Jean-Pierre Goyer, (January 17, 1932 – May 24, 2011) was a lawyer and Canadian Cabinet minister.

Early life and education

Goyer was born in Saint-Laurent, Quebec, the son of Gilbert and Marie-Ange Goyer. His wealthy family owned a coal distribution company in Montreal. He was educated at two collèges classiques, the College St. Laurent and the College Ste. Marie. His first wife was Michelle Gascon, by whom he had three daughters.

MP

1965 - 1968 term

Goyer was first elected to the House of Commons of Canada as the Liberal Party of Canada Member of Parliament for Dollard in the 1965 election. In 1967, when the Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson announced his intention to resign, Goyer was part of the team that supported the bid of the Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau to win the leadership of the Liberal party. There had been rumors for some time that Pearson-widely considered to be a lackluster leader presiding over a chaotic minority government-would resign in the near-future and ever since 1967 the media had been speculating that Trudeau-who was regarded as a star minister in Pearson's cabinet-would be his successor. Pearson had been prime minister since 1963, but he was unable to win a majority in two successive general elections in 1963 and 1965. Pearson was widely viewed as an inept leader who blundered from disaster to disaster, and most Liberals had long wanted Pearson to retire, leading to internal pressure for the prime minister to step down. Pearson had wanted to stay on to preside over the events of the centennial year of 1967, and with 1967 almost over Pearson had no more reason to stay on. Marc Lalonde, one of Trudeau's closest advisers recalled: "He [Goyer] was the first MP to rally for Trudeau's candidacy and he was actively involved in Trudeau's leadership campaign". Côté complained that Goyer had appointed his mistress as his chief of staff despite her manifest lack of qualifications and awarded her privileges such as a free pass with the Crown corporation Air Canada, allowing her to fly anywhere she wanted at the expense of the taxpayers. At a press conference in Toronto, Morton told the media that "Goyer blew it!", saying the Solicitor General had undermined the agreement that the citizens committee had reached and was in part responsible for the torture-murder session, which had would have been avoided had it not been for Goyer's press conference. Morton also stated that the prisoners wanted promises that they would not be beaten by the prison guards if they surrendered, which Goyer put off giving, which thereby extended the riot as that one was of the key demands of the inmates. Morton stated he knew from speaking to Knight and the other inmates' committee members that the prisoners were most insistent on receiving promises that they would not be beaten if they surrendered peacefully. Morton complained instead of giving that promise, Goyer had marched outside of Kingston Penitentiary with a megaphone shouting abuse at the prisoners inside and warning them the Canadian Army would kill them all if they did not surrender. Morton stated that Goyer was unfit to be Solicitor General, saying that his actions during the Kingston prison riot had served to inflame tensions instead of reducing them and that Goyer seemed intent on sabotaging efforts for a peaceful resolution.

Continuation at Millhaven Institution

Contrary to what the prisoners had been promised, after their surrender, the prisoners from Kingston Penitentiary were sent to Millhaven Institution where they were all beaten by the guards. Knight, as the man who started the Kingston prison riot, was singled out by the Millhaven guards and forced to walk a gauntlet of prison guards who struck him with nightsticks several times. Knight later sued Goyer in a civil court for the beatings and won his case with a judge ordering Goyer to pay Knight $3, 500 dollars. Several members of the citizens committee such as Martin wanted to visit Millhaven to investigate the reports that the prison guards were beating the prisoners to punish them for taking prison guards hostage, a demand that Goyer flatly refused.

On 28 April 1971, four NDP MPs, namely John Gilbert, Arnold Peters, John Skoberg and Frank Howard arrived at Millhaven with a request to speak to the prisoners after receiving reports of the beatings. Under the Penitentiaries Act of 1886, MPs were classified as "privileged visitors" free to inspect any federal prison without notice to ensure that the prisoners were being treated humanely in order to raise concerns in the House of Commons though only a few MPs had availed themselves of this privilege. Warden Don Clark called Goyer to ask him what to do, saying to allow the MPs to visit Millhaven would lead to uncomfortable questions for the solicitor general in the House of Commons about the mass beatings the Millhaven guards had inflicted on the Kingston prisoners. The four MPs were all expelled from Millhaven, which led to Howard giving a speech in the House of Commons protesting their treatment, which had violated Canadian law. In response, Goyer admitted to the House of Commons that he ordered the four MPs out of Millhaven, saying that the visit of the MPs could have caused another riot. Goyer told the House of Commons: "Millhaven is currently overcrowded. The psychological climate there is tenuous and we have to be careful. My first responsibility is to see there are no more riots and to see to the protection of the prisoners". In response, Howard shouted: "What have you got to hide? Evasiveness is no substitute for intelligence". Goyer answered Howard with the remark: "Mr. Speaker, I did not appeal to the intelligence of the honorable member, but to this courtesy and I see he lacks both".

As the Liberal benches erupted in laughter, Howard continued to press on with his line of questioning, saying he had received reliable information about the beatings at Millhaven and the minister should answer his questions. The mood of the House grew more excited leading for the Speaker of the House to call for order. The four MPs expressed concerns about Millhaven, saying that before they were expelled on Goyer's orders that they had discovered the Millhaven "recreation hall" was just a mud field, that the beds in Millhaven were filthy, and the cells were "claustrophobic".

On 13 May 1971, Peters during question time in the House of Commons told justice minister John Turner that he learned from reliable sources that a number of Millhaven prisoners were engaged in a hunger strike to protest the living conditions at Millhaven. Turner in response stated that he had asked Goyer to investigate the problem of hunger strikes at Millhaven and devise a solution. The NDP and Conservative members of the justice committee of the House of Commons began to press to visit Millhaven to investigate the reports of inhumane living conditions and that the guards were beating the prisoners, but Goyer was adamant that no MPs being allowed to enter Millhaven or talk to the inmates. Goyer told the justice committee that he was denying them the right to visit Millhaven because: "It wouldn't be good to cause any more excitement than necessary in the present climate. We open the doors and run the risk of another riot or we close the doors and run the risk of criticism". Peters argued that the best way of preventing a repeat of the Kingston prison riot at Millhaven would be to investigate the reports, but Goyer exploded in fury at him, saying: "If you don't know the truth, keep quiet!" The Conservative MP and justice critic Eldon Woolliams put forward a motion that the MPs of the justice committee visit Millhaven to inspect the condition of the prison, but the motion was defeated in a vote along party lines 5 to 3. During question time, the Liberal MP Harold Stafford noted that one of the men killed in the torture-murder session during the Kingston prison riot, the child abuser Bertrand Robert, had repeatedly asked to moved out of Kingston Penitentiary out of fear for his life. Goyer replied to Stafford that he could not comment on Robert's murder because it was now under police investigation, but stated that Robert had been held in the 1-D range at Kingston Penitentiary for child killers and child molesters for his own safety. Another MP, the Liberal Terrence Murphy then rose to tell Goyer that in 1970 he visited several prisons and had discovered that "undesirable" prisoners such as Robert were segregated from the other prisoners. Murphy told Goyer: "They live in conditions we would not expect a dog to live under. They spent twenty-three and a half hour a day in cramped cells and looked like hungry chickens begging for food". Goyer replied that he needed more time to study the problems of prison life. On 27 May 1971, the Ontario Provincial Police charged 11 Millhaven guards with 24 counts of assault causing grievous bodily harm in connection with the mass beatings on 18–19 April 1971. Goyer told the House of Commons that he would not fire the 11 guards charged unless they were convicted and announced that the Crown would pay for their defense counsel at their trial.

Aftermath

In response to a media firestorm about the conditions in Canadian prisons, which had become a topic of public interest since the Kingston riot, on 20 July 1971, Goyer announced that he was amending the Penitentiaries Act to give prisoners the right to elect committees to advise the prison authorities about living conditions in the prisons. He told the House of Commons: "We recognize committees of prisoners elected by the inmate population can provide vital communication between the inmates and the prison administration". Fogarty wrote that Goyer took a harsh and gratuitously aggressive approach during the Kingston penitentiary riot, but rather "surprisingly" became an advocate of prison reform afterwards, a choice in approach that she credited to the Kingston penitentiary riot as Goyer wanted to prevent more prison riots.

On 24 April 1972, the Royal Commission under Justice J.W. Swackhamer presented its report to Goyer on the causes of the Kingston Penitentiary riot. The report concluded that the root cause of the riot was the government's policy of keeping prisoners in their cells for 16 hours per day and the policy of ending recreations such as sports teams and sports events. The parts of the Swackhammer report which stated that 86 prisoners had been beaten at Millhaven on 18–19 April 1971 and that the attacks had ordered by Warden John D. "Don" Clark, deputy warden Patrick McKegeny and Deputy Warden Howard S. Bell were censored. Swackhammer had recommended that Clark, McKegeny and Bell be fired for ordering the mass beatings, but no one was ever fired for the beatings.

RCMP espionage

On 5 March 1971, Goyer received a memo John Kennett Starnes, the director of the RCMP Security Service, stating the RCMP had been monitoring the "Waffle faction" of the New Democratic Party as a "subversive and radical element" in Canadian life. In May 1971, Starnes received a request from Goyer's for an "enemies' list" of federal civil servants with left-wing views. In response, Goyer received that same month another memo from Starnes entitled "The Changing Nature of the Threat from the New Left-Extra Parliamentary Opposition and the Penetration of the Government". Starnes listed 21 civil servants whom he believed were abusing their positions to advance extreme left-wing causes. Most of the people on the "enemies' list" were so named because they had as university students in the 1960s been readers of Praxis (a dissident Marxist journal in Yugoslavia that was somewhat critical of Marshal Josip Broz Tito for not establishing the sort of society Karl Marx had envisioned) and/or had been readers of an anarchist newspaper On Your Generation published in Montreal. Goyer in turn sent out a memo to several other ministers on 15 June 1971 about the 21 civil servants whom Goyer accused of being "former campus revolutionaries" who were working for "the destruction of the existing political and social structure of Canada". In response, several of the civil servants named on Goyer's list were promptly fired. Higgitt in June 1971 received a memo from Robin Bourne of the Solicitor General's office saying that Goyer wanted monthly reports of the number and locations of RCMP electronic eavesdropping operations with regard to the FLQ and its supporters, but was not interested in "the operational side of these activities such as how various devices are installed". At the same time, Starnes sent out a memo to Higgitt stating that the electronic eavesdropping operations "are or may be outside the law" as the RCMP rarely asked for a warrant, but that Goyer was not to be informed. Later in June 1971, Starnes wrote a memo to Goyer asking for permission for the RCMP to review tax filings and requests for unemployment insurance, which he stated was necessary for his intelligence-gathering. Goyer lobbied both the Revenue minister Herb Gray and the Labour minister Bryce Mackasey for the Mounties to be allowed access to tax filings and unemployment insurance claims "in a manner which would attract no attention or criticism".

In September 1971, Goyer ended the restriction imposed in 1961 on the RCMP conducting intelligence operations on universities, though he added that the RCMP had to seek permission in writing from himself in the event of recruiting a paid informer or conducting a bugging operation on a university. The number of paid informers on universities was small as by 1972 the Mounties had a total of five paid informers working in or attending universities. Goyer however excluded unpaid informers on universities from needing his prior approval, thus meaning the RCMP could recruit any university professor or student as an informer without seeking Goyer's approval in writing provided the informer was not being paid.

In May 1972, the RCMP burned down a barn in St. Anne-de-la-Rochelle in Quebec's Eastern Townships because it was believed the barn was going to be used for a meeting between the FLQ and the Black Panther Party. The barn-burning was to be one of the more controversial acts committed by the RCMP, but was justified when it emerged under the grounds that the FLQ and the Black Panthers were working together to launch a cross-border guerrilla war against the United States and Canada. Goyer was later to deny that he known of the barn-burning. In October 1972, the Mounties broke into the Montreal office of a separatist publishing house, the Agence de Presse Libre du Québec (APLQ). Goyer met with Starnes and Higgitt after the APLQ break-in, but he was to later claim that the break-in was not discussed. Even at the time, there were allegations that the Mounties were behind the APLQ break-in as it was noted that the thieves had only taken the files in the APLP office. Goyer was to claim at the McDonald commission hearings that because the Quebec Justice Minister Jérôme Choquette had denied in a press conference that any police forces were involved in the APLQ break-in that for him it settled the matter and he did not ask Higgitt or Starnes about it. Contrary to Goyer's testimony, both Starnes and Higgitt were to testify at the McDonald Commission that they had in fact informed Goyer that the Mounties had staged the APLQ break-in, which had provided a treasure trove of information about Quebec separatists as both maintained that the minister was kept fully informed about the illegal means the RCMP obtained intelligence.

Penal reforms

In September 1971, Goyer introduced the penal reforms that he had been promising since the spring of 1971. Under his reforms, prisoners' in federal penitentiaries were permitted to grow their hair long; allowed greater chances to earn parole; were permitted for the first time in Canadian history conjugal visits with their wives and girlfriends; and allowed greater educational opportunities as most Canadian criminals were barely literate.<sup>,&nbsp;</sup> The Orchestre Métropolitain briefly sought bankruptcy protection, but did pay Rescigno the damages he had been awarded in May 2006. On 23 May 2006, Goyer was forced to resign in disgrace from the Orchestre Métropolitain.

There is a Jean-Pierre Goyer fonds at Library and Archives Canada. Jean-Pierre Goyer is also honoured with Mécénat Musica Prix Goyer for collaborative emerging artist.

References

Books and articles

  • Trudeau's solicitor-general was the architect of prison reform Globe and Mail obituary