It took me a while, but I eventually figured out what it was about. It was one of two things, or maybe the two combined, and they both involved events that took place between 1981 and 1982.

At the beginning of the 1980s the American government was looking for sites where they could test one of their newest weapons, the Cruise missile. Northern Alberta in Canada was ideal for their needs, as the topography was varied and there were miles upon miles of unpopulated land. They could launch the missiles from planes and guide them to their final destinations, secure in the knowledge that no humans would be disturbed.

That it happened to the traditional hunting grounds of neighbouring Native Canadians didn't concern them overly much, nor did the fact that it was the migration route for huge herds of caribou. It's not as if the missiles had nuclear warheads on them, for gosh sakes. Anyway, the Canadian government gave the Americans permission to go ahead and test the missiles and even offered to build the guidance system on Canadian soil.

In 1981 I was one of about 20 people in front of the American Consulate in downtown Toronto protesting the testing. As we marched on the sidewalk in front of the front doors, two gentlemen, who might as well have been wearing signs saying "SPY", were taking our pictures from a meridian in the road. In the course of the next two years the demonstrations grew larger and larger until in the fall of 1982, about 100,000 people turned out to march through the streets of Toronto against the Cruise missile tests.

It was probably the biggest demonstration of its kind in Toronto, maybe even Canada. Shortly after that, somebody left a van filled with explosives parked up against the factory in Rexdale, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, where the guidance system for the missiles was being constructed. It didn’t cause that much physical damage, but some poor security guard was killed.

I remember hearing about it at work and coming home and asking my roommate if we knew the people who did it. He gave an odd look and said, "We know people who know them. Watch what you say on the phone for awhile." I wasn't thrilled that we had even a tenuous connection to anybody that could be responsible for killing somebody else (they called themselves Direct Action and had actually been responsible for a couple of attacks across Canada; they had blown up a couple of adult video stores in British Columbia and some power lines as well — ironically when I moved to Kingston, Ontario in 1990, they were already here having been sentenced to serve their time in the jails here) but I did think he was being a little paranoid about the phones until my father asked me why the hell my phone was tapped.