Protection racket
An Ontario judge glosses over illegal aboriginal acts at Ipperwash. Indian blockaders now seem free to extract demands from government with impunity
Kevin Steel - July 2, 2007
Listen to Terry Nelson, chief of Manitoba's Anishinabe First Nation, and it's easy to see just how disruptive Canadian Indians' national day of protest, planned for June 29, might be. "There's 30,000 miles of railway lines in this country and more than 50,000 miles of [oil and gas] pipelines," Nelson told a reporter in early June. "The reality is that there's no army that can actually protect all that. Not the United States army, not the Canadian army, not any." This is the same Terry Nelson who had earlier stated, "There are only two ways of dealing with the white man. One, either you pick up a gun, or you stand between the white man and his money." Listen to Phil Fontaine, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, and it's immediately clear just how widespread the aboriginal commitment to illegal action is. "Many people ask why our people are so angry," Fontaine told the Canadian Club of Ottawa in mid-May. "At this point you must realize we have a right to be frustrated, concerned, angry--anger that's building and building." Fontaine is also on record saying he is powerless to stop any blockades.
But listen to elected officials, especially at Queen's Park in Toronto, and it's hard to see any sign of scrupulous commitment to upholding the laws of the land in the face of native illegality. Rather, as viewed in the light of inaction surrounding the ongoing Caledonia dispute and, more significantly, of recent de facto official approval of native lawbreaking at Ipperwash, governments are essentially signalling that native lawbreakers will be rewarded, not punished for their actions.
That seems to be how Fontaine interpreted the findings, made public May 31, of Ontario Justice Sidney Linden's special investigation into the Ipperwash affair, in which native demonstrator Dudley George was shot and killed by a police officer after weeks of escalating native protests. "Clearly, the inquiry has found that nothing is to be gained by applying force to situations where people legitimately feel their rights are at issue," Fontaine asserted. What Fontaine appears to be saying, then, is that as long as Indians feel they have the moral high ground, the government has no authority to apply the law against them.
The lack of focus by Linden on any native culpability at Ipperwash led influential National Post columnist Andrew Coyne to conclude that the report effectively legitimized illegal protest. "What we have here is nothing less than the normalization of lawlessness, the legitimization of violence as a means of political protest," Coyne wrote June 2. "And by a judge! Native radicals elsewhere can only take the appropriate clues and be emboldened."
If Coyne is correct, then Linden's Ipperwash report represents a milestone in Canadian legal and political history and, as such, bears close scrutiny, not only for what it examined and concluded, but also for what it ignored and the biases it betrayed.
I lived exactly 400 feet away from where it happened, where Dudley was shot and died," says Mary-Lou LaPratte. The 62-year-old x-ray/ultrasound technician now lives in Sarnia, Ont. But for 18 years she lived with her husband in Ipperwash, from 1989 until March of this year. The "Dudley" she refers to is, of course, Dudley George, the native protester shot and killed by Ontario Provincial Police in Ipperwash Provincial Park on Sept. 6, 1995. That shooting was the subject of a $25.7 million, four-year inquiry headed by retired judge Linden. Linden heard from 140 witnesses over 25 months.
But he didn't hear from LaPratte, even though she lived so close to the event. He didn't want to hear from her even though she was one of 103 cottagers originally sued by the band in 1992--they wanted title to her home and $250,000 for trespassing on beachfront property the band had surrendered in the 1920s. The inquiry didn't call her to testify even though her house had been broken into by protesters.
Actually, none of the residents who lived in the area were called to testify at the Ipperwash Inquiry. All they were allowed was a 90-minute town hall meeting with the commissioner and the inquiry's lead counsel. And nothing of substance that was said at that meeting ended up in Linden's report.
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