{"id":57920,"date":"2021-05-18T07:26:09","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T12:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57920"},"modified":"2021-05-18T07:26:09","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T12:26:09","slug":"the-brutal-legal-odyssey-of-jessica-ernst-comes-to-an-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57920","title":{"rendered":"The Brutal Legal Odyssey of Jessica Ernst Comes to an End"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Brutal Legal Odyssey of Jessica Ernst Comes to an End<\/h3>\n

The Alberta landowner fought an epic battle against fracking interests.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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\"JessicaErnstFrackingWaterLegalBattle.jpg\"
Jessica Ernst became a high-profile critic of hydraulic fracturing, injecting liquid at high pressure to force loose oil and gas out. \u2018The system dismissed my case, but I don\u2019t think I lost in the court of public opinion.\u2019\u00a0Photo by Colin Smith.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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After 14 years of battling Alberta regulators and the fracking industry over a water well contaminated with methane and chemicals, Jessica Ernst says she feels incalculable grief and anger.<\/p>\n

On April 1, 2021, her tortuous legal crusade \u2014 which included a controversial detour to the Supreme Court of Canada \u2014 came to an end with no resolution. What one Alberta lawyer dubbed \u201cthe legal saga of the decade\u201d is over.<\/p>\n

Court of Queen\u2019s Bench Judge J.T. Eamon accepted applications from Encana and the Alberta government to dismiss the case due to inactivity on the file for three years.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was inevitable,\u201d says Ernst who was informed three weeks after the dismissal. \u201cThe rules are the rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Toronto lawyers Murray Klippenstein and Cory Wanless\u00a0quit<\/a> the case in August 2018 without warning, Ernst was left hanging.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy lawyers knew I couldn\u2019t find a replacement lawyer in Alberta when they quit,\u201d said Ernst. \u201cThey even wrote me that and added that I would fail as a self-represented litigant.\u201d<\/p>\n

She not only had no lawyer, but incomplete legal files to work with, Ernst says. Klippenstein told The Tyee in 2019 that he would return them to Ernst, but she maintains his firm only returned some correspondence but not the complete files. And so the lawsuit languished.<\/p>\n

Although Ernst tried to find another lawyer, she says that she couldn\u2019t find a suitable candidate for various reasons, including conflict of interest. Most big law firms do business in or with the oil patch.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Brutal Legal Odyssey of Jessica Ernst Comes to an End The Alberta landowner fought an epic battle against fracking interests. Jessica Ernst became a high-profile critic of hydraulic fracturing, injecting liquid at high pressure to force loose oil and gas out. \u2018The system dismissed my case, but I don\u2019t think I lost in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[1082,5549,103,331,5092,1729,23884],"class_list":["post-57920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-liberty","tag-alberta","tag-andrew-nikiforuk","tag-canada","tag-fracking","tag-jessica-ernst","tag-oil-and-gas-industry","tag-thetyee-ca"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57921,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57920\/revisions\/57921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}