I’m meeting some fascinating people on my door knocking adventures but this past Saturday was particularly fun. I spent upwards of an hour inside the beautiful Brighton Commons home of Robert and Pauline Norburn. Bob is a British engineer who was the central figure in a 1980’s Canadian defense industry scandal that nearly ruined him financially and personally. He blew the whistle on quality assurance issues at Fleet Aerospace, the defense contractor that employed him in Fort Erie, Ontario to certify the safety and reliability of F-18 fighter jet components they manufactured. It was the beginning of a six year ordeal in which he was fired, blacklisted, bankrupted, threatened, and the victim of an assassination attempt. An F-18 with Fleet components that Bob refused to certify — under enormous pressure to do so — crashed here on PEI in Malpeque Bay in 1986, killing the pilot.
He eventually testified for a US Defense Department investigation into defective parts sold by Fleet, giving private testimony to Casper Weinberger, Barry Goldwater, and Ted Kennedy, among others. In the end, Bob was vindicated, but it was no doubt due in large part to his unusually strong character. It’s been a long time since I met someone with such a forceful personality; he’s as forthright as a hammer.
Bob made news in Britain two years ago after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and denied a life saving procedure by the NHS. He was fortunate enough to be able to pay for the treatment privately but I gather the experience left him very bitter. Having only recently moved to PEI, it now appears Bob is ready to train his sights on the troubling problem of doctor shortages on PEI, a problem he believes exists only because of an appalling lack of will to fix it. I believe Islanders will be familiar with Bob’s name soon. He has a history of standing his ground and fighting hard when he knows he is right.
Bob was featured not long ago on the British reality show Dragon’s Den — a formula show that spawned ABC’s American Inventor (which also features an Island connection in judge Doug Hall, CEO of Eureka Ranch and sometime summer resident of PEI). It seems Bob reinvented himself after his engineering career as a hugely successful exporter of cosmetics and perfumes, and then spent seven years — after cutting himself shaving — formulating a new type of shaving cream to bring shaving “out of the dark ages and into the 21st Century”. This is the product he pitched on Dragon’s Den.
So after an intense hour of interesting discussion on everything from politics to Internet radio, and a dozen things in between, I left Bob’s house very much less intimidated then when he first started lecturing me in his kitchen, and with a shopping bag full of the best damn shaving cream on the market.
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