28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  Be helpless, dumbfounded,

  Unable to say yes or no.

  Then a stretcher will come from grace

  To gather us up.

  I read it about 20 times. I took great comfort from it. I knew that I’d already received stretchers from grace, to gather me up. Intuitively, I also accepted the prescription to “be helpless, dumbfounded / Unable to say yes or no.” This required a measure of surrender. A surrender of the will—quite a different approach to the world than I was used to.

  I’d always felt immune from surrender, out of pride, and willed everything myself, I thought, since I was old enough to remember. What happened to me, from the time my troubles began that summer of 2009, has been the regular appearance in my life of those “stretchers from grace,” to gather me up in my lowest moments.

  Friends had already come to my rescue, within minutes of the accident, before we knew how tragic it had been. Susan was both stretcher bearer and in need of a stretcher herself. Nikki Holland spent the evening and the next day helping Susan rescue me. Together they’d contacted lawyers, and the suit-bearers and jailhouse liberators Andrew and Stephen—one sockless, the other beltless—who showed up at a moment’s notice in the middle of the day to literally give me the clothes off their back.

  Meanwhile, I needed all the help I could get. Unemployed and staying mostly at home, I was physically and psychologically incapable of doing much more than eating, sleeping, jogging, and writing thank-you notes, at my most energetic, for months after the accident.

  As I later learned from my psychiatrist, I had PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. The definitive explanation of PTSD describes it as “exposure to an extremely stressful traumatic event that involves personal experience with actual or threatened death or serious injury; a response of fear, helplessness or horror; repeated re-experiencing of the event; persistent symptoms of increased arousal [i.e., stress]; and clinically significant impairment of important areas of functioning (e.g., social or occupational).” In a word, I was shell-shocked.

  Spiritually, I’d experienced something that liberated me from the bonds of reputation management. Legally, I could say nothing on or off the record that would compromise my defence. Police, prosecutors, and the defence are not supposed to comment on matters before the court, to avoid the appearance (or reality) of influencing the judge or potential jurors through the media. As I knew from my days as Attorney General, violation of this rule could lead to contempt of court, or the dismissal of a case for abuse of process. Even if this principle is flouted in the U.S., it tends to be narrowly observed in Canada and other Commonwealth countries, most of the time, and certainly I could not violate the so-called sub judice rule as a former Attorney General.

  As the sun rose on September 1st, Susan had called the managing partner at her firm, Peter Lukasiewicz, to alert him to the emergency, and explain that she wasn’t sure when she’d be in the office. Peter was at his desk and was soon going through his Rolodex. He told Susan that, with her permission, he’d assemble a short list of the best criminal lawyers, and the best forensic professionals. He knew that my defence team (which didn’t yet exist) needed to be assembled immediately and start collecting evidence before the crime scene was completely useless.

  Experts had to comb the streets for skid-marks, evidence of where the car had travelled, and any evidence on the fire hydrant or mailbox. They had to dust the car for fingerprints before the evidence became “contaminated” by the fingerprints of others. (But it was too late. There were about a dozen different fingerprints on the vehicle, rendering the evidence useless; the police had failed to contain the scene.)

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER DELIVERING me home, Stephen, a modern Orthodox Jew who thought food was an answer to every problem, asked if I was hungry. And it wasn’t just Stephen who made sure I wouldn’t go starving. The day I was released from the cell, the food started to arrive and kept on coming. Care packages from good friends and simple acquaintances. There was enough food for a week: casseroles and lasagna, smoked meat and bagels and verenikas and deliveries from stores.

  Then there was the unforgettable conversation I had with Toronto Mayor David Miller. As mayor, Miller was chair of Invest Toronto, the economic development agency he’d created and to which I’d been hired as founding CEO.

  His hopes, like mine, had been high on May 25, 2009. “Michael Bryant is exactly the person Invest Toronto needs in this important leadership role at this time of challenge and opportunity,” read the press release at the time.

  Now, Miller’s CEO was charged with killing someone. I was no longer anyone’s idea of the ideal global business cheerleader. So I called David Miller on September 1, standing beside an unlit barbeque in my backyard, to offer my resignation.

  “I don’t think you should resign,” he said.

  “Thank you, David,” I said after a long pause, as I tried to gather myself. I had a huge lump in my throat. He wasn’t thinking about Invest Toronto or himself. He was thinking of me.

  “No, seriously. You’re innocent. Innocent until proven guilty means something to me. It means something period. You should rethink this.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” I said. “I’ve gamed out the scenarios. The media will howl for a resignation starting late tomorrow. Let’s not allow them to push me into this. I want to get ahead of it.”

  “No, I won’t accept your resignation,” he said, “… or at least resign pending the completion of the investigation—”

  “Oh, the investigation is complete,” I replied. “It lasted a few minutes. They charged me within seven minutes, my lawyer tells me.”

  “I mean resign pending the conclusion of the prosecution.”

  “Well, I think that’s half-pregnant. Either I’m the CEO or I’m not. If I’m not, I resign. What happens afterwards is—”

  “Just sleep on it,” he said.

  I slept on it and resigned the next morning, September 2.

  “I do not believe … that I can continue in this position on account of the circumstances of the past two days,” I wrote in my resignation letter. “Let me be clear: I am innocent of the very serious accusations made against me. It would, however, be unfair to you, the Board and above all to the residents of Toronto to allow this event to distract from the vital efforts of Invest Toronto.”

  A FEW DAYS AFTER the accident, I went back into the offices of Invest Toronto to collect some personal effects.

  I logged onto my (old) computer to check emails that had been sent over the past week. A couple of messages were nasty. “Subject: MURDERER.” But more than 20 emails of support had come in, including one from a PC MPP. I printed them up and literally hugged them against my chest.

  One had been sent at 7:30 a.m. on September 1. It was the first one that responded to the media reports of my arrest. At the time it was sent, I was in a jail cell. At that moment, the media were reporting that a former Attorney General was arrested for a road-rage death in Yorkville after a night celebrating with an unnamed blonde. So the sender of this message had the worst possible version of the events. When I read it, I shook my head.

  “I know you may feel very alone right now. You’re not. All your many friends are with you and will stand beside you. Sincerely, Michael Ignatieff.”

  Ignatieff was the Leader of the Official Opposition in Canada’s Parliament at the time. The last thing he needed to be doing was sending words of support, in writing, to an accused felon, well before hearing all the facts. As it stood at that moment, what was known was ugly. But Michael Ignatieff found the time and humanity to send his support anyway.

  I’d supported Ignatieff for the federal Liberal leadership. But that perhaps warranted an annual, electronically signed Christmas card. Not a personal, poetic missive of friendship.

  That first morning I awoke at home after spending the previous night in jail, Susan’s Uncle Harvey and Aunt Maura were at our house, looking after the kids or looking after me, whichever seemed most necessary. They greeted
people who showed up at the door. Which happened often.

  That week I got a visit from Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, a great client of Susan’s and good friend to us both. Full of wisdom and kindness, she spent hours with me, drinking coffee. Then the doorbell rang.

  It was an older man and his son, the proprietors of Dutch Dreams Ice Cream. I’d frequented their delightful establishment on Vaughan Road near St. Clair Avenue, as the MPP for the area, and provided the token celebratory local scroll. Now, they came to comfort me with their greatest gift. The father had tears in his eyes and litres of ice cream under each arm.

  The look in their eyes, those Dutch Dreams proprietors, told me something. The 28 seconds had clearly had an impact on people, many people I’d never meet. Strangers would approach me again and again with the same sentiment. “There but for the grace of God, go I.” My unexpected life change had rocked some people, I realized, because they seemed to feel, quite viscerally, the lack of control we all have over our lives. The fragility of our pedestrian existences left people feeling powerless. To see that in people’s eyes, and hear it in their words, made me feel as if I were not alone.

  The next thing I noticed was that people were helping me without me even knowing it. One day Rob Oliphant, then Member of Parliament for a Toronto riding, and a former United Church minister, rang my doorbell. He had a card with his numbers on it, and told me to call him. Then we spoke.

  In the days that had followed the 28 seconds, he decided that the best way to help me was to help my former political staff, all of whom were understandably freaked out by what had happened to their former boss. Political staff are like family, except they don’t always get remembered like family. Oliphant took the time to sit down and talk with them. This was a comforting thought—that someone was caring for those I was unable to care for at that moment.

  Oliphant’s actions inspired me. He looked the picture of serenity, and he was doing good deeds. Meanwhile, it’s a tenet of alcoholism recovery that in times of high anxiety, it’s best to get out of one’s head, and to be outward-facing. In particular, it’s suggested that we engage in service to others.

  In my case, I started to reach out to people who were clearly worried about me. I wanted to assure them that I was doing okay, and that I was all the better for their generosity of spirit. In fact, hundreds of messages had come my way, by email or Facebook or instant messages, or by phone calls, visits, and many, many hand-written notes. I decided to write everyone back.

  First step, a stationery store. I wasn’t employed, so there was no fancy letterhead for me embossed with Invest Toronto or Government of Ontario or Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Next step, an email address. This sounds odd, but the truth was that my identity was wedded to my old email addresses. I spent days—not hours, but days—figuring out an email address. The same was true for the stationery. That it took so long to complete these simple tasks was evidence that I was in a serious funk. Psychic numbness, depression, shock, PTSD equals serious funk.

  Finally, I decided on an email address with no reference to my past vocation, and bought blank, cream-coloured stationery. I began writing thank-you notes to people. Getting them addressed on an envelope often took five times as long as writing them. Getting a stamp for them took still longer. And then getting them to the mailbox became an odyssey. This became compounded by the fact that I didn’t keep track of my thank-you notes, which meant that some people might have received several cards, some received none. During the day, I carried a briefcase with files full of kind notes from people, another file with my thank-yous, and another with envelopes. Often I’d leave one or the other at home. This was not the Manhattan Project, but I was pretty useless in those days.

  In addition to writing notes and calling people, I visited people—at their workplace or a nearby coffee shop, or at their homes. Making the appointment was one thing. Keeping it was another. I stood people up inadvertently because I failed to put appointments in my calendar. It would have been comic if I hadn’t so inconvenienced the very people I’d wanted to reach out to. I was behaving more like Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein than a Harvard graduate with lots of time on his hands.

  September and October remain a fog of time spent in front of a computer, at a coffee shop, in the gym, or in our backyard, writing notes, and … meeting at Marie Henein’s office. I don’t recall much.

  I wrote very little at first, although I did start keeping notes of my daily life at the advice of a generous friend, Doug Pepper, father to my daughter’s best friend and a book editor/publisher. I went to meetings with recovering addicts and alcoholics twice a week, and sometimes more often. All those people who met with me, all those people in those meetings, everyone, did a lot to heal me. I wondered whether I should send a thank-you note to follow up on the thank-you note, a running commentary of my gratitude. Susan and I decided that was a little much.

  Meanwhile, there was a debate raging in the media to which I was oblivious. After August 31, I never read newspapers and never watched the news. It was only by accident that I’d come across something. More likely, Susan or Marie or a friend would point something out. Family friend Frank Iacobucci said to me one day: “What Patrick said: that’s how we feel.” I nodded, not knowing the reference, which I later looked up.

  In a media interview, the Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, a former professor of mine, Patrick Monahan, made a strong case for why, if anything, the justice system was likely to overdo it in my case. The police and prosecutors and the judge were so paranoid of appearing biased in my favour that they’d be biased against me. But when asked whether he was a friend of mine, which might taint his legal opinion, Patrick was blunt: “I’d do anything for Michael Bryant.”

  And then there were what I came to call “The Drivers.” A series of angels, disguised as ordinary drivers, would pull up beside me on the street, every other week, sometimes more frequently.

  Some of them I knew—like Brad Duguid and Peter Fonseca, two cabinet ministers from the McGuinty government (who were driving themselves; where was their driver?). But most were complete strangers.

  One man was in his sixties, a former Conservative activist in his time, he told me. He was driving a beautiful BMW convertible. He thought I’d like to be driven in that for a bit. Just like that: he saw me, recognized me, and offered me a lift to where I was heading.

  Another time a beige SUV pulled up beside me, a mom behind the wheel and two occupied child seats in the back.

  “Michael Bryant?”

  “Yes.”

  “I heard about what happened to you and know you can’t drive so …”

  So she gave this accused felon a lift down Avenue Road with her kids chattering in the back seat. (“Mommy, who’s dat man?!”)

  When I wasn’t receiving this treatment from Toronto drivers, I got around town by bike. I purchased one from Duke’s Cycle about two weeks after I returned home.

  Now, keep in mind that cyclists had filled Bloor Street in memoriam for Darcy Sheppard the day after his death. It made the front pages. And bike shops are obviously a hub for any cycling news. More than a century old, Duke’s Cycle was a veritable Speaker’s Corner of cyclist hobnobbing. But I was completely out to lunch in those early days, because nothing was sticking in my brain.

  I walked in, looking like Michael Bryant, and after a few minutes of perusing the bikes, a man came up to me. I realized that the place had gone very quiet the last few minutes.

  “Can I help you?”

  I explained what I was looking for and ended up purchasing a fold-up bike that would allow me to cycle and subway easily. The gentleman assisting me suggested that I give it a test drive before buying it and asked for a piece of photo ID. So I handed over my driver’s licence.

  By this point, every worker and customer in the store had stopped whatever they were doing, and awaited the verdict. The man behind the counter had brown curly hair, a toque on a warm September day, and a beard that was braided, p
encil thin, at his chin. The friendly fellow, who was working the cash register, looked down at my licence and announced to everyone in the store:

  “Yep, it’s Michael Bryant alright!”

  Then I was helped down the few stairs of the Richmond St. W. entrance for my test drive. The pencil-bearded fellow ran the transaction through and explained everything to me regarding tune-ups, the warranty, and the like, as he’d done with countless others.

  Then he shook my hand, held it fast, leaning in to whisper: “I’m with you, brother.”

  Other stretcher bearers arrived unbeknownst to me. Witnesses who came forward had to figure out how to come forward in a manner that allowed them to provide direct evidence to the defendant, rather than to the police.

  One such witness was a successful engineer living in Yorkville. During the 28 seconds that I struggled for control of my car, he’d been enjoying a smoke at his window in his condo on the Mink Mile, above one of the shops on Bloor Street West.

  He ended up getting a bird’s-eye view of almost everything that happened. His version was quite helpful to my defence. The engineer turned out to be an important witness. Besides providing a professional and credible accounting to both our defence team and the police, he was willing to swear an affidavit about a chilling exchange with a police officer on the telephone, within a few days of the 28 seconds.

  The police officer he spoke to said that he, the witness, was “fucking up” their case and asked him to reconsider his exculpatory statement.

  To me, this sounded like Mark Fuhrman planting a glove in the O.J. case. Marie didn’t seem fazed, assuring me that this happened more than I’d like to think. Needless to say, that incident has permanently changed the way I think of police investigations. Even assuming that particular police officer to be a bad apple, the point is that such apples exist, and they have enormous, frightening powers.

  Another witness was a successful hair stylist, who had been on Bloor Street when it all happened. She too recalled a version of the events that squared with mine. One of the stylist’s long-time customers was a bencher at the Law Society of Upper Canada, the regulator of the legal profession. Benchers tend to be the most successful lawyers of their generation, and this one was no exception. Although not a criminal lawyer, she well understood how difficult it could be for a defence team to connect with positive witnesses. So, upon hearing the stylist’s story, she dug up Marie Henein’s number and made her call my lawyer.