Jane Fonda, Tommy Douglas…and Me

One demonstration my friends and I enjoyed was a protest against the Vietnam War on the beach in Nanoose Bay north of Nanaimo; and no, Jane Fonda didn’t show up. We built a “Vietnamese village”, watched by men wearing sunglasses sitting in dark blue sedans – really! – parked on the highway, and when darkness fell the village was “attacked” by US forces and set on fire. It was quite an impressive spectacle, since we had a fire department permit to set off fireworks for a passable imitation of US rockets. (I wonder if the Mounties said whoever gave the permit was “aiding subversives”?)

We held another protest in Nanoose Bay against the American nuclear test in October 1971 on Amchitka Island in the Aleutian chain. To be honest, the protest involved only ten of us, including a sympathetic CBC TV stringer and a local man who came with his fishing boat –  the only person I ever met who had built his own submarine. I wonder if the Mounties warned the navy, especially since he had painted his sub bright red? 

Somehow the CBC stringer made a fishing boat, a dinghy, and our motley crew into a protest fleet, and her video made the CBC National News; it was a Sunday night, and I guess it must have been a slow news day.

As Tommy may well have done, we assumed we were being watched by someone. That someone may well have been a character who rented a farm called “The Edge” on the fringes of Lantzville. Our suspicions grew as he became increasingly an “agent provocateur”, urging more and more extreme protest activities, and wondered why, given his drug trafficking was so well-known, the police never raided the farm. Our suspicions seemed to be confirmed when a few years after we had all moved on to careers and marriage one of our group swore he’d seen the trafficker on a plane flying from Vancouver to Toronto, minus earrings and in a crisp business suit.

The closest I saw Tommy to criminal activities was when another well-known local drug dealer walked into an NDP meeting in the now demolished CCF Hall in downtown Nanaimo. Dave Stupich, then the local MLA and a provincial cabinet  minister, told Tommy the dealer was there and Tommy should leave in case the police were around. (Of course we now know they almost certainly were – watching Tommy, not the drug dealer.)

Tommy was irate; he wasn’t going anywhere. He told Dave Stupich to get rid of the dealer, he certainly wasn’t leaving. “I’m not the criminal” he snapped, a denial which must have made hovering RCMP spies smile wryly.

If the Mounties noted the names of everyone in the room it must have made interesting reading a few years later; one of the people there, for example, was a lawyer who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court of BC. (Communist infiltrators were everywhere!)

Everything considered, Tommy might have summed it all up in a story he enjoyed telling about how he once made a speech from a “manure spreader” on a prairie farm. He said a huge farmer was sitting in the centre of the front row glaring at him, and his every instinct warned him to be cautious. But he couldn’t resist telling the crowd “this is the first time I’ve spoken from a Conservative platform.” Tommy would always chuckle as he described how as soon as the laughter died down the farmer bellowed, “Pull the switch Tommy, she’s never had a bigger load!”

But the people of Canada had the final say when they voted Tommy the greatest Canadian of all time in a popular CBC contest, and the farmer’s words now accurately describe Tommy’s RCMP dossier.