Blatchford on Caledonia....

If you haven't read her book...please do so immediately...

Consider that, at its height, the following happened in Caledonia under the noses of the Ontario Provincial Police:

• Dave Brown, the best-known Caledonia resident after his 2009 lawsuit against the Ontario government and the OPP, and some others among the 450 residents who live adjacent to the DCE site, were forced for a time to show native-issued “passports” merely to get to their own homes. Their vehicles were occasionally subjected to arbitrary searches by self-appointed native security officers, with goods sometimes being seized. None of this was denied by government lawyers at Mr. Brown’s civil case, nor was a shred of evidence ever offered that it had not happened.

• These same residents were sometimes subjected to arbitrary native-imposed curfews, and either not allowed home or allowed to leave.

• At least two residents were asked to subject themselves to body searches before being allowed to return to their homes.

• The OPP Emergency Response Team, basically the force’s riot squad, broke a cardinal rule of crowd control by always facing only the townspeople for the first five months of the occupation. This is in direct contravention of the principle that when trying to keep the peace between two quarrelling groups, officers are to face both sides to watch for possible threats. ERT members complained to their union to no avail.

• The OPP policed the occupation in two distinct manners. Non-native activists were painted as “outsiders” and meddlers (chiefly by then-Commissioner Julian Fantino) and subjected to public campaigns to discredit them. Mr. McHale was also singled out by Mr. Fantino for special attention and targeted for arrest. Native activists from New York and all over Canada were never similarly demonized. Neither were they subjected to contemporaneous arrests, if they were arrested at all. The OPP rank-and-file absorbed the lesson that they should not attempt to arrest native lawbreakers lest it provoke greater or more widespread lawlessness.

• More egregiously, as is clear from a transcript of Brian Skye, the native head of security on the DCE, in the Ontario Court of Justice at Cayuga on Dec. 19, 2010, the OPP was actually taking their marching orders from natives on the site. Mr. Skye, then testifying in his own defence on a charge of assaulting Mr. McHale (he was acquitted), described how he and other native security leaders were regularly texting members of the OPP’s Aboriginal Liaison Team and Major Event Liaison Team, who would in turn tell the rest of the OPP what they could or couldn’t do. As Mr. Skye inimitably testified, “So if there was a line that they would set up between the people protesting our actions and us, I would be able to tell them that they could come back further towards us or, or they could, we would, we could if we wanted to, you know, pull our people back further … being able to tell the OPP that their men should move forward, or, or, or that they can move back as opposed to staying static.” Mr. Skye testified that his “work” with the OPP, texting and face-to-face meetings, continued from April, 2006, after the OPP’s failed raid on the site, through until 2009, when negotiations to settle the matter stalled.