Nov. 27, 2009
About six weeks after the OPP refused to allow a Caledonia residents group to march down the town's main street carrying a Canadian flag and even arrested one man for doing it, the same police force gave a respectful, lights-flashing escort to native protesters who did precisely the same thing while carrying flags of the Mohawk Warriors.
The jarring and undeniable contrast in the force's approach to policing the two marches is evident in videotapes played yesterday at the lawsuit of Dave Brown and Dana Chatwell now being heard before Mr. Justice Thomas Bielby of Ontario Superior Court.
The judge has already heard that one senior OPP officer involved in the Caledonia crisis describes the Warriors as an organization akin to the Hells Angels, whose members are usually armed.
Mr. Brown and his family, whose home is bordered on two sides by the former Douglas Creek Estates development seized by Six Nations protesters almost four years ago, are suing the OPP and the Ontario government for a total of $7-million.
Ironically given the tale of the tapes, a central allegation of the lawsuit is that though natives routinely behaved with criminal recklessness that sometimes turned violent, the OPP refused to police them in any recognizable fashion, leaving Mr. Brown and his family essentially on their own.
The two marches happened May 24 and July 15 this year in the small Southwestern Ontario town, just south of Hamilton, which has been in the headlines off and on since protesters first seized the DCE site in February of 2006.
Mr. Brown, a 42-year-old former heavy-equipment operator who yesterday completed almost five days in aggressive cross-examination, videotaped both events.
As he told government lawyer David Feliciant at one point, he was "trying to prove that natives can protest whenever they want and fly their flags whenever they want.
"They're a proud nation," he said. "I don't have a problem with that."
But when Mr. Feliciant suggested that he and town residents should have considered that flying a Canadian flag so near to the DCE site might provoke "a negative response" from the natives, Mr. Brown snapped, "Counsellor, it seems to me any decision I make is going to upset the protesters.
"I've talked to numerous politicians and they all say 'we don't want to upset the natives.'
"Well, look at them," he said, gesturing to the TV monitor where the tape was playing. "They're already pissed off, and I don't blame them - I'm fighting my own land claim right now."
But he added, "All we're trying to do is carry a Canadian flag and hang it proudly. Our soldiers are dying for that flag."
The first march saw town residents - infuriated after years of seeing Six Nations and Warriors flags flying not only on the occupied land but also on adjacent roads and telephone poles - try to march down Argyle Street from the local Canadian Tire to the highway bypass.
The OPP was prepared, and had gathered nearby in significant numbers with enormous resources. As Mr. Brown's tape reveals, there were dozens of cruisers and even the force's helicopter in the air.
The protesters were stopped and held back before they reached the DCE site, and when Randy Fleming, carrying a Canadian flag, dared step onto the site, he was immediately arrested by about a half-dozen officers - who barely got to him before a group of natives.
Though Mr. Fleming didn't appear to resist, he was roughly put to the ground, with one officer keeping a knee to the back of his head while another handcuffed him behind his back and put him smartly into a cruiser.
The native march - on the same stretch of Argyle Street, though in fact they had started walking in nearby Hagersville - couldn't have been more different.
About a half-dozen protesters, walking in the centre of the road and carrying both Six Nations and Warrior flags, were preceded by an OPP cruiser, lights flashing; clearly, this was an OPP-approved gathering.
Behind the marchers was a procession of at least a dozen vehicles, some bearing Warrior flags on their grills, others with Warrior flags hanging out the windows. At the entrance to the DCE site, police blocked traffic for the procession, and, after a time, the OPP took their leave.
One officer even waved a cheery goodbye.
"Aaaah," Ms. Chatwell could be heard bitterly saying on the tape, "they even waved at them. Isn't that special?"
The marches were held on the same street blockaded for about six weeks in the spring of '06 after the OPP made its one and only significant foray onto the DCE site and tried to execute a court order requiring the protesters to leave.
But the police were repelled by protesters, whose numbers had swelled to an estimated 1,000.
In the aftermath, in addition to erecting three barricades, including the major one on Argyle Street, natives burned a wooden bridge to the ground, threw a vehicle off an overpass and destroyed a hydro transformer.
None of these events - nor other violent incidents where, for instance, natives followed curious bystanders looking into the site into town and terrorized them - are in dispute at the trial.
The first tape, of the aborted residents' protest, is 70 minutes long, and is a stunning indictment of the effects of years of the OPP's two-tier policing, one for natives and one for non-natives.
The bitterness between the two groups is evident, with stare-downs and shouting regularly occurring, and both residents and natives dramatically overreacting to perceived slights. When Mr. Fleming was arrested, for instance, a resident could be heard predicting, "They're gonna torture him," and another asking, "Why are they doing this to him?" and someone else replying, "Because he's Canadian."
No one appears to recognize the truth of it more than the very decent Mr. Brown himself, who at one point yesterday, seeming near to tears, told Mr. Feliciant, "This video shows you the hatred that has happened over this the last four years ... I'm just appalled at what's transpiring there."
Later, in re-examination by his lawyer, John Evans, Mr. Brown was even more eloquent: "You never get used to the ugliness, to the hatred of this whole deal. I don't know where it came from. I don't believe I started it, but I'm definitely caught up in it."
The trial resumes Monday.