Revolutions are never ‘common sense’

By Maurice Switzer

The problem with revolutions is that most of the casualties are usually innocent bystanders.

That’s certainly the case with the Common Sense Revolution, former Ontario premier Mike Harris’s slash-and-burn program of cuts to health care, education, social services, and infrastructure spending that contributed to many of the social ills being experienced today in Canada’s most populous province.

Residents of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation had to attend the funeral of one casualty of that campaign.

On the night of Sept. 6, 1995, a heavily-armed tactical response unit of Ontario Provincial Police marched into Ipperwash Provincial Park. One of their team of sharpshooters shot and killed Anthony “Dudley” George, 38, one of two dozen unarmed Chippewa land defenders trying to get the return of reserve lands expropriated for military training in World War II.

A decade later, Harris became the first Ontario premier summoned to a public inquiry to account for his actions leading up to the Ipperwash tragedy, which was the first time an Indigenous person had been killed in a land claim dispute in over a century.

After three years of exhaustive evidence gathering, the Ipperwash Commission found that Harris contributed to an environment that made it more likely that Dudley George would meet his fate. It accepted testimony that the premier angrily told subordinates that “I want the f….ing Indians out of the park!”

One of its key recommendations was that Ontario schools do a better job of explaining treaty rights to students than they had apparently done with members of the Harris cabinet.

Subsequent provincial governments are still trying to repair relationships with Indigenous communities that reached an absolute  low point in the Harris years.

Another public inquiry found that, in deregulating water quality testing, the Harris “revolution” contributed to the deaths of seven citizens of Walkerton, and caused hundreds more to experience life-threatening health effects.

Other casualties of the Common Sense Revolution were hundreds of nurses who lost their jobs,  single-parent mothers and other social assistance recipients now numbered among the homeless, and students cheated out of an important fifth year of high school that better prepared them for post-secondary studies.

Ontarians for whom the fallout from the Harris years is still a fresh memory shudder when they hear federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre sprinkle his speeches with encouragement for Canadians to use “common sense” in casting their votes in the next federal election.

The Tory leader’s derisive views about Indigenous peoples have echoed those associated with Harris. Hours before Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 formal apology to students of Indian residential schools, Poilievre told an Ottawa radio interviewer that he didn’t think that Canada “was getting value” for the court-ordered compensation.

Revolutions, both real and imaginary, tend to be motivated more by anger than by common sense.

That will be the lasting legacy of people like Mike Harris.

Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Michi Saagig of Alderville First Nation. He was present when Mike Harris testified in February, 2006 at the Ipperwash Inquiry.