Controversial transit ads reveal council’s weakness

In future, friends, never vote for a municipal politician, or any politician really, who cannot show he or she has taken and passed a women’s studies course.

The present display of ugly anti-choice bus ads, which demean women, intrude on personal decision- making, induce guilt and shame and make our public spaces mean-spirited, is on our buses for the next three distasteful months.

Our leadership did not consult the best legal advice, which had been sent to them by people who specialize in women’s health and rights. A city council, (disclosure: I ran and lost, in 2010) cannot be expected to know everything about every issue, but their insensitivity to this one, and their blindness to our current culture and its values were profound.

Now there are lame attempts to say “sorry.” There are suggestions that the money earned ($1,800) go to a women’s shelter. There is the publishing of a telephone number so that citizens can object to the ads. There is a promise to do better. It all seems to me late and weak.

Just how many Peterburians, particularly the vulnerable among us, have been hurt and distressed? One woman, a mother of an eight-year-old, said to me, “I had seen these ads on-line in advance, but the lurid giant lettering gutted me completely”.

Spokespeople, in official responses, speak of their “being bound by the principle of freedom of speech.” A little deeper investigation into precedents would have revealed that the Charter does not protect hate speech or speech that does harm. In Grande Prairie, Alberta, in the Court of Queen’s Bench last December, Mme Justice C.S. Anderson ruled that indeed the city had the right to refuse the same ads as we have now, on the grounds that they contravene section 14 of the Advertising Code against “unacceptable depictions and portrayals”, and would create “a hostile environment for transit users and other uses of the road.”

Properly presented, it’s not rocket science, the law. City council was told months ago that they could safely refuse these ads. Information was presented repeatedly by letter and email and personal lobby. Local activists were strengthened by the involvement of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada in Vancouver and its impressive executive director, Joyce Arthur.

Arthur will join a public discussion at Sadleir House on April 30.

“Stop the Killing,” the ads say. Killing? Doctors, who perform about 300 abortions year at PRHC, mostly for distraught 14- to 19-year-olds, are killers? Women are murderers?

Abortion numbers across Canada are going down gradually each year, with the rise of women’s self- esteem and their knowledge of contraception. Not thanks to the propaganda work of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Not only has the tone of our city been lowered, but we are a national embarrassment again (no, not a plane landing on Lansdowne Street or a terrible firebombing of a mosque), but something very serious.

In a recent case, a leader sought advice on a topic he was urgently concerned about: the fate of the Earth. Pope Francis in 2016 said to his Lutheran scientistfriend Prof. Hans Schnellnhuber: “Tell me everything I need to know about climate change.” Then he went on to write a widely-hailed letter, “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home.”

Casey Remy Summers, one of the leaders in the women’s resistance to the ads, has made a list of suggestions to the city. Apologize for the harm done. Release information on what will be done with feedback received from the public. Link the city site to the site of the Advertising Standards Council of Canada site where more objections can be filed. Inform people of the city’s transit policy.

But for now, Peterborough has been outsmarted, outflanked and outraged. There must be a lesson here.