Caledonia resident Dave Brown launched a lawsuit last December against the Ontario Provincial Police and the provincial government for $7-million, saying his family had been abandoned by the police. The province quietly settled the suit for an undisclosed sum.Glenn Lowson for The Globe and Mail
Now that I've written a whole book about what happened in Caledonia, Ont., starting in February of 2006 and continuing to this day, it's daunting to offer a précis.
But basically it's this: The people of that lovely small town just an hour and change from Toronto were abandoned by their governments, and ultimately by their police force, and left to fend for themselves. The book is about the failure of government to govern, and of leaders to lead.
From the get-go, the federal and provincial governments had adopted a hands-off policy to the occupation. Ottawa didn't even recognize the tenuous land claim that residents of the Six Nations reserve were belatedly making, and deferred to Queen's Park; the Ontario government nonetheless treated the occupation as purely a land claim and somehow, overtly or in the subtle ways that are the hallmark of practised politicians, made its wishes known; the Ontario Provincial Police, first under then-commissioner Gwen Boniface and later under her successor Julian Fantino, now a star candidate for the Stephen Harper Conservatives, obligingly carried that message to the force's rank and file.
The end result was a form of policing that would be simply unrecognizable to Canadians living anywhere else in the country: cops who watched or turned away as the law was broken, sometimes brazenly; cops who appeared to take sides and would take action against only one group of people and not the other; cops who refused to make arrests, conduct investigations or protect the public.
Some of those officers who resisted were either punished, reprimanded or disciplined, with the result that the others lost heart.
Few people are as shamed by Caledonia, sickened by their own impotence, as the men and women of the OPP who worked there regularly.
At one end of the spectrum is a letter written by then-commissioner Fantino in December of 2008.
The occasion was the criminal trial of Clyde Powless, a Six Nations man who had acted as one of the band's spokesmen and liaisons during the most heated period of the occupation.
Mr. Powless was on trial for assaulting a non-native, anti-occupation leader named Gary McHale, an offence to which Mr. Powless pleaded guilty on Dec. 8 that year, and for which he received a conditional discharge.
But on Dec. 4, Commissioner Fantino provided a letter to Mr. Powless's lawyer.
He gave Mr. Powless a ringing endorsement. He blamed the victim, Mr. McHale, for having provoked the assault. "The Honourable Court," he suggested, might want to consider that Mr. Powless had often acted as a peacemaker.
It was extraordinary, and it was official: Ontario's senior law official was not only denouncing the victim of a crime, he was also singing the praises of the assailant to a judge.
At the other end of the spectrum is the event described in the excerpt below, which happened to a Caledonia resident named Dave Brown in May of 2006 - early on in the occupation of the Douglas Creek Estates housing development by protesters from the nearby Six Nations reserve and their supporters.
At this time, protesters had set up barricades to the site, issued makeshift "passports" to the residents, and were occasionally imposing curfews upon them.
This may be the sorriest night of Dave Brown's sorry four years, until his lawsuit against the Ontario government and the OPP was settled out of court in the fall of 2009 and he and his family were finally able to move away from the occupation site.
The very worst of the violence and lawlessness - grossly underreported in the national press - that marked this occupation were still to come, but the ground had been beautifully prepared, the conditions set, which would allow these things and, arguably, enable them.
BOOK EXCERPT: Helpless, by Christie Blatchford
In May of 2006, Dave Brown was still working at the Nicholson and Cates lumberyard, operating the lift truck, still hanging on to the remnants of his old life.
Until the natives moved onto the Douglas Creek Estates and into his yard three months earlier, Brownie, as everyone calls him, was a man so happy in his own skin, his disposition so sunny, that his best friend, Jeff Bird, says he was like a big old Lab, impossible not to love. Brownie liked to party. He loved to barbecue and have friends over; he was the Q King. He worked hard, played hard. He was a loyal and reliable friend, a good teammate and a trusted employee. He loved his glamorous wife, Dana Chatwell, her teenage son, Dax, their border collie, Hunter, and his friends.
I don't want to make Brownie seem unsophisticated - he's not. He has lived and worked in Europe and is bright. But he was a stable man, content with his lot, not locked into the more-is-better cycle. He had all he wanted.
In August of 2005, he and Dana had bought her family house from her dad. Right on the west side of Argyle Street, with commercial zoning, it was perfect for what she had in mind: A hairdresser who once had owned her own business, she had a hankering to do it again. The entrepreneurial spirit ran deep in her. She and Dave sank everything they had into the new house, renovated the lower level to the tune of $30,000 and a lot of their own sweat, and she hung out her Shear Body Sense sign. With five employees, posh new digs and a potential motherlode of new homes and customers coming right next door, things could not have looked rosier.
The house, as OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino was later to acknowledge in court, was "almost within" the occupied site. People on the Sixth Line had more barricades to pass through and nowhere to run when things turned ugly, and there were many more folks directly affected in the Thistlemoor subdivision at the north end of Douglas Creek Estates, but no one lived more intimately with the occupiers than Brownie and his family.
That month, Nicholson and Cates had rented a limo bus, invited some employees to a Blue Jays baseball game in Toronto and laid in some beer and a big buffet for them. Brownie was one of them. It was exactly his sort of night - lots of people, a Jays game at the centre of things, a bit of a road trip and a few pops. He testified about this in the fall of 2009, during his lawsuit against the government, and his delight at the memory even then was evident. The Jays were playing the Los Angeles Angels, and won 5-1. Brownie estimates that, over the course of about seven hours, he had 25 chicken wings, garlic bread and anywhere from seven to nine beers.
The bus pulled into the Nicholson and Cates yard about midnight; he'd invited his friend Harold to stay with him, instead of going to his in-laws' place in town so late. The routine was familiar by now: Dave would stop at the OPP barricade, say he lived in the house on the highway, one of the officers might joke, "I'm sorry to hear that," and off he'd go to the native barricade.
"You know who I am," he told the natives at the barricade. "Going home."
But, one of them replied, tonight there was a curfew, it had come and gone, and he couldn't go through.
"That's not going to happen," Brownie told them. "My wife's at home."
He drove through the tape that was strung across the road and tore home, dragging a pylon.
"They followed me, of course," he testified. "Right away, I was scared. They started yelling at me that the curfew was posted." His friend was disbelieving. "He'd never seen anything like this," Brownie said. Filled with outrage, Harold began yelling at the natives, and got into a shouting match with one of them.
Dana was in their TV room, looking straight into the driveway. She saw Dave fly in, then saw all the lights as ATVs, trucks and a van arrived in hot pursuit. She ran out the front door.
"They all swarmed in," she testified at trial. "An ATV drove by him, smashed a concrete light stand." She was yelling at Harold, "We've never had a curfew!" He stormed off down the road, heading for the police barricade.
"I yelled at Harold not to go," Brownie testified. "It was dangerous."
He told Harold, "Nobody's gonna help you if you get into a confrontation!"
Dana called the OPP, she said, laughing at herself for her folly.
"I don't know why I called the police; I knew they wouldn't come. We knew the police wouldn't come; they would never come through those barricades."
Brownie was wild with rage, as if days of living behind the barricades - having to show a passport; being made to wait, and when he'd ask why, being told, "As long as it takes; it's been 200 years"; watching as occupiers seized groceries and beer from his vehicle - and all the humiliations great and small had loosened some control mechanism in his head.
Then, as the ATVs screamed and circled around Brownie, Brian Skye, a purported native security boss, pulled up. "He told me if I didn't get in his truck, these guys would beat the shit out of me," he told the court. "I looked at Dana, she's scared to death; I'm scared to death. I got in the truck."
Skye drove him to the OPP barricade.
"I just wanted to go home," Brownie said. "I just wanted to go to my home. Of course, I'm irate. I probably called him [the OPP officer]everything but a police officer. 'How can you watch this happen, you useless piece of shit?' I was angry to the point - I don't think I was ever more angry in my life."
He was thrown into a cruiser. At the wheel was Constable Will Lariviere. It was a measure of the one degree of separation that exists in small towns. As Brownie put it, "Before I started dating Dana, he was dating the roommate of the girl I was dating."
Lariviere actually got into an argument with another officer about which of them would drive Brown to the OPP station in Cayuga; Lariviere wanted to do it, because of their previous connection, and he won the day.
The OPP put Brownie in a cell. He was not charged.
"It was a long night for me in that cell," he testified, "knowing Dana was home" alone. He paced and shook. He got no phone call, not even a drink of water.
"Just for trying to go to my own house," he said, "I got thrown in jail."
Every bit of this - the occupiers chasing Brown down because he dared defy a native-imposed curfew and try to go home; the OPP doing nothing to help him or stop the occupiers; his confinement, under threat, by Skye; his arrest without charge - was confirmed by evidence given in discovery by OPP Superintendent John Cain in October of 2008 for the Brown/Chatwell lawsuit.
Early the next morning, a female officer Brownie knew came to let him out. "She's crying," he testified.
Brownie apologized to Will Lariviere; Lariviere kept apologizing back to him. His father came and picked him up, and took him to his house. "He gave me a hug," Brownie said. "I walked home." His dad couldn't drive him all the way; he wasn't allowed past the barricades.
As he went through the OPP line, Brownie said, "I watched the OPP watching me." He was almost 40, and, "It was like I got a time-out or something," he said. "I was so ashamed. I didn't even want to talk to anybody.
"That was only the first two weeks."
Excerpted from Helpless . Copyright 2010 Houndhead Enterprises Inc. Published by Doubleday Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved. The book arrives in bookstores Tuesday.
Christie Blatchford is a Globe and Mail Columnist.