Ipperwash and the Freedom Convoy

Part 1: Canada's Attorney General David Lametti told the Public Order Emergency Commission that everyone should read the Ipperwash Inquiry Report, so I did. Here’s what I learned.

Sometime during the first week of the Ottawa protests, as hundreds of big rigs and other vehicles converged on the capital’s downtown core, Canada’s Attorney General, Minister David Lametti was texting with Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, expressing concern over the police response, or lack thereof.

“You need to get the police to move… too many people are being seriously adversely impacted by what is an occupation,” texts Lametti.

Then in another exchange between the two, Lametti texts, “Need [Ottawa police chief] Sloly to be quick, quick, quick.”

The text exchange was one of thousands of exhibits and background documents referred to during the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC), an inquiry into what went into the federal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act in February 2022.¹

Ottawa protests, February 2022. Wikimedia commons.

I’ve written about the Ottawa protest and the POEC proceedings here, here, here, here, and here.

At one point during Lametti’s testimony, counsel for the POEC, Gordon Cameron, asks an important—though awkwardly worded—question about the relationship that exists between government and police:

Do you think that the question of whether Chief Sloly should be dealing with the Ottawa protesters ‘quick, quick, quick’ or wait until he believes he has the resources to perform the operation safely, do you think the decision between those two options is an operational decision for Chief Sloly or a decision that should be influenced by you and Minister Mendicino?

Lametti responds that he believes government cannot make operational decisions for police, but that governments can make “priorities clear in these situations.” The distinction is an important one to clarify, and why Cameron likely raises it, because in a democracy, the government shouldn’t be telling police what to do. Unlike in a police state—where the government directs the police to maintain or enforce political power and where government critics typically end up in jail, or worse—Canada’s police should have autonomy in enforcing the rule of law and their operations should be independent of government.

“I guess what I would say is I would recommend everyone read the Ipperwash report, quite frankly, because it’s nuanced and tries to deal with the variety of these kinds of situations,” says Lametti.

So, I did.

The 2007 Report of the Ipperwash Inquiry was published twelve years after the events leading up to the death of Anthony “Dudley” George, who was shot and killed by Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) in 1995 during a protest by First Nations at Ipperwash Provincial Park.

While the grievances held by the First Nations people in Kettle Point and Stoney Point are starkly different from those expressed at the Ottawa protests, the Ipperwash report is relevant because of the thorny question about what the government’s relationship should be with police in a democracy. While the question became central to the Ipperwash inquiry, it wasn’t the first time an inquiry has broached the subject of government interference in police operations.

In fact, the issue seems to come up time and again: it was investigated at the APEC Inquiry, the Donald Marshall Inquiry, the McDonald Commission, and the Maher Arar Inquiry. The subject was also considered more recently during Nova Scotia’s Mass Casualty Commission.

Public Order Emergency Commission counsel Gordon Cameron (left) questions Canada’s Attorney General, Minister David Lametti, November 23, 2022.

Stolen lands, a long-standing grievance

In 1939 William Lyon MacKenzie invoked the War Measures Act, which gave the federal government broad powers to protect national security including the ability to suspend civil liberties and intern what were called “enemy aliens”—Italian Canadians, German Canadians, Japanese Canadians, Jewish refugees, and pacifist Mennonites. They censored newspapers, banned some religious, cultural, and political groups, and detained anyone who criticized the government.

The Act also allowed the Department of National Defence, in 1942, to expropriate the Stoney Point Reserve in southern Ontario as an advanced military training centre. Even though the Kettle and Stony Point Bands voted against the surrender of their ancestral lands, the government went ahead, forcing the band members to relocate from Stoney Point Reserve to Kettle Point Reserve. The government promised the bands could purchase back the land at market value after the war, but that never happened.

In the Ipperwash inquiry report, Justice Sydney Linden wrote:

Aboriginal witnesses described the emotional turmoil of their forced relocation, the loss of their livelihoods and self-sufficiency, and the friction that resulted between the Aboriginal people in Kettle Point and Stoney Point… Some homes were bulldozed and others were placed on blocks and moved. The move took place during the day, and Aboriginal people returned from work to find their reserve abandoned, their homes destroyed, and their belongings broken. People received paltry sums for the relocation. The land at Kettle Point to which people were transplanted was much smaller in size and lacked the resources necessary to sustain families… The impact of the appropriation on the Kettle and Stony Point Band was significant. The acreage had been reduced from 5,096 acres at the time of the Treaty to just over 2,000 acres.

In 1993, this long-standing grievance reached a tipping point when band members began to occupy the military range and army barracks at Camp Ipperwash. Some took up residence in the army barracks and were in it for the long haul, and as Justice Linden put it nearly fifteen years later, they were there to “reclaim the land and to get the negotiations moving again.” He also wrote, “the mood amongst the Aboriginal group was jubilant; people were overjoyed to be back on their land.”

The federal government was also only willing to negotiate with elected members of the Kettle and Stony Point Band, and “refused to initiate discussions with the occupiers, many of whom were descendants of former residents of the Stoney Point Reserve appropriated by DND in 1942,” wrote Linden.

In September 1995, some of the protesters also set up a blockade at Ipperwash Provincial Park on Lake Huron, which was created in 1937 but was historically part of the Stony Point reserve land, and the site of a sacred Chippewa burial ground.

Ipperwash protests, 1993-1995. Screen grab from Ontario First Nations mark 25 years since Ipperwash crisis, death of protester. In 2015, fully twenty years after the protests at Ipperwash and more than 70 years after the lands were stolen by the federal government, the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation approved a deal with the feds that includes a roughly $90 million financial settlement, and a return and cleanup of the Stoney Point lands.

The ‘dining room meeting’

On September 6, 1995—a couple years after the occupation of the military range, but only two days after protesters set up a blockade at Ipperwash Provincial Park—a pivotal, twenty-minute meeting took place at the Ontario legislative building.

More importantly, the meeting took place not long before Dudley George was shot and killed by an OPP officer.

According to the Ipperwash Inquiry report, the meeting was the “subject of controversy,” because of who was present. There was widespread speculation at the time that the provincial government headed by Premier Mike Harris attempted to direct police operations at Ipperwash.

Present at the meeting were Harris, Attorney General Charles Harnick, Solicitor General Bob Runciman, the Minister of Natural Resources, as well as assistants and deputy ministers. But also present were police officers Ron Fox and his assistant Scott Patrick. Both were seconded to the Ministry of the Solicitor General, but remained police officers with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), wrote Linden, and reported to a senior police officer at the OPP for administrative matters.

According to Linden, one of the officers was in contact with the Incident Commander at Ipperwash, which “created the risk of placing political pressure on the police.”

According to the Inquiry report, the purpose of the “dining room meeting” was to “make sure everybody understood what the Premier’s view was.” During the inquiry, Attorney General Harnick testified that when he took his seat in the dining room, he heard the Premier say in a loud voice, “I want the fucking Indians out of the park,” and “use guns if you have to.” For nearly a decade, Harnick concealed this information when questioned about it in the Ontario legislature.

During the inquiry, Premier Harris denied making these statements, but in his report on the Inquiry, Justice Linden concluded that the former premier did make the statement, but that ultimately there was no evidence that it had any “influence” on the OPP operation at Ipperwash later that same day.

Justice Linden wrote:

Although one may disagree with his view, it was legitimate for the Premier to take the position that the First Nations people were illegally occupying the [Ipperwash provincial] park, and that he wanted them out of [the park] as soon as possible. He did not give directions on the manner in which the OPP should enforce the law; how, when, and what arrests should be made; tactical decisions; or other actions the police should take to end the occupation. In my view, the Premier did not give instructions to or interfere with OPP operations at Ipperwash… [but] Mr. Fox and Mr. Patrick should not have been in the dining room meeting with the Premier and Cabinet Ministers… the appropriate buffers were not in place… There was a danger in these circumstances, both with the transmission of information from the Premier and Ministry to provincial police and with the transmission of police information to the politicians. Even though there may not be actual interference by politicians in police operations, the public’s perception of non-interference by the government is a fundamental principle that the Premier, Ministers, and other politicians must adhere to… The dining room meeting was woefully lacking in transparency.

So, while Justice Linden concluded there was a lack of transparency, and that the optics of having OPP at the meeting were not good, he found there was no evidence of inappropriate government influence.

Linden concluded that governments and police “can and should work together” and that in light of this “evolving understanding… the concept or doctrine of police independence needs to be modernized.”

Linden wrote:

Any attempt to modernize police/government relations must begin with a reconsideration of the term “police independence.” Simply put, the term “police independence” is misleading. The word “independence” suggests that the boundaries between police “independence” and government “authority” can be clearly articulated and understood. This is not always possible or advisable. The term “police operational responsibility” is generally a better way to conceptualize and describe our contemporary understanding of what is often referred to as “police independence” … Important democratic and public safety considerations justify the exchange of information between the police and government, but when such exchanges are necessary, care must be taken to ensure that they do not become covert or veiled attempts to inappropriately direct police operations.

Indeed, this is likely what Attorney General Lametti was meaning when he told the POEC that “there isn’t a black or white answer. The identification of priorities is a much more complex answer.”

But the author of the 2001 book, One Dead Indian: The Premier, the Police, and the Ipperwash Crisis, saw the government role on that deadly day as much more hands on, and comes to a different conclusion than Linden did. Investigative journalist Peter Edwards writes about the ‘dining room meeting’ and recounts, “There had been a meeting of some cabinet-level people at Queen’s Park, and right after the meeting, all of a sudden, police were coming down to the park.” According to Edwards, the meeting notes concluded that the province will “remove the occupiers as soon as possible.”

Quick, quick, quick.

[Part 2 of this series will look at analysis of the media coverage surrounding the Ipperwash crisis, and will explore how protests tend to get covered in the press and what is often missing. I’ll also swing the discussion back around to the “Freedom Convoy” and the Ottawa protest.]

1. The Commission, led by Justice Paul Rouleau, took place from October 13 to December 2, 2022, and culminated in a final Report of the Public Inquiry, a five-volume, 2,000 page set, in which he concluded that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met the threshold to invoke the Act.  After the report was made public, Rouleau commented: "I do not come to this conclusion easily, as I do not consider the factual basis for it to be overwhelming… Reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion than the one I have arrived at." As previously stated, Rouleau said his task was not to discuss the legality of the invocation of the Act, and that the job belonged to the courts. In February 2022, after the invocation of the Act, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association initiated and have since maintained an application for judicial review before the Federal Court. This court will assess the legality of the declaration and also consider the legality and constitutionality of the emergency measures that were put in place. According to Cara Zwibel, the CCLAs director of fundamental freedoms, this application will be heard in early April.