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Did Chrétien destroy Clark?

Last week's acquittal of former BC premier Glen Clark raises ominous questions about who was behind the failed investigation, and why it happened.

by Kevin Potvin
The Republic

To courtroom cheers from friends and supporters, and a big sigh of relief from the man and his family, former New Democratic Party leader and British Columbia premier Glen Clark, 44, was acquitted August 29 of criminal charges that he used his office to improperly influence the outcome of a casino licence application. Clark's exoneration, which took three-and-a-half years and millions of dollars to investigate and prosecute, would seem to finally close the book on this vast and sordid affair.

It does not. At the very best, curtains have fallen on nothing more than Act I of what is, at least, a three-act play.

In rendering her decision of innocence for Clark on charges that he breached the public trust and accepted a benefit, Judge Elizabeth Bennett strongly foreshadowed what new and dramatic direction the plot is about to take.

"The defence theory was, in part, that [RCMP] Staff Sergeant Peter Montague drove this investigation for political motives," Bennett said. "Whether there was in fact substance to the allegations cannot be determined because of the defence's decision not to cross-examine Staff Sergeant Peter Montague," she said. That cross-examination is now overdue.

Bennett's comments regarding Montague were interpreted by most media to mean she had effectively headed off any further speculation of a political conspiracy popular among the public. The outline of that conspiracy theory has it that Montague, BCTV reporter John Daly, and then-opposition and BC Liberal leader (now premier) Gordon Campbell collaborated to destroy Clark's political career and to skewer the left-leaning NDP's chances in the next provincial election by drumming up false allegations and illegally using police services to pursue a phony investigation of Clark that would embarrass him publicly. Instead, Bennett's acquittal of Clark could fuel a blaze which may reach all the way up to the Prime Minister's Office.

An anonymous letter, a sheet of used plywood, and reports of occasional neighbourhood potluck dinners was what apparently caused police to raid a sitting premier's house and initiate a $5 million multi-year investigation, and for the justice system to appoint a special prosecutor. Surely, then, well-documented political and personal ties between the lead investigator and the then-opposition leader, suspiciously strong psychic powers of a television news reporter, and expensive chartered jets to a vacationing judge in Palm Springs to win a questionable wiretap warrant, should lead at least to a little official curiosity. If nothing else, the RCMP head office in Ottawa must be concerned about $5 million spent on an investigation that produced a case which can at best be described, to be charitable, as lame.

BCTV reporter John Daly has maintained that he was only playing a lucky hunch the evening he showed up at then-premier Glen Clark's house expecting to find a police raid. It was quite a hunch. Such an event has never before happened in Canadian history. It was particularly lucky for Daly to guess the raid would occur at 8 pm, after usual business hours during which one might imagine the police would serve a summons to search for documents.

In raw footage of videotape prior to what television viewers saw on a live-TV interruption of the prime-time screening of a Friends episode, there is evidence of a high degree of collegial familiarity between the television crew and the warrant-serving police. The police do not seem at all surprised to find a camera crew standing by, waiting for them to arrive at the scene. In fact, as the premier's wife answered the door, the police politely introduced to her the BCTV crew poking over their shoulders. The odd timing of the raid on the premier's house and the strong evidence that a reporter with the leading news station in the province had been tipped off by police to the raid in order, it appears, to capture it live for prime-time television viewers, are facts that demand investigation.

Staff Sergeant Montague has maintained that he was only conducting proper police work in following up on an anonymous tip alleging an improper arrangement between a casino licence applicant and the premier of BC. But this is not Montague's first brush with scandal. In the summer of 1996, an Indian known as Wolverine led a native occupation of private land near Gustafson Lake, BC. RCMP moved in to clear the occupation camp, but encountered resistance. During the ensuing stand-off, gun shots were fired, prompting then-BC Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh to request the deployment of the Canadian armed forces. The event became the largest domestic deployment of both the Canadian army and the RCMP in Canadian history.

In an official inquiry that followed, it turned out that the only shots fired were those by the police, possibly by accident, drawing return police fire. RCMP at the time characterized the Indians as armed and dangerous, and the media, BCTV and The Vancouver Sun especially, ran headlines alleging the Indians were shooting at police. The allegations were based almost solely on RCMP press releases, because, at the time, reporters were barricaded by the RCMP about 100 miles away from the scene at Gustafson Lake, and could witness nothing.

Peter Montague was, at the time, the official RCMP press spokesperson, in charge of the press releases. He was also instrumental in the plan to keep the press far away from the scene. During questioning at the inquiry, Montague blurted out that he was in charge of smear campaigns, and that the Gustafson Lake Indians were his target. What Montague meant by this statement has never been adequately addressed.

Gordon Campbell has maintained that he and his constituency office staff were merely following routine procedure when they passed on to Montague's office an anonymous and rambling letter alleging some vague connection between a man by the name of Dimitrios Pilarinos, who was seeking a casino licence from the provincial government and then-premier, Glen Clark. But anonymous letters alleging a variety of crimes or suspicions thereof are a regular staple of every political constituency office mailbox, as well as newspaper reporters' mailboxes. Typically, they're dismissed. But this one went straight to a senior RCMP officer's desk. It managed the extraordinary trip possibly because Campbell and Montague are close friends who see each other socially on a frequent basis. Furthermore, following the Gustafson Lake inquiry, then-opposition Liberal leader Gordon Campbell invited Montague to run as a candidate for provincial office with the BC Liberal Party.

The anonymous letter turned out to be written by a man by the name of Dimitri Vrahnos, who was identified as the author of several anonymous letters to various constituency offices and local newspapers over the years alleging a wide variety of perceived crimes by a number of people. As Judge Bennett discovered, Vrahnos's suspicions about Clark were completely unfounded. He was correct to write that Pilarinos claimed to have the premier in his pocket. But Bennett found that Pilarinos "was only pretending" to have won Clark's influence in the casino licencing process in his discussions with investors in the project. This is the grounds for Pilarinos's conviction for fraud in the affair.

Vrahnos's letter must have presented what appeared to Campbell to be an opportunity to embarrass his arch nemesis, Clark, who earlier stole away from Campbell a sure-win election victory. All that was required was that police be convinced to take the letter seriously as well. Personal connections between Campbell and Montague could well have ensured that. To alert the public to the trumped-up scandal, a compliant media needed to be co-opted. Personal connections between BCTV reporter John Daly and both Campbell and Montague could have ensured that as well.

Pulling the focus back, even larger questions arise. Just prior to the breaking of the casino licence scandal, then-premier Clark endured the wrath of Ottawa in the form of recriminations from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien over Clark's handling of a fishing dispute between British Columbia and Alaska. Clark complained that Ottawa was not helping BC fishers in the way that Washington was helping Alaska fishers in a dispute over the allotment of international quotas for salmon fishing on the west coast. To draw the attention of both Washington and Ottawa to the seriousness with which BC viewed its dispute with Alaska, Clark threatened to cancel the American lease on a body of water off of Nanaimo, BC, known as the Nanoose Bay Torpedo Testing Range.

The site is far more than merely a torpedo testing range. The American Pentagon uses the site to test a broad range of sophisticated navy weapons of the kind actively employed in wars in the Persian Gulf, for example. The kind of activity conducted at Nanoose Bay is environmentally questionable to the degree that it is unlikely any west coast American state government would allow a similar Pentagon testing site to be located off their shores.

Nanoose Bay is leased from the BC provincial government. If Clark succeeded in canceling the lease, the Pentagon would be deprived of an important weapons testing site that they couldn't easily replace. After Clark was forced to resign in the scandal arising from the RCMP raid of his home, the Canadian federal government under Chrétien took the historically unprecedented step of expropriating Nanoose Bay from BC, before promptly renewing the Pentagon's lease on it in perpetuity.

This extraordinary move underlines the importance Ottawa attaches to the security of the Pentagon lease of Nanoose Bay, as well as Washington's level of concern. Questions should be raised about what transpired between US President Bill Clinton and Chrétien during the Nanoose Bay crisis.

Both before and after the Nanoose Bay incident, official inquiries into other federal political events revealed a rogue group of RCMP officers secretly available to the Prime Minister's Office to conduct illegal and unconstitutional operations. Chief amongst these events is the scandal surrounding the RCMP pepper-spraying of legal demonstrators at the University of British Columbia campus during the 1995 APEC summit.

The official inquiry into that event determined that a man by the name of Jean Carl, who then oversaw management of the Prime Minister's Office, issued orders to Sergeant Hugh Stewart to clear demonstrators away from a position where then-Indonesian dictator General Suharto might be able to see them during an official dinner at the UBC President's residence. RCMP witnesses testified that they feared Suharto's bodyguards, who might have been heavily armed, might have reacted dangerously to the sight of the demonstrators, because Suharto was then besieged by global demonstrations against his brutal rule.

Stewart, who infringed the constitutional rights of Canadians in his pepper-spray attack, has since gone on to become the highest ranking RCMP officer in BC. Carl, who ordered Stewart to break the law, but did not finger the Prime Minister as the original source of the order, went on to replace the fired head of the Business Development Bank of Canada in another Chrétien scandal involving improper government loans to a failed golf course Chrétien owned.

The head of the APEC inquiry in his report noted that within the RCMP there exists a group dedicated to conducting secret political operations on behalf of the Prime Minister. There must have been contact between US president Clinton and Chrétien over the issue of Clark's alarming threat to cancel the lease on Nanoose Bay. A potentially fruitful area to concentrate investigations on would be to learn if Jean Carl and Peter Montague are in some way connected. There is already a firm connection established between Carl and RCMP officer Hugh Stewart. Given the gravity with which Clark's threats over Nanoose Bay were received in Washington and Ottawa, it is not implausible that Montague was conducting work on behalf of Carl's secret group of Chrétien loyalists within the RCMP when he collaborated with Gordon Campbell and enlisted John Daly in a campaign to destroy Clark.

Campbell would have been an easy ally for Montague to recruit, since he stood to make immense political gains with such a trumped-up scandal. Indeed, the one-sided results of the next election, which saw the BC Liberal Party take 77 of 79 seats, has been widely attributed to the legal scandal surrounding Clark. And Daly, along with most of the BC establishment media, would also have made an easily-won accomplice simply out of the local media's insatiable taste for political scandal, however implausible, and their demonstrated especial hostility to the socialist NDP government of Glen Clark.

Judge Bennett, in her decision of August 29, warned against smearing Montague's name. But Montague, in this scenario, is merely a pawn. The opening of Act II in the affair should be set in the Prime Minister's Office, with this question: Did Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien illegally deploy his rogue group of RCMP officers to remove from elected office a BC premier who proved an irritant in Chrétien's relations with US president Clinton?

The fact that the Ottawa headquarters of the RCMP somehow found over $5 million in a tight budgetary environment to finance a bogus investigation of Clark raises grave suspicions of a serious breach of the most sacrosanct elements of the constitution. The possibility of a secret federal government-orchestrated destruction of a provincial government, with illegally-employed national police resources, is one that must be taken seriously, however incredible it seems.

Montague is the "G Gordon Liddy" key to this gate, and the people won't be satisfied until he appears before an official inquiry. Sufficient threat of penalty at the disposition of a properly appointed inquiry panel may well cause Montague to roll over and give up Carl. Also with sufficient threat of penalty, Carl may this time roll over and give up Chrétien. A byproduct of such an inquiry would be the head of BC Premier Gordon Campbell.

Those are pretty big targets, and they won't easily fall, especially if the starting point is an incomprehensible anonymous letter. Thirty years ago, it must also have seemed the US president was a pretty big target to contemplate bringing down, starting with a picked lock to a hotel room in Washington. In that traumatic affair, Americans learned much about the necessity for safeguards for basic democracy. Canadians are due for a similar lesson.

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