Do the B.C. Hells Angels have a shot at getting the courts to throw out the province’s civil forfeiture law?

Simon Fraser University criminal law expert David MacAlister thinks it may be possible.

The constitutional rights of the seven men connected to the East End Chapter that filed the suit Tuesday may be violated because a lower burden of proof is required in civil forfeiture cases compared to their legal counterparts, said MacAlister.

“If the outcomes are the same, then presumably the due process safeguards should be the same,” MacAlister said. “Because you’ve got the same sort of seriousness of penalty, the effect of sentence is the same, the stigma attached to having your property forfeited is the same.

“Therefore, the Crown should be forced to go through the same hoops regardless of whether we’re talking about the federal (criminal) law or provincial (civil) law.”

The Hells Angels launched its counterclaim Tuesday to a suit by the CFO last fall to seize Hells Angels’ clubhouses in East Vancouver and Kelowna. Hells Angels’ lawyer Joe Arvay said the government has been going after clubhouses owned by the gang, even though they haven’t been able to prove in a B.C. court that the Hells Angels is a criminal organization.

B.C.’s Civil Forfeiture Office (CFO) was created seven years ago to “take away the profit motive” for criminals and has since seized about $40 million worth of property, goods and cash, including more than $8.4 million last year, according to its director, Phil Tawtel.

Forfeited items include properties housing marijuana grow operations, vehicles, helicopters, boats and large quantities of cash obtained from drug trafficking, he said in an emailed statement.

To date, the “extremely successful” office has seized property in almost half of its 1,400 cases and decided to not go ahead with about 370 other cases forwarded by police across the province, Tawtel said. Most of its 510 ongoing cases are tied to drug activity and the vast majority involve wads of $10,000 in cash or less.

Since 2007, the government has used the Civil Forfeiture Act to go after Hells Angels’ assets in Nanaimo, East Vancouver and Kelowna, including the three clubhouses.

This week, the CFO filed another lawsuit going after the assets of a Kelowna business that police allege was a “chop shop” used by the Hells Angels and other biker gangs.

A lawsuit was filed in B.C. Supreme Court last week against Kelowna’s Cycle Logic and its owner John Edward Newcome, alleging his business “was an automotive chop shop for the purposes of storing, processing, trafficking and selling stolen vehicles.”

The government wants $750,000 worth of property seized in a police raid in August 2012 forfeited and sold, with the proceeds going into the Civil Forfeiture account.

Newcome is facing a series of charges including possession of stolen property and trafficking in stolen property. He is next in Kelowna Provincial Court Oct. 11.

At the time of his arrest, Kelowna RCMP said Cycle Logic was involved in modifying vehicle identification numbers on stolen vehicles, trailers and machinery and then reselling them.