Funding Round Closed!
Thanks so much to everyone who has supported us in getting to this point. We have now successfully finished raising the funds we need to prepare our Leave to Appeal submission to the Supreme Court of Canada (which we expect to submit following the decision from the Court of Appeal for Ontario in early 2025). Since we don't know whether the Supreme Court will grant us leave to appeal, we are now encouraging supporters to pledge their support for submitting an appeal to the SCC if they allow us to. We've broken these pledges into two phases - (1) preparing and submitting our written appeal, and (2) preparing for and appearing before the Supreme Court. Please visit our pledging pages for Phase 1 and Phase 2 if you would like to assure us of your support in advance (we won't collect the pledges before they're needed). And please visit our "Operating and Future Initiatives" donation page if you would like contribute to our ongoing activities.
Background on "Leave to Appeal" Phase:
Since 2019, over 1400 Canadians have collectively contributed nearly $300,000 to get us all the way from filing our Notice of Application in 2019 through to our recent appearance in the Appeal Court for Ontario. We're currently expecting the Court to issue their ruling early in the new year.
Looking forward, whichever side the Appeal Court's ruling goes against will want to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). But appearing there is not guaranteed - one first has to ask for "leave to appeal", which involves preparing a well-researched written argument outlining why the SCC should hear the case, and then wait to hear if they decide to grant the leave.
Our lawyer, Nicolas Rouleau, estimates that preparing and filing a "leave to appeal" application will cost approximately $30,000, so, to be ready to go after the Appeal Court issues its decision (likely in early 2025), we're now inviting contributions towards the application for leave stage (a few generous supporters contributed $3500 to kickstart this stage of our fundraising, so our remaining goal is $26,500). To support us in this, you can make a secure online donation via credit card below. To donate by cheque or e-transfer, please visit this page.
NOTE: We've heard that some users using Firefox have had trouble using this donation page - apparently you can get kicked back to the home page after filling out the form rather than having your donation processed. We've alerted our web service to this problem, but in the meantime, if you experience this problem, please try using a different browser. We apologize for the inconvenience.
