Nov. 21, 2009
Though I am a ridiculously easy crier, I think there have only been two occasions when I wept, and felt shame, about being Canadian.
The first was years ago at the Gomery inquiry into the federal sponsorship scandal. I covered four or five weeks of the hearings, when some of the biggest players testified, and was appalled and enraged that such wanton corruption had gone on in my country.
The second time came this week, in Hamilton, at the lawsuit of a man called Dave Brown against the Ontario government and the Ontario Provincial Police.
Mr. Brown is a 42-year-old former heavy-equipment operator who, with his family, was trapped behind the barricades when a native protest turned ugly almost four years ago.
Mr. Brown, wife Dana Chatwell and teenage son Dax in 2005 had bought her family home from her father. It was a time in their life, as Mr. Brown put it eloquently once, that was "the final chapter of everything she wanted." They had bought the house she grew up in, and after a $30,000 renovation, she had opened her own hair salon and spa in the lower level. The house was located cheek-by-jowl to the former Douglas Creek Estates, a housing development where, it was planned, as many as 1,000 people - and potential customers - would live.
The house has a big deck, and Dave had a big barbecue Dana had bought him, and the place was filled with their friends. Caledonia is a gorgeous little Southwestern Ontario town, built along the Grand River, and they knew it inside and out. I didn't know them then, but I know people like them, those who are generally happy in their skin and their life, who work hard but do not aspire to fame, who have a nice home but aren't trapped in the big-city cycle of strive-and-spend.
I don't mean they're simple people - they're smart, and Dave, the only one of the three to testify thus far, is in the soliloquies he calls "soup sandwiches" eloquent and self-aware - but they have simple wants.
Now, they are in ruins - broke, betrayed, exhausted, and all but undone. As Dave testified earlier this week, "Four years, that's what it took to diminish us." He's right, I fear: They are diminished.
Dana's hair salon went belly up, the first blow coming in the minute the natives threw up the barricades and no one, certainly no customer, could get there; its fate sealed when the government bought out the developer for $12-million and allowed the natives to remain on the land, unmolested. That July, Dave was fired from the steady, good job he had with a local forestry products firm; his frequent absences (Dana would call, in tears or scared, and he would fly home) and increasing volatility made him a liability. Dax, who is a great young man, was sent away to live with another family for the duration of the period the barricades were up, denied the pleasure of friends and subjected to his parents' fraying tempers, forced to see the guitar he slept with destroyed when the house was trashed.
The pride they took in themselves - as good parents, friends, reliable breadwinners, lovers - was eroded. They began to drink too much. They smoked too much. Dave, who would pace the house at night with the family border collie, afraid to sleep lest something happen, used cocaine, stimulants, pills. (When I reported this earlier this week, a furious reader wrote to demand how I could have called them "normal." I told her to try living in a war zone for that long and see how she did.)
They felt ... useless.
They fought: The house meant more to Dana than it did to Dave, and so they fought, in the early days, about whether they should stay or leave. Dana got involved in the local protests, her entrepreneurial spirit kicking in. Dave wanted to lay low. They snapped at one another and at Dax. As Dave said this week, he said things to both the people he loves most that he doesn't even know how to take back.
It would have been tough enough to endure the month or so of the barricades - the constant gnawing tensions as they had their car searched and had to show native-issued "passports" just to go to their home - but what compounded the injury done to them was the failure of the state to act to protect them.
After the failed OPP raid, the government or the OPP made a policy decision that the police would not go back onto the Douglas Creek Estates; as Gwen Boniface, then the OPP commissioner, testified in pretrial discovery, portions read in last week, that situation hasn't changed to this date.
The result was that the natives were emboldened, enabled: They threw a car over an overpass; burned a bridge; destroyed a hydro transformer; held two out-of-town police officers hostage for at least two hours - all events Ms. Boniface confirmed she knew about.
Dave and Dana, like everyone else in town, either watched or heard about these occurrences. Their lives were controlled by those who held two visiting cops hostage and who either got away without being charged or appeared to get away without being charged. If that had been you, wouldn't you have worried what the natives could do to you?
It is evident already that the government defence of this disgraceful conduct will be threefold: One, native land-claim issues require delicate handling and if the assertion of a land-claim right turns violent, traditional policing (i.e., immediate arrests and law enforcement) cannot be used; two, if the natives terrorized Dave and Dana, the government is not responsible; three, Dave and Dana, in their fury, sometimes acted badly and provoked the natives.
That defence is also disgraceful.
Ontario and its police force acted with this family as a mother who learns about incest in her home, under her roof, slaps the child and calls her a liar. The state - Dalton McGuinty's government and Gwen Boniface's (and later Julian Fantino's) OPP - denied Dave and Dana the truth of what they all knew was happening to this family: They had been deemed acceptable collateral damage and to this day no one in authority will admit it.
Shame on them, and shame on the rest of us if we don't call them on it, shouting from the rooftops.