The Justice Centre argued charter rights were breached when two people were fined for attending a Saskatoon anti\u002Dlockdown protest in 2020.
“The issue before this court is: Was a strict, numerical restriction on outdoor protests reasonable in a province that permitted, at its most severe, restrictions on indoor public gatherings that were three times larger than those permitted for outdoor public gatherings,” said Marty Moore, a lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.on behalf of Jasmin Grandel and Darrell Mills.
Theodore Litowski, a Crown prosecutor with the government’s constitutional law branch, said indoor facilities with higher gathering limits were often in locations that were already tightly regulated. Those protests spurred an important public conversation, which lockdown protesters aimed to do as well, he said.
Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of the Canadian Constitution — the highest law in the country. Section 1 of the Charter, “guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”The right to protest was never taken away, and outdoor gathering limits cannot be analyzed in isolation from the overall public health protections, Litowski argued.