Monday, January 10, 2011
Western Standard
Well, look who showed up in Stephen Harper's cabinet last week:
Former Ontario Provincial Police commissioner Julian Fantino, who narrowly won the GTA seat of Vaughan for the Tories just five weeks ago, was handed the junior cabinet post of Minister of State for Seniors.
[…]
The seniors portfolio gives Mr. Fantino a high-profile perch from which to address older Canadians, who tend to be among the most active voters in federal politics.
“Canada’s seniors will be in good hands, thanks to the experience he has accumulated and the judgment he has demonstrated over his long and illustrious career of public service,” Mr. Harper said of the former officer of the law.
Well perhaps not all seniors.
Take the case of Kathe and Guenter Golke, a couple in their late sixties who drove past the disputed Douglas Creek Estate, near Caledonia, in June of 2006. Their country pleasure drive provoked the wrath of some of the occupiers, who chased them to the parking lot of a local Canadian Tire Store.
An OPP officer took the couple into his cruiser for protection, and later to a police substation. Guenter Golke, a diabetic, was soon after transferred to a hospital for an irregular heart beat. The couple's car was stolen - likely in the presence of OPP officers - by some of the occupiers and taken for a joy ride. The car was returned to the Golkes two days later, with some three thousand dollars in damage. No one has been charged with the theft.
This is just one of the stories documented in Christie Blatchford's book Helpless. It is one of many incidents during the Caledonia Crisis when Canadian seniors, and Caledonia residents of all ages, were abandoned by the OPP.
Julian Fantino became OPP Commissioner in October of 2006, months after the Golke's ordeal. This was not, however, an isolated car theft, beneath the attention of an OPP Commissioner. Nor was it a bit of adolescent carousing gone too far. Within the context of the Caledonia Crisis, it was a brazen act of anarchy.
The occupiers of the Douglas Creek Estates were testing the resolve of the OPP and found it wanting. While an attempted flag raising provoked the wrath of Julian Fantino, the attack on Kathe and Guenter Golke seems to have escaped his notice. The assaults on the home of Dave Brown and Dana Chatwell, which did take place during his tenure as Commissioner, attracted little of his time or attention.
This is the man Stephen Harper has chosen to represent Canada's seniors at the cabinet table. When real Canadian seniors were in harm's way, Julian Fantino placed politics above policing. When Caledonia's children were threatened, Julian Fantino did not act. When his duty demanded that he enforce the laws of Canada, he failed to act. This has been documented in news reports stretching back over more than four years. It has been documented in footage shot by local television stations. The events have been carefully shifted by Christie Blatchford in her book Helpless.
Perhaps the greatest scandal of the Caledonia Crisis is not the hypocrisy of our political class (which is to be expected), or the failure of will on the part of the upper branches of the OPP, but the media's dereliction of duty. We are solemnly told, most often by journalists themselves, that they have a duty to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." They declare themselves the conscience of the nation and watchdog of the state.
The recent appointment of Julian Fantino to Cabinet has generated little mention of Caledonia. Instead there have been exhaustive discussions of the appointment's political implications. Many are hailing the appointment as a decisive step in the Prime Minister's quest for a majority government. A dozen more seats will give him, and his party, the power they've sought for two decades.
Perhaps Stephen Harper will succeed in winning his majority. If he does, it will be due to the ignorance of the Canadian people. Our corps of investigative journalists, always ready to chase down a crooked used car dealer, seem completely uninterested in how a top level police officer, now a minister of state, failed to do his job.
Omissions of this kind are never accidental. Instead of outraged editorials about Fantino's Caledonia record, we are treated to semi-coherent ramblings about how the new minister is unlikely to mandate ground floor washrooms in new homes. Had the current Canadian MSM been around in the spring of 1940, they would have been filling detailed stories on how the Blitzkrieg was adversely impacting the wildlife of northwestern Europe, with a small line item about the fall of Paris.
Had the people of Vaughan been fully aware of Julian Fantino's conduct as OPP Commissioner, it's almost certain he would have remained a private citizen. The journalists of another era would have shown their readers the extent of the Caledonia tragedy. The people of Vaughan have remained in ignorance and so Fantino now sits in Cabinet, a useful political prop for the ambitions of an opportunistic Prime Minister.
There is a Caledonia Conspiracy. It is not a conspiracy of business suited men in back rooms, which would long ago have been exposed. It is an example of the most powerful type of conspiracy, that of ideas. Just as the OPP's two-tier policing was a product of reverse-racism, so too has been the two-tier reporting of Caledonia.
There have been honourable exceptions to this silence. But far too few. If Canada's journalists are unwilling to find and fight for the truth, even at the expense of questioning their own politically correct assumptions, Douglas Creek Estates will be only the beginning. There will be many more Caledonias, and many more Julian Fantinos.