Wrestling with his demons

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This article was published 12/11/2015 (3675 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s always more to a story.

Especially a news story in which a politician decides it’s in his self-interest to add details that had been withheld.

So it was that Tuesday morning Mayor Brian Bowman — out of concern, no doubt, about how his police service was looking in the media — finally loosened his self-knotted gag and not only told reporters why a senior police officer called him Saturday to report a city councillor was taken to the drunk tank over the weekend, but revealed the identity of that senior officer.

The mayor said Chief Devon Clunis made the call out of concern for the legally blind Ross Eadie, who happens to be a member of the police board that oversees the Winnipeg Police Service.

By the time the mayor could round up one of his staff to get to the Main Street Project, Eadie was not only sober, he was gone. It was between 10 and 10:30 a.m., according to what Eadie would tell me later, when a homeless man beat the mayor’s staffer to it and helped guide the man he saw leaving the drunk tank who was wearing sunglasses and carrying a long, fold-up cane.

Eadie, grateful for the gesture, got the man’s name. He caught a bus home thinking the story would end there.

As it had last autumn when…

Well, I’ll let him explain it in his own words.

Those words and others that add even more to the story. As only seeing public figures in a human way can.

We met near city hall over a late lunch. Earlier in the day, Eadie had met in his office with Clunis and Deputy Chief Art Stannard, who walked from the Public Safety Building to explain the call had been made out of concern, not malice, and to offer details about what happened early Saturday morning.

Details such as how, after a friend saw Eadie get into a taxi meant to take him home, police were called when the driver didn’t know where to take him. Officers tried to find a friend’s place before finally dropping him at the Main Street Project.

“I live alone,” Eadie wrote in a letter of apology Monday.

Alone in the North End where he grew up, much of which he now represents at city hall in his Mynarski ward.

What wasn’t mentioned is Eadie and his wife are separated.

So taking him home wasn’t an option for police — whom he reportedly verbally abused in his drunken state — or for the cabbie.

The apology was written after the Free Press broke the story of the drunken incident involving Eadie.

“I don’t know who called,” Eadie said over lunch.

“Maybe it was a police officer who was really pissed off at me,” Eadie said with a laugh that quickly trailed off into these words: “I just want it over.”

But it’s not over.

Eadie could lose his position on the police board, which would be a blow to him and maybe even the police.

He said he gets along well with Clunis.

“I’m a big supporter. I love the direction he’s going.”

‘I can sit down and have a beer, socialize. But there are days when you’re going to party, right? And the point is at what point do you stop partying?’

— Coun. Ross Eadie

But while Eadie likes Clunis, he said he has become closer with Stannard.

Which prompted me to ask if Clunis, who’s a former police chaplain, and Stannard had asked if he’s getting any help for the depression he alluded to in his letter of apology, or for his drinking.

“I’ve talked to Art,” he said.

Then Eadie surprised me with a confession. Or at least the beginning of one.

“This happened to me last year. Around this time of year.”

“What did?” I asked.

At first he shied away from answering directly.

“Fall has never been good for me,” he said.

It was in the fall, he explained, at Thanksgiving, when he left a home where his parents were fighting and drinking, and ran to the street. He would end up briefly in a foster home and in the Manitoba Youth Centre for breaking into a laundromat coin box to support himself. By then, Eadie, who was bullied as a youngster, was already blind in one eye. He was only nine when someone threw a tree branch at him that struck his right eye.

By the fall of 1984, at age 24, he had lost the sight in the other eye during a drunken house party when he was sucker-punched. “And my prescription glasses shattered into my left eye. So, I’m touchy.”

Eadie knew he would be blind for life. He remembers an ER physician trying to calm him down. He punched the doctor in the stomach.

“I don’t like being confined,” Eadie said.

He thinks that’s probably why he was so disruptive with police last weekend.

That and his being so drunk he can’t remember what happened.

It was drinking that helped him cope with being blinded.

He drank for two years after he lost the sight in his second eye.

Until he was tired of going nowhere and decided to go back to school. In the fall, that terrible time of the year for Eadie.

Which brings us back to the rest of his confession about what happened last fall that resulted in Eadie sharing personal matters with his police pal of sorts, Stannard. “Art and I had a discussion,” Eadie said. “I was taken to my girlfriend’s last year.”

“By the police?” I asked.

‘Fall has never been good for me’

“Yeah.”

“Because you were drunk somewhere?”

“But,” he responded, “I wasn’t as drunk as I was this time.”

Eadie said it’s police protocol to drive someone to a safe place if they’re intoxicated. Obviously, that incident was kept quiet. Maybe because Eadie went more quietly and gratefully at the time.

Eadie had ordered a glass of Riesling for lunch, which as we wrapped up two hours later he still hadn’t finished.

I told him I was concerned about him and asked if he would look for help with his drinking.

This was his best answer.

“I can sit down and have a beer, socialize. But there are days when you’re going to party, right? And the point is at what point do you stop partying?… So I just have to refrain from that sort of thing.”

He said something else about last weekend.

“I should have just went home.”

But there was no one there.

Which reminds me.

Remember the homeless man who helped guide him out of the Main Street Project? Eadie gave the guy his card and, if the landlord approves, the homeless man won’t be homeless anymore.

And Ross Eadie won’t live alone anymore.

 

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca