A Vancouver bookstore needs a financial miracle if its owners want to continue a 10-year legal battle with Canada Customs.
In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Vancouver's Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium is not entitled to have the government foot the bill for the store's legal fight.
"They will continue to harass our store, they will continue to seize and destroy gay and lesbian material," charged owner Jim Deva.
Joe Arvay, lawyer for Little Sister's, said the fight is finished unless the store receives a huge amount of money.
"The case is dead," he said.
Little Sister's wanted to take Canada Customs to court for detaining many of its imported gay and lesbian material at the border, including books, videos, and magazines. They said the agency has been engaged in censorship, with no one overseeing their decisions on what constitutes obscenity.
But the cost of such a battle would have been around $2 million. The store said they had already spent more than $500,000 on the case and wanted Ottawa to pick up the tab for them to move ahead with their Charter challenge.
"But the court ruled the case didn't meet the threshold of exceptional case," CTV's Rosemary Thompson reported from the halls of the Supreme Court.
"The courts are saying they don't want to create a parallel system of legal aid. They're saying that only in the most exceptional circumstance where a case has broad implications can you argue that you need the government to front your costs."
Canada Customs argued that the case simply wasn't important enough to justify spending public money to subsidize a for-profit business.
A lower-court judge in British Columbia ruled that the case was important enough to deserve federal financial aid, but the provincial court of appeal decided otherwise in 2005.
The case had been particularly significant given that the Conservative government cancelled the Court Challenges Program which funded groups to challenge federal laws, shortly after taking power last year.
Little Sister's won a major legal battle in 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled it had suffered "excessive and unnecessary prejudice" at the hands of Canada Customs agents who seized homosexual erotica.
But the bookstore says nothing changed after that ruling, with more publications being ruled obscene in 2001 and 2003, including two series of comic books and two books on bondage and sadomasochism.
*CTV News Staff
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