In 2007, when Beth was six years old, the Kelowna office of British Columbia’s Ministry of Children and Family Development, or MCFD, placed her in foster care while her mother was in a treatment facility for alcoholism. Living in strangers’ homes, she faded into the background. She felt like she was no one’s priority. By the time she was 14, Beth, a member of the Carrier Sekani First Nations, was homeless and couchsurfing with friends and extended family. (Beth is not her real name; I’ve agreed to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy.) Kelowna’s family services appointed Robert Riley Saunders, a social worker who managed care for Indigenous youth, to handle her case. Once a month, Saunders would take her for lunch. He gave her gift cards that she could spend at the mall. “I thought he was a nice, cool person,” she says. Saunders told Beth that she reminded him of his daughter.

One day in 2016, when Beth was 15, Saunders took her to a local branch of Interior Savings Credit Union and told her she needed to open an account. Saunders had done the same thing for Beth’s older brother, whose case he also handled. When Saunders and Beth walked into the branch, they were escorted into a private office. Beth saw that he was holding several cheques made out to her. “I got excited,” she says. “I was like, ‘Are those all for me?’ ” Saunders chuckled and told her that no, the cheques were not for her. He didn’t explain further. “I was confused,” she says. “They had my name on them. We were opening an account for me. But the bank dude was just sitting there.” The employee handed Beth some paperwork, which she filled out. And then Saunders drove her home. “I guess I thought kids were supposed to have bank accounts,” she says. The bank had given her a debit card, but because she believed she didn’t have any money, she never used it.

A year later, Beth was back with her mother. Family friends let them stay in spare rooms, until those friends got evicted themselves. Saunders sometimes helped Beth and her mom move to a new place. Beth was pregnant with her first child and signed up for a program in downtown Kelowna for Indigenous job seekers. The program would pay her to attend, but she had to provide banking information. The only bank account she’d ever had was the one that Saunders opened for her, so Beth, her brother and her mom visited the branch. When she asked about her account, a teller handed over a stack of statements indicating numerous deposits and near-immediate transfers of the same funds out of the account. There were tens of thousands of dollars in transactions, but the balance was near zero. Beth’s older brother asked for his statements, too, and they showed the same pattern. 

Right around this time, just as Beth was starting to suspect something wasn’t right, the authorities at the Kelowna family services office began to investigate Saunders. Their investigation would ultimately reveal that Saunders had been doing the unthinkable: stealing government funds earmarked for the most vulnerable kids in our society. He manipulated homeless teens, many of them Indigenous, to sign over funds intended to help them survive. The British Columbia social services system was so poorly organized and badly supervised that his crimes went undetected for years. 

***

Last year, the ministry budgeted about $50 million in spending for the 4,852 children in its permanent care. A child’s social worker—what the MCFD calls a guardianship worker—is responsible for finding them permanent living arrangements, often through adoption, alternate family placements or foster care. This can be particularly challenging in the cases of older children and adolescents. At the age of 16, kids might be approved to live on their own but receive financial support from the MCFD—what’s referred to as a Youth Agreement. They might also receive “start-up” funds to help purchase things like furniture, dishes, pots, pans and the other things that transform an empty apartment into a functioning home.

Saunders’ salary as an MCFD guardianship worker was about $70,000, but he lived well above his means. He had expensive tastes and he liked to show off. He lived with his wife and their two children in an upscale home on a golf course. He bought a boat and made regular trips to Las Vegas. The seemingly carefree, prosperous nature of Saunders’ lifestyle was at odds with the youth in his care, who often struggled to pay for food and lived on the street.

Saunders was born in Winnipeg in 1970, the child of parents who struggled with alcohol addiction and separated when he was in his mid-teens. He’d hoped to become a professional hockey player, a dream that ended when he broke a leg at 16. He enrolled at the University of Manitoba and took some general arts courses but never graduated. By 1995, he started working in Winnipeg as a rehabilitation counsellor at a private agency. A year later, he applied for a job as a social worker with the MCFD in Fort St. John, British Columbia.

There was only one problem: he didn’t have the credentials. With the help of his girlfriend at the time, he forged a diploma from the University of Manitoba, claiming he had a bachelor’s degree in social work. He was told that he would have to provide a certified copy of his degree, but no one ever followed up with him about it. Saunders exploited another loophole: unlike other social workers in the province, MCFD employees aren’t required to register with the BC College of Social Workers. Because the college obtains all documentation—such as diplomas—directly from institutions rather than prospective members, its staff would have likely discovered his ruse. In 2001, he asked for a transfer to the MCFD’s Kelowna office, where he was eventually moved to the group that works with Indigenous permanent wards.

In recent pictures, Saunders, with dark hair and eyes, has the easy grin and conventional if somewhat beefy good looks of a man who is accustomed to things going his way. He appears confident and fun, whether he’s beaming over a fluffy golden retriever puppy or clutching a surfboard at an oceanside resort, an expensive-looking watch on his wrist.

I spoke to one woman who met Saunders when he was coaching her daughter’s softball team. The kids seemed to like him, but the woman wasn’t impressed, describing him as a “typical Kelowna douchebag.” Translation: he was arrogant and brash, a loud talker with a machismo-tinged bravado that rubbed some people the wrong way. Still, even those who didn’t like Saunders respected him. He was a social worker with the MCFD, after all, a challenging job that surely brought out the best in him.

In 2011, Saunders and his wife divorced, and he needed money. He saw how, despite the frequent reviews and requirements for paperwork and approvals, staff at the MCFD didn’t pay close attention to all the cheques issued for kids in their care. Saunders realized he could open joint bank accounts with his charges, take advantage of their lack of financial experience and secretly divert the funds back to himself. He couldn’t steal from kids living in foster homes, where the foster parents were expecting cheques from the ministry. And he had to be careful not to target kids who were in fact living independently and paying rent, as they would ask about what funds were available to help them. His sweet spot was the kids who lived on the margins and slipped out of the system—the ones sleeping on the streets, in and out of troubled homes or couchsurfing like Beth. They were kids who often had no one looking out for them. Saunders deliberately steered them away from stability in order to line his own pockets.

One of the kids Saunders bilked was a boy I’ll call Henry. He had been in care since he was 14. He wanted to live with his dad, but the situation at home was volatile, and Henry was placed in a series of foster homes. At weekly check-in appointments, Saunders would pass along vouchers for food or clothing, typically for $100 or $120 each. Henry got no more than three vouchers a month, and he was expected to keep receipts to prove that he was spending them as intended. At some point, Saunders took Henry to Interior Savings Credit Union and helped him open an account. Henry never used it again.

When Henry was 16, Freddie Kabok, a youth worker at the Bridge, a social service agency that works in partnership with the ministry to help kids transition out of care, told him about his options for independent living. Henry was an ideal candidate to receive provincial financial support to help pay for rent, food and other necessities—what’s called an independent living fund. When Kabok texted Saunders in November of 2017, wanting to discuss Henry, Saunders dismissed Kabok’s suggestion. “Henry asked about independent living,” Saunders texted. “I have advised him there really is no such thing as far as providing Henry with his own place. So if he ever mentions it to you please don’t encourage it.”

By this point, Saunders had already been collecting cheques in Henry’s name for more than a year. From March of 2016 to January of 2018, Saunders issued two cheques a month for $579 each, which he then deposited into their joint account—a total of more than $50,000.

Saunders was doing the same with a dozen other kids. He’d create false documents to facilitate the issuance of cheques by the MCFD, forge the signatures of both the kids in his care and his supervisors, approve his own cheque requests, and fill out paperwork to make it appear that he had forwarded the cheques to the intended recipients. He thought he’d covered his tracks.

***

In December of 2017, Saunders’ usual supervisor, Siobhan Stynes, was on vacation and a social worker named Andrea Courtney was filling in as the team lead. Saunders was usually able to both request and approve cheques for children in his care, but some payments still required a supervisor’s signature. In Courtney’s inbox were 10 forms from Saunders awaiting her approval, and one of them caught her attention. It was a request for independent living funds for a kid I’ll call Quentin, whom Courtney was familiar with. She knew that Quentin was in youth custody and therefore not entitled to independent living funds. She called Saunders to ask why he was issuing cheques to an individual who didn’t need the funds. Saunders told her that he was giving the cheques to Quentin’s mother. But when Courtney called her, she said she hadn’t received any money from the MCFD in years.

While pilfering money intended for kids in his care, Saunders lived large, buying a boat and a house on a golf course and going on tropical vacations

That same month, Beth showed up at the Kelowna family services office after she’d discovered the transactions in her account. She asked Courtney if someone could explain why there was money moving in and out. Had those cheques in fact been for her? Did this have something to do with Saunders? Courtney told Beth that she was on the right track—and that she would soon get answers.

When Courtney next spoke to Saunders, his story changed. This time, he claimed that he was depositing the cheques in Quentin’s account for when Quentin got out of jail. Courtney asked Saunders to provide screenshots of the bank transactions; he said he would, but he never did. Courtney, now sure that something was very wrong, told Saunders that he needed to come clean. She suggested they go to their manager together, but Saunders refused. He kept telling her to drop it, that there was no need to look into the matter any further.

Saunders targeted kids who lived on the margins and slipped out of the system, who were living on the streets, in and out of troubled homes or couchsurfing. Kids who had no one looking out for them.

Courtney did keep looking, and she and another manager ultimately reported Saunders to ministry officials. An investigation uncovered a pattern of fraud. Officials soon learned that, under the guise of paternalistic concern, Saunders would take his kids to TD Bank or Interior Savings Credit Union and help them open an account. It was his duty as a social worker  to help them learn the ropes of financial management. But he was actually opening joint accounts. Saunders would have cheques issued for the youth in his care—victims A through X, as they were later known in court documents—and deposit the money into those accounts. Almost immediately, he would transfer those funds into his personal account or use them to pay off his credit card bills. Over a six-and-a-half-year period, Saunders had the MCFD issue more than 850 cheques totalling over $460,000—an average of $541 per cheque. 

Over the years, his thefts got bigger. In 2015, the amount he transferred through those joint accounts was $81,641. In 2016, it was $104,431. And in 2017, it was $125,200. A man whose job was to protect and support vulnerable Indigenous youth was taking their money. And his employer—the government—had made it easy for him to get away with it.

***

After Courtney presented evidence of his fraud to ministry officials, Saunders was suspended with pay in January of 2018. He disappeared from Kelowna just as word of his many transgressions hit the local news. The RCMP tracked him down in Calgary, where he had been living with one of his sisters and working at a golf course and then a pet store. The cops brought him back to Kelowna to face multiple counts.

In September of 2021, Saunders pleaded guilty to three charges: defrauding the province, forging a university diploma and breaching public trust. In court last summer, Saunders appeared to be humbled; he was sorry, he said. He wished he could roll back the clock and make things better. If he knew then what he knew now—principally, one assumes, that he would be busted—he would make different choices. (I received no replies when I contacted Saunders and his lawyer.)

Saunders was willing to acknowledge that he’d abused his position as a social worker to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the ministry. What he wouldn’t do was admit that he had caused harm to the youth in his care.

Saunders opened joint accounts with the kids in his care and tried to cover his tracks. He created false documents to issue cheques and forged the signatures of his supervisors.

Saunders told the court that he viewed his work with youth as an exercise in futility. He blamed the kids for their own outcomes, citing their lifestyles of addiction and criminal behaviour. He also blamed holes in the province’s social work system for the fact that he was able to defraud it, and even pointed a finger at his superiors for not catching him in the act sooner. He said that a kid who didn’t have a home didn’t need government money. He didn’t think they could be trusted to spend it responsibly.

This argument didn’t fly. Steven Wilson, the presiding judge at the criminal hearings, found that Saunders not only acted contrary to the best interests of the youth in his care, but that his actions resulted in material and sometimes emotional deprivation. Some kids alleged that he could be cruel. In one civil complaint, an Indigenous youth said that Saunders subjected her to chronic verbal and emotional abuse, intentionally undermining her sense of self-worth so as to dissuade her from the belief that she might be entitled to financial support from the province for basic needs like food, clothing or shelter. She ended up homeless and hungry. At times, she was hooked on hard drugs like meth, crack and cocaine. 

Wilson’s pre-sentence report described Saunders as having a flexible moral compass and indifferent to how his actions might affect others. “This moral ambivalence prevented him from gaining genuine insight into his behaviour until, that is, he got caught and must now face the consequences,” states the report. In July, he was sentenced to five years in prison.

***

Saunders wasn’t an individual bad actor who exploited an otherwise decent system. The neglect seems to extend far beyond him. Andrea Courtney had been acting supervisor for only one hour when she cottoned on to Saunders’ transgressions. She explained to the court that it typically takes five people to issue a cheque: one to make the cheque request, one to approve it, one to print the cheque and another two to sign it. In Saunders’ case, he was able to input and approve cheque requests with no oversight, forging signatures when necessary. Wilson noted that Saunders’ fraud should have been obvious.

Especially because there were early signs of trouble. Saunders was known among colleagues for his lack of diligence and sloppy note-taking, which was something his supervisors never seemed particularly concerned about. He failed to complete the required youth care plans and he didn’t prepare any of his charges for aging out of care. This is a formal process that’s supposed to begin when a kid is 15, where they learn about how to find housing, obtain appropriate ID and file taxes. Saunders even kept incomplete contact information for some of his kids.

Saunders pleaded guilty to three charges, but told the court that he viewed his job as an “exercise in futility” and that he blamed the social work system for allowing him to get away with fraud for as long as he did

A 2003 performance review noted that he had been reprimanded for making disparaging remarks about Indigenous children. Saunders was also admonished in 2004, that time for withholding a client’s money and deliberately avoiding oversight of financial transactions. Yet later that year, Saunders’ supervisors thought highly enough of his work to assign him to a unit that specialized in high-risk Indigenous youth.

One counsellor who often worked with Saunders told me how he flaked on the kids, ignored their calls, withheld resources and failed to inform them about meetings related to their care. Once, during a mediation, she was shocked when Saunders talked about the youth, who was present, without directly addressing or involving them. The counsellor kept interrupting to make sure the teen understood and to determine whether they had any questions. Saunders’ most recent supervisor, Siobhan Stynes, who was also present at the meeting, observed passively. “She let him run the show,” says the counsellor.

According to the province’s Child, Family and Community Service Act, children in care have the right to be nurtured, to be consulted about significant decisions affecting them, to be informed about their plans of care and to receive guidance related to their cultural heritage. Guardianship workers must have in-person, private visits with children and youth at least every 90 days, and more frequently if possible. They are supposed to be there for birthdays and other special occasions. Workers are expected to share care plans and progress with their team lead, typically on a weekly basis.

Saunders was careless about completing the plan of care documents for his kids, but he was far from the only offender—an MCFD audit in 2020 found that up to 15 per cent of cases had incomplete plans. During an internal investigation prompted by Courtney’s discoveries, Saunders himself admitted that he was emboldened because his employer turned a blind eye and there was little accountability to ensure he was actually caring for the kids entrusted to him. When no one flagged the first illicit payments, he decided to keep going. 

Jennifer Charlesworth, who leads the province’s office charged with monitoring children and youth services, believes Saunders was enabled by a culture of silence at the MCFD, and that employees stuck together rather than flagging concerns—until Andrea Courtney stepped into a leadership role and broke the pattern. 

The MCFD declined my interview request, but a spokesperson, Gayle Mavor, provided a written statement. “We offer our heartfelt apologies to all the young people who have been affected,” it reads. 

In response to the Saunders revelations, the MCFD conducted internal reviews, partnered with professional organizations for additional oversight and provided compensation of approximately $15 million to the kids Saunders stole from. The Office of the Provincial Director of Child Welfare launched its own special review, including interviews with children and youth in care, along with their families. At least one high-ranking MCFD director was fired, but none of Saunders’ immediate colleagues have been charged. Perhaps the most significant change is that staff are no longer able to initiate and print cheques without the involvement of a second staff member. And yet as far as I can tell, the MCFD has taken zero action to address the institutional neglect that some of its employees and kids in care have raised.

The BC Association of Social Workers is now campaigning to have the law regulating social workers in British Columbia amended so that MCFD workers are required to register with the college. That would prevent someone unqualified, like Saunders, from gaining work with the ministry.

MCFD has launched a consultation related to the oversight of social work, and the report should be released in April. But Michael Crawford, the association’s president, says that in recent years the MCFD has loosened, not tightened, restrictions. Years of recruitment challenges and high turnover led to a change in January of 2019 regarding the education child protection workers need. Whereas before they required a degree in social work, now a degree in a relevant “human services field” is sufficient.

The Saunders case underscores the over-representation of Indigenous children in government care. According to the MCFD, the 2019 rate of children in care in British Columbia was 6.76 per 1,000 for all children and youth across the province but was 43.8 per 1,000 for Indigenous children and youth. Cheryl Casimer, the political executive of First Nations Summit, a B.C. political organization comprised of First Nations and tribal councils, says that the child welfare system that currently exists might as well be an extension of the residential school system. “It’s not a system that was created to nurture and care for Indigenous people,” she says. “And it certainly doesn’t have the supports to nurture the traditions and culture and the connectivity and language required for kids to thrive. So, our youth in those systems of so-called care end up moving to the justice system. It’s a vicious cycle.” 

Meanwhile, those formerly under Saunders’ care launched some two dozen civil suits, naming both the MCFD and Interior Savings Banking Union (which has denied culpability) as knowing or unknowing co-conspirators. The civil suits alleged that Saunders chose high-risk Indigenous youth as his targets because they were already disregarded and Saunders knew that if they complained about him, his supervisors and managers likely wouldn’t believe them. “They were the most marginalized, the most disconnected and the ones who were the least likely to raise any concerns because they didn’t know that they had rights,” says Charlesworth. “And no one was asking them, what’s your experience? Are you feeling well supported?”

Michael Patterson, a lawyer in Penticton who represented several people in this case, says it’s proof of a broken institution. “He could have put these kids in a crack house, and no one would have batted an eye.”

Some of Saunders’ former charges got six-figure settlements—a fortuitous turn after years of deprivation

One of Saunders’ former charges, who I’ll call April, wishes that there had been some form of Indigenous-led restorative justice process. “It would’ve been nice if the kids had been able to express to him how he’s affected their lives,” she says. She describes a lingering sense that she just wasn’t important enough to protect, plus a general distrust of authorities. Today, she has a disabled son and finds interactions with social workers a challenge. The anger and anxiety haven’t gone away. “I think it will last forever,” she says.

Some people are forced to contend with proximate and generational trauma. Others, like Saunders, are Teflon. As a result of his actions, he was pushed out of his job and publicly humiliated, and his relationship with his two children is reportedly strained. But the court documents also talk about the sisters who love him, his second-chance employment with a landscaping company and a new relationship with a woman who supported him throughout his reckoning. Robert Riley Saunders, unlike the kids in his care, had such a massive head start in life that he was back on his feet even before he went to prison.

A group of Saunders’ victims joined a class-action lawsuit against MCFD that claimed the system had failed them for decades. The MCFD settled the class action in 2020, acknowledging responsibility. Some of the complainants ended up with six-figure settlements from the province—a fortuitous turn after years of deprivation.

Beth was part of the class action. She ended up with a sizable settlement, which she used to buy a truck and a five-bedroom home for herself and her two small children. The money doesn’t make up for what happened, but she’s happy to use it to build a secure life for her family. 

With such a big home, Beth is considering becoming a foster parent. She’s been mostly on her own for as long as she can remember, and she wants to give kids a different experience than the one she had. “Saunders did not support me,” she says. “He didn’t help me the way that he should have. He saw all of us kids drowning, and he was okay with it.”

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post The Grifter Guardian appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Nisha never doubted her family’s faith in her. Growing up as the youngest child in a big family in India’s Punjab state, Nisha—who agreed to speak with me if I didn’t use her last name—always had her sights set on bigger things. After she graduated high school, her family championed her decision to get a bachelor’s degree in education at a nearby university. They were proud when she found a job in a local school teaching English and social studies. Despite the low pay—10,000 rupees per month, or about $150—Nisha cherished the opportunity to educate her young students, who ranged in age from 10 to 18 years old.

In 2020, when Nisha was 26, she floated the idea of returning to school for a diploma in early childhood education. Her family kept an open mind—even though she wanted to study in Canada, 11,000 kilometres away. The field was in her wheelhouse, and she was confident that if she enrolled in a program with an internship, the practical experience would put her in high demand as a skilled educator in Canada, the United States or Europe. An international education was key to those opportunities. Canada was a no-brainer: it had a reputation as safe and welcoming, and most of Nisha’s acquaintances who studied abroad went there. 

Because she didn’t know much about the country, she approached one of the countless local education agents whose job it was to advise prospective students on international schools, steer them to the appropriate programs and help them with the application process. Nisha’s agent worked with IDP, a well-known global student recruitment outfit. He recommended M College, a small private institution in Montreal. Nisha had never heard of it, but the recruiter assured her it was the best fit—it had the right classes, would provide her with a laptop and, importantly, refund her fees if her Canadian study permit was denied.

The problem was the tuition: $14,852, roughly six times the average annual salary in India. After thinking it over, one of Nisha’s brothers decided he would remortgage the apartment where Nisha lived with 11 family members. If her brother had any doubts, he didn’t let on. Nisha wanted this more than anything.

First she had to satisfy the multitude of bureaucratic requirements that Canada asks of international students, beginning with an acceptance letter from M College, her “designated learning institution.” (Every province and territory except Nunavut maintains a list of schools it has approved to accept international students.) Then she had to apply for a Quebec Acceptance Certificate, required to study in the province. She had to demonstrate that she had $10,000 available to cover living expenses. Her federal study permit application demanded a passport, biometric information (fingerprints), a clean bill of health, a passing grade on an English proficiency test and a clear criminal background check. Finally, she had to write a statement of purpose to convince the federal government she wasn’t using her studies as a back door into Canada—that she wouldn’t stay illegally after she finished.

Nisha jumped diligently through each hoop, hoping to arrive and start studying in May of 2020. After COVID-19 halted international travel, she set her sights on the fall semester instead and took advantage of a government program called the Student Direct Stream. In exchange for paying her entire tuition up front—an enormous sum for her family—the government would expedite her study permit. Then, in July, the government announced a new program: a two-stage approval process. If Nisha’s application passed muster at first glance, she’d get an “approval in principle,” allowing her to begin studying online while the rest of the application was assessed.

In September, Nisha received that critical approval in principle, clearing her to study. Two months later, she started a fast-tracked program in early childhood education: one year, three semesters. She was still hopeful she’d complete most of it in Canada, where she’d meet new people and have new experiences that might help pave the way for a Canadian work permit after graduation. She was acing her courses, and soon the life she’d imagined no longer seemed so far away.

That was more than two years ago. Today, Nisha has still not set foot in Canada—and she probably never will. In January of 2022, M College filed for creditor protection. Months later, it shut down permanently, along with two other private colleges operated by the same scandal-plagued Montreal family. Instead of completing a work placement in a Quebec school or daycare, Nisha is still living in Punjab, one of hundreds of students whose big dreams imploded along with the colleges they’d trusted. “Some families had to sell their land to pay for college,” says Nisha. “Some students were on the edge of suicide. Many of us felt ashamed, helpless, wondering how we could have let this happen.”

***

For more than a decade, the feds have been pitching the world’s young people on a pie-in-the-sky vision of the Canadian Dream, branding the country as a land of tolerance, opportunity and first-rate education.

In 2012, the federal government declared its intention to double the number of international students to 450,000 within the next decade. The following year, the government committed to an ongoing annual expenditure of $5 million, largely to be spent on advertising and promotion: glossy promotional videos, higher-ed fairs and online marketing. In 2016 it launched the EduCanada website and brand (tagline: “A world of possibilities”), plastered with feel-good messaging about Canada’s cultural diversity and welcoming nature. And in 2019, the government announced nearly $150 million in spending over five years, including $29.5 million for targeted digital advertising alone. 

These efforts have paid off enormously. The federal government estimated that in 2018, international students spent $21.6 billion on tuition, accommodation and other expenses—an economic infusion supporting 170,000 domestic jobs and exceeding the impact of major exports like lumber, auto parts and aircraft. At that point, foreign students contributed nearly 40 per cent of tuition revenues at Canadian universities. Those numbers may well be higher now; as of 2022, international student enrolments in Canada surpassed 600,000, far exceeding the government’s 2012 targets.

And well-known public institutions aren’t the only schools benefiting from the boom. As the cohort of students travelling to Canada has swelled, so has the number of small, private-sector colleges emerging to capitalize on them. Many operate out of inauspicious-looking storefronts, strip malls and office parks, where they specialize in short-term programs with clear paths to the workforce: accounting, secretarial studies, IT support, truck driving.

And their numbers are growing fast. In Quebec, those include 48 non-subsidized private colleges in 2022, up from 28 in 2015. (Non-subsidized schools are similar to for-profit career colleges found in other provinces.) The number of study permits issued to international students in the province has more than doubled from 4,900 between 2016 and 2018 to 11,500 between 2019 and 2021.

The international student explosion of the past decade has created fertile ground for shoddy schools and fraud artists. “Money drives these schools, not education,” says immigration lawyer Ho Sung Kim.

Meanwhile, education agents—like the one who recommended M College to Nisha—are funnelling students straight into these schools. According to global education organization ICEF Monitor, as many as half of international applicants to Canadian schools use recruiters. Universities and colleges pay recruiters a commission for each student, typically 10 or 15 per cent of first-year tuition, and sometimes more. (Students themselves generally don’t pay recruiters directly.) Yet the industry remains essentially unregulated, as do recruiters’ relationships with the fast-growing private college sector. According to Montreal immigration lawyer Ho Sung Kim, this is why so many business people are interested in the industry: “Money drives these schools, not education.”

Will Tao, an immigration and refugee lawyer in Vancouver with a special interest in international students, says agents and recruiters often peddle misinformation about the quality of schools. While there are respectable private colleges across Canada, he says, the international student explosion of the past decade has created fertile ground for shoddy schools and exploitative operators.

And when things go awry, students pay the price. In 2015, provincial regulators shut down Fraser Valley Community College, a private college in a strip mall in Surrey, B.C. The government had received dozens of complaints from students about misleading promotions that guaranteed jobs after graduation, plus promises of high-quality facilities the school didn’t have and tuition refunds the college allegedly refused. The government decided the institution could no longer be trusted to comply with regulations and revoked its registration. 

In 2020, the Ontario Provincial Police charged owners and employees at the Royal Institute of Science and Management in Markham, Ontario—another storefront career college—with fraud, forgery and other offences. Police allege that the college recruited students to apply for a government funding program to help pay for tuition. The students then simply handed the money to the college and received a diploma without attending any classes. 

But little in recent years can match the debacle that Nisha—and hundreds of other students—endured. The story of M College isn’t just about one failed school. It’s about a booming international education machine that’s commodified the hopes and dreams of young people, mostly from the Global South. It’s an industry that has been aggressively stoked by Canadian governments—which have done little to protect students when things go terribly wrong.

***

Caroline Mastantuono is a woman with a knack for both the slow burn and the big swing. In 2004, Mastantuono, then 41, was a support staffer in Montreal’s sprawling Lester B. Pearson School Board, which serves students in grade schools, high schools, adult education centres and adult vocational schools throughout the city. It’s the vocational programs—like auto mechanics, hairdressing and accounting—that are the board’s biggest money-makers, with tuition in some cases topping $18,000.

In 2004, Mastantuono—who did not respond to interview requests sent to her lawyer—received a promotion from the board, putting her in charge of a new international student department. Her mandate was to boost international admissions to those vocational and adult education programs. In 2012, she partnered with a Toronto businessman named Naveen Kolan, who ran a student recruiting company called Edu Edge Inc., which focused on students from India. The partnership soon bore fruit: between 2010 and 2016, the number of international students enrolled in the board jumped from seven to 777, supercharging the department’s revenue from $91,000 to $5.5 million.

 “What happened with the students in India is a tragedy. I spoke with one girl who tried to end her life twice in January of 2022,” says Alain Tardif of the law firm McCarthy Tétrault.

Then, in the spring of 2014, Mastantuono’s daughter Christina, who worked on her staff, came to her with a problem: some students were being denied Quebec Acceptance Certificates because they didn’t have enough money to cover tuition. In June, Mastantuono and Kolan allegedly gathered the department’s staff and laid out a creative solution: they would create false receipts of tuition payment. The false receipts were kept secret from students and submitted to the provincial government. Edu Edge then billed the board a recruiter’s fee for 81 forged chits, representing a total of $1.65 million in tuition.

Soon, another alleged scheme came to light. Two staffers in the department began noticing that a numbered company in British Columbia was being credited for recruiting students who the employees knew had applied independently. The pair started digging and found that the company was registered to Kolan’s wife. In total, 25 students were falsely linked to the B.C. firm, which received $119,000 in fees from the school board between 2014 and 2016.

By then, the board’s finance department, as well as its chair and its assistant director, were asking questions. An internal investigation, which concluded in 2016, found that Mastantuono “lacked transparency” in regards to her department’s activities and its financial arrangement with Edu Edge. She and her daughter were both fired, and the minister of education and higher education ordered an audit of the board’s international program. That December, the Quebec government’s anti-corruption squad launched a parallel investigation that found evidence of fraud, fabrications, use of forged documents and abuse of power at the Pearson board. The investigation was code-named “Projet Pandore.” 

Canadians abroad Justin Trudeau and Caroline Mastantuono met at the Canada-India Business Forum in 2018

For the Mastantuonos, this was just a temporary setback. By March of 2017, Caroline had leveraged her knowledge of the international student market to launch a new recruiting firm: Rising Phoenix International, or RPI. She hired her son, Joseph, along with Christina. The new RPI team travelled to China, the Philippines and Mexico on recruitment trips and signed deals with private and public colleges in Quebec, Ontario, B.C. and New Brunswick. In 2018, as president and CEO of RPI, Caroline took part in the Canada-India Business Forum in Mumbai as a member of the Canadian delegation, a trip that included photo ops with Justin Trudeau, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and celebrity chef Vikram Vij.

By 2020, the Mastantuonos had also taken over operations of three private colleges. There was M College, Nisha’s would-
be alma mater, which the family itself founded. It was licensed by Quebec’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education in 2019. The family purchased two other schools: CCSQ, with one campus in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil and another in Sherbrooke. And there was CDE College, also in Sherbrooke. RPI had already served as the schools’ recruiters, drawing the vast majority of students from abroad, almost exclusively from India. There were well over 1,000 students at the colleges, and only six were Canadian. Joseph Mastantuono was named president of all three schools.

***

In January of 2020, Ravneet Kaur Mand stepped off a city bus on Curé-Poirier Boulevard West in Longueuil, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, across from Montreal. It was her first day of classes at CCSQ—and immediately, she was confused. The neighbourhood was mostly residential, and the building at the college’s address looked like a plain three-storey walk-up. My apartment building is bigger than this, she thought. Ravneet checked Google Maps on her phone again.

It was no mistake. She made her way inside, which was just as dispiriting. With the exception of a cafeteria in the basement, there was nothing more to the school than bathrooms and a few classrooms with desks, chairs and laptops. Her family was paying $30,000 for her to attend the college’s two-year medical office specialist program, which Ravneet found through a recruiter in her small hometown in Punjab. Once she saw what the college had to offer—an unresponsive administration, mediocre facilities and an educational experience generally unworthy of her steep tuition—she became convinced that her recruiter was financially incentivized to get her to enrol by exaggerating its prestige and the quality of its facilities.

(Photo illustration by Lauren Cattermole; photographs by Alexi Hobbs)

Each year, Quebec’s advisory commission on private education releases a report that evaluates conditions at private colleges across the province. According to its 2020–21 report, only three of the 14 teachers at CCSQ in Longueuil were technically qualified to teach, and turnover was extremely high—the average level of seniority was one year. At CCSQ in Sherbrooke, only one teacher was qualified. Both colleges were warned to stop overcharging for tuition or other services. A provincial inspection at CDE in 2021, meanwhile, revealed that several classrooms were overcrowded. By most accounts, CCSQ’s sister school, M College—the one Nisha virtually attended—wasn’t much better. Located on a busy thoroughfare in the borough of LaSalle in Montreal, it was housed in a nondescript office building nestled among a rotisserie chicken joint, a mattress store and a pair of car dealerships.

Even as students like Ravneet and Nisha were plowing through their underwhelming studies at the RPI schools, the alleged schemes and frauds at the Pearson board were about to come roaring back for the Mastantuonos. After nearly four years of digging, the Projet Pandore investigators concluded their work. In late November of 2020, Caroline and Christina Mastantuono were arrested and charged with fraud. The pair stepped aside from their RPI roles and pleaded not guilty. (Kolan, who’d seemingly vanished, turned himself in two months later. He also faces fraud charges and has pleaded not guilty, and did not respond to a request for comment sent to his lawyer.) That was just the beginning of what would turn out to be a very bad 12 months for the family—though most RPI students were completely unaware of the mounting troubles.

When Caroline and Christina were arrested, RPI was still expecting $10.6 million in financing from TD and the Business Development Bank of Canada to cover the purchases of CDE and CCSQ. After the arrest, the financing was cancelled. Then, during the first two weeks of 2021, the province’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education stopped processing study permit applications from M College and CDE (along with eight other Quebec colleges, unrelated to RPI) while it investigated questionable recruitment practices, among other problems. In retrospect, the family appears to have been aware of a looming financial reckoning: in March of 2021, Caroline Mastantuono gifted a lakefront house she owned in the Laurentians, valued at $750,000, to a family trust—a move that protected it from creditors.

In November of 2021, Caroline came back aboard as RPI president. At the end of that month, students received emails insisting that they had to pay their fees by early December—not January, as they’d previously been told.

Ravneet, who’d already paid her tuition, watched as stressed-out classmates and friends scrambled to secure funds and navigate bank limits on transfers. “I still don’t know how they managed,” she says. The students were perplexed by the colleges’ sudden need for immediate tuition payments.

Things became clear in early January of 2022, when Joseph Mastantuono, president of the colleges, emailed students to inform them that they had filed for creditor protection. (CDE and M College filed the previous day.) He blamed the financial troubles squarely on the pandemic: the cost of delivering new laptops to students abroad, getting the campuses COVID-safe and a drop in enrolment due to travel delays. He said the college would work with a court-appointed monitor, which would oversee the finances. Students close to graduating would continue. Everyone else would be on “extended pause.”

***

After 10 months of studying day and night, sometimes 12 hours straight, Nisha wrapped up her final exam in August of 2021 at home in India. All that was left was to get her study permit, still only approved in principle, and travel to Canada to complete an internship.

Only moments after finishing the exam, an email popped into her inbox from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Her heart sank: her permit had been rejected. The agent who reviewed her application wasn’t satisfied that she’d leave Canada at the end of her stay and didn’t think that the proposed studies—now nearly completed—were consistent with her previous education and qualifications.

Nisha was beyond confused. Neither of these problems were raised in the first stage of the process, when she received her approval in principle. How could the same country that accepted her, and took her money, refuse her almost a year later?

Her first priority was to get a refund from M College, which had previously told students that even in the event of a study permit rejection, they could get their money back, minus administrative fees. Through the summer and fall, the college put her off, citing COVID-related processing delays. When RPI applied for creditor protection, she finally realized that her money was gone for good unless the schools could find a new buyer willing to refund her.

More than 500 other students in India were in a similar situation: their tuition was paid but their study permits or visas had been rejected. About 125 of those had received an approval in principle for their study permit, just like Nisha, and had been studying online for more than a year, with every expectation that their permits would be approved.

Hundreds more were still waiting on their paperwork, or were already studying in Canada, only to find those studies indefinitely paused. All told, approximately 2,000 current or prospective students were affected. Panicked and angry, the RPI students organized protests in Canada and India to raise awareness. They wrote to MPs across the country, especially those with Punjabi backgrounds, like Jagmeet Singh, MP Anju Dhillon from LaSalle, and MP Sukh Dhaliwal from Surrey, B.C. 

In February of 2022, they met with the law firm McCarthy Tétrault, which the court had appointed to represent them in the insolvency proceedings. The lawyers’ goal: to ensure affected students got their study permits or visas extended or approved, or received a refund of their fees.

McCarthy Tétrault reached out to the federal government. When no answer came by mid-March, the firm petitioned the Superior Court of Quebec to extend the students’ Quebec Acceptance Certificates and study permits and reconsider student visas for students still in India who had been rejected. The application was dismissed in mid-April; the judge ruled that he couldn’t compel the provincial and federal governments to do what McCarthy Tétrault was asking. Instead, the firm would need to apply to the federal court. According to Alain N. Tardif, a partner at McCarthy Tétrault, that’s a much more complex and expensive undertaking.

To Tardif, Nisha’s case was among the most critical of all. The government had granted her permission to study, only to snatch it away after she’d paid tuition and almost entirely finished her studies. She and her family stood on the precipice of financial catastrophe due to the failure of the RPI schools. According to the McCarthy Tétrault team, the federal and provincial governments were partly responsible for the financial fallout.

“What happened with the students in India is a tragedy,” says Tardif. “I spoke with one girl who tried to end her life twice in January of 2022. Victims of fraud always believe that it’s their fault, but there’s nothing they could have done. The federal government told them to pay those fees in advance. The students keep telling us to get a court order so they can be reimbursed, but what they don’t understand is the money is gone.” 

The province’s responsibility—and its culpability—began long before students even paid their fees, adds Tardif. Quebec’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education signs off on which colleges become designated learning institutions, which are approved to enrol international students. The ministry signed off on CCSQ and CDE after the Mastantuonos acquired them—despite a 2020–21 report by Quebec’s advisory commission on private education that flagged financial problems, such as the family’s inability to demonstrate that the colleges had sufficient funds for adequate operations.

But there was another clear red flag the government overlooked, adds Tardif. If one of the permit holders or directors has a judicial record that demonstrates issues that could impede their ability to run an educational institution, he says, the ministry can revoke their permit. That didn’t happen after Caroline and Christina Mastantuono were charged with fraud.

“The first shortcoming is the Quebec government allowing these colleges on that list,” he says. “They had warning that there were issues with the ownership, there were issues with insolvency. Those colleges should not have been on that list.”

***

Today, Ravneet lives with three roommates in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. After struggling to land the internship she needed to complete her program, she found a placement as a technician at a pharmacy. She’s now been approved for a post-graduation work permit, allowing her to stay in Canada for the time being.

Despite everything, she doesn’t have a problem with recruitment agents in general. “Recruiters translate all this English information into Hindi and Punjabi, which is especially helpful for the parents, who often aren’t very educated,” she says. But she does have a problem with agents getting big commissions for pushing certain schools, and students paying the price.

(Photograph by Alexi Hobbs)

Manitoba is the only province to regulate recruiters. In 2016, it introduced legislation requiring schools to properly train recruiters and review the information they provide to students. It outlines ethical standards for recruiters and requires schools to terminate partnerships with recruiters when those standards are breached. In 2017, the provincial audit on the Mastantuono situation made 15 recommendations to improve the way international student programs conduct business, including accrediting recruiters. No action was taken. Then, last February, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration made a similar recommendation, suggesting that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada introduce new regulations to govern recruiters, working with provinces, territories and schools to enforce ethical behaviour. 

Last June, CDE, CCSQ and M College were transferred to the privately owned Cestar College of Business, Health and Technology. Cestar has operated in Ontario since 2007 without incident, and the acquisition allowed enrolled RPI students, like Ravneet, to finish their studies. Still, the collapse of the schools made many students skittish—about Montreal, about Canada and about private colleges.

Varun Khanna, who’s 32, moved to Canada from India in 2015 to attend a private college. Today, when he’s not busy running the small trucking company he owns, or studying mobile application development at one of Montreal’s public colleges, he volunteers with the Montreal Youth Student Organization. He co-founded the organization in response to the RPI collapse, advocating for South Asian students. 

 “The headlines in Punjab right now are discouraging people from applying to Canada, because they’re going to be defrauded. That’s very, very bad publicity.”

He says that he’s heard many stories of recruiters telling students they won’t be able to get into a particular well-known college or university and directing them to private institutions instead. Some may be good, but others turn out to be little more than a few floors, or a few rooms in a cheap office building, with underpaid teaching staff. The RPI colleges fit that bill. After the disaster there, he says his organization is recommending students go to public colleges and universities—“just to be safe.”

Caroline and Christina Mastantuono, and Naveen Kolan, are standing trial early this year on charges of fraud stemming from the Pearson school board case, but the outcome will have no bearing on the fate of the RPI students.

Tardif would like the federal government to contribute to a fund for them—it would be the right thing to do, as well as a small step toward rehabilitating Canada’s image abroad. “Our reputation in India is damaged by this,” he says. “The headlines in Punjab right now are discouraging people from applying to Canada because they’re going to be defrauded. That’s very, very bad publicity.”

Nisha wishes someone had given her that kind of warning. “It was my dream to come to Canada, to become something,” she says. “But it would have been better if I’d never applied.” For a while, Nisha just wanted a resolution, in the form of a refund, or entry to Canada. If the school won’t pay us back, then it is the responsibility of the Canadian government to allow us to complete our education, she would tell herself. We’re not criminals; we’re students. Even months after the Superior Court of Quebec dismissed McCarthy Tétrault’s application, she retained some hope.

Now she knows there will be no Canada and no money. Some other Indian students who’d been in similar situations have since managed to gain entry to Canada. Others have found the money to start over again in a new program, at a new school in a new country. There are few people left who truly understand everything she’s gone through.

Nisha’s family doesn’t speak of the financial strain of remortgaging the family home; they want to protect her, and they want her to forget her terrible luck. Their faith in her remains unshakable.

She’s doing her best to turn a profoundly negative experience into something positive—not just for her, but for others. She’s tutoring friends, and friends of friends, in English, on a volunteer basis. At any time, she has 10 or so students between the ages of 18 and 30, across India, taking her classes online, all people who can’t afford the cost of traditional language classes. She wants to help them improve their English and pass their language proficiency exams so they can eventually do what she couldn’t: study abroad and build a new future for themselves.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post How fraud artists are exploiting Canada’s international education boom appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Abby Spadafora was two years old when she joined the Bluewater Gymnastics Club in Sarnia, Ontario. Her mother thought the sport would make a good outlet for her daughter’s abundant energy. Spadafora loved everything about the gym, especially flipping her little body into the foam training pit. By the time she was seven, in 1990, Spadafora was accepted into Bluewater’s competitive program and began training with the gym’s esteemed husband-and-wife coaching team, Dave and Elizabeth Brubaker. 

Most days, she would wake up at six so she could practise for two hours before school, then leave class early so she could train for several hours more. The Brubakers told her she was on the path to a gymnastics career—and maybe, one day, the Olympics.

Spadafora craved the Brubakers’ approval, but it was hard to come by. They would yell at her if she didn’t master a skill or hesitated in a routine. As part of her training, the coaches measured Spadafora’s height once a week and her weight twice a day. Sometimes they used calipers to gauge her body fat. She learned to hang her heels off the scale to dip the numbers and hide the granola bars her mother packed as a snack. 

When she was 11, Spadafora became the first Canadian to perform a difficult maneuver called a Rulfova—in which a gymnast launches herself backward from a standing position, twists in the air and lands seated in a straddle on the balance beam. But the Brubakers always asked for more. One time, when Spadafora couldn’t nail her routine the way Dave wanted, he became enraged and repeatedly pushed her from a handstand position off a five-foot-high bar. Each time she crashed headfirst to the ground.

Spadafora believed that the yelling and the fixation on her weight were normal parts of the coaching. She learned never to complain about her frequent injuries (the list included a dislocated finger, a broken foot and torn shoulder cartilage). Even as she feared the Brubakers, she also saw them as parental figures. If they pushed her, it was so she could be better. In 2000, when Spadafora was 17, Dave and Elizabeth relocated for two years to a gym with better facilities in Burlington, Ontario. Spadafora followed, boarding at their house.

Soon Dave Brubaker’s attention took on sexual overtones. According to Spadafora, Brubaker expected her and the other girls to greet him with a kiss. At training sessions, he would snap Spadafora’s sports bra. During a team trip to Taiwan when she was 17, he pulled her onto his lap while they were in the pool, placing her buttocks directly over his crotch, and tickled her. On the same trip, he entered her hotel room at 2 a.m., claiming that his roommate was drunk and he needed a place to sleep, then climbed into her bed and spooned her.

Spadafora knew what was happening made her feel awful and that it wasn’t right, but she couldn’t process it as abuse. She loved being a gymnast, loved being a competitor. Then at night she would cry herself to sleep, thinking she’d done something wrong, dreaming of escape from the gym. “Looking back,” she says now, “I was in complete survival mode.”

Abby Spadafora, now 39, began training at Bluewater at age two. Here, she’s pictured at a competition in 1997 (right), stretching with Elizabeth (far left) and with Dave in 1997 (bottom). (Portraits by John Kealey & Jackie Dives.)

In 2002, she left Bluewater to join the gymnastics team at the University of Arizona, where she had an athletics scholarship. Three years later, after suffering a back injury, she dropped out, returned to Sarnia and got married. She tried working as a coach at Bluewater, but left because she couldn’t bear being so close to Dave Brubaker. As an adult, she rarely spoke about what she refers to as her “gym days.” She told her husband, her sister and a therapist only the barest details. Then, in October of 2017, she received a call from the Sarnia police. Melanie Hunt, a 35-year-old health-care worker and a former Bluewater athlete, had filed a complaint about Brubaker. She had named Spadafora as a possible fellow victim. Spadafora told the officer that he was “opening a can of worms.” Abuse was so endemic within gymnastics, she felt, that one case would unearth countless others.

She was right. Eleven women, including Spadafora and Hunt, came forward to share similar stories of abuse at Bluewater. Women alleged Dave Brubaker kissed and fondled them, some when they were as young as 12. They say he screamed at them, repeatedly called them fat, and forced them to perform dangerous moves that resulted in injuries. They say they were manhandled into painful positions—their bodies stretched, yanked and pushed beyond what they could endure. The Brubakers denied any wrongdoing.

The case is one of many prompting a widespread reckoning within gymnastics, as parents and athletes question why this notoriously high-pressure sport attracts and tolerates abusive coaches. The crisis was a long time coming and, by many measures, inevitable. Gymnastics’ problems don’t end with a pair of coaches or a single gym—it’s infused into the DNA of the sport itself. The question now is not simply whether it can be made safe for thousands of young girls, but whether it deserves to be saved at all.

Perhaps more than any other sport, gymnastics burdens children with expectations of extreme excellence. Many kids begin as young as 18 months and, like Spadafora, start training competitively by age seven. A coach can have an overpowering influence on how a young athlete views herself and her self-worth. This dynamic leaves kids in an impossible position: even if they’re being mistreated, speaking up could risk everything they’ve worked for, including an identity formed around the sport.

The notion that ideal female gymnasts should be young, thin and lithe took hold in 1976, when the tiny 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored a perfect 10 on the uneven bars at the Montreal Summer Olympics. The feat—something no Western gymnast had done—ushered in what one journalist at the time called the “attack of the mini-monsters.” Gymnasts in North America and Western Europe started competing at much younger ages and attempting infinitely more daring handsprings and mid-air twists. Soon, girl gymnasts were idealized as the perfect mix of precious and powerful, feminine and determined. They wanted to be the next Comaneci or Mary Lou Retton or Natalia Yurchenko. In competition, they sparkled and shone and, as they performed incredible athletic accomplishments, they always smiled.

In Canada, more than 250,000 gymnasts are registered with the national athletic body, Gymnastics Canada. The organization was established in 1969 with the express purpose of advancing the sport and putting Canadian gymnasts on the world podium. Based in Ottawa, it has a board of directors, 13 staff and, in 2022, a $5.6-million annual budget. Ian Moss, its CEO since 2018, previously held management and leadership roles at Rowing Canada, Speed Skating Canada and the Canadian Olympic Committee.

Throughout the criminal trial, the Brubakers stood by their training methods. (Photograph courtesy The Canadian Press/Mark Spowart)

GymCan, like so many athletic organizations, exists to train athletes for the podium. Winning means more fame and funding for the sport. This comes with a potential conflict: an organization incentivized to pressure kids to perform better, higher, faster is also responsible for their well-being and policing its own glory-seeking coaches.

While preparing athletes for the Olympics, GymCan, in partnership with its regional partners, directs education and training for coaches and judges, shapes its gymnastic programs, and manages any complaints brought forward by gymnasts in the country. Athletes and GymCan-accredited coaches must sign a code of ethics that covers anti-doping rules and anti-racism policies and prohibits abusive and sexual behaviours. If anyone is reported to have violated the code, it’s up to GymCan to decide whether to investigate or dismiss the accusations, and what punishment to dole out if it determines they’re substantiated. In other words, GymCan has historically had complete power to make, arbitrate and then enforce the rules.

Moss estimates that the organization vets two or three complaints about safe sport violations per month. In the four years that he has been CEO, 13 complaints have triggered a full investigation and disciplinary process. Some of those involved sexual assault and misconduct charges against underage gymnasts. On its website, the organization discloses basic details about disciplinary decisions and a list of suspended or expelled coaches (a total of 31 since 1996, the year GymCan started collecting such data).

Along with gymnastics, several other sports are facing a wave of abuse allegations. Last March, bobsled and skeleton athletes wrote a public letter calling for the resignation of their national federation’s president and of its high-performance director, citing a culture of fear. Two months later, more than 100 boxers signed their own letter, calling for the resignation of Boxing Canada’s director. They wrote, in part, that any athlete or coach who spoke out against physical and psychological abuse often found themselves sidelined from competitions. And in October, the CEO and entire board of Hockey Canada resigned after allegations of sexual assault surfaced against members of the World Junior team—and complaints of a corresponding culture of silence and cover-ups.

Last October, following the public furor over both gymnastics and hockey, federal sport minister Pascale St-Onge began toying with the idea of a full public inquiry into the country’s sporting organizations. She also catalogued accusations of mistreatment, sexual abuse or misuses of funds directed at eight national sports bodies, including rugby and rowing. Until now, abuse was tolerated as the price of victory.

***

The barn-like main facility at Bluewater Gymnastics is lined wall-to-wall with blue gymnastics mats and training equipment. Over the years, it’s been decorated with mementoes from the Brubakers’ triumphs: flags from the 2007 Pan American Games in Rio, the 2011 Japan Cup, the 2012 Olympics. For 34 years, Bluewater was the Brubakers’ second home.

Dave and Elizabeth met in the 1980s as students in the gymnastics coaching program at Toronto’s Seneca College. Dave, a sporty teen, had started coaching part time at a local club in Waterloo during high school, mostly because he needed a job. He fell in love with gymnastics and, soon after, with Elizabeth—a gymnast since age 10 who grew up in Scarborough and had also coached in her teens. After the new couple graduated, they searched for a club where they could coach together. In 1984, they landed jobs at Bluewater Gymnastics, which is run as a non-profit. Dave soon became the head coach.

After his arrest, Dave Brubaker wrote an apology letter to his wife and the complainants. “I am guilty of crossing the line,” he stated. “But I want you to know that my intentions weren’t sexual or premeditated.”

Next came marriage and two sons. Both Brubakers were well-liked, thought to be trustworthy and committed. While they were busy shuttling their athletes to competitions across the province, their athletes’ parents babysat the Brubakers’ kids, creating a close-knit gym community. When the two left town for Burlington in 2000, Bluewater secured funding from the city to upgrade the facilities and woo them back in 2002, offering Dave a job as gym director and Elizabeth the role of program director.

Their gymnasts placed consistently on the podium at provincial and national events, and there were some, like Spadafora, who performed notably difficult skills. In 2012, 18-year-old gymnast Dominique Pegg, under Dave’s coaching, made the national team and competed at the Summer Games in London—the first Bluewater athlete to make it to the Olympics.

Before the 2012 Games, Canada’s gymnastics team was never on the level of major players like the U.S., China, Romania and Russia. That year, however, Team Canada finished a historic fifth in the all-around competition, only four points behind China. Not only was it Canada’s best-ever showing at women’s gymnastics, it was the first time the team had made it to the finals since the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, when the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc sat out the competition. To the team, and to a thoroughly charmed Canada, the fifth-place finish was as good as gold. Pegg herself finished 17th—the fourth-highest ever by a Canadian gymnast in a non-boycotted Games. Justin Bieber congratulated her on Twitter.

In 2014, GymCan gave Dave Brubaker an award to honour his long-time service and recent success. That same year, it named him the national director of the women’s artistic gymnastics team, officially handing him power over female Canadian gymnasts’ Olympic dreams. Brubaker told the Sarnia Observer that he had hesitated to take the influential position because he didn’t want to spend so much time away from Bluewater and the kids he loved. Still, he added, “I think I’m the right guy for this job.”

In 2015, under Brubaker, Canada placed sixth at the women’s team finals at the World Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow. “People said it would never happen again,” Brubaker said. “Never say never.” At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Team Canada’s Ellie Black finished fifth in the all-around category. It was the country’s best-ever showing by an individual gymnast. Brubaker told reporters he was already looking for athletes to compete in the 2020 and 2024 games.

He wouldn’t have the chance. In late 2017, based on reports made by Hunt and Spadafora, Sarnia police charged Brubaker with one count of invitation to sexual touching, three counts of sexual interference, three counts of sexual exploitation and three counts of sexual assault, dating back to a period between 2000 and 2007.

Shortly after Brubaker was arrested, he wrote an apology letter addressed to the complainants, as well as to his wife. In it, he stated: “I am guilty of crossing the line, but I want you all to know that my intentions were not sexual or premeditated.” (He later said the investigating officer pressured him to write the letter and told him what to write.)

Bluewater placed Brubaker on unpaid leave and banned him from the premises. GymCan followed suit, putting him on administrative leave pending the outcome of the criminal investigation. And yet Brubaker still had his supporters in Sarnia and the national gymnastics community. Elizabeth stuck by him, while continuing to train gymnasts at Bluewater.

Brubaker’s trial was scheduled for October of 2018 in a Sarnia courthouse. The judge, Deborah Austin, had 30 years behind the bench and a reputation for compassion and efficiency. By the start of the trial, the Crown had reduced the charges to one count each of sexual assault and sexual exploitation involving Hunt. Brubaker pleaded not guilty to both charges.

In the courtroom, Brubaker wore a suit jacket and tie, his short, greying hair styled into spikes. On the stand, Hunt described incidents that echoed Spadafora’s own experiences. She testified that from the time she was 12, Brubaker made her kiss him hello and goodbye on the lips. She also said that he would pick her up from school and take her to his house before practice, sometimes proposing that they take naps together, then spoon her in bed and tickle her belly. She alleged that he touched her inappropriately during massages.

In response, Brubaker’s defence team argued that Hunt was “bitter” she was not named to the Olympics team, unlike others he had trained. On the stand, Brubaker said Hunt had initiated the kissing out of “habit.” He added: “I don’t come from a kissy family, so to me it’s just part of the gymnast culture. It’s not something I need as a man.” He admitted that he had massaged Hunt, including touching her pubic area and around her breasts, but said it was only to improve her performance in the sport. As for the spooning and tickling, he said, “It never happened.”

The case against Brubaker began to fall apart mid-trial, when the Crown learned, then shared with the defence team and Justice Austin, that the investigating officer was in fact related by marriage to Hunt and had shared with her details of Brubaker’s interview with police. Brubaker’s defence lawyer, Patrick Ducharme, argued that the officer’s investigation lacked professional distance and that he had “cajoled a favourable statement out of her.” Justice Austin agreed and acquitted Brubaker. The Crown’s case, she wrote, was fatally compromised when the investigating officer abandoned both his oath of impartiality and his oath of secrecy. Austin stressed that none of her criticism of the officer should be taken as an indictment of the complainant: “She was forthright and appeared to be doing her best.” Her testimony, the judge said, was sincere and genuine.

With his case dismissed, Brubaker hugged his wife, and his supporters applauded. Ducharme told reporters that they would soon restore his client’s good name. The celebration was short-lived. Minutes after the judge read her decision, GymCan CEO Ian Moss stood outside the same Sarnia courthouse. He announced that during the trial, GymCan had received nearly a dozen written complaints about Dave and Elizabeth Brubaker from former Bluewater athletes, including Spadafora and Hunt, spanning from 1996 to 2017. The allegations were familiar: groping and fondling, pushing athletes to perform dangerous skills, belittling their weight and appearance, forcing them to train through injury. In response, GymCan was launching its own investigation. “We want to maintain the sanctity, the beauty of the sport,” Moss said. “We know we have work to do. Every sport has work to do.”

***

To investigate complaints against its own members, sports organizations like GymCan typically set up their own judicial systems. An internal investigation is meant to guarantee a fair process for the complainants and the accused, but it also helps protect GymCan from getting sued for erroneously dismissing or banning anyone. 

Brubaker’s defence team argued that the complainant was “bitter” she wasn’t named to the Olympics team. Brubaker said she initiated the kissing out of “habit”: “It’s just part of gymnast culture. It’s not something I need as a man.”

To lead the investigation, GymCan hires an independent case manager who usually has a background in labour law, workplace investigations or human rights. The case manager weighs whether to refer the case to the authorities, to recommend a mediation process facilitated by GymCan or to begin their own investigation. 

At the end of an internal investigation, the case manager presents a report and GymCan decides if a full disciplinary hearing is warranted. The case manager recommends the disciplinary panel members—usually two lawyers (one of which is named chair of the panel), and one sport or subject expert. Both GymCan and respondents like the Brubakers have a chance to either accept or reject the recommendations of the hearing panel. The closed procedure is at once a mock trial and an event that can destroy lives.

In September of 2020, more than a year after Brubaker was acquitted by the province, his GymCan hearing commenced. Similar to court proceedings on sexual assault and misconduct, GymCan’s process requires complainants to recount their allegations at the hearing—where the accused has a right to be present, and often is. And so the Brubakers, their lawyers, Moss, the three discipline panel members, GymCan’s lawyers and the case manager, plus 11 Bluewater gymnasts, all gathered over Zoom (the pandemic prevented them from meeting in person).

Spadafora spoke from a lawyer’s conference room in London, Ontario. The Brubakers’ counsel, civil litigation lawyer Tanya Pagliaroli, cross-examined her for over three hours. Spadafora remembers repeated questions about her hotel room in Taiwan. Next, Pagliaroli asked her about a photograph which showed her sitting on Dave’s lap in a pool, suggesting Spadafora wasn’t really on his lap at all but merely floating above it.

Spadafora found the experience traumatizing. Afterward, she had nightmares. “This is not a matter of a victim just explaining their story,” she says. “You have to prove this happened to you—time and time and time again, you have to prove it.” Spadafora and the other complainants told me how the hearing was the first time most of them learned about the extent of the Brubakers’ abuse. Hunt was deeply disturbed by how close her fellow gymnasts’ experiences matched her own.

Melanie Hunt testified that the Brubakers’ harsh methods gave her an eating disorder and that Dave touched her inappropriately. Here, she’s shown practising at ages nine (top left) and five (right), and at age 16 (bottom), sharing a hotel room with Dave during a competition in Ukraine.

During her testimony, she went into greater detail than she had at the trial, telling the disciplinary panel that, like Spadafora, she joined gymnastics as a young kid, at age four. Her parents wanted a safe place for her to do the kinds of things she was already doing, like flipping off swing sets. To Hunt, gymnastics was the closest she could get to flying. By age seven, she was part of the elite program, and the sport became her life. She convinced herself from an early age that the sport required a mindset of “no guts, no glory.” If she died attempting a cool gymnastics move, well, it would be an honourable death.

Hunt felt the harder she worked, the more likely she was to please Dave. The coach-athlete relationship became more toxic when she moved in with the Brubakers at age 12, a year after Spadafora. At the coaches’ home, milk and carbohydrates of any kind were forbidden. Thinking back to that time, she only remembers hunger. She developed a bingeing disorder and, after moving back home, quickly gained 10 pounds. She tried everything to lose weight, including taking diet pills and laxatives without her parents’ knowledge. Dave enrolled her in spin classes for extra exercise.

At 12, she says, the abuse turned sexual. First, Dave told her to kiss him in the morning when she arrived at the gym and in the evening when she left. He gave her massages and ran his fingers under her panty line. She recounted how he made her nap with him, putting his hand under her shirt and playing with her stomach. “I was living with Dave’s voice in my head and I didn’t know how to make a decision,” she told me. “I turned to him for everything.”

Imogen Paterson—shown at competitions at ages 12 (top) and eight (bottom right), and at age 14 at the Pacific Rim Championships in 2018 (bottom left)—says an uncomfortable encounter with Dave Brubaker, then in charge of Canada’s women’s national team, eventually led to her quitting the sport

One former gymnast who testified wasn’t a Bluewater athlete. In 2017, when she was 14, Imogen Paterson, who lived in Vancouver, desperately wanted to make the national team. That year, she had a chance to impress Dave Brubaker when they both attended an international competition in France. She remembers walking by him during warm-up, on her way to get some water, proudly wearing a Team Canada leotard she’d been given for the competition. When she was about 10 feet away from her coaches, Dave slapped her on the bum and remarked, “You look good in that suit.” She remembers the exact way he said “good,” the word drawn out, elastic. She forced herself to push it to the back of her mind so she could compete. Paterson told her mom what had happened on the ride home from the airport. With her Olympic dreams on the line, Paterson begged her mom not to make an issue of it. Three weeks later, after Dave was arrested, her mom told her coaches everything.

Paterson made the national team. But within a year, one of her coaches in B.C.—who Paterson says constantly demeaned, berated and gaslighted her—kicked her out of the gym, allegedly because Paterson’s parents were too demanding. Paterson found another gym and kept competing for Team Canada. Still, her experiences took a cumulative toll: shortly after testifying against Brubaker, Paterson realized gymnastics was destroying her mental and physical health. She let go of her Olympic dreams and quit the sport.

In March of 2021, after hearing testimony from Hunt, Spadafora, Paterson and eight other athletes, the discipline panel released its decision. It ruled in favour of the complainants. In total, the panel found 54 counts of misconduct and ethics code violations, including physical abuse, sexual harassment, child abuse and neglect, and discriminatory and unethical behaviour. “The Brubakers demonstrated a willful and persistent disregard for the ethical principles that governed their conduct and their obligations as coaches of child and young athletes,” the panel wrote. GymCan permanently banned Dave from gymnastics in Canada and suspended Elizabeth for five years. A year later, in April of 2022, having spent $300,000 in legal fees and believing the process was stacked against them, the Brubakers abruptly withdrew an appeal of the panel’s decision.

The Brubakers told me they were scapegoats—the first Canadian coaches to fall on the wrong side of #MeToo. They insist they never heard any accusations of mistreatment until Dave’s criminal trial. But how could 11 women get it wrong?

GymCan’s hearings and the reasoning behind its decisions aren’t public—sometimes not even to those directly involved. The Bluewater athletes I spoke to have GymCan’s final report on their case, but have collectively agreed not to share it as some athletes are not ready to have their stories heard.

The women who testified against their former coaches are now campaigning for greater changes in gymnastics. In response to the panel’s decision, they released a collective statement as the Bluewater Survivors. They commended the ban on Brubaker, but criticized the way GymCan handled their complaints. “It compounded the trauma of survivors and prolonged what had already been an open-ended nightmare,” they wrote in an open letter. “That process cannot be allowed to continue as is.”

***

Last October I interviewed the Brubakers, at first over email—while they wanted to ensure their voices were heard, and that the reporting was “balanced,” they were also nervous to meet with a journalist. Later, we spoke over the phone. Throughout our conversation they finished each other’s sentences, speaking warmly about their marriage and family and wistfully about their time as coaches. That demeanour shifted, however, when the conversation turned to the allegations against them, the GymCan investigation and Dave’s ban.

The Brubakers feel they are scapegoats—the first coaches to take the fall in GymCan’s quest to be on the right side of #MeToo, and the international backlash against gymnastics culture. To them, GymCan was forced into a difficult situation and acted with the intent of kicking the Brubakers out of the sport; they were never going to triumph at the hearing, let alone at an appeal. They insist that they had never heard any accusations of mistreatment until Dave’s criminal trial and are angry that GymCan seemed to suddenly change the rules on them after 40 years of coaching, during which they only received praise and success. They asked me, without really expecting an answer: if there are issues around the treatment of athletes, why was that treatment accepted for so long, only to change without GymCan communicating it to the coaches?

We talked about their coaching history and philosophy. In response to questions about the trial and the complainants’ experiences, the Brubakers were often evasive, explaining why they believe themselves to be the bigger victims. But if the allegations are false, I asked them, where did they come from? How could 11 women get it wrong? The Brubakers said they don’t know. In general, they tend to look away from the sexual misconduct allegations, preferring to frame the complaints as both historical and centred on alleged too-tough coaching. They say they love the sport and they want to help fix what they see as the “problem”—not an abusive culture, but rather a gap between how coaches do their jobs and how today’s athletes, who they consider overly sensitive, want them to do their jobs. “Gymnastics in Canada is being destroyed, and coaches are fleeing the country,” Dave said. “Coaches call us every week. They’re afraid. They’re saying, ‘If this can happen to the Brubakers, then it can happen to anyone.’ ”

***

Late last summer, I met Ian Moss and GymCan board chair Jeffrey Thomson over Zoom. Moss was at a cottage, and Thomson was in the middle of a long period of travelling, first to the U.K. for the Commonwealth Games and then to Turkey for the Islamic Games. Both men were eager for a chance to acknowledge GymCan isn’t perfect. “We know in gymnastics that we need to change. We all accept that. We’re not hiding behind some sort of rock,” said Moss. “We all believe that this sport cannot survive in a moribund state. It has to evolve.”

He added that national sport organizations like GymCan were traditionally set up to guide their sports on technical matters—how to reach the podium, how to excel, how to dominate—and that their staff usually don’t have expertise in dealing with abuse. Questions about whether, and how, organizations influence the outcome of complaints against their own members‚ the coaches, are fair, he allowed. He also pointed out that sports bodies have argued for years that it’s difficult for them to police themselves. That statement is true of any organization: everyone is biased toward their friends, their colleagues, themselves.

Thomson believes the criminal justice system failed the Bluewater athletes during Brubaker’s trial. He’s proud that GymCan did not let the couple go back to coaching without its own investigation. “It was a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of resources to make sure that they never coached again. We went hard and it was not easy,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for those girls and those women, but, you know, we got ’em in the end.”

To date, more than 100 athletes have signed onto a class action suit against Gymnastics Canada and several provincial federations, saying they contributed to their abuse by creating a toxic culture and failing to protect them

Last June, GymCan hired the consulting firm McLaren Global Sports Solutions to conduct a study of the organization’s culture. The firm will analyze GymCan’s safe sport policies, compile international findings of similar investigations across the world and interview athletes and members of the GymCan community. The company only takes on such work for a body like GymCan if the organization agrees to make the findings public.

The firm has completed investigations into abuse for several international and Canadian sports federations. Many gymnasts have said there’s no guarantee from McLaren that the process will avoid making them relive traumas—or that it’s meant to help them at all. After all, McLaren’s stated mission is to help its clients—in this case, GymCan—“protect and enhance their brand” and to “navigate difficult organizational issues.” It wasn’t hired to rewrite an entire sport’s culture. By the end of 2022, McLaren had collected hundreds of surveys and interviewed dozens of GymCan stakeholders, including a number of athletes who described being abused and wanted future kids to be protected.

For many gymnasts, the McLaren study is a half measure. Last spring, a former B.C. gymnast named Amelia Cline filed a class-action lawsuit against GymCan and several provincial gymnastics federations. The lawsuit states that the sport’s governing bodies contributed to the abuse of athletes by creating a toxic culture and failing to protect athletes in their care, many of whom were children. To date, more than 100 former athletes, including Spadafora and Hunt, have signed on to the lawsuit. Some of those athletes are pushing for a third-party investigation into both the sport and GymCan itself. An independent review, they argue, is the only way to ensure that, if needed, the harshest recommendations will be made: tear it all down, fire everybody, start over.

This past July, a possible saviour for gymnastics arrived in the form of a new federal office dedicated to sports integrity. Pascale St-Onge, the sports minister, modelled the commission on a similar body in the U.S., which was swamped with reports of abuse from the moment it was founded in 2017. In the 2022 federal budget, the government granted $16 million to the office over three years and appointed Sarah-Eve Pelletier, a lawyer and former national competitor in artistic swimming, as commissioner. The idea is for the office to operate as an independent, third-party investigator into any complaints received from athletes, parents or coaches.

The federal government isn’t giving sports organizations any choice but to change. In July, it suspended GymCan’s annual $2.9-million funding. The freeze was to last until GymCan became a signatory to the sports integrity office. If it signed on, GymCan would no longer receive abuse reports, investigate its own coaches or decide on disciplinary action; a case like the Brubaker one would be completely out of its hands. Sport organizations still have questions about how exactly the office will operate, how it will collect complaints, whether there will be a public database of sanctioned coaches and what support will be offered to athletes who complain of abuse.

Three national organizations initially signed on: Volleyball Canada, Weightlifting Canada and Hockey Canada. Then, in December, GymCan finally agreed to participate. It will still be responsible for keeping athletes safe, but it will no longer be the body that gets to decide how adequately it does that job.

***

It took a criminal trial and the Gymnastics Canada investigation, plus years of therapy, for Spadafora to fully confront what she had endured at Bluewater—that it wasn’t just tough coaching and inappropriate moments, but grooming and deep, constant abuse. Today, she feels closer to healing, and she’s also aware of how her experiences continue to affect her. She suffers from anxiety and panic attacks and was recently diagnosed with obsessive-
compulsive disorder.

In November, Spadafora met with eight former gymnasts for another round of testifying—this time in Ottawa, speaking at the Status of Women’s hearings on the safety of women and girls in sport. She’s joined dozens of other athletes organizing under Gymnasts for Change Canada. Together, they’re lobbying the government for a federal inquiry into Canadian sport. It can be exhausting to push for change, to share your deepest trauma, only to see the needle move the smallest bit. It can be frustrating to feel like too few care about the vulnerability of young athletes. But she’s determined to keep going. There’s too much at stake: the well-being of every athlete and the future of the sport she’s always loved, even when it didn’t love her back. She still believes it can change for the better. No kid should suffer abuse to taste victory.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Harder They Fall: Inside Canada’s gymnastics abuse scandal appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Early on a Sunday morning in June of 2021, Nathaniel Veltman told a co-worker he expected to have a rough day on the job. Veltman worked at an egg-processing plant in the town of Strathroy, Ontario, where his duties involved loading 20-pound crates of eggs onto skids, then loading the skids onto trucks, and he wasn’t feeling up to hours of manual labour. “Yeah, man, just so many shrooms last night,” he said. “I went to hell and I saw Satan.”

The co-worker was used to Veltman saying odd things and didn’t pay it much mind. “I was just like, ‘Yeah. Take it easy today, man, like maybe don’t go on any power equipment.’ ” Veltman chuckled and looked away. “Nothing really seemed that off to me,” the colleague says.

The next morning, Veltman, who was 20 at the time, wasn’t at work at all. Another person broke the news: “You’re probably never gonna see Nate ever again.”

Neither colleague is likely to, unless they attend Veltman’s murder trial next fall. After the Sunday shift, Veltman got into his Ram pickup, which he had recently equipped with a bull bar on the front bumper, and drove to London, Ontario, 35 kilometres away. A little past 8:30 p.m., he proceeded down Hyde Park Road, a broad suburban avenue on the edge of the city. Arriving at the intersection with South Carriage Road, he accelerated and jumped the curb. Police allege that he then intentionally struck down five members of the Afzaal family, who were out for an after-dinner stroll not far from their home.

Four of them died: 44-year-old Madiha, who was working on a Ph.D. in environmental engineering; her 46-year-old husband, Salman, a physiotherapist; their 15-year-old daughter, Yumnah, a Grade 9 student; and her 74-year-old grandmother, Talat Afzaal, an artist and teacher. Madiha and Salman’s nine-year-old son was badly hurt. Now an orphan, he is living with extended family members.

While bystanders rushed to tend to the Afzaals, Veltman drove to Cherryhill Village Mall, seven kilometres away, where he stopped in a parking lot. The front of his truck was damaged, streaked with blood. He wore a helmet and body armour, and a T-shirt bearing what some witnesses described as a cross, though that hasn’t been confirmed. He spoke to a shocked taxi driver, who was parked in the lot as well. He reportedly told the driver to call police, and that he’d killed someone.

The driver said Veltman was laughing.

***

In London, Ali Chahbar is the kind of local character who seems to know everyone. He grew up in the city, the son of the first Muslim to serve on city council, and he loves his hometown. Today he’s a lawyer who works with the Thames Valley District School Board. When he first heard of the incident on Hyde Park Road, he thought it was probably a tragic accident, and imagined it might have been caused by a drunk driver. Within hours, though, a London police officer he’d known for years paid him a visit. When his friend arrived in his civvies, visibly distraught, Chahbar knew something worse had happened. The two men sat in Chahbar’s backyard together—his friend wanted to tell Chahbar what he knew, or at least as much as he was permitted to share.

“He said that as they were getting preliminary information, it looked like it might have been a targeted thing,” Chahbar recalls. “He said, ‘I can’t share much with you at this point, but there was a family, and it looks like they might have been targeted because of their identity.’ ”

The Afzaals are Muslim, with roots in Pakistan. Some women in the family typically wore hijabs, which the driver would have seen from inside his truck. The news hit Chahbar hard. He didn’t know the name of the family yet, but he knew they likely attended the same mosque he did and walked the same streets in the community where he grew up. And he was, of course, aware of the mass shootings that had struck mosques and synagogues in recent years in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, Quebec City and elsewhere. But this was different. This was in his town. “I didn’t think that these types of things happened in London,” he says. “I took some measure of comfort from the fact that they took place in other parts of the world, other parts of the country. You know, it’s London.”

When Chahbar’s friend told him the news, that the suspect was a local guy, born and raised nearby, it shattered his sense of his city. “It took some time,” he says, “to come to grips with the fact that it happened here.”

The Afzaal family’s nine-year-old son was the only survivor of the attack.

John Brennan and his wife, Charlene Pratt, heard the news the next day while listening to CBC Radio in their suburban Strathroy home. As the day went on, the news got worse. “You hear ‘four people,’ ” Brennan recalls. “And then the report clarifies a little bit more, you know, it’s a family. And then the next reporting cycle, suddenly it’s an Islamic family.”

When they heard Veltman’s name, it rang a bell. The Brennans are both retired, after long careers teaching at Strathroy District Collegiate Institute, a local high school. Brennan got out a yearbook. “Flip, flip, flip, and you go, ‘Oh my God, it’s Nathaniel Veltman.’ ” Brennan had coached Veltman on the cross-country running team, and taught both of his parents as well. After teaching 5,000 kids over 32 years, he had learned to spot troubled ones, but Veltman never registered. “No red flags,” he says.

As a student, Veltman had been easy to deal with, pleasant and friendly, and he seemed to enjoy the runs that Brennan organized in the woodlands around Strathroy. “The idea that a gentle, happy, 15-year-old boy who appears to be fine could morph in five years into an agitated, angry killer. This is where I start to wonder if there’s such a thing as an active force called evil in the universe.”

Brennan found himself asking a version of the same awful question that so many have asked, but which has remained unanswered since that truck mounted the curb and destroyed a family: could an apparently normal Canadian boy—who grew up with so many advantages in a prosperous, safe place—end up turning a truck into a weapon of mass murder?

The day after the incident, police laid four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. Within days, they also laid terrorism charges, which suggests the Crown believes he was motivated by hatred.

In the meantime, there’s a mountain of evidence in court files pertaining to Veltman’s past—much of which I’m unable to report directly because a judge has sealed it under a publication ban, intended to give Veltman the best possible chance at a fair trial. Veltman’s parents did not respond to interview requests, and his legal representatives declined comment. But the clues available to us, and the evidence I was able to gather during months of reporting in Strathroy and London, point to a combination of psychological struggles and family crisis—and a hateful ideology that may have offered a sense of meaning and direction to a young man more deeply disturbed than anyone around him realized.

***

Mark Veltman and Alysia Bisset were married in the Bethel Baptist Church in Strathroy in April of 1997. Bisset was 19; Veltman, 23. They bought a comfortable four-bedroom ranch house on the outskirts of town, down a lane set back from the road. Behind the house, on a half-acre lot bordering farm fields, there is today an above-ground pool, a basketball pad, a fire pit and a little red barn. Mark worked at Lambton College, in an administrative job in the information technology department, where, tax records show, he was earning $92,000 a year by 2017.

On December 20, 2000, Nathaniel Veltman was born, along with a twin sister. Mark and Alysia had four more children, one every two years, until 2010. People who knew Nathaniel as a child describe a sweet-natured boy who loved animals. Alysia homeschooled the kids in what was, by all accounts, a deeply devout household in a part of small-town southwestern Ontario sometimes described as a Canadian Bible belt.

The family attended the same Baptist church in Strathroy where Mark and Alysia had wed. According to tax records, Mark Veltman donated to several evangelical missions, to an anti-abortion group and to Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based fundamentalist Christian organization that advocates for socially conservative policies. He also donated to the Peoples Church of Sarnia-Lambton, a literalist congregation that believes the Bible is the unerring, verbatim word of God. (One of its recent pastors studied at Liberty University, the private U.S. evangelical university co-founded by conservative Christian icon Jerry Falwell.)

In September of 2016, after a lifetime of homeschooling, Nathaniel Veltman enrolled in Strathroy District Collegiate Institute for his last two years of high school. Students who knew him there say he was a quiet and agreeable kid, though he had a reputation for eccentricity. One student said he seemed closed off, keeping mostly to himself. A female classmate said there was something off about him, that he was odd. He appears to have been studious, graduating from high school with a scholarship intended to help deserving Strathroy students afford post-secondary education. But at home, things were going badly. Mark and Alysia separated in February of 2016, and three months after Veltman enrolled at Strathroy Collegiate, his mother filed for divorce.

There are 570 pages in the divorce file at the courthouse in London. A judge has ordered significant sections redacted in response to a motion from Mark Veltman, but the information that is accessible indicates that the family had long been dealing with strife and conflict. It shows growing discord, with Alysia on one side and her oldest son and his father on the other. In the divorce application, Alysia alleged that Mark’s infidelity had ended the marriage, and repeatedly complained that her husband was working to turn the children against her. In a separation agreement reached in March of 2016, she won sole custody of the six children, with only supervised access for Mark—which he didn’t honour, often arranging to see them alone.

Veltman’s alleged crime and victims fit a terrible pattern that has occurred over and over, in killings in Norway, New Zealand, Quebec City and Buffalo.

The file also contains complaints by Alysia that Mark often sent messages to the children, especially Nathaniel, blaming her for the breakdown of the marriage. He texted another child, “I’m sorry I can’t see you tonight. I am not feeling well. Being on the receiving end of your mother’s relentless mission to utterly destroy me has that effect.”

Mark sent angry messages to Alysia, calling her in one “the most wicked human being” he had ever known. According to his mother, Nathaniel became difficult and argumentative, complaining about the child support his father had to pay. At times, the file says, Alysia locked herself in her bedroom to avoid her son. Nathaniel complained that his mother should quit homeschooling the other children so she could get a job and stop using his father’s money. He began objecting to long-standing household rules, encouraged by his father.

Alysia and Mark disagreed on parenting matters as well. “The ridiculous restrictions that you want to impose on Nate I don’t agree with and you know I never did,” he wrote to her in August of 2016, predicting that her approach to raising the children would create “six bitter children,” and leave Nathaniel “emasculated.” Two days later, in a second email, he wrote: “Your [sic] going to have a disaster on your hands. Clearly my input is meaningless. You need help.”

With his father’s encouragement, and against his mother’s wishes, Nathaniel moved out on his own. The file says that in January of 2017, a month after his 16th birthday, he withdrew from parental control, which teenagers in Ontario are permitted to do when they reach that age.

The troubled loners who commit mass murder for ideological or religious reasons frequently have difficult family lives, says Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor of religion and political science at Queen’s University who specializes in terrorism and radicalization. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a radicalized case,” he says, “where there wasn’t some sort of family turmoil.”

Amarasingam suggests that the painful divorce, and the struggle between Veltman’s parents, may have created what is known as a “cognitive opening,” into which new ideas and new ways of thinking might make inroads. That can take the form of an ideology, or an online community that seems to offer support and understanding, especially during times of heightened crisis.

Veltman may have found just such a community online. During their investigation, police were looking for evidence of the installation and use of a specialized browser for accessing the dark web, where extremists share hateful messages in chat rooms that leave no electronic trail. A search warrant seeking access to his laptop and other devices said that they appeared to contain “hate-related material and [were] relevant to the listed offences.”

Amarasingam also speculates that Veltman was inspired by other mass killings, such as those committed by white supremacists in Norway in 2011, in Quebec City in 2017, in New Zealand in 2019, and in Buffalo in 2022. All followed a similar, terrible pattern, and most of the killers subscribed to the “great replacement” theory. These terrorists see themselves as soldiers in a war to defend white culture against an invasion of brown-skinned invaders, orchestrated by a Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy white communities.

So far, there is no clear indication that Veltman left a manifesto, as these killers sometimes do, but his alleged crime and victims otherwise fit a pattern that has recurred with depressing regularity: troubled young men, radicalized online, committing mass murders and leaving terrible suffering in their wake.

Thousands gather for a vigil at the London mosque the Afzaal family attended

***

In 2018, Veltman moved in with a friendin a basement apartment in Strathroy. By then, he was already working at the egg plant, mostly with other young men from the area.

His co-workers found him pleasant and helpful, always willing to finish others’ tasks so they could leave early. He made friends—after the attack, his co-workers tried to square their memories of a quirky but likable guy with the murderer he’s now alleged to be. Two employees, including one who was raised Muslim, told reporters that it must have been an accident, because Veltman never showed any sign of hatred. But once they started trading stories, a different picture took shape.

One person remembered him saying explicitly, viciously racist things about Black people, for instance. (The colleague says he replied with: “That’s really fucked up. Don’t say that, man.”) Veltman also talked about outlandish conspiracy theories, including the flat Earth theory, and the “lizard people” theory—an idea, often linked to anti-Semitism, that a group of reptilian humanoids is secretly controlling human affairs. He also often spoke about religion, and appeared to be struggling with his sexual desires. He would use his phone to look at pornography, become disgusted with himself and break the device. He lost several phones that way. “One time he actually tried to cut off his own testicles,” recalls a co-worker. “He had to go to the hospital.”

Veltman often joined other employees at a riverside pub for karaoke nights. Patrons remember him as shy, just another young guy drinking beer—but he would sometimes get extremely drunk. A friend recalls that one night he was “slamming drinks” before disappearing from the pub. The friend went outside to look for him but lost him in the rain. The next time the two men saw each other, Veltman said he had gone down to the trails along the Sydenham River. “He said he went in there,” says the friend, “and was fighting demons.”

Another night, Veltman drank too much and walked home. He later told a co-worker he was arrested for breaking into someone else’s house, thinking it was his own. In May of 2019, Strathroy police ticketed Veltman for public intoxication several blocks from his home, fining him $50. A police source says there were 13 “occurrences” mentioning Veltman in their files—minor incidents that didn’t result in police action. Things were about to get much worse.

***

That summer, Veltman moved out of the basement unit in Strathroy and rented a bachelor apartment in downtown London, near Covent Garden Market. In many ways it’s a charming neighbourhood, full of restaurants, pubs and shops, though nearby Dundas Street has a gritty edge, with open drug use and a large population of unhoused people frequenting nearby shelters and services. Veltman’s apartment was across the street from the downtown campus of Fanshawe College, where in September of 2018 he started studying architectural drafting.

Even between school and two jobs—one at the egg plant, the other a work placement at a local engineering company—Veltman found time to get involved in fringe political movements, such as anti-lockdown rallies. He volunteered for the Christian Heritage Party candidate in Elgin—Middlesex—London. Elections Canada records show he donated $20 to the campaign in October of 2019.

He’d called them out of the blue to volunteer, and another campaign volunteer, a farmer who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, had him over for dinner with his family. (“You could just tell he hadn’t had a home-cooked meal for a while.”)

The farmer, a devout Christian, could see that Veltman needed guidance, and they stayed in touch after the campaign. At some point after his divorce, Veltman’s father had left the Christian church, which pained Veltman. The farmer, whose faith is rock-solid, was there to help. Veltman considered becoming a Mormon, and several times attended a London evangelical church whose congregation is made up mostly of first-generation immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. He even exchanged text messages about scriptural matters with the Black pastor, who told me he had no idea that the young man harboured racist views.

As the pandemic continued, Veltman became much more isolated, the farmer says. He tried to arrange for the young man to live with a family he knew, but it didn’t work out. Veltman came over for dinner a few more times, and cancelled once, saying he was hungover. In November of 2020, Veltman wrote a long email to the farmer, detailing his psychological struggles.

“I have been blessed beyond belief, I have a place of my own, a car, a job to go back to, friends, school, and yet, I still have been losing my ability to even feel happy about life. I can never get enough of just laying in my bed … I feel so isolated from my family and my soul doesn’t even seem to understand the reason why I am on this earth. I feel full of resentment, anger, hatred, and rage against this world and some people. I got on my knees in the bathroom today and asked God to save me from myself … I told him that I knew my heart was filled with pride and asked him to take it away from me. Walking away I feel empowered and I feel like God is lifting me out of my mental torment. After praying I felt reminded that I was on this earth to serve God, and not myself.”

A friend recalls that one night he was “slamming drinks,” before disappearing from the pub. Veltman had gone down to the trails along the Sydenham River. “He said he went in there and was fighting demons.”

The farmer sent him emails encouraging him to listen to Christian music and establish better routines, although he doesn’t believe Veltman followed his advice. They planned to get together over Christmas that year, but Veltman cancelled because he was broke—he said his credit card was maxed out, and he couldn’t afford to buy windshield-washer fluid, so he couldn’t drive. In April, he dropped out of school. The next month, he bought a 2016 Ram from a dealership in London and had it fitted with a bull bar: a rigid barrier designed to push aside brush or animals, which also makes a vehicle more dangerous in a head-on collision, especially with pedestrians.

Veltman joked that he’d bought the bar to “ram the cops.” One of his friends chalked it up as one of Veltman’s strange jokes, but also wondered how he’d come up with the money for such an expensive truck. Used Rams of that vintage sell for $15,000 to $45,000. Given that Veltman had recently been too broke to buy windshield-washer fluid, it’s hard to imagine how he qualified for a big loan. One co-worker wonders if someone he met online helped.

Search warrants in Veltman’s case include documents pertaining to the purchase of the truck. Michael Arntfield, a University of Western Ontario criminology professor and former London police officer, suggests the purchase may well speak to preplanning, and the Crown will likely allege that Veltman acquired the large vehicle for the purposes of maximizing the casualties. “The defence is going to say he’s a blue-collar guy who wants a truck,” says Arntfield. “But clearly you can see the prosecution forming the case that he acquired this as a weapon.”

***

A few days after the Afzaals were struck down, Ali Chahbar—the lawyer with the love for all things London—got a call from the principal at Oakridge Secondary School, where 15-year-old Yumnah, the youngest of the slain Afzaals, had been attending Grade 9. At the beginning of the year, every student in her grade had been assigned to write a letter to their future selves outlining their aspirations. The principal had Yumnah’s handwritten letter, and he didn’t know what to do with it.

“You need a reservoir of hate,” says one of the Afzaals’ relatives. “You need to have a mode of transmission, and most times now it’s the internet. And you need to have a vulnerable individual. You need all three to exist before someone actually commits a crime.”

“Mom’s gone. Dad’s gone. Grandma’s gone,” the principal said to Chahbar. He hoped that because Chahbar was so well connected in the city, particularly in the Muslim community, he may be able to find a home for the letter. “I have this thing I think is of value,” he said. “I think it’s a keepsake, and you’re the only person I know who might have a potential connection to somebody.” Chahbar agreed to see if he could get the letter to the family. “It fucking wrecked me, man,” he says of its contents. “This girl in there, she was just snuffed out.”

The Afzaal family’s nine-year-old son was the only survivor of the attack, which claimed the lives of Yumnah, Madiha, Talat and Salman

Chahbar reached out to community members, who found names and addresses of surviving relatives—one of whom lived in the same neighbourhood as him. Chahbar walked down the street, letter in hand, and knocked on the door. Yumnah’s great-aunt answered. Chahbar explained who he was and what he was doing. He handed her the letter and she read it on the spot. The woman, whose two eldest children were close to Yumnah, was overcome; she couldn’t finish the letter until later, when her family had gathered with her. This is what it said:

“Dear me, 

Coming into high school, there was a lot that I was expecting. There was also so much I was completely unsure about. I knew which classes I had, but I didn’t know with whom. I knew COVID-19 was going to change things, but I didn’t know how.”

As she got to know her school, however, she became more confident: “I’ve been successful in working my way towards the goals that I have set for myself. I would describe myself as an ambitious person, so the eagerness and dedication I put into my goals is what drives me to reach them. Although it sounds heavily generic, I have learned that there isn’t anything that isn’t within our grasp.”

She describes her passion for art, her pleasure in painting a mural in elementary school, her love of R&B and hip hop, and her favourite classes (English and history). And she spoke of her devotion to family.

“I would describe myself as an introverted person that has a small circle. My family consists of me, my brother and my parents. I’m close with my cousins, too, and I enjoy getting on their nerves and hanging out with them. Overall, I’m someone that values people, their time and the things I’m passionate about.”

Yumnah’s great-uncle, a London doctor who asked us not to use his name out of concern for his safety, says the letter from Yumnah is “very precious to us.” He and Yumnah’s great-aunt keep it in a binder with her artwork, each page covered in plastic film. They treasure their memories of the optimistic, hopeful, energetic girl who has been taken from them.

In Islam, the formal grieving period is three days. “But you can grieve your whole life,” says Yumnah’s great-uncle. “And we will.”

***

In the London courthouse, there are hundreds of pages of search warrantsfrom the London Police Service’s investigation into Veltman, including documents for warrants to search his truck, apartment and electronic devices.

There is nothing in the file to definitively indicate that Veltman had the active assistance of far-right groups, or anyone else. But as the terror charges against him indicate, police believe he was motivated by hate, given his suspected activity on the dark web and other material found on his laptop.

After the attack, Veltman was locked up in London’s Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre, where he’s been ever since, and where he turned 21 last December. It is a 450-bed maximum-security jail, and a rough place—there have been 19 inmate deaths there since 2009. Veltman has appeared at several hearings by video linkup from jail, looking young and frail in an orange prison-issued T-shirt and blue face mask.

When Veltman stands trial, he will be represented by Christopher Hicks, a veteran Toronto defence attorney who has handled many high-profile criminal cases, representing bikers and killers. He often does legal analysis on CTV News, breaking down arguments in a concise, matter-of-fact manner, and has argued more than a dozen times before the Supreme Court of Canada. In June, Hicks successfully brought a motion seeking a change of venue, convincing Superior Court Justice Renee Pomerance that Veltman should be tried outside of London. The reasons for the decision are under a publication ban, but such rulings are sometimes made when intense media coverage of a crime, or local reputation, could make it hard for a suspect to get a fair trial.

Veltman made a virtual court appearance in October of 2021, as Justice of the Peace Robert Seneshen (top left) and lawyer Alayna Jay look on. (Sketch courtesy of Alexandra Newbould/The Canadian Press)

If Hicks seeks a not-guilty plea on the basis that Veltman was mentally ill, he will have to convince Justice Pomerance that the young man didn’t understand his actions. Defence lawyers for the man who drove a rented van onto a Toronto sidewalk in 2018, killing 11 people (including one who died in 2021, after more than three years in hospital), tried a similar argument, which was rejected by the judge in that case.

Michael Spratt is an Ottawa defence lawyer, a criminal law specialist and a frequent legal commentator (he is not involved in this case). “Running that sort of defence can be an uphill battle for an accused,” says Spratt. “It’s Hicks’s onus to show that Veltman suffered from a psychiatric illness that prevented him from understanding the nature and consequences of actions. That he was not able, essentially, to tell right from wrong.”

***

The day after the attack, Ali Chahbar went to the place where the Ram with the bull bar struck the Afzaal family. Londoners had gathered, many bearing flowers to express their sorrow. Chahbar recalls a white woman, probably in her 60s, who came with a bouquet. “She was crying and she started to apologize to me,” he says. “And before I could even say something to her, another random Londoner who was at the scene gave her a hug, and he started to cry as well. And so we have three strangers on the corner.” Chahbar chokes up a year later as he recalls the scene.

Although Londoners rallied immediately and forcefully around Muslims in the community, the attack on the Afzaals has made many fearful. When Chahbar enters his mosque to worship on Fridays, the thought of something terrible happening sometimes enters his mind. He thinks about the possibility of being carried out on a stretcher. Yet he doesn’t stay away. “It’s almost an act of defiance now to say, ‘You’re not going to scare us. If your objective, Veltman, was to instill fear in the hearts and minds of the community, you failed miserably.’ ”

Mourners pray during the public funeral for the Afzaal family in June of 2021

In fact, he says, the attack has had the opposite effect—it’s brought people together. On the anniversary of the killing, thousands of Londoners gathered at the sports field next to the school that Yumnah attended. Her cousin spoke, and a friend, as did religious leaders from many faiths, plus Mayor Ed Holder and Justin Trudeau, who later walked with young Muslims at the head of a march opposing Islamophobia.

Relatives of the Afzaals have tried to stay out of the public eye, though they have supported scholarships in Madiha and Salman’s names, and there are plans in the works for one to honour Talat, who was a talented artist.

Yumnah’s great-aunt, who received the letter from Ali Chahbar, says the Afzaals were extremely private, and their relatives have tried to respect that privacy even now. “After the attack, people didn’t know their names,” she says. “But when they saw the pictures, they said, ‘I know that person, I had met them at the mosque,’ or ‘he had helped me with such and such.’”

Shaukat Rizvi, a relative of the Afzaals, said the killing has deepened the understanding between different communities. But he also suspects that anti-Muslim feeling may be growing in the area as the Muslim population grows. London police reported a recent increase in hate crimes in 2021, with Muslims among the most targeted groups.

Strathroy still looks much like the place it was when the Veltmans got married, and like countless other small Canadian communities. It has a small, historic downtown, full of handsome brick buildings that date from the era when the railway was the main source of economic activity. There’s a newer commercial area on the outskirts, packed with chain restaurants and big-box stores.

But like the larger city to the east, its population is changing. Long dominated by white English Canadians, Strathroy experienced a postwar wave of Dutch immigration, and a later wave of Portuguese immigration. Today, its proximity to London is driving more rapid population growth, with thousands of new residents in the past several years. Among them is a small but growing Muslim community.

Brennan, who coached Veltman in high school and sits on the Strathroy-Caradoc municipal council, says most people in town are welcoming—although there have always been those who resist change. “People feel threatened,” he says. “We’re talking about a very small minority of people, but that’s all it takes. It only takes one person out of a hundred.”

Yumnah’s great-uncle agrees. “You just need to find the most vulnerable individual,” he says. “The weakest link is going to go down a rabbit hole. It just takes one.” A doctor by profession, he sees this kind of crime as a public-health problem that can only be tackled systemically, as if stamping out a virus. “To do something like this, you need to have a reservoir of hate,” he says. “You need to have a mode of transmission, and most times now it’s the internet. And you need to have a vulnerable individual. You need all three to exist before someone commits a crime.”

The farmer who tried to help Veltman thinks about it in more personal terms—he wishes he had been there, and is haunted by what-ifs. “I don’t know if I would’ve had the courage to do it,” he says. “But I wish I could have stepped in front of the Afzaal family. Because that might have stopped him. Because he probably wouldn’t have run me over. That’s still in my mind.”

This article appears in print in the November 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post An Act of Evil appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In the 1970s, my dad, Jean Claude Garofoli, was a local celebrity businessman in Hamilton, Ontario. He had long, black, permed hair, and while the other dads wore brown suits and striped ties, mine rocked bell-bottom jeans and T-shirts and rode a motorcycle. He was an alchemist who could turn nothing into something with clever storytelling and slick salesmanship. His personality was captivating, like Kevin Kline meets Eugene Levy.

Dad owned a shopping plaza with a car dealership and a furniture store, where he financed colour televisions, stereo equipment and appliances with 10 cents down. This was unheard of at the time. Somewhere along the way, he became a gemologist, selling jewellery for cash as a side hustle. He had a certificate from the Gemological Institute of America on the wall behind his desk.

He went by the moniker “Funky Garfunkle” in his advertising campaigns. In addition to running his businesses, he worked as a concert promoter. He brought acts like Pink Floyd, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka and Bob Hope to town. He was the only person in the area to drive a Rolls-Royce, and famous people often stopped by our house.

I grew up with my parents, my older sister and my older brother in the picturesque town of Grimsby, Ontario, just east of Hamilton. I thought we were a nice, normal family: my mom worked at the furniture store, and her stern Ukrainian mother, who we called Baba, commanded us like an army general. I didn’t know the difference between a Rolls-Royce and an Oldsmobile. Our home was filled with museum pieces—shrunken heads and Egyptian artifacts. My dad once casually noted, “If you need to hide money, put it in art, jewels or antiques. Cops don’t know the difference between a child’s finger painting and a Van Gogh. You can cross the border with a mil in jewels. Just wear them on your neck.” My schoolmates’ fathers clock-punched at steel mills or worked in offices. Mine came and went with the predictability of a sycamore seed helicoptering in the wind.

Garofoli was the first person in their hometown of Grimsby, Ontario, to drive a Rolls-Royce.

Most of my early memories of Dad are of watching him cook dinner on Sundays. While other families ate ham or roast beef, he cooked seafood and made homemade pasta. He had a twisted sense of humour: once, he put a live lobster in my bed. (I don’t eat seafood to this day.) Still, I learned that dinnertime was a golden opportunity to snag Dad’s attention. “I’m going to be a writer and a pilot someday,” I told him. “You’re not smart enough to make money writing, and girls don’t fly planes,” he replied, a cigarette hanging from his mouth as he stirred a pot of his famous Italian sauce. “Your goals are too lofty—just marry rich.” I knew one day I would prove him wrong.

I was a gawky introvert who often ran away from school to read books in the town library. On my walks home from school, I regularly passed a small log house that I’d fondly nicknamed the Writer’s Cabin. I dreamed of living there one day. I planned to fly commercial jets to exotic places and write about my adventures in novels. My older brother, Brad, was my only ally. He and I would disappear on epic adventures, riding our bikes 44 kilometres round-trip to Balls Falls. We’d sustain ourselves with Popsicles and chocolate bars along the way, paid for with silver dollars we’d lifted from Baba’s security box. Brad and I understood each other. We both had undiagnosed learning disabilities, and we never felt stupid in each other’s company, as we did with the rest of the world.

By the time I was 12, my father was running for the position of city controller on Hamilton’s city council, claiming that he wanted to “clean up” the city’s mass corruption. He believed the RCMP and Hamilton Police were targeting him for this, and that the lead detective, Ken Robertson, was jealous of his success.

The tension came to a head in 1977. One day, when I was 12, I stepped off my school bus in Grimsby for the last time. When I approached our home, I saw police officers and movers hauling furniture onto a truck. My mother and Baba stood on the lawn next to a few suitcases and our toy poodle, Bijou. “Get in the car. We’re taking a trip,” my mom said. We quickly piled into Baba’s brown Pontiac LeMans and headed to the U.S. border. My mom said my father and brother were at my aunt’s, and my sister was staying at boarding school. I didn’t ask any questions.

There’s only one problem with this indelible memory. It probably never happened. Not the way I remember it. Everyone I’ve spoken to—my family, my dad’s friends—remembers the story differently. Throughout my life, I hung my childhood history on this pivotal, life-changing moment like an IV bag on a coma patient. I would find out decades later that the film in my head was some kind of trauma stew—bits of truth melded with fiction, fused by the repeated fallout of my father’s bad decisions.

***

That summer, my mom, Baba, and I lived in a Travelodge motel near Fort Lauderdale. Our room smelled like mildew, commercial cleanser and stale cigarette smoke. I entertained myself with a skateboard we found at a yard sale.

By fall, my father showed up and moved us to a beautiful home across the street from the beach. They registered me at a small private school. My sister was still in boarding school, and Brad had dropped out of high school and was working as a roadie for a travelling carnival in Canada.

When I was 13, he quit the carnival and arrived in Florida. He had sprouted more than two feet, and our three-year age gap seemed much wider. I was old enough to start paying attention to the grown-ups in my life and began twigging onto the fact that my dad had one too many hush-hush meetings. The idea that we were a normal family was slipping away like a wet fish.

The author (bottom right) grew up with her parents, siblings and grand-mother.

My dad was an entrepreneur before anyone knew what that meant. He claimed he could set up a business in any city with $50, a phone and a classified ad, and he was right. “America’s where it’s at, man. Those socialist Canadians are taxing businesses to death.” He was always an early adopter. One day, he came home with a Commodore 64, the world’s first home computer. “This is the future,” he said. “Wait and see. Soon there will be one of these in every home. People will shop on it, date on it and work from home on it.” He started a new furniture business in Fort Lauderdale called Model Home Furniture. After spotting a hole in the marine market, he bought my brother scuba gear, then set him up in a business servicing the bottoms of boats. Brad took to diving like a dolphin to a bucket of minnows.

By the time I was in high school, I’d developed meaningful friendships and settled into a routine. My sister was enrolled in law school, and she and my brother lived in a condo they purchased together. Father and son spent much time at marinas and hung out on gleaming yachts with high-flyers like oil tycoons, art dealers and sheiks. Occasionally, I’d tag along while they drank martinis and smoked Cubans.

Dad began to offer private jewellery showings to his new friends. Sometimes he’d take me to Miami to see where he did business. We’d walk the streets with a brown paper lunch bag filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewels, stopping in at the International Building. He’d always treat me to a Cuban coffee and a guava pastry, then buy a sandwich to give to a homeless person. These were the rare moments I felt a connection to my dad, where snippets of humanity peeked through his shady varnish.

Somewhere, deep down, I knew something suspicious was going on. Our gated neighbourhood had 24-hour security and a guard house, and yet I found handguns strategically placed in planters in every room of our house. Dad had a man purse, fat with hundred-dollar bills, and he filled the garage with antique sports cars. As he carelessly built his house of cards, my adolescent mind began to puzzle at the abnormality of it all. A parade of men would come and go from our house at all hours. Dad had me call them all “uncle.” “Business associates. Don’t worry about it,” he’d tell my mom, who was working at a medical office. She had no idea he was getting up to anything illegal.

Sometimes my dad would take me to Miami. We would walk the streets with a brown paper lunch bag filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewels.

One day, my dad asked me to meet a client on Las Olas Boulevard to exchange a diamond for a $10,000 cash payment. I had no idea why he was sending me on the errand, but when I arrived at the appointed spot, the man who climbed into my car pulled out a gun and took the diamond from me.

When I got home, I screamed at my father, demanding to know why he’d put me in danger. At that moment, he was laying a record of one of his favourite opera arias on the turntable. He turned to me and said, “If you don’t like living under my roof, then you can get the fuck out.”

So I did. I was only in Grade 10, but I had a car and a waitress job at a diner. I dropped out of school and took a second job in a jewellery kiosk at the mall, and I rented a room in my co-worker’s apartment for $150 a month. After a few months, my dad sent my brother to talk me into coming home. I was furious he was siding with our father. I yelled, “If you aren’t going to support me, you can go fuck yourself,” and slammed the door in his face.

That night, at 4 a.m., I was roused by fists pounding on my apartment door. I looked through the peephole and saw my father, sheet white and shaking. “Get in the car,” he said. “Your brother’s been in an accident.”

Garofoli swimming with his son Brad.

Brad had borrowed my dad’s Mercedes convertible to go out on a date. On the way home, someone ran a red light, pinning the car against a transport truck in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts where I used to work. His head had slammed against the windshield.

In the ICU, Brad looked nothing like himself, his head wrapped in bandages and his face swollen. He wasn’t my brother. By the time the on-call neurologist got to the hospital, it was too late to save my brother from the swelling in his brain. He was 19 when he died.

I moved back home and lived in a haze of confusion for the next nine months. My mom and dad rarely left their bed. One day, someone robbed our home and stole my mom and brother’s jewellery collections, including a couple of Rolexes. And so I launched my own investigation. We had deadbolts on our doors and 24-hour security with a guard: I suspected it must have been one of my dad’s sketchy contacts taking advantage of my parents’ grief.

I asked to see the visitor logs and found out that one of my father’s associates had visited when we were out of the house. I knew where he lived and took one of my dad’s guns to confront him. When I pulled up and pointed the gun at him, he was getting into his car. “I know it was you. I want everything back, or I’ll shoot you.” He sped off.

When I got home, my father was furious. He took the gun out of my purse and screamed, “Are you fucking crazy?” I told him to call the police on the guy, but he insisted his friend was innocent. I later discovered that my father was behind the ordeal. He was tight on cash because he hadn’t worked since Brad died and staged the robbery to make a claim against his homeowner’s insurance.

Desperate to escape my toxic home life, I joined the U.S. Coast Guard and devote my life to chasing drug runners and rescuing people at sea. In my third year with the Coast Guard, I met and married a Special Forces soldier. My parents had moved back home to Canada. Then I received a phone call from my dad. “My life is in danger. I need your help. Some bad people are after me. Don’t tell anyone I called. Not even your mother.”

My husband and I left the Coast Guard base in Miami in a rental car and drove non-stop to meet my dad in Montreal. His essence looked like it had been sucked away by vampires. “You’re going to take me to the border and drop me off, and I’ll meet you on the other side tomorrow morning.” We left him in the woods, then found a room in a Vermont inn.

Garofoli pictured in Canada, right before his arrest.

We awoke to a SWAT team surrounding our hotel. They seized our rental car, but by some dumb luck, the fellow interrogating my husband used to be in his military unit. They shared a brotherly bond and, as a result, he released us.

After returning to my base, I learned from my mother that Dad had absconded after being charged in an organized crime bust. Specifically, for conspiracy to import three kilos of cocaine from Florida to Canada. The evidence against him was derived from wiretaps and involved five other men, one of whom was a member of the Hamilton branch of the Buffalo mafia. My parents did a masterful job of keeping his arrest from me. The RCMP extradited Dad to Canada, and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he served at Millhaven Institution near Kingston, Ontario. At long last, all the bits and pieces of my dad’s shadowy existence began to line up.

***

Over the next few years, my sister stayed in the U.S. My mom remained loyal to my father throughout his time in prison. Meanwhile, I was forced to rebuild my life. In 1987, I was called into my commander’s office and given an honourable discharge. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “How a Canadian managed to enlist is beyond me, but it must have been a clerical mistake.” I shrugged it off as sloppy paperwork.

My then-husband and I moved back to Canada and eventually landed in London, Ontario. When we divorced in 2001, I found myself with two young daughters, a shaggy dog, an outdated resumé and $20 to my name. I took a job selling cars to put food on the table. It was still a male-dominated, shark-infested industry, but there was good money to be made, and soon I was earning more than $120,000 each year. Salesmanship was a valuable skill I learned from watching dear old Dad.

My father was released on early parole in 1992 and immediately started a new business. He sold computer systems, financed on low monthly payments. As per his usual method of operation, he also started brokering gems again. Within a few years, he began an affair, and Mom finally left him. He and I were estranged for a long while, but reunited a few years before he died of cancer in 2013.

In the meantime, I moved to northern Ontario and got a job at a boat and ATV dealership. I met my second husband after I hitched a ride on his floatplane to Killarney Provincial Park for a solo hiking trip. We moved to a farm on a lake, and I started a business in my laundry room, making natural care products. I had spent five years scaling my company, Walton Wood Farm, even landing a stint on Dragon’s Den. Running an international company was far more complex than selling cars on 100 per cent commission. But I soon realized that car sales training was the key to my success. I applied everything I learned at wholesale trade shows and worked the circuit across the U.S. and Canada twice a year.

In 2019, my mom dropped in for a visit and unloaded a trunk full of treasures into my foyer. She heaved a giant binder onto my hall table. “What’s that?” I asked. “Oh, it’s the manuscript your dad wrote in prison,” she said as plainly as “pass the salt.” Only the salt, in this case, was 550 pages of 30-year-old typed sheets.

I did the only thing you can do when receiving an unwanted gift from beyond the grave: I shoved the manuscript into my hat and mitts drawer, where it lay dormant for the next five months. It surfaced again when the first sugary snowflakes sifted down onto our farm fields and I needed a hat and mitts. “Oh, hello there, dead Father,” I said.

I cracked open the autobiography and broke down into a blubbering mess upon reading the dedication.

To Bradley,
May you find peace. There is none here.
Love, Dad.

With all the bravery I could muster, I gathered my broken self and curled into a chair with the binder, an emotional support blankie and a cup of tea. The introduction began: “He had it all—a loving family. Influential friends. His business interests were extensive. One day, he decided to run for political office in his hometown…That brought him to an underworld few knew existed. A dirty world run by legitimate agencies, the CIA, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Naturalization Services, and more. He learned the U.S. and Canada were full of snitches doing these agencies’ dirty business on a clean front.”

Wait, what?

***

After her father’s death, the author discovered a 550-page manuscript confessing his many years of covert criminal activity. (Photo by Markian Lozowchuk).

I learned a lot about my dad by reading his manuscript. For example, that he spent his elementary school years with his sidekick and brother—my Uncle Tony—gambling on street corners to earn money for food. In 1958, when my dad was 18, his family arrived in Hamilton.

I found out what happened to my uncle, too. My parents always told me Uncle Tony died in his sleep of unknown causes when he was 32. But in the book, Dad confessed he’d fired Tony from his car lot, and he believed his brother had killed himself. My father never forgave himself.

I also learned about how he first got involved with drug trafficking. On one hand, he claimed the concert-promoting culture at Hamilton Place was an excruciating game of bribes and interference by management, unions and politicians. Yet he admits he also learned how to get cocaine for Pink Floyd, who he says refused to perform without the drug.

His decision to run for city controller in Hamilton was his downfall. He lost to the incumbent, who he says tried to bribe him to drop his candidacy. At this point, the running narrative in my father’s story was that of an honest businessman trying to right the wrongs of corrupt politicians and police. “He was framed for fraud,” he wrote about himself in the third person.

I could see the manuscript was an inky smudge of truth and lies. If I was going to get close to the truth, I’d have to deconstruct my memories against Dad’s version of events and hunt down as many of the people from our lives as I could find.

***

I decided to turn the project into a podcast, which I called Rewriting Dad. I enlisted the help of a business acquaintance, a writer and actor named Meg Murphy. She quickly tracked down Ken Robertson, the detective who had led the charge against my dad. Robertson’s name had regularly come up in our home, even as I held my father’s hand on his deathbed. Dad blamed all his troubles on him. “Robertson is the devil himself,” he said. Robertson had retired as Hamilton’s police chief in 2003. He had moved to a small town in Ontario and was enjoying life as a father and grandfather. He responded to my email: “Jean Claude Garofoli? Yes, I remember.” Then he allowed me to phone him.

He was very kind, and at first he said he barely remembered the guy. But as he kept talking, it seemed he knew a lot more than he thought he did. Robertson said that in 1976, he was assigned to investigate a case involving Samsung, a major supplier to Dad’s furniture store. They claimed they weren’t getting paid, and initially, Robertson thought it was theft by conversion. They claimed they were owed around $400,000.

After taking a closer look and wondering what my dad did with all the money, he witnessed the members of Hamilton mafia families, the Luppinos and Musitanos, showing up at the store. At the time, the police were trying to get to the bottom of the so-called “bakery bombings,” a series of attacks on Italian bakeries by the Musitano family. The bombings instilled fear in the community, helping the Musitanos extort protection money from small business owners like my father. The Samsung investigation at my dad’s store offered the cops an opportunity. It became a springboard to examine the Luppino and Musitano crime families, and Hamilton city council approved its first-ever organized crime Joint Task Force, with Robertson as administrator. With evidence from this Joint Task Force case, Tony Musitano, the boss of the family, was convicted of conspiracy to possess explosive substances with intent to cause explosions. Pat, Tony’s nephew, took over the family in 1992. Their era of dominance ended in July of 2020, when he was gunned down at midday at a Burlington strip mall.

Dad absconded after being charged with conspiracy to import three kilos of cocaine from Florida into Canada.

Through my conversations with Robertson, I learned that when we fled for Florida, my dad was facing fraud charges for the Samsung conspiracy, though they were dismissed a few years later. Robertson told me that my dad’s connections to organized crime and illegally living in Florida likely made him vulnerable and ripe to recruit as an informant. Dad claims he was recruited to work with the Montreal branch of the RCMP, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services, the CIA, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency. He did not want to return to Canada. Jail was certainly not an option.

In his book, he says the feds used his boat business to suss out drug runners, who were all over marinas back then. Another assignment, he writes, was to get intel on a well-known Montreal criminal who kept an 80-foot yacht on the New River. Dad took my brother and me along for a viewing of the yacht, pretending to be interested in buying it. My brother and I were supposed to distract the owner with questions out on the deck as my dad had a look at the interior. He says he stole some of the notes out of the garbage and managed to grab the fella’s Rolodex, which he turned in to the police.

Thanks to his jewellery background, he writes, his role expanded to fencing jewels acquired by foreign governments to fund the Contras, the rebel groups fighting the Nicaraguan government. He says the agencies also had him buying and selling weapons. Those trips Dad and I took to the International Building in Miami? Apparently, that’s where he would pick up illegally smuggled jewels and drop off cash. “I sold arms to the U.S. government. Arms that would be used to kill people in some foreign country,” he writes. “I did undercover work for surreptitious agencies. I sold jewellery belonging to the people of South and Central America that their government stole to raise money so they could undermine and destabilize their systems,” my dad writes in his book.

Around the same time, I learned, one of my dad’s friends got me into the Coast Guard illegally. It was a dream for me to enlist, and he knew his friend could get me in under the radar as a favour. After I read this, I went rifling through my mom’s treasure trove for evidence. I found my recruitment papers, which his friend had signed. It all made sense—he and my recruiter came to my bon voyage dinner. Recruiters didn’t go to family dinners with their newbies.

According to a friend, after Brad died and when I was in the Coast Guard, Dad’s business model shifted to much darker activities, which led to his downfall. I think he stopped caring altogether. There was nothing to live for. When his private jewellery clients would pay cash for their purchase, he would note the location of the safe. A few weeks later, he’d send two thugs dressed as cops to rob them at gunpoint. One of those fake cops was a friend of my dad’s, who I learned had staged the robbery of our home—when Brad’s jewellery was stolen—so my dad could collect the insurance.

In his book, my dad insists he was innocent of the armed robbery scheme, but Florida law enforcement almost caught up with him. To escape them he fled out the back door. That’s how he and my mom ended up back in Canada.

Jean Claude Garofoli and his wife in Florida.

As soon as they arrived in Hamilton, the RCMP wiretapped our home, investigating him as part of a conspiracy to traffic cocaine with members of the mafia. When they stormed into their bedroom to make the arrest, my long-suffering mother was in bed with a bad back and couldn’t even get up.

When my father later appealed his conviction and 15-year sentence, his lawyers applied to challenge the admissability of the wiretapping evidence, setting a precedent now known as a Garofoli Application, which is still used today, mostly in terrorism and money laundering cases. A Garofoli Application is a motion to exclude intercepted communications based on a client’s Charter rights, and to ensure the evidence was obtained legally.

While interviewing my father’s friends, lawyers, and acquaintances, the most shocking thing I heard was from a close friend of my dad. It was about my brother, Brad. “Your dad told me it wasn’t an accident,” my friend told me, though he didn’t know any more than that. The idea that Brad’s death might have been a revenge murder was a battering ram to my heart.

As I investigated my dad, I was struck by the notion that he could have easily been successful without committing crimes, but he was drawn to the underworld like a hermit crab to a shell. It was also evident that working the system and being “connected” in his community of immigrants was a badge of honour—the “I got a guy” culture. My dad was “the guy.”

Most of all, I was surprised by how much I was like my father—minus the criminal activity. I was rewriting Dad, and he was rewriting me. We both lay awake many nights, worried about cash flow, supply chain issues, staffing, sales and taxes. We never confided in anyone. We both always thought we could handle things ourselves. It was consoling to know Dad went through precisely the same things I did.

Both of us were prone to chase the next shiny thing, but I learned restraint from my dad’s lack of discipline and inability to control his impulses. I learned to cage those squirrels, set a course and stay true to it.

Like my dad, I could find holes in the market and fill them. This was my inheritance. When I started a personal care company, I targeted the gift market. The world was full of lavender and vanilla, but I knew people would pay for story over utility. I wrote funny copy on the packaging: Winter’s a B*tch, Week from Hell, and Better B’ver were some of my product names. My collections became the perfect, practical gift.

Nearly everyone I interviewed deeply missed my father. He inspired and pushed them to seize the day, pursue their dreams and live fully. To eat well, drink well and find laughter in the mundane. My dad was a wine enthusiast, and when he died, we placed his ashes in a crate that had contained his favourite vintage, which he sipped as he took his last breath—a $5,000 bottle of 1989 Petrus.

I’ve learned much about my memories and how flawed they can be. Time erodes the truth of what we experience and replaces it with an imperfect web of stories that we may never fully untangle.

Today, I am both a pilot and a writer, despite what my father said. If he were alive today to read this article, I know he wouldn’t say, “Well done.” His reaction would be, “Where’s my cut?”

This article appears in print in the October 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post My father was a criminal. Here’s how I found out. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Just before midnight on March 1, 2020, with a steady rain pit-patting onto Vancouver Harbour, the SeaBus was making one of its final runs of the day to the North Shore when the captain noticed a small vessel directly ahead. Roughly eight metres long with an aluminum hull, it was a style of boat typically used by commercial crab fishermen—odd, because the busy harbour is off limits to fishing. The boat’s lights were off, but a few people could be seen milling around on its deck. The SeaBus captain reported this suspicious traffic to the Coast Guard.

On a Coast Guard patrol ship in nearby English Bay, Leslie Sanderson was awoken and briefed about a boat that might be fishing where it shouldn’t be. Sanderson, a field supervisor at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, or DFO, immediately had a pretty good idea who the culprit was. Almost any DFO officer would have guessed the same name. So he and three officers rushed to one of their high-speed Zodiacs, fired up its twin outboards and whipped under the Lions Gate Bridge to start the hunt.

Through binoculars, a crew member quickly spied the suspect vessel, which was lit only by headlamps worn by the shadowy figures on board. The boat was listing slightly, with a trap-hauling line extending into the water. The patrol vessel edged up to within a few boat lengths, then switched on its blue emergency strobe. The fishing boat’s operator quickly grabbed his wheel and sped away.

The patrol boat gave chase at up to 40 knots, or 75 kilometres per hour—absurdly fast for the middle of the night in a crowded waterway. The fleeing boat made erratic turns, veering perilously close to an anchored freighter. One of the men on board could be seen clutching a jerry can, frantically refuelling as the boat zigzagged through the harbour. But a standard fishing craft can’t outrun a DFO Zodiac. The crab boat gave up, pulling up at North Vancouver’s Lonsdale Quay. Just before Sanderson stepped aboard, the skipper tossed his mobile phone into the water.

Strewn about the deck were traps containing about 250 Dungeness crabs, one of the most lucrative products in B.C. salt water. It was a haul worth several thousand dollars. Sanderson quickly identified the skipper, wrestled him to the deck, yanked off the man’s heavy fisherman’s rubber gloves and handcuffed him. The DFO had caught Scott Steer. Again.

***

Every year, officers in the DFO’s Pacific region collar a handful of serious rulebreakers, some more brazen than others. Scott Steer is in a class of his own, the most prolific poacher on the West Coast. He’s been busted for illegally catching just about every type of fish in the north Pacific: halibut, ling cod, sablefish, crab, prawns and more, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of quality catch over the years. He has been fined repeatedly, and when that didn’t work, the courts began throwing him in jail, while simultaneously slapping him with an escalating series of fishing prohibitions. When Sanderson’s crew nabbed him that night in Vancouver, Steer was already banned from so much as setting foot in a fishing boat until 2038.

Steer, who is 44, stands a sturdy six feet, with greying stubble and weather lines around his blue eyes. He’s combined a lifetime’s worth of fishing know-how with the ability to spin a good tale. He is notorious for persuading those around him to give him what he wants—a loan he might not pay back, or a boat he can borrow for a poaching mission.

Steer has sustained his pattern of deceit for well over a decade. Though he is white, he has made use of special Indigenous fishing rights, and is even alleged to have posed as a First Nations member to access funds set aside for Indigenous fishermen. Steer did not respond to repeated interview requests placed with his lawyer and his wife, but people in the fishing world are astonished that he never went legit after so many fines, boat seizures and escalating penalties.

The DFO officers whom Steer deplores, meanwhile, keep hoping they’ve ended the game of cat-and-mouse-and-court-order that has defined their enforcement efforts against him. And yet they worry he has learned from his arrests and is getting better at evading capture.

Scott Stanley Matthew Steer appears to have come by his dishonest streak honestly. His father, Stan Steer, is a commercial fisherman based at a small Fraser River inlet called Annieville Slough, not far from the family’s home in Delta. Like Scott, the elder Steer is notorious among West Coast fishermen and Fisheries officers: he has a lengthy record of Fisheries Act charges and convictions up and down the coast. In 2010, for example, Stan went out with his boat, the Steer Clear, to lay crab traps in McIntyre Bay, on the northeast tip of Haida Gwaii, a day before crab season officially opened. Authorities confiscated 153 traps and returned 1,854 live crabs to the ocean. A judge fined him $20,000. Then, over 18 days in 2015, he was caught three times trying to trap prawns using a boat owned by a B.C. First Nation, yet couldn’t show authorities documents proving he had rights to use the nation’s Indigenous fishing licence.

Stan began taking his son out on fishing trips around the time Scott was six, during spring and summer breaks, and the younger Steer grew up around the wild-and-woolly skippers and deckhands Stan would hire. By his teens, Scott was getting odd jobs in boat repair, while taking traps out on his own. He was quiet, awkward and a little bumbling, recalls Dean Keitsch, a commercial fisherman who knew him back then. As he matured, some colleagues remarked he looked like a ling cod, a fish whose head is comically large for its body. They gave him the nickname “Buckethead.”

Over time on the docks and decks, though, Steer developed confidence. He became known for a willingness to learn the stuff others wouldn’t, and built his mind into an unofficial coastal reference guide. A colleague could phone him if he needed intel on boats for sale, the best deals with wholesalers or who was willing to lease out lucrative commercial licences.

On the West Coast, as on the East, those licences are a form of currency. The federal government began setting up the system in the late 1960s, and by the time Steer was playing first mate on his dad’s boats, the rules covered practically every species fished. The zones, quotas and caps on the number of licences in this regime are intended to serve twin purposes: to prevent overfishing and to ensure there was enough income to go around. It’s a kind of supply-management system for the seas.

For common species such as shrimp, there are a few hundred vessel licences. For others, like rare sea urchins, there are only a few dozen. All are in demand on the transfer and leasing markets. A study done for the DFO pegged the average value of a licence to commercially fish for halibut at $33,000 in 2019, and a fisherman must pay more for a by-the-pound annual quota. The average value of a crabbing licence, by comparison, was $1.1 million, and each permit holder was limited to one of seven coastal areas. But there’s a big payoff: in 2019, fewer than 200 B.C. vessels were licensed to catch crab, yet those boats hauled in $92 million worth of catch, an average of nearly $500,000 per vessel.

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Over time, regulations have expanded to include minimum fish sizes; trap specifications; logbook requirements; and, for some fisheries, mandatory on-board video monitoring devices. Record-keeping has become as important as lines and bait.

As the rulebook grows, though, so does the incentive to poach. Without the costly burden of licences and legally approved gear, lawbreaking fishermen can undercut their legitimate competitors by selling at below-market rates to wholesalers and trading companies, while still collecting tidy profits. Some buyers of illicit seafood are duped by fraudulent catch documents. Others are simply willing to look the other way. The catch, meanwhile, can end up almost anywhere: upscale urban restaurants, supermarkets in mid-sized cities, or, as with crab, the cargo holds of airplanes bound for China, where there is little in the way of oversight. Harvesting fish out of season, or in an area that is off limits year-round, can be particularly rewarding. They are plentiful, and there’s no legitimate competition.

Poaching, however, takes investment, knowledge and constant effort to evade detection. All the energy Steer has wasted ducking authorities could have been spent leasing a licence, working hard and going legit, observes Kelvin Campbell, a veteran B.C. crab fisherman. “It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s almost like he likes to get caught.”

***

The first time Steer was found breaking commercial fishing rules, he got off lightly. It was the fall of 1998, and he was skippering a boat called the Lucky Kari on a halibut fishing trip. At the dock, a DFO officer came by and spotted a glaring omission: the ID number all commercial fishing vessels must display on their sides and roofs. Further inspection revealed that Steer’s fishing gear was registered to a different boat—another infraction. What’s more, his deckhands couldn’t provide the necessary fisher’s registration cards. Authorities didn’t catch Steer fishing, but the offences were tantamount to driving somebody else’s car without a licence. Steer got off with a warning.

The following year, he was in Port Hardy, on northeast Vancouver Island, casting long lines for halibut. At the docks, where fishermen must weigh their catches before witnesses, he brought in not only halibut but 46 pounds of ling cod, which make great restaurant fish and chips. But the ling cod fishing season for that area was closed. Somebody reported Steer to Fisheries officers, netting him his first ticket for a commercial fishing violation.

Over the next few years, DFO officers would not be the only ones having problems with Steer. In 2006, a Vancouver-based seafood processor called Harbour Marine Products began advancing him large sums for boat upkeep and crew salaries, on the understanding he would pay them back in fish. Steer sold some of the catch elsewhere and soon stopped paying back the loans. The company sued, winning $135,144, but needed garnishing orders to recoup the money.

His schemes grew more complex over the years, pulling in more people and companies. In 2008, he persuaded two members of a First Nation on Vancouver Island to transfer him their special licence to catch fish for food, social or ceremonial purposes. Authorities say Steer intended to sell the fish, offering the Indigenous licence-holders a generous cut of the proceeds. It was the type of promise-the-sky arrangement for which he would become infamous. Steer fished for weeks under the cover of Indigenous rights, from the north end of Vancouver Island to Haida Gwaii. He brought a massive haul to a processing plant in Port Hardy, where he flashed the Indigenous designation to bypass other layers of regulation. The plant filleted and boxed 5,000 pounds of halibut and nearly 4,500 pounds of ling cod, along with other fish. Plant staff assumed he was bringing it to First Nations for their consumption, so they marked the several dozen boxes “not for sale,” as required.

By then, DFO officers were onto Steer. They’d received tips on his dubious claim of First Nations rights, and had even done aerial surveillance on his boats. That April, officers followed Steer’s white cube van from Port Hardy to the B.C. Ferries terminal in Nanaimo, then over to Vancouver.

There, they trailed him to a Wendy’s parking lot alongside the Grandview Highway and watched him make a deal with somebody in a truck. After that, Steer flung open his cube van doors and began selling fillets to passersby at rates far below what supermarkets charge—$1 per pound for whole ling cod; $7 per pound for halibut. An undercover Fisheries officer bought some ling cod from Steer, at which point the team arrested him. For all of those offences, he received a $3,500 fine. (This wouldn’t be the last time Steer tried to take advantage of First Nations fishing privileges. As recently as 2020, he applied for fishing loans and grants from the Native Fishing Association, posing as an Indigenous man named Terry Seymour, according to allegations filed in court. He did not face charges.)

By 2010, a Vancouver-based seafood company was sizing up Steer to lead one of its tuna-fishing expeditions. Word of his misdeeds was out: one of the company’s owners had heard accounts of Steer’s fraudulent use of Indigenous fishing rights. But when the other owners met him, they were intrigued by his experience and brash promises to bring in loads of fish. Despite his past wrongdoing, they hired him to skipper their 15-metre boat Pacific Titan, with a warning to follow the rules. They had reason to think he would comply: as a condition of its licence to catch sablefish, the boat was equipped with a video and GPS monitoring system that it was required to constantly run. If he strayed from the rules, there would be a digital record.

Steer’s crew didn’t catch much tuna. To his bosses, he blamed this failure on the stress from the breakdown of his first marriage, and a desire to spend more time with his kids. In fact, Steer had taken out the Titan and cast his lines deeper than tuna swim, going instead for halibut, which can sell for more per pound than beef tenderloin. During these secret forays, a judge later found, Steer turned off the Titan’s GPS and video systems so there was no digital record of how much fish he was landing. Crew members later testified seeing the deck of the boat covered in halibut. Steer deliberately brought those hauls to shore in the dark of night, the court said, so he could avoid validation—a legally required process where the catch is weighed before a Fisheries official.

It is against the law to sell commercially caught fish that has not been validated, but that didn’t deter Steer. Using a new cellphone and the alias John Renton, he sold frozen fillets from that trip as far afield as Dawson Creek, in northeastern B.C. Out there, Steer sold sablefish and halibut to an old friend, and offered her commissions if she secured other sales. Fisheries officers followed the delivery to her house and seized the catch. Steer’s friend was furious to learn he had sold her fish illegally. When she confronted him, according to court documents, he retorted: “Keep your mouth shut. If you don’t say anything, you can’t get in trouble, and neither can I.”

Steer was charged in the Pacific Titan case with selling illegally caught fish, failing to keep the GPS running and landing fish without validating them. It soon became clear his employers weren’t the only ones he’d cheated. By bringing in his hauls at night, Steer had also skirted the typical revenue-sharing arrangements with crew hands, which are based on official catch weights from the validation process. One of those hands, a newly landed German immigrant named Florian Spika, complained that his former skipper had bilked him out of several months’ wages from their time on the Titan, and gave damning testimony when Steer was prosecuted.

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The judge in the Pacific Titan case called Steer’s treatment of Spika “an act of moral bankruptcy” and ordered him to pay the crew member $15,000 in restitution. Steer also got a six-month jail sentence for selling illegally caught fish, along with his first ban from fishing: he would not be allowed to board a fishing vessel for 10 years. “Mr. Steer represents a threat to the health of the fishery,” the judge wrote, “and should be prohibited from participating in it.”

Still, Steer’s offences kept piling up. In 2015, officers found unmarked traps, full of crab, that he’d placed in Vancouver Harbour. He violated his sentencing conditions two more times the following year, and with each new conviction, the courts extended his fishing ban—first to 15 years, then to 17, then to 22. His record has made him legendary among DFO officers, many of whom have monitored, investigated or busted him over the years. Still, the DFO can convict somebody only of the crimes they can prove, and officers have investigated Steer more times than they’ve busted him. After they nab him, he tends to get out of jail in mere months. (The maximum sentence for most Fisheries Act offences is two years.)

Besides, poaching is a problem that goes beyond one man. Between three and five per cent of all fish caught in Canadian waters goes unreported, potentially winding up in the illicit trade, according to estimates from a 2020 global study co-authored by Rashid Sumaila, an economist with the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. That’s not bad, comparatively speaking: in other countries, far greater shares of the catch are harvested under the radar. Still, it amounts to between $97 million and $156 million worth of fish.

'Mr. Steer represents a threat to the health of the fishery and should be prohibited from participating in it,' wrote one judge

Industrial-scale operators land a sizable share of that, in some cases mixing a bit of illegal fish with their legit catch—a practice that’s hard to trace because it requires a paper trail. But eight-metre boats like those Scott Steer has used are difficult to track, too. There are barely more than 600 DFO officers watching over Canada’s coasts, rivers and freshwater lakes. Only about a quarter of them are spread among 27 Pacific region offices. Their work is vital to the whole sector: illegal vessels and reckless poachers harm aquatic habitats, mess up fish counts and steal income from honest players.

In B.C., though, the challenge is forbidding geography. The province’s gargantuan coastline is a labyrinth of inlets, islands and coves that plays to the strengths of operators like Steer. He knows them intimately, and has mastered fishing for many of the species that inhabit them. (Most commercial fishermen stick to the one or two they’re licensed to catch.) What’s more, every time officers catch him, he tries new ways to evade them. So the DFO has stepped up its game, spending more time tracking Steer’s movements, dedicating resources reserved for the best-known rogues.

***

On an April day in 2016, two officers followed Steer from his home in Nanaimo to the woods near a dock on nearby Gabriola Island, then watched him paddle a yellow kayak to a fishing boat that lay at anchor. He steered the vessel, the Holly V, over to the wharf, where a man they knew as a regular partner in Steer’s fishing schemes waited. Officers swept in and, after a short chase, boarded the Holly V. Despite his associate’s claim that nobody else was on board, they found Steer crouched in a crawlspace below the bow.

It was a glaring breach of his fishing ban. In court, though, Steer spun a winding yarn about how he was merely helping his friend pilot the boat through a tricky set of narrows, and planned to kayak back to the dock immediately afterward. He was too busy, he said, to notice the hydraulic trap hauler on board, or the crab-measuring calipers, or the boxes of sardines marked “crab bait.” At sentencing, he told Justice Neena Sharma of the B.C. Supreme Court that he wanted to do something else with his life, and had enrolled in flight school.

It was vintage Steer, who has long countered charges against him with excuses, evasions and promises. Sharma was buying none of it. She dismissed Steer’s explanation for the Holly V incident as “not only implausible but inconceivable,” and handed him a 45-day jail sentence. She also had some advice: “You are 38. You do not want to find yourself in your 40s and 50s going in and out of jail. What will your kids do?”

While Steer’s far-fetched stories and lavish promises have not always worked on judges, he sometimes gets what he wants from wholesalers, or fellow fishermen. His old colleague Keitsch, who had long warned Steer about where his dishonesty would lead, says he lent the man $8,000 a few years ago. Admitting a soft spot for the guy he’d known for decades, Keitsch says he’s given up hoping of repayment, which was supposed to arrive within days.

If Steer has a nemesis, it is Shaun Tadei, a senior DFO officer based in Nanaimo, where Steer lived until recently. Tadei is unsparing in his assessment of the man he’s spent years investigating: “He’s the worst poacher that we know of on the West Coast.” But he’s as incredulous as everyone else at Steer’s audacity, and his talent for persuasion. How, he wonders, has Steer avoided the kind of rough justice aggrieved fishermen have been known to mete out? “We don’t understand how this person has been able to operate, and rip off people for so long, without someone doing him serious harm,” says Tadei. “He’s literally ruining people’s lives.”

'He’s the worst poacher that we know of on the West Coast,' says Shaun Tadei, a Fisheries officer who's been pursuing Steer for years

Tadei helped with investigations into Steer through the 2010s. Then, in early 2020, the higher-ups at the DFO assigned Tadei’s four-person team to probe Steer’s business activities and finances. It’s the kind of project that police departments give to major investigations units. In this case, the work fell to Tadei and his fellow general-duty officers in Nanaimo—an assignment that has become almost a full-time job for him.

Following Steer’s money offered the chance to answer some longstanding questions. Over the years, Steer had done a lot of fishing—some legitimate, some illegal—but Tadei’s team had little sense of how lucrative the illegal side of his activities had been. Nor did they know what he had done with his illicit proceeds. After his bust on the Pacific Titan, the DFO looked into his personal finances and found fewer than $100,000 in assets and more than half a million dollars in liabilities. Steer has not splurged on fancy houses or swanky cars. His social media presence shows a family man with five kids (a sixth was due in April) and a penchant for griping about the government. Tadei and his team began pulling bank records and picking up other breadcrumbs: “We’re reaching out to people we know that he has ripped off, stolen money from, just never paid.”

Then, in a brazen move even for him, Steer went on his March 2020 night-fishing misadventure in Vancouver Harbour. His arrest kicked Tadei’s investigation into high gear, and the cellphone Steer flung overboard proved a key piece of evidence. Divers recovered it from the harbour floor, with Steer’s credit card and driver’s licence stored in the phone case.

With Steer’s cell number, Tadei’s team was able to get a production order allowing them to view Steer’s contacts and communications over the phone. Fourteen months later, Steer was charged in a 2019 scheme involving the illegal harvest of sea cucumbers, bottom-dwelling invertebrates used in traditional Chinese medicine. The raft of charges in that case included something new for Steer: immigration offences. He had allegedly hired Mexican nationals who lacked work permits. (Those counts are still before the courts.)

Last year, Steer was convicted on all charges for trapping crab in Vancouver Harbour. On top of yet another six-month jail sentence, and the forfeiture of his fishing partner’s $50,000 boat, a judge gave him the harshest penalty handed to a West Coast fisherman in more than a decade: a lifetime fishing ban. Steer also received a five-year prohibition from involvement in the sale, purchasing or brokering of fish. Tadei had discovered that Steer was trying to make money off other people’s catches.

***

While Steer was under house arrest with his wife and kids on Gabriola Island last summer, convicted for crabbing but awaiting his sentence, federal Fisheries officers helped launch a new front in the fight to get him out of the illicit market in seafood. One evening, a process server dropped off a provincial civil forfeiture claim, brimming with the DFO’s investigative work. It targeted $1.3 million sitting in bank accounts, as well as the house to which Steer was largely confined—a four-bedroom, timber-framed home with vaulted ceilings, sundecks and ample yard space for trucks or boat trailers. The forfeiture revealed the many tentacles of Steer’s operation, most of which he set up after the DFO’s earlier look at his finances. Six companies were listed as co-defendants, and the money was spread among 25
accounts at four different banks.

The forfeiture files also reveal that Steer has brought another family member into this murky world: his wife, Melissa, a former hairdresser who had recently started working in her husband’s trade. In 2019, she began to launch seafood brokering companies; her business partner was one of Steer’s crew mates when he got caught in Vancouver Harbour. The civil forfeiture claim alleges that her companies were dealing seafood without licences, and that her husband would be the one making the sales for her company. (Reached by text message, Melissa Steer declined to comment or facilitate an interview with her husband while the forfeiture case remains before the courts.)

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To get a sense of how lucrative Steer’s dealings were, Tadei and his team focused on one wholesaler to whom the Steers’ companies sold crab—$309,735 worth in a four-month span last year, according to court filings. In some cases, the documents say, the wholesaler, Shin Grand Food Trading Ltd., did not receive slips required to confirm the crabs were legally caught; in others, it got incomplete ones. A few times, the documents allege, Steer asked Shin Grand’s owner, Bingxin Hou, to fill out the slips himself. “I didn’t know this guy’s background” says Hou in an interview. “He just seemed like a normal fisherman to me.” Hou, who is not facing charges over the transactions, also claims Steer owes him for a $40,000 loan he never repaid.

While the bank accounts remain frozen, the provincial forfeiture office has dropped its attempt to seize the house Steer and his family live in, which his mother-in-law owns. (Investigators initially alleged she was an “owner of convenience” of a house funded by illegal fishery proceeds, but the province abandoned that claim.) And there aren’t any boats to pursue, because over the years Steer has been ordered by the courts to forfeit several, and is barred from owning any more. As of March, the Steers had not yet filed a defence against the other claims.

Steer’s release from jail for the Vancouver Harbour incident came late this past winter, several weeks before his wife was due to give birth. He still faces charges in the sea cucumber case, and others for alleged breaches of his conditions. The DFO, meanwhile, is not taking chances. Senior officers sent out an internal bulletin warning that he had been released, reminding staff of his history and pattern of offences. Perhaps the bans, imprisonment and forfeiture will finally deter him. But the experience of Fisheries officers up and down the coast suggests otherwise. They’re as keen as ever to reel him in again.

This article appears in print in the May 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post The hunt for B.C.’s most notorious fisherman appeared first on Macleans.ca.

It came as a profound shock yet no real surprise, Jeff Blackstock allows, when he learned in 1979 how his mother had died 20 years earlier. He was in London, Ont., and in his first year of law school when his sister, Julia, called from her home in Kingston, Ont. She told him about the autopsy report she had found among papers belonging to their recently deceased relative: Carol Blackstock had died of arsenic poisoning. “I ran from the telephone to throw up in the washroom,” he says in an interview, “and when I got back on the line, we both, at the same time, said, ‘Dad.’ We both already knew.”

So does anyone who reads the upcoming book Murder in the Family, which begins, “I think that my father murdered my mother.” In it, Blackstock, a 69-year-old retired Canadian diplomat, presents—in the meticulous language of his profession—a convincing account of how and why his mother died, who was responsible for the murder and who acted as “my father’s enablers” in keeping the crime buried. “I knew following this through could have consumed my life, I knew my mother would have wanted us to have carried on with our lives,” says Blackstock. “And I still knew I would have to write about it someday.”

The roots of Carol’s horrible death run deep. Jeff’s parents, Carol Gray and George Blackstock, came from very different worlds. The Grays, his beloved maternal grandparents and their only child, were comfortable by the end of the Second World War. They were happily ensconced in a Toronto apartment while father Howard, a Great War veteran and a working-class night-school graduate, worked as an accountant. The Blackstocks, for their part, were Upper Canada elite, descended from immigrants to Ontario in the 1830s who grew rich from becoming professionals, and from the liquor trade. One, after whom the town of Blackstock, Ont., is named, was counsel to the Canadian Pacific Railway and a close ally of Sir John A. Macdonald. Later, Jeff’s great-grandfather married into the Gooderham distillery family, and then went into business with his father-in-law as a partner in the Bank of Toronto, a forerunner of TD Bank. His son, Jeff’s grandfather, was a graduate of Upper Canada College (UCC) and the Royal Military College, and a highly decorated officer during the First World War.

George became a diplomat in 1958 (National Film Board of Canada)

The Blackstocks continued to flourish in the 1920s, a good decade for any family that derived its income from mining investments and alcohol. Times were harder once the Great Depression hit, and after Lt.-Col. Blackstock died young of a heart attack in 1945. Still, his widow could afford to live in a six-bedroom house in one of Toronto’s wealthier neighbourhoods, there was a family trust fund and summer estate north of Toronto, and Jeff’s father, George (born in 1933), was still able to attend UCC. There he made lifelong connections, including Ted Rogers, founder of Rogers Communications and godfather to Jeff’s younger brother, Doug.

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Then George met Carol, and by the spring of 1950, the highly intelligent, pretty, vivacious 15-year-old was pregnant with Jeff. She and 17-year-old George had their shotgun wedding before a justice of the peace in a Toronto suburb, far from the bridesmaids, bouquets and midtown Anglican ceremony that graced other Blackstock nuptials. A few hard years followed, marked by tense relations with in-laws George despised for their lower social status, and testy correspondence from great-uncle Brooke Bell, a high-powered Bay Street lawyer who doled out money from the Blackstock family trust. Things began to look up after George secured a job with the expanding postwar federal government, and more so in 1957, when he aced the foreign service exam and was assigned to the Canadian embassy in Argentina. In April 1958, the family arrived in Buenos Aires. The following April, days before George’s 26th birthday, Carol fell ill.

It was mysterious from the beginning, and became terrifying. There was endless vomiting and loss of feeling in her extremities, classic poisoning symptoms. Carol was admitted to a clinic where the attending physician, a devotee of mid-20th-century Freudian thinking, was convinced her ailment was psychosomatic and never checked her for toxins. As her symptoms waned at the clinic and—after a pause—waxed at home, she was in and out of the clinic, slowly shrinking from 115 lb. to an emaciated 90 lb. By July, Carol’s doctor suggested she return to Canada for treatment—pressure from an alarmed Ottawa bureaucracy roused into action by her parents probably contributed to that decision (George had never reported her illness to his superiors).

Her husband insisted Ottawa not tell the Grays he was bringing his wife to Montreal for treatment, and then took her on a 36-hour flight, which included a 90-minute stop in Toronto. Carol lay on her stretcher at the airport while her parents, who had no idea she was a short drive away, continued their frantic preparations for a flight to Argentina they could barely afford. On July 25, 1959, less than three days after she arrived in Montreal, 24-year-old Carol Blackstock died. Her baffled doctors performed an autopsy, but George nonetheless moved quickly: Carol died on a Saturday, was autopsied on Monday, was transported to Toronto on Tuesday and was laid in her grave on Wednesday. And then George ground to a halt, remaining in Canada for seven weeks before returning to Buenos Aires in late September to tell his children—Jeff, Doug and Julia, who were then ages eight, six and three, respectively—that their mother wasn’t coming back.

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Less than eight months later, he was engaged to his second wife—Jeff Blackstock calls her Ingrid. George ever after claimed not to have met her during Carol’s lifetime, just as he claimed for the next two decades that no cause had ever been established for his first wife’s death, changing that story after the 1979 revelation to a claim no one had ever told him.

Jeff demolishes his father’s lies. There is correspondence from Ingrid that indicates George knew her long before Carol’s death. And while the official toxicology report—which found “significantly large doses” of arsenic in Carol’s liver, kidneys, brain, small intestine and even her toenails—wasn’t issued until the day after George returned to Argentina, the preliminary autopsy findings were enough to keep him in Canada for those seven weeks. The police had warned him not to leave. “He was interrogated more than once, and quite aggressively, according to an older cousin who was present,” says Jeff. “My sister and I have been trying to get the police records for years and are continuing to do so.”

Throughout the children’s confrontations with their father between 1979 and George’s death in 2007, they never raised the question of motive. It’s the same in Murder in the Family , even as Blackstock’s relentless presentation of facts points to two really good motives. Asked why he took that approach, Jeff replies, “I wanted to let my father speak for himself in those notes we found after his death.” In them, George is evidently crafting a defence against all charges. “He raises the issue of motive himself,” Jeff continues, “and writes in effect: Why would I have done this? The only reason that J and J—that would be Jeff and Julia, my sister and I—could possibly think of would be Ingrid. But we never spoke about that with my father at all. That came out of his mind.”

Clearing the path to marrying Ingrid, in an era when divorce could have been a crippling social, career and financial blow to him, made for an obvious motive. Far more subtly, Jeff’s account offers a motive for that motive, a deeper reason for taking up with Ingrid at all: George’s festering resentment of Carol. The shotgun wedding and the reality of her modest socio-economic status grated on him. Then George met Ingrid: the right age, the right social standing, the right family wealth—her father was a German industrialist and postwar immigrant to Argentina. “That conclusion is in the eye of the beholder,” Jeff says. “I leave that to readers.”

Carol’s diplomatic passport, found in her husband’s papers after his death (Courtesy of Penguin Random House Canada)

Something else he leaves to readers is almost as appalling as the crime—the silence from authorities, both Canadian and Argentinian, that followed it. “We are getting into speculation here,” says a cautious Jeff about his and his father’s former employer. “We’ve tried to get records from the government. Julia made multiple access-to-information requests back in the ’90s, which always came back empty, no records to be found . . . [Yet] we also know, from my sister’s interview with the pathologist who conducted the autopsy on our mother, that he was preparing for a criminal case, before it all of a sudden went away.”

Blackstock writes at length about how an investigation of a transjurisdictional crime would have required requesting the co-operation of the Argentinian government and the involvement of the Buenos Aires police, and could not have avoided scandalous publicity. Once again, Murder in the Family lays out facts but leaves the conclusion unspoken.

The federal government’s silence reminds Jeff Blackstock of his extended family’s, and his own. “My mom’s father was torn between loyalty to his daughter and burdening me with the knowledge. He did try to tell me when I was a teenager, but I wasn’t ready to listen. So he left us his papers. I think Blackstock family members, in their collective denial that something was very wrong, were conflicted as well.” In the end, as his grandfather came to believe, it would be up to Carol’s children to bear witness to her fate. And her oldest son has met that call.

This article appears in print in the August 2020 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Father. Diplomat. Murderer?” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post ‘I think that my father murdered my mother.’ appeared first on Macleans.ca.

LEFT: Canadian theatre owner Ambrose Small. (Toronto Star archives/Toronto Public Library)
RIGHT: Sir Harry Oakes leaning against an airplane with his hand propped on his hip. (David E. Scherman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

One hundred years ago, on Dec. 2, 1919, 53-year-old Ambrose Small disappeared, never to be seen again. It was the day after one of Toronto’s most prominent businessmen had sold his booking agency and his stake in a chain of live theatres for a hefty $1.75 million (about $23 million today), and about two weeks before anyone began seriously looking for him. The lack of concern arose in large part because Small—not exactly a pillar of Toronto the Good in either his sharp-edge business practices or his private life—had a history of disappearing for lengthy periods, visiting racetracks or a mistress. But another reason was the fact that a century ago it was still easy and common to “go missing for several days at a time,” says journalist Katie Daubs, author of The Missing Millionaire, in an interview. Getting out of “the modern mindset of emails and cellphones,” she adds, was a crucial first step in re-creating Ambrose Small’s world.

And recreate it Daubs does, in a lovely, nuanced work of social history. The Toronto of 1919, which the forces of industrialization had transformed completely over the course of Small’s lifetime, was haunted by the ghosts of thousands of the “missing,” young men mowed down in the Great War. It was also a golden age for what Maclean’s, looking back 30 years later, politely called “an unusual number of investigators with methods so mysterious that they completely baffled police”—meaning pseudo-scientists, psychics and con men of all stripes. One was Maxmilian Langsner, a self-styled “Viennese criminologist” (he was neither) who announced, in 1928 no less, that he had located Small’s burial site through his “thought-wave system” and merely needed funds to unearth the bones and, not incidentally, pay his own hotel bill. That Langsner received any kind of hearing may seem laughable, even in our age of lunatic conspiracy theories, but belief in communicating with the dead was not ridiculous in the 1920s, when Arthur Conan Doyle proclaimed it a “new revelation” sent by God to comfort those bereaved by the war.

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Daubs also covers the nitty-gritty of the era well, with a sharp eye for details. As a flashy, younger rich man, Small was an early car enthusiast—he tended, in fact, to buy a new one twice a year—and one of his vehicles was among the first in the city, with Small’s chauffeur at the wheel, to strike and kill a pedestrian. And then there’s Daubs’ entertaining account of how Jack Doughty, Small’s private secretary and a chief suspect in whatever happened to the impresario, conducted the 1919 equivalent of those how-to-kill-your-spouse Internet searches that prove so damning in contemporary trials: he asked almost every acquaintance he encountered in the days before Small’s disappearance, “How would you kidnap an abusive employer?”

What Daubs doesn’t do—and couldn’t after all these years, short of a hidden confession emerging—is solve the crime, any more than Charlotte Gray can add much more of an answer in Murdered Midas to the question of who killed mining magnate Harry Oakes in 1943. (Who says Canadian business history is boring?) What true crime writers can do is the same as what crime novelists do: offer social commentary with a puzzle aspect. Two factors tend to distinguish actual crime stories from their fictional counterparts. First, they are often unsolved and the police work, more often than not, is shoddy—in the first of what will likely be a few books about the 2017 slayings of wealthy Toronto couple Honey and Barry Sherman, Kevin Donovan’s The Billionaire Murders, the Toronto Police Service does not come off well.

READ: What really happened to Ambrose Small?

In Small’s case, Daubs essentially opts for the conclusion reached by the Ontario Provincial Police’s 1936 examination of the record: in all probability, Small’s wife, Theresa, was the brains behind his disappearance (and death), Doughty was the muscle, and investigating police detective Austin Mitchell the useful idiot. As for the murder of U.S.-born Oakes’ murder, the case was bungled from the start by two Miami cops imported into the Bahamas case by the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII who was governor of the British colony. The mess police made of the evidence was crucial in the acquittal of Count Alfred de Marigny, husband of Oakes’ daughter Nancy, in his trial for the murder of his father-in-law. Just as well, argues Gray, who believes de Marigny was innocent and points a convincing finger at another suspect.

But it’s the second factor that probably most unites true crime stories, especially the cases that generate multiple books and documentaries over the years. They are usually lurid in ways that much very good crime fiction is not, because the best fiction writers are often far more interested in what Ann Cleeves, the prominent British author whose works are the basis of the Shetland and Vera TV series, calls the “social pathologies” that led to the death. That’s why, Cleeves told a packed audience at a Toronto Public Library talk in November, “I tend to just smash [the victims] on the back of the head.” Harry Oakes, however, was struck four times behind his left ear with what may well have been a miner’s hand pick, then doused with insecticide and set on fire in his own bedroom. That’s why Gray can confidently predict that the same combination of “a dead white man who is the epitome of white privilege, a brush with the royal family—actually, a rather seedy ex-king—and a completely delicious unsolved murder” that made the Oakes case “absolute catnip for Fleet Street writers for decades” will see it kept alive for years to come.

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Gray opens her absorbing and offbeat book with a lengthy foray into the origins of Oakes’ wealth—his key role in the Northern Ontario gold rush that turned Toronto into the world capital of mining in the 1920s—before turning to the inept officers and the sensational de Marigny trial. But Murdered Midas is at its most original and compelling in the final section, on Oakes’ afterlife. An award-winning historian and biographer, Gray wanted both to let readers in on the tricks of her trade and offer Oakes, a truculent and unpleasant man, some justice. “ It was a very deliberate attempt to be transparent,” she says. “You’re always making choices about what to include and how to interpret the evidence. And there are things you don’t know. This time I wanted to come clean on all that. I know I can tell a story. But now I wanted to show readers how it’s done. Writers can and do shape posthumous reputations with subtle adjustments and sly cuts, so I showed how Oakes’ story has been skewed in the years since his murder.”

For Gray, Oakes is very much “the dead guy in a game of Clue.” So too is Daubs’ Small, in his shadowy way. The victims are the backdrop, entrées to a time and place, in true crime stories as much as in the fictional variety. In both, murder always brings a final indignity: “A corpse,” as Gray quotes Jean-Paul Sartre, “is open to all comers.”

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The post Why the long-ago murders of two tycoons in Canada haunt us still appeared first on Macleans.ca.