Nygard seeks Supreme Court opinion on bail case

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This article was published 19/05/2021 (1614 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Denied bail by Manitoba’s highest court, former fashion mogul Peter Nygard is taking his fight for release to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Nygard, 80, is being held at Headingley Correctional Centre after being taken into custody on a provisional arrest warrant Dec. 14, 2020.

He is facing possible extradition to the United States, where he has been charged with sex trafficking and racketeering offences spanning decades.

Nygard has filed for leave to appeal to Canada’s top court, arguing his case raises questions “of national importance,” including how extradition proceedings impact an accused person’s right and access to reasonable bail.

He was first denied bail in February after Queen’s Bench Justice Shawn Greenberg ruled she was not satisfied Nygard wouldn’t try to tamper with witnesses if he were released.

Security and monitoring measures — proposed by the defence to satisfy justice officials he would not flee from a $1-million home in Winnipeg — would not prevent him from tampering with alleged victims or witnesses by phone, or having someone do it on his behalf, Greenberg said.

The Manitoba Court of Appeal upheld the decision a month later, ruling Greenberg “was rightly concerned that others would act on behalf of (Nygard) to contact witnesses and victims.”

In its application to the Supreme Court, Nygard’s legal team argue Nygard, who has no criminal record, is being held to a different bail standard because he is facing extradition.

The risk an accused will interfere with the administration of justice, referred to by the courts as a “secondary ground” for denying bail, is not considered in a consistent manner in domestic and extradition bail proceedings, Nygard’s lawyers argue in court documents.

“In domestic bail proceedings, courts are skeptical of the use of uncharged and unproven allegations to establish secondary ground concerns,” the documents say.

“However… courts do not apply a similar level of skepticism to the use of uncharged and unproven allegations to establish secondary ground concerns in extradition bail proceedings. This has the potential to cause significant and undue prejudice to the liberty interest of the person sought, who has no evidentiary route through which he or she can challenge the accuracy or reliability of those allegations, because no witnesses from the requesting state are realistically compellable on an extradition bail hearing.”

Nygard’s lawyers argue it remains unclear when deciding an extradition bail case in Canada whether it should be based on the strength of the Crown’s case supporting a committal to stand trial or the strength of the requesting state’s case at trial.

“This court has never addressed the question of how the law of bail applies in the extradition context,” the court documents say. “Lower courts have taken varying approaches, resulting in unfair and unwarranted disparity of treatment based solely on the location in which criminal charges were filed.”

The Supreme Court has not decided whether to grant Nygard leave to appeal.

His extradition hearing is set for November.

On Wednesday, a Winnipeg judge approved a motion by several news outlets to broadcast an extradition-related motion in July.

“Based upon the evidence I have examined, I have come to the determination there is no risk to the administration of justice if the hearing in July is broadcast,” Queen’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal said.

“I’m in agreement with the media consortium, when they argue that there is indeed a significant national interest in the exhibition of proceedings generally… and there are educative benefits to getting insight into potentially what is at play in that motion.”

The U.S indictment against Nygard alleges from 1995 and 2020, he — alongside business associates and co-conspirators — engaged in a “pattern of criminal conduct involving at least dozens of victims in the United States, the Bahamas and Canada.”

Nygard is accused of raping and sex trafficking young girls, often targeting individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds with a history of abuse and keeping them quiet via “threats, false promises of modelling opportunities” and “other coercive means.”

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca