OTTAWA — A Toronto dog owner’s fight to overturn a provincial ban on pit bulls reached the end of the legal road Thursday when the Supreme Court of Canada declined to consider whether the four-year-old law is unconstitutional.
The decision means that pit bulls will remain illegal in Ontario, which imposed the ban in 2005 to eliminate what the government described as a “ticking time bomb.”
The high court’s refusal to weigh in on the issue effectively upholds a ruling in the Ontario Court of Appeal, which concluded the law is justified to protect public safety.
“The total ban on pit bulls is not “arbitrary” or “grossly disproportionate” in light of the evidence that pit bulls have a tendency to be unpredictable and that even apparently docile pit bulls may attack without warning or provocation,” said the October 2008 decision.
The Dog Owners’ Liability Act prohibits pit bull terriers, Staffordshire bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, American pit bull terriers and any dog “that has an appearance and physical characteristics that are substantially similar.”
Ontario has the only provincial ban in Canada, although a handful of municipalities have passed their own bylaws, including Guysborough, N.S., and Winnipeg, which has outlawed pit bulls since 1990.
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