John Furlong, CEO of Vanoc, Accused of Abuse in Schools

[DonLever]

John Furlong, the CEO of Vanoc, have been accused of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse of children in a residential school he taught at in 1969 as a young man in Burns Lake, BC.

The story came out in the Georgia Straight, which he is now suing.

http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Former+Vancouver+Olympic+head+John+Furlong+denies+abuse+allegations/7309956/story.html

[goalie13]

As public denials go, that one sounded fairly convincing.

[nucklehead]

I expect him to make minced meat out of his false accusers.

[Jägermeister]

Any accusation that has the phrase "pay us and we'll go away" is inherently suspicious.

I hope these accusations are indeed false.

[DonLever]

Those charges are serious criminal offenses. If they are true, why has the RCMP not launched an investigation into them? Or have the RCMP looked into them and decided not to lay charges.

The Georgia Straight claimed it has 8 affadavits from former students alleging the abuse perpetrated by John Furlong.

[ThaManbeast]

I know somebody who gave that a guy a headbutt. And that feels awesome!

[Watermelons]

Why did they have to wait 43 years to tell the RCMP about this again?

**Just to clarify, I am not saying the accusations are false, but the fact that they waited almost half a century to make the accusations is suspicious enough...**

[Bertuzzi Babe]

Perhaps folks should read the Georgia Strait article as well? It will give a little more information about the allegations.

By Laura Robinson, September 27, 2012

A young John Furlong came to B.C. in 1969 as a Frontier Apostle volunteer.

Special report

John Furlong biography omits secret past in Burns Lake

“Welcome to Canada. Make us better.” It is a phrase that former Vanoc CEO John Furlong often repeats when he tells the story of the Edmonton airport customs agent who met him in 1974 after he immigrated to Canada. “A recruiter from a high school in Prince George, British Columbia, had come to Dublin in search of someone to set up an athletic program,” wrote Furlong in his 2011 book, Patriot Hearts. He decided to take the position, and his wife and he “bundled up our son and daughter and boarded a plane to Canada”.

“Welcome to Canada. Make us better,” said the agent who stamped his passport. The story leads many articles about Furlong, and the boss of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (Vanoc) tells it twice in his book.

But Furlong had actually come to B.C. years earlier, living in another town. And there are a lot of people from those days who think that he not only didn’t make his new country better—he made their lives considerably worse.

The fact that most of those people are Natives puts a cruel spin on the fact that the 2010 Winter Games are widely remembered as the first Games to include aboriginal peoples as official hosts.

Furlong has been feted nationally and internationally. The Globe and Mail named him Canadian of the year in 2010; he’s received the Order of B.C., the Order of Canada, the Olympic Order, and the Paralympic Order. He chairs the board of Own the Podium (now, post-Olympics, a stand-alone legal entity), chairs the board at Rocky Mountaineer, and is on the Whistler Blackcomb Holdings Inc. board. In April, he became the “executive chair” of the Vancouver Whitecaps. UBC, UNBC, BCIT, the University of Calgary, and the B.C. Justice Institute have given him honorary degrees. He can command $25,000 per speaking gig, and he is worth every penny, according to those who hear him, because he speaks commandingly about teamwork and commitment, emphasizing the importance of values, honesty, and integrity.

Furlong has also been named one of Canada’s most transformative people. That may actually be the most accurate way of describing him.

John Furlong’s official Olympic CV and his book say that he arrived in Canada in the fall of 1974. He actually arrived years previously, in 1969, as an Oblate Frontier Apostle missionary. He went not to Prince George to direct a high-school athletic program but to Immaculata Elementary School in Burns Lake, B.C., to help save the souls of First Nations children. It was here that 18-year-old Furlong, fresh out of Dublin’s St. Vincent’s Christian Brothers Secondary School, with no formal training as a teacher and no university behind him, ran physical-education classes.

But if his goal was to persuade First Nations children of the virtues of Catholicism, he chose, say former students, a brutal way to do it.

One student, Beverley Abraham, from Babine Lake First Nation, had Furlong as a phys-ed teacher and school disciplinarian when she was 11 and 12. She said in a 2012 affidavit: “He worked us to the bone. His attitude was very bad. ‘You good for nothin’ Indians—come on, come on. If you don’t do this, you’re going to be good for nothing.’…He would stand over us. If we didn’t complete it, he would take his big foot and slam us down on the floor. It really hurt our chests.”

Abraham is one of eight former students of Furlong’s who have signed affidavits for the Georgia Straight alleging his physical and mental abuse. Many more told the Straight about the abuse Furlong meted out. Through emails from his Vancouver lawyer, Marvin Storrow, Furlong has denied physically abusing children. Storrow was on the Vancouver Olympic bid committee team and is thanked by Furlong in his book for lending him his office, where he wrote Patriot Hearts (along with Globe and Mail reporter Gary Mason). Although multiple emails were sent to Furlong through Storrow, no answer has been received from Furlong to questions about the five unexplained years, from 1969 to 1974, when he was a Frontier Apostle missionary, and why he was not honest about his arrival date and work in Canada.

After the two-minute point of this TEDx talk at SFU last year, John Furlong tells the story of his arrival in Canada and his encounter with a customs agent.

Abraham sits at a Burns Lake restaurant. It’s licensed, but she hasn’t touched alcohol in years. It’s part of her healing journey. Her food remains untouched; she says nausea swells up when she thinks about Furlong.

“Young girls started drinking. My friends and I started drinking at age 12. I do believe it was because of his abuse. If we didn’t do what he said, he’d grab us by the shoulders. ‘Do you understand me!’ Smack on the back of the head; smack in the front.”

Abraham closes her eyes and fights tears. She says Furlong regularly made the same four girls—her and three friends—stay behind after phys-ed class, one at a time. The three friends were the ones who started drinking with Abraham. She says the three committed suicide in later years. “Every time I started phys-ed, I was honestly always afraid. He stood by the change-room door. [A nun] would say, ‘Okay, girls, come on.’ We were just afraid to go. He really degraded our name and our inner self. No wonder they call us drunks. Why did we drink so hard? Immaculata School.”

Ronnie Alec, a hereditary chief, also filed an affidavit about Furlong. The Olympic CEO’s image on television brought disturbing flashbacks for Alec. “When you’re not doing too good in basketball, all of a sudden you get kicked in the butt or slapped on the head,” he wrote in his affidavit. “It was a hard kick, and he backed up to make the slap, so it hit hard. He could stand in front of us and, unexpected, he would slap us on the head.…With his big eyes, I can picture him, and then, next thing: boom, a hard slap to the head.”

Alec says that after he saw Furlong on TV, he called his office to try to confront him before the Olympics began but he never heard back from him.

Alec’s voice is joined by Cathy Woodgate’s in her affidavit. “I was slow and weak. I got hit by a ball, whipped in the calves, yardstick thrown at me—all by John Furlong. I was very shy, very low in self-esteem. I grew up with low self-esteem and decided not to take part in any physical activities because of this nightmare of phys-ed class.”

Later, at age 29, Woodgate was diagnosed with a type of muscular dystrophy. She had it as a child, which was why she was always at the back of the pack while the children were being forced to run extraordinarily long distances—more than 30 laps of the school field or a run up and down Boer Mountain, a good eight kilometres—with no water. Furlong “saluted” Immaculata’s few white pupils who made it to the top but ignored their First Nation classmates, according to former students.

Students from 1969-70 say Furlong screamed “Lazy Indians!” at them and physically abused them in different ways because, in his mind, they had committed some offence that needed punishment. He did not, they say, see them as children who were afraid of a tall white man who communicated through beatings and screaming in English. He is remembered as a gratuitously violent bully who taunted children, beating them in front of the class if he felt they were too slow, fat, or inattentive.

Richard Perry, another hereditary chief, said in an affidavit that he is convinced he suffered brain damage because of Furlong’s repeated beatings, and he struggles to comprehend what he reads even today.

“I was hit on the head all the time. I was hit with a ruler: a metre stick in the legs. I remember one day talking to another Native person in my language. I said, ‘What are you learning in school?’ John Furlong hit me for that. Those days there was not too much learning. I remember John Furlong chased me home one day.”

First Nation families who went to school authorities about Furlong’s abuse say nothing changed. If students complained to the nuns, they were strapped for lying. When they tried to skip classes or stay out of school, the RCMP brought them back—to more punishment.

“Another time, he [Furlong] took me to a private room where the furnace was,” Perry declared in his affidavit. “It was really noisy so no one could hear.…I watched them take kids one by one to the basement and beat us [with the strap]. I got too much abuse, too many hits all the time.”

Other students talk about the furnace room—a much feared place. Furlong, they say, grabbed children by the hair and dragged them there for strappings, usually by a priest or nun.

Paul Joseph and his cousin Richard also went to Immaculata. “Richard was pretty much the same age as I am,” Joseph said in a phone interview from Burns Lake. “On the John Furlong side, he hit me so hard once when we played basketball, right on the back of the head with a full hand for no reason. Another time I didn’t hear him say [something] to me while I was playing basketball. He came from behind and grabbed my hair from the back—almost on top of my head. He punched me in the back of the head and I went flying. I was unconscious for 15 minutes. I remember then I was crying. Everyone was too afraid to help me.”

Joseph says the abuse was unrelenting. “I played lots of hockey. John Furlong hit me right at the back of my head with a hockey stick. After this, I didn’t want to go to school. I was too afraid of what he would do. If he doesn’t get his way, he will hit us really hard. My cousin Richard and I just walked around outside in the cold. We didn’t have anyone. My parents were dead and I was 13. If we went to the priest, he would say we were lying. He would put our hands on the desk and hit us so hard. It feels like our hands are broken.”

By Laura Robinson, September 27, 2012

Special report

John Furlong biography omits secret past in Burns Lake

Georgia Straight responds to John Furlong's news conference

Watch full video of John Furlong news conference on Georgia Straight article

Full text of John Furlong's statement regarding Georgia Straight article

Former students at Immaculata and at Prince George College (later called O’Grady Catholic High School), where Furlong worked later on, are part of a national class-action suit against churches and the federal government. Under the narrow definition of what the federal government, in its Indian Residential Schools Settlement, determined was a “residential student”, they did not qualify for so-called common-experience payments. Residential and day students, Native and some non-Native alike, attended these schools. Native day students frequently experienced abuse from the same teachers, priests, and nuns as the residential students who were later compensated.

The children, who were forced to attend from eight surrounding First Nations, often spoke only the Carrier language. Their families, if still on the land despite many attempts to “settle” them, lived traditionally, but with the building of Immaculata in Burns Lake in 1960, students were herded by the Prince George diocese into the new school.

Bishop John Fergus O’Grady, who oversaw the diocese, made sure, during lobbying trips to Ottawa and Victoria, that his 13 schools (he built nine in just four years) received government top-ups for every Native student registered. He and Father Gerard Clenaghan (who regularly flew to Dublin to recruit Frontier Apostles and priests) lived well. O’Grady loved to dress up in buckskin and moccasins and tell stories to big-city North American Christians about “half-breeds” and “little Indians” so he could leverage more money for his empire.

Added to donations were government payments to the diocese. The more First Nation kids O’Grady registered in Catholic schools, the more the government paid and the more he could feed his diocesan expansionist dreams—but he didn’t waste money on teachers’ salaries. O’Grady beat the cost of hiring trained teachers by inventing in 1956, along with Father John Brayley, the Frontier Apostolate: a labour force of Christian volunteers, often recruited from Ireland, whom he referred to as the “Catholic peace corps”.

The first FAs arrived in 1957; by the time the diocese shut down the program in 1992, more than 4,000 had volunteered from five continents. O’Grady paid them $25 per month plus room and board. Some were qualified teachers; most weren’t. One priest wrote that the Grade 2 class in his parish was taught by a Grade 10 dropout.

It was to this that Furlong, at age 18, arrived. He had just left St. Vincent’s Christian Brothers School in Dublin.

By June 1969, not only was Furlong a missionary but he worked part-time in the Burns Lake bakery. In May of the next year, he married Margaret Cook, a Frontier Apostle kindergarten teacher. In June 1970, Sandy and John Barth took over from the Furlongs at Immaculata and the Furlongs moved to Prince George College, where they are listed as “resident supervisors” in the 1971 yearbook. Furlong also coached a number of school teams. In 1972, Furlong continued to coach and supervise a residence, but he graduated to phys-ed teacher and then disappeared from the 1973-74 yearbook.

It appears that for some reason, Furlong either returned to or was sent back to Ireland. He states in Patriot Hearts that he was in Dublin in May and June 1974.

He reappeared at Prince George College in 1975-76, again as a resident supervisor and phys-ed teacher, while Margaret and their two children—who were born in Canada before he left Prince George—are listed as being from Dublin, Ireland.

Like at least four other former Immaculata students from those days, Paul Joseph’s cousin Richard committed suicide. Now, Joseph says, he is fighting for the truth, just as much for Richard as he is for himself. (Frontier Apostle records are tightly guarded by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Prince George; the Straight was told in April in Prince George that those records were closed.) He says he can move on from Richard’s suicide “as long as we bring out the truth so no other students will be so abused”.

Joseph says students were told by one nun that “we had to be quiet about the abuse. God would strike us down. I thought God did that to Richard, but later I realized God didn’t act that way.” Joseph says that ensuring Furlong is made to answer to those he allegedly abused is part of the healing process involved in truth-telling.

“After what he has done with us out here—for a long time I was looking for this guy—then I see him on the news with that Olympic thing. I wanted to break my TV. But it wasn’t my TV—it was him.”

Other students recall Furlong—who, at more than six feet in height, had been on the Irish school basketball and handball teams and played Gaelic football—using either a closed fist or a full-handed slap to their head or to their classmates’ heads. Even some of those Furlong left alone or favoured admitted to the Straight that he used harsh violence on others.

For some of his former students, seeing Furlong oversee the Olympics brought frightening memories as well as shock over how he kept his past secret—and even more surprise that Olympic authorities didn’t research who he really was. Several of them told the Straight that they attempted to or actually did contact Furlong prior to the Games. One bumped into him in a Prince George hotel elevator and confronted him about the abuse; he said Furlong refused to speak to him. Another said Furlong denied that he had abused her. Yet another said a voice-mail message was ignored.

When he met with one former student (who does not want to be named; the Straight has been informed of the name) before the start of the Games, he allegedly brought along Dan Doyle, the Vanoc executive vice president of construction and then-chair of B.C. Hydro. Doyle, when asked in an email about his presence at that meeting, responded only through a May 13 email, without denying that he was at the get-together in a private residence in Surrey. “I am not a spokesperson for Vanoc on any issues. You should continue to deal with Mr. Furlong and his lawyer.” (On September 24, 2012, B.C. premier Christy Clark announced Doyle’s appointment as her chief of staff.)

John Furlong's former students swore affidavits about their experiences.

Rusty Goepel was chair of Vanoc’s hiring committee, and in November 2009, he became chair of Vanoc. He is also senior vice president of Raymond James Ltd. in Canada, one of North America’s largest investment firms. “John was a member of the board of the [Olympic] bid corporation from day one,” Goepel said by phone from his Vancouver office. “I knew him; I knew his background. We went through a hiring process with a professional: Tanton Mitchell. I’m quite shocked [to hear these accounts of abuse] after the efforts he made and the plaudits he received. John emerged as an absolute stellar performer and a stellar representative of this city.” Goepel added that he was skeptical of the allegations.

Besides being Vanoc CEO, Furlong was the president and COO of the Vancouver 2010 bid team. He was involved for more than a decade, but did Goepel ever actually have Furlong’s CV researched? Goepel admits he can’t remember if he ever saw Furlong’s CV. “But it wouldn’t be like I asked him.…There was nothing we did wrong in our hiring process. You’re describing a totally different, alien person than I know.”

The Canadian Olympic Committee was pivotal to Vancouver’s bid and the Games themselves, with COC members sitting on both Vanoc and the bid committee. The Straight emailed questions in April about whether or not the COC practised due diligence—did a background check, received a Furlong CV—prior to Furlong’s hiring. None have been answered.

The organization that oversees all things Canadian and Olympic—including the national team sent to London 2012—claimed, through its director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, in a June 28 email: “We simply cannot comment on matters that are out of our jurisdiction….concerning fundamental principles of ethics and morals, we always set and implement the highest standards.”

The City of Vancouver, through Mayor Gregor Robertson’s office, has also been asked to comment on its role in Vanoc and how it practised due diligence in terms of hiring. There has been, to date, no response.

As of June 27, 2012, the B.C. Registry office still listed the Vanoc board as “active”.

Along with the customs-agent story, Furlong often repeats the story of his cousin Siobhan Roice’s tragic death in Dublin in a terror bombing in May 1974 that killed 26 people. Siobhan, only 19, was walking to the Dublin train station on her way home to Wexford, 130 kilometres away, on a Friday after work.

In Patriot Hearts, Furlong writes about the anguish the Roices experienced when Siobhan did not arrive at the Wexford station. He says “that task [of identifying Siobhan’s body] was too much” for her parents, so his father, Jack, went to the temporary morgue. “Body parts were stuffed in bags. It was a ring on a finger that helped identify Siobhan.”

Furlong continues: “My cousin’s funeral was difficult to sit through.…My aunt and uncle were broken and almost unrecognizable in their grief. So was my father….He was never able to shake the feelings he was left with after having to see his niece’s body torn asunder….Less than a month later, on June 4, my father was felled by a heart attack.” Jack Furlong died the next day.

Furlong’s cousin Jim Roice tells the tragedy quite differently. When Siobhan did not arrive home, they were in despair. The next morning, her father, Ned, his son-in-law, and brother-in-law boarded the train to Dublin. “My father, distraught as he was—no one could have stopped him from getting on that train,” 60-year-old Jim Roice told the Georgia Straight by phone from Ireland. Roice learned the details of the bombing from his family when he returned home the week after it happened; he had been at sea, in the merchant marine. “Uncle Jack was a lovely man, but he did not identify my sister’s body.”

A 2003 feature in the Irish Independent quoted Ned Roice, Siobhan’s father: “When it came to my turn, I didn’t know what to expect. I said I wanted someone else to come in with me in case I made a mistake and identified the wrong person.” The newspaper continued: “He need not have worried about that. He spotted his daughter immediately, her body mercifully intact. ‘The minute I went in, I recognised her right away. It was as if she had called me,’ he says. ‘She was lying there perfect. It’s 29 years ago, but it’s the same as if it only happened yesterday.’ ”

“It was my father’s mother’s wedding ring on Siobhan’s finger, but she was perfect; there wasn’t a mark on her,” Jim Roice told the Straight. Records from an inquiry into the investigation of the bombing list Siobhan Roice as a victim. In the paperwork relating to it, Ned Roice is listed; Jack Furlong is not.

Furlong uses the story as the jumping-off point for why he came to Canada in 1974—ostensibly for the first time—saying, in his book and in interviews, that the death of his cousin and father had left him “feeling a little empty, and open to new adventures….I decided to take the [athletic director] position, thinking I would return to Ireland in a few years.”

Except it seems that, for whatever reason, he already had done that.

Furlong was actually going back to Prince George College (described in Patriot Hearts only as “a high school in Prince George”) and taking the position he’d already held. He disappeared from the school’s yearbooks after 1976, but he appeared in the Prince George phone book that year and again in ’77. In his book, he says that he became the director of Prince George’s parks and recreation department after “a couple of years”. The City of Prince George will not confirm his employment, directing the Straight to submit a freedom-of-information request.

By 1978, he’s gone from the phone book and “M. Furlong” appears. Some of his former students and friends of his children say he left his wife, Margaret, and their children. Furlong writes in Patriot Hearts that “shortly after” Prince George hosted the Northern B.C. Winter Games in 1978, he was asked to take on the job of regional director of Nanaimo parks and recreation and moved to Vancouver Island.

Inside his book’s inside dust jacket, Furlong is described as “a born storyteller”. And in his addresses as a motivational speaker, he likes to give “lessons” for life. He lists the following values as essential: respect, accountability and inclusion, trust, integrity, honesty, fairness, and compassion.

Some of his former students wish he would come back to Burns Lake. They want to discuss what these lessons really mean to him.

http://www.straight....past-burns-lake

[Common sense]

I read the Georgia Straight article earlier when the news broke, and the timing is simply suspicious at best. While assault victims do speak out later than other crimes (some blame it on themselves), something doesn't add up.

Hopefully, the investigation is not tainted by anything, and we'll be able to determine innocence of guilt. 9 lives (the 8 former students and Furlong) hang in the balance.

[-SN-]

The timing is irrelevant. The accusations were originally levelled in 2011, and I don't see any how the timing gives any sort of advantage anyway.

[Armada]

Love John Furlong, highly doubt this is true.

[DonLever]

Right now, CKNW's Dan Russell is discussing the case.

One of the interesting question is why did he did not mention his Burns Lake work experience in his auto-biography. He entirely omitted it. He just talked about arriving in Canada for the first time in Edmonton.

[Dazzle]

Perhaps folks should read the Georgia Strait article as well? It will give a little more information about the allegations.

By Laura Robinson, September 27, 2012

A young John Furlong came to B.C. in 1969 as a Frontier Apostle volunteer.

Special report

John Furlong biography omits secret past in Burns Lake

“Welcome to Canada. Make us better.” It is a phrase that former Vanoc CEO John Furlong often repeats when he tells the story of the Edmonton airport customs agent who met him in 1974 after he immigrated to Canada. “A recruiter from a high school in Prince George, British Columbia, had come to Dublin in search of someone to set up an athletic program,” wrote Furlong in his 2011 book, Patriot Hearts. He decided to take the position, and his wife and he “bundled up our son and daughter and boarded a plane to Canada”.

“Welcome to Canada. Make us better,” said the agent who stamped his passport. The story leads many articles about Furlong, and the boss of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (Vanoc) tells it twice in his book.

But Furlong had actually come to B.C. years earlier, living in another town. And there are a lot of people from those days who think that he not only didn’t make his new country better—he made their lives considerably worse.

The fact that most of those people are Natives puts a cruel spin on the fact that the 2010 Winter Games are widely remembered as the first Games to include aboriginal peoples as official hosts.

Furlong has been feted nationally and internationally. The Globe and Mail named him Canadian of the year in 2010; he’s received the Order of B.C., the Order of Canada, the Olympic Order, and the Paralympic Order. He chairs the board of Own the Podium (now, post-Olympics, a stand-alone legal entity), chairs the board at Rocky Mountaineer, and is on the Whistler Blackcomb Holdings Inc. board. In April, he became the “executive chair” of the Vancouver Whitecaps. UBC, UNBC, BCIT, the University of Calgary, and the B.C. Justice Institute have given him honorary degrees. He can command $25,000 per speaking gig, and he is worth every penny, according to those who hear him, because he speaks commandingly about teamwork and commitment, emphasizing the importance of values, honesty, and integrity.

Furlong has also been named one of Canada’s most transformative people. That may actually be the most accurate way of describing him.

John Furlong’s official Olympic CV and his book say that he arrived in Canada in the fall of 1974. He actually arrived years previously, in 1969, as an Oblate Frontier Apostle missionary. He went not to Prince George to direct a high-school athletic program but to Immaculata Elementary School in Burns Lake, B.C., to help save the souls of First Nations children. It was here that 18-year-old Furlong, fresh out of Dublin’s St. Vincent’s Christian Brothers Secondary School, with no formal training as a teacher and no university behind him, ran physical-education classes.

But if his goal was to persuade First Nations children of the virtues of Catholicism, he chose, say former students, a brutal way to do it.

One student, Beverley Abraham, from Babine Lake First Nation, had Furlong as a phys-ed teacher and school disciplinarian when she was 11 and 12. She said in a 2012 affidavit: “He worked us to the bone. His attitude was very bad. ‘You good for nothin’ Indians—come on, come on. If you don’t do this, you’re going to be good for nothing.’…He would stand over us. If we didn’t complete it, he would take his big foot and slam us down on the floor. It really hurt our chests.”

Abraham is one of eight former students of Furlong’s who have signed affidavits for the Georgia Straight alleging his physical and mental abuse. Many more told the Straight about the abuse Furlong meted out. Through emails from his Vancouver lawyer, Marvin Storrow, Furlong has denied physically abusing children. Storrow was on the Vancouver Olympic bid committee team and is thanked by Furlong in his book for lending him his office, where he wrote Patriot Hearts (along with Globe and Mail reporter Gary Mason). Although multiple emails were sent to Furlong through Storrow, no answer has been received from Furlong to questions about the five unexplained years, from 1969 to 1974, when he was a Frontier Apostle missionary, and why he was not honest about his arrival date and work in Canada.

After the two-minute point of this TEDx talk at SFU last year, John Furlong tells the story of his arrival in Canada and his encounter with a customs agent.

Abraham sits at a Burns Lake restaurant. It’s licensed, but she hasn’t touched alcohol in years. It’s part of her healing journey. Her food remains untouched; she says nausea swells up when she thinks about Furlong.

“Young girls started drinking. My friends and I started drinking at age 12. I do believe it was because of his abuse. If we didn’t do what he said, he’d grab us by the shoulders. ‘Do you understand me!’ Smack on the back of the head; smack in the front.”

Abraham closes her eyes and fights tears. She says Furlong regularly made the same four girls—her and three friends—stay behind after phys-ed class, one at a time. The three friends were the ones who started drinking with Abraham. She says the three committed suicide in later years. “Every time I started phys-ed, I was honestly always afraid. He stood by the change-room door. [A nun] would say, ‘Okay, girls, come on.’ We were just afraid to go. He really degraded our name and our inner self. No wonder they call us drunks. Why did we drink so hard? Immaculata School.”

Ronnie Alec, a hereditary chief, also filed an affidavit about Furlong. The Olympic CEO’s image on television brought disturbing flashbacks for Alec. “When you’re not doing too good in basketball, all of a sudden you get kicked in the butt or slapped on the head,” he wrote in his affidavit. “It was a hard kick, and he backed up to make the slap, so it hit hard. He could stand in front of us and, unexpected, he would slap us on the head.…With his big eyes, I can picture him, and then, next thing: boom, a hard slap to the head.”

Alec says that after he saw Furlong on TV, he called his office to try to confront him before the Olympics began but he never heard back from him.

Alec’s voice is joined by Cathy Woodgate’s in her affidavit. “I was slow and weak. I got hit by a ball, whipped in the calves, yardstick thrown at me—all by John Furlong. I was very shy, very low in self-esteem. I grew up with low self-esteem and decided not to take part in any physical activities because of this nightmare of phys-ed class.”

Later, at age 29, Woodgate was diagnosed with a type of muscular dystrophy. She had it as a child, which was why she was always at the back of the pack while the children were being forced to run extraordinarily long distances—more than 30 laps of the school field or a run up and down Boer Mountain, a good eight kilometres—with no water. Furlong “saluted” Immaculata’s few white pupils who made it to the top but ignored their First Nation classmates, according to former students.

Students from 1969-70 say Furlong screamed “Lazy Indians!” at them and physically abused them in different ways because, in his mind, they had committed some offence that needed punishment. He did not, they say, see them as children who were afraid of a tall white man who communicated through beatings and screaming in English. He is remembered as a gratuitously violent bully who taunted children, beating them in front of the class if he felt they were too slow, fat, or inattentive.

Richard Perry, another hereditary chief, said in an affidavit that he is convinced he suffered brain damage because of Furlong’s repeated beatings, and he struggles to comprehend what he reads even today.

“I was hit on the head all the time. I was hit with a ruler: a metre stick in the legs. I remember one day talking to another Native person in my language. I said, ‘What are you learning in school?’ John Furlong hit me for that. Those days there was not too much learning. I remember John Furlong chased me home one day.”

First Nation families who went to school authorities about Furlong’s abuse say nothing changed. If students complained to the nuns, they were strapped for lying. When they tried to skip classes or stay out of school, the RCMP brought them back—to more punishment.

“Another time, he [Furlong] took me to a private room where the furnace was,” Perry declared in his affidavit. “It was really noisy so no one could hear.…I watched them take kids one by one to the basement and beat us [with the strap]. I got too much abuse, too many hits all the time.”

Other students talk about the furnace room—a much feared place. Furlong, they say, grabbed children by the hair and dragged them there for strappings, usually by a priest or nun.

Paul Joseph and his cousin Richard also went to Immaculata. “Richard was pretty much the same age as I am,” Joseph said in a phone interview from Burns Lake. “On the John Furlong side, he hit me so hard once when we played basketball, right on the back of the head with a full hand for no reason. Another time I didn’t hear him say [something] to me while I was playing basketball. He came from behind and grabbed my hair from the back—almost on top of my head. He punched me in the back of the head and I went flying. I was unconscious for 15 minutes. I remember then I was crying. Everyone was too afraid to help me.”

Joseph says the abuse was unrelenting. “I played lots of hockey. John Furlong hit me right at the back of my head with a hockey stick. After this, I didn’t want to go to school. I was too afraid of what he would do. If he doesn’t get his way, he will hit us really hard. My cousin Richard and I just walked around outside in the cold. We didn’t have anyone. My parents were dead and I was 13. If we went to the priest, he would say we were lying. He would put our hands on the desk and hit us so hard. It feels like our hands are broken.”

By Laura Robinson, September 27, 2012

Special report

John Furlong biography omits secret past in Burns Lake

Georgia Straight responds to John Furlong's news conference

Watch full video of John Furlong news conference on Georgia Straight article

Full text of John Furlong's statement regarding Georgia Straight article

Former students at Immaculata and at Prince George College (later called O’Grady Catholic High School), where Furlong worked later on, are part of a national class-action suit against churches and the federal government. Under the narrow definition of what the federal government, in its Indian Residential Schools Settlement, determined was a “residential student”, they did not qualify for so-called common-experience payments. Residential and day students, Native and some non-Native alike, attended these schools. Native day students frequently experienced abuse from the same teachers, priests, and nuns as the residential students who were later compensated.

The children, who were forced to attend from eight surrounding First Nations, often spoke only the Carrier language. Their families, if still on the land despite many attempts to “settle” them, lived traditionally, but with the building of Immaculata in Burns Lake in 1960, students were herded by the Prince George diocese into the new school.

Bishop John Fergus O’Grady, who oversaw the diocese, made sure, during lobbying trips to Ottawa and Victoria, that his 13 schools (he built nine in just four years) received government top-ups for every Native student registered. He and Father Gerard Clenaghan (who regularly flew to Dublin to recruit Frontier Apostles and priests) lived well. O’Grady loved to dress up in buckskin and moccasins and tell stories to big-city North American Christians about “half-breeds” and “little Indians” so he could leverage more money for his empire.

Added to donations were government payments to the diocese. The more First Nation kids O’Grady registered in Catholic schools, the more the government paid and the more he could feed his diocesan expansionist dreams—but he didn’t waste money on teachers’ salaries. O’Grady beat the cost of hiring trained teachers by inventing in 1956, along with Father John Brayley, the Frontier Apostolate: a labour force of Christian volunteers, often recruited from Ireland, whom he referred to as the “Catholic peace corps”.

The first FAs arrived in 1957; by the time the diocese shut down the program in 1992, more than 4,000 had volunteered from five continents. O’Grady paid them $25 per month plus room and board. Some were qualified teachers; most weren’t. One priest wrote that the Grade 2 class in his parish was taught by a Grade 10 dropout.

It was to this that Furlong, at age 18, arrived. He had just left St. Vincent’s Christian Brothers School in Dublin.

By June 1969, not only was Furlong a missionary but he worked part-time in the Burns Lake bakery. In May of the next year, he married Margaret Cook, a Frontier Apostle kindergarten teacher. In June 1970, Sandy and John Barth took over from the Furlongs at Immaculata and the Furlongs moved to Prince George College, where they are listed as “resident supervisors” in the 1971 yearbook. Furlong also coached a number of school teams. In 1972, Furlong continued to coach and supervise a residence, but he graduated to phys-ed teacher and then disappeared from the 1973-74 yearbook.

It appears that for some reason, Furlong either returned to or was sent back to Ireland. He states in Patriot Hearts that he was in Dublin in May and June 1974.

He reappeared at Prince George College in 1975-76, again as a resident supervisor and phys-ed teacher, while Margaret and their two children—who were born in Canada before he left Prince George—are listed as being from Dublin, Ireland.

Like at least four other former Immaculata students from those days, Paul Joseph’s cousin Richard committed suicide. Now, Joseph says, he is fighting for the truth, just as much for Richard as he is for himself. (Frontier Apostle records are tightly guarded by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Prince George; the Straight was told in April in Prince George that those records were closed.) He says he can move on from Richard’s suicide “as long as we bring out the truth so no other students will be so abused”.

Joseph says students were told by one nun that “we had to be quiet about the abuse. God would strike us down. I thought God did that to Richard, but later I realized God didn’t act that way.” Joseph says that ensuring Furlong is made to answer to those he allegedly abused is part of the healing process involved in truth-telling.

“After what he has done with us out here—for a long time I was looking for this guy—then I see him on the news with that Olympic thing. I wanted to break my TV. But it wasn’t my TV—it was him.”

Other students recall Furlong—who, at more than six feet in height, had been on the Irish school basketball and handball teams and played Gaelic football—using either a closed fist or a full-handed slap to their head or to their classmates’ heads. Even some of those Furlong left alone or favoured admitted to the Straight that he used harsh violence on others.

For some of his former students, seeing Furlong oversee the Olympics brought frightening memories as well as shock over how he kept his past secret—and even more surprise that Olympic authorities didn’t research who he really was. Several of them told the Straight that they attempted to or actually did contact Furlong prior to the Games. One bumped into him in a Prince George hotel elevator and confronted him about the abuse; he said Furlong refused to speak to him. Another said Furlong denied that he had abused her. Yet another said a voice-mail message was ignored.

When he met with one former student (who does not want to be named; the Straight has been informed of the name) before the start of the Games, he allegedly brought along Dan Doyle, the Vanoc executive vice president of construction and then-chair of B.C. Hydro. Doyle, when asked in an email about his presence at that meeting, responded only through a May 13 email, without denying that he was at the get-together in a private residence in Surrey. “I am not a spokesperson for Vanoc on any issues. You should continue to deal with Mr. Furlong and his lawyer.” (On September 24, 2012, B.C. premier Christy Clark announced Doyle’s appointment as her chief of staff.)

John Furlong's former students swore affidavits about their experiences.

Rusty Goepel was chair of Vanoc’s hiring committee, and in November 2009, he became chair of Vanoc. He is also senior vice president of Raymond James Ltd. in Canada, one of North America’s largest investment firms. “John was a member of the board of the [Olympic] bid corporation from day one,” Goepel said by phone from his Vancouver office. “I knew him; I knew his background. We went through a hiring process with a professional: Tanton Mitchell. I’m quite shocked [to hear these accounts of abuse] after the efforts he made and the plaudits he received. John emerged as an absolute stellar performer and a stellar representative of this city.” Goepel added that he was skeptical of the allegations.

Besides being Vanoc CEO, Furlong was the president and COO of the Vancouver 2010 bid team. He was involved for more than a decade, but did Goepel ever actually have Furlong’s CV researched? Goepel admits he can’t remember if he ever saw Furlong’s CV. “But it wouldn’t be like I asked him.…There was nothing we did wrong in our hiring process. You’re describing a totally different, alien person than I know.”

The Canadian Olympic Committee was pivotal to Vancouver’s bid and the Games themselves, with COC members sitting on both Vanoc and the bid committee. The Straight emailed questions in April about whether or not the COC practised due diligence—did a background check, received a Furlong CV—prior to Furlong’s hiring. None have been answered.

The organization that oversees all things Canadian and Olympic—including the national team sent to London 2012—claimed, through its director of communications, Dimitri Soudas, in a June 28 email: “We simply cannot comment on matters that are out of our jurisdiction….concerning fundamental principles of ethics and morals, we always set and implement the highest standards.”

The City of Vancouver, through Mayor Gregor Robertson’s office, has also been asked to comment on its role in Vanoc and how it practised due diligence in terms of hiring. There has been, to date, no response.

As of June 27, 2012, the B.C. Registry office still listed the Vanoc board as “active”.

Along with the customs-agent story, Furlong often repeats the story of his cousin Siobhan Roice’s tragic death in Dublin in a terror bombing in May 1974 that killed 26 people. Siobhan, only 19, was walking to the Dublin train station on her way home to Wexford, 130 kilometres away, on a Friday after work.

In Patriot Hearts, Furlong writes about the anguish the Roices experienced when Siobhan did not arrive at the Wexford station. He says “that task [of identifying Siobhan’s body] was too much” for her parents, so his father, Jack, went to the temporary morgue. “Body parts were stuffed in bags. It was a ring on a finger that helped identify Siobhan.”

Furlong continues: “My cousin’s funeral was difficult to sit through.…My aunt and uncle were broken and almost unrecognizable in their grief. So was my father….He was never able to shake the feelings he was left with after having to see his niece’s body torn asunder….Less than a month later, on June 4, my father was felled by a heart attack.” Jack Furlong died the next day.

Furlong’s cousin Jim Roice tells the tragedy quite differently. When Siobhan did not arrive home, they were in despair. The next morning, her father, Ned, his son-in-law, and brother-in-law boarded the train to Dublin. “My father, distraught as he was—no one could have stopped him from getting on that train,” 60-year-old Jim Roice told the Georgia Straight by phone from Ireland. Roice learned the details of the bombing from his family when he returned home the week after it happened; he had been at sea, in the merchant marine. “Uncle Jack was a lovely man, but he did not identify my sister’s body.”

A 2003 feature in the Irish Independent quoted Ned Roice, Siobhan’s father: “When it came to my turn, I didn’t know what to expect. I said I wanted someone else to come in with me in case I made a mistake and identified the wrong person.” The newspaper continued: “He need not have worried about that. He spotted his daughter immediately, her body mercifully intact. ‘The minute I went in, I recognised her right away. It was as if she had called me,’ he says. ‘She was lying there perfect. It’s 29 years ago, but it’s the same as if it only happened yesterday.’ ”

“It was my father’s mother’s wedding ring on Siobhan’s finger, but she was perfect; there wasn’t a mark on her,” Jim Roice told the Straight. Records from an inquiry into the investigation of the bombing list Siobhan Roice as a victim. In the paperwork relating to it, Ned Roice is listed; Jack Furlong is not.

Furlong uses the story as the jumping-off point for why he came to Canada in 1974—ostensibly for the first time—saying, in his book and in interviews, that the death of his cousin and father had left him “feeling a little empty, and open to new adventures….I decided to take the [athletic director] position, thinking I would return to Ireland in a few years.”

Except it seems that, for whatever reason, he already had done that.

Furlong was actually going back to Prince George College (described in Patriot Hearts only as “a high school in Prince George”) and taking the position he’d already held. He disappeared from the school’s yearbooks after 1976, but he appeared in the Prince George phone book that year and again in ’77. In his book, he says that he became the director of Prince George’s parks and recreation department after “a couple of years”. The City of Prince George will not confirm his employment, directing the Straight to submit a freedom-of-information request.

By 1978, he’s gone from the phone book and “M. Furlong” appears. Some of his former students and friends of his children say he left his wife, Margaret, and their children. Furlong writes in Patriot Hearts that “shortly after” Prince George hosted the Northern B.C. Winter Games in 1978, he was asked to take on the job of regional director of Nanaimo parks and recreation and moved to Vancouver Island.

Inside his book’s inside dust jacket, Furlong is described as “a born storyteller”. And in his addresses as a motivational speaker, he likes to give “lessons” for life. He lists the following values as essential: respect, accountability and inclusion, trust, integrity, honesty, fairness, and compassion.

Some of his former students wish he would come back to Burns Lake. They want to discuss what these lessons really mean to him.

http://www.straight....past-burns-lake

And another article about John Furlong by this same 'journalist' that came out in April 2011

The Vancouver Olympics and John Furlong’s Sins of Omission

In this comment piece, Canadian author and journalist Laura Robinson takes us further into the discussions of the legacy of the Vancouver Games with a look behind the biography of John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee and into what information on the 2010 Winter Games and his personal background made it to the book and what did not.

By Laura Robinson

13 April 2011

Print version

John Furlong, VANOC CEO. Photo by Flickr user United Way of the Lower Mainland used under a Creative Commmons License 2.0

In this comment piece, Canadian author and journalist Laura Robinson takes us further into the discussions of the legacy of the Vancouver Games with a look behind the biography of John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee and into what information on the 2010 Winter Games and his personal background made it to the book and what did not.

Comment: How exactly did VANOC CEO John Furlong manage to emigrate from Dublin, Ireland to Prince George, B.C.—a remote part of Canada in 1974 when he was twenty-four, with a wife and family?

He wrote in his recently released book about the Vancouver Olympics, Patriot Hearts, the he was “recruited” to be the “athletic director” of a high-school in Prince George, B.C., but fails to mention who recruited him. Had he delved into the details of his passage to Canada, not just in his book, but in the decade when he was the front man for the Olympic bid and then the organizing committee, perhaps there would have been less likelihood of him getting the job—and support from Aboriginal organizations across the country.

Sins of Omission

Furlong kept his past a secret. Nowhere in all the bios and hundreds of articles will you find that he was part of an international missionary movement called the “Frontier Apostles” in Northern B.C. They helped the Catholic diocese increase the Catholic student head count by building, and then working at Prince George Catholic High-School—a day and residential school where 80-90% of the students were Aboriginal. Some students came from as far away as Prince Rupert, a 700 km distance. Expansion worked in the church’s favour. Not only would souls be saved, but the federal government paid for every First Nation student attending.

In 1974 Furlong heeded the call of the Oblate Brothers, received the small stipend and room and board afforded the missionaries and, according to students, became the phys ed. teacher and a coach.

“He was a decent guy in those days. A motivational guy who brings out the good in you” says Terry Sam, who competed on the teams Furlong coached. “But he’s sort of too busy for us now. He didn’t have time for us—to talk” he says, adding he would see his former coach in Prince George when Furlong came to see his grandchildren, and with the torch relay, but Furlong would only have passing words with him. He also says he saw Furlong in Vancouver, but by then Furlong would only say “hi” and brush past him.

“His shoes got too big for him” says Sam, who still comes to Vancouver to run the Sun Run—the biggest mass race in Canada, at age 54. “But we made his resume for him. It was coaching us—we were good athletes—that moved him up the ladder and out of the school. Furlong used to tell us we were the best basketball team he ever coached.” (In his book Furlong also says he coached the Irish women’s national team).

Another former student, who wishes to remain anonymous, says the same thing. “He wouldn’t give more than a sentence when I bumped into him and tried to talk to him about the teams he coached. He avoided talking about those days.”

Furlong wrote in his book that he became the Parks and Recreation Director for Prince George in 1976, but he left out another teaching stint, this time at Immaculate Catholic School in Burns Lake, also under the Prince George Diocese, but in an even more remote part of B.C. Former student Thomas Perry wrote in the student newspaper at Simon Fraser University that he is one of the very few who "was able to overcome the abuse and negative reinforcement that were regularly used as teaching tools in my elementary school. The first school I attended was a Roman Catholic School called the Immaculate School; there was nothing immaculate about a school where every morning I was greeted with strapping from the nuns and priests who ran the school. I could barely speak the English language, which the teachers didn't know, or at least never inquired about, so I continuously got into trouble for speaking my own language."

By 1978 Furlong says he was the regional Parks and Recreation Director for Nanaimo, a city on Vancouver Island, over 800 km south. He was gone, says Sam, but left in a fashion that did not impress his former students. “He left his wife and kids in Prince George to go to Nanaimo. Who does that? I wish I could talk to him and see what’s going on.” To the athletes he once coached—Sam, his brother Howard, and their school friend and teammate Mark Prince--Furlong built his resume by using their athletic performances, then left them and his family for a better position far away. All three say, despite being some of his top athletes, he did not seek them out on his many visits back to Prince George over the ensuing years.

Not having time for former athletes, especially those who committed to excellence—is hardly the advice Furlong gave to the people of Prince George when he was there in December 2010, giving them advice for their bid for the 2015 Canada Games (the first big games Canadian athletes go to before the Olympics or World Championships).

"The No. 1 thing, I think, if I were CEO of these Games, I would want it to matter to everybody who lives here. The most important decision we (VANOC) made was the first one: we committed to a vision. Be sure of what you want to do and stick to it. Anchor it in a set of core values. It has to inspire people to get up and out of bed in the morning,” Furlong told bid organizers.

Visions and values

Furlong talks about “vision” and “values” in Patriot Hearts frequently, but never actually defines the words. Did he bring his strong missionary vision to sport—one based on the conviction that other belief systems are simply wrong because they do not share the values of the missionary? Would Aboriginal organizations and provinces across the country have footed the bill to send dancers to the opening ceremonies and other cultural performers to the Aboriginal pavilion if they’d known Furlong came to Canada to work at a school that took away First Nation languages and replaced them with English, while killing their culture and replacing it with Christianity? Would they have believed him when he told them Aboriginal youth would receive lasting legacies from these Games?

Most of the world does not know that Aboriginal children in Canada were taken from their families by the police, the churches and by “the Indian Agent”—a white person representing the federal government who had legal power over Aboriginal people. Approximately 150,000 children were taken for over 150 years. From 2010 to 2015 Canada will be in the midst of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools—not unlike the one held in South Africa after apartheid ended. There is evidence of mass graves, abortions done on girls carried out in the basements of schools after they were raped, and a litany of other unspeakable practices. The last residential school closed in 1996.

Sam says he was punished because he chose not to go to mass. “They’d ground you for two weeks—no activities, no sports, no going downtown. You were confined to your dorm. After awhile you did what they said just so you could get out. I didn’t like that at all.”

Margo Sagalon, Terry Sam’s sister, a counselor today, and former student at Prince George Catholic, says she has no reason to believe students suffered sexual abuse there. “Over the years no one has reported sexual abuse to me and I have counseled many, many former students. But there are hundreds of us survivors. We were only allowed to go home for the summer and holidays. We had to pray and do all that crap; go to church. It makes me mad that we’re not even recognized as a residential school. The Department of Indian Affairs paid our tuition directly to the church. We didn’t ask to go there. We lost our language and our culture.”

Canada’s dark shadow

There is a $ 15 billion nation-wide class-action lawsuit against the federal government from former students of “day schools” that Aboriginal people went to that were excluded from the federal government’s Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. If schools were privately built by churches and had day students—as did Prince George Catholic—they were not considered “residential schools” even though most of the students lived there.

The students who attended them were not eligible for the Common Experience Payment others received or extra payments if they suffered abuse. Sagalon collected names of former students who went to Prince George Catholic as part of that class action. All of the schools—residential and day schools—are a dark shadow from Canada‘s past when millions of dollars each year were spent to “kill the Indian in the Indian” through a litany of ways, such as forcing them to be Christians and banning their language.

When Furlong was asked through his publishers, Douglas & McIntyre, about his involvement as a Frontier Apostle and his non-disclosure of his missionary work, the following response was received:

John Furlong worked at Prince George Catholic High School for two years as the athletic director. The students at this school were Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, international and "day" students. It was a fee-paying private school. Furlong had, and continues to have, impeccable relations with aboriginal students, parents and Aboriginal leaders in Prince George, BC and across the country.

Furlong skips over the fact that the vast majority of Native students resided there, something the Prince George Diocese confirmed in March, 2011. Other “day” students boarded at white homes in Prince George, far from their families. The “international” students were mainly the Frontier Apostles’ children. Sam also adds, “He was a gym teacher who coached. We didn’t have an athletic department.” Further to that, Sam says there was no swim team at the school, despite Furlong’s claim in his book that he brought a fast but small team to the regional championships. He mentions that Jim Fowlie, who went on to break world records, did the relay all on his own and won, giving the school (carefully not mentioned once more) the championships. There is no swim team in the 639 pages of school activities and athletic teams from various yearbooks on the Prince George Catholic Facebook website. There was a private swim club in Prince George that did have a roster of good athletes, including Fowlie.

Opening Ceremonies

Furlong plays with the facts all the way through Patriot Hearts. For instance, he outlines how he and Australian opening ceremonies producer David Atkins wanted “to give the international world a real insight into Canada’s view of the Aboriginal community” by having them greet the athletes as they entered the stadium. “We would ask these communities to send us their best and their brightest, their future leaders….We would dress them in modernized version of their tribal regalia to create the colour and pageantry for which we were striving.”

Furlong wrote they wouldn’t tell the youth they would be in the opening ceremonies until “we had them locked in a hall in Squamish” but added that VANOC was running out of cash. When he met with then Assembly of First Nations Chief Phil Fontaine, the elected head of Native people across Canada, to “seek his blessing” he told Fontaine, “We may even need a little help because financially it’s extremely difficult to do.” Furlong reports that Fontaine was extremely supportive and writes, “Sweet mother of mercy…. I quickly rolled up my papers and left to tell David Atkins we had lift-off.”

That’s the official story. When Furlong was again asked to comment in more detail about the difference between what he wrote and what history tells us, Douglas & McIntyre’s publicity dept wrote the following email:

John Furlong responded to your questions a few weeks ago. He doesn't have anything further to say.

Absolute rights in perpetuity

With or without Furlong’s input, let’s look at reality. Young people found the application to the Olympic Indigenous Youth Gathering on-line. They did not have to go through Aboriginal leaders because they had to sign a multi-page contract with VANOC, agreeing to be unpaid “volunteers”; they had to send VANOC photos of themselves, but only in regalia—this was about creating a romanticized notion of what Indians look like—not as Furlong wrote, about how Canadians view Aboriginal people. If Aboriginal leaders had read the contract, chances are they would not have allowed the youth to sign it.

Generally Aboriginal people are invisible to Canadians. Most could not tell you that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission even exists, despite its five year mandate.

VANOC gave the young people strict instructions on how they wanted the regalia changed or simply disallowed it. The dancers performed their traditional dances for Atkins, but he gave them new dances that were to look as though they were traditional. The young people could not criticize VANOC, the IOC, the “Olympic Family” or any other organizations attached to the Olympics; and had to give VANOC and the IOC absolute rights to their images, creative property and intellectual property in perpetuity.

If they created a painting, dance, or a piece of music during the “Youth Gathering”—which turned out to mainly be rehearsals for the opening ceremonies, VANOC and the IOC owned it. Aboriginal people had no right to their own art. If they did or said anything VANOC deemed to be un-Olympic, VANOC could ship them home.

The “hall” Furlong had the 350 young people locked away in was a remote camp, 20 minutes outside of Squamish (between Vancouver and Whistler) where they lived crowded into rough cabins. Just days into the Games the present Assembly of First Nations Chief, Shawn Atleo, said he had not known about the above terms, and was disturbed that Aboriginal creations were now owned by the IOC and VANOC. “If Canada had signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, I think things would have turned out differently.” At that time only Canada and the U.S. had not signed the declaration. Canada now is a signatory.

“Never in our wildest dreams…”

Patriot Hearts skips all of these truths, and many others too lengthy to go into here. But Furlong has made his way up the sport administration food chain. His website, johnfurlong.ca has its own set of arms and gives many testimonials about his ability to move a crowd. Furlong charges $20,000.00 CAN per keynote address. That amount did not seem too high for the International Council of Shopping Centres, the B.C. Pharmacists Association, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association and the Canadian Construction Association, who conveniently had their conference in Hawaii—far away from Canadian journalists who question an email he sent eleven months before the Olympics showing he had prior knowledge about the possible dangers of the fatal Olympic luge track.

Furlong wrote to VANOC staff “mbedded [sic] in this note (cryptic as it may be) is a warning that the track is in their view too fast and someone could get badly hurt. An athlete gets badly injured or worse and I think the case could be made we were warned and did nothing…. I’m not sure where the exit sign or way out is on this. Our legal guys should review at least.”

Yet when Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died, Furlong is quoted as saying, “It’s not something I prepared for, or ever thought I would have to be prepared for.” In Patriot Hearts, which came out before the above email was public, Furlong wrote, "Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine the death of an athlete on Opening Day.”

To this day, no one is allowed to use the men’s starting gate on the luge track. The track is located in Whistler, 150 km north of Vancouver. But Furlong appears to have moved on from the scandal surrounding it. He has been named as the Chair of Whistler-Blackcomb’s Corporate Governance Committee. Whistler-Blackcomb is the massive resort/ski area located at Whistler. In November, VANOC paid them $32.1 million in “make whole” compensation, after the resort argued that the Olympics had hurt business.

Most recently he has also been made a director of Rocky Mountain Railtours, the luxury rail company whose train makes the run to Whistler. While environmentalists argued for this rail line to be a dedicated transportation route during the Games, VANOC chose a widened highway and vehicles instead. Rail use was restricted to Rocky Mountain Tours who rented out the train to politicians who met with corporate leaders on their way to Whistler.

John Furlong certainly has come a long way since his first missionary position.

[canuckbeliever]

I find it quite disgusting and appaling at how people jump the gun to automatically assume the alleged victims want money.

First off, they waited this long because most of these individuals were 11 or 12 at the time and tried to suppress what happend. This is not shocking. I have a couple of friends who have done research on native individuals and what has led them to be in the Criminal Justice System as much as they are. One of the first things they say is that a lot of native people suppress bad things that happen to them simply because they do not believe they will be trusted. Especially when the incidents occur on the reserve. Thiis leads to drug addiction/alcohol abuse/etc and then crime to feed these addictions.

In addition, it is mentioned in the Georgia Straight article that these individuals did try to reach Furlong. Furlong ignored all of these gestures , except one which occured prior to the Olympics.

Third, I do not care if any journalist has an agenda. Someone doesnt write an investigative piece that clearly took months to get facts about just because they have an agenda. The owners of the Georgia Straight would not put extensive resources if they believed something was nothing more than a "personal agenda".

Four, the biggest question to ask is why did Furlong say he moved to Canada in 74 in his book when he actually moved in 1969. Also the fact that individuals who hired Furlong onto Vanoc can not answer what his employment record was and what research they did clearly brings about more questions.

Furlong can admantly deny whatever the heck he wants. However, where there is smoke there tends to be fire. I just can not logically crasp why Furlong would hide his first 5 years in Canada in his book if he had nothing to hide

[Grapefruits]

John Furlong, the CEO of Vanoc, have been accused of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse of children in a residential school he taught at in 1969 as a young man in Burns Lake, BC.

The story came out in the Georgia Straight, which he is now suing.

http://www.vancouver...9956/story.html

[canuckbeliever]

Last point on this. Robinson has eight sworn affidavits. I do not think eight people would lie in affidavit just to get "money". They know what the allegations entail and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out

[canuckbeliever]

I might be missing something, but from what I've read about this the original accusations were of just mental and physical abuse that came out a couple years back, and now he is being accused of sexual abuse as well. Am I right?

[DonLever]

I might be missing something, but from what I've read about this the original accusations were of just mental and physical abuse that came out a couple years back, and now he is being accused of sexual abuse as well. Am I right?

[goalie13]

I find it quite disgusting and appaling at how people jump the gun to automatically assume the alleged victims want money.

[Grapefruits]

The Georgia Straight did not mention sexual abuse. They only mentioned physical and verbal abuse. John Furlong, during his press conference, said the allegations now include sexual abuse.