Canadian Restaurant Owner Charged With ‘Trespassing’ After Reopening in Defiance of Lockdown Orders

At 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, November 24, Adam Skelly opened his BBQ restaurant in Toronto and began serving customers. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been unremarkable. But on that day, it was an act of political defiance, because a recent lockdown order prohibited restaurants like his from providing indoor and outdoor dining services.

Skelly, a 33-year-old husband and father of two, was specifically ordered to close by Toronto Public Health later that day, but he opened again on Wednesday and made it clear that he would continue operating as normal. Then, early Thursday morning the police changed the locks on the restaurant to bar his access, and when Skelly showed up later that morning he was met by a significant police presence.

Police allowed him into a back part of the building behind the restaurant, but then he and his employees secretly broke into the restaurant from the back and kicked down the newly locked front door. A scuffle broke out as the crowd of customers briefly blocked the police from entering, but shortly thereafter the operation was shut down and Skelly was arrested.

Furious customers, staff, and other supporters held a protest against the arrest. Skelly was released on bail 30 hours later, with one of his bail conditions being that he isn’t allowed to post on social media. In the days following the incident, a GoFundMe campaign for Skelly’s legal defense raised over $320,000, demonstrating just how much support he has garnered.

As expected, Skelly is facing a number of charges, including intent to obstruct police and holding an illegal gathering. But what’s surprising—and quite frankly confusing—is that he’s also facing a charge of trespassing. Sure, he violated police orders and broke into the restricted area, yet this still brings up a really interesting question.

How can you “trespass” on your own property?

From a legal perspective, the answer is fairly straightforward, because Toronto Public Health has been given the authority to shut down businesses that fail to comply with their edicts. But philosophically, the answer is much more nuanced, because it forces us to grapple with our notion of property rights.

In theory, property rights are the idea that you can do whatever you want with your property as long as it doesn’t interfere with someone else’s property. It’s yours, after all, and what makes it yours is that you alone have the right to control its use.

The most basic property right is the right to be sovereign over your own body, which is known as self-ownership. As economist Murray Rothbard once said, “A man’s right to per­sonal freedom is his prop­erty right in himself.” Rothbard’s point was that property rights are paramount because they constitute the necessary foundation of all other human rights.

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