Sometimes the most memorable storms are the ones that rise up suddenly and hit with full force with little or no warning.

I call to mind a snowstorm I experienced in Alberta in the mid-1980s, with the largest amount of snowfall in a one or two-day period I have ever seen, to this day. The night before it began as rain, and this was exactly what the forecast was calling for: periods of rain to end overnight.

By the next morning, at 7 a.m., I could hardly open the front door because there was so much heavy, wet snow piled in front of it. And to make it worse, the heavy wet snow continued to fall all that day and into the night. I could go on about what kind of disruption this caused (basically it shut down most of the province for a couple of days), but that would miss the point I'm eventually leading to: there was a storm (of sorts) in reaction to the leaked announcement that the Weyburn courthouse would be closing at the end of summer.

I use the words "leaked announcement" because, as I found out as I dug into this story, there was no formal announcement per se, indeed no warning of any kind to anybody, including the staff who work there, and incredibly, the Chief Justice of the Court of Queen's Bench and the Chief Provincial Court Judge.

To compound this unbelievable situation, the MLA, Brenda Bakken, was given no word about it (she found out through a local lawyer) and no one at City Hall knew: in short, there was absolutely no consultation made on this matter whatsoever, for which Justice Minister Chris Axworthy offered no apologies.

(As an aside, this is an example of extreme arrogance I thought was only possible under the Mulroney Tories; this kind of sneaking-in-the-back-door act is despicable, in my view.)

The storm reference I made was the reaction of anger, outrage and shock: in all the years I've been covering federal and provincial politics, both in Saskatchewan and Alberta, I have rarely encountered such a storm of reaction before, where people of all political affiliations have expressed disbelief that this could even be considered, never mind completed as a decision.

I for one can completely understand this reaction. No matter which way I've thought about this decision, there is no sense or logic to it. Weyburn is a major point in the southeast, with several small town police forces using our court services along with the citizens of the city and area - and the city has been a judicial centre since 1913.

I cover court news, so I know very well how much use the facility gets, as do the members of the legal community; the services there range far beyond criminal trials, as was noted in a story in last week's Review. At the I wrote this column, I signed a petition being circulated in the area, and am considering ripping off a few phone book covers to send into the Legislature as well.

I don't know if the latter will accomplish anything, but I do know the Southeast Bar Association, the president of the Law Society of Saskatchewan, and the Mayor and council of Weyburn all want to have a meeting with minister Axworthy, and that should accomplish more than a pile of phone book covers.

If I may add one point here: Premier Roy Romanow will be in town for the annual NDP spring banquet on April 13 in the Legion Hall. I would hope there will be a few people wanting to bend his ear to get a reversal of this ill-conceived decision.

Weyburn is not the same as Assiniboia and Humboldt; indeed, if you combined the populations of those two centres, you still wouldn't have Weyburn's population, never mind the population of the surrounding districts that we serve from here.

I would hope that NDP members in this area in particular can also see how incredibly myopic this decision is. This issue transcends party lines: there is an issue of justice, and equitable access to justice, that goes beyond supporting the ruling party, and goes way beyond the issue of dollars and cents (and there isn't that much being saved from three courthouse closures).

Let's take the momentum from the storm of protest, and make sure the government knows they are perpetrating an injustice on the southeast residents of rural Saskatchewan, and it's not right. Let's get justice back in Weyburn!