Damned one way or the other
The dilemma of handling ‘teepee’ protests
What to make of the news out of Regina this week that the Justice for Our Stolen Children Protest Camp, which with its teepees and tents and ceremonial fire is parked adjacent to the Saskatchewan legislature, is taking the government to court?
Well, the only real lesson is that governments — provincial, federal, municipal — don’t know what to do about Indigenous protest and that pretty much whatever they end up doing, even if it is nothing more than wringing their hands, will somehow bite them in the collective rear.
A lawyer for the Stolen Children group, Dan LeBlanc, filed an application Monday in the Court of Queen’s Bench, seeking an order that the camp should not have been dismantled last month, albeit briefly and to little effect, and that six protesters should not have been taken into custody, also briefly and to little effect.
LeBlanc says that the former action was an unjustifiable breach of the protesters’ Charter right to freedom of expression and that the latter action by Regina Police breached their right against arbitrary detention. As he told David Fraser of the Regina Leader-Post, “We say that right (freedom of expression) is more important than the government’s interest in keeping a green lawn.”
By the time the police came in to dismantle the camp on June 18, the Provincial Capital Commission, which runs Wascana Centre, the lovely man-made lake where the legislature is located, had issued eviction notices under the Trespass to Property Act, which prohibits overnight camping, the erection of tents and other structures, and burning wood and other combustibles.
Wascana, in other words, is a public park, with various play areas, pools, bandstands, a Speaker’s Corner, public launches for boats, etc. What it is not is a campground.
By most local accounts, there were nine teepees and other structures, including a central teepee with the sacred fire, on the grounds. Protesters had been there for 108 days, having moved in late February in the aftermath of the controversial verdicts in two trials involving dead Indigenous young people, 22-year-old Colten Boushie and 15-year-old Tina Fontaine.
The camp, LeBlanc told the National Post Tuesday, is about 100 metres from the front doors to the legislature.
After the dismantling, the first teepee was back by June 21. By June 26, Global News reported, it had been joined by five others. Tuesday, Fraser reported in the LeaderPost that there are now 13 teepees.
It appears, then, that dismantling has only served to encourage the growth of the camp, just as the protesters’ reasons for being there also have broadened. Though some protesters felt the forcible removal was inherently violent “settler” activity, the state reacted with measured force necessary to remove those who wouldn’t leave on their own.
Justice issues have melded with systemic racism, the shocking number of Indigenous youth in state care and the disproportionate number of incarcerated Indigenous people, and, in the case of one of LeBlanc’s clients, Richelle Dubois, the death of her 14-year-old son, Haven, “as well as the way in which Indigenous people are treated throughout Saskatchewan,” as the court filing says.
The measured approach also failed in Caledonia, Ont., where a handful of occupiers on a privately owned housing development moved in peaceably enough in October 2005. The longer they stayed, as government and developers tried to settle things quietly, the greater their numbers grew. Then the protesters ignored and burned a temporary injunction seeking their removal and, when ordered into court by the late Ontario Superior Court Judge David Marshall, refused to acknowledge the court’s authority.
Reluctantly, he found them guilty of criminal contempt but ordered the sentence immediately suspended.
The police, in that case the Ontario Provincial Police, stalled and stalled, until early on the morning of April 20, the OPP conducted a raid so botched they were lucky to get out of the place without serious injury — outnumbered, they were forced to withdraw.
The occupiers and their supporters threw up barricades on the main roads, set fires all over town and, by nightfall, both the OPP and occupiers agreed there were now between 500 and 1,000 protesters on the site. What followed were months of equal parts violence and intimidation (on the part of the occupiers) and paralyzed inertia (on behalf of the then-Dalton McGuinty government and the OPP).
It very nearly tore the town apart.
So, if the velvet glove doesn’t work, neither, so much, does the iron fist it occasionally contains. And if it’s only a Trespass to Property to Act that is being broken, well, the rule of law is a fragile creature.
The Stolen Children Camp application will be heard in court next month.