Virgil Knapp said it for the family. His rangy, six-foot eight body is stretched out in a chair on the back deck of this 100-year-old house, dog Cody resting motionless in the late afternoon heat and oppressive humidity. Angela, his mother, sits beside him, father Wesley sits opposite as the 24-year-old, looking evenly, steadily into the middle distance where the neighbouring farmer loads bales of hay. He then says, very softly, “This is home, this is the building I was born in. I’ve lived my whole life here.” 
 

But for how much longer? This is a family home which may very well be doomed to make way for an airport in Pickering which may very well never be built. "The Federal Government’s current policy for the residents is one of attrition by eviction and demolition” according to Land Over Landings, a stewardship association formed by the Knapps and the other site’s tenants. It’s not a new story, this one. It’s been told many times over the years about plenty of other people and their homes in this burgeoning township, with the only difference being that, for now, the Knapps' home is still standing -- and they're still in it. There are many, many others -- some of them beautiful heritage homes, even older than this one -- which were bulldozed away or left boarded up for vandals to rob and desecrate and eventually to destroy in a different, but equally cruel fashion.

Tenants and Land Over Landings members Wesley Knapp and Mary Delaney speak with Ajax Pickering MP, Mark Holland on a tour of a number of homes on the Airport Land, July 15, 2005.

On a notice received late in the winter, they were scheduled by the government to be evicted by June 30, for “economic” reasons, because their home of 27 years on the airport site, (which Works Canada operates on behalf of Transport Canada, the official landlord), is suddenly defined as “unviable, old stock, not worthy of maintenance and scheduled for demolition.” Wesley and Angela recently spent three days at a Provincial Landlord and Tenant Tribunal -- where a typical hearing might last on four hours -- defending themselves against what they term "the assault on our family’s home and way of life by a Federal Government which is the biggest landlord in Canada." Now they await the result, which might not be given until September or even October. Like a number of the other 13 tenants who simultaneously received similar eviction notices, after 25 more homes were demolished in March, “We have been rescued by lawyer Bob Doumani and consultant John Andrade, who offered to represent us ‘pro bono’,” Wesley says.

Wesley and Angela Knapp are not your average couple by any means. Wesley, with his tight ponytail, flowery, Hawaiian-style shirt, clam-digger pants and sandals teaches Tibetan Buddhist Meditation and Yoga, so that’s part of the persona. But prior to putting down roots on this idyllic three-acre piece of land in North Pickering, he’d been pretty well most places in the world, “never staying anywhere for more than a couple of years at a time, moving on to somewhere else, restless, curious, you know?” His Canadian father was a career soldier in the British Army so Wesley’s trail as a boy growing up in army bases took him from A to Z on the world atlas. He went to boarding school in England and then, following his father’s wishes joined the military at age 16. Against his father’s wishes however, instead of going to Sandehurst, the British Officer Training School, where Prince Harry is currently an officer candidate, he joined the Royal Marines and trained as a commando, where, while learning to kill people quietly and efficiently, he also became a proficient boxer and rugby player, two sports which share some pain inflicting characteristics. And now he’s a Buddhist?

Long story short, “I was keen to do something exciting and a bit dangerous in the military, so I volunteered for a cliff leader’s course which, unfortunately, was cancelled by the ‘brass hats’, and I was reclassified as a clerk.” He shrugs. This was an “awakening jolt” and resulting in him "making my escape and gaining citizenship here through my Canadian father." Then he started traveling on his own.

After several jobs, including nickel-mining in Sudbury and a chocolate refinery in Toronto, he became a band-manager and then a partner in the Penny Farthing, a Rock and Roll Restaurant Club in Yorkville in the late sixties. He hosted stars such as Led Zeppelin, the Butterfield Blues Band and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. "I also became a ‘formal Buddhist’ when I met my Guru, Namgyal Rinpoche, who advised me to go to the Yukon to meditate to balance the wild life I had been leading."

In the Yukon he met Angela, a New Yorker, who still carries a little bit of that ‘Noo Yawk’ accent. “I went there after I did Woodstock,” Angela says. “First I went to California, then to Vancouver and then with friends to the Yukon.” There she established herself as a painting contractor to the government, where she met Wesley. He meanwhile, following a personal agenda, traveled to Morocco to meet his Guru for six months of therapy and meditation in the desert, “after which we studied with Tibetan Lamas in the Himalayas for a few months, went to Australia and started a silkscreen business to finance the next leg of the trip to New Zealand for another six month meditation retreat in the mountains” -- only to return to the Yukon and meet up with Angela again seven years later. They received Tibetan Buddhist Ordination as lay teachers and moved to Toronto 28 years ago.

As Angela speaks she’s massaging her youngest son’s right foot because he, like his parents, marches to the beat of his own drum. He was a motocross competitor and during one of his wilder moments of danger a few years ago, as his father says, “tried to jump his motorbike over a 100 foot span but only made it to 98 feet before he and the bike parted company and he seriously injured his leg. It was ugly. “They wanted to amputate at first,” Wesley says. After an extended stay in hospital and a major muscle and skin graft, Virgil’s leg is still not a thing of beauty, but at least he’s still got it. “My mother was my prime care-giver during the rehabilitation process,” he says. “And she still is.”

Angela, a registered nutritionist, says, continuing her massage, “We’re stewards of the land here.” Over her shoulder can be seen a large organic garden which they plant and tend each year.  They grow celery, peppers, zucchini, eggplant, beans, Swiss chard, “50 kinds of lettuce,” says Angela. “We embrace the land. We love it. We share the food we grow because we can’t eat it all. We call this the Namgyal Healing Garden. It’s a sacred place, a place of refuge and it’s here for those who need to come and meditate with us.”

Says Wesley, “The government doesn’t care about people like us. They don’t give a hoot.” Warming to the topic he calls the federal government “the biggest slum landlord in Canada. They are supposed to look after these properties. They don’t. When they’re forced into it they send in these cowboy contractors who don’t know anything about anything and they create chaos and havoc which costs thousands to fix up after they’ve gone.” Says Angela, “tell him about the oil in the basement.” Wesley’s eyes roll back in his head and he leans forward with this devilish look in his eyes. “Un Believable,” he says. Bottom line is a contractor came in to do some work, turned on the tap of a large domestic fuel tank next to their home, went away for the weekend and several hundred gallons of home heating oil flooded their basement and the property. “I’m guessing it cost, oh, I don’t know, maybe $60,000 to clean that whole thing up,” Wesley says. And this is only one of a litany of horror stories that this family -- and many of their neighbours -- have had to endure as tenants beholden to their landlords, the federal government.

Between the two of them they listed some of the problems they’d experienced. “They decided to institute an inspection policy, using ‘experts’. Hah! The sump pump was broken for three months. The roof leaked. There was an electrical issue. Then it was mould. They found mould which grew because we couldn’t use the sump pump. That’s part of the reason they’re evicting us, because they found mould.” There’s more. Much more. None of it pleasant. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it,” says Wesley, with finality.

Reprinted from the Durham Sun, August 14, 2005