John Ibbitson tells the story of a man whose life was interrupted by official injustice, and why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now vowing to issue him a posthumous pardon. This article was published more than 9 years ago.
Some information may no longer be current. Everett Klippert in the late s. O utwardly, at least, his years in prison left remarkably few scars. When Everett George Klippert was finally released in after spending a decade behind bars simply because he was gay, he moved to Edmonton and found a job as a truck driver.
A decade and a half later, as his years as a senior citizen neared, he got married. In , she asked him to stand beside her at her wedding. His nephew Donald Klippert, who lives in Calgary, remembers a "gentle, jovial, always happy, outgoing" man who refused to dwell on his persecution by a vindictive justice system. In later years, when gay activists tracked Mr.
Klippert down and asked him to tell his story and to march in Pride parades, he refused. He was no crusader. He was also no saint. He hooked up with teenagers, both when he was a teenager himself and when he was older. He would offer a couple of bucks for the hand jobs that were, typically, all that were offered or on offer. But two psychiatrists who examined him found no evidence that he could be violent or that he was any kind of pedophile. They described him as "courteous," "intelligent," "unusually co-operative," "sensitive," even "docile.
Nothing that Everett Klippert did remotely warranted becoming the only person in Canadian history to be labelled a dangerous sexual offender simply for being gay β effectively a life sentence, which the Supreme Court upheld in one of the most disturbing rulings in its history.
