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TI: But let me just ask this question. So at this point, this was, in some ways, you're thinking, this is a career-ender for you. Your stand on this really kind of ended your career in the bureaucracy there.

OK: In fact, I called my wife after I had, you know, said what I had said to David Crombie, that I was probably not going to survive long. I thought that they, that Fournier, the deputy minister, would send me back to Vancouver, 'cause I was there in an acting capacity. I was not in the job permanently, I had turned the job down. He had asked me to move back to Ottawa permanently and I said no, I didn't want to do that. Basically I thought I could go back to Vancouver, I might survive for a while, and that would be the end of me. And I wasn't worried. Maybe very naively, I wasn't worried, 'cause I thought, "Well, I can always go teach." I always felt that I had that as a default position, and that was naive on my part. There were not exactly a lot of vacancies for professors of political science in Vancouver. 'Cause if I had come home to my wife and said we're moving anywhere other than south from Vancouver, I would have been told to enjoy myself, but it was going to be a move I made on my own. 'Cause she had made very clear to me that we weren't going to be moving back east under any circumstances. I had visited a lot of moves on my family over the years, between going back to Ottawa and coming to Alberta and going back to Ottawa, going to Vancouver. And the time that I went to Vancouver in 1981, I spent a year, close to a year commuting to Toronto as the acting regional director for Ontario. And some months after that ended, I spent six months in Manitoba as the Acting Regional Director for Manitoba at the same time keeping my position in Vancouver. And then I spent that year commuting to Ottawa.

RD: How'd you miss the Maritimes?

OK: Actually, or Quebec, it's actually really good questions, that... so I had asked a lot of my family, and I was not prepared to... and that's why I turned down being appointed to the position as the Assistant Under-Secretary on a permanent basis. But I really thought that my career was going to be basically over, but I wasn't worried. I really, and that was naive on my part because, as it turns out, I spoke to friends of mine in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia and said, "I'd like to come and teach." And I went to Jean Fournier, the Deputy Minister, and I said, "I did you a favor by commuting to Ottawa for a year as the Acting Under-Secretary of State, Assistant Under-Secretary of State. I want you to give me an Executive Interchange to the University of British Columbia where you pay my salary and I'll teach there." And I kind of, I pushed him on it, he agreed, and so I went to teach at the University of British Columbia with the federal government paying my salary, which was the only way the university could afford to have somebody like me to come in from the outside. And that worked out really well. I mean, I enjoyed my time there, and I was able... when I think back on it, again, I like to think of myself as not being a stupid person, that I'm reasonably intelligent, but when I was teaching, I kind of thought I was a free spirit. That I was cutting my ties to the bureaucracy so I could say what I wanted to say, conveniently forgetting they were paying my salary. I was still a federal public servant on an Executive Interchange assignment. And so I wrote papers for example about the Meech Lake Accord denouncing the accord saying that what the government of Canada was agreeing to was just wrong. Of course, I was then denounced as being a Trudeauite, as a spokesman for the Trudeau position who had come out strongly opposed to the Meech Lake Accord.

David Crombie came to the university to give a speech, and so we spent some time together, and I talked to him about the Japanese Canadian negotiations and where they were going, and they were coming to a successful fruition with the announcement in 1988 of a settlement. He was, he said to me that he never ever forgot what I said to him about what his position was in terms of not willing to carry on a meaningful negotiation. Basically I guess I said not only was the government without any moral authority if they took that position, he was without any moral authority. David Crombie is an incredibly decent man; an incredibly decent man and a very enlightened individual. And he allowed to me that what I had said to him at the time had an effect on him, and I always appreciated the fact that he -- and for all I know, he may have stood in my defense, I don't know that. Because I know Fournier was very, very unhappy with me, extremely unhappy with me. Basically what I had done is denounced the minister and denounced the government, and you don't do that as a bureaucrat and survive. You have a choice. If you can't agree with the government, you resign. And I didn't do that. I said what I said, but I had made pretty clear I was prepared to go back to Vancouver immediately and be not involved in any sense in any of the meetings or discussions, or anything to do with the NAJC and the negotiations. So I don't know whether David Crombie ever said anything to anybody else, but I never suffered any repercussions, none whatsoever. And in fact, after I'd... when I mentioned earlier that when I was at the University of British Columbia, Milton Wong, David Lamb and I established the Laurier Institute. And I left my teaching position, continued on Executive Interchange for another year as the Executive Director of the Laurier Institute, and then took leave for another year where the Laurier Institute paid my salary. So I was essentially gone from the department for four years.

This was now 1992, and I got a phone call from Jean Fournier, and he said, "I'm coming to Vancouver and I'd like to talk to you." And I said, "Oh, great, let's have lunch." This is really interesting, I haven't heard a word from him since I left Ottawa in June of '87. Well, that's not quite true. When I was still, I had my discussions with him about going on leave and Executive Interchange. But in the time I was at the university, I had no interaction with him at all. So we had lunch and he said, "I want you to come back as a director, Regional Director for Multiculturalism. We've separated and created a new Department of Multiculturalism, separate from the Department of the Secretary of State, and I want you to be the Director of Multiculturalism." And I thought, well, that's really interesting. I kind of had decided I was going to finish my career in one way in my mind with the Laurier Institute, knowing in the back of my mind that that was not the most secure position in the world in terms of the financing of the foundation and everything. So I agreed to go back as the Director of Multiculturalism. And shortly thereafter, the government, there was an election, the liberals were back in power, and they revamped government and created the Department of Canadian Heritage, eliminated the Department of Multiculturalism, eliminated the Department of the Secretary of State, eliminated the Department of Communications, and put everything into the new Department of Canadian Heritage. A friend of mine became the new Deputy Minister of the Department of Canadian Heritage, and he asked me to be the Regional Director General of the new department. So in the end, from a career point of view, things worked out really well, and I ended up with a promotion because of the added responsibilities of the new department, and was in a kind of nice place. I had a good position, I had a good job, an exciting job, an interesting job. Stepping back a little bit, I did get back involved with the NAJC and redress. When I was asked by the deputy minister to join Roy Miki and Paul Kariya in settling the final claims of mainly residents, Japanese residents in Japan for compensation, individual compensation. So I met a number of times with the two of them in Ottawa where we went over individual cases and said, "Yes, we'll compensate, no, we won't compensate." And there was a lot of pretty heavy discussions, mainly between Roy and myself. Roy wanted to compensate everybody irrespective of what the situation was.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.