By Greg Mercer, Record staff
WATERLOO — Less than a month after protesters derailed Christie Blatchford’s plans to talk at the University of Waterloo, she was finally allowed to speak last night – flanked by dozens of police officers standing watch.
In what may be the tightest security ever for a book signing on the UW campus, the author and journalist chided the protester who called her a racist and “Nazi apologizer” on Nov. 12, when three people chained themselves to the stage.
“God bless Dan Kellar. Driving up book sales wherever he goes,” Blatchford said afterward, in reference to the UW student who led the protests.
This time around, a small group of protesters couldn’t even get inside the building and were sent home before Blatchford began speaking. Kellar said through Twitter that he had been threatened with trespassing charges and kicked off campus for picketing.
That left the Globe and Mail columnist free to promote her book, Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us, her account of the four-year standoff over native land claims in Caledonia.
She didn’t pull any punches. She said non-natives need to stop “cowering at the altar of native self-determination.” The election of former OPP chief Julian Fantino – who she blames for abandoning the rule of law in Caledonia – to a federal seat in Vaughan “makes me want to slit my wrists,” she said.
And she dismissed calls for her to examine her own “guilty history as a white settler” as “so much unmitigated crap.”
What she did, Blatchford said, was write a story that has been ignored by the national press – of a small town where residents were harassed and intimidated by native occupiers while police turned a blind eye.
No one wants to talk about natives behaving badly, she said. It doesn’t fit with the one-dimensional picture of Canada’s First Nations as constant victims.
“Aboriginals are fully human and complete and sometimes, too, they can be the perpetrator and the villain,” she said.
Blatchford said she was no scholar on native history, and agreed Canada’s natives have often received the “short end of the stick” in dealing with the government. She criticized the “glacial” pace of land claim negotiations, the legacy of residential schools and the deplorable conditions of Canada’s reserves.
Her book upset people by criticizing the province and the police for letting natives overrun a suburb development and “scaring the hell” out of the residents who lived nearby, she said.
“So what did I do to be on the receiving end of all this hullabaloo? Oh yes, I wrote a book,” she said.
The University of Waterloo was deeply embarrassed by the protest that chased Blatchford away Nov. 12, and was not going to be upstaged on this night.
Campus police and officers from the Waterloo Regional Police guarded every entrance to the theatre and at several checkpoints leading into the building. More still patrolled the grounds outside. Two officers stood on either side of the stage as Blatchford spoke, and flanked her while she signed books afterward.
Blatchford said she was “stunned” by what happened on Nov. 12
“I never expected that anyone would try and shut me down, and chant ‘racist’ at the stage where I was expected to be,” she said. “I think the university was much better prepared this time and it was much better test of their commitment to freedom of expression.”
Before her talk, the crowd was told police would remove anyone who tried to stop Blatchford from speaking.
Her return generated significant interest. Tickets sold out by noon Monday, and the roughly 300-seat Theatre of the Arts was almost filled to capacity.
Had the lawlessness in Caledonia been covered by the mainstream media, she never would have needed to write her book, Blatchford said.
“This is something I think Canadians need to know about,” she said.