MP speaking of private pain to aid others
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
As he drives to and from Ottawa, MP David Sweet has been listening to Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.” He recites its famous opening line as he settles behind the desk at his constituency office.
We are not talking politics today. This conversation is personal. Emotional.
This is about Sweet’s worst times. And how he is trying to make the best of them.
In the past six months the Conservative member of parliament for Flamborough-Glanbrook has publicly laid his soul bare. He has revealed broken pieces of his life without any thought of political benefit or fallout.
He has shared the deeply private stories of his daughter’s suicide and his own childhood abuse at school because he wants others to know they are not alone. He wants to help them. “Redemptive,” he calls it. Last fall Sweet, 60, began talking publicly about Lara’s suicide.
She was 23. Last August 11, she died of a drug overdose in Oshawa, where she lived for two years.
To fully understand the story of Lara, one must understand the
Dickensian story of Sweet.
His father, Gordon, (adopted by the Sweet family after they answered a newspaper ad) was a military man and then a TV repair man.
“Dad was a good old drinking boy,” Sweet says.
His mother, Jean, was mentally ill. She had shock treatments and drank too much.
Sweet grew up in Kingston trying to look out for his brother Paul, a year younger. Paul had his own mental health issues, which a psychiatrist attributed to his upbringing.
“I just knew that was wrong,” Sweet says.
Paul had to be strapped into his high chair to keep from hurting himself. “He’d stick his hand on the stove.”
By the time he was five, doctors were sedating Paul with Valium. They labelled him “incorrigible.”
“This is no goddamned way for a young person to live,” Sweet’s father said before stopping the medication.
Paul acted out. He burned a garage down. Damaged property. Couldn’t be controlled. Sweet was a handful, too. He ran away and stole cars for joyrides.
Both siblings were placed in St. Joseph’s Training School, a residential reform facility for delinquent boys. Paul was there from age 10 to 16, Sweet from 13 to 15. Though at the same institution in Alfred, 70 km east of Ottawa, they saw each other only in the halls.
The Christian Brothers who ran the facility regularly beat the children and forced them into hard labour. Some boys — Sweet included — were put in solitary confinement. Some boys were raped.
Sweet bolted from a notorious Brother who summoned him to his bedroom. He believes he narrowly escaped sexual assault.
After St. Joseph’s, Paul used drugs, did crimes and wound up in jail.
Sweet’s life sputtered. He married at 18, divorced at 19. But in 1982 he made “a commitment to Christ.”
He met Almut, who became his wife and they had a family. In 1994, they adopted Paul’s baby daughter, Lara.
She was a troubled girl. Sweet came home one day to find his father — who also lived with them for a time — sitting alone at the kitchen table weeping. Lara had been screaming for six hours.
There were plenty of doctors and coping strategies. Once, Lara was enrolled in a study and given Ritalin. Sweet and Almut were downstairs when they realized they couldn’t hear Lara. Sweet raced to find her.
“She was in her room, sitting on the floor, playing quietly,” he recalls, overwhelmed with tears. “I had never seen her like that before.”
Lara was active at church and helped with her father’s political campaigns. She loved to sing.
Alas, Lara didn’t like taking Ritalin and as a young teen, refused it. She turned to street drugs instead and left home at 15. Sweet visited her at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre.
In the months before her death she had a room in Oshawa, a job, was clean.
The weekend before she died, Lara came home to Ancaster. The Sweets (she has four siblings) went to the Brassie Pub for karaoke.
“We walked home far too late and far too loudly,” Sweet says. “We laughed a lot. Lara said it was one of the best family nights of her life.”
Her funeral was packed. “There’s this lineup of hundreds of young people. They were sobbing. I said to Almut: ‘We’re going to have to check our own emotions to support them.’ These young people were falling down. They put so many purple flowers in her casket that by the end of the night you couldn’t even see Lara.”
One young man said Lara once gave him $20 for food, a gesture she really couldn’t afford. But she told him she had eaten that day and he hadn’t. There would be no argument.
After Lara’s death, Sweet and Almut shared a bottle of wine and discussed the value of going public. By now, his parents had passed. Paul died of cancer in 2015. There was no privacy left to guard but their own and that of the remaining children.
Might speaking out honour Lara’s memory and her desire to help others? Could it break down stigma?
“We wanted to just give people some comfort.”
The family unanimously decided to share Lara’s story. Sweet rose in the House of Commons on Sept. 13 and paid tribute to his daughter.
The avalanche of media stories that followed had barely slowed when Sweet read a Toronto Star investigation into survivors of abuse at provincially run secular training schools.
The government has quietly settled more than 200 lawsuits alleging historic abuse by staff. But a group of former students had their cases thrown out by a judge who deemed them not credible because they had criminal records.
“I went apoplectic,” Sweet recalls.
That spurred him to anonymously phone the Toronto Star. He told a reporter he was a MP and the men were telling the truth. The reporter asked if he would go on the record and identify himself.
Again Sweet and Almut talked. She and the children already knew about St. Joseph’s. Years ago Sweet took them to see it because he felt they deserved an explanation of his sometimes “overbearing” ways. That experience was cathartic. Now his past could help others.
Last month, the Star published a story on Sweet’s experience at St. Joseph’s. Almut was concerned about the toll publicity would have on her husband.
“These roads present themselves before you,” says Sweet. “When you open up about your pain, people will comfort you. Then they just start telling you their story. You give them permission.”
Parents of children who died by suicide have reached out to him. Likewise, survivors of training schools.
This is the new public life of David Sweet. Advocate. Survivor.
“When you become a politician, you imagine just fighting policy issues. I certainly had no political motivation for sharing my stories. But a cavalcade of circumstances led me to this place.”