When the political characters go home for the summer, the real characters of Parliament Hill come into better focus.
In recent years, one of the more notorious Hill regulars was Glen Kealey, a bankrupt Tory businessman from Hull who claimed to have knowledge of corruption and bribery inside the Mulroney government. He said he was a victim.
Day after day, he would stand on the Hill shouting “resign” at every Tory he could see. Government members winced when they heard his leather-lung call. They said he was a kook.
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But a Quebec MP eventually convicted of shaking down Hull businessmen for political “contributions” in return for contracts had reason to think Kealey was more than just a disenchanted kook.
These days, as always, there is a cast of characters on Parliament Hill.
There is, for example, the “cat” man who has made his retirement project the feeding and maintenance of the dozen or more stray and wild cats who live in the woods behind Parliament.
He spends hundreds of dollars out of pocket. Tourists taken with the story of “the wild cats of Parliament Hill” often drop money in a box to help him.
Then, there is the man who sits day after day brandishing a sign which condemns abortion and homosexuality. “God will not be mocked,” says his sign. After years of daily attendance, politicians and journalists often stop to check how he is.
But the king of the current Hill characters is Harold Funk, a former Ottawa lawyer with a conspiratorial mind and a grudge against the system and the United States.
Every day for more than a year, he has spent some time on Parliament Hill across from the American Embassy, shouting abuse and accusations.
He often issues press releases addressed to “heads of nations”, denouncing the Americans and their dupes for everything from running a system of concentration camps and crematoria for political prisoners to testing germ warfare and forcing prisoners to take drugs.
One week, he produced a map of alleged CIA crematoria worldwide. One was just south of Red Deer, Alta.
To talk to Funk is to remember one of Winston Churchill’s definitions. “A fanatic is someone unwilling to change his mind and unable to change the topic.”
Last week, “on the 450th day of my demonstration before the United States embassy detailing U.S. atrocities since 1946,” Funk’s topic was the healing power of soybeans.
It eliminates symptoms of the common cold, he said, made a breast lump disappear and eliminates strep throat. “I hope the medical scientists will test this food for these healing qualities.”
On most days, his antics and accusations of atrocities and drug experiments on prisoners draw smiles or baffled looks from tourists.
But a few Hill veterans remember that a decade ago, one of Funk’s causes was to allege sexual abuse inside Ottawa’s Children’s Aid Society.
Not so many months ago, a series of charges were laid.
Harold Funk was smiling that day.
