It’s a normal as Kool-Aid summer's day on neighbourly Wolverleigh Boulevard. A retiree is patiently mowing his lawn. Children pedal up the sidewalk on tricycles, a woman on a porch brandishes a folded newspaper at a buzzing bumblebee. Just two blocks north of Danforth and just steps east of Coxwell, middleclass Wolverleigh Blvd., is a quiet tree-shaded family neighbourhood.
A relatively new neighbour is sometimes seen pushing his 2-year-old toddler along in a stroller. The father of another 13-year-old son, his partner is a nurse. A big dog named "Wobbly" and a brick semi-detached house with a white verandah, and a basketball hoop out back complete the picture.
Meet 47-year-old John Clarke, the new neighbour.
Firebrand Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) leader Clarke, who publicly deplores "the ridiculous cult of personality stuff", would most likely balk at being profiled in private life.
A resident of 180 Wolverleigh since late last August, most neighbours do not know that Clarke is de facto OCAP leader of Queen’s Park riot fame.
Even after televised coverage of the riot, most area residents did not make the connection between their neighbour and the firebrand activist. In reporting on the riot, one Toronto daily newspaper had Clarke living in Scarborough.
"It’s not as if he’s making Molotov cocktails out on his verandah," one neighbour from up the street told Toronto Free Press.
There is no steady stream of visitors at 180 Wolverleigh. Clarke seems to be around a good deal of the time. Area residents consider him and his partner, who keep to themselves, "good neighbours".
"It was only lately that I came to realize he was the John Clarke of the Queen's Park riot," said a neighbour a block away. "I’m told by neighbours at closer range that he seems able to keep his home life separate from his OCAP work."
Some area residents told TFP they would prefer to have Clarke think that they do not know who he is. Their anxieties stem from fears that identification of his address could see their lives disrupted by people who may disagree with Clarke’s public antics as an activist.
Although he’s been active much longer, Clarke the firebrand broke into major newspaper headlines on the weekend of August 8, 1999 with a mass sleep-in at Allan Gardens by OCAP members. When police dispersed activists in a surprise early morning raid on the Gardens, Aug. 10, Clarke, then living on Hart Ave. in Scarborough, was at home.
On Wolverleigh, the red Honda he drives is parked in the driveway, and neighbours say they see him more often on his bicycle.
Clarke, who obviously has a better lifestyle than the people for whom he advocates, has never stated that he is homeless. He has stated that he is paid about $20,000 a year in salary from a variety of trade union coffers. It is unknown whether he is paying the rent or the mortgage on his new place of residence, or whether his salary is enough to cover either one.
Documents (Plan 602E, Lot 23) obtained by TFP, list the present owners of 180 Wolverleigh as Robert MacDiarmid and Angeles Garcia-Ameijeiras. A mortgage in the amount of $161,250 was taken out with the Toronto Dominion Trust Company in May of 1992, the same year the property was transferred from James Richard Monaco to MacDiarmid and Garcia-Ameijeras.
In July of 1999, the tenants who were renting the house told neighbours they had been given notice to move out.
Clarke and his family moved in sometime in late August or early September.
Some Wolverleigh Blvd. residents have a difficult time matching Clarke their neighbour to the Clarke of Queen’s Park protests.
Unrepentant and defiant in the aftermath of the riot, he said "Nothing happened at Queen’s Park that doesn’t happen in alleyways all over the city."
While Clarke and company claim to protest for the homeless and the poor, they say they are broadening their base and that "it’s now about discrediting the government".
There is anxiety in some corners that Clarke plans to mark the anniversary of last August’s takeover of Allan Gardens with another protest.
"As you have created a whole population of people with nothing to lose, so we have been building up a readiness among them to fight back as seriously as the situation demands," is his unchanged message to Premier Mike Harris.
Clarke has always insisted that the true leadership of OCAP is a "collective one".
"I think there’s a certain agenda behind trying to paint OCAP as a one-man show led by a half-crazed ideological maniac who incites poor people to violence," says OCAP staff member Sarah Vance.
If Clarke said nothing about his fears of imminent arrest to neighbours in the aftermath of the Queen’s Park riot, he was not so close-lipped at a Hamilton NDP convention shortly after.
"An attack on me is being perhaps prepared by police," he told the group. "They are talking about coming and arresting me."
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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