“The climbing community has built a special bond with the land as well that should not be ignored”

Like, are you guys for fucking real? Colonizers started climbing there in the 60s. The Wotjobaluk people by contrast have been living there for millennia

I also wonder if the Wagner/Côté bloc would have decided this case the same way had it been individual v. individual, rather than individual v. city? Honestly, if it had been about a family enclosing and squatting a strip of their neighbours' land, the SCC wouldn't even have taken up the case at all

This one gets complicated by a lacuna in Ontario's Real Property Limitation Act on the specific issue of adverse possession of municipal lands. Effectively, it looks like the SCC is rubber stamping the enclosure of public lands (I'm thinking now of a couple houses in Ottawa encroaching on NCC land)

satisfy the requirement, which is 10 years of "open, notorious, peaceful, adverse, exclusive, actual and continuous possession." Notorious, in this usage, typically means that the possession is known widely (and usually, to the actual owner of the title).

Anyway, yeah, lots of thoughts about this. Like, if the previous owners had never actually established legal ownership of the strip through arguing adverse possession, why would that adverse possession continue to the new owners? Shouldn't they need to possess the land til 2027 in order to...

This is the problem with appointing SCC Justices with such short bench careers. Maybe Trudeau thought he was getting his own version of Ketanji Brown Jackson, but that's obviously not the case.

The SCC overturned that decision on a 5-4 ruling. Seeing a pattern where it's looking more and more like O'Bonsawin has been absorbed into the Wagner-Côté bloc.

For context, the couple in question bought the property in 2017, and it included a chain link fence that cut off a section of municipal park land. They offered to buy the strip, the city refused, court ensued. Both the Ontario Superior Court and Court of Appeals found in favour of the city.

But the one that really wrinkles my historian brain is how weird it seems, on the face of it, that a First Nations supreme court justice wrote a majority decision ruling in favour of adverse possession. Like, in this case we're literally talking about enclosure!

“Hey baby… time for a little Yub Nub”

Um, I beg your pardon? There is definitely a Wawa in Canada. It might mean something different here though…

“🙌 Potato is Risen! 🙏”

“Dying potatoes”? I guess dying is the first step to them becoming true Easter potatoes?

Anyway, that guy deserves every block coming his way

Dude needs a serious reminder that him inferring something =/= someone else implying something. Context matters, and in this case the context is a clueless white forever-backbencher deciding he is the arbiter of what is or isn’t racist against Britons of colour

This fucking guy

the Borg (at least before they became a constant presence with a horny queen) aren’t really evil, they’re amoral, they don’t give a shit about anything but growth, all they say is “that’s irrelevant, we’re going to add you to the thing”

They aren’t communists they’re Silicon Valley capitalists

It’s sort of telling how popular Minions and Stormtroopers are in American culture.

Prob also about time to tear up that “safe” third country agreement, among other things