Justice for our Stolen Children protesters appeal order to vacate
REGINA The sacred fire at the Justice for our Stolen Children camp may be gone, but the protesters who nurtured it for 197 days want another day in court.
In a notice filed with the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal on Thursday, a group of campers and supporters appealed a September 7 decision ordering them to vacate the West Lawn of Wascana Centre.
The notice is signed by the protesters’ lead lawyer, Daniel LeBlanc. He alleges errors of fact and law, with many of his arguments focusing on the same sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that came up in an August hearing.
The appeal asks the province’s top court to quash Justice Ysanne Wilkinson’s decision in its entirety. Wilkinson had rejected the protesters’ argument that overnight camping without a permit was protected as a form of expression, and refused to declare the arrest of six protesters on June 18 illegal.
The protesters again are asking for that declaration. They also want the Court of Appeal to declare bylaws forbidding structures and fires in the park unconstitutional.
LeBlanc’s notice of appeal rehashes several arguments the protesters made during an August 23 hearing. He argues Wilkinson failed to properly take some of them into account.
During the hearing, the protesters held that the province could not use the Trespass to Property Act to justify the June 16 arrests, since police did not claim to have arrested on that basis. LeBlanc now argues that Wilkinson relied on precisely that Act in her decision “despite finding that the police arrested pursuant to s. 129 of the Criminal Code.
“To the extent the Learned Judge relied upon the Trespass Act throughout her reasoning, she exceeded her jurisdiction and committed significant error,” the notice states.
LeBlanc also takes issue with the reasoning Wilkinson used during her charter analysis, where she agreed the government was limiting the protesters’ expression but found it justified as an attempt to balance competing rights. She also found the bylaws were not an absolute limit on free expression, since they allowed protesters to seek a permit for their camp.
But LeBlanc claims she placed too much emphasis on the permitting process, put too great an onus on the protesters and failed to account for the cultural value of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.