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. The main attraction, beside the overall distinction of the department, is that there was a well established computer graphics lab. Ron Baecker, covered animation to user interface, and Bill Buxton just finished his pioneering work in computer music, plus many other things. It was thrilling to have the best of both worlds, not only a solidly established environment but also an opportunity to create a modelling/rendering lab. In addition, there was access to some of the best graduate students anywhere. In the 9 years there, he had the chance to supervise four remarkable Ph.D. students, Delfin Montuno, John Amanatides, Eugene Fiume and Avi Naiman, plus 9 Master students.

During this time span, many interesting things happened: the apparition of John Danahy and his vision for landscape architecture, the creation of Alias, the collaboration with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation through Catherine Richards. At some point in the mid-eighties the Toronto Lab became one of the more prolific producers of SIGGRAPH papers along with Caltech, Cornell and Lucasfilm.

Alain Fournier spent 2 years on leave from Toronto from 1985 to 1987. The main reason was to be with Adrienne Drobnies. The side-effects were to spend a year at Stanford, teaching graduate courses there and at UC Santa Cruz, and another year at Xerox PARC, mainly enjoying the surroundings, writing papers and trying to write a book. During that period he collaborated with Bill Reeves at Lucasfilm on work on the modelling of ocean waves. The most important event of that period is nevertheless the birth of Ariel, his daughter, in March 1987.

… Then something unexpected happened. In the spring of 1989 Adrienne Drobnies had a job offer from Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, and he enquired about the prospects around Vancouver. He had some indications that computer graphics at UBC was one of the areas they wanted to build. Having decided to move (reluctantly leaving Toronto) he found himself in this rare situation where more was delivered than was promised. With the generous support of the department and the University, and with two Ph.D. students making the move with him, there soon was a productive lab (which they called Imager) where there was nothing before in the department. …”

(“Alain Fournier: 1994 Achievement Award”, CHCCS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS, Graphics Interface)

Back in 1987 at the University of Toronto, Fournier’s name had been mentioned in a Toronto Star newspaper story on computer graphics and landscape design applications:

“All the agony about our beautiful harborfront vision being wiped out by highrises to make a few people rich could have been avoided, electronic experts say, if the city had been smart enough to do what the national capital planners did.

There was a construction plan for prime land in Ottawa, too – to put up federal office buildings on Parliament Hill, behind the Centre Block. They would be gleaming new, of course. Certainly not an eyesore. And big, because they had to house a lot of people. It all looked good.

Then John Danahy walked in with his computer screens and killed the whole idea.

The program Danahy had written let his computers put an electronically generated picture of the rear of Parliament Hill on a color TV screen. But this was not just any picture. The user could play with the controls to see what the view would be for tourists, looking toward the Hill from either side or from across the river in Hull. It was like being in a helicopter, able to move around and see from almost any angle or elevation.

And at the touch of a button, the computer would put the new offices into the picture or take them out.

What this showed – and what had not been fully grasped by the people looking at all the paper drawings before – was that from a lot of angles, buildings that big, in that spot, would block most if not all of the view of the Centre Block, or the Supreme Court, or even the architecturally exquisite Parliamentary Library. Aesthetically this would have been a great leap backward. It wouldn’t have done the tourist trade any favors, either.

The federal decision-makers learned fast. They agreed on a plan to scatter the offices among several new small buildings, nestled innocuously among the structures that have given the Hill its character and history.

Danahy is one of the whizzes who keep building the reputation of the University of Toronto’s departments of electrical engineering and computer science, which together created its Computer Systems Research Institute. The institute runs the Dynamic Graphics Project. There are lots of other whizzes there, including William Buxton, Ronald Baecker, Alain Fournier. They are helping turn what used to be mechanistic-looking computer graphics into something that comes closer and closer to movies.

Danahy is a landscape architect. He’s not even a computer scientist, technically; he’s in the research institute to find ways to use computers better. His idea here is to let people see more effectievly how a landscape will look before it exists, to eliminate the risk of unhappy surprises after they spend millions building it.

The U of T computer programs let you “walk” through such a landscape or “fly” over it. They’ll even let you move 10 or 20 years into the future, to see if the little bare trees you’re thinking of planting today would block or enhance the view from any angle after they get big and leafy.

The Parliament Hill story is not the only example of how well this has worked. Ontario Hydro wanted a big new power line to get some of the electricity it’s now able to generate at its Bruce nuclear station down south where it can be used. …”

(“How computers can prevent landscape eyesores”, by Jack Miller, May 11, 1987, Toronto Star)

A computer graphics professor with prior press mention on a computer graphics project with applications in landscape design in the heart of Canada’s capital Ottawa, while at the University of Toronto that had launched Klawe’s computer science career and connected her to Nick Pippenger and IBM, as discussed in Part 2 – so why wasn’t Fournier a steal, if not a jackpot, to share the press spotlight with Klawe in UBC’s launch of its computer graphics field in 1989?

I have to read carefully to point out a few subtle but important points that might be behind Fournier’s omission for the press in Vancouver:

1) According to his biography for the 1994 Achievement Award of the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, quote earlier, Fournier’s specialty At U of T had been “creating a modelling/rendering lab”, while someone else, Ron Baecker, was an animation expert;

2) his collaboration with Bill Reeves at Lucasfilm in the mid-1980s had been on some special effects only, “work on the modelling of ocean waves”;

3) he was away in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1985 to 1987 when the Toronto Star story on John Danahy’s landscape design applications appeared in May 1987, and thus mostly likely was not as active in that project as the others mentioned; and

4) the U of T project described in Toronto Star was probably not yet bona fide animation as in movie-like, but multiple-view modeling of scenes.

The above points are consistent with the early facts at UBC: UBC’s first computer graphics lab founded by Alain Fournier and Peter Cahoon was named “Imager”, whereas the IBM-funded project Klawe announced was “Grafic, short for graphic, film and computers project” – with the word “film” in it.

At that point in late 1989 as I recall, Kellogg Booth of the University of Waterloo in Ontario had visited UBC, given a talk and showed the interest to move there in 1990:

“This got even more exciting the following year when Kelly Booth showed an interest in joining him, and making it into one of the biggest and best labs in North America. Largely through the efforts of Maria Klawe, IBM Canada decided to give to UBC nearly $1M worth of graphics workstations, and this plus matching funds from the province of British Columbia created GraFiC (Graphics and Film in Computing), a lab dedicated to the development and use of computer animation for research, education, scientific visualization and communication. GraFiC works in synergy with Imager, and participated in projects resulting in more than 40mm of animation with more than 15 different departments, individual and groups outside of UBC.”

(CHCCS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS, Graphics Interface)

The last quote from Fournier’s 1994 award biography said quite succinctly: Kellogg Booth came in 1990, with Klawe’s efforts GraFiC was created with funds from both IBM and the provincial government, and “GraFiC works in synergy with Imager, and participated in projects resulting in more than 40mm of animation with more than 15 different departments, individual and groups outside of UBC” – the broader applications came from animation by GraFiC more than from Imager.

Booth was not an animation expert either, as far as I knew, but he was a senior leader figure in the computer graphics field. Several months before the Toronto Star story mentioning Fournier, a January 1987 The Globe and Mail story, originated from The New York Times, mentioned Kellogg Booth:

“Electronic animation is not yet a huge commercial success, though. Its usage is still measured in minutes per film or broadcast, said Kellogg Booth, chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery.”

(“Film animation making forays into TV”, New York Times News Service, January 8, 1987, The Globe and Mail)

The Association for Computing Machinery, the main international organization for computer science previously mentioned in the context of the A. M. Turing Award, had been founded at Columbia University and has been based in New York City.

(“Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)”, Encyclopaedia Britannica)

But in the 1980s Booth was not chairman of ACM – there probably wasn’t such a position – but of ACM SIGGRAPH, i.e., ACM’s special interest group on computer graphics; so he likely knew everyone who was anyone in that field, as his 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award biography described:

“Kelly’s first leadership role in ACM SIGGRAPH was in 1981 when he chaired an ad-hoc committee that made policy recommendations about the conference technical program. This began more than a decade of continuous service at the highest level in the organization. Kelly served on an ACM committee that recommended comprehensive changes to how SIG conferences should be managed. In 1983 he served as co-chair for the SIGGRAPH Conference. He was then elected to the position of ACM SIGGRAPH Chair in 1985, serving in that role until 1989. He helped guide the organization and the conference through a period of extraordinary creativity and growth in the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques, working to put in place a three-year budgeting cycle to ensure financial stability.”

(“2010 Outstanding Service Award: Kellogg S. Booth”, ACM SIGGRAPH)

So it was a plausible scenario that in late 1989 the only UBC computer graphics faculty member Fournier wasn’t enough for Klawe’s goals and the better connected senior figure Booth hadn’t arrived, and so Klawe chose to talk about herself and Bill Reeves only, given Reeve’s name recognition with an Oscar and given – I would think, with Klawe’s computer industry experience and ambition – Pixar’s ownership by the magical tech whiz Steve Jobs, who had acquired it from Lucasfilm for $5 million:

“Although Steve Jobs is best known for his role as the CEO of Apple, he also played a huge role in turning film company Pixar into a multi-billion-dollar success. 

After Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, he bought Pixar (at the time called Graphics Group) from Lucasfilm for $5 million. He became the company’s largest shareholder and CEO until Disney bought it for $7.4 billion in 2006.”

(“Why execs from other companies wanted to meet with Steve Jobs on Fridays”, by Jillian D’Onfro, March 22, 2015, Business Insider)

By the time Jobs sold it to Disney, Pixar was a $7.4 billion company, in 2006 as quoted, the year Klawe became Harvey Mudd College president as in Part 1.

A recent Harvey Mudd anecdote also corroborates this scenario, namely that Maria Klawe much preferred Pixar, or at least industry-level animation. In 2013 the college completed a new central academic building, and the ceremony’s main feature was Pixar animation lead researcher Tony DeRose:

“Harvey Mudd College spokeswoman Judy Augsburger said the four-story interdisciplinary teaching and collaborative learning building has a ceremony planned for 1:30 p.m. Sept. 28. The event, at 320 E. Foothill Blvd., will feature Tony DeRose, senior scientist and research group lead for Pixar Animation Studios, giving a presentation and building tours.

..

“The R. Michael Shanahan Center for Teaching and Learning has transformed the Harvey Mudd campus,” said President Maria Klawe in an email. “Now it will transform the educational experience through open, flexible spaces that will support our curriculum, while nurturing the tremendous creativity of our students, faculty and staff. The building is already becoming the central gathering place for the campus community, where we work and play, share ideas and, together, enrich the Harvey Mudd educational experience.””

(“First classes held in new building at Harvey Mudd College”, by Wes Woods, September 8, 2013, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin)

Perhaps not unlike with Leslie Berlowitz at American Academy of Arts and Sciences, when I was at UBC the message seemed to be that Maria Klawe could made decisions the way she wanted even though she wasn’t at the top, because she was the ‘only’ woman; a 1990 press story mentioned her as UBC science faculty’s only female department head, and quoted dean of science Barry McBride – as in Part 1 he later helped Klawe crush my political activism:

““Science and technology are going to have a more and more pervasive influence on our lives in future,” says Barry McBride, dean of science at the Univeristy of B.C. “The public has to become more knowledgable if it is to make informed decisions.”

…

“The educational system is like a big tanker in the ocean,” says Science Council [of Canada] official Gene Nyberg. “It takes a long time to turn it around.”

Canadian universities, which have for years lamented the lack of female scientists in the country, do not move too quickly either.

The University of B.C. science faculty has only one female department head, Maria Klawe in computer science.

The university is planning a major push in future. A female associate dean of science is soon to be appointed to promote women in science at all levels, from elementary schools through to universities, says McBride.”

(“Science awareness is still evolving”, by Margaret Munro, March 3, 1990, The Vancouver Sun)

In a sense, it was unwittingly predicted that my 1991-1992 challenge of Klawe’s management was going to be difficult.

When Kellogg Booth arrived in 1990, he became the director of the university’s Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre, or MAGIC. Here is a The Province story in December 1994 – after I had left UBC – featuring MAGIC director Kellogg Booth on medical applications at B.C. Children’s Hospital, i.e., workplace of Fournier’s wife mentioned earlier:

“It can be a six-hour operation to bare the spine of a young girl suffering from idiopathic scoliosis and to insert the fasteners and steel rods needed to correct worsening curvature.

Operating-room teams at B.C.’s Children’s Hospital have been taking stereo pictures of exposed spines as part of a research project.

The hope is that by building a library of images and using these as the basis for the three-dimensional modelling of spines on computer screens, it may be possible to gain an improved understanding of how individual cases should be handled.

…

“You can only go in once,” says Dr. Kellogg Booth, director of the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) at the University of B.C.

“It is not something you can redo, so everything which contributes to the knowledge of surgeons is important.”

MAGIC –which is not concentrated in one computer laboratory but dispersed between several faculties — has computer animation tools it can use to create and manipulate models of spines in an effort to see how they will respond to different surgical solutions.

“The payoff will come if we can understand a deformity well enough to know which of a number of corrective surgical procedures is the most appropriate to use,” Booth says.

…

Booth says patients could submit to CT (computerized tomography) scans to yield computer-malleable images that may influence how surgery is performed, but research is still at too early a stage for this.

Children’s Hospital has a high-capacity data link with UBC, and researchers at both sites can work with the same images on their screens as they collaborate.

UBC has an internal network of fibre-optic lines and the necessary advanced switch gear to permit the heavy data flows needed to support video, data and audio exchanges between researchers both on and off campus.

…

In a similar exercise, work is under way at UBC to build up facial muscle on model skulls created on the screen.

This is part of a larger effort co-ordinated by the RCMP to use computers to reconstruct identifiable faces from skulls or skull fragments and replace conventional forensic modelling in clay.

“If you saw the movie Gorky Park, you will remember how they built up the musculature and skin on clay heads,” Booth says.

…

It is vital for patients and their families to have realistic expectations of outcomes, Booth says.

“You may do something very good, but if it falls short of expectations, then you may have caused deep disappointment.””

(“Working MAGIC: Computer images aid corrective surgery”, by Mark Wilson, December 22, 1994, The Province)

So Booth not only was a computer graphics group leader above Fournier, responsible for university-level interdisciplinary work and broader applications, but got to make all the press presentations on the medical applications at Adrienne Drobnies’s hospital – I wonder how it might feel to Alain Fournier’s sense of manhood.

Still, I note that The Province was provincially focused, without the national exposure of the capital newspaper The Ottawa Citizen, in both of which the November 1989 story of Klawe’s inspiration by Bill Reeves and getting IBM’s $5m contribution had appeared.

By this time of late 1994, Klawe herself had made a big leap into video game, which was a part of the computer graphics field in academic research.

In an April 2012 blog post, I commented on its timing in early 1993, in the context of my expanding political activism onto the leadership conduct of then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney:

“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.”

(“Team 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”, April 30, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

What I cited as above was a The Vancouver Sun story. But even the Toronto Star, which had mentioned Fournier in a 1987 story quoted earlier, now featured Klawe’s new video game project, GEMS (Games for Education in Math and Science):

“Some parents look at the Super Nintendo game Street Fighter 2 and see the evils of macho violence and weapons worship.

Maria Klawe sees a way for teachers to give a lesson on how biologists fight diseases.

She’s co-ordinating a Canadian-U.S. team of computer scientists, teachers, education professors and commercial-game producers that will look for ways schools can plug into children’s fascination with video games.

“Why video games? They’re part of children’s culture,” Klawe says.

“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.”

…

Her GEMS (Games for Education in Math and Science) group, a team of 24 people, will spend $8 million on several years of research.

Its goal is to:

* Find ways for teachers to use existing video games to explain ideas to the Grade 4-7 set.

* Create video games to help children use even more sophisticated calculations.

* Design video games appealing to both children who are already experts and those who aren’t part of the game-playing group, particularly girls.

Klawe, head of the University of British Columbia’s computer science department, is the mother of two video game players. She’s the kind of person who goes to schools and uses her juggling skills to explain math and science.”

(“Study aims to tap games’ power to teach”, March 6, 1993, Toronto Star)

Video game is more dynamic and technologically more challenging in user interactivity than animation alone, which itself is already more dynamic than image modeling. In this sense, in one leap into the field Klawe landed at a spot “two notches” trendier than Fournier’s – no doubt the $8m Electronic Arts funding, more than IBM’s $5m in 1989, was the key.

But Klawe had social and political goals, which she outlined in a magical vision that gave her project 3 political flavors of her interest: education, mathematics, and bringing girls into game playing.

On October 1 the next year – 2 months before the The Province story on Kellogg Booth’s MAGIC center and B.C. Children’s Hospital – another Toronto Star story on Klawe’s video game research project reported progress for an Electronic Arts computer game, Counting on Frank, teaching mathematics and attracting girls to it in a culturally old-fashioned way:

“In the macho, do-or-die world of electronic games, some people are waking up to the fact that girls just want to have fun, too.

Bloodshed and bullets now dominate video screens. Even a best-selling hand-held game is marketed as, ahem, Game Boy.

But soon games of aggression will share space with ponies and castles in an electronic world offering more girl-oriented products.

Maria Klawe, head of computer science at the University of British Columbia, led a research project over the past year that looked at helping the computer industry evolve to attract more females.

“If you look at the market now, video and electronic games are much more attractive to boys and embody boy culture,” Klawe says.

…

Females make up just 20 per cent of undergraduates in computer studies at Canadian universities, and there’s a disproportionate number of men to women in computer-related careers.

Rena Upitis, associate professor of education at Queen’s University in Kingston, says girls tend to lose interest in math and science before reaching high school.

…

Klawe and her team, along with software developers at Electronic Arts Canada, worked with thousands of 8- to 12-year-olds to find out how games might be more girl-friendly.

…

Paul Lee, vice-president of Electronic Arts Canada, says the company’s producers and designers are just now opening their eyes to the gender gap.

“We really didn’t understand how to appeal to girls.”

Electronic Arts’ new educational game, coming to stores in November, was created with the help of the research. Counting on Frank is a CD-ROM game that teaches math through a story about a boy named Henry, his friend Ginger – a smart and not subservient female – and their adventures in a house.”

(“Computer game makers turn to girls”, October 1, 1994, Toronto Star)

Another year later in November 1995, Klawe was now a UBC vice president and “a leading expert on using video games in teaching”; a research assistant of hers produced computer software for teaching geometry to children:

“Educational research shows interactive video games teach math more effectively than traditional exercises. The only catch is that the learning doesn’t just happen by itself, says Maria Klawe, a leading expert on using video games in teaching.

“You can’t just park your kids in front of the computer and tell them to have fun,” said Klawe, vice-president of academic and student services at the University of British Columbia. “It’s not a Band-Aid for education. It’s an opportunity to do better.”

…

After 18 months studying the impact of computer games on learning, Klawe and a team of classroom teachers are convinced educational videos — not your average hero-and-villains games — can do a lot to improve math skills, even in children who have little or no computer experience.

The reason is part magic, part method.

…

For example, one of Klawe’s research assistants has developed computer software to teach three-dimensional geometry. With it, students can examine shapes from all sides and also see what happens when they make changes like rotating or flipping the images.”

(“Specialized video games ‘more effective’ in teaching children math”, by Susan Balcom, November 3, 1995, The Vancouver Sun)

Klawe became not only regularly featured in the major press, but also a part of the media one more year later in November 1996, as a member of a CHUM Television advisory board along with Raminder Dosanjh, wife of Attorney-General Ujjal Dosanjh in B.C. Premier Glen Clark’s government, helping Toronto-based CHUM get a license to start a Vancouver station:

“Premier Glen Clark was politically motivated when he supported a Toronto-based firm’s bid for a Vancouver television licence, says B.C. Liberal leader Gordon Campbell.

Clark took the unusual step of publicly supporting CHUM Ltd. at Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearings in Vancouver in September.

Raminder Dosanjh, wife of B.C. Attorney-General Ujjal Dosanjh, is on the 11-member CHUM advisory board pushing for the licence.

…

On Tuesday, Ujjal Dosanjh referred all questions on the issue to his wife. Raminder Dosanjh, who heads India Mahila Association, a B.C. Indo-Canadian women’s group, could not be reached.

In September, after a meeting between Clark and CHUM Ltd. executive producer Moses Znaimer, Clark took the rare step of endorsing the VTV bid in a videotaped message played before the CRTC.

…

Pia Shandel, a member of the CHUM Ltd. team pushing for the VTV licence, said the Dosanjh link is overblown and denigrating to Raminder Dosanjh’s qualifications.

…

Others on the unpaid board include Maria Klawe, vice-president of the University of B.C., Jill Bodkin, the former chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade and author Peter C. Newman.”

(“Clark took ‘care of his friends’ in TV bid: The wife of the B.C. attorney-general is on the unpaid CHUM advisory board pushing for a Vancouver license”, by Jim Beatty, November 20, 1996, The Vancouver Sun)

As I have remarked in Part 1, the socialist B.C. premier Glen Clark had smart business brains, later in 1998 having Maria Klawe give a keynote speech in his provincial business summit.

By March 1997, Klawe’s research project, now called E-GEMS (Electronic Games for Education in Math and Science) with the word “electronic” added in front, led to a specialized computer game, Phoenix Quest, for teaching math in a way girls would enjoy:

“Computers are playing an increasing role in almost every aspect of adult life, but girls still seem to think “this is something that boys do well at and girls don’t,” says Maria Klawe, vice-president of student and academic services at the University of B.C. and director of UBC’s Electronic Games for Education in Math and Science (E-GEMS) project.

…

One problem is that most software still addresses “boy” themes such as action, adventure, violence and fantasy. “It is likely to make girls think of computers as a boy domain,” Klawe said.

Her research has shown that girls prefer programs with a storyline, characters, creativity and social interaction.

…

E-GEMS is testing Phoenix Quest, a remarkable interactive computer game it developed that incorporates math into themes and activities that girls enjoy. It is aimed at children aged 10 to 14.

“We’ve ended up with something that’s appealing to both girls and boys,” Doug Super, a member of the E-GEMS project, said

The game features a story about Julie, a 14-year-old girl from Sooke who falls through a crack in rocks near Hong Kong.

Players read portions of the story, written in journal form by British Columbia children’s author Julie Lawson: “You have passed through the time beyond time. Passed the borders of today and the edges of yesterday. Be calm. Be strong. You have entered the Phoenix Archipelago.”

…

Artificial personality software developed by E-GEMS member Richard Gibbons analyzes the communication and mails a response.

…”

(“How to get girls into the world of computers”, by Jenny Lee, March 12, 1997, The Vancouver Sun)

Klawe no longer spent time in her previous theoretical computer science field, but ran the E-GEMS lab as reported in a The Globe and Mail story that appeared at the end of March 1997, about the character Julie in Phoenix Quest:

“Julie Steele is a 14-year-old who likes pizza, Mel Gibson, tennis and volleyball. She prefers rock music to rap and likes math because “it’s so nicely self-contained.”

Likes Math? Self-contained?

Julie seems very bright, but she’s also getting plenty of help from her personality trainer, Richard Gibbons, who has entered her in the 1997 Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence.

…

Mathematician Maria Klawe runs the E-GEMS lab when she’s not tending to her duties as the university’s vice-president of student and academic service.

“There is a lot of software out there, but it’s hard to show any real learning occurring.” she said. “There are tons of computer games out there that boys like to play, but few that girls like.””

(“UBC researcher hopes computer seems human”, by Greg Joyce, March 31, 1997, The Globe and Mail)

On April 29, E-GEMS member Richard Gibbons placed 3rd at the 1997 Loebner Prize Contest in New York City.

(“1997 Loebner Prize Contest Results”, rev. April 30, 1997, loebner.net)

In May, Klawe received a Women of Distinction Award from the Vancouver Young Women’s Christian Association:

“Maria Klawe. Theoretical computer science researcher at the University of B.C. Initiated e-gems, which developed computer games for mathematics education. Held national and international posts in math and
computer science. Winner in the Science and Technology category.”

(“Women of Distinction honored by YWCA”, May 16, 1997, The Vancouver Sun)

Maria Klawe still a “theoretical computer science researcher” at this point, as reported?

Klawe’s official resume at Harvey Mudd College shows that her last theoretical computer science research paper, collaborated with B. Mumey, was published in 1995, and thereafter papers were about electronic games, learning and education, and female participation.

(February 7, 2014, Harvey Mudd College)

During my 4 years at UBC, Brendan Mumey was the only graduate student Klawe produced, earning a Master’s degree, but Klawe’s current resume doesn’t even list him as her former student.

During that 4 years Klawe taught only one course once – a graduate course jointly taught with me, which I mentioned in a May 2011 blog post:

“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.”

(“Team 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”, May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In fact, Klawe’s resume shows that she became an IBM Research manager in 1984, then in 1985 published her last individually authored paper while at IBM, and then only one individually authored paper in the 4 years I was under her at UBC, with a conference proceeding version in 1990 and a journal version in 1992.

To be fair, that one paper at UBC was the core of her lectures in the graduate course co-taught with me – during my 3rd year at UBC, but as a part of the arrangement with her that got me the 4th year job – and I found it to be technically very solid, of theoretical interest.

In the next 10 years before moving to Princeton in 2003, Klawe produced several master’s students in electronic games and learning, according to her official resume. In the games field she also produced a Ph.D. student, Kamran Sedighian in the E-GEMS project designing math games for children, with thesis, “Interface style, flow, and reflective cognition: issues in designing interactive multimedia mathematics learning environments for children”; and with Kellogg Booth she co-produced another Ph.D. student Kori Inkpen, designing learning environment for children, with thesis, “Adapting the Human-Computer Interface to Support Collaborative Learning Environments for Children”.

(“Adapting the Human-Computer Interface to Support Collaborative Learning Environments for Children”, by Kori Inkpen, August 1997, University of British Columbia; and, “Interface style, flow, and reflective cognition: issues in designing interactive multimedia mathematics learning environments for children”, by Kamran Sedighian, February 1998, University of British Columbia)

In her resume, Klawe also claims to have co-supervised another Ph.D. student, Kate Collie, in visual-art activity therapy for cancer patients. But Collie’s 2003 Ph.D. thesis, “A narrative view of visual creative expression as psychosocial support for women with breast cancer”, acknowledged only Joan Bottorff as the research supervisor, and Klawe as one of other 4 members of the supervisory committee; a supervisory committee is required for every Ph.D. student and a committee member is normally not considered a supervisor.

(“A narrative view of visual creative expression as psychosocial support for women with breast cancer”, by Katharine Rosemary Collie, 2003, University of British Columbia; and, February 7, 2014, Harvey Mudd College)

Coming back to the press coverage of Klawe in 1997, by the fall, UBC vice president Maria Klawe also became a “prestigious chair” – borrowing the term in Part 2 describing a University of Chicago professorship offer to John Nash in 1958 – UBC’s new chair for women in science and engineering:

“Dr. Maria Klawe, University of B.C.’s new chair for women in science and engineering, is one of the women featured in this year’s HERitage mag put out by the Ministry of Women’s Equality for history month.

Klawe is developing computer programs designed to spark girls’ as well as boys’ interest in math and to inspire them to seek careers in computer science.”

(“Women celebrate their HERitage: Canadian Women’s History Month 1997 is dedicated to women in science and technology”, by Jeani Read, October 21, 1997, The Province)

As the above story suggested, sparking girls’ interest in computer games for learning math could “inspire them to seek careers in computer science”. This upgrade of the 3rd of her initial goals for E-GEMS, stated in a March 1993 Toronto Star story quoted earlier, no doubt would suit her better for her new academic chair.

On March 8, 1998, 29-year-old Kori Inkpen, who had received her Ph.D. in 1997 supervised by Klawe and Booth jointly, was featured in a The Province story:

“There are few women teaching computer science in universities. Joining their slight number is Kori Inkpen, 29, who takes up a post as an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in the fall.

…

Inkpen completed a PhD at UBC last year. Her thesis is on child-computer interactions and is based on research done in 10 Vancouver- area schools.

Currently, Inkpen is at the University of Washington in Seattle, researching the use of virtual-reality technology to improve collaboration between young students sharing computers.

UBC vice-president Dr. Maria Klawe says Inkpen is set to become a real star in her field. Inkpen says Klawe and Dr.Kellogg Booth, who both supervised Inkpen’s PhD work, were invaluable mentors.

Klawe is an evangelist for an expanded role for women in the information-technology sector. Inkpen preaches a similar message, taking it to the schools as a volunteer speaker. …”

(“Technology”, by Mark Wilson, March 8, 1998, The Province)

Good for Kori Inkpen who was at the age when I received my Ph.D., and she was becoming an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University. Back in 1988 I had received an SFU job offer as well but opted for UBC, as mentioned in my November 22, 2009 blog post:

“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.”

(““Nairobi to Shenzhen”, and on to Guangzhou (Part 1)”, November 22, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

I get a sense from the March 1998 press story that the technology at the University of Washington in Seattle where Inkpen was doing research, was even trendier than Klawe’s electronic game: it was virtual reality.

Today Inkpen is a research group manager at Microsoft. Brendan Mumey, Klawe’s master’s student in theoretical computer science, received his Ph.D. also in 1997 from that leading university in the state named for the founding U.S. president.

(“Kori Inkpen”, Microsoft Research; and, “Brendan Mumey”, Montana State University)

With the upgrade of her goal from bringing girls into video-game playing to inspiring them “to seek careers in computer science”, in the Inkpen press story Maria Klawe was now called “an evangelist for an expanded role for women in the information-technology sector”. In other words, her new UBC chair for women in science and engineering made Klawe an ‘ordained preacher’, with Inkpen a volunteer preacher as in the press story.

In this sense, eventually in March 2009 when Klawe became a board director of Microsoft Corporation, she ascended to the top of an empire that has reigned over the computer technology world in the state of Washington and beyond.

But that would happen one step at a time. In the fall of 1998 Klawe became UBC dean of science and it was a news item – her previous vice president appointment had not been one – in The Vancouver Sun, the major B.C. newspaper with national exposure:

“Maria Klawe, a theoretical computer science researcher at the University of B.C., has been appointed dean of the university’s faculty of science.

Klawe was previously UBC’s vice-president for student and academic services. Before that, she was head of the department of computer science for six-and-a-half years.

Klawe initiated e-gems, which are used to develop computer games for mathematics education.

She has held national and international posts in math and computer science.”

(“UBC: Computer researcher named science dean”, August 27, 1998, The Vancouver Sun)

Maria Klawe still a “theoretical computer science researcher”?

Oh well, I guess a person of her high position – as in Part 2, she had chaired American Mathematical Society’s board of trustees in 1995-1996 – could claim whatever at UBC.

As remarked in Part 1, it was a step down from her vice presidency for student and academic services, but the deanship was an academically more prestigious post and would position her well for her later Princeton deanship.

The UBC science deanship gave Klawe broader authority to actually get more women into computer science. She immediately implemented a 2-year program adopted by both UBC and SFU – obviously already planned as she just became dean – to train university graduates in computer programming, attracting some of them from outside of science, with half of the spots reserved for women; she also started a programming project to appeal to girls, “virtual family”, featuring a cartoon family of four:

“Maria Klawe, Dean of Sciences at the University of British Columbia and expert in the different skill sets and needs of boys and girls in relation to the wired world, offers more solutions.

In September, UBC and Simon Fraser University introduced a two-year post graduate computer science program designed as a hands-on experience.

Applicants had to have good academic records, but not necessarily in the sciences. Also 50 per cent of the 38 spots were reserved for women.

“So far, it’s been a very stressful experience for these students. But we did manage to position a program to get women to apply,” Klawe says, adding that it’s too soon to know who will survive the course.

Klawe is also working on a project designed to make programming more attractive to teenaged girls. Using Java, a popular computer language, program developers are creating activities that appeal to girls. For example, one program features a cartoon family of four. The girls interact with the virtual family and write scripts for them. One story line starts with the premise the daughter has pierced her belly button.

“The girls can change the script and write in their own version of mom’s, brother’s and dad’s reactions,” Klawe explains. “The idea is to get them right inside the program and to demystify the mechanics.”

Another initiative that Klawe hopes will encourage girls to take computer science would be the breakdown of the traditional divide between arts and sciences faculties. She thinks, if there were a cross-over between the
disciplines at universities, this would make it easy for girls to take English and computer courses at the same time.”

(“Women on the Web Wired women; The tech world has long been a bastion of male dominance. But not for long – that is, if these gals get their way”, by Donna Jean MacKinnon, March 4, 1999, Toronto Star)

Through this decade-long period 1989-1999, as I have reviewed Maria Klawe was regularly featured in the provincial and national press, for bringing industry funding to UBC computer graphics and electronic game projects, and for making the trendy video game field the focus of her research leadership tailored to attract girls in the areas of learning, math, and games and computer programming; Kellogg Booth was in the provincial press a couple of times, for computer graphics medical applications at Children’s Hospital, i.e., workplace of Fournier’s wife, and for co-supervising a female Ph.D. with Klawe.

But in the Canadian major newspaper archives I have found no trace of UBC computer graphics professor Alain Fournier, until a May 8, 1999 letter to The Vancouver Sun from an Alain Fournier in Vancouver, whom judged by the letter’s content was my former UBC colleague. The full letter is as follows:

“It is always comforting to see some honesty and courage where you do not necessarily expect it. Your May 1 story “Empire of hype” by Katherine Monk in the Mix section was a welcome drop of sanity in an ocean of hype. Not being especially a fan of Katherine Monk’s movie reviews (after all, movie critics are here to disagree with) and having tremendous admiration and respect for George Lucas and his accomplishments, I was not prepared for that.

Your reviewer made exactly the right points. This is only a movie — there are many important issues around the fact that many Canadians, mostly educated and trained here, work for the U.S. industry in computer graphics, animation, games and special effects. The amount of control George Lucas and his organization is exerting is indeed frightening. Using Godzilla as a reminder of what could go wrong was a very nice touch — it seems that only the big dead lizard can actually scare them at this point.

Reality is always more complex than fiction. Control can be good if it forces theatres to give viewers the best possible quality of image and sound. Control is bad if you threaten employees with dismissal for speaking to the media, or threaten journalists implicitly with dire retribution if they do not toe the line.

I am not looking forward to the June interviews (the “second wave”) telling us how wonderful it is to work for the creative genius and how the company appreciate the excellent training they got back in Canada. And yes, I am looking forward to see The Phantom Menace(TM).”

(“Menace in Phantom’s marketing”, Alain Fournier, May 8, 1999, The Vancouver Sun)

Without being explicit, Fournier in effect outlined his order of importance of the subjects in computer graphics, as quoted above:

“… many Canadians, mostly educated and trained here, work for the U.S. industry in computer graphics, animation, games and special effects.”

Indeed like in my earlier analysis, animation was more than graphics, games were even more. But “special effects” were the most – Fournier must be thinking about the ocean-wave modeling he had done in the mid-1980s with Bill Reeves at Lucasfilm, that it should have given him higher value at UBC.

While expressing his “tremendous admiration and respect for George Lucas and his accomplishments”, in his letter Fournier clearly intended to criticize the negative side of influence and control by George Lucas and his company, that it was “indeed frightening”:

“… Your May 1 story “Empire of hype” … was a welcome drop of sanity in an ocean of hype. …

… The amount of control George Lucas and his organization is exerting is indeed frightening. Using Godzilla as a reminder of what could go wrong was a very nice touch — it seems that only the big dead lizard can actually scare them at this point.

… Control is bad if you threaten employees with dismissal for speaking to the media, or threaten journalists implicitly with dire retribution if they do not toe the line.”

Did Fournier have a personal axe to grind when mentioning, “threaten employee with dismissal for speaking to the media, or threaten journalists implicitly with dire retribution if they do not toe the line”? As I have reviewed in detail, since moving to UBC in 1989 he was given no press exposure at all, in sharp contrast to Maria Klawe and Kellogg Booth, for computer graphics.

Fournier also made clear in his letter that he was not fond of working at Lucasfilm, though he would like to see “The Phantom Menace”:

“I am not looking forward to the June interviews (the “second wave”) telling us how wonderful it is to work for the creative genius and how the company appreciate the excellent training they got back in Canada. And yes, I am looking forward to see The Phantom Menace(TM).””

Fournier sounded hostile.

“The Phantom Menace” was the latest Star Wars movie being released, named “Episode I” because its storyline went back in time. Here is an excerpt from Janet Maslin’s movie review in The New York Times on May 19, 1999:

“Things look dicey for the new “Star Wars” crew when their undersea craft is threatened by a large aquatic critter. But then an even mightier beast appears, and it swallows up the first. “There’s always a bigger fish,” observes the Jedi sage Qui-Gon Jinn, speaking for more than marine life on the planet Naboo, where the sequence takes place. That description also sums up the earthly atmosphere into which George Lucas’s pathologically anticipated “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” arrives today.

… Nobody, not even camp followers ready to turn this souped-up “Star Wars” into the second coming of the Grateful Dead, wants to be sick and tired of a film before it hits the screen.

…

It goes without saying that those scenes also work hard to have kiddie appeal. “You mean I get to come with you in your starship?” exclaims pint-sized Anakin Skywalker, the prepubescent who will grow up to be Darth Vader and who is the new film’s most pandering creation. … Anakin seems to be here mostly to try out the film’s many toys. Only in the bland conception of Anakin is “The Phantom Menace” really undermined by its own innate boyishness. There’s no hint of the future in him, though the audience knows this is one high-pitched voice that’s really going to change.

…

… Whether dreaming up blow-dryer-headed soldiers who move in lifelike formation or a planet made entirely of skyscrapers, Mr. Lucas still champions wondrous visions over bleak ones and sustains his love of escapist fun. There’s no better tour guide for a trip to other worlds. Bon voyage.”

(“Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999) FILM REVIEW; In the Beginning, the Future”, by Janet Maslin, May 19, 1999, The New York Times)

Once upon a time Alain Fournier had been a George Lucas “camp follower” working with Bill Reeves at Lucasfilm, but in May 1999 he probably felt more like a “blow-dryer-headed soldier”, only “pathologically” looking forward to seeing The Phantom Menace.

I certainly feel resonance with Fournier’s criticism of ‘bad control’ that threatened employees with dismissal for speaking to the media, given the experiences of my UBC dispute with Klawe and the Canadian justice system’s suppression of my political activism to expose wrongs, as mentioned in Part 1.

But I was a pretty small fish compared to Fournier, and presumably he was to another.

In the mid-1990s there was one short TV news segment I saw that had a few seconds of appearance by Alain Fournier, showing computer graphics-generated, impeccably photographic images of the old Yuan-Ming imperial palace and gardens of China. Some of the images can be found on UBC Imager lab’s website.

(“The Main Imager Gallery”, April 12, 1996, Imager Laboratory, University of British Columbia; “Modeling of Rocks and Ornamental Garden Stones”, by Christopher J. Ellefson, April 1997, University of British Columbia, Pierre Poulin, Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal)

In a 2010 blog post on the history of Christianity in China, I mentioned some of the Jesuit missionaries’ roles in the 18th-century imperial China, including helping design the unprecedented Yuan-Ming palace and gardens – an infusion of Eastern and Western architectures and cultures:

“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.

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!”

(“Bangkok to Kwangtung, and back to America (Part 1) – Opening China to Christianity”, February 19, 2010, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The Yuan-Ming Palace, or Yuan-Ming Garden, was burned to ruins during the Second Opium War of 1860. Prior to his death, in January 2000 a research group led by Alain Fournier published a paper on their goal to recreate a digital version of the Yuan-Ming splendours:

“… Translated into English, Yuan Ming Yuan means “the Garden of Perfect Brightness.” In October 1860, at the peak of the Second Opium War (also known as the Arrow War), the British and French joint army set Yuan Ming Yuan on fire. The garden of gardens was burned to the ground in one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in recorded history. To bring Yuan Ming Yuan back to life, we’re building a digital version using computer graphics.

Emperor Kang Xi started Yuan Ming Yuan’s construction in the early Qing dynasty around 1700. Six generations of Qing emperors took 150 years to finish it. In its heyday, it covered 350 hectares and included more than 100 scenic sites ( Figure 2), hundreds of lakes interconnected through waterways, 2,000 architectural structures, millions of pieces of furniture and precious objects, and countless plants, trees, rocks, animals, and birds from all over the country. Yuan Ming Yuan was more than an imperial playland, it was the largest and richest museum China ever had.

…

Decades of work by scholars in China and the rest of the world has produced much research material on Yuan Ming Yuan. For example, researchers have discovered more than 1,000 pieces of blueprints of the original garden plan. During Yuan Ming Yuan’s construction, architects built small miniature models for the emperor’s approval. Many of these models still exist in the Forbidden City Museum.

…

We believe we can produce a meaningful reconstruction of Yuan Ming Yuan so that people can glimpse its original beauty, the imperial life, and its history, even if the digital version doesn’t fully match the original.”

(“Envisioning Yuan Ming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness)”, by Lifeng Wang, Christine Wang and Alain Fournier, January/February 2000, Volume 20, Issue No. 1, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications)

That sounded a very ambitious goal to start the New Millennium for peace, perhaps more so than the American Mathematical Society’s January 2000 publication of a biography book on my Ph.D. adviser Stephen Smale and his anti-war political activism as in Part  2, though the two were of contrasting political colors.

Whatever it was that he might feel his “drop of sanity” was not accorded fairly in “an ocean of hype”, and whether his “looking forward to see The Phantom Menace” implied anything hostile, when Fournier wrote to The Vancouver Sun it was only a little over a year before he would die of cancer.

On May 17, 1999, 9 days after publishing Fournier’s letter, The Vancouver Sun reported the successfully sale of a UBC educational software company, WebCT, to a Massachusetts-based educational software company, quoting Klawe’s appraisal that the new company “has a chance to be one of the university’s most successful spinoff companies, rivalling QLT Phototherapeutics and its light-based drug delivery systems”:

“A University of B.C. spinoff company that dominates the world market for on-line teaching software is being bought by a U.S. competitor.

However, WebCT Educational Technologies Corp. will remain in Vancouver and its staff will immediately double from 35 to 70.

Its software is used by about 700 universities and colleges in 36 countries to deliver on-line courses to about two million students.

WebCT is being bought by Universal Learning Technology of Peabody, Mass. The deal was closed last week and the announcement was to be made today.

…

WebCT founder and president Murray Goldberg, a UBC computer science instructor, began work on the software in 1995, and demonstrated it at a conference in Paris in mid-1996.

…

UBC computer sciences dean Maria Klawe said she thinks WebCT/ULT Canada has a chance to be one of the university’s most successful spinoff companies, rivalling QLT Phototherapeutics and its light-based drug delivery systems.

…

UBC retains ownership of the technology and will collect licensing fees and the company’s local growth will help fuel B.C.’s high-tech economy.

Klawe recalled Goldberg as a top graduate student in 1988, who later became an instructor with “the highest teaching evaluations I’d ever seen.”

She encouraged him to put his computer systems expertise together with his teaching strength “and do something in education technology.” A year later he obtained a grant to put one of his courses on-line.

He realized that process was “sort of a pain,” Klawe said, and decided to create tools to make it easier. The result was WebCT, which even professors not particularly computer-literate found they could use.

Klawe called Goldberg “one of the nicest, most energetic and brightest people I’ve known. This could not have happened to a more deserving individual.””

(“UBC spinoff software firm bought by U.S. competitor: WebCT educational technologies to remain in Vancouver, doubling size of its staff to 70”, by William Boei, May 17, 1999, The Vancouver Sun)

Clearly in the view of “computer sciences dean” Maria Klawe, medical applications were greater but an educational application for ease of use was good – with or without “special effects”, I can sense.

Klawe’s words that no one was “more deserving” than UBC computer science instructor and founder of WebCT, Murray Goldberg, stood in stark contrast to what Kellogg Booth had said in December 1994 on medical applications at B.C. Children’s Hospital, previously quoted:

“You may do something very good, but if it falls short of expectations, then you may have caused deep disappointment.”

Booth’s language may have sounded like the mafia’s, but Klawe had big ambitions for computer science’s applications, and for computer graphics to move in the direction of animation and video game. The lack of press coverage for Alain Fournier could mean that Fournier’s “very good” research might not meet that kind of “expectations”.

The hierarchical view that Klawe most likely held, ranked animation above high-quality images, and interactive games further above, for UBC computer graphics; and for UBC computer science more generally, it ranked user applications above scientific research per se, and medical applications further above.

Not unlike the unstated hierarchy exhibited by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under Leslie Berlowitz’s leadership in its 2009 induction announcement, various external considerations outweighed traditional academic merits.

The money generated by applications was doubtlessly a key factor, as illustrated by the various press stories’ emphasis on Klawe’s obtaining industry funding, much like Berlowitz’s emphasis on honoring business and philanthropy and, especially, contributions to the Academy.

Shortly before Alain Fournier’s death, in July 2000 a UBC controversy came to the press, regarding a special bonus pay only for faculty members in the computer science department and the computer and electrical engineering department:

“Professors in two University of B.C. departments will receive immediate bonuses, averaging $25,000, to keep them from leaving for more lucrative positions in the private sector and other academic institutions.

Faculty members in the computer science and the computer and electrical engineering departments will be given the payout, which could become an annual bonus.

While the university has, in the past, given bonuses based on merit to individual faculty members, it has never singled out whole departments for special pay.

The payout has generated anger among faculty members in other science departments, such as zoology, chemistry, physics and botany, who will not get similar raises.

“A university is not a dot.com company,” said Donald Fleming, a senior chemistry professor upset about the proposed pay raises. “A university is a collection of people dedicated to the idea of basic research.”

Fleming, a nuclear chemist who does research at the Tri-University Meson Facility (TRIUMF), considers it grossly unfair to create a separate pay scale for professors who could earn far more money in the private sector.

If UBC gives extra rewards to people in commercially hot fields, it devalues those doing excellent research in areas where there is little market pressure, he said.

“If I were in the department of English, I would tell the university to shove it.”

Fleming said he recognizes that market pressures make it hard for UBC to retain top-flight people in computer science. But he said there are other ways to keep them, such as making it easier for them to do outside consulting.

Another professor, who fears reprisals for speaking out, said all science departments are under pressure and are losing faculty to competitors willing to pay more. By creating divisions within the science department, collaborative efforts collapse.

“There are people in different faculties working on projects with people who are in departments that are getting raises,” he said. “What does that say about the worth of these collaborations?”

Michael Davies, head of the computer and electrical engineering department, said there is an immediate need to recruit more faculty and retain the existing teaching staff.

…

Universities in Alberta and Ontario are planning major expansions to their computer departments, said Davies. UBC must keep up or risk losing its standing among major Canadian universities.”

(“UBC faculty angered by bonuses for computer science, engineering profs”, by Petti Fong and Rebecca Wigod, July 12, 2000, The Vancouver Sun)

As quoted, computer and electrical engineering department head Michael Davies openly spoke of the need for the bonus, to retain good faculty members in the face of strong competition among Canadian universities; no computer science department person was cited, probably because the science dean, obviously a decision maker, was already from that department.

On the opposition side, one faculty member was cited saying it would create division among science faculty, but he stayed anonymous because he “fears reprisals for speaking out”; only one faculty member, nuclear chemist Donald Fleming, was named in expressing opposition, stating, “A university is not a dot.com company”, “A university is a collection of people dedicated to the idea of basic research.”

As dean of science Maria Klawe kept a low profile amid the heated debate, stating she would answer questions at a later meeting, letting the university’s acting director of public affairs handle the media:

“In an e-mail sent to dozens of faculty members in science departments, science dean Maria Klawe said she will answer questions about the increases at a meeting Thursday.

…

In the last year, the two departments have lost eight faculty members, an unacceptably high number, according to Debora Sweeney, UBC’s acting director of public affairs.

“The market for computer specialists has grown dramatically and suddenly, and it’s a trend that’s going to continue,” Sweeney said Tuesday. “We value all of our faculty, but we recognize the salary differential in certain fields has resulted in a higher market demand.”

The University of Toronto has given average bonuses of $22,000 to its computer faculty members each year since 1997, she said. The University of Washington in Seattle has increased wages for some of its computer
professors by 22 to 99 per cent.

The $1.375 million for the bonuses will come from royalties received from the university’s industry liaison office.

Sweeney said the bonuses still need to be approved by the faculty association.

In the association’s June newsletter, president Norma Wieland, who is out of town, wrote that the administration cannot unilaterally respond to market pressures that are luring computer scientists away from UBC.

Collective bargaining, she said, is the only process by which salary money at UBC can be distributed to faculty members.”

(Petti Fong and Rebecca Wigod, July 12, 2000, The Vancouver Sun)

As quoted, the decision needed the approval of UBC faculty association, and its president Norma Wieland had expressed opposition, stating that collective bargaining was the only process by which salary money could be distributed to faculty members.

As for Maria Klawe’s role, I note that, the special-bonus decision for faculty members in these two departments was consistent with her outlook of the academic hierarchy as reviewed earlier, i.e., her outlook was computer-industry influenced and applications dominated. In this case, the bonus money would come from UBC’s industry liaison office.

I also note that several months earlier on April 3, 2000, Klawe had been quoted in the press over UBC offering extra-high starting salaries to new computer science faculty members in order to compete with the University of Toronto:

“The University of B.C. recently offered two assistant computer science professors an extra $20,000 a year to lure them to its campus.

…

UBC dean of science Maria Klawe said the University of Toronto is brutal competition. It offers computer science professors — who are aggressively wooed by industry — starting salaries of $85,000 or more.

UBC pays its young scientists starting salaries of $63,000 to $67,000, but Klawe said it recently made job offers in the $85,000 range to two prospective assistant professors of computer science.

“There is just no way we would be able to get these people without going that high,” she said.”

(“Universities up ante in battle to attract top academic talent”, by Rebecca Wigod, April 3, 2000, The Vancouver Sun)

Clearly, Klawe wanted to extend the extra pay to all faculty members in computer-related fields, but encountered opposition from other science faculty members.

To be fair, the desire for better compensations on the part of computer scientists was not limited to UBC, as the same press story on the bonus controversy also quoted SFU computer science department head Jim Delgrande:

“The computer science department at Simon Fraser University will be asking for comparable bonuses, said its head, Jim Delgrande.

“Faculty retention and renewal is our number one problem,” Delgrande said. “We haven’t had any salary increases in B.C. in a number of years and, with salaries skyrocketing, we’re forced to compete and we can’t.”

Invariably, academics in areas such as commerce, medicine and computer science must draw larger salaries than their counterparts in social sciences, he said.

“People in philosophy spend heaps of time on their research and do really neat stuff, but the system is always going to have an intrinsic amount of injustice.”

Among Canadian universities, UBC pays, on average, the second highest salaries. Full professors earn about $96,000.

At the University of Toronto, the country’s largest university, full professors earn $102,743.

At comparable American institutions, salaries could be 10 per cent higher, before the exchange rate is considered.

Paying some specialties more money to avoid losing them to the private sector is shortsighted, said Jim Turk, the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

“It’s hard to predict what is going to be of value,” said Turk. “There are all sorts of disciplines that have turned out to have importance but no commercial factor, like people who do research into child poverty, social
workers.””

(Petti Fong and Rebecca Wigod, July 12, 2000, The Vancouver Sun)

As quoted, Jim Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, also expressed opposition – this was the same Canadian organization where William Bruneau, former UBC faculty association president who dealt with my dispute in August 1992, once served as president as quoted in Part 1.

As promised, 2 days later dean of science Maria Klawe gave her explanations in a “closed-door meeting”, i.e., reporters not allowed, to a group of faculty members from departments not receiving the bonuses. Klawe did not seem to clarify the bonus decision from her dean’s management position, but rather stated that as the dean she was not eligible for the money even though her husband was; ironically, rather than pursuing the real controversy the press story focused on this secondary matter, “UBC science dean won’t get controversial $25,000 bonus”:

“University of B.C. science dean Maria Klawe said Thursday she won’t be eligible for the bonus UBC wants to give its computer science professors.

Klawe, a professor of computer science, raised the matter herself during a closed-door meeting in which she explained the controversial bonuses to dozens of faculty members who won’t be getting them.

…

Some professors in other science departments say the plan is inherently unfair. Chemistry’s Donald Fleming said it will “destroy the university” if it goes through. His colleague Brian James said, “I think it’ll cause incredible chaos.”

At the meeting, from which reporters were barred, Klawe said deans are not eligible to receive such bonuses.

However, her husband, Nick Pippenger, would receive it because he is a professor of computer science.

“The husband is in the department and would be one of the individuals eligible, and she explained that,” Jim Horn, UBC’s associate vice-president of human resources, confirmed as he came out of the 90-minute meeting.

Called at his office, Pippenger refused to comment.

Horn said that when the skills of a particular group of professors are in high demand outside the university, as is the case in medicine and engineering, universities recognize this market differential.

…

Fleming, so far the most outspoken critic of the plan, said it seems to be a fait accompli.

Echoing him, James said it is “obviously a done deal.”

But Horn denied those assertions, saying the university must negotiate with the faculty association over special pay for the two groups of professors.

The bonuses must also be approved by two external bodies, the public sector employers’ council and the university public sector employers’ association.”

(“UBC science dean won’t get controversial $25,000 bonus: She says deans are not eligible to receive such bonuses — but her husband is because because he is a professor of computer science”, by Rebecca Wigod, July 14, 2000, The Vancouver Sun)

It looked like Klawe did not address the issue as the dean should and, again instead, brought in the higher management, letting UBC associate vice president of human resources Jim Horn address the fairness issue in general.

Donald Fleming criticised the preferential bonus decision as “a fait accompli”. This time he got the open support of his colleague Brian James – an interesting name – who called it “obviously a done deal”.

The preferential bonus decision was then supported by both vice president academic Barry McBride and chancellor William Sauder, despite reservations expressed by two UBC board of governors members:

“Chancellor William Sauder said if UBC doesn’t give more money to professors of computer science and electrical and computer engineering, the best people in the two departments will be lured away by lucrative job offers from other universities and private industry.

…

Vice-president (academic) Barry McBride said UBC must do something to balance the rich offers being made to these sought- after faculty members.

One respected public university in the United States pays full professors of computer science as much as $370,000 for nine months’ work, he said.

…

Sauder and McBride were responding to concerns raised by board member Patricia Marchak, a UBC professor and author and former dean of arts.

…

Board member Stephen Howard also expressed reservations about the planned bonuses, which still have to be approved by the faculty association.”

(“UBC chancellor backs hefty bonuses: Only two members of the university’s board of governors spoke against an extra $25,000 for professors in three science faculties”, by Rebecca Wigod, July 21, 2000, The Vancouver Sun)

Barry McBride, Maria Klawe’s superior in the UBC academic management, had a history of deferring to Klawe, including helping her put down my political activism as mentioned in Part 1.

Chancellor William Sauder, previously mentioned in a quote in Part 1 on the 1996 hiring of Martha Piper as UBC president, was a British Columbia business executive; so his pro-bonus stand wasn’t surprising. The press did not mention the opinion of UBC president Martha Piper, who was from Klawe’s alma mater, the University of Alberta.

(“Dr. William L. Sauder”, December 19, 2007, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia)

Reading the overall press coverage of the preferential bonus issue, I come to the impression that, ironically, the debate revealed the lack of academic freedom when it came to individual faculty members airing their disagreement with the management.

From the start, a faculty member expressed fears of reprisals. The one faculty member who spoke out with his name quoted, Donald Fleming, was described as: “a senior chemistry professor”, and “a nuclear chemist who does research at the Tri-University Meson Facility (TRIUMF)”, as quoted earlier. This suggests that only a senior professor whose research involved a prestigious nuclear facility could speak out without as much fear for reprisal from the authorities.

More to that, during 1999-2001 Fleming held an international research award, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize from Germany, and therefore any retaliation against him would risk creating an incident noticed by the international science community.

(“CSC 2002 Award winners announced”, 2002, Canadian Society for Chemistry Bulletin; and, “2004 GLENN T. SEABORG AWARD FOR NUCLEAR CHEMISTRY: Donald G. Fleming”, Division of Nuclear Chemistry & Technology, American Chemical Society)

So on the part of the faculty members, the carefully chosen open expression emphasized the prestige of the established academic hierarchy.

This faculty preferential bonus case therefore played out as a cultural clash, between a more industry- and application-oriented academic hierarchy Klawe and the UBC administration promoted and the prestige of the established academic hierarchy protected by collective bargaining.

I note the case’s striking similarities to my 1992 UBC dispute discussed in Part 1:

1) The official opinion on the faculty members’ side belonged to the faculty association, and its president Norma Wieland stated “collective bargaining” was the rule, while in 1992 its president William Bruneau emphasized “publish or perish” mentality as the reality;

2) there definitely were fears of reprisal on the part of individual faculty members when it came to speaking out, as one said so anonymously; here both Klawe as the dean and the university administration were the authorities;

3) like in 1992 when department head Klawe got dean of science Barry McBride to help suppress my opposition, this time dean Klawe got the university’s other management figures to face the public criticisms; and

4) like myself in 1992, only one faculty member, this time Donald Fleming, expressed opposition in his name openly, although his colleague Brian James later seconded him.

Now, I can see an academic-hierarchy rationale why my challenge of Klawe’s management style in 1991-1992 was so easily suppressed: given my lowly position in the established academic hierarchy, the tradition-minded faculty members likely did not take my issue seriously, and the faculty association’s collectivism simply screened it out.

So it is quite possible that established academic hierarchical propriety is behind why the UBC computer science department’s current “In Memoriam” page features former computing facility manager Rick Sample along with the late faculty members, but not former Imager lab founding researcher Peter Cahoon.

This also points to a rationale why Maria Klawe persistently described herself to the press as a “theoretical computer science researcher” when after 1995 she did research only on electronic games: when given an award or appointed to a prestigious academic management post, Klawe was likely mindful that an established academic might say, like Donald Fleming quoted earlier, “A university is not a dot.com company”.

This UBC preferential bonus episode happened just a month before Alain Fournier’s death. The timing was interesting: in the climate of emphasis on broader applications fostered by Klawe, whose side won the debate, Fournier likely paled in comparison to some others in computer graphics, such as Klawe with her video game project, and Booth overseeing medical applications.

In light of this, I note that in the January 2000 publication by Fournier and his collaborators proposing a digital version of the old Yuan-Ming Garden of China, discussed earlier, there was a commercialization aspect, a company started by Fournier’s collaborator, UBC computer science graduate Lifeng Wang:

“We believe a digital version of Yuan Ming Yuan is the best and most feasible way of restoration ( Figure 4). One of us (Lifeng Wang), a graduate from the Computer Graphics Research Group at the University of British Columbia, initiated the project. The project’s cultural and historical significance as well as its potential in other areas of research made it possible for the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (Magic) and Imager—computer graphics groups at UBC—to offer their support. Xing Xing Computer Graphics, an independent company founded to commercialize the project’s results, now manages the project.”

(Lifeng Wang, Christine Wang and Alain Fournier, January/February 2000, Volume 20, Issue No. 1, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications)

But it was too late for any allure of the Yuan-Ming Garden project and its commercialization to save Alain Fournier, who passed away quietly on August 14, 2000. His former student Eugene Fiume at the University of Toronto wrote an “appreciation” of Fournier:

“Alain’s early contributions to computer graphics on the modelling of natural phenomena were brilliant in themselves, but perhaps more importantly they advocated a methodology that required validation against real visual phenomena. This set the bar at the right level scientifically. His approach, which he once called “impressionistic graphics” both revolutionised the field and drove it forward. Perhaps the best example of this work is his beautiful paper on the depiction of ocean waves with Bill Reeves. His subsequent work on illumination models, light transport, rendering, and sampling and filtering is remarkable for its far-sightedness and depth. His theoretical work in computer graphics and computational geometry made us think about the limits of both fields.

…

If C.P. Snow were ever in need of a prototypical person to bridge the “Two Cultures” of Science and Art, Alain would be it. He was blessed with an irrepressible enthusiasm to communicate his understanding and his curiosity about the universe, and he did so in whatever language was most appropriate. He wrote wonderful mathematics, algorithms, prose and poetry. His vocabulary in English and in French was gently intimidating, for even in intimidation he was benevolent. It seemed that his intellect was able to synthesise everything he ever learned. He would routinely interject a Latin “bon mot” into the papers we were writing or practise writing Kanji on the napkins on which we were doing research. We rarely did research in an office. How I miss those days.

…

Alain’s wit, his innate “jeu d’esprit”, was legend. His fondness for good jokes, especially Groucho Marx gags, allowed some but not all of us to overlook his weakness for Jerry Lewis.”

(“Alain Fournier, 1943-2000: an appreciation”, by Eugene Fiume, Volume 19 Issue 4, October 2000, ACM Transactions on Graphics)

Samples of Fournier’s ocean-wave modeling and illumination modeling, among his specialties, can be found on UBC Imager lab’s website.

(April 12, 1996, Imager Laboratory, University of British Columbia)

As Fiume told it, Fournier had called his own graphics “impressionistic graphics”, or as I have noted, impeccably photographic images. but they were not so much Klawe’s preferences of the more dynamic animation and the more interactive electronic games; in building his craft Fournier did “wonderful mathematics, algorithms”, close to Klawe’s research fields but the more ambitious boss wanted industry orientation and consumer applications.

On October 2, 2000, in the same month when Fiume published the above-quoted article in memory of Fournier, Maria Klawe was described in a Montreal Gazette newspaper story, as one of the “digital dozen” of “goddesses of tech”, like Grace Murray Hopper:

“Denise Shortt calls herself a gender and technology analyst. A founder of the Wired Women Society (www.wiredwoman.com) and co-author of the just released book Technology With Curves, she nevertheless shies away from calling herself a techie. “I’m a woman who knows how important technology will become,” she says.

But Shortt knows more than that. She knows how underplayed women’s contributions have been, to the extent that when profiles of the “gods” of the new technology appeared in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, not one woman showed up on the magazine’s radar.

…

Dig a little and it becomes clear that women have been, and continues to be, very involved in computer technology, albeit always holding minority status, painfully aware of how much work is needed to create a critical mass.

Take Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, who delivered the first compiler, the A-O, in 1952 and was instrumental in the development of the Mark series of computers at Harvard.

Another mathematician, Betty Holberton, wrote the C-10 instruction code for the Univac I, which made programming easier and faster, designed the control console, keyboards and numeric keypad for the Univac I, served on the committee that developed Cobol and wrote standards for the Fortran language.

But they were not considered professionals, according to Kay Mauchly Antonelli, one of the programming women. “To be a professional, you had to be a man; that was the way it was,” she recalls.

Shortt’s “digital dozen,” described in detail in her book, include Anita Borg, a “Silicon Valley superstar” who heads the Institute for Women and Technology at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre. With a PhD in research into operating systems, she has developed tools for predicting the performance of microprocessor memory systems, the basis of many of today’s performance-analysis tools.

…

Then there’s Sherry Turkle, professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first woman to make the cover of Wired magazine, and author and chair of the commisson on gender and technology for the American Association of University Women.

In Canada, we have Maria Klawe, dean of science at the University of British Columbia, past chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Mathematical Society and currently holder of the NSERC-IBM Chair for Women in Science and Engineering at UBC.

After years at IBM Research in California, then at the University of Toronto and UBC, Klawe has also founded and directed E-GEMS, a large-scale collaborative project involving the development of computer software for girls, as well as SWIFT, a technology group for women.

“She’s Canadian, and has the respect of the international stage,” Shortt says.

Others among the “digital dozen” are Esther Dyson, president of Edventure Holdings and interim chair of the leading Internet governance body; Kim Polese, president and CEO of Marimba Inc., who helped create the computer language JAVA while at Sun Microsystems; Geraldine Laybourne, head of Oxygen Media Inc., founded with Oprah Winfrey; and Janese Swanson, founder of Girl Tech.

…

“I can tell Vanity Fair where the women are,” Shortt says. Meet the “goddesses of tech.””

(“High-tech has its goddesses: Book tells who they are”, by Donna Nebenzahl, October 2, 2000, The Gazette)

A goddess is much more divine than an “evangelist” – what Klawe was referred to as after she had become UBC’s chair for women in science and engineering – and more divine than even a religious guru. She can be a great inspiration, but can she be held accountable as a decision maker? UBC’s handling of the science faculty’s preferential bonus issue showed Klawe using other management figures to deal with faculty open opposition and press questions.

Just like I have mentioned in Part 1, Klawe was very public-relations minded and her media profile was nearly spotless.

One exception, as in Part 1, was in 1995 after she had become UBC vice president, when her handling of the firing of UBC women’s basketball coach Misty Thomas, showing her deceptiveness in manipulating opinions and shifting blames, led to a controversy in the press and criticism by player Lori Kamp.

In Part 2, I have reviewed a The New York Times article that intriguingly appeared on September 11, 2001, the day of the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in the U.S., featuring William Ayers, former leader of the Weather Underground organization that had carried out anti-Vietnam War terrorist bombings in the U.S. during the 1970s.

On that same day, the Canadian newspaper National Post featured Maria Klawe in an article with an interestingly combative title, “Educator shakes Dilbert image”, about her goal of changing computer science’s “Dilbert image”:

“For too many people, computer scientists have a nerdy, Dilbert image, and Dr. Maria Klawe would like to reprogram that way of thinking. “We need to work hard with the entertainment and media industry to change the image of these kinds of careers. I know many men and women in this industry who lead well-rounded lives,” she says.

“I think if we don’t get a broader representation from our society and the people who are designing and developing our technology, we are not going to get the technology that will best serve society.”

It is about education. That is where Dr. Klawe starts and pushes against the odds. As the dean of science at the University of British Columbia, she has led research teams to fashion software to both delight, entertain and teach math, especially to girls often disinclined to try.

Her passion earned her the Educator of the Year title at this year’s Canadian New Media Awards. “The profile helps a lot because it’s recognition across the country and it’s a great accomplishment. They’ve been selected from the cream of the crop, so it’s a great profile,” says Elizabeth Doyle, the awards producer.

For Dr. Klawe, also the IBM/Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council chairwoman for Women in Science and Engineering at UBC, the award is for her team, as well as currency with which to develop her initiatives.

…

On changing images, Dr. Klawe knows plenty of computer scientists who would gladly provide career advice, movie plotlines or characters for free. She is working to change public perceptions, but is looking for that “hook” to get Hollywood players to the table.

It’s like getting people to quit smoking … you have to do a lot of things and it takes a lot of time – but over time, it’s happening.”

(“Educator shakes Dilbert image”, by Diane Lu-Hovasse, September 11, 2001, National Post)

Klawe did not actually say to “shake” the Dilbert image, but to “reprogram” people’s thinking about computer scientists’ nerdy image, and recruit more well-rounded people to computer science. That of course would take “a lot of time”, but “it’s happening” as long as the big sponsors of Klawe’s chair for women in science and engineering, i.e., IBM and the Canadian government, were willing to finance her public-relations reprogramming.

Just like in 1989 when she failed to “hook” Bill Reeves to UBC, Klawe has not succeeded with Hollywood since September 11, 2001, presumably because Hollywood hasn’t decided to get people “quit smoking” the way she wanted.

But the globally influential Fortune magazine has taken Klawe as one of its World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, as in Part 1, on March 20, 2014 – a leading business magazine that would like to see people try using marijuana, and quit smoking.

(“The big business of Marijuana, Inc.”, March 21, 2013, “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders”, March 20, 2014, “Tobacco CEO and CVS exec both want people to quit smoking”, by Beth Kowitt, October 23, 2014, “High times: Behind the scenes at a women’s pot conference”, by Sara Davidson, June 2, 2015, and, “Raising worker pay reduces smoking”, by Claire Zillman, August 7, 2015, Fortune)

Regardless, the notion of changing the Dilbert nerdy image also confirms my analysis of Klawe’s hierarchical view of computer graphics, i.e., image versus animation versus games, each above the previous: Dilbert had been a newspaper comic strip since April 1989; during 1999-2000 it was also an animated TV series; but neither was up to the level of “well-rounded lives” in Klawe’s electronic games for girls.

(“Dilbert”, Wikipedia)

But was this technological hierarchy the story, namely that a good faculty member with fine-quality research – Alain Fournier – came to UBC in Vancouver in 1989, but his background and focus did not meet the goals of the boss – Maria Klawe – and he was not given press coverage, was left behind by the boss’s dynamic games focus and politically ambitious public-relations drive, and died of cancer in relative obscurity in 2000?

The coincidence of Fournier’s death in the same year with the illness death of Peter Cahoon, together the founding faculty member and founding researcher of UBC’s computer graphics field in 1989 as discussed in Part 2, was just too eerie.

A more recent self-revelation by Maria Klawe, that she has had some psychological issues for a long time, may shed some new light.

As discussed in Part 1, in October 2014 when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella appeared with Klawe at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, the former rebuffed the idea that female employees should ask for a pay raise, saying:

“It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise”.

(“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Women: Don’t Ask For A Raise, Trust Karma”, by Selena Larson, October 9, 2014, ReadWrite)

Then in a follow-up, Nadella issued an apology to women, saying that Klawe was right that they should ask for pay raises:

“Maybe she didn’t exactly anticipate this at the time, but Maria Klawe offered women a rare glimpse at think-on-your-feet leadership last week.

Unfortunately, it was nearly overshadowed by controversy.

… Towards the end of their nearly hour-long conversation, Nadella offered this suggestion:

“It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise. That might be one of the initial ‘super powers,’ that quite frankly, women (who) don’t ask for a raise have. It’s good karma. It will come back.”

His quote was picked up by ReadWrite and quickly (and appropriately) spurred ire around the web. 

Not surprisingly, he issued a swift apology, which deferred to Klawe: “Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.””

(“THE PERFECT CASE AGAINST MICROSOFT CEO’S REMARK THAT WOMEN SHOULDN’T ASK FOR RAISES”, by Lydia Dishman, October 14, 2014, Fast Company)

It was quite rude for Nadella to have put it his way, namely that not asking for a pay raise is “good karma”, when Klawe had been praising him for nearly an hour in front of a large audience:

“Though it was great that Nadella acknowledged Klawe after the fact, her polite but firm dissent is an example for women in any industry when confronted by a tone-deaf response from a male leader —even one you admire.

When their talk began, Klawe gave Nadella praise for being the first male CEO of a major company to speak at a plenary session during the technical executive forum.

The conversation led by Klawe and questions from the attendees covered such topics as career choices and work-life balance, the latter not usually asked of men. Throughout, Klawe agreed with Nadella’s assessments and advice—until the point where he fumbled the question on pay raises. Klawe, who spent the earlier part of the conversation talking about how much she admired Nadella, didn’t miss a beat before saying this was one of the few things she didn’t agree with him on.”

(Lydia Dishman, October 14, 2014, Fast Company)

But perhaps Nadella already knew – given Klawe’s Microsoft board directorship since 2009 – that Klawe had the trait of praising an important job opportunity when given it and later complaining about low pay, and so he had “karma” in mind about her:

“To back up her dissent, Klawe quickly pulled anecdotes from her own career, citing the time she neglected to negotiate salary before accepting the position of dean of engineering at Princeton, a mistake she estimates set her back about $50,000 per year. She remarked that she did it again when staying mum on the salary offer for her current presidentship, even though she felt as though it was low. “Don’t be as stupid as I was,” Klawe told the audience.”

(Lydia Dishman, October 14, 2014, Fast Company)

That was blunt, the leader of ground-breaking electronic game projects for girls, Counting on Frank, Phoenix Quest, and Virtual Family, calling herself “stupid” at a leading technology conference for women – in doing so she also exposed certain stinginess on the part of the world renowned Princeton University and the elite Harvey Mudd College she has been leading!

This “goddess of tech” then acknowledged that she had had “impostor syndrome” for decades:

“Klawe also notes, “One of the things I am very deliberate about is talking about my own failures.” Indeed she spoke to us candidly about her decades-long battle with impostor syndrome and her strategies to stop feeling like a fraud. This is extremely important, says Klawe, because, “I am generally regarded as being successful and people think we don’t make mistakes.””

(Lydia Dishman, October 14, 2014, Fast Company)

So there were things wrong, at least psychologically, with Maria Klawe all these decades, that when others regarded her as successful, she privately felt like “a fraud”; she attributed it to Impostor Syndrome, defined as follows:

“Impostor syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence. 

It is basically feeling that you are not really a successful, competent, and smart student, that you are only imposing as such. 

Some common feelings and thoughts that might characterize the impostor syndrome are: “I feel like a fake” “My classmates/professors etc. are going to find out I don’t really belong here,” “Admissions made a mistake,” etc.”

(“THE IMPOSTOR SYNDROME”, Caltech Counseling Center)

But there may indeed be substance in Klawe’s private feeling of “fraud”, in the sense that, as competent and as ambitious as she has been, Klawe may have played the career field, fudged her credentials and manipulated others in ways that inflated her image.

One instance discovered by my review of press coverage is her continuing to brand herself as “theoretical computer science researcher” even after she had stopped publishing in that field and instead concentrated on electronic games.

As pointed out earlier, when an ambitious academic management leader was exulted and held up as a “goddess of tech”, it can mean intellectual and other frauds creeping into decision-making accountability – even if it was not as obvious as Leslie Berlowitz’s claiming a nonexistent Ph.D. degree in her resume.

And there was at least one instance when a prestigious but non-existent University of Toronto Ph.D. of Klawe’s was reported in the major press.

In early 1995 after she had become UBC vice president, a The Vancouver Sun story featuring 10 members of “B.C.’s emerging professional establishment” touted Klawe by stating, “You’d be hard-pressed to find a more likely candidate for the future presidency of UBC or some other Canadian university than this high-achiever”, and included a false “PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto”. The full profile was as follows:

“Name: Maria Klawe

Age:44

Born: Edmonton

Education: PhD in mathematics at the University of Alberta; PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto

Position:Vice-president, academic and student services, at the University of B.C.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more likely candidate for the future presidency of UBC or some other Canadian university than this high-achiever.

Klawe left a research job with IBM in California to become head of UBC’s computer science faculty in 1988. In January she was named UBC vice-president.

“I’ve always liked to have a life that has many different components. One of which now is being a researcher, another being a teacher, and another is trying to get the organization I’m involved in to grow in a particular direction.”

She sees UBC as key to B.C.’s economy becoming based more on knowledge than on natural resources. And she doesn’t tire of university committee meetings.

“I’m one of the few people who really loves being an administrator. I just love that job. I don’t think of it as being a bureaucrat.”

Oh, she also runs marathon races.”

(“THE NEW PROFESSIONALS Series: EMERGING ELITE”, by Doug Ward, February 27, 1995, The Vancouver Sun)

Klawe’s current official resume correctly lists her study at the University of Toronto that ended without a formal degree:

“EDUCATION

B.Sc., Mathematics, University of Alberta, 1973

Ph.D., Mathematics, University of Alberta, 1977

Graduate Studies, Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1979”

(February 7, 2014, Harvey Mudd College)

So by 1995 not only that issues raised by me of her management style had been swept under the carpet by UBC, but that Klawe emerged in the major press with a falsely claimed Ph.D. from Canada’s top university, and with the potential to be the No. 1 boss in the future.

In my view that involved a degree of intellectual fraud and managerial fraud, eve though I have no question about Klawe loving “being an administrator” since she barely taught in her first 4 years at UBC, as reviewed earlier.

Compared to Leslie Berlowitz’s resume fudging scandal, Maria Klawe didn’t even ‘keep a low profile’ about it – so to speak – with her unique front page A1 feature and photo, while the other 9 emerging establishment professionals were on page B2, in this February 27, 1995 The Vancouver Sun article; also, ahead of her profile was an introduction of 2 ‘old guards’ of the B.C. professional establishment, Peter Butler and Richard Henriquez:

“Second in a series; The other nine are on page B2.; PROFILE OF MARIA KLAWE; Today we profile 10 people, including Maria Klawe, right, who are part of B.C.’s emerging professional establishment.

They have their PowerBooks, 60-hour work weeks, bulging briefcases and stress.

They are the emerging professionals, men and women taking over files and challenges from an older crowd that came of age in the ’70s and the ’80s.

…

If they’re lucky they’ll be like prominent lawyer Peter Butler and have few regrets about rising to the top ranks of their profession.

“I loved every minute of it,” says the 62-year-old veteran litigator from Farris Vaughan Wills and Murphy.

There are tradeoffs, he adds. “Nothing is perfect in life.”

… 

“Lots of it is fluke: Who you know, what cases you had.”

…

Butler says his profession has always been a highly competitive one.

“Everybody still wants to win. I’d say it’s a tough profession to do well in unless you’re prepared to work like hell.”

…

Butler is currently at home on extended sick leave and not sure when he will return or for how long. He says up-and-comers should be allowed to make their mark – and “old blokes shouldn’t stay around forever.”

Butler admits to missing his profession. “It’s very difficult sitting at home when you don’t have any hobbies and you sit around and watch O.J.”

One of Vancouver’s top architects says a passion for your craft is necessary for professional success.

“I guess that”s what keeps anyone going in whatever field,” says Richard Henriquez, 54, of Henriquez and Partners.

He adds: “Everyone has to pay their dues. And part of paying your dues is working long hours and doing the best you can. There’s no magic about it.”

…

“It’s a very competitive, very stressful profession. And it’s getting more and more litigious. People are suing other people and you have to be more careful than ever.”

…

But people do recognize people like Butler and Henriquez as professionals who epitomize success.

And all the professions have comers who are following their path, including 10 people profiled today in The Vancouver Sun.

Name: Maria Klawe

…”

(Doug Ward, February 27, 1995, The Vancouver Sun)

Peter Butler’s law firm, Farris Vaughan Wills and Murphy, happened to represent UBC as a defendant in my civil lawsuit filed in October 1992 over the UBC dispute, mentioned by me in a March 2012 blog post:

“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.

In October 1992 UBC chose Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy as its lawyer, after lawyer Brian Mason and I filed my lawsuit. UBC’s statement of defence was filed by Jack Giles, a lawyer as successful and nearly as prominent as Peter Butler.”

(“Team 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”, March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It seemed quite clear that Klawe was confident her newspaper front-page falsification of academic pedigree would not cause her problems given her profile as an emerging professional establishment figure in British Columbia to succeed someone like lawyer Peter Butler. Persons who knew the real facts would not contradict her, or could not express themselves freely like my under oppression, as I recalled in a September 2013 blog post:

“… 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.”

(“Team 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”, September 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

It certainly appeared that intellectual dishonesty and fraud became a part of leadership and justice.

Klawe’s championing of women’s issues also led to a controversy as to whether it inflated her leadership ability, when a long-time Princeton faculty member said to Klawe, then the new dean of engineering and applied sciences, as previously quoted in Part 1:

“I don’t have to listen to a word you say, because I know you only got the job because you’re female”.

(“How some universities are attracting more women to math, science programs”, by James Bradshaw, November 25, 2012, The Globe and Mail)

This unnamed long-time Princeton professor may or may not have been right – Klawe herself admitted that such doubts had merits when it came to her past, as in Part 1 – just like UBC senior nuclear chemist Donald Fleming’s strong opposition to the computer-related faculty preferential bonuses may or may not have been fair; but one gets a sense that only the established seniors like these two dared to challenge Klawe. So who knows in how many other cases a fraud might have been accepted as “a fait accompli”?

So was with my early-1990s dispute with Klawe at UBC: when I raised certain issues about her management the authorities dismissed or ignored them, dealt me with repercussions and, worse, maintained a degree of suppression indefinitely, probably intended to last permanently – to me that has been perpetuation of managerial fraud and political fraud.

As discussed in Part 1, when members of an academic institution had other concerns or agendas, they could well choose covering up over opening up a certain issue about the management, have the faculty organization leader – UBC faculty association president William Bruneau in my case – explain it away by collectivism – incorrectly branding my case as of “publish or perish” mentality or syndrome – and even falsely blame it on violence.

In such a mindset, it would be convenient for them if an ambitious and power-driven boss was elevated to a “goddess” status at the expense of scientific integrity and intellectual honesty – and of course it wouldn’t hurt to receive a $25,000 special bonus courtesy of the “goddess”.

Likewise, what happened to Alain Fournier and Peter Cahoon, particularly if they were not treated fairly in their 11 years founding and developing the computer graphics field at UBC, may be relevant to issues of scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, namely the lack of such, and possibly fraud. 

Some facts about another dimension of Alain Fournier’s life may shed more light onto these issues.

When I was Fournier’s colleague I was quite aware that his wife Adrienne Drobnies was a fellow UC Berkeley alumnus, and we conversed about it on at least one occasion.

As quoted earlier from Fournier’s biography for the 1994 CHCCS Achievement Award, it was Drobnies accepting a job at Children’s Hospital in Vancouver in 1989 that brought Fournier to UBC; prior to that in 1985-1987, it was Drobnies in the San Francisco Bay Area that led Fournier, then a University of Toronto faculty member, to spend time at Stanford, UC Santa Cruz and Xerox PARC, and do collaborative work with Bill Reeves at George Lucas’s Lucasfilm – by the time Reeves visited UBC in 1988-1989 that animation unit had become Steve Jobs’s Pixar.

In 1990 while on my fixed-term assistant professor position, I applied for a tenure-track one within the UBC computer science department, and that position was later offered to Jack Snoeyink because of his research connection to computer graphics, as recalled in my May 2011 blog post:

“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.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

At the time of writing the above-quoted blog post, I was mindful of Klawe’s link to a missing reference for me, mentioned in Part 1; but now with the knowledge about Fournier’s prior stay at Stanford, it becomes apparent that the UBC computer graphics group’s intent to hire Snoeyink had likely been in place earlier, i.e., before my applying for the position.

Snoeyink was a new Stanford Ph.D. in 1990, having studied under Leo Guibas, specializing in computational geometry.

(“Jack Snoeyink: Professor”, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and, “Leonidas J. Guibas”, Leonidas Guibas Laboratory, Stanford University)

Fournier’s own Ph.D. study, at the University of Texas at Dallas, had been in computational geometry and computer graphics, creating a new method for drawing images of mathematical fractals, as described in his 1994 CHCCS Achievement Award biography:

“After 8 years of college teaching, he decided to undertake graduate studies in computer science, and entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Dallas. There he successively realized that there was more to computer science than programming, that this “more” was actually interesting, and that making pictures with computers looked like a potentially enjoyable activity. The latter revelation was mediated by the presence of Henry Fuchs and his frame buffer.

When Henry Fuchs departed for the University of North Carolina, he started his Ph.D. work with Zvi Kedem in computational geometry, but got rapidly side-tracked, and tried with fellow graduate student Don Fussell to reproduce some of Beniot Mendelbrot’s amazing images. They developed their own recursive subdivision method to generate approximations of fractional Brownian motion, together with methods to map the result unto objects modelled as piece-wise parametric surfaces. This became the core of his Ph.D. dissertation completed in 1980.”

(CHCCS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS, Graphics Interface)

Given their being in the same field of computational geometry, in the mid-1980s visiting Stanford Fournier must have connected to Guibas. This was confirmed by a fact Eugene Fiume – author of an “appreciation” of Fournier quoted earlier – stated in 1989, that Guibas was one of the members of “various committees” involved in his Ph.D study under Fournier at the University of Toronto; Fiume had received his Ph.D. in 1986.

(Eugene L. Fiume, The Mathematical Structure of Raster Graphics, 1989, Academic Press)

Computational geometry is a branch of theoretical computer science, connected to mathematics as mentioned in earlier discussions regarding the research of Michael Sipser and a number of other academics in complexity theory. A part of my research was in theoretical computer science, and thus the UBC position that went to Snoeyink in 1990 was the one I had applied to.

Interestingly also in 1990, my then colleague David Kirkpatrick, who brought Snoeyink to UBC for the job interview, presented at an symposium in Tokyo, Japan, a paper collaborated with me, and Guibas, then at MIT, said he and some collaborators had done similar work; so we added their names onto the 1993 journal publication of the research.

Snoeyink later moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

“Originally American, around year 2000 Jack Snoeyink moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Forunier’s 1994 CHCCS Achievement Award biography quote earlier mentioned Henry Fuchs, who was a faculty member at UT Dallas when Fournier started his Ph.D. study there, but who then moved to UNC Chapel Hill. Fuchs is now a distinguished professor there, and so Snoeyink’s move to that school may have been related.

(“Henry Fuchs: Federico Gil Distinguished Professor”, Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

The intimateness of the academic connections had been something I was unfamiliar with, and it no doubt put me in a disadvantage when it came to advancing within the academic hierarchy.

Worse, my predicament was exacerbated when senior UBC persons, namely Klawe and Kirkpatrick, used deceptions to deal with my application for a tenure-track job.

Kirkpatrick had assured me of his support, telling me that my chance was good and there should be no problem, but then brought in Snoeyink for an interview that Kirkpatrick claimed was for a postdoctoral position, and did not even notify me when the tenure-track faculty position was offered to Snoeyink, as described in my May 2011 blog post:

“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.

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.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

For that early-1990 application for a tenure-track position, I requested 5 references from various senior professors in the academia, but only 3 arrived; though 3 met the minimal need, department head Klawe did not bother to let me know some letters of reference did not arrive, even when a missing one was from her friend, Berkeley professor Richard “Dick” Karp:

“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.

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.

A meticulously commanding professor, Karp was also a close friend of Maria Klawe and Nicholas Pippenger…”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

In the summer of 1990 I intended to keep my tenure-track job application active for 1991, but Klawe subtly pressured me to withdraw it:

“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.

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.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As illustrated, there was a degree of intellectual dishonesty and probably fraud, with Klawe the department head representing UBC management in handling my application for a tenure-track position in 1990; also, in 1990 Kirkpatrick’s wife Pamela was a B.C. Supreme Court Master, as I recalled in my March 2012 blog post:

“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.”

(March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

To begin with, back in the spring of 1988 when offered a position by UBC, I was also given the assurance by the acting department head Uri Ascher that if the potential new head Klawe and her husband Pippenger chose not to come, there would be more open positions and I would be offered a tenure-track one:

“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.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

I was still in Berkeley in the summer of 1988, and Karp told me that Klawe and Pippenger had accepted UBC’s offer, i.e., my job would only be fixed-term:

“… 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.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

According to Klawe, it was her husband Nick Pippenger who decided the couple should go to UBC:

“By 1988, among the shower of offers that Klawe and Pippenger had received from IBM Almaden, DEC Research in Cambridge, Mass., the University of Texas in Austin, and the University of California at San Diego was one from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Of all the options, UBC paid the least, and had only an annual budget of only $4,000 for computers for the entire department,” Klawe recounted. “Then Nick said, ‘We claim to be idealistic. Maybe we should make the idealistic choice and do what nobody in their right mind would do.’”

So they went to UBC.”

(Trudy E. Bell, Fall 2012, The Bent of Tau Beta Pi)

At UBC, Klawe’s management style could sometimes be traced to the personality of her husband Pippenger. In fact, I had already been cautioned in the summer of 1988 when Richard Karp at Berkeley told me that the couple had accepted UBC’s offer, as I recalled in my May 2011 blog post:

“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.”

Not the least because Nick was a prestigious ‘IBM Fellow’.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

There was another incident that also happened in the spring of 1990 – when I was applying for a tenure-track position – regarding visiting faculty candidate Pascal van Hentenryck, due to Pippenger’s sometimes harsh personality and Klawe’s deceptive management tactics:

“In my … June 18 [1992] 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 1990 incident involving faculty candidate Pascal van Hentenryck, here as described in the letter:

“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. …”

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.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted, during his seminar talk van Hentenryck had a debate with Pippenger that upset the latter; afterwards, even though the department decided to include van Hentenryck among the persons to receive job offers, his name disappeared from the list after department head Klawe took it to dean of science Barry Mcbride; a female candidate with a similar priority made it on the list after her conferring with the dean.

As the head, Klawe’s work for the department’s expansion was commendable, but her management style was not necessarily a good fit overall – an issue carefully addressed by me in consultation with Kirkpatrick and others before being raised, as previously quoted in Part 1:

“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.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

But of course, my challenge of Klawe’s headship management failed in 1992.

In hindsight, Alain Fournier’s wife Adrienne Drobnies appeared to be the one who triggered all the events that led to the arrival of Jack Snoeyink: she was a fellow UC Berkeley alumni who first brought Fournier to Stanford in the mid-1980s, and then to UBC in 1989, leading to Fournier bringing Snoeyink to UBC in 1990 and the loss of my longer-term prospect.

If the above and earlier-discussed interrelated events were not coincidental, then there may have been more in their history.

Fournier and Drobnies had Texas and chemistry in common in their pasts.

Growing up in Texas and California, Adrienne Drobnies had received her Berkeley chemistry Ph.D. in 1979 – 9 years ahead of my mathematics Ph.D.

(Adrienne Elizabeth Drobnies, Kinetics and Thermodynamics of Double Strand Formation in Selected Deoxyoligonucleotides, 1979, University of California, Berkeley; and, “Adrienne Drobnies”, adriennedrobnies.com)

A fellow Ph.D. student of Drobnies’s in the late 1970s at Berkeley referred to her as “a comrade in anarchy”, a sort of being active I guess:

“Regarding the graduate student members of Nacho’s Nucleases, Soo Frier, Mark Watts and Kyong Yoon were available for many informative discussions during my first years in the group, (Kyong also procurred my supply of pBR 322.) Adrienne Drobnies was a comrade in anarchy In the department and group. Carlos Bustamante provided the opportunity for theoretical discussions and a different perspective on the USA, the world and space. …”

(“THE INTERACTIONS OF 4-NITROQUINOLINE-I-OXIDE WITH NUCLEIC ACIDS”, by  Stephen Alan Winkle, August 1979, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley)

Born in Lyon, France, and trained to be a chemical engineer, Alain Fournier moved to Montreal, Canada, studied chemistry and became a chemistry instructor. Then by the mid-late 1970s, he was at UT Dallas studying for a computer science Ph.D.

(CHCCS ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS, Graphics Interface; Eugene Fiume, Volume 19 Issue 4, October 2000, ACM Transactions on Graphics; and, “Alain Fournier, a life in pictures”, Pierre Poulin, Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal)

It is unclear from the publicly available information how the two became connected, but reportedly in 1984 Fournier divorced Beverly, his first wife since 1968, and not long after should have married Drobnies as their daughter Ariel was born on March 5, 1987.

(Pierre Poulin, Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal; “Ariel Jeanne Fournier”, California Birth Index 1905-1995, FamilySearch.org; and, “ALAIN FOURNIER BEVERLY BICKLE”, August 17, 1968, Texas Marriage Record Index 1966-2008, and, “ALAIN FOURNIER vs BEVERLY FOURNIER”, Texas Divorce Record Index 1968-2002, Mocavo)

I should caution that the online records cited above on what could be the first marriage and divorce of Alain Fournier in Texas have not been independently verified.

There was an additional facet in the union of Alain Fournier and Adrienne Drobnies, that was likely a factor in the events. Drobnies’s late father, Saul Drobnies, was also a mathematician who did research in computational methods.

Saul Drobnies’s obituary indicated that he grew up in Dallas, received his mathematics Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, and worked for General Dynamics in Fort Worth – near Dallas – before moving to teach at San Diego State University:

“Dr. Saul Drobnies, Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Sciences at San Diego State University, died October 22, 2002, at San Diego Hospice, of lung cancer. He was born on June 8, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, and moved with his parents, Abraham and Lee Drobnies, to Dallas, Texas, when he was five years old. He graduated from Forest Avenue High School in Dallas in January, 1950, and briefly attended Southern Methodist University before moving to Austin to attend the University of Texas, where he received all of his academic degrees. He studied with the renowned mathematician and teacher, R. L. Moore, and completed his doctoral studies in 1961 under the guidance of Hubert S. Wall. Dr. Drobnies worked for General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas, and taught mathematics at San Diego State University from 1963 until his retirement in the early nineties.

He is survived by his former wife and friend, Ana LaReal Drobnies, of San Diego; by his sister, Naomi Baxter, of Yorba Linda, California; and by his daughter, Adrienne Drobnies, and granddaughter, Ariel Fournier, both of Vancouver, Canada. …”

(“Obituaries”, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, San Diego State University)

Saul Isaac Drobnies’s 1961 Ph.D. thesis was titled, “Concerning the uniform polynomial approximation of a bounded function”; he moved to then San Diego State College in the fall of 1963 as announced in SIAM Review, and in 1974 became an associate dean of the College of Science at San Diego State University.

(“News and Notices: Personal Notices”, Volume 5, Number 4, October 1963, SIAM Review; (“Alumni Notes”, July/August 1974, Alcalde; and, “Mathematics Alumni”, Department of Mathematics, The University of Texas at Austin)

The Ph.D. academic backgrounds of Alain Fournier and Saul Drobnies remind me that back in 1988 before taking up the UBC computer science headship, Maria Klawe had entertained headship offers from 3 universities: UT Austin, UC San Diego and UBC, quoted earlier.

Saul Drobnies’s alma mater UT Austin was a top U.S. public university ranked No, 12 nationally – for convenience I use recent university ranking data – that is considerably higher than Alain Fournier’s alma mater UT Dallas at No. 46 – a fact acknowledged by UT Dallas in reporting this 2015 ranking by the American City Business Journals:

“UT Dallas has been named among the top public universities in the nation by the American City Business Journals.

UT Dallas ranked 46th out of 484 public universities and colleges nationwide. The three Texas universities listed in the top 100 were UT Austin (12th), Texas A&M (20th) and UT Dallas (46). The next highest Texas institution in the ranking was Texas Tech University at No. 117.”

(“UT Dallas Ranks 3rd Among Texas Public Universities in New List”, February 13, 2015, The University of Texas at Dallas)

The same 2015 rankings rated UC San Diego at No. 14, considerably higher than Saul Drobnies’s former institution San Diego State University at No. 60.

(“2015 rankings of U.S. public colleges”, by G. Scott Thomas, February 12, 2015, The Business Journals)

Academic brands are not unlike business brands. From this viewpoint, Fournier’s educational and family academic backgrounds could be additional factors for Klawe to consider in 1989 when weighing his hiring, aware also of Adrienne Drobnies’s influence on Fournier; it could be as follows in my analysis:

a) Fournier was moving from a top Canadian university but his research focus was not quite what Klawe really desired; b) Klawe could have become an academic department leader at Fournier’s father-in-law’s Texas alma mater, ranked considerably higher than Fournier’s own Texas alma mater; c) she could have become an academic department leader at a California university ranked considerably higher than Fournier’s father-in-law’s institution; and, d) starting as an assistant professor, Saul Drobnies did eventually become an associate dean at San Diego State, but at any of the three that offered to her Klawe would start as department head, and at UBC she later became vice president and dean.

Compared to Fournier, Kellogg Booth who came a year later in 1990 and became UBC’s overall computer graphics field leader as MAGIC director, had a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, ranked No. 5 in the same 2015 U.S. public university rankings – yet another notch higher than either UT Austin or UC San Diego.

(G. Scott Thomas, February 12, 2015, The Business Journals)

So from this perspective of an academic hierarchy in accordance with university rankings, if Klawe’s goal for UBC was to turn it into the like of UT Austin and UC San Diego, could she not have some additional doubts when Alain Fournier’s alma mater was quite below those that had offered her the computer science department headship?

One may disagree with my arguments, and counter that Klawe’s own Ph.D. degree had not been from a university of such high ranking as UT Austin or UC San Diego.

True, but in 1989 Klawe was no longer a typical faculty member in research, but an academic manager who had moved to the corporate world through her marriage to an outstanding IBM research scientist, risen through the IBM hierarchy and then come to a university department’s helm with computer industry funding resources.

Such exceptional, beyond-the-norm success cases do happen. In a February 2015 blog post, I reviewed a case of sexual impropriety on the part of Bob Filner, former U.S. Congressman and San Diego Mayor, and how the scandal ruined the prospect of a San Diego-Tijuana international joint bid for the 2024 Olympic Games. In that story, Filner was a former San Diego State professor, i.e., a former colleague of Saul Drobnies in a general sense:

“Quite a man Bob Filner had been, counting among his credentials jailed civil-rights activist for Black Americans in Mississippi, and San Diego State University history professor.

Filner was tough, but politics could be tougher. …”

(“Sexual complaints against a seasoned U.S. Democrat, and the end of a U.S.-Mexico bi-national Olympics dream”, February 9, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

At that level of achievement by a politician, the university rankings could not box him in; Mayor Filner, known for his aggressiveness and combativeness, was lavishly praised as “San Diego’s first really strong mayor” by UC San Diego political science professor Steve Erie:

““San Diego has never had a mayor like this, style-wise,” said Steve Erie, a political science professor at UC San Diego. “Filner is San Diego’s first really strong mayor, using the bully pulpit and aggressive style to advance his populist agenda.””

(February 9, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Hence, with the extensive review and discussions in this Part of the current blog article I reach the following conclusions, regarding controversies about Maria Klawe’s management at UBC, links to the two 1989 founding members of UBC’s computer graphics field who both died in 2000, and connections to  Leslie Berlowitz at American Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose 2013 resignation as president and CEO due to a resume-falsifying scandal has raised a plethora of controversies about her management and leadership:

1) The fact that the UBC computer graphics field’s 1989 founding researcher Peter Cahoon, who died of illness in 2000, is not listed in UBC computer science department’s “In Memoriam” page is likely a result of the established academic hierarchy’s attitudes not giving significance to personnel outside the faculty and management;

2) on the other hand, the fact that the UBC computer graphics field’s 1989 founding faculty member Alain Fournier, who died of cancer in 2000, was not given press coverage during his 11 years at UBC when UBC’s computer graphics field regularly received high-profile major press exposure, was likely due to department head, vice president then dean of science Maria Klawe’s interests and priorities: in favor of industry connections, medical applications and user applications over academic research; in favor of animation, and the electronic games project she started with industry funding, over research in high-quality image; and in favor of various academic hierarchy influences over the individual researcher’s merits;

3) just over a year prior to his death, Fournier may have wanted to express to the press his criticisms relating to his experiences in the computer graphics field and at UBC, but was only able to do so indirectly, in a letter to The Vancouver Sun on issues others had raised about George Lucas and Lucasfilm;

4) there were strong similarities between the falsification of academic credentials on the part of Berlowitz, which led to her 2013 resignation, and untruthful claims of academic credentials at various times by Klawe;

5) serious issues existed with Klawe’s management style, although hers tended to be deceptive management tactics to make things worse for persons she targeted, in comparison to the open nastiness Berlowitz often displayed toward others below her; and

6) there are strong similarities between Klawe’s management priorities and Berlowitz’s management priorities, with their considerations often pro-money, pro-management, and pro-external factors; in addition, I have found a concrete link, with further controversies, surrounding the induction of Klawe into the Academy under Berlowitz in 2009.

And of course, any questionable circumstances of the 2000 deaths of Alain Fournier and Peter Cahoon would be of grave concern.

Andrienne Drobnies is now a writer and poet, with considerable public exposure. But when visiting her website I noticed that there is no mention of either UBC or B.C. Children’s Hospital, even though there is mention of her late husband Alain Fournier’s poetry; there are mentions of Simon Fraser University, not just because she is now remarried to an SFU professor:

“I grew up in Texas and California, and am a dual Canadian/US citizen, having spent most of my adult life in Toronto and Vancouver. I received a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and have worked in clinical and research labs, most recently as a project manager at the Genome Sciences Centre of the BC Cancer Agency. I am a poet and a 2010 graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

My poetry has appeared in Canadian literary magazines, including Scrivener, NeWest Review, Waves, Poetry Canada Review, and Poetry Toronto. …

…

I co-edited and published a volume of French poetry, Poèmes sur Mesure, by my late husband, Alain Fournier.

My immediate family is my husband, John Bechhoefer, who is a physics professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, and my daughter, Ariel Fournier, who is a journalist.”

(adriennedrobnies.com)

As quoted, she is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

Her connection to SFU had started earlier, no later than shortly after Fournier’s death, and in the form of employment. A memo written by SFU dean of science William Davidson in 2001 – the year after Fournier’s 2000 death and at a time when Maria Klawe was UBC dean of science – identified Adrienne Drobnies as Grant Facilitator for SFU faculty of science:

“The nomination of faculty and staff, irrespective of department, for major awards is a priority in the Faculty of Science. All Chairs should be active in this regard as well as the Dean. The Grants Facilitator, Dr. Adrienne Drobnies, is coordinating this effort and the recent results in the BC Science Council Awards attest to this commitment.”

(“Response of the Dean of Science to the Comments/Recommendations of the External Review of the Department of Chemistry and the response to them by the Chair of Chemistry”, by William S. Davidson, Dean of Science, 2001, Simon Fraser University)

As a chemist, Adrienne Drobnies has worked in clinical and research labs, most recently at B.C. Cancer Agency, and earlier at Children’s Hospital.

Then, less than a year after her husband’s passing as a UBC professor she was in the SFU science faulty as the Grant Facilitator, which would give her the opportunities to liaison with the various SFU science departments as well as external science agencies and organizations.

Still later, when Drobnies really felt the bite of her interest in poetry, she had the opportunity to attend and graduate from SFU’s The Writers’ Studio.

So the difference between the two universities for the Fournier family quite likely had been felt before Fournier’s death.

The love for literary expression can probably be described as ‘in their genes’, as Fournier had written a book of poetry, co-edited with his wife, who survived him and has also become a poet, and a writer, and their daughter Ariel has become a journalist. As quoted in Part 2, Peter Cahoon also published a book of his poems, in 1993.

With his intellectual interest, Fournier would have loved to get press publicity for his research. This is very relevant because it corroborates my earlier comments on Fournier’s May 1999 letter to The Vancouver Sun after 10 years at UBC without press coverage, that he appeared to have a personal axe to grind at that point.

But the UBC-SFU difference regarding Alain Fournier was most likely not only of personal attitudes but also of competitive prestige, as my review has shown about Klawe’s management priorities.

The University of Toronto had a considerably higher ranking than UBC, which in turned ranked considerably higher than SFU: for convenience, here I cite recent, 2013 global rankings by the U.S. News & World Report, which ranked the University of Toronto as 14th in the world, UBC 30th and Montreal’s McGill University44th, but SFU not among the top 100.

(“University of Toronto is Canada’s top university: U.S. News & World Report Rankings”, by Michael Kennedy, November 3, 2014, University of Toronto)

My personal experience of job prospects in Vancouver was consistent with such rankings: in the fall of 1987 I visited U of T’s computer science department and received the offer of a post-doctoral research position; then in the spring of 1988 I was formally interviewed by UBC computer science department and offered a fixed-term assistant professorship – it could have been a tenure-track one had Maria Klawe and Nick Pippenger chosen not to go to UBC as discussed earlier – before another interview in late spring by SFU’s school of computing science and the offer of a tenure-track assistant professorship.

The UBC fixed-term position was initially offered for 2 years, then increased to 3 years for immigration reasons. In 1990 I did not succeed in my attempt to get a tenure-track position, which went to Jack Snoeyink, and department head Klawe then gave me an additional year of lecturer upon my withdrawal of the application, as quoted earlier.

The SFU tenure-track position would have been for 3+3 years, with a review in between and the permanent tenure decision near the end.

In addition to UBC’s higher sense of competitive prestige was a repute of social academic snobbery, pointed out by a 2013 The Globe and Mail article comparing Canadian universities:

“University of British Columbia

Research powerhouse by the beach

Vancouver

Students: 57,000

Cost: $5,300

Awards: $35-million

Pro: World-class research opportunities

Con: Academic competitiveness and snobbery

…

Simon Fraser University

Interdisciplinary education leader

Burnaby

Students: 30,000

Cost: $5,600

Awards: $11-million

Pro: Large, comprehensive co-op program.

Con: Soulless commuter campus

…”

(“CANADIAN UNIVERSITY REPORT 2014: PROFILES-BC: Help choosing a university in British Columbia”, by Erin Millar and Tari Ajadi, October 22 (updated October 29), 2013, The Globe and Mail)

There are explanations for UBC’s snobbery; in addition to being a more historic, better connected and more competitive school, it has a beautiful bay-side campus, which in 1993 hosted the first U.S.-Russia summit between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, as I noted at the beginning of my blogging in January 2009:

“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, 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 Goals 2000, Educate America Act.

President Clinton loves Vancouver, British Columbia, obviously.”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 1)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

SFU would have been better for my job prospect, and has worked out well for Adrienne Drobnies after her husband’s death. So I would think it would have been a more comfortable experience for Alain Fournier himself.

I can certainly sympathize with Fournier’s feelings, reading the major press coverage on Maria Klawe’s games projects for children and the exultation of her as a “goddess of tech”, and contrasting it to my fruitless efforts to get Canadian media exposure about political scandals, including about Klawe’s management style. What a pity!

Who knows. Alain had had a bout with cancer before going to Vancouver, but with a psychologically more positive experience there he might avoid a relapse.

But wait. Had I chosen SFU in 1988, and then Alain gone there in 1989, wouldn’t he have recruited Jack to that school, whose receiving a UBC tenure-track job offer in 1990 practically ended my future prospect there?

Jack did not actually come to work in Vancouver until 1991, after a year of postdoctoral research at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, as recorded succinctly by the U.S. National Science Foundation where in 2015 Snoeyink has become a program director:

“BSc 1985, Math & Computer Science, Calvin College PhD 1990, Computer Science, Stanford University Posdoc ’90-91: Vakgroep Informatika, Utrecht Univ. Asst/Assoc Prof ’90-’99: Computer Science, University of British Columbia Prof ’00-: Computer Science, UNC Chapel Hill IPA ’15-: NSF CISE/CCF Algorithmic Foundations”

(“Staff Directory: Jack  S. Snoeyink: Biography”, National Science Foundation)

A job performance review at SFU would have come up for me in 1991 – a fit with the timing of Snoeyink’s actual arrival in Vancouver had there been the need for SFU to vacate my position for Jack.

Oh well, there was probably no “magic” for my academic prospect in Vancouver; but there could be panacea for Alain’s career and life, maybe.

(Continuing to Part 4)

A review of postings about scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, with observations regarding elite centrism – Part 1: behind “publish or perish”

Issues concerning scientific integrity and intellectual honesty have been given much attention in my blogging and social media posting, from the very beginning.

Here is the opening of my first blog post, dated January 29, 2009:

“It was eleven years before the New Millennium, in February 1989 only several months with my Mathematics Ph.D. degree out of the University of California, Berkeley, when the notion “Mathematics for the New Century” circulating in the mathematics community made a strong impression on me. A larger public-relations campaign was soon launched by then President George H. W. Bush and the U.S. state governors, spearheaded by a few including Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, for what would become the first National Education Summit held in September 1989 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where it was declared that, among other objectives, U.S. high school students would be leading the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000. Subsequent efforts would lead to the Goals 2000 project later signed into law in 1994 as a centerpiece of President Bill Clinton’s education reform.

In 1989 I was a computer science faculty member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, as an educator and researcher generally interested in good news for education and particularly impressed by declaration of lofty goals and projects to achieve them. Education, however, was often trumped by other more ominous or more urgent matters, such as the Gulf War in 1991; or at least that was what I would presume. But press archives indicate that on January 17, 1991, the day of the launch of Operation Desert Storm, or what Iraqi president Saddam Hussein called “Mother of all Battles”, President Bush, Sr. actually met with his education advisory panel to hear about creating national standards for student performance, though he made no commitments on their proposal at the time according to panel member and former U.S. secretary of labor William Brock.

Having grown up a peaceful child and done Ph.D. study under someone who happened to have a past background of vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War, I tended to look into things via more idealistic, less bombastic lenses, and my presumption could sometimes be quite naïve. The peaceful and beautiful British Columbia where I had moved to in 1988 was not all reclusive when it came to U.S. politics: the city of Nelson,B.C. was well-known as a haven for many of the Vietnam-era “draft dodgers”, and U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Catherine Glaspie, who was in the news over the controversy of exactly what the U.S. government told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 just days before his launching invasion of Kuwait, was originally from Vancouver.”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 1)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As my very first blog post indicated, in the late 1980s – early 1990s when I was in the academic fields of mathematics and computer science, “Mathematics for the New Century” was a captivating slogan, and both U.S. President George Bush, Sr. and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton championed math and science education in the first National Education Summit in 1989, that later led to the Goals 2000 project signed into law in 1994 by then U.S. President Clinton.

But as my post also showed, other matters of urgency could trump education, math and science education in particular – matters such as the Gulf War of 1991, which the United States launched to evict the Iraqi army of the Saddam Hussein regime out of Kuwait, even if Bush did not entirely forget education.

My post also pointed out that not everything was back-and-white in the picture of a war against a stereotype bad guy: U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Catherine Glaspie was in the news over the controversy of exactly what the U.S. government told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 just days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Well, someone may have lacked intellectual honesty and misrepresented something, and it became a part of the context, albeit a largely overlooked part, of the Persian Gulf conflict.

But that was politics and foreign relations, not science or education.

Over a year later in April 2010 I extended from blogging to social media presentation on Facebook. In my first posting on a Facebook community page I created, “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, I excerpted the above-quoted part of my first blog post, as well as what happened to Goals 2000 by the year 2000:

“When the new century, or rather the New Millennium as it was referred to by then, finally drew close the views on progress towards it were by no means universal. Some in fact were quite critical about perceived lack of progress in education despite the efforts: at the eve of the New Millennium, then The New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein described the movement toward “Goals 2000” as a failure’s shutout victory over the United States.”

(“Tumbling and fumbling toward the New Millennium – a look back”, April 24, 2010, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

As quoted, The New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein considered Goals 2000 a failure’s victory, that ambitious goals were not accomplished at all by the time the Clinton era was greeting the New Millennium; he described it:

“The goals were these: By 2000, all children will start school ready to learn; 90 percent will graduate from high school; all will demonstrate competency over challenging subject matter in English, math, science, foreign languages, civics, economics, the arts, history and geography; the United States will be first in the world in math and science; all adults will be literate; no school will have drugs, violence, firearms or alcohol; teachers will have needed skills; all schools will get parents involved.

Faced with unmet goals, it’s easy to maintain that sincere effort was all that mattered. That is the approach taken by the National Education Goals Panel, an agency run by governors, members of Congress, state legislators and federal education officials. Ducking accountability, the panel earlier this year proposed changing the name “Goals 2000” to “America’s Education Goals,” dropping any mention of deadlines. Then, in its 1999 report, it stated that its “bold venture” had worked, because the goals had “helped stimulate reforms.””

(“LESSONS; ‘Goals 2000’ Score: Failure 8, U.S. 0”, by Richard Rothstein, December 22, 1999, The New York Times)

Rothstein considered it a political failure as much as an education failure:

“The very leaders who set these national goals now demand accountability from districts and schools: principals and teachers should suffer consequences for not meeting state targets that sprang from the nationwide goals. But when national leaders fall short of goals, why do they not face similar sanctions? Policy makers’ lack of candor about the irresponsible way the goals were set can breed local educators’ contempt for the entire standards movement.”

(Richard Rothstein, December 22, 1999, The New York Times)

In April 2010 my new Facebook community page’s title was fittingly about science and education progress. It was also about “New Millennium Bugs”, but what were “New Millennium Bugs”?

My first blog post and the Facebook excerpt mentioned it:

“Just before the New Millennium began I was joining the Silicon Valley in California (after another stint as an educator at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu), arriving at the high-tech world among the dot-com and venture-capitalism rushes, which I wasn’t really part of. The ominous notion someone like me read and heard daily about the New Millennium at the time was not failure of education, but fears for Y2K (also called the ‘millennium bug’), and the tremendous amount of government and corporate efforts being made (and of course money being spent) to prevent disasters from materializing out of tiny numerical ‘legacies’ of computer programs. It was reported that one man in Ontario, Canada, had been preparing for the potential doomsday scenario for 20 years, burying 42 school buses deep underground as a home for himself.”

(April 24, 2010, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

Basically, in old computer programs the year in 4 decimal digits had been represented by only 2, e.g., 1989 as 89 and 1999 as 99, and there were fears that when 2000 came as 00 calculations would go wrong and catastrophes would strike where computers were relied on. It was called “Y2K”.

The U.S. government spent $8.5 billion, upgrading computer systems and software, to avoid potential Y2K disasters.

(“Federal Y2K glitches compiled”, by Brian Friel, January 13, 2000, Government Executive)

As in the above cited article, when year 2000 arrived there were only minor glitches, some described in my post:

“… The U.S. government later reported only a number of small technical glitches at the moment of the arrival of the millennium, such as: on the Naval Observatory web page the date read “19100”, the alarm systems at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston malfunctioned, a federal facility security access system in Nebraska was stuck in the open position, a Federal Aviation Administration system stopped processing some notices to airmen, an automatic backup system at the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center failed to activate, a fire alarm system at a Financial Management Service office in Kansas was falsely activated, also in Kansas a lock failed at a Food and Drug Administration leased facility, and a Chicago-area bank stopped electronic transfers of Medicare payments to healthcare providers; in the end only oddly behaving malfunctions like the above, without any obvious disaster, yet all the while in Guam the processing of federal food-stamp benefits was being carried out manually because the systems there were not Y2K-compliant.”

(April 24, 2010, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

Back in 2000 I had the feeling that the Y2K concerns were overblown. But then something else soon happened and was real, as I recalled in a late 2009 blog post, excerpted in my second post on the Facebook page:

“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.”

(“Was the New Millennium here? Barack Obama didn’t quite think so”, April 24, 2010, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

“Al Qaeda was likely real” and so, once again, war trumped things like education – this time under U.S. President George Bush, Jr. as I noted in my first blog post:

“In any case, when it came to the junior president Bush, the facts have appeared solid that he was more willing to let other issues such as education be trumped by his focus on fighting terrorism: another summit in the National Education Summit series first started in 1989 by his father George Bush, Sr., was held on October 10, 2001 and the U.S. president was a no-show, as were a large number of state governors, drawing criticism from a key sponsor of the event, then IBM chairman Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.; many of those who did attend this 2001 summit soon after 9/11, including then Gov. Gary Locke of Washington and then Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, deplored the poor state of minority-student education in the United States and the widening gap in performance between white and minority students.”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

So that was a rationale for my naming this Facebook community page “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, namely that science and education need to be on solid grounds and to make good progress, in order to uncover and eliminate “bugs” that otherwise might obstruct, or even ruin, humanity’s progress toward a better future.

In the academia, excellence of scholarly pursue, scientific research included, has traditionally been measured by a scholar’s body of publications in both its quantity and its quality.

The saying, “publish or perish”, reflects what is demanded of an academic as well as the competitiveness of the academic environment. The academia being relatively autonomous in the broader society, there has been a tendency by academics to explain themselves to the outside entirely in this context.

But such explanations could actually be counter-scientific, as philosophical as they may be.

A personal story early in my academic political activism, in 1992 when I had been actively questioning the management style of my boss, Computer Science Head Maria Klawe at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, illustrated this point.

My job there ended at the end of June 1992 amid the dispute and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was called to evict me from the office on July 2. Then on August 24 in the city of Montreal, Quebec, Concordia University faculty member Valery Fabrikant gunned down several colleagues in an escalating dispute that had involved credits for scholarly publications but now had his job on the line. Two days later, UBC Faculty Association President William Bruneau was quoted in Kitsilano News, blaming the “publish or perish” mentality for both the Fabrikant murders and two local disputes including mine, and calling them “consequences of Reaganism and Thatcherism of the 1980s”:

“The local story in the community newspaper, Kitsilano News, 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 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.

…

“He had to be dragged from his office,” Bruneau said. “It was related to the level of pressure on the campus.”

…

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…

“Tenure issues are pretty big here,” Jansen said. “But we’ve never had anything anywhere near as big as the Concordia event.”

“There’s a lot of personality issues that takes place here – it’s just like any other community.”

…

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.”

…

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.””

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.

…”

(“Team 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”, February 20, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Bill Bruneau expressed everything in the rightful way from his faculty association president position, that the academia was about “publish or perish”, and when violence occurred Reaganism and Thatcherism were to blame in the views of the politically left-leaning Canadian academics.

This was not limited to his faculty association role, or later his role as president of Canadian Association of University Teachers, but an academic specialty of Bruneau’s, who was also a scholar on Bertrand Russell. In the same February 20, 2012 blog post I also quoted from a scholarly book of Bruneau’s:

“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:

“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.”

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, effectively denied about a local management flaw while denouncing, in his publications, the wrong management theory for the world according to him?”

(February 20, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Bruneau’s logic seemed both scholarly solid and politically righteous, that Reaganism and Thatcherism were business oriented and performance focused. But unfortunately as applied to my case it was lacking in the disposition of scientific inquisition, and simply untrue: in the Kitsilano News story, the police at UBC did not confirm any violence; and as in Part 4 of my blog-post series where Part 5 is quoted above, in June 1992 the faculty association had held a hearing on my grievance about Klawe’s management-style problems – so the association president should know that it was not about “publish or perish” mentality on my part.

Almost two decades later in 2009-2010, nothing had changed for the better as UBC and RCMP never acknowledged any mistake on the part of the management, and probably for the worse for me because by then Klawe was a much more powerful figure in the academia and the computer science field: in Part 4 of the quoted blog-post series I noted that after the start of my blogging in 2009, she became a board director of Microsoft Corporation.

It was about 10 years into the New Millennium as in the title of my first blog post, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”; but the academia in its core thinking continued to defer to the established prestige for its sense of judgment.

This was illustrated by an August 1, 2012 article in The Scientist magazine, summarized and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, critical of the recent open-access model of scientific publication that has loosened the peer review process:

“… the open-access movement is producing an almost boomtown-like increase in the number of scholarly open-access publishers, fostered by a very low barrier to entrance into the learned publishing industry. To become a scholarly publisher, all you need now is a computer, a website, and the ability to create unique journal titles.

Bolstering this trend is the so-called “gold open-access” model, in which publishing is supported not by subscription fees but by author fees. …

This increase in the number of open-access journals has major implications for scholarly publishing. Authors become the publishers’ customers, an arrangement that creates a conflict of interest: the more papers a publisher accepts, the more revenue it earns.

Not surprisingly, acceptance rates at gold open-access journals are skyrocketing, and article peer review is decreasing. Scholarly communication is now flooded with hundreds of thousands of new, second-rate articles each year, burdening conscientious researchers who have to sort through them all, filtering out the unworthy ones.

Exploiting the trend is an increasing number of what I define as “predatory” publishers—those that unprofessionally exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit. These publishers use deception to appear legitimate, entrapping researchers into submitting their work and then charging them to publish it. Some prey especially on junior faculty and graduate students…

…

The implications for tenure and promotion are significant. Previously, traditional publishers played a validation role: if an article appeared in a journal of a respected publisher, generally everyone accepted it as quality work worthy of publication. Now, predatory publishers assign lofty titles to their journals, making the task of judging a tenure candidate’s list of publications much more complicated. Sadly, a few academics are gaming the new system, exploiting the scholarly vanity press to buy prestige.”

(“Predatory Publishing”, by Jeffrey Beall, August 1, 2012, The Scientist, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

While no doubt a “boomtown-like” atmosphere and lesser-quality publications come with an expanded journal publishing landscape, in my view the proper context needs to be understood: traditional publishers did charge author fees but the fees were small, not the main source of revenue; the emergence of the “gold open-access” model is likely partly due to increased availability of research funding that can cover publication costs, besides easier public access to journals without paying for subscriptions.

A journal’s dependence on author fees can be incentive for laxer peer review. But in a similar logic the tenure system, in part intended to protect academic freedom, can mean disincentive to scholarly productivity once a scholar has mustered enough – most reliably with publications in traditionally respected journals as in the above quote – to secure tenure at an academic institution.

Another The Scientist article in late August 2012, also summarized and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, proposed an effective remedy to inadequate peer review and inadequate quality in open-access publications, through making peer review open-access:

“The Research Works Act, which made the rounds of the US Congress earlier this year, brought the question of access to the fore and motivated scientists to become activist in their support for open-access publishing. Many universities (for example Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco) have strongly urged their researchers towards open access, and, in the first nationwide push in the same direction, the British Government announced a couple of weeks ago that all publicly funded research will be published open access by 2014.

There has been a rising tide of blog posts, seminars, and workshops discussing the problems of the peer review system, with numerous proposals being floated for how to fix it, and also much discussion about the need for more openness and transparency, particularly with respect to the data behind research findings. …

…

At F1000, we believe that if everything is out in the open, then biases will lose their power and errors will quickly be addressed and discussed. Furthermore, the contributions of referees, whose role in improving published science is vital, can be publicly acknowledged and formally recognized as important and valuable outputs.

The F1000 Research publication model works as follows: New submissions go through a rapid internal pre-publication check and are then published immediately, labeled clearly as “Awaiting Peer Review.” Expert referees are then invited to review the submissions and are asked to do two things: first, assign a quick “Approved” … “Not Approved” … or “Approved with Reservations” … status within a matter of days. The paper’s status will be prominently displayed along with the referee’s name. Second, referees are asked to write a more standard referee report that they sign and publish alongside the article (this is optional if the referee status provided in the first step was “Approved”). Authors are then encouraged to revise their articles in response to the referee’s comments and each article version will be separately accessible and citable.”

(“Opinion: Transparency in Science Publishing”, by Rebecca Lawrence, August 28, 2012, The Scientists, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

I can think of a few minor problems with this open-access peer review system: the quick-response requirement, when referees typically take on peer review as additional work to their scientific activities; the referee’s no-report option if the recommendation is approval, when even experts can act lax; and the open display of all revisions of a paper, intimidating to potential authors who prefer to be known for their satisfactory final product.

Other than the above, this open-access pear review approach preserves the key ingredients of, and with open access does not appear inferior to, the traditional peer review.

The context of these two articles’ appearance is telling of what The Scientist editors favored.

The article on predatory publishing was in the August 2012 issue, which had a panel question-and-answer article on the future of scientific publishing, titled “Wither Science Publishing?” with a negative tone, and two other related articles, “Predatory Publishing” quoted earlier, and “Bring on the Transparency Index”, both choosing to identify open-access publishing with predatory publishing.

(“The Scientist”, August 2012, Volume 26, Issue 8)

In contrast, the August 28, 2012 article quoted above, “Opinion: Transparency in Science Publishing”, favoring open access, was not in the magazine but an opinion piece on the website of The Scientist.

The contrast illustrated that as the governments and the public embraced open access of scientific publications, The Scientist magazine was not so positive, seeing ills in the new trend.

The Scientist isn’t just any scientific publication. It was founded in 1986 as the first ‘trade magazine’ for science in the U.S.:

“Oddly enough, up to now scientists have had no equivalent to the trade papers of other professions. Physicians and attorneys have access to such papers, which keep them up to date on developments that affect their professional lives. Don’t scientists need the same kind of information, in the same kind of format? We think the answer to that question is Yes, and so we are publishing THE SCIENTIST.”

(“A Voice for the Science Professional”, by Eugene Garfield, October 20, 1986, The Scientist)

From the start, this “trade papers” inspired magazine gave plenty of coverage to government policies on science and to science policies internationally, as shown in articles in its first issue with titles such as, “Congress Hikes NIH Budget”, “Report Sees Decline In British Science”, and “Chinese Move Ahead On Science Reforms”.

(“The Scientist”, October 1986, Volume 1, Issue 1)

Another article, “New Ideas Are ‘Guilty Until Proved Innocent’”, in this founding issue strongly stated that traditional ideas should be favored over new ideas in science:

“Acceptance of any new theoretical framework depends on credibility and improvement on existing alternatives. In cases where the choice is not immediately obvious, the burden of proof generally lies with the new idea. Given a choice, the scientific community invariably sticks with the conventional wisdom. Furthermore, the older ideas have usually been around long enough to have accumulated supporting evidence, whereas the new idea rarely has much going for it, at least at first. It is not a fair game.

Despite the lack of “fairness” to new ideas, the traditional practice in science may serve us better than a more democratic mode. History shows that most new ideas fall. Science would be very confused much of the time if all new ideas were given precisely equal treatment. It is clear that the new theory is guilty until proved innocent, and the pre-existing theory is innocent until proved guilty.”

(“New Ideas Are ‘Guilty Until Proved Innocent’”, by David Raup, October 20, 1986, The Scientist)

One can read it, that “traditional practice” is better than what would be “more democratic”, and that the new theory is “guilty until proved innocent” whereas the pre-existing theory is “innocent until proved guilty”.

Not much changed from 1986 to 2012 in the mindset demonstrated by this first ‘trade magazine’ of U.S. science, and it was little wonder in 1992 in Canada a university faculty association president used the “publish or perish” mentality like a ‘veil’ to explain all academic disputes that concerned him – the tradition was it.

So while a magazine like The Scientist has been a good source of reports on scientific ideas and advances, which I frequently shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, it is by no means the best place to look for open coverage of flaws in science or fair judgment on science politics.

Next to publications, funding is a top issue for scientific research. Here, scientific biases can occur when the funding source has an interest in seeing particular types of conclusions.

On both my personal Facebook page and “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, I summarized and shared a November 2012 article from The Washington Post on a major case of such bias in the publication of research funded by pharmaceutical companies:

“For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup.

The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best.

“We now have clear evidence from a large international study that the initial use of [Avandia] is more effective than standard therapies,” a senior vice president of GlaxoSmithKline, Lawson Macartney, said in a news release.

… The trial had been funded by GlaxoSmithKline, and each of the 11 authors had received money from the company. Four were employees and held company stock. The other seven were academic experts who had received grants or consultant fees from the firm.

Whether these ties altered the report on Avandia may be impossible for readers to know. But while sorting through the data from more than 4,000 patients, the investigators missed hints of a danger that, when fully realized four years later, would lead to Avandia’s virtual disappearance from the United States:

The drug raised the risk of heart attacks.

“If you looked closely at the data that was out there, you could see warning signs,” said Steven E. Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist who issued one of the earliest warnings about the drug. “But they were overlooked.”

A Food and Drug Administration scientist later estimated that the drug had been associated with 83,000 heart attacks and deaths.”

(“As drug industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias”, by Peter Whoriskey, November 24, 2012, The Washington Post, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

Money likely spoke with this piece of scientific research work, beyond “publish or perish”; and The New England Journal of Medicine is more than any respected traditional scholarly journal, but one of the world’s most influential scientific journals – No. 9 in the 2012 Thomson Reuters journal impact factors rankings – and the leading medical journal with “highly rigorous peer-review and editing process”. It was established prestige as ultimate qualification for the Avandia drug maker GlaxoSmithKline.

(“New Impact Factors Released”, by Bob Grant, July 6, 2012, The Scientist; and, “Publication Process”, The New England Journal of Medicine)

It showed that even a preeminent peer-reviewed scientific venue is not immune to serious errors – in this case with an associated human cost of thousands of lives.

As a matter of fact, the sanctums of science and academia have never been so pure as to be separated from human flaws, not with “highly rigorous” peer review as illustrated, and not even in their great glory or established traditions.

A classic example is the popularity of occult studies, including magic and alchemy, in the glory days of the British Royal Society, practiced by prominent scientists the like of Isaac Newton, as told in a September 2012 The New York Times article summarized and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”:

“Founded in 1660, the Royal Society is the world’s oldest continuous scientific society. Newton, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and many more came together in a spirit of revolutionary if at times eccentric inquiry. Magic and alchemy greatly fascinated the society’s founders.

…

The society no longer occupies that globe-dominating perch. The United States casts a much longer shadow, with billions of dollars spent on research and industrial might; American scientists dominate many disciplines. And other nations, not least China, are gaining.

…

The society took root in the soil of revolution. More than half of its founding members favored the Parliamentary cause in the 17th-century civil war that cost Charles I his crown and then his head. During that intoxicating century, nearly everything holy, from royal rank to economics to science to the immortality of the soul, was challenged. In the early days of the Royal Society, knights and earls sat shoulder to shoulder with metalsmiths and merchants.

Though rationalists, these scientists viewed God as central to their universe and their work. As Edward Dolnick, author of “The Clockwork Universe,” an entertaining history of the early society, noted, the founders viewed the laws of nature and God as inseparable. They were mapping his universe.

The historian Christopher Hill termed this the “stop in the mind.” The scientists, philosophers and politicians of any era confront limits to their consciousness. How do you imagine a world, or even know what questions to ask, when you lack reference points?

And there is that question of magic. Society members lived in a time shadowed by apocalyptic dread, from plague to fire to war. They were fascinated by alchemy, unicorns’ horns and magic salves, and they often experimented on themselves.

“They researched the phenomena a lot, and they weren’t all wrong,” [Royal Society librarian] Mr. [Keith] Moore noted. “They knew there was an invisible world.”

Critics attacked Newton as an occultist for theorizing about gravity, as it was unseen and not mechanical. (Over his lifetime, he would write far more pages on biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on math and science.) Still, he dominated the society’s early years.”

(“A Redoubt of Learning Holds Firm”, by Michael Powell, September 3, 2012, The New York Times, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

In a blog post in a different context, I have mentioned that Newton was deeply influenced by the ancient mystical Rosicrucian Order.

(“Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 1)”, January 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Another case in point is the long dominance of the theory of the “luminiferous aether”, a hypothetical medium carrying light. It has been cited by several scientists advocating greater openness for publishing negative results from research, in a January 2013 The Scientist article summarized and shared on my Facebook personal page:

“Negative data have always been harder to disseminate, yet ostensibly insignificant results can sometimes lead to a paradigm shift. One noteworthy example is that of Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, two 19th-century physicists, who performed a series of experiments to detect the relative motion of matter through the “luminiferous aether”—a theoretical medium thought to carry light waves. Despite the fact that their negative results clearly contradicted the theory of stationary aether, the scientific community initially overlooked them. It was only when they eventually published their findings in the American Journal of Science in 1881 that the prevailing theory was questioned, thereby opening up a line of research that ultimately led to Einstein’s special theory of relativity.”

(“Opinion: Publish Negative Results”, by Gabriella Anderson, Haiko Sprott and Bjorn R. Olsen, January 15, 2013, The Scientist, shared on Feng Gao’s Facebook page)

The notion of the “luminiferous aether” dated back to Isaac Newton’s study of light in the early 18th century.

(Isaac Newton, The Third Book of Opticks, 1718, online at The Newton Project; and, Pietro Giuseppe Frè, Gravity, a Geometrical Course: Volume 1: Development of the Theory and Basic Physical Applications, October 2012, Springer)

The advocates for publishing negative results also pointed out an important link to “a “publish or perish” culture”, that this academic culture may be biased against dissemination of negative results due to the uncertainty they create:

“In an ever more competitive environment, it may be that scientific journals prefer to publish studies with clear and specific conclusions. Indeed, Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom suggests that results may be distorted by a “publish or perish” culture in which the progress of scientific careers depends on the frequency and quality of citations. This leads to a situation in which data that support a hypothesis may be perceived in a more positive light and receive more citations than data that only generate more questions and uncertainty.”

(Gabriella Anderson, Haiko Sprott and Bjorn R. Olsen, January 15, 2013, The Scientist)

Similarly in August 1992 at the University of British Columbia, murders from an academic dispute elsewhere became a pretence by UBC academics collectively, as spoken for by the faculty association president, to condemn Reaganism and Thatcherism in relation to “publish or perish”, and the “distorted” political righteousness served to disregard local cases including mine that could lead to more openness.

But how prevalent are the problems hidden behind the traditional prestige or the contemporary political correctness? GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia drug case showed that such problems can be potentially very serious, and that publications of questionable research results are not confined to less established venues.

A number of major scandals in the 1980s led to the policy of educating and training researchers about “responsible conduct of research” (RCR), initiated by U.S. policy makers for research funding agencies, as reviewed in a May 2013 The Scientist article summarized and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”:

“… “Lack of formal discussion about responsible research practice and the ethics of research is a serious flaw in the professional training of young scientists and clinicians,” the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies stated in 1989. The assumption was that formal RCR training would reduce the incidence of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in research. Over the next decade, training programs evolved slowly, and by the turn of the century, RCR instruction for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows was firmly established in policies from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).”

(“Opinion: Ethics Training in Science”, by James Hicks, May 14, 2013, The Scientist, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

But despite the ethics training, problems have remained common. As reported in 2009, 1/3 of the scientists responding to surveys anonymously admitted to “questionable research practices”.

(James Hicks, May 14, 2013, The Scientist; and, “How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data”, by Daniele Fanelli, May 29, 2009, PLOS ONE)

In an April 2015 blog article, excerpted on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, I quoted from a The Guardian article by Australian medical scientist John Rasko and researcher Carl Power, who mentioned works by pharmaceutical researchers revealing that a majority of the “landmark” published experiments studied by them could not be independently reproduced – and are thus questionable if not false:

“In its recent comprehensive reporting of the Obokata scandal – a feature article dated February 18, 2015, written by John Rasko and Carl Power – The Guardian has solemnly informed the public that the phenomena of published scientific research results incapable of verification by independent reproduction, i.e., replication, have been widespread and could even be in the majority.

Firstly, scientists would rather produce new results than reproducing others’ work:

…

Secondly, those who find it important to verify others’ published results, such as some pharmaceutical industry researchers do, may find to their horror that even most of the so-called “landmark experiments” in their field can not be reproduced:

“…

A few years ago, Glenn Begley put this suspicion to the test. As head of cancer research for pharmaceutical giant Amgen, he attempted to repeat 53 landmark experiments in that field, important work published in some of the world’s top science journals. To his horror, he and his team managed to confirm only six of them. That’s a meagre 11%. Researchers at Bayer set up a similar trial and were similarly depressed by the results. Out of 67 published studies into the therapeutic potential of various drugs (mostly for the treatment of cancer), they were able to reproduce less than a quarter.”

And thirdly, if the public haven’t known about it, researchers know “in their heart of hearts” that for various reasons, fraud being one, “reproducibility is the exception rather than the rule”:

“The Amgen and Bayer studies were too small to tell us how bad the problem really is, but they do illustrate something that biomedical researchers already know in their heart of hearts: reproducibility is the exception rather than the rule. There are probably many reasons for this. Apart from outright fraud, there are all those “benevolent mistakes” that scientists make more or less unwittingly: poor experiment design, sloppy data management, bias in the interpretation of facts and inadequate communication of results and methods. Then, of course, there is the devilish complexity of reality itself, which withholds more than it reveals to the prying eyes of science.”

…”

(“Young Japanese researcher’s stardom fraud begs questions about American Science don’s intellectual practice”, April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

In the Amgen case cited above, 53 “landmark” publications – papers in top journals, from reputable labs – were checked before the pharmaceutical company could use them for cancer drug development, and 47 of the 53 could not be verified:

““It was shocking,” said Begley, now senior vice president of privately held biotechnology company TetraLogic, which develops cancer drugs. “These are the studies the pharmaceutical industry relies on to identify new targets for drug development. But if you’re going to place a $1 million or $2 million or $5 million bet on an observation, you need to be sure it’s true. As we tried to reproduce these papers we became convinced you can’t take anything at face value.”

…

George Robertson of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia previously worked at Merck on neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s. While at Merck, he also found many academic studies that did not hold up.

“It drives people in industry crazy. Why are we seeing a collapse of the pharma and biotech industries? One possibility is that academia is not providing accurate findings,” he said.

…

When the Amgen replication team of about 100 scientists could not confirm reported results, they contacted the authors. Those who cooperated discussed what might account for the inability of Amgen to confirm the results. Some let Amgen borrow antibodies and other materials used in the original study or even repeat experiments under the original authors’ direction.

Some authors required the Amgen scientists sign a confidentiality agreement barring them from disclosing data at odds with the original findings. “The world will never know” which 47 studies — many of them highly cited — are apparently wrong, Begley said.

…

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.

“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.””

(“In cancer science, many “discoveries” don’t hold up”, by Sharon Begley, March 28, 2012, Reuters)

Amgen’s Glenn Begley concluded that “you can’t take anything at face value”. Likewise with disputes in the academia, a politically correct explanation, such as Reaganism and Thatcherism being the culprit asserted by Bill Bruneau, is only face value that would block others from sorting out the real problems.

The real thinking behind such face value can be complex. It can involve research funding considerations as the earlier discussed RCR training suggested, or it can be due to ambitious drive for “greater fame and power”, as pointed out in an April 2015 blog article by me:

“The reported prevalence of published scientific experiments that are actually irreproducible, and thus suspect in the forms presented, if indeed known in the hearts of researchers can make it more likely for the ambitious among them to take bolder steps, catapulting themselves on the back of falsehood to a higher plateau for greater fame and power.”

(“Young Japanese researcher’s stardom fraud begs questions about American Science don’s intellectual practice”, April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

South Korean genetics scientist Hwang Woo Suk is a well-known example of what greater fame and potential power can be achieved by a scientist making a major discovery, as recalled in a October 2014 Bloomberg article summarised and shared on “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”:

“A decade ago, he became one of the most celebrated scientists in the world when he published two studies in the journal Science that announced the first successful cloning of a human embryo. Hwang, then a Seoul National University (SNU) professor, said he’d been able to extract stem cells from the embryo, apparently creating a new and potentially unlimited source for these important cells, which were becoming recognized as a possible treatment for all kinds of diseases. Time named him one of its “People Who Mattered” in 2004, and in June 2005, Korea’s Ministry of Science and Technology declared Hwang the first “Supreme Scientist” in the country’s history. He was honored on a postage stamp.”

(“For $100,000, You Can Clone Your Dog”, by Josh Dean, October 22, 2014, Bloomberg Business, shared on Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

The scientific breakthrough brought Hwang fame beyond the science field, with the recognition by Time magazine as one of the “People Who Mattered” in 2004.

The South Korean government’s honoring Hwang as the first “Supreme Scientist” in the country’s history no doubt would bring him the influence and power to be a great leader of science there.

But Hwang’s invention, published on Science journal – the world’s No. 3 influential scientific journal according to the 2012 Thompson Reuters impact factors rankings cited earlier – was a fraud. Its exposure led to Hwang’s disgrace as a scientist and punishment of criminal conviction:

“Then it all came undone. An American researcher who’d been one of the co-authors on the Science papers disavowed the work later that year. In Korea, a member of Hwang’s team went public, claiming that he’d paid women, including underlings at the university, for their eggs—a major ethical breach. An inquest launched by SNU subsequently determined that Hwang’s group hadn’t actually cloned an embryo, despite harvesting cells from 288 different human eggs. Pictures of the results, investigators learned, were fakes—merely multiples of the same photo—and government funds had been misused. Hwang called a news conference to apologize and announced that he would resign from his numerous posts. “I was blinded by work and my drive for achievement,” he said.

It wasn’t over. The government assigned a prosecutor to the case and eventually convicted Hwang of bioethical violations and embezzlement of $700,000 in public research funds. It also stripped him of his license to practice stem cell research.”

(Josh Dean, October 22, 2014, Bloomberg Business)

Despite his troubles, many South Koreans still believed in Hwang:

“Hwang was, in his own words, “penniless and devastated” after the scandal, but a sizable portion of the Korean public never turned against him and continued to support him and his work. Donors included sympathetic citizens, who mailed in checks for as little as $100 or sent him food and clothes, as well as investors, who still believed in his ability to do important research. “Thanks to all of them, I was able to start Sooam,” he says.”

(Josh Dean, October 22, 2014, Bloomberg Business)

Hwang’s ambition and hard drive continued, and he returned to media attention as the founder of a research company leading the world in commercial dog cloning:

“In 2007, Hwang met an American named Lou Hawthorne who had led the unsuccessful effort to clone a border collie mix named Missy in the late 1990s … Hwang took the samples and cloned Missy on the first attempt, producing four pups. Hawthorne brought all four Missys back to California.

One year later, Sooam sold its first cloned dog to Edgar and Nina Otto, a Florida couple so distraught over the death of Lancelot, their beloved Labrador, that they were willing to pay $155,000 in an auction for the opportunity to receive the world’s first commercially cloned dog. They named him Lancelot Encore. Six years and hundreds of cloned dogs later, Sooam has streamlined the process enough so that anyone with $100,000 and the patience to wait in line for up to six months can have a dog cloned. A team of scientists works under Hwang with the ability to carry out every part of the painstaking process, and the lab has the capacity to produce 150 to 200 commercial clones a year for clients who so far have included celebrities, Middle Eastern royals, and a few proud, non-anonymous buyers such as Dr. Philip Dupont, a veterinarian in Lafayette, La.

…

What’s most intriguing to Hwang now is the study of clone performance, particularly among what Sooam calls special purpose dogs. He wants to know if a puppy cloned from a truly exceptional working dog will end up performing at that job as well as his genetic twin. …

Recently, Sooam secured a contract to provide 40 cloned special purpose dogs to the South Korean national police, and several are already in service at the Incheon International Airport near Seoul. …”

(Josh Dean, October 22, 2014, Bloomberg Business)

Less than a decade after the South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk’s fraudulent work published in the journal Science and his notoriety, fame and then notoriety occurred to a female Japanese scientist, Haruko Obokata, for her work published on Nature – the world’s No. 1 influential scientific journal according to the 2012 Thompson Reuters rankings. My April 2015 blog article reviewed this case in detail:

“Barely 30 years old and already leading her own laboratory at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, Haruko Obokata shot to scientific stardom in January 2014 when she and her colleagues published two breakthrough papers in Nature, one of the world’s top science journals, demonstrating a surprisingly simple way of turning ordinary body cells into something very much like embryonic stem cells.

…

It would be a faster and easier way to reprogram cells, much less likely to damage them or make them cancerous, than the genetic manipulation pioneered in 2006 by another Japanese scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for it.

It was Haruko Obokata’s turn to become an instant media sensation. As Britain’s The Guardian newspaper reports, the media wondered when she would be given a Nobel Prize…

But within days of the Nature papers’ publication, disturbing allegations emerged in science blogs and on Twitter: some of the papers’ images looked doctored, and chunks of her text were lifted from other papers.

The RIKEN research institute, of which the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology is a part, conducted an investigation in February and March, confirming there was at least some research misconduct…

RIKEN’s investigation findings of “research misconduct” were announced on April 1. Haruko Obokata’s short-lived scientific stardom was now a scandal, and public shaming of her followed. …

…

Obokata insisted that her STAP cells exist, that she had created them “over 200 times”, and would be willing to go anywhere to reproduced them with other scientists:

…

But despite her method’s simplicity, other scientists were unable to reproduce the results. One by one, Obokata’s co-authors expressed doubt and asked to retract the papers, and in June so agreed Obokata. …”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

What could have motivated scientists like Hwang Woo Suk and Haruko Obokata to commit research misconduct and/or scientific fraud? Their ambition for fame and power may be one reason.

Taking note of information from Australian researchers John Rasko and Carl Power, quoted earlier, that researchers know “in their heart of hearts” that reproducibility of scientific experiments is “the exception rather than the rule”, I have asserted that the staying fame and power of others in history, achieved partly through fraud, may make ambitious modern researchers eager to do it that way:

“An acquired habit may likely have been peer influenced. The reality that some of the notorious frauds in science history took a long time to be uncovered, or settled, may well have given some of the ambitious researchers of the modern generation a sense of rightfulness, namely that they, too, deserve greater fame and power, based on scientific half-truth at best, than their own solid accomplishments could bring them.”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

A famous, and infamous, such case in history discussed in the The Guardian article by Rasko and Power was that of Nobel prize winner Alexis Carrel a century ago:

“… Carrel discovered that, if you remove some cells from the body, sit them in a nutritious broth and handle them correctly, they can not only survive, but thrive and multiply. Also, if you take some cells from one culture, you can start a new one and, with that, a third, and so on. The importance of this technique – know as cell “passaging” – can’t be overstated. With it, Carrel literally opened a new era in cell research. Unfortunately, he did so with an experiment that, while earning him international superstardom, proved to be a complete and utter train wreck.

On 17 January 1912, Carrel removed a chick embryo from its egg and cut out a small fragment of its still-beating heart with the aim of keeping it alive as long as possible. He had hardly begun this experiment when he announced to the world that his chicken heart culture was immortal, that immortality belonged potentially to all cells, and that death was only the consequence of how cells are organised in the body. In other words, the secret of eternal life is within us all, an attribute of our basic biological building blocks. It captured the public’s imagination and was soon accepted by the scientific community.”

(“What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata”, by John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

I compared the grandiose optimism in Carrel’s claim of potential eternal life for a cell culture to that by Haruko Obokata over a century later; and I noted that the Nobel prize was awarded to Carrel – for his earlier work on organs – in the same year after his publication of the cell life discovery, and that he demonstrated a living chicken cell culture for 34 years – science now knows that a chicken cell culture can only live for months – and it was accepted by the scientific community as truth for half a century:

“I note that Alexis Carrel’s grandiosely optimistic claim of potentially eternal life for a cell culture, published in May 1912 a few months after the start of his experiment, bore remarkable resemblance to the kind of claim made by Haruko Obokata and her co-authors in January 2014 that mature cells could be bathed to re-emerge as youthful stem cells. …

…

I should comment that the world must have been so excited by Alexis Carrel’s good news of eternal life in the horizon, as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Carrel, for his earlier work as a pioneer of organ preservation and transplant, by the end of 1912 – exactly a century before its awarding to Shinya Yamanaka:

…

Carrel’s optimistic claim of potential permanent life seemed to bear out as one of those chicken cell cultures continued to live and grow for 34 years. Other scientists tried in vain, none could reproduce Carrel’s results, but they dared not question his scientific statue:

…

Long after Carrel and his famous chicken culture had died, scientific research finally proved that his success was scientifically impossible, that the same chicken culture can live no longer than 35 times of multiplying, which would take several months only:

…”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

This kind of lifetime scientific glory based on falsehood happened when other researchers dared not contradict a famous and authoritative scientific figure, discarding instead of publishing their own negative results for the scientific community’s attention.

Alexis Carrel is now in the long past, but an article in the 1986 founding issue of The Scientist still asserted, as quoted earlier: “Despite the lack of “fairness” to new ideas, the traditional practice in science may serve us better than a more democratic mode”.

Still not quite open today, the academia and the scientific community are not necessarily fair when it comes to scientific integrity.

Reviewing the recent Obokata scandal, I have compared the investigative and corrective measures taken on Haruko Obokata to the lack of such taken on her co-author and mentor, prominent U.S. scientist Charles Vacanti, and compared this case to other recent major cases of scientific improprieties; my conclusion is that Vacanti has likely benefited from “elite impunity”:

“The Scientist magazine in December 2014 named the Haruko Obokata story No. 1 on its list of “The Top 10 Retractions of 2014”.

At No. 2 on the list was an Iowa State University researcher who spiked rabbit blood samples with human blood to make it look like his HIV vaccine was working. The fraud led to serious penalties not only for the researcher, Dong-Pyou Han, who resigned and is facing criminal charges, but also for the institution, Iowa State University…

…

Given the illumination by John Rasko and Carl Power that the contemporary scientifically disgraced Hwang Woo Suk and the early 20th-century Nobel Prize laureate Alexis Carrel were top examples of scientific fraud in biomedical research history, and given that the ramifications during the two’s respective career and life times were polar opposites – criminal conviction versus lifelong glory – I have to wonder if the inaction on the part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the Haruko Obokata/Charles Vacanti case has been due only to the absence of a concrete allegation of intentional fraud, or also to a sense of elite impunity – when compared to the Iowa State University case.

Next down on the No.3 spot of The Scientist’s top-10 retractions of 2014 was Taiwanese researcher Peter Chen and his fraudulent peer-review ring, a connected circle of researchers who peer-reviewed and approved one another’s papers for publication – often relying on false identities.

The unraveling of the Peter Chen case led to the retraction of 60 published papers deemed to have been accepted due to fraud, Chen’s departure from his university professorship, stepping down of a U.S.-based scientific journal’s editor-in-chief, and the resignation of the Taiwanese government’s education minister in 2014. A former president of the National Central University, the Taiwanese education minister Chiang Wei-ling had advised Chen’s twin brother on his Ph.D. thesis 10 years earlier, and was named by his former student as a co-author on 5 of those fraudulent papers. …

…

In comparison, even if he had not been a party in the fraudulent experiments conducted by Haruko Obokata, Charles Vacanti was a senior author of the now retracted Nature papers, an academic and scientific mentor of Obokata, and the intellectual father and leader of this whole framework of spore-like cells and STAP cells. His acts of posting special recipes online, claiming creation of STAP cells in his laboratory as described but providing no evidence, already were much more involvement in activities of questionable scientific honesty than the former Taiwanese education minister Chiang Wei-ling.”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

In short, on The Scientist’s top-10 retraction list of 2014 there were serious investigations that led to corrective and punitive measures in the No 2. case of research at Iowa State University, in the No 3. case of researchers in Taiwan, and in the No. 1 case with respect to Haruko Obokata at Japan’s RIKEN institution; but in the No. 1 case with respect to Charles Vacanti, a scientific research leader who had guided Obokata onto this path of research that eventually led to the fraudulent results and their publication in Nature journal, nothing has been done at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston – a leading U.S. hospital – and the affiliated Harvard Medical School.

Though my academic dispute at UBC in 1992 was about academic management style rather than “publish or perish”, a core issue of it was the lack of intellectual integrity and honesty – beyond UBC Faculty Association president Bill Bruneau’s use of collective political correctness as explanation. Moreover, the substance of the dispute was incorrectly dismissed by Bruneau’s calling it a case of “publish or perish” mentality.

In a May 2011 blog post I recalled how I became involved in the academic dispute:

“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.

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.

…

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. …

…

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.

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.

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.”

(“Team 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”, May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

As quoted, the situation was that Klawe had moved from research management in the giant computer industry corporation IBM to become UBC’s Computer Science Head, an appointed position in contrast to most academic department chairs that were elected. There was disgruntlement among some faculty members about her management style and her intent to break the department’s ‘honored’ tradition limiting the length of headship, and I agreed to raise the issue in the hope that there would be a more democratic way for department members to express their opinions.

In the summer of 1991 when I requested that we went to a lunch so I could discuss with her some concerns I learned of about her management, Klawe accepted – as quoted above she had declined having lunch in the summer of 1990 when I needed to ask about my prospect of getting a job potentially more permanent.

It was our only lunch alone together. Klawe appeared surprised by my willingness to raise the headship issue and to suggest that she use a formal department meeting to listen to criticisms. At one point she said to me, a little portentously and a little incredulously, that she was a trustee of the American Mathematical Society and the president of Western Canada computer science association.

I replied that as an AMS member I had voted for her trustee candidacy as well as for the vice-president candidacy of “Lenore”, but that professionally the two matters – her AMS trusteeship and her UBC computer science headship – were different. As for the Western Canada computer science association, I hadn’t heard of it until then – a sign of how disconnected I might be already.

“Lenore” was a friend of Klawe’s, and a mentor for me when I was a mathematics Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. I have mentioned her in another blog post about what happened later in 1999 when I spoke with her on the phone:

“Friends with Klawe and Pippenger, this time around in 1999 Lenore responded to me coolly, “If you can program, you don’t need to be in the academia”.”

(January 29, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Maria Klawe and Lenore Blum were among a small number of ambitious female academics and activists in mathematics and computer science. In hindsight, to the ambitious and hard-bargaining Klawe my professionally-oriented attitude that each issue be considered in its proper context must have looked naive and wrongheaded: every power position, be it appointed or elected, added to a portfolio of achievements with which she could aim for more – that would be consistent with the mentality of taking pride in breaking an honored tradition meant to keep the department head from becoming too powerful.

The relevance of intellectual honesty in this decades-old dispute has been, metaphorically, in the saying of “no news is good news”, i.e., for Maria Klawe.

The notion of her management style being corporate suggested that Klawe got her management positions partly because of her willingness and skills to do certain things not so common in academic management. Some of it could be unpleasant as shown in my May 2011 blog post, about the minimal chances she allowed others to air criticisms:

“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.

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…”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

When I pressed on, Klawe used her deceptiveness and ‘dirty trick’-like hardy ways to dodge the issue, and then brought in management suppression:

“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.

…

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.

But at the prior session’s end Klawe refused to leave, instead insisting on hearing first what I wanted to say.

It was threatening to be a stalemate again.

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.

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.

The last session was then led by Kelly Booth, who asked that I provide the facts to support my assertions.

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.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Without referring to the name, I compared Klawe to Richard Nixon. As an academic manager, she played tricky and hardy games instead of sitting down to listen to others and promise improvements in order to head off their discontent.

Imagine if an academics was one who, like Amgen’s Glenn Begley found out in disillusion, did an experiment 6 times and published the only good result as the proven result, would that academic be willing to persist in questioning the management? The type of politically correct explanation by Bill Bruneau on academic disputes would only be a facade to hide systemic problems.

UBC management and a small number of faculty and students then took part in schemes to falsely brand me as “violent” so that psychiatric oppression could be brought in to silence me. These schemes involved UBC Dean of Science Barry McBride, as I recalled:

“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.

On the contrary, it was my vulnerability Dean McBride immediately “targeted” in a separate memo to me on the same day, 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:

…

The fact that Barry McBride subsequently forwarded these e-mails to John Leslie, a psychiatrist at Vancouver General Hospital, shows the so-called “counselling” as intended to be psychiatric, and therefore coercive and oppressive in nature.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

When the long-premeditated psychiatric oppression finally came it was after I had left UBC and filed a lawsuit against the university, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for its role in the incident discussed by Bill Bruneau in the Kitsilano News article quoted earlier.

In November 1992 I sent out press releases to discuss the UBC case and also the leadership conduct of then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Several hours after my faxing the documents to the local Member of Parliament Kim Campbell, a former UBC faculty member and the Mulroney government’s Justice Minister, RCMP Sergeant Brian Cotton and a fellow officer came to my apartment to take me to a psychiatric assessment and committal; Cotton cited a request by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Pamela Kirkpatrick, who was the wife of former UBC colleague David Kirkpatrick involved in the academic politics, as I recalled in a March 2012 blog post:

“After the phone conversation, Cotton turned to me and said that CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] 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.

Sgt. Cotton then said, “You need to come with us for a psychiatric assessment at UBC Hospital.”

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.

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.”

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.”

(“Team 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”, March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

So when my political activism expanded, oppression originated from higher authorities.

During my first involuntary psychiatric committal at UBC Hospital in December 1992, I was shown documents revealing that back in early 1990 at UBC when I applied for a faculty job with a more permanent prospect, two UC Berkeley professors who had agreed to write letters of recommendations for me likely did not write them – one was Richard Karp, a friend of Klawe’s – although the number of letters written met the minimum requirement:

“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.

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.

A meticulously commanding professor, Karp was also a close friend of Maria Klawe and Nicholas Pippenger…

Kelly Booth, a leader of the Computer Graphics group, had received his Berkeley Ph.D. under “Dick” Karp years before…

…”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Thus, my personal experiences in the academia showed that things can be much less forthcoming, and that hidden behind elite images and smart political correctness academic politics can be deceptive, tough and even nasty. Such politics can revolve around technical or procedural matters, as illustrated by my case, and center on traditional academic points of views, “publish or perish” included.

But if on certain issues of broader societal ramifications academics do not take the challenges and yet the elite facade accord the academia a noble role, then it is not only intellectually dishonest but a disservice to the society; in a collective manner it can also be a treachery toward those academics who would like to do.

There is no question that many academics are passionate about and active on worthwhile social issues. For female academics, increasing the roles of women in various academic fields is one which Maria Klawe, and frankly I would think most female academic administrators, devote time and efforts to when they can.

But if the pursue of some important issues came with the exclusion of other important issues, that would be akin to medicine with both desired effects and undesirable side effects; and if it came with a consequence of undermining other important issues, that could be like targeting civilians when fighting a war viewed as just.

The psychology of Steven Dale Green, a U.S. soldier in the Iraq war who had a major role in the murder of an entire Iraqi civilian family, has been reviewed in a blog post by me.

(“The baffling rise of suicides in the U.S. military — plausible theories and grim reality”, September 9, 2014, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

The academia is not the hospital or the war zone, which I would agree, that education is a primary objective and, as Bill Bruneau stated, “publish or perish” can be more of the mentality.

On the other hand, if righteous condemnation of Reaganism and Thatcherism as causing social ills was deemed the higher calling, then it would demand a sense of responsibility and a level of care closer to dealing potentially with life and death. In such a circumstance, invoking the academia’s elite pedigree as the rightful qualification would be worse than “disillusioning” – it would be intellectual fraud.

Suppressing an academic dispute such as mine regarding a boss’s management style, to the point that the issue would not become open even within the academia, and that the matter would discredit the complainant due to his lesser pedigree versus the management’s authority, was intellectual fraud in my opinion.

As an academic administrator, Klawe typically aimed for good public relations in the media, with little or no controversy. So the following news story was rare, but revealing of her management tactics, reported long after I had lost the UBC dispute with her and she had served out a full 5-year term headship and been appointed a second term; the story took place shortly after her 1995 promotion to become a UBC vice president:

“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:

“Technically foul.

That’s the mood around parts of the University of B.C. campus following the apparent firing of women’s basketball coach Misty Thomas.

…

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.

Dr. Maria Klawe, vice-president of academic services, was also away from the office.

But a source said Klawe told Thomas that “competition has no place in athletics at UBC.

“She (Klawe) said she was doing Misty a favor because Misty would not want to stay in that kind of situation.

…

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.

Officials then told Thomas that her players wanted her out and that the desire was unanimous.

[Starting point guard Lori] Kemp disagrees that the feeling was unanimous, and says several players have sent letters to university administration expressing disapproval of the move.

“Some players weren’t surveyed and there was no indication that the survey could lead to a firing,” said Kemp.”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The firing of UBC women’s basketball coach Misty Thomas was carried out deceptively, and presented to different persons differently: a survey was done to get players’ views about their coach, but not all players were asked, and they were not told its purpose; the results were then used as the basis to fire Thomas, deceivingly UBC officials told Thomas the players unanimously wanted her fired, and Klawe even explained to Thomas that it was for her good because UBC athletics – obviously the players included – was not competitive.

So in this Misty Thomas case, Klawe easily handled an unpleasant management task by deftly shifting the expenses of blame to the players and the coach mutually – were it not for a player like Lori Kemp who publicly aired her disagreement with the way it was done.

Perhaps the controversial handling of firing a varsity sports coach was not as much an academic ‘taboo’ as a dispute about the management of an academic department, and it was thus easier for Lori Kemp’s disagreement to get past any hidden ‘censorship’ there might be.

It certainly saved the hassle of having to explain a dispute in one’s academic management record, for an occasion like in 2002 – Klawe was then UBC Dean of Science, a position not as high as her previous vice presidency for student and academic services but more prestigious for a scientist – when the highly prestigious Princeton University in the United States decided to hire her as Dean of Engineering and Applied Science:

““Maria Klawe is a leader in science education, and particularly
in encouraging and increasing women’s participation in information
technology and sciences,” said Princeton President Shirley
M. Tilghman.

“As dean of science at the University of British Columbia,
Maria has been remarkably effective in developing innovative science
programs, and promoting interdisciplinary research to achieve results,
while looking outward to build new relationships with industry. I’m looking forward to working with Maria as she leads the initiatives
that will keep Princeton at the forefront of academic engineering.”

Klawe, 50, has been UBC’s dean of science since November, 1998.
Before that, she was vice-president, Student and Academic Services,
and she headed UBC’s computer science dept. for six and a half years.

“We are truly sad to be losing a scholar of Maria’s rank,” said UBC President Martha Piper, “but we take some consolation in knowing that she will be joining one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions.”

…

Born in Toronto, Klawe holds bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in
mathematics from the University of Alberta. She has held faculty
positions in mathematics and computer science at Oakland University
in Michigan and the University of Toronto, and worked for eight
years with IBM.

Klawe steps down as science dean on Nov. 1 and takes up her new
position at Princeton Jan. 1, 2003. …”

(“UBC science dean is Princeton’s top pick”, June 26, 2002, UBC News)

Both Klawe and myself had started working at UBC in the summer of 1988. According to this UBC news release, Klawe served her headship for 6 & 1/2 years – breaking the computer science department honored tradition of 4 out a 5-year term – as vice president for about 2 months shy of 4 years, and as dean for exactly 4 years.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Klawe served the shorter lengths of around 4 years only for better trophies, one after another, than a department headship.

Then UBC President Martha Piper had good words for Klawe as quoted, “a scholar of Maria’s rank”.

Klawe had good words for Piper in return:

“Shirley Tilghman, 55, might be different. Elected the first woman president of Princeton University in May last year, Tilghman has since turned more than half the top administrative positions over to women at an institution that has been co-ed only since the 1970s.

Within a week of her own appointment, the Toronto-born Tilghman named Amy Gutmann as provost. This May, she named a woman as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and in June, she appointed Maria Klawe as dean of the school of engineering and applied science. She also extended the appointment of Nancy Weiss Malkeil as dean of the undergraduate college for a second five-year term. Out of nine top academic jobs at Princeton, five are now held by women.

…

Maria Klawe, 51, currently dean of science at the University of British Columbia, thinks being female was “almost something they had to ignore about me.” Klawe herself would never ignore the effect of having a woman at the top of a hierarchy, however. At UBC, Martha Piper has been president since 1997. “Until Martha came along, it was an oddity not dragging your spouse along to university functions. But her husband is a distinguished psychiatrist, and he had a life. Then it became the norm to show up by yourself. It’s like this is how it’s done and it’s OK.”

When Klawe takes over in January as dean of engineering and applied science at Princeton, she will join a small club. There are a handful of female deans of engineering in the United States and one in Canada, Tyseer Aboulnasr, at the University of Ottawa.

…

Before Shirley Tilghman became president of Princeton, she said the key to getting recognition for women was to appoint more women as administrators. …”

(“Shaking the old boys’ club: Female president of Princeton appoints women to top jobs at university”, by Janet Bagnall, July 12, 2002, The Gazette)

Maria Klawe said that being female was “almost something they had to ignore about me” – this context was clearly important for Princeton president Shirley Tilghman determined to hire female administrators to increase “recognition for women”.

As for Klawe becoming one of only a few female deans of engineering in the U.S. and Canada, that wasn’t too surprising: UBC computer science was in the science faculty but Princeton’s was in the school of engineering and applied science; and as Tilghman said in an earlier quote, Klawe had been effective at “looking outward to build new relationships with industry”.

To me, what was surprising is Klawe’s emphasis on the “distinguished psychiatrist” husband of UBC president Martha Piper, the successor to David Strangway who had handled my grievance about Klawe in 1992 as discussed in my May 2011 blog post cited earlier.

Given my personal experiences with the political use of psychiatry to suppress my activism in academic politics and in Canadian politics, I can be sensitive about such coincidences.

A psychiatrist connection in former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s family – his psychiatrist father-in-law – to the Vancouver psychiatrist who sent me to a committal at the B.C. Forensic Psychiatric Institute in January-February 1994, which falsely branded me a “Paranoid Schizophrenic”, was recalled by me in an October 2012 blog post:

“Attending the Forensic Clinic on January 26 as [probation officer Fred] Hitchcock advised, I didn’t get to meet my counselling psychiatrist Dr. Clifford Kerr, who held the opinion … that despite no observed psychotic symptom I had “Paranoid Schizophrenia” as inferred from my persistent behavior.

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.

Months later in May, I read a newspaper article by him and realized Dr. Dilli was the leader of Bosnians in British Columbia:

…

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.

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 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”…”

(“Team 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”, October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Then the next person to become UBC president had a psychiatrist husband, a fact that even Maria Klawe emphasized.

In my view, when the real facts are not in the open it is justified for those potentially affected, like myself, to maintain a healthy degree of concern about, and attention to, what might be going on behind the scenes.

The UBC news story mentioned Klawe’s academic degrees from the University of Alberta. But her roots were much deeper there, as I noted in an April 2012 blog post that her parents were professors at U of A, and had longer British roots:

“… 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 …”

(“Team 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”, April 30, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

When Martha Piper became UBC president in 1997, she came from none other than the University of Alberta, where she had been vice president of research and external affairs:

“Martha Piper, Vice-President (Research and External Affairs), has been appointed the University of British Columbia’s next president.

…

The UBC Board of Governors made the appointment on the unanimous recommendation of a 19-member presidential search committee, chaired by UBC Chancellor William Sauder, which conducted an extensive search throughout North America.

…

“I regret seeing her leave,” said the chair of the Board of Governors community and government affairs committee Betty Anne Pearson. “This is a wonderful opportunity for her and the U of A should be proud. …” she told Senate.

Dr Piper has the proven academic and institutional leadership, and management and administrative abilities necessary to successfully head a complex institution such as UBC, said UBC Board of Governors Chair Shirley Chan.

…

In August 1994, she was appointed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien to the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology and she chaired a sub- committee on Quality of Life. …”

(“Vice-President Martha Piper to be University of British Columbia’s next president”, November 29, 1996, Folio)

The boss of Klawe’s parents at Klawe’s alma mater became Klawe’s boss at UBC; so obviously nothing could go wrong for Klawe.

The two news stories quoted earlier about Klawe’s move to Princeton mentioned that both her and Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman had been born in Toronto, Canada.

Tilghman was a graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

(“Princeton President speaks on gender gap in science and technology”, September 27, 2010, Queen’s Gazette)

A little over a year after moving to Princeton, Klawe received an honorary degree from Queen’s University. I reviewed a few of the interesting co-honorees in my February 2012 blog post:

“… 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” Harper’s Magazine 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.

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.

…

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.”

(February 20, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

The various coincidences among these 2004 Queen’s University honorees were very unsettling from my perspective: Klawe along with Jean Chretien, for whose government Klawe’s and her parents’ former boss Martha Piper worked as a science and technology advisor, and along with Brian Mulroney’s in-law – though not the psychiatrist father-in-law – and Klawe’s date of receiving it being June 4.

If these were merely ‘coincidental’, what about the other June 4 honoree, Queen’s graduate Gordon Wells, Canadian navy officer who was also a government advisor and official in Jamaica, the capital of which is also named Kingston? Was that merely by chance and not thoughtfully selected?

As my above-quoted blog post and also my March 2012 blog post pointed out, a key UBC person in false profiling of me as violent and mental ill, graduate student Andrew Martin, was a Queen’s graduate.

The official name of greater Kingston, Jamaica, happened to be ‘Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation’.

(“Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation”, Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Foreign Trade, Jamaica)

It did look like a few selected through connections of alma maters, bosses, political bosses and families, by Queen’s University to honor in 2004.

There is no question that being a vocal advocate for women in mathematics and computer science, and in science and engineering, had much to do with Maria Klawe’s steady ascent to become an elite academic administrator. Belatedly in 2012, Klawe herself admitted that being a woman had had a lot to do with the important positions given to her, recalling a conversation with a male Princeton faculty member:

“Shortly after Maria Klawe was named Princeton University’s first female dean of engineering, she met a long-serving male faculty member on a campus walk. “He said, ‘I don’t have to listen to a word you say, because I know you only got the job because you’re female,’” Dr. Klawe, now president of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., recalls. “And I said, ‘Actually, this is one of the few times in my life when I know I wasn’t hired because I’m female because President [Shirley] Tilghman told me she was going to receive a lot of flak for hiring me, but I was the best candidate.’ He just walked away. He didn’t say a word.””

(“How some universities are attracting more women to math, science programs”, by James Bradshaw, November 25, 2012, The Globe and Mail)

Klawe admitted her sense that prior to Princeton most of the important jobs she got had to do with her gender: “… this is one of the few times in my life when I know I wasn’t hired because I’m female …”.

As for Princeton, she told this Princeton man that President Tilghman told her she was the best candidate. While that was true, Tilghman had also stated, as quoted earlier from a July 2002 The Gazette article, that the key to getting recognition for women was to appoint more women as administrators; thus the female preference had already been decided by Tilghman.

Klawe must have been aware of Tilghman’s ‘pre-condition’ of appointing more women, but she cited Tilghman’s words of her being “the best candidate” to rebuff this long-time Princeton man, while making a compromise by admitting the female factor in her earlier jobs – enough for the man to walk away rather than escalating the argument.

Maria Klawe has been deviously clever, if not devilishly smart.

But to begin with, this Princeton male professor had decided to keep silent about his dismissive attitude toward the new female Dean – I wonder if this anecdote had resemblance to the lid kept on my dispute with her at UBC?

Tilghman said that Klawe was good at building relationships with the industry. Clearly she should be, given her years of experience as an IBM Research manager, and her corporate style of management as UBC faculty member David Lowe pointed out in 1992, as quoted earlier.

So it’s not surprising that in 1998 Klawe was the keynote speaker at then British Columbia Premier Glen Clark’s business summit in the city of Kamloops; what surprises me is that Clark’s finance ministers played school math kids in front of Klawe:

“Take the premier’s announcement yesterday to finally cut stumpage rates — the fee the government charges forest companies to cut trees on Crown land.

The announcement is welcome — but the damage has already been done.

Clark and the NDP have beaten this proud industry into the ground for six years straight.

…

As of January 1998, stumpage costs were 285 per cent higher in B.C. than in Alberta.

…

The forestry CEOs gathered around Clark barely peeped about all this yesterday. Not surprising, since Clark just cut their expenses by $600 million.

“If your landlord promised to cut your rent as long as you smiled for the cameras for a few minutes, wouldn’t you?” asked Liberal forests critic George Abbott.

…

CLASS CLOWNS

It was a no-brainer question for Finance Minister Joy MacPhail and predecessor Andrew Petter yesterday.

“Who here loved math in school?” asked UBC’s Dr. Maria Klawe in her keynote speech to Clark’s business summit here.

MacPhail and Petter both shot their hands in the air.

You didn’t expect any less, did you?”

(“Premier’s savior act wearing thin”, by Michael Smyth, May 29, 1998, The Province)

The staunchly socialist premier already had smart business brains back then, if no one expected where it would lead; Glen Clark is today the president of Jim Pattison Group, the company of one of Canada’s richest, Vancouver billionaire Jimmy Pattison:

“It’s not the fare normally associated with a God-fearing 84-year-old billionaire whose first job was as a trumpet player in youth gospel camps. But today, Mr. Pattison is the king of the checkout counters, with a distribution network that encompasses at least half the magazine and book racks in North American supermarkets and pharmacies.

…

No one is closer to the whims, fantasies and economic challenges of ordinary North Americans than Jimmy Pattison, the ordinary titan whose wealth is estimated by Forbes magazine at $4.3-billion (U.S.), amounting to the fifth-largest fortune in Canada and 248th biggest in the world. All this for a compulsive striver who was born on the eve of the Great Depression in Saskatchewan, grew up poor in east-end Vancouver, and started out as the lowest of the low salesman in a downtown car lot.

…

Twelve years ago, he took a chance on Glen Clark, the former B.C. premier and socialist stalwart who had left his post amid allegations of corruption and was then hired by Mr. Pattison. …

… Mr. Clark, 55, is a big part of that team, having assumed a first-among-equals role as Pattison Group president, while Mr. Pattison remains chief executive officer. A lot – although not all – of the Pattison operating businesses are now under Mr. Clark’s purview.”

(“Lunch with the irreplaceable Canadian billionaire Jimmy Pattison”, by Gordon Pitts, January 18 (updated March 22), 2013, The Globe and Mail)

But in March 2009 I was taken aback, in part because of the timing, when  Microsoft Corporation announced Maria Klawe as a new director of its board; I had started intensive political blogging in January, as I recalled in my May 2011 blog post:

“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. …

On March 9, Microsoft Corporation announced the appointment of Maria Klawe to its Board of Directors.

Microsoft was of course influential. When I was teaching at the University of Hawaii in 1997-1999, my teaching assistant “Hu” … did her summer internship at Microsoft in Seattle, and my teaching assistant “Wang Lingwang” … was hired by Microsoft in Seattle after his master’s degree …

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 …”

(May 24, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Apparently earlier as a Princeton dean, Klawe and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates had appeared together in a 2005 Microsoft Research Summit.

(“Media Alert: Bill Gates and Maria Klawe to Address Importance of Collaboration Between Academia and Industry”, July 13, 2005, Microsoft News Center)

So through step-by-step ascent, one as a base for the next, in 2009 Klawe finally re-entered the corporate world – at a top level as a board director of Microsoft, a computer industry giant no smaller than IBM.

Again, Klawe’s high media profile was advocating for women.

After top-level management changes at Microsoft and Satya Nadella became the CEO, in 2014 Klawe persuaded Nadella to appear at the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference – as the first-ever male headline speaker:

“Earlier this year, Maria Klawe persuaded Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella to spend a day at the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Phoenix this October.

She dangled the prospect of his becoming the first man ever to be a headline speaker at the event. For the 8,000 female technologists and diversity activists planning to attend, Klawe herself may be the bigger draw.

Since she became president of Harvey Mudd College in 2006, the 800-student liberal arts college near Los Angeles has made tangible progress creating a blueprint for encouraging women to become computer scientists. Last year, more than half the school’s engineering majors were female for the first time. Women made up a record 47 percent of its computer science majors.”

(“Harvey Mudd’s Klawe Maps Way to Woo Young Women Into Tech”, by Peter Burrows, August 7, 2014, Bloomberg Business)

But this time, the distinguished guest speaker said something that annoyed all the women present:

““It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise,” Nadella told a confounded (and predominantly female) audience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing on Thursday.

…

Nadella made the comments in an on-stage conversation with Maria Klawe, a computer scientist, president of Harvey Mudd College, and member of Microsoft’s board of directors. He seemed to suggest that “faith in the system” is akin to magic.

“That might be one of the initial ‘super powers,’ that quite frankly, women (who) don’t ask for a raise have,” he told the straight-faced Klawe. “It’s good karma. It will come back.””

(“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Women: Don’t Ask For A Raise, Trust Karma”, by Selena Larson, October 9, 2014, ReadWrite)

Nadella seemed to be saying that women who have “faith” in “the system” and do not ask for a pay raise tend to have ‘super powers’ and thus will be able to make higher pays in the future. But he called it a “karma”, as if asking for a pay raise would lead to some undesirable consequence – it couldn’t be as bad as my challenging Klawe’s management, could it?

It’s kind of sad that the first public rebuff of Maria Klawe I have read in the press has come as a rebuff to all women who want higher pays. On the other hand, Maria Klawe has been this decades-old unfinished story for me that I don’t yet know what was really in it.

Regardless, I feel that the following comments I made on the Haruko Obokata scandal, quoted earlier, may have relevance in this case – not so much about scientific research but about management ambition:

“An acquired habit may likely have been peer influenced. The reality that some of the notorious frauds in science history took a long time to be uncovered, or settled, may well have given some of the ambitious researchers of the modern generation a sense of rightfulness, namely that they, too, deserve greater fame and power, based on scientific half-truth at best, than their own solid accomplishments could bring them.”

(April 26, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

From my perspective, “affirmative action” – to borrow an old political term – is truly affirmative when aligned with broader societal progress; otherwise it can lead to negative trade-offs when the focus is on the “rightfulness” of having something.

In Klawe’s case, advocating for women was a broader cause for her academic management career; but when she reached Nadella he seemed to say: for what I manage, gender rightfulness can’t cover it all and I emphasize ability.

Never mind for Maria Klawe, though, when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella publicly poured some cold water on this board director’s enthusiasm advocating for female employees in computer industry, Klawe had already reached a higher plateau in her fame.

In 2014 Fortune magazine named Maria Klawe No. 17 on its list of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” – behind Chinese company Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma at No. 16 – with the following citation:

“A mathematician and computer scientist by training, Klawe is leading the charge to bring more women into science, technology, and engineering. At Harvey Mudd, freshman women go to computer conferences, and introductory coding classes are now designed to be more welcoming to newcomers. Thanks in no small part to Klawe, women now make up 40% of computer science majors at the college, up from 10% in 2005.”

(“The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders”, March 20, 2014, Fortune)

Amazing, becoming one of the world’s greatest leaders for achievements at an 800-student college – but I have read she’s done more than that.

Klawe has been the president of Harvey Mudd College since the summer of 2006 when it was a 700-student college, after 3 and 1/2 years as Princeton dean of engineering and applied science.

(“Diamond in the Mudd”, by Melissa Ezarik, July 2006, University Business)

As I am finishing this blog post intended for this Friday on my blog, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring, I come across a local news item, the list of Spring 2015 honorary degree recipients at the University of Toronto; here I list a few ones of interesting relevance:

“…

Ceremony 5	Thursday, June 4	2:30 p.m.	Convocation Speaker – Tye Farrow
Ceremony 6	Friday, June 5	10:00 a.m.	Honorary Graduand – The Honorable Paul Volcker
Ceremony 7	Friday, June 5	2:30 p.m.	Convocation Speaker – Professor Jeffrey Karp
,,,
Ceremony 18	Friday, June 15	10:00 a.m.	Honorary Graduand – Dr. Alfred Aho
…
Ceremony 24	Thursday, June 18	10:00 a.m.	Convocation Speaker – Margaret Wilson
Ceremony 25	Thursday, June 18	2:30 p.m.	Convocation Speaker – Margaret Wilson
Ceremony 26	Friday, June 19	10:00 a.m.	Honorary Graduand – Dr. Maria Klawe

”

(“Honorary Graduands and Convocation Speakers for the Spring 2015 Convocation Ceremonies”, University of Toronto)

As selected: the only ceremony on June 4, with Tye Farrow, Toronto designer, as convocation speaker; all two ceremonies on June 5, one with American economist and banker Paul Volcker as honorary graduate, and the other with Jeffrey Karp, stem cell scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School – thus a colleague of Charles Vacanti of the Haruko Obokata scandal fame – as convocation speaker; the first of two ceremonies on June 15, with Alfred Aho, Columbia University computer scientist and U of T graduate, as honorary graduate; all two ceremonies on June 18, both with Margaret Wilson, Toronto secondary school teacher and Ontario Teachers’ Federation leader, as convocation speaker; and the only ceremony on the last day, Friday, June 19, with Maria Klawe as honorary graduate.

There are only two computer scientists among the 2015 honorees: Alfred Aho and Maria Klawe, both with specialization in theory, both in industry research before becoming head or chair of an academic department – for Aho it was AT&T Bell Labs and then Columbia University.

Like with Queen’s University’s in 2004, these University of Toronto honorees have been thoughtfully chosen.

It is a special addition to the honors Klawe has already, because U of T is where she had turned her fortune around:

“By the late 1960s, when Klawe entered the University of Alberta, the hippie movement was in full swing… “I couldn’t figure out how math could make the world a better place,” Klawe recalled. So Christmas 1970, halfway through her third year toward an honors degree, she dropped out of the university and went to live with a Yale dropout. In summer 1971, the pair headed overseas…

In India, Klawe found herself craving mathematics… she returned to the University of Alberta in fall 1972. After finishing her bachelor’s degree in May 1973, she went straight on to grad school at Alberta, earning her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1977, and getting divorced in 1978. Hearing of booming job opportunities in theoretical computer science, she enrolled at the University of Toronto, one of the three best programs in the world (along with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). By summer 1979, she was named assistant professor at Toronto.

That fall, a young hotshot theoretical computer scientist named Nick Pippenger from IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, flew to Toronto to give a colloquium at the university. “He was extraordinarily shy, extraordinarily bright, and extraordinarily nice,” she recalled. The two young mathematicians rapidly developed a long-distance romance, flying between Toronto and New York every week or two. When they announced their engagement, “IBM Research was so afraid of losing Nick that they made me an offer to join either Yorktown Heights or a new theory group in San Jose.” Klawe and Pippenger married in May 1980 and moved to California in July.”

(“Maria M. Klawe: Welcoming the Excluded”, by Trudy E. Bell, Fall 2012, The Bent of Tau Beta Pi)

As she herself told it, not becoming a social activist, with a math Ph.D. but not committed to mathematics, Klawe enrolled as a computer science graduate student at the University of Toronto and soon in 1979 was made an assistant professor; she had recently divorced her ex-husband – the Yale University dropout I presume – and now met Nick Pippenger, an IBM researcher in her math-oriented field of theoretical computer science, and in about a year they were married and moved to IBM Research.

The corporate world was better for Klawe, both professionally and in personal life, and the University of Toronto started it all.

By the time Klawe started her UBC computer science headship along with my arrival in 1988, she had been with IBM for 8 years, as a manager for several years. So I wonder why in 1992 UBC Faculty Association president William Bruneau was quick to hide my local management-style dispute with her by dismissing the issue as “publish or perish”, and yet so eager to blame Reaganism and Thatcherism globally?

In fact, compared to Klawe’s own IBM experience, UBC management – Klawe included – and the faculty association were worse than IBM management in handling an internal dispute:

““At first, I did not realize how little value my manager put on me as a woman,” Klawe reflected. “I could have been anyone, and he would have hired me to keep Nick.” By 1984, relations with her manager had deteriorated so bitterly that Klawe started her own research group in discrete mathematics. In 1985, she was promoted to head all mathematical research within the computer science division at what became the IBM Almaden Research Center—leading what was regarded as one of the three best theoretical computer science research groups in the world and becoming manager of her former manager.

Ultimately the two became lifelong friends. At the time, however, the confrontation with gender discrimination left Klawe both angry and thoughtful—and led her to discover a major goal. “I began to wonder: How can we build institutions and groups to create a culture within science and engineering to nurture all people, beginning with undergraduates?” She began thinking about returning to academia.”

(Trudy E. Bell, Fall 2012, The Bent of Tau Beta Pi)

Maria Klawe was allowed to start her own research group after her manager had given her a hard time, and she then rose within the IBM Research system to become manager of her former manager!

But in this sense, at UBC and in Canada, and perhaps even more broadly affected, having disputed the management style and leadership conduct of powerful figures like Maria Klawe and Brian Mulroney, it has been endless career stall, recurring political persecutions, and life frustrations for me.

I have been living in Toronto for nearly 13 years. With the availability and accessibility of the internet I have been able to engage in intensive political blogging since 2009 – compared to in 1992 when the World Wide Web did not exist – but otherwise my predicaments haven’t improved.

Now Klawe is back receiving an honor in Toronto, as one of the world’s greatest leaders according to Fortune magazine.

I do notice that she isn’t given a higher profile, such as a convocation speaker, and the ceremony with her is scheduled as the last of the season. In comparison, a day earlier local school teacher Margaret Wilson gives two convocation speeches. But that is very subtle, nearly unnoticeable.

In contrast, much local media attention has recently been given to a case of child sexual exploit by University of Toronto education professor Benjamin Levin, who had been deputy education minister of Ontario province.

The case is rather bizarre, involving Levin’s urging women, in online chats, to sexually assault their daughters:

“There were two very different sides to Benjamin Levin.

The version known to his family and friends was a “kind, gentle” and “treasured” man, who served as Ontario’s deputy education minister and taught and researched at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

“Mr. Levin also had a hidden, dark side,” Ontario Court Justice Heather McArthur said Friday, when she sentenced him to three years in prison for making and possessing child pornography and for counselling to commit sexual assault.

…

It was a stunning fall for a man one former colleague said in a letter of support was “one of the world’s most outstanding educators over the past three decades,” who worked on Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team in early 2013, following Dalton McGuinty’s resignation.

…

His foray into the online realm of child pornography put Levin on the radar of three undercover officers.

An image Levin sent to one of the officers was of a bound girl with a gag in her mouth, a leash hanging down her body and a woman standing over her, writing “mmm, so hot to imagine a mother doing that to her girl to please her lover.” In another instance, he sent her a story he wrote about the violent sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl.

He told two undercover officers posing online as mothers with young girls that he and his wife had been sexually active with their own three daughters. Levin told one officer that “he hoped his daughters would ‘share’ their own children with him and his wife,” McArthur wrote.

The judge said there is no evidence that Levin actually sexually abused a child. His wife of 36 years and his daughters wrote him letters of support.”

(“Benjamin Levin sentenced to 3 years in prison on child porn charges”, by Jacques Gallant, March 29, 2015, The Toronto star)

As “one of the world’s most outstanding educators”, Levin had a starkly opposite life online, distributing pornographic images, advising women to sexually assault their daughters, bragging about doing it to his own daughters – this was denied by his family – and expressing hope that his daughters would “share” their children sexually with him.

It sounds worse than any umbilical cord-like, everlasting desire of keeping children from moving on, I am afraid.

That brings me to the following impressions I recorded in Part 2 of my very first blog article, dated January 29, 2009:

“Sitting in front of a cableless old TV this New Year’s Eve in Toronto, I suddenly realized that unlike previous New Year’s Eves there are no longer Time Square and Dick Clark on television, normally carried by CTV network’s local affiliate CFTO; Ben Mulroney must have an aversion to the year 2009, I said to myself. Settling on watching the New Year countdown and celebration at Nathan Phillip Square live on CityTV – the only thing there was on the TV set – I was surprised to see the Toronto “Jersey Boys” appear to say “I love you baby” from a 1967 song, Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You, but I did not remember hearing the Auld Lang Syne, or perhaps it was too noisy for me to notice the sing-along.”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 2)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In my recollection, in the years before and after at least one TV station live-broadcast the New York City Time Square New Year’s Eve celebration that I could watch on a “cableless”, analog TV. But not 2009’s.

Now I hope what I recorded of the Toronto 2009 New Year’s Eve celebration wasn’t a Benjamin Levin kind of perverted love: “I was surprised to see the Toronto “Jersey Boys” appear to say “I love you baby” from a 1967 song, Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You, but I did not remember hearing the Auld Lang Syne…”

Think of it again:

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off (Of) You” said, “I love you, baby, And if it’s quite all right, I need you, baby, To warm the lonely night”, whereas “Auld Lang Syne” had said, “Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and auld lang syne?”

(“‘Auld Lang Syne’: What Does it Mean Again?”, by Christina Ng, December 31, 2012, ABC News; and, “Bob Crewe, Songwriter for Frankie Valli and Four Seasons, Dies at 83”, by William Yardley, September 12, 2014, The New York Times)

Who’s to blame?

At the time I hoped 2009 would be a good year because I was starting political blogging, hence my explanation for the lack of Time Square event on TV air, “Ben Mulroney must have an aversion to the year 2009”, referring to Brian Mulroney’s son, a CTV entertainment reporter in Toronto.

It turned out not to be, as by March 9 Maria Klawe became a Microsoft board director and, as almost always before, wherever she went not a whiff of disagreement would be in the press.

But at least in January 2009 there was another type of excitement, namely Obamamania, and even my landlady’s daughter, a secondary school principal, was reported in the press for it:

“It probably doesn’t matter to most people as they are swept up in another type of euphoria, i.e., Obamamania, anyway. The other day my landlady Mrs. Kristensen proudly showed me a copy of the January 16 Toronto Star newspaper in which her daughter Kyra Kristensen-Irvine, a Toronto-area school principal referred to as “Mrs. K.I.” by her students, made front-page news for forming an “Obama Committee” and encouraging students’ enthusiasm on the first African-American U.S. president.”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Mrs. Kristensen’s old house was across the street from the University of Toronto.

Later by 2012 Canada’s TV broadcast standards were upgraded to digital, and the old TV set Mrs. Kristensen had for me no longer worked. In late 2014 she passed away at a good old age of 99, this March I moved and now I get to watch a digital TV.

But since 1993 I haven’t been able to find a civil lawyer willing to legally confront the oppressions, nor the money for it at this point. Meanwhile, Brian Mulroney’s children are nesting comfortably and successfully in the same city.

And my extensive and in-depth blogging since 2009 has not led to any media coverage I have been hoping for. Yet today Maria Klawe is back in Toronto to roost.

But at the least, the lurid stories of online child sexual-assault chats by Benjamin Levin, the disgraced former Ontario deputy education minister, in the Canadian media has presented a tempting political blame.

For instance, some blamed Levin for the proposed radical changes to Ontario schools’ sex education curriculum – something Premier Kathleen Wynne, once Levin’s boss as education minister, vehemently denies despite some evidence for it:

“On March 6, 2009, Levin wrote and signed a memo that put himself in charge of Ontario’s school curriculum.

“Dear colleagues, I am writing to provide an update on our sector’s agenda … I will be filling the ADM (assistant deputy minster) position previously held by George Zegarac … The division formerly headed by George Zegarac will be renamed as ‘Learning and Curriculum.’ It will have responsibilty for curriculum and for Special Education including Provincial Schools.”

…

For some, it’s a question of what children should be learning. For others, it’s about age appropriateness. But for many, the key question is should such a strategy be moved forward when the man at the top of it is accused with crimes against children?

…

“Ministers and deputy ministers do not write curriculum,” Wynne told reporters. “Curriculum is written by subject experts in conversation and in consultation with a wide array of people and curriculum is reviewed and written on an ongoing basis.”

…

No involvement?

Memos show Levin announcing he is taking over the “renamed” Learning and Curriculum department and “will have responsibilty for curriculum.” It’s nonsensical and troubling to suggest Levin was not involved. In the interest of children, with these documents now public, members of the legislature should sanction the premier and minister for spinning attempts.”

(“Liberals can’t deny Levin’s role with sex-ed curriculum”, by Joe Warmington, March 2, 2015, The Toronto Sun)

How sexually explicit and age inappropriate is the proposed new sex-ed curriculum?Even University of Toronto students have their eyebrows raised:

“Benjamin Levin is a tenured University of Toronto professor, former Ontario deputy education minister, and was a member of Kathleen Wynne’s transition team. This July, the U of T community was shocked when Levin was arrested and charged with seven counts of child pornography.

…

In 2010, as Ontario’s deputy education minister, Mr. Levin proposed a radical sex education curriculum, which then education minister and current premier Kathleen Wynne was hoping to adopt. Parts of the program suggested teaching eight-year-olds about sexual orientation and identity and eleven-year-olds about anal and oral sex, as well as masturbation. Premier Dalton McGuinty rejected it at the time due to opposition from parents.

Wynne now denies that Mr. Levin played any role in forming the sexual education curriculum.”

(“Canada’s most scandalous university”, by Laura Charney, December 11, 2013, The Newspaper)

As the deputy education minister, Levin supervised far more than sex education, of course. He had a vision for a “whole-system reform” of education:

“… The moral and political purpose of whole-system reform is ensuring that everyone will be affected for the better, starting on day one of implementing the strategy. The entire system should show positive, measurable results within two or three years.

We have done this in Ontario, Canada, where we have had the opportunity since 2003 to implement new policies and practices across the system—all 4,000 elementary schools, 900 secondary schools, and the 72 districts that serve 2 million students. Following five years of stagnation and low morale, from 1998 to 2003, the impact of the new strategies has been dramatic: …”

(“The Fundamentals of Whole-System Reform: A Case Study from Canada”, by Michael Fullan and Ben Levin, online June 12 (in print June 17), 2009, Education Week)

But Levin’s education reform success has been questioned by a Ph.D. thesis produced at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education where Levin has been a professor. In her 2011 thesis, Lindsay Anne Kerr wrote:

“… this study is an intertextual analysis of print/electronic documents pertaining to students ‘at risk.’ … This study questions the accounting logic that reduces education to skills training in workplace literacy/numeracy, and contradicts the official ‘success’ story that promotes Ontario as a model of large-scale educational change. …

…

As distinct from the messy haphazardness of ruling directives that teacher/participants experience on the ground, Levin, Glaze, and Fullan (2008) paint a rosy picture of Ontario’s success story as a made-in-Canada model for large-scale education reform. As I have pointed out, this disconnect between frontline teachers and the official story marks the operation of ruling relations. … The purpose of this section is not to single out individuals, but to show how the ruling apparatus operates to bring about institutional capture to the ruling ideology. …

…

… From my analysis, it becomes apparent that the Liberal government in Ontario is actually building on education reforms begun by the Harris/Eves regime, rather than bringing about any substantive change to the original plan that exacerbated the problem of students dropping out of high school before graduation. Thus, the Liberal government’s SS Strategy continues to reproduce socio-economic inequity through strengthening neoliberal education reforms and displacing critical democratic approaches to education. …”

(“The EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTION of STUDENTS at RISK”, by Lindsay Anne Kerr, 2011, Graduate Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto)

It reads like, away from the public eye, the Ontario education reform process overseen by Levin was to a degree authoritarian, and discriminative against “at risk” students.

Now I wonder what Benjamin Levin’s possibly concocted stories of sexual assaulting his daughters might be for – getting extra jail time on a pathetically cooked tale in exchange for hiding other matters of substance in a kind of scam justice?

(Continuing to Part 2)

Has China’s anti-corruption campaign brought down a “New Gang of Four”, and what could that imply about the country’s leadership? – Part 1: It’s four power leftists’ corruptions

(This article is expanded from a January 13, 2015 posting on my Facebook community page, History, Culture and Politics.)

In 2012-2013 when former Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Bo Xilai was expelled from the party, criminally tried and sentenced to life in prison for “bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power” following his wife’s trial and suspended death sentence for murder, I covered their cases extensively on postings on the Facebook page, History, Culture and Politics.

(Facebook posting, September 30, 2013, History, Culture and Politics)

I noted that Bo was only the 3rd Politburo member to fall from grace since the 1989 Chinese military suppression of pro-democracy protests on Capital Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and that prior to his downfall Bo had led the most maverick high-profile political campaign, a Maoist-style one, in China since 1989:

“Suspension of Bo Xilai from the Chinese Communist Party Politburo and arrest of his wife as a murder suspect in the death of British businessman Neil Heywood signalled the end of the most maverick high-level political campaign in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests when then Party leader Zhao Ziyang took a stand more sympathetic to the protesters than the Party establishment, and fell from power.

Bo is the third Politburo member to fall from grace after the military suppression of the 1989 protests. The previous two were Beijing City Party leader Chen Xitong in 1995, who had been one of the hardline leaders supporting the military crackdown, and Shanghai City Party leader Chen Liangyu in 2005, all on corruption charges.

Unlike the Chen’s, Bo, “princeling” son of a Communist revolutionary / behind-the-scenes elder of the 1989 crackdown, has been a Maoist-style populist campaigning directly to the people.”

(Facebook posting, April 11, 2012, History, Culture and Politics)

I also noted a unique international dimension of the Bo Xilai scandal, namely that it was triggered by British businessman Neil Heywood’s murder later admitted to by Bo’s wife Gu Kailai, and that Bo maintained a degree of popularity in the city of Chongqing where he was the party chief until his fall, because of his campaign against organized crime, efforts on building affordable housing, and promotion of Maoist songs and mass gatherings:

“The scandal surrounding Bo, Congqing city party leader when it unraveled, involved his wife Gu Kailai’s murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, and city police chief Wang Lijun’s seeking asylum from the U.S. Consulate in nearby city of Chengdu, who exposed the Bo family secrets.

Bo was a leftwing populist, and is still popular in the regions where he served, especially in Chongqing he led from 2007 to 2012. Bo campaigned against organized crime, built affordable housing, and promoted Maoist songs and mass gatherings as a way of building his popularity among the city’s 30 million residents.”

(September 30, 2013, History, Culture and Politics)

In March 2012 just as Bo Xilai was about to fall from grace, a Ferrari car crash in Beijing killed the young male driver and seriously injured his two young female passengers, sending rumors swirling that the dead man was the son of senior party official Ling Jihua, director of the Communist Party Central Committee’s General Office and a top political lieutenant of the party leader, then Chinese President Hu Jintao. The two young women were reported to be of ethnic minority origins, possibly Tibetan.

The timing of these events, that involving Bo and that rumored to involve Ling, was sensitive. A scheduled, once in a decade, party-and-government leadership change was about to take place in late 2012 – early 2013, and it was believed by some political watchers that Ling’s attempted cover-up of his son’s death cost him a promotion, by the outgoing leader Hu, to the Politburo. One sensitive question was:

“How had the son of a Communist Party official, whose salary is relatively meager, managed to acquire a Ferrari?”

(“How a Ferrari Crash May Have Unsettled China’s Leadership Transition”, Hannah Beech, September 4, 2012, Time)

But some experts on Chinese politics saw in these events political factional infighting within the Communist Party.

Brookings Institution analyst Cheng Li viewed the ruling party as broadly divided between two informal coalitions, the “elitist” and the “populist”:

“Li argues the core elitist faction is the “taizidang,” or so-called “princelings” — the offspring of former revolutionary leaders and high-ranking officials. Another elite, albeit fading, faction is the so-called “Shanghai Gang,” or followers of Jiang Zemin, who served as mayor of Shanghai before becoming China’s supreme leader in 1989.”

(“‘One Party, Two Coalitions’ – China’s Factional Politics”, Alexis Lai, updated November 8, 2012, CNN News)

Li said that in 2012 the elitist coalition was led by Wu Bangguo, outgoing chairman of the National People’s Congress (the national legislature), and Jia Qinglin, outgoing chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (an advisory body consisting of delegates from various political parties and regions) – both protégés of Jiang.

According to Li, the populist coalition was dominated by former Communist Youth League officials:

“The populists are dominated by the “tuanpai” — politicians who cut their teeth in the Chinese Communist Youth League, the party’s nation-wide organization for youth aged 14-28 to study and promote communism. The league is also a training ground for party cadres.”

(Alexis Lai, updated November 8, 2012, CNN News)

Li said that in 2012 the populist coalition was led by outgoing President Hu and outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao.

Broadly speaking in this theory, the two coalitions run along socioeconomic and geographic divides, with the elitist coalition representing businesses and the affluent regions, and the populist coalition representing the poor and the less developed regions:

“The two coalitions represent different socio-economic and geographical constituencies. Most of the top leaders in the elitist coalition, for instance, are “princelings”, leaders who come from families of veteran revolutionaries or of high-ranking officials. These princelings often began their careers in the economically well-developed coastal cities. The elitist coalition usually represents the interests of China’s entrepreneurs.

Most leading figures in the populist coalition, by contrast, come from less-privileged families. They also tend to have accumulated much of their leadership experience in the less-developed inland provinces.

Many advanced in politics by way of the Chinese Communist Youth League and have therefore garnered the label tuanpai, literally meaning “league faction”. These populists often voice the concerns of vulnerable social groups, such as farmers, migrant workers and the urban poor.”

(“Viewpoint: The powerful factions among China’s rulers”, Cheng Li, November 6, 2012, BBC News)

Li reasoned that the formation of two main coalition factions is a departure from the “all-powerful strongman” rule of the Mao Zrdong era and the Deng Xiaoping era, and represents “something approximating a mechanism of checks and balances in the decision-making process”:

“In fact, two main political factions or coalitions within the CCP leadership are currently competing for power, influence and control over policy initiatives. This bifurcation has created within China’s one-party polity something approximating a mechanism of checks and balances in the decision-making process.

This mechanism, of course, is not the kind of institutionalised system of checks and balances that operates between the executive, legislative and judicial branches in a democratic system.

But this new structure – sometimes referred to in China as “one party, two coalitions” – does represent a major departure from the “all-powerful strongman” model that was characteristic of politics in the Mao and Deng eras.”

(Cheng Li, November 6, 2012, BBC News)

Bo Xilai is the son of Bo Yibo, a former Politburo member who last served as a vice chairman of the Central Advisory Commission during the Deng era. Cheng Li singled out Bo Xilai and Ling Jihua as stars of the “elitist” and “populist” factions, respectively, who took a fall or setback in 2012:

“And there is a crisis going on now – one brought on by scandals among the factional leaders.

Threats to stability

The most serious one has centred on Bo Xilai, a prominent princeling. Another case is Ling Jihua, Hu Jintao’s former chief of staff and up until recently a rising star in the tuanpai faction. Having become embroiled in a scandal of his own, Ling was appointed to a less important position on the eve of the Party Congress.

These scandals among factional leaders, however, can and should be easily dismissed. Factions themselves are too strong to be dismantled.”

(Cheng Li, November 6, 2012, BBC News)

If the emergence of the “one party, two coalitions” structure was about “balances” as Cheng Li asserted, then I wonder whether Bo’s fall and Ling’ setback in 2012 represented a balance, i.e., one “elitist” star and one “populist” star, each damaged by corruption.

But there was a stark irony in this contrast: while the elitist’s fall was connected to his wife’s shady business dealings that led to murdering a foreign businessman, the populist’s setback came with the loss of his son to a flashy lifestyle – if the Ferrari crash rumor was true.

Ling Jihua’s corruption was real as over 2 years later in December 2014 the Communist Party leadership announced that he was being investigated for “discipline violations”:

“He was, in effect, presidential chief of staff to Mr Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao – the gatekeeper at the very heart of power for a decade.

Ling Jihua’s problems began more than two years ago when rumours began to swirl about an alleged cover-up over his son, who died while driving his Ferrari alongside two semi-clad young women.

Over recent months the net has been closing in on the entire Ling family as corruption investigations were announced into one brother after another.”

(“Ling Jihua: China investigates top aide to former president”, December 22, 2014, BBC News)

But what about Bo Xilai’s Maoist-style populism that made him better known in China individually than most of his peers? Didn’t that make him a “populist”, and the downfalls of two populist stars?

Cheng Li categorized Bo as a “princeling” elitist making appeal with a populist – Maoist – approach across the factional lines:

“Some politicians have sought to round out their resumes with credentials across geographic and socioeconomic lines. Bo famously adopted a populist approach invoking Mao nostalgia during his tenure as party secretary of Chongqing, while Xi Jinping — widely expected to become China’s next president — left a prestigious post in Beijing to work in rural Hebei for three years.”

(Alexis Lai, November 8, 2012, CNN News)

I suppose a politician of greater ambition would try to make broader appeals beyond his established political base, and so if Bo had, it is not surprising that Xi Jinping, in 2012 the expected next leader of China, as a “princeling” elitist also had cultivated a populist image – through working in the rural area for a time.

But there was a huge difference between Bo Xilai and Xi Jinping in the political meanings of the word “populist”, in “invoking Mao nostalgia” versus “to work in rural Hebei”. One was deploying Maoist politics, while the other displaying an affinity with people at the grassroots.

Given that both were “princelings” and the identification is important in Chinese politics, the respective stories of their fathers may have relevance.

When Bo Xilai’s father Bo Yibo, a noted Communist revolutionary, died in 2007, The New York Times’ obituary included the following descriptions of him:

“Bo Yibo, the last of the Eight Immortals, Communist Party leaders who steered China through a politically volatile shift from Maoism to today’s market-oriented economic boom, died Monday. He was 98.

…

As one of the elderly but immensely influential party veterans who hovered above the country’s appointed leadership in the 1980s and 90s, Mr. Bo helped Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who died in 1997, overcome elite opposition to capitalist-style economic reforms.

Also like Deng, Mr. Bo had little tolerance for political liberalization. He played an important role in purging Hu Yaobang, a popular party leader who favored faster political change, in 1987. Mr. Bo also defended the army crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989, which left hundreds of people dead.

The Eight Immortals were an informal group of senior Communist Party leaders who were purged during Mao’s Cultural Revolution but experienced a second political life after Mr. Deng’s return to power in 1978.”

(“Bo Yibo, Leader Who Helped Reshape Chinese Economy, Dies at 98”, Joseph Khan, January 17, 2007, The New York Times)

As described, Bo Xilai’s father was one of the overlords around strongman paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and 1990s, exercising power from above the official leadership, having previously suffered during the Cultural Revolution under the strongman leader Mao Zedong; and he defended the military suppression of pro-democracy protests in 1989.

So the son’s invoking Maoist politics, with a twisted irony perhaps, might really be about exercising power.

Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun, who died a few years before Bo’s father, was a little lesser known, and in early 2012 when the son was set to become the next Chinese leader, the following was in The Washington Post’s descriptions of the father:

“A brief, official biography issued by Xinhua News Agency makes no mention of Xi’s illustrious father, who commanded communist guerrillas in northwest China, rose to the rank of deputy prime minister after the 1949 revolution, got ousted by Mao Zedong in 1962 and, after 16 years in disgrace, reemerged to pioneer some of China’s boldest economic reforms. …

…

But the details of the elder Xi’s tumultuous career — his rupture with Mao, his close ties to other purge targets who are still on the party’s blacklist, and his defiance of rigid orthodoxy — are increasingly sensitive topics in a one-party state where history is shaped to serve the present.

…

… Although respected by crusty conservatives and neo-Maoist firebrands, Xi senior is particularly popular with many liberals, who remember him as unusually open-minded and tolerant — and hope that his son, under a carapace of political rectitude, is perhaps similar.

…

While in charge of a vast swath of northwestern China in the early 1950s, the elder Xi resisted pressure from some colleagues to crush an early uprising by Tibetans and insisted on negotiating. When Deng Xiaoping ordered tanks into Tiananmen Square to clear protesters in 1989, Xi said nothing publicly but is widely thought to have been appalled. (His official biographer declined to comment on that).”

(“For China’s next leader, the past is sensitive”, Andrew Higgins, February 13, 2012, The Washington Post)

As described, Xi Jinping’s father had been more independently minded under Mao Zedong, fallen out of favor earlier and suffered longer than Bo’s father; then under Deng Xiaoping, Xi’s father was involved in economic reforms like Bo’s father, but more as a “pioneer” than as an ‘overlord’, and when the military suppression of pro-democracy protests happened in 1989 he remained silent, unlike Bo’s father who defended it.

Like fathers, like sons, perhaps? At the least, it could be an explanation why Bo Xilai the “princeling” son resorted to a Maoist-style political campaign whereas Xi Jinping the “princeling” son had chosen a “common touch” approach.

If so, then not only that the fall of Bo Xilai and the setback of Ling Jihua represented a balance between the elitist and the populist coalitions in 2012, but that the fall of Bo Xilai and the rise of Xi Jinping must have indicated something about the “princeling” elitist faction itself.

In 2012 anticipating a huge power shift toward the elitist coalition, the China analyst Cheng Li was critical of the once-in-a-decade leadership change.

Prior to the leadership change, Li lauded the merits of the relatively even split of seats on the outgoing all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, expressing concern over any shift of balance in favor of the elitist coalition:

“The nine-member PSC, for example, has – at least prior to this 2012 Party Congress – maintained a four-to-five split, with four seats for the populist coalition and five going to the elitist coalition.

…

Paradoxically, it is also in the interest of both factions to have the existing balance of power remain intact (a three-to-four split assuming the new committee will consist of seven members). The overall balance of power should also take into consideration the composition of the full Politburo and the Central Military Commission, including whether or not Hu Jintao steps down as the chairman of the powerful military commission at the Party Congress.

But recent rumours hold that the factional split in the new standing committee will shift to two-to-five (two tuanpai versus five princelings or protégés of Jiang). If true, this could be highly problematic. If the factional balance is not maintained, the defeated faction would likely use its political resources and socio-economic constituencies to undermine the legitimacy of the political system, which in turn would threaten the stability of the country at large.”

(Cheng Li, November 6, 2012, BBC News)

In short, as the Politburo Standing Committee was being downsized from 9 to 7, Cheng Li would like to see the power balance maintained at a ratio of elitist 4 versus populist 3, similar to the outgoing elitist 5 versus populist 4, and not the rumored change to elitist 5 versus populist 2, which in his opinion could risk China’s stability due to socio-economic problems.

When the new leadership emerged Li found it a shock, seeing a near total win for the elitists over the populists in a 6:1 ratio of the “supreme decision-making body”:

“Prior to the announcement of the composition of the new guard, led by new party General Secretary Xi Jinping, many analysts both in China and abroad had believed that the new leadership would continue to maintain the roughly equal balance of power that existed between the Jiang Zemin camp and the Hu Jintao camp. Yet in the end, the results were a huge surprise: the Jiang camp won a landslide victory by obtaining six out of the seven seats on the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) while only one leader in the Hu camp—Li Keqiang, now designated to become premier in March—was able to keep a seat on this supreme decision-making body.

…

Chinese politics thus seem to be entering a new era characterized by the concentration of princeling power at the top.”

(“Rule of the Princelings”, Cheng Li, February 10, 2013, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Brookings Institution)

Cheng Li saw two major problems with this new leadership, namely, no expansion of “intra-party democracy” others had hoped to see “in the wake of the recent Bo Xilai scandal”, and too many “princelings” on the PSC:

“In the wake of the recent Bo Xilai scandal and the resulting crisis of CPC rule, many had anticipated that party leaders would adopt certain election mechanisms—what the Chinese authorities call “intra-party democracy”—to restore the party’s much-damaged legitimacy and to generate a sense that the new top leaders do indeed have an election-based new mandate to rule. For example, some analysts had anticipated that the CPC Central Committee might use competitive (though limited) multiple-candidate elections to select members of its leadership bodies, such as the twenty-five-member politburo or even the PSC. Such high-level elections, however, did not take place. The selection of elites at this congress continued to be done the old fashioned way—through the “black box” of manipulation, deal-cutting, and trade-offs that occur behind the scenes among a handful of politicians (e.g., outgoing PSC members and retired heavyweight figures—most noticeably the 86-year old Jiang).

What is even more troubling is the fact that four out of the seven PSC members are princelings—leaders who come from families of either veteran revolutionaries or high-ranking officials. It has been widely noted that large numbers of prominent party leaders and families have used their political power to convert state assets into their own private wealth. The unprecedentedly strong presence of princelings in the new PSC is likely to reinforce public resentment of how power and wealth continue to converge in China.”

(Cheng Li, February 10, 2013, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Brookings Institution)

In other words, Li saw the fall of Bo Xilai as that of a “princeling” elitist star, and a lesson for the Communist Party not to concentrate power further into the elitist coalition, but to take a more populist route, to make the party internal election mechanism more egalitarian and real.

But I can see something quite different: Bo Xilai wasn’t just any “princeling” elitist but one with a Maoist populist tendency; and so the denunciation of him could already be a step away from political dictatorialism, while rendering the new elitist coalition purer – provided the elitists can rely on the “common touch” populism of its new leader, the incoming Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

In 2012 Cheng Li did mention the rumor that both the disgraced elitist Bo Xilai and the demoted populist Ling Jihua had ties to the retiring domestic security tsar, outgoing Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang. But Li did not mention the fact that the downsized new PSC no longer reserved a seat for domestic security supervision. That change was potentially significant, as subsequently in 2013 Zhou also came under suspicion of corruption:

“China’s former domestic security chief Zhou Yongkang, one of the country’s most powerful politicians of the last decade, is helping authorities in a corruption probe and, contrary to media reports, is not currently the target of the investigation, sources told Reuters.

The investigation could take weeks, maybe months, to complete. Even if Zhou is implicated, he is unlikely to follow in the footsteps of disgraced ally Bo Xilai and face prosecution, said the sources, who have ties to the leadership or direct knowledge of the matter.

…

When Zhou stepped down along with most members of the Standing Committee at the 18th Party congress last November, the role of domestic security tsar was downgraded, reflecting leadership fears that the position had become too powerful.”

(“China’s ex-security chief helping probe, not target: sources”, Benjamin Kang Lim and Ben Blanchard, September 4, 2013, Yahoo News)

I can also see the 2012 downgrade of the Communist Party leadership’s top position overseeing law and order as another step away from political dictatorialism, in line with the denunciation of Bo Xilai and the subsequent criminal prosecution of him for abuse of power.

But most importantly, in 2012 Bo Xilai’s downfall and Ling Jihua’s setback had more to do with corruption, as did the suspicion in 2013 about former security tsar Zhou Yongkang. Cheng li was probably right pointing out that “large numbers of prominent party leaders and families have used their political power to convert state assets into their own private wealth”, and so high-level leadership change in their favor might “reinforce public resentment of how power and wealth continue to converge in China”.

Fighting corruption is thus an important mechanism to placate public resentment over wealth accumulation among the politically powerful.

In 2012 the incoming Politburo Standing Committee gave a seat to Wang Qishan, a protégé of former Premier Zhu Rongji, both well known for economic and management abilities, and China watchers hoped that Wang would be tasked with fixing the economy and pushing for more economic reform:

“China’s Politburo Standing Committee operates in much the same way that a board of directors with specific portfolios assigned to each member does. … Their individual portfolios are important, however, because that determines which issues each member will have the most authority over for routine policymaking.

…

…The cadre most likely to receive one of those seats is Wang Qishan, the current vice premier in charge of financial affairs. The big question is which portfolio he will get.

That is a delicate question in Beijing. Some had considered Wang Qishan to be a better fit for the premier slot than Li Keqiang. The premier manages China’s economy, and Wang Qishan boasts significant economic experience. He is also considered to be a competent and reliable fixer—so much so that he has been nicknamed the “firefighter.” Chinese leaders have called on Wang Qishan to reform provincial governments in Hainan and Guangdong, to repair China’s image after the SARS crisis, and to manage Beijing’s 2008 Olympics debut. He succeeded in every task.

Wang also happens to be a protégé of former Premier Zhu Rongji, the economic and finance czar who cleaned up China’s banking system in the 1990s and ushered the country into the World Trade Organization. Overall, Wang is widely seen as a competent fixer with serious economic chops—and China is definitely in need of economic fixing.

…

Zhu Rongji was certainly effective in that regard, and many who look at Wang are reminded of his mentor. Given China’s current economic problems, many observers are hoping that Wang Qishan will receive a similar role and use that position to once again push for serious economic reform.”

(“Beijing to Announce New Leaders and Their Portfolios”, Melanie Hart, November 2, 2012, Center for American Progress)

But instead of overseeing the economy, Wang Qishan was given the role of primarily leading the fight against corruption within the ranks of the Communist Party:

“After the transition of power at China’s 18th Party Congress, the country’s leaders have voiced their determination to fight corruption with a stringency rarely seen in the past. On November 17, President Xi Jinping said that corruption, if left uncontrolled, would ruin the Communist Party and the nation. His voice was echoed by Wang Qishan, also a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and the secretary of the Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Central Committee of the Party, during a symposium two weeks later. The symposium had gathered eight scholars of political science, law,and economics to give advice on fighting corruption.

The torrent of anti-corruption rhetoric seems also to be unfolding in practice. In recent weeks, more than ten public officials have been dismissed and investigated. …

Yet a large portion of Web users feel that the string of cases look more like arbitrary political moves than reliable institutional proceedings. …”

(“China’s War on Corruption Is About to Get Real”, Yueran Zhang, December 11, 2012, The Atlantic)

As the above quote indicates, the importance and urgency of fighting corruption was reflected by the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s statement, that if left uncontrolled corruption would ruin the Communist Party and the country, and also by the assignment of new Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Qishan – the “firefighter” – to “Discipline Inspection”.

In 2014 under the leadership of President Xi Jinping and the supervision of Wang Qishan, the anti-official corruption campaign expanded, intensified and caught two retired top Communist Party officials more senior than Bo Xilai and Ling Jihua, expelling them from the party and sending their cases for criminal prosecution.

In June, it was People’s Liberation Army General Xu Caihou, former vice chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission and former Politburo member, “the most prominent Chinese military leader to be purged in decades”:

“Until his retirement in late 2012, General Xu held one of the highest ranks in the People’s Liberation Army, as a vice chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission. He was also a member of the elite Politburo. He has become the most prominent Chinese military leader to be purged in decades, and the most senior official named publicly in Mr. Xi’s campaign to clean up the elite and impose his authority on the party, government and army.”

(“China’s Antigraft Push Snares an Ex-General”, by Chris Buckley, June 30, 2014, The New York Times)

Then in December, it was retired security tsar Zhou Yongkang – suspected of corruption since 2013 – who, being a former member of the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, became “the most senior member of the Communist Party to be investigated since the infamous Gang of Four – a faction that included the widow of founding leader Mao Zedong – were put on trial in 1980”:

“Mr Zhou – who retired from China’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee in 2012 – “leaked the party’s and the country’s secrets,” Xinhua said, adding that the once-influential official was found to have “accepted a large amount of money and properties personally and through his family”.

The announcement makes Mr Zhou the most senior member of the Communist Party to be investigated since the infamous Gang of Four – a faction that included the widow of founding leader Mao Zedong – were put on trial in 1980.”

(“China arrests former security chief Zhou Yongkang”, December 5, 2014, The Telegraph)

It was after these two bigger ex-officials’ downfalls had become public that in late December 2014 the Communist Party leadership announced the investigation of Ling Jihua – the rumored father of a dead Ferrari driver, missing an anticipated 2012 promotion to the Politburo – for “suspected serious discipline violations”:

“Xinhua, the state-run news agency, announced in a terse statement on Monday night that the official, Ling Jihua, was being investigated for “suspected serious discipline violations,” the standard euphemism for allegations of corruption and abuses of power. It gave no details.

Until his abrupt loss of influence in September 2012, Mr. Ling, 58, was a trusted aide to Mr. Hu, comparable to a White House chief of staff, and had been widely considered a candidate for promotion to the Politburo.

…

The investigation into Mr. Ling opens another chapter in a palace intrigue that began with a car crash two years ago that killed Mr. Ling’s 23-year-old son, Ling Gu, and critically injured two young women riding in the Ferrari he was driving on a Beijing ring road.”

(“Party Opens an Inquiry Into a Onetime Aide to China’s Ex-Leader”, by Andrew Jacobs, Chris Buckley and Michael Forsythe, December 22, 2014, The New York Times)

That made it a total of 4 former top-level Communist Party officials disgraced by and prosecuted for corruption, with their seniority reaching the highest level since the infamous “Gang of Four” of the Mao Zedong era were put on trial in 1980.

With such a reminder, even Communist Party cadres began to dub these four the “New Gang of Four”:

“Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to investigate his predecessor’s top aide for corruption marks the downfall of the remaining “tiger” in a group that Communist Party cadres termed the “New Gang of Four.”

…

Gu Su, a law professor at Nanjing University, said the “New Gang of Four” term is popularly used by party members to describe the loose grouping, even though the extent of ties between them aren’t clear. The name is borrowed from the infamous gang, including Mao’s wife, who held immense power in the Cultural Revolution.

Uprooted Gang

The state-owned Global Times Dec. 6 described the case of Zhou alone as the “biggest, gravest since the Chinese Communist Party uprooted the Gang of Four.”

“The so-called New Gang of Four represented a very strong political group that covered every aspect of power from military to the party,” said Zhang Lifan, a Beijing-based historian who previously worked at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. They could have posed a challenge to the current leadership’s hold to power and claim to legitimacy if left unchecked, Zhang said.”

(“Xi Dismantles the ‘New Gang of Four’ With Probe of Hu’s Aide”, December 23, 2014, Bloomberg.com)

At least the case of Zhou Yongkang was the “gravest” since the Communist Party’s removal of the “Gang of Four”, according to the official media.

That kind of wording, and the Beijing-based scholar Zhang Lifan’s comment that “they could have posed a challenge to the current leadership’s hold to power and claim to legitimacy”, strongly suggest power politics, besides corruption, as a serious component of Zhou’s case as well as the cases of the other three.

But as law scholar Gu Su pointed out, it was unclear if these four had been a linked group and hence justified to be lumped together as a “gang”. The official accusations have focused on the misdeeds of each, centered at corruption. Zhang Lifan’s claim, “The so-called New Gang of Four represented a very strong political group that covered every aspect of power from military to the party”, remains to be substantiated.

After the four’s fall, in early 2015 the Chinese official media used the term “gang” to refer to groups of lesser officials around these top figures, including the Secretary Gang, the Petroleum Gang, and the Shanxi Gang:

“Over the weekend, the Party-run Xinhua news agency even went as far as naming three of the cliques as well as some of the senior officials it said were connected to them.

“The Secretary Gang,” it said, was a group of aides to senior officials, including some of the former personal secretaries of Zhou Yongkang, the once supreme head of China’s domestic security apparatus and now himself under criminal investigation.

“The Petroleum Gang,” were bureaucrats in China’s oil industry, a sector also intimately linked to Zhou’s patronage and political control.

And finally, “The Shanxi Gang,” the newspaper claimed, were officials from the coal rich province, some of whom were linked to Ling Jihua.

Mr Ling is a native of Shanxi who, as a chief aide to the former President Hu Jintao, is another high profile political scalp to have been taken down in President Xi’s purges.

…

It said a meeting, headed by President Xi, had determined that: “Organising cliques within the party to run personal businesses is absolutely not tolerated.””

(“Why China’s Ruling Party is Bearing Down on ‘Cliques’”, by John Sudworth, January 5, 2015, China Blog, BBC News)

These “gangs” around some of the disgraced four are singled out for their being corruption groups.

Given that confirmed information about high-level Chinese politics usually only comes from the official media controlled by the Chinese government and the Communist Party, without further disclosures, some likely during the upcoming criminal trials, vailidty of the “New Gang of Four” notion would need to rely on other forms of political analysis.

For these four figures to be viewed as a political group, they should have been in collaborative activity in politics. Thus a basic question is: Did these four even share any common political objective, or outlook, at all?

If the China analyst Cheng Li was right in his theory of the populist coalition versus the elitist coalition as characterizing high-level Chinese politics, one would guess that, given the status of the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the leader of the elitist coalition, and given the historian Zhang Lifan’s claim that the four could have posed “a challenge to the current leadership’s hold to power and claim to legitimacy”, these disgraced former top officials were part of the populist coalition.

As discussed, former President Hu Jintao’s top political lieutenant Ling Jihua  was a member and a star of the populist coalition dominated by the “League faction”, persons whose careers had gone through the Communist Youth League. Also as discussed, Bo Xilai was a “princeling” elitist making Maoist-style populist appeal.

So Cheng Li’s theory could apply to these two, relating to Ling’s populist status, and to Bo’s populist ambition despite his elitist status.

But a limitation of Cheng Li’s theory becomes apparent when one considers the other two of the four.

Neither Xu Caihou, the former top leader of the military, nor Zhou Yongkang, the former overseer of police and security, was from an influential or prestigious social background to be viewed an elitist, and yet they were not, and in fact could not have been, populists given their positions of holding and wielding power at the top of vast government apparatuses used to deter or restrain the population from becoming restless.

Rather, their political roles had more to do with upholding the Communist political system and ideology, and enforcing adherence and compliance to the system and to the rule of the state within the system’s framework, as can be seen in not only their former top positions but also their career backgrounds.

Starting his career in the People’s Liberation Army in 1963 when he was admitted to study Electronics Engineering at Harbin Institute of Military Engineering, Xu Caihou became a solder after military university graduation in 1968, in 1971 became an army officer when he was appointed a “deputy political instructor”, and a year later was given a serious political post as “secretary and deputy chief of the Personnel Division of the Political Department of the Jilin Military Area Command”. After 10 years on that job, Xu began to rise steadily through the ranks on the political supervision side, and in 1985 became the top political officer of the 16th Group Army, and in 1992 the director of the Liberation Army Daily, the Chinese military’s official newspaper:

“1985-1990: Director of the Political Department of the 16th Group Army of the Ground Force.

1990-1992: Political Commissar of the 16th Group Army of the Ground Force.

1992-1993: Assistant director of the PLA General Political Department, assistant director of the Department and concurrently director of the Liberation Army Daily.

1993-1994: Deputy director of the PLA General Political Department and concurrently director of the Liberation Army Daily.”

(“Who’s Who in China’s Leadership: Xu Caihou”, China.org.cn)

In 1996, Xu became Political Commissar of the Ji’nan Military Area Command, i.e., the political leader at one of the 7 multi-provincial military commands that together cover the entire China, at a level just below the central military organs. In 1999 Xu became a member of the Central Military Commission, and in 2002 the military’s top political officer as the director of the PLA General Political Department, before his elevation in 2004-2005 to be one of the few overall military leaders as a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, and in 2007 also a Politburo member:

“1999-2000: Member of the CPC Central Military Commission, member of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China, executive deputy director of the PLA General Political Department, and deputy secretary of its Party Committee.

2000-2002: … and concurrently secretary of the Discipline Inspection Committee of the CPC Central Military Commission …

2002-2004: Member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, member of the CPC Central Military Commission, member of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China, and director of the PLA General Political Department and secretary of its Party Committee.

2004-2005: Member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, Vice chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission and member of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China.

2005-2007: Member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, Vice chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission, and Vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China.

2007- Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee (till November, 2012)…”

(“… Xu Caihou”, China.org.cn)

Clearly, despite his initial military engineering education, General Xu’s entire career advancement to the very top of the Chinese military came along a political, rather than technical or warfare, track.

As for Zhou Yongkang, the most senior of the four, the criminal charges he faces include “bribery, abuse of power and leaking state secrets”, at least the last of which suggests that politics besides corruption is likely a part of his case.

Starting his career as a technician, Zhou worked in China’s state owned oil industry for 32 years, and reached its political top in 1998 in his appointment as the Communist Party secretary of China National Petroleum Corporation. A year later, Zhou was moved to a party career track as party secretary of Sichuan province. In 2002, Zhou became a member of the Politburo and the Chinese government’s minister of public security, and in 2007 was further elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee to be the overseer of law and order in the country.

(“Profile: China’s fallen security chief Zhou Yongkang”, by Yuwen Wu, April 3, 2015, BBC News)

In the Communist Party-ruled China, law and order at the top level is closely related to politics as can be seen in the name of the party central organ Zhou headed as a PSC member:

“Zhou Yongkang is secretary of the Politics and Law Commission. That makes him China’s domestic security chief. He heads China’s police and paramilitary operations and has a massive budget for maintaining law and order (which includes preventing and suppressing mass protests).”

(Melanie Hart, November 2, 2012, Center for American Progress)

In a political governing system in which career advancement was primarily through the hierarchy, and which valued political loyalty the most, it is possible for persons with influential family backgrounds and/or connections to rise to the top when such backgrounds and connections are important facets of the system, but it is unlikely that the rest of the top positions would go to “populists” i.e., those with appeals to the ordinary people, given that the vast apparatuses on which the system and the country depend would want their own top-level representations – this may be a major limitation of Cheng Li’s theory of populist coalition versus elitist coalition as characterizing high-level Chinese politics.

In the case of the four as a possible “New Gang of Four”, the facts that the two representing government apparatuses, Xu Caihou and Zhou Yongkang, were elevated for political indoctrination or enforcement substantiate them as power leftists; the Maoist-style political maverick Bo Xilai can also be viewed as such, as can Ling Jihua, the top political lieutenant of then President Hu Jintao, leader of the populist coalition dominated by the Communist Youth League faction.

It is important to understand that the populist officials who have appeals to the ordinary people work entirely within the Communist ideology and the Communist Party-ruled political system, making appeal for – instead of enforcing – the same ideology and system. Whatever their deep concern for the ordinary people or their talents in solving concrete problems, they do it within the rules, the perspectives and the outlooks of the ideology and the system.

So I think it can be reasonably concluded that all these four who fell with the emergence of the present Chinese leadership have been power figures on the political left – left of the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is also the new leader of the so-called elitist coalition.

Most importantly, according to the official accusations these four have all engaged in serious activities of corruption – while at the top of the political left – in leading major sectors “that covered every aspect of power from military to the party” as pointed out by historian Zhang Lifan, They thus serve as a sobering dose of reality – contrary to any perception or presumption that the political left is people oriented – whether or not Xi Jinping’s leadership considerations had any role in their downfalls.

As time goes by, slowly there has been more information disclosed, mostly from confirmed semi-official sources, inching toward a scenario that these four disgraced former top officials, who shared political perspectives as shown in my analysis, may have indeed been a sort of a political group.

Once a year, China’s national legislature, National People’s Congress, and national political consultative body, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, hold their sessions around the same time. The CPPCC has traditionally been the place where the Communist Party leadership displayed its willingness to consult with, and listen to, various sectors of the society, including non-Communist political parties that abided by the rules of the system and cooperated with the Communist Party – the constitutionally enshrined “leadership” party of China.

(“Constitution of the People’s Republic of China: Preamble”, March 14, 2004, The National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China)

In the latest March 2015 session several CPPCC members, quoted in their names, provided useful information on the cases of the four who might have been a political group, according to the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post.

First off, CPPCC’s official spokesperson confirmed that there had been a Ferrari car crash involving Ling Jihua’s son, clarifying that the incident was not the main cause of Ling’s downfall:

“Lu Xinhua, spokesman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, became the first to publicly link a fatal crash involving a Ferrari in the capital three years ago to a one-time aide to former president Hu Jintao. Lu said that the crash, which killed the son of former rising political star Ling Jihua, was not the main cause of Ling’s downfall.

Ling, the former director of the Communist Party’s Central Committee’s General Office, was demoted to vice-chairman of the CPPCC and head of the party’s United Front Work Department in 2012, shortly after overseas media reported on the crash.”

(“Going on record on those rumours”, by Cary Huang, March 10, 2015, South China Morning Post)

There was an official rationale for CPPCC’s providing this info to the public: after his 2012 political setback Ling was made a CPPCC vice chairman.

The South China Morning Post story went on to report that a CPPCC member and former Communist Party central researcher confirmed the existence of the “New Gang of Four” group, though no detail was quoted:

“Shi Zhihong, a CPPCC member and the former deputy director of the Central Policy Research Office, confirmed overseas reports about the formation of a “New Gang of Four” faction within the party leadership, saying the four corrupt officials had long ago been put under internal investigation.”

(Cary Huang, March 10, 2015, South China Morning Post)

It implies the four had links in their corruption activities, but not necessarily as a “political gang”.

Perhaps the most intriguing and significant info – that can broaden the scope and horizon of the discourse in this article – came from two CPPCC members who were retired senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army.

One of them, Major General Yang Chunchang, told the media that former President Hu Jintao had been a “lame duck” in chairing the Central Military Commission and CMC events had been “dictated” by the fallen former CMC vice chairman Xu Caihou:

“Yang Chunchang , a retired major general and CPPCC member, said Hu Jintao was a “lame duck” in chairing the Central Military Commission. Yang said Xu had dictated events at the commission.”

(Cary Huang, March 10, 2015, South China Morning Post)

Now, that could explain a possible scenario of the “New Gang of Four”, namely that the former Chinese leader Hu Jintao was not a strong or hands-on leader, and as a result in his era several officials in top positions around him wielded the real powers and made important decisions, and they collaborated but not necessarily as a “gang”.

Note that the four in this possible “New Gang of Four” had risen to the top of their careers during the Hu era, and was disgraced just before Hu’s retirement, was retired along with Hu, or had the career rise stopped as Hu was departing. This and their being power leftists make their identification with Hu’s rule the most obvious conclusion.

With the exception of Bo Xilai, their downfalls came in the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign.

Truth could hurt, couldn’t it? Or at least difficult to swallow. Hu Jintao, the Chinese leadership’s face to the world for a decade from 2002-2003 to 2012, may have just been a “lame duck”.

Yet China’s growing success and influence garnered its leader some of the highest recognitions and praises bestowed on anyone in power.

The influential Forbes magazine in 2010 named Hu Jintao “the world’s most powerful person” – beating out none other than U.S. President Barack Obama for the title – and then in 2011 “the world’s third most powerful person”:

“Hu currently holds all 3 offices required to be considered China’s Paramount Leader: Communist Party General Secretary, President and Commander in Chief. But as part of a well-orchestrated succession plan, he will gradually give up his titles over the next few years, starting with the most important one– General Secretary–next year. His presumed successor, Xi ­Jinping, will assume the ­pres­i­den­cy a year later.”

(“The World’s Most Powerful People: Hu Jintao”, 2011, Forbes)

But it may have been Hu’s underlings like this possible “New Gang of Four” who exercised the real power, if Maj. Gen. Yang Chunchang was right about Xu Caihou and it did reflect Hu’s style more generally.

So much for the real worth of a Forbes advertisement.

Is there independent evidence that can substantiate this CPPCC member’s claim?

There is something that may well be: the promotion of Xu Caihou to be a CMC vice chairman came with President Hu Jintao’s taking over as chairman in an ‘off year’.

Communist China’s supreme military leadership setup is essentially two faces of the same body: the Party’s Central Military Commission and the State’s Central Military Commission. For instance, it is quoted earlier that Xu Caihou became a vice chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission in 2004 and vice chairman of the state’s Central Military Commission in 2005. The time discrepancy in the 2 appointments is due to the fact that the party appointment was made several months ahead of the annual session of the National People’s Congress when the state appointment was made.

More generally, in the past two decades China’s top leadership power holding and transition have settled into a rigidly smooth sort of ‘ideal’, in practice since 1992-1993 with Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping in succession: the Communist Party’s general secretary is also the state president, with a 5-year term and serving 2 terms; a new term of the general secretary is elected by a new slate of the party congress held late in the calendar year ending with 2 or 7; the party leader is then elected the president by a new slate of the National People’s Congress, typically in March of the following year, i.e., calendar year ending with 3 or 8; in the term prior to becoming the new leader, the future successor serves as a Politburo Standing Committee member and vice president.

(“Who’s Who in China’s Leadership: Jiang Zemin”, “Who’s Who in China’s Leadership: Hu Jintao”, and, “Who’s Who in China’s leadership: Xi Jinping”, China.org.cn)

The military leadership title separate from those of the party and the state, what the Forbes description of Hu Jintao referred to as “Commander in Chief”, is the chairmanship of the two Central Military Commissions. The current Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been the first leader to hold the military leadership title immediately after the normal transition of the party and state leaderships.

Historically, the military leadership title possession played a key role for the 1989 military crackdown of pro-democracy protests on Capital Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. 

In the 1980s when Deng Xiaoping was the behind-the-scenes paramount leader of China, he let a younger generation of politicians, Yu Yaobang and then Zhao Zhiyang, serve as the party general secretary, and other elders, Li Xiannian and then Yang Shangkun, as the largely ceremonial state president. But Deng retained the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission to ensure Communist political stability. In 1989 when pro-democracy protests came, General Secretary Zhao Zhiyang showed sympathy and an internal division within the leadership came to the fore; Deng had control of the military and the cooperation of his fellow elder President Yang Shangkun and Premier Li Peng, and mobilized the military to crush the protests in Beijing on June 4. Also in June, Zhao was replaced by Jiang Zemin, party chief and former mayor in Shanghai who was able to end the protests there without using the military. In late 1989, Deng passed his Central Military Commission chairmanship to Jiang as well. In 1993 Jiang also replaced Yang as the president, and the transition began towards the norm of two 5-year terms of 3-title consolidated leadership as it is today. 

(“Deng, Li Seen Winning China Power Struggle”, by David Holley and Jim Mann, May 26, 1989, Los Angeles Times; “TURMOIL IN CHINA; In Shanghai, Protesters Turn Defiant”, by Richard Bernstein, June 10, 1989, The New York Times; Michel Oksenberg, Lawrence R. Sullivan and Marc Lambert, eds., Beijing Spring, 1989: Confrontation and Conflict: The Basic Documents, 1990, M. E. Sharpe; and, “Party Chief Jiang Zemin, 70, Holds Reins but Faces Tests”, by Steven Mufson, February 20, 1997, The Washington Post)

A decade after Jiang Zemin consolidated the 3 titles, the 2002 Communist Party congress and the 2003 National People’s Congress became the first time when power transfer to the next leader took place orderly and without turmoil in the background. Still, Jiang acted like Deng in the 1980s and passed only the party general secretary and state president positions to Hu Jintao, keeping the Central Military Commission chairmanship.

Then in 2004-2005, Jiang finally let Hu assume the remaining important title, and that was when Xu Caihou, the PLA general among the possible “New Gang of Four”, was elevated to vice chairman of the CMC, i.e., at the same time as President Hu Jintao’s ascension to the supreme chairmanship of the military:

“The Fourth Plenum of the 16th CCP Central Committee witnessed some important personnel moves and structural modifications to the Central Military Commission. In addition to Hu Jintao succeeding Jiang Zemin as chairman, Xu Caihou joined Guo Boxiong and Cao Gangchuan as vice chairman. General Armaments Department (GAD) Director Li Jinai moved over to replace Xu as director of the General Political Department (GPD), and in a surprising move, Jinan Military Region Commander Chen Bingde was added to the commission to replace Li Jinai as head of the GAD. …”

(“The King Is Dead! Long Live the King! The CMC Leadership Transition from Jiang to Hu”, by James Mulvenon, No. 13, China Leadership Monitor, Hoover Institution)

Within this promotion are several interesting pieces of evidence, albeit partial, showing that Xu Caihou was made one of the overall leaders of the Chinese military to help Hu Jintao run the military apparatus.

Firstly, since the Jiang Zemin era the CMC normally had two military vice chairmen, as it was prior to Xu’s promotion and as it is today, but Hu’s arrival at its helm came with the appointment of Xu as an extra-third vice chairman.

Secondly, as cited earlier, in March 2015 retired Maj. Gen. Yang Chunchang, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, stated Hu Jintao had been a “lame duck” CMC chairman while Xu Caihou dictated the CMC events; quite clearly, Xu was promoted there to run the CMC under Hu.

Thirdly, that the promotion of Xu was an enforcement boost for Hu can be seen indirectly in a resulting promotion that was a boost to Xu: the PLA’s General Armaments Department director was moved laterally to fill Xu’s General Political Department directorship, and the new armaments director was promoted from the Jinan Military Region, i,e., Xu’s former regional base in the late 1990s when he was, as cited earlier, “Political Commissar of the Ji’nan Military Area Command and Secretary of its Party Committee”.

And lastly, the promotion of the PLA’s top political officer as a specially added CMC vice chairman to assist new CMC Chairman Hu Jintao had the perfect political color and symbolism for who this new Chinese leader was.

The China analyst Cheng Li pointed out, quite correctly, that then President Hu Jintao was the leader of the “populist” coalition that was dominated by the “League faction”. Quite like Xu Caihou but in a civilian setting, Hu started with an engineering education at China’s leading engineering university, Tsinghua University, then became a “political instructor” there, and subsequently spent most of his life on a Communist political career track, including serving as the head of the official Chinese youth organization, the leader of the Communist Youth League, and the Communist Party chief in the ethnic Tibet:

“1982-1984: Member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China, and Chairman of the All-China Youth Federation.

1984-1985: First secretary, Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China.

1985-1988: Secretary of the Guizhou Provincial Party Committee, and first secretary of the Party Committee of Guizhou Provincial Military Command.

1988-1992: Secretary of the Party Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region, and first secretary of the Party Committee of Tibet Military Command.”

(“… Hu Jintao”, China.org.cn)

As the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao cared about the welfare of the ordinary people, and tried to carry out policies aimed at bridging the growing economic gap between the rich and the poor, championing the slogan of “putting people first”:

“The Hu era — which ends at the 18th party congress starting Nov. 8, as Hu begins the process of officially yielding power to Vice President Xi Jinping — started out with a different vision for the country. From as early as the summer of 2004, apparatchiks began to speak of “putting people first” and creating a harmonious society — in other words, addressing China’s yawning inequalities and imbalances in ways that differed from the Jiang Zemin era. Jiang, a relative liberalizer, had successfully encouraged businesspeople to join the party in 2001. The question facing Hu when he came into office was what to do about the huge differences between the rich and the poor across the country.”

(“Hu Jintao’s Legacy”, Kerry Brown, November 8, 2012, Foreign Policy)

It could be subtle, but Hu’s efforts to forge a path to reduce inequalities, one that would differ from the Jiang Zemin era, started in 2004 – the year Jiang passed the military leadership to him.

It would be reasonable to infer that a part of President Hu’s newfound confidence and optimism in 2004, underlay by his imminent relative independence in ruling the country, could be credited to the presence of General Xu Caihou, specially promoted to run the Central Military Commission under Hu.

But 10 years later in 2014 after the Hu era had given way to the Xi Jinping era and the retired Xu was brought down for corruption, what the anti-corruption investigators discovered was nothing short of shocking:

“Prosecutors searched Xu’s luxury home in Beijing in March and discovered stashed in the basement more than a tonne of US dollars, euros and yuan, reported Phoenix Weekly, a magazine run by broadcaster Phoenix Television.

Xu also stored countless precious gems and hundreds of kilograms of expensive jade, as well as rare antiques, the magazine said, citing a person with knowledge of the matter who is close to high levels of the military.

“Case handlers had no option but to call more than 10 military trucks before all the confiscated property piled up like mountains from this former Central Military Commission vice-chairman’s house could be taken away,” the magazine said. The report, which was carried by several mainland news outlets, added that Xu was forced to “bow his head and admit defeat” when confronted with a list of the items.”

(“Ex-army leader Xu Caihou had ‘a tonne of cash’ in basement”, November 21, 2014, South China Morning Post)

Literally “more than a tonne of” cash, including U.S. dollars and Euros, in General Xu’s home basement, and a mountain of treasures that took over 10 military trucks to fill!

One cannot help but shake one’s head in wonder: did President Hu Jintao honestly believe in 2004 that with General Xu backing him up like a military ‘protector’ with Communist political indoctrination, he would be able to achieve his “putting people first” populist goals?

Well, President Hu’s “putting People first” priority did not go far before he made the adjustment, affected by the economic crisis in the West, to focus on economic growth in his second 5-year term:

“But beginning in 2007, after the dramatic collapse of Western export markets, Chinese leaders decided to put everything back into maintaining economic growth, no matter how unevenly wealth was spread across society. …

Perhaps Hu had no choice but to make this gamble. Perhaps the only way to fend off the public’s rising expectations toward government and paper over growing imbalances between wealthy coastal regions and poorer western ones was to keep his foot on the gas.”

(Kerry Brown, November 8, 2012, Foreign Policy)

Concurrent to Hu’s second term where the focus is placed back onto economic growth was the promotion of public security minister Zhou Yongkang to the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee to oversee the country’s law and order – a police and security tsar whose career started in technical work in the state owned oil industry before moving onto a Communist Party career, as cited earlier.

In April 2014 while Zhou was under suspicion of corruption, The New York Times conducted an investigation into Chinese corporate documents and estimated Zhou’s family to have $160 million U.S. in at least 37 companies in China, not counting real estate assets or overseas assets:

“It’s difficult to get a handle on the scale of Zhou’s alleged corruption. Back in April, a New York Times investigation estimated that Zhou’s family had amassed one billion renminbi ($160 million) in assets in “at least 37 companies scattered across a dozen provinces.” NYT cautioned that this estimate did not include real estate holdings or overseas assets.”

(“In Zhou Yongkang, Xi Bags the Ultimate ‘Tiger’”, by Shannon Tiezzi, July 29, 2014, The Diplomat)

Was the Western economic crisis the only big problem ruining President Hu Jintao’s goal of reducing inequalities? His own overseer of the nation’s law and order benefited himself but caused the state and the people “huge losses”, according to official accusations:

“In a brief statement, China’s top prosecution body said that the allegations against Mr Zhou were “extraordinarily severe”.

“The defendant Zhou Yongkang… took advantage of his posts to seek gains for others and illegally took huge property and assets from others, abused his power, causing huge losses to public property and the interests of the state and the people,” it said.”

(“China ex-security chief Zhou Yongkang charged”, April 3, 2015, BBC News)

But with powerful underlings like Xu Caihou and Zhou Yongkang, President Hu’s rule was nearly trouble-free, except for a short period of riots in Tibet, a region he had previously presided over, and – with these power leftists handling the problems – Hu appeared in full control to the outside world:

“In his decade in power, Hu has maintained rigid control over the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the absolute summit of decision-making in China, which in turn maintained a strong grip on Chinese society. The disgrace of key leaders, like former Shanghai party secretary Chen Liangyu in 2006 and Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai in March, led to no noticeable fissures or dissent. Hu has adroitly handled unpleasant surprises, like the Tibetan riots in 2008, albeit with vast influxes of central funding and security spending. (Makers of close-circuit televisions in China have grown rich under Hu; rare for a country not fighting an armed rebellion or a civil war, spending on internal policing has outpaced national defense.)”

(Kerry Brown, November 8, 2012, Foreign Policy)

But as the Hu era ended in 2012-2013, the province of Guizhou, another region Hu had presided over, has remained the poorest in China:

“Whatever the case, the country Hu presides over remains as unequal, if not more, than it was the day he ascended to the top in 2002. China may boast more than 96 dollar billionaires now, but 150 million Chinese still live in poverty. The country may have become the second richest in the world on aggregate, but per capita income hovers near 90th, similar to per capita income in Cuba and Namibia. Shanghainese enjoy a per capita income of more than $12,000 a year. Residents of Guizhou, China’s poorest province, earn a mere $2,500 a year.”

(Kerry Brown, November 8, 2012, Foreign Policy)

Now we know that there were these four power-leftist high officials under then President Hu Jintao in “every aspect of power from military to the party” in China, supervising important matters and making decisions, and also engaging in serious corruption activities to enrich themselves, their families and their circles.

But beyond that, how can they be compared to the “Gang of Four” in terms of politics, i.e., the policies they pursued and the decisions they made, that could make some of their problems the “gravest” since the “Gang of Four”?

To help gain a better understanding, I review a number of excerpts from an interview of Deng Xiaoping by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, in 1980 following Mao’s death in 1976, the end of the Cultural Revolution and Deng’s return to power. The interview regarded Deng’s views on Mao Zedong’s mistakes in late life, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s use of the “Gang of Four” in politics.

Deng said Mao’s unsound ideas were “chiefly “Left” ones”:

“Question: We Westerners find a lot of things hard to understand. The Gang of Four are blamed for all the faults. I’m told that when the Chinese talk about the Gang of Four, many of them hold up five fingers.

Answer: We must make a clear distinction between the nature of Chairman Mao’s mistakes and the crimes of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. … Of course, Mao Zedong Thought was not created by Comrade Mao alone – other revolutionaries of the older generation played a part in forming and developing it – but primarily it embodies Comrade Mao’s thinking. Nevertheless, victory made him less prudent, so that in his later years some unsound features and unsound ideas, chiefly “Left” ones, began to emerge. …”

(“ANSWERS TO THE ITALIAN JOURNALIST ORIANA FALLACI”, by Deng Xiaoping, August 21 and 23, 1980, People.cn)

My analysis has shown that, like the “Gang of Four”, the possible “New Gang of Four” were all to the political left of the current Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Deng said Mao’s objective for the Cultural Revolution was “to avert the restoration of capitalism”, but that Mao made an erroneous assessment to target “capitalists roaders in power in the Party”, cadres who had contributed to the revolution and had practical experience, and Mao’s political mistake was taken advantage of by the “Gang of Four”:

“Question: … And what did Chairman Mao really want with the “Cultural Revolution”?

Answer: … So far as Chairman Mao’s own hopes were concerned, he initiated the “Cultural Revolution” in order to avert the restoration of capitalism, but he had made an erroneous assessment of China’s actual situation. In the first place, the targets of the revolution were wrongly defined, which led to the effort to ferret out “capitalist roaders in power in the Party”. Blows were dealt at leading cadres at all levels who had made contributions to the revolution and had practical experience… Chairman Mao’s mistake was a political mistake, and not a small one. On the other hand, it was taken advantage of by the two counter-revolutionary cliques headed by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, who schemed to usurp power. …”

(Deng Xiaoping, August 21 and 23, 1980, People.cn)

Any comparable motive on the part of the possible “New Gang of Four”, i.e., targeting other politicians, has yet to be made known, and would be an important factor substantiating the recent four as a ‘political gang’. So far as per the official disclosures, serious corruption and related abuse of power have been the main characteristics of the recent four.

Deng said using the “Gang of Four” was a mistake of Mao’s, but Deng acknowledged that they had their own “factional set-up”, and a “fair-sized base” particularly in the use of “ignorant young people”:

“Question: What we did not understand was: If the Gang of Four was, as you said, a minority with all the country against them, how could it happen that they were holding the whole country, including the veteran leaders? Was it because one of the four was the wife of Mao Zedong and the ties between Mao Zedong and her were so profound that no one dared to touch her?

Answer: This was one of the factors. As I’ve said, Chairman Mao made mistakes, one of which was using the Gang, letting them come to power. Also, the Gang had their own factional set-up and they built a clique of some size – particularly they made use of ignorant young people as a front, so they had a fair-sized base.”

(Deng Xiaoping, August 21 and 23, 1980, People.cn)

What links there were among the recent four remain largely unclear. But my analysis has shown that they had some appeals among the political left: Ling Jihua was a “populist” star and the top aide to former President Hu Jintao, then leader of the populist coalition; Bo Xilai’s Maoist-style political campaign in the city of Chongqing enjoyed popularity; Xu Caihou had served as the PLA’s top political officer, and one would believe that the Communist political indoctrination, disciplinary and egalitarian in emphasis, has some fit in the military; and Zhou Yongkang, perhaps the least populist-oriented of the four, rose from a career in the state oil industry, and such state industry sectors would tend to show support for the political left.

Deng also said that Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, a member of the “Gang of Four”, did evil things by “flaunting the banner of Chairman Mao”, and that Mao was “responsible” for failing to intervene effectively:

“Question: Was Mao Zedong blinded by her so that he wouldn’t see what she was doing? And was she an adventuress like the Empress Dowager Yehonala?

Answer: Jiang Qing did evil things by flaunting the banner of Chairman Mao. But Chairman Mao and Jiang Qing lived separately for years.

Question: We didn’t know that.

Answer: Jiang Qing did what she did by flaunting the banner of Chairman Mao, but he failed to intervene effectively. For this he should be held responsible. …”

(Deng Xiaoping, August 21 and 23, 1980, People.cn)

It would have only made sense for the new four, in pursuing their political agendas, to flaunt the banner of President Hu Jintao, who was not only their boss but the official leader of China and for that, one with an aura of ‘the Youth Leaguer’. But what inappropriate or even “evil” political agendas the four pursued have not been revealed.

And it is getting harder to discover the full scope and depth of the possible “New Gang of Four” as their numbers have just dwindled by one.

In March 2015 a few days after retired Major General Yang Chunchang, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, told the media that former President Hu Jintao had been a “lame duck” in chairing the Central Military Commission while former CMC vice chairman Xu Caihou dictated the events, General Xu died of cancer at 71.

Writing in The Diplomat on Xu’s death, China analyst Bo Zhiyue noted that from a poor and unprivileged background Xu was able to enter the Harbin Institute of Military Engineering, “an elite university usually reserved for princelings”, by doing well in competitive entrance examinations:

“Julius Caesar isn’t the only person who should “beware the ides of March.” March 15 also spelled doomsday for Xu Caihou, the former Central Military Commission vice chairman and Politburo member who was disgraced as the highest ranking officer in the People’s Liberation Army to be brought down for corruption since 1949. On March 15, 2014, then-General Xu Caihou was placed under investigation for corruption. Exactly one year later, on March 15, 2015, he died of bladder cancer.

A professional soldier from a humble family, Xu in fact epitomized his time. A native of Liaoning, Xu was born in his home village of Xujiazhuang in Changxing Island in June 1943. His grandparents were both farmers, and his father found a job as a clerk in a grocery store in Dalian City when he was 12 years old. An outstanding student through his elementary and secondary education, Xu entered Harbin Institute of Military Engineering — an elite university usually reserved for princelings — through competitive college entrance examinations in 1963. He was one of the only two students from his high school — No. 8 High School in Dalian — to study there. Obviously, he was a star student at the time.”

(“The Rise and Fall of Xu Caihou, China’s Corrupt General”, by Bo Zhiyue, March 18, 2015, The Diplomat)

I suppose General Xu got to know quite a few princelings during his military university education and that was helpful later in his politically focused military career.

From 1999 to his retirement in 2012, Xu was in charge of screening for senior officer promotions, and made recommendations for more promotions of full generals than Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao each promoted – since after the Cultural Revolution when China restored official military ranks in 1988:

“Between September 1999 and November 2012, Xu was in charge of appointments and promotions of high-ranking officers in the PLA. During that time, Xu personally screened more officers for promotion to the rank of full general than any CMC chairman — the top leader of China — since 1988.

Deng Xiaoping only promoted a batch of 17 generals in 1988. As chairman of the CMC from November 1989 to September 2004, Jiang Zemin promoted a total of 79 generals. As chairman of the CMC from September 2004 to November 2012, Hu Jintao promoted a total of 45 generals. But Xu Caihou screened and recommended 83 full generals — four more than promoted by Jiang, 38 more than Hu, and almost five times as many generals as those promoted by Deng!”

(Bo Zhiyue, March 18, 2015, The Diplomat)

That could be a profitable source of bribery income, which General Xu was accused of accepting in “extremely large” amount, according to Chinese military prosecutors:

“Xu Caihou, former vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission (CMC), has confessed to taking bribes, said military prosecutors on Tuesday.

…

Xu was found to have taken advantage of his position to assist the promotions of others, accepting huge bribes personally and through his family, and to have sought profits for others in exchange for bribes. The amount of bribe was “extremely large”, the statement said.

…

Xu was CMC vice chairman from 2004 to 2012 and was made a general in 1999. Xu has been discharged from military service with his rank of general revoked.”

(“Xu Caihou confesses to taking bribe”, October 28, 2014, Xinhuanet)

Xu’s history as quoted earlier also included supervising “discipline inspection”, i.e., including anti-corruption, at the Central Military Commission in 2000-2002. That could make passing his screening a ‘premium’ clearance in ethical conduct.

But Xu’s death isn’t the end of the story for the Chinese military. During the March 2015 CPPCC annual session when Maj. Gen. Yang Chunchang lashed out at Xu, another CPPCC member, retired Major General Liu Jian, stated that former Central Military Commission vice chairman Guo BoXiong “should take responsibility for his son’s wrongdoing”, i.e., corruption:

“Liu Jian , another retired major general and CPPCC member, suggested that another former CMC vice-chairman, Guo Boxiong, was in trouble by saying that the 72-year-old general should take responsibility for his son’s wrongdoing. The Ministry of Defence recently announced that more than a dozen senior officers – including Guo’s son Guo Zhenggang – had been snared in the military’s graft crackdown. Both Guos have been the subject of speculation for months.”

(Cary Huang, March 10, 2015, South China Morning Post)

Recall that in 2004 General Guo Boxiong and General Cao Gangchuan were the military vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission, appointed under previous CMC Chairman, former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, when then President Hu Jintao took over chairing the CMC and General Xu Caihou was promoted to become a third CMC vice chairman.

In 2007-2008 Cao retired and the CMC returned to the normal setup of two military vice chairmen.

(“Chinese Military Leadership After the 17th Congress: Hu’s Guys or Whose Guys?”, by James Mulvenon, No, 23, China Leadership Monitor, Hoover Institution)

Now one has been directly implicated in President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, and died of cancer, and the other is at least indirectly implicated due to corruption in his military family.

That was a lot of corruption, nearly full of it, at the highest level of the Chinese military.

Whether there was a “New Gang of Four” is politically intriguing, to be further discovered and explored, but official corruption underneath former Chinese leader Hu Jintao appears beyond just the four of them.

(To be continued in Part 2)

Young Japanese researcher’s stardom fraud begs questions about American science don’s intellectual practice

Barely 30 years old and already leading her own laboratory at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, Haruko Obokata shot to scientific stardom in January 2014 when she and her colleagues published two breakthrough papers in Nature, one of the world’s top science journals, demonstrating a surprisingly simple way of turning ordinary body cells into something very much like embryonic stem cells.

All Obokata did was drop the mouse cells into a weak bath of citric acid for 1/2 hour to wash away their developmental past, and the cells emerged like cellular infants, able to multiply abundantly and grow into different types of body cells – a power known as pluripotency.

Published online January 29 (in print January 30), with an almost supernatural title, “Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency”, Obokata phrased the scientific question as follows:

“In the canalization view of Waddington’s epigenetic landscape, fates of somatic cells are progressively determined as cellular differentiation proceeds, like going downhill. It is generally believed that reversal of differentiated status requires artificial physical or genetic manipulation of nuclear function such as nuclear transfer or the introduction of multiple transcription factors. Here we investigated the question of whether somatic cells can undergo nuclear reprogramming simply in response to external triggers without direct nuclear manipulation. This type of situation is known to occur in plants—drastic environmental changes can convert mature somatic cells (for example, dissociated carrot cells) into immature blastema cells, from which a whole plant structure, including stalks and roots, develops in the presence of auxins. A challenging question is whether animal somatic cells have a similar potential that emerges under special conditions”.

(“Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency”, by Haruko Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama, Yoshiki Sasai, Koji Kojima, Martin P. Vacanti, Hitoshi Niwa, Masayuki Yamato & Charles A. Vacanti, online January 29, in print January 30, 2014, Pages 641-647, Volume 505, Nature)

The answer was yes, cells could become supernatural in a sense – pluripotent to be accurate – when given unusual stimulus:

“Collectively, these findings show that the differentiation state of a committed somatic cell lineage can be converted into a state of pluripotency by strong stimuli given externally. Hereafter, we refer to the fate conversion from somatic cells into pluripotent cells by strong external stimuli such as low pH as ‘stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency’ (STAP) and the resultant cells as STAP cells. …

…

This study has revealed that somatic cells latently possess a surprising plasticity. This dynamic plasticity—the ability to become pluripotent cells—emerges when cells are transiently exposed to strong stimuli that they would not normally experience in their living environments.”

(Haruko Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama, Yoshiki Sasai, Koji Kojima, Martin P. Vacanti, Hitoshi Niwa, Masayuki Yamato & Charles A. Vacanti, January 29, 2014, Nature)

It would be a faster and easier way to reprogram cells, much less likely to damage them or make them cancerous, than the genetic manipulation pioneered in 2006 by another Japanese scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for it.

It was Haruko Obokata’s turn to become an instant media sensation. As Britain’s The Guardian newspaper reports, the media wondered when she would be given a Nobel Prize, curiously finding out and reporting more about her: she painted her laboratory pink and yellow, sticking cartoons everywhere; at work she wore a kappogi – a cooking apron – her grandmother had given her; and in her leisure time she fed her pet turtle, took baths, shopped and went on dates.

(“What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata”, by John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

But within days of the Nature papers’ publication, disturbing allegations emerged in science blogs and on Twitter: some of the papers’ images looked doctored, and chunks of her text were lifted from other papers.

The RIKEN research institute, of which the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology is a part, conducted an investigation in February and March, confirming there was at least some research misconduct; in the Nature paper quoted above, some of the text may have been copied from a paper by other researchers, and some images were copied from Obokata’s doctoral thesis on a very different subject:

“The Paper 1 Methods section in question consisted of 17 lines copied from the paper by Guo J., et al., without citing the source. This is absolutely not allowed, and this is something that is strictly taught at research institutions and universities. Appropriate quotation and citing of all sources is a matter of course for all researchers. Dr. Obokata’s explanation that she did not possess a copy of the Guo paper, did not remember where she had copied the text from, and that it was simply oversight, is highly questionable.

…

On February 20, the committee was presented by Drs. Sasai and Obokata with a request for correction and with supporting documentation. They brought up two points: One was that some of the immunofluorescence images of in vitro differentiated cells and teratoma … actually were derived from STAP cells created out of bone marrow hematopoietic cells but not spleen hematopoietic cells; and the second point was that they were thinking of replacing the incorrect images. The supporting documentation they provided consisted of these image files. Dr. Obokata explained that she mistook the images because both the spleen and bone marrow hematopoietic cell samples had the same “hemato” (hematopoietic) label.

Later, it was discovered that the images in Paper 1 very closely resembled images she had used in her doctoral dissertation for Waseda University. …

Paper 1 presents STAP cells created by subjecting the spleen cells of a 1-week old mouse to an acid bath, while in Dr. Obokata’s doctoral thesis she describes acquiring “sphere” cells (sphere-shaped cell clusters) by forcing the bone marrow cells of a 3 to 4-week old mouse through a narrow pipette in a process of applying mechanical stress to the cells. The two experimental conditions are quite different. …

… It is hard to believe that Dr. Obokata was unaware of the different experiment conditions when she prepared the images. Also, there are traces around the images in Paper 1 that suggest they were cut out of an identical arrangement of images in the doctoral thesis. This makes it very difficult to accept Dr. Obokata’s assertion that she cut and pasted the images from the thesis to Paper 1 without realizing that they represented completely different experimental procedures. …”

(“Report on STAP Cell Research Paper Investigation”, by Research Paper Investigative Committee, March 31, 2014, RIKEN)

Also in March, co-author Teruhiko Wakayama of Yamanashi University, Japan, a cloning expert, reviewed data of the tests he had conducted for the Nature papers, and found a mismatch between a line of mouse reported in the Nature papers and the lines for which experiments were actually done by Obokata.

The Nature paper had reported the success of converting mature cells to STAP cells for 3 strains of mice:

“We tested the following three different genetic backgrounds of mice for STAP stem-cell establishment from STAP cell clusters, and observed reproducible data of establishment: C57BL/6 carrying Oct4-gfp (29 of 29), 129/Sv carrying Rosa26-gfp (2 of 2) and 129/Sv × C57BL/6 carrying cag-gfp (12 of 16).”

(Haruko Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama, Yoshiki Sasai, Koji Kojima, Martin P. Vacanti, Hitoshi Niwa, Masayuki Yamato & Charles A. Vacanti, January 29, 2014, Nature)

Wakayama’s test data revealed that results published for the mouse strain 129 had actually been from the other 2 strains:

“On 25 March, Wakayama told Nature News that his preliminary analysis of the STAP cell lines on which Obokata worked alone showed that they were genetically distinct from the ‘129 strain’ of mouse said to have been used to derive them. Instead, he says, they came from two other strains, known as B6 and 129B6F1 hybrid. “This discovery was a shock,” says Wakayama.”

(“Mismatch alleged in acid-bath stem-cell experiment”, by David Cyranoski, March 27, 2014, Nature)

RIKEN’s investigation findings of “research misconduct” were announced on April 1. Haruko Obokata’s short-lived scientific stardom was now a scandal, and public shaming of her followed. On live television, Obokata tearfully apologized for her mistakes, but calling them “benevolent”:

“The news media, having built her up, was more than happy to tear her down. A tearful Obokata faced a gruelling press conference, broadcast live on TV. Standing amongst a battery of microphones, strobe-lit with camera flashes, she apologised, bowed, answered questions, bowed, apologised some more, and bowed.

Obokata apologised for many things that day. She apologised for “insufficient efforts, ill-preparedness and unskilfulness”, for errors of methodology and sloppy data management. They were all, she said, “benevolent mistakes”, due to her youth and inexperience.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

Obokata insisted that her STAP cells exist, that she had created them “over 200 times”, and would be willing to go anywhere to reproduced them with other scientists:

“This is the first statement in public by Dr. Obokata since the problems with the articles emerged in February. Her lawyers said she was hospitalized Monday because her “mental and physical condition” was unstable.

…

“The STAP phenomenon has been confirmed on many occasions. Since I encountered the STAP phenomenon, I’ve dedicated myself to experiments with a sense of mission to explore the phenomenon. I sincerely hope that the STAP phenomenon won’t be denied due to presentational mistakes, and that scientific research on it continues.”

…

Dr. Obokata says she has created STAP cells over 200 times.

“If anyone wants to watch me create STAP cells, I’ll go anywhere” to work with others to replicate the data, Dr. Obokata says.”

(“Live: Obokata Speaks About Stem Cell Research Probe”, April 9, 2014, The Wall Street Journal)

But despite her method’s simplicity, other scientists were unable to reproduce the results. One by one, Obokata’s co-authors expressed doubt and asked to retract the papers, and in June so agreed Obokata. Online on July 2 (in print July 3), 2014, the two Nature papers were retracted.

At RIKEN, Haruko Obokata’s supervisor was co-author Yoshiki Sasai, a deputy director of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology. Sasai stood by Obokata as indicated in the investigation report quoted earlier, but the investigation brought him tremendous mental stress that saw him hospitalized for nearly a month in March; then in early August 2014, Sasai was found dead at the Center, hanged from a stairway handrail, to the end still determined to get Obokata to “reproduce STAP cells”:

“Sasai, 52, deputy director of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe and an adviser to scandal-hit Riken scientist Haruko Obokata, 30, was confirmed dead after being found hanged from a stairway handrail at the center, the police said.

…

Satoru Kagaya, head of public relations at Riken, said at a news conference that at least one apparent suicide note was found on the desk used by Sasai’s secretary, as well as three other notes left near the body.

One of the notes, addressed to Obokata, read, “Be sure to reproduce STAP cells,” sources revealed later in the day.

…

Sasai supervised Obokata’s writing. A Riken investigative committee has said Sasai bore heavy responsibility for not confirming data for the STAP study and for Obokata’s misconduct.

Obokata is now engaged in experiments at Riken to verify the findings of the research.

…

Retractions of papers in major scientific journals are rare, and the scandal was a major embarrassment to Japan’s scientific research.”

(“STAP paper co-author Sasai commits suicide”, August 5, 2014, The Japan Times)

A major embarrassment to Japan’s scientific research led to the suicide of the man who supervised the writing – but not the end of the saga as the woman at the center of the research work continued to insist that STAP cells exist.

Finally in December 2014, after months working with a research team assembled by RIKEN to assist her, Haruko Obokata conceded that she could not produce STAP cells under the stricter conditions and was “extremely perplexed”, and resigned from her job:

“Obokata submitted her letter of resignation to Riken, dated Dec. 21, on Dec. 15, the institute said. Riken plans to accept her resignation.

…

“I regret that I had to conduct my work (for verification tests) within limitations that were much greater than I had anticipated and therefore was not able to do the examination to the fullest,” Obokata, 31, said in a statement issued through Riken. “But, under the given circumstances, I tackled the work to the limit of my soul. Now, I am exhausted. I am extremely perplexed by such a result (of my verification tests).””

(“Obokata resigns as Riken reports her failure to re-create STAP cells”, December 19, 2014, The Asahi Shimbun)

RIKEN then released its second investigation report. Its genetic analysis showed that Obokata’s so-called STAP cells had been derived from regular embryonic stem cells, and so there was no other choice but to conclude that the mix-up with embryonic stem cells “refutes all of the main conclusions of the two papers”, and that the contamination – involving 3 different types of  embryonic stem cells – was unlikely accidental, although persons responsible could not be pinpointed:

“Investigation of samples from the Obokata and Wakayama laboratories

The following conclusions were reached based on analyses of SNP distribution, specific deletions, inserted GFP gene, and other factors.

a) The three STAP stem cells, FLS, GLS, and AC129, were actually derived from the three ES cells FES1, GOF-ES, and 129B6F1-ES1, respectively.

b) The FI stem cell CTS was actually derived from an ES cell FES1.

c) It is highly probable that the chimera mice claimed to be developed from STAP cells were actually developed from ES cells FES1.

d) It is highly probable that the teratomas claimed to be developed from STAP cells were actually developed from ES cells FES1.

e) The STAP cell samples given to GRAS for Chip-seq analysis were actually 129B6F1-ES1 cells.

Opinion

It is unlikely that there was accidental contamination by three different ES cells, and it is suspected that the contamination may have occurred artificially. However, given the difficulty of identifying who might have contaminated the cultures, it is not possible to conclusively determine that it was artificial contamination.”

(“Summary Report on STAP Cell Research Paper Investigation II”, RIKEN)

Clearly there had been persistent, even systemic, contamination with embryonic stem cells in Obokata’s over 200 experiments successfully producing the STAP cells, which under the verification conditions imposed by the RIKEN investigation she was unable to produce even once.

In its recent comprehensive reporting of the Obokata scandal – a feature article dated February 18, 2015, written by John Rasko and Carl Power – The Guardian has solemnly informed the public that the phenomena of published scientific research results incapable of verification by independent reproduction, i.e., replication, have been widespread and could even be in the majority.

Firstly, scientists would rather produce new results than reproducing others’ work:

“But before we start to congratulate ourselves on the ever-upwards path of science, we should bear in mind that most experiments are never reproduced. There are simply too many of them. Besides which, researchers often don’t have much interest in repeating the work of others. Scientists may be truth-seekers, but they generally prefer new truths. They want to be the first to make a discovery. That’s where all the glory lies; that’s how to get a name for yourself, attract more funding and advance your career. Confirming – or failing to confirm – someone else’s discovery is unlikely to get you very far. It’s unlikely to even get you into print since science journals tend to favour novel research.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

Secondly, those who find it important to verify others’ published results, such as some pharmaceutical industry researchers do, may find to their horror that even most of the so-called “landmark experiments” in their field can not be reproduced:

“Not only are most experiments not reproduced, most are probably not reproducible. This statement will shock only those who have never worked in a wet lab. Those who have will already suspect as much.

A few years ago, Glenn Begley put this suspicion to the test. As head of cancer research for pharmaceutical giant Amgen, he attempted to repeat 53 landmark experiments in that field, important work published in some of the world’s top science journals. To his horror, he and his team managed to confirm only six of them. That’s a meagre 11%. Researchers at Bayer set up a similar trial and were similarly depressed by the results. Out of 67 published studies into the therapeutic potential of various drugs (mostly for the treatment of cancer), they were able to reproduce less than a quarter.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

And thirdly, if the public haven’t known about it, researchers know “in their heart of hearts” that for various reasons, fraud being one, “reproducibility is the exception rather than the rule”:

“The Amgen and Bayer studies were too small to tell us how bad the problem really is, but they do illustrate something that biomedical researchers already know in their heart of hearts: reproducibility is the exception rather than the rule. There are probably many reasons for this. Apart from outright fraud, there are all those “benevolent mistakes” that scientists make more or less unwittingly: poor experiment design, sloppy data management, bias in the interpretation of facts and inadequate communication of results and methods. Then, of course, there is the devilish complexity of reality itself, which withholds more than it reveals to the prying eyes of science.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

But how do The Guardian article’s writers know what biomedical researchers know in their “heart of hearts”? Researchers certainly would not say anything like that to contradict the credibility of their own work.

These two writers appear to be medical and academic insiders: John Rasko is a professor at Sydney Medical School, and leads both the Cell and Molecular Therapies at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Group at the Centenary Institute, University of Sydney, while Carl Power is a researcher and editorial coordinator at the Centenary Institute and University of Sydney.

Still, the incredible speed at which Haruko Obokata shot to scientific stardom, and the same amazing speed at which it unravelled – I note that it was quite unlike the pet turtle she kept at home – made her case a glaring one. It has brought her to the rank of notorious fraudsters in biomedical research history, according to Rasko and Power who refer to two other such personalities in history.

One of the two was South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk:

“In 2004, this charismatic, square-jawed scientist from Seoul National University became the pride of South Korea when he claimed he had created the first human embryonic stem cells by means of cloning. His smiling face was on the front page of newspapers worldwide, and Koreapost issued a commemorative stamp in his honour. Since cloning is a form of cellular reprogramming, Hwang’s work generated the same kind of excitement as Obokata’s. Both promised the holy grail of regenerative medicine: patient-specific stem cells capable of repairing any damaged tissue or organ in the body. But an investigation by Hwang’s university proved his results were as bogus as Obokata’s. None of his 11 “cloned” stem cells matched their supposed donors.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

In fact, the Hwang Woo Suk scandal loomed large in the minds of other scientists, like Shinya Yamanaka of Japan’s Kyoto University who was pioneering reprogramming mature cells into stem cells, and who felt it prudent to repeat the experiments as he later recalled in his 2012 autobiography for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine:

“In 2005, we succeeded in generating ES-like cells with the four factors, and I named the resulting cells “induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells.” I was anxious about whether they were really the pluripotent cells that we were looking for because the method used to generate the iPS cells was much simpler than I had expected. In addition, after hearing about a big scandal involving a Korean researcher who falsely reported the successful generation of human ES cells by cloning at around that time, I thought we should repeat our experiments to make sure of the result so that no researcher could cast doubt on our findings.”

(“Shinya Yamanaka – Biographical”, 2012, Nobelprize.org)

But even Yamanaka noted that competition was fierce and publishing papers “as quickly as possible” was critical:

“In 2006, we published a paper in Cell on the successful generation of mouse iPS cells using the four factors. Some researchers seemed surprised at the finding that only four genes are needed to reprogram somatic cells into the embryonic state. But in the following months, a few labs at MIT and Harvard demonstrated that they had been able to produce mouse iPS cells using our protocol, and an increasing number of researchers have since started working on the new technology.

Right after we generated mouse iPS cells, my team began to work on reprogramming human somatic cells. In November 2007, we reported the generation of human iPS cells from human fibroblasts by introducing the same quartet of genes via viral vectors. On the same day, Thomson’s lab announced in Science that they had also succeeded in making human iPS cells using a different set of four factors … I remember that I worked day and night to publish our paper as quickly as possible after I heard a rumor in the summer that a U.S. group had submitted an article on the successful generation of human iPS cells.”

(2012, Nobelprize.org)

The Hwang Woo Suk saga, a recent development of which I cited on a Facebook community page, “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, was intriguing not only in his fast rise to stardom and fall – like Obokata but in a much more brilliant fashion – but also in his apparent scientific research ability and resilience, which have brought him recovery from criminal fraud conviction to founding a research company that leads the world in the nascent field of commercial dog cloning, and launching a major joint project with a company in China sponsored by the Chinese government.

(Facebook posting, March 3, 2015, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

So I wouldn’t be surprised if her present disgrace isn’t the last the world hear from, or about, Haruko Obokata, either.

The reported prevalence of published scientific experiments that are actually irreproducible, and thus suspect in the forms presented, if indeed known in the hearts of researchers can make it more likely for the ambitious among them to take bolder steps, catapulting themselves on the back of falsehood to a higher plateau for greater fame and power. But contrary to the rejuvenated pluripotent trajectories of the fairy-tale STAP cells, ethically such is fraud on a downhill path, as John Rasko and Carl Power remarked:

“While some stem cell researchers may indeed possess that “vaulting ambition” characteristic of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, from what we have read and witnessed firsthand, scientific fraud rarely springs from a heroic, all-or-nothing decision. It is more like a bad habit you acquire, a gentle slope you descend without realising how deep you’re getting.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

An acquired habit may likely have been peer influenced. The reality that some of the notorious frauds in science history took a long time to be uncovered, or settled, may well have given some of the ambitious researchers of the modern generation a sense of rightfulness, namely that they, too, deserve greater fame and power, based on scientific half-truth at best, than their own solid accomplishments could bring them.

The other example of a notorious fraud in biomedical research history discussed by John Rasko and Carl Power was one that occurred a century ago, that pioneered the right methodology leading to modern cell science, but with overly optimistic claims that were untrue but were not debunked during the lifetime of the perpetrator – Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel:

“Over the past century, the “wet lab” (where scientists carry out biological experiments) has seen more than its share of scandal. Indeed, modern cell science emerged from a terrible debacle.

The man in the middle of it all was Alexis Carrel, a brilliant and rather dapper Frenchman working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Carrel discovered that, if you remove some cells from the body, sit them in a nutritious broth and handle them correctly, they can not only survive, but thrive and multiply. Also, if you take some cells from one culture, you can start a new one and, with that, a third, and so on. The importance of this technique – know as cell “passaging” – can’t be overstated. With it, Carrel literally opened a new era in cell research. Unfortunately, he did so with an experiment that, while earning him international superstardom, proved to be a complete and utter train wreck.

On 17 January 1912, Carrel removed a chick embryo from its egg and cut out a small fragment of its still-beating heart with the aim of keeping it alive as long as possible. He had hardly begun this experiment when he announced to the world that his chicken heart culture was immortal, that immortality belonged potentially to all cells, and that death was only the consequence of how cells are organised in the body. In other words, the secret of eternal life is within us all, an attribute of our basic biological building blocks. It captured the public’s imagination and was soon accepted by the scientific community.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

I note that Alexis Carrel’s grandiosely optimistic claim of potentially eternal life for a cell culture, published in May 1912 a few months after the start of his experiment, bore remarkable resemblance to the kind of claim made by Haruko Obokata and her co-authors in January 2014 that mature cells could be bathed to re-emerge as youthful stem cells. Carrel wrote:

“The purpose of the experiments described in this article was to determine the conditions under which the active life of a tissue outside of the organism could be prolonged indefinitely. It might be supposed that senility and death of the cultures, instead of being necessary, resulted merely from preventable occurrences; such as accumulation of catabolic substances and exhaustion of the medium. The suppression of these causes should bring about the regeneration of old cultures and prevent their death. It is even conceivable that the length of the life of a tissue outside of the organism could exceed greatly its normal duration in the body, because elemental death might be postponed indefinitely by a proper artificial nutrition.

…

Of sixteen cultures of heart and blood-vessels made on January 17, 1912, five were still very active in March, 1912, and of the five active ones, two heart cultures previously described grew slowly, but pulsated, and another heart culture, which pulsated from time to time, produced a large growth of ameboid and fixed cells which covered an extensive area of the medium. …

…

These facts show that experiments made with these or with more perfect techniques and followed over long periods of time may lead to the solution of the problem of permanent life of tissues in vitro, and give important information on the characters acquired by tissues liberated from the control of the organism from which they were derived.”

(“On the Permanent Life of Tissues Outside of the Organism”, Alexis Carrel, May 1912, Pages 516-528, Number 5, Volume 15, The Journal of Experimental Medicine)

I should comment that the world must have been so excited by Alexis Carrel’s good news of eternal life in the horizon, as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Carrel, for his earlier work as a pioneer of organ preservation and transplant, by the end of 1912 – exactly a century before its awarding to Shinya Yamanaka:

“The new ways he has opened up of protecting threatened tissues and of replacing damaged or harmful tissue with tissue that is healthy and alive are so remarkable and the results obtained so marvellous that the Caroline Institute considers itself to be acting in complete conformity with the fundamental purpose of the great benefactor’s will in awarding Carrel the greatest distinction of present-day medicine, the Nobel Prize. ”

(“Award Ceremony Speech”, J. Akerman, December 10, 1912, Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine of the Royal Caroline Institute)

Carrel’s optimistic claim of potential permanent life seemed to bear out as one of those chicken cell cultures continued to live and grow for 34 years. Other scientists tried in vain, none could reproduce Carrel’s results, but they dared not question his scientific statue:

“Carrel and his assistants kept – or claimed they had kept – that culture alive for 34 years, which is five times longer than the average chicken. For many years, around 17 January, journalists wrote birthday stories on the chicken heart and wondered how large it would have grown had Carrel nurtured every one of its ever-multiplying cells. (According to calculations, it swiftly dwarfed the Earth and filled up the entire solar system.)

The problem was, no one else could keep a cell culture alive indefinitely. Lab after lab tried and failed, decade after decade. Because Carrel was a giant in the field of cell research and a Nobel Prize winner, few dared to doubt him. Scientists blamed themselves when their cells died. They assumed that they lacked the master’s skill, that his lab had higher standards than they could reach, that they had somehow exposed their cells to infection or failed to keep them properly nourished. …”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

Long after Carrel and his famous chicken culture had died, scientific research finally proved that his success was scientifically impossible, that the same chicken culture can live no longer than 35 times of multiplying, which would take several months only:

“It was only in the mid-60s – half a century after Carrel established his chicken heart culture – that the dogma of cell immortality came crashing down. That’s when Leonard Hayflick, an ambitious young researcher at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, discovered that ordinary body cells have a finite life span – or, more precisely, an average number of times they can multiply in vitro. This is their Hayflick number. For chickens, it is 35. In other words, a population of chicken cells can double about 35 times before they die, which usually takes several months.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

But how did Carrel’s chicken cell culture live for 34 years when the cells could only multiply 35 times? There is no direct answer:

“By the time Hayflick proved this, Carrel was long dead and his “immortal” chicken cells discarded. Which means that we know Carrel’s most famous experiment was a sham, but not why.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

The first scientific paper on such limits, by Leonard Hayflick, was written in May 1961, and published in December 1961 – 17 years after Carrel had died in November 1944 (his longest-running chicken cell culture created on January 17, 1912, must have outlived him but died before January 17, 1947).

(“Alexis Carrel – Biographical”, 1912, Nobelprize.org; and, “The serial cultivation of human diploid cell strains”, by L. Hayflick and P.S. Moorhead, December 1961, Pages 585-621, Issue 3, Volume 25, Experimental Cell Research)

Carrel’s chicken fame was either a fraud, or a result of continual contamination by live chicken cells as it went along, according to Rasko and Power:

“If it was fraud, it was one of the most outrageous cases in the history of science. However, the cause may have been carelessness rather than dishonesty. Carrel and his staff used “embryonic juice” as a culture medium and, if they prepared it badly, it might have contained live chick cells. In that case, instead of just feeding their culture, they re-seeded it. It’s an easy enough mistake, but to make it consistently enough to keep their chicken heart cells alive for 34 years suggests an astonishing degree of negligence.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

Such persistent luck was more likely fraud, i.e., “artificial contamination” as termed by the RIKEN investigators on STAP cells in 2014.

According to John Rasko and Carl Power, the entire scientific community should share the blame for upholding such a false dogma for so long:

“… The entire scientific community shares some of the blame because it upheld the dogma of cell immortality for more than 50 years despite the fact that it was based on a single, sensational, irreproducible experiment.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

My view, though, is that those with the understanding and the influence should share the blame for upholding an untrue claim as scientific maxim for 49 long years, but that not everyone in science was in the know, or could openly go against the dogma even if disagreeing with it.

A century after Alexis Carrel, Haruko Obokata had the same persistent luck of contamination, but not the fortune of permanent scientific glory like that bestowed on Carrel, and instead disgrace.

Well, Obokata hasn’t been a successful pioneer of cutting-edge organ science, with medical applications, has she?

She hasn’t; but intriguingly some of her co-authors have been accomplished in that field and harbor great ambitions for laboratory growing of transplantable human organs.

In the list of authors for the earlier-quoted Nature paper dated online January 29, 2014, are Martin P. Vacanti and Charles A. Vacanti, two of the well-known Vacanti brothers, accomplished medical scientists in Boston, Massachusetts.

The four Vacanti brothers had been touted for their accomplishments by The New York Times over a decade earlier:

“Jay, 55, more formally known as Dr. Joseph P. Vacanti, is the chief of pediatric surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, the director of pediatric transplantation, the director of the laboratory of tissue engineering and organ fabrication, and a surgeon in chief of MassGeneral Hospital for Children.

Chuck, the second-oldest brother, is Dr. Charles A. Vacanti, 53, chairman of the department of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and director of the laboratory for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Marty, third in line, is Dr. Martin P. Vacanti, 51. He is a pathologist at Mass General and a research scientist in Chuck’s and Jay’s labs.

And Frank, Dr. Francis X. Vacanti, a 49-year-old self-described “gizmo guy,” is an anesthetist at Massachusetts General who, working mostly independently from his brothers, is developing a coated breast implant.

Together, the brothers hold 88 patents, a vast majority of them Jay Vacanti’s. They have a total of 11 children and have been father figures to nearly 1,000 graduate students or doctors in training. The brothers have also written more than 300 scientific papers, 189 of them attributable to Jay Vacanti.”

(“SCIENTISTS AT WORK — JOSEPH, CHARLES, MARTIN AND FRANCIS VACANTI; From Old Cars to Cartilage, Brothers Like to Tinker”, by Judy Foreman, December 30, 2003, The New York Times)

As fate had it, among the 1,000 or more graduate students and doctors mentored or trained by the Vacantis would be Japanese graduate student Haruko Obokata, led in 2008 by Charles Vacanti onto a research career path that would eventually see the short-lived stardom and then shame.

Besides each working in the medical fields, the brothers had tissue engineering laboratories, led by Joseph and Charles as reported in the New York Times, where they produced world-leading pioneer work, reported as early as 2001:

“Joseph (Jay), Charles, Martin, and Francis Vacanti work together as researchers in the new field of tissue engineering, a discipline they practically invented. What they are trying to create is nothing less than lab-grown human organs, produced from a patient’s own tissue. Their work is urgently needed— roughly 100,000 patients in this country die each year because not enough people donate organs, and many of those who are saved by transplantation ultimately die because donor organs are rejected.

… Imagine a world, say the Vacantis, in which diseased pancreases, lungs, and spinal cords can be replaced as easily as the transmission in an old Chevy. Imagine a world in which salvation grows in an incubator. Imagine a world in which hope is a given.

… It was only in 1996 that Chuck and Jay Vacanti held the first conference of their fledgling Tissue Engineering Society. Today two of their former colleagues, Anthony Atala, a pediatric urologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston, and Laura Niklason, a Duke University researcher, have already performed what seem like miracles— Atala successfully implanting lab-grown bladders in beagles and Niklason growing fresh pig arteries in her lab. This year there are more than 50 laboratories in the United States alone racing to create people-made people parts. And the researchers in all of those labs are indebted to five breakthroughs made by the four Vacanti brothers.”

(“Brothers with Heart”, by Joseph D’Agnese and Chris Buck, July 1, 2001, Discover Magazine)

One of the five breakthroughs made by the Vacanti brothers was the discovery of “spore-like cells”, unusually tiny cells that lie dormant in animal tissues, so tiny that fellow researchers at first dismissed as “debris”, “junk”:

“In 1996 Chuck had convinced Marty, the pathologist, to leave Nebraska and join him in Worcester. Chuck had grown increasingly frustrated with the fragile adult-tissue cells he had been working with. Most cannot last more than 30 minutes without an oxygen supply. Fetal stem cells are hardier, but harvesting them is controversial.

Chuck told Marty to find an alternative: “Look for stem cells in adult tissue.”

He instantly replied: “They don’t exist.”

“They have to exist,” Chuck insisted, intent on driving his point home. “If the human body is constantly trying to repair itself, it must have immature cells somewhere. Find them.”

“You’re nuts,” Marty told him.

“Just do it.”

… Marty decided to give it a try. For 15 months he drew cells from living animals, only to watch them die. He scrounged lab animals other researchers had sacrificed for their work. He scraped flesh with scalpels and dissolved it in enzymes. He peered into the resulting broth, magnified 200 times, to no avail. At every staff meeting, Marty had nothing to report. It became embarrassing.

Then one day, peering through the microscope, he spotted tiny circular shapes. Adult-tissue cells are about 15 micrometers wide. Marty saw cells only 3 micrometers wide. He began showing them around. They’re too small to be stem cells, everyone said. Just debris. Junk.

Tired and depressed, Marty stood in his lab staring at flasks of the cell soup, thinking, “Wastebasket or incubator?” For reasons he does not comprehend, he stuck them in the incubator. Three days later, those little specks of junk had multiplied. What’s more, they had gone without oxygen for more than an hour before he put them in the incubator, an ordeal adult stem cells could not have survived.

At staff meetings Marty took center stage. Eventually someone asked: What do you call these cells? Privately, Marty had begun to call them “sporelike cells.””

(Joseph D’Agnese and Chris Buck, July 1, 2001, Discover Magazine)

These spore-like cells turned out to be among every animal tissues, with the ability to survive tough physical conditions, some stem cell ability and the ability of fast growth when activated:

“Weeks later, Chuck phoned with a suggestion, but Marty cut him off. Obsessed now, he had been examining every scrap of tissue he could lay his hands on and had isolated sporelike cells in every one. He’d bought a tray of chicken livers at the grocery. Even there, he found them.

Chuck was agog but, being Chuck, couldn’t wait to up the ante. Freeze ’em and cook ’em, he said. Marty took them down to -121 degrees Fahrenheit. The cells survived. He left them at 187 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes. They were still alive.

Marty tried to keep a lid on his excitement. He’d learned early that it was prudent to get the data in the bag before you crowed over a new discovery. His confidence soared the day he showed his work to Guido Manjo, an eminent Italian-born pathologist who lectures at UMass. Manjo’s advice: Test those cells for DNA— and publish as soon as possible. Then came the ultimate compliment: “Dr. Vacanti,” said the senior scientist, “you may have discovered a fundamental process of nature that has not yet been described.”

Manjo was correct. DNA was present in the cells, and no one in the history of biology had ever identified such minuscule formations living in mammalian tissue. They were the kind of cells that the Vacantis had been dreaming about: They could live in the body without oxygen for days until blood vessels grew to supply them. Marty’s most recent research shows the cells may actually be able to differentiate into tissues other than those of the organs from which they originated.

Properly incubated, they grow like grass on a prairie. The team in the lab at Worcester has used them to grow everything from retinal rods and cones to liver, bone, fascia, skin, and heart tissue. They have pulled sporelike cells out of a diabetic pancreas and grown insulin-producing islets in 12 weeks. They have cut a golf-ball-sized section from a living sheep’s lung, stuffed the wound with a scaffold seeded with pulmonary sporelike cells, and watched as the lung incorporated the new tissue in eight weeks. Everyone was in awe: A lung is perhaps the most complex organ in the body, possessing at least half a dozen different types of tissue.”

(Joseph D’Agnese and Chris Buck, July 1, 2001, Discover Magazine)

The Vancanti brothers were not trained cell scientists. Yet Chuck’s great leap of logic and imagination and Marty’s hard work led to the discovery of the versatile spore-like cells and their omnipresence.

But his colleagues were so skeptical that Chuck Vacanti moved himself to a different institution in order to avoid them. Then in 2008, graduate student Haruko Obokata came to work under him, reproducing Marty Vacanti’s results with much more professional rigor:

“The initial, tiny seed cells seemed to be very hardy and resistant to harsh conditions, so he and his brother dubbed them spore-like cells and published their results in 2001 in a respectable, though not prominent journal.

Other UMass scientists were extremely skeptical of the results. Eventually, tired of having to defend his work internally, Charles moved to Brigham. He made a conscious choice during the job interview not to mention the research.

“I didn’t want to tell them about my little flop on spore-like stem cells,” Vacanti recalled.

Martin eventually moved back to the Midwest, and Charles’s research went in other directions. But he was still interested in the strange cells he and his brother had isolated. He asked Koji Kojima, a thoracic surgeon and researcher in his lab, to try to see whether he could isolate the same tiny cells.

Kojima started by trying to find them in lung tissue. Eventually, he found the right protocol. Another scientist in the lab found them in muscle.

But Vacanti had learned his lesson. Maybe his lack of training had been an asset when he was trying an unconventional approach and following his intuition where few others would have gone. But he now knew he had to build a rock-solid case that these cells were what they seemed to be.

…

“Older scientists were never going to abandon what they were taught. We needed someone who was flexible enough to explore different possibilities,” Vacanti said. They needed a student.

In 2008, a Japanese graduate student, Haruko Obokata, took up the project, and succeeded in much more rigorously replicating the 2001 work that had attracted so much criticism.”

(“Ignorance led to invention of stem cell technique”, by Carolyn V. Johnson, February 2, 2014, The Boston Globe)

Perhaps other scientists’ skepticism played a role. Charles Vacanti began to think that the spore-like cells had not been present everywhere in the organ tissues but were created by the lab process – a thinking Obokata’s Japanese teacher also harbored:

“Two years later, at a conference in Florida, Vacanti met with Obokata and her mentor from Japan, Masayuki Yamato, from Tokyo Women’s Medical University. He asked them not to make fun of him. Then, he proposed that maybe the isolation procedure was actually creating the cells. He wondered if Obokata would return and see whether this was true.

“I was completely convinced that the cells we described . . . were being ‘created’ during the isolation process, rather than simply being isolated,” Yamato wrote in an e-mail. “I was so surprised to find that Chuck and I had independently reached the same conclusion.””

(Carolyn V. Johnson, February 2, 2014, The Boston Globe)

Then somewhere in this second great leap of logic and imagination, the laboratory stress became more than producing the spore-like cells, but converting the mature cells to pluripotent stem cells – as phrased in the January 2014 Nature papers.

In February 2014 Paul Knoepfler, a biomedical scientist and blogger at the University of California, Davis, conducted an interview with Charles Vacanti, who stated “our belief” that the STAP cells and the spore-like cells “are one and the same”; however, Vancanti’s explanation that the lab process killed mature cells and allow the “stem” cells to survive, obviously did not match Obokata’s notion of “conversion” in their newly published Nature papers:

“You have published some revolutionary findings and outside the box hypotheses in the past such as spore stem cells. What’s your thinking today on spore stem cells? Is there any connection between the STAP cell stress reprogramming concept and spore stem cells, which you reported were able to resist great stress like desiccation and freezing?

Vacanti: It is our belief that they are one and the same. The report demonstrates that we were making these cells rather than isolating them. It may be a subtle, but we feel very important difference. We feel that many reports describing stem cells may indeed represent reports of how to make stem cells. It has been believed that the harsh environment associated with the isolation process killed mature cells, allowing the hardier “stem” cells to survive, and be selected out.

We were not dumb enough to again call them “spore like cells”, since almost no one read that paper. For several years, we believed that to be the case, but were fairly “gun shy” about being roasted again. But it seems that the time has come.”

(“Interview with Charles Vacanti on STAP Cells: Link to Spore Stem Cells & More”, by Paul Knoepfler. February 2, 2014, Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog)

In a slightly different version of the history as in a Nature report, Obokata first proved the “pluripotency” of spore-like cells, then both Charles Vacanti and she felt that the spore-like cells were created in the lab process, and after that came her notion of “conversion”:

“Vacanti told Nature’s news team in January that by 2006 his laboratory could grow the cells in large numbers, but that they still “were not exceptionally well characterized by us”. That is, the team had not demonstrated pluripotency. This was a job he gave to Obokata, a graduate student who had joined his lab in 2008.

Proving pluripotency is often done by injecting cells into a developing mouse embryo — creating a ‘chimaera’ — and tracking their fate. It is a difficult experiment, and Obokata needed help. “I was looking for the god’s hand of chimaeric-mouse generation,” she said back in January. A Google search led her to famed mouse cloner Teruhiko Wakayama at the CDB, whose lab she entered in 2011 as a visiting professor. After hundreds of failures to get cells derived from adult mice to show up in chimaeras, she and Wakayama switched to newborn mice as the source of the cells — and the process worked.

By that point, both Vacanti and Obokata were convinced that the stress of the isolation process was creating the pluripotent cells. Obokata said that the idea had come to her while she was taking a bath and reflecting on the stress in her own life.

In the experiments at RIKEN, she used acid to stress spleen cells from newborn mice, and she carried out further experiments to characterize their conversion with Yoshiki Sasai and Hitoshi Niwa, two highly regarded stem-cell biologists at the CDB. With the two key characteristics of STAP cells now demonstrated — they were pluripotent and were created using stressful conditions — she had enough data to publish two papers in Nature on 30 January.”

(“Research integrity: Cell-induced stress”, by David Cyranoski, July 3, 2014, Nature)

It still appears unclear why the creation of the pluripotent cells was a “conversion” – something supposedly demonstrated in the now discredited Nature papers:

“Through real-time imaging of STAP cells derived from purified lymphocytes, as well as gene rearrangement analysis, we found that committed somatic cells give rise to STAP cells by reprogramming rather than selection.”

(Haruko Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama, Yoshiki Sasai, Koji Kojima, Martin P. Vacanti, Hitoshi Niwa, Masayuki Yamato & Charles A. Vacanti, January 29, 2014, Nature)

John Rasko and Carl Power wonder if Obokata was “cooking” data to “please” Charles Vacanti:

“Vacanti’s role in this scientific debacle is especially intriguing because Stap cells originally sprang from his fertile imagination. For well over a decade, he had been working on a hunch that pluripotent stem cells exist in all mammalian tissue, ready to swing into action whenever needed. It was a big, bright, potentially career-defining idea which for a long time Vacanti couldn’t sell. He lacked conclusive proof. He also lacked credibility. After all, he was not a stem cell scientist but an anesthesiologist and tissue engineer best known for grafting an artificial ear on to the back of a mouse (the infamous Vacanti earmouse).

Then, in 2008, Obokata joined his lab as a graduate student, bringing with her the skill set and credentials he sorely needed. Thus began a partnership that continued after Obokata returned to Japan. With her help, Vacanti repeated his earlier experiments and revised his hypothesis: mammalian tissue doesn’t so much maintain a reserve of pluripotent stem cells; it creates them when put under stress by injury or disease. Stap cells were supposed to confirm this hunch, being the laboratory equivalent of stem cells spontaneously produced by the body.

Did Obokata begin cooking data in order to please her supervisor? Did Vacanti ever suspect that her results were too good to be true? Whatever the case, the Stap cell scandal is their monster child.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

Whatever the truth had been, when other scientists were unable to reproduce the results and expressed their doubts after the Nature papers’ publication, Vacanti defended his brainchild more vigorously than even Obokata defending her work, claiming that he was able to create the STAP cells, and even posted a “special recipe” online for doing it, which, like Obokata’s work, others were unable to reproduce:

“This charming, silver-haired midwesterner, who headed the anesthesiology department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, did almost as much to confuse the issue of replication as Obokata herself. From the start, Vacanti claimed that he had been able to create Stap cells, including human ones, though he offered no evidence. What he did offer, however, was his own special recipe, which he posted online in mid-March (around the time that Riken first declared Obokata guilty of misconduct), assuring the scientific community that if he could make Stap cells, anyone could.

Unfortunately, that humble boast backfired. No one else could get his recipe to work.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

Then when co-author Teruhiko Wakayama, who found mix-up of test data as discussed earlier, went public with his request to retract the Nature papers, both RIKEN and Vacanti continued to defend the STAP cells:

“Wakayama told NHK he has requested that his co-authors retract the studies and then would like outside experts to do verification studies. He said he is “no longer sure about the credibility of the data used as preconditions for the experiments,” NHK reported.

A Riken official told The Japan News that “the basis of the articles” — the fact that STAP cells were produced – “is unshakable.”

…

Dr. Charles Vacanti, a study co-author, said in a statement that he stands by the research.

“I firmly believe that the questions and concerns raised about our STAP cell paper published in Nature do not affect our findings or conclusions,” said Vacanti, who is director of the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.”

(“Scientist wants to withdraw stem cell studies”, by Elizabeth Landau, March 12, 2014, CNN News)

After RIKEN’s release of its first investigation report, finding research misconduct on Obokata’s part, Vacanti continued to defend the Nature papers and opposed retracting them:

“Harvard researcher Dr. Charles A. Vacanti, head of the department of anesthesia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was the senior author of one of the papers but was not named in an English-language draft of the RIKEN report provided to the Globe.

Vacanti said he continues to stand behind the main findings of the research he did with Obokata, who worked in his Brigham lab for several years.

“While the investigation determined there were errors and poor judgment in the development of the manuscript, I do not believe that these errors affect the scientific content or the conclusions,” Vacanti said in an e-mailed statement. “It is imperative to correct the errors, but absent any compelling evidence that the overall scientific findings are incorrect, I do not believe that the manuscripts should be retracted.””

(“Fraud alleged in findings on stem cells”, by Karen Weintraub, April 2, 2014, The Boston Globe)

The Nature papers were retracted in July, and in August came the death of Obokata’s RIKEN supervisor and co-author Yoshiki Sasai. Then, Vacanti decided to step down from his chairmanship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston for a one-year sabbatical, but doing so without mentioning the scientific fraud scandal, only that his resignation was 2 years overdue after 12 years on the job:

“When I accepted the position in 2002, I anticipated serving as Chair for a period of 10 years, having a vision of what I hoped to accomplish during that time.  I approach the age of 65 next year having served as Chair of two anesthesia departments – UMASS then BWH – over the last two decades.  I have always felt that a leader is most effective during the first decade of service, after which time there can be diminishing returns on the energy invested in the challenges faced. I feel that is certainly true in my case, and that by this measure, I am two years past due in making this decision.”

(“STAP News From Harvard? Vacanti Stepping Down as Chair & Going on Sabbatical”, by Paul Knoepfler, August 13, 2014, Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog)

As a fellow biomedical scientist, University of Sydney’s John Rasko expressed his indignation at Charles Vacanti’s unaccountability, and unwillingness to retract the Nature papers even after Obokata’s expression of consent:

“Fellow scientists question the explanation, given the controversy erupting around the Nature papers. “(It) certainly seems to coincide with recent events,” said Sydney University stem cell researcher John Rasko.

“Vacanti was reluctant to accept that the study should be retracted, and maintained that the observations were real,” Professor Rasko said. “This was even after Obokata had said she supported the retraction — and it took a long time for her to capitulate.””

(“Science can keep its house in order”, by John Ross, August 19, 2014, The Australian)

As Rasko and Carl Power later pointed out in their The Guardian article, while leaving for sabbatical Vacanti posted another “special recipe” for creating STAP cells, stating that his laboratory was able to use it to reproduce them through “conversion”, with “profound” results:

““In recent months, our lab decided to re-explore the utility of a low pH solution containing ATP in generating STAP cells,” Vacanti writes in the revised protocol. “We found that while pH alone resulted in the generation of STAP cells, the use of a low pH solution containing ATP, dramatically increased the efficacy of this conversion.  When this acidic ATP solution was used in combination with mechanical trituration of mature cells, the results were even more profound” (emphasis original).”

(“STAP co-author offers yet another recipe for stem cells” by David Cyranoski, September 12, 2014, Nature)

Just like with his previous online recipe, others were unable to make it work.

Given Charles Vacanti’s leadership role and status in medical research and education at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a leading U.S. hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, his lack of scientific accountability in the face of efforts by the Japanese RIKEN institution to conduct a thorough investigation into fraud, questions naturally arose about institutional responsibilities on the part of Brigham & Women’s/Harvard.

In March 2014 when the controversy grew intensely public, Harvard Medical School issued a general statement emphasizing its “highest standards of ethics”:

“We are fully committed to upholding the highest standards of ethics and to rigorously maintaining the integrity of our research. Any concerns brought to our attention are thoroughly reviewed in accordance with institutional policies and applicable regulations.”

(Elizabeth Landau, March 12, 2014, CNN News)

When Charles Vacanti decided to resign from his chairmanship, the contrast between RIKEN’s active investigations and inaction on the part of Brigham & Women’s/Harvard was noted by researcher and blogger Paul Knoepfler:

“What’s the deal with Brigham and Women’s Hospital or Harvard Medical School when it comes to the retracted STAP cell papers?

I was just writing yesterday in part about how we haven’t really heard anything (news, statements, etc.) from those places about the whole STAP cell mess.

In contrast, in Japan and at RIKEN there has been a non-stop flood of news and developments involving STAP.”

(“Paul Knoepfler, August 13, 2014, Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog)

By December 2014 when Obokata resigned her job and RIKEN’s second investigation report completely discredited the retracted Nature papers, the inaction of Brigham & Women’s/Harvard became the focal point as Knoepfler pointed out:

“With its final report released today (also a powerpoint of images were released including the one showing a figure posted here of reportedly made up data published in a STAP paper), RIKEN seems to now have handled this complicated mess in a relatively rigorous, scientific manner that paves the way for moving on from it.

…

Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital may or may not be conducting STAP investigations of their own. However, certainly at this point relatively speaking key unanswered questions remain on the Harvard side of STAP.”

(“Perspectives on final RIKEN report on STAP cell scandal & what comes next”, by Paul Knoepfler, December 26, 2014, Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog)

In their February 2015 The Guardian article, the Australian researchers John Rasko and Carl Power observed that in the United States scientific misconduct investigations are usually carried out “under a veil of secrecy”; they further opined that “in all likelihood Brigham has begun its own inquiry”:

“It makes you wonder why Vacanti hasn’t been dragged over hot coals like Obokata and her Japanese colleagues, and why Brigham hasn’t followed Riken’s example by publicly flogging itself.

The answer is simple: in the US, investigations into scientific misconduct usually take place under a veil of secrecy. In all likelihood, Brigham has begun its own inquiry but, in stark contrast to the one carried out by Riken, we probably won’t learn anything about it – even the fact of its existence – until after a verdict is reached.”

(John Rasko and Carl Power, February 18, 2015, The Guardian)

It had better be, because scientific accountability has become a serious issue. Now in other parts of the world like Japan in this case, and also Taiwan, a Nobel Prize laureate or a government cabinet minister would have to shoulder the appropriate responsibility for a scientific scandal.

The Scientist magazine in December 2014 named the Haruko Obokata story No. 1 on its list of “The Top 10 Retractions of 2014”.

(“The Top 10 Retractions of 2014”, by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, December 23, 2014, The Scientist)

At No. 2 on the list was an Iowa State University researcher who spiked rabbit blood samples with human blood to make it look like his HIV vaccine was working. The fraud led to serious penalties not only for the researcher, Dong-Pyou Han, who resigned and is facing criminal charges, but also for the institution, Iowa State University, which must reimburse the National Institute of Health nearly $0.5 million in funding spent on Han’s employment, and also lose nearly $1.4 million in cancelled funding for the remainder of the project:

“Federal officials are rescinding nearly $1.4 million in grant money for an Iowa State University research team that was besmirched by a colleague’s alleged fraud.

The National Institutes of Health decision comes on top of ISU’s agreement to reimburse the federal agency $496,000 for salary and other costs related to Dong-Pyou Han’s employment. The former ISU scientist is accused of faking experiment results to make it look like a vaccine was protecting rabbits against the AIDS virus.

Han, who resigned from the university last year, faces four federal criminal charges that could bring prison time if he’s convicted.

The National Institutes of Health is the leading source of federal money for medical research. A spokeswoman told the Register on Monday that the agency has decided not to make the final, $1.38 million payment on a grant to the ISU team. The team, which includes researchers at other universities, was awarded $14.5 million in such grants over several years, officials have said. Much of that money was awarded because of the team’s dramatic reports of vaccine success, which turned out to be bogus.”

(“ISU loses $1.4 million in fraud case”, by Tony Leys, July 8, 2014, The Des Moines Register)

As RIKEN’s second investigation report has concluded that the contamination with embryonic stem cells in the STAP cells experiments was unlikely accidental, the main difference between the fraud in the Obokata case and Dong-Pyou Han’s fraud is that no one has been caught for “artificial contamination” leading to the STAP cells.

Like the Dong-Pyou Han case in the U.S., the Hwang Woo Suk case in South Korea nearly a decade earlier also saw the perpetrator face criminal charges, and Hwang was held criminally accountable for fraud in spite of his solid scientific research ability.

Given the illumination by John Rasko and Carl Power that the contemporary scientifically disgraced Hwang Woo Suk and the early 20th-century Nobel Prize laureate Alexis Carrel were top examples of scientific fraud in biomedical research history, and given that the ramifications during the two’s respective career and life times were polar opposites – criminal conviction versus lifelong glory – I have to wonder if the inaction on the part of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the Haruko Obokata/Charles Vacanti case has been due only to the absence of a concrete allegation of intentional fraud, or also to a sense of elite impunity – when compared to the Iowa State University case.

Next down on the No.3 spot of The Scientist’s top-10 retractions of 2014 was Taiwanese researcher Peter Chen and his fraudulent peer-review ring, a connected circle of researchers who peer-reviewed and approved one another’s papers for publication – often relying on false identities.

The unraveling of the Peter Chen case led to the retraction of 60 published papers deemed to have been accepted due to fraud, Chen’s departure from his university professorship, stepping down of a U.S.-based scientific journal’s editor-in-chief, and the resignation of the Taiwanese government’s education minister in 2014. A former president of the National Central University, the Taiwanese education minister Chiang Wei-ling had advised Chen’s twin brother on his Ph.D. thesis 10 years earlier, and was named by his former student as a co-author on 5 of those fraudulent papers. On the Facebook community page, “Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs”, I have posted some facts from press articles on this case:

“The case came to light in May 2013 when Ali Nayfeh, then editor-in-chief of the Journal of Vibration and Control, learned from an author that he had received e-mails from two people claiming to be reviewers, e-mails that came from generic-looking Gmail accounts rather than the professional institutional accounts that many academics use.

Nayfeh alerted SAGE, the company in Thousand Oaks, California, that publishes the journal. The editors there e-mailed both the Gmail addresses and the institutional addresses of the authors whose names had been used; one scientist responded that he had not sent the e-mail and did not even work in the field.

This sparked a 14-month investigation that came to involve about 20 people from SAGE’s editorial, legal and production departments. It showed that the Gmail addresses were each linked to accounts with Thomson Reuters’ ScholarOne, a publication-management system used by SAGE and several other publishers, including Informa. The investigators tracked every paper that the person or people behind these accounts had allegedly written or reviewed, and also ferreted out further suspicious-looking accounts, a total of 130 of such accounts.

After the scandal was exposed, ring leader Peter Chen resigned from his teaching post in February 2014. In May, Nayfeh resigned at his journal. And in July, Taiwan’s education minister Chiang Wei-ling (蔣偉寧), whose name had appeared on 5 of the papers, resigned “to uphold his own reputation and avoid unnecessary disturbance of the work of the education ministry”, according to a public statement.

Those 5 papers were authored by Chen Chen-wu (陳震武), twin brother of Chen Chen-yuan (陳震遠), i.e., Peter Chen. The papers bore Chiang’s name as a co-author, and also listed Peter Chen as one of the authors — without Chiang’s knowledge — according to Chen Chen-wu.

Chiang, a 56-year-old civil engineer, was president of National Central University before he was appointed education minister in February 2012. He said he did not know Peter Chen personally, but had advised Chen’s twin brother Chen Chen-wu in his doctoral thesis about 10 years earlier.”

(“Facebook posting”, March 28, 2015, Science, Education Progress, and New Millennium Bugs)

In comparison, even if he had not been a party in the fraudulent experiments conducted by Haruko Obokata, Charles Vacanti was a senior author of the now retracted Nature papers, an academic and scientific mentor of Obokata, and the intellectual father and leader of this whole framework of spore-like cells and STAP cells. His acts of posting special recipes online, claiming creation of STAP cells in his laboratory as described but providing no evidence, already were much more involvement in activities of questionable scientific honesty than the former Taiwanese education minister Chiang Wei-ling.

In Japan, developments continue in relation to the Obokata scandal. In early March 2015, Japanese media reported the decision to step down by RIKEN president, Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate Ryoji Noyori:

“Ryoji Noyori, longtime president of the Riken research institute, has decided to step down as the head of the government affiliate, which has been mired in a scandal involving the creation of so-called STAP cells, sources said March 6.

In expressing his intention to resign, the 76-year-old Nobel Prize-winning chemist has cited his advanced age and the fact that his term has already extended for nearly 12 years.

…

Ministry officials said that he is not resigning to take responsibility for the recent scandal over the groundbreaking discovery of a new stem cell mechanism called “stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency” (STAP).”

(“Nobel laureate Noyori to resign as president of embattled Riken, citing age, long tenure”, March 6, 2015, The Asahi Shimbun)

There were remarkable similarities to Charles Vacanti’s resignation as department chairman at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in August 2014, I note, that both had been on the helm for 12 years, and both resignations were said to be unrelated to the Obokata scandal.

But Ryoji Noyori wasn’t even in a science field related to Obokata; still, he voluntarily returned part of his salary to RIKEN as a gesture of taking responsibility for the debacle:

“Riken will announce later this month the results of an evaluation by a panel of outside experts on the progress of the institute’s organizational reform to prevent similar instances of misconduct from occurring. Noyori is likely to have decided to resign as the announcement is approaching.

…

Noyori voluntarily returned a portion of his salary to take responsibility for the STAP scandal last October. But he has appeared in only one news conference to discuss the scandal, triggering criticism that has not fulfilled his accountability as head of Riken.”

(March 6, 2015, The Asahi Shimbun)

Then on March 24, Japanese and international media reported on Noyori’s imminent departure and the Japanese government’s naming of his replacement, former Kyoto University President Hiroshi Matsumoto:

“Former Kyoto University President Hiroshi Matsumoto will replace Nobel laureate Ryoji Noyori as head of the Riken research institute, the science ministry decided Tuesday.

Noyori, 76, will leave the post on March 31, halfway through his third term through March 2018, after a difficult year caused by a researcher’s highly publicized misconduct in a stem-cell study.

The 2001 Nobel winner in chemistry has served as head of the leading government-backed research organization since October 2003.

…

Matsumoto, a 72-year-old expert on space plasma physics, was president of Kyoto University for six years until last September. He is a member of the government’s Committee on National Space Policy.”

(“Former Kyoto U. chief to take helm at scandal-plagued Riken”, March 24, 2015, The Japan Times)

So the Japanese government has moved a top academic executive from the institution where Shinya Yamanaka had done ground-breaking, Nobel Prize-winning research on cell reprogramming for stem cell creation, to RIKEN’s helm.

Foregoing the remaining 3 years of his third term, the timing of Ryoji Noyori’s resignation was highlighted in his official announcement, that he was departing a day before the commencement of RIKEN’s new status as a National Research and Development Institute, and that his efforts to reform RIKEN following the Obokata scandal had received a positive assessment in the prior week:

“As of April 1, 2015, RIKEN will have a new status as a National Research and Development Institute. With the consent of the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, I have decided to take this opportunity to step down from my position as RIKEN president, effective March 31, 2015.

Over the 11 years and 6 months since my appointment in October 2003, I have dedicated my efforts to making RIKEN the bedrock for the launching of many of Japan’s advances in science, technology and innovation. Fortunately, RIKEN has attracted numerous outstanding scientists from inside and outside Japan, and these people have achieved creative and outstanding results, not least of which has been the discovery of element 113. RIKEN has also successfully completed two of Japan’s key technology projects—the SACLA X-ray Free Electron Laser and the K computer—and most recently, has launched the world’s first clinical trial in regenerative medicine using iPS cells. …

Despite this, however, because of a most unfortunate case of research misconduct that has severely tarnished RIKEN’s good reputation, I have had to implement major RIKEN-wide organizational and managerial reform directed at rectifying this situation. Last week, the Management and Action Plan Monitoring Committee commended these efforts in its report, and it is with some relief that I am assured the measures are proving to be effective and will be carried forward.”

(“Ryoji Noyori to step down as RIKEN president”, March 24, 2015, RIKEN)

Clearly, this Nobel Prize winner has displayed appropriate senses of conscientiousness, pride and humility.