Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
TORONTO — Animal rights activists and the Ontario government squared off in court at the end of June over the activists’ recently recognized right to tell lies to farmers in order to avoid prosecution under the province’s farm trespass law.
An Ontario judge last year ruled that it’s legal for animal rights activists to gain access to farms by becoming farm employees, by lying about themselves to the hiring farmer. Parts of a regulation under the 2020 Security from Trespass and Protecting Food Safety Act violated the liar’s freedom of expression guarantees in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, according to the judge.
The province appealed the May 2024 decision won by plaintiffs Animal Justice and Toronto Cow Save. Hearings went ahead June 24-25, 2025, at the Ontario Court of Appeal.
It’s a common activist ploy to misrepresent themselves to get jobs on farms for purposes of collecting video and photos inside livestock facilities. The portions of the regulation struck down last year directly prohibited this underhanded tactic. Farmers could screen out job applicants with activist sympathies by asking if they had a university degree or were affiliated with animal rights groups. If the applicants lied to get hired, the law treated them as trespassers lacking the farmer’s consent to be on the property. Animal activist groups disparage this approach as an “ag gag” law that prevents them from practicing “journalism.”
In its notice of appeal, the province argued that the judge “made a palpable and overriding error of fact in concluding that reducing or eliminating undercover ‘exposés’ was a purpose of the legislation.”
