Planning to drive or take the train to Toronto this summer? Maybe you should fly: Indian protest groups haven't yet figured out how to block the sky. As for trains, at least, Ontario seems to have little interest in keeping the public right-of-way public.
A few Mohawks from the Bay of Quinte area blocked train tracks in the Toronto-Montreal corridor for 30 hours last weekend, leaving 3,600 hapless passengers unable to complete their journeys. The Ontario government and the Ontario Provincial Police stood around and watched.
Could someone explain, please, why Indian protesters are allowed to use disruptive tactics forbidden to anyone else? Imagine if some other ad hoc group had chosen to strand 3,600 passengers: police would surely have cleared the track in short order. But in Ontario,ever since a policeman shot a native protester at Ipperwash in 1995, the police have taken a hands-off approach to any native protest even if, like this one, it consists of a few hotheads without approval from their band council or tribal elders.
The result is to make the situation worse, not better. Who can doubt that more than a year of police inaction at an occupation in Caledonia, Ont., figured in the calculation of these protesters, who now say they're planning further, bigger actions? Who can deny that some natives elsewhere in Canada are talking of similar tactics precisely because they see that they can operate with impunity?
Native people have faced injustice and prejudice, in varying degrees, in Canadian history. But neither that, nor anything else, justifies tactics such as these. And when police and politicians start to think that weak-kneed acceptance can replace law enforcement, then why should anyone obey the law?