October 13, 2010
By Jeff Parkinson
As a faithful Conservative, it is sometimes necessary to swallow my personal views about an issue so long as the party as a whole is doing the best job they can to represent us. That is not the case with the latest decision by Stephen Harper.
Touting the tripe that he’s “good for the party” and under the apparent delusion that he’s a “law & order guy”, the Federal Conservatives are running former OPP commissioner Julian Fantino in the riding of Vaughan. This for me as a staunch Conservative constituent and as someone who has seen first hand the havoc that Julian Fantino wreaked on the town of Caledonia is too much to take quietly.
It’s frustrating to see that a few mainstream media outlets are still oblivious to the anguish he inflicted on so many, and to hear them speak of him as someone who “hates bad guys” and is “perfect for the Conservatives” when it’s so clear to all involved in or remotely following the Caledonia crisis that he made an effort to align himself with the “bad guys” while working feverishly to silence the voice of the residents and anyone who dared to challenge his race based policing policies.
This is a guy whose behavior saw him criminally charged with attempting to influence municipal officials, and while everyone but the Liberal party was screaming for an independent, non McGuinty employed Crown Attorney to be brought in to decide what to do with the case, one of the McGuinty Crown’s quickly stayed the charge. Not only was there no effort to ensure that justice was done, but no effort to ensure that justice at least seemed to be done.
Now that he is finally off of the taxpayers dime ($250,000 per year as an ineffective and at times abusive OPP commissioner), the party who is supposed to be about law and order wants to trot this guy who to describe it gently has been a lightning rod for controversy throughout much of his career, and is well known for his very active role in subverting the very rule of law that he was sworn to protect out to us and say “hey, he’s an ex cop so he represents law & order”?
He doesn’t hate bad guys, (in my view) he hates motorists, he hates court rulings, he hates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but he has consistently demonstrated an apparent inability to distinguish between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.
Running McGuinty’s former lap dog is a pill far too foul for myself or many other Conservative voters to swallow. I find this statement difficult & distasteful to write, but I must concede that in the next federal election I will vote Liberal if Mr. Fantino is a Conservative MP. I will do so as a Conservative who believes it is far more important to send a strong message to Mr. Harper in the only language that he seems to understand than it is to toe the party line.
In fact I’m going to do alot more than just vote for a Liberal, but that is a story of its own that will be written in the near future.
It’s not just the voters who are appalled by this decision. Our own sources within the Conservative Party of Canada are telling us that the feedback from members is against bringing in Fantino by a margin of 10-1, but Harper is doing it anyway by skipping the democratic nomination process in favor of fast tracking Fantino into Vaughan.
I continue to believe in fundamental principles of conservatism such as law & order, traditional values, and individual responsibility, but it’s become clear to me that the highest levels of the Harper Government do not share my conservative views. Pursuing someone such as Mr. Fantino shows a complete disregard for the rule of law, for the victims of race based justice both historical and present, and for the platform that put them in office.
Those believing the unsubstantiated propaganda that Fantino is “good for the conservatives” should check out Conservatives Against Fantino and at the very least reserve judgment on this issue until the October 26 release of Christie Blatchford’s book Helpless – Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear & Anarchy and How The Law Failed Us All.
Blatchford exposes how Fantino worked to subvert the rule of law and hung his own officers out to dry while using his authority to target non Native activists and residents for intimidation and criminal charges.
More on the book can be found here and much more on the crisp slap to the face of Haldimand residents by the Harper appointment of a man we all wish we could forget about can be found at Conservatives Against Fantino.
Suggested viewing
Fantinogate Exposed – an attack upon the Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Helpless by Christie Blatchford
Canadian Advocates for Charter Equality
JeffParkinson.ca 
Are there actually any conservatives left in CPC?
I can’t name any besides Jason Kenney and Maxime Bernier. Harper is blowing it big time, so no surprise come elections, there will be no conservative turnout and we’ll have count Dracula as PM. What has Canada become?
It’s a perplexing political climate right now to say the least Aaron.
I’ve been a steadfast Conservative for most of my adult life and I agree they have been deteriorating for quite some time, but the grotesque concept of “law & order” that Harper is presenting has left me disillusioned.
I remember during one of the debates in the last Federal election, Diane Finley proudly discussed how she was a law & order candidate because she helped raise the age of consent while abandoning the people of Caledonia to organized crime.
Her assertion left me wondering aloud how old must one be to consent to being terrorized by rampaging “warriors”? She insisted she was “protecting children” while many children in Caledonia and on the Sixth Line were terrified to go to bed at night.
Jeff
Jeff:
In real democracies there usually is a provision in law that allows federal government to intervene when provincial or municipal governments are incapable of coping with violence. Canada seems to insist that it’s special in a sense that both province and feds are playing deaf and blind.
Aboriginal matters fall into federal jurisdiction, correct me if I am wrong. But Harper appears to be quite happy with the situation where no one is asking for his help and he is not doing anything at all about Caledonia. Nothing could be finer, so to say. He keeps himself busy doing things which we neither need nor want, like bailing out failed enterprises and lecturing the UN.
The CPC had ample opportunity to force an election on the desperately broke libs, yet they never made important issues confidence vote. That spells ‘coward’ or ‘spineless’ to me.
Aaron,
Mr personal belief is that they have not forced an election lately out of fear that the public is so sick of extra elections and the extraordinary cost to the tax payer each time one is called, they feared they would not gain any ground.
Harper has I think been very happy to bury his head in the sand on Caledonia. I respect that in the beginning they issued a statement that they would not negotiate this because there is no valid claim to Plank Road, but from that moment onward they chose to fail us repeatedly. There is Federal representation at the negotiating table today only because it was ordered by the Ontario Superior Court, and they’re accomplishing absolutely nothing tangible.
In 2006 McGuinty told us essentially that he had all the answers, and that we should sit tight. He said the occupation would not last into the winter of 06 and that he would fix everything.
By the end of 2006, McGuinty announced that this problem which he had all the answers to just months prior is a federal issue and that he can do nothing, but he did not make that announcement until after he had purchased DCE in order to subvert the court order demanding the removal of the criminals from the land.
With that move, he removed the authority of the Federal Government to clean up the mess because the DCE was now privately owned by Ontario and McGuinty made it clear that as the owner of the property, Ontario was going to let the Natives stay there and terrorize Caledonia for as long as they pleased.
He absolutely screwed us all by ensuring that the feds could not solve this before declaring that it was a Federal problem.
Harper at that time still had a chance to do something significant though. He could easily have announced again that there is no valid claim to Plank Road, and made clear to the Canadian public that Mr. McGuinty had taken the jurisdiction to deal with this out of the hands of the CPC. The general public had and continue to have no idea to this day.
Instead of doing that, the Conservatives zippered their mouths on the issue and let the general public believe the bold faced lies coming from the Ontario Liberals.
I contacted some of the Conservatives including Harper and Diane Finley about this in 2008 to ask them why they don’t remind the public that there is no valid claim, and clarify that their hands were tied by McGuinty in 2006. I of course didn’t hear back from Harper or his office, but I did manage to talk to Finley through her senior staff.
Her answer was essentially that the Harper Government didn’t want to engage in a mud slinging contest with McGuinty, and didn’t feel that they should dignify the McGuinty assertions that it was their problem with a response.
I half (ok more like 5%) believed them at the time, but in hindsight I have little doubt that their plan was to try to wash their hands of the issue and of the gaping hole in democracy in Caledonia so that they could continue to run on a platform of law & order without most people knowing that they were ignoring a state of lawlessness within one of their ridings.
I also contacted Toby Barrett who agreed with me, but was unable to do anything because as the opposition he often found his voice being silenced by the ruling McGuinty Liberals. He did what he could in the legislature but a classic example is when Michael Bryant held a news conference in Caledonia in late 2007 (where he agreed to meet with residents but never actually did) Mr. Barrett attended and was not allowed inside the building. He stood with his constituents outside in the cold trying like the rest of us to catch a sliver of information from inside.
Democracy as we know and live it today is far from being democratic. It comes close to resembling democracy during an election campaign, but then quickly reverts to what we know now.
Jeff