As police descended on a railway blockade in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory on Monday morning to enforce a court injunction, Ontario’s energy minister says the government and provincial police were wary of repeating the actions that led to the deadly 1995 Ipperwash crisis — wherein an Indigenous protester was shot and killed by police in Ontario.

The current railway blockade, located near Belleville, Ont., had been in place for weeks — stunting rail traffic across swaths of eastern Canada. Provincial police moved in on the demonstration Monday morning, following a deadline of midnight on Sunday that was reportedly given to activists, lest they want to face police investigation and possible arrests.

“Unfortunately, all avenues to successfully negotiate a peaceful resolution have been exhausted and a valid court injunction remains in effect,” the OPP wrote in a release Monday morning about the blockade. The police force also claimed that the “broader societal impacts” of the protests corresponded to increased risk to public safety close to the demonstrations.

While the OPP said use of force was a “last resort” in clearing the site, by early morning, videos and images were circulating online from the protest site, several of which showed a group of police officers collectively restraining a protester on the ground. “I can tell you, I saw the videos myself, and I think in most instances, this was a relatively peaceful removal of the blockade,” Ontario Energy Minister Greg Rickford claimed to reporters after question period at Queen’s Park.

“Obviously individuals made choices how they wanted that to happen,” he added.

Carolle Dionne, a spokesperson for the Ontario provincial police force, told iPolitics at 3 p.m. that the OPP didn’t yet have a firm count of arrests at the Tyendinaga blockade on Monday. “The event is still ongoing,” she wrote in an email.

The Ontario government’s response the countrywide demonstrations has, in part, been to pass the buck to the feds — saying that issues underpinning the dispute, like the divisions of authority between elected band councils and hereditary chiefs, fell under a national portfolio. “The Prime Minister needs to step up and take responsibility. Enough is enough,” Premier Doug Ford wrote in a statement on Friday, as the Prime Minister called for an immediate end to the demonstrations in Ottawa.

On the blockade in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory specifically, Rickford has also spoken about leveraging Indigenous leaders, like Ontario Regional Chief RoseAnne Archibald and Tyendinaga Mohawk Chief Don Maracle, to attempt a resolution without confrontation. Doing so, Rickford said on Monday morning, was an attempt to follow the recommendations born out of an inquiry on the Ipperwash clash.

The 1995 incident occurred during a protest and land claim occupation by First Nations peoples in Ontario’s Ipperwash Provincial Park. When matters escalated, an Indigenous protester named Dudley George was shot and killed by an Ontario Provincial Police officer. A hundred recommendations were made in the 2007 inquiry report to avoid acts of violence happening in similar circumstances down the line.

“The immediate catalyst for most major occupations and protests is a dispute over a land claim, a burial site, resource development, or harvesting, hunting, and fishing rights. The fundamental conflict, however, is usually about land,” the report notes. (The Tyendinaga blockade was in support of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who oppose the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline; the pipeline is supported by elected band councils along the project’s route.)

All parties navigating the Tyendinaga blockade response had an “obligation to follow” this time, Rickford said Monday, if they didn’t want history to repeat itself when the blockade came down. “Respecting the recommendations from Ipperwash was essential. This obviously became the epicentre of some very serious and profound questions, national in scope, given the uncertainty of the federal government and the vagueness, at times, in what they were prepared to do,” Rickford claimed.

Sol Mamakwa, the Indigenous relations and reconciliation critic for Ontario’s opposition NDP, sharply rebuked Rickford’s claim that the government had learnt lessons since Ipperwash. “I would disagree with that fully,” Mamakwa claimed on Monday, citing video footage from the protest site in which, he alleged, police officers had instigated confrontation.

The NDP MPP from Kiiwetinoong, who is also a Kingfisher Lake band member, urged the provincial government to cease any “jurisdictional ping-pong” on issues affecting Indigenous communities, and to not task the federal government alone with acting on a host of issues that plague multiple First Nations, from access to clean water to rashes of youth suicide.

“This is a very complex issue,” Mamakwa conceded of the blockades, urging continued dialogue.

The back-and-forth between Mamakwa and Rickford began during question period, after Mamakwa asked Ford when he was made aware of the coming police action at the Tyendinaga blockade, and what role he and his cabinet played in the OPP’s move. Rickford fielded the question, but did not specifically say when the government had learned of the decision.

Mamakwa then asked Rickford to clarify the actions the province had taken to facilitate a resolution, given the confrontations that occurred on Monday morning — to which Rickford responded, in part, that they continued to “challenge the federal government” to address the lingering national questions. “Fortunately, here in the province of Ontario, Mr. Speaker, we all worked together towards a peaceful resolution of this challenge. We look forward to working with Indigenous communities across this province moving forward so that this doesn’t happen again,” Rickford told the House.

On the federal end, Trudeau convened his incident response group on Monday to discuss the ongoing blockades and efforts to restore the partially paralyzed rail services across the country. The incident response group includes Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Carolyn Bennett, Minister of Indigenous Services Marc Miller, and RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki. Part of that discussion, per the PMO, was an update on their discussions with Canada’s premiers.

The federal Liberals have placed a heightened focus on intergovernmental relations since starting their second term, acknowledging that the fall election showed some cracks in the state of the federation. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, citing what he claimed to be “a lack of federal leadership” around the blockades, organized a conference call with all premiers last week. A subsequent call was held between the various premiers and Trudeau on Thursday evening.

We are now approaching two weeks of these illegal blockades, impacting the economic interests of all Canadian provinces. Today, the Prime Minister spoke in the House of Commons, but offered no course of action to protect the economic interests of our nation. — Scott Moe (@PremierScottMoe) February 19, 2020

Injunctions had been enforced by police forces outside of Ontario prior to this week, with riot police arriving at a blockade south of Montreal last week, according to the Canadian Press. Around two dozen protesters had begun dismantling their blockade earlier in the evening following discussions with police, the outlet reported, and later abandoned the site.

Quebec Premier François Legault had called on Trudeau to adopt a hard deadline last week, after which point — if the blockades were still active — any protests contravening court orders would be met with police enforcement.

– With files from Kevin Dougherty