LIKE MOST small communities in Canada, Walkerton has no door-to-door mail delivery. Instead, heading down to the post office is a peaceful ritual of daily life, a chance to greet friends and neighbours, catch up on the latest gossip, discuss the weather, pick up the mail. Now there was no place to park. Media vehicles and satellite trucks filled every available space as reporters milled about the building’s entrance. Residents found themselves having to run a gauntlet of cameras and nosy big-city media types. Questions, questions, questions. Do you know anyone who’s sick? Do you know anyone who has died? Who do you blame? What do you think of Stan Koebel? But the interlopers could never understand the conflicted emotions raised by every question about friends, neighbours, and family. How could these outsiders fathom the shock, the confusion, the grief and fear? The reporters, most of whom had never heard of Walkerton before being thrown into the assignment, would soon vanish like the snow on a warm April day, but they had to live here. Their presence was intrusive and ugly, their interest seemed almost prurient. They turned the funeral for Lenore Al into a circus befitting a rock star, instead of the sad farewell to a retired librarian whose widower was overcome by grief. That some of the local kids followed the cortege on their bicycles was wholly understandable. But vehicles emblazoned with media call letters? The only reporters and photographers they knew, often the same person, showed up at flower shows and minor-league hockey games and ribbon-cuttings and fundraising walkathons. How could these strangers possibly understand what they were going through? And so townsfolk developed a strategy: they marched into the post office with gaze averted. Eye contact or a smile would invariably be construed as an invitation to an interview. Reporters were perplexed. The small-town coldness, the hostility, made no sense. How could these people, upset as they must be, fail to understand their interest? It fell to those among the townspeople who were angry enough or who enjoyed the attention to satisfy the media’s curiosity. Most Walkertonians felt sickened by what they read and saw.
Friday, May 26
1:30 P.M.
Far from the crowd gathered outside the post office and adjoining municipal building, a private plane carrying Ontario Premier Mike Harris cruised the almost cloudless, pale blue sky toward the airport outside Hanover. The wind was light, a perfect spring day for flying. From his window, the premier could see a checkerboard of fields with their intricate ploughing patterns offset by swaths of green meadows and patches of bush. In the airport building, Conservative legislature member Bill Murdoch munched on a hamburger. The tarmac was empty, save for a news helicopter off to one side. To the left of the airport building, a dark green Honda minivan, the favoured vehicle for moving the premier around, waited outside the iron gate that opened directly onto the tarmac. The plane landed, taxied to the middle of the tarmac, and came to a stop as the engines died. A man with mirrored sunglasses drove the minivan to within about fifteen metres of the plane. A reporter followed. A few minutes later, the door opened. The stairs lowered and Hillary Stauth, Harris’s bubbly twenty-something junior communications assistant, emerged into the sunshine. She looked confused, as if she’d been expecting a crowd. It seemed so quiet.
“I hear CNN’s here,” she said, as if she couldn’t quite believe it.
A few minutes later, Harris emerged at the top of the stairs. Dressed in a dark blue sports jacket and light blue open-necked shirt, he looked decidedly unhappy. He moved quickly down the stairs, strode to the minivan without a sideways glance, and got in. The van disappeared through the gate for the ten-minute run to Walkerton.
The van took him to the back of the municipal building. Harris slipped inside and met privately with Mayor Dave Thomson. Although he had little grasp of the staggering magnitude of the situation, Thomson told Harris that the municipality was facing something it couldn’t handle alone and the premier promised to do what he could. Outside, in the now blazing sun, an impatient media crowd waited. Harris’s arrival had been set for about 1 P.M., but he was running close to an hour late. Behind and to the right of a row of TV cameras and reporters, a clutch of about forty residents, adults and children, had gathered. Across the road lined with cars, news vehicles, and satellite trucks, a few pre-teen boys took pictures. Walkerton had never seen anything like this. Just behind one of the TV cameras, a boy put down the puppy he’d been carrying.
“Has your dog been sick as well?” one reporter asked.
“Yeah, he’s been a little sick,” the kid replied gravely.
Hillary Stauth emerged from the municipal office through the glass door to the right of the post office. The premier would be out in a few minutes, would make a statement, and then take questions. To keep it orderly, she said, she would give the signal to each reporter. It was clear this was going to be a tightly controlled, conventional news conference. Someone to one side asked if the premier would take questions from the public. Stauth made a note, said something to the man, and disappeared inside. Moments later, Harris came through the glass door and strode the few steps over to the brown podium set up on the concrete boulevard. Bill Murdoch and rookie Environment Minister Dan Newman stood awkwardly against the red-brick wall of the municipal office. His mouth turned down, his face grim, his brow furrowed, Harris placed a piece of paper on the podium, waited a few seconds for the TV cameras to get rolling, and began reading:
“I come to this community under very tragic circumstances,” he read. “I come today not only as premier, but I come as a father, I come as a son, I come as a fellow citizen who has been touched by the events of this week. I come on behalf of an entire province and indeed an entire country that has been moved and deeply saddened and brought together by what is happening here.”
Mike Harris, it is fair to say, had never been celebrated for his oratorical skills. During question period or in dealing with the usual media crowd at the legislature, he had shown himself highly capable of spontaneous flashes of wit and charged partisan rhetoric. That was a game he’d mastered. However, a natural stump speaker he wasn’t. Under the right circumstances and at his best, the premier could deliver a speech that engaged an audience even if it didn’t quite captivate them. At his worst, his dull monotone and stiff, wooden style gave the impression that he didn’t quite believe or feel the words coming out of his own mouth.
“For today, Walkerton is Ontario and Walkerton is Canada,” he continued as the silent crowd listened intently.
“All of us, all Canadians, are united with the families of Walkerton. United in grief, we are united in prayer, we are united in heart, and we are united in mind. We are united in the determination to stand by one another until this situation passes.
“I have directed that all necessary resources of the Ontario government be made available to help the citizens of this community weather this storm. I pledge that we will do what it takes to get to the bottom of this tragedy. The people of Walkerton demand answers. People of Ontario demand answers. And I demand answers. But that is an issue for tomorrow.
“Today, our thoughts rest with the families of this community, with everyone that is struggling to cope with these tragic events, and standing beside them I believe is the first priority, and that is the first priority reason that I am here.”
On paper, the words appeared to have exactly the right sound, the right balance of empathy and concern. But as he spoke them in the hot sun, glancing up only to look at the cameras in his practised way, they appeared to lose all flavour, all real sentiment, all resonance. His flat, lowered voice betrayed little, if any, emotion. It felt too carefully prepared, overcooked, insipid. The crowd remained quiet.
“I’ll take questions,” he said quickly.
CBC reporter Raj Ahluwalia immediately jumped in. He asked about the changes the Conservative government had made after coming to office in 1995. Could the Tories’ decision to privatize water-testing have contributed to the crisis? Harris fiddled with the front of his jacket.
“Well, I am told there are no changes,” Harris began.
Harris went on to say that if any government policies or procedures had played a role, it wasn’t his regime that had implemented them. Look to the New Democrats, who had formed the government before him, he said. The tragedy had become a partisan political football.
Almost immediately upon coming to power in June 1995, the Harris government had taken the axe to the Environment Ministry, slashing its budget and staff as it tackled the province’s $10-billion annual deficit with single-minded purpose. Warnings from scientists, health professionals, and even the most senior bureaucrats about the debilitating and demoralizing effects of the cuts went unheeded. While the NDP had governed during one of the deepest recessions since the Great Depression and had made some staff cuts, it was under the Harris government that, for the first time, hundreds of ministry employees were forced out the door. Helping business and industry topped a Conservative agenda designed to balance the province’s books and cut taxes. Environmental rules and regulations, such as one requested by the minister of health himself to clarify the reporting of bad water, were rejected as red tape that simply got in the way of much needed job-creation. From on high, the word came down that strenuous enforcement of environmental rules was not wanted. “Partnerships,” “stakeholders,” and “voluntary compliance” became the new buzzwords. The number of prosecutions, convictions, and fines levied against polluters fell sharply. The number of inspections of waterworks declined. The ministry’s traditional role as watchdog over the province’s ecological integrity and its water quality had been dangerously undermined. Harris said nothing about any of that.
If Mike Harris wasn’t known for his rousing speeches, he’d also never been known for his warmth or exuberance. He could be amiable enough, but he seldom appeared to be at ease in a crowd. He did not indulge in phony baby-kissing. Perhaps that was part of his appeal. He seemed to be a genuine, down-to-earth fellow who had little use for touchy-feely antics in order to win votes. But to a town desperately in need of a warm, steadying hand and a show of solidarity and leadership, Harris seemed indifferent.
The hardline policies and confrontational approach that marked the Conservatives’ years in office, especially those of their first term, had made Harris a target for protests both big and small. He’d been dogged at every stop during his re-election campaign in the spring of 1999 by small, vocal groups of dissenters. Through it all, Harris remained dismissive, even contemptuous. He portrayed every voice of opposition as coming from a “special interest group” to which he would never listen. Labour unions, teachers, civil servants, mothers on welfare had all felt the sting. His supporters, and they were many across the province, including Walkerton, liked his strength of conviction, his willingness to forge ahead with what he believed. But Harris seemed to view the townsfolk gathered outside their post office as just another special interest group. He offered no personal words of encouragement, gave no sign he really cared, no indication that he had come for any other reason than to bolster his own political interest. He gave no hint that he understood the calamity that had visited this rural town. Instead of applying balm to soothe their wounds, he had rubbed in partisan salt. Without so much as a glance at the people who looked to him as their leader and friend, Ontario Premier Mike Harris turned away and disappeared into the municipal offices.
When he had first approached the microphone, Harris had stared briefly at a crudely crafted protest sign directly in front of him, the only one in evidence: We Demand Answers. No More Cutbacks. The sign seemed to confirm that the gaggle of people clustered around the protester were just another anti-Tory special interest group. In fact, had Harris looked to see who was holding the sign, he’d have noticed a slightly weathered man in his mid-fifties, a man who had never demonstrated before, a man who had given the premier and his Conservative party his vote in both of the previous provincial elections, the second one barely ten months earlier.
Dieter Weiss owned the old foundry property on the edge of town, directly across from Lobie’s Park. The foundry, one of the first manufacturing plants in the province, dated back to Joseph Walker’s days. Horse ploughs and the like had been made there in a plant that drew its power through a water wheel on the Saugeen River before the Walkerton Electric & Power Company provided electricity. The plant closed in the late 1980s, and Weiss bought the site with the retirement aim of turning it into a tourist-type canoeing and fishing recreation area. The river was thick with salmon and trout, but as the years went by, the fish slowly disappeared.
The huge Friday-night rainstorm had swamped the site. The overflowing Saugeen drowned the foundry in forty centimetres of putrid water. The stench of manure sickened him. Despite being an old farm boy, Weiss had become increasingly disconcerted with what he considered to be Big Agriculture’s maltreatment of the environment. Over the previous four or five summers, beaches along his favourite strip of Lake Huron had to be closed due to bacterial contamination, sparking finger-pointing between farmers and cottagers. He bridled at what he saw as the irresponsible spraying and spreading of vast quantities of manure and pesticides on fields because it would inevitably wash into nearby waterways, killing minnows, frogs, and other aquatic life. Although he complained to anyone who might listen, the powerful agricultural lobby had the ear of the politicians. No one had the guts to take them on, certainly not in a town like Walkerton that depends so heavily on its farm neighbours.
Weiss felt sure the poisonous water coursing through the town’s taps had to be farm-related. But, he said to friends, no one would investigate. Even the mayor was a farmer. There would be a cover-up. There’s nothing you can do, they said. The hell you can’t, he replied. Though he had never taken part, images of the 1960s’ civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations had left an indelible impression on him. People had marched and carried signs and, ultimately, someone had listened. Still, the idea of demonstrating terrified him. It was a front-page newspaper photograph that steeled his determination to act. Tucked into a stretcher next to her teddy bear, five-year-old Tamara Smith was about to be airlifted for treatment to London. Dieter Weiss pondered the photograph, and cried. Tamara could just as easily have been his granddaughter.
On hearing that the premier was coming to town that afternoon, Weiss headed to his workshop at the foundry and scrounged up the most quintessential of Canadian artifacts: an old canoe paddle. Next, he found a piece of plywood, and a sign was born. Now, the hard part: What’s it to say? Harris is an asshole? No. He had no desire to offend the man he’d twice voted for. He had approved of many of Harris’s policies: work-for-welfare, the downsizing of the bloated bureaucracy. But the cuts to the Environment Ministry bothered him, especially because big farmers appeared to have been given free rein to pollute the environment, his environment, his grandchildren’s environment. And so he scrawled: We Demand Answers. No More Cutbacks. His friends were dismayed. You could be arrested, they said. You could be clubbed or pepper-sprayed, they said. You’re going to get your ass kicked, you’ll be tarred and feathered and run out of town, they said. Weiss considered. What he needed, he realized, was support. People power. So he sped over to Ron Leavoy’s print shop on Durham and asked for a rush job on five hundred flyers advertising a protest for the following day. “Come to our meeting to preserve our clean water and air and stop the cutbacks,” the flyers said.
“I don’t know if we can get this done,” Leavoy told him.
“It’s your grandchildren that are affected,” Weiss rejoined.
The flyers were printed. He plonked down the $50 and headed back to his shed, retrieved his newly minted sign, and began what surely must have been one of the loneliest and strangest protest marches the town had ever seen. Clutching the pile of flyers in one hand, the sign in the other, he made his way over the bridge across Durham and up the lower end of Yonge Street toward the post office. A reporter spotted him.
“You’re a lone voice in the wilderness,” she said. “Where are your supporters?”
“I don’t expect any,” he replied.
All he wanted, Weiss explained, was to talk to the premier, to ask him the environmental questions that were bothering him. Already he suspected that Stan Koebel was going to take the fall and it would then be business as usual. But no matter what the town’s water manager had or hadn’t done, he felt the problem ran far deeper. He was shocked when he turned the corner onto Scott Street and sighted the horde of media assembled in front of the post office. That he hadn’t expected. The mayor, a flock of councillors in tow, passed him on their way to Newman’s for lunch. They glared and refused to take a flyer from him. Almost no one would, except for a couple of reporters who feigned interest. No way they were going to be taken in by some half-crazed old geezer with a beef and a sign, not with a far bigger news story set to happen. A few motorists quietly gave him the thumb’s up or timidly honked their horns as they drove by, but that was it for support. It didn’t bother Weiss. To and fro he walked. To and fro. Then, perhaps fed up with having nothing better to do while he hurried up and waited for the main event, a reporter at last moseyed over.
“Why are you doing this? Isn’t this a local problem?”
“It’s all over Ontario,” he replied. “Do you think all the E. coli in the province washed down our well?”
Weiss waxed on about the damage caused by the wanton spreading of manure and pesticides: the dead minnows and frogs, the closed beaches. And suddenly other reporters were lining up to talk to him as well. Harris’s lateness offered more time for interviews. Each time, he passed on the simplest of messages:
“I have children and grandchildren. I don’t want them to live in a garbage dump.”
When Hillary Stauth emerged from behind the glass doors to survey the lie of the media land and say Harris would be out shortly, Weiss had already joined the small clutch of townsfolk standing to her left. He asked if the premier would take questions from the public. Stauth jotted the comment down, said she’d see what she could do before going back inside. Suddenly, a uniformed local police officer standing just behind him and to his left put his hand on the shoulder of the man with the sign and hissed:
“Dieter, you know what you did back there.”
He turned his head toward the officer.
“What do you mean?”
“Jumping in front of the cameras. I don’t want to see any more of that.”
“I did not jump in front of the cameras. I was politely asked and I obliged.”
A burly man pushed his way behind Weiss, and the lone protester, who was becoming increasingly nervous, knew it was an undercover officer appraising the threat. Weiss worried about being pepper-sprayed or dragged off to jail. The hot spring air felt charged. Minutes later, a hush fell on the crowd as Harris emerged and began his speech to the media. Weiss listened quietly, patiently. The reporters were almost done and he could wait no longer. “Mr. Harris, Mr. Harris,” he called out, to no avail.
The uniformed police officer behind him tapped him yet again on the shoulder.
“Keep it down or else,” he growled.
Dieter Weiss had never given up on democracy even though it had never seemed to work very well for him. He exercised his franchise zealously. He voted on the issues he cared about rather than for the personalities or parties. Each time, it felt as if his vote had been stolen from him. He had backed the federal Liberals under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, at least until he turned the country metric. He voted for the federal Conservatives when Brian Mulroney promised jobs, jobs, jobs, then watched in dismay as the jobs went to Mexico. When Jean Chrétien promised to scrap the federal sales tax introduced by the Mulroney Tories, he voted Liberal again but the GST remains a fact of Canadian life. Provincially, he had backed the Liberals under David Peterson when they promised to make beer available in corner stores. But they reneged on that pledge and so, in 1990, he voted for the New Democrats of Bob Rae because they promised cheap, publicly run car insurance. That, too, didn’t happen. But he liked what Harris and his provincial Tories were saying in 1995, and so he voted for them, and again in 1999 because he felt Harris was a politician who knew how to get things done. Still, he wished the premier would get his people to research the effects of all those cuts to the Environment Ministry a little better and he wanted badly to ask Harris about that. Weiss wheeled to face the cop.
“We don’t live in Communist Russia. We don’t live in a dictatorship. I’m here to ask a question, now back off.”
The officer began reaching for his truncheon, but a TV camera swung toward them and the club stayed put. By this time, Harris had vanished, leaving resident Veronica Davidson shrieking after him and taking the pressure off Weiss and his furiously pounding heart. He had received no answers. He hadn’t even gotten to ask his question. He felt deeply offended and deeply disappointed. As reporters rushed off to file their stories, the crowd dispersed. When someone mentioned that Harris was going to the arena where donated bottled water was being passed out, Weiss jumped into his truck and followed after him. It was too late. Harris had dropped a few bucks into a collection jug and left town. Weiss dropped $20 of his own into the jug and went home. He put his sign away and spent the rest of the day waiting in dread for a knock at the door that would tell him he was off to jail. It didn’t, of course, come. No one, if you discount the media and the Davidsons, who came with their ginger-haired offspring in tow, showed up the following day for the big protest that Weiss had tried to organize. Not even Weiss.
Veronica Davidson had also come down to the post office to hear what Premier Mike Harris had to say that Friday afternoon and she didn’t like what she heard. When the premier abruptly disappeared through the glass door, the drama teacher exploded.
“Mr. Harris!” she shouted after him. “It’s a shame you have to go off quickly and not hear those points of view of the people who live in Walkerton.”
As cameramen, photographers, and reporters jostled to get closer, Davidson unloaded. For a moment, it was as if the entire town’s anger was being channelled through this short, ginger-haired mother of two.
“We are a small town, we have dealt with death,” Davidson said, her voice rising over the din, as if that would help her words reach the ears of the now vanished premier.
“We have seen the system obviously does not work,” she said, hands flailing. “And now that you’ve seen the system doesn’t work, are you going to put a system in place so this type of tragedy never has to happen again?”
She paused to spell her name for one of the reporters.
“It seemed like a lot of platitudes without substance. I waited patiently, with respect, to see what he would say, and when he did not say anything, then I felt it was necessary to speak up. I think he needs to address us personally. I don’t think he can hide behind all kinds of protocol.”
From their home on the hill, Davidson’s bemused husband watched Harris and then his wife on TV. While her roots in the area go back a century, Bruce Davidson was a newcomer of fourteen years to Walkerton. Born of Jamaican parents in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, Bruce had met Veronica during their university years in Guelph, Ontario. For a while, Bruce flirted with making a career in theatre, and worked behind the scenes as a technician at a small company in Toronto. But when Veronica went on to pursue a career in teaching, Bruce opted to qualify as a registered massage therapist. It was Jim Kieffer, now chairman of the public utilities commission, who processed Bruce’s Ontario driver’s licence, sold him a pair of pants, and rented them their first Walkerton home, a townhouse. This is the only place, Davidson liked to quip, where you can find an ear, nose, and goat specialist. Although his family had escaped illness because they had been out of town, four people on their stretch of street had been airlifted to city hospitals. He had watched the confusion, terror, and heartache unfold as the glare of the national and international media grew increasingly harsh. He had watched the news conferences with Mayor Dave Thomson and Jim Kieffer and got no answers. It seemed to him as if things were out of control, that no one in charge was taking charge. The town’s two main grocery stores had ordered in skids of bottled water, but council had failed to act. Walkerton was fast on its way to becoming North America’s leper colony, but all the Davidsons saw that Friday from their provincial government, from their premier, was political posturing and denial. Even worse, they felt as if Mike Harris had simply ignored them. But if Veronica’s tirade was heard across Canada and beyond, it resounded most loudly in her own backyard, in a shell-shocked community that had yet to find a voice to ask the hard questions, to express the depths of its frustration. At the Davidsons’ home, the phone began ringing as friends and acquaintances called to let her know she had expressed them. And in that heady rush, Bruce began pondering a way to ensure that the community would stay heard, whether or not the premier and his allies in far-away Toronto wanted to listen.
Out of a conversation with his old activist neighbour Chris Peabody, a teacher at Sacred Heart and a future town councillor, a plan began taking shape. Davidson sat down at his computer and wrote a letter to the premier demanding a judicial inquiry into the disaster. He quickly garnered fourteen signatures and headed down to the local print shop to get the letter photocopied. There, he got talking with owner Ron Leavoy, whom he hadn’t met before. Leavoy, whose daughter had been thwacked on the head by an overzealous TV cameraman at the Harris news conference outside the post office, signed immediately and the letter was faxed to Premier Mike Harris and copied to other politicians.
Soon, the leaders of the Opposition would visit the Davidsons’ home and impress on the sixteen or twenty people gathered there that they needed to get organized. So a steering committee was formed and Concerned Walkerton Citizens (CWC) was born. Ron Leavoy became chairman, Bruce Davidson was elected vice-chair, and Veronica named secretary. Todd Huntley, who had once wondered why a girl couldn’t buy a slush at the Becker’s, became treasurer. Leavoy printed flyers advertising their first public meeting and other volunteers papered the town with them. About two hundred people showed up at the old Hartley House in mid-June and most signed on as members. Within weeks, the group grew to a signed-up membership of more than five hundred, 10 per cent of the town’s entire population. Still, some people hated what Bruce and his group were doing. “You don’t speak for me,” the father of one of the town’s elected politicians chastised him. “Who the hell does he think he is?” was another comment heard around town.
“There are some people who believe that if we deny, we will go back to being Walkerton,” Davidson told one reporter.
The CWC would not be denied. The politicians in Toronto were starting to listen and Bruce Davidson, whose biggest public speaking event had been as valedictorian at massage school graduation, became an articulate, persistent voice of Walkerton’s residents, perhaps the voice. Slightly balding with curly hair, just five-foot-six-feet tall, he possessed the perfect turn of phrase, an intuitive understanding of what reporters needed, and first-hand knowledge of the town. Most importantly, he was willing to share what he knew, ask the questions few others in the community dared ask, and make himself available for a dizzying array of media interviews. Papers ranging from the New York Times and the Manchester Guardian to the weekly Walkerton Herald-Times talked to him. TV crews paraded through his home, sometimes lining up outside as they waited their turn. A CBC national TV crew spent three days doing “a day in the life of,” following the family as they brushed their teeth with bottled water or drove the kids to a nearby town for a bath. Sociology students called asking if they could study the group as an example of an effective grassroots organization. Someone from the British Columbia government asked to use its resources. And through it all, Davidson marvelled at just how much attention he and the group continued to get.