About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


70 Crim. L.Q. 247 (2022)
Policing Protest via the Civil Law: Class Actions, Injunctions, and the "Freedom Convoy"

handle is hein.journals/clwqrty70 and id is 259 raw text is: Policing Protest via the Civil Law: Class Actions, Injunctions, and the Freedom Convoy Irina Ceric and Jasminka Kalajdzic 1. Introduction and Overview In the aftermath of the so-called Freedom Convoy and the blockades in Ottawa, Windsor, and Coutts, Alberta, crucial questions have emerged about the implication of the use of the civil law to demobilize and criminalize protest movements. Injunctions have long been wielded by governments and corporations against movements for Indigenous and environmental justice, but their invocation by local residents and small businesses against a lengthy and disruptive protest is unusual. While class actions have a similarly long history of use by large groups of people against well-resourced institutional defendants, they have rarely been employed as a vehicle for interim injunctive relief, let alone by individuals against other individuals in response to an abdication of the state's law enforcement functions. The combination of these two civil law tools in Li v. Barber, a class action brought by downtown Ottawa residents, workers, and businesses, is a unique and inspiring use of the law to counter extremism, but one that also carries risks of normalizing private responses to public problems. As experts on injunctions and class actions, respectively, the authors set out to analyze Li v. Barber in its doctrinal and historical contexts and for its potential policy implications. We first consider how the civil law tools of class actions and injunctions (separately and in combination) have operated in the protest context historically, especially with respect to civil disobedience. We then turn to the normative question, how should they? An absence of policing in the Ottawa context left private citizens with only one legal avenue: to don the mantle of private attorney general. Ms. Li and her counsel leveraged two kinds of civil procedure against a better organized, * Irina Ceric: Post-Doctoral Visitor, Osgoode Hall Law School and incoming Assistant Professor, University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. Jasminka Kalajdzic: Associate Professor, University of Windsor, Faculty of Law and Director, Class Action Clinic. 247