Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

Regrets

November 19, 2024

One evening, a short time before her passing, Lucette and I talked about regrets. She said she had none. I did, one of them was what I put her through and what she had missed out when I lost my job at the then Department of Foreign Affairs (today Global Affairs) for failing to report, under impossible conditions, the theft of millions of dollars.

A SUNNY DAY IN MAY

(Abbreviated from Shooting the Messenger,  Boreal Books)

Every morning, if the sun was shining, for a few hours the corridor in front of the small beige cell where I sat would be flooded with sunlight from the east facing windows in the section further down the hall where the bosses had their offices. I was staring into the brilliant May sunshine flooding the usually gloomy corridor when Bruce came running in.

"Do you have the 15 cents I loaned you for the bus the other day," he asked.

Bruce more than lived up to the stereotype of the penny-pinching Scot—in other ways he was not the archetype at all. He was fastidious to the extreme. Some can't see the forest for the trees; Bruce could not see the trees for the leaves.

Bruce and I were left much on our own when my first boss at Foreign Affairs, John Turley, accepted a posting as Chief Financial Officer to the London High Commission and Bruce's boss, the head of Systems Administration accepted another assignment or retired, I don’t know, but he too was no longer available.

They both became unavailable at a critical juncture in the implementation of Full Telegraphic Input of Financial Data. Bets were that it would be cancelled because testing and training on the new system was taking too long and posts were complaining. At this stage posts were somewhat overwhelmed with having to maintain the current financial reporting system and having to send additional information to Ottawa via our global communication network to allow us to iron out the kinks in the new system.

The information they were sending also allowed us to test their understanding of the new procedures to be followed once the old system was abandon and the new one took over.

It is difficult enough to train staff on a new system when they’re in the same building, imagine what it’s like when most of the people you have to train are mostly citizens (locally engaged staff) of another country. That is more than one hundred countries and twenty-four different time zones.

Bruce and I spent a summer and many more months, at 125 Sussex, working 14 hour days, and weekends getting staff around the world to prepare and transmit operational financial data in a manner that the central computer in Ottawa could process.

It was crunch-time when Bruce and I were asked to meet with Dave Gordon, the director with overall responsibility for the Full Telegraphic Input project.

"When can we go ahead with full telegraphic input of financial data?" he asked.

Gordon was asking us when the Department could abandon the old way of reporting financial information altogether. If the new electronic way of transmitting and managing financial information did not work as predicted after the old way of doing things was abandoned, it would be chaos, but not unmanageable chaos.

Except for a few posts, Warsaw in Eastern Europe, Addis Ababa in Africa and a handful of others who could present problems (which I felt we could easily handle) I was in favour of going ahead as soon as possible. Bruce wanted to wait until every posts had achieved perfection. A laudable but unrealistic goal.

Bruce was not into taking risk no matter how miniscule—no McDuff or Macbeth was he.

Gordon emphasized that the entire project was in jeopardy if we did not go ahead soon. Bruce would not budge.

At the end of a rather animated discussion between Bruce and me, I asked him: “Would you rather have an assured failure than risk an almost certain success?” The usually soft-spoken Bruce shouted his emphatic "YES!" I recommended taking a chance on success.

Gordon made his decision. We would go ahead with full telegraphic input of financial data the following month—ready or not. Bruce did not express any further misgivings. Somebody else would be blamed if things did not go as planned.

We went live the next month and the rest is history.

An ambitious, daring, innovative project to get a handle on the Department’s expenditures was a resounding success; a success due, in large measure, to Bruce and I (and Dave Gordon who as project manager had the most to lose but stayed the course) who rose to the challenge and saved the day when others, perhaps fearing a disaster with which they did not want to be associated, took their leave.

Getting back to Bruce and his 15 cents. He was almost beside himself. He was literally shaking as I reached into a pocket and found a dime and a nickel.

"Yes, I’ve got it," I said, and gave them to him.

Without saying another word, he ran out the door just seconds before two security guards showed up.

"Please come with us," one of the guards said.

The Foreign Affairs complex is comprised of three low-rise buildings (Towers A, B and C) which are linked by a large cavernous reception area. My little beige cell was on the ground floor of Tower C.

I was escorted down a long corridor that opened onto the reception area. We crossed the vast lobby where curious visitors waiting at the central reception desk looked on and embarrassed acquaintances exiting from the ground-floor cafeteria looked the other way.

Our destination was Tower A (the tallest of the three towers), the tower where the really important people had their offices.

We took the elevator to the floor where Canada’s former ambassador to Belgrade (then the capital of Yugoslavia, today the capital of Serbia), Assistant Deputy Minister, Personnel Branch, J.G. (Jim) Harris conducted his business. Ambassador Harris was between diplomatic assignments keeping busy in Ottawa until he could return to the job he was trained for.

An important and pressing piece of business for the Ambassador that day was firing me. Somehow, it seems appropriate that it was an ambassador on temporary assignment in Ottawa who would officially put an end to a nasty piece of business.

With me standing in front of him, Ambassador Harris, in the manner of medieval heralds for kings, tyrants and other potentates, read a formal proclamation of the crime for which I was being terminated.

You have neglected to submit to instructions from your superiors to begin work immediately on the project which was assigned to you namely the preparation of the report on currency fluctuation. In spite of instructions from your superiors you did not produce any work as part of this project.

The crime, that of insubordination for insisting that I could not complete using only an adding machine, a pencil and paper the Currency Fluctuation Report that I had programmed into the Department’s mainframe computer to perform more than a million monthly calculations, many, such as for the Italian lira, to seven decimal points.

The Impossible Report and the Missing Millions

With my firing formalities out of the way, I was escorted out of 125 Sussex. A poster with my picture and description was put up in a conspicuous place with a warning that I was not allowed in the building without an escort. Less than a year after proclaiming the end of my career as a public servant, Ambassador Harris returned to his diplomatic duties as Canada's High Commissioner to New Delhi.

*****

One evening, a short time before her passing, Lucette and I talked about regrets. She said she had none. I did, one of them being that losing my job and having to start over meant she was subjected to unnecessary hardship and debilitating uncertainty until I got back on my feet.

At the worst of times, and even as her world was closing in on her, she never complained about our life together, and that night was no different. She reached out and placed one hand on top of mine, looked at me with those soft blue eyes, and said, "Don't be sad; that doesn't matter. What matters is that during my life with you, I have always felt loved. What more could a woman ask for?"

A toast to us on the occasion of our 25th Wedding Anniversary

Two regrets I never divulged were about girlfriends to whom I abruptly said goodbye. I broke up with Glenna after attending her graduation. Following the dinner and dance, rather than drive to our special place where we would kiss and make-out, I drove her home and told her it was over. Was I afraid about what could happen next, and convinced that our relationship had no future deciding that someone else should be the first? I don’t know!

The way I behaved, and not talking things over, remains a lasting regret as does the way I ended my relationship with Margaret. She would fly to Ottawa from Windsor to visit me after I made the city my home. After I decided I was marrying Lucette, I simply packed the clothes she kept in my apartment and mailed them to her with a note that said, “I’m sorry.”

Returning to my apartment, after driving her to the airport after her last visit, I found a note she left behind: “I think am falling in love with you all over again.” When I wrote my own note, I felt a twinge of satisfaction that she might feel the pain I felt when I found her in bed with Rakesh; a twinge of satisfaction for a lifetime of regret. Not worth it!

Then, there is the death of a young woman, when I was a young man living across the hall from her, whose suicide I should have anticipated.

Of all my regrets there is one I consider poetic justice, which makes it even worse. I was working at the Energy Supplies Allocation Board (ESAB) when I came back from lunch and she wasn’t there. "Where is she?" I asked Arthur. When he told me, I only felt a twinge of remorse. That would change. It wasn't my decision, after all. It wasn't even Art's. I had told Art, who had told the chairman, who had told Art what to do, or so Art told me. Only years later would I fully appreciate the pain and humiliation I must have caused.

AN APPALLING INDISCRETION

(Abbreviated from Shooting the Messenger,  Boreal Books)

 When I came back from lunch she wasn’t there. "Where is she?" I asked Arthur. When he told me, I only felt a twinge of remorse. That would change. It wasn't my decision, after all. It wasn't even Art's. I had told Art, who had told the chairman, who had told Art what to do, or so Art told me. Only years later would I fully appreciate the pain and humiliation I must have caused.

The Energy Supplies Allocation Board (ESAB) was part of the Trudeau Government’s commitment to what it called a Made in Canada Price for Oil. This initiative took on a new urgency after the first energy crisis in 1973 which saw OPEC prices for crude more than double. Eastern Canada got most of its oil from OPEC; the pipeline carrying oil from Alberta stopped at Sarnia in southern Ontario. If nothing was done, most of Ontario, Québec and the Maritime provinces could expect to pay a lot more for oil, while Western Canada and parts of Ontario would continue to enjoy low prices.

Alberta did not have the disproportionate clout it has today and Trudeau chose to use revenues from the sale of oil from Alberta to the United States to subsidize oil imports from OPEC and Venezuela and thereby equalize gas prices across Canada.

On a regular basis, our registered accountant and auditor, who was also my boss, would travel to every oil company's head office in the United States to confirm that the documents submitted as justification for billions of dollars in compensation were legitimate.

 It was during a visit to the New York offices of the owners of the refinery at Come-by-Chance that he discovered claims paid out for more than 30 million dollars of oil that had never been delivered.

There was no secret about what went on at ESAB; it was a small organization, 30 employees or so. I should have known that when the secretary asked, "What if the press got a hold of this?" she was just doing what everybody else did: indulging in idle, somewhat pointless speculation and gossip. I told Arthur what the secretary had said about "the press getting a hold of this.” When I returned to work after lunch, she was gone.

When the guards came for me, I imagined what it must have been like for her. This made me feel both better and worse. Better, because in a way I felt it was what I deserved for that appalling indiscretion—poetic justice and all that; worse, because I imagined what was happening to me happening to her.

THREE PHOTOGRAPHS

It was about the time that Lucette had finished her radiation treatment and been told that she could expect to live at least another five years (it turned out to be eight) that I was diagnosed with a neoplastic cyst on the pancreas, at the worst possible location. Rather than perform a biopsy that could cause cancer cells to escape into the bloodstream if it was cancerous, it was decided to take a wait and see attitude and schedule another MRI six months hence.

My pessimistic self immediately assumed the worst. I was a semi-regular listener to The John Tesh Radio Show. When all this was happening, he happened to have a discussion about the last person you will remember before you draw your last breath. He said it would be a girl you were with during your teenage years.

I was not a teenager when I met Lucette and neither was she. I kept a box that contained pictures of Margaret, Glenna and Joyce. Thinking that I was going die before her, and that the last thing she would hear from me would be one of their names, and later find the box and assume that I loved someone else more than her, I got rid of it. What an idiot! My last memory will be of her and no one else, of that I am sure.

Who is Joyce? I am grateful to Joyce for being the first when I thought it would never happen, and for when Lucette asked me if I knew how to ride a horse (she was an accomplished rider), the answer was yes.

JOYCE

(Abbreviated from Love, Sex & Islam, Boreal Books)

The first time I had sex was also my first time on a horse. It was Joyce’s idea. She was still infatuated with my brother and knew that he loved to go riding on the Tk'emlups Indian reserve across the river, less than a mile from downtown Kamloops, British Columbia.

Girls like Joyce were not usually attracted to guys like me. Like most attractive, outgoing young women, she preferred the strong, physical type with the pleasant personality who knew how to dance—that was not me.

My brother’s interest in Joyce had waned as his interest in another young lady blossomed, and he was looking for a way to let her down gently. He suggested to Joyce that she might want to date me. For Joyce, that was a no-brainer. If dating the brother meant being close to the man she was still in love with, that was a price she was willing to pay.

The riding instructor reminded me as we left the corral, that if I ever wanted to enjoy sitting again, I must ride with my legs, letting my bum go up and down in rhythm with the motion of my horse's back.

About a mile into our slow trot in the direction of Mount Peter and Paul, Joyce, an accomplished rider just like my Lucette, decided she had had enough of this slow, single file canter and peeled off at a gallop heading towards the river, waving at me to follow. Once I had my ride pointed in the right direction, it understood. All I could do was hang on.

I was gaining on Joyce as we approached a bend in the Thompson River when her charging horse stopped suddenly, and a pair of flying hooves narrowly missed knocking out my mount's front teeth. An attempted sucker punch if there ever was one! The now insulted and angry beast beneath me was not about to let it go. It, too, stopped, swivelled 180 degrees, and before we knew it, both horses were knocking hooves. Joyce quickly regained control of her mount and, to my surprise, I managed to do the same with my rambunctious stallion.

About a mile into our slow trot in the direction of Mount Peter and Paul, the aboriginal leader of our little posse had galloped back to talk to me. "What’s the problem?" he shouted.

"My horse won’t go where I want him to go," I shouted back.

He came close enough to grab the bridle, and twisted my horse's head until its nose almost touched the tip of one of my boots. "You have to show your horse where you want him to go," he explained. "You have to show him who is the boss," and he galloped back to the head of the line. That lesson was undoubtedly the reason I managed to regain control of my charger.

With our rides under control, we made our way back to the stables. Back in the car, Joyce was not ready to go home just yet. She suggested I drive to a secluded place on the reserve where we could talk and watch, unobserved, others riding by.

Maybe she was still under the influence of the adrenaline rush, or maybe it was my unexpected competence as a cowboy, but Joyce was in the mood...

*****

To cap it all, a few months ago, a beautiful 30-something woman I had just met wanted us to spend time together. I was putting the finishing touches to Fade to Black - Triumph of the Irrational  and worried that if one thing led to another I might not get it done, I declined. Maybe it’s because I didn’t want her to give me a reason to live, who knows?

One last regret—a minor one you might say, considering… but you would be wrong. A regret made even worse by my doctor's observation that the type of activity I feared would interfere with completing my legacy— now a done thing with the publishing of Fade to Black would not have a caused my aneurism to burst before its time.