THE ADVOCATE 951
VOL. 79 PART 6 NOVEMBER 2021
dents Canada and Rise Legal Clinic. While the number is correct for all of
these initiatives, Mr. Maclaren advised that Access Pro Bono received only
$250,000. We regret the error.
The week of November 14 to 20, 2021 has been proclaimed Victims and Survivors
of Crime Week in British Columbia. It is followed immediately by
Restorative Justice Week on November 21 to 28, 2021.
On the installation of fences between neighbouring properties, Robert
Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” has been treated as akin to judicial precedent,
though judges do not appear aligned on whether the poet favoured or
implicitly criticized the fencing at issue. Outlining the situation in Beffort v.
Zuchelkovski, 2016 ONSC 583, in which the plaintiffs claimed that through
adverse possession they owned a strip of the defendant’s land, Justice Trimble
noted:
1 In “Mending Wall”, poet Robert Frost and his neighbour are engaged
in their annual spring ritual of repairing the stacked stone wall that
divides their properties. Frost asks the neighbour why they do it every
year. He asks why they need the wall. There is nothing on either property
that needs containing except pine trees on the neighbour’s and apple
trees on the writer’s, neither of which will wander. The neighbour merely
answers “Good fences make good neighbours.” For every reason Frost
puts forward for not having the wall, the neighbour repeats “Good fences
make good neighbours.” Frost, convinced that his neighbour will never
change, resigns himself to mending the wall.
2 This case shows us that, sometimes, the neighbour is correct. Good
fences do make good neighbours – provided they are placed on the property
line.
But sometimes the neighbour is not correct. In Arthurs v. Matthews, 2021
NBQB 160, the New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench noted that
“contrary to the oft-misunderstood line in Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Mending
Wall’, good fences do not make good neighbours. Case in point: the Respondents
have erected a fence preventing their neighbours, the Applicants,
from accessing a portion of a drive way between them. Neighbourly relations
are now far from good.”
And our Supreme Court noted in Dainow v. Tait, 2003 BCSC 1040: “Counsel
provided me with case law which unhappily illustrates the fact that fences,
which ostensibly might create good neighbours, in fact seem capable of creating
legal arguments.”
We found this old correction from The Economist. Pedants unite! “In our article
about the death of Kofi Annan on August 23rd we said that he wore a