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Train Service Paralyzed in Eastern Ontario As Mohawks Barricade Rail Crossing

Posted on: Friday, 20 April 2007, 21:00 CDT

By ALLISON JONES

DESERONTO, Ont. (CP) - Train service on one of the country's busiest rail corridors was paralyzed Friday as a long-simmering aboriginal land dispute erupted into a full-scale blockade, sending thousands of passengers scrambling onto buses to reach their destinations.

Tensions near the eastern Ontario town of Deseronto culminated around midnight Thursday with a school bus parked across a rail crossing - shutting down all freight and passenger service from Toronto eastward to Ottawa and Montreal.

The latest aboriginal standoff to hit Ontario comes on the one-year anniversary of a provincial police raid against an occupation in the southern Ontario town of Caledonia. Aboriginal groups had warned that a lack of political will to settle that claim had protesters considering further standoffs in Ontario.

On Friday, that warning proved all too prescient.

Despite being served an injunction ordering their immediate removal from the site, members of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte vowed to maintain their planned 48-hour blockade.

"There comes a point in people's lives when you have to stand and you have to fight, and there are bigger things for us to consider," said protest organizer Shawn Brant.

The group is protesting a developer's plan to build condominiums using material from a quarry on land they claim is theirs. While Brant said they'll leave peacefully after 48 hours, he added they won't leave before then without a fight.

"If (police) want a disaster on the Deseronto boundary road, then they should consider enforcing (the court order)."

The tense situation prompted Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty to urge the federal government to intervene at the "earliest possible opportunity" to help resolve the issues behind the blockade.

On Friday, several protesters gathered around a makeshift campfire on the roadway as aboriginal flags flapped in the wind. Provincial police monitored the situation from a distance.

Last April 20, a provincial police raid of occupation in Caledonia saw a handful of aboriginal protesters arrested. Several hundred protesters soon swarmed onto the site, barricaded the town's main thoroughfare and rail line, and maintained a tense, days long standoff with police.

On Friday, Via Rail brought in chartered buses to replace passenger rail service between Toronto and Ottawa, and Toronto and Montreal. Late Friday, CN Rail (TSX:CNR) announced it had shutdown all of its rail operations in the Toronto-Montreal corridor.

In Toronto, rail passengers expressed frustration as they were loaded onto buses to start, or complete, their trips.

"CN is concerned that the Ontario government has not ensured enforcement of the court order to allow train traffic to resume in this very important corridor," the company said in a release.

McGuinty, meanwhile, appealed to the federal government for help.

"The best thing that the federal government could do to protect the interest of all Ontario citizens is to address this outstanding issue in a way that takes the protest action off the table, sets up a good negotiating table, and resolves this at the earliest possible opportunity," he said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said while he didn't "know all that much" about the blockade, he said he was "obviously hoping that that can be cleared away, and that it can be dealt with fairly quickly."

Jim Prentice, the federal Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, said the protesters should "abandon" their blockade.

"I continue to ask that everybody return home and do so peacefully," Prentice told the Belleville Intelligencer on Friday. "That is the best way forward."

Prentice said negotiations concerning the land tract are proceeding and the protester could jeopardize the talks.

The protesters initially set up day-long barricades at the gravel quarry operated by Thurlow Aggregates outside Deseronto in November, and again in January. A third protest barricade went up last month, and the group warned then they might expand the demonstration to the town of Deseronto itself.

The condominiums are planned for an area known as the Culbertson Land Tract.

The tract is on a parcel of land granted to the Six Nations in 1793 and the Mohawks claim they never surrendered any part of it.

The federal government has appointed a land-claims negotiator to try to resolve the long-running dispute, but Brant has said the talks were moving too slowly.

"This is one of the targets on the list for disruption for the fact the quarry license still hasn't been revoked," Brant said. "We shut (the rail lines) down as part of the ongoing rotational economic disruption campaign we promised."

Don Maracle, chief of the area Tyendinaga Mohawks, said he sympathized with Brant's group but added the Mohawk council did not sanction the quarry blockade.

Brant said he believes the Mohawk community is behind the action, in spirit.

"Even though there may not be full support for the action, there certainly is support for the issue," he said.

"As Mohawk people we have a great attachment to the land."

Source: Canadian Press

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