Fantino has lost the propaganda war

January 8, 2010

One of the most significant battles CANACE has faced for the past 3 + years is a propaganda war initiated by the OPP and in particular by Julian Fantino. Today what I would submit is the most significant article written by anyone in the mainstream media in the almost 4 years since DCE was seized by weaponized toddlers appeared in the Globe & Mail.

From the day that Fantino was appointed commissioner of the OPP, he has stated “there is one law for all” and worked very hard to ensure that the opposite is true, but in order to enforce race based policing he needed the majority of the public to believe that he was acting in good faith as an actual police officer instead of as a tyrannical puppet of the McGuinty government.

To that end, he simply told the media that the OPP have been doing the best they can, preserving the peace in a delicate and complicated situation, and an abundance of other catch phrases and buzz words designed to fool everyone into thinking he was doing his job instead of working to subvert the foundation of justice itself.

With CANACE standing in his way and rebuking his rhetoric at every turn, he started a propaganda war in the media that has been raging for years. The simple goal was to discredit us and he’s used every filthy tactic in the book to do so. These have been well documented and range from slandering us to arresting us to arranging a situation where we were physically attacked and hospitalized.

Each time the media would catch a whiff of what was happening, he would assure them that we (never the violent Native thugs nor the OPP) were the sole problem in Caledonia and most of the time they would take the bait.

I think at this juncture it’s important to point out that The Regional News in Caledonia caught on to what’s really been happening a very long time ago and has been running consistently hard hitting stories on this topic for years. They deserve to be recognized and congratulated for their efforts. They have stood tall in the face of threats and a lawsuit from the OPP and continue to print the facts instead of the propaganda week after week.

It would be easy to say that the mainstream media failed to do their job for the past 4 years but I don’t view it as so simple for a number of reasons.

On any given day, the media rely heavily on the OPP for information regarding a huge array of stories. Without police forces giving them information the media would simply not know about the vast majority of crimes that take place in this country. It’s a simpatico relationship that obviously works well when the information being provided is actually true.

As a society we are raised to be completely dependant on the police and to trust that they are beyond reproach. I was brought up this way as were most of us including those who grew up and became reporters for major media outlets.

Furthermore every reporter has an editor to answer to. CANACE has been told outright by reporters that their editors forced them to water down a Caledonia story to replace facts with statements that put a more positive light on the OPP or Native criminals and cast doubt on the victimized residents. We could try to dig deeper into why this has taken place but that’s really not the point today.

Mark Vandermaas once told me that once the media figures out that they’ve been being lied to, the tide will turn in a big way. There are countless examples of this happening throughout history, but perhaps the best of all is residential schools.

There was a time when even CBC ran stories about happy Native children living their great new lives in residential schools run by churches and our government. We all know now what an abomination those places were and I would defy anyone to find me a mainstream media outlet that did not condemn those monstrosities once they found out what was really happening behind closed doors.

The same has begun to ring true for Caledonia now that prominent journalists like Christie Blatchford have realized that they have been lied to by the OPP and by Fantino in particular. Her article published today entitled “Activist a nagging throrn in Fantino’s side” is exceptionally well researched and takes a hard look at some of the actions that Fantino has taken to oppress anyone who tried to stand in the way of his racist policing policies. She covers not only the years long campaign that Julian has waged against Gary McHale and CANACE, but his disgusting (failed) attempt to discredit and disgrace Hamilton Police officer and Caledonia resident Dave Hartless who dared to speak out against the attacks on his community and his family by Native extremists under the watchful and useless eye of the OPP.

When the Brown Chatwell lawsuit against the OPP and Ontario government went to trial late in 2009, it was Christie Blatchford who wrote the first hard hitting story that brought throngs of fellow reporters to the court room to see for themselves what’s been going on.

I have more than once compared our struggle in the propaganda war to chipping away at a wall between the truth and the mainstream media, and while I think we have been very successful at keeping the story alive and creating serious cracks in that wall, Christie has arrived with a story that’s the equivalent of a wrecking ball and started swinging.

It will take time for the rest of the country to catch up to her, but the process has begun, Fantino has lost the propaganda war, and we are one very large step closer to the day when everyone will know the truth about Caledonia, Fantino, CANACE, the Native thugs, and the OPP.

Jeff Parkinson