LSUC: No Yurts!

The Law Society of Upper Canada is located in beautiful Osgoode Hall on Queen Street in the heart of downtown Toronto. The large, manicured grounds in front are partly surrounded by an ornate iron fence that’s interrupted at a few points by elaborate gates known as “cow gates,” baffle affairs that would indeed keep cows out (or in) and that are enjoyable to wiggle through.

I happened to pass by recently and saw that No Trespassing notices had been posted at these gates. Perhaps they’ve been there for a while and I’ve just never noticed them before. At any rate, I was amused to read the elaborate notices, in a way as Victorian as the fence itself. I’ve put a photograph of it below (click on it to enlarge it) and a transcription of the text here, if you can’t read the notice in the photo easily.

What particularly struck me was the prohibition of yurts. Who would think to prohibit a dwelling from the steppes of central Asia?

I suspect that the answer has to do with the Occupy movement’s occupation of a Toronto park a few years ago and the Batty case (2011 ONSC 6862) in which the City successfully defended its claim that the occupiers were trespassing. One of the descriptions of the occupation that was used in most media reports and quoted in the course of the judgment, referred, among other things, to the presence in the park of three yurts, large circular tent-like structures housing various services available to the occupiers. It seems the Law Society’s lawyers feared that the past would simply repeat itself with remarkable faithfulness (lawyers as poor historians, “condemned,” as in Santayana’s epigram, to repeat the past if only in bad dreams?).

From a larger perspective, this notice demonstrates a lot that is wrong with legal drafting, let alone betraying an elitist anxiety about incursions by the lumpenproletariat. I imagine that the Trespass to Property Act contains sufficient provisions to allow the Law Society to repel the hordes without the need to post the property with notices prohibiting defecation or setting fires. On the brighter side, I also imagine that no one reads these notices, or if they start to, that their eyes glaze over about half way through the first bullet point where the ejusdem generis listing goes on and on.