Dead Ends

by Paul Willcocks

  MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY

  It was supposed to be routine. A milk run to shuttle passengers from Vancouver to Prince George, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, and Watson Lake and Whitehorse.

  The forty-six passengers—including four young children—climbed the ramp and found their seats on Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 21, welcomed by the steward and two stewardesses.

  Capt. Jack Steele, a forty-one-year-old veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force, headed the three-man crew.

  The DC-6B was a shiny four-engine workhorse, with a white, red, and silver paint scheme and Canadian Pacific’s stylish script logo painted above the small windows.

  They rolled down the runway and off the ground at 2:42 p.m. on July 8, 1965. The first leg to Prince George should have taken about ninety minutes at the plane’s 500-km/h cruising speed.

  For a few passengers, it was routine. For most, the flight was an adventure. Air travel was new, and passengers dressed up for the occasion.

  Helge and Liv Rognerud, from Norway, were part of a group heading to jobs in a Cassiar asbestos mine, their infant son and daughter tucked in beside them. Doris Harris of Halifax was on the last leg of a long trip to Prince George to see her son and his family. H. A. Janssen, regional manager, was heading to Williams Lake to open a new Volkswagen dealership. (The Beetle, at about $1,700, was selling well across Canada.)

  The travellers settled in, lit up cigarettes in those days before smoking bans. The plane climbed over the Coast Mountains.

  At 3:29 p.m., about forty-seven minutes into the flight, the crew checked in with Vancouver air traffic control. They had passed Ashcroft, flying at 4,900 metres. They would reach Williams Lake about 3:48 p.m. Prince George would only be about 130 kilometres away.

  Routine. Less than ten minutes later, Vancouver control called Flight 21 and got no reply.

  Two minutes later, there were three cries of “Mayday” from the airplane. Then silence. The plane vanished from the radar.

  But 330 kilometres away from Vancouver, witnesses watched in horror. Tom Shaylor was working at a sawmill, idly watching the plane, when things went terribly wrong.

  “Then there was this awful blast … a boom and we could see it sort of split apart,” he said. The tail was blasted away from the body of the plane. Dark objects spilled from the fuselage. It sounded like a dynamite blast, said Shaylor, a Second World War veteran.

  The airplane tilted nose down, spun slowly, and crashed into giant pines. It fell so straight down that the wreckage, among splintered trees, looked like a cross from the air.

  Slim Sherk, a British Columbia Forest Service pilot, was sent to investigate when a plume of black smoke was reported about forty kilometres west of Williams Lake. Sherk saw the burning plane. He counted at least twenty, maybe forty, bodies scattered on the ground.

  Forestry workers and ambulance attendants from 100-Mile House rushed to the scene. But there were no survivors. Bodies, and pieces of bodies, were scattered in the woods. The objects that witnesses saw falling from the plane were passengers, sucked out in the seconds after the blast.

  The wreckage burned all night. When police and Department of Transport investigators entered the plane the next day, they found twenty-nine bodies, many still with seat belts fastened.

  They were murdered. Investigators knew right away that a bomb had brought down Flight 21.

  The evidence was compelling. Paint had been blasted beneath the skin of some passengers. A flight attendant’s overnight bag stowed near the rear of the plane was found some 300 metres from the wreckage, and showed signs of having been near an explosion. The RCMP x-rayed the bodies and found a piece of metal that appeared to be from a detonator.

  Crash investigators, reconstructing parts of the fallen plane, became convinced there had been a deadly explosion in the left rear lavatory.

  But why would anyone want to blow up the plane?

  The RCMP, with few leads, decided to do psychological profiles and background checks on all the passengers.

  And four names stood out.

  Douglas Edgar, a forty-year-old Surrey man, had spent $3.50 to buy $125,000 worth of life insurance less than half an hour before boarding the flight. His wife, daughter, mother, and a niece were the beneficiaries. Buying life insurance was not that suspicious. Companies had vending machines in airports to allow nervous flyers to buy last-minute insurance, with envelopes to mail the policies to their families. But Edgar had told his family he was flying to Prince George because he had been offered a pulp mill job. The Mounties couldn’t find any evidence that was true.

  Steve Koleszar, of Vancouver, was experienced with explosives, and had been charged with murder seven years earlier. (And acquitted.) But the fifty-four-year-old was on his way to a new job, and had no apparent motive.

  Peter Broughton was flying to a summer job in Cassiar. The twenty-nine-year-old was a gun enthusiast, and almost three pounds of gunpowder were missing from his personal inventory. But he had no reason to blow up the DC-6.

  And Livingstone King of Toronto worked for an accounting firm that had audited the books of Atlantic Acceptance Corporation. The company had collapsed without warning a month earlier. It was fraud, the worst in Canadian history, and many investors lost everything. A federal royal commission was ultimately appointed to investigate the mess.

  Not suspects, the police were quick to say. They just had unanswered questions about them.

  There were other rumours. A strange man had been seen leaving the rear lavatory before takeoff in Vancouver. A flight attendant had smuggled explosives onto the plane as a favour to her boyfriend. A miner was preparing charges in the washroom when one went off accidentally. In 1965, there was no security or searches. You showed your ticket, checked your bag, and walked on board.

  But police could never answer the main questions—who brought the explosives onto the aircraft, and why.

  Most of the wreckage is still in the forests where the plane crashed more than a half century ago, trees growing up around the plane.

  But it gives up no answers. The crash of Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 21 remains a mystery. Someone killed fifty-two people.

  And we don’t know why.

  GO HOME!

  When the first ship came in the summer of 1999, British Columbians were intrigued, even sympathetic. It was like aliens from another planet, seeking a haven in Canada. No one talked about criminals.

  The rusty hulk intercepted off Vancouver Island’s Gold River on July 20 was carrying 123 Chinese migrants. They had braved a thirty-eight-day journey in horrific conditions for a chance at life in North America.

  The first news reports presented a gripping tale of suffering in a filthy ship, sleeping on plywood boards, hungry and sick, with a scant supply of bad water, all to start a new life.

  It was a heroic feat of endurance. “Think of your worst nightmare on a ship and that’s what you got,” said a Coast Guard officer.

  For a few days, there was even warmth for the 106 men and seventeen women—including ten minors—so keen to start anew, like millions of immigrants before them.

  Less than two months later, three more ships had arrived and the mood in Canada was poisonous. The ships had brought just 599 migrants. Every ten days that year, the same number of people arrived in Canada by air or road and sought refugee status. No one was much concerned about them.

  But politicians, media, and much of the public were outraged or frightened by a few hundred desperate people on rusty ships. They were queue jumpers, criminals, maybe even diseased, the reports suggested.

  The migrants had committed no criminal offences. They might be ineligible to remain in Canada, but they weren’t illegal. The only possible criminals, under Canadian law, were the organizers. It was a remarkable case of collective hysteria.

  There was little hint of any of that in the days after the first boat arrived.

  The migrants were detained and held for immigration hearings in a gym at CFB Esquimalt, the g
iant naval base in Victoria.

  Eleven were identified as possible paid crew, who might face criminal charges. But the rest were viewed kindly. “They’re very calm,” a Coast Guard official said. “They’re polite to the officers they’re dealing with. There’s certainly no aggression or anything like that at all. I would guess they’re happy to be on ground and in somewhat of a protected state.”

  But things began to change. News stories raised the cost of housing the migrants. People started to talk about queue-jumping and whether criminals were among the travellers. RCMP officers said they found a weapon fashioned from an aluminum food plate and decided to search the gym. They found pens and combs, and declared them potential weapons. After that, the migrants were handcuffed any time they left the gym.

  Except they suddenly weren’t migrants any more. The TV news talked about “illegal aliens.”

  The Chinese arrivals seemed happy to have survived the journey and ready for whatever happened next. They had paid snakeheads varying amounts—$20,000 or more—for the chance to come to North America. An average wage in Fujian province, their home, was six dollars a day. Even with the huge debt, there was a chance to work hard and send money to families.

  Immigration laws called for speedy hearings. If migrants asked for refugee status, immigration officials were to decide if they posed a risk or were likely to disappear. By August 4, two-thirds of the migrants had been released to be supported by non-profit agencies or, in the case of minors, into the government’s care.

  Things calmed down.

  Then, barely four weeks later, the second boat came. Canadian Forces patrol planes spotted an unmarked cargo ship about 240 kilometres off the wild Queen Charlotte Islands. The government dispatched a small armada—planes, three Coast Guard ships, and an RCMP ship.

  The crew eluded the pursuers and made a dash for the coast. They dumped 131 Chinese migrants—including forty-three minors as young as eleven—in a shallow, forbidding bay on Kunghit Island, where they shivered on a rocky beach until they were rescued. Goetz Hanisch, who owned a lodge on the island, transported two men and a woman. “They’re cold, they seem hungry, one’s sick and holding his stomach all the time and they’re crying,” he reported.

  The crew made a run for it. But the aging ship couldn’t escape the air force surveillances. The RCMP boarded the ship in international waters, arrested the eight crew, and headed for shore.

  It was only 254 people so far. Less than a planeload. But the friendly, welcoming face of Canada got uglier, and crazier. Media coverage focused on the perils. A flotilla of coming ships was predicted.

  The Victoria Times Colonist polled its readers—unscientifically—and found ninety-seven percent favoured sending the migrants home without hearings. The newspaper ran a giant GO HOME headline on its front page.

  Politicians joined in. Canada’s Immigration Minister, Elinor Caplan, said she was looking at tougher laws “in light of these troubling incidents.” Reform party leader Preston Manning thought Parliament should be recalled to respond to the emergency by suspending the Charter of Rights.

  It was a crazy time. The eight crew members from the second ship turned out to be Korean. Before their first appearance in a Victoria courtroom, Judge Jeanne Harvey ordered that no one be allowed in without protective breathing masks. Reporters, greeted by a locked door, rushed to a nearby dentist’s office to get some surgical masks.

  The Koreans shuffled into court in their green prison coveralls. They faced a roomful of people wearing everything from cheap, disposable white masks to elaborate, military-style gas masks. The translator had a purple mask with two breathing tubes snaking down like tentacles. Unfortunately, it made her difficult to understand in either language.

  It was unnecessary and irrational. The crew was healthy. They were not in quarantine, and came to the hearing in a van with Mounties who saw no need for masks.

  Not all the migrants were unwelcome. A well-fed dog was on the second boat, a Labrador crossbreed that the Victoria SPCA named Breeze. Adoption offers came in from across Canada.

  The migrants on the second boat weren’t as well briefed. Asked why they came to Canada, seventy-seven of the 131 said they wanted to make money. The correct answer is as a refugee fleeing persecution.

  This was all getting expensive. Immigration Canada spent about $400,000 in two weeks dealing with the new arrivals. The provincial government had to find space for about fifty children in government care.

  Partly, costs were so high because of the push to “get tough” with the migrants. Refugee claimants are usually released and told when to appear for a hearing. Almost three-quarters of the adults on the first boat were released into the community.

  But all the adults on the second boat were detained, an expensive alternative. (It is worth noting that almost half the adults on the first boat who were released disappeared before their refugee hearings.)

  Then came ship number three. A Canadian Forces Aurora patrol plane spotted it on August 30. It looked like it was about to sink, so the navy and coast guard boarded the next morning and took the people to safety. Another 163 adults and twenty-seven minors entered the system. The migrants were ferried to Gold River, a town on Vancouver Island’s west coast hammered by a mill closure and job losses.

  Ten days later, the fourth ship, the largest yet, arrived. The captain tried briefly to outrun a Canadian Forces destroyer, then hoisted a white T-shirt as a flag of surrender. There were 146 people on board.

  The summer had brought 599 people to Canada’s shores in two months—about 2.4 percent of the total who would make claims for asylum that year.

  But somehow, the boat people sparked fear and anger, while the 24,000 refugee claimants coming by air or land were ignored.

  Everyone braced for another wave of migrant ships on the British Columbia coast. Government departments worked on contingency plans.

  But the ships never came. The botched journeys might have made people unwilling to book passage on the route, or the snakeheads might have found a better way to help people travel to North America. Maybe there were more jobs in China.

  In British Columbia, 250 migrants were still in jail, taking up about ten percent of the available beds. An old prison in Prince George was reopened especially for the migrants.

  The refugee process was painfully slow. By the next spring, there had been two mass deportations of ninety people each time. There had been an unsuccessful jail escape, a small prison riot, and an eight-day hunger strike by female inmates.

  ***

  Of the 599 people on the four boats, 580 made refugee claims and only twenty-four were accepted.

  But only 330 people were deported.

  Most of the rest just disappeared. The detained teenagers, in the province’s care, flew away like birds leaving the nest—twenty-five in one night in Victoria. They had sacrificed too much to be sent back to China. Adults released from detention did the same. It was a good deal for taxpayers—the costs stopped once they had checked out of the system.

  And no actual kingpins or organizers were ever charged with a crime. In fact, from all four ships, only five people were convicted of “organizing, aiding or abetting the coming into Canada of a group of persons who were not in possession of valid travel documents.”

  The whole exercise cost, based on the lowest estimates, $40 million—or $67,000 per migrant. Much more than they paid for the journey.

  And for one ugly summer, Canadians seemed a meaner people.

  SUBURBAN TERRORISTS

  The van full of dynamite rolled across the lawn and stopped outside the Litton Systems factory in a Toronto suburb. The driver, Ann Hansen, flicked a switch to start the timer. She stepped out, set down a carboard box with a warning that the van was a rolling bomb, and disappeared into the night. It was 11:15 p.m. on a cloudy Thursday night in 1982, two weeks before Halloween.

  From a nearby phone booth, Julie Belmas called the factory, which had been the scene of protests over Litton’
s work on guidance systems for U.S. cruise missiles. Belmas warned security that the van was a rolling bomb. They had twenty-five minutes to evacuate the building and clear the streets.

  The guard didn’t understand the message. Nervous and worried about the call being traced, Belmas hung up without answering his questions.

  Just fourteen minutes later, a huge explosion rocked the factory, shook homes up to five kilometres away, and sent shrapnel in all directions. Seven people—Litton workers and police—were hurt, two seriously.

  Direct Action, an odd collection of Vancouver anarchists who became known as the Squamish Five, had staged their most spectacular terror attack.

  But not their first. Or their last.

  ***

  They were an unlikely crew. Brent Taylor, twenty-five at the time of the blast, went to Oak Bay High School in Victoria’s poshest community, the son of two university professors. He hit the road after high school, first to party, then to learn from U.S. terror groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army, famous for kidnapping Patty Hearst. He told his father he was going to be a revolutionary.

  Ann Hansen, twenty-eight, grew up in Concord, a small town later captured by Toronto’s northward sprawl. She was one of five children of Danish immigrants who found a better life on an acreage amid idyllic farms and woods. She discovered Marxism in university and travelled to Europe in 1979 to learn about urban guerilla groups like the Red Army Faction. An anarchist-led battle with police in Paris was “probably one of the most exciting days of my life,” she recalled.

  Gerry Hannah, twenty-five, grew up in the Vancouver suburbs and was semi-famous as Gerry Useless, the bass player for the popular Vancouver punk band the Subhumans.

  Belmas was twenty, part of the group for two years, joining with her boyfriend, Hannah. She too had a middle-class background. Peaceful protests, she decided, weren’t working.

  Doug Stewart, twenty-five, was the group’s technical wizard, happily poring over bomb-making manuals and exploring security weak points.