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OK: There was still no great -- oh, and I should step back a bit. In 1981, I left Ottawa and I went to British Columbia as a Regional Director for the Department of Secretary of State. And so I was no longer involved in the day-to-day discussions. My successor was a man named Kerry Johnson, and he inexplicably started talking to the Imai group again. And so I was getting calls from people in the department, in the program, saying, "Johnson is talking to Imai and company, and that's causing problems with the NAJC." My response was, "Hey, I'm not involved in this anymore. I'm out here as a regional director, I don't have any direct involvement in this kind of stuff." I guess I kind of said, "Quit calling me." Well, they didn't quit calling. And so by 1984, I went to the minister responsible for multiculturalism, Jack Murta. Highly irregular. I had no right to do it, I had no authority to do it, but I went to him. I didn't even know him. He was an MP from Manitoba who got appointed, had no involvement with multiculturalism whatsoever. Prior to his appointment, he was a potato farmer from Manitoba. It turns out to be, as it turned out, he was a wonderful, wonderful man who, with a deep sensitivity. But I went to him and I said, asked a meeting through his Chief of Staff, and guy named Newton Stacey. Said, "I'd like to meet with him, he's going to be in Ottawa for departmental meetings." Didn't talk to the deputy minister, didn't talk to the assistant deputy minister, I just went directly to the minister. When I think back on it, it was really not a very smart thing to have done. I could have got fired for having done what I did. But I went and I talked to him and I said, "Minister, you got to not listen to the Imai group. You can't listen to your Director of Multiculturalism," which, within the bureaucracy is something you just don't do. You shouldn't ever do that, but I did it. And was able to persuade him that the group he had to talk to was the NAJC.

And so the meetings ended and I got on my plane and went back to Vancouver. Several days later I got a call from him saying, "I want you to come to Ottawa. We're gonna talk about the NAJC." And in the meantime, he had spoken to the Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Multiculturalism, Doug Bowie, who was Kerry Johnson's superior. And I got, got back to Ottawa, went to a meeting with Bowie and Murta, and his Chief of Staff Newton Stacey. And they said, "We're gonna open discussions. Not negotiations, we're gonna open discussions with the NAJC, and we'd like you to be involved." Well, needless to say, this isn't something that went over very well in the multiculturalism program. What was this westerner regional director coming in here getting involved in something that should be the legitimate purview of Director of Multiculturalism? I raised my concerns with the minister saying, "I don't think this is really wise on your part." That, "Kerry Johnson is the person who you should really be talking to about this who should be leading the discussions." And Murta said, "No, I want you to do it." And I said, "Okay," rather naively. You know, I was not intimately involved with the issue at this time, I'd been away from Ottawa for three years. But I agreed to do it, and so he said, "Set up a group to work with you," and so I picked a couple of people, my executive assistant from Vancouver and a woman named Anne Scotton, who was in the policy branch of the Department of the Secretary of State in Ottawa.

We contacted the NAJC and said, "We're prepared to have some discussions with you. Not negotiations, all we're gonna have are discussions." Art Miki and Roy Miki and Roger Obata and others' response was, "We're not interested in discussions. We want negotiations. We want to negotiate redress with you people." I went back to the minister and said, "They don't want discussions, they want negotiations." He went to the Prime Minister's office and said, "They don't want discussions, they want negotiations." The response was, "Hold the discussions. You can call 'em negotiations, but they're not negotiations, they're discussions." There was a limited appetite, even in the Mulroney government, for full-blown negotiations. Partly because you had a group of people there who were basically unfamiliar with the issue. There was Mulroney who had some knowledge, some interest, some concern. Most people in cabinet, no interest, and probably significant opposition. There was a man in the Prime Minister's office, an academic from York University in Toronto, Charles McMillan, who I think was the one who ultimately persuaded Mulroney to be more open-minded on the whole issue. I don't know much about McMillan other than that he was a distinguished professor of business in, at York, and was highly regarded in the business community and highly regarded within the conservative hierarchy. But I think he's the one that really was the one that really persuaded Mulroney to be more open and be prepared to go further on this.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.