By Alison@Creekside
What was the point of this exactly?
Sending in snipers in camo with dogs to crawl through the grass towards a group of unarmed people blockading a road because they fear the wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary of a Houston, Texas exploration company is setting up to frack their land.
Oddly enough, Canadian law supports the rights of the foreign company to frack over those of the people attempting to protect their community from it.
Hence the blockade protest, ongoing since Sept 30 when Elsipogtog First Nation Chief Aaron Sock issued the company an eviction notice not recognized by our courts and government.
Yesterday, three days after the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples called conditions facing First Nations in Canada “a crisis” and the same day our PM also left the country, hundreds of RCMP moved in to enforce the rights of the fracking company. 
Forty people including the chief were arrested for refusing to abide by the court injunction to leave and the media was presumably pleased with their pictures of burning cop cars after the situation blew up.
In France, fracking has been banned since 2011 — despite legal challenges from corps — due to its potential for contamination of groundwater and causing earthquakes.
In BC, 85% of our 8,000 natural gas wells are fracked with another 40,000 on the way.
Elsipogtog Update : Eyewitness account at Halifax Media Co-op — excellent, important read.
Another Excessive Response Team story, from rural BC.Here’s a guy from the RCMP Emergency Response Team with his M-16 exactly as he looked when he and three others set out to arrest war veteran and PTSD sufferer Greg Matters for assault in Sept 2012 after Matters and his brother got into a family fight the day before.
Matters was unarmed and surrendering to them when he was spooked by the ERT helicopter sent in from Kamloops full of more officers circling closely overhead and tried to run away. When a faulty taser failed to work on him, he was shot twice in the back with an M-16 and died.
The Independent Investigations Office which had cleared the officers of “having committed a criminal offence” in April stated Matters was shot “in the chest,” but last week a forensic pathologist testified at the coroners inquest he was “shot twice in the back.” He either was or was not wielding a hatchet at them according to officers’ testimony.
The ECT also assaulted and arrested Matters’ mother and had no warrant so the BC Civil Liberties Assoc. has lodged a complaint with the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP.
Prince George Citizen : RCMP jumped the gun: lawyer
How would anyone with an ounce of sense think a stressed out guy the police knew had PTSD from having been physically attacked by superiors in Bosnia react to four guys dressed like this showing up on his property accompanied by a helicopter?
The Elsipogtog First Nation are in negotiations with the fracking company and local government officials; Greg Matters had a number of people he trusted to bring him in for questioning over what was a family dispute.
Yet somehow they both wound up dealing with RCMP escalating excessive response teams advancing on them through the grass with sniper rifles.
There’s something very wrong with this picture.
Only the international community can help Elsipogtog
The United Nations Special Rapporteur, James Anaya, who came in Canada from 8 till 15 October to inquire about First Nations, left days before one other example of what they face. The people living in Elsipogtog reserve did not want exploratory drillings for shall gases in their region. They raised a barricade which policemen dismantled by force October 17. The Chief and the band council of this reserve are in the group of forty persons who were arrested during these events.
The Elsipogtog’s people assert that they cannot accept passively the risk to see their region groundwater being contaminated with chemicals injected in the ground to extract gas. The 2011 Gasland movie made in the United States shows the dangers of such exploitation. It shows countrymen setting fire their tap water after wells were dug near their house. Many countries and provinces have already expressed by legal way their anxiety to see this situation occurring. France voted for a law in 2011, which forbids this kind of drillings. Quebec has for its part imposed in 2013 a total moratorium on this type of exploitation. In New Brunswick, chief medical officer of health, Eilish Cleary, recommendations concerning shale gas development show a lack of knowledge about its effect on resident’s health (http://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/h-s/pdf/en/HealthyEnvironments/Recommendations_ShaleGasDevelopment.pdf).
But it is the governments of Canada and New Brunswick, which make laws on the lands of the Elsipogtog’s ancestors, not them. Having said politely not and peacefully resisted, they eventually used force to prevent the dismantling of their barricade. More than 40 persons will be judged as common law criminals because politicians did not solve this problem. Only the international community can help Canadian’s First Nations because peaceful actions and demonstrations of First Nations do not have the power to change laws in Canada.