How Gabriel Wortman Seduced Young Mounties

The young Mounties probably were lucky to get a word in sideways.

Gabriel Wortman always had a way with turning on the charm, the earnestness, the sincerity when he needed to, with his elders and with other temporarily important people.

The young Mounties, originally sent out to look into a possible weapons offences, probably left with more than a few earfuls about Gabe’s two wonderful, wonderful uncles in the Mounties ; how his uncles were lifers in the Force, men with exemplary records.

Gabriel Wortman never ever had a shrine to the RCMP in general.

Instead for his own protection, he developed a shrine, a line, a spiel to his two RCMP uncles.

And man oh boy, was he ever just about their biggest fan.

Gabe wasn’t RCMP himself, no sir, but he was practically family.

The Mounties family is forever and ever : even retired members feel an intense loyalty to defend and protect the Force.

Defend and protect Canadians, too : sure, sure.

But protecting and defending those deemed ‘inside’, inside the Mountie family ; that never stopped.

Because the point was, when the young Mountie got back to base and casually asked around among the senior staff, Gabe’s uncles Cris and Al indeed were viewed as exemplary members of the Force.

And subtly, the poison set in : by extension their nephew was too.

So what if he owned a few illegal assault rifles to shoot rabbits ?

A millionaire, a medical professional, a successful entrepreneur, a native-born, white protestant Canadian : it was practically his birthright.

Soon, too soon, the young Mounties were almost friends with Gabe....

Twenty years ago Gabe & Lisa met, fell in love and stayed together till the day he died

Peoples’ lives are never simple ; victims’ lives are never simple.

For six years, from 1996 till 2001, Gabe Wortman had a lovely house at the bottom of  Pine Street in Dartmouth next to the park, which he shared with his wife Corinna Kincaid.

For six years, from 1996 till 2001, Lisa Banfield had a very nice home on Saluki Drive in Beaver Bank which she shared with her husband.

Then sometime twenty years ago, these il-starred married people met.

 It could have stayed just been a brief secret fling.

But instead, the pair fell in love, divorced their spouses, moved out of their lovely homes to the rooms above the shop  —— and stayed together for 20 years, until the day he died .

Through all the times we’ve all heard about, through all the times we can only imagine....

William Dawson & the numbered company (hint : he was against it)

I am writing a book about Dr Martin Henry Dawson whose family was a very close contemporary of the much more famous Sir Willam J Dawson family back in Pictou Nova Scotia.

Medic, later infantry officer and later artillery officer  Lt Martin Henry Dawson, MC

People often think they were related but they were not.

What they did share in full though were the very same mid-Victorian evangelical Presbyterian values : after all, they attended the same churches, went to the same schools, worked in the same small business district.

Perhaps one of the most important of those values was the belief that the main thing you brought to your business was your character, your good name.

If through a combination of bad luck and il-management the family firm got into debt, such as William Dawson’s family did, the parents and their children would work harder, spend less, for decades, until the debts were all repaid and the family’s name and good character was restored.

Even today, some of this belief in good character lingers on.

You still don’t need to register your business if all your business correspondence simply reads : “Michael R Marshall, songwriter”. That’s your real name and that’s your real trade.

Victorians would have hated - not worse, simply not have been able to comprehend - the numbered company.

Their business signs all read something like, “Samuel J Mosher & Sons, Coal Merchants and Ship Chandlers”. Exactly who was running the show and exactly what they did. In your face, straight forward, straight-shooters.

Not for them today’s companies operating under fanciful made-up names or numbers.

We all know the guy who operates out of his battered van, equipped only with his cell phone and one used industrial vacuum.

Yet his van is decorated in Star Trek symbols and he grandiosely calls himself Galaxy Cleaners Ltd, though, in fact, he rarely ventures out beyond Cole Harbour-Forest Hills.

A moral cut far below him is the murderous denturist who had a numbered New Brunswick corporation set up to operate a hole-in-the-wall denturist clinic in Halifax Nova Scotia.

Victorians, I repeat again, would be appalled by all this fakery and putting on airs.

We in our age, by and large, aren’t.

 I mean most of us still distrust the numbered corporation instinctively, but fanciful company names instead of a guy simply calling himself “Bev H Albright, home carpet cleaner”, well that, that simply goes unnoticed....

AM music versus REC music

Back in the Sixties & Seventies, when I heard a lot of music-making in Canadian REC rooms, one thing was abundantly clear to my bleeding ears, if not yet to my mind.

This was music made in a rec room, but not made for a rec room : bands practising at volumes more suitable for the thousand seater auditoriums they soon hoping to be performing in.

These bands might think they were amateurs but they were really instead that very common transitional group : amateurs-hoping-to-be-professionals, hoping soon to be performing before others, for others, for money.

The true amateur musicians, lovers of music-making for its own sake, don’t need an audience other than the other performers and singers in the same room with them.

They simply love to sing or play, without money, without audience.

The parlour musicians of 1820s-1920s fit that bill.

We still find true AM music today, on YouTube.

Not the supposedly amateur cover band with two hundred million views : but rather those with maybe only a few hundred or few thousand views.

Still they continue to put out new songs, simply because they enjoy doing so.

The point that best defines them is when they are asked to perform in public , maybe even do a small tour : if they decline, saying they must secure the day job they enjoy, or that they have too many family commitments, then we know we see the true amateurs.

For a variety of reasons, of which job and family loom far in the background, they don’t think they would really enjoy playing before audiences, hewing to the audience’s time table and requests.

They much prefer repeatedly trying out different takes on a weird pop version of a rap tune and only releasing it on YouTube, a year later, when they finally got bored with it.

They prefer dancing to their own drummer.

These groups may still be performing in a REC room but this time the music is made for the rec room, as well as just in it.

The volumes are much lower, the textures much more linear and transparent : because it is no longer fun to do if they all can’t hear each other’s musical line and respond to it.

Think of bebop jazz pianists, in a tiny club, dropping in the occasional muted 3rd and 7th of the chord, instead of stride jazz solo pianists in a big hall, incessantly pounding out block chords at top volume with all ten fingers, simply to be heard.

Some instruments in the truly amateur rec room are rare : brass winds and cymbals and most drums were never designed for indoor use in small rooms, in rec rooms they sound either monstrously loud or ridiculously quiet.

Real Marshall stacks are also out - though as I said in an earlier post albeit, merely echoing the advice of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page : inside a studio even a tiny amp can be made to sound very loud, even when it is not. That works for fuzz guitar and fuzz bass : but real loud deep bass from bass guitars and bass drums remain too loud for small rooms.

We are in a  moment of a truly historic transition in the global history of music : Covid-19 fears are merely hastening the long slow death of stadium filling rock groups and concert hall filling orchestras.

For advantages in electronics has moved far beyond the 1970s bringing in of loud music from extremely expensive but small solid state equipment to today’s bringing in of loud-sounding music from tiny, cheap software equipment.

Maybe 7000 people in the whole world can play the oboe at a professional level : one person in a million.

The instrument is very expensive, good players obviously scarce - and expensive.

To assemble twenty such players of various traditional instruments in my rec room would be impossible for so many reasons : they’d charge union rates and cartage, I would need an arranger and a copyist for charts, for yet more money. My rec room is far to small to fit all in.

Or I can go to my free (did I mention free ?!) copy of Garageband  on this ipad, where I have an orchestra full of individually sampled instrument notes, played in tune by the finest musicians, to assemble like a child’s lego set, into music compositions.

Perhaps via the fingers of me and four friends in my rec room, live, with tiny MIDI keyboards attached to Garageband equipped ipads, switching instantly between various software instruments as the tune requires.

Or perhaps, done all by my self, in bits and pieces over a long period of time, in the way that a writer writes a book or a composer creates a tune.

The point is we are likely to soon see an outpouring of actual amateur music making out of all this, not merely today’s mostly amateurs-hoping-to-be-professionals..

This is not a good news story about Gabriel Wortman and animals

There is some good news reported about animals during the Portapique murder spree : dogs shot and injured but recovered : all covered in loving detail by the major media.

But some animals, cat animals in particular, sadly died in the house fires started by the killer and I saw nothing of this from the big media.

If you like cats, and I am sure you do, pause for a moment to reflect on the innocent cats caught in this tidal wave of hate unleashed by our ‘superior’ species...

Should Denturists Board have acted against Gabriel Wortman if RCMP refused to ?

Any one of the many violent incidents that Gabriel Wortman perpetrated over the decades would have triggered a genuine response from the RCMP —— if only he had been poor and black or aboriginal or moslem or even if he had been francophone and catholic.

But Wortman was a white protestant millionaire businessman medical professional.

What could the unhappy victims of his violent intimidation, threats and actions have done as an alternative ?

The key might lie in the last word , two sentences back : professional.

Professionals are granted by legislatures a good deal of self regulating with the fond hope (delusion) that the professionals will actually regulate for the public good.

They regulate all right, with a stalinist fist - but only to protect their economic monopoly power.

Regulate for the public good - its never happened and never will.

Still the legislation that set up the Denturist’s Board, like all other boards set up to regulate other professions does contain a morals clause : a requirement that applicants to receive a denturist license in Nova Scotia (or to have it renewed) must be of good character.

Now if  I saw my family doctor on a lawn choking the life out of their spouse and then telling their own uncle, “don't you dare call the RCMP or I will shoot you just like the guy I killed in the States,” I could take my complaint to the doctors licensing board.

I could basically complain, appealing to their collective economic self interest,  that this sort of public activity tends lowers the reputation of all doctors —— and could they please require my doctor to join AA, take an anger management course and surrender all firearms.

They probably won’t do anything and if anything, tend to “lose“ your initial complaint, but if you document everything really well and send it by signed for registered mail, at least you know you tried.

You might even have gotten lucky : it could be that denturists of Nova Scotia had found Gabe a royal pain in the ass for decades (color me very surprised if they don’t) and were just dying for a complaint from the general public as an excuse to kick him to the pavement.

The good things about complaints of professional misconduct is that the burden of proof is much lower than what the RCMP know will be required in a court of law.

But there are further alternatives to the feckless mounties and the faint-hearted licensing boards.

FRANK MAGAZINE, for example : perhaps 50,000 Nova Scotians will be sad to tell you how a mere mention in Frank can make them a hot household word in their community for at least two weeks...

REC : Dartmouth’s GARAGE BANDS that never were

Never practised in garages anyway.

As a musical genre, the bands I saw rehearsing, in the Sixties and Seventies, in Dartmouth Nova Scotia Canada (Canada - important bit, that) certainly made the right sounds, certainly fit the bill.

But I think the myth of all amateur bands rehearsing in garages much better fits sunny warm southern California or Australia than most of the rest of the world.

Where, if garages even existed, they were freezing cold much of the year.

Yeah, Canada. As in : cold.

Bands that I knew always rehearsed downstairs, in the basement’s REC room.

More accurate then to call this sort of music, REC.

There is quite a story on how that name emerged.

The word parlour for the ‘best’ room in the house had long been replaced by newer words, but the form and function still fit.

A room to the front of the house, with soft wall coverings and plush furnishings that made the room sound relatively quiet and sedate.

Often called the front room - for obvious reasons, ditto sitting rooms.

But as they came to be called ‘living’ rooms, they underwent a subtle shift that was made clear when they became, in turn, the family room.

They gradually shifted to the back of the house, open both to the kitchen and to the back deck.

Still at least semi-formal when they needed to be, louder than the old parlour style rooms but not as loud as the REC room downstairs.

REC rooms started out a big open room, taking up about half of a semi-finished basement, designed for noisy children and were called, appropriately, rumpus rooms.

Then as teenagers, the kids now wanted to take the toys out and to bring a big games unit in.

And sometimes parents (ie Dad) intervened to fixed it up a little so he could put a bar to entertain his drinking buddies in a man-cave.

But frequently teenagers also found the REC room an excellent place to rehearse as a band : big, warm, often with a bathroom, plenty of electricity.

Hard concrete walls and floor and no isolating insulation on the open floor boards and joists ceiling meant mom and dad upstairs heard nothing all night but the bass-line.

The sound downstairs was even worse, in my opinion, so when I built my recording studio in the REC room in my parents’ tiny home on Hastings Drive, I made sure to improve it.

My success was limited, mostly because the current culture among musicians back then mitigated against it : this was still the era of bringing big stage amps into studios and then turning them up to ten.

I was just briefly in one Halifax studio beneath the Zapata's restaurant before I had to leave (as my ears were bleeding) because I honestly thought the volume from the hard rock band inside was about 110 decibels, yet with the massive studio door closed you heard nothing in the corridor outside.

It had cost over a million dollars in today’s money to achieve that though.

Still, by the time my much more modest efforts were complete, entering my studio slash REC room was a bit like entering an anechoic chamber : corpses in a funeral home made more noise.

Good enough that when once, by mistake, I recorded Bella Coast Bounty only on the room mike rather than through all their individual close-up mikes, it sounded so good I released it as a record : Shake, Rattle & Roll, Strident Records SR 826 Boy Side*.....

*Yeah, I thought using A and B sides was a waste of good ink : one side was boy-oriented, the other  girl-oriented.

But even then, even with all the sound-padding, I still noticed that groups with very small or no amps (for I also recorded vocal jazz, folk and country-pop, as well as rock and R&B) sounded best recorded in REC rooms. A parlour is a parlour is a parlour.

So if I claim that there are still four to six person bands making amateur parlour music (often on ipads with the Garageband app) and releasing it on Youtube, where actually is their music being performed ?

Probably not in the the equally mythical bedroom : much too small.

And rarely in the family room : too open to constant interruptions.

Nope, just like the good old Sixties, its still be made in the REC room.

I credit Greg Shaw, he of WHO PUT THE BOMP fame - a really really nice guy - with popularizing the term garageband  in 1973 after he reviewed Lenny Kaye’s compilation album NUGGETS from 1972.

But in my communication with Greg, I never had the nerve to task that term, even though I made it clear that my own recordings were all coming out of a basement REC room.

Like all Canadians back then, I was too in awe of America in those days to really do my own thinking, I’m afraid.

After all, I had deliberately labelled my record label, Strident Records, as delivering rocking sounds from the Memphis of the East....

Could Gabriel Wortman have threatened urban neighbours unhindered for decades as he did in remote rural Portapique ?

To regain some measure of sympathy for the RCMP’s actions on the night of April 18th 2020 in Portapique it really helps to view this video, deliberately shot from a car driving at normal dirt road speed, that viscerally brings home just how big and sprawling the tiny community is, and just how far apart are the homes and of all the woods between each of them.

car video graphically reveals isolation of Portapique Beach Rd

Now just try to imagine travelling that heavily wooded road in the inky black darkness of dead of night.

Which begs the question : why were the small number of RCMP on the spot so certain they would locate and arrest the suspect in that sprawling darkness, when they clearly had not yet done so ?

Why not swallow their lifetimes of preening Mountie pride, announce to the world, not just the unprecedented number of murders so far, but also to confess that the spree killer might just escape their roadblocks in the inky wooded darkness to drive off in his fake police car to do more killings ?

Mountie unbounded pride, a sin in the eyes of God, tussles with Gabe Wortman’s unbounded evilness, for the major reason why eight more people died.

Viewing this video, we regain some measure of sympathy as well for the neighbours who Gabriel Wortman threatened.

For they were NOT neighbours at all - not in the urban and suburban sense of that term.

Gabe could have killed everyone at one house with the nearest neighbours hundreds of metres away in either direction, none the wiser - let alone the RCMP a 100 km away.

I highly doubt that Gabe would be able to so casually threaten the next door neighbours around the Pine Street Dartmouth home he shared with his first wife Corinna Kincaid : the Austenville Residents Association would be up in arms in an instant.

Urban people may feel that they are safer from violent neighbours in the country, but people like myself, with some experience of living in rural areas, feel just the reverse.

Gabriel Wortman might have been the unchallenged Billy Stafford of Colchester County, but he was hardly alone - wacky scary neighbours with guns is part and parcel of actual country life in rural Nova Scotia.

Rural sprawl is a large part of it : there are virtually no villages in the European sense - many times you basically find it is easier to drive to your nearest neighbour rather than make the five minute walk.

I partially blame my generation of urban hippies, with all their back-to-the-land visions, for forgetting why their parents had fled the land in the first place.

Fact is, communities like Portapique are generally tranquil —-albeit mixed with some rumours of hell-raising on the illegal side of shady — and then the rare outburst of extreme violence that stuns everyone, until the tranquil life resumes...

Two very different takes on Gabriel Wortman from across the St Croix River : both are correct

Calais & St Stephen closer than Riverview & Moncton

The Saint Croix River forms part of the border between the US and Canada — and across that river, Calais Maine and St Stephen New Brunswick are so close to each other that it is as if they are living in each other’s pocket.

Yet separate public comments from people in those tightly knot communities on both sides of that river, on the Gabe Wortman they knew well when he was younger, could not differ more widely.

But I think both parties are 100% right in their views - their differing perspectives are entirely due to them knowing GW in different time periods and in very different environments.

Pierre D. Little is the publisher of the Calais Advertiser and of the Machias Valley News Observer and knew Gabe as a friend together in the rural Riverview NB suburb of Bridgedale.

Pierre twittered his response to cartoonist Mike De Adder’s vague recollections of GW in High School, in the early days after the shooting.

Pierre moved to a private school in the US in grade nine, but in junior high school recalls Gabe at age 12 as nice and normal - a kid with a kid’s fascination with airguns and making stink bombs with gunpowder.

I have speculated that the special airgun was a high powered US airgun, illegal in Canada and usually smuggled-in, in plain sight, as part of a family’s car vacation in the US.

It was treasured among the kids of my youth because while it looked exactly like a kid’s airgun, it secretly had all the power of dad’s .22 carbine with .22 shorts.

Laura Porter now lives in Charlotte County, just across from Calais, but grew up just 20 miles north of Riverview and early on posted on Facebook about the Gabe she knew - my first break in the steady diet out of New Brunswick of “oh what a great guy Gabe was”.

I always took Laura’s story totally seriously, even if the media ignored it, because her details were supported by another dorm mate of Gabe at UNB - a man now living in the UK. His accounts of Gabe-the-total-arsehole at UNB had been on the web circulating among his fellow dorm mates for 12 years.

And none, NONE, in all that time, disagreed with his assessment - and hence, indirectly with Laura’s.

Laura met her husband Rob and his best friend Greg at UNB Fredericton around 1990 - at the time when Gabe was in UNB’s own animal house, Bridges House dorm.

(**** see below) Greg had plenty of insight into Gabe at age age 22, ie ten critical years after Pierre knew him - because he was his actual dorm roommate.

Now the Riverview of Gabe’s school years was really an uniquely isolated geographic enclave and as a result was more small town than small city in many ways. All the teenagers attending the only high school knew a little about every other teen - it was a fishbowl and no place to have a second secret life.

And Gabe was young - the evidence suggests that narcissistic personality disorder, though formed earlier, first becomes clearly publicly manifest when a person, usually a male, is around 20.

Again I have speculated that at that age, many people have left their parents home and hometown and are now free to re-invent themselves in a new bigger place where no one knows them.

People with mental illnesses (not personality disorders) certainly also tend to become apparent at around age 20, but they do so whether they still live at home or not.

So Greg (and through him, Rob & Laura) knew Gabe when he was ten years older - at the time when his disorder tends to present publicly generally. That alone created a big difference in the viewpoints about GW.

But I believe that Gabe also manifest his real hidden nature now publicly because he felt free too.

Metro Fredericton is hardly larger than Moncton but it tends to have a greater percentage of NB, Canadian and foreign CFAs that metro Moncton/Riverview.

For not only was Gabriel well known in the small fishbowl of Riverview, as Wortman is one of the founding families of Moncton itself, he was indirectly known in Moncton through his hundreds of relatives.

But Fredericton, 200 km from Riverview and Mom and Dad - now he could re-invent himself.

So hair dyed silver, a cock ring, a public sex life (sex in public showers while dorm mates try to get ready for class.)

But also an calculated air of mystery : told no one anything about his family or background, made no friends or even acquaintances, picked fights over every little matter : an all around pain in the ass.

Voted Chuck Cosby award winner as UNB’s #1 arsehole.

In revenge he complained to the UNB admin so effectively that the award was banned the next year and a major student riot exploded in protest.

But Greg - and thus Rob & Laura - had an insight to GW that few others might have had.

By then Gabriel was a fully of age legal adult —- yet he had a stack of false names and false IDs, used when he went out at night, gone for days, never did say where or why.

This at a very time when Allan Legere was making a laughing stock out of the NB Mounties - killing and burning and assaulting all over the province while always evading capture.

That sounds a lot like Portapique 30 years later doesn’t it ?

Some in the media found Pierre Little online and printed his recollections - I am sure some found Laura Porter online as well - but her comments have never been reported in the media.

I have blogged - incessantly - as to just why the NB media won’t want to see her comments aired in their pages - but why have no national media or NS-based media taken up these disturbing revelations of GW’s UNB years ?

****Greg : I kidded myself that the only Greg I had ever heard of out Charlotte County was the very well known and longtime Tory politician Greg Thompson - obviously not him !

 But I checked anyway: yeah - way too old.

HOWEVER, the same obituary that revealed his age and education did reveal that he also has a son with same name,who is friend of Rob Porter and he is also a sociology grad - but he  joined the US  Army in Feb 1989 so he seemingly is out of the picture unless his tenure as Gabe’s roommate was from September 1988 til Feb 1989. God knows, living with a prickly control freak like Gabe might want to make me run away and join the army too !

Did Gabriel Wortman kill people in America to obtain his illegal cache of high powered weapons ?

Sometimes it is really worth going back carefully through older news scoops, to see the stuff that all others may have have ignored.

Spree killer GW’s Portapique neighbour Brenda Forbes’s account has hardly gone unreported either here in Canada —- or around the world.

Nevertheless, the media have not focussed equally upon every portion of her interview with CBC AS IT HAPPENS host Carol Off.

Brenda was a good friend of Gabriel Wortman’s uncle Glynn who lived very near GW himself in Portapique.

Gabe loved to drink, as did Glynn and Glynn’s drinking buddies.

Rich guy Gabe supplied the booze.

So when their alcohol dealer Gabe started choking his spouse on Glynn’s property, all three did nothing —- didn’t call the mounties.

Nothing new here —— not calling the Mounties on Gabe was the Portapique neighbourly way of doing things : nice neighbours don’t fink on bad neighbours with lots of guns and short fuse when drunk. Not when the Mounties are a 100 km away on a good day.

But Brenda Forbes says that Glynn Wortman told the RCMP via speaker phone that his nephew would kill him if he made a formal complaint about the choking and Gabe’s big stash of illegal guns from the US, because Gabe had already said he had killed guys in the US.

Wow ! It says everything about the scope of this extraordinary story that a blockbuster detail like this is made public but not made popular - ie didn’t become front page news.

Paul Wortman told FRANK MAGAZINE that Gabe told Glynn he planned to kill his mom and dad and Paul says that on a trip to Cuba he did attempt to kill him, his dad.

Now we learned, via CBC/Brenda Forbes - that he threatened to do the same to his uncle Glynn.

Gabe’s RCMP uncles, Cris in lower mainland BC and Alan in Ottawa, were probably both too far away and too well trained in guns for Gabe to try to kill them.

But his oldest uncle, Neil in Shediac NB was near by, in frail health and had a very successful career in education, the sort of career success that would rankle the ego of Gabriel.

I wonder if Gabe ever threatened him ?

And frankly, if I were Gabe’s brother Jeff in the US, I would have been totally terrified of having gained a resentful older brother with lots of illegal high powered weapons and a very short fuse.

Because it seems clear that Gabe really, really resented his parents doting over his newly found baby brother.

Some Canadian media really should interview Jeff and his wive Robin....

But really, really folks, its the illegal gun cache from US + “killed guys in US” angle that grabs me.

I keep flashing back to that photo with all those American flags in the background in the shrine to one of Gabe’s precious motorbikes - the photo GW featured on the front page of his FACEBOOK page.

I think we will find that GW was definitely a full on SECOND Amendments NRA type of guy - tutored by his grandmother Doris’s second husband - the mysterious gun smuggler from Michigan that father Paul talked about.

Did Gabe obtain some of his illegal weapons by killing guys for them in the US ?

Was this in anyway connected to those mysterious overnight trips he made while an adult at UNB in 1990, using false names and false ID ? (UNB Fredericton is just a short drive to SECOND AMENDMENT-rabid Northern Maine.)

Admittedly, Gabe probably told all this “killing guys in US” stuff to uncle Glynn when both were drunk out of their skulls.

On the other hand, things you have long successfully concealed when cold sober , do tend to slip out when you are stone-blind drunk....

memo to new brunswick media : yes, killer’s fake mountie cars were registered to a NEW BRUNSWICK CORPORATION but no, nobody expects you to investigate

Yes, a New Brunswick Corporation funded the fake mountie cars that killed 24 people in Nova Scotia.

Berkshire Broman Corporation. Found it on a NB government website :

Oh God I know : its that local angle that all New Brunswick journalists feared that this foolish Nova Scotia based investigation might throw up.

Why can’t the mounties down in Dartmouth just let sleeping dogs lie ?

The killer is dead, done and dusted.

But no, they had to go and drag the Irving-owned sister province in this horrible Bluenose affair.

Its so beastly unfair.

Haven’t Nova Scotians seen all those signs on metro Halifax lawns that say “Irving shipbuilding jobs start here”.

And all those signs on New Brunswick lawns just as soon as you cross the border that say “ hear no evil, speak no evil” ?

Gabe Wortman & Gerry Regan were not related : but the people who knew about their Open Secrets probably were

Former NS Premier Darrell Dexter was once also a young reporter.

And as a young reporter, he told me of  reporting on a public event in the early 1980s in Sackville NS involving lots of girl scout aged girls.

He watched the whole bunch of girls and their elders watching the then federal minister of women’s rights Gerald Regan coming on way too strong to one of the young underage girls, making her look very uncomfortable ——— and no one did anything.

Maybe some in that same crowd who saw the Open Secret of G Regan’s sexual assaults in action but did nothing, got old and retired to Portapique.

There to see the Open Secret of G Wortman assaulting women, fire-bombing neighbours’ huts, threatening people with his arsenal of illegal military style guns, paranoid, sociopathic, bitter, drinking way too much —- and again they did nothing....

“The Legend of how Jeff & Paul & Gabe & Ev reunited, bonded and lived happily ever after”

“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” : loved the movie, loved even more the hit song by Gene Pitney.

But what I am enjoyed the most, being the wicked cynic that I am, was the reporter tearing up his big big scoop: that the upcoming Vice Presidental candidate, Senator and former Governor Stoddard, actually wasn’t “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”.

Because upon reflection, he realizes that when the Legend becomes the Fact, its best to print the Legend, not the actual Facts.

The facts may not, in the end, bear out the legend that after Jeff Samuelson reunited with his birth family of Paul, Evelyn and Gabriel Wortman after 40 years, that the whole family blended and bonded and lived happily ever after.

But for now, the media will go along with the gag....

did Doris Wortman meet the mystery gun-smuggler from Michigan in her home town of Stratford Ontario ?

Ye Olde Stratford, Ontario

                   
How this for some gratuitous name dropping ?

One time, when I was desperately trying to make small talk with filmmaker Michael Moore (actually the only time we met) at the Atlantic Film Festival, I mentioned that all my relatives came from South Western Ontario and the link with Michigan across the water were closer than most outsiders imagined.

Unexpectedly, the very tired and drained looking Moore lit up and got animated.

His medium-sized but working class and remote city of Flint MI (Davidson, rural suburb more specifically) was many miles away from Ontario.

But the flat open waters of Lake Huron, and the flat countryside generally, made the TV and Radio signals from the bigger and richer cities of South West Ontario as clear, if not clearer, than local Flint area signals.

Teenager Moore gained an intimate knowledge of Canadian and Ontario retail politics from his listening and watching, a fascination for Canada that obviously never left him.

I doubt he was alone - few Michigan residents who regularly take vacations haven’t hopped over to SW Ontario at least once in their lives.

Now Gabriel Wortman’s paternal grandmother Doris came from a English family that emigrated to Ontario when almost all the kids, but for Doris,were already born.

They settled in Stratford Ontario , almost all lived there and almost all died there.

The exception was young Doris, who left Stratford for remote Moncton during the war years, for reasons unknown.

Doris’s first husband ,Stanley, died in 1977 and Doris soon took up with a mystery spouse from Michigan who was Gabriel’s “Second Amendment” teacher and illegal gun smuggler.

Most people seem skeptical of her son Paul’s claims about his son Gabriel and this Michigan man.  Moncton to Michigan ? It seemed such a stretch.

But my folks visited their SW Ontario relatives as often as our scant finances permitted - why not Doris as well ? And that summer, just happened to meet a vacationing Michigan man...

“COVID DEATHS START HERE” : at your local taxpayer-subsidized stadium

Stadium Rock isn’t yet dead, nor are taxpayer-subsidized Stadiums : but many Stadium-goers are.

No more so than from the stadium where the current world wide pandemic really took off : at a Feb 19th 2020 Champions League match between an away team from Spain and the home team in Northern Italy.

Supporters from both teams went home to spread Covid-19 among tens of thousands before themselves dying.

Police and anti-terrorism experts for decades have fretted about a chemical or germ warfare device spreading instant death throughout 50,000 to 100,000 spectators at a major musical or sporting event via the air circulation system at a semi-enclosed stadium.

I can’t recall them expressing fears that the spectators might’t die right away but instead return to their homes all over the world , to spread a slower but bigger death toll globally.

Between the dinosaurs of Arena Rock themselves dying of  old age and potential concert goers of the future recalling that Covid started in a similar stadium to the one they are contemplating going to, stadium rock is on the watch-list.

Parlour rock, however, is doing just fine...