What others say

Page 4

There's not much humor to come out of the terribly serious confrontations at Oka and Kahnawake. But Oka's mayor, Jean Ouellette, provides the closest thing to a smile.

Mr. Ouellette has chutzpah. In abundance.

It's sometimes said the best example of a person with chutzpah is the fellow who killed both his parents with an axe and then asked the judge for leniency on grounds he was an orphan.

Mr. Ouellette has little to learn from home.

If ever a mayor was architect of his town's misfortunes, it is he. Now - smile - he was hired a public-relations firm to help bail the town out of its image woes. And - hold your hats - he is asking Premier Bourassa to pay for it.

The appreciate the mayor's chutzpah it's worth recalling it was he who rejected an eloquent letter written July 9 by Quebec Native Affairs Minister John Ciaccia. In his letter the minister implore - that is not too strong a word - Mr. Ouellette not to call in the Surete du Quebec to enforce a June 30 court injunction ordering the Mohawks to remove a barricade they had erected in support of their land claims. Mr. Ciaccia said the mayor's plan to use the disputed land for a golf course was "unjust".

With prescience the minister also argued that a police-Mohawk confrontation had to be avoided because of its "sad consequences" on over-all relations between Canadian mainstream society and Native people and - ahem, Mr. Ouellette - on the message it would send to the world about Canada's treatment of Native people.

That, indeed, is now a PR problem.

What the mayor does not seem to realize is that injustice, besides doing a lot of other things is always a PR problem. It's not, however, the kind of flaw one can fix by giving a few practitioners of the arts of slick marketing.

Editorial in Montreal Gazette / 27 July 1990