Richard Hickerson and Leo Courville defend NDP budget

27 August 1991

What was the relationship between Richard Hickerson, former clerical paedophile turned secular paedophile, and Leo Courville, Cornwall lawyer, NDPer and former Chair of the Police Service Board?

From the following I would venture a guess that the pair definitively knew each other.  The question is how well?

On 27 August 1991 Richard Hickerson appeared before the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs.  The Ontario Bob Rae NDP government (socialist) was in power.  The committee met at the Parkway Motor Inn in Cornwall, OntarioThere to defend the Bob Rae government’s budget were Leo Courville, Delores Jensen and Richard Hickerson.

Courville, a former Western Canadian economist turned lawyer, was appointed to the Cornwall Police Service Board in 1992.  It was a political appointment during the Bob Rae years.  Courville ran for the NDP in the 1990 election.  Delores Jensen was his campaign manager .  Jensen became a member of the Cornwall Police Service Board in 1992, shortly before Courville.  They both served on the board during the former Chief Claude Shaver’s final years.  Courville was Chairman of the Board when Shaver took his early retirement (end 1993 early 1994).  The board replaced Shaver with Carl Johnston as Acting Chief.  Johnston had worked in the Rae government as an Assistant Deputy Minister. 

Courville testified that with the early “retirement” of Shaver it was “fortuitous” that Carl Johnson Carl Johnston “who was at that time the Assistant Deputy Minister in charge of the Police Servicing Division within the Solicitor General’s department, was retiring from that position.”

It was under the Johnston and Courville’s era that a Citizen’s Complaint filed by David Silmser against Constable Heidi Sebalj (file # C.C. 94-01) mysteriously morphed into charges under the Police Service Act against then Constable Perry Dunlop (file # C.C. 94-01) .  Indeed it was Courville and Johnston who, when the cat was wriggling out of the cover-up bag, and when  the CPS, Sebalj and Johston were seemingly under the gun, jointly worked out an 11 January 1994 Press Release which I believe  misrepresented facts of the Constable Heidi Sebalj “investigation” of David Silmser's sex abuse allegations against Father Charles MacDonald and probation officer Ken Seguin.  I do believe it was here that the Cornwall Police Service and the Board started deflecting attention from the CPS botched sex abuse "investigation" which ended up in an illegal pay-off and cover-up.  It was here that the Board, Johnston and Luc Brunet began publicly directing attention to and pointing an accusatory finger at Perry Dunlop. ( I don't know for fact if or not by January 1994 CPS knew the pay-off was illegal, but they had ample time by then to investigate and they most certainly should have known.)

The following is a list of (1) those presenting (2) members of the committee, and (3) the transcript of Hickerson’s presentation.

I personally am inclined to believe it is not happenstance that Hickerson, Courville and Jensen showed up together.  Was Hickerson a member of the local NDP riding association? Did Courville perchance debrief Hickerson on the ups and downs and ins and outs of economics?  

Many questions! But, quite intruiging to see the pair both defending the Ontario Rob Rae NDP government, in the same locale and on the same day. 

1991-92 budget 

Ontario Federation of Labour 

Cornwall Environment Centre 

Ontario Hospital Association 

Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, District 21

STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND ECONOMIC AFFAIRS 

Chair: Hansen, Ron (Lincoln NDP) 

Vice-Chair: Sutherland, Kimble (Oxford NDP)

Christopherson, David (Hamilton Centre NDP)

Jamison, Norm (Norfolk NDP)

Kwinter, Monte (Wilson Heights L)

Phillips, Gerry (Scarborough-Agincourt L)

Sterling, Norman W. (Carleton PC)

Stockwell, Chris (Etobicoke West PC)

Sullivan, Barbara (Halton Centre L)

Ward, Brad (Brantford NDP)

Ward, Margery (Don Mills NDP)

Wiseman, Jim (Durham West NDP)

Substitutions:Cleary, John C. (Cornwall L) for Mr Phillips

Conway, Sean G. (Renfrew North L) for Mrs Sullivan

MacKinnon, Ellen (Lambton NDP) for Mr Sutherland

Villeneuve, Noble (S-D-G & East Grenville PC) for Mr Stockwell

Wilson, Gary (Kingston and The Islands NDP) for Mr Wiseman 

Clerk: Decker, Todd 

Staff: Anderson, Anne, Research Officer, Legislative Research Service 

The committee met at 0900 in the Parkway Motor Inn, Cornwall.  

RICHARD HICKERSON 

The Chair: The next presenter is Mr Hickerson. I would like to welcome you to the committee. You have up to 15 minutes for your presentation and, if you can, leave some time at the end for a question-and-answer period. 

Mr Hickerson: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you all. I really appreciate this opportunity to speak to you today. It is strictly on my own behalf, John Q. Citizen, ordinary guy on the street, whatever, but in my view there is a real need to counterbalance the one-sided criticism I have been hearing and you have been hearing of the recent Ontario government budget. There is a need to counterbalance a lot of this criticism with what I call common sense and some realism. I hope I will have time to get through my presentation. 

The Chair: You can use all your 15 minutes on your presentation. 

Mr Hickerson: If I do not, I will skip through paragraph to paragraph and quickly. I have a tendency to be a bit long-winded by nature anyway, but I will skip to the end if I have to. 

The Chair: If you do not get through it all, the clerk here will have a copy and she will be reading it over for part of the report. 

Mr Hickerson: Very good. I am glad about that because I may not get through. This is the kind of thing that gets me going as an ordinary citizen. I am trying to understand what is going on in the world and in my own province. I am trying to understand the tremendous changes going on in the Soviet Union, and this is what I see in the paper. I will just read you a couple of headlines to show you how much confusion there seems to be about what is actually going on and how difficult it is for the ordinary citizen to understand. 

This is the Standard-Freeholder, our local newspaper, the issue of Monday, August 26: "New Democratic Era Begins in USSR," rather an interesting headline I would suggest. Take a second look at that one. Here is one that will really turn you upside down if you are an ordinary citizen trying to understand what is going on in the world. I turn to the editorial page and I see under the little heading "World Today" by Mr Derek Nelson a title, "Retreat from Socialism Isn't Easy." That throws a real curve at me as a reader and as a person trying to understand and I say, whoa, what is going on here? 

So I get my books out. I read the main articles in the Encylopaedia Britannica on capitalism, on socialism and on Marxism. I spend two weeks plowing through this material to try to get a grip on what is actually happening in my world. My comments are in the light of my two weeks of study -- very interesting stuff. Of course we are going through a very interesting time and it impacts on Ontario as it impacts on every other part of the world, and we had better be awake to know what is going on. 

Socialism is frequently spoken of today as if it were incompatible with democracy. The corresponding fallacy is to identify capitalism with democracy, so you have a double whammy, double heresies going on here. Both these errors can be cleared up with a proper understanding of what democracy is and what socialism is. Socialism refers simply to a society in which the economic means of production are not controlled by private individuals. Democracy refers to a type of political organization in which representatives are elected by the people and in which majority rule generally prevails. It is quite possible, therefore, for a society to be both socialistic and democratic -- a great revelation there. 

In states which are totalitarian, the state is glorified and considered as more important than the individual. In democracies, however, the individual is seen as more important than the state. The danger in democracies is that the majority can, if unchecked, exercise a form of tyranny over the minority which is just as evil as any kind of despotism. Equally dangerous is the kind of tyranny that can be exercised over the many by a powerful few who have most of the real

power very simply because they own the means of production.1540 

The most terrible effect of capitalism has been to depersonalize and dehumanize relationships between people, making them more like machines, units of production, and people become an impersonal kind of labour force. What a way to dehumanize people. Now we are not even people any more; we are a force. This annoys me to no end, the terminology, but it is classic. This is what is happening to us. We have to be aware. Instead of human values and human needs we have machine needs and technological needs which seem to come to the fore. That seems to be the driving force, not human needs but technological needs, profit needs, competitive needs etc. 

No political system is, of course, above criticism. I do not care how good it is. We have not found a perfect one yet, obviously. Capitalism itself is certainly not perfect, although I do not think it gets enough close scrutiny and attention and it does not get questioned or challenged often enough. It is taken as the status quo and it is taken as unchanging and unchangeable and there is nothing any of us can do to improve it. It has already reached the state of perfection. 

If the fans of the capitalistic approach give themselves permission to criticize other systems, then they must be a little more willing, perhaps, to accept the legitimate criticism of those who can still see the real weaknesses of capitalism. Although not necessarily wrong in themselves, some of the values in capitalism are pretty thin. They do not reach to the highest parts of human beings. They do not inspire us to our highest levels of ability and growth. They are too thin for us. We are not completely satisfied with that. We are restless and looking for something better because we see these disadvantages every day. I will move on to the next paragraph and I will let you just read for yourselves. Ethics and economics have not mixed too well in the historic evolution of our capitalistic system. Despite this, the value and dignity of the human person still lies at the heart of any economy based on justice. People are subjects, not objects. It is about time they started being treated as subjects and not as objects, as they sometimes are. They must take priority over both capital and technology in any kind of just economic order. People are meant to be agents of their own destiny, not simply pawns. The common good of all must take precedence over vested self-interest. This is why economic strategies aimed at maximizing profit, power and domination are distorted models for true growth and development. They put profit and things before people and are therefore immoral. Might never did make right and you have to be a moral idiot to say that it did. 

The old Darwin thing of survival of the fittest, what kind of world is that and who wants to live in that kind of world where everything is based on survival of the fittest? What does that do to the poor and the disadvantaged and minority groups and what does that say for our whole approach to human beings? Good heavens, surely we can do better than that. 

Here is an interesting one, right out of the Brittannica, ironically, in the article on capitalism. This particular paragraph threw me. "It is the society which invests more in its people that will advance more rapidly and truly inherit the future. Many economists maintain that in the long run larger resource allocation to the public sector, especially to education, basic research and investment in people generally, heightens the prospects for sustaining high rates of economic growth. A society which can casually disregard the fact that over 10% of its workers are relegated to the trash heap of unemployment and which can, with a straight face, call 6% or 7% unemployment `full employment'" -- I love the terms that these economists use. 

I wish I could find an economist who only had one hand because then he would never be able to say, "But on the other hand." If we could only find a one-handed one, it would be so great. I am no economist but I love reading what these fellows write. Some of it is incredible. It really boggles your mind. I suppose they are wiser than I am in their special field. But there are economists who see beyond the way things are now and who are looking for that, who say, "How can we, as a social, caring, humane society, call 7% unemployment full employment?" That is a real trip, that one is. 

I am not against true progress. I am not against profit. When I start talking like this, everybody says: "What's the matter, Dick? Are you against profit?" I am not against profit. I am against exorbitant, extravagant, outlandish profit, where profits are never controlled but wages are always controlled. We have to control things like rent -- I heard the lady -- rent and everything. We never put controls on profit, though. It is okay for people to gouge each other and to exploit each other right to the hilt -- no limit on profit. There is something wrong with that philosophy, in my books anyway. 

I do not define progress solely in terms of profit. True progress must improve the lives of ordinary people, not simply add to the wealth of the wealthy. That is not progress. The basic human needs of the many must take precedence over the wants of the few. I will pass over the rest of that next little paragraph to save a little time at the end maybe, and I will just read you the last paragraph. 

The Chair: You have two minutes left. 

Mr Hickerson: I will just do my last paragraph. 

The Chair: Summarize. 

Mr Hickerson: No, that is fine. This is why a social democratic government -- and let's face it, this is a first. We have not had a social democratic government in Ontario ever before. They seem to be starting to pop up here and there in Canada, now and again. We are starting to realize that maybe there is a better way. Maybe there is another way of handling things. This is why you find the NDP in Ontario more likely to use deficit spending in a time of crisis. We were -- and I do not know if we still are but we were -- in a time of crisis, the deepest depression since the 1930s. This was no fun. So what did they do? Deficit spending. This is a traditional strategy and approach by -- I do not care if it is Canada or anywhere in the world. Any social democratic, responsible government in a time of crisis is going to stand up and do this kind of thing because it puts people before profits. 

I know it is hard to understand. I know we are not used to it yet because we have not seen it all that often. What is truly refreshing about the recent Ontario budget is that people, accustomed to being low on the list of priorities and to being treated like objects and commodities, units of production under capitalistic schemes, pawns to be exploited and manipulated by an impersonal, uncaring system often based largely on greed -- finally a breath of fresh air. After all this time of living under that other cloud, all of a sudden, we get a government that says: "Whoa, we are going to give people the priority. We are going to put them first. We are going to let them come forward, right to the head of the class." With this government that is what it promised us, and that is only what it is delivering, putting people first. 

This is why I would like to take this opportunity to thank the government of the day for coming through with its promises and putting people where they really belong, and that is at the head of the class. When you put people first you feel good. Do you know why? Because it is right to put people first. That is where people belong. 

1550 

The Chair: Thank you for appearing before the committee. Sorry you ran out of time. 

Mr Hickerson: That is okay, it is just my long-windedness. Thank you very much.