AS Manitobans have learned over the last six weeks or so, there are two standards of law enforcement in this country. One applies to aboriginals. Natives from the Hollow Water reserve illegally blocked the road that allows non-natives to reach their cottages on the east side of Lake Winnipeg for most of the summer.
The blockade ended on Saturday, but only because of a deal with the government, not because of anything that the police did.
Pretty well every Canadian knew about it previously from the lengthy protest at Caledonia, in Ontario, where natives blockaded roads for 16 months to protest the development of land that they claim belongs to them, despite several court orders to desist. The Ontario government and the police refused to do anything about it, and that dispute continues.
Hollow Water affects only a handful of Manitobans. The rest of us can watch that drama unfold with varying degrees of disinterest. Caledonia affects only a handful of Canadians. The rest of us can sit back and watch that with varying degrees of disinterest. But when we do that, sit back and watch rather than react with the outrage these situations should produce, we are sitting back and watching the erosion of the most important protection of our rights -- the rights of all Canadians, native or otherwise -- which is the rule of law.
The federal government has now driven the erosion of that concept to a deeper level with a refusal to include in its upcoming budget steps to counter the massive smuggling of cigarettes into Canada from the United States through the Mohawk reserves in Ontario and Quebec. That affects all Canadians -- the estimated loss of tax revenue to tobacco smugglers is estimated at more than $1 billion annually, and growing. Manitoba is experiencing, as are most Canadian provinces, an increase in illegal tobacco such as has not been seen since the middle 1990s, and that costs every taxpayer.
Where Canadians lose interest in the issue, however, is in their realization that tobacco products are punitively taxed and their belief that it is almost a civic duty to avoid punitive taxes if they can peacefully do so. Even that does not excuse the federal government from enforcing the law against smuggling tobacco on native reserves while they confiscate an extra bottle of booze from non-natives crossing the border at Emerson, nor does it excuse provincial governments and police forces from refusing to prosecute natives who obstruct major roads even as they arrest non-native bicyclists who obstruct traffic in Winnipeg.
There are clearly issues here that need to be resolved -- in Hollow Water, in Caledonia, in tobacco's dark and smoky world -- but it is even more clear that governments need to be able to assure Canadians that in this country, there is one law, and it applies to everyone.
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