The criminal case involving former Ontario politician Randy Hillier for his role in the 2022 convoy protest in Ottawa is back on track after the province’s highest court reversed a decision that had stayed the charges.
The charges were initially stayed in late 2024 when a lower court judge decided that the case had taken too long, exceeding the time limits set by the Supreme Court of Canada.
The maximum period allowed is 30 months for cases in Superior Court, and Judge Kerry Mc Vey determined that Hillier’s case lasted for 31 months and 13 days after accounting for delays caused by the defense and exceptional circumstances.
In a ruling released on Friday, the Ontario Court of Appeal found that Mc Vey should have added another 93 days, or roughly three months, of delay due to exceptional circumstances and subtracted them from the total count. This adjustment brought the case back within acceptable limits.
This delay was tied to rescheduling a motion to hear the case outside of Ottawa, following a Supreme Court ruling that influenced how such motions should be assessed.
Mc Vey acknowledged that the Supreme Court ruling represented an exceptional circumstance but believed that the Crown “did not do all it could to ensure the motion was re-heard promptly,” which meant those days couldn’t be deducted from the timeline.
However, the Appeal Court concluded that some delay was “inevitable because there was nothing the Crown could have done to obtain an immediate date for the ‘rehearing’ of the change of venue application,” according to its ruling.
Prosecutors also made efforts to manage this delay and “accepted one of the earliest dates offered by the court,” as stated in their decision.
“By all accounts, the parties were clearly and legitimately under the impression that no date earlier than September 2023 could be found,” it read.
Consequently, this case will now return to Superior Court.
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9 charges laid in 2022
Hillier spent 15 years in provincial politics, first representing Progressive Conservatives before becoming an independent member. He faced nine charges starting March 2022 linked to his alleged involvement in convoy protests that took over downtown Ottawa for weeks. The demonstrations opposed COVID-19 measures as well as actions by the federal government. The accusations include assaulting a peace officer, mischief, counseling others to commit mischief, and resisting or obstructing a peace officer. The assault charge arose from claims that Hillier pushed a metal gate into an officer while attempting to enter Parliament Hill.Source link
