Northern Showdown

Barricade Blockade digging in for the long haul
October 16, 2000
by Charlie Angus
Like a mouthy, drunk rich kid in a blue collar bar, Toronto City Council is walking smack dab into a haymaker. And like a kid who's never taken a real punch, the City fathers have totally underestimated the resolve of their opposition. City hall scribes have dismissed the Adams Mine opposition as "Johny come latelys" -- just the usual band of motley lefties who oppose every decent development plan.
But the punch is coming from a very different kind of folk. On a recent night walk along the Adams Mine Road blockade I saw retired school teacher Barb Bukowski flossing her teeth before hunkering down in her frost covered car for the night. Definitely a woman more at home at a library board meeting than on an illegal occupation. Barb has managed to remain relentlessly cheerful over four straight nights of sleeping in the cold. Come morning, she was in the makeshift cookhouse along with other Kirkland Lake women helping to prepare the donated beans, bacon, coffee and butter tarts.
Further up along the barricades, the night watch was being handled by two German farmers and a young "warrior" from Timiskaming First Nation. They were watching the lights from police cruisers up the road -- expectations of a potential dawn raid.
Three months ago, few people in this rural farming and logging district had ever met their neighbours on the Timiskaming and Mattachewan First Nation Reserves. But three months ago seems like a lifetime for people who have learned to wake up with frost on their tents, throw together make shift cookhouses in rapid time and withstand the odious assault of the outhouses.
In just over the span of a few weeks people have grown used to the massive presence of police cars and paddy wagons standing on guard over the roads and rail lines of the region. And folks who otherwise might be considering their odds at bingo or bridge are weathering the threat of injunctions and sizing up the odds on civil disobedience
What Toronto Council has yet to learn is how disciplined and widespread the resolve is across this rural region. You can see it by the donations pouring into the camp -- 50 pounds of fresh fish from Ville Marie, Quebec; volunteers from Kapuskasing, Timmins and Barrie; building materials and pre-fab housing supplied by local building stores.
Toronto City Council is no doubt hoping the opposition will get tired and go away, but as folks will tell you in Timiskaming, they have no where else to go. And that, in a nutshell, is why Toronto council is walking straight into an embarrassing black eye.

A version of this article appeared in Now Magazine.
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