By Chris Fox
The Daily Gleaner
October 10, 2009
http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/819931
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| Michael Harris delivers a lecture at St. Thomas University on Wednesday. He’s the reporter who broke Mount Cashel story and has written extensively on the wrongful conviction and victimization of Donald Marshall Jr. Photo by Ray Bourgeois |
Michael Harris was one of the first people to bring sexual abuse inside the Catholic Church into the public consciousness when he exposed countless stories of abuse at St. Johns's Mount Cashel Orphanage in 1989, while publisher of the Sunday Express.
Since then he has written a book about the ordeal - Unholy Orders - and has also gone on to write extensively about the late Donald Marshall Jr., whose wrongful conviction for murder sent shockwaves through the country and, according to Harris, exposed deeply rooted racism inside the criminal-justice system.
Harris is living and working in Fredericton as the Irving chair in journalism at St. Thomas University and recently caught up with reporter Chris Fox to talk about the Bishop Raymond Lahey case, Mount Cashel and how the Canadian justice system wronged Donald Marshall Jr.
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Q: What was the last movie you saw and the last concert you went to?
A: The last movie I watched was John Wayne's 1960's film The Alamo.
When you are up here by yourself you watch a lot of movies. The last concert would have been Van Morrison at the jazz festival in Ottawa.
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Q: What do you think of the decision to reopen the Mount Cashel files after it came out that a victim there may have first reported seeing child pornography inside Bishop Raymond Lahey's house some 20 years before he was arrested for possession of child pornography in Ottawa earlier this month?
A: It is a complex issue. At the time of the Royal Commission by Sam Hughes, the justice minister got angry in the middle of it all and went to the commissioner and said, "Look you have to stop having the kids give such graphic details of what happened to them."
So instead of people saying exactly what happened they started giving a generalized version, and often commission council would lead them away from the facts.
One of those examples was the testimony about Raymond Lahey. Shane (Earle) did start to tell the story on the stand but never got pressed for any details.
If he had given the details of what he saw, the onus would have been on the journalists covering the event, the church and the police to go to Lahey and say what about this, but because it was a generalized version, nobody knew quite what he was talking about and since the inquiry was filled with desperately detailed stuff about physical and sexual abuse, it slipped by.
I don't sit and worry much about this one case, unless it turns out that Raymond Lahey had victims like Shane Earle and his brother Billy; then that means it might have been stopped back in 1989.
If that is the case everyone has a lot of explaining to do, and most especially the Catholic Church, because we now know that the archbishop was told about that incident by a priest back in the day. He is on vacation now and nobody can get an answer from him regarding what he did about this, but if it is in keeping with what he did about Mount Cashel, he did nothing and that matters a lot.
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Q: If that is proven to be the case what do you think should happen?
A: Well, I have always believed that senior Catholic officials who conceal a criminal act have obstructed justice. I have absolutely more compassion if you want to call it that for the priests who commit the crimes, because I think they are sick people, than the people who make corporate decisions inside that says, "Let's let our first response be to avert a scandal and hide the perpetrator."
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Q: You covered Mount Cashel right from the initial allegations through to the Royal Commission. Was that a difficult story to cover personally?
A: It was. At that time, I had two little kids and you go and see your kids sitting on the couch with their little hands folded across their chest and you realize that these kids (victimized at Mount Cashel) were the same age as your kids, and that takes you to a place that you never quite drag yourself out of again.
There is a great saying and I think it is true - when you go into the abyss the abyss looks at you.
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Q: How do you approach it when your kids come up to you and say, "Daddy what did you do at work today?" That has to be tough.
A: Well, I guess every parent makes the error of trying to create a perfect world for their kids as best as they are able to do it, and I will tell you one thing it taught me to be super, super vigilant about the kids whenever they were going off to any classes or any group stuff, but I also tried to preserve their innocence for as long as I could.
The funny part about it is when the kids did understand what I did and the books I had written, they were fascinated with what happened.
One became a psychologist dealing with kids with learning disabilities and the other a doctor - both helping professions - and I think that is where they got it.
Journalism is like that as well in the sense that when someone needs help we are sometimes the court of last appeal, and that is certainly true with (Donald) Marshall (Jr.) too.
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Q: Speaking of Donald Marshall Jr, whose wrongful conviction for murder you exposed and later wrote a book about, what type of person was he?
I read a column you wrote for the Ottawa Sun after his death, and it sounded like you had a very personal relationship with him.
A: He was a very aloof guy. He was a person that was put through something that very few people would have been able to go through, and I am amazed, for example, that he didn't commit another major crime after getting out of prison in 1982 given all the things that had happened before, but also all the things that happened after 1982 and even after 1983 when he was acquitted by the appeal court.
Once you get into the '90s and this new 21st century, his life was far from a happy ending, but he did his best with it.
As a person he was very tough and quite forgiving in an odd way. Even when he was drinking - or as he put it, "had a glow on-" he never turned to hatred of John McIntyre (the Sydney police chief heading the Seale murder investigation).
He might have crowed a little bit about how the system tried to beat him, but he never personalized it.
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Q: You mentioned the treatment he received after his conviction was overturned. How galling was it for you to witness everything from the judge's initial resistance to fully absolve him to the poor compensation he received compared to other wrongfully convicted Canadians ($200,000 and a monthly pension)?
A: Very. Take a look at some of the current settlements with Maher Arar. Relative to Marshall, it is just plain out-and-out prejudice and racism, and in fact, I was shocked when the system itself admitted that in the Royal Commission in 1990. There were a couple MPs that said this could have never have happened to a white person, and I think that is true.
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Q: You delivered a lecture called "Facts and Myths about the Donald Marshall Case" at St. Thomas University on Wednesday. What is the biggest thing Canadians have wrong about his story?
A: Canadians believe our country is not like other countries, and we may believe that Joe Blow walking down the street might not like Indians or black people or Chinese people, but we have a hard time with the fact that we might have institutional racism, and we do.
This case (Donald Marshall Jr.) is proof positive.
When you go through it in detail, you go away shaking your head, and I think that is why person after person that has looked at this from the institutional perspective has coming away saying a big factor in the way things turned out for Marshall was the fact that he was a native.
You know most Canadians looking at Marshall think what a terrible story that the wrong guy was in prison for 11 years, but it is a happy ending because he gets out, gets compensation, and his life starts again when that, in fact, is the biggest myth.
It wasn't a happy life. The court cases exacerbated it after the original miscarriage, even down to how they paid the man.
They gave him a cheque for $1,875 a month for the rest of his life because he was too irresponsible as a native to take the lump sum.
Even if he wanted to go through it that's his business, and I just think it was disgraceful that we did that to him.
Towards the end of his life right up until this summer, he would phone me actually and would say, "I have to get my hands on my money, but they won't give it to me. They treat me like a welfare recipient."
Chris Fox is a graduate of the St. Thomas University journalism program. Q&A appears each Saturday.
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