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Gibbons Charged With Disobeying a Court Order

New charge a radical departure from past practice

By Tony Gosgnach

TORONTO, October 10, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A court official has confirmed that longtime pro-life demonstrator Linda Gibbons has been charged with disobeying a court order after her arrest outside the Scott "Clinic" abortion site in downtown Toronto last Wednesday.

The charge marks a radical departure from the Crown attorney office's practice since 1994 of prosecuting Gibbons for "obstructing a peace officer." At her last trial on that charge, completed Sept. 30, Justice S. Clement Ford ruled that her silent and peaceful conduct, as well as acquiescence with law enforcement officials, could not have made her guilty of an offence - simply refusing to follow the verbal requests of law enforcement officials in itself does not constitute obstruction, the judge said.

The change in the nature of the charges appears to be a response from the Crown attorney's office to that ruling. Pro-life activists have long held that the attorney-general and Crown attorney offices' practice of using an inappropriate charge to keep Gibbons in jail for several of the past 14 years has been a politically motivated tactic. It has served to deny Gibbons a jury trial and the opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of a 14-year-old "temporary" court injunction that prohibits pro-life activity of any sort within a 20-metre zone around the Scott abortion site.

That may change with the latest development. Instituted in 1994 at the behest of the virulently pro-abortion provincial regime of NDP then-premier Bob Rae and attorney-general Marion Boyd, the injunction has been assailed by groups including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. "The injunction tends to cast too wide a net," said CCLA general counsel Alan Borovoy in 1993, just prior to the injunction being imposed. "It operates not simply against people who have committed wrongs in the past, but against those who might do so in the future… The terms of the proposed injunction in this case are so broad that they could arguably prohibit even silent, peaceful, informational picketing within easy view of the impugned abortion clinics."

History has shown that the injunction has done exactly what Borovoy predicted it would, which appears to have been fine with not only the Rae-Boyd regime, but also all those that have succeeded it, including the Mike Harris and Dalton McGuinty governments.

Having appeared in court Thursday, Gibbons is being detained at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, Ont. Her next court appearance is Wednesday, Oct. 15 at 10 a.m. in Room 507 of the Ontario Court of Justice at College Park, Yonge and College Streets in downtown Toronto.

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