Helpless by Christie Blatchford

Author:Christie Blatchford [Blatchford, Christie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

He was writing letters at a furious clip—never identifying himself as a police officer, only as an enraged Caledonia resident. And after the Vanderwyks’ flag rally, during which Bo Chausse was arrested, Hartless posted an editorial on CaledoniaWakeUpCall.com.

He was infuriated that the OPP had stopped the townspeople from raising a Canadian flag at the same location where “the OPP sat back and watched the natives erect Warrior flags, Six Nations flags and unity flags without so much as a ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ ” He called the force ineffective, impotent and “nothing short of traitors to the country as a whole.” He demanded that Haldimand council remove the OPP, asked the province to investigate the force’s practices and urged Ottawa to bring in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the army.

On December 5, senior Ontario negotiator John Nolan forwarded a copy to a handful of people, including Inspector McLean. Within three hours, McLean was writing to his superiors, Chief Superintendent Bill Dennis and Acting Superintendent Doug Babbit.

“As you are aware, the OPP in the past has been victim to Hamilton Police Service Officer David Hartless and his direct verbal aggression as well as written slander by signs on his lawn and articles in the website of Gary McHale. We have in the past contacted his chief, Brian Mullen, and on several occasions he [Hartless] has been spoken to by their senior command.”

McLean suggested Hartless was violating the code of conduct under the Police Services Act, noted he has “a contact who also openly discredits the attempts of the OPP to maintain peace in a fragile environment” (this was McHale, of course) and suggested this mere “association” with McHale was also a breach.

McLean asked that Chief Mullan be sent the Hartless article and that Hartless “be held accountable for his actions and comments.”

Dennis duly passed the article to Mullan, who sent it to Hamilton deputy chief Ken Leendertse, who reported back that “the OPP was not willing to formally complain about Hartless’ activity at that time.”

But Mullan instructed Leendertse to speak to Hartless, and on December 13 Leendertse duly called him in “and I discussed the issues in Caledonia and I told him that his actions, even though off duty, reflected on him as a police officer. I advised him to be careful of his actions and words in the future.”

Fantino’s name didn’t appear in the email chain, but, as developments in the new year would soon reveal, he was keeping tabs on Hartless.

“The OPP, the county, the government, the natives have all worked together,” McHale says now, “and I mean worked together, to silence any resident” who wouldn’t play well with others.

As my former government insider puts it, “You could get mugged, and the first reaction from most of the people in the bureaucracy was to assume you had done something to provoke it.” He was “really surprised at how the entire focus was on containment. The whole thing [at government meetings] was about not letting this flare up,

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