Well of Lies

by Colin Perkel

  The huge Friday-night rainstorm had swamped the site. The overflowing Saugeen drowned the foundry in forty centimetres of putrid water. The stench of manure sickened him. Despite being an old farm boy, Weiss had become increasingly disconcerted with what he considered to be Big Agriculture’s maltreatment of the environment. Over the previous four or five summers, beaches along his favourite strip of Lake Huron had to be closed due to bacterial contamination, sparking finger-pointing between farmers and cottagers. He bridled at what he saw as the irresponsible spraying and spreading of vast quantities of manure and pesticides on fields because it would inevitably wash into nearby waterways, killing minnows, frogs, and other aquatic life. Although he complained to anyone who might listen, the powerful agricultural lobby had the ear of the politicians. No one had the guts to take them on, certainly not in a town like Walkerton that depends so heavily on its farm neighbours.

  Weiss felt sure the poisonous water coursing through the town’s taps had to be farm-related. But, he said to friends, no one would investigate. Even the mayor was a farmer. There would be a cover-up. There’s nothing you can do, they said. The hell you can’t, he replied. Though he had never taken part, images of the 1960s’ civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations had left an indelible impression on him. People had marched and carried signs and, ultimately, someone had listened. Still, the idea of demonstrating terrified him. It was a front-page newspaper photograph that steeled his determination to act. Tucked into a stretcher next to her teddy bear, five-year-old Tamara Smith was about to be airlifted for treatment to London. Dieter Weiss pondered the photograph, and cried. Tamara could just as easily have been his granddaughter.

  On hearing that the premier was coming to town that afternoon, Weiss headed to his workshop at the foundry and scrounged up the most quintessential of Canadian artifacts: an old canoe paddle. Next, he found a piece of plywood, and a sign was born. Now, the hard part: What’s it to say? Harris is an asshole? No. He had no desire to offend the man he’d twice voted for. He had approved of many of Harris’s policies: work-for-welfare, the downsizing of the bloated bureaucracy. But the cuts to the Environment Ministry bothered him, especially because big farmers appeared to have been given free rein to pollute the environment, his environment, his grandchildren’s environment. And so he scrawled: We Demand Answers. No More Cutbacks. His friends were dismayed. You could be arrested, they said. You could be clubbed or pepper-sprayed, they said. You’re going to get your ass kicked, you’ll be tarred and feathered and run out of town, they said. Weiss considered. What he needed, he realized, was support. People power. So he sped over to Ron Leavoy’s print shop on Durham and asked for a rush job on five hundred flyers advertising a protest for the following day. “Come to our meeting to preserve our clean water and air and stop the cutbacks,” the flyers said.

  “I don’t know if we can get this done,” Leavoy told him.

  “It’s your grandchildren that are affected,” Weiss rejoined.

  The flyers were printed. He plonked down the $50 and headed back to his shed, retrieved his newly minted sign, and began what surely must have been one of the loneliest and strangest protest marches the town had ever seen. Clutching the pile of flyers in one hand, the sign in the other, he made his way over the bridge across Durham and up the lower end of Yonge Street toward the post office. A reporter spotted him.

  “You’re a lone voice in the wilderness,” she said. “Where are your supporters?”

  “I don’t expect any,” he replied.

  All he wanted, Weiss explained, was to talk to the premier, to ask him the environmental questions that were bothering him. Already he suspected that Stan Koebel was going to take the fall and it would then be business as usual. But no matter what the town’s water manager had or hadn’t done, he felt the problem ran far deeper. He was shocked when he turned the corner onto Scott Street and sighted the horde of media assembled in front of the post office. That he hadn’t expected. The mayor, a flock of councillors in tow, passed him on their way to Newman’s for lunch. They glared and refused to take a flyer from him. Almost no one would, except for a couple of reporters who feigned interest. No way they were going to be taken in by some half-crazed old geezer with a beef and a sign, not with a far bigger news story set to happen. A few motorists quietly gave him the thumb’s up or timidly honked their horns as they drove by, but that was it for support. It didn’t bother Weiss. To and fro he walked. To and fro. Then, perhaps fed up with having nothing better to do while he hurried up and waited for the main event, a reporter at last moseyed over.

  “Why are you doing this? Isn’t this a local problem?”

  “It’s all over Ontario,” he replied. “Do you think all the E. coli in the province washed down our well?”

  Weiss waxed on about the damage caused by the wanton spreading of manure and pesticides: the dead minnows and frogs, the closed beaches. And suddenly other reporters were lining up to talk to him as well. Harris’s lateness offered more time for interviews. Each time, he passed on the simplest of messages:

  “I have children and grandchildren. I don’t want them to live in a garbage dump.”

  When Hillary Stauth emerged from behind the glass doors to survey the lie of the media land and say Harris would be out shortly, Weiss had already joined the small clutch of townsfolk standing to her left. He asked if the premier would take questions from the public. Stauth jotted the comment down, said she’d see what she could do before going back inside. Suddenly, a uniformed local police officer standing just behind him and to his left put his hand on the shoulder of the man with the sign and hissed:

  “Dieter, you know what you did back there.”

  He turned his head toward the officer.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jumping in front of the cameras. I don’t want to see any more of that.”

  “I did not jump in front of the cameras. I was politely asked and I obliged.”

  A burly man pushed his way behind Weiss, and the lone protester, who was becoming increasingly nervous, knew it was an undercover officer appraising the threat. Weiss worried about being pepper-sprayed or dragged off to jail. The hot spring air felt charged. Minutes later, a hush fell on the crowd as Harris emerged and began his speech to the media. Weiss listened quietly, patiently. The reporters were almost done and he could wait no longer. “Mr. Harris, Mr. Harris,” he called out, to no avail.

  The uniformed police officer behind him tapped him yet again on the shoulder.

  “Keep it down or else,” he growled.

  Dieter Weiss had never given up on democracy even though it had never seemed to work very well for him. He exercised his franchise zealously. He voted on the issues he cared about rather than for the personalities or parties. Each time, it felt as if his vote had been stolen from him. He had backed the federal Liberals under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, at least until he turned the country metric. He voted for the federal Conservatives when Brian Mulroney promised jobs, jobs, jobs, then watched in dismay as the jobs went to Mexico. When Jean Chrétien promised to scrap the federal sales tax introduced by the Mulroney Tories, he voted Liberal again but the GST remains a fact of Canadian life. Provincially, he had backed the Liberals under David Peterson when they promised to make beer available in corner stores. But they reneged on that pledge and so, in 1990, he voted for the New Democrats of Bob Rae because they promised cheap, publicly run car insurance. That, too, didn’t happen. But he liked what Harris and his provincial Tories were saying in 1995, and so he voted for them, and again in 1999 because he felt Harris was a politician who knew how to get things done. Still, he wished the premier would get his people to research the effects of all those cuts to the Environment Ministry a little better and he wanted badly to ask Harris about that. Weiss wheeled to face the cop.

  “We don’t live in Communist Russia. We don’t live in a dictatorship. I’m here to ask a question, now back off.”

  The officer began reaching for his truncheon, b
ut a TV camera swung toward them and the club stayed put. By this time, Harris had vanished, leaving resident Veronica Davidson shrieking after him and taking the pressure off Weiss and his furiously pounding heart. He had received no answers. He hadn’t even gotten to ask his question. He felt deeply offended and deeply disappointed. As reporters rushed off to file their stories, the crowd dispersed. When someone mentioned that Harris was going to the arena where donated bottled water was being passed out, Weiss jumped into his truck and followed after him. It was too late. Harris had dropped a few bucks into a collection jug and left town. Weiss dropped $20 of his own into the jug and went home. He put his sign away and spent the rest of the day waiting in dread for a knock at the door that would tell him he was off to jail. It didn’t, of course, come. No one, if you discount the media and the Davidsons, who came with their ginger-haired offspring in tow, showed up the following day for the big protest that Weiss had tried to organize. Not even Weiss.

  —

  Veronica Davidson had also come down to the post office to hear what Premier Mike Harris had to say that Friday afternoon and she didn’t like what she heard. When the premier abruptly disappeared through the glass door, the drama teacher exploded.

  “Mr. Harris!” she shouted after him. “It’s a shame you have to go off quickly and not hear those points of view of the people who live in Walkerton.”

  As cameramen, photographers, and reporters jostled to get closer, Davidson unloaded. For a moment, it was as if the entire town’s anger was being channelled through this short, ginger-haired mother of two.

  “We are a small town, we have dealt with death,” Davidson said, her voice rising over the din, as if that would help her words reach the ears of the now vanished premier.

  “We have seen the system obviously does not work,” she said, hands flailing. “And now that you’ve seen the system doesn’t work, are you going to put a system in place so this type of tragedy never has to happen again?”

  She paused to spell her name for one of the reporters.

  “It seemed like a lot of platitudes without substance. I waited patiently, with respect, to see what he would say, and when he did not say anything, then I felt it was necessary to speak up. I think he needs to address us personally. I don’t think he can hide behind all kinds of protocol.”

  From their home on the hill, Davidson’s bemused husband watched Harris and then his wife on TV. While her roots in the area go back a century, Bruce Davidson was a newcomer of fourteen years to Walkerton. Born of Jamaican parents in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, Bruce had met Veronica during their university years in Guelph, Ontario. For a while, Bruce flirted with making a career in theatre, and worked behind the scenes as a technician at a small company in Toronto. But when Veronica went on to pursue a career in teaching, Bruce opted to qualify as a registered massage therapist. It was Jim Kieffer, now chairman of the public utilities commission, who processed Bruce’s Ontario driver’s licence, sold him a pair of pants, and rented them their first Walkerton home, a townhouse. This is the only place, Davidson liked to quip, where you can find an ear, nose, and goat specialist. Although his family had escaped illness because they had been out of town, four people on their stretch of street had been airlifted to city hospitals. He had watched the confusion, terror, and heartache unfold as the glare of the national and international media grew increasingly harsh. He had watched the news conferences with Mayor Dave Thomson and Jim Kieffer and got no answers. It seemed to him as if things were out of control, that no one in charge was taking charge. The town’s two main grocery stores had ordered in skids of bottled water, but council had failed to act. Walkerton was fast on its way to becoming North America’s leper colony, but all the Davidsons saw that Friday from their provincial government, from their premier, was political posturing and denial. Even worse, they felt as if Mike Harris had simply ignored them. But if Veronica’s tirade was heard across Canada and beyond, it resounded most loudly in her own backyard, in a shell-shocked community that had yet to find a voice to ask the hard questions, to express the depths of its frustration. At the Davidsons’ home, the phone began ringing as friends and acquaintances called to let her know she had expressed them. And in that heady rush, Bruce began pondering a way to ensure that the community would stay heard, whether or not the premier and his allies in far-away Toronto wanted to listen.

  Out of a conversation with his old activist neighbour Chris Peabody, a teacher at Sacred Heart and a future town councillor, a plan began taking shape. Davidson sat down at his computer and wrote a letter to the premier demanding a judicial inquiry into the disaster. He quickly garnered fourteen signatures and headed down to the local print shop to get the letter photocopied. There, he got talking with owner Ron Leavoy, whom he hadn’t met before. Leavoy, whose daughter had been thwacked on the head by an overzealous TV cameraman at the Harris news conference outside the post office, signed immediately and the letter was faxed to Premier Mike Harris and copied to other politicians.

  Soon, the leaders of the Opposition would visit the Davidsons’ home and impress on the sixteen or twenty people gathered there that they needed to get organized. So a steering committee was formed and Concerned Walkerton Citizens (CWC) was born. Ron Leavoy became chairman, Bruce Davidson was elected vice-chair, and Veronica named secretary. Todd Huntley, who had once wondered why a girl couldn’t buy a slush at the Becker’s, became treasurer. Leavoy printed flyers advertising their first public meeting and other volunteers papered the town with them. About two hundred people showed up at the old Hartley House in mid-June and most signed on as members. Within weeks, the group grew to a signed-up membership of more than five hundred, 10 per cent of the town’s entire population. Still, some people hated what Bruce and his group were doing. “You don’t speak for me,” the father of one of the town’s elected politicians chastised him. “Who the hell does he think he is?” was another comment heard around town.

  “There are some people who believe that if we deny, we will go back to being Walkerton,” Davidson told one reporter.

  The CWC would not be denied. The politicians in Toronto were starting to listen and Bruce Davidson, whose biggest public speaking event had been as valedictorian at massage school graduation, became an articulate, persistent voice of Walkerton’s residents, perhaps the voice. Slightly balding with curly hair, just five-foot-six-feet tall, he possessed the perfect turn of phrase, an intuitive understanding of what reporters needed, and first-hand knowledge of the town. Most importantly, he was willing to share what he knew, ask the questions few others in the community dared ask, and make himself available for a dizzying array of media interviews. Papers ranging from the New York Times and the Manchester Guardian to the weekly Walkerton Herald-Times talked to him. TV crews paraded through his home, sometimes lining up outside as they waited their turn. A CBC national TV crew spent three days doing “a day in the life of,” following the family as they brushed their teeth with bottled water or drove the kids to a nearby town for a bath. Sociology students called asking if they could study the group as an example of an effective grassroots organization. Someone from the British Columbia government asked to use its resources. And through it all, Davidson marvelled at just how much attention he and the group continued to get.

  Going Back Home

  ONLY THE MOST hardened miscreant, or blithering idiot, faces the prospect of criminal charges with any kind of equanimity. Stan Koebel was neither. As with most people, whose brushes with the law might comprise a parking-meter violation or speeding ticket, the prospect of being a hunted man was truly terrifying. For Stan, who two weeks earlier had been the respected manager of the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission, it was beyond terror. People were dead. God only knew how many more were ill or might die. How could this be? He’d flushed, and flushed and flushed. Hell, why hadn’t anyone warned him? How on earth could he face those who had trusted him? How could he admit what he’d done, what he hadn’t done? Dr. McQuigge had said the deaths
were preventable. Did that make him a killer? A reckless monster? But look how hard he’d worked for so long. Look how well he’d done. Waves of anguish swept over him. Uncomprehending. How could this be? Who to talk to? Who to trust? What about Frank? With two heart attacks behind him, could Frank take the stress? Stan was inconsolable.

  “I want him here today,” Bill Trudell told Carole.

  Trudell, a prominent criminal lawyer practising in Toronto, had defended some of society’s worst offenders. People like Gary Foshay, the hitman who’d executed Hanna Buxbaum, a mother of six, on the side of a London-area highway at the behest of her whacked-out millionaire husband. Then there was James Ruston, a seventeen-year-old Petro-Canada gas-station attendant and a “kid worth saving,” as Trudell put it. When Joseph Fritch, a corporate executive and father of four, tried to pay for his gas one night, Ruston pulled a garbage bag over his head while a buddy smashed his skull with a fire extinguisher and stole his wallet. Stan, of course, was different. This was a lost soul floundering in its own private hell. Trudell immediately arranged to get Stan to a psychiatrist. He also knew reporters, police, and ministry investigators all wanted to talk to his client.

  “You have a right not to say anything. Don’t talk to anybody, not even your brother,” Trudell told him.

  “Would you see Frank?” Stan asked.

  Trudell agreed and Frank arrived the next day. He, too, was quiet and overwhelmed. Bill gave him the same brief advice he’d given Stan, had a psychiatrist talk to him, and referred him to fellow lawyer Mike Epstein.