Nov. 26, 2009
More than two years ago, the Caledonia family now suing the Ontario government and the OPP offered to drop their lawsuit if their MPP, Dave Levac, would personally talk to Premier Dalton McGuinty about finding them an escape route out of the war zone in which they were living.
"I offered to drop the lawsuit if he'd talk to [Mr.] McGuinty," a furious Dave Brown yesterday told Ontario Superior Court Judge Thomas Bielby here, where the lawsuit is being heard.
Mr. Brown said Mr. Levac, the chief government whip, later reported back that he'd talked to the Premier and that Mr. McGuinty "told him he'd love to sweep this [presumably Mr. Brown's situation] under the rug."
Mr. Brown took great comfort from the reported remark, and was so excited he even told his wife, "I really think we're outta here," meaning he hoped Mr. Levac's intervention would result in the government buying them out of their house, located cheek-by-jowl to the former development site which was seized by natives from the Six Nations reserve in February, 2006, and has been occupied by them ever since.
The family claims they were abandoned by the government and the OPP and much of the evidence is virtually uncontested - that harassment of the family by native occupiers was a regular, sometimes violent, occurrence and that the police took a hands-off approach.
By the summer of 2007, Mr. Brown was, as he has acknowledged, all but disintegrating under the relentless pressure of being surrounded by protesters, sometimes masked, who routinely trespassed onto his property and intimidated his family.
Mr. Levac later reported back to him that someone from Mr. McGuinty's office - his chief of staff, Mr. Brown thought - put the kibosh on any purported deal, saying "the matter was before the courts and we're going to have to go this route."
Mr. Brown was being questioned by government lawyer David Feliciant about a threat he made at the time that he was going to go to Queen's Park and "take a run at McGuinty and punch that idiot out like a schoolboy."
Mr. Brown said he didn't remember the details of what he said but recalled "wanting to go there [to Queen's Park] ..." At the time, he said, it had been two years since the occupation began, and he was desperate for an out.
"I'm not a terrorist," he said. "I didn't want to go and shoot [Mr.] McGuinty. ... But my family has been threatened hundreds of times, and I believe it's my right to question the decisions of politicians."
He admitted he had a lot of "bad dreams and nightmares about Dalton McGuinty. I'd written him personally ... no response from my leader, that I voted for, in two years?"
The OPP, revealed in court as having what can only be called a minimalist, laissez-faire approach to native crime, acted swiftly and interviewed Mr. Brown, eventually determining he wouldn't carry out his threat.
The judge has already heard that about a year later, Mr. Brown also threatened to put a steak knife in the heart of another government lawyer, Dennis Brown, whom he mistakenly believed was making all the decisions in the case. Mr. Brown was actually charged in that instance, though the matter was resolved with a peace bond.
What he said yesterday about that incident - "What I said about Dennis Brown, that was not me; I don't do that" - appears to apply to other instances where this normally polite 42-year-old man was so distressed he utterly lost his cool.
Even well into 2008, Mr. Brown and his family were still being harassed by natives, and as he said once yesterday, he was so weary of what he saw when he looked around his home - Mohawk Warrior flags; a Canadian flag flying on the Douglas Creek Estates site upside down, the leaf cut out, and an RCMP action figure doll hanging, a noose around the neck, from a TV antenna.
"It may be I thought if they [the authorities] thought I was going crazy, they'd get me out of there," he said yesterday.
It appears there are government fingerprints all over this file.
Mr. Brown had dealings, directly or indirectly, with a variety of government representatives - John Burke, then the deputy municipal affairs and housing minister and apparently part of the Caledonia negotiating team; Roger Moyer, a senior adviser in the same ministry, and Jane Stewart, a former federal Indian affairs minister who was for about a year Ontario's chief negotiator on the Caledonia problem.
Mr. Burke told Mr. Brown, he said, that "he had a lot of leeway with us" and that the family should try to look for another home. There was even discussion of the government providing a second vehicle for the family if they had to drive their teenage son Dax farther to school.
This discussion was formalized in a letter of Jan. 5, 2007, to the family's former lawyer, a letter Judge Bielby yesterday ruled was an offer to settle part of the lawsuit and therefore inadmissible at trial. Mr. Feliciant had argued the letter countered the mistaken impression the government "did absolutely nothing" to alleviate Mr. Brown's situation.
But the judge described it merely as offer of assistance to "move out of the house for some period of time."