Inquiry makes natives blameless
So for all Mr. McGuinty’s pious claims that the inquiry was merely about “looking for the truth about what happened” the night Mr. George was killed and “what lessons we might draw from that tragedy so that we can ensure that it is never repeated,” the subtext was clear: it was to put Mr. Harris and his government on trial. The charge: that he had personally ordered the Ontario Provincial Police to use force to break up a native occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park, and thus was directly responsible for Mr. George’s death at the hands of an OPP sniper.
The George family’s statement of claim had gone so far as to allege that Mr. Harris “ordered the OPP to utilize its Tactical Response Unit, with the express purpose and intent of taking severe action against the Protesters.” Scarcely more restrained, Liberal MPP Gerry Phillips had claimed, inter alia, that the evidence showed Mr. Harris “decided to overrule the OPP wishes and to direct them on action,” that indeed “the Premier was deeply, directly and inappropriately involved.”
By the time Mr. Harris resigned, the story line had been set in the media, barely encumbered by the usual disclaimers. “His orders have been clearly linked to the [OPP’s] decision” to march on the park, a Globe and Mail story claimed. The Toronto Star editorialized breathlessly about “the damning memos and briefing notes that trace a path right to the Premier's door.”
So you would think it was at least newsworthy to note that the inquiry found no such thing. “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.
Well now. If Mr. Harris was not personally to blame for Mr. George’s death, who -- or what -- was? Judge Linden names a number of culprits, notably the OPP for its mishandling of the occupation and the federal government for its failure to live up to a promise to return to local natives land it had seized during World War II for a military base. He also takes the provincial government to task, for being too “impatient” to see the occupation resolved and for fuzzy lines of command that allowed the “perception” of political interference to arise.
All of which is true enough. Some OPP officers are caught on tape making appallingly racist comments, far worse than Mr. Harris’s exasperated (and disputed) declaration to his advisers that “I want the fucking Indians out of the park.” Operational commanders made a series of misjudgments, culminating in the disastrous decision to deploy the crowd control unit -- not to clear the park, but to force the natives, who had spilled out into an adjoining parking lot, back inside it. The federal government, though it had announced its intention to return the expropriated native land, had failed to do so, fifty years afer the war’s end, fueling native frustration. The commissioner’s criticisms of the Harris government are also well taken, as are his suggestions for how such situations might be better handled in future.
Yes, yes and yes. But while we are listing those to blame for Mr. George’s death, is there no part that should be apportioned to the native occupiers themselves? Whatever their grievances, and however justified these may have been, there is little dispute that the occupation was illegal. Indeed, the provincial park, where the fatal confrontation took place, was not even formally in dispute, being a different parcel of land than the military base. The natives who seized the park had no mandate to do so from the local band council, and indeed faced active opposition from other band members for having done so. Many of those who participated were not even from the area, but had travelled from as far away as the United States to show their support.
No formal warning was offered that the park was about to be occupied. No grievance was clearly articulated beforehand, other than a vague, disputed and intermittently advocated claim that the park contained a native burial ground. Even after the occupation began, the protesters refused to communicate in any way with the police. And in almost every case where police and natives clashed, the violence was initiated by the natives. While the beating of Cecil Bernard George at the hands of several OPP officers, the proximate cause of the events leading to the other Mr. George’s death, was clearly deplorable, it came only after the first Mr. George had whacked an officer with a six-foot length of pipe. The fatal shooting -- again, as wholly unjustified as it was -- came after natives drove a bus at police.
So 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.
6/02/2007
