Move over, Senator Patrick Brazeau—make a little room for Justice David Brown.
He’s a darling of the far Right: a devout Catholic with deeply conservative views, a determined opponent of so-called judicial activism.
A moral beacon—except when he is not.
He was only a weekend telephone call away from his former client, CN Rail, when it sought an injunction against an Idle No More blockade. Despite the glaring conflict of interest, he was happy to oblige.
Ontario Superior Court Justice David Brown ordered them to leave by 12:01 a.m. ET Sunday and they left the site about then anyway, but as Brown noted in his reasons for the injunction, released Monday, it wasn’t because police enforced the order. [emphasis added]
Indeed the police did not go in with guns blazing, as they once did in Ipperwash. That lesson has been learned. Instead, they took a cautious approach, and it paid off: the blockades came down that night, the trains ran again, and all was well.
But Mr. Justice Brown was beside himself:
“We seem to be drifting into dangerous waters in the life of the public affairs of this province when courts cannot predict, with any practical degree of certainty, whether police agencies will assist in enforcing court injunctions against demonstrators who will not voluntarily cease unlawful activities, such as those carried on by the protesters in this case.”
Now, thanks to APTN’s investigative reporter Kenneth Jackson, we can discern a motive for his tantrum.
Jackson is an old-school reporter who ventures where the flacks dare not go. He’s with APTN, a young network busy breaking stories and covering events with a gusto all but absent in the jaded ranks of the Media Party. APTN’s broadcast licence is shortly up for renewal: this latest scoop is just one more reason to heed the words of my co-blogger Balbulican and send in your messages of support.
Meanwhile, Mr. Justice Brown, considered a contender for a Supreme Court position just two years back, might well be headed somewhere else instead. He’s obviously Senate material.
