By Dennis Gruending

Douglas Roche reminds me of Emmett Hall. I published a biography in 1985 called Emmett Hall: Establishment Radical about the Supreme Court judge whose royal commission recommended Medicare for Canada in 1964. Hall was comfortable in the hallways of power but he was also a social reformer who used his position for public good rather than private gain. He was social Catholic, someone influenced by the teaching of his church as outlined in various papal encyclicals that defended private property but also supported labour unions and moderate reform. Prior to being appointed a judge, Hall had been a Diefenbaker supporter in Saskatchewan and saw himself as a Red Tory – a political species that is now close to extinction in Canada.

Roche’s varied career in public service is quite different from Hall’s but he does exhibit many of the same characteristics. Roche, who is in his 80th year, was born into a staunchly Catholic Irish family in the Ottawa Valley. Hall was born into a similarly devout Irish Catholic family in Quebec but the Halls moved to Saskatchewan in 1910. Hall studied law and practiced in Saskatoon for many years. He was involved in various communities – as a Catholic hospital board member, a separate school trustee, a prominent member of the bar association and a Conservative.

Roche went to college in Ottawa and then into secular journalism but soon offered his services to Catholic newspapers in Canada and later in the United States. He was, like many Catholics of his generation, inspired by Vatican II, the church council that occurred between 1962 and 1965. It was intended to empower the laity and to bring the church into a dialogue with the modern world. Roche returned from the U.S. to become editor of the Western Catholic Reporter in 1965 and he was working in that capacity when he was approached on behalf of Robert Stanfield to become a Conservative candidate in the 1972 federal election. He was to spend 12 years in the House of Commons before being named Canada’s disarmament ambassador at the United Nations. He did not seek a second five-year ambassadorial term in 1989, due mainly to his disappointment over the Mulroney government’s allowing U.S. cruise missile testing over Canadian territory. In 1999, Jean Chretien appointed Roche to the Senate, where he sat as an Independent until his retirement in 2004.

Roche has written or participated in 19 books, an impressive feat given his many professional and family responsibilities. His latest offering is called Creative Dissent: A Politician’s Struggle for Peace. It is at once a personal, political and diplomatic memoir and in the hands of a talented, if unadorned writer, it is a significant cut above the usual “told-to” memoirs of many retired politicians. I called Roche recently to talk to him about the book and the appearance that he will make to promote it in Ottawa on December 4th.

Roche is best known as a crusader for peace and disarmament but it was only later in his parliamentary career that the peace theme emerged strongly. “I went into politics with the theme of social justice in mind domestically and internationally,” Roche says, “but actually in my first years in parliament I was, of necessity, more taken up with domestic and constituency issues.” Yet his interest in international issues was always there. “I did not see them so much as peace issues at first but rather as issues of social justice and development. Pope Paul VI said that development is the new name for peace. I began to see that disarmament and peace were essential for social justice to occur.”

There is also in Roche’s book an undercurrent of disappointment with the political system. I asked if he pursued his speaking, writing, travelling out of some frustration with the limitations imposed upon him as an opposition MP. “I went into politics to extend social justice,” he says. “It is true that in an opposition party there was no great interest in these matters. So I tried to find an outlet for my convictions about social justice. It was the circumstances in which I found myself that determined my actions.”

I asked him what he sees as the main impediments to social justice, peace and disarmament. “Our political system is so short sighted,” he says. “Governments are shallow in their thinking about the trend lines on issues such as the environment and spending on arms.” Roche has the scars to prove that advancing this agenda in political and diplomatic circles is not easy. “There is this idea,” he says, “that anyone who works in these areas is a fuzzy headed idealist and the other people are realists, and you are marginalized for your ostensible idealism. I would argue that the realists are actually those people recognize that the status quo is not sustainable and are looking for answers to the over arching issues of our time. These are the nuclear arms race and climate change.”

I asked about what he sees as signs of hope. He says there were positive moves between 1995 and 2000 to extend the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to take practical steps toward abolishing nuclear weapons. “There were signs that we were coming down from the nuclear mountain,” he says. “Then George W. Bush was elected and it’s been downhill ever since.” Roche says, however, that president-elect Obama has promised to centre U.S. policy on the abolition of nuclear weapons. “I believe that the net is closing on those who want to keep nuclear weapons. I am expressing a view that there is an historical momentum here. I do not forget the forces arraigned against us in the military-industrial complex. They are very powerful but then slavery, colonialism and apartheid were all overcome when a critical mass of people decided that change was needed. So, too, it will be with nuclear weapons although it may not be in my lifetime.”

Roche confronts his own mortality (his first wife Eva died in 1995) and he looks ahead to future generations. “I sigh not for the past but cry for the future,” he writes in his book. “It is not my lost youth that I pine for but a lost future for my grandchildren.” He admits that he feels “some sense of outrage” because the kind of Canada that he wanted and represented does not seem to be there now. He knows only one way to deal with both frustration and hope, and ends his final chapter in the book with the words that one assumes are his motto — Never Quit.

Roche will be in Ottawa to speak about his book on Thursday, December 4, 7:30 p.m. at Southminster United Church, 15 Aylmer Avenue, (at Bank & the Canal).  Former Prime Minister Joe Clark will introduce him. For more information:  613-730-6874 or suc@rogers.com.

By Dennis Gruending

He would be called an icon if he was in business, sports or even politics but in the world that he inhabits 85-year-old peace activist Murray Thomson is just quietly and deeply respected. This night he speaks about militarism to a group of about 50 people at the modest Quakers House in Ottawa as part of a two-week peace festival. There is a video and some music provided by a middle-aged group who (tongue-in-cheek) call themselves Grateful We’re Not Dead — but Thomson’s 15-minute speech is the centrepiece. “Militarism is bad for the global economy, terrible for the environment, hugely destructive of human rights and of life itself, and it poses a major risk to the future of humanity,” Thomson says.

He has a deeper appreciation than most about both the attraction and repulsion of militarism. He was a student at the University of Toronto when the Second World War began. He enlisted in the air force and became a pilot although he never actually flew a combat mission. He was still in the military when, in 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. “Hiroshima made me a pacifist,” Thomson told Embassy magazine in June 2008, and now, 63 years after that unspeakably violent event, he is still spreading the word about resisting militarism and building peace.

Militarism, Thomson says, is fed by the recruitment and training of armed forces, nourished by military alliances, such as NATO, and supported by the well-funded secret intelligence agencies. “Militarism grows in a social climate characterized by nationalism, patriotism, denigration of women and an over-emphasis on authority, buttressed by attitudes which stress the perversity and weakness of human nature. Militarism is fostered by economic, political and military interest groups which benefit materially from the arms trade.” Canada, for example, plans to spend $490 billion on the military over the next 20 years, and the U.S. spends $700 billon each year. Thomson says the tentacles of the defence establishment and its lobby are everywhere and that militarism is deeply etched into our individual and collective consciousness.

Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND), he says, spends millions of dollars on think tanks and scholars and in return expects them to provide supportive commentary. Citing research by University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, Thomson says that eleven universities receive between $580,000 and $780,000, and Queens University obtained a grant of $1.5 million. “He [Attaran] claims that DND sponsors policy scholars who create the ideas, news and views that shape Canadians’ perceptions of the military and war.”

Militarism is also associated with the acceptance of violence in films and videos, and our use of language in sports and other community events, Thomson says. “Who of us is not embarrassed by the rants of Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada, the champion of both hockey brawling and a tougher military?” Many professional sports teams “use military terms to describe and promote their activities and at last year’s football final in Toronto, the Grey Cup was brought into the Rogers Centre by the Canadian military. It could be seen, riding on a tank, followed by a recruitment detachment from DND.”

Thomson may be discouraged but he is not deterred. He has been an active pacifist and remains so. He’s worked for the Quakers and internationally for CUSO. He was the co-founder of the inter-church peace group Project Ploughshares, a founder of Peace Brigades International and of Peace Fund Canada, a campaign aimed at allowing conscientious objectors to have their tax payments spent only for non-military purposes. For his unceasing efforts, he has received the Order of Canada, the Pearson Peace Medal and other awards.

Thomson provides his Quaker House audience with a checklist of practical ways to challenge militarism. They include:

- Keep on doing what we are doing. Work to rid the world of weapons: land mines, cluster bombs, automatic weapons, arms technology or weapons of mass destruction.

- Ask questions of academic presidents about the research done because of grants received from the Department of National Defence.

- Advocate for a [Canadian] Department of Peace which puts peace, the environment and disarmament priorities into foreign policy and seeks to train thousands of youth and others in conflict resolution, in Canada or elsewhere.

- Campaign to end the war in Afghanistan and to support war resisters seeking to live Canada.

- Support couragaeous Africans seeking to end civil conflicts in their countries, or Israelis and Palestinians seeking a just solutions to the never-ending conflict in the Middle East.

- Keep on working to creating global structures that strengthen international law and human rights.

- Challenge NATO’s nuclear policies and the existence of NATO itself.

- Find the means to coordinate efforts, pool financial, human and spiritual resources and speak with one voice.

Then, having delivered his speech, Murray Thomson picks up a fiddle and plays a tune along with the evening’s entertainers. All they are saying was give peace a chance.

By Dennis Gruending

 John Dear, an American Jesuit priest and peace activist, gave an uncompromising address on non-violence to about 120 people in an Ottawa church basement on August 22. “Violence doesn’t work,” he said. “War doesn’t work. War is not the will of God. War is never justified. Peaceful means are the only way ahead.”  The message was stark in its clarity: there is no excuse for violence — ever; no just war theory; no supporting a war to end all wars. Rev. Dear has been arrested over 75 times in acts of non-violent civil disobedience for peace, has organized hundreds of demonstrations against war and nuclear weapons at military bases across the U.S. and worked to stop the death penalty. He is also the author/editor of 25 books on peace and non-violence. Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

Dear spoke at St. Joseph’s Parish in Ottawa on a Friday evening, and then left for the Galilee Centre in nearby Arnprior to lead a weekend retreat on non-violence. He reminded those in his Ottawa audience that it was 45 years ago (on August 28, 1963) when Martin Luther King Jr led 200,000 people in a non-violent civil rights rally in Washington D.C., and 40 years ago that King was shot to death while standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis. Dear said that King’s last publicly spoken words were: “The choice is no longer between violence and non-violence. It is between non-violence and non-existence.”

“The world is a mess,” Dear said. “There are 35 wars going on right now. There are 20,000 nuclear weapons and no significant peace movement. The U.S. is building state of the art nuclear weapons and the Pentagon is itching to use them. In the American church we have developed a spirituality of violence and war. In Los Alamos, New Mexico the people who the build nuclear weapons actually believe that they are the peacemakers and our priests bless the bombs.”

“Martin Luther King was hopeful at the edge of despair,” Dear said, “and we have to do this as well. Non-violence is not only a strategy; it is a way of life. There is no cause for which we will support the taking of a human life. We are willing to take on suffering in this struggle without a trace of retaliation. It’s called the cross. We really have to work on inner non-violence. The starting point is in our heart, it is our doorway to peace and non-violence.”

Dear said that the future of the movement must be inter-faith. “Non-violence is the common ground of all religions. Jesus said love your enemy. He was meticulously non-violent but he was not passive, and if you are his follower you are non-violent. It is as simple as that.”

Dear concluded with a how-to list regarding non-violence:

- Be contemplatives of non-violence. Spend time every day with God, giving up your violence and anger so that you have something else to offer. “Radiate the peace personally that you want politically.”

- Be students and teachers – learn, then teach the methodology of non-violence. “Every level of our society has to be transformed.”

- Become activists. Get involved in organizations. Pick one or two big issues and have a hand in them. “Canada is critical here.” Dear said. “I worry about Canada but there is a lot that you could do here in Ottawa.”

- Be visionaries of non-violence. “Think of the abolitionists,” Dear said. “They announced that a new world was coming and that slavery had to end. We are the new abolitionists. A new world is coming and it’s not going to be John McCain’s (the U.S. presidential candidate’s) 100 years of war.”

- Become prophets of non-violence. “Demand end to the 35 wars and the abolishment of all nuclear weapons, and institutionalize non violence in our societies.”

- Connect issues such as war, poverty and environmental degradation. “Ask this — where is the money that has been stolen for weapons but which belongs to the poor of the planet?”

Dear took questions following his remarks. One person describing himself as a former diplomat said that Canadians are told that they are good guys who are in Afghanistan to fight bad guys. “Don’t believe it,” he said. “We are fighting on behalf of the winners in a civil war against the losers. What our troops are being asked to do is wrong. We have to stand up against it. Don’t wear red on Fridays whatever you do.”

The man also said that Canada’s super secret commandos in the Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) have been sent to Afghanistan to kill people. “That’s what they do, they kill people.” He added that JTF2 is instructed in its deadly arts at Dwyer Hill Training Centre, just to the west of Ottawa.

By Dennis Gruending

Bill Janzen, the respected face and voice of the Mennonite Central Committee Canada office in Ottawa, is retiring at the end of July after 33 years. Janzen has been a quiet but significant presence, working with politicians of all stripes, with civil servants and with a variety of church and secular organizations on a range of issues, including refugee and immigration policy, war and peace, food and famine. Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s former minister of foreign affairs, said in an e-mail interview, “In the years I worked with Bill Janzen, he was always a source of good advice based upon a sound set of values which provided assistance for countless people around the world.” Bill Blaikie, the longest serving MP in the House of Commons and a United Church minister, says, “I always found Bill to be a voice of calm, reflective reason in the Ottawa tempest. He is one of the best examples I can think of for Christian witness and advocacy in the political process.”

Asked what he has found most satisfying about his work, Janzen points to a number of projects. “In the fall of 1978 a civil servant named Gord Barnett and I drafted and negotiated Canada’s first master agreement for the private sponsorship of refugees, although I should add that after it was signed I was less involved in the actual work with refugees.” The agreement was widely used to provide sponsorships for Indochinese boat people in 1979 and other refugees in subsequent years. Janzen also mentions his involvement with inter-church and secular coalitions, including Project Ploughshares, Kairos, the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, the Commission on Justice and Peace of the Canadian Council of Churches, and the Social Action Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

Janzen refers as well to a letter that he drafted on behalf of MCC Canada in 2002, urging then Prime Minister Chretien to stay the course in refusing Canadian support for a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. “People in Iraq and in the region are very worried, as are many in Canada,” the letter said. “The present situation is certainly not ideal but, in our view, a war would make things much worse. We pray that God will give you wisdom and courage as you deal with this and other issues that face our country and our world.”
Janzen says, “The ideas in that letter contributed to the broader inter-church voice on that issue and when Jean Chretien decided not to support that invasion, he said the voice of the faith community had been significant in his decision.”

Janzen mentions his advocacy in helping Low-German speaking Mennonites whose families had emigrated to Latin American to recover their Canadian citizenship. “This is a long and involved story but in 1976, after I submitted a substantial appeal, the government agreed to interpret one discretionary provision in the Citizenship Act in a broader way. In my opinion some 75,000 of those Mennonites, and an untold number of other people, now have Canadian citizenship as a result.”

About 80 friends and colleagues gathered at the Ottawa Mennonite Church in June to pay tribute to Janzen. One of those to speak was Bert Lobe, who has a long association with the international and North American work of the Mennonite Central Committee. Lobe grew up near Janzen’s home community of Blumenheim, a small Mennonite village north of Saskatoon. Lobe said that Janzen, one of 11 children, was a good athlete who excelled as a fastball pitcher and hockey player.

Janzen went on to post-secondary studies at the Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg, the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, where he received a PhD in political science. He turned his thesis into a book titled Limits on Liberty, which was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1990. In it he describes conflicts that occurred with Canadian governments when some Mennonites, Hutterites and Doukhobors attempted to live communally and apart from the rest of society. A second book, Sam Martin Went to Prison, tells the story of Martin and other conscientious objectors who chose to go to jail rather than serving in the Canadian military during the Second World War. “Thanks for that book,” Lobe said to Janzen. “We still use it in our schools.”

The words most often used at the Ottawa event to acknowledge Janzen were integrity, trust, competence and respect for others. Lobe gave the final word to Janzen’s elderly parents, who still live at Blumenheim. “Just pat him on the shoulder,” his father Abram told Lobe, “and say well done.”  Janzen now plans to focus attention on writing that he has been too busy to complete.