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What to make of the news out of Regina this week that the Justice for Our Stolen Children Protest Camp, which with its teepees and tents and ceremonial fire is parked adjacent to the Saskatchewan legislature, is taking the government to court?

Well, the only real lesson is that governments — provincial, federal, municipal — don’t know what to do about Indigenous protest and that pretty much whatever they end up doing, even if it is nothing more than wringing their hands, will somehow bite them in the collective rear.

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A lawyer for the Stolen Children group, Dan LeBlanc, filed an application Monday in the Court of Queen’s Bench, seeking an order that the camp should not have been dismantled last month, albeit briefly and to little effect, and that six protesters should not have been taken into custody, also briefly and to little effect.

LeBlanc says that the former action was an unjustifiable breach of the protesters’ Charter right to freedom of expression and that the latter action by Regina Police breached their right against arbitrary detention. As he told David Fraser of the Regina Leader-Post, “We say that right {freedom of expression} is more important than the government’s interest in keeping a green lawn.”