LECLERC SPREADS ANTI-DRUG MESSAGE

Sask. Party MLA Uses Own Errors To Steer Kids Right

Minutes before his speech to a group of high school students, Serge
LeClerc set the scene like someone quietly familiar with the process.
Dragging a podium across the stage, the short, barrel-chested man
slipped off his jacket to reveal tattoos on his arms: A Viking, a
tiger, an eagle and a wolf. In the next hour, he would clown with his
young audience one moment and bellow at them the next. His message was
simple: "It's not important where you begin in life. It's important
where you end up."

Born to a raped teenager, the former drug kingpin would spend 21 years
in prison, then turn his life around to win a national pardon and a
Saskatoon seat in the November provincial election for the
Saskatchewan Party.

"It's about choices. For the greater portion of my life I made all the
wrong choices," he told the packed auditorium at David and Mary
Thomson Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, Ont., on Wednesday.

Peppering his speech with ex-con vernacular, LeClerc held the
auditorium in rapt attention, although the performance did draw some
jeers.

The room was especially hushed when he spoke of his criminal exploits,
from stabbing another offender in the stomach with a pitchfork to a
$40-million crystal meth lab he ran in Quebec.

When he was a toddler, LeClerc and his mother moved to Toronto's
Regent Park, a crumbling 1940s housing project on the city's east side.

By age 12, having circulated through the youth detention system,
LeClerc had developed ties with the future heads of several motorcycle
gangs, eventually becoming a gang leader himself. Not long after,
LeClerc got addicted to crystal meth. For the next 20 years, he used
heroin and cocaine and crack.

His epiphany -- what he calls a "faith experience" -- came at
Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, a super maximum security prison in Quebec where
he was serving a nine-year sentence after police busted his crystal
meth lab.

He watched as a volunteer handing out magazines to prisoners in
solitary confinement was being humiliated by staff during a strip search.

"I couldn't figure out his angle. He wasn't getting money and he
wasn't getting prestige and nobody was patting him on the back. It
fascinated me, but I also got angry at him because I couldn't figure
out his angle . . .

"In a very short conversation of about three minutes, he challenged my
premise that you're either an animal that walks on two legs and there
is no meaning to your life and to the aftermath of your life, or that
you're a creation and that you have a soul, and that makes you of
great value."

LeClerc, who had a Grade 5 education, began correspondence courses,
eventually earning a bachelor of arts in sociology and social work
from the University of Waterloo while in prison.

Shortly afterwards in 1989, he began giving motivational speeches,
speaking to some 110 high schools every year for nine years.

It was that work that helped him earn the pardon in
2000.

The transformation sweetened during last year's provincial election,
when LeClerc won a seat in the Saskatchewan legislature. Premier Brad
Wall then appointed him as legislative secretary to the minister of
corrections.

In Toronto, the former dealer railed against drugs and called out to
those in the room who might be selling to their classmates.

At the dawn of his political career, LeClerc is intent on cleaning up
Saskatchewan's juvenile custody and corrections facilities. Even as it
leads the nation in economic growth, LeClerc pointed out, the province
has led per capita in crime since 2000.

Today, he said, Saskatchewan also has the highest rates of child
poverty, child incarceration, youth gang recruitment, drug addiction
and child prostitution, with some victims as young as nine years old.

"Over 16 years, we had a government that socially neglected our
province."

As for skepticism at his turn from dealer to politician, LeClerc's
response was as unconventional his story.

"I never lied to anybody," LeClerc told the crowd, pointing out that
as a dealer, he never promised his clients popularity or happiness,
just high quality drugs.