…and gutless Conservatives

Kate McMillan over at Small Dead Animals runs a fine blog with a lot of provocative content. Unlike many of her Conservative cohorts, she keeps things civil, she has a good wit, and her range of interests, while nearly always ideologically filtered, is wide. But when talk turns to First Nations, her dark side tends to emerge.

In the past, she has posted some comments that keep coming back to haunt her. She has attracted, as an antagonist, a formidable Indian rights activist, Meaghan Walker-Williams, whose latest broadside against Kate and others can be found here.

Kate is now a member of a CBC Round Table on the current election campaign. Another member posted a withering attack on the politically late, unlamented Mike Klander, and linked to that post by Meaghan. Kate threatened to sue the CBC and her co-commentator in the following two letters, posted within an hour of each other:

This is your formal notice that I consider the post currently up at the CBC forum, by: Marcie Abramovitch December 26, 2005 2:30 PM Titled: Another example of bad taste for the Liberals

http://forums.cbc.ca/roundtable/2005/12/another_example.html

To be an act of malice and intentional libel. I am holding the CBC responsible for permitting this post, as the Abramovitch post clearly links to a site that defames me. For the CBC to allow their forum to be used to sideswipe other members of the blog is unacceptable, and unworthy of a public broadcaster.

Here is the second:

Can someone explain to me how the editorial process allowed the linkage of
this hate site run by Meaghan Walker Williams?

This woman also runs the following sites: http://smalldeadanimals.blogspot.com/ Where she has been known to invite others to do me harm and suggested I have sex in lesbian threesomes with my dogs. This woman is highly disturbed.

She is also responsible for this site, which is devoted to attacking the highly successful Indian blog, Dust My broom. It goes by the delightful name of "Uncle Tom Injuns" http://dustmybroom2.blogspot.com/

If the CBC is going to allow another roundtable member to direct their traffic to a site operated by an internet stalker who has dedicated much of her online life to slandering myself as well as others, I will hold the blogger responsible, the editors and the corporation responsible for libel.

Here are the quotes that Meaghan references at her site, and to which Kate takes exception:

Build new residental schools, if that's what it takes and tell the detractors to go to hell.

and then:

I changed my mind. We don't need residential schools for those little 4 year olds running the streets of Saskatoon late at night. We need institutions to lock up the Indian activists and apologists, so that there's an outside chance that the concept of "personal responsibility" will take hold in First Nations communities.

Now, there is no love lost between these two bloggers: that much is obvious. Hurtful things have no doubt been said on both sides: in Meaghan's post noted above, some tasteless photoshopping of herself by Kate is also mentioned. But it is simply astounding to me that Kate threatened to use the courts against third parties who had the temerity to link to a site that does no more than refer to her unfortunate comments of some time ago. She probably richly regrets having made them in a public forum; perhaps she and Mike Klander might have a drink or two at some undisclosed location and commiserate. Nobody said politics was kind.

But Kate, it seems, has scored a victory. The CBC caved almost immediately, and the link has been removed from the co-commentator's post. Censorship and heavy-handedness have won. Those, whatever their politics, who would silence the opposition and shut down debate can only take heart from this.

So I am here being even-handed. I despise what the Liberals have been up to in this campaign, with their threats and (in one case) the jailing of a heckler. But when Conservatives play the same game, it is only right that they be called on it. I, for one, regret the CBC's cowardice in censoring the Round Table post. It sets a terrible precedent. The last thing we need during an election campaign is more threats and silencing.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: (December 28) I am reliably informed that I got the order of Kate's two letters wrong; the one identified in my post as the second was actually the first received. More important, on prompting by Andrew of Bound By Gravity, I retract any suggestion that Kate speaks for, or is a member of, the Conservative Party of Canada. That she is a conservative, there can be no doubt; that she is frequently in the company of Conservatives, whether at the Western Standard's Shotgun blog, on the Blogging Tories blogroll, or even literally as a fellow-traveller on a recent Tory cruise, there can be no doubt either. But she was not acting as a Conservative Party representative when she threatened to sue her co-commentator. She was just being--herself. I apologize, not to her, but to the Conservative Party; and I await their apology for endorsing the candidacy of the racist Rob Anders in Calgary West. Fair enough?

Gutless Liberals

Mike Klander's quick step-down has averted another bump in the road for the Liberals, none of whom will now have to apologize, or even acknowledge that a former senior official spent months on a public blog expressing odious racist, sexist, homophobic and ableist comments. They will no doubt all claim ignorance, and indeed the spin-cycle is on full bore: Klander wasn't even playing a role in the current campaign, a "Liberal spokesman" said, with a straight face.

But this kind of refusal to acknowledge responsibility is just one aspect of the Liberals' craven approach to political life. Yours truly has now experienced first-hand the cowardice that is the flip-side of Liberal arrogance.

A blogger who proudly calls himself "Liberal For Life," I have just discovered, has actually banned me from his blogsite, if my readers can believe it. Not for foul language or slander or anything like that, but simply for expressing spirited opposition to the Liberal Party.

This is a new one on me. I've never been banned before, not by the many conservative sites I visit (and on which I make fairly mordant comments on not a few occasions), nor on any progressive sites. But Liberals are a different breed of cat: gutless wonders who threaten to sue people for expressing opposition during an election campaign (Richard Mahoney, Michael Ignatieff), or even get them thrown into the clink (Paul Martin). Anti-Liberal views are banned, threatened, silenced, whatever it takes. Power is all these people believe in.

Too bad for the tender sensibilities of "Liberal for Life," though. The Liberals are totalitarians who deserve the fate that awaits them on E-day--another minority, dependent upon NDP support, which will keep some semblance of decency in play. And I'll be continuing to catalogue their excesses, moral failures and common-or-garden thuggishness all the way.

Liberal Party racism

Despite the odd silence from the corporate media over the sick slobber of hatred drooling from the mouth of one Mike Klander, a senior Liberal official in Ontario, the blogosphere has risen to the challenge: numerous references to his views have surfaced, with the appropriate pithy commentary. Let's keep it up.

Three things are immediately obvious. First, Klander should be prosecuted under Canada's hate speech legislation (Section 319 [2] of the Criminal Code of Canada). Secondly, he should be ousted from his job. Thirdly, the first two things aren't going to happen. Why? Because he’s a Liberal.

Liberals protect their own, from stamp-licking hopefuls in campaign offices to the Prime Minister of the country--whether we’re talking about the power-drunk Jean Chrétien or his creepy successor, Paul Martin. They can steal money from the public purse with impunity, they can utter hateful racist, homophobic, ableist comments on public blogs, they can (and do) threaten their opponents with court action for criticizing them during an election campaign, or even have them jailed. They hold the reins of power, and it's about as easy to pry them from their insidious grip as it is to get a gun away from Charlton Heston.

Various so-called "ethnic communities," including the Chinese community that Klander slurs, have traditionally been friendly to the Liberals, for a variety of reasons, all of them beginning to lose their lustre: a relatively enlightened immigration policy (tainted by the reintroduction of the head tax and patronage appointments of know-nothings to the Immigration and Refugee Board), inclusiveness in candidate selection (losing its shine after the Jean Augustine ouster in favour of the Americanized war-hawk Michael Ignatieff), and acres of idle rights talk. Compared to the Conservatives, whose copy-book is not only blotted but by now virtually illegible, the Liberals have looked reasonably enlightened on racial issues. But "looked" is clearly the operative word.

One simply has to examine the sorry history of the Lubicon and of other Indian bands, or the "none is too many" policy on Jewish immigration before and during the Second World War, or the more recent imperial excursion into Haitian affairs, to know that the Liberals have nothing to boast about and plenty to be ashamed of when it comes to these matters. It's been a long, sordid tale of power for its own sake, convenient public anti-racism promulgated for political effect, skin-deep anti-sexism (just ask the women who fought for pay equity in the federal public service about that), and Colgate smiles. In the backrooms, could we but lift up that rock, we would see the scurrying and scuttling that has been keeping this party alive for years: a teeming mass of maggots and cockroaches, frantically feeding on the body politic.

There is nothing unique about Klander or his views. Liberals can believe anything they want, and say and do anything they want, with one exception: they must remain loyal to the party, meaning the PMO. And they do: for such loyalty brings its rewards, sometimes of staggering value. Klander will stay where he is; the spin doctors will make his heinous views disappear into thin air; his vicious, racist attack on Olivia Chow will be turned into a "just kidding," or a "wuzn’t me," the Liberals will get another mandate, and the universe will continue unfolding as it should.

Where is the tipping point? Will Tony Ianno’s razor-thin margin over Olivia Chow last time hold after this? Maybe not. But will Canadians of all hues and abilities wake up to the damp and fetid reality that is the Natural Governing Party today? Maybe someday. But not, alas, on E-day, thanks to the first-past-the-post voting system that excludes an array of rational political choices, and a gigatonne of friendly media spin.

If I seem at various points in the foregoing to be channelling David Warren, tant pis. I’m a Canadian, and I'm disgusted. And I'll still be that way, I'm afraid, on January 24. For the record, I’m voting NDP. Maybe we have a shot, at least, of keeping the awful Martin crony Richard Mahoney at bay in Ottawa-Centre, and putting the gentle and decent Paul Dewar into the House. But, even if we're successful, it's one minor battle on the losing side of the war. Until the stubborn minority of Canadians who vote Liberal, perhaps because the choices are so limited, wake up and realize that what they’re smelling...isn’t coffee.

UPDATE: (December 26, 6:20 EST) This just in. Klander has stepped down from his position as Executive Vice-President of the Liberal Party (Ontario). The usual damage control spinmeistering is revving up: a Liberal spokesman says he spoke only for himself, his views don't represent those of the Liberal Party, he apologized to Olivia Chow, and he played no official role for the Liberals in this election campaign....

Merry Christmas from Dr.Dawg

Jeeves was in the other room hanging holly, for Christmas would soon be at our throats. --P.G. Wodehouse

And indeed it is. So a few hours of mad shopping and preparation are left, followed by a day that still holds its measure of magic for me. I stand revealed here as an unabashed sentimentalist, for once squarely in the conservative camp, looking around uneasily, marking the exits and hoping not to be noticed by the grim celebrants of all things reactionary.

I will not hide my Christmas under a bushel. This is a day of wonder and delight. Just take a look at the kids. Many decades have not made my enthusiasm waver. Am I, er, religious about it? Not really. In fact, not at all. It's in my cultural bones, though, the whole nine yards of tree, dinner, presents, stockings, fluffy snow, mandarin oranges, fireplace, and everybody (really) being nice to each other. A fresh turkey awaits us, and a dreadful tofurkey for the Vegan in the family, and I simply must dash.

But here is a poem about the other side of the equation, because we leftists can always be counted upon to spot the skeleton at the feast. Celebration without empathy is not our thing, and the struggle continues.

private life

his favourite colour is mauve

he's got a horse in a distant valley
and a pied-à-terre in london

he wakes at the first squawk of light
calling his beasts by name: thunder! lightning!—
until he remembers, and sleeps

and others remember too:
out of tune with the times, he is,
a streak of ruby in the polar sky
set to the common music,
a patient man, snowed under,
labouring at his bench
in wood and plastic and gold

i saw him hunched in the crowds
at the corner of two windy streets
needing a bit of change, so he said,
it's the season of rough weather, it's rough all over,
and his voice was a thin sing-song>

why not? he sang, why not?
i loved you once
in the days i could call
my crazy name to my mind;
but all that's left of me now
i gave i gave i gave

Here I leave my new-found...what? Brothers and sisters? They won't be having that. Coalition partners? Never mind. Let's eat, drink and be merry, those of us who are fortunate enough to do so. And to all a good night.

Bolivia: The Grope & Fail has a hissy fit

I've been enjoying watching Latin America slip through American fingers like unprivatized water: Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, now Bolivia and soon Chile. The Americans hardly have a friend remaining down there, with the possible exception of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Perez--and a few corporate toadies like an anonymous editorialist in today's Globe and Mail. I reproduce the editorial, a classic of its kind, interleaved with my comments.

The editorial is entitled "What Bolivia risks." That has resonances for old Latin America watchers. The people of Bolivia have been stupid enough to abuse their democratic privileges and vote for a socialist, and there will be consequences if they don't smarten up. It's on their head.

Sick of corrupt old-line political parties, tired of the U.S.-led campaign on cocaine cultivation and angry at what they consider the plundering of Bolivia's natural-gas wealth, Bolivians made it clear before Sunday's presidential election that they want change. Well, they are going to get it now.

I like the clever last sentence. But what about that "plundering?" It's not, of course, plundering: Bolivians consider it plundering, but it's just...investment. Sure, astronomical profits are being made while Bolivia's 9 million people remain the poorest in Latin America, with a $2,600 per capita income, but "plundering?" That's a trifle strong, isn't it?

The apparent winner, Evo Morales, is a left-wing rabble-rouser

In other words, a progressive and popular individual has won--and not "apparently," either. (Don't Globe editorial staff read the papers?)

who wants to seize control of Bolivia's natural resources from greedy "transnationals"

Imagine, Bolivians wanting to "seize control" of their own natural resources. Who do these upstarts think they are? Everyone knows they belong to the US as of right.

and decriminalize the growing of coca, the raw material of cocaine.

This is grossly misleading. Here is Morales on the subject:

"I want to make an alliance with the US, with others, a real alliance against drug trafficking, but not against the cocaleros [coca growers]," Mr Morales says, sitting in his campaign headquarters at La Paz. "Zero cocaine, but not zero coca."

Of course, the alternative is blitzing the coca farmers off the face of the earth, the US’s favoured solution.

A former llama herder and trumpet player who now heads a coca farmers union,

Good God! Three strikes against him at the start! He obviously has no right to govern. Ignorant Indians workers who fool around with musical instruments don’t know how to run a country. Bolivia needs lawyers, corporate executives, military men, people who know what's what. And he's a union leader too? What were those benighted Bolivians thinking?

Mr. Morales made his name leading the radical street protests that have racked Bolivia.

Well, those protests "racked" the power structure, anyway. They included successful demonstrations against the privatization of water, including rainwater, in 2000 (led by Oscar Olivera, now a critical supporter of Morales), and, in 2003, against the continued siphoning off of Bolivia's huge gas and oil reserves.

The story of Bolivia is in fact only a short chapter in the continuing story of global exploitation and poverty, in short, the narrative of the utter failure of neoliberal policies that have caused so much human misery in Latin America and around the world. John Crabtree notes in his book Patterns of Protest that 60% of Bolivians live on less than $1 a day and only 16% have enough to meet their basic needs. This, while they are sitting on vast reservoirs of oil and gas, and foreign corporations are making millions by pumping it all out of the country.

He boasts of his affinity with Hugo Chavez, the anti-American demagogue who leads Venezuela.

If the wildly popular Hugo Chavez, who has won supervised elections with ease and survived both a coup attempt and a recall vote, is "anti-American," it goes without saying that he must be a "demagogue": meaning, “the people like him, but I don’t.”

He vows to "bury the neo-liberal" state and fight the evils of capitalism.

Horrors! But Morales is in good company. Besides, neo-liberalism is doing a good job of burying itself.

To many Bolivians, Mr. Morales's brave talk of battling globalization and standing up to the Americans has a satisfying ring. But his formula of Yankee-bashing, statism and economic nationalism has been tried before in Latin America, with disastrous results. In the 1960s and 70s, the region's then mostly authoritarian governments took many big industries under the state's wing and put up high barriers to imports, hoping for home growth. Instead they got hyperinflation, debt and stagnation. It would be madness to return to those discredited policies now. Yet that is precisely what some Latin American governments seem prepared to do.

Whoa, slow down there. There are enough progressive Latin American countries around now to create their own trading block. They are sitting on enough natural resources to eliminate poverty in their part of the world forever. Now they're in a position to negotiate fair contracts with foreign investors, rather than submit to corporate gang-rape as in the past. The nerve of these backward-looking Latinos, opposing the natural order of things: multinational corporations divesting poor countries of their resources, and tossing a few crumbs to the local elites to keep the peons in line.

Bolivia and Venezuela are not the only countries turning left. Brazil has a left-leaning, though pragmatic, president, Luiz Inacio de Silva. Peru has seen the rise of a former military officer, Ollanta Humala, who hopes to follow Mr. Morales's populist road to the presidency. Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner delights in bashing the International Monetary Fund, while Uruguay's government has been cozying up to the egregious Mr. Chavez.

Yup. The world's going to hell in a hand-basket. End Times must be near. According, at least, to our egregious propagandist editorialist.

If Bolivia continues the leftward lurch, it is bound to suffer.

Marines? International capital boycotts? Forget it. That's nostalgia. There are just too many countries on track now to be put off by that kind of threat. It's wishful thinking, from a romantic apologist for Manifest Destiny.

Mr. Morales's threats against foreign energy companies have already hurt the country's economic hopes, which rest on its huge gas reserves. It needs outside help and capital to exploit them.

The man's not even assumed office yet, and he's "hurt" Bolivia's economic hopes already? By demanding the renegotiation of contracts with the multinationals? Get serious. If there's a profit to be made, even a slimmed-down version, the corporations will be lining up to sign deals.

His hostility to the United States could hurt, too. Washington wants to negotiate a free-trade agreement with Bolivia, as it recently did with Peru.

We've seen what that kind of agreement can do in Mexico, a land of increasing poverty and unemployment, precipitously falling wages and toxic waste dumps. So, frankly, who cares what Washington wants? The only "hurt" is going to be in Washington, and maybe in the offices of the Globe and Mail. Bring it on.

That would help protect the 100,000 Bolivians who work making clothing, jewellery and other goods for export. The U.S. is also offering hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, but only if the government helps suppress the growing of coca. Mr. Morales defends the plant, which he claims has many legal, traditional uses among Bolivian Indians. An Aymara Indian himself, he held a press conference on Sunday at which coca leaves were scattered on a Bolivian flag.

It's an outrage--an Indian in power, never mind that 62% of Bolivians are indigenous. The blatant racism of the editorialist is here exposed for all to see. Coca does indeed have traditional uses among Morales' ignorant brown-skinned countrymen, but, as already noted, Morales wants to eliminate the cocaine trade.

Mr. Morales says he will become Washington's "nightmare" when he takes office. If he implements his backward promises, the nightmare will be Bolivia's.

Not likely, unless Bush withdraws from Iraq and goes sniffing about the Bolivian countryside for those elusive WMDs. But not even Bush has the ability to invade several countries at once. Sleep tight, now.

Liberal bullies on the hustings

An old film about a Mexican revolutionary, Viva Zapata, came to mind as I was observing the Liberals' behaviour on the campaign trail over the past few weeks. At the beginning of the film the peasant leader Emiliano Zapata appears in a crowd before the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz and dares to speak out. "Get his name," says Diaz. Near the end of the film, as Zapata has consolidated his power, someone speaks out against him. "Get his name," says Zapata--and then, realization flooding in, he removes himself from power and retires to the countryside. Would that the Liberals had Zapata's instincts.

In Montreal, a pro-Haiti activist, Yves Engler, was thrown into jail for four days for hecking Prime Minister Paul Martin about Canada's role in the overthrow of the democratically-elected government there. In Ottawa, Richard Mahoney, the Liberal candidate for Ottawa-Centre, threatened to sue a community newspaper, the Centretown News, for daring to mention his difficulties anent the lobbying game.

Now, even during an election campaign, the Liberals simply can't refrain from bully tactics. Power is their oxygen, brute force their only principle. From helping to prop up a puppet regime in Haiti to introducing legislation to permit close police surveillance of ordinary Canadians (giving whole new meaning to the well-known phrase "Just watch me"), this is the party that effectively put the entire country under martial law in 1970, introduced "anti-terrorist" legislation more recently that, in its initial form, would have defined unions as terrorist organizations, and was complicit in the rendition of Maher Arar to Syria. Martin's ignoble predecessor, Jean Chretien, personally beat up a non-violent protester, and his office authorized the use of pepper-spray and other police-state tactics against peaceful demonstrators at the APEC conference in Vancouver in 1997.

But traditionally, the Liberals have at least been tactful enough to keep their bullying out of election campaigns. Lying through their teeth to the electorate has sufficed. They campaigned against wage and price controls in 1974 only to introduce them immediately upon election, for example; they campaigned against the NAFTA "free trade" pact, only to sign the deal right after being swept into power.

At this point, though, even in a precarious minority situation, the old arrogance has reached a dizzying new level. Hecklers and critics beware: jail and lawsuits await you if you dare to stand up against the Liberals by exercising your right of free speech. And if this is what dissenters can expect while the electors, for a brief period, have some potential power of their own, just imagine what their lives will be like after the election.

Pace Buzz Hargrove, it's time for a change. Candidates should be under the microscope during a campaign, and they should expect critical things to be said about them. That's how democracy works, isn't it? But when desperate Liberals start running to the police and the courts because it's getting too hot for them on the campaign trail, maybe they should have the grace to reflect, as Steinbeck's Zapata did, that perhaps others are currently better suited to govern.

Paul Martin: Crossing the Lubicon

A simmering 66-year-old injustice against an Indian Nation known as the Lubicon Lake Nation is being perpetuated in Canada, with the active connivance of Paul Martin. In fact, it is nothing less than a mini-genocide, but, done over time, genocide seems somehow less...like genocide. Nevertheless, here's the definition of the term: "A systematic attempt to annihilate a racial group or nation. The word was first used in 1944." Read on, and judge for yourselves.

Throughout the unfortunate history of the Lubicon, the outlines of classic colonial administration unmistakably emerge. Native people in Canada do not even have the right to determine who is, or is not, "Indian": that is a (white) government responsibility, under the Indian Act. The construct "Indian" is imposed by lawmakers and courts; and "culture" in Supreme Court of Canada decisions such as R. v van der Peet appears to be frozen and reified in pre-contact timelessness, with "central" and "non-central" elements to be decided by the Canadian judiciary, an anthropologically-illiterate position as some lawyers, at least, have grasped. As Calgary law professor Nigel Bankes put it, for example, "aboriginal peoples of Canada have rights so long as they remain in a fossilized or primitive state, but their rights are progressively diminished to the extent that they avail themselves to the benefits and burdens of the twentieth century."

In the process of constructing treaties between the Canadian federal government and the many First Nations inhabiting the land over which the Canadian state claims overall jurisdiction, a number of Native people were and continue to be left out. The Lubicon Lake Nation was one such group. Their history offers us, in capsule form, a recapitulation of the history of colonialism and its effects on indigenous peoples: in three words, occupation, dispossession and decline.

Under the treaty process, aboriginal peoples have been placed historically in the position of having to negotiate to keep a portion of their own lands. But at even a greater disadvantage were those Native groups who were left out of the treaty process altogether. The Lubicon Cree should have been included in Treaty 8, between the federal government and the Cree, Beaver and Chippewyan peoples of northern Alberta and adjacent parts of British Columbia, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, a treaty negotiated in 1899 in order to open the North for gold prospecting. Like a number of other isolated groups in Northern Alberta, however, the Lubicon were never contacted by Canadian government officials, who for various reasons did not enter the interior north of Lesser Slave Lake where the Lubicon lived.

By 1932, Native people from that territory began asking to have the terms of Treaty Eight applied to them. In 1933, the people of Lubicon Lake sent a petition to Ottawa formally asking for a reserve. In 1939 a federal government official, Napoleon L'Heureux, made the trip to Lubicon Lake, and was greeted by more than a hundred band members. Their leader, Alexis Laboucan, pressed his community's claim for recognition, and with it the provisions and schooling that Treaty Eight guaranteed.

A federal inspector, Pant Schmidt, who had accompanied L'Heureux, was impressed:

I saw a number of small gardens and potato patches all fenced in with rails. I noticed also that they had very good horses. I was very much interested in this band, and found them clean, well dressed, healthy, bright and intelligent; in other words, people who want to live and do well.

It was at this point that the fortunes of the Lubicon Lake band changed dramatically for the worse. There were odd delays in establishing the borders of the reserve, and then an energetic Indian Affairs bureaucrat in Ottawa, Malcolm McCrimmon, came on the scene. While David Laird, the negotiator of Treaty Eight, had defined a Native person simply as "one who lived an Indian way of life," McCrimmon went back to the more restrictive language of the 1876 Indian Act, which defined an "Indian" as a "male person of Indian blood reputed to belong to a particular band…Any child of such person...Any woman who is or was lawfully married to such person."

McCrimmon's agile pen soon deleted 640 people from several bands in the region, unable to prove their Native lineage to his whimsical satisfaction, forcing 124 children out of school with no other schools available to them, driving many off reserves, including an 80-year old man with severe rheumatism and a woman with children whose husband was overseas fighting for Canada in the Second World War, and splitting families, allowing some children Indian status and refusing others. People who were successful proved especially likely to lose their status: McCrimmon apparently couldn't believe that Native people could prosper.

McCrimmon struck off 75 of the Lubicon band's 154 members in 1942, and in 1943 another 26, leaving only 64 people—whereupon he recommended to Ottawa that this number was too small for a reserve.This overtly racist behaviour attracted the ire of many, including Members of Parliament, and two inquiries were held.

The first was a farce: McCrimmon wrote the terms of reference and accompanied the inquiry judge, C.M. McKeen, on his rounds. Nevertheless, the judge filed a favourable report, duly ignored by McCrimmon’s boss, Thomas Crerar, the federal minister of Indian Affairs at the time. This provoked a fresh outcry, and Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent was persuaded to call a formal judicial inquiry in 1944.

It recommended that nearly eight out of nine persons expelled by McCrimmon should be reinstated. At Lubicon Lake, 57 of the 90 names that had been removed were examined: 51 of them were found to have been removed in error.

But it was Thomas Crerar once again who received Macdonald's report, and the minister tasked McCrimmon to implement its findings. Not surprisingly, only 120 people were restored to status, leaving another 600 out in the cold. At Lubicon Lake, only 18 were reinstated: McCrimmon had cut the band in half.

After the war, McCrimmon found himself working for a new minister, who favoured assimilation of Native people "into the general life and economy of the country." A revised Indian Act was passed in 1951, further restricting the definition of "Indian" with racial and gender criteria. McCrimmon became the first Indian Registrar under the new Act. "I was a power unto myself," he later reminisced. His continued activities drew more than one thousand written protests.

But the near-fatal blow to the Lubicon was the discovery of oil in the Edmonton area, the subsequent creation of an oil and gas industry in Alberta, and the province’s desire to begin oil exploration further north. Indian Affairs internal reports began to describe the proposed site of the Lubicon reserve as a barren wasteland, and alternative sites far from oil exploration areas were proposed--but even then without subsurface mineral rights. McCrimmon now claimed that the Lubicon Lake Indians had never been officially established as a band in the first place. Ottawa took no action to obtain reserve land, and Alberta deleted the provisional reserve from its books in late 1953. McCrimmon then proceeded to transfer most of the Lubicon band members to the Whitefish Lake band list. The Lubicon Lake band was now down to 30 members.

More catastrophic events followed. A Lubicon Lake community, Marten River, was bulldozed in 1967 after some dubious manipulations by the Alberta government: by coincidence, two years later, the land next to it became the first producing oil field in Lubicon territory. A lease for a proposed farming co-op on part of the promised reserve land was approved in 1970, but a Métis family slowly took over; Lubicon members were fired and replaced with family members until no Lubicon remained involved.

In 1971, oil drilling took place near Little Buffalo. OPEC’s oil embargo in 1973 intensified drilling: the Lubicon and other groups filed a caveat to protect their interests. The Alberta government opposed this, and was supported in court by the federal government; it eventually passed retroactive legislation in 1977 disallowing such caveats. By 1984 there were more than 400 oil and gas wells operating within a 15-mile radius of Little Buffalo. Permits were issued and reissued without any environmental assessments. Oil workers deliberately wrecked trap lines, and forest fires, some deliberately set, raged uncontrolled.

In 1978, the Lubicon elected Chief Bernard Ominayak, who remains chief today. A man of grim determination, he sat down with Alberta Premier Don Getty in 1988, after a show of force that sealed off Lubicon territory for a short period until the RCMP intervened. The two hammered out a comprehensive deal that came to be known as the "Grimshaw Agreement." All that remained was federal participation, but this foundered primarily upon the matter of compensation: far too little was offered to enable the Lubicon to become self-sufficient (which the Lubicon had planned for in detail) rather than perpetually dependent. Ottawa's take-it-or-leave-it offer was rejected.

In 1979, trapping yielded $5000 per Lubicon family; by the mid-eighties, this had dwindled to virtually nothing. Moose killed for food dropped from 219 in 1979 to 19 in 1983: Indian Affairs in Ottawa claimed that land clearing by oil and gas companies was good for the moose population. From 1980-1984, the number of Lubicon on welfare increased, according to the band, from 10% to 90%. Although this figure is contested by federal government officials, band records indicate that in fact 95% of the band was receiving social assistance in the early 1990s.

By 1982, $8 billion worth of oil and gas revenue had been pumped out of Lubicon territory, without a cent going to the Lubicon. Lubicon request for an injunction against further oil and gas exploration was dismissed with costs in 1983 by a judge who had formerly been an oil company employee. An appeals court upheld the verdict, and the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the case. The Alberta ombudsman, Randall Ivany, looked into complaints of despoliation and cultural genocide in 1984, and found no merit in them. (He was later revealed to have believed in conspiracy theories such as the alleged "funding" of the Lubicon by the radical American Indian Movement; after his death, he was revealed to have been a common embezzler.)

By 1985 the Alberta Indian affairs minister, Milt Pahl, was calling the Lubicon "squatters," and claiming that only 9 genuine Lubicon existed. And, as if untrammeled oil and gas exploration hadn't been enough, the Alberta government sold logging rights in Lubicon territory to the giant Japanese paper manufacturer, Daishowa, in 1988.

The Lubicon and their supporters became active on the ground. A world-wide boycott of the Calgary Winter Games in 1988, and of the Calgary Glenbow Museum's exhibition of Native artifacts was mounted, garnering considerable adverse publicity for Canada. Since then, with growing national and international support, Chief Ominayak has been continually fighting for his people. A coalition called Friends of the Lubicon mounted a successful boycott of Daishowa.

Meanwhile, tuberculosis was ravaging the Lubicon population—of 358 people screened at Little Buffalo in 1987, 47 had active TB and many more were infected. 107 people in all received treatment, nearly a third of those tested. In 1985-86, 19 out of 21 pregnancies resulted in stillbirths and miscarriages.

There was, and continues to be, a formidable array of powerful interests inimical to the Lubicon. But matters are far more complex. The state is not a monolith. Even within the Canadian and Alberta governments, sympathetic and supportive voices had been raised: from Liberal MPs during the McCrimmon years to Conservative Indian Affairs minister David Crombie, who appointed E. Davy Fulton in 1985 to inquire into the situation. The latter noted the destruction of the environment, and commented that the Lubicon were being literally "bulldozed...into another lifestyle." But Fulton's sympathetic report was never acted on.

The NDP opposition in Alberta set up a citizens' panel in 1993, the "Lubicon Settlement Commission of Review." Its Final Report contains twelve recommendations But nothing came of it either.

Successive federal governments have intervened shamelessly to break the Lubicon resolve. Using its power to create Indian bands under the Indian Act, the Liberal government under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien invented two other bands, hoping to lure away Lubicon; the members of one band, the "Woodland Cree," had been promised $1000 each if they voted for a federal offer of a pitifully inadequate reserve, but they later found out that this would be deducted from their welfare payments.

This brings us almost to the present day, and Paul Martin's shameful continuation of this miserable tradition. He promised to start negotiations with the Lubicon by the end of March 2004, but this never took place, and federal officials claim that they have been given no mandate to negotiate. It's been bad faith all the way with Mr. Dithers.

Amnesty International has denounced Canada for its treatment of the Lubicon; and the UN Committee on Human Rights, which heard the Lubicon complaint and found against Canada in 1990, repeated its concerns only last month.

Decency demands that we make Martin and his Liberal "team" accountable for this outrage during the current campaign campaign. But we ought to be even-handed about it. We should embarrass the Conservatives, whose own record has been nothing to be proud of on aboriginal affairs, and we should force the NDP to put this issue on the front burner. The survival of the Lubicon--those who are left--depends upon it. Let's stand up for them before it's too late.

Large Dead Animals

Kate McMillan reprints part of an article by Mark Helprin over at the Claremont Institute, and proceeds to discourage rebuttal, saying that the piece should simply be read as the reason she and her political co-religionists see us on the Left as enemies. Fair enough; it's her site. But the article does call aloud for a strenuous rebuttal--it is a characteristically dishonest and tendentious screed, a small army of straw figures out on a Wild Man Weekend. Here, then, is Mark Helprin, with my comments.

Why does the Left so often abstain from defending not only American interests but, after September 11th, the United States itself? During the Cold War, one could always suspect that democratic socialists lusted in their hearts for Leninism, and might have given themselves over had the balance of power shifted eastward.

Some of the most savage red-baiting I have ever encountered took place among social-democratic ranks here in Canada. In the US, to argue that such people as Norman Thomas were closet Leninists is tinfoil-hat stuff, not even worth refuting. But it is clear, on the other hand, that brute fascism has a visceral appeal to many mainstream "conservatives": witness Margaret Thatcher’s great admiration for Augusto Pinochet, the bloodstained Butcher of Santiago, for example. Or Ngo Cao Ky, one of a string of US-installed puppet princes in South Vietnam, saying, "My only hero is Hitler." Or recent attempts to rehabilitate Francisco Franco as merely a misunderstood conservative.

This was at least a plausible explanation for their opposition to virtually any measure of Western defense, and their perpetual horror of anti-Communism.

Our "perpetual horror" was of freaks of nature like the House Un-American Activities Committee, the endless witchhunts, the use of the code-word "communist" to apply to everything from trade union organizing to the fluoridation of water, and imperialist wars of intervention allegedly to "contain communism" but in fact to advance US interests, corporate and geopolitical: Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, the list goes on and on. Our own RCMP played the same games, infiltrating campus organizations, the usual. Even student opposition to the war in Vietnam, or to the mutually-assured destruction of the nuclear stalemate, was branded "communist."

But no force, it would seem, should be capable of transforming even a lifetime of socialist ardor into sympathy for absolutist mullahs, 10th-century tribal warriors, decapitators, and circumcisors of women.

And no force has, except in the fevered minds of conservatives, who were quite happy to support such reactionaries themselves when it suited them, as in Afghanistan, and still do (the torture-state of Saudi Arabia, for example). Now the word "terrorist" has become a new signifier for everything the right hates and fears, the word "communist" having lost its energy.

It would make no sense. And yet as the immense plumes of smoke and dust still were rising in strength from the ruins of the World Trade Center, and not a single shot had been fired or a single soldier sacrificed in what was to become the War on Terrorism, the worldwide Left mobilized instantaneously to assert that such a war—the particulars and extent of which it could not know—would be unjust.

Let's be clear, here. A group largely made up of Saudi nationals flies a plane into the World Trade Centre. This is followed by two wars: one in Afghanistan, the next in Iraq (which had no ties to Al Qaida). The Left has pretty good antennae when it comes to predicting the wild lashing-out of the Right, but our prescience in the instant cases is criticized, although we were right from the get-go. Now we have (in capital letters, to accent the fetishizing of American foreign policy that’s currently going on) a "War on Terrorism" the "particulars and extent of which" we still don't know (and by "we" I mean all of us). And we're supposed to sit back and simply trust in Bush and his loony advisers? What's good for the country is good for Halliburton, it seems, but the rest of us have some questions we'd like answered.

It is true that since then many opponents and proponents of the war, despite being not even decimally aware of pertinent facts or relations, have managed to enlarge their unexamined notions into either complex and disconnected conspiracy theories involving oil, or manic crusader-atavistic visions of remaking the Arab and Muslim worlds, and that the dust from these ignorant armies as they debate with the finesse of English football hooligans rises into a plume of its own.

Does anyone here have the remotest idea what Helprin is wittering on about here? In the fog of obscurantist language appears the silhouette of a notion that we on the Left stand for this or that proposition, all of which he is about to demolish with the finesse of an arsonist setting fire to scarecrows.

But, like a mammoth perfectly preserved in ice and uncomplicated by subsequent infections, the Left's purely reflexive impulses immediately following September 11 are worthy of attention.

We shall dub this the “Large Dead Animal (LDA)” thesis.

Most remarkable is the initial and continuing indifference both to those who perished and to the country itself as it came under attack. On a political level, the Left could summon no indignation after assaults upon America's capital, defense headquarters, civil aviation, embassies, warships, and chief city, any one of which would be a classic and unambiguous casus belli, while in strange contrast it seemed to regard the mere presence of Americans in Saudi Arabia, the trade in oil, and the Arab world's exposure to American popular culture as unpardonable aggressions.

The Left showed no such indifference, of course, to this atrocity. But what I find remarkable is the Right’s initial and continuing indifference to those who have perished in its recent foreign adventures: tens of thousands of civilian Iraqi men, women and children, thousands, too, of Afghan civilians; before that, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead due to sanctions, deaths that were, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, “worth it”; the use of white phosphorus in battle, originally denied; und so weiter. Not a tear shed, not a hand wrung.

And the Left, rather than considering this airplane full of nationals from an allied power as erupting from some conspiracy that is everywhere and nowhere, began to ask questions about the root causes of such hatred and violence. For that, we were, and are, excoriated by the Right, whose level of analysis rarely rises above the "Let's do it" plane.

Irrationality on a political level from these quarters has never been a shock. On a personal level, however, the predominant response of the intellectual Left was a mystery. It was as if the thousands of crushed and incinerated men, women, and children—those who threw themselves into a quarter-mile abyss rather than have the flesh seared off their bones as they stood in the wind at glassless walls, the small children who died in terror after watching hysterical fanatics slit the throats of screaming stewardesses, and so on, for there are almost three thousand stories—simply did not exist. How does one explain such an egregious absence of sympathy (much less assertions that "they" deserved it, or that it was a work of art) among endlessly self-proclaiming empathetics whose stock in trade is to milk compassion even from the Rock of Gibraltar? This is a real rather than a rhetorical question, because it is significant of a great division.

No, this is a rhetorical, not a real question. And, like other rhetorical questions, it contains precisely the answer that Helprin wants to assert in the first place--a bald, lying assertion based upon nothing at all. But I do wonder, in this connection, why he and his co-religionists are so silent about the Iraqi civilians, screaming as white phosphorus eats into their flesh, or, just before the war, the kids in hospitals dying long and painful deaths because of sanctions, or, earlier than that, the roasting to death of Vietnamese civilians drenched with burning napalm? Could it be that only white people are capable of feeling pain?

The nature of one's reaction to aggression against one's country will often be determined by whether one sees the polity primarily as individuals who must struggle with the imperfection of being bound into a collective, or as a collective that must overcome the circumstantial imperfection that it comprises individuals. For wildebeest thundering across a plain in Africa, it takes a village. The herd defends itself by sacrificing a minuscule proportion of its number and moving on. If the herd were to turn upon the jackals preying upon it, the jackals would be pulverized almost instantly. Nonetheless, if the price for the escape of ten thousand is the sacrifice of only a few, that is how it is done when the collective is paramount.

But animals like bears, tigers, and lions, that wander individually or in small groups, know that their survival depends upon how they fight, and their willingness to fight is so well understood that they are seldom attacked, whereas to a predator a herd in flight is a living contradiction of the maxim that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Mankind is not a genetic set piece, divided into lone wolves and lemmings, but rather the division is a reflection of habituation to the collective—indeed, worship of it—as opposed to a habitual resistance to it. Capitulation and appeasement may sometimes be merely subcategories of a controlling impulse that produces both. When the Left bends to America's enemies it may not be a result of cowardice or betrayal, but of loyalty to the omelette so single-minded that it precludes consideration of the eggs.

The LDA thesis here gives way to small animals and ultimately eggs, but in such sloppy writing do we not discern a reverse ontogeny, a large, thundering argument recapitulating phylogeny in reverse? The best that Helprin can do in his laboured analogy would appear to be to argue that individual large-animal responses are better than animal collectives. The former seem to avoid all casualties, while the latter accept some as the price of survival.

For the life of me, I can't follow this analogy, if that is what it is really what it is supposed to be. But I'll try. Since the casualties of the current US overseas initiatives are legion, may I take it that the American people, in a kind of herd instinct, have agreed to sacrifice more than 2,000 of their own and inflict many times that number of fatalities upon foreign non-combatants, because they have mindlessly swallowed the Administration's rhetoric that this is the price of survival? I guess I can accept that.

But Helprin does get a little confusing when he reduces animal collectives to herds of wildebeest. There are also, of course, prides of lions and packs of wolves, whose instinct to hunt and kill is always in the foreground--perhaps like the US, which can’t seem to get though a decade without invading some other country. (I'm just trying to follow the analogy, so don’t jump on me, folks, for mocking the rhetorical ineptness of a conservative attempting to sound like an intellectual.)

At times, of course, the collective should take precedence. It is a matter of finding the appropriate balance for impulses that contend eternally because man was created as an individual and yet there is more than one of him. And, depending upon the wind, one must occasionally tack to port even if one's preference is to tack to starboard. But by its hostility to virtually every part of the War on Terrorism, and its continuing assertion that in this war almost every step America has taken is an unnecessary and wasteful overreaction, the Left implicitly makes the argument that the dead of September 11 represent only one one-hundred-thousandth of the American population, and that although intelligent people understand the implications of this, the impatient jingoes who 'control' the country do not.

As the Right, I suppose, asserts that the countless dead Iraqi and Afghan civilians are only a small percentage of the total population, their deaths "worth it" to reconstruct the American version of democracy around the world. This is their implicit and explicit argument, in fact. [Editorial note: the word is "jingoists."]

After all, a herd of 100,000 wildebeest would neither miss just one of its number, nor even pause to reflect. But where the Left in all its wisdom gravely miscalculates is that the dead of September 11th were not wildebeest, and neither are we. That is why America, for all its failings and sins, has not gone down, and will not go down, on bended knee.

No, clearly it will not. Instead, it will continue to use brute force to ensure that the rest of the world goes down on bended knee to its imperial might. It will whine in fatuous columns like Helprin's when a few voices are raised in conscientious opposition; and, if people resist more forcefully, it will greet this resistance with bombs, artillery, more bombs, white phosphorus and a cloud of triumphalist rhetoric.

And here I would echo/mirror Kate’s comment: articles like this go a long way to explaining the Left reaction to the Right’s hypocrisy, lies and frankly sociopathic lack of empathy. As for the large dead animal that we have been compared to, I feel that a more realistic deployment of this analogy (mammoths in ice don't have reflexes, Mark) might be to look at the fate of a small children's zoo in Ramallah, and juxtapose it with the comments about Ramallah as a zoo here.

Twenty-third, fifth

Another one of these tag memes. I thought I'd get hit eventually. Thanks a bunch, Timmy G.

Here are the instructions, not, I notice, followed by all: Find your twenty-third post. Pluck out your fifth sentence. Then--write a short fictional piece with the sentence as the first one in the piece. And tag five more people in the blogosphere.

I tag:

Small Dead Animals

The Amazing Wonderdog

Cerberus

Cathie from Canada

Miss Vicky

My brief contribution:

Yet we are politically selective, if not outright cynical, in what we deem to be "terrorism." So I claimed at the campfire when we were into one of those late-night beer-fueled discussions, and I was holding forth as usual, not having a blog at the time, and I suspect I slurred my words a little. Al Caider, who lives just down the street from me, wasn't so sure, though. As far as he's concerned, the kid who delivers the papers is a terrorist, for spreading news of terrorism. The old lady next door to him is a terrorist, because she lets ragweed grow rampant in her garden. In fact, when you come right down to it, Al says, everybody’s a terrorist.

"Does that apply to you?" George Bouche quizzed him. "You don’t drink, you won't touch the hot-dogs--hell, you could be one of those Moozlims we keep hearing about."

"I don’t drink because I used to drink. And road-kill sausages aren't my thing," said Al.

George was unconvinced. "OK, what's that little rug you keep carrying around with you?"

"It's a toupee," said Al, sounding a little miffed.

That shut George down for a while. Then, being clever, "Got your Christmas lights up yet?"

"What's this, Guantanamo?" Al asked, stung beyond endurance. "This is supposed to be a barbecue, not Abu Ghraib."

The rest is a little hazy. A small knot of former friends bore down on Al. I remember corn cobs, shorn of their kernels, spilling off his paper plate. I remember cell-phones in use, I remember a car showing up...but I can barely remember Al, I can't even visualize his face, or his wife's face, or his eight-year-old son's face.

Our summer get-togethers aren't the same now. You have to go through a metal detector, we've got Men in Black types patrolling the perimeter, and, worst of all, my buddies have to go through a security check, every time, before they're allowed to get near the fire.

But, you know what? The hot-dogs taste as good as ever. And what else really matters at a barbecue?

The body politic and its
paraphilias

After a detailed clinical examination of the political actors in Canada at the moment, I fear that my diagnosis, outlined below, is not for the prudish or faint of heart. Worse, my prognosis is a pessimistic one.

True, an electorate clearly recovering from acute chremastistophilia* may be a step closer to a final cure after the Liberals, on the ropes and clearly the worse for wear, seem to have talked themselves into thinking that they have a better chance in a Christmas election than a February one. (Is Paul Martin talking to the ghost of his dog? Or is he a taphephiliac?**)

Who knows. The political calculations here must be Byzantine indeed. In any case, the hematolagnia*** of the Opposition, brought to a near-crisis by Gomery's exposure of the chronic Liberal mysophilia,****will reach its climax later this month and thereafter, when the government falls in an almost certain confidence vote.

As a less-than-enthusiastic NDPer, and a strong supporter of proportional representation, I look at the current stats and weep. Public opinion? There is no "public opinion." We have two strong regionally-based parties, neither of which gives a damn about Canada, a great, loathsome kleptocratic party that has settled upon the nation like a noisome cloud, with the continuing support of about one-third of the electors who continue to suffer from ozolagnia*****, and a mildly progressive social-democratic formation that has brought along a fan and a perfumed handkerchief.

How have things come to this? I blame, among other things, our antiquated first-past-the-post system. Once a national party has established itself, the only real hope of beating it in a plurality system is to exaggerate ragional issues, play on disaffection and alienation, and gull the voters into a kind of tribalism that is ultimately destructive of the Canadian polity. If anything points to the serious need for electoral reform, it is the current fragmented state of federal politics. And even with electoral reform, in which a third of the voters insisting on the Liberals will get a third of the seats and no more in the House, it will take time, perhaps too much time, for the Canadian political culture to change, adapt and coalesce into a national vision, or, more accurately, into a tri-national vision where aboriginal peoples, anglophones and francophones can find their common and stable ground.

In the meantime, we're about to watch the country descend into a bout of vorarephilia****** over the Christmas period, FPTP will inevitably mean that my party loses seats that it shouldn't because of some upstart dendrophiliacs*******, and the political universe, instead of unfolding as it should, will suffer accelerating entropy.

Not a pretty picture, as Krafft-Ebbing might have said.

_______________________
Notes:
*sexual arousal from being robbed
**a person sexually aroused by being buried alive
***abnormal attraction to blood
****abnormal attraction to filth
*****abnormal attraction to strong smells
******sexual arousal from eating or being eaten
*******those who are sexual attracted to trees

And lest we forget…

A tiny handful of veterans of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the XVth International Brigade, or the "Mac-Paps," remains officially unacknowledged by the Canadian government and by the Canadian Legion. Some 1600 brave Canadian volunteers, mostly serving in this Battalion, went to Spain to fight fascism before it was fashionable to do so, suffering heavy casualties-- half were killed on the battlefield.

Many veterans of the Spanish Civil War weren't permitted to enlist in the forces when Canada entered the Second World War in 1940. They were (to use the FBI cant phrase) "premature anti-fascists." Fascism is only bad if the government says it is, apparently, and Canada’s position on the Spanish Civil War was one of shameful neutrality. Francisco Franco's forces invited the Nazis in to test their newest equipment on civilian populations, while the West stood by in silent complicity.

I was fortunate enough to attend an unveiling ceremony in Ottawa in 2001 for a memorial to these fallen heroes. The Governor-General at the time, Her Excellency Adrienne Clarkson, assisted in the unveiling and gave a moving tribute. I shook the hands of the few veterans able to make it to the ceremony.

These men, many of whom had fought injustice at home and were part of the On to Ottawa Trek, deserve to be remembered and honoured for their fight against fascism. I take this opportunity to do so on Remembrance Day, 2005.

Kolumn Kop-out

A boil has been lanced in Ottawa, and it isn't a pretty sight. Today's Ottawa Citizen contains an account of yet another police "internal investigation," this time of officers who swooped down on a Somalian restaurant in January 2004, put all the Somalians in cuffs but made an exception for the one white man present, held some of them overnight, allegedly caused physical injury to one co-owner--and all this on the basis of an anonymous call that someone on the premises had a gun, after an argument had taken place with their next-door neighbours.

In July, 2004, Deputy Chief of Police Larry Hill, the happy face invariably trotted out to show the various minority communities that the cops are their friends, stated that the police were discussing an out-of-court settlement, but it never materialized. Now the case is going to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, referred there by the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Here is what the latter has to say: "There is sufficient evidence to indicate that the complainants were subjected to unequal treatment and discrimination because of an intersection of race, colour, ethnic origin, ancestry, age and gender in services." The report of the OHRC goes on to state that the evidence indicates that two of the officers involved in the raid used excessive force.

The restaurant,as I noted yesterday, has gone under. According to the owner, there was a "continuous police presence" around his restaurant, until it was forced to close this past March. "We never had a chance to prove ourselves," he said. Repeated raids did the same to health care worker Tracey Gooden’s dream of having a West Indian restaurant.

Meanwhile, in another part of this increasingly murky forest, the police have presented their side of the Danny Gauthier case that I blogged about over the last couple of days. They are assisted by a particularly witless column by Citizen commentator Kelly Egan, which will be duly fisked in a moment. But first, to the official police account:

Gauthier, according to the internal police investigation, was "uncooperative," and was therefore "grounded." (As a reminder of how this was done, check out this video of the events.) The two officers who did the grounding stated that his hands were under his stomach, resisting attempts to handcuff him. The report claims that Gauthier was in violation of the Liquor Licence Act because he was intoxicated, and that he was trespassing, too, because he refused to leave the Tim Horton’s restaurant where all of this took place.

Constable Shane Henderson, the beefy, menacing-looking fellow in the video, claimed that, before the take-down, Gauthier took his right hand out of his pocket and "raised it in an assaultive and aggressive manner." Both officers admit hitting Gauthier with "close-handed hard strikes" until he was handcuffed. They claim that they were afraid he would get into a van they saw in the parking lot and drive off drunk. And he had refused to answer their questions about whether the van was his, or where he had come from. They claim that they had no idea that he was staying just across the street, until they found a pass key in his pocket after the arrest.

The report also noted that two restaurant employees told investigators that Gauthier was intoxicated, and that one had asked Constable Nesbitt, the first police officer seen in the video, to "do us a favour and kick him out." But the same witness described the arrest as "pretty rough."

One of Gauthier's co-workers was interviewed, and stated that he had had only two or three drinks earlier. He himself claims that he had consumed five beers during the course of the whole evening, and was tired after having seen twenty clients that day. The medical report indicated, however, that Gauthier had been prescribed the anti-depressant Paxil, which should not be combined with alcohol. The report concluded that the two officers had behaved appropriately, being confronted by "an aggressive, intoxicated male who refused to identify himself and refused to comply with their commands."

Now, take another close look at that video, and see how well it conforms to this version of events.

First of all, did he refuse to leave the restaurant? We see Gauthier attempting to leave on three occasions, and being pushed back each time.

Ws he intoxicated? We see him clear off his table, walk to the garbage, and then to the counter: there is no indication of staggering. Indeed, he continues to drink his coffee at the counter, while talking to the two officers.

Did he raise his right hand in "an assaultive manner?" The video shows him, just before the take-down, removing his right hand from his pocket and gesturing, as he talks to Constable Nesbitt. But his shoulders remain down; his body language is anything but aggressive--unlike that of Officer Henderson, which is aggressive from the start and throughout the episode.

The video, in other words, does not appear to back up the officers' claims. As for being "uncooperative," free citizens of the country do not have to answer questions by officious police officers, and it is no crime to refuse to do so. And what business did they have issuing "commands?"

Enter Kelly Egan, in a column (subscriber-only) entitled "Gauthier caused his own troubles."

The piece is laced with sarcasm, stuffed with wrong-headed assertions, and signally lacking in facts. Did Gauthier author his own misfortune to some degree? He's been "rather silent" about that, says Egan, a "perfect angel, surely."

Perhaps Gauthier was silent because he wasn't to blame for his troubles, as the video would strongly suggest. He had dozed off for a few minutes, but, says Egan in his cheap sarcastic way, he was "not drunk, though, he assures. Like me, I’m sure you've had power naps in all-night restaurants. Happens all the time."

Indeed, at 1:00 a.m., which is the time in question, it's not uncommon to see people close their eyes for a while in such places. They can simply be tired, not drunk; but admitting this possibility would undermine Egan's thesis.

"If a constable on patrol finds a sleeping drunk on the sidewalk or in a quasi-public place like a coffee shop," he says, "she has a duty, I would argue, to at least inquire about Mister Sleepy's particulars."

Well, er, no, Mr. Egan, she does not. Her duty is to uphold the law. The question is, was Gauthier breaking it? Notice that Egan has already concluded, on no evidence, that Gauthier was "a sleeping drunk," and compared him to someone passed out on a sidewalk.

"Does the public reasonably expect her to ignore him?" he asks.

Of course it does, unless he was breaking the law. She woke him, and the video shows what happened next. He was not permitted to leave. The two officers put on their gloves and roughed him up. As Gauthier's lawyer said on CBC yesterday, police don’t have the right to come into a restaurant and boss people around.

"It is quite plausible, too...that she asked the staff about the hunched-over man in the loud shirt," Egan continues.

So, without facts to go on, we enter the realm of pure speculation. And we get a clear hint that Gauthier's clothing is more evidence that he was up to no good. I must remember to pitch my collection of aloha shirts next time I'm out and about in warm weather.

Finally, Egan has a lucid moment. "When she rouses him, she is no doubt trying to ascertain whether he is a) he is [sic] drunk or sober; b) conscious or in a coma, and c) open to a gentle suggestion that he retire to a proper bed."

Ah, if only. But, as the video makes plain, no "gentle suggestion" appeared to have been forthcoming, and his attempts to retire to his bed across the street were in vain. It is to be regretted that our intrepid columnist didn't follow up this promising line of enquiry.

Instead, he goes on to suggest that the officer asked for Gauthier's name, and that "he refused to provide it, or answer any other questions about his identity. He can argue Charter rights until he’s blue in the face [black and blue, shurely?--ed.]. In fact, if he's drunk, he may already be guilty of a criminal act."

This is sheer nonsense. He doesn't have to answer an overbearing officer's questions. And look at the weasel-language here: "if he's drunk," "may...be guilty of a criminal act." In fact, it's not a criminal offence to be drunk: Egan should check his Criminal Code before making such stupid claims.

But he rushes on to defend the indefensible, and now blunders into the realm of the absurd. "The man could be a fugitive from the law, he could be in violation of a probation order or a parole condition, he could be a serial rapist, he could be on the FBI most-wanted list."

At this point one can see flecks of spittle on Egan’s lips. "Speaking in the abstract," he goes on, whatever that phrase means, "how would it look--on videotape--if Const. Nesbitt comes across a sleeping criminal in a coffee shop, gives him a once-over and lets him go before finding out who he is and what he's up to?"

Indeed. If a person is asleep, he might be drunk. If he's drunk, he might be a serial rapist. I think I follow. But why stop with someone who's nodded off? Why not interrogate everybody she comes across, in restaurants, on the street, in any public place? They could be bank robbers. They could be serial killers. No wonder the Ottawa Police Service needs more officers.

"In addition," Egan ploughs on, "there seems to be a suggestion that Mr. Gauthier was going to get in a car and drive back to Montreal." Seems to be a suggestion? Certainly the cops claimed this, but on what evidence? Until the man actually pulls out keys and attempts to enter a vehicle, he has done nothing illegal. Suggestions are simply not enough grounds for a beating and an arrest.

Gauthier was a salesman, says Egan, so he "should have been able to talk his way out of a jam. Instead, things got worse." In other words, despite the fact that the video shows a relaxed Gauthier doing quite a lot of talking, his failure to be persuasive is yet more evidence of his guilt.

Then comes the arrest. "[I]t's clear from the video images that he will not submit willingly," says Egan, who has obviously been watching a different video from the one available to us. There was no aggression demonstrated by Gauthier at any time, even though he had now been confronted by Officer Henderson, whose aggressive posture throughout is unmistakeable. Nor is it at all clear why Gauthier should "submit." (Why should any citizen "submit" under these or similar circumstances? This isn't a police state. "Submit," hell.)

Our columnist goes on to speculate about the unpredictable nature of drunks, and then, tellingly, asks how anyone is to know whether Gauthier was drunk at the time. Which, I guess, is the point, but he manages, once again, to miss it. Instead, he concludes:

It does appear that Mr. Gauthier sustained a couple of hard whacks during the arrest. He certainly came out looking worse for wear. Possibly, this was excessive force. Surely, however, this is a byproduct of his own intransigence.

Egan ends his sorry piece by stating that citizens have "a burden...to provide a minimum of cooperation when faced with a police officer's enquiry. Silence cannot be our sole offering." And he cannot avoid one more gratuitous swipe at Gauthier: "[L]ook in the mirror, man: a halo you will not see."

Egan's grasp of civil liberties, shall we say, is tenuous. Ordinary citizens, presumed innocent, are not accountable to police officers who want to flex a little authority or muscle. Certainly their cooperation with the police is reasonable under a wide range of circumstances, even if not mandated by law. But a man dozing off in a coffee shop late at night has a right, it seems to me, to keep himself to himself when awakened, proceed on his way unimpeded, and not be smacked around by police officers with nothing better to do.

_____________
NOTE: The Amazing Wonderdog has some excellent analysis of the officers' body language here and here.