Check It Out: When the most unlikely to succeed do the impossible

By Joan Janzen

People who are labelled the most unlikely to succeed can surprise you. Albert Einstein, the scientific genius, couldn’t speak until he was 4 years old. Later on, he was expelled from one school and refused admittance to another.

Meanwhile, I stumbled across a Canadian man’s story, who was transformed from a lawbreaker to a lawmaker. Serge LeClerk, the former MLA for Saskatoon Northwest, succumbed to cancer in April of 2011; however, I listened to him relay his story in a 2008 video.

His 14-year-old Cree mother ran away from home, was raped, and gave birth to Serge in an abandoned building somewhere in northern Quebec in 1949. “I came from a long line of alcoholics,” he said.

His mother made her way to the inner city of Toronto and worked sixteen hours a day to provide for him for the first years of his life, while they lived at a rooming house. His life of crime began at eight years of age when he skipped school with a group and went shoplifting. “I discovered I wasn’t built for speed,” he laughed. He went to court and was sent to St. John’s training school, where he was beaten and abused, causing him to repeatedly run away.

“I would not tolerate the abuse, and I reacted. My genetic makeup was to fight back,” he explained. By the age of 10, he was caught stealing a station wagon filled with cigarettes. Because of his aggressive behaviour, he was labelled as having irreparable brain damage and sent to a maximum security training school. By the age of 12, he was living on the streets, and by the time he was 15, he was the leader of the toughest street gang in the city.

He hijacked transport trailers, ran a break and enter crew, bought a garbage truck and used it to empty out stores. “I discovered you became somebody when you had money. At 15, I bought my first home for $67,000,” he said. “In the 1960s someone approached me and said we have a new product that can make you millions.”

By 1984, he was generating $140 million a year as the co-leader of Canada’s most powerful drug crime families, but he was also an addict. That was also the year he was arrested for operating a $40 million drug lab.

He spent six years in solitary confinement for assaulting guards. “Instead of getting life, I made a deal and went to a maximum-security penitentiary in Quebec. From his cell, he watched a free man come in twice a week, enduring a strip search, and smiling continually while speaking to convicts. Serge couldn’t figure him out.

When the man approached his cell, Serge smashed the door and called him all kinds of names, but the man continued to smile. “I said you must be brain dead, and he said you might be right,” Serge recalled. “I didn’t know what to say.” But his visitor had a quick response.

“I don’t believe God created any garbage,” the man said. “You’re not stupid. You created a sophisticated drug lab; it took a year and a half for the RCMP to bust you, so you’ve got to be intelligent. You can be anything you choose to be but you have chosen to be a drug dealer and screw up your life and everybody else’s around you. God bless you and have a great day.”

He remembered those words nine months later when he saw a 19-year-old convict commit suicide. Serge went to chapel and was given a Bible. “It said the truth will set me free. That’s what I wanted. It was hard. I had to change what I believed, what I felt, but I had the way to do it - his teaching. And I had people to help me along the way,” he said.

Serge was released in 1988 to a prison ministry, which found an adoptive family for him, with whom he lived for three and a half years while attending university. “I learned how to live like a human being, and of all things, I became a main speaker for Crime Stoppers, working with the police,” he said. “I didn’t know it would happen, but working with Crime Stoppers got me a national pardon in 2000.”

He had applied for the pardon, and Crime Stoppers petitioned the government in a letter-writing campaign from police chiefs and RCMP. “They all said, if anybody aught to have reference to him, it should be us who spent most of our career putting him behind bars. We know he is for real and he deserves a pardon,” Serge explained. In 2002, he became the director of Teen Challenge, located near Saskatoon, a faith-based program to help youth struggling with addiction.

“Little did I know that pardon would open up the doors for me to run for MLA in Saskatchewan and become the first man with my criminal record to become an elected MLA and represent Saskatoon northwest as their choice as an elected representative. And to be appointed by the Premier to look into the correctional system, gangs and drugs and find a solution. Because apparently he said I have a lot of experience in that area.” Serge laughed.

He was elected in 2007 to represent the riding in Saskatoon, and resigned from the Saskatchewan Party caucus in April, and as a member of the legislative assembly in August, 2010. In April of 2011 he succumbed to his battle with cancer and passed away.

After his passing, former Premier Brad Wall said, “Serge overcame a very troubled past and went on to touch the lives of thousands of young people with his powerful message about the dangers of drug use.”

Those who are dubbed the most unlikely to succeed often manage to do the impossible. Like the smiling man said, “You can be anything you choose to be.”