Terry Cottam was a consummate street activist. He was also a brilliant designer and writer of one-off political flyers. These documented such corporate activities as PepsiCo's (and now Nortel’s) involvement with the brutal regime running Burma, shrieking "Pepsi, Choice of a New Genocide" or "Gotta Boycott". Or MAI-NOT! they warned, about preparations for the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. A recent campaign was to show citizens the dangers of the Y2K bug -- that they needed to look out for each other since governments and corporations weren’t coming clean with their preparations. He was a familiar sight at the Eternal Flame on Parliament Hill, or the Human Rights monument, struggling to hold up his outsize yellow banners.
His deadly aim, brevity and humour, together with careful research, could turn a complex issue into something convincing and instantly readable, on a three by four inch leaflet. His impeccable footnotes in tiny 6 point type became legendary. The Mad Teak Party flyer alerted environmentalists to the rape of Burma’s rainforests by the companies owned by Burmese and Thai generals. His NOR TEL a Lie pamphlet exposed Ottawa’s favorite corporation and its sale of cell phone equipment to Burma through a Thailand-based subsidiary. These got people thinking and acting, and eventually nailed many offending corporations and governments.
But after his sudden death last week, after a fall from a balcony, it was his humility, his laughter, his excitableness, his needs and his capacity for friendship that his friends spoke about, as much as his work. He was a passionate comrade-in-arms. His long campaign to establish community currencies that would allow people to bypass the cash economy by bartering their skills and consumer needs spoke to the depth of the reforms he embraced. His plain-speaking in public could and often did horrify those colleagues more attuned to the political niceties of Ottawa.
He was an unlikely hero. Handsome in a gaunt way, he had no interest in money, food, or clothes. His closest friends worried about him and often provided the basics of life, home and friendship, that he needed. To say he was not socially adept is an understatement but he loved parties and was a generous ally. He certainly didn’t want a career, preferring (as he told his mother) to work voluntarily or for a pittance on the issues he believed in. A request for an invoice, so he could be paid, weighed heavily on him. His steadiest job, which he held on and off between being fired, was helping produce The Canadian Guide to Living and Working Abroad whose publisher, Jean-Marc Hachey, was also Terry’s friend. Jean-Marc said his talent for finding exactly the right word quickly made Terry indispensable to more senior editors. But while Jean-Marc tolerated Terry turning his office into an activist publishing house, he fired Terry at least three times for devoting all his time to causes and neglecting the work he was supposed to be paid for. Sometimes. Jean-Marc would negotiate Terry’s invoices "up" so Terry would have money for food and rent.
Ottawa has spawned its own underworld of often ill-paid activists committed to making the change needed to bring about social and international justice. Many of them have fashioned effective organizations out of apparently thin air. That air, now alive with Internet connections, campaigns and friends, was the air that Terry breathed like oxygen. And his friends were all there at his memorial service, in body or in words -- from Ottawa, Australia, France, the USA, St. Lucia, Egypt, Belgium and across Canada. "Thank you for what you have done for our country," from Chinese-Burmese groups in the USA; "I only met him a few times working on stories at Carleton university...his loss will be felt in so many ways" from Almira Elghawaby in Egypt; "Terry was a gentle soul who walked between two worlds. I’ll miss his emails and his gentle presence. Thank you Terry for raising the consciousness of those who crossed your path", from Beverly Young.
Terry’s was the first death many of us have experienced that was so quickly honoured on a web site. Before he died, he shut down all his own valuable web sites, announcing they would no longer be updated. Ironically for someone who never "fitted in", the news immediately drew together a worldwide community of people for whom he was the focal point -- but fitting for a person whose skill and talents had made that community his own.
He shaped his own life and he lived it with unique success. Through his innate talents, and perhaps because he appeared to have no sense of what is generally thought of as possible, he achieved the impossible.