We thought he was on PCP or something, one says.

He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness.

He’s huge, one exclaims! Massive! They had to use rubber bullets on him, one says, casually, like he’s not talking about my family, a man I share DNA with. Like it’s a motherfucking video game to them.

We had to tase him too, the other cop offers, like tasing doesn’t kill people, like it couldn’t have killed my brother.

I will learn later that my brother had been driving and had gotten into a fender bender with another driver, a white woman, who promptly called the police. My brother was in an episode and although he never touched the woman or did anything more than yell, although his mental illness was as clear as the fact that he was Black, he was shot with rubber bullets and tased.

And then he was charged with terrorism.

Literally.

Excerpted from When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir © PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS and ASHA BANDELE, 2018. Published by Raincoast Books, raincoast.com

Dear Progressive Detective: I heard police arrested a man at the Pearson International Airport in Toronto after receiving a tip from Canada’s Suspicious Incident Reporting System, which alleged the man intended to join a Somali terrorist group. I’m concerned: what is SIRS, and how might the Government’s security efforts affect my civil liberties and right to privacy?

Mohamed Hersi was arrested in March as he was preparing to board a plane for Cairo to study Arabic. The 25-year-old security guard’s employer had submitted a Suspicious Incident Report based on web browsing it deemed “suspicious.” Charged with attempting to participate in a terrorist activity and counseling another person to do the same, Hersi’s case is still before the courts. Though out on bail, he’s hardly free—Hersi can’t apply for a passport or access the internet. He must be accompanied by a surety at all times.

The RCMP describes SIRS as an online service allowing operators of certain companies in sectors such as transit, finance, and energy to file reports on any suspicious activity they witness. The Mounties, CSIS, and other relevant agencies are notified upon a report’s submission. RCMP spokesperson Greg Cox says SIRS allows the RCMP to “develop crucial partnerships, support investigations, and maintain continuous dialogue with internal and external partners on shared national security concerns.”

But according to civil liberty and privacy experts, information sharing may be cause for worry. The government is collecting information about people who have yet to—or may never—commit a crime. Micheal Vonn, of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, calls this connecting the dots before knowing if those dots will be useful. To her, such “info grabs” are counterintuitive. “If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” she says, “these systems provide more hay, not the needle.”

Vonn fears the fate of Maher Arar, deported and tortured because of “suspicions” he associated with alleged terrorists, will be repeated. “Information sharing has ramifications for privacy,” she adds, “and the sense that we aren’t being assessed as people, but by our data shadow.”

To its credit, the RCMP is fairly transparent; SIRS is monitored by the Privacy Commissioner. But any sighs of relief may—for now—be premature. As Sukanya Pillay, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, stresses, civil liberties and privacy must be respected. “Concerns arise when these liberties are chipped away,” she says. “That’s when a country starts to change.”

I saw him on the subway for the first time the day I brought the meat bomb to work. He wore the most glorious toupée. It was the colour of a fox with the front curled under in a Prince Valiant thing that continued on around the sides and back of his head. It didn’t blend in whatsoever with the rest of his real hair, which was a wispy greyish brown. The toupée had a side part that didn’t so much part the hair as simply create a break in the bangs to indicate where a real part would be. The hair itself was just like a helmet or a cushion molded to his head.

We were on the same packed car and I had to stand on my toes to reach the hand strap, which gave me a better view down the train. I saw him appear when a man and a woman standing close together moved their heads to opposite edges of my field of vision just enough to reveal him. He was reading the paper and looked genuinely happy. He was actually smiling. He didn’t look crazy or simple, only like he was having a nice time finding out the news. He wore a dark green suit from an indefinable era.

You could tell that as a young man he had been extremely handsome. Like a film star. Even though he wasn’t looking up from his paper, it was clear that he knew he was being watched. A man as handsome as he would once have been is always aware of being watched. He had all the confidence of a man with a head of lush, flowing hair all his own.

As his eyes reached the bottom of the paper and he was shaking it out to turn the page, he looked right up, directly at me, and winked.

The doors opened at my stop and I shuffled out with everybody else, looking back to see if he was still there. He wasn’t.

Nobody winks at me. People rarely look at me. Obviously, he knew about the bomb. I almost backed out of the whole thing then and there.

But then I thought about Glenn.

When I got to work that morning, I planted the bomb in the hole behind the stereo cabinet. Then I put on a pot of coffee and started peeling eight pounds of potatoes to stick in a bucket of cold water for the day. Glenn wouldn’t be in for another half hour, so I didn’t even have to sneak around. I have opened up the restaurant every morning for the past four years. To peel potatoes. Working with Glenn makes me want to set things on fire. I hate him for employing me, I hate him for being who he is and I hate him for imposing his flaccid proximity on me. But when I think of leaving, I don’t see another job, another boss, another life. I see only his pasty face. And it makes me hate him more.

I had found the hole in the cabinet a few weeks earlier when I was dusting. It looked like someone had kicked it or possibly termites had eaten through it. It was jagged and in a spot down by the baseboard that was impossible for Glenn to see because it would require bending over and he’s a million years old with a bad back. If he has to reach his fingertips further down than his knees to get something, he asks someone to get it for him. He should really be in a nursing home, or a museum, but as the owner he feels he has to be present at the restaurant as an ambassador to the clientele, who can’t stand him. Whenever he musters up the generosity to send a very weak drink to the table of some important patron and minces over to shake their hand, trying to look magnanimous, you can see the mild distaste forming on their faces as he approaches. Then his weedy handshake seals their revulsion. You don’t need to know Glenn to hate him; you only have to see him.

I had been thinking about the bomb for a while, but when I found the hole in the stereo case, I figured it must be a sign.

The thing about the stereo is that Glenn worked in radio 40 years ago and feels he still has his finger on the pulse of what’s hip and hot with the kids. He programs the music for the evening in the restaurant, then locks up the stereo in the cupboard and takes home the key. Even though he knows we can’t get at the stereo and have to languish for the entire shift, listening to instrumental covers of the Beach Boys, he still calls in the middle of the night and demands that we hold the phone up to the speakers so he can hear for sure that the rotation hasn’t been tampered with. Everybody hates the music there. Everybody has complained to him about it and he smiles his insipid smile, nods calmly and says, “Well, I’ll look into that.” He’ll never look into that.

The next week on my way to work, I saw the man again. This time he wasn’t reading anything; he was just sitting with his hands folded in his lap.

I was standing facing the doors, and since he was sitting sideways in his seat, he was staring right at my back. As I looked at my own reflection in the darkened window of the train, I noticed him behind me, also looking at my reflection.

He saw me see him. I unintentionally raised my eyebrows. He intentionally raised his eyebrows back. I averted my gaze because the last thing I wanted to do was play the mirror game with a psycho on the subway, only to have him follow me to work and be sitting outside at the end of the night, ready to follow me home. This would invariably be the thing that would happen.

I unfocused my eyes to avoid his gaze and as I did, in my peripheral vision, I saw his hand slowly move up toward his face and touch the edge of his rug at me like a cowboy tipping his hat.

I couldn’t think of how to respond. He saw me see him again, so I nodded just barely in return. Then he shook his head sternly at me and smiled almost paternally, as though I had done something that wasn’t really bad, and he kind of approved in a way, but he trusted that I would take care of it because I knew right from wrong. Then he nodded to himself, folding his arms and resting his chin on his chest.

He didn’t look up for the rest of the ride.

When I got to work I took the bomb out of its hiding place and had a good look at it. It seemed to be working. There was an active white foam bubbling all around the chicken gizzards and guts. The meat was fermenting in milk. The pressure would overpower the glass of the jar and it would blow within a couple of weeks. The smell would be unbearable. Glenn would have to replace that wall and possibly the entire floor. He might have to abandon the restaurant, or it might have to be torn down. More than anything though, he would run around just furious, screaming like a preschooler, veins bulging through the papery, translucent skin on his temples. He might even have a heart attack. I held onto the jar for a minute, transported. Glenn would be wearing shorts, beige shorts with black socks and black shoes, as he did in the summer. I could hear the pitch of his squeal when he demanded to know who could possibly have done such a thing.

I put the bomb back in its hiding place.

Glenn has a trick he does that he thinks is really good. He finds a cigarette butt outside and picks it up, presumably with a stick with a nail through it or a really long pair of tweezers, and he puts it on the steps out front and waits to see how long it takes one of the staff members to see it and pick it up. Then he comes into the kitchen and announces how many days it’s been there with no one noticing. Glenn believes in the kind of employee loyalty that would make someone stop and pick up a cigarette butt on the stairs because it was marring the beauty of their place of work.

“You’d pick it up if this was your own house, wouldn’t you?” he whines. “Why can’t you keep my restaurant clean? Is it disdain? You can tell me.”

He keeps up the cigarette trick and we all play along now, which isn’t hard because the cigarette butt is always in the same place. We try to pick it up the second he puts it there, which makes it like a game. The whole point of his trick, Glenn doesn’t realize, is defeated now, because our picking up the cigarette butt doesn’t mean anyone

cares any more about the well-being of the restaurant, but it certainly does make him feel as though his stupid crybaby will is being obeyed, which is more important to him than even employee loyalty.

I had started dreaming about the bomb every night and getting downright giddy every time I looked at Glenn, which I had to try and conceal because smiling at him would have been so out of character as to give me away.

I hadn’t seen the man on the subway for a couple of weeks and had started to feel that I was in the clear.

Then this happened:

I was on my way to work, as usual, when I saw him. He was a few yards away, near the end of the car. He wasn’t sitting, even though there were seats available. He was standing next to the pole, but he wasn’t holding on to it. He looked bad. I had to really squint to make sure it was him, but his rug was unmistakable. Just as I was looking, not sure what to do, the front of his toupée stood up from his head, just lifted right up. He didn’t seem to notice. The rug stayed that way, looking at me for a second. Then it addressed me.

“He’s sick,” it said.

It didn’t have eyes or fangs or anything; it was just standing up, talking. It had a soft, deep voice.

“If you let this happen,” it told me, “it will kill him.”

I was frozen on the spot, staring back at the rug, which, even though it didn’t have eyes, was giving me a very serious look. We stood like this for the rest of the ride. When the doors opened at my stop, I nodded slightly and then the rug nodded back, flopping up once and coming down to rest on the man’s head.

I would get rid of the bomb. I would throw it in the river.

I walked as fast as I could to work and was almost running when I rounded the corner and the smell stopped me like a wall. It very nearly knocked me down. It was how you might imagine the smell of an open mass grave. Next to a latrine. I doubled over and gagged a few times with my hands on my knees. Then I looked down the street at the restaurant and saw Glenn on the steps.

He was sitting there with his head in his hands. He wasn’t screaming or scampering around like a gerbil; he was just sitting, looking at the ground.

With my nose buried in my arm, I made my way over. He looked up when he saw my feet in front of him, and I saw it in his eyes: the pain of a full grown child still getting his lunch money stolen every single day in the schoolyard. Glenn lied to himself a lot, but as much as he wanted to believe that as a successful restaurateur and former radio celebrity he was loved and respected by his clientele and staff, he knew that people simply didn’t like him. He knew that people made fun of him. He had heard them in the kitchen.

“What is it, Janine?” he asked. He really wanted to know. “Is it—is it disdain? Is it…” He shook his head and trailed off as his voice filled with tears.

I sat down on the steps beside him and hesitated a second before putting my arm around his frail little shoulders. This made him start crying harder. I felt something let go inside of me, put my other arm around him and pulled him close. I actually squeezed him. This made him start sobbing so hard he felt like he was breaking apart, so I squeezed him tighter, hoping my arms might hold the pieces of him together.

Michelle Winters is a translator and technical writer from Saint John, N.B. A founding member of Just in a Bowl Productions, she co-wrote and performed two plays, Unsinkable and The Hungarian Suicide Duel. She has had over 30 jobs and nearly as many apartments. “Toupée” is her first published work of fiction.

Jane Creba.

On Tuesday, the sixth and final remaining manslaughter charge in the Boxing Day shootings that killed 15-year-old Jane Creba and wounded several others in 2005 ended in acquittal. Two others, who actually fired weapons, had previously been convicted of second degree murder. G.C., whose full name is withheld because he was a minor at the time of the shootings, was, like the five manslaughter defendants acquitted before him, being charged with having a “common unlawful purpose” with the shooters, despite not carrying any firearms. With good reason, the Crown is now 0 for 6 in these manslaughter prosecutions.

Though, like many observers, I lamented the outsized attention these shootings received, I can understand why they caused such a stir. This was, after all, a shooting with indiscriminate victims, in a major urban center, during a national holiday, and the details of Creba’s death are both heartbreaking and infuriating. Nevertheless, the Boxing Day shootings didn’t warrant anything like the hysteria that ensued. Despite being part of a larger wave of gun violence in Toronto, incidents like this were hardly commonplace, and other shootings that killed bystanders received a small fraction of the attention because their victims failed to elicit the same degree of nationwide sympathy. It may not immediately seem like it, but Tuesday’s acquittal amounts to a small measure of justice, and a necessary pushback against the culture of panic.

G.C. was a gang member who freely chose to associate with Creba’s killers; that he is, or at least was, an unsavoury character seems quite clear. Also clear is that the Crown overreached, almost certainly in response to the public outcry. “A person cannot be guilty of manslaughter merely because he was present when his companions committed murder,” explained Justice Anne Molloy. “He must have some actual connection to the wrongdoing.” How depressing that this need even be said.

Though our media and politicians have yet to fully succumb to — or perhaps just failed to master — the lurid exploitation of tragedy that’s so common in the United States, we aren’t immune to its effects. The overwrought response to Creba’s murder — from public hysteria, to media fulminations, to governmental overreach — isn’t all that different from responses to terrorism, in which extremely rare violent acts warp our perspectives to the point where we lose sight of anything beyond our primal reactions. It’s hard to tell if G.C.’s flippant post-acquittal behaviour showed a lack of remorse, or merely understandable relief. In either case, he never should have been tried, and his release is a welcome rebuke to a troublesome trend.

Nav Purewal is a Toronto-based freelance writer. Follow him on Twitter here.

Police investigating yesterday's bombing of a Rome gay bar.

Several people were injured in Rome yesterday when two letter bombs were thrown into a gay neighbourhood bar. The attack wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a pattern of escalating violence against gay people in Italy which some speculate has been fuelled by the election of Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, a member of the post-fascist National Alliance party.

It is hard to see these attacks as anything short of terrorism. Something pre-meditated like a letter bomb attack is in a different category from spontaneous acts of street violence. The intention behind it is to make gay people in the region feel under siege.

And it works. My partner spent 10 days in Rome this summer, and while her straight friends endured the whistles and jeers expected in Italy, she got a lot of cold stares, and angry taunts from cars. It was a level of harassment she hasn’t experienced in Toronto for many years. She avoided the gay neighbourhood, along Via San Giovanni, because of a sense that being queer in Italy was a much more dangerous, underground experience than she was used to.

The threat of violence can shape the character of a community. In Toronto, safety is not a constant concern for me, but it was a consistent issue in parts of Edinburgh after dark. I still instinctively let go of my partner’s hand at night when I see men walking towards us. At concerts and baseball games, the first thing I do is take the measure of the people sitting around us. When considering travel destinations, before checking out the beaches I look into how safe we’d be there.

I grew up in a place where people get drunk and start fights more often than they do in Canada, but it’s not somewhere where, statistically, gay people are actually all that unsafe. So I can only imagine what it’s like to go to a bar that might get bombed, and the kind of self-preserving reflexes you pick up as an identifiably gay person in those places.

It’s easy to get stuck in definitions of terrorism that involve training camps in the mountains and plots against government buildings. But it is no less significant when a faction of people set out to terrorize a community or class of people within their own country. This week, my thoughts are with the queer community in Rome.

A natural gas site near Dawson Creek, B.C., damaged by a blast on December 3, 2008. Photo credit: RCMP.

The RCMP’s recent decision to raise the temperature in this region by officially describing the gas well blasts as “terrorism” is unlikely to improve the relationship between the investigators and area residents. “This is not the work of eco-terrorists, for God’s sakes,” Andrew Nikiforuk, the author of the 2002 book, “Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil,” said in a particularly prescient October 2008 interview. “This is the work of a pissed-off landowner who’s probably a property-rights advocate, who doesn’t like the fact that either his health has been damaged, or his property has been devalued by sour-gas developments.” In that same interview, Nikiforuk rejected the idea that the intent of the person(s) behind the bombing was to injure people. “Whoever did this wanted to make the headlines, they didn’t want to kill people. If you want to kill people up there with sour gas, it would be very easy to do. There are thousands and thousands of pipelines, wells, and scores of sour-gas plants up there,” he said. “Whoever did this planned it very well, picked the locations very carefully, and seems to have been either skilfully adept at not rupturing a pipeline, or skilfully inept at not rupturing a pipeline — and I suspect there are signs here of skilful adeptness.”

Letter from the bomber that preceded the first blast at an EnCana facility. Courtesy RCMP.

The original letter, above, that preceded the first bombing some nine months ago identified the unregulated and unrestricted growth of the oil and gas industry and its effects on the health and security of local residents as the source of the author’s anger. Blair Lekstrom, the MLA for Peace River South and the Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, believes that the government has made progress on that front. “We have acted on a number of things,” Lekstrom said in an interview with the Dawson Creek Daily News recently. “The setbacks and the flaring we’re working on right now as I committed to. There have been numerous issues raised that we have moved on in the last six-months, and I’m quite proud of what we have been able to do.” These issues include introducing a code of conduct for the land agents who interact with local homeowners on behalf of the oil and gas companies, the opening of an Oil and Gas Commission in Dawson Creek and Fort Nelson, and the creation of a farmer’s advocate.

For the bomber, though, that doesn’t appear to be enough, judging by the two most recent bombings. In time, whether because of a misstep on the bomber’s part, a tip from the public, or just good old-fashioned detective work, the RCMP will break the case and make an arrest, but that will only be the end of the beginning of this story. The rest of the story will turn on whether local officials continue to insist that the person responsible for the bombings was an isolated lunatic, a dangerous idiot with an unreasonable vendetta against local industry. If they do, another disgruntled individual willing to take the law into his own hands will materialize in time, just as Wiebo Ludwig did a decade earlier. Violence, after all, is a perfectly logical way of expressing political dissent in a part of the country whose culture is informed in equal parts of anti-government prairie populism and stubborn, gun-at-the-hip, can-do northern individualism, and more effective than any facebook petition, political rally, or other form of civilized political disagreement could ever hope to be.

The bigger challenge facing local officials, from Liberal MLA Blair Lekstrom, who conveniently enough is also the Minister of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources, all the way down to the mayors of towns like Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Pouce Coupe, and even little Tomslake, where this all began nine months ago, is to recognize that the public’s silence throughout this investigation represents a form of protest of its own. Nobody up here wanted to see anyone hurt or injured while doing their job, but neither do they want to have to see their quality of life sacrificed to the development of the gas industry, or live with the long-term consequences of being so close to such a dangerous substance. It’s time for someone to find a middle ground between these two equally toxic alternatives.

Monday: Why no leads? Yesterday: Everyone’s a suspect. Today: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.

Site of two bombings of EnCana natural gas facilities near Dawson Creek, B.C., one on July 1, 2009, the second on July 4. Police are still seeking a suspect. Photo credit: RCMP.

If the gas that was coming out the ground in Northern B.C.  smelled like rose petals, it might not be such a big deal. The well sites, after all, are relatively small and inconspicuous compared to those required to extract oil from the ground, and it’s not like people up here are short on land. But sour gas doesn’t smell like rose petals, and its effect on the health of those who are unfortunate enough to live near the source of its extraction is no prettier. Sour gas, a form of natural gas that contains significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide, is unpopular among the ranchers, farmers, and other rural residents who are forced to count the well sites as neighbours.

The gas, exposure to which can lead to everything from memory loss, headaches, and dizziness at lower levels to reproductive disorders such as miscarriages, birth defects and even death at higher concentrations, is routinely released into the air by companies that would rather flare it on site—quite literally, burn it off—than transport it to a refinery where the hydrogen sulfide could be removed more safely. While these wells used to be sunk deep into the bush, away from populated areas, the sheer number of them being drilled, combined with the savings associated with using local transport and energy infrastructure, means that the wells are now frequently placed no further than 100 metres away from the property limits of homeowners. Governor General Award winning author Andrew Nikiforuk describes living near a sour gas as being “like having a child molester in your neighbourhood. You never know when it’s going to go off; when there’s going to be a problem. So it introduces to agricultural communities a level of risk and hazard that was never there before.”

Some of these homeowners have fought back, most famously the infamous Wiebo Ludwig, who waged a decade-long war against EnCana that ultimately resulted in convictions on five charges related to bombings, and other forms of vandalism against the company’s installations, that landed him in prison for 28 months. Despite the presence of a local culture that holds personal independence and a facility with firearms in roughly equal esteem, many residents in the Peace are more reticent than Ludwig was to get into a confrontation with the oil and gas companies in the area. In a March 23, 2004 piece published by The Tyee, journalist Shefa Siegel tried, without success, to get residents affected by their proximity to sour gas wells to go on the record. “I don’t know what it’s going to take for people to wake up to what’s happening here,” one local who wished to remain anonymous told him. “We’re even scared to grow a garden because we don’t want to eat food from our land. We don’t have any idea what’s in the soil.” Another, he writes, ”sought me out to discuss burns on their bodies suffered after what they believed was an unpublicized leak at a nearby well. I met a number of other families who claimed their lives are in ruin because of sour wells perched in view of their kitchen windows. I made notes on their health woes, their trouble getting physicians to take them seriously, and their feelings of abandonment. But none of these sources would agree to be identified by name.”

The reason why so many won’t talk is because they know what the penalty associated with doing so looks like. The big companies, Siegel wrote, might offer modest cash settlements in exchange for non-disclosure agreements, but they’re just as likely to engage them in a court battle in which their exceptionally deep pockets give them a nearly insurmountable advantage.

As one frustrated resident told Siegel, “Look, I want to talk to you, but I’ve been shouting about this for five years, and no good has come of it. I can’t afford to pay a lawyer if it comes to that. I just want to sell my land and get my family out of here.”

Local, provincial, and federal politicians aren’t of much help, either, given the fact that the extraction of natural gas is increasingly the only business of consequence in the Peace Region. In 2008-09, the revenues from the sale of oil and gas land rights hit a record $2.4 billion, a figure that was double the previous record of $1.2 set in 2007-08, and four times the $625.7 million the province took in just five years earlier in 2003-04. Despite lagging global commodity markets the natural gas exploration boom doesn’t look like it’s going to stop, with all the big players exploring new plays in the region from Tumbler Ridge in the south up to Fort Nelson. That boom, which has already created 34,000 new jobs since 2001, is welcome in a region that has seen just as many jobs in the forest industry disappear with little hope of them ever returning.

But while the natural gas industry is a big hit in northern communities like Dawson Creek and Fort St. John, at the corporate headquarters in Vancouver, and the government offices in Victoria, the people who have to live in close proximity to the thousands of well sites that pockmark the Peace are less enthusiastic. That disaffection helps to explain why the public in the Peace appears to have elected to sit on their collective hands when it comes to the RCMP’s investigation. In an unintentionally ironic statement, the RCMP announced on January 13th that they were offering a $500,000 for anyone who provided information that led directly to the arrest of those responsible for the bombings, and noted that their investigators “are being thwarted by uncooperative residents in the area who are opposed to sour gas exploration.” Right now, that definition could include just about everybody living within a kilometre of a sour gas well, which is, well, just about everybody.

Yesterday: Why no leads? Today: Everyone’s a suspect. Wednesday: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.

A natural gas well head near Dawson Creek, B.C., site of a deliberate blast that partially destroyed the well's metering shed on January 4, 2009. Photo source: RCMP.

[Editor’s note: this series of blog posts on the bombings of natural gas wells in Northern B.C. will run over three days, starting today. Look for part two on Tuesday morning and the final part on Wednesday.]

When I agreed to take a job as the editor of a small newspaper in Chetwynd, B.C., I didn’t expect to find myself in the middle of an ongoing national story. I learned about the first bombing of an EnCana pipeline as I listened to CBC radio while driving across the country, stuck somewhere between Ignace, Ont., and Theodore, Sask., and I didn’t expect the story to last the two days it would take me to get to Dawson Creek, B.C, the major city closest to where the bombing took place. Yet almost nine months after I arrived in the Peace Region the campaign of bombings continues, while the person(s) responsible for them continue to elude the RCMP. The bomber celebrated Canada Day with a personalized fireworks display, launching another attack on an EnCana installation that was just a few kilometres from Dawson Creek. As RCMP investigators were collecting evidence from that incident, the bomber struck again on the fourth of July.

For those who don’t live up here, this campaign of bombings must be more than a little confusing. How, you must wonder, can the RCMP—with the assistance of INSET, the integrated national security enforcement team—have made so little progress in finding the person or persons responsible for six separate bombings in a pair of communities, Pouce Coupe and Tomslake, that together barely exceed the population of the average Toronto-area high school? Forget looking for a needle in a haystack; for trained law enforcement officers working with $500,000 in reward money, this should be like looking for a needle inside an empty manila envelope.

Yet in more than eight months, during which time the RCMP has moved from chiding the public for their lack of co-operation to virtually begging them for their assistance, they have been unable to produce a suspect. A series of surveillance photographs taken by a security-camera in the Shoppers Drug Mart in Dawson Creek, where the RCMP believes the initial letter threatening EnCana was sent from, yielded nothing. Likewise, the $500,000 reward has failed to lubricate the local tongues that the RCMP believes hold information that’s vital to the case. The locals, it seems, aren’t particularly interested in helping the RCMP catch the person or persons responsible for the bombings.

There’s a good reason for that, and it smells like rotten eggs. While one would be hard pressed to find anybody who would express support for the bomber’s methods on the record, it might be even more difficult to find somebody who doesn’t sympathize with the motives behind his actions. Virtually everyone who owns land in the Peace Region has had to come to terms with a legal technicality that dictates that while they might own the land on which their home, their farm, or their ranch sits, they don’t own the rights to what lies beneath it. In a region rich with oil and gas deposits and an international commodity market increasing desperate for each, that’s a recipe for conflict.

Today: Why no leads? Tomorrow: Everyone’s a suspect. Wednesday: Will the bombings change anything?

Max Fawcett is the editor of the Chetwynd Echo, a weekly newspaper serving the community of Chetwynd, B.C., and a contributing editor at Dooneyscafe.com.

"ATTACK #6" (2003). Photo by Martin Savoie.

Socially Acceptable Acts of Terrorism: that last word seems to just hang in the air. These days, not many organizations would choose to use the “T” word. But when Montreal’s public art duo ATSA (the group’s French acronym) first hit the streets over a decade ago, terrorism was a much more debatable concept.

ATSA collaborators Pierre Allard and Annie Roy. Photo by Martin Savoie.

“The word was less concrete [then]. Terrorism was not in our North American vocabulary,” explains Annie Roy, who, along with common-law partner Pierre Allard, makes up ATSA. “Of course, it is terrorism as a concept — art that wants to explode in the public field because it has demands.”

Last fall, the pair chose to celebrate 10 years of creating art that does just that. In commemoration, 10 prominent Montreal artists and activists put together When Art Takes Action, a retrospective book on ATSA. “Not only have they maintained their creativity, but the have also managed to stay innovative, bringing forward new ideas and old issues in a new way,” says Laure Waridel, a Montreal-based environmentalist and co-author of the retrospective.

Soon after meeting in the fall of 1997, Roy, a dancer, and Allard, an artist, created their first installation: the Banque à Bas (literally the Sock Bank, but also “Down with the Bank”), a giant cardboard ATM that distributed socks in winter to Montreal’s homeless. They were inspired to create it after hearing how banks were making billions in profits while a Montreal shelter struggled to find enough socks for its users.

Poverty has been a central theme of ATSA’s work ever since, and is quite evident in their most well-known work, State of Emergency, a five-day, downtown Montreal encampment they have run since 1998. Originally a symbolic winter refugee camp for Montreal’s homeless, State of Emergency now involves more than 400 volunteers and features a range of resources for Montreal’s street population, including free meals cooked by top Montreal chefs, outreach groups and medical aid. The goal has also been to try and break down the stereotypes that divide those living on and off the streets.

In 2008, State of Emergency was recognized by Les Arts et la Ville (Arts and the City), an organization representing 350 Quebec municipalities, with the 2008 Citizen’s Culture prize. Says Roy: “It was a wonderful award to receive. We don’t do this work for the recognition, but it is motivating to know that others are taking notice.”

ATSA have also grabbed attention outside Quebec. Starting in 2003 they toured Canadian cities with ATTACK: an SUV that appeared to have been hit by a roadside bomb and contained an audio/ video installation showing footage of war and environmental degradation.

The duo hopes to hit the road once again in 2009 with Change, an installation they put together to celebrate ATSA’s ten years. Taking on the form of a corner store, the installation was named for its double meaning — changing the world, but also for the change in your pockets. Walking into the small, white-washed shop is a trip down ATSA’s memory lane: on sale are bits of warning tape in frames, large prints of curious citizens peering at ATTACK, framed blankets from State of Emergency.

Meanwhile, Roy says ATSA will continue its “balancing act” between art and activism, trying to keep the spark alive. And she is confident that even after 10 years, a lot more can be expected out of the pair.

“It’s a life project. We don’t make the difference between our family life and our ATSA life anymore. It’s a family thing. So if it stops, it stops a lot of things. So it’s not really an option.”

A slideshow of ATSA’s work over the years:

In Israel, terrorism breeds hatred that passes from one generation to the next. Photo: Laura Kusisto

It was a great moment for the Conservatives’ law and order agenda, and a terrible one for justice. Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan recently announced new anti-terrorism legislation that would allow Canadian victims of terrorist attacks on both domestic and foreign soil to sue individual terrorists, terrorist organizations, or even countries accused of supporting terrorism.

The last of these has raised a flurry of controversy. Critics say giving Canadians a virtually unparalleled ability to launch suits against foreign governments could alienate allies without actually aiding the fight against terrorism. A similar provision has already proven problematic in the U.S. — the only country with similar legislation currently in place — as suits have been directed (and in several cases succeeded) against a motley crew of friends and allies that include North Korea, Iran and Israel. Just a few days before Van Loan’s announcement, the Obama justice department stepped in requesting immunity for Saudi Arabia, fearing a successful lawsuit could enflame tensions.

Van Loan claims to have addressed this because governments can only be sued if they are on what he promises will be a very short list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” But what Van Loan has not addressed is whether any such protection will be afforded the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The PA is recognized by the Canadian government only as the “legitimate representative of Palestinian interests in the Middle East”; not as a sovereign government. This leaves the PLO — already teetering on the brink of bankruptcy — without protection under the legislation and thus vulnerable to expensive lawsuits from Canadians injured in terrorist attacks in Israel.

In the U.S. at least two such suits have been filed against the PLO and PA. One is still in the court system, and the other was successful, with $192.7 million in damages awarded. If the plaintiffs ever collect, there is no question that this amount would completely bankrupt the PLO. The PLO’s control over terrorists in the West Bank is notably weak, and even PLO members have committed numerous acts of violence and the organization’s own funds been diverted for appalling purposes. Without yet knowing what the standard of proof will be under the Canadian legislation, it is likely that damages could also number in the hundreds of millions.

Of course, in reality the PLO will probably survive because there is no way to guarantee the plaintiffs will ever see a penny of this money. Only about 2 percent of the damages that have been assessed in cases under the U.S. legislation have actually been paid to victims and their families. Instead, Van Loan argues the power of such suits is largely symbolic. It is a chance for Canadians “to seek justice that might otherwise have been denied them.” But even as symbolism, this is absolutely the wrong message for Canada to send.

In Israel terrorism is a scab that never heals. At funerals for victims on both sides, the faces of relatives are still contorted with grief when they begin to harden with anger and the readiness for revenge. These lawsuits are said to be about justice, but there is no justice in a lawsuit that drags on for years with no possibility of just compensation. There is only public humiliation, and the generations of anger it ensures.

No one doubts the unjustifiable horrors committed by terrorists in the West Bank, or that the Canadian government should do everything in its power to force the PLO to crack down on terrorist cells and rogue members in its own fold. But this kind of public shaming only threatens to undercut delicate diplomatic negotiations and harm by far the best — if imperfect — alternative for good government in the West Bank. It will drag the PLO onto the international stage for years to come, setting an example of revenge and humiliation that has nothing to do with the Canadian justice I know and want the world to see.