Boyko is also an OpEd contributor to the Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Maclean’s and more. He also writes entries for the Canadian Encyclopedia.
He has addressed audiences across Canada and appeared on radio and television discussing his books and various historical and current political issues. The Globe and Mail has called Boyko “a distinguished scholar of Canadian political history” and the Winnipeg Free Press has praised his “encyclopaedic knowledge of Canadian history.”
Boyko has earned degrees from Trent, Queen’s and McMaster universities, served on and chaired many boards, and been elected to municipal office. He lives in the Village of Lakefield, Ontario.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Devil's Trick: How Canada Fought the Vietnam War, and reported the following:
Page 99 relates part of Canadian anti-Vietnam War activist Claire Culhane’s long effort to bring attention to the ways in which Canada was involved in the war. It tells of her March 4, 1971 protest at Canada’s House of Commons in which she made her way to the Visitors’ Gallery and as Question Period began, she slipped a lock and chain from beneath her baggy clothing and secured her ankle to a chair leg. She then shouted: “Why is Canada building hospitals in South Vietnam and also supplying bombs in Vietnam?” Culhane threw handfuls of leaflets that fluttered down on government members. Four security guards quickly descended and, after fumbling with the chain, led her away. She was charged but later acquitted of creating a disturbance. The page also tells of her visiting Washington in June, resulting in New York Representative Bella Abzug reading into the Congressional Record Culhane’s 1968 report detailing how a Canadian medical facility in Vietnam was functioning as a front for CIA counterterrorism and how Canada was profiting by selling war material to the Pentagon for use in Vietnam.Visit John Boyko's website.
I will confess to being skeptical of the Page 99 Test but a great deal of what the book is about is actually captured on this single page. The book tells of Canada’s secret and insidious involvement in the Vietnam War by exploring the experiences of six fascinating people. One of them is Claire Culhane. She was a 48-year-old hospital administrator who, in 1967, applied to work at a Canadian-built and run hospital in Vietnam. She was shocked at the horrors of the war but outraged to discover that while one department of the Canadian government was building hospitals in Vietnam, another was sanctioning the manufacture and sale of military hardware that helped fill them with patients. It was to bring attention to that hypocrisy that Culhane wrote articles and letters to politicians and engaged in cross-country speaking tours. She also participated in political stunts such as the House of Commons protest. She told all who would listen of Canada creating jobs and making money through the manufacture and sale of ammunition, aircraft engines, grenades, gun sites, TNT, generators, military vehicles, spare parts, napalm, Agent Orange, and much more. This one page hints at the disconnect between what Canadians knew or ignored and what was actually happening in that slow-motion tragedy that was the Vietnam War.
--Marshal Zeringue
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