Indians and Ipperwash

Andrew Coyne notes what Mike Harris did not do and what the Indians did do(read the end part at p.3 on the excruciating land claims process):

..."In my view," Justice Sidney Linden wrote in his report, "although premier Harris was critical of the police, I do not find that he interfered with or gave inappropriate directions to the police at Ipperwash. The premier did not inappropriately direct the OPP on its operations at Ipperwash or enter the law enforcement domain of the police."

In other words, on the central issue before the inquiry, the Liberals' main charge against Mr. Harris was found to be utterly baseless. Yet if you learned that at all from most news reports, it was somewhere around paragraph 19, below a lengthy description of Mr. McGuinty's apology to the George family "on behalf of the people of Ontario" and amid speculation over whether Mr. Harris would offer one of his own. Score another one for Liberal media management.

[...]

...the police badly mishandled the occupation, yes. But had this particular group of natives not taken it into their heads to break the law, defy their band council, and seize the provincial park, they would never have come into conflict with the police. Yet throughout his report, Judge Linden takes the existence of this and other such native occupations as a given.

They simply "occur," as if by acts of God, rather than being the result of conscious decisions by morally responsible adults. At no time does he call into question the advisability of such a strategy, let alone its acceptability in a democratic and law-abiding state.

Indeed, by his silence, he implicitly ratifies it. What we have here is nothing less than the normalization of lawlessness, the legitimization of violence as a means of political protest. And by a judge! Native radicals elsewhere can only take the appropriate cues, and be emboldened...

As for the future:

By Terry Nelson's calculations, Canada's security forces don't stand a chance if the summer turns hot and nasty.

The native leader figures that in Winnipeg, the car theft capital of Canada, there's no shortage of abandoned vehicles to set alight across train tracks that haul resources to the United States.

"There's 30,000 miles of railway lines in this country and more than 50,000 miles of (oil and gas) pipelines," says Nelson, chief of the Anishinabe First Nation, south of Winnipeg.

"The reality is that there's no army that can actually protect all of that. Not the United States army, not the Canadian army, not any."..

Mark C.

Posted by markc at June 3, 2007 10:14 AM