Ontario pit bull ban appealed to Supreme Court

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, May 2009:
TORONTO–Civil rights lawyer Clayton Ruby on April 16, 2009
petitioned the Supreme Count of Canada to appeal an October 2006
Ontario Court of Appeal verdict which upheld the breed-specific Dog
Owners Liability Act.
The 2005 act forbids breeding, selling, or keeping a pit
bull within Ontario, except for pit bulls who were already licensed
in Ontario when the act took effect. Those dogs must be sterilized,
and must be kept leashed and muzzled when in public. A lower court
weakened the act in March 2007, holding the term “pit bull terrier”
to be too imprecise, but the Ontario Court of Appeal restored the
act as written.

Ruby’s client, Catherine Cochrane, has a dog she terms a
Staffordshire terrier mix, whom she reportedly had intended to breed.
“She wasn’t obeying the law for a while, in terms of
muzzling and neutering,” Ruby said of his client. “I don’t know if
she is now,” he added, to Toronto Star reporter Paoloa Loriggio.
Noted for representing the surviving Dionne quintuplets, the
wrongfully convicted Micmac murder suspect Donald Marshall Jr., and
the Church of Scientology in prominent cases during the 1960s and
1970s, Ruby in recent years has served on the board of the
Greenpeace Charitable Foundation, and has defended seal hunt
protesters.