Enter laughing

Court ruling extends refuzee law to criminals.
— News headline
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FOR DECADES, Black Jack Bentine and his pirate crew
were the scourge of the Caribbean.

They had cut a bloody swath
through the West Indies as they
murdered, raped and looted. No
one was safe from their cannons
and cutlasses.

Island g.vernors enlisted gun-
boats to protect their shores and
Black Jack «nd his cutthroats
were driven North, where their
ship ran aground on the East
Coast of Canada. Black Jack and
his crew demanded refugee status.

“We cannot go back,”’ Black
Jack told a CBC reporter. ‘“We
could even be imprisoned or
hanged, "

Hearing this, several United
Church ministers said they would
let the pirates hide out in their
church basements,

The pirates put their case to an
Immigration Appeal Board. But
there was a lengthy wait because
of the large backlog, which in-
cluded 97 Iranian torturers, 108
high-ranking officers from the
Pol Pot gangiin Cambodia, 5,503
Vietnamese gold-bearing boat
people, 92 Jamaican extortionists
and murderers, and an
Englishman from Sussex who had
an unpaid parking fine.

Black Jack and his men were
put up in the luxurious Chateau
Magnifique in Montreal,

Ottawa also furnished them
with welfaze cheques and a gerer-
ous clothing allowance, their
social worker having decided that
pirate garb was not suitable for
Canada’s climatic conditions.

The pirates soon reverted to
their old habits. They obtained
funds by robbing Canadians at
knifepoint, but were caught.

“Your police are racis:s,"’ they
complained,

They were represented by Mr.
Sidney Sternberg, Q.C., a founder
of the Immigrants’ Defence
League. His plea was that piracy
was the accuseds' only trade and
that the government had failed to
put them in a job-training pro-
gram,

The judge found them guilty,
but in a landmark decision the
Supreme Court of Canada ruled
that in a multicultural country,
newcomeis are entitled to main-
tain their culture and values.

The pirates were moved into
subsidized housing.

By then, they had been given
much sympathetic coverage on
CBC TV, CKNW’s open line
shows, and in Maclean’s maga-
zine.

The editor of the Vancouver
Sun wrote a column in which he
said that a speech given by Black
Jack was the finest he had ever
heard.

A gala concert was held in ;
Toronto’s Thomson hall in aid of
the Pirates Legal Fund and Black
Jack appeared with Mike Har-
court, Bob Rae, Adrienne
Clarkson, Pierre Berton, Judy
Rebick, Mel Hurtig, and the B.C,
Organization to Fight Racism.

In the House of Commons,
NDP immigration critic Dan Heap
demanded to know why these
poor pirates had not been granted
landed immigrant status and why
they were being subjected to men-
tal anguish and torture.

A nervous Tory backbencher

KEN BAXTER
,LAWYER

124 Years
Experience

aS

Doug
Collins

ON THE OTHER HAND

ventured the view that many Ca-
nadians were worried about hav-
ing cutthroats and rapists living in
their midst.

The NDP justice critic, Svend
Robinson, in a speech that
brought tears to the eyes of many
in the Press Gallery, said that Ca-
nadian society had benefited
greatly fram freebooters,
marauders, rum-runners, corsairs,
brigands and night-stalkers, and
that these newcomers would surely
make a great contribution to
Canada. °

“We must not condemn peaple
simply because they are dif-
ferent,’’ he thundered.

Spokesfolk from the Indo, Afro
and Hispanic communities
declared that ‘white racism is
alive and well in Cangila today,”
and the Globe & Mail rain a
two-page spread on white su-
premacists, complete with pictures
of cross-burning.

Ottawa took action.

Black Jack and his crew were
summoned to Rideau Hall and
sworn in as New Canadians by
Governor General Iona Cam-
pagnola.

Two months later, Jack and six
of his mates died in a shootout
with rival Haitian drug dealers in
Montreal. Seven others are serving,
time for various violent crimes.
The rest fied to Los Angeles.

The story of the pirates and
their illegal landing became the
subject of an award-winning
CBC/National Film Board
docu-drama by the McKenna
brothers entitled, Cold Country,
Cold Heart.

Before he died, Black Jack Ben-
tine gave several interviews to
author June Cailwood, who used
them in her book Backlash: The
War Against Canada’s Im-
migrants.

An all-party parliamentary
committee has now recommended
that the phrase ‘‘We stand on
guard for thee’’ be removed from
the national anthem because it
implies that Canada is a racist na-
tion that defends its shores against
newcomers.

(The above was written by a
Vancouverite who wishes to re-
main anonymous, several of Black
Jack’s men having popped up in

-monster homes in Stiaughnessy.

‘We love Canada,”’ they told

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