Boreal.ca

Bernard Payeur

A Short Autobiography

I was was born in 1951, the fifth of eight children, in Hearst, Ontario, a mostly French-speaking town about 150 miles south of James Bay on a northern leg of the Trans-Canada Highway.

In 1967, my parent’s lifelong business selling logging and farm equipment was forced into bankruptcy. The year before, the family home and much of the family’s belonging had been destroyed in a middle-of-the-night fire.

Having to start over again with next to nothing my parents decided to try their luck out West. On a cold Sunday afternoon in late November, in a scene reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath, with a snow storm threatening, my mother at the wheel, we set out on a journey of more than 2,000 miles to begin again.

My parents found a business they could afford in Ashcroft, a small town about 50 miles South-West of Kamloops, 3 miles or so off the highway to Vancouver. How welcoming would a town which catered to miners, ranchers and cowboys be to people who spoke English with an accent and were responsible for that foreign language on cereal boxes?

I may have been born in Ontario but I had never been to Ottawa. In 1973, mostly out of curiosity, I decided to visit the National Capital and perhaps work for the federal government for a year or two before returning to B.C.

A few months after arriving in the national capital I joined the Federal government. Six years and five promotions later I went to work for the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Auditor General of Canada suspected that la crème-de-la-crème of the Canadian Public Service, the Foreign Service, had sticky fingers. It would be my misfortune to confirm the Auditor General’s suspicions.

For a more complete account of my life in Hearst and in British Columbia,  and my time with the Canadian Public Service please read:

The Next 15 years

A professor at Simon Fraser who introduced me to Jane Austen and Jonathan Swift said that if I applied himself I could became a decent writer. At fifty or so I decided to apply himself. I may have waited too long.

I abandoned computer consulting and writing computer code to write prose. My first book, which was self-published, got raved reviews in the Calgary Herald. Columnist Les Brost warned his readers not to the read Canada – The Fractured Nation Interviews unless they were “prepared to think -- really think -- about tomorrow's Canada”.

The Interviews which imagine a future where Canada is no more was nominated for The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.

My next book was on the Koran, the inspiration for this effort may have come from a young Muslim woman from West Africa whom I met in Montreal while consulting for Bell Canada Enterprises.

Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice got some favourable response from university and trade publishers but all were reluctant to market a book on such a controversial subject by a layperson (read Between A Scholar and A Hard Place).

An aide to Joe Clark had given me assurances that if I fell on my sword for the good of the Department things would be different. When I found out that a director was given a substantial bonus on retirement for the impact that my discoveries had had on his career I realized nothing had changed.

I tried to get the governments' attention only to be rebuffed at every turn. That is when I decided to write Shooting the Messenger.

I am still unsure about whether it was the right  thing to do. Does my pursuit of justice justify revealing a lack of ethics in our diplomats, not only to Canadians but to the world, the stage on which they dance?

Religion, Islam in particular, has become the focus of much of my writing.

Like Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University, who writes in the The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (2007) about what he calls "the fragile exception" I worry that the "Renaissance, which marked the end of the Catholic Church’s dominance in Europe allowing for a flowering of the arts and sciences, and the Enlightenment which ushered in the Age of Reason" may be undone by a resurgent, uncompromising Dark Age religion.

Teach Your Children Well is about accommodating Islamic teachings within Canada's ostensibly secular public school system and the impact this will have on the next generation of children on which the survival of "the fragile exception" must again ultimately depend.

At this writing I have completed a first draft of a companion guide to Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice, Going Swimming Fully Clothed a Layman’s Guide to Islamic Law. What I look most forward to is finishing Remembering Uzzah a dark, tragic informative three act comedy.

And then there is Shared Prophets, what Allah has to say about performance of the biblical heroes and villains whom He invited to strut their stuff on His stage, the Koran.

Bernard Payeur