CBC Interview was a Turning Point

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We were doing all this work after the ’73 coup. It happened from the first day, when the CBC wanted somebody to talk about the coup. So they got the Maclean’s correspondent and me to do this big interview. It was a special issue on the CBC, I guess the 11 o’clock news then. From that point on, we had all this opportunity to mobilize people across the country, which ended up with the movement that supported all these refugees. Was that a turning point?

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LAWG wasn’t the only one, but it was a Big One around Chile work. We had this established relationship with Florrie, who was there. And Florrie let me tape her – the conversation with her got on the CBC.

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At a lot of different levels we touched a kind of cultural nerve in Canada, of sympathetic interest in a democratic country in Latin America facing a military dictatorship, you might call it our cultural DNA. There was such a reaction in Canada around all that. It was a pretty big impact although we didn’t necessarily even recognize it. Because we were really focused on getting thousands of refugees here. As part of Canada kind of breaking out of the traditional European immigration settlement to more a diaspora from around the world, and placing more emphasis on people who were in very challenging situations, especially refugees (thinking about later Joe Clark and Vietnamese boat people later), as Canada became a leader around reaching-out and bringing people from refugee camps … but that’s another story.

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U of T Student  – First Contact with LAWG

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From ’69 to April of ’73, I was a full time student at U of T. But I was also the co-president of the Latin American Studies Course Union. And at the Latin American Studies Course Union, we had a film series from the Third World Film folks in New York City and we’d bring in a film every so often and run it at the Medical Arts Centre and we’d get hundreds of people out. And then we did a conference in partnership with LAWG at the International Student Centre and then I got to know John and Sandra, and then Sandra told me that LAWG was going to hire somebody again. Judy Skinner had been a staff person early on. Then there was a hiatus. And then they kind of started up again and so I was hired in the fall of ’72, at which point I had just gotten back from spending 2 months in Mexico, and 2 months in Peru and Chile, with the guy who had been the co-president of the Latin American Studies Course Union with me.

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I had taken Spanish a little bit in high school and then I did 2 months at Cemanahuac in Cuernavaca. Cemanahuac was sort of a break-away from some mainstream language schools, not CEDOC per se, but some progressive Mexicans who kind of broke away and set up their own school. I was fortunate to be there, to be part of their start-up which was great. And then this guy, Jim, joined and met me and we just travelled by bus to Santiago. And in Santiago, this guy, Jim’s sister (he was born in Brazil – kind of an Anglo-Brazilian family) had married George Lowe, who, with Edmond Hillary climbed Mt. Everest. The three of them got to the penultimate point and then Tenzing and Hillary went on to Mt. Everest. So George was the head master of the British School in Santiago. We stayed there and then travelled down to Concepcion and we visited the Atacama Desert visiting the workers at the copper mines.

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LAWG and News Synthesis

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And so I came back and started working at LAWG which was on Bedford Road – and is now an Eaton household. Frances and Bob were working on the Canadian News Synthesis Project. And I think I was the holder of the mailing list of the Canadian News Synthesis Project. And so I had a part time job there. And then I did my 4th year at U of T. And we had started organizing to get a delegation of people to explore Allende’s Chile. And then on September 11th the coup happened.

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So, it went from me being a half-time person to people showing up and volunteering – like Jim Sinclair. Then there was a Mexican news synthesis kind of project analogue, what was run by two guys – one of them had probably been in seminary in Mexico. I don’t think it was CENCOS … It was Bernardo. I can’t remember how many months we were at the Ecumenical Institute at 11 Madison Avenue. They gave us their room at the back, and then we got the office on Crawford and moved there.

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Reflecting on LAWG’s History

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If we don’t learn from it, we repeat it. Thinking about LAWG and its impact, there are a lot of different moving parts. Obviously, there were direct contributions around policy, like labour policy, foreign affairs, immigration policy for example, aid policy, and all the stuff around the peace process we tried to do. There’s so many different pieces of the pie. You can cut them a lot of different ways. There’s so much to consider around social change, how social change happens, or doesn’t happen. But you think, “Wow, we really did engage on all those social action things and we did make a difference.”

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I would say that in all these different, newly-emerging frameworks that are looking at social change, you could trace back to all this era and find antecedents. So basically, the churches were all doing their own thing about this or about that, and then people said, “Well, we should do it together” like the Inter- Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America, or the Taskforce on Churches and Corporate Responsibility, and together they had a lot more impact than the Catholic Church over here, and the Anglican Church over there. Like simple coalitional politics, which tried to link things together.

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When I look back at my own career, which didn’t have a road map, I ended up at various change points with really pretty wonderful opportunities that I was able to take up, embedded in the values and all this other history that led me to doing what I’m doing today. And I think that’s true of others as well. All the LAWG people who continued to do work at global movements for change – all of that was informed by all this other experience we had. And I think that’s the value of it.