Dead Ends (18 page)

It was unnecessary and irrational. The crew was healthy. They were not in quarantine, and came to the hearing in a van with Mounties who saw no need for masks.

Not all the migrants were unwelcome. A well-fed dog was on the second boat, a Labrador crossbreed that the Victoria
SPCA
named Breeze. Adoption offers came in from across Canada.

The migrants on the second boat weren't as well briefed. Asked why they came to Canada, seventy-seven of the 131 said they wanted to make money. The correct answer is as a refugee fleeing persecution.

This was all getting expensive. Immigration Canada spent about $400,000 in two weeks dealing with the new arrivals. The provincial government had to find space for about fifty children in government care.

Partly, costs were so high because of the push to “get tough” with the migrants. Refugee claimants are usually released and told when to appear for a hearing. Almost three-quarters of the adults on the first boat were released into the community.

But all the adults on the second boat were detained, an expensive alternative. (It is worth noting that almost half the adults on the first boat who were released disappeared before their refugee hearings.)

Then came ship number three. A Canadian Forces Aurora patrol plane spotted it on August 30. It looked like it was about to sink, so the navy and coast guard boarded the next morning and took the people to safety. Another 163 adults and twenty-seven minors entered the system. The migrants were ferried to Gold River, a town on Vancouver Island's west coast hammered by a mill closure and job losses.

Ten days later, the fourth ship, the largest yet, arrived. The captain tried briefly to outrun a Canadian Forces destroyer, then hoisted a white T-shirt as a flag of surrender. There were 146 people on board.

The summer had brought 599 people to Canada's shores in two months—about 2.4 percent of the total who would make claims for asylum that year.

But somehow, the boat people sparked fear and anger, while the 24,000 refugee claimants coming by air or land were ignored.

Everyone braced for another wave of migrant ships on the British Columbia coast. Government departments worked on contingency plans.

But the ships never came. The botched journeys might have made people unwilling to book passage on the route, or the snakeheads might have found a better way to help people travel to North America. Maybe there were more jobs in China.

In British Columbia, 250 migrants were still in jail, taking up about ten percent of the available beds. An old prison in Prince George was reopened especially for the migrants.

The refugee process was painfully slow. By the next spring, there had been two mass deportations of ninety people each time. There had been an unsuccessful jail escape, a small prison riot, and an eight-day hunger strike by female inmates.

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Of the 599 people on the four boats, 580 made refugee claims and only twenty-four were accepted.

But only 330 people were deported.

Most of the rest just disappeared. The detained teenagers, in the province's care, flew away like birds leaving the nest—twenty-five in one night in Victoria. They had sacrificed too much to be sent back to China. Adults released from detention did the same. It was a good deal for taxpayers—the costs stopped once they had checked out of the system.

And no actual kingpins or organizers were ever charged with a crime. In fact, from all four ships, only five people were convicted of “organizing, aiding or abetting the coming into Canada of a group of persons who were not in possession of valid travel documents.”

The whole exercise cost, based on the lowest estimates, $40 million—or $67,000 per migrant. Much more than they paid for the journey.

And for one ugly summer, Canadians seemed a meaner people.

T
he van full of dynamite rolled across the lawn and stopped outside the Litton Systems factory in a Toronto suburb. The driver, Ann Hansen, flicked a switch to start the timer. She stepped out, set down a carboard box with a warning that the van was a rolling bomb, and disappeared into the night. It was 11:15 p.m. on a cloudy Thursday night in 1982, two weeks before Halloween.

From a nearby phone booth, Julie Belmas called the factory, which had been the scene of protests over Litton's work on guidance systems for U.S. cruise missiles. Belmas warned security that the van was a rolling bomb. They had twenty-five minutes to evacuate the building and clear the streets.

The guard didn't understand the message. Nervous and worried about the call being traced, Belmas hung up without answering his questions.

Just fourteen minutes later, a huge explosion rocked the factory, shook homes up to five kilometres away, and sent shrapnel in all directions. Seven people—Litton workers and police—were hurt, two seriously.

Direct Action, an odd collection of Vancouver anarchists who became known as the Squamish Five, had staged their most spectacular terror attack.

But not their first. Or their last.

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They were an unlikely crew. Brent Taylor, twenty-five at the time of the blast, went to Oak Bay High School in Victoria's poshest community, the son of two university professors. He hit the road after high school, first to party, then to learn from U.S. terror groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army, famous for kidnapping Patty Hearst. He told his father he was going to be a revolutionary.

Ann Hansen, twenty-eight, grew up in Concord, a small town later captured by Toronto's northward sprawl. She was one of five children of Danish immigrants who found a better life on an acreage amid idyllic farms and woods. She discovered Marxism in university and travelled to Europe in 1979 to learn about urban guerilla groups like the Red Army Faction. An anarchist-led battle with police in Paris was “probably one of the most exciting days of my life,” she recalled.

Gerry Hannah, twenty-five, grew up in the Vancouver suburbs and was semi-famous as Gerry Useless, the bass player for the popular Vancouver punk band the Subhumans.

Belmas was twenty, part of the group for two years, joining with her boyfriend, Hannah. She too had a middle-class background. Peaceful protests, she decided, weren't working.

Doug Stewart, twenty-five, was the group's technical wizard, happily poring over bomb-making manuals and exploring security weak points.

They came together in a communal one-and-a-half-storey house in Burnaby, a Vancouver suburb, in 1980. The house was a centre of anarchist and protest activity. They shoplifted or Dumpster-dived for food, organized protests, produced pamphlets and posters, and stole what they needed. Taylor, then twenty, had made the news when he hit then Conservative leader Joe Clark with a cream pie during a 1977 Vancouver visit.

The ideology was fuzzy, but the goals were clear: Disrupt the established order; challenge all institutions; and fight a long list of wrongs, from pollution to prisons to poverty.

And have fun. The fact was that being a revolutionary, risks and all, was exciting. Belmas liked buying second-hand clothes for disguises; Hansen revelled in the rush of crime.

Hansen's arrival from Toronto brought change to the group. They began to talk more about guns and false identities and robberies to fund real guerrilla acts, less about symbolic protests.

It started small. They vandalized a mining company office in downtown Vancouver in April 1981 to protest marine pollution, throwing jars of paint and rotting fish through the windows in a nighttime raid. No one paid attention.

Hannah and Belmas, then just eighteen, were involved in a second, slightly more effective, effort to vandalize the office. At least it rated a few paragraphs on an inside page of the newspaper.

Then Belmas proposed travelling to Victoria to attack the Environment Ministry that approved the mine's plans. A night attack would draw attention to the pollution on the north coast. “Plus it would be fun,” Belmas added.

This time, they threw highway flares as well as paint through the windows. There was smoke and water damage and a front-page story in the
Victoria Times Colonist
. But the media called them “yahoos.” For people who wanted to be revolutionaries, that stung.

They wanted to be taken seriously. If small actions don't work, there are only two choices—go bigger, or give up on guerrilla acts as a tool of change. The five weren't ready to give up.

Over the next year, they prepared. Hansen got a firearms certificate and legally bought a rifle, a Ruger Mini-14. One gun was not enough; in November, a break-in at a gun collector's home let them grab twelve handguns, semi-automatic rifles, and shotguns. They diligently practised shooting in the mountains near Squamish and stockpiled ammunition.

Real actions took money, and robbery was the guerrilla way. Their first two attempts failed. But Hansen successfully pulled a gun and grabbed a bag of money from a grocery store manager on his way to the bank. They stockpiled fake
ID
s and studied bomb making.

They picked targets. Litton Industries of Toronto made guidance systems for U.S. cruise missiles. The arms race, the
group reasoned, threatened the world and enriched a few. BC Hydro was building a transmission line that damaged the environment and would lead to more industry on Vancouver Island. Both deserved to be attacked.

Surprisingly easily, they stole hundreds of kilograms of dynamite from highway work sites. Idealism, naiveté, arrogance, thrill-seeking, fuzzy ideology, romance, both political and personal, and groupthink drove them on.

A year after the attack on the Environment Ministry, the group was ready for another “action” on Vancouver Island.

On May 30, 1982, a sunny afternoon, Hansen and Stewart cut the fence around an almost completed transformer substation, part of the controversial transmission line. The substation was in the woods near the island's east coast; there was no security. They set up five explosive charges, detonators, and timers. At 1:30 a.m., when they were back in Vancouver drinking coffee, 160 kilograms of dynamite rocked the substation. Windows rattled kilometres away and the explosion was heard fifty kilometres away. The transformers, a crane, and other equipment were wrecked. The total damage was almost $4 million.

Direct Action claimed credit and issued a statement to the media.

But again, the response was disappointing. There was news coverage. BC Hydro offered a reward. Police launched a big investigation. But, Taylor noted days later, the public didn't really pay much attention. (That can be partly explained by the group's media statement linking the bombing to “the ecological destruction and the human oppression inherent in the industrial societies of the corporate machine in the West and the communist machine in the East” and “the sinister bonds that underlie … oppressive human relations.” And partly by the fact British Columbians rejected political violence.)

They were undeterred. Plans were already under way for the Litton bombing. Hansen, Taylor, and Belmas drove to Toronto in late September, conscious of the hundreds of kilograms of dynamite riding with them. That wasn't the only
reason the trip was tense. Ann Hansen and Brent Taylor were in a relationship, but she was convinced he was flirting, and maybe sleeping, with the much younger Belmas. Even revolutionaries get jealous.

They prepared, casing the Litton plant, stealing the vehicles they would need. And on October 14, they struck.

It was a disaster. The warning to Litton security wasn't understood. The dynamite exploded eleven minutes ahead of schedule, before the building was cleared. The blast and shrapnel injured three police officers, five Litton employees, and three people driving on the nearby highway.

Terry Chikowski, a thirty-four-year-old Litton employee, was trying to get staff out of the building when the bomb exploded. He found himself sprawled in the rubble, his back ripped open, ribs smashed, and organs shattered. Doctors worked seven hours to save him. Employee Barry Blunden's skull was fractured.

The three bombers were back in their apartment watching
TV
when the program was interrupted by a news bulletin, with horrific scenes of damage and a reporter talking to a victim with blood pouring from a head wound. Belmas started crying. Hansen contemplated suicide. Taylor talked about fleeing to the United States.

The bombing was attacked by virtually everyone involved in the protest movement against Litton and the arms race. Two communiqués issued by Taylor and the group—each about 2,000 words long—did nothing to increase support. One attempted to blame Litton staff and the police for the injuries because they didn't react quickly enough. It was seen as a pathetic attempt to avoid responsibility.

Undaunted, the group reunited in Vancouver to plan their next steps.

But by October 29, the massive police investigation had already identified Taylor as a suspect in the bombing. It wasn't difficult. Taylor had been a high-profile activist since the Joe Clark pie incident, and there were obvious links between the BC Hydro and Litton bombings.

And Canada's community of potential bombers was small. It wasn't hard to draw up a list of suspects, or surprising that Taylor was on it.

They continued planning, working with an associated cell, the Wimmin's Fire Brigade, on arson attacks on Red Hot Video stores that sold violent pornography.

But as Hansen cased the stores, the
RCMP
were watching. The attacks went ahead—two stores were set on fire with gasoline bombs. Belmas failed in her attack on a third store when the Molotov cocktail wouldn't ignite.

She was luckier than Hansen. Her attempt to use gasoline to burn one of the stores worked, but a fireball engulfed her. “I vaguely remember my coat being on fire and the smell of singed hair,” she recalled. Her trip to the emergency room, hours after a high-profile arson attack, was hardly likely to go unnoticed.