Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

That’s the deal: entice big-name people like the Dalai Lama, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, David Suzuki, et al., to come to Salt Spring, hang out at Stonehouse, sit inside the Stone Circle, absorb the positive energy, and engage in positive dialogue about how to change the mental switching of human beings to something less destructive for our surroundings.

At one point Lefebvre tells me, “I shoot off my face about the way things are in the world. It was self-evident to me to walk the walk. I had an opportunity to make some huge differences. I know, it sounds like a post-mortem, and in a lot of ways it is a post-mortem because I lost $100 million worth of stock value and gave $40 million cash to Uncle Sam. That’s a lot of giving away money gone.”

But he’s still got enough to build the kind of castle where a man like David Suzuki might like to stay. Stonehouse is about ten miles from Sunset Drive, on the northwest side of the island. You have to drive south on Sunset, hang a left on Vesuvius Bay Road, then a right on Lower Ganges, then drive on through Ganges Harbour, right by its market and on up Fulford-Ganges Road a couple of miles. Now you’re heading southeast and looking out over the east side of the island.

It’s a stinking hot, beautiful afternoon this third week of June. Lefebvre talks a bit about his gardener, Lynn Demers, with whom we’ve just been talking. She’s also a sculptor. When Lefebvre first arrived in Salt Spring in 2005, he noticed her work immediately and loved it. He bought some pieces, and they now stand tall in the downtown area. He also asked her over to the house on Sunset Drive to talk about commissioning and then placing some of her work on the property.

Geoff Savage took one look at the way Lefebvre became animated around Demers and thought, Uh-oh . She’s a good-looking, fit, middle-aged woman bathed in a kind of milkmaid purity, with straight blond hair, ample décolletage, and a warm, giving smile. Lefebvre’s liaison with Demers was affectionate and casual. It did not last long, maybe a year. They remained friends as well as being engaged in an employer-employee relationship. Lefebvre explains, “She’s gotten away from working with chisel and soapstone because it’s hard on the joints. She does the gardening to pay for the time to do the sculpting, but she’s good at it. She likes doing that, too. And she’s not just a gardener but a landscape designer, too. She built that whole garden at my house.”

Lefebvre cranes his neck and backs the Sequoia out the driveway, then casts one look back at Demers, bent over a bush in his garden.

On Sunset Drive, we enjoy the rolling view, and so I ask about the weather in Salt Spring, out in the gulf, where the ecology is so different from Malibu, Costa Rica, or Calgary. Lefebvre explains, “Winters here are beautiful because it’s so lush. It’s like a rainforest here in wintertime. There are two waterfalls on my property and they’re roaring in the winter.” One burbles through a drainage pipe under the driveway road and the other marks the property boundary. He adds, “The last three winters we’ve had maybe seven to ten days below zero, and it would be two and three below. It’s nippy, though — a humid cold.”

We grouse about spending numerous winters in Calgary, with its potential for both mild Chinook conditions and forty-below cold snaps that reduce all peregrinations to the bare essentials. We’re happy to see the back of those; nice place to visit and all. I tell Lefebvre Calgary’s growth astonished me when I went back in 2005 after a long absence, all helter-skelter, a boomtown with a Deadwood -like mentality and no taste for curbing reckless growth.

Lefebvre says,

Calgary is a beautiful place to be, a lot of outdoorsy people. It’s too bad the outdoorsy people can’t get their heads right about climate change. It’s the lobster boiling in the pot. It doesn’t look like anything’s wrong, with the seemingly unlimited amount of land.

That’s mixed in with a bit of people tend to believe what they want to believe. If that’s what we’re doing in Canada, imagine China, imagine Russia — imagine everything. That’s what humans do. They just go until they get stopped.

Lefebvre stops. He picks up a hitchhiker, a young woman named Alison, twenty years old at most. She’s lugging an overstuffed backpack that dwarfs her. She’s fresh out of St. Thomas, Ontario, directly south of London, and was just in Victoria for two weeks. The ferry let her off at Fulford Harbour and she then hitched a ride to Shark Road. She was planning to stay at an organic farm. “Then I found out they changed locations,” she tells us. “Now they’re actually closer to Fulford ferry, so I’m going to try to get back down there.”

“I lived in London when I was an infant,” says Lefebvre, “a place called Frontenac Road.” He wonders whether we want to stop for coffee in Ganges Harbour. He asks Alison if she’d like a drink. She would. We gas up with Americanos and double espressos. Lefebvre pays. You cannot buy anything when you are with him. He won’t let you. Then Alison has to get out and head in a different direction, toward her organic farm.

A couple of miles beyond town, heading uphill on Fulford-Ganges Road, we arrive at Stonehouse. From this vista, way below is the long, narrow inlet into Ganges Harbour. And to the east, the impressive volcanic deposit of Mount Baker juts into view. The attraction for Lefebvre is evident. Baker is playful from this vantage point, sometimes luminescent, sometimes invisible. Every day, or even several times a day, it is a different color or barely there or not there at all — a mystery, a painter’s delight.

Stonehouse contains six separate sleeping and cooking quarters, an office for Geoff Savage and his assistant, Marian Bankes, a sound studio for Lefebvre and musician friends, an outdoor concert round, and thermal heating and cooling coils underground, which Lefebvre says are expensive but actually will pay for themselves in ten years and be free thereafter. And yes, he really does want to invite the Dalai Lama and his entourage to Stonehouse. Lefebvre’s overture to His Holiness is not so outlandish. His friend Jim Hoggan is a board member of the David Suzuki Foundation, and so Hoggan knows Victor Chan, the executive director, who co-authored a book with the Dalai Lama called The Wisdom of Forgiveness .

Lefebvre explains,

When Victor was twenty or so he was traveling the world and wound up getting kidnapped in Afghanistan by some clannish people and held for ransom. It just so happened that the Dalai Lama was running through there at the time, interceded and got Victor freed. Victor became quite a big fan, obviously, and devoted quite a bit of his life to assisting Dalai Lama. They became quite dear friends. Victor’s roughly my age, and Dalai Lama is about twenty years older. Victor spends two or three months a year with Dalai Lama. So through Jim I met Victor, and through Victor I began to take a deeper interest in Dalai Lama, commonly referred to in his circle as “His Holiness.” After I gave some money to the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, His Holiness decided he wanted to meet me. I had actually met him before. A group of about fourteen setting up the Dalai Lama Center met him in Tucson. I committed some money, $5 million, which, eventually, I was unable to give because of Uncle Sam. I was only able to give $1 million, but I had given $500,000 before, so it was a million-five. The truth is, Dalai Lama is not a guy who is going to have trouble raising money. It’d be easy for him to get thirty million people in the world to give him a buck — but we got the ball rolling.

The Dalai Lama was curious to meet the source of the money and granted Lefebvre an audience in Vancouver. He wondered if the donor would like to bring anyone. Lefebvre figured if His Holiness wanted to know where he was coming from, he had better meet his mother. The Dalai Lama’s schedule was packed, and when Lefebvre arrived with his mother he recognized a bunch of Conservative government cabinet ministers. Prime Minister Harper had given the go-ahead to make the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen, which upset Chinese politicians. Lefebvre and his mom had to wait their turn.