This week in Hamilton, Ont., a court is hearing a civil suit against the Ontario government and police. The testimony has shed light on just how cack-handed and cowardly the handling of the Caledonia siege has been by provincial officials.
The $7-million lawsuit that is at the centre of the Hamilton trial was brought by Dave Brown and his family, whose home is bordered on two sides by the former Douglas Creek Estates, a subdivision near Caledonia, Ont., that Mohawks from the nearby Six Nations reserve decided to occupy in February, 2006, as part of an ongoing land-claims campaign against the federal and provincial governments.
When, in April of that year, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) finally decided to enforce a trio of federal court orders evicting native squatters from the construction site, the squatters and their supporters repelled officers, who have largely abandoned the site -- and neglected the safety of nearby non-aboriginal residents --ever since.
That summer, the government of Premier Dalton McGuinty bought the disputed land from the developer and ceded effective control of it to the squatters. In other words, it used $12-million in tax dollars to make the issue go away.
The squatters are still there, sometimes occupying the half-finished homes, and other times pulling down walls and frames for firewood.
The Browns now live in a largely worthless home. (Who would want to pay them a reasonable price for a property that abuts the siege site, even though, I suppose, the aboriginal occupation is no longer, technically, a siege?)
The Ontario government is not stepping in to pay them a premium price for their land. Because no aboriginals are claiming the Brown home is on their ancestral lands and threatening violence over the Browns continued "occupation," Queen's Park is not offering to compensate the family for its losses.
Because the Browns did nothing illegal to embarrass the McGuinty government, they were left to twist in the wind -- until they brought their suit. After that, the Ontario government brought the full force of its legal apparatus against the Browns to keep them from exercising their claim against the government's actions and the OPP's inactions.
Where the McGuinty government scurried to appease the Mohawk squatters -- even paying well over the market value for the land they demanded --it hurried just as hard to beat back the Browns' claim lest the inequity of it all expose the two-tiered, politically correct hash the federal and provincial governments have made of the rule of law as it is applied to aboriginals and non-aboriginals.
I have no doubt that were the squatters white supremacists or Christian cultists, the OPP would have returned as many times as it took to remove them from Douglas Creek. They would not have been scared away at the first hint of violence.
Nor would the Ontario government have used taxpayers' money to buy the land and give it to the squatters.
The situation may not have deteriorated into a Ruby Ridge or Branch Davidian-like siege that ended in the deaths of scores of squatters. Still, I am reasonably certain, expensive appeasement would have been well down the list of alternatives for dealing with any squatters other than aboriginals.
Which brings me to the tiny incidents the Browns have described at trial that illustrate just how truly damaging the whole siege has been to the fabric of society.
Mr. Brown felt compelled to sleep with a shotgun between his knees at the height of the siege in case squatters broke into his home. No police were around to defend him and his family. The Browns' were routinely forced from their vehicles on the way in and out their neighbourhood and searched by squatters. They even had to crawl on their bellies to their fence to see whether squatters were planning attacks.
It is not only the preferential treatment of aboriginals that corrodes the rule of law, it is also the abandonment of non-aboriginal citizens by their government and the police -- the way the Browns felt forced to defend themselves as a last resort -- that damages the web of society.