Canada isn’t known as even a lukewarm defender of free speech, using sweeping emergency powers to crack down on nonviolent Freedom Convoy protests against COVID-19 restrictions and investigating a nurse for praising gender-critical Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, before suspending her license for saying men are men.The former government of Justin Trudeau, now better known as pop singer Katy Perry’s boyfriend, set aside $200 million on a new speech-policing office. Just last month, U.S. House committee leaders warned his successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, against legislation that would mandate surveillance backdoors on American-made tech without judicial oversight.
Yet one of the Great North’s courts just rebuked its version of the U.S. Capitol Police for censoring pro-life activists who sought to “convey the reality of abortion in Canada,” finding the ban violated Canada’s version of the Bill of Rights and dismissing the relevance of whether the gruesome abortion images were misleading, as the government argued.
The Ontario Superior Court’s ruling stands in contrast to Madrid police arresting the Canadian anti-gender transition activist Chris Elston for engaging passers-by – Spain is a haven within Europe for medicalized transition for teens, without parental consent – and a U.S. appeals court immunizing Louisiana police for censoring a “Christian vegetarian” leafleteer.
“Billboard Chris,” known for his globe-trotting street conversations while wearing sandwich boards and support from the U.S. State Department, said Monday he’ll take legal action against Madrid police for allegedly violating local laws in his arrest. He was in Spain to receive an award from a pro-family group.
Lawyers for Richard Hershey petitioned the Supreme Court last week to review a ruling that granted qualified immunity to Bossier City, Louisiana, police officers who violated “clearly established First Amendment law” by threatening to arrest Hershey for handing out religious leaflets on the sidewalk, while ignoring a “commercial leafleteer” nearby.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals uniquely and “inexplicably” limits a SCOTUS precedent against qualified immunity for “obvious” constitutional violations to the Eighth Amendment, leaving censorship victims no recourse in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, the petition says.
The pro-life activism protected by the Ontario Superior Court is still routinely prohibited by U.S. municipalities through so-called buffer zones around abortion clinics, under a 26-year-old “zombie precedent” that SCOTUS has abandoned but not disavowed.
‘A bit of a leap’ to say signs are promoting ‘hate’
The “graphic, bloody and disturbing” images of aborted fetuses, as Ontario Superior Court Justice Calum MacLeod described them, were set to be displayed by the Campaign Life Coalition at a press conference the day before the 2023 National March for Life in Ottawa and at the march itself, which starts and ends at Parliament Hill.
Sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church and other Catholic organizations, CLC has organized the annual event “for decades,” MacLeod said. (While gruesome images also tend to appear at the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., organizers don’t use them.)
Parliamentary Protective Service officers told organizers the signs “were too graphic” under the General Rules for the Use of Parliament Hill, devised by a committee composed of Senate and House of Commons members and representatives from PPS, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other public bodies.
The rules prohibit signs that are “obscene,” “promote hatred or violence,” or “display explicit graphic violence or blood,” the latter taking effect the day of the presser, long after CLC got the march permit. CLC agreed not to display them at all, then sued.
While taking no position on abortion, PPS “led expert evidence and spent much time in argument in relation to the accuracy and truthfulness” of the signs, calling them “misleading, exaggerated and [used] out of context, misrepresenting the reality of abortions conducted in Canada and of doctoring images for maximum impact,” the ruling said.
