Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Infamy, Impunity

The law of the land presumably accounts for law and order and everyone is treated equally under the law. At least it would be reasonable to assume that to be the case. Particularly since Canadians have been assured that such is the case repeatedly by our politicians who point to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Are we speaking of generalizations, beyond which exceptionality begs the case for different treatment?

Canada's aboriginals claim that they represent a nation exempt from Canadian law, since they have their own laws. They also have their own territories, although Canada presumes the conceit that this is one nation equal under the law and one geographic spread divided into provinces and territories upon which live various populations, including tribal populations comprised of First Nations peoples.

Who are not Canadians first, but rather First Nations, period.

They are a law unto themselves. If they decide that it is to their benefit to import/smuggle guns or drugs or tobacco into the country and their reserves this is their affair and no government need seek to intervene or to claim those activities to be unlawful. For what they do is performed on Indian Land. And if treaties have not been signed it is a mere formality awaiting a solution that may never arrive.

Land developers who believe they have a license through lawful application to municipal governments to proceed with building housing units on contested land will henceforth be on notice that all is not quite as smooth sailing as it would appear to be. Particularly when an Indian Band lives in close proximity to the proposed housing development.

For the simple reason that tempers flare and Indian Warriors are summoned and what results is a stand-off between the Warriors and the Law, in the persona of policing agents, both provincial and municipal who find themselves between that rock and that hard place, because government leans on the law to apply a variant on the kind of justice and law and order that most of us take for granted.

After violating the law, confronting police, disturbing the peace and performing a myriad of unlawful, violent acts the 'native occupation' of the Douglas Creek Estates hard by Caledonia, disrupting peoples' lives, terrorizing citizens, displacing many and causing the Ontario government to waste millions of taxpayer dollars buying off a developer, unrest remains.

The land in question has, by default, been ceded to the protesters, all $16-million-worth. Add to that an additional $20-million to be paid out and divided among 440 residents and 400 businesses - who had their lives upturned by the strident, unlawful and violent protests - as an ameliorating gesture from the government to the citizens involved.

The police, frustrated beyond words that they were given strict orders to stand down and stand back and allow lawlessness to prevail, for no one in government wished to confront the native protesters who claimed their human rights and rights under the Charter would be violated in the process, and no one has forgotten Ipperwash, burn with indignant frustration.

Too bad. That swath of land once quaintly named the Douglas Creek Estates is now, it appears, irrevocably Six Nations territory. They claimed it to be so, and lo and behold, it came to pass...!

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