AJA presentation

The story, "Who is Darrell Dexter?", appeared in the June 3, 2009 edition of The Coast, Halifax's alternative weekly. Coast writers were finalists in five categories at last night's awards presentation in Halifax.

King's Journalism School alumni were also well represented. Christina Harnett (along with Myfanwy Davies) of CBC Radio, Halifax, NS, won the Gold medal for Feature Writing, Radio. Christina was also a finalist in the Enterprise Reporting catergory. Other finalists included Bev Ware (Spot News, Print), Rob Linke (Enterprise Reporting, Print), Joan Weeks (Continuing Coverage, Radio), Chris O'Neill-Yates (Feature Writing, Television), Norma Jean MacPhee (Arts and Entertainment Reporting) and Eleanor Beaton (Commentary and Best Magazine Profile). Halifax Magazine, edited by King's alum Trevor J. Adams, won for Best Magazine Cover. A number of other journalism grads were members of newsroom teams that won or were finalists in other categories.

2010 journalism grads Jon Linds (Atlantic Lottery Corporation Achievement Award) and Jennifer Pawluk (Province of Nova Scotia Prize) were also recognized during the ceremony.

Check here for a complete list of winners

When American sailor Damon Crooks was killed on Argyle Street, police had a strong suspect but a weak case. Luckily for a city embarrassed by the murder, the suspect cooperated. Stephen Kimber finds out how pleading guilty became Corey Wright’s best move, right or wrong.

Corey Wright Photo essay by Aaron Fraser

My blood is my ink
My tears are my tales
I did a couple years in jail
But I shall prevail

He smiled. Big smile. “What you doing after?” It was nudging four in the morning on Saturday, November 4, 2006, closing time at Rain, the downtown Halifax nightclub where Corey Wright had spent his evening. He’d glimpsed her earlier. She served drinks in the bar. Hot. He’d made eye contact. Smiled. She’d smiled back. Now, he chatted her up. Got her name, her number.

“Got to clean up,” she told him.

“Do your thing,” he shrugged. But they agreed, in the way such things are agreed to, that he would wait outside for her.

As he bounced down the steps from the second floor bar to Argyle Street, Corey Wright couldn’t help thinking just how well all the pieces of his life were coming together.

Finally.

He and two friends had spent the early evening hours at Wright’s apartment “chillin’, freestylin’” and drinking a six-pack of Corona, lubrication for their night ahead. At around midnight, they’d made their way downtown to Rain.

Wright had heard that Madd Links, the new host of Black Entertainment Television’s Rap City, and Big Apple, an American-based rapper, would be at the club tonight. He’d printed out a copy of his portfolio, grabbed a couple of his CDs—Vinny Deniroz was his rap name, Hali Hustler the name of his CD—and “got all dolled up and pretty.” Corey Wright was going to make it in the music business, and tonight would be his opportunity to start networking his way to the top.

The night had gone even better than he’d hoped. He’d handed Madd Links his card, inside-joked about the Rap City host’s perceived weaknesses—“How come you don’t rap in the booth?”—and engaged in some similarly familiar chit and chat with Big Apple.

“What you drinking?” he’d asked Apple at one point.

“I’m not a big drinker,” Apple replied.

Wright went over to the bartender anyway. “Send over a couple of drinks,” he said.

Before the two American rappers left for the night, Wright had even gotten a few pictures taken him of himself with them.

Which may explain why he hadn’t been paying attention to the booze-fueled storm brewing inside the club between some visiting American sailors and a group of local blacks, most of them guys Wright knew from the hood. When one of them, the half brother of a buddy, told Wright about a “nice chain” he’d seen around the neck of an American sailor—“I’m gonna take it”—Wright tried to discourage him. “Don’t do that man,” he said. “You got a nice chain too.”

Now, however, Wright spilled out onto Argyle Street and into the messy middle of the seething tension. To his right, familiar faces, friends; to his left, American sailors. Everyone was circling, puffed up, strutting, acting hard.

Wright looked around, then back up the stairs, saw the the woman coming down. “Fuck this,” he thought to himself, “I’m going with her.”

But just then, something happened—who knows what—and people started beating on each other. Someone punched Wright. He swung back. He hit some people, got swarmed. He kicked, punched, fought back. Someone pulled his shirt up over his head. He felt something cold against his skin—a blade! He knew what a knife felt like, knew what it meant. So he “spazzed,” swinging ever more wildly. Down, up, down again. Swallowed by the crowd. On his knees on the sidewalk at one point, he eyed the spoils of battle: scattered wallets, cell phones, watches, even a shoe that had come off in the melee. He grabbed what he could, shoved them in his pockets. Except the shoe. Who needs one shoe?

Finally, he saw his escape. A few of his buddies were inside a nearby car. He jumped in. His hand stung. He looked down. He was bleeding from where the knife had sliced him. Before he could stanch the bleeding, a patrol car pulled up behind them.

“Get out of here,” Wright shouted at the driver.

“No, man,” his friend replied. “We ain’t done nothing.”

Wright knew that wouldn’t matter. I know how it goes. Besides, he was on parole, less than two months away from the end, less than two months from freedom.

From off in the distance, he heard someone shouting, “My friend’s been stabbed…”

He opened the car door, jumped out, ran for it.

***

The murder of Damon Crooks—he’d been stabbed four times, including once through the heart—shocked and appalled Haligonians.

For starters, his killing was just the latest, worst example of the crazily escalating mindless mayhem plaguing downtown Halifax. In June, The Coast had published a cover story about what one criminologist called Halifax’s “dirty little secret,” the reality the city “had the highest violent crime rate among the 17 Canadian cities surveyed.” As if to drive the point home, in the week before the murder the press had reported that four more people had been assaulted in two separate attacks near Pizza Corner, the traditional final pit stop for local late-night bar-hoppers.

To make this murder more reprehensible, the victim, Damon Crooks, was not only a visitor to the city—a 28-year-old US navy Petty Officer 1st Class from the USS Doyle—but also the soon-to-be father of a baby girl.

Not surprisingly, the story of his death had media legs, not only in Canada but also in the United States as well.

As if to atone for the sins of its city, the Chronicle-Herald quickly set up a “Damon Crooks Family Fund” to raise money for the child’s upbringing. The fund would eventually raise $60,000.

In the legislature, opposition leader Darrell Dexter introduced a motion to express Nova Scotians’ “deepest condolences to the family and friends and shipmates of Damon Crooks… and urge that every step be taken to ensure the safe enjoyment of Nova Scotia port cities by the visitors that we welcome to our shores.” The resolution passed unanimously.

Not to be outdone, Halifax mayor Peter Kelly promised to set up what would become the much publicized Mayor’s Task Force on Violence in Halifax.

In death, Damon Crooks became larger-than-life. His shipmates claimed his only role in the brawl had been as unlucky good Samaritan—coming to the aid of a sailor friend whose necklace had been ripped from his neck.

“He was a great man, a great person,” his grieving fiancee told CTV News. “He’s really going to be missed.”

***

If this narrative now had its hero, it also needed a villain.

Corey Wright—initially charged with first degree murder—fit that role perfectly. He’d been arrested within minutes of the stabbing fleeing the scene of the crime. Damon Crooks’ wallet was in his pocket. And he had a history of knife violence.

In 2002, Wright had been convicted of aggravated assault in connection with the stabbing of a man and his girlfriend. Despite the prosecutor’s plea that Wright be locked up for 12 years, the judge sentenced him to just five and a half years, which—thanks to time credited for the period he’d spent in jail before his trial and a positive recommendation from the parole board—meant Wright was on the streets, on parole, when Crooks was murdered.

That, predictably, transformed Corey Wright—described as an “unpredictable psychopath” and a “knife-wielding maniac”—into the poster boy for a justice system run amuck.

“If [the judge] had listened to a crown attorney two-and-a-half years ago,” thundered David Rodenhiser in the Halifax Daily News, “Corey Wright would still be safely behind bars in a federal penitentiary and Damon Crooks might still be alive and looking forward to the birth of his first child.”

Rodenhiser’s guilty-as-charged diatribe —widely shared—came just three days after Damon Crooks’ murder, one day after Corey Wright’s arraignment, and years before the facts of the case against Wright could be argued in court!

And yet…

Corey Wright was not without his supporters. During his second of many courtroom appearances, the court house filled with family and friends. Some handed out flyers showing a photo of “a beaming [Wright] with a toothy grin… cradling his newborn son” with the words: “Society Please Don’t Condemn A Man To Life Because Of His Past” and “Help An Innocent Black Man Accused By Halifax Police.” Others chanted, “Free Vinny D!” as sheriff’s deputies escorted the shackled Wright from the courtroom.

“He’s innocent,” a family member told reporters. “He said he didn’t do it.” Added a neighbour: “Corey is one of the sweetest guys I have ever known.”

***

I wouldn’t be this strong if it wasn’t for my moms
Discipline, dedication, determination and honour
This is what she taught me
Same for my stepfather

Corey Wright, named after his biological father, was born in Halifax on April 25, 1983, the middle of Valerie Wright’s three sons. His parents split when he was very young, and he never had a relationship with his father. He was raised instead by his mother. She calls him DeeWan.

“My mother was great,” Wright says from his prison cell today. “Growing up… I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

When he was 15, however, he got into “an altercation with my mother that changed my life.” It was, he admits now, a stupid teenager-thing. That morning, Corey was rushing around, late for school—“I had tests that day in math, in science, an essay due in English, and I always did things last minute”—when he saw his younger brother, Marvin, in the living room. Lounging around. Still in his pajamas.

“Get ready for school,” Corey ordered him.

“I’m not going,” Marvin replied.

“What do you mean, you’re not going?” One thing led to another and “I clipped him in the back of the head. He went all dramatic, crying to my mother and such.”

His mother admonished Corey not to hit his brother.

“Why do you worry about him?” Corey shot back. “You don’t worry about me.”

“As soon as I said it,” he says today, “I knew I was wrong. I hurt her feelings.”

Valerie lashed back, “slapping and hitting me” with little effect.

“I was smiling. I couldn’t help it,” Wright remembers. “But then she’s all, ‘Get out! Get out! Don’t come back!’”

Today, he shakes his head. “It was pride, stupid pride.” Corey stormed out, didn’t come back.

He ended up couch surfing. “I had three aunts and two best friends, so that was five couches and I just kept moving…” He stopped going to school. “I started smoking weed but I didn’t have any money.” One morning, one of his best friends showed up at the apartment where he was staying and began “to count his money. I figured he was selling weed, so I says, ‘Let me sell some too.’ And he says, ‘No, I don’t sell weed. I sell crack.’ And I thought, screw it, I’ll try it. I sold crack so I could smoke weed.”

He was 16.

Selling crack cocaine wasn’t just illegal; it was dangerous.

One night in July 2000, one of his best friends, Tyrone Oliver, who’d also allegedly been selling drugs, was gunned down on an outdoor basketball court. After that, Wright, in the words of his parole officer, would “drink the ‘hard stuff’ and continue to ingest alcohol until he could not drink any more.”

He was scared, but he wasn’t about to show it.

“I was always a fighter, you know, I was this skinny, short kid, but I loved to fight, especially the bigger guys who picked on the little kids or girls,” Wright says today. “When you’re a teenager, fighting is fun.” It’s less fun when others are carrying guns. “I’d never carry a gun,” Wright insists. “Guns make me nervous. But I got a knife. For protection.”

It was the knife that got him into trouble. In the early morning hours of April 20, 2002, he went to a birthday party at an after-hours spot on Gottingen Street, where he ended up dancing with a girl who turned out to be someone’s girlfriend.

“Why you hitting on my girlfriend?”

“I’m not hitting on your girlfriend.”

Words led to words, and the other guy went outside to get something from his car. “’Hold on,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll be right back.’” He returned moments later. “I’m trying to leave and he says, ‘I got something for you.’… I thought he had a gun. I panicked. I pulled out my knife and started swinging.” Wright stabbed the guy 14 times and, when the guy’s girlfriend tried to intervene, he cut her too. Today, he shakes his head. “He didn’t even have a gun on him.”

Wright pled guilty to the assault—“Your lordship,” he told the judge at his sentencing, “I acknowledge what I done wrong, and the weight of my sins is greater than I can bear”—and began, it seemed, to turn his life around.

***

But I’m gonna rise to the occasion
I’m driven by my ambition

While in jail, Wright earned his GED high school equivalency and enrolled in Second Chance, a one-year program to provide entrepreneurial skills to young people who’d been in “conflict with the law.”

Wright had already launched his own small business, opening up a north end storefront with his mother—with whom he’d reconciled—and one of his brothers. “We’d go out to Costco and buy in bulk—toothpaste, coffee, jerseys—and sell them in the neighbourhood” to people who couldn’t afford transportation to shop themselves.

He and a friend also got into the party promotion business. “We’d pay for the flyers—$40 for a thousand—and organize the shows. The club would get the bar; we’d get the door. We made a lot of money.” But then they got burned in a deal with a San Francisco promoter who was supposed to do in a show in Halifax and didn’t, and Wright and his partner “decided to go our separate ways.”

Wright’s separate way was to begin making his own music. When he was still selling crack, he remembers going to a house party and seeing some kids he’d grown up with performing, pretending to be the gangsters he actually was. “I saw these guys rapping what I’m doing, but they weren’t really doing it. They were going to school. They were good kids. So I thought, I’ll give rapping a try. At least I’m doing it.”

Wright ended up at Village Sound, Stephen Outhit’s north end recording studio. “He was an exceptionally talented rapper,” Outhit recalls, and he remembers being equally impressed by Wright the person. “He wasn’t a thuggy, peer-pressured kind of guy. He was a smart businessman who’d been born in an unfortunate situation.”

Outhit’s encouragement “put something in me,” Wright acknowledges. “I thought, this guy doesn’t know me and he’s saying I’m good. Maybe I can do this.” He made a CD, got a manager, made plans for a tour. “Two thousand and seven,” Wright says wistfully. “That year was going to be my dream, going to be all music for me.”

And then, on the morning of November 4, 2006, the dream became a nightmare.

***

Well at least my pain
Is more than a rhyme to me
How can I complain
When he’s doing more time than me

From the beginning, there were questions about what really happened outside Rain that night. Even about what had started it. A fight over a girl? A chain?

Although the circumstantial case against Corey Wright was compelling, even overwhelming—he was caught running for the crime scene with blood on his hand and the victim’s wallet in his possession—there was little hard evidence to connect him to the actual murder. It had happened in the confusing middle of a sprawling brawl involving, by some accounts, more than two dozen participants. Virtually every one of them—not to mention non-combatant witnesses—was intoxicated, their memories fogged, their evidence unreliable. Some, perhaps understandably, weren’t keen to talk to the police.

Within hours of the incident, however, a very different narrative began circulating in the black community. Someone else, also black, had murdered Damon Crooks—and bragged about it. The alleged killer had a well-known fetish for knives and for other people’s gold chains. The night before the murder, or so the story went, the man had stabbed someone else and taken his gold chain. Valerie Wright began compiling affidavits to show her son was not Crooks’ killer. It wasn’t easy. Everyone, it seemed, was scared of the other guy.

According to emails between the Crown lawyers and police, detectives knew soon after the murder that “someone else confessed to the murder to a third party.” What police did with that information isn’t clear.

They certainly had the information from several sources. The summer after the murder, for example, Stephen Outhit, the producer who’d befriended Corey, wrote to mayor Kelly expressing his concerns about delays in the case, as well as explaining that he’d been told that someone else—he named the individua—had allegedly confessed to the crime. Kelly wrote back, “essentially thanked me for my letter and said he’d forwarded it to the police,” Outhit explains. “The police never contacted me about it.”

He says he knows several other people contacted Crimestoppers with similar information, but were never contacted either.

The crown’s case against Corey Wright was no slam dunk. Within months, the crown had reduced his first degree murder charge to second degree, and eventually settled for manslaughter. Wright’s preliminary hearing, which had been scheduled to run for 20 days, lasted only five. The case had dragged on for close to a two and a half years when, in March 2009, on the edge of the beginning of his trial, Wright surprised everyone by changing his plea to guilty of manslaughter.

To understand just how big a surprise—not to mention relief—Wright’s plea must have been for prosecutors, it’s instructive to read Justice Felix Cacchione written judgment.

“Having reviewed the evidence in this case,” he noted at Wright’s sentencing hearing, addressing his comments to Crooks’ family, “I can say to you with certainty that this case was not an open and shut case of either murder or manslaughter. The crown acknowledged to me the difficulty that it would have in proving the charge as originally laid… It is very possible that a jury hearing the evidence that the prosecution had available to it could have decided that they either could not decide who did what and hence… been hung as a jury… Or the jury could in all likelihood have had a reasonable doubt that Mr. Wright was the offender who caused Damon Crooks’ death.”

The flimsiness of the crown’s case was not the only surprise on sentencing day. The crown and defence lawyers told the judge they’d agreed on a joint sentencing recommendation: 15 years for manslaughter.

In the complicated ways of the criminal justice system, that meant Wright typically would have been credited with double the time he’d already spent in jail while awaiting trial, reducing his actual sentence to 10 years. And—normally—he would have been entitled to apply for parole after serving just one-third of his sentence, meaning he would have been eligible to apply for parole after roughly three and a half years in prison.

Instead, Cacchione—“mindful of society’s abhorrence of what occurred and the prevalence of these types of activities in our community”—allowed Wright to claim just four years of remand time instead of five and ordered that “you serve at least half the sentence before you are considered eligible for parole. That means, sir, that on the 11-year sentence you will have to serve five-and-a-half years before you can even apply for parole.”

***

Lookin’ in the mirror
when I’m all by my lonesome
Pictures getting clearer
Play the cards that I’m holding
Pornographic magazine keeps me with a pin up
But it’s the pen and pad that keeps me with my chin up
Still unsigned so they think I’m a beginner
But it’s my inner that’s telling me I’m a winner

“Do you mind if I turn on the tape recorder?” I ask. We are sitting in a small windowless room inside the Springhill Institution, the prison where Corey Wright is serving his sentence. It’s the first time I’ve met Wright. But I’ve been following his story almost from the beginning.

As a columnist for the Daily News, I’d written about the media rush-to-judgment after it was revealed that Wright had been on parole at the time of Crooks’ killing. I’d spoken to Outhit, who believed an injustice might have been done, and to Valerie Wright, Corey’s mother, who was his number one and, seemingly, sometimes his only defender. I’d followed the case as it worked its way through the courts.

After Wright’s sentencing, we’d begun an email and letter correspondence. “I really want to share my story, the trials and tribulations I have gone through,” he wrote at one point. “I’ve done a lot of wrong things, but who hasn’t?... I always knew when I was doing wrong, but I am not and was never a bad person… Sorry for talking about my past,” he added, “but everyone new I meet I try to shed light on me as a person. Just because the newspapers and the media painted me out to be something I’m not. Well, anyway, we will talk soon, I hope.”

Now we sit, face to face, both eying the tape recorder between us. Wright is a handsome young man with an easy smile, the slight gap between his front teeth making him seem more boyish than his 26 years. The intelligence that’s obvious in his conversation serves as a counterpoint to the muscles he’s been building, lifting weights in prison, and to his tattoos: there’s one on the back of each hand containing the names of each of his two young sons and another on his shoulder that declares he is “My Brother’s Keeper.”

“It depends,” he says finally in response to my question about the tape recorder. “How honest do you want me to be?” We don’t turn on the tape recorder.

The issue, it turns out, is practical—as was his decision last spring to plead guilty to manslaughter. He hadn’t been impressed by the performance of his lawyer, Warren Zimmer, during the preliminary hearing. “He just took my case for the publicity,” Wright argues. “I’m at the police station [after his arrest] and a cop says to me, ‘You’ve got a call.’ It was Warren. He told me he was going to fight for me. I take people at their word. But we did the preliminary and he wasn’t fighting. Some days he wasn’t even there.”

Which is why, about a month before his trial was scheduled to begin, Wright asked to speak to Zimmer. He’d been thinking about his prospects in court and about what a long stretch in prison could mean to his dream of a music career. “I’ve got a bright future,” he tells me today. “I can feel it. I’m destined for something. Give me a pen and a roll of toilet paper and I can make rhymes… Doesn’t matter where I am. I can do time. But I can’t do forever…

“So I said to him, ‘Honestly Warren, this is my life. Be straight with me. What are my chances?’ And he says, ‘Well, it’s 50–50.’ So a coin toss is going to determine my life. I said, ‘Warren, go to them, get them to drop it to manslaughter…’ And that’s what happened.”

After he went to jail, Wright appealed Cacchione’s decision to reduce his remand credit and force him to serve more time before he would be eligible for parole. Just last month, the appeal court reversed those conditions. Which means Wright can now apply for parole in 2012 instead of 2014.

Which may be one more reason Corey Wright isn’t keen to go on the record, arguing he didn’t kill Damon Crooks. Call it the Donald Marshall, Jr., conundrum. Marshall famously spent 11 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, unable to get parole because he refused to admit his guilt, and therefore, according to the parole board, wasn’t ready to be rehabilitated.

Wright’s situation is different, of course. He did plead guilty to being responsible for Crooks’ death.

But did he really do it?

There are those who remain convinced Corey Wright is innocent.

While Wright answers most of my questions about the events of the night of November 4, 2006, he steers clear of the key question about whether he stabbed Crooks.

“I can’t talk about that,” he tells me.

It would be easy to take from that that Wright is guilty. But he is also—not to put too fine a point on it—someone who understands the justice system well enough to know guilt and innocence often matter less than luck and cunning.

Having been branded for a stabbing he admits he did commit, what were his chances of getting a jury’s benefit of the doubt if he was on trial for something he actually didn’t do? And, if he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison?

Corey Wright would rather not go there. He can do the time he’s been given.

He fills his days working on his rhymes. Whenever he has something ready, he sets up a phone call with James McQuaid, aka Homegrown, his Halifax-based producer. While Wright raps to the beat of an unrelated song playing from his CD player into his earphones, McQuaid records Wright’s voice over the telephone and later marries it to a beat in his studio.

Wright says his new music is very different from his earlier, more gangsta-inspired raps. “It’s like a different me,” he says. “It’s more party, more chill. I’m now more conscious, more motivational.”

Corey Wright still dreams. Destiny calls. We turn on the recorder. He raps:

You be waiting a long time
If you think I’m going to fade out
Not in this lifetime
Check my lifeline
Known for the gap in my teeth
And writing nice rhymes…

Corey Wright laughs, shows the gap in his teeth.

Stephen Kimber, The Coast’s Senior Features Writer, is the author of eight books. He teaches journalism at the University of King’s College.

The Dexter story is up against two other stories—Tim Bousquet's "Doolittle, Darwin and the Deeply Dumb" from The Coast and Andrew McGilligan's "Long Journey's Home" in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal—in the Print Feature category. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in Halifax on May 8.

Excerpt's from the entry submission explaining the background to the Dexter story:

"From During the winter of 2009, it became increasingly apparent Nova Scotians would voting in a spring general election, and that Darrell Dexter’s New Democrats would likely form the next provincial government. Such an outcome—unthinkable a generation ago—could mark an historic turning point in Nova Scotia politics.

How should The Coast cover these developments? Unlike the dailies or other media, we don’t have the luxury—in the print edition at least—of providing continuing coverage of events as they unfold. We had to decide on the central story of the election and write it.

We decided that story was Darrell Dexter. Who is he? Where does he come from? What makes him tick? What kind of government was he likely to lead?

While Nova Scotians had seen Dexter in action in the legislature over the previous decade, few were aware of more than the vaguest outlines of his personal history or the path he had taken to party and political power.

Our feature profile was an attempt to understand the man who could become premier by weaving together his personal story with the story of the party’s rise, and showing how the party had affected Dexter and Dexter has affected the party."

I’ll admit I was taken aback when I looked at the cover of The Coast on June 9 to see a title that assumed Dexter would win the election the next week," Kimber recalled. "Shades of Dewey! But the paper’s editors were braver—and more prescient—than me. Dexter won and, even seven months later, I believe our story provides useful insights into the mind of the province’s 27th premier."

Kimber is also a finalist for this year's Atlantic Book Awards. His book, IWK, is up for the Dartmouth Book Award for Nonfiction. The Atlantic Book Awards will be presented April 14 at a ceremony in Dartmouth.
 

Shortly before 10 on the evening of March 31, 2006, residents along the Old Birchtown Road near Shelburne reported seeing what looked like a white Pontiac Sunfire speeding away from the site of the one-story wooden bungalow that housed the offices of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalist Heritage Society. Within minutes of the car’s disappearance into the night, hot flames licked up an outside wall and into the building’s eaves, setting the roof ablaze and eventually causing parts of it to collapse into the offices below.

Inside those offices—inside computer hard drives, cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets—the priceless fruits of nearly two decades of research into the often ignored, always marginalized history of Nova Scotia’s black community melted, burned, scorched, charred, disappeared into smoke.

It didn’t take the Mounties long to conclude the fire had been deliberately set.

But was it a hate crime?

Elizabeth Cromwell, the president of the heritage society, turns that question around. “Why,” she asks, not unreasonably, “would anyone burn down a building belonging to a group of black people?”

It wouldn’t have been the first time black people in Nova Scotia were targeted for nothing more than being who they are. Or the last. Just consider last weekend’s cross burning outside the home of a mixed race couple in Hants County. Or this week’s protest march at city hall to bring attention to the ongoing discrimination black municipal workers say they face in the workplace.

***

Birchtown was supposed to be different.

During the American Revolution, the British promised America’s black slaves their freedom—more, it should be acknowledged, as a military tactic than from some lofty commitment to racial equality—in exchange for abandoning their white masters and fighting for the crown. Thousands did.

But in 1783 after the British lost, the victors demanded the return of “the negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.” British negotiators in Paris were happy enough to send their erstwhile black friends back to vengeful former masters but Sir Guy Carleton, the man in charge of the British evacuation in New York, objected. He ordered one of his generals, Samuel Birch, to compile a “Book of Negroes,” a detailed listing of the 3,000 freed black men, women and children deemed eligible to sail in the British evacuation of New York.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the 1,500 of those who settled on the rocky edge of the new white loyalist city of Shelburne, N.S. named their community in honour of the general whose precious certificates they carried. Birchtown instantly became the largest settlement of free blacks in North America. But there were other freed black communities in the colony too, in places like Tracadie, Weymouth and Brindley Town.

None of them were really free, of course. The British had promised the freed blacks land. But then offered them only the rockiest, most barren scraps of a generally unfriendly land, if they gave them any at all. Some white loyalists even tried to grab that from them. Unlike more well-to-do white loyalists, the blacks arrived with no money or resources. That meant many ended up as indentured servants—slaves by another name—for whites in Shelburne. Some whites even pocketed the rations the British designated for the freed blacks.

Because the desperate blacks were prepared to work for less than the almost as desperate, disbanded white soldiers, the soldiers attacked them. In July 1784, the first race riot in North America took place in Shelburne. It lasted a week.

Things didn’t get better after that. There were fires and famines, recession and drought. Whites moved on; blacks died of starvation.

By January 1792, the colony’s black loyalists had endured all they could of British freedom in frigid Nova Scotia. More than 1,100 of them—including 550 from Birchtown and Shelburne—set sail from Halifax in an armada bound for Sierra Leone where they were, once again, promised they would be free.

Those who remained in what was left of Birchtown—as well as in other black and poor communities huddled on the outskirts of richer white communities—hunkered down, survived, made lives and communities. For two centuries, they—and their history—were either ignored or dismissed.

To cite but one example: in 1963, Birchtown residents approached the Nova Scotia Historic Sites Advisory Board seeking historic designation for their community. The board’s chair, prominent author Will R. Bird, wrote to the then-premier, Robert Stanfield, dismissing Birchtown as “a sort of shack town, a settlement of the slaves who came with the loyalists and were left there by the loyalists who moved on.” The community, he suggested, was not important enough—or white enough—to be considered historic.

***

Elizabeth Cromwell, who grew up in the area, knows all about the ways in which black history was marginalized in Shelburne. “They’re very good,” she says simply, “when they’re talking to your face.” After being mostly invisible in official celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the loyalists’ 1783 arrival in Shelburne, the few hundred remaining members of the local black community began to band together in the mid-1980s. Although the traditional United Empire Loyalists’ organizations were “upset we were organizing,” Cromwell recalls, “that just gave us another little push.”

So too did government plans to situate—what else?—a landfill in Birchtown.

Their success in stopping the landfill not only led to the incorporation of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society in 1991 but it also sparked an archaeological dig on land just a few hundred yards from the Cromwell family home. Researchers uncovered a treasure trove of more than 16,000 “exceptional” artifacts from the late 1700s, which helped cement Birchtown’s place in black history—and in Canadian history.

By 1996, the group had convinced the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board to finally erect a plaque to recognize Birchtown as “a proud symbol of the struggle by blacks… for justice and dignity.”

The society also began to create spaces—acquiring an old church and a one-room school house from the 1830s—to store and display their growing collection of information and artifacts of the black experience. It partnered with the Nova Scotia Museum to mount a traveling exhibit called “Remembering Black Loyalists, Black Communities.” The exhibit ended up on permanent display in Birchtown. The society also developed an 800-metre Heritage Walking Trail for visitors that circled around the museum past a black burying ground and a replica of the sort of pit house where the early residents might have lived. Its first official visitor was then-Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.

In 2000, the society hired experts to train four members of the local black community to conduct genealogical research in order to handle the ever growing number of calls from around the world asking for help in tracing their black family histories. They began to put together a Black Loyalist Registry, identifying those descended from the original settlers. More than 2,000 self-identified black loyalist descendants joined the society.

The operational hub for this growing web of activity was the small, non-descript $66,000 bungalow on the Old Birchtown Road, built in the mid-1990s with the help of an ACOA grant.

Or at least it was, until fire destroyed it.

***

Police refused to call the fire a hate crime. The criminal code, which defines a hate crime as one designed to intimidate or harm an identifiable group of people, provides for stiffer sentences for such crimes. Within weeks of the fire, however, an RCMP spokesperson confidently told a reporter from Shunpiking that investigators knew who did it and “the motive of the individual involved… was not race-related.”

Eight months later, police finally charged Gaylord Avery Perry, a 41-year-old local ne’er do well, with the crime. Perry was already in jail, serving time for a laundry lists of unrelated offences: “assault causing bodily harm, assault with a weapon, criminal assault, uttering threats, criminal harassment, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, committing an offense while operating a motor vehicle, a breach of undertaking, causing a disturbance, and evading a peace officer.”

The Black Loyalist Heritage Centre arson case never went to trial. In February 2008, the prosecutor stayed the charges because he wasn’t convinced he could get a conviction based on the evidence “available.” One key prosecution witness had apparently refused to testify.

While that decision may not matter much in the criminal justice scheme of things—Perry was already back in jail, having been convicted of assaulting his parents by throwing a tea kettle at his mother and beating his 70-year-old father with a shovel—staying the charges means there will never be a judicial airing of the reasons for the crime.

While there are no shortage of rumours in the community about what really happened, the one thing that is clear is that whoever decided to burn down “a building belonging to a group of black people” didn’t do it randomly or accidentally.

And publicity about the fire itself also brought out even more crazies. “It was a terrible time,” Crowell recalls. “There were horrible telephone calls, threats, insults…” The police traced much of it to the United States, but there was local fallout too. “Things were written on the side of the building, or in the snow…”

Ironically, however, the fire may yet turn out to be as much an opportunity as it was, quite clearly, a disaster.

Or not.

***

The fire—and the publicity it generated—brought the community, white and black, together. “This,” says Elizabeth Cromwell, “was not the way the community wanted to be seen.”

The congregation of Shelburne’s Christ Anglican Church—which can also trace its roots back to the town’s earliest days—donated $10,000 to the rebuilding campaign. Acadia University offered $6,000 and two senior students to help “reconstitute” the society’s destroyed genealogical records. The owners of the Whirligig, Shelburne’s popular new and used bookstore, organized a sponsor-a-book program, inviting its customers to help buy replacement books for the Society’s burned-out library. They raised more than $3,000. David Bradley, a Halifax-based computer guru, even volunteered what ended up being 80 hours of his time to rescue almost all of the priceless data stored on the society’s burned computer hard drives.

During a successful June 2006 Birchtown Healing Weekend staged by the society to both raise funds and also promote a greater spirit of community, Stanley Jacklin, the society’s then-president, told the Halifax Herald: “A lot of good things do come from bad things, I guess… We will rebuild and become bigger and better than ever.”

Even before the fire, it was clear the society had not only outgrown its too-small bungalow-office space but also that it needed bigger and better space than a renovated old one-room schoolhouse in which to display its valuable collection for the growing number of tourists, black and white, who wanted to understand the black loyalist experience.

In 2000, there’d been ambitious talk of building a new $9-million interpretive, tourism and community economic development project in Birchtown. But the best federal and provincial governments were prepared to offer then was $200,000 to help “preserve rural culture.” The project died.

And then the bungalow burned down.

Today, a more modest $3-million proposal is working its way through the long and complicated funding food chain.

Cobbling together seed money from Canadian Heritage, Nova Scotia Museums and the province’s department of economic and rural development, the society hired a team of Halifax-based architects—lead architects Peter Henry and Christine Macy, the dean of Dalhousie’s architecture department, and project architect Judy-Ann Obersi—to come up with a design for a new centre that could not only combine exhibit and display space with offices, meeting rooms, a theatre and gift shop but also represent the black experience architecturally.

The result is visually stunning and aesthetically pleasing. The exterior design incorporates traditional granaries of west Africa, which is where many of the black loyalists began their journey as captured slaves. The granary motif will serve as both a building feature and also as display cases for artifacts. The low-rise building will be built into its surroundings and covered with a gently sloping “green” roof. That will be environmentally friendly but also a living reminder of the pit-house architectural style the first residents were forced to adopt. A massive curving stone wall, reminiscent of the remnants of manmade stone walls found around Birchtown, will lead visitors in to and out of the main exhibit area, and may even include the names of all of those recorded in the original Book of Negroes etched into the stone.

The architects’ blueprints are expected to be ready by the end of March, and then the real work of raising the money to make it a reality will begin. Cromwell’s group has already met with the provincial minister, made its first overtures to the cabinet. “Money is always short when we come to the table,” she allows. “But it’s time for Canadians to step up and take ownership of this history. It’s not just our history; it’s Canadian history.”

Are we finally ready to claim it?

In my story for The Coast (November 19, 2009) on the city’s striking number of unsolved homicides, I’d quoted Martin, a respected retired homicide detective as saying: “To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid one single criminal charge in nine years.”

Not true, replied the chief. “They’ve laid charges in two murder cases,” he told interviewer Bob Murphy. But when Murphy pressed him for details on the outcomes of those cases, Beazley demurred. “I don’t recall,” he said.

Curious, I emailed HRP spokesperson Brian Palmeter to ask which murders the squad had solved.

The two incidents, Palmeter replied, involved “the 1988 murder of Smiley Bailey where Gerald Patrick Dow was charged in 2002, [and] the 2000 murder of Joe Murphy where Christopher Terriak was charged.”

The realities of those cases, however, are considerably more complicated—and less convincing—than the chief suggests.

Terriak was indeed charged with murdering Murphy, a fellow street person, in 2003, three years after the original incident. But the cold case squad appears to have had nothing to do with laying those charges.

Martin says the case “was solved and charges laid while I was still in homicide—by members of the homicide section.”

In 2003, Terriak was arrested for beating up another street person, a man he believed had “ratted him out” for Murphy’s murder. When Rev. Gus Pendleton, a local minister, heard about that beating, he went to police with an audiotape in which Terriak confessed to having killed Murphy three years before. Terriak’s confession to the minister was what got him charged—and convicted.

Hardly a triumph for the cold case squad.

The case of Arnold (Smiley) Bailey is even murkier. Bailey was gunned down on Creighton Street in Halifax’s north end in 1988 in what police believed was a drug-related murder. They initially charged Spryfield drug kingpin Terry Marriott Sr. with the crime.

Gerald Patrick Dow had been supposed to be one of the witnesses for the crown in that case. During Marriott’s 1991 preliminary hearing, in fact, Dow testified he saw Marriott shoot Bailey, and claimed that Marriott had then given him the gun with instructions to give it to Marriott's wife. Despite the fact Dow was granted immunity from prosecution in the case, he was never called to testify during the trial, and Marriott was acquitted in June 1991.

Eleven years later—for reasons that have never been fully disclosed—the crown revoked Dow’s immunity deal and police this time charged Dow himself with first degree murder.

By the time the case actually got to court, that charge had been bounced down to being an accessory to the murder. In the end, Dow pleaded guilty only to hiding the 9 mm handgun used in the crime.

To this day, no one has been convicted of Bailey’s murder — even though the case is no longer listed on the police department’s website among its 48 unsolved murders.

Much else about Beazley’s interview with the CBC, as well as his written response to the Coast article—”Frank Beazley: Setting the Record Straight,” Letters, November 26, 2009)—are equally problematic and incomplete.

While Beazley and Martin claim to respect one another—Beazley described Martin’s career-long contribution to the force as “valuable,” while Martin insists “I respect the chief and my opinion is he is a good chief [who was] given wrong information” for his rebuttals—they clearly see the issues through very different lenses.

Beazley, for example, claims the city’s homicide clearance rate isn’t nearly as bad as Martin portrays it. But when the CBC’s Bob Murphy pointed out that similar-sized cities such as London and Windsor, Ontario, had far fewer unsolved murders than Halifax, Beazley suggested the reason was that many of Halifax’s murders were more difficult to solve because they were “gang related, drug related.”

Martin doesn’t buy that. “Both those cities have very high profile gangs— the Rock Machine and the Hell's Angels,” he notes. “Neither of these gangs have a high profile in Halifax.”

“It is disappointing,” Beazley wrote, “that the [Coast] article brought into question the experience and professionalism of our officers, particularly those in the major crime unit.”

In fact, the focus of the article wasn’t on the experience and professionalism of the officers in the major crime unit themselves—whom Martin also went out of his way to praise—but the lack of murder-investigation experience and decision-making smarts among those, including Deputy Chief Chris McNeil, who directly manage those officers and make the critical decisions that affect the investigators and their investigations.

“The only point I am attempting to make known is Halifax Regional Municipality has too many unsolved homicides,” Martin says today. “The problem is not with the quality of investigators or the types of murders we encounter. The problem is management’s lack of experience in these types of investigations and, until this changes, the numbers of unsolved are only going to increase.”

One of the results of that lack of experience, Martin says, was the decision to shut down a special task force set up to look into the 1999 murder of Jason MacCullough because an informant turned out to be a liar. Beazley told the CBC the decision was made “with the best consultations with the best legal minds, not within the department but with outside people.”

Martin, who argues the task force had developed plenty of other information independent of what the informant had told them and was “very close” to being able to lay charges, says the chief’s claims simply don’t match the timeline. The investigators discovered the informant had lied on a Saturday afternoon; McNeil “shut down the file Monday morning first thing. At no time was there any discussion or explanation that the crown was consulted. It would have been physically impossible for a crown prosecutor to have the time to review the file and make such a decision… The investigation was shut down and the explanation given was because Deputy Chief McNeil said so, and there is no room for discussion. This is what investigators were told.”

Beazley also dismissed two other claims Martin made in the article concerning the Kimberly McAndrew missing persons investigation: that when Martin was a cold case investigator himself, he had been unable to get a copy of the RCMP’s files of its investigation into her disappearance, and that evidence he’d intended to send out for DNA testing in the case had disappeared.

“The simple truth,” wrote Beazley, “is that all exhibits are accounted for and the RCMP file referenced in the story has been in our possession for many years.”

Not so, replies Martin. There was, in fact, more than one RCMP file. Because McAndrew’s father was an RCMP officer, he says, the “RCMP were involved in Kim’s incident before Halifax police were even called. They went to her workplace, spoke to people and even went through her workplace. I was informed by several RCMP members after I was assigned Kim's file that the RCMP had their own file regarding Kim. That is the file I tried to obtain and was unsuccessful.”

As for the DNA evidence, Martin says it wasn’t there when he went looking for it. “I went looking for a certain piece of evidence, [the nature of] which I can not disclose,” he explains. “I was told by all the those that I made requests for this item that they did not have it and they could not locate it. To me that equals missing.”

“What is most disconcerting,” Beazley added in his letter to The Coast, “is the specific information about individual files that was contained in the article. This could very well jeopardize the integrity of those files and open up old wounds for the families involved.”

As for information jeopardizing the integrity of the case files, it’s important to make the point that Martin was very careful not to discuss specific investigative details of any of the cases with me. The detailed information about those cases in the story comes either from my own independent interviews or from previously published reports.

And Beazley’s concern about the story opening up old wounds—“We have reached out to the families in question to assure them that work continues on their loved ones’ cases”—would be more convincing if one of those families hadn’t told me they hadn’t heard from the department for at least five years prior to the publication of the article.

Why is our police department one of the worst in Canada at finding killers? Stephen Kimber investigates.

OK, boys… Pack it up… Back to what you were doing… We’re done here…

Tom Martin had known it was coming. Call it his experience, or—perhaps, more to the point—his boss’s lack of experience. Whatever, Martin had guessed this morning’s outcome even before Bill Hollis, the staff sergeant in charge of major crimes, descended from the department’s executive offices to personally deliver the message from above.

The Halifax Regional Police task force set up to re-examine the August 28, 1999, murder of Jason McCullough was being disbanded.

Pack it up… Back to what you were doing…

It was the summer of 2005. The re-investigation had begun the year before after an informant had come forward with new information about what happened in the park off Pinecrest Drive the night Jason McCullough was murdered, information the investigators had since “qualified” independently. Was this the break they needed to finally close the five-year-old murder investigation?

They desperately wanted to. Jason McCullough was what cops like to call a “pure victim:” a straight-arrow 19-year-old kid. He shoveled snow for the elderly, volunteered with the local Boys’ and Girls’ Club. He’d just ended up in the wrong park at the wrong, late hour on a hot, wet summer night.

Investigators were convinced they knew who’d murdered Jason. The problem was they hadn’t been able to prove it, at least not to the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt certainty the courts rightly required. Maybe this witness carried the key to unlock a conviction.

Days after the witness came forward, Chief of Police Frank Beazley authorized setting up a task force to take another look at the case.

The group included Martin, other members of the department’s cold case unit, and officers seconded from regular duties. They were a “fantastic team. Everyone had a key role. And everyone did their job.” Operating out of makeshift quarters in a cavernous room in the department’s Gottingen Street headquarters, the group gathered around a shoved-together collection of tables in the middle of the room each morning, and sometimes again in the afternoons. They discussed and dissected what they’d learned that day, then figured out what to do next.

During its re-investigation, the task force had progressed far beyond the thin gruel the informant had had to offer, putting together important new pieces of the puzzle of who killed Jason, independent of what the witness had told them. They were, Martin believed, “close, very close, extremely close” to being able to lay charges.

But then, two days before it was disbanded, investigators caught their informant toying with truth, “remembering big.” The investigators had had no choice but to cut him loose. Liars don’t make good courtroom witnesses.

It was a blow, but not lethal. Martin says every experienced investigator knows informants are notoriously unreliable. They’re usually criminals, with deals to make or axes to grind. So you never depend on an informant alone to make your case. The task force hadn’t. Which was why catching their informant in a lie, Martin believed, was just another “bump in the road” of their ongoing investigation.

But he wasn’t sure their bosses weren’t experienced enough to know that.

Tom Martin looked around the room. There was disbelief, anger. The other cops knew this was bullshit. Still, there was no point in confronting their staff sergeant. He was just the messenger. The message had come from two floors above, from Deputy Chief Chris McNeil, a man who’d never run a murder investigation.

We’re done here…

“You’re making a mistake.” Martin tried, with varying degrees of un-success, to keep his voice neutral. He knew he had a reputation for being one of management’s “biggest pains in the ass.” He preferred to see himself as a guy “who wasn’t afraid to piss off the bosses” in the interests of solving his case. Now, he stood just inside the door of McNeil’s office and tried to explain why the deputy chief shouldn’t do what he’d already done.

McNeil wasn’t listening. He simply stared at his computer screen while Martin made the case for continuing the task force. McNeil didn’t look up. All he said was, “It’s done.”

And it was. The task force was disbanded. Two weeks later, Martin suffered his first heart attack. He was never able to return to work. In 2008, he officially retired from the force.

***

It is a crisp fall morning in 2009. Tom Martin and I are having breakfast in a booth in a corner of the Athens’ restaurant on Quinpool Road. Two years before, while he was still on disability, I’d interviewed Martin for a Coast feature (August 24, 2006) called “The Last Best Hope” about his ongoing obsession—even after his heart attack—with solving the city’s many unsolved murder cases.

But he was still a cop then, which meant there were things he couldn’t say. I’ve come back today to ask about some of those things, including his views on why there seem to be so many unsolved murders in Halifax.

The Halifax Regional Police website currently lists 48 unsolved homicides, dating from the December 9, 1955, execution-style murder of Michael Leo Resk to the May 11, 2009 killing of Tanya Jean Brooks, an aboriginal mother of five.

Forty eight unsolved homicides? What’s that number really mean?

Well, the most recent figures I could find—from the Centre for Justice Statistics—compared homicide clearance rates from 1976 to 2005 for Canadian jurisdictions with populations of 150,000 or more. Halifax ranked 32nd out of 38 police forces with a clearance rate of just 80.3 per cent of 157 homicides. By contrast, the city with the best clearance rate was London, Ontario, a similar-sized city. London’s clearance rate for 139 murders was 97.8 per cent. Even the RCMP, which had 4,713 murders during the same period, solved 91.2 per cent of them.

Although those statistics are dated and include years that were kinder and gentler for violent crime, more recent numbers make Halifax look even worse. According to its own figures, HRP’s clearance rate for the 31 murders committed between 2005 and 2008 is just 64.5 per cent.

Martin pins much of the blame for that on his former department’s senior managers who, he says, lack the training and experience to effectively manage major criminal investigations.

The department’s own website, in fact, touts Frank Beazley’s most significant career accomplishment prior to becoming chief in 2003 as serving for six years as officer in charge of human resources and training. His deputy, McNeil—the man who shut down the McCullough investigation—is a law school graduate with what the website describes as “a broad range of policing experience in operations, communication and automation, and administration.”

“Chris McNeil is a smart man,” Martin says, “but he’s book smart. He’s not investigative smart. There’s a difference.” He pauses, considers, points. “Talking to him that day was like talking to that plant over there.”

***

Tom Martin isn’t just any disgruntled ex-cop. By the time he retired last year, he was the force’s most experienced criminal investigator with more than 500 major case investigations under his belt, including as lead investigator in 25 murders. In 2001—a year in which he helped make arrests in two murders, an attempted murder and a kidnapping, not to mention nailing serial abuser William Shrubsall for assault and robbery and three sexual assaults, which helped convince a judge to officially label Shrubsall a “dangerous offender”—his fellow cops voted him officer of the year. In 1993, he was investigator of the year.

In 1999, he helped create a four-level criminal investigator’s course, which he then taught not only to fellow officers but also to the RCMP and military police.

In addition to training other cops in the art and craft of criminal investigation, Martin took specialized courses himself, including in death and crime scene analysis, and in cold case investigations—both of which were jointly offered by the Jacksonville, Florida, Medical Examiner’s Office, the U.S. military and the FBI. (Martin is one of only two Halifax officers to have taken the cold case course; both are now retired.)

Experience counts, Martin says, because repetition is how investigators learn “to fine tune, to tweak, to attain that magic point of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ It’s why young cops get partnered up with experienced ones.” And why you need cops with investigative experience making decisions about investigations.

None of that is to suggest it’s easy to solve any crime, let alone murder. Consider the force’s best known 20-years-and-counting missing person’s investigation. Though almost no one expects to find Kimberly McAndrew alive or doubts she met with foul play, her case is, ironically, still officially listed as a missing person. That means it isn’t even counted among Halifax’s 48 unsolved homicides.

McAndrew’s case has involved informants, false leads, fortunetellers, riddle-talking psychic tipsters, dog bones, well bottoms, too many bodies that weren’t hers, weird suspects who turned out to be just weird, eyewitnesses who probably weren’t, turf wars, a task force, missing evidence, egos, twists, turns… and there’s still no end in sight.

The long version could fill a book; this short version should give you the flavour of why experience matters.

***

At 4:20 p.m. on Saturday, August 12, 1989, Kimberly McAndrew, a 19-year-old cashier at the Quinpool Road Canadian Tire store, punched off work, walked into the parking lot and… disappeared.

Tom Martin was a young undercover drug squad officer at the time, but he—like virtually everyone else on the force—pitched in during the investigation’s early stages, in part, because McAndrew—like McCullough—was also a pure victim and, in part, because her father, Cyril, was a Mountie, a fellow cop.

It was an RCMP informant who initially convinced investigators Kimberly had been abducted by pimps. While that tip had to be pursued, Martin says that, with the benefit of hindsight and experience, it’s clear investigators quickly fixed on it to the exclusion of other possibilities. “Investigation 101. Don’t believe your informant too much.”

Or well-meaning, supposed eye witnesses. One woman insisted she’d seen Kim in a Penhorn Mall flower shop the afternoon she disappeared. That tip became so embedded in the investigation it’s still listed on the department’s website as her last known sighting.

Martin says that doesn’t make sense but believing it again kept early investigators from considering other possibilities.

In 2004, when Martin finally officially got the McAndrew cold case file—“I’d been working it anyway; it was the case everyone wanted to solve”—his first step was to sit down with Kim’s family.

“Let’s go back to square one,” he told them.

He wanted to know everything about Kim—from the fact Bryan Adams was her favourite singer to the reality she was still a small-town girl so nervous of the big city she would rather go home to her parents in Parrsboro than stay overnight alone in the Halifax apartment she shared with her sister.

“This was not a girl who was going to go on a safari to Dartmouth,” Martin says. Besides, if she wanted to buy flowers—it was her boyfriend’s birthday—there was a flower shop along the most logical route from work to her apartment.

“My instincts and experience tell me Kim never got of that parking lot,” Martin says today.

But that raises a question. Given Kim’s skittishness, wouldn’t she have screamed if someone had tried to abduct her in a parking lot filled with Saturday afternoon shoppers?

She would have. Unless…

In October 1997, police in Nanaimo, B.C.—following up on complaints that a man driving a Pontiac Gran Am with Nova Scotia licence plates had been posing as a police officer to lure young girls into his car—arrested a former Halifax resident named Andrew Paul Johnson. They found a developmentally-challenged 20-year-old woman locked in the back of his car, along with what police described as a rape kit: pornographic magazines, a Halloween mask, handcuffs, a meat cleaver, lubricating gel and packing tape.

Halifax police had been looking for Johnson too. In 1992, Johnson had pleaded guilty to confining and sexually assaulting his Halifax girlfriend. In 1997, he’d been caught masturbating in his car while watching girls at play in Hammonds Plains. There was a warrant for his arrest for making harassing phone calls to a 12-year-old White’s Lake girl while posing as a teen fashion representative. And, shortly before Johnson turned up in B.C., he had disappeared from a Dartmouth sexual offender treatment program—but not before turning in a chilling assignment. Psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Gabriel asked participants in the program to write an essay about a sexual assault from the point of view of its victim.

Johnson had written his about the rape and murder of Kimberly McAndrew.

Gabriel notified the Halifax police, who quickly set up a task force to investigate. Although Martin—who was busy with several other major investigations himself at the time—wasn’t directly involved with that investigation, he says its members did a “phenomenal job” putting together the puzzle pieces of Johnson’s life.

Intriguingly, at the time of Kimberly’s disappearance, the local telephone directory lists Johnson’s girlfriend as living in an apartment in a complex across from the Canadian Tire parking lot. “If someone had identified himself to Kim as a police officer,” Martin suggests today, “she—being the daughter of a police officer—might have gone with him.”

The task force uncovered other evidence in its investigation too—including some which linked Johnson to other unsolved murders in Halifax.

On January 1, 1992, a 22-year-old Vancouver woman named Andrea King had arrived at the Halifax International Airport with dreams of enrolling at Dalhousie Law School… and disappeared. Her body was found nearly a year later. During their investigation of Johnson, police found Andrea’s eye shadow compact.

Police sent several pieces of evidence for DNA testing, but the science wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to give them what they needed to charge Johnson.

Confronted with what they knew, however, investigators hoped Johnson might confess. By that point, Johnson, who’d pleaded guilty to abduction charges in the Nanaimo case, was facing a dangerous offender hearing that could—and did—put him behind bars indefinitely. Johnson refused to talk to the Halifax investigators.

In May 2001, days after a court in B.C. declared Johnson a dangerous offender, HRP disbanded its task force, without explanation—and without laying any charges. Why?

Three years later, when Martin—now officially a member of the cold case unit—began his back-to-square-one re-examination of the McAndrew file, he went looking for a piece of DNA evidence he knew the task force had collected. Martin hoped advances in testing procedures might produce a breakthrough. But the evidence was missing. He shakes his head. “No one could find it.”

He also asked the RCMP for a copy of the file from the “unusual” parallel investigation it had run at the time into McAndrew’s disappearance. “I asked for it, but I never got it.” Martin doesn’t know why—“I didn’t just ask once”—but he believes there may still be lingering turf wars left over from the integration of the local major crimes units with the Mounties’ squad following municipal amalgamation in 1996.

“Whatever,” he says, “I never did get the file.”

***

“From where I sit, in charge of operational policing,” Chris McNeil begins, “one unsolved murder is too many for me.” We’re sitting in a boardroom near his office in police headquarters. Though he says he isn’t familiar with the clearance rate statistics I’d asked him about, the city’s deputy police chief insists his force’s clearance rate for the past two years—10 of 14 homicides in 2007-08—is a “very respectable” 70 per cent.

“There’s always going to some ex-somebody telling me how I should do my job better,” he says of Tom Martin’s criticisms. “But some of the very cases you’re talking about happened at the heyday of when Tommy and other very experienced investigators were here. They didn’t solve those cases.”

McNeil does concede Martin’s point that the department has lost a lot of experienced investigators in the last several years, but he sees that as a positive. “We’re a younger force today. There’s a whole new energy, and people are getting opportunities that weren’t available to me as a young officer. And now we’ve lived through that period of transition. I have a lot of young but very experienced investigators.

He says he’s “not one to look back with rose-coloured glasses… We will always have unsolved homicides.” Many involve bad guys killing bad guys, cases where investigators smack up against that subculture’s brick wall, an unbreakable code of silence. Or investigators may be hobbled by “procedural protections” built into new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “Things that were done 20 years couldn’t be done today.” While he doesn’t dispute the legitimacy of some of those new protections, the result is that solving cases has become “10-fold” more complex than before.

McNeil acknowledges financial incentives—the province is offering up to $50,000 for useful information in a number of specific cases, including McCullough and McAndrew—provide investigators with “another tool” but he adds “the reward system has not led us to solve a single serious crime so far.”

Neither, in truth, has the force’s cold case unit.

The unit was unveiled amid much fanfare in 2000. The five-member squad was initially going to focus on 15 homicides and eight missing persons cases, including McAndrew. Today, its murder caseload has more than doubled to 34—now including McCullough—but no one will say how many officers are assigned to it. “We don’t give information on our deployment numbers,” HRP spokesperson Brian Palmeter told me. Neither will the department indicate the unit’s budget.

Tom Martin suspects that may be because there’s no one besides Sgt. Jeff Clark, the officer nominally in charge, minding the store. “You need to go out and pound the pavement,” he says. “Re-interview. Re-think. That’s how you solve cases. And you can’t pick and choose the cases that ‘deserve’ to be investigated. A case where bad guys kill bad guys is no less important and should have the same resources as a case involving an innocent victim, perhaps even more because solving it will often lead to solving more murders… It’s about results. To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid one single criminal charge in nine years. To me, that’s unacceptable.”

For his part, McNeil says the public may simple expect too much from cold case units. “I call it the CSI factor. People think you find a piece of forensic evidence and, 40 minutes later, case solved. There’s no panacea like that.”

Even if a cold case investigator finds new evidence worth pursuing, he adds, the department then has to put together a “resource-intense” task force like those in the McCullough and McAndrew cases.

“There’s always a challenge deciding which ones you work on and which ones… there’s no point in pulling off the shelf,” McNeil acknowledges. “It’s not like you’re ever guaranteed results but I have to believe there’s something here that can be pursued and that there’s a likelihood that this is going to produce results.”

Or else?

OK, boys… Pack it up… Back to what you were doing… We’re done here…

***

When I ask Tom Martin about McNeil’s argument that some of what are today’s unsolved murders occurred on his watch, Martin is quick to fire back. “Investigators,” he says, “can only do what their bosses let them do. Investigators didn’t shut down the McCullough investigation. The deputy chief did.”

As for being an ex-somebody, Martin points out, “I’m an ex-somebody with experience.”

He say McNeil is a “micro-manager” who makes critical decisions about cases “even though he has never been involved in a major investigation himself.” To make matters worse, he adds, the other key players in the chain of command making day-to-day decisions on murder investigations—Superintendent Mike Burns and Staff Sergeant Frank Chambers—have “little or no” investigative experience either. He shakes his head. “These are the bosses makings the decisions on these cases.”

One more example. On January 6, 2003, 61-year-old businessman Larry Rhynold died during a mysterious fire in what news accounts at the time described as his “expensive, plantation-style home” in the city’s south end. Rhynold, who had been through a messy divorce, faced a myriad of “financial, legal and personal troubles.” Days before the fire, friends say, he’d been beaten up by two men outside his own home. Within days, fire investigators concluded the blaze had been deliberately set.

After weeks of on-scene investigation, witness interviews and forensic analysis, police investigators, perhaps not surprisingly, ruled the incident a homicide. The brass disagreed. “I argued with Staff Sergeant Frank Chambers for weeks trying to prove to him that this was a homicide,” Martin says. “The department’s policy is that every death is to be treated as a homicide until proven otherwise. I was just trying to convince my boss to follow the department’s own policy. In my career, I don’t recall Chambers ever being the lead investigator in a homicide case or even being assigned a homicide case. But he was my boss.”

Eventually, Martin says, he did win his point and Rhynold’s death was designated as a homicide. Shortly after he left the department, however, the case disappeared from the list of murders.

Not listing it as a murder, of course, makes the department’s clearance numbers look better.

***

Why is Tom Martin saying all this now? He says he has nothing to gain by going public, but “I have spent too many years sitting with the families of murder victims promising them we would do all we could to solve their case, and that’s not happening. The numbers of unsolved just keep getting higher.”

Forty-eight.

Plus Kimberly McAndrew…

Plus Larry Rhynold…

And getting higher.

___

Stephen Kimber, The Coast’s Senior Features Writer, is the author of one novel and eight books of nonfiction.

Lost Children

“I feel like Jesus,” Tina announces to no one in particular. We are sitting on a hard wooden bench outside Courtroom 1 in the Dartmouth law courts building, waiting for Tina’s lawyer to finish up another matter in another courtroom so the wheels of justice can finally grind through her business at hand — her formal sentencing on eight counts of uttering threats.

When I look at her quizzically, Tina tries and fails at a smile. “I feel like Jesus,” she repeats. “Like I’m going to be crucified.” Her eyes are watery and there is a tremble in her lip. “I’m not going to cry,” she insists, talking as much to herself as to me.

Tina has cause to be concerned. She has already pleaded guilty to making the threatening telephone calls. According to Tina’s version of events, she bought a 375 ml. bottle of vodka on the afternoon of October 17, 2006. Then, back in her apartment, she began drinking while she listened to her favourite song — the Dixie Chicks singing, over and over, “I’m not ready to make nice, I’m not ready to back down” — until, finally, she picked up the phone and began dialing various officials in the provincial department of community services with whom she’d had unhappy dealings over the past months and years.

When no one answered — it was already after hours — she began leaving messages. If she didn’t get her daughter back, “you got a war.” If the charges against her daughter weren’t dropped, “be prepared for a fucking war.” It only got worse as the night — and the vodka — disappeared. “You’re going down,” she screamed in one frantic late-night call. “I’m gonna shove a pitchfork up your ass so far it’s gonna come out your fucking throat, you cunt.”

Before the sun rose the next morning, Tina had left 42 different messages.

That morning, she made one last call to the home of the family court judge who’d handled the case in which her daughter was made a permanent ward of the department of community services. She told the man who answered the phone: “It’s your fucking wife’s fault for everything what my daughter’s going through, so you tell her that she’s going down too.”

Tina knows she should not have made those calls. She never intended to actually harm anyone, she insists. She was just frustrated and angry at “all the shit” that had happened to her and her daughter.

Tina is not a physically intimidating woman; she’s short — probably not even five-feet-tall — and puffy from too much unhappy life. Today, she looks every one of her hard-lived 37 years. In court, even the prosecutor will concede she has had “a pretty rough life.”

The pre-sentence report prepared for today’s court hearing tells the story of that life — but only part of it. Which is why Tina is worried the judge may make an example of her and send her to jail. “She won’t know why I did it,” she says plaintively.

The daughter of an occasionally employed German-Irish father and a workaholic, abusive French-Canadian-Aboriginal mother, Tina grew up in Orillia, Ontario, in what the probation officer compiling her pre-sentence report has described as a “dysfunctional” family.

“I was abused from the time I was a newborn until I was 15,” she tells me. “Verbally. Physically. Ten lashes with a belt buckle. That was normal. I’d have welts on my arms. I always wore long sleeves to hide the bruises… There was psychological abuse too.”

Twice, Children’s Aid removed Tina and her two sisters from the family home; twice, they returned them. When she was 15, Tina demanded Children’s Aid take her back. “I told them I’d rather be dead than go back home.” She spent the next two years in four or five different foster homes.

She was 15 when she became pregnant the first time. “I wasn’t prepared,” Tina confesses of motherhood. “Angie was colicky. No one told me what to do, so I’d feed her bottle after bottle. I didn’t know how to burp her; I didn’t know that’s what you did with a baby. All I knew was how to change diapers.”

Tina stops, becomes almost wistful. “If only they’d helped my parents be better parents,” she says of Children’s Aid, “maybe I’d have known what to do…” She pauses again. “If only they’d helped me.”

Instead, Children’s Aid applied for — and won — permanent custody of Angie. Tina would not see her eldest daughter again for 15 years, not until she re-met her at the funeral of her second child, Albert, who’d died at 14 in a car accident in 2002. Tina had had Albert — by a different father — barely a year after Angie was born. The father got custody of the boy and, Tina says, used threats to keep her from seeing her son.

Though she still dreamed she’d somehow, someday, somewhere meet Mr. Right, Tina’s choices in men didn’t improve. She’s not sure who the father of her third child is — “I was sleeping around at the time” — but she did know she didn’t want any of the possibles as a husband. She wanted more children. Her fourth child, another son, was born a year later. Like her oldest son, his father got custody of him too.

In the six years since she’d left home, Tina had had four children by four different fathers, as well as two miscarriages. Finally, at the urging of the father of the fourth, she had her tubes tied. She was 21.

The only positive thing she had to show for those 21 years was her third child and second daughter, Andrea, of whom she had custody and for whom she insists she wanted only the best.

Tina tried to raise Andrea on her own. But she was also playing hopscotch across the country — from Orillia, to Edmonton, to Vancouver, to Toronto, to Saint John, to Halifax — chasing abusive men and relationships that ended badly for all concerned. Including Andrea. Tina says Andrea witnessed the father of Tina’s fourth child beat her and was in the same room again two years later when Tina’s new husband, Jack, assaulted her.

At one point, Tina decided she couldn’t cope and put Andrea in care in Toronto for 30 days so she could get her life together. Luckily, during that time, Tina won $3,500 at bingo — enough so they could stay in the same apartment for the rest of the year and Andrea could complete an entire school year in the same class.

Finally, in 1997 when Andrea was just six, Tina, her daughter and Jack moved to Nova Scotia. They ended up in a welfare hotel in Dartmouth. Though Tina enrolled Andrea in school and an after-school program, their troubled family life — Tina kicked her husband out of the apartment; he applied for custody of Andrea — soon brought them to the attention of child services workers. They got a court order that allowed Tina to maintain custody of her daughter, but with conditions: she had to see a therapist, get anger management and marriage counseling, and Andrea needed to be assessed by psychologists at the IWK. Tina agreed to all of those conditions. But she disregarded another order requiring Tina’s husband to stay away from Andrea because, as Tina explains, “DCS was keeping Andrea and her dad apart on purpose, and the courts wouldn’t intervene.”

It all came to a head a few weeks later on Easter Sunday — April 12, 1998 — when Jack arrived at the apartment with a chocolate bunny as well as a stuffed bunny, and offered to take Tina and Andrea for dinner and a movie.

Before that could happen, a police officer and two social workers — who’d been tipped off by hotel personnel to Jack’s arrival — showed up to apprehend Andrea and place her in temporary care.

After that, Tina only got to see her daughter once a week — and only with a police officer stationed outside the room.

Because of ongoing problems in Tina’s marriage, her lack of parenting skills and her history of moving from place to place, a family court judge made Andrea a permanent ward of the province in September 1999. There was no provision in that order for Tina to see her daughter again. “I honestly didn’t understand any of this and why it happened in the first place,” Tina explains. “I cried real hard.”

Everything that happened to Tina between losing custody of Andrea and the night she made her threatening phone calls — and much did happen — is summarized in one single sentence in Tina’s pre-sentence report: Tina, it says, “has been making application to Family Court for custody and visitations, but has been denied.”

That doesn’t even begin to cover it, and that worries Tina. If the judge doesn’t fully comprehend her ongoing, never-ending war with community services, the judge won’t have a clue why Tina lost it on the night of October 17, 2006.

You may not have heard of Tina, but you almost certainly know about Andrea. She is the “troubled” 16-year-old girl who was at the centre of a legal tug of war last fall. Youth court judge Pam Williams ordered community services minister Judy Streatch — the legal guardian for Andrea and 2,000 other kids formally placed in the care of her department — to personally attend a case conference to discuss how to make sure Andrea got the help everyone agreed she needed.

At the time, Andrea had just pleaded guilty to 32 criminal charges involving incidents in and around Halifax area group homes where she’d been living. “Since August 2005,” as the Chronicle Herald report laid out the prosecution’s case against her, “the girl has repeatedly assaulted [group home] workers with her fists and feet and anything she could get her hands on — including a chair and an antenna off a radio. She has also caused property damage and breached court undertakings by ignoring her 11 p.m. curfew.”

Andrea’s lawyer, Megan Longley, told the judge her young client had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder — multiple personalities — and needed intense, daily psychiatric treatment on a long-term basis. Such treatment isn’t currently available in Nova Scotia. Which meant that Minister Streatch was “the only one who can do anything about the problem. It’s her decision how to allocate resources,” Longley explained.

Perhaps surprisingly, prosecutor Gary Holt agreed. In court, he supported Longley’s application, later explaining to reporters: “We’ve known for a long time in this province that there is a lack of services for youth. And particularly in the psychiatric, psychological situation — in particular a secure treatment centre. We just don’t have one.”

The judge’s unprecedented order and the fact that Holt, a respected veteran youth prosecutor, had publicly agreed with it seemed like — and was — a searing indictment of the failures of the child protection system in the province. Predictably, the news touched off what Holt himself would later concede was a political “firestorm.”

The province’s justice minister, Murray Scott, called Holt’s superiors to complain. Those superiors then ordered Holt back into court to argue the polar opposite of the position he’d taken three just days before.

The judge eventually, seemingly reluctantly, rescinded her original order and allowed the department’s acting director of child welfare and residential services to appear in her stead.

By then, however, the issue was moot. Within days of that first hearing, Andrea had disappeared.

It was not the first time. Nor would it be the last.

Carl can remember the exact date — November 22, 1997 — and even the hour and minute — 3:06 a.m. — when his life changed forever. He was 12 years old. His parents came into his room and woke him up. His suitcase was already packed. He was going on a trip, they said. It was only when he was in the car on the drive from their home in Sackville to the airport that they told him where he was going and why.

He’d always been a difficult child. “When you were born,” his mother told him more than once, “you didn’t come with an instruction manual.” Carl was disruptive in school, so his teachers called in his parents. They sought professional help. Doctors diagnosed Carl with ADD, ADHD and an alphabet soup of other disorders and syndromes. The doctors wanted to prescribe pills; Carl’s mother resisted, but relented when they told her she might lose her child.

Ritalin, I ask?

Carl laughs. “I could look in the [pharmacist’s standard reference] book and pick out every damn pill there. I’ve had them all.”

But the pills didn’t help. When he was 12, he warned his parents he was going to “slit your throats while you sleep.” In fact, he did hurt a classmate, which is how he ended up in youth court. His parents were given yet another Hobson’s choice: send Carl to the Nova Scotia youth jail in Shelburne or to Bayfield, “a rural residential treatment facility [in Ontario, offering] care and treatment for boys experiencing difficulties such as conduct disorder, psychiatric disorders and attention deficit disorder.”

His parents were reluctant to let him go so far from home, but opted for Bayfield because they believed Carl might finally get the help he needed there. Which is how he came to be at the airport before dawn on that morning in 1997 meeting the social worker who would accompany him to Bayfield.

“We arrived at 11:05 a.m.,” Carl tells me as if the time is proof that what he says happened actually did.

Carl tells me this story as we sit at a table in the middle of the deserted Backpacker’s Café on Gottingen Street on a damp Friday afternoon in mid-April. I had arranged to meet Carl because I hoped he’d lead me to Andrea, whose story was the one I actually wanted to hear.

In the six months since she’d been in the media spotlight, Andrea had run away, been caught, run away, been caught, run away again. She’d spent short periods at the youth prison in Waterville and also at the Wood Street Centre, a Truro facility described as “a secure and stable environment for children and youth in the care of the minister who are in-crisis.” Ironically, Wood Street was initially touted as the made-in-Nova-Scotia solution to sending kids like Carl out of province for treatment. But the reality is that Wood Street is what Andrea’s lawyer, Megan Longley, calls a “settling-down place” for troubled teens, and not the long-term treatment facility that’s still needed.

During one of Andrea’s many escapes, she met Carl, who lives by his wiles on the streets. They became friends. The week before I caught up with Carl, he and a few of his friends had attended Andrea’s most recent court appearance — as a show of support. That, indirectly, was how I’d gotten his cell phone number.

“Call me C-C,” he says when we meet. “Everybody does.”

C-C?

“Crazy Carl. That’s what it stands for.” Today, he is dressed in a T-shirt, ill-fitting jacket and over-sized camouflage pants. His hair is close-cropped, but growing out. You can see the outline where someone had carved symbols of some sort into the hair on the side of his head. He has bad teeth and his eyes are lidded. Medication? Drugs? It’s hard to tell. There are scrapes on his knuckles. From a fight? Impossible to know.

“I have chronic anxiety,” he tells me as if reading a description on a restaurant menu. “I’m out of control. They give me an injection in the rear. It’s supposed to calm you, but it makes me worse.” He stops, considers. “I hate psychiatrists.” Still, he refuses to badmouth his latest one, a doctor at the Abbie Lane Hospital he’s just started seeing. “You have to give him a chance,” he tells me.

Carl has seen more than his share of shrinks. Despite the fact he doesn’t have a high school education, he seems bright, articulate, even self aware, especially when he talks about the child welfare system in which he has spent half his life. “I know the system better than the system knows itself,” he boasts, then confides, “We all put on this glamorous front,” he says of kids like him who’ve grown up in care. “What’s happened to us in the system makes us need to have an edge. That’s why I’m so well spoken,” he explains, answering a question I haven’t yet asked, but planned to.

Carl also believes he understands what triggers his own outbursts. “Every year, I seem to have a setback around October, November, December… The sun goes down and it screws up my mood. It goes in a routine pattern.”

He’s still on probation from his last “routine pattern.” While living in a Halifax group home, “they had tuna for lunch and I didn’t want that, so I went to the cupboard to get some Sidekicks to make for myself. They told me I couldn’t cook it.” He shrugs. “It went downhill from there…

“I have severe anger problems,” he concedes. “I lose it over the smallest things. But I knew I had to change after I got charged, so I did. I can control my anger now.”

I look down at his knuckles and wonder.

Still, as I listen, it’s clear Carl believes he has excellent reasons for those “severe anger problems.”

Take the five years he spent at Bayfield. “They put you in these houses, 16 to 20 kids to a house,” he remembers. “And the staff would play favourites: ‘You! In bed at 8… You can stay up until 9.’” Carl, it is obvious, wasn’t one of the favourites.

He claims he once sent seven staff members to hospital during an altercation. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he insists. “I just couldn’t concentrate because of these medications they had me on… psychotropic drugs. At one point, I was on 13 of them. They made me aggressive and paranoid. One day I’m with this teacher and I couldn’t concentrate. The teachers all had these [flash] cards — they go from five, which is great, to zero, which is bad. So when I couldn’t concentrate, the teacher hauls out the card that says, ‘Zero.’ And that’s when I went off…

“They play head games with you.”

During his years in Bayfield, Carl only saw his parents twice. It wasn’t that they didn’t care. In fact, his mother started a support group back in Halifax for more than two dozen other families whose kids had also been sent out of province for treatment because there were no facilities for them in Nova Scotia. The group was called KIN. “There’s a double meaning,” his mother told the Daily News in 1999. “It stands for ‘Kids In Need,’ and ‘kin’ also means family, which is very important as these kids are away from their families, away from those who love them most.”

So why didn’t she visit her own child more often? Scheduled visits to her son in Bayfield, Carl’s mother told the newspaper, were often cancelled at the last minute — staff would tell them “it wasn’t a good time” — and phone conversations were limited.

At the end of the day, Bayfield didn’t help Carl either. They sent him back to Nova Scotia in the winter of 2003. He was 17, and on his own. He wound up as an in-patient at the IWK where he says the doctors finally took him off all his medications. “They were very disappointed [with the treatment he’d received at Bayfield],” Carl tells me. “I was on all these meds and they were all for adults. I was like a Zombie.”

For the past four years, Carl has bounced from program to program, group home to group home, doctor to doctor.

He tells me he first met Andrea last fall at the Alderney Gate library. Homeless kids often use its computers to communicate with one another. “I knew her brother. That’s how I met her. We’d, you know, chill and hang out.”

He doesn’t know where she is now.

But what he’s learned about Andrea’s life story and current problems, he says makes him “scared” for her. “I mean she’s only 16 and she’s caught up in the system and can’t get out. I mean, you know, it’s not good.” He pauses. “I don’t want her to end up like me.”

Carl is only 21 but he talks as if his future is already in his past. It probably is.

“I’m to work on the following if I want to obtain custody of Andrea.” Tina has carefully written down the judge’s long ago directions to her. What she understood the judge said she had to do. What she’s done.

Tina goes on to list three places she’s lived in nine years while acknowledging that “for a year, I couldn’t find stability.”

The knife-edged sliver of hope her lawyer had offered Tina after Andrea was taken away from her in 1999 was that Tina could regularly reapply for custody, or at least for the chance to see her daughter. Tina did. On five different occasions. Each time, the courts turned down her application.

When Andrea was 12, however, officials did allow the girl — who, by that time, hadn’t seen her mother for nearly five years — to write letters to her mother. Andrea did. Thrilled, Tina wrote back as soon as she got them. But her letters, Tina says now, were never delivered.

In February 2005, Tina got a phone of her own after some friends suggested Andrea might look in the phone book to try to contact her. Andrea did. And the two, to the chagrin of Andrea’s social workers, got together.

Tina says Andrea, who was then 14, wanted to move in with her right away, but she discouraged that, urging her daughter to remain in her group home and complete her school year. When she did eventually move in, Tina says she laid down her house rules: “Curfew at 9 p.m.; help keep the house maintained; [and] make future plans for herself.”

Instead of doing what they could to assist Tina and her daughter, who both seemed eager to reunite, officials not only refused to let Andrea have any of her personal belongings from the group home, including her anti-depressant prescription medications, but they also applied to the courts to prevent Tina from having any contact with her daughter and then called in the police to investigate the situation as a kidnapping.

But the same day the police came to question her — Tina tells me Andrea told the officer “she knew her rights and was home of her own accord” — Tina and Andrea had a falling out over a missed curfew. Andrea stormed out. “She went off saying how it was her life, and my life was mine, and therefore to leave her the hell alone.”

Things twisted out of control after that. The courts granted community services the order it had sought to keep mother and daughter apart. So when Andrea changed her mind and contacted her mother again, asking to come back, Tina had to tell her about the court order.

“Well, you may have [an order against you],” Andrea replied, “but I don’t.”

Andrea was soon caught again anyway, and returned to her group home. Whether because of her contact with her mother, or because of what she learned about how community services had tried to keep her from her mother, or simply because she didn’t want to remain in the group home, Andrea’s behaviour suddenly got worse.

Though she’d had minor discipline problems in the past, Andrea had never been charged with a crime until August 2005, soon after being returned from her mother’s. That charge was the first of what would ultimately become the 32 criminal charges — every single one for incidents in and around her group homes — that would bring before Judge Williams.

Just before the 2006 Thanksgiving weekend — and just before Andrea ended up in Williams’ court room — she bolted from her group home once again and showed up at her mother’s door.

“Andrea comes home soaking wet,” Tina recalled of Andrea’s arrival in a rainstorm. “She takes a hot bath, and her and I eat supper and spend the night talking about anything and everything until five in the morning.”

This was the kind of mother-daughter relationship Tina had been imagining.

They spent close to a week together. Tina took Andrea to a walk-in clinic so she could get her prescriptions for the anti-depressant Prozac and an anti-schizophrenia drug called Resperdal. She also asked the doctor to give Andrea a pregnancy test. (Community services apparently routinely provides teenaged girls in care with three-month birth-control medication, but Andrea hadn’t gotten her last shot and hadn’t had her a period in almost two months.) Tina also promised she’d “take care of” Andrea’s dissatisfaction with her legal aid lawyer by getting someone else assigned to her case. It made her feel motherly. Tina even said no when Andrea asked if she could attend a weekend party; this time her daughter didn’t object.

Tina was beginning to think their relationship had finally turned a corner. But then, one afternoon, Andrea went to the Alderney Gate library to use the computers and meet some friends. Though Tina was worried the police might find her there, Andrea insisted she would “keep low and out of trouble.” Andrea promised to be home early. Tina said she’d have supper on the table at 7 p.m.

Just before four o’clock, Andrea called her mother. The police had picked her up and were taking her to cells. Tina tried to talk to her daughter, but the policeman hung up the phone.

Three days later, Andrea appeared before Judge Pam Williams to face the 32 outstanding charges against her. She pleaded guilty, after which Williams issued her infamous order commanding community services minister Streatch to appear at Andrea’s case conference the following month.

Within days, Andrea disappeared from the group home. Again. And this time she didn’t contact her mother.

Which was how it came to be that Tina, walking home to her apartment that day, began “thinking about the last 10 years” and decided to buy that 375 ml. bottle of vodka.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

“Hi,” I say when she opens the front door. Andrea resembles her mother. She’s short, dark-haired. She wears what look like Value Village rejects — a too-big red shirt and too-long black pants. Her fingernails are painted a glowing red; eyeliner is slathered so thickly along her upper eyelid it seems as if the weight would make it impossible for her to lift them to make eye contact.

“Nice to meet you,” I continue lightly. “Finally! You’re a hard person to track down, you know. Every time I think I’ve found you, you disappear—“

Andrea silences me with a sudden, panicky stop-sign look that is part plea, part command.

It was mid-July, nearly 10 months after her first criminal court appearance. She’d called me this morning from a cell phone. A friend of a friend had passed on my number. I tried to explain why I’d been looking for her, that I wanted to talk with her about her experiences in care and her life with her mother.

“OK,” she’d answered non-committally. Since she was on the lam yet again, we agreed to meet that afternoon at the house where she was crashing. When I arrived, she was waiting just inside the door with a friend.

“Uh, I’ll just go and get my jacket,” the friend says as the awkwardness fills the hallway.

“She doesn’t know,” Andrea whispers urgently as soon as the girl is out of earshot. “Everyone here thinks I left [the group home] voluntarily.”

Since the girl who doesn’t know the real story is accompanying us to a nearby Subway where I am to ask my questions and Andrea — who hasn’t eaten all day — will get something to eat, I realize the conversation I’d planned would be awkward, perhaps impossible.

I steer clear of her latest escapades. Instead, I ask what she remembers of when she initially lived with her mother. “I remember she used to buy me cats,” Andrea says. “And we fed the swans… We moved around a lot too. I remember that.”

How many foster families did she live with after community services took her away from her mother? She counts on her fingers before she answers. “Six or seven. Sackville, Beaverbank, Prospect, Dartmouth… all around.” While some were good — “[one family] took me to Magic Mountain, and Upper Clements [park], and the zoo” — she has more bad than good memories. “In one place, it was like, if you lie, we won’t feed you. One girl, it was, like, 10:30 before she confessed and got her supper… Another place [was so over-crowded] one girl had to sleep in the living room and this other boy, he broke in and bothered her. She called the police but they said there was nothing they could do.”

Most of the foster families she’s lived with couldn’t cope with her. “My behaviour was out of control,” she admits. “I’d throw myself on the ground to get what I wanted.” She shrugs. “I was frustrated, upset, that’s all.”

She became even more frustrated after she was moved out of foster care and into group homes. She missed her mother, or at least some idealized memory of her. “I’d think about her all the time,” Andrea tells me. “I tried to find her but she’d keep moving from place to place and I’d never be able to contact her.”

When they finally did make telephone contact when Andrea was 14, Andrea says she immediately made arrangements to meet her mother on Spring Garden Road the next day. “I walked down the street, looking around, and I seen her standing by the Dairy Queen. She smiled, and I guessed it was her right away… It was, like, a really happy feeling. She was my mother, and I hadn’t seen her for so long.”

Her happy feeling didn’t last. And not just because of the predictable difficulties of getting back together after having been apart for so long. During her conversations with her mother, Andrea made two discoveries. She learned that Tina had answered the letters she’d sent her — but no one had let her read them. And she discovered her older brother had died in a car accident two years before, and no one had told her or allowed her to go to his funeral.

“That’s what led to my anger,” she tells me. “That’s when I [first] got charged with assault with a weapon on the social worker.”

And then things got worse. She’s been sent to the Wood Street Centre on five different occasions. She spent last New Year’s Eve there. “It’s like you have to go to bed at 10, 10:30 if it’s a weekend… New Year’s… it doesn’t matter. So [on New Year’s Eve] four of us came out of our rooms at midnight. We just started singing these songs and they told us to stop. They said the songs were ‘inappropriate’.”

What songs?

“You know, like ‘Lock’d up’.”

“So then they come and they escort us back to our rooms. I’m like, ‘Fuck that,’ and I went in the bathroom and I’m on the toilet and I’m sayin’, ‘Come on! Come on and take me out!’ And they do. I kicked a staff member in the face… I got restrained…”

“’Lock’d up,’” she says, isn’t the only song she wasn’t allowed to sing that night. “’Shake your Moneymaker’ too. And we can’t even listen to 50 Cent. They say he’s, like, a bad influence.”

What does she think?

“I think it’s stupid. It’s just a song.”

Does she want to live with her mother again? Andrea shrugs. “If we had help.” She thinks for a while. “We don’t even know each other.”

Does she want children? Yes, she says, but not now. “I’m not ready.” She knows she’ll probably never be allowed to have children. “If I have a child, they’d take it,” she confides. How does she know that? “They said.”

What about school, I ask, mostly to change the subject.

“The last grade I passed was 8,” she explains matter of factly. “I failed Grade 9 twice. And Grade 1 too.”

What does she want to be when she grows up,?

“When I was little, I wanted to be a vet. People say I’d be a good lawyer… I like to argue.”

Lawyer? Vet? Does she have a preference?

She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No preference.”

No, I think. And not much hope either.

Cheryl Harawitz knew she shouldn’t get involved. Not now that she had the time she wanted. To paint, play music, travel with her husband. That other part of her life — the frustrating, obsessive part that had consumed five years of her life — was over. No one could say she hadn’t tried. The bureaucratic walls were just too high, too thick.

It was May 2004. Harawitz and her husband had just returned from a trip to Europe, only to discover that their west-end Halifax neighbourhood had been turned into an armed camp. SWAT police officers blockaded every street.

As Harawitz listened while a neighbour explained what was going on — a couple had barricaded themselves inside their nearby Shirley Street house with their infant daughter after the police tried to grab the child in the middle of the night — her first thought was, “How sad.” Her second was the one she verbalized to her husband.

“Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully, ”it’s time to resurrect New Zealand.”

Cheryl Harawitz is a retired a social worker. She’d worked with the Association for Community Living, a group that develops support networks for people with disabilities, and was a former director of Family SOS, an organization that tries to help people on social assistance learn life and parenting skills by pairing them up with peer mentors to help them navigate the tricky shoals of parenthood. So she understood the importance of involving families in dealing with family crises.

Which may be why she remembers being so “visibly excited” at the end of a session on “the New Zealand experience” during a social workers’ conference in Toronto in 1991.

Two years earlier, the New Zealand government had introduced The Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act, revolutionary legislation that transformed the way the state dealt with children and families in crisis. Instead of leaving power in the hands of social workers, police, judges and bureaucrats, who had traditionally determined — arbitrarily and on their own —the best interests of the child, the new law put that power into the hands of the families themselves.

When a child was deemed to be in need of protection, the first step was to convene a “family group conference.” Family members, often including extended family, neighbours and others interested in the welfare of the child, would meet with experts —medical professionals, police officers, protective services workers, therapists, teachers and others — to discuss possible options for the child’s care. After that, the family would meet alone and come up with a consensus plan, which it would then present to the child’s caseworker. If that plan didn’t work, there would be another conference and another plan.

As dramatically different — and unwieldy — as it sounds, the system worked. The number of children in foster care and other institutions fell by 90 per cent. Fewer young people ended up in court.

New Zealand youth court Judge Mick Brown, who’d initially thought it was “absurd to expect all families — simply by a stroke of the legislative pen — to suddenly become mature decision makers,” became a convert. “What amazes me,” he said, “is how often family groups, with input from police and victims, are achieving creative and constructive outcomes.”

In the years since it was introduced, the New Zealand model has been adopted or adapted — usually with great success — all over the world. But not in Nova Scotia. Cheryl Harawitz tried. She returned home from that 1991 conference eager to bring the New Zealand model to Nova Scotia.

But there were a number of problems. For starters, the Nova Scotia government had just passed its own Children and Family Services Act, and wasn’t about to tinker with what it believed was good legislation. There was also resistance from many social workers who believed implementing such a scheme would just add to their already burdensome workload.

But Harawitz was relentless. She got $30,000 from the attorney general’s office to bring experts from New Zealand — including the police officer who’d spoken at the Toronto conference — to talk with Nova Scotia police officers, judges, child protection workers, health and social welfare professionals, academics and, of course, senior government officials to explain just how — and how well — the system worked.

She formed a steering committee, wrote a report and — with letters of support from everyone from the then-Halifax police chief to a judge — put together a tentative proposal for a three-year, $200,000 project to demonstrate the idea’s possibilities. She’d even discovered a pot of leftover money in the provincial budget she could use to pay for it.

“And then,” she says simply, “the government changed.”

The new Hamm government had other uses for that money. And other priorities that did not include changes to child welfare.

Though Harawitz fought the good fight for two more years — “This was my passion; I knew it would work” — she eventually “burned out.” In August 1995, she decided to take a year off and help out in her husband’s software business. That year turned nearly a decade. And then retirement.

She’d slipped nicely into retirement mode, in fact, when the end result of the Shirley Street standoff (criminal charges and jail for the parents, foster care and the destruction of her biological family for the child) reinforced her belief that events might have played out differently — and better for all concerned — if Nova Scotia had implemented the New Zealand model.

So she threw herself back into the fray one last time.

In 2005, she thought she’d convinced the federal Liberals to fund a pilot project but then “there was another change of government,” this time to Stephen Harper, and it didn’t happen.

So she applied to serve on a controversial provincial review committee that’s supposed to advise the community services minister on how our current legislation is working and to recommend changes.

The reality, of course, was that, on a scale of one to 10, the government’s real interest in that legislatively-mandated committee ranged from zero to none. For five years, it hadn’t even bothered to appoint members to serve on the committee until two determined mothers took the department to court in 2005 to force it to live up to its own Act. Then it tried to stack the committee with bureaucrats who had a vested interest in the status quo.

Despite that, Harawitz — perhaps because of her social worker’s background and her outwardly genteel manner — managed to get herself not only appointed to the committee but also named its chair.

Though the committee has yet to file its first report since 1999 — “I’m preparing drafts of sections now for critique by the other members of the committee” — Harawitz says she’s been “encouraged” by other members’ openness to at least considering new ideas.

She’s already made one presentation to the committee on the New Zealand model. There was some positive feedback, she says, but concerns too that such an approach “wouldn’t work in our culture” or “for the families we’re dealing with.” Harawitz doesn’t buy that. “It’s worked in England. It’s worked in Australia. It’s worked in Washington State. It’s worked in Texas… If you can think outside the box in child protection, you open up some amazing possibilities.”

She’s already warned the other members of the committee she intends to raise her New Zealand flag again before it finalizes its report and she remains hopeful there will, finally, be a pilot project in Nova Scotia to test just how different the system — and the results — might be.

Would it made a difference for Tina, and Andrea, and Carl, I want to know?

“Oh, absolutely,” Harawitz says without hesitation. “Right now social workers work inside a bubble. They only see the immediate family and its problems. And they only see the solutions they expect to see.”

Which, it’s all too clear, are not solutions at all.

In the end, Judge Alanna Murphy did not make an example of Tina. While making the point that Tina had dealt with her “frustration… in an inappropriate and illegal way,” Murphy acknowledged she had had a “very difficult life in many respects,” and accepted the crown’s recommendation Tina be placed on probation for 18-24 months, complete 40 hours of community service and have no contact with close to a dozen social workers or anyone at community services except through a lawyer.

Before formally sentencing her, Judge Murphy asked Tina if she had anything to say for herself.

“I’ve learned,” she said simply.

But what has she learned? That the system didn’t work for her — and that it hasn’t from the day she was born. Now that her court case is finally over, Tina tells me she’s thinking of moving to Ontario and trying to make a fresh start. She talks vaguely of finding a lawyer there, of launching a class action suit on behalf of all the people whose lives have been made worse and not better by the system that was supposed to protect them. Like herself.

And like Andrea as well. As it did with Carl when he was cut loose from Bayfield at 17 and left to fend for himself, the system has now essentially given up on Andrea.

In 1999, the department of community services, with the approval of the courts, took Andrea from her mother because it claimed it knew better how to raise her. Now, eight years later — without publicly saying so — community services is acknowledging that it didn’t, and doesn’t, know any better.

During an August court appearance to deal with still more charges that Andrea had broken still more curfews, Andrea’s lawyer, Megan Longley, told the judge the department was threatening to rescind Andrea’s permanent care order because she’d failed to follow the programs it had laid out for her and continued to get in trouble with the law. Which meant she would never get the long-term care everyone had claimed she needed.

Judge Pam Williams’ frustrations were obvious. “It’s another example of the criminal justice system and the child welfare system coming at each other like two freight trains,” she declared, without stating the obvious — that both of those trains were making straight for Andrea as well as each other.

Because Andrea’s latest “crimes” were simply that she had violated the conditions — abiding by a 9 p.m. curfew and living in the group home — from her earlier probation order, Williams rescinded those conditions. “[The] sooner we can get you out of the [justice] system the better,” she told Andrea.

But she urged Andrea not to give up on the programs community services was offering her. “You’re very vulnerable,” Williams told her, adding that she’d have no place to live, no money and no prospects if she was on her own.

Andrea was undaunted. “I’d rather be out of the [community services] system,” she told Williams.

And now, apparently, she is.

Last week, according to the friend of a friend who’d initially put me in touch with Andrea, she’s living on her own in the same place where I met her back in July. She’s telling everyone she’s finished with community services and it’s finished with her. This time, it seems, she’s telling the truth.

____

Stephen Kimber is The Coast’s Senior Features Writer. He teaches journalism at the University of King’s College.

The Possible Dream?

“Got it!” the young woman announces triumphantly as she breezes back into the NDP’s storefront office off Wolfville’s main drag, holding aloft a roll of inch-wide orange ribbon.

“Told you,” King’s South candidate David Mangle says to no one in particular. “Anything you need you can get at the Home Hardware.”

It’s 4:25 on a warm, wanting-to-be-sunny Wednesday afternoon, and the buzz, such as it is, is that Darrell Dexter will be here soon. It is the third day of the first full week of campaigning for the June 13th provincial general election, and Dexter is spending this afternoon on a minivan tour of the Annapolis Valley, planting the seeds of constituency campaign offices in Greenwood, Wolfville and Windsor.

He’s already done his main media event of the day— a morning photo-op at Northwood seniors’ centre in Halifax. Dexter used the setting, carefully stage-managed to win precious air time on the supper-hour TV newscasts, to attack his Conservative opponents for breaking a 1999 promise to expand long-term care facilities in the province. The theme for today, and for much of the first stage of the campaign, will be that the Tories—who’ve filled the weeks leading up to the election call stealing the most popular promises from the NDP’s platform—can’t be trusted to actually keep them.

The Halifax reporters, having already been fed the basis of the story du jour, don’t bother to accompany Dexter to the Valley. One the one hand, that makes sense—constituency office openings are usually just more camera-friendly grip-and-grin events—but, on the other, it doesn’t. The future of Rodney MacDonald’s Conservative government—not to forget the NDP’s, and perhaps Darell Dexter’s own electoral fate—will almost certainly be decided in a half dozen rural ridings like this one in King’s South.

Once you venture out beyond the NDP’s seemingly impenetrable electoral fortress of Halifax, in fact, King’s South is as promising as it gets for Darrell Dexter’s prospects of becoming premier.

The riding is not only home to Acadia University in socially progressive, Officially Sustainable Wolfville but there’s also fertile electoral ground for vote-tilling in the nearby, ever-expanding exurbia around the shopping-centred community of New Minas. In the last provincial election, the NDP’s David Mangle finished second here, 553 votes behind Tory cabinet minister David Morse and 112 ahead of a popular Liberal candidate.

On the face of it, Mangle’s prospects seem better this time. Morse, a controversial minister of community services whose resignation the opposition has frequently demanded over the last three years, is a polarizing figure who may repel as well as attract. Ray Savage, the Liberal candidate, faces the double whammy of not only being less well known than his predecessor but also running for a party whose new leader is not especially popular, even among Liberal faithful.

For his part, Mangle, one of the co-founders of the Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op, has buffed up his personal political profile since the 2003 election. As more than one person in his headquarters is eager to tell me today, he recently won a seat on town council with the most votes of any candidate in the race.

Mangle, who has spent the early part of this afternoon knocking on doors in a trailer park behind the Sobeys in New Minas, is cautiously optimistic. “We were 500 votes shy last election,” he acknowledges, “but it was my first time around, and we’ve learned from that.” One of the lessons, he says, is the importance of getting the vote out. “We took this poll by over 60 per cent,” he says of the area around the trailer park, “but only 30 per cent of the eligible voters actually voted. So we know we have to be more efficient this time, get to more doors during this campaign.” He pauses, repeats what is already the local campaign’s rallying cry: “If we had gotten just 12 more votes in each of the polls last time, I’d have won.”

Electing an NDP MLA in King’s South is not without precedent. Bob Levy, the personally popular son of a former Conservative politician, won the riding for the New Democrats in 1984. Four years later, with John Buchanan’s Conservative government under fire for corruption and patronage, there was optimistic talk King’s South might become the building block for an NDP electoral breakthrough in rural Nova Scotia. Instead, the wily Buchanan coupled announcing the 1988 election campaign with appointing Levy—who’d been going through marital difficulties—a judge. That effectively undercut NDP attacks on the government’s patronage record, handed King’s South back to the Tories and consigned the NDP to yet another decade on the margins of political power.

Even without having to cope with a Machiavellian maneuvre like that, the NDP’s prospects in King’s South this June remain problematic at best. Despite the controversies incumbent David Morse may have stirred in Halifax, most independent observers say he’s viewed locally as a “very active, very visible” constituency politician who will be difficult to unseat. And, if the Liberals do lose support, they say, there’s at least as good a chance those ballots will end up in Morse’s tally as in Mangle’s.

Which is why every vote counts. And why David Mangle is keen to make sure his leader’s first campaign visit to the riding today goes well. Which, in turn, is why he wanted that roll of orange ribbon.

After the ceremonies inside, Mangle and Dexter will step outside the office, someone will stretch a length of the newly purchased, party-coloured orange ribbon across the doorway and the two politicians will smile and cut the ribbon to officially open the campaign office. With luck, the reporter-photographer from the local weekly will snap a picture and it will end up in the paper, tangible proof of his leader’s interest in King’s South.

“Before the election last time, [campaign organizers in Halifax] said we’ll try and get some provincial support down to you,” Mangle remembers. “But then they circled the wagons around Halifax and that was the end of that. This time it looks like we’ll get an election-day organizer as well as a canvass organizer [from provincial headquarters]. That tells me they see this riding as winnable, and one they want to win.”

Dexter’s advance team—two women, one from Alberta, the other from New Brunswick—finally arrive at Mangle’s headquarters with news that the leader’s swing through the Annapolis Valley is on schedule.

“I’ve heard that before,” Mangle says with a smile.

A podium, festooned with orange balloons, has been set up in a corner of the small headquarters’ office in front of a room divider backdrop. The divider is festooned with NDP-orange balloons, the lectern dressed up with posters touting Mangle and Dexter. About a dozen people, most of whom know each other, have drifted into the office now, and they take up positions around the room in order to provide an audience in case the TV cameras do show up for Dexter’s speech.

They don’t. But Dexter himself breezes in a few minutes later, less a rock star arriving for his performance and more everyone’s favourite uncle who got time off work for today’s family barbecue. Despite the tailored suit and the reality he’s a sophisticated lawyer-politician, Darrell Dexter manages to exude a comfortable-shoe, ordinary-guy charm that almost seems apolitical. And genuine.

No silver spoon socialist, Dexter was born in Milton, Queen’s County, one of six kids of Elvin, a sheet-metal worker-dad, and Florence, a grocery store clerk-mom. His parents, he told one interviewer, “lived from pay cheque to pay cheque, and anything that upset their routine—you know, their ability to pay for heating oil and electricity, buying the kids new sneakers before they went back to school—anything that upset that, that was an issue for them.”

Dexter joined the NDP in 1979 during Alexa McDonough’s first failed bid for a federal seat in Halifax when the party was still the none-of-the-above choice for most provincial voters, and has supported the party ever since—even as his own career path caromed like a pinball from local news reporter to naval officer to teacher to lawyer to Dartmouth city councilor to member of the legislature, and the party went back and forth like a ping pong ball between Pyrrhic success and moral victory, never quite managing to convince voters to take it seriously.

During much of the 1980s and nineties, the NDP suffered from what Acadia University political scientist Ian Stewart describes as “free-floating failure.” Even after many of the traditional hobbles —the I’m-a-Liberal-because-my-father-was-a-Liberal syndrome, or the province’s ingrained patronage culture—had largely disappeared as electoral impediments, the NDP was stuck with a self-fulfilling reputation that they were losers.

That all changed in 1998 when a “perfect storm in reverse” catapulted the provincial party—and Darrell Dexter—from electoral bystanders to Official Opposition.

It actually began the year before, says Stewart, when the federal NDP, led by former provincial leader Alexa McDonough, surprised itself, the province and the country by capturing six of 11 Nova Scotia seats in the House of Commons. It was, says Stewart, the result of a fortuitous collision of time and circumstance. McDonough not only had the native-daughter factor working in her party’s favour, but “voters here saw the Reform Party as hopelessly western. The Conservatives, who’d been practically wiped out in 1993, were still non-contenders. And, by 1995, the Liberals had swung hard to the right. That created a vacuum at the federal level that the NDP was able to fill.”

The momentum from that federal victory carried over into the 1998 provincial election when voters—still angry with the provincial Tories for the excesses of the Buchanan years and unhappy with a Liberal government in such disarray it had tossed over its own leader—decided to throw caution to the winds and vote NDP too.

On election night, the Liberals and the NDP ended up in a dead heat with 19 seats each, leaving the Tories in third place with 14. Although Russell MacLellan’s Liberals managed to cling to minority power for the next year, they—and the NDP—ended up on the outside looking in when John Hamm’s Conservatives swept back into power with a majority in 1999. Still the NDP had “reset the bar” of public expectations. It remained the official opposition and, three years later, after voters reduced the Tories back to a minority, the second place NDP once again held the balance of power with 15 seats.

While the party has been a legitimate electoral contender in every election since 1998, the big hurdle remains—can Darrell Dexter form even a minority government after this election.

“Anything is possible,” Stewart allows cautiously. He doesn’t sound optimisitic, although he concedes the current electoral landscape is “probably as good as it gets from the NDP’s perspective.”

For starters, there’s the fact that Rodney MacDonald won the Conservative leadership. MacDonald, a rural Tory in the free-spending John Buchanan mode who has seemed out of his intellectual and strategic depth in the first days of this campaign, is unlikely to pose the kind of circle-the-wagons threat to the NDP’s Halifax power base his leadership rival Bill Black might have.

To make prospects even brighter for the NDP, the Liberals are in a mess. As the campaign began, party leader Francis MacKenzie remained largely pinned down in his own riding, struggling to win his own seat, while many of the party’s traditional power brokers were content to sit quietly on the sidelines, waiting for him to lose so they can start the rebuilding process again.

Darrell Dexter, on the other hand, is his party’s best asset. Michael MacMillan, the chair of the political science department of Mount Saint Vincent University, recently told Canadian Press that “Dexter has many of the same strengths that John Hamm had—a very pleasant personality from small-town Nova Scotia, someone who goes over very well in front of gatherings.”

A low-key moderate who has nudged the party ever closer to the political centre without straying far from its progressive roots, the policies Dexter’s NDP has championed—from public auto insurance, to improved treatment for seniors, to the elimination of the HST on essentials—transcend traditional political labels. “I don’t think we’re moving to the centre so much as the centre is moving to us,” Dexter insists. “I kind of joke with people: do Nova Scotians want Progressive Conservatives or conservative progressives?”

Dexter recalls a phone call he got from the secretary of the Centennial Branch Legion in Dartmouth. “He said, ‘Darrell, I know you’ve been going all over the province with your petition on long-term care? Why don’t you bring it over here?’ I said, ‘Well, you know, I understand and I respect the Legion’s rules against politicking on Legion property.’ There was silence at the end of the line, and then he said, ‘Well, Darrell, we don’t consider this a political issue. This is a common sense issue; it’s the right thing to do.’” Dexter smiles. “So I went right over and dropped off copies of the petition and let them distribute them.”

Dexter probably could not have done a better job of steering the NDP through the tricky shoals of minority government—propping up John Hamm’s Tories with timely compromises while wrangling concessions for a variety of key NDP—and public—priorities. But political parties are rarely rewarded for playing nice, so now Dexter must now find a way to separate himself from the Tories.

New Conservative leader Rodney MacDonald has made that easier—and harder. Easier because MacDonald is no John Hamm, and harder because MacDonald’s first throne speech, budget and platform rip off many of the NDP’s key promises, including elimination of the HST on home heating oil.

That’s one reason Dexter’s focus today is on broken Tory promises. During his brief speech to the faithful at Mangle’s constituency office, Dexter reiterates his morning attack on the Tories for failing to follow through on their long-term care commitment, and stays on message with his own rural-friendly promise. An NDP government, he announces, will introduce a $250 tax credit for volunteer firefighters. It’s a promise, he pointedly tells the audience, the Tories themselves made seven years before but never kept. “It was an excellent idea,” Dexter says. “It would have been excellent if the Conservatives had kept the promise. They did not.” The NDP, he says, will.

But will the promise of kept promises be enough to help David Mangle pull in those 12 additional votes per poll he says he needs to turn the tide? Or allow Doug Sparks to win a three-way race in Preston that was so close last time only 80 votes separated the riding’s first from third-place finisher? Or win in Queen’s where Vicki Conrad is running again to try and close the 421-vote gap between herself and Tory cabinet minister Kerry Morash? Or make the difference in Waverley-Fall River-Beaverbank where Percy Paris lost to Tory MLA Gary Hines in 2003 by just 363 votes. Darrell Dexter, in fact, very calculatedly launched his party’s election campaign in the Waverley riding and, by then end of the second week of the campaign, had visited the constituency two more times.

But even if the NDP does manage to add those four seats to its current 15 and perhaps pick up a few more without losing any they currently hold, will that push them over the edge to form a government?

It’s still unlikely, says Ian Stewart. “There are only a finite number of seats the NDP has any realistic hope of winning. Much of rural Nova Scotia is still a black hole for them.” Worse, if the Liberal vote does collapse, as many are expecting, Stewart says that might end up converting some of their red seats to Tory blue, making a majority Conservative government considerably more likely than a minority NDP one.

An NDP victory, concludes Setewart, “would be a long shot. It wouldn’t be as surprising as [the party’s breakthrough] in 1997 or ’98, but would I be surprised? Yes, I would.”

Darrell Dexter, who describes himself as “a political junkie who thoroughly enjoys the machinations and strategic thinking” that go into such discussions, knows all about those permutations and combinations and what ifs… which may be why he doesn’t want to talk about them.

What, I want to know, will constitute success for the NDP in this election?

“That’s a loaded question,” he replies. “No matter what I say, I’ll live to regret it. I’ve got too much to think about just campaigning to spend a whole lot of political capital thinking about what the end result is going to be in terms of numbers of seats. We’ll just keep trying to get our message out there and let the voters decide what happens.”

Darrell Dexter has to go now. There’s an orange ribbon still to cut, another constituency office in Windsor that needs opening in a half an hour from now, and too many more days and nights of campaigning to go before the voters render their decision.

The trials of Dr. Horne

by Stephen Kimber

May 04, 2006

Her first “light-bulb moment” occurred sometime on a Friday morning in the spring of 1999, probably in the stairwell between her tiny, windowless office on the second floor of the new Halifax Infirmary and the hospital’s Heart Function Clinic two flights up.

Dr. Gabrielle Horne was on call at the clinic that morning—the nurses would page her if a patient needed a doctor—but her thoughts were elsewhere. She was editing a research paper but also, and more importantly, trying to come up with a proposal for her first grant application since returning to Halifax.

Horne is what is known as a “translational researcher.” While she did see clinic patients, her larger role was to go away and think about their problems from new angles, use the questions generated by those clinical experiences to shape her research and, ultimately, to translate her results back into hands-on patient care—as she explains it, “to make a difference for the patients themselves.”

In 1998, Horne had arrived in Halifax, where she’d already done some cardiology training. Armed with a medical degree from the University of London in England, a PhD in cardiology research from the University of Calgary (where she’d also completed her residency training in internal medicine) and a two-year cardiology research fellowship at Indiana University, Horne was ready to begin her medical research career at Dalhousie University and the Capital District Health Authority.

As a relatively untried newcomer, she understood she would have to jump through hoops to get research grants. “The trick for a beginning researcher,” she explains, “is to draw on what you know, but do something a little new. There has to be an element of risk involved, of course, but it should be low risk —no one wants you to fall flat the first time out.”

What could she do that would draw on what she knew—her expertise was in cardiac imaging—be new but not too new, and still make a difference? She was in the middle of pondering that question when she was interrupted by a page from the clinic. Could she see a patient?

The patient had had a heart attack in 1982 that was so massive his heart function was “barely compatible with life.” Still, he’d not only recovered but managed to live symptom-free for the next 17 years. A quarter of patients with similar problems end up back in a hospital within six months of the first attack. This man was in the clinic for the first time since 1982. Horne interviewed him about his symptoms of fluid build-up and worked out a treatment plan. It was all very routine.

She was about to return to her office when the nurse asked if she could see one more patient. This man had suffered a mild heart attack just 18 months earlier but never completely recovered. He’d had frequent episodes of fluid overload in his lungs and body, and been in and out of hospital on a regular basis.

Horne couldn’t help but be struck by the contrast—one patient, with severe heart problems, does “fabulously” for 17 years; another with what, on the surface, appears to be a much less life-threatening condition, spirals downwards….

The cases appeared to defy conventional wisdom, which is that heart failure is caused by a deterioration of the pumping capacity of the heart muscle, which results in the loss of the heart’s ability to pump blood to the body. The problem with that is that medicine usually can’t stop this deterioration, only slow it down. Horne considered. Was there some other factor at play in the case of the first patient, some mysterious something taking up the pumping slack inside his heart? What about the…? What if she…? Could it be…?

By the time she got back down to her office that morning, Horne already knew the subject of her first research grant application. This project, which she concedes now was based on little more than a “hunch,” would be more than “a little new.” But, if her hypothesis was right, it could actually make a difference for heart failure patients.

Gaby Horne’s second light-bulb moment occurred in the middle of a fall morning three-and-a-half years later. This moment would not seem nearly so magical.

It was the morning of Thursday, October 17, 2002. Horne was juggling triage duties in the hospital’s emergency room with routine issues back in her lab when she got a call from her secretary. The secretary had just gotten a call from Horne’s department head. Dr. Horne was to drop whatever she was doing, the secretary said, and return to her office to read an email that was waiting for her on her computer.

Waiting for the too-slow elevator that was the first stage of the five-minute journey back to her office in her lab on the eighth floor of the Abbie Lane Building, Gaby Horne understood and, at the same time, did not have a clue about what was happening and, more importantly, was about to happen to her.

On the surface, Dr. Susan Gabrielle Horne —Dalhousie’s first female MD/PhD in adult cardiology—appeared to be a walking advertisement for the sound judgment of her employers, Dalhousie University, where she held an academic appointment as an assistant professor of cardiology, and the Capital District Health Authority, where she was the director of the QE II Health Sciences Centre’s innovative new Cardiac Imaging Lab.

In the three-and-a-half years since her first light-bulb moment, resident cardiology trainees had chosen her as their “teacher of the year,” the faculty of medicine had awarded her a five-year, $450,000 Clinical Scholar Award to allow her to spend 75 percent of her time on her research and the hospital’s department of medicine had picked her for its Research Excellence Award.

Perhaps more important, Horne’s initial research proposal—based on her hunch that the septum, a complicated muscle wall between the heart’s receiving and pumping chambers that Horne calls the “cardiac gymnast,” might be helping the heart in cases like the patient who’d been symptom-free for 17 years compensate for sudden changes in pumping function—had generated more and larger grants, morphing into a full-scale multidisciplinary research lab with its own stenographer and nurse, as well as researchers and students from computer science, biomedical engineering and cardiology. Initially, they’d had to develop their own software and build their own equipment—including one piece constructed from a Wal-Mart vacuum cleaner and a specially designed kayak skirt The Trail Shop had ordered for them from BC—but as the buzz about the research grew, companies began to call to offer free equipment. A Dalhousie press release described the lab’s researchers as “global pioneers in a new area of heart failure research.”

The excitement wasn’t surprising. Heart failure is the number one cause of hospital admissions in the western world, including in Nova Scotia, generating a “tremendous amount of suffering and cost.” If Horne’s hypothesis was correct about the role of the septum, then perhaps it would be possible to compensate mechanically for the heart’s failures, changing the way the septum functions inside the heart, protecting the patient from those sudden changes that too often lead to instability and sickness.

Horne is quick to admit she wasn’t “the only person who wondered about the interaction between the heart’s chambers,” but researchers had largely neglected the role of the septum, so it was still “an unknown quantity. If we could find a way to compensate for that, we would solve a problem that really mattered to patients,” Horne explains. “It wasn’t abstract…I felt so privileged to have the chance to be doing this kind of research.”

Horne herself had become one of the medical school’s “good news stories.” She was the chair of Research Awareness Week, and did public relations for the annual Molly Appeal in support of the Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation.

“Overnight,” Horne marvels today, “you go from being a good news story, getting grants, everyone encouraging you…to persona non grata.”

It wasn’t exactly overnight. During the previous year, she’d come under increasing pressure from Dr. Blair O’Neill, the head of the Cardiology Division, to include Dr. Jonathan Howlett, the director of the Heart Function Clinic, as a “prominent” part of her research team. Howlett was himself a well-known researcher who specialized in the management of congestive heart failure and had established the hospital’s heart function clinic the year after Horne was hired.

Horne resisted. “I had a lot of collaborators,” she explained. “I’d put a lot of thought into how to put the team together, to get the right expertise, the communication skills we needed…I told him I’d made my choices.”

There is nothing new about a researcher choosing who she or he wants to work with, Horne notes. She’d once been on the wrong end of such a choice herself. “I’d approached a scientist to talk about his research in hopes of collaborating with him. I thought it was a natural fit. He went away and thought it over, and then came back and told me he didn’t want to go that route. I was disappointed but it was his choice.” She pauses. “I mean, I can’t imagine the sense of entitlement…” Her voice trails off.

Things became so tense Horne, at the insistence of a colleague, hired a lawyer to protect her interests. “I’d rather have a root canal than talk to a lawyer,” Horne says with a laugh. Eventually, she confronted O’Neill and said, “Let’s sit down and work this out, or else I’m out of here.”

“It seemed to be worked out after that,” she says. In September, in fact, she’d returned from a two-week vacation “optimistic” about the future. “But it quickly became apparent that the division head”—Horne carefully describes O’Neill and Howlett only by their positions “to avoid impugning the reputation of another physician”—wasn’t in a “let’s-work-this-out mode.”

On October 8, 2002, Howlett wrote a letter to Horne in which he expressed “concerns about your pattern of behaviour and interpersonal actions, which are a concern to me.” Two days later, Howlett wrote to complain about “your behaviour, personal interactions and conduct” in the clinic and listed eight specific “failures.”

As the conflict escalated, Horne contacted the Canadian Medical Protective Association, a physicians’ self-help organization set up to protect doctors’ integrity, and they dispatched a second lawyer to assist. “I knew I had a problem when lawyers began giving me their cell phone and home phone numbers, and saying, ‘Call me if anything happens.’ I thought, ‘This is not good.’”

Now, sitting in her office Thursday morning trying to read between the lines of the email—which demanded that she attend a meeting with Howlett the next morning at 8am—Horne admits she was “freaking out from all this unbridled aggression and craziness.”

When they did finally meet the next day—with the hospital’s lawyer present— Horne says she experienced another “light-bulb moment. It was clear to me suddenly that this was no longer a situation where I was in a conflict with a professional colleague. This was a situation where I was in a conflict with the hospital. I was seen as an employee, and the director was management.”

On Monday after lunch, Horne was summoned to a meeting with Dr. Elizabeth Ann Cowden, the head of the hospital’s department of medicine, who’d spent the morning meeting with O’Neill, Howlett and another senior cardiologist who was critical of Horne.

Horne’s lawyer, Ron Pizzo, who accompanied her to the meeting, tried to ease her concerns. It will probably just be a meeting where everyone puts their cards on the table, he’d said. “Nothing’s going to happen.” He was wrong.

After a 20-minute recitation of the allegations against her—which had suddenly escalated into new and more damaging charges, including that her research conduct threatened the safety of patients and that she’d breached research ethics in handling patient charts—and a cursory invitation to rebut them, Cowden told her that she was unilaterally “varying” Horne’s hospital privileges on an emergency basis.

“In view of the concern for patient safety,” she wrote in a letter following the meeting, “your clinical duties are being reallocated… You will cease participation in those clinical services where team care is the existent model…effective immediately.”

By banning Horne from treating patients in the clinic, which is where she got her research patients, Cowden, in effect, shut down Horne’s “pioneering” heart research program.

A doctor’s hospital privileges are considered sacrosanct. Unilaterally altering them without a formal hearing is usually only done as a last resort in an emergency—to prevent a drunken physician from wielding a scalpel on a patient, for example. The idea that Horne’s case constituted such an emergency seemed preposterous. “It was quite clear,” Horne says now, “that the facts had nothing to do with it. They didn’t give a toff about process.”

Still, there was now a process. Under the health authority’s bylaws, the hospital board’s Medical Advisory Committee had 10 days to investigate the appropriateness of the variation of Horne’s privileges. Its report would then be submitted to the hospital board’s Privileges Review Committee, which had another 10 days to review the decision and make its recommendation to the board itself.

Twenty days, a month at most, reassuring colleagues told Horne, and it will be over. And she could back to her lab.

They were wrong. It’s been three years and six months. And there’s no way of knowing when, or if, Horne will ever get back to her research.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about what has happened to Gabrielle Horne is that it appears to be happening to other researchers, including at Dalhousie.

In March 2004, the National Review of Medicine reported on a British study that found that “stress and bullying are common problems” for post-grad medical research fellows like Horne. Thirty-eight percent of British researchers questioned in the study—who complained about “belittlement, public humiliation, unjustified criticism, intimidating use of disciplinary procedures, threats, exclusion and name calling,” among other abuses—said they would not recommend their position to a colleague.

The situation for medical researchers working in teaching hospitals is complicated because they usually hold joint appointments at the hospital and university. Their bosses at the university and the hospital will often be the same person with different titles—Cowden, for example, was the chair of the department in the faculty of medicine at Dalhousie and the chief of medicine at the QE II—with very different powers. Within the university, Cowden’s powers were tightly circumscribed by faculty unions and academic freedom; in the hospital there was no union, and her word was law.

And not just in the case of Gabrielle Horne.

On the very day Cowden varied Horne’s privileges, she did the same to an oncologist and medical ethics specialist named Michael Goodyear. The ostensible issue in that case was a dispute over chemotherapy dosages, but it too seemed to have as much to do with the fact that Goodyear, who has been described as “abrasive,” rubbed some people the wrong way.

But not everyone. Goodyear was the oncologist for the late Nova Scotia premier John Savage during his cancer treatment, for example, and Savage’s son, Mike, says he was “very compassionate without providing false hope, very competent and responsive… He and Dad got along very well. [Goodyear] provided unvarnished factual info, which Dad craved, and yet provided a sense that there were things that could be done when that was indeed the case.” Savage, now a federal MP, says he wishes Goodyear well and “hopes his ordeal ends as soon as possible.”

Like Horne, Goodyear’s ordeal is ongoing. Less than a year after losing his privileges, Goodyear was removed from his position as research ethics chair—despite a letter of protest from all the committee’s members as well as several former chairs—and told he could no longer treat patients at all. In December 2003, he was locked out of his office and was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy.

Goodyear, who is still fighting the case, declined to be interviewed on the advice of his lawyers, but James Turk, the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which has taken up the cudgels for both researchers, calls Horne and Goodyear “canaries in the mine.”

As word leaked out about what was happening to Horne and Goodyear, Turk says he got at least half a dozen calls from Halifax-based researchers with similar concerns. Some, he says today, have since left the province to continue their careers elsewhere.

Gabrielle Horne’s own case was initially taken up by the Medical Advisory Committee, which advises the hospital board on issues of patient care, teaching and research. The committee could produce no evidence to support allegations that Horne’s research was compromising patient safety, but recommended remedial action for what was described as her “lack of collegiality.”

The case was then passed on to the Privileges Review Committee, another board advisory committee that considers issues involving hospital privileges. After what Horne calls “a six-month scab-picking exercise” that resulted in no conclusions, both sides agreed to a CAUT-suggested mediation with Toronto-based Martin Teplitsky, one of Canada’s most successful arbitrators, who has solved disputes at institutions as different as Air Canada and the University of Toronto.

On June 6, 2003, the parties—Horne and her lawyer, Ron Pizzo; Cowden, Capital District Health Authority CEO Donald Ford and two hospital in-house lawyers; and Dalhousie’s academic vice president Sam Scully and university lawyer Karen Crombie —met in Halifax with Teplitsky to begin discussions. CAUT’s Turk, who had meetings in Toronto that day, was planning to fly to Halifax that afternoon to join the talks but he got a call shortly after noon telling him not to bother. They had already reached a settlement.

The settlement, drafted by lawyers for Capital Health and the university, declared that “the parties agree that this is a full and final settlement of this matter and that neither party shall take any action against the other.” Under the terms of the deal, the two sides agreed that they’d resolved all of the “research protocol issues” and that Horne would return to the heart function clinic as an attending physician. Horne had to borrow Ford’s pen to sign the document.

Almost eight months after Horne’s privileges were suspended, they had a deal.

Or did they?

It turned out that, according to the health authority, the deal wasn’t a deal after all.

After months of fruitless negotiations over the role of “mentors” mentioned in the agreement—Horne says she was quite willing to agree to having clinical and research mentors but they couldn’t agree on mutually acceptable candidates—Horne’s lawyer became so frustrated he went to court to force the authority to live up to the deal.

In court, the health authority’s lawyers argued—incredibly—that its chief executive officer, Ford, didn’t have the legal power to negotiate a settlement on behalf of Capital Health. The settlement was nothing more than a “proposal” that might form the basis for a “proposed settlement.” The “full and final settlement”—as it had been described in the agreement—would first have to be considered by the Privileges Review Committee and its report sent to the board for its consideration before there could be any end to the dispute.

Although Justice Donald Hall noted in his February 2005 judgment that the authority’s in-house counsel “appeared at first to have taken the position that the negotiated settlement was a binding agreement,” the law was on the authority’s side. The hospital CEO didn’t have the legal power to make a deal on behalf of the hospital board.

“I regret that I have had to come to this conclusion,” Hall wrote, “as it appears to me that the matter has been going on for an unduly lengthy period of time, which undoubtedly is involving great expense to the public and Dr. Horne, as well as hardship and stress for all.”

For all, of course, except the lawyers. According to estimates compiled by CAUT, Capital Health had been spending half a million dollars each year on outside lawyers—not even counting the costs of its in-house legal team—since the dispute began. That money, CAUT’s James Turk pointed out, could have paid for 92 hip replacements, or 57 heart bypasses, or 229 cataract surgeries.

Making a difference for patients in a very different way.

In January 2004, CAUT announced what it described at the time as the “largest investigation” it had ever undertaken into the Horne and Goodyear cases. But Capital Health refused to cooperate since CAUT, which represented the researchers in their roles at the university, didn’t have jurisdiction within the hospital. According to Dr. Andrew Padmos, the health authority’s vice president of research and academic affairs, CAUT “have the same jurisdiction in cleaning up the harbour as they do in this issue.”

To make matters worse for Horne, Capital Health informed her in June 2004 that it would no longer provide “bridge financing” to keep her lab staff and trainees in place until the privileges issue was resolved. Horne’s lawyer wrote to the board asking them to intervene, “but their lawyer returned the letter to us saying their clients were not concerned with such matters.”

The following spring, after the courts had ruled in favour of the health authority, CAUT wrote to then-premier John Hamm, imploring him to intervene because “at some point responsibility has to be taken for restoring a broken system.” CAUT also attempted to put pressure on Dalhousie, which it claimed had recently moved from being “an ineffective defender of its faculty member to one of her attackers” by rescinding Horne’s clinical scholar award because of “her failure to report significant research activity.” CAUT’s letter described Horne’s treatment as “Kafkaesque.”

Many in the hospital’s medical staff agreed, and worried about what the hospital’s treatment of Horne and Goodyear might mean for them.

In the summer of 2004, five of the hospital’s most senior doctors called an emergency staff meeting to discuss the issue. The hospital refused them permission to meet at the hospital, so more than 120 doctors and other medical staff trudged through the rain to Dalhousie’s Tupper Building so they could talk about their concerns. The result of that meeting was the re-establishment of the district’s Medical Staff Association, which had become moribund after Nova Scotia’s health care system was reorganized in the late 1990s, concentrating power in the hands of the new capital district authority.

On October 20, 2005, three years less a day since the suspension, the newly revitalized staff association made an announcement. It was appointing three respected, retired physicians and its president, Dr. John Sullivan, who, coincidentally, was himself a former head of the hospital’s cardiac surgery division, to investigate the allegations against Dr. Horne.

Ironically, Sullivan says, few medical staff, even within the cardiology division, knew the details of the allegations against Horne. “No one really talked about it so, when I went into this, I went in with an open mind.” He approached members of the board’s Privileges Review Committee. “I asked them point blank if they knew of any smoking gun here, anything that I should know going in. They said, ‘We can’t tell you.’ It was all about confidentiality. But we looked at all the evidence, everything, and there was nothing there. There was no smoking gun.”

Its December 5, 2005, report was unequivocal. After examining all three allegations against Horne—that her research threatened patient safety, that she’d breached research ethics and that she lacked collegiality—the committee found “no documentation to support the allegations… All the evidence presented indicated that Dr. Horne’s research program functioned in the same manner as that of other members’ research programs in the clinic and division. Dr. Horne was transparent with her colleagues and attempted to involve them in reviewing her studies.”

The committee’s report shows that, within days of the suspension of Horne’s privileges, 22 of about 30 doctors in the cardiology division wrote letters of support for her, and members of her research team came forward to say the charges against her were bogus. “I am honoured to be part of her team,” wrote one. Added another: “I have never worked for anyone who is more sensitive to the needs of each individual…In my opinion, allowing this to continue another day is giving permission to those in positions of power to act without any validation or accountability.”

The committee concluded that the allegation that Horne lacked collegiality was “nebulous and the most difficult to address,” but it added the charge was “not substantiated nor consistent with the documented history of Dr. Horne as a highly valued resident and Fellow; with the high regard for her by the nursing staff and patients; with the adulatory letters of commendations” her bosses had written before her privileges were varied; “with the large number of individuals who wrote letters corroborating Dr. Horne’s collegiality, and finally and most importantly, by the fact that Dr. Horne had developed multidisciplinary research collaborations requiring significant collegiality, transparency and compromise.

“Dr. Horne had developed a unique, externally funded research program that has been irreparably altered,” the committee concluded. It said the health authority should “expeditiously re-examine these issues and reinstate Dr. Horne’s full privileges.”

That didn’t happen. “We went to the chair of the board with our report and he refused to look at it, refused to even read it.” Sullivan pauses. “This whole thing,” he says with disgust. “It’s fueled by the lawyers. They’re getting rich off this. The board didn’t even know what was going on.”

The Canadian Association of University Teachers, stymied by its failure to get cooperation from the health authority or action from the provincial government, which argues it has no authority in the dispute, stepped up pressure on Dalhousie to put pressure on its partners at the Capital District Health Authority.

In November, it wrote to university president Tom Traves, threatening to censure Dalhousie if it didn’t press for what it calls “procedural fairness” and do more to support its beleaguered medical faculty member. Such a censure could have profound consequences for Dalhousie—under censure procedures, CAUT’s 48,000 academics across Canada would be urged not to accept appointments at Dal or participate in university academic conferences, and academics world-wide would be asked to do the same.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Dal did respond—Traves wrote to the authority’s board chair, expressing the university’s “profound and continued concerns” about the treatment of Horne and Goodyear—but it wasn’t quite enough to convince CAUT to rescind its threat. Last weekend, the matter came up at CAUT’s regular executive committee meeting in Ottawa. Although it held off on proceeding with the formal censure process until November, it pointedly warned Dalhousie it expects action—and soon.

In the three-and-a-half years since Horne’s hospital privileges were unilaterally—and supposedly temporarily— altered, both Elizabeth Ann Cowden, the chief of medicine who varied Horne’s privileges in 2002, and Donald Ford, the CEO whose signature on the 2003 settlement agreement was repudiated by his own bosses, have resigned their positions.

For her part, Gabrielle Horne says that after all this time she’s “lost any personal connection with the way life used to be, and now it’s impossible to conceptualize what the future might be.” But she can’t quit, even if she wanted to. “Until this is settled,” she says, “I couldn’t get privileges anywhere else. I have to clear my name, or I’ll never get out from under.”

Geoff Wilson, a senior communications advisor for Capital Health, says the procedural universe is still unfolding as it should. The board’s Privileges Review Committee has finally filed its report with both parties and it has been referred to the full board—“the final decision maker” in the process—for review.

But Horne says she and her lawyer are challenging its report for focusing on “alleged collegiality problems” while giving short shrift to the reality it found no evidence to support the allegations that her research exposed patients to risk, which, she notes “was the primary reason for the variation of my privileges.

“The [Privileges Review Committee] report is not a basis for settlement,” she adds, noting that the “only basis for a settlement would be complete re-establishment of the research program, to the point where it would have been if none of this occurred.”

Dr. John Sullivan, the staff association’s president, has read the privilege committee’s massive, three-inch thick report. “It is very damning,” he says, then adds, “and it’s a piece of junk. Ground zero, the only thing they can say is that she didn’t show the proper respect and deference to her peers. Three- and-a-half years later, and the best they have to justify what amounts to a case of professional homicide is that Doctor A can’t get along with Doctor B…That’s it. That’s all.”

The still-unanswered question in all of this, of course, is why. Why did this happen in the first place, and why—after the board’s own medical advisory committee cleared her of violating patient safety and ethics rules, and after Elizabeth Cowden and the board’s CEO signed off on a settlement agreement to end the dispute in June 2003, and after the hospital’s medical staff association independently exonerated her after its own investigation—is it still going on?

Why is Dr. Gabrielle Horne not back in her research lab doing research that could make a difference for patients?

Perhaps because this dispute seems so otherwise inexplicable, there have been dark hints—but no evidence—that there’s more to the case than we know, or can be told. “Although he refused to get into details,” the Daily News reported on June 24, 2004, that Dr. Andrew Padmos, the authority’s vice president, insisted the complaint against Horne “was not simply a case of professional jealousy. ‘This is a lot more than anything that could be characterized as short term, or silly, or insignificant,’” he told the newspaper.

Officially, the Capital District Health Authority still says it “won’t be offering comment or opinion on any details that are part of the ongoing deliberations.” As for why it’s taken so long, its spokesperson will only say that, on various occasions, both parties agreed to waive the timelines for resolving the issues.

Horne says that’s bunk. While she concedes she did ask for extensions “of a few days” for filing some specific documents, she says she never agreed to an open-ended waiver. That, she says, “would be like a surgeon consenting an otherwise healthy patient for removal of an ingrown toenail, and then proceeding as though this was equivalent to consent for an above-knee amputation. I would no more consent to [Capital Health] conducting an open-ended investigation while my research program and career are being destroyed, than I would let them take off my leg.”

Which brings us back inevitably, inexorably, to Why?

John Sullivan believes it has a lot to do with professional jealousy. “I’ve been here for 30 years and Gaby Horne is the best researcher we’ve ever recruited in that time. She was the first independent researcher in the division of cardiology in years, and her lab was attracting millions and millions of dollars. She was doing ground-breaking stuff, stuff that would have put Dalhousie and Halifax on the map. But there was one guy she didn’t get along with, and she refused to allow him to bully her.”

CAUT’s James Turk says the reason could be as complicated as the fact that Horne was the only female MD/PhD in a traditionally old-boys’ clinical environment, or it could be as simple as “office politics.”

As to why it has dragged on for so long, he shakes his head: “I wish I could answer your question.”