Injunctions have been used to uphold the law and protect Native Americans

Several of these blockades were quashed through interim injunctions obtained by the Canadian National Railway and Pipeline companies against protestors. An interim injunction request requires the court to consider whether there is a ‘serious question’ to be tried and to apply a ‘balance of convenience’ test, evaluating whether the harm done to those applying for the injunction outweighs the potential harm/ injustice done to those against whom the injunction would be obtained. Factoring into this calculus is the question of ‘irreparable harm’—if it can be established that those seeking the injunction would sufer irreparable harm as a result of the actions of (in the cases below) protestors, then it is highly unlikely that the ‘balance of convenience’ will weigh in favour of the targets of the injunction. In Enbridge Pipelines v Jane Doe, 3 the judge, citing Mr. Justice Sharpe, says in no uncertain terms: ‘Under our system of law, property rights are sacrosanct…[t]he balance of convenience and other matters may have to take second place to the sacrosanctity of property rights in matters of trespass’ (2014, p. 12). The judge goes on to note competing rights—for instance, freedom of expression—but the judgment proceeds from the axiom that property rights are sacrosanct whilst competing rights must argue for themselves—ultimately, this reasoning supports the granting of the injunction against the protestors. Similarly, in CNR v. Chief Chris Plain (2012), a case awarding an interim injunction against Aamjiwnaang First Nation members maintaining a blockade in solidarity with Idle No More in Sarnia, the judge explains: ‘Persons are free to engage in political protest…but the law does not permit them to do so by engaging in civil disobedience through trespassing on the private property of others’ (2012, p. 23). While the ideal of ‘freedom of expression’ is a point of pride within neoliberal frameworks (e.g. Whyte 2019), it must ultimately bow to private property, which is ‘elevated in terms no less extensive than those attributed to the transcendence of myth…the foundation of civilization, the very motor-force of the origin and development of society…the modality of appropriating nature’ (Fitzpatrick 1992, p. 50). The legal rationale in these cases, however, moves beyond the foundational transcendence of property rights alone to a broader construction of urgency in Canadian law relating to the ‘circuitry of capital’ (Pasternak and Dafnos 2017, p. 7). In Canadian National Railway Company v. John Doe, 4 the judge explains the cascade of consequences that would ensue from the blockade’s continuation: All the eastbound and westbound trafc between Toronto and Montreal will quickly become backlogged…This is because start up problems amount for every hour the Main Line is blocked—customers simply cannot process two days’ worth of trafc in one day, resulting in further backlogs. In turn, this will produce a shortage of empty equipment for subsequent loading, creating a further compounding efect. By the time the backlog is cleared, costs of these compounded delays will be much greater than the sum of the costs of the individual train delays. (2013, para. 22) This colonial-capitalist cluster of interdependent urgencies is not a universal means of understanding and organizing time.