National Post - Nov. 28, 2009
Nothing symbolizes the pathetic gutlessness of Dalton McGuinty's government, or that of the provincial police force that is nominally sworn to protect the province's residents, than the saga now playing out in a Hamilton courtroom. The fate of a lawless Ontario enclave, it seems, now rests not with the province's politicians or its police, but with a pair of scrappy Caledoni litigants who have the guts to take a stand.
What has become glaringly obvious in their civil suit against the Ontario government and Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) is that within that province there are two tiers of justice, a preferential one for aboriginals and another, lower tier for non-natives. This unequal treatment throws the justice system into disrepute. The dangerous message it sends is that, in some cases, whites seeking justice against aboriginals have no choice but to take the law into their own hands.
The disparity was never more obvious than at the trial on Thursday in Hamilton. There, the court was shown two videos, one of a non-native march through the small town last May, and another of a march by the Mohawk Warrior Society and its supporters down the same street a few months later.
Police stopped the first protest cold. When a non-aboriginal marcher attempted to defy officers and stride ahead anyway, he was arrested. The non-native marchers said they merely wanted to wave the Canadian flag along main street. After three years of a land-claims siege on the town outskirts, they were tired of seeing only the flags of the Six Nations Mohawk reserve or the grandiosely self-styled "Warrior" Society. They merely wanted to fly the Maple Leaf, and thereby disabuse locals of the (not unnatural) conclusion that their area had been turned over de jure to the local native thugs. No matter: The OPP refused to let their demonstration proceed.
Yet, six weeks later, a dozen or so Warriors marched through town, along the very same street, followed by their supporters driving pickups, all waving only Mohawk flags. There at the head of the procession was an OPP cruiser, lights flashing, clearing the way for the aboriginal protesters.
The Mohawks were even seen waving Canadian flags with the Maple Leafs cut out of the centre. These flags were then tossed in mud without consequence.
The message, even if unintended, was clear: The OPP is there for the Mohawks, but not Caledonia's other residents.
Throughout this siege, which began in February 2006, when a group of Mohawks took over the Douglas Creek Estates subdivision as part of a land-claims dispute, the squatters and their supporters have got away with behaving lawlessly. They chased the OPP from the site in April 2006, burned a wooden trestle bridge to the ground, erected tire barricades across municipal streets and set the tires ablaze, pushed a minivan off an overpass and destroyed a power company transformer. They roughed up an elderly couple who inadvertently crossed their path, assaulted a television news camera crew they believed had taken footage of them being violent, and even stole a police vehicle and attempted to run down an OPP officer.
Rather than punish the Warriors, the Ontario government has rewarded them. It bought the subdivision at an inflated price in the summer of 2006 and has permitted the squatters to continue their occupation ever since -- an escapade that now resembles, to outward appearances, a bunch of homeless squatters entrenched in an abandoned building. (As one can imagine, all this is doing wonders for property values.) Meanwhile, it has left non-aboriginal neighbours -- such as Dave Brown and Dana Chatwell, the pair who brought the current lawsuit -- to fend for themselves.
The trouble with all this is that ordinary citizens see through this charade. They know that political correctness and the fear of being labelled racist is what lie behind the timid, unequal actions of politicians and police.
The OPP and Dalton McGuinty's provincial government don't even have the courage to decide who has the authority to act decisively to protect local citizens. For all anyone knows, Caledonia will still be a Third World zone a decade from now.
If the Ontario government does not want more lawsuits, bad publicity, and open invitations to illegality, it needs to do just one thing: Enforce the laws of the land. Act swiftly against non-natives who break the law around the siege in Caledonia.