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A decade after the Toronto G20 summit, two mass class actions brought against the Toronto Police Service (TPS) by people caught up in kettles and/or imprisoned at a temporary detention center have been settled. After a detour to the Supreme Court of Canada – the TPS unsuccessfully attempted to have the lawsuits dismissed – a settlement which includes $16.5 million in financial compensation, expungement of arrest records, and “a public police acknowledgement regarding the mass arrests and the conditions in which protesters were detained” has been reached. The settlement still needs to be approved by Ontario’s superior court in October 2020, but there is no doubt that it is a victory – a rare example of police being held at least somewhat accountable in the aftermath of social movement repression. Beyond the TPS’s “acknowledging” of their misdeeds, however, it is worth thinking through the potential impact of this settlement – and especially the specifics of the TPS’s “commitment to detailed changes regarding policing of future public demonstrations” – on street protest and broader organizing in Toronto.

Canadian universities’ requests for court orders and police enforcement to clear Palestine solidarity encampments raise questions about the legal status of encampments and the use of injunctions.

This article centers on the profound discrepancy between efforts by First Nations to obtain injunctions against industry and the state versus the far more successful record of corporations and governments seeking to obtain injunctions against First Nations. We examine how the common law test for injunctions in struggles over lands and resources leads to these results. We begin by tracking the history of injunctions in the Aboriginal law context, especially the development of s 35(1) jurisprudence, which ironically deprived First Nations of access to injunctions, despite an earlier period of successful defence of Indigenous land rights using this legal tool. We then focus on the doctrinal and political function of the “public interest” consideration in injunction cases, positioning this concept within a broader political economy framework. Finally, we turn to the origins of the injunction as an equitable remedy and argue that the current imbalance in injunction success rates ought to be understood through a re-examination of equity within a broader historical trajectory of settler-colonial legality. We conclude that the heavy lifting done by notions of ‘public interest’ both relies on and obscures the circumvention and exclusion of Aboriginal treaty and constitutional rights from the law of injunctions and constitutes a de facto resolution of Aboriginal land rights in Canada. Finally, we ask what place, if any, exists in injunction jurisprudence for Indigenous law and governance.

This article centers on the profound discrepancy between efforts by First Nations to obtain injunctions against industry and the state versus the far more successful record of corporations and governments seeking to obtain injunctions against First Nations. We examine how the common law test for injunctions in struggles over lands and resources leads to these results. We begin with the history of injunctions in the Aboriginal law context, especially the development of s. 35(1) jurisprudence which ironically deprived First Nations of access to injunctions, despite an earlier period of successful defence of Indigenous land rights using this legal tool. We then focus on the doctrinal and political function of the “public interest” consideration in injunction cases, locating this concept within a broader political economy framework. Finally, we turn to the origins of the injunction as an equitable remedy and argue that the current imbalance in injunction success rates ought to be understood though a re-examination of equity within a broader historical trajectory of settler-colonial legality. We conclude that the heavy lifting done by notions of ‘public interest’ both relies on and obscures the circumvention and exclusion of Aboriginal treaty and constitutional rights from the law of injunctions and constitutes a de facto resolution of Aboriginal land rights in Canada. Finally, we ask what place, if any, exists in injunction jurisprudence for Indigenous law and governance.

A vast literature has considered the proactive use of law as a tool by progressive social movements, but far less attention has been paid to the way activists respond to involuntary engagement with law as a result of repression and criminalization. This dissertation explores the legal support infrastructure of grassroots protest movements in Canada and the US by tracing the evolution of contemporary activist legal support through two periods. The tactic of jail solidarity and an emerging legal collective model are highlighted as the key features of the global justice organizing era (1999-2005) while in the second age of austerity era (2008-2018), I discuss evolving approaches to law collective work in various protest movements and highlight a renewed focus on anti-repression as a framing praxis of both organizing and legal support. Grounded in my own activist legal support work over more than two decades, this research rests on data arising from detailed interviews and analysis of more than 125 archival documents. I develop two areas of inquiry. First, I trace critiques of movement lawyering in the legal literature to demonstrate that those critiques are often shared by legal support organizers. Divergent opinions on the appropriate role of lawyers and norms of professional ethics in law collective practice reflect long-standing contradictions in progressive lawyering practice. Accordingly, I argue that the legal work of non-lawyer activists ought to be understood as a complementary if also sometimes disruptive model of movement lawyering. Second, I demonstrate that an analysis of radical legal support speaks to the post-arrest experiences of protesters and the impact of such repression on mobilization phenomena largely absent from the literature on state repression of social movements. I consider this dynamic through the lens of legal mobilization, arguing that the pedagogical work of law collectives, understood as a site of social movement knowledge production, plays a significant role in mediating the complex relationship between repression and mobilization. I conclude by exploring the legal consciousness of activist legal support organizers and argue that the education and organizing praxes of law collectives are evidence of a form of prefigurative, counter-hegemonic legality.

Claiming that the criminal justice system fails to effectively prohibit protest and civil disobedience, corporate lawyers embrace the pervasive use of injunctions and contempt of court charges in struggles over resource extraction in British Columbia, dubbing this approach the “new normal.” Yet even a cursory review of protest policing in Canada reveals that state intervention in resistance movements is alive and well and that Indigenous peoples and allied social movements are made subject to repression, surveillance, and criminalization through the mechanism of injunctions and contempt, among other legal tools. Based on my direct experience with injunctions and contempt in BC as an activist legal support organizer and a settler ally, this article argues that the reliance on injunctions by extractive industries embroils the courts and police in struggles over public and/or collectively held lands and resources that are nonetheless constructed by the law as private disputes, largely insulated from the reach of constitutionally-derived Aboriginal rights. After tracing the long history of BC’s “injunction habit,” I examine the judicial and policy practices that make the “new normal” claim possible—and show how it is ultimately not accurate. As crucial tools in the legal arsenal of settler-colonial states, injunctions and the subsequent use of contempt charges carve out a distinctly colonial space within Canadian law for the criminalization of Indigenous resistance, facilitating access to resources and lands and easing the operation of extractive capitalism.

There have been 12 injunctions spawned by Coastal GasLink's original injunction on Wet'suwet'en territory, all of them granted over the past 2 ½ weeks in response to solidarity actions across the country in support of the Wet'suwet'en hereditary leadership.