The Current - Scott Oake lost his son to drugs. He wants to help other families

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

The broadcaster Scott Oake lost his son Bruce to a drug overdose more than 10 years ago, and has worked tirelessly since to help other families avoid that same heartbreak. He talks to Matt Galloway about opening a recovery centre named after Bruce, and his new book For the Love of a Son.

Uncover from CBC podcasts explores a different high stakes true crime and justice story each season. From the NXIVM sex cult to the satanic panic of the 1980s or the investigation into a serial killer targeting gay men in the village. Find Uncover wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Bruce, you are our guiding light in this beautiful project. You got us this far and I know you're going to take us the rest of the way. In the words of Robert Munch, who wrote Bruce's favorite book,

love you forever, Bruce. Happy birthday. You may recognize that voice, especially if you're a hockey fan. It's broadcaster Scott Oak. He was speaking in 2021 at the opening of a drug recovery facility in Winnipeg named after his son, Bruce,

on what would have been Bruce's 36th birthday. Bruce died of a drug overdose 10 years earlier. In the years since, Scott and his wife Anne, along with their younger son Darcy, worked tirelessly to open a facility that could help others struggling with addiction. Scott's new book, For the Love of a Son, is a chronicle of Bruce's life and how the family carried on after his death. And Scott Oak joins me now from our Winnipeg studio. Scott, good morning. Good morning, Matt. A pleasure to be with you.

Really glad to have you here. What's it like to think back on that day when you opened the doors of the Bruce Oak Recovery Center? Well, so much has happened since then that it seems like a long time ago. It's nice to look back on it because the Recovery Center, when it opened, offered a lot of hope to a lot of men, and it's worked in just the way we hoped it would.

In fact, better than we hoped it would. Tell me a bit about Bruce and what kind of kid he was. Bruce was a precocious child. Like any parents would look at their child as a tot, you'd think, man, they could be anything. The world is their oyster. And that's how we viewed Bruce. He was a beautiful boy.

He didn't begin speaking probably until the age of two and a half, and then right away it was in full sentences, and he never shut up afterwards, I guess, for the rest of his life. I had a guess around the age of eight or nine he was diagnosed with ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which made him ripe for taking chances. And there weren't many he didn't take. When did drugs enter the picture? Well, we were never sure.

We always worried about it. We didn't really know much about the signs of drugs, drug addiction. But his path into addiction, I would say, was the same one followed by many an addict, which was weed in high school, which didn't separate him from a lot of his friends. And then that propensity for taking chances. So why not try ecstasy at a weekend party? And after that crystal meth, and from there it wasn't a giant leap into the opioids and the drug that would eventually claim his life, heroin.

And caught him buying weed outside of a store, right? Yes, yes. Well, there were a number of episodes like that, I guess, that didn't seem like they were huge worries at the time, just kids' behavior. But yeah. What was going through your mind in those instances? Because as you say, some of that's kid stuff. Kids are going to do things, they're going to experiment and they're going to play around and

what have you, but what were you trying to figure out in that moment? Um, would, I guess essentially was there a bigger problem? And we always said to Bruce that, look, if there is a problem, we'll be here to help you. But we weren't sure there was until that day when we got a call from Darcy that Bruce had been assaulted.

I was in Calgary getting ready to do a hockey game, Flames, and somebody. I can't remember who the other team was. It was a Saturday. It was a Saturday, yeah. And Darcy said Bruce is in trouble. He got beat up by a gang member. And, uh, of course my mind switched into overdrive right away as to what to do to

help them the rest of that afternoon, leading up to the game was spent trying to get ahold of, uh, of anyone I could, who could help us. I remember being in the bowels of the Saddle Dome and cell phone reception there is not very good because it's a concrete bunker basically. And I was out on one of the benches, I guess, the visiting bench trying to get a hold of a lawyer in Winnipeg to see if he could help.

And I got through the game somehow. And then I had to get on a red eye to go to Nova Scotia. We were going there to celebrate my mother's 75th birthday, and I was meeting my wife there. She was already in Nova Scotia at the time. When I got to Nova Scotia, I kept it from Ann for a while because I didn't want to spoil the occasion. But then I ended up telling her we got Bruce out of this house he was living in into a hotel with Darcy where they could be safe until we got home.

I got a hold of a family friend who was the lawyer for the Winnipeg Police Association. He put me in touch with the head of the gang unit. He called me back right away saying, where's your son? We want to go get him and put him into protective custody. This is in part because I mean it's not just that he got beat up, there was the allegation that he owed somebody or some organization $25,000 or something. The beating was that the gang member was using the house that Bruce lived in,

was renting with a friend of his, to stash his goods. And he alleged or said that Bruce broke into kilo of cocaine and used it for his personal use. That may well have been true. I don't know. We never did find out the truth about that. As a father, how do you, how do you wrap your head around this? Um, very difficult.

I mean, just to go back to what I said earlier, you look at your beautiful baby boy and think that, you know, he could be anything. And no parent dreams of their kid growing up to be a drug addict or to be in a treatment center. No kid himself dreams of growing up to be an addict. But it happened and we had to come to terms with it. And how I look back on it is we did everything we possibly could to help him. We acted in the moment and did our absolute best.

Can I ask you about something that you write about regularly um, regularly in the book, it comes up on a number of, of instances, and this is about the work that you were doing as a broadcaster and what that, what that meant for you in terms of being away, you're on the road a lot. Um, you write about how you, you were traveling more than, than you liked. Um, you felt like you had no choice, but to keep

going or sometimes where things would be happening and you're like, what am I doing? I'm getting on a plane to go here. I'm going there. Um, what are the questions that you ask yourself about, about that time and, and your job? Well, now I ask myself a lot of questions about that. Uh, the book starts as you've read it.

So, you know, it starts with me being at the Canada summer games and St. John New Brunswick and you know getting on a flight home to be there in time because Anne went into labor to be there in time for the birth and I made it but then I got on a red-eye and went right back to the Canada Summer Games and I look back on that now according to today's standards I should be and I am almost ashamed but that's the way it was back then. You know, you did whatever it took to get the job done and to make sure that you were

on a path to success. But overall, are there regrets? Yeah, I often wonder if I didn't have that job and if I wasn't so devoted to it, essentially leaving Anne for the better part of our marriage as a single parent, would it have been different? I struggle with that, but there's nothing I can do about it now. Trevor Burrus Those are what if questions, right? David Morgan Absolutely.

And the book is a very difficult read for me. Even now, I just got the copies that an author gets, the 40 or 50 that you get. If I pick up one of the books and rifle through it, I get to a part sometimes where I gotta put it down, I can't read it. It is difficult to relive what Bruce went through, especially in his last four or five years of his life. You talk, and you said this already, that you did as a family everything

you possibly could for Bruce. You get him into a private recovery facility in Toronto. He spent six weeks there. He graduated from that program. When he came out of that, how optimistic did you feel that, that the behavior, the, the addiction that you had seen that that had been, um, treated, if I can put it that way, that that had been addressed and that there was a different path ahead for him. Well, as I say in the book, when we took him first to the detox unit of the Health Sciences Center,

there was a lovely doctor there, Lindy Lee. She was a medical, I think a family doctor, but she devoted a lot of her time to addiction. And she was running the detox unit in the initial meeting. She pulled us aside and said, prepare yourself for failure. He's got multiple addictions. There was a lot of stuff at play. And she said, this doesn't often work the first time. But we rejected that out of hand.

I was going to say, when you heard her say, prepare yourself for failure, what went through your mind? We rejected it right away. That's not going to happen to us. We're doing everything right. We've seen a problem. We're throwing money at it. We're sending him to a treatment center from detox. And so this will work and we'll all go back to our happy little lives right after. It was

a very naive view as we look back on it now because there was failure, multiple failures. He moved to Halifax? We moved him to Halifax from Winnipeg when he graduated from the treatment center just outside of Toronto, because there was nothing good that was going to happen if he came back to Winnipeg. We thought Halifax would be a good place for him because it was two hours from where my parents lived, so he would have support and he'd have a fresh start. But as it turned out, Halifax, because it was a port city, made it easier to access opioids than it would have been

in the interior of Canada at the time. And it wasn't long after he got to Halifax that he was a full-fledged IV heroin user. Did you ever feel, not like a parent is going to give up on their child, but did you ever feel like we have done everything we possibly can? I don't know what else we can do. There's a sense of frustration, but you can

feel in the book that you're trying to make your way through this, as I said, in real time. Did you ever feel that sense of frustration? Absolutely. On many occasions. And I recall vividly the day that he failed a test at the Recovery Centre he was at in Calgary and he had to leave. And I remember saying to Ann, this is not going to end until he's dead. What a horrid thing to say. But that was a measure of my frustration.

And she said, oh, don't say that. We didn't argue over it. It's just something that came out. But I think that day often because he died. That's just a terrible thing to even think about. But I was so frustrated at the time that those words came out. There's a realization in that that you, and you write about this in the book, that you couldn't force him to be sober.

Look, it's the old adage, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. And, you know, addiction and recovery, um, is only possible really when the person suffering from substance abuse or addiction wants it. It is a recipe to make the loved ones of an addict crazy if they want it and behave like it more than the addict themselves.

I have come to realize that the men of the Bruce Oak recovery center, they don't want to be there. It's not going to work. And it happens. The success rate of the Bruce Oak recovery center is about 57%. That success rate is measured on sobriety one year after entering the program. But the fact is that a lot of men come there, I shouldn't say a lot, but some men come there and they want recovery when they first get there and a couple of days in they think it's

not for them or whatever happens and they leave. May try again later, but they don't want to be there, then recovery is not going to work. And as I say in the acknowledgments of the book, if I had known back then what I know now, it may have changed my approach and Ann's approach to how we dealt with Bruce. I don't know if it would have changed the outcome, but it would have made us feel better, most likely. You, and you've again hinted at this,

that Bruce getting kicked out of that facility in Calgary was, as you say, the beginning of the end. And this is really hard to talk about. You write about it and it breaks your heart as you read it. What happened after that, if you don't mind me asking? Well, he was there twice. The first time he finally got to stage two. At that time, the program at that, it was Simon House,

and their program was a three-phase program. First phase, you focused on your recovery, stayed in the facility and then you graduated to the second phase where you had more freedom and you had to get a job. And he, I think, was the longest participant at Simon House ever to take, oh, I think eight months or nine months to get into phase two. It's what a hard case he was. And he got into phase two and he got a job at a local mall, Footlarker, I think it was. And the freedom was too much for him and he got caught smoking dope and he had to leave, failed a drug test, had to leave.

At the time, Simon House's rules were very punitive and we're not complaining about that and we never did because we knew what the rules were going in and so did he. There wasn't a lot back on the property for a year. Year later he went back and we had great hope because we thought this is the time he's finally going to get it right. But he was only in there for four weeks, failed a test, had to leave and he was so discouraged, so disheartened, which is one of the things that happens in addiction. You lose hope, he lost hope and four days later he was dead. It was heartbreaking, obviously.

You know, as Darcy says, it's like a ten-pound brick in your pocket all day long and some days it's lighter than others. Uh, the harsh reality is that rock bottom for some addicts is death and that was his. That you feel like the brick is still in your pocket. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's not a day goes by that, uh, I

don't think about Bruce. Um, and certainly, um, I see him every day. Well, every day I get to the recovery center because his urn is right at the, as you enter the building. We would give everything that we have to have another day with him, but that's a real conundrum because if he was still here, the Bruce Oak Recovery Centre would not exist and the hundreds of lives that have been saved there wouldn't have been saved. So it's a, as I say, it's a conundrum, but we carry on.

Your colleagues at Hockey Night in Canada announced Bruce's death on air. This is how it sounded. Welcome. Just before we combine our voices to tell the story of a big night in the NHL and hockey night in Canada, a word about our dear friend Scott Oakes' son, Bruce. Bruce died this week at the tender age of 25. Scott's home now with Anne, his wife, and their son, Darcy. Bruce had so many dear friends at Simon House, a facility you can support, in honour of Bruce,

at King of the Dot Entertainment, where the finest hip-hop rappers in the land square off. He worked and starred there. In sports, he was a Canada Games boxer. Back in 1996, Scott Oak could not even attend the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony in his honour because he was on assignment for the CBC. And young Bruce, as he always did, stepped up. Even though I'm only ten years old i understand the meaning of this on that anyone from our family should be put into the hall of fame just for talking makes perfect sense

they may forget what you said but never how you made him feel bruce tonight's telecast is dedicated to bruce oak that's really quite something uh Yeah, yeah, I recall I knew the guys were gonna do something and I recall we were home obviously, Anne and I, Darcy, had some close friends around us and that came on and I just dissolved into, as did Anne, into a bucket of tears because that goes back to what I said earlier.

You look at your kid, your beautiful boy, daughter, whoever it may be, and think they could be anything. And if you see Bruce back then, you think, man, this kid's got it. He can own a room at the age of 10. And he'll be something. It's hard to look at, it's hard to listen to even now as you can tell by my voice having heard it just a second ago but you know it just just makes me think of what a tragedy it turned out to be, but then again, um, that tragedy turned into something positive

and hope for a lot of other men. Can I ask you, I want to talk about the center, but can I ask you about you as a public figure speaking openly about this? Um, there's a stigma that still surrounds, as you well know, addiction and drug use. And that can be felt by any member of society. But when you are somebody that people see on television

every week, they know you. And I just wonder whether you felt that at all and how comfortable you were in being open about it. You are now and you've written this book that is, that's heartbreaking and powerful. But how, how, what the process was for you to get to that place if you weren't comfortable initially? We never really went through a great degree of discomfort in talking about it. Even when Bruce was on his journey before he died, you know, people might

ask us, how's Bruce doing? And Anne's response, and mine, was that Bruce is struggling with addiction, but we're doing everything we can to help him. So we were open about it back then. struggling with addiction but we're doing everything we can to help them. So we were open about it back then. So we didn't really struggle with, you know, trying to, as Anne used to say, and this is a common expression I think, you're only as sick as your secrets. And we never kept it secret. So I guess in a way that made it easier for us to deal with it and me in a public form to deal with it. People see me or hear me talking about it. I hope it proves to them that addiction knows no boundaries. It knows no socioeconomic boundaries. It can come for anyone at any time. And it did Bruce. So when

he died and we were on the plane on the way to get him in Calgary, we wrote his obituary and we were, as I say, resolute in our belief that there was no shame in what it claimed his life and we weren't going to hide behind it. So, the first line of his obituary reads, tragically, Bruce Oak lost his battle with addiction at the tender age of 25. And that one line, as it turned out, was the genesis of the grandios project that has become the Bruce Oak Recovery Centre and will become the Anne Oak Family Recovery Centre. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to

tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Scott, what was it that you wanted to do with the Bruce Oak Recovery Center? What we wanted to do from the start, and this is

happening, was to ensure that families didn't have to go through what we did. That if they had a loved one struggling with addiction, that they wouldn't have to go out of the province to get treatment. That this would be something of a made in Manitoba solution. I hesitate to use the word solution. That's reaching a bit, I think, in the world of substance abuse and addiction, but that

they could get assistance in their own province. Because Bruce's best year of his addicted life was that first stint at Simon house, um, where he stayed for 11 months and it worked because one of the reasons it worked was because it was long term treatment at no cost. And so our goal became to bring that, that wonderful concept of long-term treatment at

no cost to, to Winnipeg and to Manitoba. And, uh, you know, after many years, we were successful. Not everybody was on side with this and you write about the backlash from the community where this was proposed. Do you understand that? Do you understand why people, or how do you understand why people would be upset by this?

I understand it perfectly. You do? Yes. And, and no resentment, uh, towards the residents who, um, you know, were concerned because you have to expect pushback if you're trying to get a recovery center built in the middle of a residential neighborhood. And the reason you get that pushback or nimbiasm as it's called is because people most often

don't understand the basic difference between the enormous difference between active addiction and recovery. Active addiction is ugly. It revolves mostly around drug-seeking behavior, but recovery, on the other hand, is beautiful because the people seeking it are focused on one thing, and that's their sobriety. And so in the midst of all that pushback, we recognized that our responsibility was to conduct a dignified educational campaign, which we did four or five public information sessions, at which we took great care to explain to the residents of

the area, many of whom were upset, a lot of rhetoric, a lot of nasty things said. But we took great care to explain to them that they would have nothing to fear from the men of the Bruce Oak Recovery Center and that they would be good neighbors. And that's exactly how it's turned out. You raised the money for this. There's a lot of money to get something like this off the ground. You get this center built. It opens in 2021. And then you go through this other unimaginable loss and being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and ultimately she dies. Yes. How do you, I don't understand, you've gone

through so much and I just wonder how you, how you would cope with that on top of the loss of your son and everything that you were trying to do in his memory. I suppose overall it's a bigger picture of what happened when Bruce died. You know, I took the weekend off, the next weekend, but I went back to work the next weekend because I thought that's what I should do.

You keep going, one foot in front of the other and I guess you know Anne's passing that's the philosophy the crude philosophy that I've applied and so you just keep going to do the best you can. You know when you lose a child and then you lose your your spouse of 41 years it could get the better of you I'm not saying it hasn't. Why didn't it get the better of you? I always thought that and I still think that Anne would want me to carry on. She wouldn't want me wallowing in my grief. I still have Darcy and Leslie, his beautiful wife and

and two grandchildren now so you know I want to be present for them and I want them to to be involved in this project and to be I hope someday at the forefront of the fight against addiction. You've been recognized with the Order of Canada. Congratulations. Yeah well that was kind of embarrassing. Why would it be embarrassing?

This is partially for the work that you've done as a broadcaster, but also your work in helping marginalized populations. Why would that be embarrassing? Well, first of all, with respect to my career, I'm proud of it, but let's not kid anybody, there's at least tenor. I could name any number of broadcasters have had more prolific careers than mine and don't have the Order of Canada. So this award, the Order of Canada has a whole lot more to do, if not everything to do with

our family's commitment to the fight against addiction, treatment and recovery as the way out of it. So I accept the Order of Canada on behalf of everyone who worked hard to get the Bruce Oak Recovery Centre built and to keep it running as the world-class facility it is and everyone who's working hard to get the Anilk Family Recovery Centre built. The Order of Canada is for all of them, right down to the participants, the men who go to the Bruce Oak Recovery Centre and do the work to get their lives back. Because if they didn't do that, there'd be no success at Bruce Oak. There'd be only complaints and there'd be no order of anything for anybody.

That's very humble, but if I might, I would say that it also really rides on the dedication that you have had in the face of enormous tragedy to get this work done. Well, as I say in the book, I'm pretty sure I say in the book, that Anne and I were good at two things, having lunch and asking for money. The heavy work to get the Bruce Oak Recovery Center up and running and to keep it running in the beautiful way that it is, it's been done by a lot of other people who know what they're doing. You know, we were very fortunate to hook up with our executive director, Marnie, who knew how to navigate the halls of the legislature and city hall. Without her, the place would never have got built.

Without our executive director, Greg Kylo, and his staff, Kyle Gertz and Scott Robson, and our counselors there, the Bruce Oak Recovery Center would not have established itself as a world-class facility. Let me just ask you two final things before I let you go. One is, as you would well know, there is a very heated debate in this country right now around the toxic drugs crisis and how to deal with it. There are politicians who want to focus more on recovery that are opposed to that idea of safe or supervised supply. Some people say that there should be involuntary treatment for people who are sick enough that they can't find treatment themselves and they can't understand that they need help themselves. Having had a lesson in this that

you never wanted but now have gone through. Where do you sit on this? What do you believe needs to happen in a meaningful way to address this crisis? At the Bruce Oak Recovery Center, Bruce Owen and Oak Foundation, our belief is that treatment and recovery is the way out of this crisis, this opioid crisis that's got our city, our province, our country in its hard, cold grip. We're losing, at last count, I think 20 people a day. So treatment and recovery is the way addicts get their lives back and once again become functioning members of society.

That's our focus. But we believe in the full continuum of care. And if that is to include safe injection sites, then we believe in those too, as long as they're licensed, regulated, and they present an opportunity for those who suffer from substance abuse or addiction to get into recovery, to reclaim their lives. But that might help them get to care.

Yes, of course. So, you know, we're on side, but our focus is treatment and recovery. How are you doing now? This is a lot to talk about, it's a we're on side, but our focus is, is treatment and recovery. How are you doing now? This is a lot to talk about, it's a lot to write about, but then to speak about and to put yourself out there. How are you doing?

I loathe these interviews because I'm usually on the other side. And mind you, I'm not asking difficult questions like you are, Matt, because I work in the toy box in the world of sports. But they're difficult for me because I never want to misspeak myself. And I'll do this now when I leave this interview. I will ponder it and think I shouldn't have said that.

I should have said this better, whatever. That's part of it. But the hardest part is reliving the journey. And when you played, for example, Bruce's speech, that takes all of my power not to break down. So I do these interviews because I want to bring attention to the problem and continue to hope that we can make a difference. You will have made a difference in writing this book and in speaking about it. You've been through a lot, but it's really important

to hear how you are on the other side and the impact that you're gonna have through these centers. Scott, thank you very much for doing this. Thank you, Matt. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today. And if nothing else, Matt, buy the book out of sympathy, would you? And it's a great read as well and occasionally

funny. There's some pretty great stories in there. Scott, thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. Scott Oakes Scott Oakes' new book is called For the Love of a Son, a Memoir of Addiction, Loss and Hope, and it is in bookstores today.