On Sept. 10, David Shugar, an internationally renowned Canadian biophysicist, turns 100. He will not be celebrating in Montreal where he grew up and was educated at McGill University, but in Warsaw, Poland where he has lived since 1952 because he was falsely suspected of being a spy for the Soviet Union during the anti-Communist paranoia following World War II.

Harriet Shugar, his niece in Montreal, is trying to give him the best birthday present: an apology from the Canadian government. Her online petition has drawn over 2,400 signatories, and a formal petition was presented in the House of Commons in June by MP Irwin Cotler, the Liberal critic for rights and freedoms and international justice.

“To me, this is a real Kafkaesque injustice,” he told The CJN. “David Shugar is the innocent victim of postwar McCarthyism. I was outraged.”

The Conservative government has been silent on the matter.

Shugar, a retired professor of the University of Warsaw, was acquitted twice by Canadian courts of conspiring to pass secrets to the Soviets.

But his name was never erased from the report of a Royal Commission struck in the wake of the sensational Igor Gouzenko affair just after the war. 

Panic ensued when the minor Soviet embassy employee who defected brought forward evidence of Soviet espionage in Canada, a shocking revelation about a wartime ally.

In 1946, with the War Measures Act still in place, Shugar was summarily apprehended and detained at an Ottawa military base for weeks based on allegations provided by Gouzenko. He had no access to a lawyer, his family says.

Although the charges against him were dismissed for lack of evidence, Shugar, who had been a naval officer during the war, was fired from his job as a research scientist for the Department of Health and Welfare in Ottawa. 

In 1948, joined by his wife Grace, he accepted a research fellowship at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. But his past dogged him and he was expelled by the French government.

In 1952, Shugar moved to Poland – where he was born in the shtetl of Opatow – invited to an academic post at the University of Warsaw by physicist Leopold Infeld, who had also left Canada after being fingered falsely as a Soviet spy. 

There he organized 14 international symposia, known as the Shugar Conferences, the most recent, incredibly at age 99, last year.

Shugar returned to Canada almost annually for many years for his work, said Harriet, and had close collaboration with scientists in this country.

In 1999, he was named to the Royal Society of Canada.

She believes the closest he ever came to association with communism was that “he met once in a social setting with Fred Rose,” the Montreal Communist MP who was convicted for spying after the Gouzenko affair. Shugar was also active in organizing scientific workers, and union leaders were among the most suspect, she added.

Shugar never gave up his Canadian citizenship and has maintained close contact with his relatives in Canada over the years (his only daughter died when she was 16). “He is like a second father to me,” said Harriet, who has visited Poland several times and regularly communicates by Skype.

Harriet has been aware of her uncle’s story all of her adult life, but Shugar is “a very humble, reserved man,” who does not express his emotions, let alone ask for anything.

She was therefore surprised two years ago, after his wife Grace died, to hear his wish. “We were sitting around after the funeral, and he made a comment that his only regret in life is that he never received an apology from Canada. As soon as he said that, it instantly became my mission.”

She has been joined in this effort to “right this historic wrong and bring closure to the sad story” by her three Roback cousins in the Maritimes, children of one of Grace’s sisters. 

It’s a “simple letter of apology” they are seeking, not any other kind of compensation, she said.

She created the Friends of Prof. David Shugar Facebook page and the online petition at change.org.

The campaign had, until very recently, hit a roadblock. Getting a petition read in Parliament entails a lot of red tape, Harriet found out. Her petition was finally approved in March. After being presented in the House by Cotler (who is not Shugar’s MP), the government had 45 days to respond.  But the election call on Aug. 2, rendered petition requests null and void, Harriet said, so the process must begin all over again with the new government.

With Cotler’s departure, Harriet had to find another MP to take up the cause.

On Aug. 20, Harriet received the good news that Don Davies, the New Democrat MP for Vancouver Kingsway, has agreed to table the petition during the new session. He is a “friend of a friend” of one of her Roback cousins. 

In the meantime, Harriet will draw up a new petition – only 25 signatures by Canadian citizens are needed – and hope that Davies is re-elected.

Harriet did at first directly appeal to the Prime Minister’s Office, but received no response to her written inquiries. She then tried telephoning “but I could never get past the gatekeeper.”

When Shugar visited her  last year, she gave him a copy of the thousands of well wishes to him she has collected – “as thick as a book.

“He was quite overwhelmed by all the support from total strangers and old friends reconnecting,” she said. 

Shugar has never expressed bitterness over how his country effectively forced him into exile.

She reflects on the shame that Canada lost the talent of someone who epitomized the immigrant success story. Shugar was 11 when the family – Orthodox Jews, his father was an egg candler – arrived in Montreal, settling in the St. Urbain Street neighbourhood. 

The oldest of five children, he came first in the province when he graduated from high school. Although it had a quota on Jewish students, McGill could not refuse someone of such promise, said Harriet. 

The extended family remained in Poland, and virtually all were murdered in the Holocaust.

 “Canada lost a distinguished scientist,” Cotler said. “ We could have benefited from his brilliance all these years. He’s almost a symbol of the severe damage done by that McCarthyism, yet the government has refused this simple, but fundamental, remedy. I’m not going to let this go.”