by Colin Perkel
On a downtown sidewalk, an old man paused to gaze upward as the all-too-familiar noise filled the air.
“Oh sweet Jesus,” he said aloud to no one in particular. “Not another one of our kids.”
—
As Jamie and Cathy McDonald watched, increasingly exhausted Walkerton hospital staff prepared five-year-old Ian for an emergency ambulance run to London. He’d been admitted some thirty-six hours earlier when he began throwing up blood and Jamie had told the nurse, “I can’t do anything else for him. I’m losing him.” Dark circles had formed around his eyes. His cheeks were hollowed. But it was only after Cathy noticed blood in his urine that the situation was deemed critical. A provincial police car acted as the ambulance escort. From the passenger seat, Cathy activated the cruiser siren, which burned out during the long drive to London.
So began their vigil. They noted every movement on their child’s chart; platelets, hemoglobin, red and white blood cell counts rose and fell. It felt as if they’d been thrust onto some nightmarish roller coaster and all they could do was ride it out. Outside the ward someone had hung a sign: Welcome to Little Walkerton. Distraught relatives swapped stories and words of comfort. Some told how local motels had turned them away, as if they all were carriers of a plague. But it was the anxiety felt by dozens of worried parents that spread like contagion as their kids suddenly needed transfusions or got shipped down to dialysis. With every needle, tiny arms turned an uglier black and blue, while moms or dads clad in yellow hospital gowns helped hold them down.
“No more needles, no more,” a child would plead, struggling uselessly against the inevitable.
A week after Tamara Smith had made her flight to London, she was deemed well enough to leave hospital, though she was so weak she could barely stand. She was disappointed to find out she’d be going by car. She wanted to go by helicopter.
—
For Jamie and Cathy McDonald, the thimble full of urine that Ian produced sent waves of joy through them. Until Jamie’s mom, who’d been looking after Kylie and Alex, called from Owen Sound.
“Now don’t worry,” she said, “but Kylie has just tested positive for E. coli.”
Jamie broke the news to Cathy, got into his car and headed to Owen Sound, while Cathy stayed behind to look after Ian. Within hours, the boy took a turn for the worse. The doctors had always warned he might need dialysis but said they’d give plenty of notice. That evening, the doctor told Cathy it had become necessary.
“When are you going to do it?” she asked.
“Immediately.”
She ran to the phone to let Jamie know. Jamie had planned to stay the night with his parents so he could take Kylie to the Owen Sound hospital the following day for more tests. The couple agreed to stick to that plan. It was about 1:30 A.M. and Jamie had just drifted off to sleep when the ringing phone jolted him into instant consciousness. The anxiety-ridden voice of his wife sounded surreal.
“It’s time to come down,” she said.
Ian was dying. The doctor had inserted the dialysis catheter, but all he was getting was blood. A surgeon opened Ian up and found a hole in an artery, and was able to staunch the flow. He stitched the hole closed and gave the child a transfusion and blood products. Ian was still in desperate need of dialysis, but the method of pumping fluid into the abdomen wouldn’t work because it simply poured back out of the surgical incision. So they put him on adult dialysis, itself risky for children, with a catheter inserted into a major blood vessel in his groin. Jamie arrived at about 3 A.M., courtesy of a colleague from the police detachment in Walkerton who drove him down in a cruiser. At the darkest of the hours before dawn, a doctor who had come up from Windsor to help in the E. coli treatment effort and who had himself been working non-stop for days walked over to the anguished parents. He was carrying coffee and doughnuts for them.
The new day had barely arrived when word came from Owen Sound: three-year-old Kylie had been admitted to hospital with failing kidneys. Dr. Kristen Hallett, who had sparked the search for the cause of the E. coli epidemic, consulted with her counterpart in the London hospital, which was fast reaching its limit to care for new patients. They discussed sending Kylie to Hamilton or Toronto but decided on London so the McDonald family could be together. With Ian in critical care, a pale and weakened Kylie was put upstairs in a ward for observation while Cathy helped hold her down so they could draw blood. In Owen Sound, two-year-old Alex felt completely abandoned. His grandparents agreed to drive him down to London so the family could be reunited. While one parent stayed with him at a motel, the other would run between floors, checking on their two sick children. Then Alex developed diarrhea as well, and Cathy and Jamie braced for a new round of fresh hell. It was a false alarm, likely caused by stress. Alex, possibly the most vulnerable of the three children, never did get E. coli poisoning. Because of recurring ear infections, he’d been on a maintenance dose of antibiotics, which likely saved him from contracting the gruesome illness. A night later, Ian began to pee and when his mom saw him eating some ice out of a cup, she knew the war had been won. Kylie, the most robust of the siblings, mended quickly without much further intervention. Two weeks after their nightmare began, the family was finally able to go back to a home they would soon leave again.
Pride and Protest
LIKE MOST small communities in Canada, Walkerton has no door-to-door mail delivery. Instead, heading down to the post office is a peaceful ritual of daily life, a chance to greet friends and neighbours, catch up on the latest gossip, discuss the weather, pick up the mail. Now there was no place to park. Media vehicles and satellite trucks filled every available space as reporters milled about the building’s entrance. Residents found themselves having to run a gauntlet of cameras and nosy big-city media types. Questions, questions, questions. Do you know anyone who’s sick? Do you know anyone who has died? Who do you blame? What do you think of Stan Koebel? But the interlopers could never understand the conflicted emotions raised by every question about friends, neighbours, and family. How could these outsiders fathom the shock, the confusion, the grief and fear? The reporters, most of whom had never heard of Walkerton before being thrown into the assignment, would soon vanish like the snow on a warm April day, but they had to live here. Their presence was intrusive and ugly, their interest seemed almost prurient. They turned the funeral for Lenore Al into a circus befitting a rock star, instead of the sad farewell to a retired librarian whose widower was overcome by grief. That some of the local kids followed the cortege on their bicycles was wholly understandable. But vehicles emblazoned with media call letters? The only reporters and photographers they knew, often the same person, showed up at flower shows and minor-league hockey games and ribbon-cuttings and fundraising walkathons. How could these strangers possibly understand what they were going through? And so townsfolk developed a strategy: they marched into the post office with gaze averted. Eye contact or a smile would invariably be construed as an invitation to an interview. Reporters were perplexed. The small-town coldness, the hostility, made no sense. How could these people, upset as they must be, fail to understand their interest? It fell to those among the townspeople who were angry enough or who enjoyed the attention to satisfy the media’s curiosity. Most Walkertonians felt sickened by what they read and saw.
Friday, May 26
1:30 P.M.
Far from the crowd gathered outside the post office and adjoining municipal building, a private plane carrying Ontario Premier Mike Harris cruised the almost cloudless, pale blue sky toward the airport outside Hanover. The wind was light, a perfect spring day for flying. From his window, the premier could see a checkerboard of fields with their intricate ploughing patterns offset by swaths of green meadows and patches of bush. In the airport building, Conservative legislature member Bill Murdoch munched on a hamburger. The tarmac was empty, save for a news helicopter off to one side. To the left of the airport building, a dark green Honda minivan, the favoured vehicle for moving the premier around, waited
outside the iron gate that opened directly onto the tarmac. The plane landed, taxied to the middle of the tarmac, and came to a stop as the engines died. A man with mirrored sunglasses drove the minivan to within about fifteen metres of the plane. A reporter followed. A few minutes later, the door opened. The stairs lowered and Hillary Stauth, Harris’s bubbly twenty-something junior communications assistant, emerged into the sunshine. She looked confused, as if she’d been expecting a crowd. It seemed so quiet.
“I hear CNN’s here,” she said, as if she couldn’t quite believe it.
A few minutes later, Harris emerged at the top of the stairs. Dressed in a dark blue sports jacket and light blue open-necked shirt, he looked decidedly unhappy. He moved quickly down the stairs, strode to the minivan without a sideways glance, and got in. The van disappeared through the gate for the ten-minute run to Walkerton.
The van took him to the back of the municipal building. Harris slipped inside and met privately with Mayor Dave Thomson. Although he had little grasp of the staggering magnitude of the situation, Thomson told Harris that the municipality was facing something it couldn’t handle alone and the premier promised to do what he could. Outside, in the now blazing sun, an impatient media crowd waited. Harris’s arrival had been set for about 1 P.M., but he was running close to an hour late. Behind and to the right of a row of TV cameras and reporters, a clutch of about forty residents, adults and children, had gathered. Across the road lined with cars, news vehicles, and satellite trucks, a few pre-teen boys took pictures. Walkerton had never seen anything like this. Just behind one of the TV cameras, a boy put down the puppy he’d been carrying.
“Has your dog been sick as well?” one reporter asked.
“Yeah, he’s been a little sick,” the kid replied gravely.
Hillary Stauth emerged from the municipal office through the glass door to the right of the post office. The premier would be out in a few minutes, would make a statement, and then take questions. To keep it orderly, she said, she would give the signal to each reporter. It was clear this was going to be a tightly controlled, conventional news conference. Someone to one side asked if the premier would take questions from the public. Stauth made a note, said something to the man, and disappeared inside. Moments later, Harris came through the glass door and strode the few steps over to the brown podium set up on the concrete boulevard. Bill Murdoch and rookie Environment Minister Dan Newman stood awkwardly against the red-brick wall of the municipal office. His mouth turned down, his face grim, his brow furrowed, Harris placed a piece of paper on the podium, waited a few seconds for the TV cameras to get rolling, and began reading:
“I come to this community under very tragic circumstances,” he read. “I come today not only as premier, but I come as a father, I come as a son, I come as a fellow citizen who has been touched by the events of this week. I come on behalf of an entire province and indeed an entire country that has been moved and deeply saddened and brought together by what is happening here.”
Mike Harris, it is fair to say, had never been celebrated for his oratorical skills. During question period or in dealing with the usual media crowd at the legislature, he had shown himself highly capable of spontaneous flashes of wit and charged partisan rhetoric. That was a game he’d mastered. However, a natural stump speaker he wasn’t. Under the right circumstances and at his best, the premier could deliver a speech that engaged an audience even if it didn’t quite captivate them. At his worst, his dull monotone and stiff, wooden style gave the impression that he didn’t quite believe or feel the words coming out of his own mouth.
“For today, Walkerton is Ontario and Walkerton is Canada,” he continued as the silent crowd listened intently.
“All of us, all Canadians, are united with the families of Walkerton. United in grief, we are united in prayer, we are united in heart, and we are united in mind. We are united in the determination to stand by one another until this situation passes.
“I have directed that all necessary resources of the Ontario government be made available to help the citizens of this community weather this storm. I pledge that we will do what it takes to get to the bottom of this tragedy. The people of Walkerton demand answers. People of Ontario demand answers. And I demand answers. But that is an issue for tomorrow.
“Today, our thoughts rest with the families of this community, with everyone that is struggling to cope with these tragic events, and standing beside them I believe is the first priority, and that is the first priority reason that I am here.”
On paper, the words appeared to have exactly the right sound, the right balance of empathy and concern. But as he spoke them in the hot sun, glancing up only to look at the cameras in his practised way, they appeared to lose all flavour, all real sentiment, all resonance. His flat, lowered voice betrayed little, if any, emotion. It felt too carefully prepared, overcooked, insipid. The crowd remained quiet.
“I’ll take questions,” he said quickly.
CBC reporter Raj Ahluwalia immediately jumped in. He asked about the changes the Conservative government had made after coming to office in 1995. Could the Tories’ decision to privatize water-testing have contributed to the crisis? Harris fiddled with the front of his jacket.
“Well, I am told there are no changes,” Harris began.
Harris went on to say that if any government policies or procedures had played a role, it wasn’t his regime that had implemented them. Look to the New Democrats, who had formed the government before him, he said. The tragedy had become a partisan political football.
Almost immediately upon coming to power in June 1995, the Harris government had taken the axe to the Environment Ministry, slashing its budget and staff as it tackled the province’s $10-billion annual deficit with single-minded purpose. Warnings from scientists, health professionals, and even the most senior bureaucrats about the debilitating and demoralizing effects of the cuts went unheeded. While the NDP had governed during one of the deepest recessions since the Great Depression and had made some staff cuts, it was under the Harris government that, for the first time, hundreds of ministry employees were forced out the door. Helping business and industry topped a Conservative agenda designed to balance the province’s books and cut taxes. Environmental rules and regulations, such as one requested by the minister of health himself to clarify the reporting of bad water, were rejected as red tape that simply got in the way of much needed job-creation. From on high, the word came down that strenuous enforcement of environmental rules was not wanted. “Partnerships,” “stakeholders,” and “voluntary compliance” became the new buzzwords. The number of prosecutions, convictions, and fines levied against polluters fell sharply. The number of inspections of waterworks declined. The ministry’s traditional role as watchdog over the province’s ecological integrity and its water quality had been dangerously undermined. Harris said nothing about any of that.
If Mike Harris wasn’t known for his rousing speeches, he’d also never been known for his warmth or exuberance. He could be amiable enough, but he seldom appeared to be at ease in a crowd. He did not indulge in phony baby-kissing. Perhaps that was part of his appeal. He seemed to be a genuine, down-to-earth fellow who had little use for touchy-feely antics in order to win votes. But to a town desperately in need of a warm, steadying hand and a show of solidarity and leadership, Harris seemed indifferent.
The hardline policies and confrontational approach that marked the Conservatives’ years in office, especially those of their first term, had made Harris a target for protests both big and small. He’d been dogged at every stop during his re-election campaign in the spring of 1999 by small, vocal groups of dissenters. Through it all, Harris remained dismissive, even contemptuous. He portrayed every voice of opposition as coming from a “special interest group” to which he would never listen. Labour unions, teachers, civil servants, mothers on welfare had all felt the sting. His supporters, and they were many across the province, including Walkerton, liked his strength of conviction, his w
illingness to forge ahead with what he believed. But Harris seemed to view the townsfolk gathered outside their post office as just another special interest group. He offered no personal words of encouragement, gave no sign he really cared, no indication that he had come for any other reason than to bolster his own political interest. He gave no hint that he understood the calamity that had visited this rural town. Instead of applying balm to soothe their wounds, he had rubbed in partisan salt. Without so much as a glance at the people who looked to him as their leader and friend, Ontario Premier Mike Harris turned away and disappeared into the municipal offices.
—
When he had first approached the microphone, Harris had stared briefly at a crudely crafted protest sign directly in front of him, the only one in evidence: We Demand Answers. No More Cutbacks. The sign seemed to confirm that the gaggle of people clustered around the protester were just another anti-Tory special interest group. In fact, had Harris looked to see who was holding the sign, he’d have noticed a slightly weathered man in his mid-fifties, a man who had never demonstrated before, a man who had given the premier and his Conservative party his vote in both of the previous provincial elections, the second one barely ten months earlier.
Dieter Weiss owned the old foundry property on the edge of town, directly across from Lobie’s Park. The foundry, one of the first manufacturing plants in the province, dated back to Joseph Walker’s days. Horse ploughs and the like had been made there in a plant that drew its power through a water wheel on the Saugeen River before the Walkerton Electric & Power Company provided electricity. The plant closed in the late 1980s, and Weiss bought the site with the retirement aim of turning it into a tourist-type canoeing and fishing recreation area. The river was thick with salmon and trout, but as the years went by, the fish slowly disappeared.