GORE BAY—Just in time for Christmas, Green Bay farmer Paul Skippen received the news that he will be retried in the case of the Canada goose that has dragged on for three years, specifically on the charge of shooting from a roadway, which Mr. Skippen has maintained he did not do.
As was reported previously, Mr. Skippen was initially charged with: hunt from road; hunt migratory bird, out of season; fail to retrieve bird; and making a false statement. The prosecution withdrew the third charge at the start of his October 5 trial, and Mr. Skippen was found not guilty of making a false statement at the end of the trial.
“Paul, from the outset, told the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) officers that he wanted to plead guilty to the second charge, but he was never given an amount of a fine and so that charge tagged along throughout the trial and the appeal,” Mr. Skippen’s lawyer, Brad Allison, told The Expositor. “He has since paid the fine ($300) and so really we are left with the first charge. This has always been the issue mostly hotly contested.”
Mr. Allison said the trial did not begin until July 26, 2016 “due to a lack of adequate judicial resources” that were required to offer Mr. Skippen trial dates without lengthy delay. “And, due to inadequate resources, the trial continued from time to time, with a day here and a day there, until it was finally completed on October 6, 2016. At that point, Paul was found guilty of the first two charges, but he strongly felt that he had not been given a fair trial. He appealed almost immediately.” He was found not guilty of the fourth charge, and the Crown didn’t appealed that acquittal.
“The appeal was heard before a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice and, again, due to inadequate judicial resources, we were not able to have the appeal heard until March 23, 2018 which was roughly 17 months after Paul served and filed his Notice of Appeal,” the lawyer continued. “After the appeal was heard, the appellate judge did not release a decision until October 2018, a delay of roughly seven more months.”
The decision confirmed Mr. Skippen’s assertion that he had not been given a fair trial and accordingly, the appellate judge overturned Mr. Skippen’s conviction on the first charge and ordered a new trial. However, the judge also made it clear that, in His Honour’s view, the prosecution ought to carefully consider whether the investment of even more time and more judicial resources in this affair was a wise choice.
“When the appeal decision was handed down, the prosecution had one simple choice: do we put Mr. Skippen through yet another stage of these proceedings, or do we accept that Mr. Skippen has paid and waited and fought long enough?” Mr. Allison said. “The prosecution took roughly two months to make that decision, and all the while Paul waited to hear whether his fight was over or whether he had to invest the time and money and emotional strength to battle through yet another trial. Today I was advised that the prosecution is more concerned about convicting Paul than it is concerned about the fairness and the cost and the delay this entire saga has cost both sides. Today the prosecution decided they want a new trial with respect to the first charge only.”
“The prosecution has decided that they would like to start the process to schedule a new trial, but not in any hurry,” Mr. Allison added. “I am advised that the prosecution requires Paul to attend at court on March 7, 2019, to start the trial process all over again. That is a date chosen by the prosecution, without any request for input from Paul or from me as his counsel. We must wait almost three more months before we can begin the process of finding new dates for the retrial of the first charge. The search for new trial dates will begin roughly one year after Paul’s appeal was granted. The new trial will require the original witnesses to attend and to testify all over again so that a different Justice of the Peace can decide if Paul protected his fields and crops by shooting at a goose from the paved surface of a road, as Mr. Skippen says was his shooting position (which is the crime alleged) and not from the shoulder of the road (which would have been perfectly legal). And Paul’s defence will again call witnesses, including an Ontario Land Surveyor, to establish that the crime alleged was physically impossible, given the location and size of vehicles at the scene that day and the width of the Bidwell Road in the vicinity of the crime alleged.”
Mr. Allison said that before the trial begins, Mr. Skippen will ask the court to consider whether a trial delayed as much as this one is fair.
“There are very clear directives from the Supreme Court of Canada on this issue of delayed justice, and accordingly Paul shall challenge the listless persistence of the prosecution in this entire affair,” his lawyer asserted. “At some point, the government must be instructed to find a better use of its resources.”
