We should teach people how to protest better | Opinion |
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We should teach people how to protest better | Opinion
Brigitte Pellerin: I’m glad we have a bubble law for protests but I’m disheartened that it’s necessary.
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A few years ago, one of my kids sent me a frenzied text saying a protestor was harassing kids at her school. Several things went through my head, not all of which I can print in a family newspaper. Including: What is wrong with people for protesting trans rights in front of a school?
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The buffoon in question, whose name I refuse to utter as I want him (you knew it would be a man) to be as unknown and unrecognized as possible, was out with a stupid billboard outside Nepean High School and Broadview Public School next door with disgusting anti-transgender messaging. My social justice warrior of a teen was incandescent with rage on behalf of her trans and gender-diverse schoolmates. She wanted a word with him.
Go ahead, I said. Just don’t let him provoke you into hitting him because that’s exactly what he wants. I jumped on my bike and hurried to join the counter-protest and protect kids from the disruption.
The incident made the news, and I know some of you remember it and not just because I wrote a column about it at the time. It is, along with anti-vaccine protests at hospitals and that nasty trucker occupation of our downtown, one of the incidents that led to the vote at Council to bring in the Safe Access to Social Infrastructure Bylaw, better known as the bubble bylaw.
We’re not the first city to do this. Toronto, Vaughan, and Calgary are ahead of us. The concern is the same: How do we allow people to protest, as is their right, without infringing on other people’s equally legitimate right to access health care or their place of worship or their school, especially if they are K-12 students, without having to jump over billboards?
Part of me is happy we’re bringing in bubble zones, but the other part wants to teach protesters to behave so we don’t need them. In between these two positions sits a loudmouth writer with a legal background wondering why we can’t manage to protest without needing so much adult supervision.
Ottawa’s bubble bylaw gives the city power to create temporary “safe access zones” around certain locations (the aforementioned, along with community centres but not government buildings or courts) where protesting would not be allowed. The bubble would be activated after an application by someone running such a facility, would only be valid during hours of operations and would be limited to a 50-metre radius around the building.
Council passes bubble bylaw despite potential future legal challenges
Is Ottawa's 'bubble' bylaw constitutional?
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That’s the length of an Olympic pool and it legitimately makes it hard to read a sign. But otherwise, I think the bylaw’s impacts on our constitutional right to express ourselves freely is mild. Whether courts will agree with me on this point remains to be seen.
There is precedent for this sort of thing, starting with British Columbia where 1990s-era bubble zones around abortion clinics have been upheld, and then extended throughout the country. Municipal bubble bylaws have not yet been tested in court, and a lot will depend on proportionality and whether they target speech or conduct. Our right to hold and express loathsome opinions, like that anti-trans bigot who likes to protest schools, is guaranteed by the Charter, and that’s fine. What is not fine is using that right to make yourself an obstacle to other people accessing essential services.
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There is already at least one charter challenge underway for existing municipal bylaws and presumably Ottawa’s latest measure will be covered by whatever ruling eventually comes. We could, of course, spare ourselves all this legal complexity by collectively agreeing that some places are simply off-limits for protests. That would require a degree of civic decency we are declining to muster. So here we are, with a bylaw, lawyers, and a 50-metre pool’s worth of buffer between us and each other. We only have ourselves to blame.
Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.
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