Native occupiers broke the law, sometimes violently right under police noses.
Often, even in the face of egregious law-breaking, the police simply did nothing.
But non-native citizens who objected -- or God forbid, took to the streets
to protest the uneven treatment and their abandonment by the state --
were treated by the police as instigators, and arrested,
for daring to assert their rights to freedom of speech and expression.
CANADA COPS HELP INDIANS HURT WHITES
And when the police belatedly deigned to enforce a court order
to remove the native occupiers,
they were driven off the site by a mob of natives
(many armed with bats, axes, shovels and the like),
with their tails between their legs.
It was an astonishing decimation of the rule of law that went on for years,
with the police and government both denying
the truth of what citizens saw daily with their own eyes.
Judge rebukes police for putting 'demands of Native occupiers' over other Canadians
by Christie Blatchford, National Post, Oct 10, 2016
More than 10 years after the oft-violent native occupation of the Douglas Creek Estates housing site began in Caledonia, Ontario, a judge has given teeth to the claim that the Ontario Provincial Police engaged in "two-tiered" law enforcement that favoured occupiers over non-native residents. "The OPP acted in accordance with a framework to put the demands of the occupiers ahead of the rights of other Canadian citizens", Ontario Superior Court Judge Kim Carpenter-Gunn said in part last month. Her decision was given orally from the bench on September 22, 2016. Postmedia has obtained a transcript.
The case was a civil lawsuit against the OPP and six of its members filed by Randy Fleming, a 55-year-old retired steelworker and long-time resident of the picturesque small town south of Hamilton. On May 24, 2009, Fleming had attempted to walk peacefully, carrying a Canadian flag, up the main Caledonia street to a so-called "flag rally", the first time since the occupation had begun that the police were going to allow the maple leaf to be raised anywhere near Douglas Creek Estates -- often referred to as DCE -- lest the mere sight of it inflame the occupiers. But as he approached the entrance to DCE, three OPP vans drove past him, turned around and then drove toward him, forcing him to clamber into a ditch and then up to the higher ground of the occupied site, whereupon he was forcibly taken to the ground by a half-dozen officers, his left elbow and nerves permanently injured, and then arrested. The judge came down strongly on Fleming's side -- awarding him a total of almost $300,000 in general and special damages and legal costs, proclaiming him a credible witness who had handled both the chronic pain and simmering rage that were the residue of his arrest with stoic grace and finding the OPP had been "very heavy-handed" and that several officers were evasive or not believable in their evidence.
Carpenter-Gunn found that Fleming had done nothing wrong, let alone illegal, and that the police had breached his Charter and common-law rights "in order to appease certain unidentified Aboriginal individuals who may have been involved in the occupation of DCE". In the end, she said, the police falsely arrested and unlawfully imprisoned Fleming. All he'd done, she said, "was to stand peacefully and alone with the Canadian flag, on a piece of public land in Canada, potentially angering a group of people (the native occupiers) who were about 100 metres away". Ironically, the judge said, there were only 20 or so native occupiers at the main gate that day, and only about half of them even noticed Fleming's approach and moved towards him. None of them was armed, and none carried weapons. And though two officers testified that if "there was a threat of violence at all, it was coming from the native occupiers", the judge said unequivocally if the police hadn't interfered with Fleming's quiet walk, "he would simply have passed in front of DCE and moved onto the flag-raising event". In other words, she said, it was the conduct of the police in "driving directly" at Fleming that forced him to leave the shoulder of the road and "walk a few feet onto what may have been DCE land".
If the decision was a tremendous personal victory for the tenacious Fleming and his lawyer Michael Bordin, it also offered in microcosm a vindication for many in Caledonia. From the moment the occupation began on February 28, 2006, when a handful of protesters from the nearby Six Nations [Indian] reserve walked onto DCE, the OPP policed as they had never policed before: Native occupiers broke the law, sometimes violently right under police noses, with arrests, when they were made, not made contemporaneously but weeks or months later. Often, even in the face of egregious law-breaking, the OPP simply did nothing. But non-native citizens who objected -- or God forbid, took to the streets to protest the uneven treatment and their abandonment by the state -- were treated by the OPP as instigators, and arrested, as Fleming was, for daring to assert their rights to freedom of speech and expression. Roads were blocked, bridges and cars burned, the residents who lived on roads around DCE at one point actually issued "passports" by masked occupiers and forced to show them to enter their property. A Hydro One transformer station was vandalized and set on fire, knocking out power to almost 8,000 people in the area. And when the OPP belatedly deigned to enforce a court order to remove the occupiers, they were driven off the site by a mob of natives, many armed with bats, axes, shovels and the like, with their tails between their legs. It was an astonishing decimation of the rule of law that went on for years, with the OPP and Ontario government both denying the truth of what citizens saw daily with their own eyes.
Even Fleming's arrest was a joke, with the OPP saying they'd arrested him to prevent a breach of the peace or because he'd breached the peace, but actually charging him with obstructing a police officer. Fleming appeared in court 12 times to defend himself against the charge (those legal fees of almost $13,000 were part of the damages the judge awarded) only to see the Crown withdraw the charges 19 months later.
The flag rally on the day when Fleming was arrested was, he testified, a response to the fact that until that date, "no one had been allowed to put up a Canadian flag on Argyle Street", though the flag of the Mohawk Warriors flew all that time on DCE. The Canadian flag meant something to Fleming: He'd been told stories by his father and grandparents about the First and Second World Wars and, the judge found, he was "sincere regarding his respect for the flag". As Christine McHale, a veteran in Caledonia's fight for fair policing, said this week, "At least Randy Fleming and the rest of our little group can hold our heads high, knowing we did the right thing".
Caledonia natives still calling the shots in land dispute, by Christie Blatchford, NationalPost, May 20, 2014
The Ontario government quietly has agreed to a native demand to put up a fence along one side of the old Douglas Creek Estates site in Caledonia, home to one of the longest-running and most violent aboriginal protests in Canadian history.... For locals who have watched in frustration as the province let the disputed land deteriorate over the years, the fence is both evidence that the natives are still calling the shots and an unsettling glimpse of the likely future of the disputed land.
The Ontario government bought Douglas Creek Estates from the developer for $15.8-million of public money in June of 2006 -- in exchange, protesters dismantled the barricades, though the dispute and the violence certainly didn't end then. This was four months after protesters from the nearby Six Nations reserve first marched onto the land, then under development as a residential subdivision, with a dozen or so homes in various stages of construction.... But in the intervening years, absolutely nothing has happened to the land itself, which abuts main street in the small town south of Hamilton and sits as an infamous eyesore, even with a vandalized Hydro tower, once used to block the road, still on the property. A native guard lives in one of the former Estates homes, and the site effectively remains a no-go area for non-natives and even the police. In addition, as local Hamilton station CHCH TV first reported last month and has been confirmed since by Infrastructure Ontario, taxpayers have forked out an additional $1.5-million in other costs -- payments in lieu of taxes to Haldimand County, utilities and unspecified site-management costs....
The fence is slated to be erected along Thistlemoor Drive, which backs directly onto the western edge of the Estates. In the active days of the occupation, the street was designated as a "hot spot" by the Ontario Provincial Police. It was from Thistlemoor where an OPP officer, two USA Border Patrol agents and one Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive agent were first boxed in by trucks and surrounded by about 15 natives. One of the lawmen ended up in hand-to-hand combat with a native man, while another native drove away in a police vehicle, nearly running over the OPP officer in the process, who was dragged to safety only in the nick of time. The police vehicle was returned about two hours later, stripped of its equipment and with the contents of a portable toilet having been dumped inside.... In the hands-off fashion of OPP policing back then, eight people were eventually arrested -- in one case, more than a year later -- and charged with a variety of offences. Only two did any significant jail time.
Back in the day, Thistlemoor residents felt so abandoned by the police that they set up their own "resident response plan" in case of attack or intimidation. In fact, in 2007-08, they asked the province to put up a fence; they were by this point sick of harassment from natives driving by in their ATVs. But then, the natives didn't support the idea, so the government refused. Now that it's the natives doing the asking, as Mr Hewitt said, the government will build the fence. Natives "want to draw a line in the sand about where the property line is", he said, and his fear is that this is in preparation for the day the land is formally turned over to Six Nations. How galling it is that Ontario is in the midst of another election campaign and yet no party has seized this issue, and the craven government inaction it has come to symbolize, as its own. As it was in 2006, so it is in 2014: Caledonia remains simply too hot to touch.
CANADA COPS HELP INDIANS HURT WHITES
CANADA INDIANS MASSACRE JUSTICE
I WON'T ACCEPT INDIAN BLAME POEM
Various, Oct 13, 2016
Big Brother's Rulers
Judge rebukes police for putting 'demands of native occupiers' over other Canadians, by Christie Blatchford, NationalPost, Oct 10, 2016
CANADA COPS HELP INDIANS HURT WHITES
CANADA INDIANS MASSACRE JUSTICE
ALONE AGAINST TERRORIST INDIANS
INDIAN LAND CLAIMS DISBELIEVED
I WON'T ACCEPT INDIAN BLAME POEM POEM (...Cameras, TVs, fast cars too, are white man's toys, to name a few. You want them all, and that's a fact -- so why don't you pay taxes Mac?...)
Rulers (...Salvation Army, Roman Catholics, Jews, Indians - and other sorts - were lackeys, parasites, flunkies of the ruling class"....")
Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~
email: orwelltoday@gmail.com
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