Well of Lies

by Colin Perkel

  “You can’t vote for this,” Stockwell whispered to the recalcitrant member.

  “But they’re right, we have to do this,” Murdoch insisted. “If you don’t do a full inquiry in this thing, we’ll never get out of this thing.”

  Party whip Frank Klees sidled over.

  “Bill, I beg you, don’t.”

  “What am I getting for it?” the cattle trader shot back.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll look after you. I promise,” said Klees.

  Murdoch understood the rules of the game as well as anybody. He couldn’t go against his own party on a recorded vote on such an important issue, no matter how justified the Opposition might have been.

  “Okay. I’ll take that,” he said at last.

  Minutes after the Tories crushed the Liberal motion, Harris himself went over.

  “You voted the right way,” the premier said without smiling.

  Still, it was becoming clearer by the minute that something had to give. On the morning of May 31, Harris appeared to be cracking.

  “We want to get to the bottom of this in a full and open way,” he said heading into a weekly cabinet meeting. “A public inquiry would be one way. I think it would take a lot longer to get to the bottom of this. A legislative committee would be another far more effective way.”

  But when at the same hour, the provincial coroner announced they were now investigating the possibility of nine deaths from the poisonous water, Harris capitulated. He put out a brief press release announcing a public inquiry and left it to Attorney General Jim Flaherty to make the formal announcement. In the house, Harris was a no-show, a fact pointedly noted by an Opposition now trying hard not to gloat. But in classic Tory government fashion, before Flaherty got up, two other senior ministers did their utmost to do what the government had always done so well: push a couple of diversionary hot buttons. First Health Minister Elizabeth Witmer bashed the federal government, a favourite Tory sport, over cuts to health funding. Then Education Minister Janet Ecker played another favourite card when she tabled a bill to crack down on unruly school students. The diversions were futile and Flaherty rose to his feet.

  “The premier has today announced that in order to get to the bottom of the Walkerton tragedy, the Ontario government will appoint a judge or a retired judge to a commission of inquiry under the Public Inquiries Act.”

  When asked why he’d changed his mind on calling the inquiry, Harris again pointed at the Opposition parties, saying he was worried they wouldn’t cooperate in committee hearings. Within days, he would be blaming the disaster on “human error.” And then he blamed the town for not taking advantage of government grants to fix its water problems, a statement for which he was pilloried when it turned out to have been wrong. It all sounded so feeble. A little more than a week after Harris’s about-face, his attorney general announced that Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Dennis O’Connor, whose brother had been a judge in Walkerton and had approved Stan Koebel’s divorce settlement, would lead what would become arguably the widest ranging public inquiry the country had ever seen. And Premier Mike Harris himself would have to answer to it.

  City Suits and Civil Suits

  IT’S NOT EVERY DAY a taxi shows up at Stonegate. It was around noon when a young woman in jeans, a reporter from the Globe and Mail, got out. Susan Bourette wanted to ask a few questions about the source of the E. coli now known to have come from Well 5, which lay behind a bit of scrub just east of the Biesenthal property. The tall vet seemed reserved but friendly enough. Beyond having heard that E. coli found in his cattle were a near match to those found in the poisonous water, no one had told Dave Biesenthal anything.

  “How would you feel if this farm was the origin of the contamination?” Bourette asked.

  Biesenthal could feel his blood starting a slow boil. Her tape recorder suddenly felt like a weapon.

  “I know this could potentially be the origin of the problem,” he said. “But what can I do about it? Go out and shoot my cows? It’s easy to say this is the origin, but how did it get from here to the well? I didn’t take a bucket of manure and throw it down the well.”

  In London early the next morning, Laryssa was preparing for the Olympic team rowing trials when she heard her farm home had become national news. She raced for the phone and called her unsuspecting parents. It was 7 A.M.

  “Why is our name all over the radio?” she asked a startled Carolyn. “Are you okay?”

  It was as if a hand grenade had been tossed into the quiet farmhouse, heralding a hostile invasion of reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen. Biesenthal parked a front-end loader across the bottom of the long drive to dam the stream of intruders. He retreated to the far end of his farm to bale straw to get away from it all. His farm, his refuge, his home, soon began to feel like a cage surrounded by predators. Carolyn was constantly close to tears, no longer even wanting to go to church in town. Dave didn’t feel much better. The market for his animals sagged.

  “Those goddamn Toronto media are ruining this town,” someone at the Becker’s said to him.

  The woman behind the counter gave him a rose. “For your wife,” she said.

  Some time after, a client from out of town was at the clinic.

  “I’m surprised they didn’t lynch you,” he said.

  No. But it felt that way, a feeling reinforced with each visit from yet another of the dozens of investigators who arrived to prod him with questions about his manure, sample his cattle, or poke holes in his fields.

  —

  The car nosed through the opening between two small stone walls, a ceramic plaque with a B on the left, another with a black horse on the right. It edged up the well-tended gravel drive that runs from the highway between rows of small spruce and locus trees that form the edging of two fields of corn and beans. When he reached the top of the drive, a barn and small pasture to the right, the yellow-brick farmhouse to the left, the driver stopped. Biesenthal, who was standing in front of the stable, didn’t recognize the car or driver, a shortish man neatly dressed in shirt and slacks in his mid-thirties. The stranger seemed thoroughly ill at ease. Biesenthal stalked over, his fists clenched.

  “Who the hell are you? What the hell do you want?” he roared.

  “I’m Peter Raymond,” the man stammered, his eyes misting over. “My daughter passed away from E. coli. We just wanted to tell you we don’t hold you responsible for her death.”

  When Carolyn pulled up a little while later, the visitor had just left.

  “What’s the matter now?” she asked her husband.

  “Guess who was here,” he said softly, tears streaming down his face.

  —

  Not long after the Biesenthals returned from a welcome break in Sydney where Laryssa had again made them proud with another Olympic bronze medal, Dr. Murray McQuigge presented his final report on the outbreak. In all, an estimated 2,300 people fell ill from the bad water in Walkerton. At least half, 1,286 people, lived in the town itself, 26 per cent of its entire population. The others worked or went to school in town, or, like little Mary Rose Raymond, had been among a stream of visitors on or around the Mother’s Day weekend. About 725 people had passed through the Walkerton emergency room in the last two weeks of May, more than double the average number of ER visits. The worst day had been May 24, when 113 people had filed through. In all, the outbreak killed seven people: four died from E. coli O157 poisoning, three from the combined effects of E. coli and campylobacter bacteria. Had a calamity of this relative magnitude hit a city such as New York or Paris, 4 million people would have fallen ill in the space of two weeks and 14,000 would have died. Unimaginable, nuclear-bomb-scale catastrophe. McQuigge also reported that genetic mapping had determined the E. coli O157:H7 found in the town’s tap water had come from a farm next to Well 5, known from Day 1 to be vulnerable to contamination. The bacteria had apparently found their way from the fields into the underground aquifer that fed the well. A day after McQuigge’s report, a man in a suit a
rrived at Stonegate and handed the Biesenthals a brown envelope. Stan Koebel and the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission had named the couple as third-party defendants in a $350-million class-action lawsuit.

  —

  The class-action lawsuit, launched at the height of the disaster, was destined from the start to become much more than a legal battle. Almost immediately, the already severely stressed town split into factions over the wisdom of what amounted to suing themselves. Nice people don’t go around suing each other, some said. It will bankrupt the municipality, others insisted. Retired lawyer Terry Halpin, who for a few days had thought he was dying from a mysterious illness, had launched the initial proceedings. Halpin was primarily angry at the seemingly hit-and-miss approach taken to informing the public about the boil-water advisory. When one of the town’s minor-league sports teams won a championship, the occasion was celebrated by an impromptu parade of fire trucks driving through town honking their horns and sounding their sirens. Halpin believed that every available police car, ambulance, and fire truck should have been out with sirens blaring, warning the people. Given the size of the town, they could have covered every corner in ten minutes flat. Instead, word of the boil-water advisory had been left to percolate through the town and beyond, leaving many to continue drinking the potentially lethal bacteria cocktail. Halpin also believed that because it was a Walkerton problem, any lawsuit should be homegrown. It was a fond hope. Soon, the town would find itself stretched in a high-stakes legal tug-of-war between big-city lawyers and the provincial government.

  One of those city lawyers was Harvey Strosberg, a large man with vast experience in class-action suits and dealing with government. Ultimately, Strosberg would spearhead a suit that came to involve six law firms and dozens of lawyers, who together demanded general and punitive damages of $350 million from the municipality, the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission, Stan Koebel himself, the health unit, and the Ontario government. The lead plaintiff was Jamie Smith, a history teacher at Sacred Heart, whose son’s bout with E. coli poisoning in May 2000 was a terrifying reprise of a 1998 episode in which the child contracted the illness during an unexplained outbreak at a Walkerton day care. Provincial police Const. Jamie McDonald was a strong backup plaintiff.

  From the outset, Strosberg realized that politics would determine how the class-action lawsuit would play out. What he didn’t realize, perhaps somewhat naively, is just how intransigent the province would be. The tainted-water tragedy had quickly overtaken the political agenda, throwing the entire government and its ideology on the defensive. The Tories were in critical need of some brownie points on Walkerton. Their answer was the “compassion initiative,” as they dubbed it, its purpose two-fold: to score those points and to cut the fledgling class action off at the knees. To Attorney General Jim Flaherty, it made perfect political sense. The government would do something voluntarily for Walkerton without any admission of fault. Its response would be driven by compassion rather than by legal or financial considerations. Under the no-fault plan Flaherty hatched, people in Walkerton could claim financial compensation for illness or the death of a loved one without having to go the tortuous court route.

  “This isn’t about legal liability, it’s the right thing to do,” Premier Mike Harris said. “The people of Walkerton should not have to go to court to get the help they need.”

  Outside town hall in early summer, a small group of Concerned Walkerton Citizens, among them Jamie Smith’s wife, Stephanie, waited on the sidewalk for a meeting to end so they could ask Flaherty some questions. But when he emerged and the residents approached him, Bill Murdoch tried to steer him away. Although his Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound riding had voted solidly Conservative, Murdoch had convinced himself that Walkerton was hostile political territory. He had already raised eyebrows in the town with his pronouncements immediately after Premier Mike Harris had visited back in May.

  “That woman and a bunch of agitators were bussed in from thirty-five miles away,” Murdoch had opined to a radio station minutes after Veronica Davidson had shouted after Harris. “The same bunch that’s bussed around whenever Harris makes an election campaign stop.”

  The more the media and town questioned whether Harris’s policies had played a role in the disaster, the more Murdoch dug in his heels. And the more Concerned Walkerton Citizens pressed for answers from the province, the more Murdoch tried to marginalize them with an antipathy that was visceral.

  “It’s getting late,” Murdoch said as the group on the sidewalk attempted to talk to Flaherty.

  “We don’t care how late it is,” someone said. “Lose some sleep.”

  While some of the group talked to Flaherty, Stephanie Smith watched from one side. A young aide to the minister came over and made some small talk.

  “You know, you guys should get T-shirts, just like after the ice storm, that say, ‘I survived the E. coli disaster.’ ”

  Smith wanted to slap her but said nothing.

  —

  More than six seemingly endless months after he had issued the boil-water advisory at the height of the crisis, Dr. Murray McQuigge pronounced the tap water again safe to drink. It had been a mind-bogglingly painstaking process. Five kilometres of water mains had been replaced, a state-of-the-art filtration system installed at Well 7, while Wells 5 and 6 had been permanently decommissioned, the former more than a decade too late. The plumbing in each of the town’s 1,816 buildings had been disinfected more than once, and thousands upon thousands of samples had been taken and scrutinized for any signs of contamination. In all, it had cost about $15 million.

  “I’ll come right to the point. I’m going to lift the boil-water advisory for Walkerton,” McQuigge said to a round of applause from the several dozen townsfolk who’d braved a brutal snowstorm for the occasion.

  Up front, about a dozen town and other officials, including Mayor Dave Thomson, lifted glasses of water to their lips and ostentatiously took a sip.

  “This day has been so long in coming that it almost feels anti-climactic,” McQuigge went on. “It may be anti-climactic, but it is a serious step in getting this town back to normal.”

  “Today’s announcement means a gigantic burden has been lifted off our shoulders,” Mayor Dave Thomson was saying. “Today is a day for optimism.”

  But there was little evidence of celebration. Around town, people collectively shrugged and carried right on drinking bottled water. The experts might have exorcised the killer bacteria but not the demons of fear and mistrust that haunted the town. And it was that mistrust that the class-action lawyers harnessed. At first blush, Flaherty’s compensation plan was a political masterstroke that would put the class-action lawyers out of the Walkerton business. But it was also doomed from the start. For one thing, acceptance of a settlement under the plan meant waiving all further rights to sue. That’s not unusual in the world of out-of-court settlements, but to a mistrustful citizenry, it was unacceptable. There were still people ill, children with seriously uncertain prospects, businesses on their heels. From the plaintiffs’ perspective, the plan put the wolf in control of compensating the chickens for the henhouse he’d just ravaged. While the lawyers were confident their suit had all the merits needed to succeed, they realized the real battle would be fought, at least initially, in the public-relations arena. People would vote with their feet. If they opted in droves for the government plan, the class action would be dead in the water. Strosberg hired an Ottawa-based research firm to conduct a series of focus groups in the town. The results were stark, if unsurprising: more than 80 per cent of the people said they trusted the courts, less than 15 per cent the government. From there, it was a no-brainer to come up with a message the lawyers would deliver in every contact with the people they sought to represent: “Whom do you trust? Do you trust Mike Harris or do you trust the courts?”

  Still, Strosberg figured this was a case that could be settled fairly painlessly if the government chose to cooperate, but his attempt at negotiation was uncer
emoniously rebuffed. The combative Flaherty, an ambitious lawyer-turned-politician with hardline conservative views, was not about to be told what to do by a bunch of class-action lawyers, especially not by Strosberg, who’d once embarrassed him in front of others at a top-level meeting. But in making a decision that would only serve to drive the legal bills into the many millions of dollars, Flaherty appeared to have seriously underestimated the mistrust the Harris government faced in Walkerton. Perhaps he had badly overestimated the people’s desire for quick cash. Or possibly, he imagined the government could rely on its highly effective public-relations machine to turn opinions around. The government saturated the area with letters and ads extolling its plan, while taking various technical positions to delay the class-action proceeding for as long as possible. But at every turn, the class-action lawyers countered with their simple question: “Whom do you trust? Do you trust Mike Harris or do you trust the courts?”