War Stories & AnecdotesGovernment Affairs
War Cries - The Story of Depot Harbour
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All of the work we do at Open Options involves learning. Every new client means that there is new corporate culture to understand, and every case we work on exposes us to a new technology or a new way that people can interact. Our first years were particularly rich opportunities to learn. This story is about one eye-opening case that allowed me to look on the work I was doing from a whole new perspective. We had been asked to by a contact at Conestoga-Rovers and Associates (CRA), an environmental consulting company, to meet with him and “the Chief”.
The room in which we met was a stark industrial classroom with green walls and a grey carpet. Formica tables and utilitarian plastic chairs made up the furniture. It echoed a bit – there were too many hard surfaces. Whiteboards covered every wall, except for one with a window overlooking the parking lot.
Our host, Julian, was clearly a bit nervous. He was a fast-tracked Project Leader at CRA and although immensely competent, he was out of his element in this case, as I suppose we all were. The Chief, sitting on his plastic chair like it was a throne, seemed to be the most relaxed of the group.
For most of our industrial era, the effect of man's actions on the environment has not been much of a concern. I am old enough to remember a culture where Mother Nature was viewed as an enemy to be confronted and conquered, where cutting down a giant tree or destroying a wetland was viewed as a battle won. In those days a factory that put poisons in the ground was seen as a nuisance at worst, if it was even noticed.
Times have changed, but the old culture has left behind a lot of mess to clean up. This has created a big need for companies like CRA that specialize in environmental remediation. Environmental remediation has a lot of elements to it. Not only do you have to know how to physically clean up a site, but you also have to be able to measure what the pollutants are and how widely distributed the pollution is. You have to develop skills in dealing with insurance companies, lawyers and government agencies, all of which are intimately involved in almost every environmental remediation situation.
CRA is one of the biggest companies of its type in the world. Their head office is in Waterloo, Ontario, which is also the home of Open Options. Being in the same town means that people know each other, so that even though Open Options had only been in business a few months at this time, our service was top of mind when an opportunity to use it arose.
Julian's expertise was in doing environmental assessments of polluted sites. Using sophisticated science, he and his team would test soil and ground water and determine the source and nature of pollutants, the rate of dispersal, the potential human effects, the economic effects on the property and the cost of remediation. Open Options – at the time consisting of myself and Gerry Sullivan - had been brought in because of some complications with his current project. Complications we were now going to learn about.
In Canada, what in the past were called "Indians" are now called "First Nations" people. This is more sensible, as I am sure people from India would agree. In the US the term "Native Americans" is used, which is almost as confusing as "Indians." Anyhow, the Chief - his name was John - sitting with authority in the industrial meeting room represented a First Nations band with a problem. It was a problem important enough for them to engage Julian, and for which Julian had asked our help.
John had three or four other people with him, part of the management group for the band. They were obviously capable people, but John was clearly the leader in all respects. He did most of the talking, but not in the controlled and precise way a business leader would, but in a slow, thoughtful way. Occasionally one of his cohorts would contribute to the discussion, and the shared ideas would be chewed over together. But it was always John who signaled that it was time to move on to the next thought.
On meeting John and his crew I immediately knew that there was an intersection of worlds going on. At this point I had been living for many years in an academic milieu with its support of logical thinking and crisp communication. I had also had some experience in the business world with its emphasis on efficiencies and appearances. The First Nations group were clearly from what can only be called a different world altogether.
Part of it could have been the differences between urban people and rural people. Part could have been cultural differences between a First Nations band and mainstream Canadian society. Or the particular personalities involved. Probably all three, and maybe other reasons. Whatever the case, it was an eye-opener.
There were overt differences such as clothing, speaking style and so forth, but there were in particular two important differences in how the First Nations group presented their ideas. For one thing, they were very integrative in their thinking - rather than speaking in a sequence of logically related steps, they would seemingly jump around from idea to idea, and only in the end would an outsider see how all of the ideas were connected. Another thing was that feelings were of predominant importance. In the culture I was more familiar with, we would diminish feelings in favor of reason, but the First Nations people seemingly did the opposite.
We will see later in this story the consequences of these differences in style, but the fact of these differences was immediately obvious to me as soon as I met the group.
After introductions, Julian explained that he had been employed by the First Nations band to do an environmental assessment of a site on the band's reservation. As a consequence a problem had arisen for which he thought Open Options might be able to help. He then asked John to tell the story of the site.
In a slow and personal style John told the story. He had lived through much of it, and was clearly a gifted story teller. The strong emotional content of his style enriched the story immensely, but here I can only report the basic facts as I remember them.
During the Second World War one of the major elements of the domestic economy in both Canada and the US was the production and shipment of war materiel. For both of these activities, it was necessary to take precautions to prevent sabotage. Production plants and transportation routes were often masked or hidden.
One secret route for explosives went through Ontario, Canada. Explosives - cordite in particular - produced at plants on the Great Lakes were shipped to a secret port in northern Ontario, and then traveled by train to Halifax to be shipped to Europe. The secret port was constructed on land expropriated from the First Nations band. At the time it was virgin land and a natural port, and the exigencies of war would make the expropriation justifiably consistent with similar actions taking place all over the world.
Massive docks and warehouses were constructed to store the shipments of explosives as they were offloaded and prepared for being transported further.
What actually happened one day in the middle of the war will never be known, John explained, partly because of the nature of the incident itself, but also because it never made it to the papers or radio of the day. The very existence of this port was secret, but also it was so far out in the boondocks that only the handful of people who survived and the administrators who oversaw the activity even knew it happened. It might have been sabotage or it might have been an accident. Whatever caused it, one day the whole port blew up. It was completely destroyed in one big explosion.
It left a big mess behind. The port was not rebuilt - the war was nearly over - so everything was left the way it was right after the explosion. Not that there was much left except a lot of chemicals hanging around. In particular, something peculiar happened in the explosion.
The main explosive stored at the site - cordite - is a very reactive chemical. Maybe because of the nature of its reactivity, or for some other reason, not all of the explosives were consumed. Apparently what happened was that the top layer of cordite blew up, but the force of the explosion pushed much of the material down into the bottom of the harbor without it exploding. John in his story estimated that only about 10% of the explosives were actually consumed. This was enough power to completely destroy the port, but it simply shoved all of the landings and buildings and 90% of the explosives to the bottom of the harbor, where they still rest today.
However, the disaster was not complete. In the early 50's Mother Nature and man conspired to make things just about as bad as they could possibly be. In normal circumstances, currents and other natural processes would eventually disperse the explosives and they would reenter the ecosystem - not without adverse effects, but in due course things would have reverted to something close to normal. However, in the early 50's a tanker full of heavy oil sank just off the destroyed port, releasing its oil into the harbor full of sodden explosives. The heavy oil sank, sealing in the explosive with a thick layer of viscous ooze.
John told of how as a teenager he and his friends would go camping at the old port. It was still barren of trees - all of them having been blown away during the explosion. They would swim in the harbor, and would dive down to the bottom where they would reach through the heavy oil to the explosives beneath. Returning to their campfire they would thrill and scare each other by throwing explosives into the campfire.
John and his band wanted the land that was destroyed by the federal government fifty years earlier to be restored to its original condition. Which makes sense - it was taken from them, and although it was returned, it was returned in unusable condition. That's not the way things should be done. And in the context of chronic government arrogance about First Nations concerns, the band's aggressive attitude about the issue was understandable, in spite of the 50 year gap.
The environmental assessment that Julian and his team performed had not given the band much good news. It had evaluated the cost of returning the land to "1492" conditions (the 1492 refers to Columbus's "discovery" of America, and means to restore the land to pristine condition) at something like 8 billion dollars. Which is a lot of money.
So why was Open Options involved? Because the band, in spite of their soft ways and mild manner, had decided that if the government would not spend the 8 billion dollars to fix up the site, they would move to militant action.
In the mid-1990's when our meeting with John was taking place, there was a period of strong First Nations agitation in Canada. There were a couple of incidents that received extensive national and international attention, including a heavily armed standoff at Oka near Montreal, and the killing of Dudley George, a Chippewa native, when police fired on protesters during a rally in Ipperwash, Ontario. It is noteworthy that the Ipperwash case also concerned land expropriated during the war.
There were many other unresolved land claims and other issues of importance to the First Nations that were of ongoing concern. Of course we are all familiar with the long historical and contemporary injustices that frame such situations. However, at that point in time there was a clear trend toward escalating differences into violent confrontation.
In the 50 years since the war, the land around the port had changed a lot. It is about a two-hour drive from Toronto, in the center of "cottage country". Originally small weekend cabins found their way onto these scenic lands of forests and clear lakes, but over the years these cabins evolved into country homes of some luxury, selling in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
John's band leased much of their land to owners of these summer homes, and controlled the access roads to many more. The band could blockade those roads at anytime, with armed young men. Armed and angry young men confronting rich impatient city people with a history of injustice on one side and a strong sense of entitlement on the other.
John and everyone in the room knew what this meant. In his characteristically soft but deeply emotional style, John was clearly saying that if the federal government would not clean up the port to "1492" conditions, people would get killed. And there was a sharp edge of anticipation in the emotions he projected. It would be the "hotheads" that would precipitate violence, but John and his team in the room that day were savoring - in a way that chilled me deeply - the prospect that power would be exercised in this very direct manner.
I now understood why Julian was nervous, and why Open Options was there. Something very bad could happen. Julian's science said that it was going to cost a lot of money to meet the band's goal, and his knowledge of the politics involved made him realize that the federal government would not be able to spend that money. A deadly crisis was in the making.
A number of times in my career this has happened to me. I find myself in a situation where I realize suddenly that I am at the center of something important. It's like being in a crowd and looking up to find that everyone is staring at you waiting to see what you are going to do. You don't necessarily know what it is you are going to do, but you do know that whatever it is, it is going to have a big effect on a lot of people.
I don't know how to prevent a crisis. What I do know how to do is to help people think through the consequences of their actions. That's all I did in this case, too.
The Open Options process basically involves just describing a problem, and then looking carefully at the implications of that description. John and his team were not mathematical people, nor were they businessmen. From my perspective they had the strangest, most emotion-laden way of thinking and speaking that I had ever known. (I later discovered that some lawyers are even more illogical, but that’s another story.) But describing a problem need not be done in a sequential manner. And John had already shown himself to be a gifted story-teller, which is almost the same thing as describing a problem.
In any case, John and his team embraced fully the process of building an Open Options model. Like every client, they reveled in the ability to talk about their detailed views and to capture their ideas in an easily-learned language. Back then our skills at facilitating were unformed, but it was a small group and they were willing to try something new.
For me, it was really gratifying that they embraced the process. I felt a strong burden of responsibility, as did Julian. Our actions could in part lead to or prevent a national crisis and more importantly the potential for lives to be lost. We had to do our best to help.
Years earlier I had been doing some experiments in innovative teaching. On two occasions I had made proposals to secure funding from a particular source in which the process included a live interview. In the first instance, I had made a clear, logical case for my proposal. I had a well-crafted presentation, and the facts of the planned innovations were, I thought, very compelling. My proposal was rejected outright, to my great disappointment. On the second occasion the project was almost the same, but instead of a well-crafted logical presentation, I simply gave my impassioned reasons why this project was important. My proposal - almost the same one as before - was immediately accepted.
The lesson I learned in this experience is that although we all listen to logical arguments and in all decisions facts are important, the emotions behind an issue not only cannot be ignored, but instead they are a very important component of every choice that is made. Emotions can also be a very effective way to communicate.
When John's band was working through developing the Open Options model, they were not taking their emotion-laden issue and stripping it down to its logical elements, as one might imagine. Instead, the very model retained all of the emotional content that was inherent in the case. The anger and recklessness of the tribal "hotheads" was part and parcel of that group's driving motivations, which was captured in their preference tree. The dutiful civic responsibility combined with pride of standing up for justice was apparent in how the band's leaders were modeled. And so forth.
It was stunning to me what a universal language the modeling process was. I was well aware the there were many types of people in the world, but I had been thinking of my game theory work as something suitable for academics or for particularly thoughtful business people. This case with John and his First Nations band made me realize that this was a tool of great value to anyone.
I think John was really curious about what would turn out from the analysis of the model they developed, but, like most Open Options clients, he also got a great deal of value just doing the modeling. Part of this was having a good language to talk and think about the problem as a group, but also I think John valued an audience - Julian, Gerry and myself - to listen to how he and his group felt about the issue and the players involved. I don't necessarily think that he expected to have his mind changed.
But he did have his mind changed. The analysis, when we presented it to Julian and the First Nations team a week or so later, had a very clear message. There were two paths that John could go down.
In the first path, the band would require that the government restore the land to "1492" conditions. The government would not do so, and so the band would blockade the roads. The cottage-owners would then confront the hotheads, and violence would result. The public would condemn the violence, and the government would send in troops to enforce the peace. People would be hurt or killed, and the site would perhaps never be cleaned up.
On the second path, the band would require the government to restore the land to "elementary school" condition, meaning to standards that would permit the placement of an elementary school on the property. In particular, the band would pursue this goal through the courts if necessary. The government would resist, but would eventually accept its responsibility. The land would be cleaned up, and there would be no disruptions and no crisis.
Remember that these two paths were visible to John and his group from the information they developed themselves. When these results were presented to the group, it was like a light bulb went on in their heads. Everything became clear. A confrontation had seductive appeal, but in the end peace was better. Justice would have called for "1492" conditions, but political reality dictated that "elementary school" conditions made more sense. John and his team only now really understood the consequences of their choices, and truly - at a deep emotional level - realized that they didn't want confrontation after all.
This was more than 10 years ago now. In the intervening years it has been interesting to note that there has been no news about what I later found out was called Depot Harbour. No confrontations, but no environmental restoration either. I found out that John's story didn't match exactly what I found from other sources, but then a good story is allowed some poetic license. Depot Harbour is now advertised as a tourist ghost town. I'd like to visit it some day.
Open Options has done lots of important cases in the intervening years, some involving billions of dollars or thousands of jobs. I am constantly having my passion stoked by seeing my clients' reactions to the process I guide them through. I also see many situations where one of the things a client most needs is simply someone to tell their story to.
But for me, this case was a turning point. Before this, I was an academic dabbling in business, experimenting if you will. This case brought home to me how important and meaningful what I was doing could be. I had stretched between worlds and communicated on a deep emotional level, not just with my First Nations clients but with myself. I gained passion for what I do, a passion that I have never lost since.
