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Because the university hadn't lived up to its agreement, Martin launched legal action in 1975. Another agreement was drawn up in May 1977. It stated that Martin was to be assigned duties by the Dean of Arts and the Dean of Social Work. His performance would be re-evaluated after April 30, 1978. If the deans judged his performance to be “inadequate,” he would required to retire effective June 30, 1978. Again Martin wasn’t assigned any teaching or other responsibilities. He simply continued doing his community development work with non-status Indian and Metis peoples in northern Saskatchewan, which took him to such places as Sandy Bay, Ile a la Crosse and Cluff lake. A grant from the Kellogg Foundation allowed him to hire two community organizers he had worked with in the U.S., Miles Horton and Tom Ludwig.
At home the day before the June 30 deadline, Martin, now sixty, received a registered letter. As his children ran about the house, excited that school was over and summer holidays had begun, he tore open the envelope. Inside, he found a note informing him that his employment with the university was being terminated as of the next day. At first he was in shock. He wrote the University, pointing out that the meagre pension he was entitled to left him no choice but “to look for immediate employment of some sort which would allow me to keep up my obligations to my family. I have no other source of income. At my age this will be difficult....I shall be denied that opportunity which professors in retirement may normally expect: time and financial security in which to round out and refine those interests developed through a lifetime of activity in the academic world.”
A few weeks later, despondent, he tried to drown himself in Last Mountain Lake near his home. He swam a mile out, hoping he wouldn’t have the strength to make his way back; his death would look like an accident. He changed his mind midway and swam back. He told Joy, who was now the breadwinner in the family, that he felt as his father must have felt; he had become a burden and his family would be better off without him. But he had decided to fight the university for wrongful dismissal.
Early in the new year, he sued for wrongful dismissal. The trial took place in November 1981. In response to a question from his lawyer, John Beke, about the effects his dismissal had had on his health, he replied, “Rather severe ones which I wasn’t aware of until [later], when I had a number of symptoms physical and emotional, mental depressions and weakness, and my legs gave out, and I started having severe problems of memory, which still occur in an unpredictable fashion....” His doctor had put him on anti-depressants.
He lost that trial. It took years for an appeal to be heard. When it was, in 1986, the court ruled in Martin’s favour, awarding him a settlement of some $330,000 to compensate for the salary and pension benefits lost as a result of his forced early retirement. This should have been the end of it. But the University appealed the decision. Four more years went by before the appeal was heard. In early 1986, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal upheld the lower court ruling. By now Joy and Martin were living in Winnipeg, where Joy was working as a deputy minister in the Manitoba government. In response to the news that his appeal had been upheld, Martin told the Winnipeg Free Press that he’d paid “a high price....It’s placed a burden on my family, and the longer it went on the more debilitated I became.” Cohnstaedt, the Free Press continued, “attributed the longstanding conflict with his sociology colleagues to internal politics and differences in academic philosophy.”
But the University appealed again, this time to the Supreme Court of Canada. To further complicate matters, Martin was now engaged in a two-front war, both on issues of principle. He was active in Conscience Canada, an organization devoted to withholding tax dollars that would otherwise go for military purposes. The Department of National Revenue was demanding payment of the 12.2% of his taxes withheld in 1983 and 1984. Martin replied that he hadn’t withheld the money; he’d paid it “to a Peace Tax Fund in trust for the Government of Canada in accordance with the dictates of [his] conscience, to be used for non-military purposes.” He wasn’t going to pay twice. Revenue Canada was adamant; he had to pay. “I object to these efforts of collection....,” Martin replied, pointing out that Revenue Canada’s request contravened Section 2 of Canada’s new Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guaranteed freedom of conscience. He insisted that the government had an obligation to amend the Income Tax Act to conform to the Charter. Revenue Canada refused to budge and went after Martin and Joy’s bewildered tenants in Lumsden. “Martin was ferocious in his adherence to principle,” says Joy, “but when he saw that innocent third parties were being dragged in to the dispute, he gave in.”
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 On his 78th birthday, Joy and Nicci helped Martin walk into the chambers of the Supreme Court in Ottawa to hear the final verdict in his case against the university (it was now called the University of Regina). He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s soon after he and Joy moved to Toronto from Winnipeg in 1989. (Joy had left her position as a deputy minister in the Manitoba government to take over as dean of fine arts at York University. Martin’s condition had slowly deteriorated. One day he woke up and forgot that he’d smoked a pipe most of his adult life. Sometimes he would dress two and three times — pants layered over pants, shirts over shirts — forgetting he already had clothes on. When he could still remember his way home, he would walk to the store, buy some buttermilk for Joy, bring it home, put it in the fridge, and then repeat the whole exercise. The fridge would be filled with buttermilk when she got home. The government took his driver’s licence away, a decision that infuriated him. One day Joy came home to find him with two salesmen who had convinced him to buy a $1500 vacuum cleaner. Years before, she’d had to sneak a vacuum cleaner into the house in Lumsden, so opposed was he to owning such frivolous contraptions.
Martin’s Room, continued >
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