WATCH ABOVE: John Bjornstrom is running for mayor of Williams Lake. Ted Chernecki reports.
There are candidates with colourful histories in nearly any municipal election.
In Williams Lake, there’s a man running for mayor whose backstory may trump them all.
You might not remember the name John Bjornstrom. But you might remember “The Bushman of the Shuswap”, an escaped convict who survived in the woods around Shuswap Lake for two years.
That was Bjornstrom. Now he’s once again making headlines. He wants to run for mayor of Williams Lake, a town of 10,000 in central B.C., and hopes voters will overlook his past misdeeds.
“I admit it and I’ve paid for my dues. Once you buy something and you’ve paid for it, the payment is done,” he says.
“Basically, if I’m in office, I’m going to be under very tight scrutiny. I’ll be watched like a hawk.”
Bjornstrom was a private investigator when he first went on the lam in the late 1990s. He was investigating Bre-X, a Canadian company that collapsed over false claims of mining gold in Indonesia, when he says people began threatening him and his family.
He decided to become a recluse in the woods surrounding Shuswap Lake, breaking into cabins to survive. Though he turned himself after a few months, he fled a minimum-security prison with eight weeks left in his sentence—again claiming people connected to Bre-X had threatened him.
Returning to the Shuswap area in early 1999, the now-convict Bjornstrom claimed he was psychic, and said he was hunting someone who was perpetrating great crimes in the region.
To escape the police, he created an elaborate hideaway with underground pipes and solar panels. He installed microphones far and wide—even on the bottom of Shuswap Lake, he said—to warn him of intruders. And he built several outposts high in the trees, installed with binoculars to observe the general area.
Many of those binoculars were stolen from nearby residents. So were skidoos, pieces of furniture, and nearly everything in his underground hideaway. He stole from over 32 cabins in all, and always carried guns.
Concern and frustration from police and home owners grew, as did his notoriety. A song was written about Bjornstrom, and reporters far and wide tried to contact him.
He finally relented in November 2001, giving Global reporter Ted Chernecki a glimpse into his life and an explanation for his behaviour.
“I’ve actually survived on the backs of cottage owners,” he admitted at the time. “Should I be a cottage owner, and suffer the same consequences, I’d be ticked off too.”
“It’s unfortunate, but it is a necessary evil. I am after something far greater.”
WATCH: Ted Chernecki’s 2001 series on John Bjornstrom, “The Bushman of the Shuswap”
PART 2
His desire for publicity was his undoing. Police tricked him later that month into meeting with a fake documentary film crew. He was arrested and eventually sentenced to 23 months of house arrest. After his release, he became a log hauler and went about his business in privacy.
Until now.
“Current mayor Kerry Cook is a pretty good person,” he says, adding that he’ll run on a platform of economic development and crime reduction.
“But the population, not everyone votes anymore. And one of the reasons people don’t vote is because they’re sick of the way politics has treated them.”
For her part, Cook, who is running for her third term as mayor, sidestepped any questions about Bjornstrom.
“When you’ve been in politics as long as I have, nothing surprises you,” she said.
It’s unclear whether Bjornstrom will even be a serious candidate. In his own words, he has “no support and no machinery”.
But for now, he’s back in the public eye, with explanations that seem confounding as ever.
“Why should they vote for me?” he asks.
“That’s a good question. Even I have to question that myself.”
– With files from Ted Chernecki
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