Homegown Terrorism Rewarded By Left Wing...

McGuinty minister's firing offence

Minister of Natural Resources, Linda Jeffrey, misleads Legislature on Ipperwash

The long, sad saga of Ipperwash took another lurch toward its ultimate end last week. The province is taking the legislative steps to give a provincial park to the Chippewas of Kettle and the Stony Point First Nation.
Like every other stage in this dark story the handover of a provincial park is filled with lies, half-truths and politics.
This is the site of the infamous occupation in 1995 and the tragic death of Dudley George.
The reverberations from that awful event 15 years ago continue to this day. Even more tragically it would seem we have learned nothing from it.
We have, of course, the considerable wisdom of the Honourable Sidney B. Linden, the Commissioner of The Ipperwash Inquiry. Linden laboriously tracked the federal government’s takeover of Stony Point land during the Second World War and the long and convoluted process that lead to the occupation of the military camp by Stony Point people in July of 1995.
The federal government had promised to return the land to the Stony Point people but the process dragged on for decades.
Why the delay? The land had been contaminated and needed an environmental cleanup and the feds didn’t want to spend the money.
Linden’s report is unambiguous on this subject. He recommends “The federal government should immediately return the former army camp to the peoples of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation and guarantee that it will assume complete responsibility for an appropriate environmental cleanup of the site.”
In September of 1995 the occupation of the military camp took an ill-fated turn when the Stony Point people decided to occupy the adjacent Ipperwash Provincial Park. The rest, however convoluted and distorted, is history.
Premier Dalton McGuinty, then the leader of the opposition, jumped into the tragedy of Dudley George’s death with political jackboots. He and his caucus colleagues turned and twisted the circumstances to fit their political ends. It was an undignified and sordid exploitation of a conflict that should have been resolved decades before.
McGuinty wanted to create the illusion that premier Mike Harris actually ordered the police to shoot a protester. It was, at best, absurd political theatre. He helped to turn the entire spectre of the inquiry into the pointless determination of whether Harris used a particular expletive.
To this day McGuinty continues to play politics with Ipperwash.
Last week the Minister of Natural Resources, Linda Jeffrey, said “One of the 100 recommendations of the Ipperwash inquiry was that the province of Ontario transfer Ipperwash Provincial Park to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point.”
Nonsense.
The Ipperwash Inquiry made no such recommendation. In fact the report quotes Chief Tom Bressette of the Kettle and Stony Point band as saying the band had no land claim on Ipperwash Park.
The wrong signal
If anything, Commissioner Linden seemed to lean toward co-management of the park.

This is important. In transferring the Ipperwash Park and tolerating absolute terrorism in Caladonia, McGuinty is clearly signalling that in Ontario the right way to claim land is to occupy it with an armed force.

It is one hell of precedent.

And now the political controversy McGuinty worked so hard to flame is scorching his own cabinet. Either Jeffrey was terribly misinformed about what Linden wrote or her distortion of the Ipperwash Inquiry report is a deliberate attempt to mislead the Legislative assembly.
If it’s the latter, that is a firing offence, or at least it was in the Harris days. Jeffrey should resign.
Who knows, maybe that would be a fitting end to McGuinty’s manipulation of the Ipperwash tragedy.
john.snobelen@sunmedia.ca