Uncategorized

Daily News

Officially, at least, there are no “hippies” living in the Slocan Valley.

Such terms ruffle the feathers of people working for the department of human resources, the RCMP or the human rights commission.

When pressed, however, members of the above government agencies make vague references to “members of the counter culture”. And that culture is extremely varied, they hasten to add.

Nevertheless, there is a conflict between two groups of people in the Slocan Valley, according to provincial Labour Minister Bill King, who called it “a very unhealthy situation” at a news conference last week.

Most people here call it a “a tempest in a teapot.”

Mr. King also referred to a “near-riot” in Slocan Village where people were beaten and kicked allegedly because some of them were on welfare.

But Cpl. Wayne McLaren, of the RCMP’s Crescent Valley detachment has another view of that incident, which happened Aug. 4.

“It was an incident that quite frequently happens in a bar on a Saturday night anywhere,” he said in a telephone interview.

Two people were charged with a total of four counts of common assault and one charge of assault causing bodily harm after a fight broke out at 6:30 p.m. in the Slocan Inn, Aug. 4, he said.

Cpl. McLaren added there are a lot of transient youth in the valley in the summertime, “and that’s subject to controversy,” but he knows of no organized campaign against them.

Social worker David Maxwell, who lives and works in Crescent Valley, said there are definite signs of tension between groups but the situation’s getting better.

“It’s a free-floating kind of prejudice” against people trying to live alternative lifestyles, he said, but it’s not based on any hard information.

The biggest cause of bad feelings between groups is the fear of some parents that their children will be introduced to drugs.

The second biggest cause of hostility, he says, is swearing, especially if the taboo is broken by women.

Mr. Maxwll divides Slocan Valley residents into three groups that, he says, identify each other pretty well: Doukhobors, Anglos and freaks.”

The last group is composed of two factions: those who are chronic losers and those who seem to have a clearly defined direction. “There’s a difference,” he says. “They may both be on welfare, but there’s a difference in approach. If there were jobs, they’d be out doing them. The other people are loafers, just along for the ride. They’ll drift on when they get bored, just like they’ve gotten bored with everything else.”

About one-third of the freaks in the valley are the losers, Mr. Maxwell estimates, and they’re giving the others a bad name.

Most of them are street freaks who move out to the country because that’s the thing to do, he says. Many of them use marijuana, but there are few dealers among them, and they don’t sell to local people, he says.

“It’s not fair to lump them all together,” said Mr. Maxwell. “There’s good and bad in every group.

“Some people are very definitely making it out here.” There are several organized societies working for changes in the valley, a lot of craftspeople doing woodwork, weaving, pottery, stained glass making and even making wood stoves. Several farms are now almost self sufficient, he says. Some residents go to Vancouver in the winter to make money to improve their land.

The tension between groups is most evident in the children, says Mr. Maxwell. He says three of his clients had their cars vandalized by juveniles in the area.

Charges that most longhairs are on welfare are unfounded says Bill English, of the department of human resources.

“Most people, it doesn’t matter whether they have long hair or short hair, really want to be self-sufficient,” Mr. English said. “They just do it different ways.” Though the department doesn’t have information on the nature of welfare recipients, Mr English said there are no more people on welfare in the Slocan Valley than anywhere else and there’s not a disproportionate number of young people on welfare in the Valley compared to other areas, he said.

“The far greater majority of Slocan people are self sufficient,” said Mr. English, and those who are on welfare have a legitimate excuse.

“The labour picture is getting worse, rentals near town are hard to get and expensive. I don’t think a lot of people on welfare just sit around and do nothing,” he said.

Nelson is a pretty tolerant town, he said, but only up to a certain point. In the summertime when the transient population increases and a lot of young people go barefoot in the city, “there’s a lot of mumbling.”

Ken Hughes who has covered incidents of discrimination under the human rights commission for the past two years said there is more discrimination against longhairs in Nelson than there is in the Slocan Valley.

‘It’s an archaic kind of thinking among “squares” — if that’s an appropriate term— that fails to recognize the rights of other people to do their own thing,” he said.

Most complaints from Slocan Valley residents that are documented in writing come from a pretty hard-core group, he said. He’s only had a couple dozen” such documented cases in the last two years.

“Not a day goes by without phone calls,” he said, usually dealing with longhairs who have been refused service in pubs. Most discrimination problems are fixed up informally on the phone. About 95 per cent of such complaints are quickly solved, he said.

“The Slocan Valley is not a nest of trouble any more than any other area,” he said. There’s a fine group of people in the Valley, but neither side is lily white. I wish they would come together and talk it out.”

Most people who come to the human rights commission complaining of discrimination, do so because of the deparment’s word of mouth reputation, he said, but there are a lot more discrimination problems than the department knows about.

Pat Roberts, a probation officer who covers most of the Slocan Valley, said the so-called hippie element contributes little to criminal activity in the Valley.

“They’re expected to have drugs,” said Ms. Rogers, but that’s the extent of their criminal activity. As far as violent crimes, “not by hippies.”

Most breaking and entering and mischief incidents are caused by children from better homes in the area, she said.

Within the Valley, hippies are accepted, she said. But on the fringes, where they’re not so easily accepted, the trouble starts.

She said there is more tension at Mt. Sentinel School near Crescent Valley on the edge of the Valley than there is at W.E. Graham Secondary School in Slocan, inside the Valley.

Though many of these people need social assistance to get started in the Valley, they’re definitely not all welfare bums, said M. Rogers.

More longhairs in the Valley seem to know what they want and they’re doing it,” she said.

“In Nelson, it’s the in thing to grow long hair, but they don’t know what they want to do.”

Most people seem to disagree that the tension reported in the valley is the inevitable result of a large influx of people in recent years.

“People need scapegoats,” said Bill English. “Right now, it’s hippies and draft dodgers.”

Ken Hughes agrees: there’s a certain kind of militancy that looks and finds things that aren’t there on both sides.”

Daily News

The whole audience is rushing towards the stage with intent to wreak grievous bodily harm upon John Wing Jr.

But Wing as a strategy: “As long as they’re laughing, they can’t get up.”

The audience at the Lower Deck laughed abundantly Wednesday night, but the Toronto-based comedian confessed to a few worried moments sparked by a beefy heckler a few tables away.

Wing handled him easily: “I’d give you my autograph but who’d read it to you?”

It got a laugh, even from the heckler. Wing has a fusillade of put-downs from the gentle to the brutal. Only a few are printable:

“Why don’t you sit on the mike so we can hear what you have to say before you open your mouth?”

“Isn’t is a shame when cousins marry?”

“I was going to do my (bleep) impression, but you beat me do it.”

“Wop I go down to where you work and kick burgers off the grill?”

“What pharmaceutical company is responsible for your condition?”

“You shouldn’t talk so much— people will think you have a big mouth. But considering your sexual preferences that must come in handy.”

Nothing is sacred to Wing.

“Happiness is a warm nun,” he sang in one number about the Pope. The audience was uneasy and he knew it.

His material isn’t all that funny but it’s fast, escpecially in a pub where people will talk right through the performance. In a university crowd where people listen more, he’ll slow down.

In his five years in the trade he’s learned audiences can be hostile, but mostly because they’re drunk. One man pulled a knife on him after a performance in Florida a year ago. “The bouncers beat the hell out of him. I just stood there and breathed hard.”

He’s had plastic cream containers thrown at him at Yuk Yuks Komedy Kabaret in Toronto where he works regularly as a comedian and emcee.

And one drunken heckler threw pennies at him all through his act. “He finally got me right in the forehead.”

But only once has he walked off stage. That was in a performance before an exceptionally drunk and rowdy crowd in Guelph. His fee was $250, a record. “The boss said I could cut my act short if I wanted to, so I did. He even paid me, too.”

Wing, 25, quit his English studies at the University of Windsor to join a rock band five yers ago. It promptly folded and he auditioned at at Yuk Yuks. “The first night it was great they went crazy. The next week I died a horrible death.”

He bombed once a week for eight months straight, performing on Yuk Yuk’s amateur nights. “I didn’t know anything about comedy — I had great presence, but no material.”

He watched paid comedians at Yuk Yuks every night during his first year. Now he has half a dozen songs in his repertoire and various impressions that include a Neil Young ‘fixed’ by his parents before puberty, a wheezy and puking Joe Cocker and a tantrum-prone baby Clint Eastwood.

He also has a persona, the perennial virgin and high school nerd. “It’ll have to go. I get laid so much now it doesn’t feel real.

“Well, I do have a girlfriend ad I’m a lot more relaxed than I used to be and I know more about people. (On the road) I get my chances.”

And he even makes a living. “This is the first year when I’ve made five figures. My first salary approached two figures”. That was $9 he got for a performance at Ryerson while still apprenticing at Yuk Yuks.

Offstage, Wing is quiet non-drinker (“I hate the teaste.”) He labors at his jokes, writing them down and reciting them at least 50 times before trying them on an audience.

“I think of my best jokes in bed. The only thing worse than bombing on stage is bombing in bed. So I’ll try something not quite kosher, or something not done.”

It’s this mood of deperate spontaneity that gets him most of his laughs– at least the ones on stage.

by Stu Ducklow
Editor, Cranbrook Townsman

David White, 20, of Calgary, might not have survived the crash of a Pacific Western Airlines jet here Saturday had he not been late for the plane.

In an interview in his parents’ home Saturday evening, White, one of two people to walk away from the crash scene, described what happened.

“I must have hit every red light on the way to the airport. I even got stopped by a train,” said White, a second-year physical education student at Mount Royal College in Calgary, who flew home to visit his parents, Anne and Bill McKay.

“I ran onto the plane … I was the last guy on. I walked down the aisle looking for a window seat.”  Though he has flown on aircraft about 50 times in his life, David said he’d never sat “that far back” in an aircraft before. He took the last seat on the right of the aircraft, sitting alone next to the window.

“The flight was just brutal,” he said of the abnormally heavy turbulence the aircraft encountered on the way to Cranbrook. He kept his safety belt on the whole time.

He said the aircraft started what seemed a normal descent on its approach pattern, but didn’t seem to flare out, or flatten its glide path as much as normal just before touching down.

“It hit the runway so hard — I never felt anything like that before. It hit so hard it lifted me off my seat,” then the aircraft bounced into the air and the power came back on.

David, who was watching the starboard engine on the aircraft said one of the two scoop-shaped thrust reversers that swing back behind the engine exhaust to redirect the thrust “flipped away like something had snapped. — I don’t think it (the damage to the reverser) was caused by the bounce.

“It flipped off and we started to bank super-hard to the left. Then it pivoted” or yawed with his side on the outside of the turn.

He said the thrust from the two jet engines must have been imbalanced because of the broken thrust reverser on one side.

I thought, “They’re really banking it hard” and then “whomp! we hit. I was thrown around and then I saw this orange flash way in front of me, but I didn’t feel any heat.”

After the aircraft stopped “I tore off my seatbelt and headed to the door of the plane. There was a stewardess (Gail Bunn, of St. Albert, Alta., also a survivor) banging on the door. She was freaked out. I shook her a bit and we both pushed on the door.

“We walked out onto the snow. I was half dragging her. She was in shock. I wasn’t really shocked at all but I’m really coming down now,” he said in our conversation hours after the crash.

“We walked about halfway from where the tail (which had split off from the aircraft) was to the runway (about 150 feet from the wreckage). Then I think I heard someone moan — a girl’s voice. She said something like “help me”. The stewardess wanted to turn back, but he grabbed her to prevent her from doing so. Then he left the stewardess and headed for the girl himself.

“She was in a seat beside her mother in the snow. Her mother was dead. I unhitched her belt and packed her out. The stewardess still wanted to go back, but I kept saying “no”, I was afraid it would explode. We walked to the runway. A truck ploughed right through the snow then just came flying down the runway. I gave them the girl,” whom he learned later, was 11 years old.

He said he and the stewardess sat in a truck for about half an hour before they were taken to Cranbrook and District Hospital. The stewardess told him people had been “chucked into the trees.” He said he could see flames leaping 20 feet over the tail from the main body of the aircraft which was obscured from his vision by the tail.

The wreckage he described as “bits and pieces. They’re never going to find all those people.”

He said seven or eight people were in the tail section of the aircraft that broke away from the main body. About five rows of seats ahead of him were contained in the section that broke off.

The aircraft had refuelled in Calgary, he said, and the flight had only taken 15 or 20 minutes so there was a lot of fuel to burn. “All I could see was flame and smoke” when he got outside the aircraft. The orange flash he saw sounded like a subdued explosion: “it just went whoomp! It just ripped through the plane, but I didn’t feel anything. Even my hair wasn’t burned.”

He said the aircraft must have slammed into the ground near the end of the runway “at least 150 miles per hour.” The left wing and nose seemed to hit at the same time.

He and the stewardess were taken to the hospital in a police car. An orderly looked at him “and couldn’t believe was in the crash.”

Aside from pulled stomach muscles caused by his seat belt holding him down in the impact, he has no injuries and wasn’t even given a sedative.

“But I’ll never fly again. Not unless I absolutely have to.”

by Stu Ducklow
Editor, the Hants Journal

Jarid Wilson, 27, of Windsor, is reluctant poster boy for fitness. “I don’t want to look like Superman,” he says, when he’s asked to stand in the famous Man of Steel pose for this article.

But Jarid has done something almost superhuman. In two years he’s lost half his body weight and he’s kept it off for the two years since.

To hear him tell it, Jarid had a normal happy childhood growing up in Mount Denson. He was of normal weight until about the age of six, but began packing on the pounds as a result of bad eating habits.

He ate little during the day, but began eating up to two hamburgers a night while watching TV and then going straight to bed. Inactivity was part of the picture. “My dad ate more than I did, but my dad worked,” he said.

His late-night eating accelerated until he would eat two burgers for dinner and as many as four later at night plus potato chips and soft drinks. The thought of breakfast made him sick to his stomach, so his regime of light eating during the day with bingeing at night continued.

During high school he played basketball and was pretty good at it. A big kid— he’s six feet, two inches now– he could push opponents anywhere on the gym floor but couldn’t move fast himself. “I’d love to play myself now,” he says wistfully.
And his weight didn’t make him a social outcast in high school either. “I always had good friends. And girls liked me. When a guy weighs 350 pounds in high school a girl feels safe.”

But none of his girl friends ever got serious about him, he said. “I was always a teddy-bear boyfriend” but never a serious romantic partner.

His weight increased in university. “You know how kids gain the freshman five pounds, well I gained the freshman 50 pounds.”

At age 22 he weighed 411 pounds and was beginning to have heart palpitations just sitting in a chair. He’d find excuses for not joining his friends at games of golf or basketball.

And when friends confronted him about his weight he just ignored them. “I was in denial. I was young and lazy.”

But finally his mother got to him. She offered to pay his tuition with Alan Mumford Boot Camps if he’d make a serious attempt to lose weight. He agreed.

Mumford pushed him hard with daily exercises, “but the biggest thing I changed was my eating habits.” Now he eats five times a day and goes to bed hungry.

Mumford closed his shop for renovations a month after Jarid began working with him, so Jarid continued on his own. “I just ran with it.” Though Mumford taught him the exercises and basic nutrition, Jarid kept learning on his own.

His father was dying of cancer and the heavy exercise regime helped him deal with his pain.

It wasn’t until he visited the hospital that he found out how much weight he had lost. Up to then, he had been too heavy to use a normal bathroom scale. He was shocked to discover he’d lost 60 pounds in only three months.

His proudest moment came when his father saw him at his target weight, a trim 200 pounds. His waist had shrunk from 52 to 32 inches. “My dad got to see me the way I am now. He was so proud of me, and I was so proud. He felt like I was able to take care of my family.”

But Jarid’s problems weren’t over. He had lost weight so fast that he had extra folds of skin over his chest, stomach and inner thighs. The skin wouldn’t just shrink away on it’s own and MSI, the provincial government health insurance program, refused to cover the cost of plastic surgery because it hadn’t authorized his weight-loss regime.

Jarid borrowed $13,000 and had a private Halifax clinic remove the skin on his stomach and chest.

Today, Jarid has no trouble keeping the weight off. He exercises four times a week and eats healthy food five times a day. Though he’ll eat junk food on weekends — “you still gotta live!” — he feels better when he eats properly.

He has allowed his weight to creep up to 211 pounds but has had no trouble holding his weight and no trouble sticking to his regime, “I live a comfortable lifestyle and I’m a comfortable size.”

Daily News

One of the least-known hazards of photography is other photographers, especially those who would rather talk than take pictures.

They generally introduce themselves at the most inopportune time. Queen Elizabeth is roller skating down Gottingen Street and you’ve got it all in your viewfinder when you hear a voice in your ear:

“Hello, I see you’re a photographer. I’ve got three zoom lenses, two camera bodies with motor drives, a couple of automatic flashes with interchangeable power packs, several tripods and studio lights.”

Well, what can you do? If you’ve got any manners, you’ll put down your camera and listen to your well-equipped colleague. You might learn something.

“Really? That’s a lot of zooms. Are they fast enough?”

Skirts flying, the Queen sails past Cornwallis Street, hits a manhole and tumbles headfirst into the mud.

“Why certainly, I just use my flash if I don’t have enough light.”

Sirens wailing, an ambulance screams around a corner on the trail of the mud-caked monarch and runs straight into a busload of flag-waving schoolchildren.

“But all those flashes and batteries must be a heavy weight to carry around.”

Screaming children rush from the burning bus. Prince Philip bestows the kiss of life on an unconscious girl as the wreckage explodes behind him.

“Certainly is, that’s why I never take my gear with me. By the way, shouldn’t you be taking pictures of all this?”

A military helicopter lands amid the carnage to disgorge a squad of heavily armed paratroopers. “Well I suppose so, I don’t see anybody here from any of the papers. Maybe I can sell it to them. Nice talking to you.”

Riot police begin clearing the streets. “Sorry Bub,” says one of them, “no pictures”.

All of which goes to show that no matter how much equipment you’ve got, it won’t do you any good if you don’t use it.

And most people don’t.

British Journal of Photography once counted the number of cameras sold in one year in the U.K. and compared it with sales of film. The magazine concluded a lot of cameras were sitting bureau drawers most of the year.

It is not unusual, I’m told, for photo labs to process one roll of film with two sets of Christmas snaps on it– one from this year and one from the year before.

Why, we might ask, would perfectly sane people spend millions on photographic gear only to leave it lying in bureau drawers? Because, we might answer, they’ve got the visual equivalent of writer’s block.

And who can blame them? After blowing their budgets on all kinds of photographic muscle, they’re expected to take award-winning pictures every time. That’s a recipe for creative constipation.

Novelists, so the cliche goes, spend hours crumpling up wads of typing paper before they finally come up with the words they want.

Photographers should do the same with film. A roll of black and white could cost you less than an evening in the pub and you don’t have a hangover to moan about next day.

The main thing is to shoot a lot and expect very little. And don’t be surprised if, before you reach the end of a roll, you’ve started working on an idea.

At the very least, you’ll be carrying your camera with you more often. So the next time the Queen goes sailing by on roller skates you’ll be too busy to brag about your equipment.

Bottles on the Brain

Halifax Daily News

Picture one of our pioneer Haligonians in an outhouse around the turn of the century.

He is well medicated with a restorative tonic which bills itself as the working man’s friend, blood-maker and promoter of quiet rest.

The outhouse is the only safe place to drink it in Victorian Halifax because the contents are 60 per cent alcohol.

So we can forgive him for losing his watch, several coins and even his false teeth down the cess pit where he has chucked the empty bottle but we are less likely to understand the zeal of bottle collectors in modern Halifax who would cheerfully spend all day at the bottom of that same pit in hopes of discovering them.

There are hundreds of people in metro with bottle collections though only about a dozen could be called true collectors.

Two people from the last group revealed themselves to The Daily News recently, but they preferred to keep their identities secret. One of them has a bottle collection worth about $25,000. The other is a history buff with no collection but he doesn’t want anybody with heavy boots tramping up the stairs to ask who his friend is.

The history buff, who asked to be called Al, says demolition workers often find artifacts as they clear the way for new construction. He says one job foreman told him a musket, sabre and a brass spittoon with a regimental number were taken from a site without the NS Museum being notified.

Legally, such discoveries must be reported to the museum, but finders often fear the institute will confiscate them. More often, museum workers only want to see them, he says. Occasionally, they may offer to buy an artifact.

One of the best ways to find old bottles is to watch for excavation sites, says Al. “We do most of our digging behind tractors.” Another is to look for places that may have been refuse sites in the past.

Old maps that show the natural courses of streams that now run through culverts may yield clues to dump sites. In the country, “look wherever there’s a disturbance in the ground. Certain weeds grow over old dump sites.” If you find the ruins of an old farmhouse think: If I was living here, where would I dump my garbage?

And then there are outhouses. “Old outhouse pits are the best sources of bottles,” says Al’s collector friend, who thinks Ralph would be a good assumed name. “They’re very well preserved— even the labels can be intact.” As well as bottles, coins and false teeth, you may find silverware and pots as the pit would have been a dumping ground for dishwater.

Ralph started collecting seven years ago when he bought an old box full of bottles at an auction. “The bottles just fascinated me.” They carried the name of Felix J. Quinn, a soda-pop maker in Halifax around 1900. They featured Hutchinson stoppers, a rubber cap that dangle inside the bottle neck but can be pulled tight against the lip with a hook to seal the contents.

Over the next seven years Ralph read up on the subject and spent around $10,000 collecting bottles.

One of his prize possessions is a Nash and McAllister fired clay bottle with a blue top bearing the name Forest Root Beer, Sydney, Cape Breton. The bottle was probably made in Montreal and may be the only Nova Scotia root beer bottle in existence. It’s worth about $7,800. Similar bottles held ginger beer, a popular beverage for the British Army, but root beer was relatively rare.

A lot of drinks— especially tonics — were alcoholic in those days, particularly nerve tonics marketed to young women “to quiet them down,” says Ralph. “You had to keep them happy and stoned around the house instead of running around town with the boys.”

Young boys, it seems, had to be content with a beverage even milder than beer, Jersey Cream Pop. “Kids would sneak into the attic and drink it,” says Ralph. Some of the bottles would fall down wall cavities where they awaited discovery much later. Ralph paid $45 to the janitor of the old Jubilee Boat Club for a potato sack full of bottles he hadn’t even seen. Their market value is now nearly $800.

Ralph has bottles of all types. Cod-stopper bottles had marbles inside them to seal them up. Kids used to break them open to take the marbles out, so the manufacturer stopped making them.

He has bottles of whisky and rum from the wreck of HMS Brittannic off Grand Manan Island in 1748. He has two more bottles and even an old cannon ball from an early waste pit at Keith’s Brewery.

His Dutch gin bottles have scars on their bottoms from the early firing process. He has master ink bottles in cobalt blue that would sit on a teacher’s desk and supply students’ ink wells. His ginger beer bottles are dark green to keep the brew protected from sun and so congealed matter wouldn’t show.

There is even a bottle of William Randall’s Microbe Killer No. 2 a concoction similar to bleach. It protected cabbages from bugs so it was marketed for human consumption as the “scourge of the evil microbe, the great enemy of all mankind” in the 1820s.

There’s a bottle that once held Tiger Whisky, favoured by Halifax’s Chinese community around Queen St. in the late 1800s.

Taverns and saloons abounded in Halifax at the time but punch with rum was even dispensed in local stores as a measure of hospitality until public pressure ended that happy custom.

Bottle collectors can’t practice their trade long before they become experts in historical trivia. But they are often resented by professionals as interfering pot-hunters, motivated by greed.

Greed certainly played a part in the demise of the Halifax bottle club. Members who went on digs refused to share their finds. Now they don’t even talk about where they’re digging.

But Ralph, with a collection bigger than that of the N.S. Museum, says bottle collectors could be a source of information for archaeologists. “We have the experience to make reasonable interpretations and there are a lot more of us.”

Nelson Daily News

Human rights advocates coud learn a lot form the likes of John Alfred Fenwick-Jones, freedman of the realm.

“I’m a revolutionary in some ways,” he says, “but not by violence. I use the tools of the oppressor and the oppressor is the law.”

His tools in this case, include nothing less than the Magna Carta, the legal foundation of British democracy that was signed under duress by King John in 1215 and ratified 10 years later by Henry II.

The oppressor is the lowly parking meter. “I’ve had a pet aversion to parking meters ever since I can remember,” says Fenwick-Jones, emitting a joyful, heaving belly-laugh highly reminiscent of baying bloodhounds, hot on the trail. He’s never paid a parking ticket in his life, though he has 11 outstanding fines collected in Nelson. He’s never put money in a parking meter, either.

And in provincal court Thursday, he told Judge R. B. Allan why. Collecting money from parking meters is treason, he said, and he doesn’t want to be an accessory.

“You could behead a marking meter,” he said in an interview later. “That’s the penalty for treason.”

And in court Thursday, he showed how serious he was.

“I’m here because I have a desire to be a Canadian, and to live up to the rights and responsibilities of being a Canadian,” he said in his defence summary. “I’m convinced there’s been an error in law … that threatens the very existence of Canada iteself.”

Seldom have the judicial feathers been so ruffled.

Crown prosecutor Lee Portous said Fenwick-Jones’ defence challenges the constitutionality of the Municipal Act, the authority of the provincial legislature and the British North America Act.

The attorney-general should be notified as to constitutional arguments, she said.

Judge Allan ordered the case remanded until Nov. 14, giving the Crown attorney’s office time to prepare for the case.

The rationale behind Fenwick-Jones defense runs something like this:

The Magna Carta, which licences the British Parliament, guarantees freedmen and merchants free access to the highways, byways and rivers of the realm. The nobles and barons that presented King John with that document in 1215 just about tore his left arm off before he would sign,” said Fenwick-Jones. But Henry II affirmed the document of his own free will in 1225 and its been affirmed by every monarch since.

Fenwick-Jones happens to be a freedman of the realm because, he told the court, he is the eldest son of his London-born father, and served in the army detachment of William Lyon Mackenzie King’s funeral, which is the equivalent of service as a castle guard.

But the same privileges apply to those who are not freedmen, thanks to amendments to the charter written in 1643 by Sir Howard Coke, extending the privileges to everybody.

The British North America Act in 1867, and the 1931 Statute of Westminster which gave Canada’s parliament the same autonomy as the British Parliament, trace their lineage directly to the Magna Carta, said Fenwick-Jones.

Both Canadian and British parliaments are licenced by the Magna Carta, said Fenwick-Jones, and it cannot be revoked.

Parking meters contravene Articles 41 and 42 of the Magna Carta, which guarantees free access to public roads, he contends.

So when charged with parking violations, he refused to state “guilty” or “not guilty”, entering instead a plea of right in defence of the crown, the realm and the dominion of Canada.

Much the same plea was entered by Charles I who was charged before Oliver Cromwell with usurping the authority of parliament, he said.

Charles I got beheaded.

The court entered Fenwick-Jones’ pleas as “not guilty”.

In order to base his defence on the refusal to comply with a treasonous act, he says, he had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown, voluntarily surrender arms and place himself as a hostage before the Crown.

He says he dug up a World War I British .303 calibre rifle, which he surrendered at the sheriff’s office. He also signed an affidavit certifying his allegiance, and turned himself in as a hostage to the Crown. For the duration of the trial, he says, “They can do anything they want with me.”

So far, the Crown has left its hostage alone.

“I have a great interest in English history and law,” he told the court. “English law is the only law in the world that guarantees justice, not law.”

He cites article 40 of the Magna Carta: “to no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay a right or justice.”

The Magna Carta guarantees 64 rights, he said later, and all but eight are gone. “They’ve been exchanged for an illusion of security but the illusion gets pretty thin at times.”

He says some of our lost rights include the right to fish in any waters, the right to free and unfettered use of lands, protection from income tax, first instituted as a war measure in 1917 and the right to bear and use arms in defence of those rights.

But worse, “our identity’s been lost,” Citizens are no longer aware of their rights and responsibilities, he says.

He’s spent about $500 preparing for his trial, he says, but if he wins, parking meters won’t be forced out of business. In all probability, they’ll make parking revenue a legal tax by modifying the meters to issue receipts, he says.

But there are other rewards. If the court decides in his favour, he may become a Knight Protector of the Realm, according to medieval tradition.

Don Quixote would be proud.