Chapter 2: July - December 1990
Regina residents Don Castle and Darrell Lowry were just happy to be home.
The president and vice-president of the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC) had been stuck in the United States since February of 1990, awaiting trial after being charged under Jimmy Carter’s Foreign Corrupt Practises Act (FCPA).
At the heart of the matter was a contract for fifty new buses from a company called Eagle Bus Manufacturing in Brownsville, Texas. The allegation was that Eagle kicked $50,000, or two percent of the contract value back to Castle and Lowry, who were charged under the pretense that both were representatives of a foreign government and accepted a bribe.
Castle and Lowry faced heavy fines and up to five years in a Texas state prison if found guilty.
In early June 1990 a Dallas judge threw out the charges, stating the FCPA was only applicable to American citizens. That decision was immediately appealed by the FBI, leaving Castle and Lowry in limbo in respect to their release conditions. While initially a judge decided both men had to stay in the United States waiting for a resolution to the FBI’s appeal, their lawyer successfully argued they should be free to travel between the two countries.
Both men were finally allowed to return to Regina, where they were about to face another inquiry into their activity, called for by Grant Devine’s government.
Sandy Monteith had entertained Rider fans at Taylor Field with his pyrotechnical stunts for as long as anyone could remember.
Every time the Riders scored a touchdown Monteith, affectionately known by Regina fans as “The Flame”, would flick a lighter at the container of flammable powder affixed to the top of his head. A strong flame would shoot straight up into the air, the heat from which could be felt by fans several sections over.
In fact, The Flame had been banned from Taylor Field in the late 1980s over safety concerns, but was allowed back after he and then-Saskatchewan Roughriders GM Al Ford came to a “verbal agreement” that Monteith would keep his act in the end zone.
The mood was jubilant on a warm July evening in 1990, as fans tumbled out of Taylor Field, riding high on the last-minute win the Riders had just pulled off against the Hamilton Ti-Cats.
On game days The Flame could always count on Rider fans for a hand hauling his gear in and out of Taylor Field, including a suitcase full of highly-flammable materials. Monteith later admitted he didn’t know a fifteen year old boy was carrying that suitcase, when it exploded in the parking lot that night. The boy endured second degree burns to a quarter of the his body.
A few months later, October 1990, Monteith was fined $200 by a sympathetic judge, for two counts of violating federal explosives’ regulations. That seaason he returned to Taylor Field to watch the Roughriders, sans any pyrotechnics.
Once again The Flame’s future and legacy was potentially about to go up in smoke.
An Angus Reid poll released mid-July 1990 showed Preston Manning’s federal Reform Party receiving support from four percent of the poll’s decided Saskatchewan respondents.
That four percent was only slightly less than half of the support Grant Devine’s governing PC Party received in the same poll, despite the fact Manning had stated his party would not be participating in the next provincial election in Saskatchewan. The PCP reflected a rock bottom 11 percent of the decided vote; the Saskatchewan NDP 32 percent.
Support for the Liberal Party, led by Lynda Haverstock, stood at 23 percent, while a whopping 33 percent remained undecided.
“My goal is to ensure a minority government; I happen to believe that’s the best form of government” - Lynda Haverstock, Regina Leader-Post July 12, 1990
Knowing Devine was going to be forced to call an election sooner or later, Haverstock was in the midst of what she had dubbed her “listening tour”. The schedule to which Haverstock had committed was grueling, with days or weeks at a time on the road, sometimes living with complete strangers.
That grind, in part, somewhat impeded her efforts to simultaneously build a party with credibility in the Legislature. She was only one woman... and she was a woman, which was an issue from the moment she won.
“At the time, the number of comments and questions from reporters and members about (Haverstock’s) age and appearance did not seem important. Later in her tenure, however, it became an annoyance. Former leaders, some of whom had been considerably younger than she had never been described physically in newspaper articles nor was it implied that they were “too young” for the job.” - Lynda Haverstock, Saskatchewan Politics, Into the 21st Century (Leeson)
Not long into her tenure as Liberal Party leader, Haverstock realized she’d been abandoned by the people who had convinced her to run for it in the first place. She made an effort to reach out for guidance from her predecessor, former Saskatchewan Liberal leader Ralph Goodale, but was rebuffed. Without the support of her party brass, she was forced to make difficult choices.
For example, because the leader’s salary the Liberal Party had promised Haverstock did not materialize and she was committed to growing the party, not her own once-thriving farm counseling service, at this point in time Haverstock was forced to remortgage her home in order to pay herself.
Over the course of the next few years Haverstock would be punished extensively by her opponents and her own supporters in the Saskatchewan old boys club, including in the press gallery, for her optimism, likeability and audacity to challenge their power.
“Less than five weeks after taking over the helm of the Saskatchewan Liberals, the media complained that Haverstock was nowhere to be found… Comparisons were drawn between Haverstock and her predecessor, Ralph Goodale, the latter praised as a permanent “fixture around the legislature in the days before he had a seat.” - Lynda Haverstock, Saskatchewan Politics, Into the 21st Century (Leeson)
In the meantime Haverstock remained undeterred, cheerfully oblivious to just how nasty things were about to get for her.
Hunched over his desk in his office, John Scraba was doing something that had become second nature to the one-time radio disc jockey: forging invoices for Grant Devine’s MLAs. This time the task was being conducted on behalf of Eric Berntson, who had requested a sum of approximately $8000 in advance of his planned departure for the Canadian senate.
Pulling out a clean, blank invoice emblazoned with the fake company details of Airwaves Advertising, one of the shell companies he’d set up to facilitate the fraud, Scraba carefully began filling in the details.
Dating the first invoice June 1, 1990, he entered “Audio presentation: Recording, dubbing, speeches” as a description of services rendered. That invoice total was $4,375.00.
Then Scraba dated a second Airwaves Advertising invoice July 5, 1990, billing the taxpayer $3,495.00 for “Newsletters: Constituents of Souris Cannington Consultation, production, distribution, Session Highlites”.
Both invoices were attached to a Request For Payment (RFP) form, which in mid-July of 1990 was submitted to the Saskatchewan Legislature Department of Finance for payment. Later, at trial, Scraba would indicate that Berntson was adamant he needed the cash quickly that summer.
On August 29, 1990, Scraba heard from the PC Party’s Regina-based law firm, Wellman, Andrews, Blais & Butler; Airwaves Advertising had mail, could Scraba come pick it up?
Knowing payment for Berntson’s phony invoices had arrived from the Saskatchewan Legislature, Scraba picked up the envelopes and rolled into a downtown Regina bank to make a deposit into the Airwaves Advertising account. On the same day he wrote a cheque from Airwaves Advertising to the PC Party and deposited it into its caucus account, from which he withdrew over ten thousand dollars in cash.
Some of that cash went into the CIBC deposit box. The rest was stuffed into an envelope and Scraba called Berntson’s house, letting his wife know the package was ready. Berntson met Scraba at his office in the Legislature, where the envelope changed hands.
Of course, no costs had been incurred by Berntson with respect to any of it, nor did Airwaves Advertising even exist.
On July 19, 1990, MLA Eric Berntson resigned from his role in Grant Devine’s caucus. Two months later he was appointed by Brian Mulroney to the Canadian Senate.
Mulroney was stacking the senate with supporters to ensure his dreaded GST bill would pass into law. This created a new, unwelcome chink in Grant Devine’s political armor, which was crumbling and cracked already by the death throes his government was experiencing. The GST was wildly unpopular and his government was tightly connected to Brian Mulroney’s in voters’ minds.
Berntson’s role in the GST implementation was about to cement that sentiment.
Born in 1941 in Oxbow, Saskatchewan, Berntson had spent most of the 1970s touring rural Saskatchewan convincing farmers that conservatives, not liberals, were the free market solution to their woes. Berntson was behind the grooming of Grant Devine for the leadership of the PC Party, as well as a number of the scandals that plagued it, including Gigatex.
In fact in his book Singing the Blues: The Conservatives in Saskatchewan, ultimate insider Dick Spencer said,
“Berntson, from the beginning of the Devine years, was the leader of the band in all matters, second only to the premier.”
Just under ten years after being appointed to Brian Mulroney’s senate, Eric Berntson would be tried and found guilty for stealing over $40,000 from Saskatchewan taxpayers, using multiple strategies, methods and fraudulent monikers.
That included the $8000 he requested from Scraba, right before Brian Mulroney appointed him to the senate.
As his top general defrauded Saskatchewan taxpayers, Grant Devine was preaching at them.
“People who live without God lose the basis for authority. Emotional, mental and spiritual health of children is best maintained in homes where parents love and care for each other. Teachers, coaches and friends are influential, but parents are the most important.”
So pontificated Grant Devine from the pulpit of Regina’s Westhill Park Baptist Church one autumn Sunday morning in late 1990.
It wasn’t the first time Devine had used his platform to impart his opinion on matters of morality and godliness. Two years prior, in response to Svend Robinson’s historical coming out as a sitting gay MP, Devine had told reporters that he placed “homosexuals” in the same category as “bank robbers”.
Love the sinner but hate the sin, etcetera.
Hearing that it was working for Lynda Haverstock, Devine had embarked on a two week listening tour of his own. He sat in coffee shops and town halls across rural Saskatchewan having relatable conversations with grease-stained, coveralled farmers about the stark realities facing their operations.
It didn’t go quite as well as planned, however. At one stop in Herbert, Saskatchewan, Devine was repeatedly interrupted as he attempted discuss the future, by voters demanding answers about his past handlings of Saskatchewan’s finances.
At a public meeting in Vonda, Saskatchewan, held in October 1990 by the Saskatoon board of trade, well-known business advocate Dale Botting highlighted Devine’s out of control spending as a major issue with his second term:
“The 1986 campaign was a public auction of taxpayers’ funds with no real consideration of the public’s ability to pay anything; Devine began his second term with a huge ball and chain tied to his leg and everything has been downhill since.”
In the previous four years, Saskatchewan’s population had once again dropped below one million people. Devine had more than doubled the debt, from $1.9-billion in 1986 to $4.6-billion in 1990. GDP was dropping and the average Saskatchewan taxpayer was on the hook for a lot more than they had been in 1986.
As an unseasonably cold autumn moved into fall, some wondered if Grant Devine’s government was attempting to orchestrate it’s own demise.
On November 13, 1990, Saskatchewan Finance Minister Lorne Hepworth held a grim news conference in the Legislature’s media room. Dramatically he intoned that Saskatchewan must pick its own poison in order to address the province’s fiscal misfortunes.
“I am asking people to come out and do jury duty for their province and their children’s future to ensure our Saskatchewan way of life is maintained and preserved.”
Hepworth warned incoming, drastic cost-saving measures would be ultimately chosen by residents at a series of public meetings, but could include the imposition of healthcare premiums or hospital closures. As he spoke, he knew his Cabinet colleagues, as well as a number of senior staffers, were livid about it.
With a looming and increasingly hopeless provincial election on the horizon, Hepworth’s fellow Cabinet Ministers and PC Party caucus had been clear: they had no appetite for defending any cuts at all, never mind deep ones. Devine told Hepworth to get on with setting the tone in the media anyway.
Devine’s back was in the corner and he knew it. There was no money. No more Crowns to carve up and auction off to the lowest bidder. Without another cash infusion and series of further concessions from Ottawa, Saskatchewan was at real risk of going into default on the global markets.
Saskatchewan’s credit rating would be in tatters. Third party management, likely by the federal government, would be required.
The humiliation would be thorough.
In late September 1990 Grant Devine’s Minister of Environment, Grant Hodges, told a conference on sustainable development in Regina that his government was looking to create an "Environmental Action Plan” to fully integrate consideration for the environment into all of the government’s decisions and plans.
This was rich coming from the party that steamrolled federal environmental laws to ensure construction on the Rafferty-Alameda dam would continue unabated. Which it did, despite constant legal setbacks in a battle of wills being waged between conservative politicians at multiple levels of government and Canadian federal court judges.
In mid-November, Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Donald MacPherson squashed the federal government’s latest application for a stop work order. It was a game of legal whack-a-mole, with another court challenge popping up as soon as one was knocked down.
Directly across from the entrance to the small Saskatchewan town of Alameda, directly adjacent Highway 9, sits the 125 year old Tetzlaff house.
Squat and square, brothers Harold and Edward Tetzlaff referred to the house their grandparents built as their “fortress”, given its exterior walls were almost a meter thick. Comprised of two layers of fieldstones sandwiching a layer of sand, then another interior of plaster, the house had withstood everything the harsh prairie winters had thrown at it.
Harold and Ed had known hard work since they were children. After their father died when they were just teenagers, the brunt of the work on the farm fell to them. Ed was forced to leave his post-secondary education dream behind at Luther College in Regina, where he’d been studying post WWII. Harold was pulled out of public school for harvest, though Ed insisted he go back after it was finished.
Just a handful of years later, their mother died of complications that arose from an ankle surgery. She was only 47.
By their early twenties, Harold and Ed’s lives were devoted wholly and completely to the day to day operation of the farm. There was no time for socializing, meaning both men were permanent bachelors. There was an unbreakable rhythm to life on the farm - holding it together was the only thing they knew.
Over the course of thirty years the two brothers built their farming operation up and outwards, adding land for growing crops while expanding into cattle ranching. Modern technology didn’t appeal to Herald and Ed, but in the summer of 1990 they embraced yet another change and installed their farm’s very first telephone.
They really didn’t have much of a choice.
Four years earlier, on February 12, 1986, Harold and Ed’s lives were upturned and changed forever by the news that Grant Devine’s government wanted to build a dam, flooding out their land. The brothers had exhausted every avenue provided for public feedback, including meeting on two separate occasions with Grant Devine.
“How can anyone say this was poor, bad, good-for-nothing cheap land? He called our lands simply dirt, and that’s very offensive to us,” Ed told reporters about what they heard from Saskatchewan’s premier.
The Tetzlaff’s public objections to the Rafferty-Alameda dam had earned them the ire of their neighbours, who were excited about the prospect of construction jobs and Devine’s promised nine-hole golf course built next two what would be a new lake over the Tetzlaff’s land. The brothers were shunned locally, lost lifetime friendships with their neighbors and received anonymous letters labelling them “dirty pigs” and “communists”.
“At one time it was almost like the deep South,” said Ed. “We were the Black guys.”
Undeterred, it was the memory of Harold and Ed’s parents hard work on that land that motivated the brothers to keep going, along with thant of of their mother’s reminders of the horrors her family had escaped overseas to build that farm.
In late 1989 a federal court judge had allowed the contentious Rafferty-Alameda dam’s license to remain intact, but demanded construction cease while an environmental review panel was created for the project, as required by Canadian law. Ten months later the appointed review panel had quit in protest of the fact construction never stopped.
That’s when the Harold and Ed realized they needed to take further action.
On November 22, 1990 in a Winnipeg courtroom, the Tetzlaff’s lawyer, Alan Scarth, argued that federal courts should overturn the judge’s late 1989 decision and instead should pull the dam’s license altogether.
Scarth claimed that US money was behind the project; specifically $50-million from the US Army Corp of Engineers, which Scarth claimed was provided to pay off the likes of Herold and Ed because American citizens didn’t want the dam on their land.
Further and more to the point, there were Canadian environmental laws that were being deliberately ignored by both Brian Mulroney and Grant Devine in order for construction to steamroll ahead.
At this point the Rafferty side of the dam was virtually complete. Preparations had now begun on the Alameda side, specifically on Moose Mountain Creek which once flooded, would leave the Tetzlaff land at the bottom of a lake. Eighty-two percent of the necessary land for the Alameda side had been purchased, with the exception of the Tetzlaff brothers’ land.
Local officials were eyeballing appropriation.
A month later, right before Christmas 1990, the Teztlaff brothers learned that their appeal had been denied. The judge upheld the 1989 federal court decision that allowed the dam’s construction to continue, leaving the Tetzlaff brothers facing the Supreme Court of Canada as their only recourse.
Bitterly cold winds froze bare arms as thousands of teen and pre-teen girls sprinted from their dad’s car into Saskatoon’s brand new arena, Saskatchewan Place. Despite the minus six Celsius temperatures, screaming fans of the New Kids On the Block were beside themselves as they waited for the five boys from Boston to literally descend from the rafters.
“I don’t use drugs” howled band member Donnie Wahlberg to the 14,000 screaming, mostly teenaged-girls in attendance that night. “In fact, I have a problem. My problem is I hate drugs!” he hollered, returned by what one reporter described as an even louder, “reassuring” roar from the audience.
Saskatchewan residents poured into movie theatres across the province to watch a young Macaulay Culkin create pop culture history with his portrayal of Kevin McCallister, an eight year old boy left Home Alone by his family over Christmas.
AC/DC released its ninth studio album in September 1990, at which the world was introduced to Thunderstruck, but it would be another twenty years before the Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleaders would make the song iconic.
In Regina, mom Elizabeth Kieling’s heart hurt as she watched her son stand trial again for stalking singer Anne Murray. Her son, 54 year old Robert, had been obsessed with Canadian songbird for over 20 years and had already served over two years in jail for breaching non-contact orders.
In July of 1990 he was back in court again. He’d phoned Murray’s office in Ontario over sixty times earlier that year, according to phone records. The Blumenhof-area farmer, a bachelor who insisted Murray was encouraging his advances, had become a social pariah in and around Swift Current because of his behaviour.
“I still love him, he’s worth caring about,” said Elizabeth after sitting through her son’s latest trial.