by Carol Shaben
Erik’s mouth went dry and he felt his stomach lurch. He’d vowed not to participate in another inquiry, especially one led by people who had nothing to do with aviation, but now the matter of an outstanding warrant could cost him the chance for a new career.
“Nothing I can’t clear up,” he said.
Erik returned to Grande Prairie in December 1985 to testify at the fatality inquiry. This time, however, his mission wasn’t to change the course of aviation safety, but to change his own life.
“I should not have been out that night,” Erik admitted in a media interview at the time. “The flight shouldn’t have left. I cut a corner, which I shouldn’t have done. I’m not proud of it. I know what I did was stupid. I was exhausted. I was tired. I was in a hurry. I just did it.”
Erik unflinchingly accepted responsibility for his actions. When he finished his testimony and boarded a plane to fly out of Grande Prairie, he still carried a heavy burden of guilt, but for the first time since the crash, Erik felt like he might finally have a chance to begin again.
FATE
Though my father seemed to have put the crash behind him by the time I returned to Canada in late 1985, I knew it weighed on his mind. On more than one occasion he pondered his last-minute decision to give up his usual co-pilot’s seat after boarding Flight 402. What had prompted it? Why had he lived when others—colleagues, neighbours and constituents—had died? Was there divine intervention at play? These questions undoubtedly plagued him when he returned to the sombre atmosphere in the government chambers of the Alberta Legislature where Grant Notley’s high-backed leather chair sat empty. Colleagues don’t recall Dad talking much about the crash, but said he seemed unsettled for some time after it.
In spite of his highly visible public life, my dad was in many ways an intensely private man, seldom sharing his innermost feelings with anyone. He spoke little of the passengers who had died, but I know the question Why not me? surfaced every weekend back in High Prairie when he passed by the Peever home or saw Gordon’s widow, Virginia, or one of their children. He called Sandra Notley and Virginia Peever after the crash, but did not share details of those conversations. Still, I had to wonder. Did the inexplicable reality of having survived strip the weight from his words of condolence, stretching them thin?
After his release from hospital, Dad also travelled north to the First Nations reserve of Atikameg to visit Elaine Noskeye’s husband and fourteen children. A devoted family man, Dad must have noticed that her absence filled every corner of their modest home, the uncertainty of a future without a wife and mother reflecting itself darkly in fifteen pairs of eyes.
The crash certainly cast a shadow on the periphery of his days and nights. For months afterward, my mom said, he awoke to nightmares and was haunted by the deaths of the other passengers—those he knew and those he didn’t. Randy Wright, his executive assistant, recalled a day the following spring when authorities delivered a box to his office at the Legislature. In it were possessions that had been retrieved from the crash site after the snow melted.
“Mr. Shaben asked me to look at it,” Randy told me. “He couldn’t bring himself to examine the contents of that box.”
Nor did my dad seem eager to examine any debris the crash may have left within him. He hurled himself back into his political life. That included flying on Wapiti Aviation to and from High Prairie most weekends. Within a month of the accident the airline had been besieged with negative media, and locals had begun to call it What-a-pity. Dad knew Wapiti badly needed a public vote of confidence. He admitted being terrified to fly again, but he also understood how critical the airline’s passenger service was to people in the isolated communities of northern Alberta. He and Grant had fought hard for that service and Dad wasn’t going to turn his back on it. He confided to Randy that there was another, more private reason. “I had to prove to myself that I hadn’t lost my nerve.” So, as was his way, stoically and with little fanfare, Dad got back on a plane.
He demonstrated the same unwavering approach to political service. Regardless of any turmoil or uncertainties he experienced, outwardly he appeared patient, purposeful and exquisitely rational. He was devoted to his constituents and worked hard, especially for the disadvantaged, Métis and First Nations communities in his riding, improving infrastructure and ensuring they had drinking water, new roads and schools, and improved television transmission. Minister of Housing at the time, he revamped a faltering government program that provided homes for needy rural Albertans, including off-reserve Métis and Treaty families. The program had been beset with problems such as late or delinquent rent repayment, vandalism and property damage. Dad supported a monumental change to the program: offering families the opportunity to own their homes if they faithfully paid their rent without interruption for eight years. Almost immediately, rent payment arrived on time, vandalism ceased, and upkeep dramatically improved. He also supported offering construction skills and training to eligible housing recipients, and engaging them in building their own homes. As an added benefit, the residents’ newly acquired skills resulted in improved employment opportunities.
“It was about restoring peoples’ pride and sense of responsibility,” he told me.
Sometime in the summer of 1985, Dad had a surprise visit from Paul Archambault. Paul had been in Edmonton to see his brother Michael and decided to pop in to the Alberta Legislature. I imagine Paul standing awestruck—as I had been when I first visited my dad there—in front of the turn-of-the-century stone building’s soaring bell-shaped dome and stately columned wings. Inside the main doors, the Legislature is even more impressive, with an intimidating rotunda made almost entirely of gleaming white marble. The floor shines like ice as sober-faced men and women in dark suits rush across it, the click of their heels echoing in the expansive space.
In the middle of the rotunda is an enormous circular fountain, and the sound of cascading water is everywhere. Paul’s mouth must have hung open as he craned to look at the ornate balconies perched atop massive marble pillars that rise more than a hundred feet toward a pale blue ceiling high above. Until that moment it’s likely that he hadn’t thought of Dad as anything other than a fellow survivor. Now Paul probably wondered uncertainly if it was right to just drop in on him.
“Call me,” Dad had said, and Paul had done so on several occasions. Their talks had been easy and filled with banter. When they’d met again in person at the inquiry, Dad had given him his business card and invited Paul to visit him anytime he was in Edmonton.
Paul made his way up to the fourth floor’s wide mezzanine overlooking the lobby, circling it until he found the wing of offices he was looking for. The door marked 403, large and made of solid dark wood, hid a suite of offices assigned to the Minister of Housing and his staff. Paul pushed it open and entered a spacious outer chamber with several desks and a small seating area. An attractive dark-haired woman looked up at him.
“Yes?” she asked, a note of wariness in her voice.
“I’m here to see Larry,” Paul said.
Her eyebrows shot up. In his office and at the Legislature, everyone except his elected colleagues called him Mister Shaben or Minister Shaben or The Honourable Larry Shaben.
“Is he expecting you?”
“Sure.”
Upon hearing Paul’s response, two other women sitting at nearby desks looked up. As Paul began shifting his weight nervously from one foot to another, a lanky redhead about his own age, neatly dressed in a suit and tie, emerged from an office door. Randy Wright. The receptionist cast him a quick, questioning look.
“He told me to drop in any time,” Paul said.
“What’s your name, please?” the woman asked.
“Paul Archambault.”
Now all eyes were overtly on him in surprise and recognition, but Paul was probably too uncomfortable to notice.
“Please take a seat, Mr. Archambault,” the receptionist said kindly. “I’ll let Mr. Shaben know you’re here.”
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p; Paul dropped stiffly into a chair, absently fiddling with the loose watchstrap around his wrist, as he was in the habit of doing when uncomfortable or distracted. Then a door at the end of the chamber opened and my father emerged. Randy recalls how his face lit up when he saw Paul. Dad came over to him and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. He asked the receptionist to hold his calls before guiding Paul into his private office and closing the door. Not many people had that kind of one-on-one access.
Dad remembered that first visit as an especially happy one. Paul clutched his now-finished manuscript. Dad was surprised at the size of it, half-an-inch thick, dozens of handwritten pages in neat block letters. On the title page were the words: They Called Me a Hero.
“You should let me read it,” Dad said, full of curiosity.
“No.” Paul looked sheepish. “I’m still working on it.”
Talk had then turned to happy news. Despite their sometimes tumultuous relationship, Paul and Sue had gotten engaged.
Dad was overjoyed. He’d met Sue briefly during the CASB inquiry the previous spring, and saw immediately that Paul was smitten with her. Paul’s stunning reversal of fortune heartened him. So many of my father’s days were shadowed by difficulty. The recent collapse of the oil and gas industry, on which Alberta relied, had brought crushing hardships to the people he’d been elected to serve. Just after he’d been appointed to the Cabinet in 1982, the bottom had fallen out of the housing market as interest rates soared to more than twenty percent. People who had flocked to the province to service the booming oil industry found themselves unable to pay mortgages they’d secured with five-percent down payments. Many simply left. Houses were abandoned and scores of commercial properties lay empty.
As head of the Alberta Housing and Mortgage Corporation, Dad was besieged with requests from developers pleading for financial relief, pestering him to either postpone their loan payments or grant them permission to forgo them altogether. Two local banks had folded, and Dad seemed constantly on the defensive.
He had told his staff never to lead people down the garden path. One of the first questions he or his executive assistants would ask when people came to them for help was: “What do you think I can do to solve this problem?”
Lately, however, it seemed there was little he or anyone else could do to make a positive difference in people’s lives. Perhaps that was the reason Paul was especially welcome.
“You’re invited to the wedding,” Paul told him during that first visit.
Dad promised Paul that no matter when or where it was, he and Mom would be there.
Alberta’s tough economic times weren’t the only thing troubling my father. Big changes were afoot in his government. That June, Premier Peter Lougheed, the man who’d inspired Dad to pursue a political career, announced he would not be seeking re-election, stepping down after eighteen years in public office. Principled and passionate, Lougheed began his political rise to power in 1965, winning the leadership of Alberta’s small “c” Conservative Party. By 1967 he’d managed to wrestle six seats from the Social Credit Party, which had enjoyed an uninterrupted majority for thirty-six years. Wielding a law degree from the University of Alberta and an MBA from Harvard, Lougheed swept into office in 1971, capturing forty-nine of seventy-five seats.
Dad had joined the Conservatives in the early 1970s, attracted by the party’s youth, energy and inclusiveness—qualities embodied by its new leader. “He was wise,” Dad said of his political mentor. “He recognized that the face of Alberta was changing through immigration and through the multicultural nature of our province, and that in order to be an effective government, he needed to include people.”
When my father was elected as a Member of the Legislative Assembly in 1975, he was one of sixty-nine Conservatives forming Alberta’s new government. Incredibly, the premier chose him to respond to the speech from the throne, the address given by the lieutenant governor to open the legislative session and set the agenda for the new government. “It was a recognition of his potential,” Lougheed said when asked why he’d singled out a newcomer for the honour.
Dad clearly remembered that day. He brought his Koran from the top shelf of a bookcase at home for the swearing-in ceremony. Few noticed when the Bible was quietly exchanged for the Muslim holy book just before my dad stepped forward to take the oath of public office. For the son of uneducated Lebanese immigrants, it was a life-changing moment.
Alberta found its voice under Lougheed’s leadership. The charismatic new premier fought for stronger provincial input into national decision making and for the province to control its natural resources, particularly oil. He took on Canada’s centrist government, led by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, over the National Energy Program, a controversial initiative that increased revenues to the federal government from Alberta’s resource-rich oil and gas industry. To many western Canadians, the program was akin to colonial exploitation, giving politicians 3,000 kilometres to the east control over Alberta’s energy resources. Lougheed retaliated by putting new oil developments on hold and ordering cutbacks in production. The eventual result of the political hardball was a revenue-sharing agreement that many believe marked the beginning of western Canada’s emergence as a true partner in Canadian confederation.
My father also found his voice in government, and after one term as a rookie backbencher, was appointed to Cabinet. Lougheed would later reflect: “Larry had an ability to grasp complex issues. He had a sense of both rural and urban Alberta, and added to that, a talent for communicating to a broad cross-section of the public. You put those together and you get an exceptional minister.”
But power didn’t come without compromise. Quietly proud of his ethnic and religious heritage, my dad walked a fine line when it came to his public persona. Though his position had made him the highest-profile Muslim politician in Canada’s history, he was circumspect about his faith and Arab identity, both of which had been misunderstood and maligned in North America. Feeling that he had to work twice as hard to gain credibility and respect, my father downplayed his ethnicity and religion. When Middle East politics ignited in the early 1980s following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the pressure on him from Arab and Muslim communities to use his political influence had been high. Even I had urged him to speak out. Dad refused, telling me he could accomplish more through thoughtful and discreet conversations with his colleagues. I didn’t understand. Instead I judged him as either afraid or unwilling to jeopardize his position by wading into the contentious realm of Muslim and Middle Eastern politics.
Looking back, I now realize that my dad wasn’t in politics for power and position, but because he wanted to make a difference. Like Lougheed, he wanted to help create a country where there was room for everyone regardless of ethnicity or religion, and under Lougheed’s leadership, Dad believed his government could make it happen. But with the premier stepping down, my father became less certain about what the political future would hold. Still, he felt he owed a debt to his country, and perhaps to God, for the inexplicable gift of his continued existence. So as 1985 drew to a close, he decided to run for another term in office and began the arduous task of campaigning for his fourth election, slated for the following spring.
It was past midnight on a bitter winter evening when Paul looked in on Sue’s children to make sure they were still fast asleep. In the past year he had grown attached to them. Though things between Sue and him had been rocky at times, he’d been overjoyed when she’d agreed to marry him and couldn’t imagine his life without her. Tiptoeing out of the bedroom, Paul grabbed the keys to the old Mustang he’d recently bought and headed for the door. The air was biting and the snow seemed luminescent under a bright moon. The door of his car creaked as Paul opened it and lowered himself into the bucket seat, stiff with cold. The engine groaned several times before finally starting and Paul sat for a few minutes waiting for the car to warm up. He cranked the fan and a blast of frigid air made him shiver. Eventually, two domes of cleared glas
s began to appear on the frosted windshield. Paul had had a few beers, but his mind felt clear and sharp with purpose.
Over the past few months rumours had begun to surface among the staff at Corona Pizza that Sue and Scott Thorne were having an affair. Though no one spoke about it openly when Paul was around, he knew the rumours the same as anyone else. Jealousy consumed him as he recalled a recent argument during which he’d confronted Sue about how she openly flirted with Thorne and a few of the other regulars.
“I got to make tips,” she’d told him.
Recently, Paul had taken to dropping in at night, but that hadn’t gone over well. The last time he’d showed up unannounced at the lounge, he’d found Sue chatting with a customer and had lost his temper. After that incident, she told Paul to stay away from the lounge when she was working.
Tonight, Paul had tried to keep his mind on other things, but it had kept swinging back to Sue and Thorne the way a compass needle points north. He drove west down the deserted city streets and pulled up to the curb near the restaurant. His heart was pounding as he approached the front door and pulled it open. Inside the small foyer, a set of stairs led down to the lounge. Paul could hear music playing loudly and the raucous jangle of voices. He shoved his hands deeply into the pockets of his jeans and started down, his eyes trained toward the long bar at the back of the room.
Scott Thorne’s back was the first thing that came into view. Sue was laughing at something Thorne was saying, her face inches from his. Paul felt his heart constrict. Sue glanced up then to see Paul standing there, a look of anguish on his face. She laid a hand on Thorne’s arm to silence him and whispered something in his ear.
If the man standing so close to Sue hadn’t been a cop, Paul would have beaten the shit out of him. But if there was one thing Paul hated more than another guy messing with his lady, it was jail time. If Paul so much as touched Thorne, the cop would make sure Paul was locked up. So he turned on his heel and bounded back up the stairs, angry, hurt and betrayed. All the time Paul had been with Sue, he’d secretly feared he wasn’t good enough, that she had her sights set on greener pastures.
