Village council wants controversial speaker event to 'never happen again'
Hadeel Ibrahim | CBC News | Posted: August 1, 2023 8:05 PM | Last Updated: August 1, 2023
'We don't need people ... spreading that word of hate,' mayor says
A village near Fredericton is reviewing its facility rental policies after the founder of a conservative Christian group spoke at its community centre.
Tanya Gaw, the founder of Action4Canada, spoke at the New Maryland Centre on Monday despite calls for the village to cancel the event.
Action4Canada is a conservative Christian group that espouses theories about COVID-19 and climate change that are at odds with established science and laments the "health hazards of living an LGBTQ lifestyle."
The group alleges on its website that certain school library books about gender identity and expression amount to "child pornography."
Village Mayor Judy Wilson-Shee said the village was not aware that Gaw was speaking at the community centre and would likely have denied her request if they did know.
"I was not sure about this group ... I was reading up on it and I said 'No, New Maryland is not the place for that,'" she said in an interview Tuesday. "We are such a small, loving community."
Gaw is based in British Columbia but has recently been involved in New Brunswick politics by organizing a letter-writing campaign in support of Premier Blaine Higgs's effort to change a school gender-identity policy. She did not respond to a request for comment.
WATCH | New Maryland mayor says she wasn't aware of speaker:
Wilson-Shee said a village staff member is in charge of facility rental requests. Part of the process is finding out what kind of event is taking place and general information about it.
Wilson-Shee said when approving the request, the staff member did not know Gaw or Action4Canada were going to be involved.
Because council only became aware of Gaw's appearance Monday, Wilson-Shee said it was too late to cancel the event. She said staff asked the organizers to voluntarily cancel it, but they already had the keys and they declined.
She said village council, staff and lawyers are reviewing its rental policy to make sure "this doesn't happen again."
"There's too much going on in this world today. We don't need people coming into our beautiful community and spreading that word of hate," Wilson-Shee said. "We want to make sure that our people are safe in our community."
Freedom of expression at play, expert says
But the question of what the village could have done to stop Gaw from renting a space to speak is a complicated one.
Kerri Froc, a law professor at the University of New Brunswick, said making policies to deny rental of public spaces based on political belief would likely be difficult to defend in court, because people have a right to free speech.
Froc said municipal policies have to follow a provincial act, which has no "equality mandate" on which the village can rely to justify limiting people's freedom of speech.
What about hate speech laws?
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which identifies itself as "an independent, nonprofit organization made up of Canada's leading experts and researchers on hate groups and hate crimes," has designated Action4Canada as a hate group.
Canada has laws against hate speech and hate crimes. Froc said the legal definition of hate speech is a high bar only reached by the most extreme cases.
"It really has to be extreme expression that vilifies a community that denies their standing as members of that community," she said.
An example would be saying that a certain protected group has absolutely no redeeming values, dehumanizing them and portraying them as a threat, as well as inciting hatred and violence against them, she said.
"There's a lot of speech that we allow that people would find obnoxious, offensive, abusive, mentally distressing," she said. "But we have to have a large free reign for expression because of the ills that censorship might cause."
Preemptively denying someone's request to rent a public space because they're likely to commit a crime is not easy to justify, Froc said.
Criminal repercussion can only come after the speech is made, she said. First, the words have to be expressed. Then, if someone believes the words to be hate speech, they can report that to police. Police will then investigate and decide the words meet that bar. If charges are laid then the Crown will decide if there's a reasonable probability of conviction before going ahead with prosecution.
Froc said hate speech laws are rarely invoked.