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COMMENTARY
June 28, 2006
Caledonia
Dare I say, that police work is a masculine activity? Always supposing, that words can have any meaning.This may be partly because most overt forms of criminality are also masculine activities, and it takes force to defeat force. Let us grant at least this much in extenuation of the poor lady police officers, whom I have several times seen embarrassed at the front line of chaos, where they have found themselves a few twitches short of the muscle they suddenly require, and in a place where the remark, “I’m a woman and you’re hurting me!” has ceased to resonate the way it does in polite society. Indeed: one of the reasons tradition stipulated big strong tall police officers, was so they needn’t resort to firearms the moment things got out of hand. But I don’t want to reduce this to men and women. I shall try to keep today’s column at the level of abstraction evoked by such words as “masculine” and “feminine”. There are, to use examples from current Canadian politics alone, tough masculine women like Rona Ambrose (whom no one could possibly mistake for a man), and weak feminine men like Dalton McGuinty (parenthesis suppressed). The ability to take a hard decision, stand ground, and cope with the response, is not something nature has restricted to men. Since time out of mind, policing, and the exercise of power behind it, has been associated with the masculine virtues. Not just “facing it down”, but in a peculiarly masculine way. There being, in the grand scheme of things, moments when talk and gestures, even empty threats, will have no discernible impact upon criminal behaviour. But superior force may still have some effect. The whole country continues to watch the disintegration of civil society at Caledonia, Ontario. The politicians may not get it yet, but my average reader will have no difficulty appreciating the connexion between law and order in Caledonia, and wherever he or she lives. When public authorities lose the courage to enforce the law in any place, whether against privileged minorities or anyone else, public order begins to evaporate everywhere. Those who have read some history know what happens next. When the Romans start withdrawing the legions from the frontier, you had better start digging your moat a hundred miles inland. I can add nothing to what is already widely reported in the media, on Caledonia. There are no mysteries, no facts to dispute. Whatever validity the Six Nations’ land claims may prove to have in some later retrospect, they had no validity when the thugs occupied the Douglas Creek Estates Property. And the thugs remain, in direct defiance of the law. The nadir was perhaps reached last weekend, when the Ontario Provincial Police revealed they were no longer offering police protection to existing homeowners trapped behind Six Nations’ lines. These people had been paying taxes for police protection for many years; but their property and safety no longer counts. Instead, the luckless captives were now under the protection of an occupying force. One which has pledged to remove, in the fullness of time, everyone else, of non-aboriginal race, for ten miles either side of the length of the Grand River. Ontario’s ruling politicians are congratulating themselves, because so far, thanks to their egregious cowardice, nobody in Caledonia has actually been killed. That is their standard for a successful result. It is a very odd standard. The same logic could be expressed in the sentence: “Until he kills you, you don’t have a case.” It goes beyond this. There was an unambiguous court order for the police to remove the Six Nations blockades. It was ignored, by police and the politicians behind them. And since the last Superior Court hearing on June 16th, the provincial government has been operating on the loopy legal theory that, by expropriating from its present owners the land Six Nations are claiming, and taking it “out of contention”, the many violations of the Criminal Code that have already occurred become null and void. This is a legal theory unworthy of adults. Dalton McGuinty would be an embarrassment in any political jurisdiction, but especially so in a province like Ontario, where the rule of law had previously been enforced for over two centuries. I do not think it will even be effective to give him and his party the pasting they deserve in next year’s provincial election. It is too late for that, for in the face of escalating Indian land claims, and radicalization, right across the country, he has set a catastrophic precedent. And yet, Mr McGuinty and the other sorry creatures who warm the seats in his cabinet, are not acting alone. They are not even making such decisions as they appear to make. They are instead passively accepting the wisdom of their social and ideological class, which holds that any expression of masculine assertion must necessarily be wrong. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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