The Current28:39Scott Oake lost his son to drugs. He wants to help other families
Scott Oake spent many hours working off the side of his desk trying to secure addictions support for his son. A longtime broadcaster with Hockey Night in Canada and CBC Sports, he’d often find himself making calls to lawyers or other family members before a game.
But after a years-long struggle with addiction and multiple attempts at treatment, his son, Bruce, died of an accidental overdose in 2011, when he was 25 years old.
“It was heartbreaking,” Oake told The Current host Matt Galloway. “We would give everything that we have … to have another day with him.”
Oake has dedicated the 14 years since to helping families avoid the same heartbreak his did. He and his wife Anne started the Bruce Oake Memorial Foundation and raised money through it to build a treatment centre in Winnipeg for men struggling with addiction, which opened in 2021.
They’ve also broken ground on a second recovery centre in that city — this one for women, and named after Anne, who died shortly after the first centre opened.
“What we wanted to do from the start … was to ensure that families didn’t have to go through what we did. That if they had a loved one struggling with addiction, that they wouldn’t have to go out of the province to get treatment,”Oake said. “This would be something of a made-in-Manitoba solution.”
Oake says despite the loss, which he details in his new book For the Love of a Son, he’s glad that “hundreds of lives” have since been saved through the recovery centre.
He told Galloway about his son’s journey. Here is part of their conversation.
Tell me a bit about Bruce and what kind of kid he was.
Bruce was a precocious child. He was a beautiful boy. He didn’t begin speaking probably until the age of two and a half. … And he never shut up afterwards, I guess.
[He became] an argumentative teenager with a dogged determination to get whatever it was he wanted. And I guess around the age of eight or nine, he was diagnosed with ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which made him ripe for taking chances. And there weren’t many he didn’t take, consequences be damned. And it ultimately led to his descent into drug abuse addiction, which claimed his life.
When did drugs enter the picture?
We didn’t really know much about the signs of … drug addiction. But his path into addiction, I would say, was the same one followed by many an addict: Weed in high school, which didn’t separate him from a lot of his friends … [then] ecstasy at a weekend party and after that, crystal meth.
And from there it wasn’t a giant leap into the opioids and the drug that would eventually claim his life, heroin.
Anne caught him buying weed outside of a store, right?
Yes. There were a number of episodes like that.
What was going through your mind in those instances?
Essentially, was there a bigger problem? And we didn’t really see signs of that in his … early and mid teen years. And we always said to Bruce that, look, if there is a problem, we’ll be here to help you.
But we weren’t sure there was until, as I write in the book, that day when we were at my parent’s place in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and got a call from Darcy [Scott’s older son] that Bruce had been assaulted.
WATCH | Scott Oake speaks about son’s drug addiction:
Sportscaster Scott Oake lost his son to drug addiction. Now he and his family are raising money to build a treatment facility to help Winnipeg’s addicts
Darcy brought him home. We hadn’t seen [Bruce] at that point, I think for a couple of weeks. And there it was in front of us — graphic proof that he had a problem. And that set us off on our journey to try to help him.
As a father, how do you wrap your head around this?
[It’s] very difficult.
You look at your beautiful baby boy and think that, you know, he could be anything. And no parent dreams of their kid growing up to be a drug addict or to be in a treatment centre. No kid himself dreams of growing up to be an addict.
But it happened and we had to come to terms with it. And how I look back on it is we did everything we possibly could to help him.
You got him into a private recovery facility in Toronto. He spent six weeks there. He graduated from that program … How optimistic did you feel that the behaviour, the addiction that you had seen, that that had been treated?
When we took him first to the detox unit of the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre, there was a lovely doctor there, Lindy Lee, who was a major proponent of recovery.
She did everything she possibly could to help Bruce overall. But in the initial meeting, she pulled us aside and said, “Prepare yourself for failure. … This doesn’t often work the first time.”
So when you heard her say, prepare yourself for failure, what went through your mind?
We rejected it right away. That’s not going to happen to us [we said]. We’re doing everything right.
It was a very naive view … because there was failure, multiple failures. But at the time when she told us that, we just couldn’t come to terms with it.
Did you ever feel like “we have done everything we possibly can?” Did you ever feel that sense of frustration?
Absolutely, on many occasions. And I recall vividly the day that … he failed a [drug] test at the recovery centre he was at in Calgary, and he had to leave. And I remember saying to Anne, “This is not going to end until he’s dead.”
And what a horrid thing to say. But that was a measure of my frustration.
WATCH | Scott Oake talks plans for new recovery centre named after his wife
Two years after Anne Oake’s death, her husband, Scott Oake, and staff at the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre announced plans this week for a new addictions recovery centre for women.
Bruce getting kicked out of that facility in Calgary was, as you say, the beginning of the end. And this is really hard to talk about. What happened after that, if you don’t mind me asking?
He got caught smoking dope and he had to leave.
He wasn’t allowed back on the property for a year. [A] year later, he went back and we had great hope because we thought this is the time he’s finally going to get it right. But he was only in there for four weeks, failed a test, had to leave [again], and he was so discouraged, so disheartened.
He lost hope and four days later he was dead. It was heartbreaking, obviously. You know, as Darcy says, it’s like a 10 pound brick in your pocket all day long, and some days it’s lighter than others.
What’s one thing that you’ve learned through all of this about the nature of addiction that you think we broadly could learn?
Well, I guess we always saw as part of our mission when we were trying to get the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre built, that dispelling the stigma was part of it.
You know, addiction is a chronic brain disorder. It is a disease. And if we treat it as such, then we’ve got a chance of making some progress in the battle against it. But if we continue to see it as a choice and a moral failing — which it’s not — then this problem is never going to go away.
It is probably, Matt, the single greatest peacetime problem our country has ever faced. … We need to address it. And we need to give those who are suffering from it a chance to get their lives back.