Back in time: December 1989

This column was published in The Daily News in Halifax 30 years ago today, December 10, 1989. Four days earlier, 14 young women at École Polytechnique in Montreal had been separated from their male classmates and brutally murdered. Their murderer accused them of being feminists and said that feminists had ruined his life.

There were already people who were insisting that this act was an aberration, that the killer was a one-of-a-kind madman. Feminists fought that view long and hard and this year — 30 years later — it's finally been acknowledged that the massacre was motivated by misogyny and was an extreme instance of violence against women.

Meanwhile, a woman or girl is killed every three days in Canada, with a total of 118 killed by violence in 2019, according to the latest report from the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability.

The only changes I've made in the column from 30 years ago are a couple of short additions in square brackets.

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December 10, 1989

On Thursday morning, distinguished lawyer and former MP George Cooper made a little joke on CBC Radio’s Information Morning. He was discussing the recent NDP leadership convention with host Don Connolly and panel mates Dale Godsoe and Ray Larkin when he decided to use a colourful comparison to express his opinion about some aspect of the race.

It’s a good news/bad news sort of situation, he said, like that old joke about your mother-in-law driving over a cliff — trouble is, she was in your brand new Cadillac at the time. I believe I detected some laughter from the others and I’d be interested to know whether the CBC switchboard lit up with outraged callers, the way it does when someone says a rude word on the air. Somehow I doubt it.

In my household, we sat in stunned disbelief, hearing a joke which would be in poor taste at the best of times but was absolutely scandalous being told and snickered at the morning after the murder of 14 women at the University of Montreal.

It wasn’t the only joke being told that day. Francine Pelletier, a Montreal feminist who was interviewed extensively on the TV coverage of the murders, said that men in the corridors at Radio-Canada were treating the massacre in a most light-hearted way, one of them remarking, “I’ve often wanted to do that myself.”

At around the same time, a young friend of mine was walking into Tim Horton’s to buy some doughnuts. There were two men in front of her carrying a newspaper with a screaming headline about the murdered women and one of the men said something along the lines of, “way to go, buddy.”

Her friends asked her how she handled this awful moment; most of them felt, bravely, that they wished they’d been there. In retrospect, we can all come up with the enviable line, the cutting quip, the perfect putdown.

She said nothing, of course. There are few women — including me — who could respond to those men. Such verbal violence is part of what renders women powerless, unable to act, not so much from fear as from emptiness, from the debilitation that results from crying out for so long and not being heard.

I’ve been told so often — all feminists have — to lighten up, to learn to take a joke. They don’t really mean anything by it, you know. This week, finally, I’ve been told by men — among others, by Peter Gzowski [the late host of CBC Radio's Morningside] and his panel on the radio, by Tom Regan [a former columnist with The Daily News] on the phone, by my husband at home — that it is time for them to do something about their violent brothers.

They know now that they must begin listening to women and they must refuse — loudly — to listen to the dehumanizing “jokes” that so many of them allow to slip by. They must disdain the views of those who keep saying that the carnage in Montreal was an isolated act carried out by a madman.

They must examine and be willing to change their political, economic and judicial systems, all of which conspire to keep women in positions of dependence. They must observe their sons — their vocabularies, the games they play, the way they’re learning to deal with anger, the things they say about little girls. They must stop undermining the mothers and, once and for all, lay to rest that age-old excuse that “boys will be boys.”

They must not simply be available to provide protection; they must work actively to create a safer world, where their sisters and daughters and mothers can live with the same sense of security that brothers, sons and fathers take for granted. They must recognize and acknowledge that the 14 women in Montreal are only the most recent to die at the hands of a man, that in 1987, almost 70 per cent of women murdered in our country were murdered by the men they lived with.

One of the buttons we brought back from the Winnipeg NDP convention — where I saw the joy and exhilaration on the faces of the women who had worked to elect Audrey McLaughlin as their leader — bears the slogan “Men of quality are not threatened by women seeking equality.” The words seem almost horrible in their irony this week but the message remains true.

And so it’s time to take another step forward, to convince men that violence against women is the fault of men and — to resurrect an old phrase — if they’re not part of the solution, they’re part of the problem.

The two lost years of Pandora

(Pandora was a Halifax feminist publication that was taken to the Human Rights Commission in the early 1990s for discriminating against a man. This is an account I wrote after the hearing for the The Canadian Forum.)

In March of 1992, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission announced a decision in favour of Pandora, a Halifax feminist publication, which had refused to publish a letter written by a man.

"I am satisfied on the evidence before me," wrote the adjudicator, lawyer David Miller, "that women as a group have been and are disadvantaged and unequal in our society by reason of sex... It follows, accordingly, that a disadvantaged group may undertake a programme or activity which has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or classes of individuals including those discriminated against on the basis of sex even if that results in distinctions being made with respect to the advantaged group...

"I am also satisfied that Pandora is an activity which has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantage to women based on sex. I am also satisfied that Pandora's policy of maintaining Pandora as a single sex newspaper is reasonable for the purpose of ameliorating disadvantage."

In the mainstream media, paternalistic pundits all sang the same tune: right decision, wrong reason. All agreed that Pandora has a right to set her own editorial policy – although, they added, all publications owe it to their readers to publish a wide spectrum of opinion. Many of them were unable to comprehend the view that Pandora does publish a wide spectrum of opinion – all written by women.

But this was not an issue of freedom of the press. Indeed, throughout the Human Rights Commission hearing, Pandora made it plain that the only issue was the need for women-only spaces as one way of working toward equality.

The beginning

This story begins in the spring of 1990 when Pandora ran an article about child custody. Halifax resident, Gene Keyes, phoned the newspaper to ask if he could write a letter in response. He was turned down because of Pandora's clearly stated editorial policy: "...Pandora reserves the right to publish only letters that fall within the guideline of our editorial policy; letters must be written by women and be woman-positive; we do not accept material that is intolerant or oppressive."

Alas, Gene Keyes was no ordinary reader. During the '80s, he had been through a bitter custody battle, which he'd lost; he was a well-known fathers' rights activist. He defines himself – and the media were always satisfied to accept him according to his own definition – as a member of a disadvantaged group: divorced fathers who are discriminated against by the justice system. (The facts don't bear him out. In our country, most child custody is settled amicably between two parents. In disputed cases, fathers gain custody in over 50 per cent of the cases.)

In June of 1990, Gene Keyes filed a formal complaint of sex discrimination with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission against Pandora Publishing. Although there was an attempt at conciliation, no agreement could be reached. Incredibly, the Commission decided to proceed with the case.

Pandora

Pandora cannot accurately be called a "newspaper" although it does, indeed, publish some news. In general though, it's a publication by, for and about women which asks its contributors to share their experiences and their realities with their sisters; it makes no claims to "objectivity" as the mainstream media do. It asks its women readers to become part of the publication – to write to Pandora as if they were writing to a friend.

And indeed, there is a feeling of sisterhood in Pandora, a sense that the paper is a shared activity and that the struggles described are collective, not individual. If a single mother writes about living in welfare poverty, she doesn't expect to hear someone hissing, "get a job!" If a teenager writes about incest or a grandmother writes about fear on the streets, they feel the security of a community which will understand and help.

It wasn't like that at The Hearing.

The Hearing

The Human Rights Commission hearing against Pandora was held on five cold days in January of 1992. The adjudicator, David Miller, was male. The Commission's lawyer, Randall Duplak, was male. Gene Keyes, representing himself, was male. And the system was, most certainly and unmistakeably, male.

It was an adversarial situation of cross-examinations and rebuttals. There was always the feeling that if a witness slipped up and said the wrong thing, fingers would be pointed, heads would roll.

There was something surreal about seeing this little feminist newspaper forced onto the defensive by a hierarchal, authoritarian system that she had no part in making.

To make her case that women are a disadvantaged group in our society, Anne Derrick, Pandora's lawyer, called 18 witnesses including a feminist historian, sociologists, experts on media, and past and present members of the Pandora collective. All but one of the witnesses were women. (The Pandora women appeared under pseudonyms; when the news of the hearing hit the mainstream media, death threats began showing up on their answering machine.)

After the hearing – and before the decision – some of the women wrote in Pandora how they felt about what had happened:

"...My special relationship with Pandora as a small women's-only community was torn as I watched and experienced male definitions and bureaucracy invade our thoughts, opinions, experiences and policies. We were no longer operating on our own ground, but became vulnerable to the rules of those who were defining the agenda of the inquiry. I wished I could just jump up and scream out, `this is crazy and we're not going to take it any more...'" one wrote.

Another wrote: "...Because women have been, and are, deliberately excluded from the development of the texts and practices of the underpinnings of this society (law, medicine, religion, business etc.), we have been silenced and oppressed. Sheltered spaces such as Pandora give us a safe place to birth our own agenda, teach it, nurture its growth until we someday send it forth a mature adult who will stand beside the texts and practices to have an equal say in society..."

Still another wrote: "...We danced with the system, to their rules, in their ballroom. It was damned uncomfortable, frustrating and tiring, but we survived, elegantly..."

The aftermath

Anne Derrick, Pandora's lawyer, says this case never should have proceeded, but as it did, it becomes a very important case and decision.

"The Commission tries to downplay the importance of the case," she says, "but it is the first time in Canada such a decision has been reached. It has much broader implications than most people have considered; not only women but all other disadvantaged groups in society will be affected by it."

Derrick was not particularly surprised at the outcome. "I felt the choice of this adjudicator gave us the prospect of getting this decision. I felt he had the ability and the intellect to grasp the arguments."

Having said that, she's also not persuaded that the Commission learned anything from the hearing.

"The response we've had from the Commission about what happened after the hearing makes me say, `they still just don't get it.'"

The day after the Commission's decision was announced, Derrick and a coalition of Pandora's friends called a news conference to demand an apology for the language used by the Commission's lawyer in his final written argument. He called Pandora women and their expert witnesses "hysterical man-haters," "radical extremists," who presented arguments "beyond reason and sanity." He said the paper did not represent women but only lesbians. He noted that the witnesses for Pandora did not take their oaths on the Old or New Testaments, the Koran, or any other of the many holy scriptures provided, but were affirmed.

Women's groups and individuals rallied in defence of Pandora and her witnesses but the Human Rights Commission has been unwilling to deal with the inappropriate language used by their lawyer and considers the case closed.

Most people would agree that part of being oppressed means that you have been defined by someone else. For women, these definitions not our own, have been very dangerous, not to say life-threatening. Women have been told that sexual harassment is flattering, that rape is just good sex preceded by a struggle, that being battered is our own masochistic fault.

Pandora, still as wise but now much poorer, is back to providing a safe space for women to work on their own definitions; back to challenging those oppressive structures that are responsible for these two lost years.

And finally, Pandora is back to being by, for and about women – this time, with no arguments.

Sharon Fraser is a Halifax journalist. She testified on behalf of Pandora as an expert witness on media.

A posthumous award for Ray's book, 2019

Ray's last book before his death, Through Sunlight and Shadows, won the 2019 New Brunswick Book Awards prize for fiction. It was presented at a New Brunswick Writers' Federation gala at the Moncton Press Club May 25.

I was very grateful to be there and to have the privilege of accepting the award as Ray's former spouse and as his literary executor. I spoke from notes and this is approximately what I said:

One of the great moments in Ray's life happened when he was a very young man living in Chatham, New Brunswick. He saw a poem by Alden Nowlan and it was the first time he realized that you didn't have to be British, or American, or dead, to be a writer. If he were here tonight, he would see so much more evidence of that early realization.

I know he would want to thank his publisher, Lesley Choyce at Pottersfield Press for making such a beautiful book. And he would thank his many friends who so willingly proof-read and critiqued and edited to make sure it was the best book it could be. He had become a lot mellower as he got older and actually allowed people to make suggestions and possible changes.

My husband, Dan, is here tonight. Dan and I were with Ray during his final hours and in the days leading up to his death, while he was still able to communicate, we could see that one of the things he was most concerned about was his literary legacy.

Because of that, I want to thank the archives at the UNB library and the archivists who worked with us for their careful and loving collection of his works.

The archivist who helped us clear out Ray's apartment was amazing. It was like watching someone panning for gold and pouncing regularly on what was obviously a nugget for her. Pure gold. Ray wrote always and everywhere. He left behind countless notebooks packed with writing that was almost illegible to anyone but him. A scrap of paper on his kitchen table might have been a grocery list or it might have been a list of synonyms — a search for the perfect word. Notes scribbled in the margin of a sports magazine left in his bathroom might be the perfect scrap of dialogue he was looking for.

Christine gathered and filed every one of them and when I was able to tell Ray about the process — he was already in palliative care — it seemed to bring him to a place of peace.

Ray's funeral was held in the church of his childhood and he's buried just a stone's throw from the house where he was born — the house and the church that figure so largely in this very book.

It seems a fitting ending — full circle, in fact, and I think he would see this as a perfect conclusion to this part of his story.

He left some unpublished work so there will be a sequel — I'm his literary executor so I can say that — but talk of that is best left for another day.

Thank you all, so much, for this wonderful honour.

Dan didn't want to be obtrusive while I was speaking — which I think was very considerate — so he shot the pictures from his only possible angle.

Fire! Noise! Music! how much excitement can you take?

Today, March 19, is the feast day of St. Joseph. He's the patron saint of Canada and of many worthy causes but nowhere is he more revered and celebrated than in parts of Spain. In Valencia today, a days-long festival will come to an end with fireworks, parades, lots of music and finally, bonfires throughout the city as massive statues built for the occasion will be set ablaze.

This is the statue in Valencia's main square and it will be the last one to burn tonight. It will be sometime around or after midnight their time — sometime after eight here in Atlantic Canada. (They haven't set their clocks ahead.)

The festival is called las fallas, literally "the fires."

I was once in Valencia for las fallas. When I got out of bed on March 19, I thought I had awakened in hell. The cacophony was deafening. I looked out the window and the air was filled with smoke. People were crowded into the streets, laughing and singing with bands that were playing in most neighbourhoods. We went out and joined the ruckus and got swept along in an almost helpless state; it was impossible to fight against it. I noticed at a certain point that many people were wearing earplugs, an excellent idea although too late for us.

There were firecrackers going off everywhere but also day-time fireworks. You couldn't really see them but seeing them was not the point. You could definitely hear them. Bars and cafés and restaurants were open and doing a grand business selling mountains of paella and gallons of wine and beer.

We followed the crowd and saw lots of the crazy statues before they went up in flames. As so many of the festivals in Spain do, the symbols incorporate a lot of religion and politics and they're often viciously satirical. Trump shows up a lot this year.

Here he is in the company of Franco, Stalin and Hitler. We will probably hear the cheering from here as this one burns.

I'm going to watch the main statue burn on the webcam from the Plaza del Ayuntamiento (Town Hall Square). As I write this, they're already making the pre-burning preparations.

We survived it, being there in person, and I have to say it was very exciting even though in many ways, it was pretty scary.

Join me at the webcam though. I recommend it!

And tomorrow, the first day of Spring, the neighbourhoods will be back planning and drawing and collecting materials to get started on their statues for next year!