Adrian Humphreys, National Post Published: Monday, November 23, 2009
HAMILTON - The government of Ontario was accused of "trial by ambush" in its defence of a 7-million lawsuit filed by a Caledonia couple over the lack of law enforcement during the acrimonious native occupation.
Two boxes stuffed with OPP reports were delivered to the lawyers for David Brown and Dana Chatwell just before their suit started in Ontario Superior Court, leaving little time for reviewing them, said their lawyer, John Evans.
"It's trial by ambush -- we gave that up 20 years ago... It's coming out of the bushes," Mr. Evans complained to Justice Thomas Bielby.
"What they are being used for is to unsettle the witness. It's not fair."
Mr. Evan's objection to the late disclosure came as Crown lawyer David Feliciant started reading from an OPP report about a meeting with Mr. Brown.
While the report was eventually allowed into the court record, Judge Bielby remains concerned about how long it took the government to turn over the reports and notes of the OPP officers involved in the dispute.
"I would like an explanation as to why these were released so late in the day... These should have been the first things to release," Justice Bielby told Mr. Feliciant.
The often-violent confrontations between natives and Caledonia residents started in earnest on April 20, 2006, when the OPP raided a 70-acre site, which was being developed into a residential subdivision, to eject natives two months after they first occupied it to protest land-claim grievances.
Hundreds of natives from a nearby reserve returned to the site that day, many of them masked and armed with bats, axes and hockey sticks.
The natives repelled the police, reclaimed the site and set up roadblocks along the access street, trapping the Brown house, the only home on the native side of the barricade. Court heard earlier that OPP officers would not breach the native's barricade, even in the face of frantic 9-1-1 phone calls.
The civil trial continues this afternoon.