Protest, Property Rights, and the Law in British Columbia

A history of the turbulent struggle between activists and private interests 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 Law in British Columbia investigates legal responses to those protests stretching back over more than a century.

As author Benjamin Isitt shows, whether through remote anti-logging blockades at Fairy Creek or tent encampments in downtown Vancouver, activists assert customary rights to property by appropriating space. In turn, property owners and managers 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.

Isitt 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.

Benjamin Isitt is a lawyer, historian, and legal scholar based in Lekwungen territory (Victoria, British Columbia). He is the author of From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada's Siberian Expedition, 1917–19 and Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948–72; co-author, with Ravi Malotra, of Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E.T. Kingsley; and coauthor, with Bob Williams and Thomas Bevan, of Using Power Well: Bob Williams and the Making of British Columbia.