Nova Scotia man appeals revocation of licence plate

HALIFAX — Lawyers for a Nova Scotia man fighting a decision to revoke a personalized licence plate bearing his surname — Grabher — say the case is about fundamental rights and is no trivial matter.

Lorne Grabher’s Nova Scotia plate, which he had for nearly 30 years, was revoked by the province’s Registrar of Motor Vehicles in December 2016 after it received a complaint saying the sign promoted hatred toward women.

Grabher, who was represented by the Calgary-based Centre for Constitutional Freedoms before the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal on Tuesday, maintains the province infringed on his freedom of expression.

However in a ruling issued last January, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court said that constitutionally protected freedom does not extend to government-owned licence plates.

“Today we are arguing about the revocation of a licence plate, a seemingly trivial dispute,”

Grabher’s lawyer Lisa Bildy told the three-member Appeal Court panel. “To Mr. Grabher, whose family name has been tarnished as offensive and deplorable, this is anything but trivial.”

In her 2020 ruling, Justice Darlene Jamieson decided that licence plates are not “public spaces’’ with a history of free expression, adding the registrar recalled the plate because it could be interpreted as a socially unacceptable statement without the benefit of further context that isn’t provided on licence plates. Under provincial regulations, Nova Scotia’s registrar can refuse to issue personalized licence plates if the proposed combination of characters expresses or implies a word, phrase or idea that could be considered offensive.

Bildy told the panel that freedoms protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms have been increasingly constrained under the guise of keeping Canadians safe from words or ideas that others have decided they shouldn’t be exposed to.