Death overtakes heroic Hill bus driver
Roger Bednarchuk drove the most famous bus to ever stop on Parliament Hill — the one with the hostages, the one that delivered a scary new world.
It was April 7, 1989. Bednarchuk, then 55, was behind the wheel of a Greyhound bus leaving Montreal for New York City with 10 passengers. One of them, a Lebanese-born radical, Charles Yacoub, 32, approached the driver and pointed a .45 calibre revolver at his head.
Not yet out of the city, the drama had begun.
It ended eight hours later on the slippery, spring lawn in front of the Centre Block, the passengers safely walking into the twilight, and Yacoub kneeling on the grass, hands over his head, to be handcuffed, in a downtown that had been evacuated.
During the nearly six hours the bus was parked on the grass, a pair of hostages was released, a shot was fired toward some American tourists, snipers took to the roof, SWAT teams to the ground, and a new era of terror was ushered in — years before we knew what the word really meant.
(Yacoub was trying to protest Syrian military involvement in Lebanon and though his tactic would attract media attention to the offshore crisis.)
Through it all, Bednarchuk, a short man who had driven for Greyhound for 29 years, was credited for being cool, levelheaded, even telling jokes to keep the mood light as passengers were confined inside while being told the bus was booby-trapped with explosives.
Bednarchuk died June 14, age 84, never having driven a bus again.
And Yacoub? He was handed a six-year prison sentence — years before Canada had an antiterrorism law — and today is a Montreal-area retailer, answering his own phone.
“I mean, what I can I do?” he said when reached Tuesday. “He died? He died. That’s life, you know?”
Yes, that’s life — and the one belonging to Roger Bednarchuk took a jarring turn.
While he was lauded as a hero and given an award of valour in June 1989, by then Bednarchuk was already through as a commercial bus driver. After a few weeks off with stress and anxiety, in May Greyhound believed he was fit to return behind the wheel.
He wasn’t, so he was placed on leave without pay, $26,000 a year. By the time he picked up his medal, he was doing odd jobs just to get by.
At the awards ceremony, he told a Citizen reporter he was still haunted by flashbacks from the siege, during which he suffered repeated anxiety attacks. Greyhound sent him for one session with a psychologist and his description was priceless.
“She told me the best thing was to get right back at it. I told her, ‘I didn’t fall off a bike’.”
Indeed, at the trial nearly a year later, he testified about memory flashes and hearing voices; the prosecuting Crown said many of the passengers were still dealing with psychological damage.
Bednarchuk’s son, Roger Jr., was reluctant to discuss his father’s passing, the result of natural causes. He said a small, private service will mark his death.
“He was retired,” his son said of the later years.
“He was living a peaceful life with his wife. He used to go to his cottage in the summer. He was not very healthy during the last couple of years.”
One of four children, Roger Jr., 61, said his father didn’t like to speak of the episode, which was covered around the world.
“He got on with his life, but the scars always remained, eh?”
A security expert, meanwhile, said the Greyhound bus hijacking was a seminal event in the evolution of enhanced public safety on the Hill.
(It occurred at a time when a private vehicle could simply drive unimpeded to the front doors of the Centre Block, which is impossible today.)
By 1997, after the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing exposed the danger of parked cars near vulnerable government targets, unauthorized vehicles could no longer park anywhere near the Hill’s main buildings.
Pierre-Yves Bourduas was an RCMP officer at the time, later deputy commissioner, and is now president of P-Y Public Safety Management Inc.
“This particular incident was certainly a wake-up call for law enforcement agencies, writ large,” Bourduas says.
One of the most glaring shortcomings from the episode was the lack of communication among police forces, he explained. After a hostage was released from the bus in Montreal and immediately contacted authorities, police assumed the vehicle was still headed to the U.S.
Police alerted border authorities but not wider police forces, meaning the RCMP, OPP and Ottawa police were not ready when the bus took a turn and headed west to the capital.
“We were lucky that nothing actually happened, but it certainly set the stage for being more alert.”
Something did happen, mind. A man lost his career — maybe his well-being — a treasured space its serenity.