Credit to the organizers of the Toronto International Film Festival.

While it’s become commonplace for Canada’s political and

law enforcement

classes to capitulate to the tantrums of the nation’s anti-Israel mob, TIFF has earned itself extra points for creativity.

In what surely must be a global first, TIFF

refused to screen

a film to avoid the risk of terrorists traveling more than 9,000 kilometres to assert their copyrights in a foreign court.

Since its founding in 1976, TIFF has prided itself on being both a major market for industry executives and accessible to the ordinary public. An estimated

500,000 people

attend, which makes it the largest film festival in the world by that measure.

Two-hundred and ninety-two movies

were invited for this year’s edition, representing a diverse range of voices from around the world.

Among the

dozens

of Canadian titles, one proved to be inconvenient.

The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue is a documentary directed by veteran filmmaker Barry Avrich. The film tells the story of retired Israel Defense Forces General Noam Tibon, who travelled from Tel Aviv to Kibbutz Nahal Oz to rescue his son and two granddaughters from the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. Along the way, he saved victims fleeing the Nova music festival and wounded IDF soldiers.

Festival organizers

were worried

about security at the film’s screenings.

Last year, activists disrupted the opening night film because they were displeased with lead sponsor RBC’s business with Israel and the fossil fuel industry. In an unabashed display of chutzpah they demanded that TIFF “cut ties” with the bank.

Another documentary, the France / Canada co-production Russians at War, also attracted protests. The film

wasn’t entirely well-received

on its merits. But hate speech it was not. Rather, it was a portrayal of ill-informed, desperate, and disillusioned soldiers who went to war based on a lie.

Like

Das Boot

,

All Quiet on the Western Front

, and the 2005 Palestinian suicide bomber film

Paradise Now

, the intention of Russians at War was to humanize ordinary people who are easily written off as barely human enemies. After initially defending the film as an honest but provocative work of art, TIFF organizers stuck a thumb in the air and cancelled multiple screenings.

As for TIFF’s cancelling of The Road Between us, anything to do with Israel — other than vilifying it — is a security risk in Toronto these days. For example, it’s become routine for Jewish organizations to withhold the location of major events until a few hours before the start time to ensure freedom from disruptive protests and political violence.

But surely a film festival that’s

hosting

the likes of Sydney Sweeney, Angelina Jolie, Keanu Reeves and Daniel Craig can keep filmmakers and audiences safe.

Copyright proved a more useful excuse

As has been widely reported, Hamas terrorists filmed themselves committing their October 7 atrocities. The footage, some of which is included in the film, would no doubt create cognitive dissonance for those lightly informed TikTok users who weren’t wearing a keffiyeh on October 6, 2023 and haven’t taken one off since October 8.

But it has also been shared publicly by the Israeli government, and was used as part of the

Nova Exhibition

, an immersive experience that was held in a Toronto warehouse this past spring. If some enterprising terrorist was looking for his day in court, it would have happened by now.

Nevertheless, TIFF claimed to be concerned about the provenance of the footage and whether licenses had been obtained.

Their legal argument seems to be that the terrorists are the copyright owners of their snuff films, and their intellectual property rights are protected under Canadian law via multiple copyright treaties.

On its face, the argument is risible and the kind of thing that makes ordinary people loathe lawyers who can’t help but find the nearest pin on which to dance.

But even a copyright stickler would have trouble buying it.

Putting aside obvious defences to a claim of copyright infringement, such as fair dealing, there is serious doubt as to whether Gazans have standing under Canada’s

Copyright Act

.

In 2014, the United Nations

announced

the State of Palestine, which doesn’t currently exist, had become signatory to multiple human rights treaties. Nothing prevented it from also becoming signatory to an international copyright agreement like, for example, the

Berne Convention.

 Foreign authors acquire rights under Canadian copyright laws solely via copyright treaties, absent which, they have no rights to assert in a Canadian court.

Moreover, there is a strong likelihood that many of the terrorists who participated in the massacre have since been killed in the war with Israel. So whatever rights they might have had transfer via Gaza’s laws of wills and estates. Good luck chasing down those heirs for a film clip license.

After significant backlash, TIFF

changed its tune

on Wednesday evening and announced its legal team would “work with the filmmaker on considering all options available.”

The only honourable option is to stand up to the bullies and screen the film as initially promised. There’s no honest legal argument to do otherwise.

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based entertainment lawyer who has worked on numerous films, including Spotlight, Molly’s Game, and French Exit. 

• Leslie Roberts: TIFF cowardly cancels October 7 doc over Hamas copyright
• Jesse Kline: Hamas cheers recognizing ‘Palestine’ but only if there is no Israel

Despite the headlines you might have read, Canada is not about to come to an end, Aboriginal title has not been found to “trump” private property in British Columbia, and there have been no “transfers” of land to the Cowichan tribes or anybody else arising from an 863-page

British Columbia Supreme Court ruling

that wrapped up last Thursday after 513 trial days.

The case has been awaiting resolution for more than a century and a half. It is a bit of a big deal, and a kind of a precedent has been set. But the ruling reveals very little that was not already obvious about the riddle that prevails in reconciling private property rights and Aboriginal land rights in all those places in Canada where the moral slovenliness and timidity of politicians has seen to it that there aren’t any treaties in place.

The status of private property in such places is a puzzle that has been vexing the courts for generations, especially west of the Rockies, where roughly 95 per cent of the land remains “unceded” by treaties. In her reasons for judgment in the Cowichan case, the Honourable Madam Justice Barbara Young has offered a way to muddle through it. It’s not nearly as frightening as it has been widely made out.

It’s complicated, but the first thing to notice is that in fact, the lands directly impacted by her decision are owned by the Crown in Right of Canada and the City of Richmond, and the privately-held properties that take up much of land successfully claimed by the Cowichan tribes were explicitly excluded from their case. The judge herself left the status of privately-owned land untouched. “The Cowichan have not made a claim for return of land from non-parties and the property rights of the private landowners are not undermined,” the judge declared.

The next thing to notice is that Judge Young suspended her own declaration for 18 months to allow the B.C. government and Ottawa to get themselves sorted, and in any case Aboriginal title cases like this are never settled by the B.C. Supreme Court. Premier David Eby’s attorney general has already announced an intention to take the case to the B.C. Court of Appeal, and it won’t be settled there, either. These cases never are. It may be years before the Supreme Court of Canada renders a decision, and as always, the can will be kicked back down the road to the politicians.

This is simply how it’s done. Which requires some explanation.

After B.C. joined Confederation in 1871, Ottawa chose to more or less avoid upsetting resource-industry apple carts and allowed generations of provincial governments in Victoria to get away with squandering the patrimony of a colony that had been a continental bastion of co-existence between Indigenous peoples and settler peoples. Until the Supreme Court of Canada definitively boxed their ears for them in the Delgamuukw decision in 1997, a succession of B.C. governments had kept on betting that there was no such thing as Aboriginal title to begin with.

It is customary for British Columbians to set their hair on fire whenever the courts remind them that they’ve been losing that bet as far back as the Calder case of 1973. This latest case involves a Cowichan fishing village on the Fraser River that Colonial Governor James Douglas had set aside from pre-emption that was swindled from the tribe only two years after Confederation by Richard Clement Moody, the former colonial commissioner of lands and works.

Not satisfied with deliberately overlooking the presence of a village that was home to as many as 1,000 Cowichan people during the fishing season, and then selling it off illegally in the province’s first rounds of land pre-emptions, Moody sold a big chunk of the old village site to himself via the connivings of a land agent.

Moody had no legal right to buy the village lands, it should go without saying — he ended up selling roughly 2,000 acres to himself in 11 different pre-emptions on British Columbia’s mainland — but the point is he had no right to sell the Cowichan land, either. The whole thing was illegal and unconstitutional.

While the federally-owned lands are no small matter — about 260 hectares are under the jurisdiction of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority — it’s the City of Richmond that’s been shouting the loudest about Judge Young’s declaration. Richmond owns several lots and the entirety of the foreshore along the Fraser River at the site, which the judge described as “essentially undeveloped land that Richmond does not use.” Richmond acquired the land over the years mostly as “windfall” from municipal tax sales.

Judge Young said she agrees with Richmond’s lawyers that a declaration of Aboriginal title creates a degree of uncertainty about the fee-simple private properties in the 2,000-hectare claim area. However, “there is greater uncertainty if I do not declare that Richmond and Canada’s fee simple titles and interests are defective and invalid.”

It’s the Cowichan victory in its fishing-rights arguments that are likely of greater significance, and it was because of those assertions that the Cowichan claim was opposed by the Tsawwassen and Musqueam nations. As for the precedent the decision sets, it’s in Judge Young’s explicit finding that a provincial Crown grant of fee-simple title is not sufficient to extinguish Aboriginal title. That’s a power available only to the federal government, and only according to a fairly severe test of justification in the interest of a valid public purpose.

“Neither Aboriginal title nor fee simple title is absolute,” the judge noted “Aboriginal title and fee simple interests are not unqualified interests.” And they can coexist, or rather they already do coexist. The provincial Land Titles Act doesn’t apply to Aboriginal title. It never did. Both Crown title and Aboriginal title can underlie private property without the world coming to an end.

But how all this will come out in the wash will depend largely on the sophistication and the stamina of the provincial and federal governments. And that’s a matter that’s very much worth worrying about. If the Cowichan decision is handled badly, we may all end up paying very dearly. Still, it doesn’t have to be this way. Where the pattern of settlement and the advance of Crown sovereignty failed in Canada, it was in the breach of an Aboriginal rights doctrine that stretches back to 1763 and in the slovenliness of politicians who preferred the easy way.

It always catches up to us, eventually.

“Depend on it,” John Robson, the New Westminster Columbian editor who went on to become premier, wrote in 1864, “for every acre of land we obtain by improper means we will have to pay for dearly in the end, and every wrong committed upon those poor people will be visited on our heads.”

National Post

• Caroline Elliott: B.C. Supreme Court takes an axe to private property rights
• Jamie Sarkonak: This is what reconciliation looks like — the end of property rights

Watch the full video directly below.

Last Thursday, anti-Israel protesters

recorded

themselves outside of former foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly’s residence in Montreal

— crossing the line between her public and private life.

The words, “Melanie war criminal — every time Melanie lies a child in Gaza dies. Israel terrorist. Melanie complice (complicit)” were projected onto her condo building. A woman with a megaphone decreed: “Canada’s arming of Israel during this genocide is the greatest stain of our generation. Ms. Joly’s actions warrant immediate consequences.” She did not elaborate on what she felt those consequences should be.

Earlier this month, it was announced that our current foreign affairs minister, Anita Anand, had closed her constituency office in Oakville, Ont., citing safety concerns related to anti-Israel protesters. 

The tactics used by these demonstrators appear to be escalating, despite Prime Minister Mark Carney’s promise to, under certain conditions, recognize Palestine as a state.

In this video, political strategist Anthony Koch and the Post’s Terry Newman discuss whether these events, and the historic ties between FLQ terrorists and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, suggest that Quebec could see an escalation of political violence, as it did during the October Crisis of 1970.

• Terry Newman: Quebec’s anti-Israel protesters mimicking early tactics of FLQ terrorists
• Anthony Koch: Gaza — the Palestinian state that could have been

Think you own your private property? Well think again, as a recent court decision has thrown the entire basis of property ownership into chaos in British Columbia.

In the ultimate “land acknowledgement,” the B.C. Supreme Court released a bombshell

judgment

last week declaring Aboriginal title for the Cowichan Tribes of Vancouver Island to around 325 hectares on the mainland, in the city of Richmond.

This is the first time a court has declared Aboriginal title over private land in the province, setting a deeply concerning precedent if the ruling is not successfully overturned following an appeal

promised

by B.C.’s attorney general.

In another troubling precedent, the court also declared that fee simple land titles — the typical form of private property ownership in Canada — in the area are “defective and invalid,” on the basis that the Crown had no authority to issue them in the first place.

As constitutional law professor Dwight Newman

points out

, if past fee simple grants in areas of Aboriginal title claims are inherently invalid, “then the judgment has a much broader implication that any privately owned lands in B.C. may be subject to being overridden by Aboriginal title.”

The only thing preventing the judge from making a similar declaration over privately held land in the new Aboriginal title area is the fact that the Cowichan did not ask for a declaration to this effect.

But nothing prevents that from happening in the future if the judgment stands. The judge actually contemplates this very scenario, writing that, “Fee simple interests … will go unaffected in practice when Aboriginal title is recognized over that land, unless or until the Aboriginal title holder successfully takes remedial action in respect of the fee simple interests.”

In short, while most private landowners assume their title to their own land is bulletproof, the ruling states: It “cannot be said that a registered owner’s title under the (Land Title Act) is conclusive evidence that the registered owner is indefeasibly entitled to that land as against Aboriginal title holders and claimants.”

It’s worth noting that the claim was

contested

by two mainland Indigenous groups, the Musqueam and Tsawwassen First Nations, both of whom lay claim to the same land. This highlights the issue of competing claims in a province where the vast majority of the land mass is claimed as traditional territory by one or more of B.C.’s 200-plus Indigenous groups.

While two previous decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada recognized Aboriginal title in British Columbia (

Tsilhqot’in

in 2014 and

Nuchatlaht

in 2024), neither declared it over privately held lands as this one does.

Even as the B.C. government has promised to appeal the decision, it has been pursuing similar policies outside the courts. The province controversially overlaid Aboriginal title on private land with its

problematic

Haida Nation Recognition Act in 2024. The act was specifically referenced by the plaintiffs in the Cowichan case, and the judge agreed that it illustrated how Aboriginal title and fee simple can “coexist.”

This is a questionable assertion given the numerous legal

concerns

. As one analysis explains, private property interests and the implementation of Aboriginal title are ultimately at odds: “The rights in land which flow from both a fee simple interest and Aboriginal title interest … include exclusive rights to use, occupy and manage lands. The two interests are fundamentally irreconcilable over the same piece of land.

While the government claims it adequately protected private property rights in the Haida agreement, Aboriginal title is protected under the Constitution, while private property rights are not. When these competing interests are inevitably brought before the courts, it’s easy to imagine which one will prevail.

The fact that B.C. Premier David Eby said last year that he intended to use the Haida agreement as a “

template

” for other areas of B.C. stands in marked contrast with his

sudden interest

in an appeal as a means of preserving clear private property titles in the wake of this politically toxic ruling.

Indeed, Eby’s government continues to negotiate similar agreements elsewhere, including with the shíshálh Nation on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, even as government documents

admit

that Aboriginal title includes the right to “exclusively use and occupy the land.”

Eby’s commitment to an appeal suggests he may have learned from his costly refusal to appeal a 2021 B.C. Supreme Court

decision

, which found that excessive development had breached the treaty rights of the Blueberry River First Nation. Eby’s government chose to pay out a $350-million settlement to avoid further litigation, a move that ultimately

backfired

when the two parties ended up back in court.

But for now, the consequences of the Cowichan decision have created considerable uncertainty for property owners, businesses and general market confidence. The judge’s own words sum it up: “The question of what remains of Aboriginal title after the granting of fee simple title to the same lands should be reversed. The proper question is: what remains of fee simple title after Aboriginal title is recognized in the same lands?”

If there’s one positive aspect to this decision, it’s that it is so extreme, it will force the Eby government’s radical Indigenous policies onto the public agenda as awareness builds over what’s at stake.

From its incessant

land acknowledgements

, to MLAs referring to non-Indigenous British Columbians as “

uninvited guests

,” to its embrace of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and its land back policies, to

undemocratic

land use planning processes and the

overlaying

of Aboriginal title on private lands, B.C. government policy has long been headed in exactly this direction.

Now, a reckoning is coming, and it’s of the government’s own creation. The broader issue will soon overtake all others in the public eye, and the premier must decide now whether he’ll start walking things back, or double down on his disastrous course.

National Post

Caroline Elliott is a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and sits on the board of B.C.’s Public Land Use Society.

• Caroline Elliott: B.C.’s land reforms treat non-Indigenous people like uninvited guests
• Caroline Elliott: Closures of B.C. parks to non-Indigenous visitors a sign of things to come

The Toronto International Film Festival has taken a deeply troubling stand — revoking an invitation to producers of a new film about October 7, citing video clearance issues and potential “threat of significant disruption.”

This isn’t about artistic differences or legal technicalities. It’s censorship, plain and simple. And it denies audiences the right to witness the unfiltered reality of Hamas’s brutality.

“The Road Between Us” focuses on retired Israeli general Noam Tibon, whose story was widely covered in the days after the attacks. Tibon made a daring rescue of his two granddaughters from the Nova Music Festival, driving into danger to save them from the Hamas assault. His journey is both deeply personal and emblematic of the chaos and heroism of that day.

The most contentious element of the documentary is video taken directly from the body cameras of Hamas terrorists. I witnessed the horrors of the Hamas footage during a recent trip to Israel with the Exigent Foundation. The Israel Defense Forces assembled 55 minutes of video footage from body cams and security cameras taken during the October 7 massacre of 1,200 people, mostly civilians. It is chilling. It’s hard to watch. But it must be shown. The Hamas filmed video I saw showed terrorists shooting randomly as young people fled for their lives through the fields, and firing into the portable toilets lined up at the festival site, where dozens of festival-goers had taken refuge. They shot through the structures one at a time, as screams from inside were audible. You can see the fear in the eyes of the young festival-goers as some are taken hostage, thrown into the back of pickup trucks while their abductors celebrate. It’s horrifying to watch and horrifying to imagine what those kids suffered. It also shows the joy the terrorists took in doing so.

Pro-Hamas activists don’t want the terrorist-filmed videos widely shown because they leave no room for euphemism or denial. It makes the attackers’ intent unmistakable: to kill Jews and destroy Israel. These were not acts of resistance. They were acts of barbarism.

Filmmaker Barry Avrich agreed to TIFF’s demand to change the title of his documentary from “Out of Nowhere: The Ultimate Rescue” to “The Road Between Us.” TIFF also reportedly asked the filmmakers to identify the source of violent footage live-streamed by Hamas and to confirm legal clearance — another roadblock to keep the film from being screened. Disclosure: I worked with Avrich on a different documentary about 15 years ago.

TIFF’s rationale — that cancelling the screening is about “clearing rights” from terrorists — collapses under scrutiny. This isn’t about intellectual property. It’s about suppressing truth that some people find politically inconvenient. As the filmmakers themselves say: “We are not political filmmakers, nor are we activists; we are storytellers. We remain defiant, we will release the film, and we invite audiences, broadcasters, and streamers to make up their own mind, once they have seen it.”

Film festivals should defend artistic freedom, confront audiences with hard truths, and spark difficult conversations. Instead, in a statement TIFF pointed to the need to disqualify films that could pose a “potential threat of significant disruption.” That same logic was cited last year when TIFF canceled Russians at War after massive protests — even though, at first, the festival defended its inclusion. Eventually the film was shown after the festival when the crowds had gone home, and under heavy security.

In uninviting Avrich’s film, TIFF has betrayed its mission — and robbed audiences of the chance to confront the reality of October 7. The truth should be seen, not buried, even if it’s hard to watch.

Leslie Roberts is a former television journalist and news anchor.

• André Pratte: PQ byelection victory heralds the return of Quebec separatism
• Gage Haubrich: Chopping gun confiscation program a good place to start cutting government spending