|
November 23, 2004
CITY RETURNS TO RED HILL BATTLEFIELD TO SHOOT WOUNDED
By Bill Dunphy, The Hamilton Spectator
I wish somebody at city council had the guts to stand up and tell David Estrin to go pick on somebody his own size.
Better yet, I wish somebody on city council had the guts and honesty to quit hiding behind lawyers like Estrin, and take full responsibility for their latest mean-spirited attack on Red Hill Creek Expressway opponents.
Even more, I wish Mayor Larry Di Ianni or Councillor Chad Collins or any of the others driving this thing would have enough guts and brains and heart to stand up and say: Enough -- it's time to heal, not divide.
Ah well, as my mother always said, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Since we're on foot then, let me walk you through this.
Estrin is the city's high-priced hired gun on the Red Hill Valley file, a Toronto lawyer who seems to favour the take-no-prisoners style of litigation that's de rigeur in that city's Darwin-driven legal community.
On his watch, the city threatened to seize the homes of protesters, and sought to place a crushing financial burden on six citizens who opposed the city in court -- routine scare tactics in the civil courts.
This isn't Bay Street , even if we are paying him Bay Street rates (more than $2 million to date, according to Collins).
And his latest opponents aren't multimillion-dollar, multinational corporations with their own army of Armani-clad attack-dog lawyers -- they're a handful of poor, mostly young idealists who likely have less in their collective bank accounts than Estrin bills Hamilton taxpayers for a single hour of advice.
You probably figured that the battle over the Red Hill Expressway was done.
After decades of wrangling, the expressway gang cleared the last legal hurdles, and won convincingly and fairly in the 2003 elections. They won an injunction barring protesters from a wide swath of the valley and are on track for a ribbon-cutting some time in 2007.
Faced with the injunction and the electoral defeats, the majority of the expressway's middle-class opponents chose to obey the law and turn to mitigating the construction's environmental impact.
A small band of opponents refused to give up the ghost, pulling off this past summer's tree-sitting protest, which ended Sept 11. They were young (two are under 20) and largely poor. They endured physical danger and security guard harassment in an impressive display of commitment that was largely met, alas, with public indifference. They and several supporters were arrested and hit with a variety of charges, mostly trespassing. One spent six weeks in jail.
When the last came down, Di Ianni said the city had been patient with them.
"I think we could afford to be patient as long as the work on the valley wasn't impeded," he told The Spectator two months ago.
That was then, and this is now.
Di Ianni said yesterday that city and legal staff have created dossiers identifying six to eight individuals responsible for persistent violations of the injunction and he blames that ragtag crew for holding up construction and costing the city money.
So now, months after the protests have ended and months after protesters have faced trespassing charges, the city will seek to have them charged with contempt of court too.
If the fight over the construction of this six-lane highway were a real war, this latest move would be striding back onto the battlefield and shooting the wounded -- to teach them a lesson.
"We're not trying to be bullies about this," said Collins. "We had legal advice stating that if we didn't take action on the tree-sitters that the injunction might be treated in the courts as null and void."
Initially he, like Di Ianni, insisted that there can be no excuse for breaking the law, especially given the multitude of legal avenues of protest open to and used by Red Hill opponents.
I pointed out the city wasn't prosecuting the hundreds of others -- like Anglican pastor Patrick Doran -- who had knowingly, deliberately violated the injunction.
Collins agreed, but pointed out that those protests hadn't held up construction.
I guess it comes down to this -- you can engage in civil disobedience with the city's blessing, so long as you're totally ineffective. If your protest starts to actually work -- look out.
I asked Di Ianni if he didn't think that this was a time to reach out to those sincere, deeply engaged citizens and seek to heal the rifts this project had caused.
He was having none of it.
"What about the people who support this project, who far outnumber this small group of protesters? These are law-abiding citizens, they're engaged in the city's life, the only difference is they chose not to break the law," he said.
Indeed they didn't. Those in power can afford to buy the law -- and lawyers -- they need.
That's not justice, that's economics.
|
