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  In 1960, when he became a Canadian citizen, Haymour was so proud that he threw a lavish Mideast-themed celebration for 250 people, complete with belly dancers. Edmonton mayor Elmer Roper and the lieutenant governor were on the guest list. “The best day of my life,” he recalled later.

  But as he neared his forties, Haymour started to reflect on his life. He had married a Canadian, Loreen, and they had four children. But Haymour worked constantly and the marriage was increasingly strained.

  It was time for a change.

  In 1970, Haymour decided the Okanagan Valley offered a new start. With the fruit trees and gentle hills surrounding the large lake, it reminded him of the Beqaa Valley.

  The Okanagan was a conservative place in 1970. Kelowna had 19,000 residents, less than one-sixth today’s population.

  Haymour—with his Lebanese background, self-made wealth, and a big personality—stood out. Especially when he built his dream house on a rocky ridge overlooking the lake. It was enormous, and defied architectural labels, part Moorish castle and part German chateau.

  The site offered spectacular views across the valley. Which meant the towering house, with seven bedrooms, three living rooms, and two elevators, was visible for miles. People called it an eyesore, sniffed at the ostentation.

  Haymour had more plans. He dreamed of a Mideast-themed amusement park to bring people to the Okanagan. On a Sunday afternoon drive, he spotted Rattlesnake Island, in front of Peachland. It was empty, just rock and scrub and grass, and, at 1.8 hectares, a perfect place to build his dream.

  Haymour was a doer. He found out the unzoned property could be developed any way he wanted. He presented his ideas to Peachland council, which agreed to help with an onshore dock for the water taxis that would ferry visitors to his attraction.

  And he bought the island, drafted his plans, and started building. Haymour didn’t hire architects; he walked the island and started sketching—a dock to welcome visitors here, an eighteen-hole miniature golf course, each hole celebrating a different aspect of Mideastern culture, here, two pyramids, a swimming pool, restaurants serving delicacies from his homeland, a twelve-metre-tall concrete camel children could play inside, a cave, and a pretend submarine.

  But some well-connected locals weren’t happy—including W. A. C. Bennett, the legendary Social Credit premier who represented the riding.

  Suddenly, Haymour started having problems. Approvals he needed for things like a sewage system were stalled in the bureaucracy. The Highways Ministry blocked access to the ferry dock. The provincial government retroactively zoned the island as ‘“a forest and grazing reserve,” even though it only had one tree.

  When he tried to welcome several hundred guests to a preview in June 1972, RCMP officers spent the day at the water taxi dock discouraging people from attending.

  Haymour pressed on, despite the enormous challenges and mounting costs. He became increasingly convinced he was the victim of a conspiracy.

  But the Royal Bank heard about the problems and delays and pulled his loans.

  The project was dead, and the $170,000 he had spent on it was lost. Haymour couldn’t pay his bills. His marriage, not surprisingly, began to fall apart, and in July 1973 Loreen and the children moved back to Alberta. The government made a lowball offer of $40,000 for the island.

  But Haymour wouldn’t sell. He complained of the conspiracy, pleaded for help from anyone he could reach, even flying back to ask the Lebanese government to intervene. No one believed him. In fact, people thought he was nuts.

  But Haymour was right. Behind the scenes, Bennett, provincial cabinet ministers, local officials, and at least six government departments had been secretly conspiring to make sure the project would never be built.

  Then Haymour went too far. He started to talk about using violence to force the government to address his case. The RCMP put him under surveillance, and an undercover officer befriended him and listened to his angry rants.

  On December 19, 1973, police arrested Haymour and Crown prosecutors laid thirty-seven criminal charges, including manufacturing letter bombs, plotting to blow up a bridge, and conspiring to hijack an airplane. He spent six months in jail awaiting his day in court, passing some of the time by trimming other inmates’ hair.

  Prison was a nightmare. He learned Loreen was filing for divorce and the bank was foreclosing on the island. His dream home was destroyed in a suspicious fire. The insurance renewal form hadn’t reached him in jail, so he had no coverage.

  When he finally appeared for trial, thirty-six of the charges were dropped. All that remained was a charge for possession of lightweight brass knuckles, something that never would have resulted in his detention before trial.

  Haymour wanted to plead guilty, which would have allowed him to walk out of court a free man.

  But the Crown pressed for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Court-ordered psychiatrists testified Haymour was delusional, believing “there was a conspiracy on behalf of certain people in the government to thwart his business attempts.”

  The fact that his beliefs might be true apparently never crossed anyone’s mind. The judge found Haymour insane and ordered him committed.

  During a recess in the hearing, government representatives pressed him again—sign over the property for $40,000. Desperate to end the process and hoping the government would then leave him alone, he agreed.

  “They adjourned it for 15 minutes and they brought me the paper and asked me to sign,” Haymour said later. “I would have sold it back for a dollar, anything to get the hell out of there.”

  The transaction was illegal and unconscionable, a British Columbia Supreme Court justice would later rule. How could government officials argue Haymour was insane and press him to sell his property to them at the same time?

  Haymour spent eleven months in Riverview mental institution before being released in 1975, planning to return to Lebanon. (He believed leaving Canada was a condition of his release.)

  After four years of struggle, most people would have given up.

  But Haymour raised the stakes. He enlisted some cousins in Beirut, got his hands on machine guns and, on February 26, 1976, stormed into the Canadian Embassy and took about two dozen hostages. After a nine-hour standoff, his key demands were granted—amnesty for the hostage-taking, and a return to Canada so he could press his case for compensation.

  Haymour settled down. But he didn’t give up. He built a small house, borrowed money from a few friends, and tried to interest a lawyer in his case. He finally found a dedicated champion in lawyer Jack Cram, a skillful advocate for the underdog and eccentric, always willing to take on the establishment.

  It took ten years, but on August 7, 1986, Haymour walked into the British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver and waited nervously for the verdict in his lawsuit against the government, after a trial that had stretched over eight months.

  Justice Gordon MacKinnon delivered a devastating judgment, concluding the government had conspired against Haymour and harassed him into poverty and a mental institution.

  “I am satisfied senior officials of government, including ministers of the Crown and with the knowledge of the premier (W. A. C. Bennett) contrived to improperly curb Haymour’s development,” MacKinnon wrote in a seventy-five-page judgment. Pressing him to sell the property at a low price during his criminal proceedings was unconscionable.

  At least six government departments were part of the conspiracy, MacKinnon found. The actions had been “highly improper, illegal and even cruel.”

  And the government was not content with shutting down the project, the judgment noted, but conspired to drive “the price of the property down through the use of regulation, and effectively drove the plaintiff to the brink of financial disaster.”

  The government could have expropriated the island at any time, he added.

  Haymour was awarded the difference between the price the government paid and the property’s real value, plus interest—about $155,
000. The scandal led to an investigation by the provincial ombudsman, and his report brought another $140,000 and a public apology from the government.

  Haymour was fifty-six. His second marriage had collapsed and he had been through hell, but he still had his dreams.

  With the settlement, he built Casa Haymour, a bed and breakfast and restaurant that was a mini-version of his planned theme park. He sometimes greeted guests in flowing Arab-style robes.

  His view included Rattlesnake Island, by then part of a provincial park. Haymour, with a sweeping moustache and thick glasses, could look out at the island and think about what might have been.

  THE INDIAN PROBLEM

  The invitations went out quietly, secretly, in the fall of 1921. Words were whispered in the longhouses and Native communities on British Columbia’s central coast, as the forests shone in the rain.

  ’Namgis Chief Dan Cranmer was preparing to host a potlatch on Village Island. A time to gather, to bring out sacred masks and robes and share the foods and gifts he would provide.

  A time to sing and dance the old stories.

  But it had to be secret. The Canadian government had made potlatches illegal, and police were waiting to pounce.

  Cranmer had a wedding to celebrate. More than that, there was a culture to keep alive. The Kwakwaka’wakw people had no written language. They shared their history, their beliefs, through stories and songs at gatherings like potlatches.

  Winter was a traditional time for potlatches. The salmon and herring and oolichan would not be in the rivers for months. People had time and could gather for celebrations.

  Or once they could. They could share the old stories, and pass them on to their children. They could outdo each other with gifts and feasts.

  But in 1884, the Canadian Parliament had passed a law to make potlatches illegal. The Indian agents and missionaries complained potlatches were wasteful. The government believed potlatches helped keep alive a culture that needed to be eradicated if Indians were to give up their past and become English-speaking, Christian subjects of the British Crown.

  Since potlatches were banned, Cranmer would risk prison for giving gifts to guests. Participating in dancing and singing or sharing the stories was a crime, punishable by at least two months, and up to six years, in prison.

  At first, the laws were much ignored, with judges reluctant to impose penalties when charges were filed.

  But in 1913, fifty-nine-year-old Duncan Campbell Scott became superintendent general of the Department of Indian Affairs.

  Scott, a career Indian Affairs bureaucrat, was a fervent advocate of forced assimilation. “I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” he wrote. “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” (Scott was also a poet and writer; his literary reputation has been overshadowed by his role in implementing Indian residential schools.)

  Potlatches kept the culture alive. Scott wanted them stopped.

  And if the courts wouldn’t do it, he had another plan. Scott persuaded the government to make the crimes summary offences. That meant judges no longer heard the cases. Indian agents could hear the evidence as justices of the peace and render verdicts. They worked for Scott. They knew what their masters wanted.

  Cranmer’s local adversary was William Halliday, the newly appointed Indian agent for Alert Bay, who shared Scott’s zeal for ending the potlatch culture.

  Cranmer was thirty-three, a handsome and respected leader. He knew the risks and made plans to avoid Halliday and the police. His people had been induced to move from their traditional village on the Nimpkish River to Alert Bay, then a growing town on northern Vancouver Island.

  It wasn’t safe to hold a potlatch there, with so many watching white eyes. Cranmer planned to hold the ceremony on Village Island, near Knight Inlet, far from the church and the government agents and the police.

  The potlatch was a great success. Representatives from at least five bands made their way to Village Island, carrying their potlatch regalia and sacred items. The gifts were lavish, part of a tradition of competitive sharing that saw each host and clan strive to outdo the next. Guests received gas-powered boats, pool tables, sewing machines, gramophones, cash, and blankets.

  “The potlatch went on for five or six days,” Dan Cranmer’s son Bill told the Victoria Times Colonist in 2005. “It was apparently one of the biggest potlatches ever held in our area.”

  Too big, perhaps. Word had reached the authorities.

  Halliday and Sgt. Donald Angerman of the British Columbia Police travelled across the water to Village Island and found the potlatch in full swing. They immediately started arresting participants.

  Forty-five people were charged and brought before Halliday as justice of the peace. Angerman was the prosecutor.

  There they were offered a choice. Be sent to Oakalla Prison for two to four months.

  Or give up the masks and robes and whistles and art that were part of their culture and essential to celebrating the potlatch. Not just their own items. To avoid jail for their members, the bands would have to surrender all those things that linked the people to their past, and let them share their history.

  Twenty-two people said yes. Oakalla was a fearsome place for Natives who had never left the coast. The struggle to keep the old ways alive had become, for many, just too hard.

  The rest—men and women—were led away in front of crying relatives to be locked up in the jail outside Vancouver, clearing trees, working the prison farm, sleeping on straw mattresses in crowded cells.

  “Great Potlatch May Be Last Of Its Kind,” said the headline in the British Colonist, a Victoria newspaper: “Chief Dan Cranmer’s Festival Somewhat Marred By Interference Of Authorities.”

  Soon Natives began arriving in Alert Bay, handing over masks and robes and copper engravings and rattles, the potlatch art and regalia handed down within the tribe.

  They gave up hundreds of pieces of art and craft, the links to their past and their culture. The carved masks and robes worn by dancers were spectacular, eagles and thunderbirds and spirits. They were beautiful, and valuable.

  Halliday displayed all the seized goods on benches in the Alert Bay Anglican Parish Hall and charged admission for people who wanted to see them. A keen amateur photographer, he and others set out to record the masks and robes and regalia.

  The public exhibit was another cruel blow to the First Nations, who believed the artifacts were sacred and kept them stored out of sight in cedar boxes when they were not being used.

  Halliday struck a deal to sell thirty-three items to George Heye, a New York collector. The pieces, with the rest of Heye’s collection, were displayed in his newly opened Museum of the American Indian in New York City, made a part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1990.

  Most of the carvings and art were crated up and shipped east. About half went to the Victoria Memorial Museum in Ottawa, a predecessor of today’s Canadian Museum of History, and half to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

  And some were just taken. Scott picked some pieces for his personal collection. So did Angerman, the arresting officer and prosecutor when the natives were pressured to give up their cultural treasures.

  But on Vancouver Island, the pieces were never forgotten. And in 1951, when the potlatch laws were removed from the Indian Act, efforts began to recover the items seized three decades earlier.

  It took time, and tremendous persistence from the Kwakwaka’wakw. Museums are sensitive about how their collections have been acquired, fearing a long list of repatriation requests.

  The National Museum of Man—the 1970s incarnation of today’s Canadian Museum of History—was first to agree that the Kwakwaka’wakw had been wrongly forced to give up their ceremonial masks and robes and art. But it insisted that a proper museum to house the collection be built on their territory before returning the collection.

  The bulk of t
he collection was from the ’Namgis Band and the Cape Mudge Band. Each wanted the items in its own community. By 1974, they agreed to build two museums and allow descendants of the original owners to decide where their artifacts should reside. Funding from national museum programs supported the two projects.

  The Royal Ontario Museum returned its items in 1988, and the Smithsonian in 1994. A woman from France personally delivered a headdress that had been in her father’s office for decades.

  That left one holdout—the British Museum, which steadfastly refused to give up its transformation mask, a carving of a crest that opened to reveal a face. British law makes it illegal for the British Museum to return items.

  But U’mista Cultural Centre executive director Andrea Sanborn was not deterred. She showed up at one meeting at the British Museum with an empty Adidas bag. It’s to bring the mask home in, she told the puzzled directors. By 2005, she had negotiated a solution. The British Museum would retain ownership, but loan the mask to its original owners.

  For the Kwakwaka’wakw, a part of their culture was restored.

  They celebrated with a potlatch.

  THE BIG CON

  Everything about Ian Thow was big.

  The investment adviser’s house was a $5.5-million waterfront mansion outside Victoria, with four bedrooms and seven bathrooms. There was a dock on the Saanich Inlet for his yacht, a seventeen-metre Sea Ray that would sleep six, and two smaller boats.

  The seven-acre property had a pad for Thow’s Jet Ranger helicopter. There was a shiny collection of cars—four Mercedes, two Escalades, a Porsche, a Corvette, and more.

  And Thow had a fleet of three airplanes, including a $12-million Citation X that could carry nine and was the fastest non-military aircraft in the world. He used it to ferry investment clients to lavish weekend getaways.

  Ian Thow was big—six foot three and over 200 pounds—with a big head, ruddy face, and hair cropped close at the sides. He seemed to be everywhere in Victoria, raising money for charities, pledging big chunks of his own cash for causes, front and centre at every gala, bidding enthusiastically at the charity auctions that were part of the social scene for the people with money.