The treatment centre that grief built, part 1
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I'm Dr. Brian Goldman. This is White Coat Blackheart. If you're a hockey fan like me, you know Scott Oak.

the host of After Hours on Hockey Night in Canada. As we like to say, the greats come to After Hours. It's even better when the guest is one of the all-time greats, and that would be the flower, Marc-Andre Fleury. There's another side to Scott. In January, his new book, For the Love of a Son, was published. It's about Scott's son, Bruce, who died of an overdose in the bathroom of a bar in Calgary back in 2011. He was just 25. We planned on having Scott in the studio for the usual book interview.

Then I read the book's prologue, a celebration for three men who are among the first to go through a recovery program in Winnipeg and remain drug-free for a full year. The name of the place is the Bruce Oak Recovery Center. It was built by Scott and his late wife, Anne, in memory of their son. To get that side of the story, I knew I had to pay a visit. Hello. Good, how are you?

I'm a bit starstruck. Besides NHL hockey, Scott has covered 10 Olympic Games, won a Gemini Award and an Order of Canada. It goes right from winter into summer, doesn't it? We have two seasons, winter and construction. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. I'm Scott Oak. I guess I am the president of the board of directors of the Bruce and Ann Oak Memorial Foundation, which is the group charged with the responsibility of keeping this place running. Well, first of all, getting it open and then keeping it running. Yeah.

Scott takes me inside the Bruce Oak Recovery Centre, a modern two-storey grey and white building in Crestview, a quiet neighbourhood near Sturgeon Creek in the northwest part of Winnipeg. So we're in the entryway and the first thing you see when you come in is Bruce's urn. So this is his final resting place.

And it's appropriate for two reasons. Because this is his legacy. And the second reason is there's a lesson in this for all the guys who see him every day. Which is, do the work here or that could be you. You notice it every time you walk in? Every time I come in I rub it, just to say hello to him. It's just difficult for us to put him here, but it seemed to make perfect sense. Near the urn is a photo of Bruce. Buzz cut, piercing eyes, and a million watt smile.

Scott comes here often to work out in the weight room, to meet the new guys, and to be close to Bruce. Some days I feel worse than others, and some days it feels heavier than others. But more often than not, when I see him here, I feel good because we know where he is, and he's the reason this place is even existing. I believe he's watching over us. I believe he got us this far. And he'll, as I said, the day this place opened, he'll take us the rest of the way.

I take the opportunity as often as I can to have lunch with participants here, meet them, get to know them, hear their stories if they want to tell them. And the one thing I always tell them consistently is, you know, think about your parents and your family. The time that you were here for four months, 16 weeks, will be...

The most comfortable and enjoyable and relaxing time that they have had since you started this journey. They know you're safe. They have hope. You have hope. And perhaps the most important reason of all is the phone is not going to ring at 10 or 11 o'clock that night with another disaster that you're expected to sort out for them.

This goes a long way in affecting other people. So think about the comfort that your parents, that your family, your loved ones have for the time that you're here. The kind of comfort Scott and his late wife Anne seldom enjoyed as Bruce moved from weed to cocaine, then crystal meth, and finally IV heroin and fentanyl.

on a wall just outside the family room. Scott shows me framed original prints of the Robert Munch book pretty much every parent reads to their kids. Love you forever. And you can see how the story starts up there. She has the child, and he's a holy terror, and all the way around here to when she's dying, and he's caring for her, and he has his own child. So I have stood here forever,

with guys who might have been on the street for two years. And to hear them say, that was my favorite book, my mother rubbing that book when I was a kid, just underlines the fact that everybody is somebody's child. And no one dreams of growing up to be in a recovery center. But if it happens, this is a good place to be. There's a lot of natural light. When we were getting the place built, we actually partnered up with

Scott knows all about that.

Bruce was in and out of treatment centers without long-term success. Which is why Scott and his wife Anne were determined to set up a recovery center based on the best scientific evidence. It's open to men with drug and alcohol addiction who are fully committed to living a sober life. The program includes 16 weeks of residential treatment followed by long-term outpatient support. It uses the 12-step model that recognizes addiction as a chronic disease.

Its therapeutic approach includes CBT, cognitive behavior therapy, mindfulness, traditional practices and land-based teachings, relapse prevention, and peer support. The staff help participants set individual goals for recovery, anything from getting employment to reconciling with estranged family members. The program costs money, but no one is turned away if they can't pay. By intention, many of the counselors on staff have lived experience with addiction.

It's a feature Scott wishes Bruce had more of when he sought treatment. I know, Scott, you've said you're not an expert, but you certainly know the difference between people who bring lived experience to the role and people who don't, don't you? Well, absolutely, because of Bruce's history. First place he went to was a private treatment centre just outside of Toronto. A lot of people with masters of whatever. No disrespect to them, but Bruce could get over on them very quickly.

When he went to Simon House just out in Calgary, in the Bowness region of Calgary, a place was staffed by those in recovery. And the first thing they said to him was, we got your bullshit. And he had the best year of his addicted life there. Stayed for 11 months, in fact. And we've always believed that if he had stayed longer, he'd probably still be alive.

So it was key for us to have a program where people who had, you know, walked the walk were employed. The results so far have been impressive. One year post-treatment, three out of every four participants are working compared to just one in five pre-treatment. And nearly all of them have housing compared to just four in ten prior to treatment.

It all sounds like putting the recovery centre here on the site of the former Vimy Arena would be a no-brainer. Scott says it wasn't. Did you ever spend time in the Vimy Arena? No, I knew of it, but I know a lot of people who played their hockey there. So we recognize the emotional attachment that people in the area had to that building, but the fact is it was boarded up and never going to reopen, which is one of the reasons we pursued the land here.

Ironically, it was a place around which people used. Correct. Yeah. And we recognized when we had our public information sessions that the most rational point was that they were losing a recreation facility.

And we were aware of that, and so we got the architects to change the plans to the Bruce Oak Recovery Centre to allow for a public entrance to the gymnasium with public change rooms so that the residents could come in and use the gym whenever it's appropriate. And now we see the residents' local area, residents coming in to play pickleball almost every morning of the week. The gym is in use a lot, and we're happy it is because that's been a good way to connect with the community.

Scott says connecting with the community was a long process that started back in 2016 when he and Anne began raising money for the centre.

The first donations came in small bills of cash. You don't have to shake a family tree too hard to get an addict or an alcoholic to fall out. We never met with a major donor who didn't have a story about someone they knew or a relative or even an immediate family member who wasn't struggling with it. I think that's the reason that the community responded so quickly and so much from the heart.

You know, when someone died, and this still happens, the family might make the Bruce and Anno Foundation the recipient of donations in their memory. It happens a lot. And I remember during...

the early years of the project and spent some time adding up all those grassroots or organic donations and at that point they came to about $80,000 I think. You got to get a lot of 20s and 50s and 100s to get it up to that. All in, it costs $15 million to build this place. It has a lot of bells and whistles like that modern gymnasium Scott talked about that the local community uses frequently.

From a second floor gallery, I see a bunch of young people gathering to play pickleball. Directly in front of me and hanging from the steel girders are 130 Winnipeg Jets hockey sweaters. Each bears the name of someone who has gone through the program and the number one. The idea behind the jet sweaters is they are in celebration of one year of sobriety, which is a landmark date for anybody in recovery.

If you get a year, that is huge. And the plan is that once you get five years, the one comes down, you get to keep that, and one with five goes up. And we're getting close to five now. We had, at our last birthday night last week, two participants got four years. And Bruce Oak has been open for just about four years, so that makes perfect sense. Those sweaters are treasured in a way that you can't believe. And this is not hyperbole. This is the truth. A lot of those sweaters are the difference between life and death.

People will say, well, what's going on with those? And when you tell them the story, it puts everything into perspective. And here's some more perspective. So far, more than 400 men and counting have completed the program. Each cohort of guys who get their one-year sweaters is welcomed into the greater circle of alumni. Community is one of the pillars of recovery here. Scott takes me to the family room to sit down on comfy furniture chosen by his wife, Anne, who lived just long enough to see the centre open.

She died of autoimmune liver disease in 2021. There's Anne's imprint on the center, and there's her imprint on Scott's book, For the Love of a Son. The telling of Bruce's story holds nothing back, which begs the question of why he finally sat down to tell it.

The genesis of the book was that I was approached by a book agent years back asking if I'd be interested in writing a book about my career. And my answer to that was, not a chance. I'll write a book about my career when everybody I know in the business is dead. So call me back in 2058 or whatever. But seriously, what I said to him was, there are many people in this business who've had more prolific careers than me who have not written a book. And so I would not subject anyone to

But the conversation then segued into the Recovery Center and Bruce's story, and I did allow that I would have an appetite to tell that story. Did you have to reach a point where you could tell that story without kind of choking up page after page after page? It was a difficult book to write. I've often been asked if it was cathartic, and of course that means an emotional release or whatever, and it was anything but.

Because to relive Bruce's journey through the written word, especially the last four or five years of his life, was very difficult. In this book, his life and his struggle with addiction is laid out in chronological order. And it was not easy to write, and it is not easy for me to read. It's an easy book to read because it's well written. It's an impossible book to read because you know where it's heading.

There were moments reading the book when I thought I could hear Anne's voice. Am I right? Yes, very much so. The thing about Bruce's journey is that Anne and I were always on the same wavelength. We never argued over what we should do to help Bruce or what action we should take if he needed to suffer some consequences. We were always in accord.

That's not the case with many families. Addiction can tear a family apart. Pretty soon it becomes, well, you did this, and if you hadn't done that, this wouldn't have happened. And why did you give them that $500 or whatever? But sure, we crossed over to enabling a lot of times, but we did it together. And when it came to trying to help them, we were always together.

And so as a result, the story is every bit hers as much as mine. And her voice, I agree with you, is in the book. You mentioned that you crossed into enabling. Who doesn't? You know, trial and error. You said something, you wrote something in the book that was startling to me when I read it.

that you don't regret what you did because if it gave you a few more years with Bruce, then it was worth it. Sure. When your kid is struggling, there are hundreds of people who will tell you what you should do. But it's a parent's instinct to want to know that their kid is safe more than anything else. And so that was our motivation, I guess, to pay his rent for a while when he was in Halifax and...

All the things that we did in the hope that he would one day get it right. It is not so easy to, as the expression goes, let go and let God. Not if you're the kind of parents that we were, that I am. We don't apologize for any of that. It was to help him get it right and for him to live. Bruce was this really smart, outgoing young man who also had ADHD.

Paint me a picture of what he was like in those early years. He was a very precocious child. I remember down to the last detail, because he slayed me with this. He was only three and a half or so, and we were in front of the house playing street hockey, and like any...

I was telling him, this is how you hold the stick. This is how you shoot. This is how you pass. And soon enough, he'd had it with my litany of instructions and he stopped cold and he looked up to me and he said, you know, dad, if you know so much about it, you should be playing it, not just talking about it.

Because at this point he had figured out that he could watch me nightly on TV talking about all manner of sports. So we incorrectly assumed that just because I could talk about it, I should be able to do it. I've never forgot that. And that kind of defined his wittiness, how quick he was for his entire life. Bruce could light up a room, but none of that matters when it comes to addiction. Addiction doesn't care who it is or what you're like. If it comes for you, get ready.

We'll be right back. Did you know that tuberculosis actually led to the invention of the cowboy hat? I didn't until I talked to John Green about his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis. It's a deep dive into the wild history of the disease.

Every week on my podcast, Bookends, we sit down with today's best authors for candid conversations about their writing, their inspirations, and their lives. You'll get to see the world through the eyes of your favorite writers. And hey, you might even learn something new about cowboy hats. Bookends with Matea Roach is available now wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to White Coat Blackheart. This week, the Bruce Oak Recovery Center in Winnipeg offers hope for men who use alcohol and drugs.

That hope springs from the achingly painful example of Bruce Oak, who died at the age of 25 from an overdose. I'm talking with Bruce's dad, Scott Oak, here inside the Recovery Center's family room. In this room, every newcomer hears the story of Bruce's life and death, including us. Scott urges everyone to get ready for addiction, in part because he and Anne weren't ready for that time, when it became crystal clear to them that Bruce's drug use had put his life in danger.

That time when Bruce's younger brother Darcy had gone to pick him up. It was bone-wracked, he looked terrible, and so off we went to the emergency room of the Health Sciences Centre here in Winnipeg. And I still remember cradling my 20-year-old son in my, it might have been 19 then, but in my arms trying to comfort him to tell him that we would do whatever it took to get him healthy again.

And all he wanted to do was run because he was coming down and he wanted to get his next fix.

You know that I'm an emergency physician. Yes, of course. So you know the signs. And you see this. I've been on, as I like to say, on both sides of the gurney. What were your impressions of the medical people who saw him that night? I want to know if there are lessons. Well, first of all, we had to endure the wait in the emergency room, which at that time was probably half of what it is now. But I think we got there around 8 o'clock and didn't see a doctor until 2 or 3 in the morning.

But, you know, in the triage system, he's just an addict and other people are going to take priority over him. So that, I think, accounted for some of the weight. I would like to see that change. If you're an addict and you want help, you don't really have the luxury of two weeks or even maybe eight hours. Who knows? I mean, you should be able to access help as soon as possible. So there was that element of it. And then when we did see the doctor, he took probably 10 minutes.

to recognize this as addiction or substance abuse and wrote a script for OxyContin to get Bruce through the three or four days before we could get him into the detox unit of the Health Sciences Center. Just a footnote here. In the years before Bruce's death in 2011, it was common for some doctors to prescribe a small dose of a long-acting opioid like OxyContin to ease withdrawal symptoms until patients could get a place in a drug detox facility.

These days, doctors prescribe the drug Suboxone or buprenorphine instead to help with symptoms like drug cravings and withdrawal. Things are better now. We have RAM clinics here, random access clinics here in Manitoba. But look, in general, the whole system when it comes to substance abuse or addiction is overloaded.

It's all too much. We have a waiting list here of 200 people. And the active list, the guys who phone every day, desperate to get in here, is usually 70 to 75 to 80 people.

So those are the guys who phone daily and you could phone them at two o'clock and they'd be here at three ready to check in. We are leaving a generation of addicts out there to die. There's such a stigma attached to addiction that people still believe, well, that was their choice. Until we can start seeing addiction as a disease, as a chronic brain disorder, then we're going to be caught in this mess where it's okay to lose 20 or 21 people a day. And it's not. We need to do better.

You describe in incredible detail the challenges opening this place that you and Anne faced because you and Anne faced it. And she lived to see the opening of Bruce Oak Recovery Center. What can you say about that?

We felt it was our responsibility to explain to people the difference between active addiction and recovery. And that's the genesis of misunderstanding when it comes to this nimbyism. You know, there was a lot of misinformation out there. Among it, you won't be safe in your home, so real estate value will just plummet. So we dealt with all that, but in the end, we were able to explain to people, look, active addiction is ugly, and our family knows it better than anybody because it revolves around drug-seeking behavior.

But recovery is beautiful because those seeking it are focused on one thing, and that's their sobriety. So we assure you the men of the Bruce Oak Recovery Centre will be good neighbours. And over the course of time, I think they all came to realise that. And even the most vociferous opponents have come to realise it. The Bruce Oak Recovery Centre has actually improved the neighbourhood because what stood here before was a boarded-up arena that was dark at night. It's no longer the case in the Crestview area of St. James. This is actually...

What do you think Bruce would think of this place?

It is the wrong order for parents to have to bury a child. But, as I say, use that word conundrum, is that if Bruce didn't die, this place wouldn't exist. I struggle with that, sure, from time to time, in particular at graduation nights and birthday nights, because I see the guys up there celebrating their recovery, and I so wish that was Bruce. Yeah, it's an ongoing thought for sure. There is no solution to it. You just deal with it and carry on.

Do you have any thoughts now, years later, insights as to why he didn't get into long-term recovery? Have you thought about that? Yeah, I have a lot. And I talked to the participants here at Brousseau. I don't ever get into lectures about recovery because that's way outside my wheelhouse. But I can tell them a couple of things. And one is that you've got to do this for yourself.

And I can say that with some authority because of Bruce's situation. It would have been different for him, I believe, if during his four stints in treatment centers and eight or nine in detox, if he had ever come to the realization that he had to do it for himself. But he was constantly doing it more for us than for him because he loved us and he wanted to make us happy. I often...

say to the guys, Bruce never did it for himself. He was doing it for us more than himself. And he's out there now. You can say hello to him every day. This place has been so successful that you've moved on to the next project. Tell me about that. The reason this place is gender specific is because we've always believed it's not a good idea to mix men and women together in long-term recovery when they're at their most vulnerable. Because it doesn't matter what you do.

tasers, barbed wire, whatever. They're going to find each other. And pretty soon the conversation becomes, we don't need this anymore. Let's just leave. We can do it together. Those relationships are almost always tragic, if not fatal. And so our belief is that women should have their own facility. So we're pleased to say that we're honouring that commitment through the Anoak Family Recovery Centre. We have a choice piece of property in the south end of Winnipeg, thanks to the provincial government and WAB Canoes, Premier Canoes support.

And the community has responded from the heart just the way it did for Bruce Oak. And that place will be open as soon as is humanly possible. The other thing about the Anilk Family Recovery Centre that's going to make it unique is a lot of women are reluctant to go into recovery because they're afraid they're going to lose their kids. The Anilk Family Recovery Centre will ensure that women can have their children with them as they get healthy again. So families will be kept together. It must be exhausting. Yeah.

telling these stories over and over again. What keeps you going? Bruce probably said it best when I was inducted into the media wing of the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame. I was in Europe covering a ski race for the CBC the night of the dinner, and so Bruce spoke on my behalf and got a huge reaction when he said that anyone in our family should go into a Hall of Fame just for talking. Makes perfect sense. laughter

So there's that. Look, I'm making light of it, Brian. I appreciate the question. I guess the answer is that it's Bruce's legacy. It will be Anne's legacy. So that part of it is good for my soul. But the bigger issue is that we just need to do better to ensure that we don't lose a generation of addicts as we are now.

Scott Oak, you've been very generous with your time and I want to thank you for speaking with me and sharing a difficult story, but also sharing.

the love that's gone into the Bruce Oak Recovery Centre and I wish it many years of success helping many men get into recovery and the Anne Oak Family Recovery Centre is also a success in the future. Well it will be and Bruce Oak is going to be around for forever. I've got two grandchildren now and one of them I hope one day will be at the head of the organization.

Funny thing, when my granddaughter was born, she just turned three, so it was three years ago, and I was on hockey night, and I think David Amber was the host that night, and he threw to me, and he said, special occasion in the Oak family, and they showed a picture of Darcy and Leslie in August. I said, I've just done the math, and by the time August graduates from high school, I'll be 85 or 86, so we know who'll be changing whose diapers then. laughter

Anyway, that's got nothing to do with the Bruce Oker and Oak Recovery Centers, except that I hope that August and her brother Harlan will one day be around to be deeply involved in the organization. Reminds me of those Love You Forever beautiful illustrations. Yeah. Anyway, thank you. Okay. All right. Bye. Scott Oker says we need to do better for people with substance use disorders and their families.

Next week, we'll show you how the Bruce Oak Recovery Center does just that. That's our show this week. White Coat Black Art was produced by Jennifer Warren with help from Stephanie Dubois and Samir Chhabra. Our digital producer is Ruby Buiza. Our senior producer is Colleen Ross. I'm Brian Goldman, and I'm proud to bring you stories from the Canadian side of the gurney. See you next week. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.