On the 44th anniversary of the Charter, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court vindicated Jeffrey Evely, who asserted his Charter right to move freely in the woods of Nova Scotia. The government had prohibited all activities — including hiking, picnicking, fishing, swimming, camping, and birdwatching — in a near-province-wide ban in August 2025, on the pretext of preventing forest fires.
Retired master warrant officer Jeffrey Evely, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, received a $28,872.50 fine (including taxes, fees, and surcharges) for simply walking in the woods. He filed a Charter challenge to the government’s irrational and draconian ban, receiving a favourable ruling on April 17, 2026.
Nova Scotia’s law targeted people, rather than potentially dangerous activities like smoking, campfires and cooking. Mr. Evely saw the August 2025 ban as Orwellian, punishing ordinary people rather than targeting the actions most likely to cause fires. He stated: “It’s about human dignity … I find the cavalier attitude with which these freedoms have been impaired to be a gross indignity to our fallen soldiers, and a moral injury to those of us still here. This moral injury serves to exacerbate my PTSD symptoms, which I have been managing with therapy, medication, and daily outdoor activity, which I normally conduct in the woods.”
In Evely v. Nova Scotia (Minister), 2026 NSSC 118, the court ruled that Nova Scotia’s decree affected mobility rights: “people could no longer go where they had once gone.” This was not a fleeting or insignificant restriction, ruled the court, but one that “substantially affected peoples’ lives.”
The court cited a recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling (Taylor v. Newfoundland and Labrador, 2026 SCC 5), which stated that Charter section 6 mobility rights “sit at the heart of what it means to be a free person” and “protect a broad interest in human mobility.” This basic human right to move freely was already described as “ancient” in 1215 in the Magna Carta, and has always been part of Canada’s heritage.
In the Evely case, the court found no evidence that government officials even considered the Charter. The documents placed before the minister (before he made the decision to ban walking in the woods) made no reference to the Charter at all, contrary to what the Supreme Court of Canada requires.
The court also noted that the term “woods” in the Forests Act was unacceptably vague, by including bog (wet muddy ground), muskeg (swamp water with partly dead vegetation), “rock barren,” and land without trees but with “surface evidence of past forest occupancy.” The court found that Nova Scotians seeking to avoid the $28,872 fine (and jail terms up to six months) were left in an “interpretative quandary” because “the woods are not the forest, but the forests are part of the woods. The woods do not mean that trees are present. The trees could have been removed. But if trees are present, that could be the woods, though it was not clear how many trees were required… And one might reasonably ask what staying out of a wet bog has to do with the mitigation of fire risk.”
The Charter Section 7 right to “life, liberty and security of the person” is engaged when a person can be punished for violating a vague law. Nova Scotia’s vague ban failed to provide fair notice to citizens of the conduct that was prohibited, and did not control enforcement discretion. While the court in Evely did not expressly apply Charter section 7, it noted that “there is a compelling argument that the ban was so vague as to be incapable of being interpreted at all.”
This Evely court ruling is a victory for freedom and common sense, warning governments to think twice before violating the Charter freedoms of Canadians. It will likely also result in invalidating the $28,872.50 fine that Jeff Evely was issued for walking in the woods.
John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
