In Trudeau's Kitchen (an excerpt)

Dear Reader: As we get closer to the publish date for In Trudeau’s Kitchen, I am re-editing the manuscript. In a book like this, it is difficult to pick out a singular excerpt to share. There are so many, and they build upon and within themselves as the story unfolds. Having said that, I have a strong love for the following excerpt from chapter 16 (‘There’s a Spider on the Pillow’). It represents a key moment on my journey. I had just been told that a police investigation was about to commence, and I was also facing a deadline with respect to an available Federal Court process. I had made two earlier efforts to get clear answers from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service as to their possible involvement in my situation, but they wouldn’t provide them. So, I decided to initiate a Privacy Act Appeal on the last possible day. Ironically, it was also the date of the first phone interception, two years earlier. That evening, I had received a phone call from a friend to arrange a time to pass a binder of email correspondence for safe-keeping, but someone else intervened. My friend could hear me on the call, but I couldn’t hear him. I could only hear the woman who had been sent to scare me back from passing him the binder. She called herself “Pam Grier.” I didn’t care what she called herself, but I surely got the message.

Since that time, a multitude of attempts had been made to silence and intimidate me. Yet I persevered, despite a whole host of emotional tensions that emanated from these stressors. What I once called PTSD, I came to call OTSD (Ongoing Traumatic Stress Disorder). It’s one thing for the originating events to come to an end—it is quite another when you are still actively under attack. That’s the great challenge of getting in the crosshairs of those affiliated with the spy world. It often goes on and on, and it is nearly impossible to get off the battlefield to recover. And, if you go too far in the direction of healing, you risk losing the emotional armor and vigilance that you need to stay alive and protect those you love. A true double bind.

Here is the excerpt from “In Trudeau’s Kitchen" (Pre-Order Link):

“I woke up on the morning of December 12th—which was ironically, the two-year anniversary of the phone interception—to drive to the Federal Court in Toronto to file the Application. It was a cold Canadian morning and I felt frightened. I was going to court to file an application that included a variety of details related to my interactions with the PM’s wife. I was certain nobody had ever filed anything like this on the public record in the Canadian court system. It felt deeply unsettling. I had entered into my dynamic with Sophie Trudeau in an effort to make the world a better place. Was reporting what happened after I disconnected from her going to make the world a better place?

As I drove the highway, I felt a compelling desire to turn back. This was just too much—how would my 60-year-old body survive this pressure-cooker? I had a burning desire to call a friend, any friend, to talk it through. But the likelihood that my phone was tapped prohibited that option.

I then did what I had done dozens of times in the last two years: I looked over at the drivers in the cars around me. I looked at them, and I imagined their own struggles with abuse of power in their lives. In this way, I knew that I was not completely alone. I meditated on their lives, my life, all of our struggles with power, and then repeated the mantra that had accompanied me for most of the last two difficult years: “If a privileged white man doesn’t speak truth about power, how can we expect anyone else to… If a privileged white man doesn’t speak truth about power, how can we expect anyone else to… If a priv….” Whatever the outcome, by asserting my right to exist, I felt that I was also asserting everyone’s right to exist. I wasn’t just fighting for my life. I was fighting for everyone else’s too. It was for all of us who have suffered systemic abuse of power while on this planet. And let there be no doubt—that is most of us.