A Nova Scotia man’s six-year legal fight to get his personalized licence approved has finally come to an end, as the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal of his case.
The Supreme Court declined to give its reasons for denying Lorne Grabher’s appeal. Grabher had used his “Grabher” licence plate for nearly 30 years when it was recalled by the province’s Registrar of Motor Vehicles in December 2016 following a complaint that the plate promoted misogyny.
Jay Cameron, Grabher’s lawyer and litigation director of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, said that Grabher’s team is “disappointed with the decision,” adding that there was no evidence that the licence plate had caused harm to anyone. Cameron also said that the surname was of Austrian-German origin.
“`In order to make his name mean anything, you have to anglicize his name and add words to it, which is what the government has done and then it has censored them,” Cameron told The Canadian Press. “I think that there is still a problem with the way that the law is being interpreted here.”
The lawyer also explained that “Grabher” is also being used on a licence plate in Alberta, and that a Manitoba court had previously ruled that the charter does not apply to personalized licence plates.
Grabher first took the matter to court in 2017, claiming that the registrar’s decision violated his charter rights to freedom of expression. But last August, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal unanimously upheld the trial judge’s decision that the licence plate was not an area to which freedom of expression applies.
In the appeal to the Supreme Court, Cameron argued on behalf of Grabher that the matter to be settled on was whether government-owned personalized licence plates should be excluded from the scope of Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
