The Guelph Mercury
Unless they were the 1980s teenage mutant turtle variety, we have a pretty good idea what Luisa Martins was describing when she said "they looked like ninjas."
From the banner with the words "Six Nations" inscribed on it that Martins saw hanging off the railway overpass at the Hanlon Expressway and Paisley Road, we have an even clearer idea.
The Cambridge woman, like other commuters, was making her way to work in Guelph Tuesday morning when she was temporarily delayed as police officers pulled burning tree limbs from the southbound lanes of the Hanlon. The blaze had been extinguished by Guelph firefighters.
While a police canine search was unsuccessful in apprehending any suspects -- evidently young adults who had covered their faces -- it's evident that this was a political protest, and it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to guess what was being protested.
It's strange, then, that Wellington County OPP spokesperson Constable Mark Cloes was being overly cautious Tuesday, stating "it would be irresponsible to assume it's connected with native issues," and stranger still that he seemed unaware of the wording on the banner that was so clear to Martins and presumably other motorists.
The police are right, first and foremost, to consider this type of public mischief a crime, and are to be commended for working quickly to clear away the traffic obstruction. But we don't think it irresponsible at all to consider this demonstration an airing of First Nations grievances by a small group of protesters, particularly since a similar fiery protest briefly blocked two lanes of the Hanlon in the same locale in April. The protesters in that demonstration indicated they were showing solidarity with a land claims dispute in Deseronto.
While we're connecting dots, it doesn't seem like a big stretch to link this latest highway disruption in Guelph not with activities in eastern Ontario but to the arrests in Brantford Monday of a prominent Six Nations spokesperson and two teenagers. Those Labour Day arrests triggered new blockades at a contentious housing development in Caledonia that has been the focus of a land claims dispute since 2006.
If we're wrong in what we're surmising, we invite representatives from the Six Nations to decry Tuesday's demonstration on the Hanlon and dissociate themselves from mischief-making protesters who are invoking the confederacy's name.