As the 1995 Labour Day weekend drew to a close, Ipperwash Provincial Park slowly emptied of campers and workers prepared to close the park for the season. On the evening of Monday, September 4, 1995, about 30-35 members of the Stoney Point First Nation gathered at the park and began a symbolic occupation to call attention to an aboriginal burial ground located in the park and the loss of their reserve lands. As night fell, the protestors settled in, but the occupation remained low-key, and the commanders of the many police officers stationed nearby noted that the occupiers were unarmed and calm.

On Tuesday morning, as the occupation wore on, more people from the Kettle and Stoney Point communities arrived to show their support. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 6th, dozens of men, women and children picnicked in the late summer sun as police helicopters flew low overhead, videotaping everyone present.

But by that evening, the situation was looking uglier. At 11pm, the riot squad of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), began marching in formation toward the park entrance – approximately 50-60 heavily armoured officers in two rows, rhythmically banging batons on their shields. In the ensuing melee, one man, Cecil Bernard George, was severely beaten by a group of officers after he approached them in an effort to mediate the situation. In response, two young native men drove a school bus towards the police in an attempt to stop the beating. Police officers opened fire toward the vehicle.

One officer, Sergeant Kenneth Deane, would later state that he did not shoot at the bus as it passed him, believing that it did not pose a threat. Instead, Sgt. Deane shot towards an embankment across the road, claiming that he had seen muzzle flashes from a gun coming from that area. But there was no gun, as a judge would later find, no armed aggressor. Instead, Sgt. Deane shot 38-year-old Anthony ‘Dudley’ George as he stood unarmed, attempting to protect the land his family had lived on for generation. After Dudley collapsed to the ground, he was loaded into the back of a car belonging to his brother Pierre, who then drove him along back roads to the nearest hospital.

OPP officers were already at the hospital entrance when the car arrived, but instead of offering assistance to get Dudley inside, they arrested Pierre, Carolyn and a third family member, throwing them against the ground, stating that they were going to be charged with attempted murder. After a night in jail, all three were released without charge the next day, too late to say goodbye to their brother. Dudley George was pronounced dead at 12:45am on September 7, 1995, shortly after his delayed arrival at the hospital.

Legacy Of Dispossession

Ipperwash is located on the shore of Lake Huron, near the towns now known as Forest and Grand Bend. Although the Aboriginal people of the Chippewa Nation had lived on the land for centuries, by 1927 only two rectangular plots on the lakeshore remained as reserve land (Kettle Point and Stoney Point), and included sacred sites and ancestral burial grounds. The 377 acres of land which became Ipperwash Provincial Park were allegedly surrendered to the Crown in 1929 (reserve lands cannot be sold directly), although the circumstances of the surrender were murky and likely illegal. Government correspondence makes it clear that there was a burial ground on the land, and that the First Nation had requested that it be protected.

Occupations

In 1942, the federal government, through the Department of National Defence (DND), attempted to force a surrender of the remaining land at Stoney Point. When the First Nation voted against giving up the 2240 acres which lie next to the park, the War Measures Act was invoked to appropriate the land, and the approximately 22 families living on the land were forcibly moved to Kettle Point, which had until then been a separate community. These families included that of Dudley George’s father, and those of several men who were overseas fighting in the Canadian Armed Forces at the time of the land seizure. When World War II ended in 1945, no legislative action was taken to maintain the lands as a DND base. Nonetheless, the DND did not return the land to the Stoney Point people, but rather established a permanent base – Camp Ipperwash. For the next 50 years, it would be used as a training facility for the military, while the Stoney Point people continued living at Kettle Point.

During the summer of 1993, members of the Stoney Point First Nation, including descendants of the families evicted in 1942, occupied Camp Ipperwash, taking over the barracks and other buildings in a non-violent show of resistance against the continued seizure of their land. By July of 1995, the DND permanently decommissioned Camp Ipperwash, handing over the base to the Stoney Point people as they marched in as a community, Dudley George among them.

The success at Camp Ipperwash led the Stoney Point people to turn their attention to Ipperwash, and particularly the burial ground which lay somewhere beneath the park. But if the summer of 1995 began with a victory for the Stoney Point people, the election of the Mike Harris government in June cast a shadow over First Nation communities in Ontario.

When members of the Stoney Point First Nation marched into Ipperwash Provincial Park on September 4, 1995, the OPP and provincial government kicked into high gear, preparing their responses to the occupation. This was to be a test for the brand-new Harris government, their first opportunity to deal with militant dissent and a potential political crisis. An inter-ministerial committee met immediately on September 5, 1995, hearing from government bureaucrats in the various offices with an interest in the matter. Representatives from the Premier’s Office did not want to negotiate on any questions of land rights. An OPP Superintendent struggled to explain to the Premier’s aides that the operational decisions of the police were theirs to make, and that the government, including the Premier, could not lawfully give marching orders to non-military police forces. Yet somewhere in the context of these discussions, someone made the decision to send in the OPP and attempt to take back Ipperwash by force.

The Opp Makes Its Move

By the evening of September 5th, the OPP were planning for night manoeuvres, adding an armoured personnel carrier, police boats, dozens of retractable batons and helicopters with night vision lenses to their arsenal, despite reports that there had still been no firearms sighted in the park and that the number of occupiers sometimes dwindled to nine, including several children.

At around 8 pm a car driven by a First Nation man opposed to the occupation pulled up at an OPP checkpoint. Gerald George told the police that one of the occupiers had thrown a rock after an exchange of words, making a small dent on his car door. News of the incident spread like wildfire and quickly grew to mythical proportions. A couple of hours later, an OPP inspector would use it to argue for deployment of the Tactical Response Union (TRU), despite the protests of other senior officers who were still urging negotiations and a non-violent resolution. Only half an hour after the disagreement within the OPP over the deployment of the TRU, its officers and dozens more marched into Ipperwash Provincial Park; a couple of hours later, Dudley George was dead.

Public attention turned quickly to the events of September 6th and in particular the role of Sgt. Deane who as early as Friday, September 8th admitted to Special Investigations Unit (SIU), investigators that he had fired the deadly shots. Ten months later, in July of 1996, the SIU would shock Ontario police forces when it released its report charging Sgt. Deane with criminal negligence causing death.

Dudley’s family had not waited for the SIU to provide answers, however. Convinced that there was more to the story than one bad apple cop, they hired a team of lawyers shortly after the shooting to sue the OPP, the federal and provincial governments, the various Ministers involved in decision-making, and the Premier for negligence in the death of Dudley George.

The addition of Mike Harris as a Defendant would turn what was already a David versus Goliath battle into a protracted legal war. Harris fought hard to avoid a day in court, hiring high-priced private lawyers to defend him separately from the other government defendants, and bringing motion after motion to delay the proceedings. It was not until 1999 that a judge ruled that Harris would be required to answer questions about his role in Dudley’s death. Despite their hard- fought victory, Dudley’s family continued to make it clear that the lawsuit was their second choice, and that a public judicial inquiry, like the sort called after Walkerton, was their preferred route.

The Tories steadfastly refused to call an inquiry, but as the family’s civil lawsuit straggled on, hampered by the defendants’ legal manoeuvrings and little money or resources, both Deane’s prosecution and political pressure from other First Nations, activist groups and human rights organizations continued to keep Ipperwash in the public eye. Deane was convicted of criminal negligence causing death in April, 1997, after a judge found that Dudley George had not been armed when he was shot, that Sgt. Deane knew that he was unarmed, and most importantly, that Deane had concocted the story about seeing muzzle flashes and a rifle after the fact to disguise the fact that he had shot an unarmed man.

Fighting For Justice

By the summer of 2003, quickly approaching the eighth anniversary of Dudley’s death, Ipperwash was in the news all over again. Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner had ordered the release of surveillance tapes from the park, and found that the Solicitor General, Robert Runciman, had lied about their existence during the prosecutions of park occupiers. The family’s civil lawsuit was scheduled to begin in September, likely coinciding with a provincial election. As September neared, it became clear that current and former Ministers and civil servants would be taking the stand to talk publicly about what happened in 1995, sparking a crisis amongst Ontario Tories, already lagging in polls and likely facing a losing election. Robert Runciman filed a last-minute request to adjourn the trial, arguing that he needed to be in his riding rather than attending court. His request followed the introduction of new and damning evidence showing that Mike Harris believed he could issue orders to the OPP and likely attempted to do so. The George family’s lawyers fought Runciman’s request, but a two week adjournment was ordered, delaying the start of the trial until the Monday after the election.

As the Ontario election swung into gear, it became clear that the Tories were fighting a losing battle and that the Liberals would likely form a new government. For the George family, this was good news. Gerry Phillips, a senior Liberal MPP had long fought for the truth about Ipperwash, and he and Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty had promised a public inquiry if they were elected. Trial preparation continued, despite an offer to settle from the OPP. Despite a settlement offer by the OPP ($100,000 for the family and a good chunk of legal costs on top of that), the George family refused all offers which did not contain provisions for a public inquiry.

But on election day in 2003, the George family changed its mind. Certain of a Liberal win and confident that a public inquiry was imminent, the wrongful death lawsuit was settled and the OPP’s offer accepted.