The polygamy tax break

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Brian Howell

He quoted the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but in Judge Diane Campbell’s Vancouver courtroom over the next three weeks, polygamous leader Winston Blackmore is confronting another book of fire, brimstone and unyielding dictates: the Canadian Income Tax Act.

By his own admission, 55-year-old Blackmore, leader of a breakaway sect of fundamentalist Mormons living in Bountiful in southeastern B.C., has faced police investigations since 1990. But while he escaped convictions for the widespread practice of polygamy, and allegations of child exploitation of young brides, it’s Canada Revenue Agency tax auditors who have laid low the once all-powerful bishop of Bountiful.

At issue is whether the polygamous group of some 450 that Blackmore leads constitutes a “congregation” eligible for special tax status under the arcane “Communal Organizations” section of the tax act. The blunt assessment by Justice Department lawyer Lynn Burch is no. In opening comments in the federal Tax Court appeal, she called him merely the “patriarch of a large polygamous family.” What little legitimacy that he had as a bishop of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints ended in 2002, when the community split in two and Blackmore was excommunicated from the controversial church. He represents, she said, “a splinter group of a splinter group.”

Auditors claim that Blackmore under-reported $1.5 million in personal income over five years starting in 2000, and that he washed personal and family expenses through a Bountiful-based business he controls, J.R. Blackmore and Sons. Throughout, Blackmore, who admitted in court to having 21 wives and to fathering 47 children during the five years under tax review, claimed annual income rarely exceeding $30,000 a year. She said by trying to win special tax status, Blackmore wanted to permanently shift his tax burden onto others in the group, many of whom work for the Blackmore company “for a pittance” in remote logging and wood-processing plants. If he sees himself as a shepherd, she told the court, “the role of a good shepherd is to shear the sheep, not skin it.”

To achieve special communal status as a congregation—as, for example, Hutterite communities have—Blackmore’s group must meet the criteria under Section 143 of the act. Members must live and work together, adhere to the principles of the religion, they can’t individually own property and their working lives must be devoted to the congregation. Blackmore, clutching his books of faith, testified he and his flock meet that test. He cited from the founding Covenants and Doctrines of the Latter-Day Saints, which says all members have “equal claims” to property, and that men’s talents must contribute to “the Lord’s storehouse to become the common property of the whole church.” At other times he quoted Scripture, and the teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, who published the Book of Mormon in 1830. Blackmore said he remains faithful to Smith’s “founding principles,” including plural marriage, while mainstream Latter-Day Saints broke faith.

Blackmore takes a calculated risk by fighting the taxman. He is testifying under subpoena as a “compelled witness” in the likelihood that his testimony in this civil case won’t be admissible in any criminal trial. Just a week before this trial, the B.C. government appointed yet another special prosecutor to consider if such charges as sexual exploitation and trafficking of young brides to polygamous enclaves in the U.S. can be laid. Clearly, these are taxing times for Bountiful and its defrocked bishop.

Newsmakers: January 19 – 26, 2012

By Ken MacQueen and Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Thony Belizaire/AFP/Getty Images

Canada versus Iran at the Oscars

For the second year in a row, a Quebec movie based on an immigrant-themed play scored an Oscar nod for Best Foreign Language Film. Last year it was Incendies; this year it’s Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, about an Algerian refugee who takes over a Montreal classroom from a teacher who has committed suicide. Falardeau is competing with the Holocaust drama In Darkness, a Canadian co-production by Poland’s Agnieszka Holland. But Falardeau realizes Iran’s A Separation is the overwhelming favourite. He says he saw it, “hoping to find flaws,” but didn’t see any.

For Queen and country

British PM David Cameron is rattling sabres over the Falkland Islands, that troublesome bit of rock down Argentina way, just as Margaret Thatcher did 30 years ago. Cameron vowed to protect the 2,900 residents of the British-owned islands, promising to react “quickly and flexibly” to any incursion by Argentina. Its president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, wants to wrest the Falklands from Britain, “a crude colonial power in decline” in her view. Thatcher, of course, went to war, in a conflict that cost 900 lives on both sides. Notably, Prince William, an RAF flight lieutenant, is to be posted to the remote outcrop as a search and rescue helicopter pilot for six weeks in February and March.

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Why it’s not your fault you can’t stand your brother

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

“I had an older brother,” writes Manhattan-based psychotherapist Jeanne Safer, “but he was never a brother to me.” That admission, and her curiously detached response to his death, may seem an admission of defeat for a therapist who specializes in sibling relationships, but conflicts among brothers and sisters are as old—and as inescapable—as time itself. Her latest book, Cain’s Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy and Regret, traces the dynamic in many families back to its earliest roots: the internecine feuds of the Book of Genesis.

Q: Let’s start by defining the problem. You write that one-third of adult siblings suffer sibling strife, and as much 45 per cent when clinicians such as yourself start probing?

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Newsmakers: Jan. 5-12, 2011

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 7:30 PM - 0 Comments

Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

A Beyoncé baby girl

One name usually suffices for pop queen Beyoncé (surname Knowles), but her new baby girl gets three, all full of meaning for mom and her hubby, rapper Jay-Z (real name Shawn Carter). Little Blue Ivy Carter arrived in style Saturday, reportedly by C-section in a private wing of Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital, rented for $1.3 million. Blue is for The Blueprint, dad’s hugely successful 2001 album. Ivy is a play on Roman numeral IV for Four, mom’s latest album. The little diva also scores dad’s real surname, though Blue Ivy Z has a ring to it, no? While some parents groused that the couple’s hospital security detail was interfering with the enjoyment of their own newborns, Jay-Z was in a mood to celebrate. He has already released Glory on his website, a song celebrating Blue’s birth. In it, he hints at the heartbreak of an earlier miscarriage. “False alarms and false starts,” he raps, “all made better by the sound of your heart.”

Women: the great leveller

Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s great physicists, marked his 70th birthday last Sunday with an admission that the answer to one of life’s great puzzles has eluded him. “Women,” the twice-married Hawking told the New Scientist. “They are a complete mystery.” Ill health prevented him from attending a symposium in his honour at Cambridge University, but in a pre-recorded message he said the future of mankind may depend on space travel. “I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile universe.” On a lighter note, he admitted he was such an average student at age 12 that a friend bet another a bag of candy he wouldn’t amount to much. “I don’t know if this bet was ever settled and, if so, which way it was decided.”

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Newsmakers: Dec. 29-Jan. 5, 2011

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Louise Gubb/Corbis

Call him a traditionalist

A debate rages in South Africa over marriage, pitting traditional polygamy against Western-style civil laws that find one spouse quite enough. At the centre of the dispute is Nelson Mandela’s chosen political heir, his grandson Mandla Mandela, a member of Parliament. He is facing a charge of bigamy brought by his first wife, Tando Mabunu-Mandela, after he defied a court order not to marry a third woman. That traditional ceremony to Mbalenhle Makhathini took place a week ago. A second marriage last year, to French teenager Anaïs Grimaud, was annulled by the court because Mandla was already legally married. “I can’t even remember the last time someone was convicted of bigamy,” National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Mthunzi Mhaga told the Sowetanlive website. “But it is a very serious offence and would need to be investigated properly before further legal action can be taken.”

And that better be a Windsor knot

Remember the scandal back in 2002 when BBC newsreader Peter Sissons announced the death of the Queen Mother while wearing a burgundy tie? No, the Queen Mother wasn’t wearing the tie, you silly git, Sissons was. Burgundy! On such a day. The gaffe shook the BBC to its foundations—shan’t happen again, and all that. So imagine the panic when the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, was helicoptered to hospital on Dec. 23 with chest pains. There was a mad scramble for sombre clothes and black ties, in case the unthinkable happened. “According to my spies,” Sissons told the Telegraph, “those who were working over this year’s holiday period lived in fear that the duke might pop off on their shift.” Didn’t happen. Doctors unblocked an artery with a stent. The duke returned home, having missed the holiday pheasant shoot.

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Are members of organized religions inherently more generous?

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Simon Hayter

When the management team of Vancouver’s Canuck Place children’s hospice met a few years back to consider a fundraising campaign to build a facility to meet the growing needs of the Fraser Valley, they were advised it was folly to consider a multi-million-dollar capital project in the teeth of a recession, says Filomena Nalewajek, CEO of Canuck Place.

She admits the board wavered before pressing ahead last year after making one key decision: they would locate the hospice in Abbotsford. “We did our homework and recognized we were going into a community that was different,” she says. “We just didn’t know how different.” A year later, the campaign is already “a stone’s throw” from hitting its $13-million target, says Nalewajek. “It is because of that community. It is unbelievable. It is unprecedented, especially in this economic climate.”

For nine years in a row, the tax filers of Abbotsford-Mission have given the largest per-capita charitable donations in Canada, Statistics Canada reported in December. Overall, Canadians gave $8.3 billion in 2010 to charities, based on income tax returns. The median Canadian donation was $260 per person, meaning half of donors gave more and half gave less. In Abbotsford and neighbouring Mission, however, the median donation was $610, which is impressive considering the median income is a modest $46,490. Calgary was next highest among metropolitan areas with a median donation of $380—but with a median annual income some $20,000 higher.

Ask observers why the Abbotsford area is so uncommonly generous, and invariably they note it is the heart of the Bible belt of B.C. There are about 90 churches in Abbotsford alone, including some of the largest in the country. As well, the community benefits from its vibrant, long-established Sikh, Muslim and Jewish communities. “There’s a faith base and there’s multiculturalism, people coming from abroad and knowing what it’s like to not have a lot to start off with,” says Hugh Franklin, a supervisor at the Abbotsford Food Bank and Christmas Bureau.

However, Dave Murray, the food bank director, questions how much of the donations go to church overheads and salaries. As well, Abbotsford attracts like-minded organizations, including a couple of Bible colleges, the provincial headquarters for the Mennonite Central Committee, which conducts relief and missionary work around the globe, and the national office of American fundamentalist preacher Charles R. Swindoll, among others, he notes. Still, he says there’s no denying faith-based institutions instill a culture of giving, though this year he frets that donations to the food bank are lagging by 20 per cent. “Eighty per cent of our budget comes in December-January, so it’s pretty stressful.”

Are members of organized religions inherently more generous? The short answer seems to be yes, but the devil is in the details. “Religious people do tend to give more than non-religious people,” says Michael Wilkinson, a sociologist specializing in religion at Trinity Western University in the Fraser Valley. This generosity is at the foundation of many faiths, he says. “It’s part of their value system. They’re motivated to give; they believe they’re doing something that’s important for the community. They believe they are involved in something bigger than themselves.”

When charities seek to learn what motivates donors, they often turn to Cygnus Applied Research, a Hamilton-based company that tracks donor intentions and charitable trends in the U.S. and Canada. Its annual survey of some 22,000 donors on both sides of the border confirms religious conviction has a major impact on philanthropy, says company president Penelope Burk. “It’s not just giving to one’s own faith,” she says. “Actively religious donors are more likely to give to, stay loyal to and give at a higher level to other causes.” Its survey of some 4,100 Canadians who regularly give to charity found the average donation in 2010 for those professing no religion was $2,345. Those who identified as “spiritual” gave an average $2,889. Those who called themselves “actively religious”—about one donor in five—gave an average $7,178.

Perhaps those numbers help explain why Quebecers—in what is considered Canada’s most secular province—give the least to charity. The median donation claimed by tax filers there was just $130.

Nationally, donations climbed by 6.5 per cent after a recessionary 2009, but Burk warns charities face a looming problem. Her surveys find the number of religious young people is falling, and with it the level of donations. The tiny minority of those under 35 who define themselves as religious gave over five times more generously than others their age, she says. As the influence of religion wanes among younger people (even in Abbotsford the average age of donors was 52), she wonders what is needed to instill a higher level of philanthropy: “I don’t know what the answer to that question is.”

Canada’s most dangerous city: Prince George

By Ken MacQueen and Patricia Treble - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 5:58 AM - 0 Comments

Most days, after Doug Leslie is back from work at the molybdenum mine in tiny Fraser Lake, B.C., he sits at his computer and writes a chatty little note to his 15-year-old daughter Loren. It’s a catch-up on the day, and maybe a bleat about those times he pulls the night shift, or about the cold of a northern B.C. winter, or about how quickly days fly by now that he shoulders the destiny Loren has inspired. “Loren, can you do anything about this weather?” he asked her recently. “It’s snowing and I hate winter, it’s cold and damp, and you are not here to warm up the room.” Invariably, he tells Loren how much he misses her, before signing off, “Love Dad.”

The notes grew increasingly plaintive as Nov. 27 approached. The pills weren’t helping him sleep, and the gulf separating father from daughter seemed impossibly wide, although he’d like to believe she reads every one of his messages. “That has been my sanity,” he says of his missives to a daughter who will forever be 15. Nov. 27 was the first anniversary of her murder.

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Canada’s most dangerous cities: Newfoundland’s other boom

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 5:58 AM - 0 Comments

One would love to have been a fly on the wall in November 2009, when 21-year-old Bradley Kavanagh landed at Vancouver airport after a cross-country flight from St. John’s, Nfld. He’d left the island province with $195,000 cash in vacuum-sealed bags in his checked-in luggage. When he landed in B.C., the airline said the luggage was lost, which just had to ruin his day. The money, quietly seized by the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) before it left St. John’s, was part of a major drug and money laundering ring operating in Newfoundland, but largely run by criminals from Victoria.

The boom in offshore oil and construction is drawing Newfoundlanders and come-from-aways to the provincial capital, but the prosperity is also a magnet for criminals. “When you have economic growth you attract legitimate business and you also attract illegal business,” says RNC Chief Robert Johnston. “Supply and demand.”

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Canada’s most dangerous cities: Vancouver’s crackdown on crime is paying off

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 5:58 AM - 0 Comments

For all of Vancouver’s über-green, laid-back urban vibe, it has a Wild West attitude toward crime. Gangs, drugs and troublemakers from the East account for the occasional shootouts and alcohol-fuelled riots, and they certainly explain why the city’s violent crime score last year was 55 per cent above the national average. That said, Vancouver is actually a crime-fighting success story. It has gone in the span of a decade from having some of the worst violent and non-violent crime scores in Canada to become one of its most improved. Its overall crime score plunged 49 per cent in 10 years, more than twice the rate of improvement of the country as a whole. Only the historically peaceful communities of Kawartha Lakes, Ont., Quebec City, and Roussillon, Que., south of Montreal, fared better or as well. Among the keys to Vancouver’s success are a series of crime-busting initiatives. Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu was happy to explain:

ConAir

Think of “Get outta Dodge” taken to the jet age. Fugitives with outstanding warrants in other provinces or cities have a habit of fleeing west to start their criminal careers afresh. Unless the warrant is for murder or other major mayhem, their home jurisdictions are often happy to saddle Vancouver with the problem. A plan was hatched to give cons with outstanding warrants an all-expenses-paid, escorted flight back to the scene of their crimes to face justice. Some of the cost of airfare comes, appropriately enough, from provincial funds forfeited from proceeds of crime.

To date, 96 people have been transported out of province: 37 to Ontario, 33 to Alberta, 11 to Manitoba, seven to Nova Scotia, four to Saskatchewan, three to Quebec and one to the Yukon. As an example of the payoff, Chu cites a con with a drug habit of about $300 a day. Assume he gets 10 cents on the dollar for the goods he steals to support his habit, says Chu. “So, 15 grand a week is not out of the question for the kinds of crimes that guy had to commit.”

Ganging up on gangsters

When hunting high-value gangbangers, it often pays to aim lower than charges for murder or drug importation. Sometimes the entry point into a gang bust is turning their source of guns, or their customers for drugs, or, in one case, promising an abused girlfriend protection in exchange for co-operation. “We would get them for any crime we could,” says Chu. New provincial anti-gang laws are another tool. One prohibits retrofitting vehicles with hidden compartments, armour and bullet-proof glass. Another law requires health care facilities to report gun and stab wounds. Civil forfeiture laws have streamlined seizure of proceeds of crime. And Bar and Restaurant Watch programs use bouncers, backed by a police squad, to keep gang members out of the hot night spots and high-end restaurants they favour. “It’s making it less fun to be a gang member, which is good,” says Chu.

Crime analysis and public flogging

Chu remembers when crime analysts were “really old cops who put pins on maps.” Today those in the department have advanced degrees. They do real-time analysis, adding statistical performance measures for investigators, redeploying resources to hot spots and even predicting where crimes may occur. The bottom-line performances of commanders and patrol team leaders are compared against other districts at regular meetings, he says. “It’s not completely a public flogging but it’s powerful accountability.” He credits crime analysts mining data for playing a huge role in the arrest in December 2010 of Ibata Noric Hexamer, a Vancouver political organizer charged with a string of violent sexual assaults against girls as young as six.

Try a little tenderness

Property crime, much of it fuelled by addiction, has been a plague in Vancouver. Surveilling chronic offenders and gathering evidence of “the full nature of their offences” to present to judges is the first step to gaining longer sentences. The next move is more social worker than beat cop. Detectives visit offenders in jail and discuss the needs for their release, whether it be detox, housing or other social support to stop their cycle of crime. “We’ve got some very creative, compassionate detectives who build up a rapport with these guys. I’ve gotten emails and letters saying, ‘Hey chief, detective so-and-so was just great with me. First guy that cared about me in years. I’m doing better now because of what he did for me.’ ”

Bridge building

Vancouver police launched SisterWatch with groups representing vulnerable women in the Downtown Eastside. Improved relations are gradually overcoming a belief among women there—born of tragedies like the missing women’s case—that predators operate with near impunity. More women report assaults or provide tips now that they have evidence their claims are taken seriously. “It’s the legacy of Robert Pickton,” Chu says of SisterWatch.

Wanted Posters

It worked in the Old West, it works today. On a wet November day, Vancouver police and a corps of volunteers distributed 35,000 posters with photos of 104 unidentified people wanted in connection with the Stanley Cup riot last June. “Of 104 we got good tips on pretty much half of them,” says Chu. (His determination to see hundreds of rioters face charges will likely boost Vancouver’s 2011 crime rate.) The department also reaped a harvest with the latest ConAir 10 Most Wanted poster displayed on its website and elsewhere. Nine have been arrested. As for No. 10? Harold Richard Lambert, wanted for uttering death threats and other breaches, your ticket to Ottawa awaits.

On the Warriors’ hardest season, playing through tragedy and learning to forgive

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

Jason Franson

Rick Gilson has coached 57 football teams over the past 30 years. This season—his 25th as football coach of the Grande Prairie Composite Warriors, and his eighth as principal at the northwestern Alberta high school—began full of promise. Then, just after midnight on Saturday, Oct. 22, a car carrying five team members home from a party collided with a pickup driven by a 21-year-old. Four Warriors died at the scene, the lone survivor in the car went to hospital in a coma. The pickup driver faces charges of impaired driving causing death. The team elected to play on, finishing the most difficult season the Warriors have ever known.

Q: Let’s start with congratulations. Last week the National Football League named you Canada’s youth coach of the year.

A: It is very definitely an honour and one I’m accepting on behalf of the whole team and everyone who’s been involved in getting us through the past several weeks.

Q: How big is football to Grande Prairie Composite and to you?

A: Football is important to me, something I didn’t want to give up when I went into administration. It’s important for what I think it can do for young men.

Q: What else do players take off the field beyond the usual scrapes and bruises?

A: My philosophy is not so much to make university players or CFL players as much as it is to try to get some core values across. I say this to the boys: it’s important to me that you go on to be great husbands, great fathers, great employees and great employers.

Q: Then came the accident. You were awakened with the news.

A: My son knocked on our bedroom door. He’s a starting corner and a Grade 12 player on our team. He said, “Dad, one of the guys called and there’s been an accident.” I got hold of an RCMP officer at the scene. We worked from there to begin to realize the scope of what had gone wrong, and that Zach [Judd] was in hospital. We headed to the hospital and were able to get there before Zach’s parents. My son accompanied me. The Judd family arrived and we were able to provide some comfort and support to them. I worked through the remainder of the night with the RCMP to help in the identification process. I accompanied the RCMP to the homes of the families to notify them.

Q: It must have been such a difficult night.

A: It was important that there be somebody there that they know.

Q: Vincent Stover, 16, Walter Borden-Wilkins, 15, Matthew Deller, 16, Tanner Hildebrand, 15, all dead, and Zachary Judd, 15, in a coma. How do you prepare the school for such a loss?

A: As we finished the notification of families, it shifted to the need to let my staff know. We met at the school at 10:30 Saturday morning. We also began the process of getting all the players, the managers and their parents together at 11:30. Many of the players knew that there had been an accident. They knew that Zach had been badly injured and that two players had passed away. They didn’t know that there were actually five in the car. The hardest part was telling the team that they didn’t lose two teammates, they lost four. That was very, very difficult. The discussion was how we’re going to get through the next hour, and then the next hour. Then the emphasis was on us healing and focusing on being supportive of each other. Focusing on compassion and mercy over anger and any ideas of revenge. We were definitely upset that it involved an alleged drunk driver, but we focused on mercy toward the driver.

Q: How was that message of compassion received? You’re asking so much of the family and friends of these boys.

A: It was received very well. I still feel today very saddened by this boy’s choices. It’s something I say to students in my office: we get to choose what we’re going to do, we don’t get to choose the consequences of what we do.

Q: Too many principals in their careers deal with the consequences of drunk drivers. Why must this lesson constantly be relearned?

A: There is no learning where nothing changes. Unfortunately, I don’t understand it. I personally don’t drink at all. It seems to me that somehow, some way, there’s only a superficial belief that you shouldn’t drive drunk.

Q: You’re a religious man of the Mormon faith. Did you have words with your God after this?

A: My God and everybody else’s is probably the same God. Personal prayer and a belief in the eternal nature of man definitely helps me get through this. The belief that these young boys are in good hands, that we will have an opportunity to be reunited. It’s not going to happen right away but I firmly believe it will happen. That helps me get through the day, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t shed an awful lot of tears at their loss.

Q: Was it your decision or the team’s to finish the football season?

A: Our decision. It was a collective.

Q: What did they draw from playing on?

A: To not have played is a decision you would have made in an emotional moment. By making a decision to play you had a place you could go to step out of the grieving process. It wasn’t easy. At first it was very solemn, like they were afraid to laugh and enjoy themselves. I said, “What do you think the boys would say?” Vince and Matt, the two Grade 11s, were very focused on getting the Peace Bowl, the league championship. If you don’t play, these guys are going to chase us around and haunt us, and you know it.

Q: What was the impact on Grande Prairie Composite and the larger community?

A: We didn’t anticipate the broad response for mercy and compassion. That did resonate far further than I ever thought. People who had gone through similar events on smaller scales had been holding high levels of resentment and anger forever. They sent notes and emails saying, “Thank you for this, it allowed me to let go.” And we didn’t expect, request, or desire to have such a broad nationwide response to us continuing to play. We drew inspiration from the people writing us to say they were inspired.

Q: You visited Zach this weekend. How is he?

A: At the time, I said to [the team] you have to prepare yourself, Zach could die. But with each passing day the worst-case scenario is moving closer to the best-case scenario. He woke up [from a coma] about 10 days after the accident. He spit out his respirator and started breathing on his own. He’s looking better every day. It’s a miracle, quite honestly. He’s still got a lot to do to [regain] movement, and the [mental] processing is delayed. There’s lots of reason for hope there. He doesn’t yet know the full scope of the accident. There will come a time when that conversation will have to take place.

Q: Two trust funds have been established.

A: The Warrior Fund is to support all five families, to help with the expenses they’ve experienced and to support the families moving forward, and in honouring their sons in some way. The Zach Judd Fund is to support Zach himself. Even though Zach has made tremendous progress from when I saw him at ground zero on Oct. 22, he’s still got a lengthy period of rehabilitation ahead of him. Both funds are through the Royal Bank. My understanding is you can go to any Royal Bank, or you can go through the school.

Q: The Warriors won two games after the accident and the regional championship. They had a shutout loss in the provincial quarter-finals. The scoreboard doesn’t really tell the tale, though. Does the loss of the game seem significant when you have lost so much more?

A: Well, the scoreboard certainly tells a tale. We liked it when it said that we won. But all of that said, the character that they displayed was so outstanding that they didn’t lose. As the game ended, I said before you shake hands I want you to go across the field to wave and clap to your parents and thank the crowd because we did receive tremendous support. That created a whole flood of tears. Unexpectedly, it hit me pretty hard. We did all we could, against an extremely strong opponent, with what was left in the tank.

Q: Now comes the off-season. Without football, are you worried about that void?

A: I’m very concerned about that, for everyone. It will be an off-season where we are doing more things and following up with get-togethers, touching base with each player to see how they are doing. And coaches, too. We have some catching up to do, on work, and on sleep, and on grieving.

Q: How are you handling this?

A: I have, quite honestly, been richly blessed through this whole experience. I had an opportunity to watch such a high level of courage and composure by a group of young men, and the four young women who are our managers. I had the chance to provide support to five families going through the most difficult time a family can go through, and watch them try to handle that with such grace and dignity.

Q: When you agreed to this interview, you said you wanted to focus on what can be learned from this. I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.

A: Around the subject of alcohol and driving, we have to stop kidding ourselves. We’re not doing a good enough job. Too much lip service and not enough change in behaviour. If we don’t change the attitude, people need to stop crying about people getting killed by drunk drivers. Learning is when behaviour changes, otherwise it’s just information. We shouldn’t have 18-year-olds drinking [the legal age in Alberta and Quebec]. Matt and Vince aren’t going to be 18. Not in this life. Never. And Tanner and Walter didn’t even get to be 16.

RCMP investigating claims it waited years before searching Pickton farm

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 5:56 PM - 0 Comments

The RCMP is reviewing explosive claims that its members could have acted much sooner in obtaining a search warrant that may have stopped Robert Pickton’s murder spree years earlier.

The allegations, by Cpl. Catherine Galliford, once the high-profile RCMP spokesperson for the Pickton and Air India investigations, were first revealed in a story in Maclean’s Nov. 28 issue, A Royal Canadian Disgrace. The story was based on interviews with Galliford, and on the 115-page transcript of a statement she gave senior RCMP officers in April. Continue…

The RCMP: a Royal Canadian disgrace

By Charlie Gillis and Ken MacQueen - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Arlen Redekop photo/PNG

A sleep-deprived Catherine Galliford is running on adrenalin and ragged nerves after a wild week that saw the RCMP corporal rock her employer with claims that she was sexually harassed and bullied by senior officers, even as she served as the spokesperson for two of the biggest investigations in the force’s history. Galliford was calm and competent on camera as the public face of the RCMP’s investigations into the Air India bombings that claimed 329 lives, and serial murders committed by Robert Pickton on his Port Coquitlam pig farm. But while Galliford’s allegations of harassment reached as far as the House of Commons this week, one of her most explosive claims is only now being made public. Galliford says the rampant sexism within the ranks of the RCMP that ruined her health and career may also have contributed to the mismanagement of the Pickton murder investigation, at a cost of many lives.

Galliford said during an internal affairs meeting with RCMP staff this April that a senior officer “did nothing” with information that could have broken open the Pickton murders more than two years before his arrest, and attributed the flawed investigation to sexist attitudes and misogyny. In two extended interviews with Maclean’s this week, she said her examination of a file from the Coquitlam RCMP, with information dating as far back as 1997, showed the force had more than enough information by the late 1990s to obtain a warrant to search the Pickton property. Instead, surveillance on the farm was curtailed, indicative, she says, of the “indifference” that marked the investigation of the disappearance of women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and a “misogynist” attitude toward women.

She said in October 2001 she read an RCMP file dealing with the Pickton farm as she briefed herself on her assignment with the missing women’s task force. “I had one of those ‘oh, no’ moments because I saw what was already on the file. There was enough evidence there for another ITO (information to obtain a search warrant),” she said. She said the file included evidence of guns on the site of the farm, as well as women’s clothing, government identification and an asthma inhaler later tied to one of Pickton’s victims. Yet, she said there was only a cursory attempt at surveillance, which was cut short because it was impossible to see activity at Pickton’s trailer, which was set back far from the road.

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Headache-free wine?

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Simon Hayter

Enlightened self-interest is a powerful motivator. For 15 years now, Hennie van Vuuren has been building an army—one yeast cell at a time—to make the world a better, safer place for fellow wine lovers, a world without headaches and other nasty things. Van Vuuren, a South African-born microbiologist, holds the Eagles Chair in Food Biotechnology at the University of British Columbia, and he is the founding director of its Wine Research Centre, a little slice of heaven for oenophiles, and home to some 30 graduate student researchers and faculty.

The heart of the centre, at least for the less scientifically inclined, is the Wine Library, a temperature-controlled vault cradling a growing collection of some 6,000 bottles, many from B.C.’s burgeoning Okanagan vineyards. But there’s also a sampling of some of the best vintages from around the globe—donated by patrons in exchange for a tax receipt. You can’t make great wine unless you have tasted greatness, he says, and few students can afford that luxury. “We use these wines to train our graduate students.”

But while van Vuuren is passionate about the finished product, the focus of his academic research in South Africa, at Ontario’s Brock University, and now 12 years at UBC, is the lowly yeast cell, one of wine’s essential building blocks. Through years of research and genetic manipulation, his team has created a yeast that stops the production of headache-inducing allergens in wine, others that drastically reduce the presence of a carcinogen, and he’s closing in on another to reduce alcohol levels while enhancing flavour and body.

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Detection in two seconds

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Verisante

One in seven Canadians will develop skin cancer during their lifetime. The good news is the disease has a high survival rate—if detected early.

Enter the Aura, a world-beating device that detects if a lesion is cancerous in less than two seconds. The technology, developed by the B.C. Cancer Agency and the University of British Columbia, was recently approved by Health Canada. The Aura should be available to health professionals by summer, says Thomas Braun, founder of Vancouver-based Verisante Technology, which licensed the device. It uses a hand-held wand to optically analyze the skin, allowing early detection of deadly melanoma, and more common skin cancers. Variants of the technology are under development for detecting lung, colon, cervical and gastrointestinal cancers. Both in terms of treatment costs and unnecessary biopsies, says Braun, “it’s got great potential to save lives, and save money.”

REVIEW: Boy from nowhere: A life in ninety-one countries

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 7:35 AM - 0 Comments

This reviewer recalls a hike into the mountains with the esteemed columnist Allan Fotheringham on a free afternoon while covering the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Dr. Foth carried a briefcase onto the ski lift. Odd? Its purpose soon came clear. Inside were fixings for (here it gets fuzzy) martinis? Screwdrivers? G&Ts? Whatever. The point is: the man travels in style.

And so he has: 91 countries and counting. At his peak in the 1980s, he had five jobs: a national column for Southam newspapers, a 27-year run on the back page of Maclean’s, a gig on CBC’s Front Page Challenge, an author with Key Porter, a turn on the lecture circuit. Annual income: $492,000. Five employers meant five separate expense accounts, Fotheringham notes. “And if one of them didn’t like my expense account, there were always four others.”

This kaleidoscopic summation of his eight-decade globe trot (Maclean’s being his longest fixed address) was born of a near-death experience in 2007, after a colonoscopy went disastrously wrong. The sad irony is he finished the book, only to write a hurried dedication to his eldest son Brady, who died of a heart attack in Korea, worn down by the daily doses of the epilepsy meds that kept him alive.

But don’t expect a brooding meditation on death. Foth is a storyteller, a dancer, a lover of women. He lunches well, dines better, and remembers every detail. You could toss Who’s Who off the CN Tower, and not drop as many names as he does in this book. He remains, though, the wide-eyed correspondent from Hearne, Sask., “a gregarious loner” whose greatest allegiance is to his audience. “Life is a collection of memories,” he writes. “They pile up, connect together, disconnect and make in a scrambly way what life is all about.” It’s an apt description of the book: the sort of breezy tales you’d get over drinks with the good doctor. An agreeable way to spend a few hours.

Whistler’s sled dog massacre

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Darryl Dyck/CP

Even now, it is the conflicted sense of apprehension that Marcie Moriarty remembers: hoping to find a mass grave under piles of junk in a forest clearing north of Whistler, B.C.—and hoping not to. Then the ugly reality of the dozens of tangled corpses of sled dogs emerging as the ground was sifted away by some of the world’s leading forensic investigators. That, and the smell of death that followed her home. “It brings shivers to me,” says Moriarty, general manager of cruelty investigations for the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “It’s hard not to look at something like this and just lose all faith in humanity.”

Few murder cases, animal or human, have generated such instant revulsion as the gory killing in April 2010 of some 56 unwanted sled dogs belonging to Whistler-based Howling Dog Tours. The panicked animals were shot or had their throats slit in the presence of the 300-dog herd before being dumped in mass graves, allegedly by Bob Fawcett, then general manager of the company, and the man who raised and nurtured most of the dogs. Details of the gruesome killings leaked out in January after Fawcett filed a successful claim with the provincial workers’ compensation board, saying the cull left him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “Some I missed, had to chase around with blood everywhere,” Fawcett wrote this January on a website for soldiers suffering from PTSD before he retreated from public view. “Some I had to slit their throats because it was the only way to keep them calm in my arms.”

The case drew international outrage, blackened the reputation of one of B.C.’s premier resort destinations, and triggered a task force that toughened provincial animal cruelty laws. It was apparent, however, that pressing criminal charges required more than Fawcett’s unsubstantiated claims. Even unearthing the bodies was insufficient, says Moriarty, a lawyer. “What needs to be shown is that the animals suffered unnecessarily to prove the Criminal Code offence.” Last month, the society filed thousands of pages of evidence with Crown prosecutors, recommending criminal charges of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to animals. It may be months before the Crown decides if charges are warranted.

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The country boy at the heart of four murder investigations

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 3:17 PM - 7 Comments

Cody Legebokoff

As an anonymous friend of suspected serial killer Cody Alan Legebokoff put it after the life of the country boy with the baby face  and the bruiser’s body began to unravel, “Cody has always been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this could have been one of those moments.” The post, on the website of Prince George, B.C. TV station CKPG, arrived after Legebokoff, then 20, was charged last November with the first-degree murder of 15-year-old free spirit Loren Donn Leslie of the northern B.C. resource community of Fraser Lake, B.C. The post expressed outrage and disbelief at the arrest of Legebokoff, “my two-stepping partner nights we would go out dancing.” Shock gave way to horror in the Prince George region when the RCMP announced Oct. 17 three more murder charges against Legebokoff in the deaths of Jill Stacy Stuchenko, Cynthia Frances Maas, both 35, and 23-year-old Natasha Lynn Montgomery.

RCMP Insp. Brendan Fitzpatrick, head of  the province’s major crime unit, refused to use the term serial killer in an interview with Maclean’s, saying that is for the courts and experts to determine. Still, he conceded B.C. attracts more than its share of multiple murders. They include the ugly legacy of child-killer Clifford Olson, who died last month, William Pickton, convicted of the murders of six vulnerable women and suspected in the killing of dozens more, and the 18 unsolved murders on the so-called Highway of Tears, the same Prince George corridor where these four women died. Fitzpatrick said forensic evidence and Legebokoff’s young age at the time of the 18 disappearances preclude any link. Continue…

Are we ready to subsidize heroin?

By Ken MacQueen and Martin Patriquin - Friday, October 7, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 221 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

For the last 22 years, Cactus Montréal has doled out needles, crack pipes and other necessities of drug use to the city’s addicts. North America’s first needle exchange program had humble beginnings; it once provided its services from a cockroach-infested storefront on St-Dominique St., facing a particularly seedy section of Montreal’s red-light district. Today, Cactus’s headquarters are a monument to respectability. Its drop-in centre and needle exchange occupy a bright, glassed-in corner of an avant-garde building in downtown Montreal, across the street from a university pavilion. “A lively and warm place,” as its website advertises, “where people of all stripes come to get injection equipment, condoms, crack pipes, counselling and even to draw a picture or play an instrument.”

Thanks to last week’s landmark Supreme Court of Canada ruling directing the federal government to stop obstructing Vancouver’s Insite supervised injection clinic, Cactus will soon be renovating once again. Cactus administrators, and those across the country who advocate harm reduction, a policy of mitigating the damage of drug use without requiring abstinence, interpret the ruling as essentially green-lighting supervised injection sites, albeit under strict conditions. By next spring, Cactus administrators hope to have an area where drug users will be able to inject drugs under the supervision of a medical professional. Many of Montreal’s other needle exchange sites, as well as those in Quebec City, will likely follow suit in the coming year, if they meet the criteria the court established to win a federal exemption from drug possession laws.

You might say it’s infectious. Supervised injection sites have the backing of several of the country’s biggest health authorities, including those in Montreal and Vancouver. There are preliminary plans for another site in Vancouver, and possibly one in Victoria. Some advocates look ahead to a time when addicts might receive prescription heroin rather than street drugs. While many governments are reluctant to endorse giving addicts a place to shoot up, let alone the drugs to do so, every province has some sort of needle exchange program. Even Calgary gave out safer crack pipe kits for three years until health officials nixed the program over the summer.

For proponents, providing a clean, medically supervised place to imbibe drugs is simply a logical extension of a service already provided across the country. “The Supreme Court decision let us stop being hypocrites,” Cactus community coordinator Jean-François Mary told Maclean’s. “For 22 years, we gave people clean tools, then sent them out into the street. We were doing half the work. Now they’ll be able to shoot up in complete safety.”

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Tatiana and Krista go to school

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Brian Howell

Not many kids get to delay the start of kindergarten by a few days so they can fly to Manhattan for a network television appearance, but then few children are as unique as Tatiana and Krista Hogan. Last Wednesday, the twins from Vernon, B.C., who are conjoined at the head, and their parents, Felicia Simms and Brendan Hogan, were the star attractions on Anderson Cooper’s new syndicated daytime talk show. This week, one month from their fifth birthdays, they’re back with their kindergarten classmates at Okanagan Landing Elementary, enjoying every minute of it.

“They love school,” says grandmother Louise McKay. The staff at the school have gone out of their way to make the girls comfortable, including setting aside a quiet room if they need a break and retrofitting a special toilet, she says. “They have a really nice team behind them, they’re helping us out trying to figure out ways of accommodating Tati and Krista so they’re comfortable at school.”

The girls have certainly caused a stir. One girl, especially, followed them around the first few hours, clearly curious. They quickly formed a friendship. “Every morning she waits for Tati and Krista to get there, and takes them over to play finger puppets,” says McKay. “They’re laughing and giggling.”

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Closing Insite would violate Charter: Supreme Court

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 12:46 PM - 5 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

A crowd gathered on the gritty streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside burst into cheers Friday morning at news the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that Insite, the supervised injection site for drug addicts can remain open. The ruling is a stinging defeat for Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which claimed the site fostered addictions, encouraged crime and violated the federal criminal code by facilitating the use of illegal drugs.

The court ordered the federal health minister to immediately issue an exemption at the site from laws prohibiting drug possession and trafficking to allow the facility to operate. The ruling almost certainly assures that similar sites will open across Canada. Montreal, Toronto and Victoria are among the communities that have expressed interest in establishing similar services. Continue…

Don’t give these kids the keys

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 13 Comments

Tom Zytaruk/Surrey Now

The 911 calls started rolling about 3:30 p.m. last Wednesday, just as the B.C. Lower Mainland’s notorious rush hour was starting to build: so many high-powered luxury cars were weaving recklessly through traffic as they raced south on Highway 99 that it looked like a Need for Speed video game come to life. A squadron of Ferraris, Lamborghinis and the like flew past anxious drivers as they streaked out of the narrow George Massey tunnel under the Fraser River toward Surrey and the seaside community of White Rock.

Lower Mainland RCMP scrambled to get a helicopter over the scene for an accurate measure of the speeds, which may have exceeded 200 km/h, but there wasn’t time, said RCMP Supt. Norm Gaumont, the officer in charge of traffic for the region. RCMP cruisers corralled some of the racers in Surrey, while the rest were pulled over in White Rock. In all, they impounded 13 vehicles worth $2 million by police estimates.

“I’ve got a Ferrari 599, I have three Lamborghini Gallardos, I have an Audi R8, I have three Nissan GTRs, I have two Maserati Turismos, I have two Mercedes SLS and I have an Aston Martin,” said Gaumont, reading through the list of cars impounded for seven days under provincial anti-street-racing laws. None of the 12 males and one female, all from Vancouver or Richmond, was older than 21. Six were novice drivers, required under B.C.’s licence system to display an “N” sign on the rear of their vehicle. “My son drives a ’94 Mazda,” said Gaumont, “and he thinks he’s pretty hard done by after this.”

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Too many cops?

By Ken MacQueen and Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 104 Comments

Ian Lindsay / Vancouver Sun

This spring, Tamara Cartwright dropped off an envelope at her local post office outside Lethbridge, Alta. A friend had sent her a jar of hemp-based ointment, so she replied with a thank you card, wrote her name and return address on the envelope and, in a decision certain to haunt her for years to come, enclosed four grams of her homegrown marijuana, enough for perhaps four cigarettes. On an April morning some days later she returned to the post office to pick up another package. Moments later, police pulled her over, handcuffed her, put her in a cruiser and hauled her off to the police station.

It made quite a spectacle, says the 41-year-old mother of four, who suffers from colitis and is one of more than 10,000 medical marijuana patients registered with Health Canada. “It was embarrassing,” she says. “I was still in my pyjamas.” She emerged four hours later with a trafficking charge for giving away those four grams.

Her charge is part of a recent marked increase in arrests for cannabis offences. Cannabis arrests jumped 13 per cent in 2010 to 75,126. Of those, almost 57,000 were for simple possession, a 14 per cent jump from the year before. (The statistics reflect cases where the arrest was the most serious charge a person faced, not the thousands more where a pot charge was tacked onto a string of more serious crimes.) The cannabis arrest rate is an anomaly at a time when the overall crime rate in 2010 fell to its lowest level since the mid-1970s.

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On the need to restart the debate on assisted suicide

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:33 AM - 4 Comments

Photographs by Simon Hayter

On Jab. 15, 2010, Kathleen (Kay) Carter of North Vancouver had a date with death, an event she’d been seeking for months. She was 89 years old and nearly paralyzed by spinal stenosis. She made a last journey to Dignitas, a Swiss clinic devoted to assisted dying, accompanied by her daughter Lee Carter, Lee’s husband, Hollis Johnson, and other family. There, she drank a lethal drug, nibbled on a Swiss chocolate and drifted off to death. Her legacy is a renewed debate on the right to die. Carter and Johnson are now part of a challenge to the law prohibiting assisted suicide. It will be heard in the B.C. Supreme Court in November.

Q: Lee, tell me about Kay Carter, your mother.

LC: She was a fiercely independent person. She was well-read. She was interested in politics, social issues. She went to university and spent one year teaching elementary school in White Rock, B.C. And then she started having children, and had seven. There was no room for a job. She was married to my dad, Ron Carter, until he died in his mid-60s.

Q: In 2008, she was diagnosed with spinal stenosis. What did it mean to her quality of life?

LC: Basically, it’s to do with the [degenerating] spinal cord. You begin to lose your extremities, the ability to use your hands, your feet and eventually your legs. When she was diagnosed, it was hard to use her arms. She knew something was wrong. She would have been around 86 or 87.
HJ: I think the prognosis was particularly horrifying for her. The doctor said at some point, “You’ll be completely paralyzed, and just be on a gurney, and all of your needs will have to be attended to by others.” For her to lose that mobility was really terrifying.

Q: At what point did she decide she wanted to end her life?

LC: She woke up in the middle of the night [in July 2009] and said, “I’ve got it. I know what I want to do. I want to go overseas. Over there they can allow me to die with dignity.”
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Premiers’ ‘life-saving’ pact

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Garrett Shakespeare, a North Vancouver swim instructor and nightclub DJ, turned 23 on July 22. When you have lived more than a decade with paroxysmal nocturnal haemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare and fatal blood disease, you don’t take such events for granted. But this birthday was special: he got back his life. Thanks to a joint purchase agreement reached among Canada’s premiers, announced coincidentally on his birthday, Shakespeare and other PNH sufferers have started treatment with Soliris, one of the world’s most expensive drugs, but one shown to restore health and longevity in those with the disorder.

“I’m so happy,” says Shakespeare, who has lived with debilitating pain, frequent hospitalization and the threat of organ failure or a fatal blood clot because the B.C. drug plan had deemed Soliris not “cost effective.” The drug costs about $500,000 a year, and patients require treatment for the rest of their lives. In June, Maclean’s wrote about Shakespeare’s plight in a story about the inequities caused by the lack of a national pharmacare strategy. There are fewer than 90 Canadians with PNH. Some had treatment paid through private health plans, some in Ontario and Quebec were treated on compassionate grounds, others did without. About 30 other countries provide the drug free for PNH patients.

Shakespeare and his mother, Rita, learned he’d get the drug in a meeting with provincial Health Minister Mike de Jong. “She started crying right away,” Garrett said of his mother’s joyous reaction, “and didn’t stop the whole way home.” He praises the lobbying efforts of Barry Katsof, a fellow sufferer and the founder of the Montreal-based Canadian Association of PNH Patients. Katsof, a 63-year-old retired businessman, receives Soliris under a Quebec program. He calls it “a miracle drug” that restored his health. Katsof said the provinces negotiated an unspecified price reduction, something he hopes will inspire greater co-operation and an equitable, cost-effective national drug strategy. “This is truly life-saving and life-altering for people.”