December 5, 2009
As a Caledonia, Ont., couple living next door to a sometimes-violent native occupation felt increasingly beleaguered and alone, the Ontario government was throwing money around and dispatching officials in what appears to have been an attempt to dignify lawlessness with bureaucracy.
The information emerged in Ontario Superior Court here yesterday as government lawyer David Feliciant cross-examined Dana Chatwell, who with her family is suing Queen's Park and the Ontario Provincial Police for leaving them unpoliced and unprotected for much of the almost four-year-long occupation.
Ms. Chatwell, her husband Dave Brown and their son Dax live in a house uniquely located near the former Douglas Creek Estate, a development seized in February of 2006 by natives from the nearby Six Nations reserve in protest of an unsettled land claim.
The family's home, where they live to this day, is bordered on two sides by the still-occupied site.
Using a number of documents - so-called "information sheets" and letters handed out by government officials to Caledonia residents, though Ms. Chatwell said she had never seen them before - Mr. Feliciant revealed that in addition to Ontario spending about $12-million to buy the site from the developer in July of 2006, the government also set up a $1.4-million "business recovery fund" for local businesses adversely affected by the occupation and a $100,000 counselling program for all Caledonia residents, including natives.
As well, Mr. Feliciant revealed that the government hired an archaeology firm to conduct "a survey for possible burial" sites on the DCE property, and was regularly testing local water.
Asked about the water testing, Ms. Chatwell replied smartly, "I was aware of threats of them [the natives] poisoning the water, so I knew they'd be testing the water."
She seemed unmoved by the sheets Mr. Feliciant showed her, grinned as he pointed to the various committees the government created - the "main table" negotiating team; the "Archaeology and Appearance Side Table"; the Community Advisory Group, or CAG - and at one point described it all as "the same old bullcrap."
Mr. Feliciant's point was that since Ms. Chatwell, who was forced to close her successful home hairdressing salon, had received $16,775 in 2006 from the business-recovery fund and an additional $6,000 the next year and met some of the myriad government officials, "it would be an exaggeration to say the provincial government has done nothing for you."
"I still think the government hasn't done enough," Ms. Chatwell snapped. "I would say they haven't done their job."
She also told Mr. Feliciant that the government had "given natives $200,000 for a [legal] defence fund" for those charged with offences; she started selling T-shirts and tuques and even held a dance to raise money for Caledonia residents who were similarly charged, several in relation to their trying to carry a Canadian flag down the town's main street.
Mr. Feliciant neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such a defence fund.
Ms. Chatwell said that where her husband "wanted to be the quiet one" and lie low, she got involved in local rallies and even formed a little group of her own, Caledonians Against Injustice, in support of a friend who set up a "smoke shop" and was charged by the OPP, this after natives had set up similar shops nearby.
While Ms. Chatwell agreed with Mr. Feliciant that in recent years there have been fewer confrontations with protesters on the site, she said the harassment, even if of the passive variety, continues to this day. "Even today," she said, "there are hydro towers at the entrance to DCE, two security vehicles at the hydro substation [where natives had destroyed a transformer during the most violent period of the occupation], and hydro towers by the [native] smoke shacks."
Ms. Chatwell was born and raised in Caledonia, and has three half-native stepsisters, the youngest of whom was raised with her, the two others who moved in as teenagers. "We all got along," she told Judge Thomas Bielby earlier this week. "There was no native issue in the house at all."
She said that when a judge's order that would have seen the protesters evicted was read aloud to protesters back in the early spring of 2006, her relatives watched - among them her nieces and nephews, "and they're one-quarter native," who stood on the roof of her house, carrying Canadian flags.
Instead, on April 20 that year, when the OPP went onto the site to carry out the order, as many as 1,000 natives poured into the area, and the police were swiftly repelled.
The natives immediately threw up barricades, blocking public roads leading into the site, and thus began, according to Ms. Chatwell and Mr. Brown, who testified earlier, a period marked by acts of violence, daily intimidation and rising ugliness.
She and Mr. Brown reacted very differently to the stress of living surrounded by the often-furious natives.
While both testified to feeling betrayed by the OPP, who after the failed raid almost never entered the site and refused to police in any fashion that would be recognizable to most Ontarians, Ms. Chatwell fought back, while Mr. Brown seemed to deteriorate internally. He lost his job, began using drugs, and clearly felt emasculated by his helplessness and inability to protect his family; she alternated between confronting natives and the police, who so often stood by, and taking to her couch, unable sometimes to summon the energy to dress or brush her teeth.
She was a ferocious witness, a fact Mr. Feliciant seemed to recognize when he broached, timidly, the matter of marital trouble - suggesting that if their marriage has collapsed under the strain of the occupation, it was hardly healthy before.
"There's been some infidelity?" he asked.
"Yes," Ms. Chatwell snapped, then said, "Are you trying ... " Mr. Feliciant interrupted her and said he asked the questions. As is her wont, Ms. Chatwell then took the bull by the horns and said, "My infidelity, yes, it happened. I've not been the perfect wife."
Mr. Feliciant didn't say if the government had a committee for that.