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‘A sudden gap’: poorest to suffer from Trump’s drive to stop Cuba sending doctors to its neighbours

Novlyn Ebanks, 73, had been due to receive the eye surgery she needed free of charge at St Joseph’s hospital in Kingston. But after Jamaica’s unilateral decision in March to end the nearly 30-year agreement with Cuba to provide doctors, she was no longer able to schedule the procedure. The hospital’s ophthalmology centre was mainly staffed by Cuban doctors, many of whom had already left Jamaica. “I’m really disturbed and concerned,” said Ebanks, who will now have to seek private treatment at a cost that, she said, could reach 350,000 Jamaican dollars (about £1,600). In recent months, many people across Latin America and the Caribbean have suddenly found themselves without healthcare, as nearly a dozen countries acquiesce to pressure from the US to end medical agreements with the Cuban government. The US claims that the programme amounts to “forced labour” for doctors, who have most of their salaries withheld by the Cuban government. Cuba acknowledges the retention but denies any human rights violations, saying the allegation is merely a pretext for the White House’s efforts to economically strangle the island and force regime change, which include the now months-long blockade of oil shipments. Meanwhile, doctors, NGOs and researchers agree that the people who will be most affected by the sudden withdrawal of doctors – typically deployed to remote and historically underserved healthcare areas – will be the region’s poorest communities. “We did not get sufficient time to come up with or put in place a contingency,” said Damion Gordon, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. “It just happened suddenly, which created a sudden gap … and a crisis for those communities,” he added. US pressure to end the partnerships has included cancelling the visas of government officials – and even their family members – who have had any connection to the programme. Since Donald Trump began his second term, the governments of Jamaica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, and Paraguay have ended the medical agreements, either immediately or gradually. The lone point of resistance has been Mexico, where the president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has refused to end the programme, saying that the about 3,000 Cuban doctors are of “great help” as they work in remote areas where there is a shortage of personnel. “People in rural conditions are the ones who will suffer,” said John Kirk, professor emeritus of Latin American studies at Dalhousie University in Canada. The programme emerged in 1960, when a medical brigade was sent to Chile to help treat victims of an earthquake. Since then, more than 600,000 Cuban doctors, nurses and health technicians have been deployed to more than 160 countries. Cuba does not release precise data, but estimates suggest there are now more than 20,000 doctors across about 50 countries, with specialisms ranging from obstetrics and paediatrics to surgery and oncology. The largest deployment was in Venezuela, which began in 2004 and at its peak involved nearly 30,000 doctors. Now, with the US calling the shots since the capture of Nicolás Maduro, there have been reports of doctors leaving the country, although the mission has not officially ended and more than 10,000 Cuban health professionals are still believed to be on the ground. It was with the Venezuelan mission, known as “oil for doctors”, that the programme became one of Cuba’s main sources of revenue and a crucial buffer against the decades-long US economic embargo. “Now, Trump is determined to cut that off in his attempt to bring about regime change,” said Kirk, who estimates the programme generates about $5bn a year for Cuba. The money comes mainly from retaining about 80% of salaries, which the US says amounts to “21st-century slavery”. Reports by the UN and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have also gathered testimonies from former participants who say they worked under coercion, and the organisations have described the programme as a form of modern slavery. “I interviewed 270 Cuban doctors, nurses and technicians; none of them said they had been forced to work,” said Kirk. “It’s not slave labour,” said the Cuban doctor Yanili Magdariaga Menéndez, 41, who spent five years in Venezuela in the early 2010s. “I joined the programme because I realised that, in Cuba, I couldn’t give my family what I wanted to,” said Menéndez, who moved from the roughly $40 a month she earned on the island to about $1,000 abroad, even after the government’s deductions. Although she said she did not consider the share “entirely fair”, she added that she also “understood Cuba depends on it and uses it to fund free education and healthcare”. After Venezuela, she moved to Brazil, where the programme once had more than 11,000 professionals, but was ended in 2018 after being attacked by the then far-right, Trump-allied president, Jair Bolsonaro. Helen Yaffe, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow and a host of the podcast Cuba Analysis, said the US allegation of human rights violations was “a pretext” and “absolute rubbish”. “How can they claim to care about human rights while blocking oil shipments to Cuba, which means that premature babies in incubators are left at risk during power cuts?” she said. Although the US is reportedly offering countries that agree to stop employing Cuban doctors support for “infrastructure modernisation”, Yaffe said Washington was “not replacing medics or even proposing to train domestic substitutes”. Although they did not respond to specific questions, a US state department spokesperson said: “We condemn forced labour and human trafficking involved in the Cuban regime’s labour export programme, especially its foreign medical missions. Cuba’s state-sponsored scheme deprives ordinary Cubans of medical care, and medical professionals of their human rights and fundamental freedoms. We urge other countries to treat Cuban doctors fairly as individuals and not as commodities to be traded by the regime.” The government of Cuba did not respond to requests for comment. In Guatemala, where the government has announced the “gradual withdrawal” of about 400 Cuban doctors by the end of the year, NGOs such as the Emergency Project already know they will have to fill the gap, which will disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. “To abandon a programme like that is to strip healthcare access from some of the most disenfranchised and underserved populations in our part of the world,” said the emergency physician Darren Cuthbert, the executive director of the NGO, noting that many countries in the region are still recovering from Trump’s decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In Jamaica, where a group of people held a march in the capital in gratitude to Cuban doctors, the health minister, Christopher Tufton, admitted their departure had created “gaps”. “Some of those gaps are challenging to fill because of the specialisation and the fact that we don’t have a local equivalent. So we have started by doubling up on the shifts … by local [doctors] to fill the void, particularly in eye care and oncology,” he said. But Tufton said he saw the moment as an opportunity to force the country to address its shortage of domestic medical staff, including through an ad campaign to encourage Jamaican doctors abroad to return. “I think we’re better off moving in that direction, where we can create less dependence [on foreign doctors] … We value what the Cubans have done and the relationship we have had. We do hope to see that kind of re-engagement under different circumstances,” he said. While still working out how she will pay for the eye surgery, Novlyn Ebanks already misses the Cuban doctors, whom she described as “very patient, humble and understanding”. “These are the people that we really need to have around us to take care of us,” she said.

Ukrainian action thriller billed as Saving Private Ryan for the drone age

It is being billed as Ukraine’s answer to Saving Private Ryan, updated for an age of drones. The war movie Killhouse is an action thriller which shows off the latest in battlefield technology. Released this week, it features cameos by figures well known in Ukraine, including the nation’s former military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov. One missing person is Donald Trump. The film is conveniently set in 2024, when Washington and Kyiv were allies. Its director, Liubomyr Levytskyi, said he was inspired by a real life story, when a couple trying to rescue relatives came under Russian attack. The man was badly wounded. A Ukrainian military unit nearby sent in a drone with a piece of paper. It said: “Follow me.” The woman followed the drone, dodging mines and bullets. Russian soldiers threw her unconscious husband into a trench. Incredibly, he survived. “A friend of mine, a journalist, rang me and said: ‘Liubomyr, I’ve got this story – it’ll give you goosebumps.’” Levytskyi said. He added: “I was like: ‘Well, of course it will. I’ve seen so many of these stories already.’ It’s very hard to impress me with a story. Then I saw footage from the rescue operation. I couldn’t believe my eyes that this is real.” The director made a 30-minute documentary, Follow Me, which he said got wide attention. “I realised that this story really strikes a chord, and people get it. Drones in general, well, they’re something new. And I thought, right, this story needs to be made into a film.” The ensuing two-and-half hour film was shot last year in the Kyiv region. Levytskyi said he took artistic licence with the plot, adding a 12-year-old girl kidnapped by Russians. Scenes take place in the White House situation room, in occupied eastern Ukraine and a farmhouse in a deadly grey zone. There is a shootout and car chase in downtown Kyiv. The US journalist Audrey MacAlpine – who plays a version of herself – said filming had to stop on several occasions. “There were air raid alerts. We had to hide. It was a war within a war,” she said. The actor Denis Kapustin said some cast members would nap in a bomb shelter, waiting for the threat to pass. Of the blurring of fiction and reality, he said: “The movie is totally meta and postmodern.” Kapustin said Killhouse captures the complicated multi-level nature of war today. “It’s a race for technological superiority,” he added. Soldiers took part alongside professional actors, with pyrotechnics used to simulate explosions. After filming ended, Kapustin joined the real-life unit in which his character serves, the 3rd Assault Brigade, a part of the 3rd Army Corps. He is now a drone operator. In one scene, a group of Ukrainian special forces soldiers clear a building, shooting dead many Russians. Kapustin acknowledged that the war is fought at a distance across much of the frontline, but said street-to-street fighting takes place in shattered eastern towns such as Vovchansk. “It’s realistic. The plan is not to lose people,” he said. The reaction from Ukrainian audiences has been positive. “It’s interesting to see people from the news such as Budanov on screen,” Maria Hlazunova, who worked for the Dovzhenko Centre, Ukraine’s film archive, said at this week’s Kyiv premiere. She added: “It’s like fiction mixed with fact. The film is super-patriotic, which is as it should be. There are a few cheesy moments. Overall it does a really good job.” Ukraine’s two main intelligence agencies, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU), were involved in the production. They provided US Humvee and MaxxPro vehicles as well as a Black Hawk helicopter. The drama showcases Ukraine’s latest homemade drones, such as a catapult-launched reconnaissance model known as Shark. The film’s makers say it is the first feature in cinema history to be use footage taken by real combat drones. They are preparing an English-language version for distributors in the US and are considering creating a four-episode version for streaming platforms such as Netflix. Killhouse was made without state support and had a $1.1m budget. Like Saving Private Ryan, the story has a moral question at its heart: is it worth sacrificing many lives to save one person, in this case a stolen child? According to Ukraine’s army media unit, Killhouse depicts “something the world often misses in the daily flood of frontline updates”. “Ukrainian soldiers are not just fighting to hold territory. They are crossing into grey zones to bring civilians home,” it said. Levytskyi suggested that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, badly underestimated Ukraine’s resilience and will to survive when he launched his 2022 full-scale invasion, thinking his armed forces could overwhelm Kyiv in a few days. More than four years later, the war continues. “The enemy is very afraid when Ukrainians are united. That is a fact,” the director said. Additional reporting by Jake Jacobs

US president cancels envoy trip to Pakistan for ceasefire talks – as it happened

Blog closing That’s where we’ll leave our live Middle East coverage for today. Thanks for following along and we’ll be back with another live blog later.

Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy signs agreement with Azerbaijan as death toll from Russian attacks rises to 10

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed deals on security and energy cooperation with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev in Baku on Saturday, he said, as Kyiv seeks to leverage its experience in defending its airspace from Russia. After the latest wave of conflict in the Middle East that began with US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran in late February, multiple nations have sought Ukraine’s assistance and expertise in downing Iran’s long-range drones. Zelenskyy said the two countries had signed an agreement relating to military-industrial cooperation. Aliyev said military-industrial partnerships between the two countries had “wide-ranging perspectives” and that the two leaders had discussed joint defence production. He did not specify that he had signed any deals. Zelenskyy has also sought to reinvigorate peace talks with Russia, which were being mediated by the US until it became more focused on its campaign against Iran. The Ukrainian leader said he had discussed with Aliyev the possibility of having a meeting between Ukraine and Russia in Azerbaijan.“We are ready for the next talks [to be] in Azerbaijan if Russia will be ready for diplomacy,” he said. Ten people have been killed in Russian attacks on the south-eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro and other regions. Regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha said eight people were killed and 49 injured in Dnipro, a repeated target in more than four years of war with Russia. “For more than 20 frightening hours, the Russians attacked Dnipro in waves,” Hanzha wrote on Telegram. “They hit with missiles and drones. They hit deliberately. They hit residential areas.” Two more were killed in northern Ukraine. A Ukrainian drone attack on Sevastopol in Russian-annexed Crimea killed one man and wounded three other people, the city’s Moscow-installed governor said on Sunday. “43 UAVs (drones) were shot down in total. Unfortunately, there are fatalities,” Mikhail Razvozhayev wrote on Telegram. He said a man born in 1983 was killed while inside a vehicle, and three people were hospitalised. The speaker of Russia’s parliament, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, arrived in North Korea on Saturday to attend an event to commemorate Pyongyang’s deployment of troops to help Moscow in the Ukraine conflict, the Tass news agency reported. Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia’s Duma, was welcomed by Jo Yong-won. North Korea has sent an estimated 14,000 troops to fight with Russian forces against Ukraine. More than 6,000 of them have been killed, according to South Korean, Ukrainian and western officials. A drone crashed in Romania on Saturday after Russian strikes in neighbouring Ukraine near a river separating the two countries, authorities said, adding that more than 200 people had been evacuated. Romania, a Nato member, has repeatedly seen its airspace violated and drone fragments fall on its territory since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But this was the first time that debris from Russian drones has caused material damage on its territory, according to local media. “A drone crashed in a populated area,” with a “possible explosive charge,” emergency services said in a statement. No casualties were reported, but an electricity pole and an outbuilding of a house were damaged, authorities said, adding that gas supplies in the area had been cut as a precautionary measure.

Macron says EU’s mutual defence clause ‘not just words’

Emmanuel Macron has spoken up for Europe’s ability to defend itself, saying a mutual assistance clause, enshrined in the EU treaty, was unambiguous and “not just words”. The French president said the pact had already been proved in action when several member states sent military aid to Cyprus after a drone attack against a British airbase on the island on 28 February. “On article 42, paragraph 7, it’s not just words,” the French leader said. “We know that for us, it ⁠is clear ‌and ‌there is no room ‌for interpretation or ‌ambiguity.” Macron, in Greece to renew a bilateral strategic defence agreement, described the clause as “stronger” than article 5, Nato’s collective defence clause, as he reiterated his long-held belief that Europe was better off boosting its own security than relying on an increasingly erratic US under Donald Trump. “I really believe this US approach will last,” he said. A day earlier, EU leaders, attending an informal council in Cyprus, said plans were being finessed on how the obscure clause would work in practice. Speaking on Friday, the European Council president, António Costa, said: “We are designing the handbook [on] how to use this mutual assistance clause.” Macron questioned the efficacy of the Nato article when asked about the military alliance and its founding principle under which members come to one another’s aid if they are attacked. “There is now a doubt on article 5, not put on the table by the Europeans but by the US president,” he told the audience during a discussion held with the Greek prime minister in the capital’s picturesque Roman-era agora. “It is clearly a de facto weakening of the Nato alliance … I am a strong believer in the European pillar of Nato and my view is that we should strengthen this European pillar.” His Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, appeared to agree, calling the decision to rush fighter jets and naval support to Cyprus “a gamechanger” for the bloc. Amid fears of the union’s easternmost member coming under sustained retaliatory attack in the first days of the US-Israeli war against Iran, France, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal scrambled to send assistance to the island. “What we did in Cyprus was a gamechanger,” said Mitsotakis, insisting that the time had come for the little-known defence pact to be taken seriously. “We have a mutual assistance clause in our treaties and this is our European responsibility. We never spoke about it because we thought that Nato would always do the job … we need to take this article much more seriously; we need to look at the Cypriot lesson, think about what could happen in another case, have exercises in terms of what it would mean if we were again to offer support to a European country under threat.” Doing so would be tantamount to a “political statement” that the EU did not only rely on Nato, and would be “also good for Nato”, he added. Infuriated by Nato’s failure to support the strikes against Iran, the US president has stepped up criticism of the transatlantic alliance, further raising concerns that support for article 5 from Washington can no longer be guaranteed. Macron, who is making his third official visit to Greece before he leaves office next year, said the strong alliance between the two nations should serve as a model for the rest of the EU. On Saturday an unprecedented nine accords were signed between the countries, foreseeing increased cooperation in areas including scientific research and nuclear technology. Macron vowed that France would stand by Greece if it ever came under attack from its neighbour and long-time regional rival, Turkey. In 2017, Macron, then newly elected, had used the dramatic setting of the ancient Pnyx beneath the Athens Acropolis to give a rousing policy speech on the future of Europe and the virtues of democracy. The tone, nine years later, could not have been more different. At a time of such geopolitical uncertainty, Europe, he said, had to “wake up” and claim its place as a geopolitical power as it faced opponents it had not faced before. “We should not underestimate that this is a unique moment where a US president, a Russian president and a Chinese president are dead against the Europeans,” he told the crowd. It now remained for a continent that had managed to end centuries of civil war – and deliver on prosperity – to “write the next chapter and become a geopolitical power”.

Conspiracy theory over UFOs and missing scientists spreads from web to White House

Are the disappearances or deaths of at least 11 US scientists, each allegedly connected in some way to space, defense and nuclear research, really linked in a nefarious plot: one that involves the Chinese or other state enemies, or possibly links back to UFOs? A conspiracy theory positing exactly that has roared through sections of the US population in recent weeks, spreading rapidly from the internet into rightwing media and hence into the mainstream press and prompting an inquiry from Congress and questions from Donald Trump. Could such an outlandish theory have even an inkling of truth? Or are lawmakers, the FBI, the White House, countless substackers and podcasters, along with US media outlets, just pandering to the latest clickbait conspiracy theory in an age rife with them? Like all good conspiracy theories, the mysterious case of the sudden flood of missing or dead US scientists is difficult to sift through. And answers to its puzzle likely lie not in the conspiracy theory itself but what it represents in an era of AI slop and social media disinformation. Especially when each morsel of conspiratorial connection creates more appetite for another and can never be satiated. But there are a few known elements. On 27 February, the retired US air force major general William “Neil” McCasland, 68, walked out of his house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, some time between 10 and 11am. His phone and glasses were left behind, he took his .38 revolver, and he is believed to have left on foot. His wife found that he was missing soon after midday. That afternoon, the Bernalillo sheriff’s office issued a silver alert – a bulletin when an older person goes missing. Nothing has been seen or heard from McCasland since. But as a former commander of the Kirtland air force base’s Phillips research site and laboratory, which focuses on space vehicles and directed-energy technologies, his disappearance raised eyebrows, including within the UFO community. Lt Kyle Woods of the Bernalillo county sheriff’s office told reporters nothing has been ruled out, “which is why we’re investigating every possible link that we can”. Woods added: “I appreciate that there’s a community that wants to go down the rabbit hole of UFOs. I don’t have a way with which to pursue that and so those theories have to be set aside unless we were to find something that would have indicated that. So we can only go off the facts.” But facts were scarce. And into that void soon poured other accounts of missing or dead scientists, often with real or imagined links to national security or space work. Reports eventually surfaced of at least 10 missing or dead scientists. They included Michael David Hicks – a scientist who worked at the Nasa jet propulsion lab from 1998 to 2022 and studied near-Earth asteroids and comets. He died from unknown causes at the age of 59 in 2023. Another scientist, Monica Reza, disappeared in June last year. She served as director of the Nasa lab’s materials processing group. She had set out on a hike in the Angeles national forest with a companion. A police report said Reza, 60, was about 30ft behind her friend when she disappeared. Her body was never found. Others added to the list include astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, shot dead on his porch; MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro, killed by a former classmate; and Jason Thomas, a chemical biologist at drugmaker Novartis, who disappeared in December. His remains were discovered in Massachusetts in March. Another name is Amy Eskridge, an Alabama-based researcher who claimed to be working on “gravity-modification research”. Eskridge died by suicide in 2022. But last week, Franc Milburn, who claims to be a former British intelligence officer, told NewsNation that Eskridge told him not to believe any reports that she had died by suicide if she turned up dead. “If you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I overdosed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I killed anyone else, I most definitely did not,” Eskridge texted, according to Milburn. The accounts were published breathlessly online in social media but also by rightwing press accounts. Trump himself was asked about the story and promised to look into it. Soon, Republican lawmakers joined the debate demanded in a letter that the FBI, the Department of Energy, Nasa and other agencies investigate a “possible sinister connection” in the disappearances. “These reports allege that at least 10 individuals who ‘had a connection to US nuclear secrets or rocket technology’ have ‘died or mysteriously vanished in recent years’,” wrote Kentucky Republican James Comer and Eric Burlison of Missouri last week in a letter to multiple law-enforcement agencies demanding action. “If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets,” they added, citing an additional two workers affiliated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory who have died or or gone missing. They wrote in a letter to the secretary of the department of defense, Pete Hegseth, that Reza and McCasland may have had a “close professional connection”. Then, last week, UFO researcher David Wilcock, 53, used a gun to kill himself outside his home in Boulder county, Colorado. Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett responded to a social media post announcing Wilcock’s death by writing: “Not cool.” Burchett told the Daily Mail: “I just don’t think there’s any chance that this is just all coincidental.” But is there anything more than coincidence that 11 out of more than 2 million scientific researchers in the US, or an estimated 700,000 with top-secret aerospace and nuclear clearances, can variously go out hiking and disappear? Or perhaps chose to end their lives, especially if they might have had mental illness or paranoid delusions? Or fall victim to murder? Experts say it is the onlookers – us – who chose to make connections when, in reality, there are none. The latest uptick in alien/nuclear mystery fears, says Greg Eghigian, professor of history and bioethics at Penn State and author of After the Flying Saucers Came, is different from the New Jersey drone scare of late 2024. “It’s one of those things that get folded into other kinds of concerns and conspiracy theories that are out there about science and medicine that have been circulating around since Covid,” Eghigian said. “That fold neatly into the decades-old notion that UFOs are spotted around nuclear facilities and some of these facilities may be masking UFO-related projects.” All of it seems to be a convergence, he adds, “so when people want to connect these dots it falls readily into a sweet spot for UFO lore because you have all the elements that have always been there – the military, state secrets, nuclear facilities and technologies, and fear of figures that are missing. What is it? Are they being abducted? Assassinated because they know too much? The seeds of this were planted decades ago.” The mystery – or lack of it – comes at a moment of heightened national security anxiety that is often accompanied by increased reports of UFO sightings or alien abductions by people or institutions with an interest in promoting richly imaginative theories that can neither be proved nor disproved. Podcaster Joe Rogan, one of the most powerful figures in US media, recently suggested – unhelpfully – that the disappearances could be to do with “plasma technology, whatever the fuck that is”. It is McCasland’s wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, who stands as the best debunker of any mystery surrounding her husband’s work, explaining that he had once had access to classified information but had retired nearly 13 years earlier. In a wry tone that used humor to try and defuse the conspiracy theories starting to sprout up around him, she took tongue-in-cheek aim at those wishing to believe something sinister was going on. “It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him,” she wrote in March before the theory had even spread too far. She said his past association with Tom DeLonge, former Blink-182 singer and a figure in UFO/UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) disclosure effort, “is not a reason for someone to abduct” him. Nor, she said, did her husband have “any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash”. No sign of her husband has been found, she said, so “maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership. However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported.”

What counts as the woods? Judge axes Nova Scotia’s ban that defied ‘commonsense definitions’

As wildfires raged across Nova Scotia last summer, the Canadian province made a simple plea to residents: stay away from the woods. As the situation deteriorated, authorities turned the request into a prohibition: anyone caught hiking under the shade of the forest canopy faced a C$25,000 fine – a figure more than half the average worker’s yearly salary. But exactly the emergency rules considered to be “the woods” was a challenge better suited to a philosopher than a confused hiker in a parking lot. Rock barrens, scrubland or marshes were all considered “woods”. So too was forest – but the presence of actual trees wasn’t necessary, just evidence they had once been there. Residents could still travel as long as it wasn’t “any great distance” through the woods. “Someone who wanted to stay out of the woods had to put in some interpretive effort,” a judge recently declared. “The government just wanted people to use common sense. But the ban seemed to defy commonsense definitions.” Last week, that same judge found the controversial ban wasn’t just confounding, it also violated Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. And while the Nova Scotia supreme court acknowledged the urgency of the wildfire crisis, it warned that if individual rights aren’t protected, “they can be eroded in a way that eventually affects everyone”. The chain of events, which ended in a scathing critique of government overreach, began last summer when the province was engulfed in flames. In July, Tim Houston, a stone-faced provincial premier, told the public that the ban on walking in the woods was “inconvenient” but essential to avoid a repeat of the disastrous 2023 wildfire season. Most people adhered to the order. But not Jeffrey Evely, an army veteran who saw an opportunity to challenge the ban. After letting bylaw officers know of his plans, he ventured into the forest in Cape Breton – and was promptly handed a C$28,872.50 fine. Aided by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) – a libertarian-leaning group that has taken on controversial cases, including an active role in the self-described Freedom Convoy that besieged Ottawa in 2022 – Evely and his supporters challenged the fine in court, and won. On 17 April, justice Jamie Campbell found the government had violated the mobility rights of Nova Scotians, and failed to weigh the cost of that breach against an attempt to stop the fires. Mobility is a protected right and has previously been called “the heart of what it means to be a free person” by courts. While governments can infringe or limit that right, courts have long demanded those efforts be taken with “reasonable” consideration of the effects. But Campbell found this wasn’t the case. At the same time, the province seemed keen to placate the concerns of industry groups such as forest operators, utilities and telecom companies, issuing permits for them to keep using the woods. “Those responsible for safeguarding … had to do something. They had to do it quickly and their options were limited,” he wrote. But he nonetheless also warned of the need to protect the rights of individuals. Campbell also found the order was “so vague as to be incapable of being interpreted at all”. “Being told to stay out of the ‘woods’ made some sense to people who thought they knew what the woods are,” he wrote. Nova Scotia’s premier defended his government’s actions during a fast-moving crisis. “I did what I thought was necessary as premier to support our firefighters, to keep people safe, to keep property safe, and that was the woods ban,” Houston said this week. “That was completely appropriate in those circumstances, in that moment, based on the information I had.” Marty Moore, the legal counsel for the JCCF, said the decision, which was “egg on the face of the government”, would probably deter others from pursuing similar measures. The JCCF takes on cases it believes are government overreach against free expression, religious freedom and individual liberty. It has also taken on controversial cases that centre on culture-war debates over gender identity and human rights law. For Moore, the case echoed themes of pandemic restrictions his organization actively fought. But he said the case also had deep roots – “all the way to the Magna Carta in England and the Charter of the Forest from 1271”- which granted rights to common people to use the forests. “Unless you’ve been to Nova Scotia and touched the forest there, it’s hard to understand the impact of what the travel ban looks like,” he said. “Nova Scotia is the woods.” • This article was amended on 25 April 2026. An error introduced during editing meant an earlier version said the Freedom Convoy besieged Toronto in 2022; the intended reference was to Ottawa. This has been corrected.