Finale in sight for long legal battle over Hecla land

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/05/2010 (5932 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For Stuart Jones, time doesn’t heal all wounds.

An ongoing fraud trial is a constant reminder of the years he has spent trying to uncover why his family was shut out of buying back the family homestead on Hecla Island when the Manitoba government decided to repatriate the provincial park more than a decade ago.

"It’s coming to an end," Jones said last week. "And after all this time, I’m still being persecuted."

It was Jones’s tenacity that led to investigations and eventual criminal charges against four people RCMP accused almost five years ago of forging the signatures of elderly former Hecla Island residents to transfer cheap cottage lots to people not originally entitled to them.

The planned two-week trial that started last December is now heading into its fifth month.

Warren Helgason and Marvin and Patricia Benson have pleaded not guilty to fraud and forgery charges. Charges against Marlene Greenfield were dismissed late last year.

Today, retired Manitoba Parks director Gordon Prouse is to testify for the defence about how the lots were sold off in the mid-1990s. He has said in the past the process was fair.

Justice William Burnett, who was appointed to the bench Sept. 9 last year, is hearing the case.

Burnett has already ruled confidential statements the four made to provincial auditor general investigators several years ago were inadmissible in court.

Helgason and Marvin and his wife Patricia Benson remain charged with 16 counts of fraud, forgery and uttering threats. The charges are in connection with the acquisition of four lots and a house on Hecla Island. Marvin Benson and Helgason were on an advisory committee to oversee resettlement of the Lake Winnipeg island. That committee did not let the Jones family buy back their old property because they supposedly did not meet the criteria. Someone else bought it instead.

Under the resettlement plan, each original landowner, or the landowner’s spouse or children, was eligible for only one lot. The accused are alleged to have fraudulently obtained extra lots and a house for their family and friends.

Jones, 62, said many people blame him for raising the issue years ago when many other original families successfully bought back onto the island.

"My name is mud," he said. "What they don’t understand is the people who were royally screwed were ordinary taxpayers."

Jones, who owns other property on Hecla Island, now wants to split up his land equally among his three daughters, but has been told provincial park rules don’t allow him to do that.

"I’ve just put up with so much over the years," he said. "I want to leave and move to Gimli, but I can’t."

He said the house his father Helgi Jones built in 1944, the house the Jones family couldn’t buy back in 1997, is falling apart.

"I don’t go out of my way to tell people that’s where I was born," the former business auditor with the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency said. "It’s just such a farce, the whole thing."

bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca

Forty years in a nutshell

IN 1969, dozens of families were kicked off Hecla Island to make way for a new provincial park.

Hope the island would become a national park was dashed in 1971 when the federal government said no.

In the mid-1990s, the provincial government under then-premier Gary Filmon decided to make amends and resettle the island.

Filmon’s Progressive Conservatives offered descendants of the original families 50 lots.

The two-hectare lots were offered for $5,000 — about a quarter of their market value — in recognition of former residents being treated poorly during the original expropriation.

Those good intentions are now the heart of an ongoing fraud trial in Court of Queen’s Bench.

Three people are on trial for allegedly obtaining island property for their families — land an RCMP probe claimed they were not entitled to.

The trial is to resume today.

The criminal trial was in part prompted by a September 2003 report by then-auditor general Jon Singleton. Singleton said in his report some of the lots in Hecla were acquired through the use of transfer documents that contained forged signatures. He examined the sale of 65 lots, including 50 in Hecla Historic Village and 15 on the North Shore. His review was preceded by reviews by Manitoba Conservation and the provincial ombudsman, as well as a Free Press investigation.

Singleton also found some families were left out of the Hecla resettlement, and perhaps even mistreated by a process that, "was not fair, open or transparent."

 

— Owen