Barbecue rebel’s COVID charter challenge coming to court

I find it hard to believe that this is still around.


Adam Skelly, who led a protest against COVID restrictions at his Etobicoke eatery in late 2020, will have his say in a Toronto courtroom .

In a constitutional challenge years in the making, the Adamson Barbecue saga is due back in court this week.

The Etobicoke eatery was the site of the so-called Barbecue Rebellion in November 2020, when proprietor Adam Skelly served meals in defiance of a COVID lockdown.

While his restaurants have since closed and Skelly has decamped to Alberta, his lawyers are alleging charter-breaching overreaches by the governments of the day – and they say a “reckoning” is overdue.

A hearing will take place at the University Ave. courts from Wednesday to Friday, the Toronto firm representing Skelly, Perrys LLP, confirmed to the Toronto Sun.

Skelly’s lawyer Ian Perry provided the Sun with a court filing that outlines his argument against four respondents: the province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, Toronto’s board of health and former medical officer of health Eileen de Villa.

The filing alleges several infringements of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms against Skelly, including his freedom of peaceful assembly and against arbitrary detention.

Perry declined to speak to the Sun or provide a statement with the matter still to come before the courts. The City of Toronto likewise said as the matter is before the courts, it won’t comment on the case.

The Ministry of the Attorney General, meanwhile, did not respond to a request for comment.

The allegations in the filing have not been proven in court.

“This constitutional challenge is a reckoning with the unchecked exercise of state power that devastated small business owners, silenced peaceful dissent and trampled core constitutional protections, all without a shred of cogent evidence to justify the destruction,” the filing says.

While de Villa and an expert acting as a witness for the province, Dr. Matthew Hodge, spoke to lawyers for hours ahead of the hearing, the evidence provided by the other side, Perry’s filing alleges, “is alarmingly thin.”

“The record discloses no evidence that closing restaurants or prohibiting peaceful assembly would have meaningfully reduced COVID-19 transmission,” it says. “These respondents … did not balance harms. They simply acted, assuring the applicant, this court and the public at large that these crippling restrictions on businesses were justified.

“Now, when challenged, it seems they have nothing behind the curtain.”

In October 2020, de Villa publicly called for a prohibition on indoor dining, which Premier Doug Ford initially rejected. The next month, the province brought in a colour-coded framework to ease Ontario into another lockdown.

“This framework was widely criticized as confusing and inconsistent with Ontario’s earlier assurance it would not impose new lockdowns,” the filing says.

Skelly, “observing this intergovernmental discord and lack of disclosed evidence,” fearing for his business and judging an impending lockdown as not “grounded in rational, scientific justification,” decided to act, the filing says.

What followed was a protest that, while lacking the longevity of 2022’s Freedom Convoy demonstration in Ottawa, was perhaps Toronto’s biggest political flashpoint of late 2020. The restaurant’s parking lot became a circus.


On Nov. 25, Skelly was ticketed for violations of COVID rules and a trespass notice was “authorized and signed by Dr. de Villa, a measure she would later be unable to provide any support or precedent for,” the filing alleges.

The next day, Skelly broke into his own property and was arrested by the swarm of Toronto Police officers already present.

“The operation involved over 200 officers, with the city later seeking more than $187,000 from Mr. Skelly in a civil action for policing costs,” the filing says.

Skelly has been tied up in litigation in the years since and has paid tens of thousands in costs, not counting the city’s $187,000 for policing, the filing says.
‘This was COVID-19’
While the Sun has heard no response from the city or province as to the filing’s version of events, transcripts of the examinations of de Villa and Hodge, as well as one of Skelly, have been posted online.


In those transcripts, de Villa and Hodge emphasize the dangers posed by COVID and the strain on Ontario’s medical system, and also concede that hindsight being 20-20, more is known today about the virus and public health’s response to it.

“The issue here is that we were in the middle of a communicable disease pandemic. … This was COVID-19,” de Villa said during questioning by Perry, according to the transcript, posted to canucklaw.ca. (While Perrys LLP did not confirm the authenticity of the transcript, the information within lines up with footnotes in the filing provided to the Sun.)

“We don’t need to hear the spiel on COVID-19 again, OK? I haven’t asked you about that,” Perry replied. “I have asked you about why the police took the actions they did, why $187,000 was incurred, and my client sued for in the weeks following this incident.”

Barbecue rebel Adam Skelly’s legal fate in hands of judge
The legal saga of barbecue restaurateur Adam Skelly appears to be nearing its end as a judge heard the last of three days of arguments on Friday


The legal saga of restaurateur Adam Skelly isn’t out of the slow cooker just yet.

After closing arguments wrapped Friday afternoon, Judge Janet Leiper told a downtown courtroom she’ll need time to weigh the very “technical” legal matters in the case of Skelly, who more than five years ago led and encouraged a protest against COVID-related restrictions at his Etobicoke eatery.

“I have a task ahead of me to look at this. I can appreciate the public’s interest,” she said.

At issue was Skelly’s protest – the so-called Barbecue Rebellion of November 2020 – and City Hall’s reaction to it.

Skelly’s lawyer Ian Perry alleges a list of infringements against his client’s freedoms under the Charter of Rights.


After Skelly served meals at his restaurant, Adamson Barbecue, in defiance of a lockdown, a brigade of police was brought in and the city changed the locks. When Skelly broke into his own property, he was arrested and detained “for over 30 hours,” Perry said – just one of the charter breaches alleged.

The city is seeking $187,000 in “policing costs” from Skelly. That potentially hinges on this case, as do criminal matters against Skelly, the court heard.

Critical to Skelly’s charter challenge is what’s called Section 1 of the document, which lays out “reasonable limits” on an individual’s rights – effectively a government override of one’s freedoms. Perry told Leiper the Crown hadn’t established that the limits the municipal and provincial governments put on Skelly’s rights were reasonable.

“The Crown doesn’t want you to go to Section 1, because they know the Section 1 analysis, they fail,” he said.

Perry also argued they had not proven Skelly’s restaurant posed enough of a danger to make their actions proportionate.

He said the province’s own expert provided figures that showed the industry sector that covers bars, restaurants and nightclubs was only tied to “.05% of cases” in the first year or so of the pandemic.

“Not a single case” was connected to Adamson Barbecue, he said.

Further, he questioned the province’s strategy of putting places like Toronto and Peel Region in lockdown while allowing restaurants elsewhere in Ontario to operate.

“Your charter rights don’t depend on your postal code,” Perry said.

While Perry complained about government overreach, the Crown argued he couldn’t suggest a better method to deal with COVID. The court heard it would be unfair to have limited the rights of just health-care workers, for example, rather than the entire population of Ontario, an idea that was mentioned during a pretrial examination of the province’s expert, Dr. Matthew Hodge.

Perry rejected the idea that he should be stress testing the governments’ own actions.

“Frankly, I don’t think that’s the applicant’s obligation. It’s the Crown’s,” he said.

Perry also called it “absurd” that one would argue, as the Crown did, that Skelly’s restaurant reopening wasn’t truly a protest.

“Compliance does not denote an expression, but peaceful defiance certainly does,” Perry told the court. “The disagreement was palpable at the time.”
City can’t ‘demolish the building’
Friday morning opened with the City of Toronto’s lawyer Penelope Ma picking up from Thursday’s proceedings, during which the city laid out the danger posed by the virus. Ma then moved to the justifications for assuming control of Skelly’s restaurant – and Leiper didn’t always seem to be on board with her arguments.

The judge asked if the city could’ve taken “any less restrictive” measures than locking Skelly out of his own barbecue joint. Ma said no, as while Skelly was allowed to pivot to selling takeout and delivery meals, he instead chose to “flaunt.”

“You can have the authority,” Leiper said, “… but does that mean you can demolish the building? … There must be limits.”

Ma conceded that the city’s use of trespass law against Skelly was unprecedented, but said, “respectfully, a lot of things were unprecedented at that time … and unprecedented doesn’t mean unlawful.”

Much of Friday’s proceedings dealt with esoteric matters such as precedents in charter law, the legal definition of seizure and from what Toronto’s medical officer of health Eileen De Villa drew her authority to restrict Skelly’s business.

Neither De Villa nor Skelly attended in person.

Lawyers on both sides made reference to the recent case of Kimberley Taylor, who sought entry to Newfoundland for a funeral in May 2020. (The Supreme Court found in mid-February that the province could refuse entry to non-residents due to the pandemic.)

The staid courtroom discussions about the 2020 protest stood in stark contrast to the carnival atmosphere seen at Skelly’s restaurant on the dates in question. One common thread, however, was the turnout of supporters, as lawyers’ chairs were at one point offered to those standing in the little University Ave. courtroom’s packed gallery.

Leiper did not announce a timeline for her decision.