Broadcaster Scott Oake hopes his advocacy can spare other families the pain of drug addiction

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…