Protest, Property Rights, and the Law in British Columbia

From strikes at Vancouver Island coal fields in the early twentieth century to recent confrontations involving assertions of Indigenous rights, British Columbia has a long history of clashes between protesters and established interests. Protest, Property Rights, and the Law in British Columbia investigates legal responses to those protests stretching back over more than a century.

Benjamin Isitt draws on case studies that illuminate both continuity and change in the regulation of protest. Whether through remote anti-logging blockades at Fairy Creek or tent encampments in downtown Vancouver, activists assert customary rights to property by appropriating space. Property owners and managers in turn deploy an array of legal remedies to uphold private rights by restoring control over space, notably through the use of injunctions, enlisting lawyers, judges, police, parliaments, and soldiers.

Protest, Property Rights, and the Law in British Columbia persuasively argues that the power of private interests in these judicial disputes has been undercut to a degree, raising questions of legal legitimacy and signalling a potential rebalancing of rights and interests.