In August 2025, the Nova Scotia government prohibited all activities across three-quarters of the province on the pretext of preventing forest fires — including hiking, picnicking, fishing, swimming, camping, and birdwatching. Rather than targeting high-risk activities such as smoking, campfires, and outdoor cooking, the law targeted people themselves.
Retired Master Warrant Officer Jeffrey Evely, who served Canada in Afghanistan and Iraq, saw the ban as Orwellian. He deliberately defied the decree with no guarantee of winning in court. 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.”
Mr. Evely received a $28,873 draconian fine simply for walking in the woods. On April 17, the fortieth anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court struck down the province’s sweeping ban on walking in the woods.
In Evely v. Nova Scotia (Minister), 2026 NSSC 118, the court ruled that the decree affected Charter section 6 mobility rights: “people could no longer go where they had once gone.” This was not a fleeting or insignificant restriction. It was one that substantially affected people’s lives. The court held that mobility rights “sit at the heart of what it means to be a free person,” protecting Canadians against curfews, requirements to carry identity papers in public, and outright blockades on movement.
This freedom of movement is actually much older than Canada’s Charter. The Magna Carta of 1215 included the right “to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear,” with merchants free to travel throughout England. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1768), William Blackstone described personal liberty as including the power of “loco-motion,” the right to change one’s situation according to one’s own inclination, free from arbitrary restraint. Canada’s 1867 Constitution, intended to be “similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom,” carried forward this common law tradition of presumptive freedom of movement.
The court found no evidence that government officials had even considered Charter rights or values before imposing the ban. The documents placed before the Minister did not refer to the Charter at all. Under Charter section 1, any limit on rights must be demonstrably justified with cogent and persuasive evidence. That obviously did not happen here, with the Nova Scotia government apparently oblivious to the existence of the Charter.
The court also condemned the unacceptable vagueness of the term “woods” in the Forests Act. The definition included bog (wet muddy ground), muskeg (swamp with water and partly dead vegetation), rock barrens, and land without trees but with “surface evidence of past forest occupancy.” Nova Scotians facing the $28,873 fine and possible jail time were left in an interpretative quandary. As the court observed: “The woods are not the forest, but the forests are part of the woods. The woods do not mean that trees are present… And one might reasonably ask what staying out of a wet bog has to do with the mitigation of fire risk.”
This vagueness of this Nova Scotia law also engaged Charter section 7 rights to life, liberty, and security of the person. The ban failed to provide fair notice and left the door open to arbitrary enforcement. While the court did not make a final ruling about section 7, it noted a compelling argument that the ban was so vague as to be incapable of being interpreted at all.
This Evely ruling is a victory for freedom and common sense. It warns governments to think twice before violating Charter freedoms, which will likely result in invalidating the fine against Mr. Evely.
Since the decision, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston has drawn sharp public criticism for flippantly stating that his government would do it again if he deemed it “necessary.” This expresses the very attitude the court condemned: a willingness to disregard Charter rights. But, thankfully, there are freedom-loving Canadians like Jeff Evely who will courageously engage in civil disobedience, to the benefit of all citizens.
John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
