Will work or else

The disturbing story of one troubled man's desperate search for employment

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

Last June 13, NDG resident Daniel Guibord mailed Premier Lucien Bouchard a letter stating that if the premier did not find Guibord a job by June 27, Guibord would become a criminal. The 51-year-old computer and electronics technician had been jobless for the past two years except for a two-week temporary stint at a computing firm last May. His job searches had proven fruitless despite his background (his three-page résumé includes a page-long, densely worded list of specialized electronics skills, an intimidating array of computer programming languages, years of work experience at companies like Bell Canada and the fact that he speaks three languages and can get by in a fourth). Guibord was desperate.

Around three o'clock in the afternoon on June 26--a day before Guibord's deadline--five plainclothes officers of the Sureté du Québec knocked on his door. The five, who had concealed weapons beneath their civilian clothes, told him they had a court order to admit him to the Pinel Institute for the criminally insane. Guibord was taken away in an unmarked car and later confined to Pinel in the city's east end.

Guibord was released Monday the 30th after psychiatrists determined that he posed no threat to society. Back in NDG, recently showered, neatly dressed and very much the computer and electronics technician in demeanour, he told the Mirror he's not sure what his next step will be.

Guibord takes his letter to Bouchard dead seriously. He admits he's relieved he was arrested: he had no idea just what he would pull off on the 27th as the symbolic criminal gesture. And it wasn't the first time Guibord has been put under suspicion for what the authorities have perceived as an erratic action: last year, also unemployed, Guibord wrote a letter to Bouchard accusing him of failing to provide jobs for Quebecers who needed work, and threatened to commit crimes; he added that if he was not arrested within 48 hours, he would resort to an unspecified kind of violence. Guibord was arrested and served two and a half months in Parthenais for such charges as disturbing the peace and issuing death threats to the public at large.

Guibord dreams his one-man crusade might become something like Mahatma Ghandi's non-violent resistance to British colonial rule in India: "Imagine if 10,000 unemployed people got arrested en masse..."

But there is a darker side to Guibord's message, one pointing to a potential for trouble if enough unemployed people with the same ideas got angry enough. In his letter to Bouchard, Guibord writes, "Find me a job; i.e., one of the government jobs now occupied by penniless immigrants; for example: the receptionist job now occupied by a recent immigrant at the office of the Public Security Minister where I met my probation agent once a month. As I have no objection to fighting for my freedom in my country, I now have a criminal record (Nelson Mandela also has a criminal record for his own political activities), i.e., because the immigrant in question (who does not wish to fight for her liberty in her own country) occupies the job that could easily have been mine if it weren't for the laziness and innate stupidity of politicians here, and this job (as with all the jobs now occupied by penniless immigrants) would have saved me from having a criminal record."

When asked about statements like these, Guibord says, "I'm not a racist; I don't hate black people. It's just that black people have too many children they can't feed back in Africa and then they come here and take our jobs." He says immigrants expect less from an employer than long-time residents do and are therefore more likely to get hired. And there is more than a hint of the creepier side of French-Canadian nationalism in his letters: he writes, for instance, that a law should be passed stipulating that in cases of competing employees with similar qualifications, hiring priority should go to French-Canadians.

The moral of the story? That the job situation in this province may be driving people to more desperate lengths than anyone has yet imagined--and that it has the potential for far more dramatic repercussions than anyone has foreseen. "After two years of looking for a job--I mean right, left and centre--I'm not going to take it anymore," says Guibord.