National Post (National Edition)
Furlong’s agonies gave him strength
YOU CAN EITHER GIVE UP OR GET UP AND FIGHT BACK.
Asold-out crowd of nearly 1,000 people turned out to hear former Vancouver Olympics chief executive John Furlong at a fundraising breakfast at the Vancouver Convention Centre, a handful of people with placards staged a “silent protest” outside, and there were seagulls circling in a light flurry of snow in the harbour. On the face of it, not much else was going on. But another altogether strange and unlikely thing was happening on Tuesday morning.
On Tuesday it became more or less official that the hurricane of lurid allegations intended to demolish the John Furlong legend — and which very nearly did — became another inspiring chapter in it. It’s now just another episode in the moral tale Furlong has been telling rapt audiences from the beginning, the one about an Irish immigrant who’d come from tragedy and ended up a reluctant but beloved Canadian hero, against all odds, by dint of sheer pluck.
This isn’t quite what the crusading journalist Laura Robinson set out to do five years ago, going to obsessive lengths to expose the Furlong story as a scandal, a cautionary tale about a widely admired white male authority figure with a secret past involving vicious abuse and racist violence at a Catholic day-school in Burns Lake, B.C. in the late 1960s.
But several odd plot twists revealed holes in the story that debuted with the version Robinson wrote for a September 2012 cover feature in the weekly Vancouver newsmagazine, The Georgia Straight. The courts dismissed civil suits alleging the most sordid sexual misconduct against Furlong, three in a row. The RCMP had found no evidence to warrant charges. Furlong, declaring himself vindicated, dropped a libel suit he’d begun against Robinson. But in the rarest of twists in stories of these kinds, Robinson the journalist sued Furlong the powerful icon, alleging he’d libelled her in making public statements in his own defence.
Not only did Robinson lose, but rarer still, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Wedge composed a 97-page judgment that reads in parts like a withering indictment of Robinson herself, and by last December, skepticism of the version of the Furlong legend that casts him as a villain gave way to alarm. The University of British Columbia rescinded its invitation to Furlong to serve as the keynote speaker at the ZLC Millennium Scholarship Breakfast, and within days, the uproar had caused UBC president Santa Ono to issue an apology and re-invite Furlong.
And so there Furlong was at the fundraiser Tuesday, in all his homespun glory, soaking up a standing ovation. “You know, I feel like I’ve been attending this breakfast for about three months already,” Furlong began, and there was laughter, and Furlong proceeded from there in his folksy motivational-speaker style to enthrall the audience with a series of cheery reminiscences of plucky high-school athletes, colourful team captains, selfless Olympic volunteers and so on, the moral of each anecdote being that grit is virtuous, and steely determination pays off, and never-say-die optimism wins in the end.
Furlong alluded to his recent tribulations obliquely, but unambiguously, and the moral of the story as he told it is the same lesson he’s been encouraging everyone to take from his own story, and the stories of the characters he’s encountered along the way. “Life happens to you and get run over a few times,” he said. “Tough things happen to all of us, and when it happens, what are you going to do? You can either give up or get up and fight back and be an example.”
He took no questions from the clutch of journalists in attendance, but then, neither did the silent protesters outside. All they said was that they were mostly UBC students, that they’d prefer to remain unnamed, and that reporters should acquaint themselves with the background to Furlong’s story and should “reach out” to the “survivors” up in Burns Lake and Babine Lake.
That last bit of advice is something journalists have been taking assiduously ever since Robinson’s story appeared in The Georgia Straight five years ago. It hasn’t helped get any of us closer to the truth of the story which, if there’s any truth in it to be told, is still a story about what Furlong may or may not have done when he was an 18-year-old Irish volunteer gym teacher at the Immaculata Catholic school in the B.C. interior in 1969, nearly half a century ago.
Furlong categorically denies the allegations against him, and the Furlong-as-villain hypothesis was served poorly by the dismissal of three civil suits against Furlong alleging sexual assault. In one case, the suit was dropped by the plaintiff. In the other two dismissed cases, both pupils were determined to have attended other schools, and not Immaculata, during Furlong’s time in Burns Lake.
Legends work better with tidy beginnings and uncluttered storylines. Robinson’s version of the legend would have been tidier if only Furlong had been served a comeuppance by now. But that hasn’t happened. And it likely won’t. The uproars over Furlong’s time at Immaculata aren’t going to go away. The story may never end in a way that will satisfy all of us. As of Tuesday, though, Furlong has clearly taken back control of the conversation, and he’s done it by making the agonies he’s endured since 2012 a compelling, instructive part of the moral tale he always tells.
Here’s Furlong to the happy breakfast crowd on Tuesday: “When the walls around you are caving in, and the oxygen is evaporating out of the room and people are saying bad things about you, and rumours abound, and it’s just getting hopeless, and you feel this extraordinary despair and you feel that there’s no way forward, at that time and that precise moment, when you feel this, the one thing that’s standing between you getting up and your survival and getting on, is the answer to one simple question. And that question is: What is true?
“It has to be enough, because it’s all you’re going to get to rely on.”
The truth has to be enough. It’s just not always quite so easy to figure out what it is, exactly.