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An Ontario court ruled in Campaign Life Coalition’s favor, confirming that government officials ‘cannot censor political expression simply because they find the message uncomfortable, difficult, or controversial.’
(LifeSiteNews) — After an Ontario judge ruled that parliamentary cops banning Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) from showing abortion victim photos was not right, the pro-life group says Canadians can feel more confident that political expression against abortion is allowed, noting the judge said abortion victim photography is not “obscene.”
In comments to LifeSiteNews, CLC president Jeff Gunnarson noted that the Ontario court ruling in its favor is important because it “confirmed” that government officials “cannot censor political expression simply because they find the message uncomfortable, difficult, or controversial.”
“This is a big win for life and for free-speech rights. This ruling is especially important at a time when freedom of expression and pro-life advocacy are increasingly under pressure in Canada,” Gunnarson noted.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Ontario Superior Court ruled last week that Canada’s Parliamentary Protective Service (PPS) “violated the Charter rights” of CLC as well as one of its members because it banned them from showing pro-life signs during the 2023 March for Life.
CLC said that the judge found that abortion victim photography “is not obscenity and does not promote hatred and that PPS was unreasonable to adopt a subjective standard.”
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), which funded CLC’s court battle, announced that the Ontario Superior Court ruled that a decision to ban pro-life signs on Parliament Hill “infringed” upon CLC’s “freedom of expression under section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and was not justified under section 1 of the Charter.”
CLC’s Maeve Gainey (then Roche), the person who was stopped from displaying the images, said that “abortion is not an abstract issue.”
“It has real victims. The images PPS tried to censor due to a bad policy reveal the truth about what abortion does to preborn children,” she said. “We do not display these images because they are pleasant. We display them because they are true.”
Gunnarson noted that Parliament Hill has for a long time been a place where Canadians can speak out and share political messages directly to the lawmakers. “We are pleased that the Court recognized that constitutional freedoms cannot be restricted through subjective and unpredictable censorship,” he said.
On May 10, 2023, the day before the March for Life in Ottawa, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s PPS banned CLC from showing images of aborted babies because they were too “graphic.”