In early 2007, we first heard the heart wrenching story of a young lady named Pam Dudych who we called ‘Dancer’ at the time to protect her identity. When the OPP ran away from the Douglas Creek Estates on April 20 2006, they abandoned the residents of the Sixth Line road including young Pam.
At 14 years old she witnessed the worst of the terror in Caledonia as the Natives rampaged outside her front door. The OPP told her one day that if a Native broke into her home and attacked her, she would be the one charged if she defended herself. As a result she was forced to begin counselling and start taking medication.
Meanwhile the Natives decided to hang a skinned, beheaded deer on a hydro pole near her house where all the children on the school bus would see it. Protectors of mother earth indeed…
During the CANACE truth & reconciliation rally on Sunday February 27, Gary McHale had a long, respectful conversation with Six Nations Elder Jan Longboat. Unfortunately the two leaders were surrounded by radicals who insisted on interrupting repeatedly, but ultimately the respectful dialogue continued until the two came to an agreement to separate the 2 sides.
The plan was simple. McHale would take the CANACE crew and residents South down Argyle Street, and Longboat would lead her people north to DCE.
When the news broke in late 2010 that some Native chiefs earn more than the Prime Minister, and that councillor Mike Halliday of the Glooscap First Nation in Nova Scotia which has a membership of 304 brought home $978,000 in 2008, Canadians were startled. When CBC tried to interview Halliday on Nov 26 2010, he threatened to have them removed by police.
When resident Sherie Francis spoke out about living in poverty while her representatives get rich, she says Halliday threatened to fire her from her job at a band operated store.
When confronted with the numbers, Chief Shirley Clarke of the Glooscap First Nation admitted that while only 87 people actually live on the Reserve, she personally takes home $243,000 per year, but she said she “works hard” for that salary and that it’s “unfair” for those numbers to be made public.
When Caledonia resident Doug Fleming held an anti illegal smoke shack protest on April 11 2010, the only people who showed up to support the shack were some students from CUPE 3903 lead by political commentator Tom Keefer, and a couple of small children waving propaganda signs.
A stark contrast to December 1st 2007 when Native supporters of the same shack violently attacked residents and activists resulting in Jeff Parkinson and Gary McHale being hospitalized which is a topic and a video for another day.
Viewers were weighing in throughout the 32 minute interview via a web chat with mixed opinions. Some still fail to understand that there is no valid claim to DCE, some think that the words “land claim” possess the magical ability to absolve those who utter them of any responsibility for their actions, and some finally understand the facts that we have been presenting to the public for almost 5 years.
Starting 2011 on a happy note, the illegal “broken promises” shack on highway 6 south of Caledonia was smashed to the ground today in a combined effort by the Six Nations Band Council, the Six Nations Police, and the OPP.
For those who may have missed it, here is some very satisfying, wholesome, heart warming, fun for the whole family footage from CHCH news that I have taken the liberty of slowing down so that those of us who don’t support selling bags of insect eggs & human feces riddled contraband tobacco that was probably scraped off the floor of a factory in China to children, may watch it repeatedly.
There is for the moment no audio in this clip because Youtube didn’t like my choice of Tiny Tim singing Tip toe through the tulips as a soundtrack.
I remember some years ago when Ontario introduced new graphic warning labels on cigarette packages to dissuade me from smoking like it was yesterday. The reason that memory is so vivid is because once I got a look at one, I ran out to purchase several packs to send to relatives in other provinces.
I waited in the long line at the smoke shop (not to be confused with an illegal Native smoke shack) and when my turn came I anxiously and enthusiastically asked the elderly lady behind the counter “Do you have the limp wiener packs?” “Yes” she responded while trying without success not to grin. “Awesome! Can I get 5 of them?” she was unable to keep herself from laughing and neither were most of the dozens of people lined up in the store.
What we were laughing about and what I was anxious to share with some smokers in my family who are spread across the Country was a warning label that was shaped decidedly like a limp penis with a warning that smoking cigarettes can make you impotent. You could argue that I was young and immature for seeing great humour in this, but the fact that the entire store laughed affirmed my point of view that this was nothing more than a limp (pun intended) attempt by our over zealous government to make themselves appear anti smoking while collecting billions in taxes from smokers.
WordPress has generated a report on how this blog did compared to the millions of other blogs on their servers in 2010, and I thought it interesting enough to share with everyone. This site received a major facelift in 2010, and I have chimed in with a few edits of interest which are in italic.
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 56,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.
In 2010, there were 50 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 770 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 65kb.
(Edit: In fact there were 30 + pictures uploaded, & the total number of “Jeff’s Blogs” posts is currently 204)
Update: December 23, 20101pm:– When the North failed to respond to the live fire drill on Yeonpyeong Island, the South decided to ramp up their drills substantially with fighter jets and tanks. In light of this, the North is renewing their threats to “unleash a holy war” on the South using nuclear weapons.
I may have been premature in declaring the North Korean threats nothing more than posturing, and in light of the thousands of views that this story has had today alone, I will continue to update it as events unfold.
Update: December 20, 2010, 11:30am – It would appear that the recent threats of retaliation were indeed nothing more than posturing by North Korea. The live fire drills which lasted just over an hour on Yeonpyeong Island were uneventful and while the South remains on high alert, the North continues to issue bizarre statements including this one issued today to the Korea News Service Agency KNCA;
“The second and third powerful retaliatory strike to be made by the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) knowing no limit as declared before the world will lead to blowing up the bases of the U.S. and South Korean puppet warmongers.”
While it’s encouraging that the threats made by the North appear to be nothing more than affectation, I for one will certainly have a curious eye on the Peninsula for the foreseeable future.
December 19, 2010
By Jeff Parkinson – Canadian Advocates for Charter Equality (CANACE)
As atrocious as the situation in our own back yard has been for the past nearly 5 years, I’m reminded on occasion how good we have it in Canada. While researching what was to be a tongue in cheek comparison of the personalities and human rights records of Julian Fantino and Kim Jong Il, I stumbled onto an alarming report that North Korea is threatening to attack the South with nuclear weapons in the near future.
North and South Korea have officially been at war since June 25, 1950 and although an armistice was signed in 1953, there has never been an official peace treaty. The current threat of nuclear war was buried in a story about South Korea planning to hold a military drill on an island bordering the North, but in the territory of the South.
In an Aljazeera story titled “S Korea military drills to go ahead” North Korean officials were quoted as saying that they ““will deal the second and third unpredictable self-defensive blow” to protect its territorial waters and that it will be “deadlier than what was made on November 23 in terms of the powerfulness and sphere of the strike”.
While it would be fun at this point to compare that to similarly incoherent statements made by Fantino, the next quote was quite concise and not funny at all. In a statement posted on Pyongyang’s official website Uriminzokkiri, they warned that “another war with South Korea would involve nuclear weapons.”
While reading an excellent story by Mark Vandermaas about why Conservatives can’t trust the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I remembered a ‘feature’ video I had seen from CBC some time ago praising the wonderful residential school system and showing happy Native children learning about such things as Valentines Day, and “the mastery of words”.
Mr. Vandermaas’s story documents the failure of the CBC to present any unbiased reports on the victims of Caledonia and their willingness to instead provide air time to the criminals. At issue specifically is their unwillingness to run a story that they have been working on about the growing dissention in the ranks of the Conservatives as a result of Fantino joining the party.
Before we have a look at the 1955 residential school video, let’s look at a clip of one of the interviews that CBC conducted with Mr. McHale on the Fantino topic. While this was being filmed in front of Fantino headquarters in Vaughan, Julian was seen sneaking out the back door and driving away.
Presented by CanaceHD, It’s best viewed at 720p which may take some time to buffer depending on your connection. Some editing was necessary due to excessive wind noise.
While Julian Fantino managed a very narrow victory in the Vaughan by-election on Monday, it’s more than a bit note worthy that the supposed “star candidate” for the CPC won his home town riding by less than 1000 votes with the full weight of top party officials including the Prime Minister behind him.
Looking back at what was an interesting campaign, Fantino and the Conservative Party of Canada pulled out every trick they had to squeak out a win that was too close to call until after midnight.
When the rumours began flying that Fantino would be embraced by Stephen Harper, we did everything we could to be absolutely sure that the CPC were aware of Julian’s salty past before they made it official. The announcement was timed to precede the release of Christie Blatchford’s book which makes clear that Fantino not only failed as OPP commissioner, but went out of his way to abuse his power.
A fully informed Harper nonetheless fast tracked Fantino into the party in a very undemocratic fashion shoving him down the throats of loyal Conservative voters and members of the party alike. This created an instant backlash within the party as high profile long time members began contacting members of CANACE to voice their disgust and help us craft an anti Fantino campaign.
Conservatives Against Fantino had the pleasure of attending the only public all candidates debate in Vaughan last night to hear what Julian Fantino & his opponents had to say to the voters with only 5 days left until the by election in which Fantino hopes to unseat the Liberals.
Unfortunately for the voters and for all who believe in Democracy, Mr. Fantino blew off the event. Organizers made every effort to accommodate Julian including rescheduling this event to suit his schedule, but he was unwilling to engage his opponents in a public debate.
UPDATE: With over 2000 unique views and climbing, my thanks to all who have taken the time to read this story. Perhaps if we get the word out to enough people, greedy Mr. Fantino & the OPPA will finally leave these families in peace.
Months after his reign as OPP commissioner ended, Julian Fantino is still trying to bully innocent victims into silence. The man Stephen Harper is said to have hand picked to run as the Federal Conservative candidate for Vaughan is trying to force the families of 2 disabled men who were shot and killed by police to pay him $17500.
The people Fantino wants cash from include 83 year old Evelyn Minty whose disabled son Douglas was shot dead outside her Elmvale home on June 22, 2009 and Ruth Schaeffer whose son Levi suffered from Schizophrenia and was shot through the heart at his private camp site in Northern Ontario by OPP officers on June 24, 2009.
The lawyer for the Minty and Schaeffer families, Julian Falconer calls the move to seek costs police intimidation which it certainly appears to be, and stated to the court “because the families have asked for police accountability, they will now be punished.”
Update: A few people have reported difficulty in viewing these video’s at 720p (HD) so I have changed the embedded video’s to play at a lower resolution.
By Jeff Parkinson
In my early days with CANACE in late 2006 and early 2007, I was on a very regular basis told stories that saddened and repulsed me. I sat and listened to each and every resident who was willing to share with me what they had endured and over the course of 4 years; I thought I had heard the worst of if not all of them.
One exceptionally disturbing story unfolded in the summer of 2009, and managed to fly under the radar of many including myself. Many of us heard that a smoke shack had gone up at the farm of Caledonia resident Ernie Palmer, but I didn’t know too much about it at the time. We had a particularly busy year, and by the time we slowed down to catch our breath, the shack was gone.
I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Palmer on October 13 2010 and he generously allowed me to record that meeting. The only things I knew for sure when I arrived were that the facts were largely unclear to me, and that an interview with him would be interesting. The media reports that I had read in 2009 painted him as a collaborator, and the County had charged him with bylaw infractions for hosting the smoke shack.
I explained a bit about myself to Mr. Palmer and made clear to him that my objective was simple. I wanted to leave that day with the necessary information to tell his story in his words. I wound up spending a day with him, and the things I learned were absolutely shocking even to a 4 year veteran of the Caledonia crisis.
JeffParkinson.ca 