Ontario’s brutal assault on a good couple

WE MUST STAND UP FOR THE MAGNA CARTA PROMISE OF DUE PROCESS. — ROBSON

Canadians have rights, don’t they? We love our Charter and the robust, even convoluted, legal system that surrounds it. Yet increasingly we live in a fools’ paradise because one of the worst things that can happen to us is to be sucked into precisely the elaborate legal system we think protects us.

This point was driven home for me, horribly, at a Canadian Constitution Foundation conference on Law and Freedom in Toronto last weekend. I was there to talk about the surprisingly encouraging “Comeau” court ruling that we can buy beer and take it home even from ( ugh) another province. But this straightforward case, upholding the plain meaning of S 121 of the Constitution, still took four years to yield an initial ruling immediately engulfed by bickering over which court shall hear a long costly appeal that will, itself, almost certainly be appealed.

It is a massive injustice that to get a simple right upheld you must endure years of court battles, sometimes petty or ludicrous but always extremely expensive and stressful, against a state with unlimited resources and a bad attitude about any mere citizen with the impudence to challenge its august will.

Without the CCF and its backers, Gérard Comeau could never have stood against this judicial Juggernaut. And the politicians and bureaucrats know it. But this matter, or the apparently endless procedural wrangling in the CCF challenge to B.C.’s restrictive health- care law, is nothing to a tragic case described at the conference that, I confess, I was not aware of.

It concerns the Reillys, a couple dedicated to helping the unfortunate who tailored two of their Orillia rental properties to low- income people with often chaotic lives. The Reillys were the sort of landlords who would personally drive carless tenants to the grocery store and to addiction counselling sessions.

So in 2008 the police alleged drug- dealing at these two properties. Furthermore, they said some rent was paid from drug profits. And under Ontario’s soothingly named Civil Forfeiture Act, the “Director of Asset Management” seized the Reilly’s two properties as the “proceeds” and possibly “instruments” of crime.

The Reillys were never charged with anything. It was never suggested that they were involved in drug trafficking. Moreover, despite deep sympathy for their tenants’ sometimes disorderly lives they had evicted more than 50 for dangerous behaviour and tried without success to have others evicted for drug use.

It gets worse. No tenant was even arrested in connection with this seizure. The state never proved that the Reillys ignored any crime, let alone condoned or quietly profited from it. It just swooped because what Juggernaut wants, Juggernaut takes, casually crushing the Reillys in the process.

They sold all their other properties to pay legal bills and mortgaged their home. Their marriage broke down. They are elderly and their lives are destroyed. And the case is far from over. Indeed the contested properties, badly dilapidated in the tender claws of the state, are being sold without any pettifogging determination whether the seizure was lawful.

Yes. In Canada. To be sure, if the CCF does not run out of donations, a court may someday rule that the Reillys never should have lost their property. Then, after various appeals, a fresh legal battle can commence over whether they were sold for an appropriate price and if not what should be done. Some day the Reillys’ estate may even be awarded costs. But Juggernaut doesn’t care. It has unlimited access to our money and is determined to make an example of this couple for some unimaginable purpose.

The human cost of this ghastly process is enormous. You would have to be literally insane to put yourself in the Reillys position, so from a broad policy perspective it helps force the unfortunate in Ontario to choose between the street and government housing ( curiously never seized because of drug trafficking). But what makes my blood boil is the direct individual cost of this aggressive attack on our rights.

Ontario’s broadly phrased and aggressively implemented legislation, originally aimed at organized crime, doesn’t just permit seizure of property on frivolous grounds. It allows the destruction of blameless lives, through an abusive procedure whose intimidating cost, duration and stress is a feature not a bug.

Nothing can ever give the Reillys back the time lost, the further good deeds not done, golden years together in the glow of shared, lived ideals. So when Juggernaut comes for you, best to roll over before everything that matters to you gets it, right?

No. Never. We must stand up for the Magna Carta promise of due process and swift justice that is our birthright. Donate to the CCF if you can. Raise your voice. Stand together as citizens. Denounce this unCanadian trampling of rights and resolve that it shall not continue.