Peaceful protest under attack
Abortion clinics don't need new protections
Let it never be said the state is shy about using an elephant gun to kill a flea.
I give you the latest musings of Ontario Attorney General Yasir Naqvi, who this week announced that next fall, his government is going to legislate “safe access zones” around abortion clinics to “help ensure the safety and privacy of women, visitors and health care workers travelling to and from these facilities.”
Naqvi, who represents a downtown Ottawa riding where a Morgentaler Clinic is located, alluded to recent “serious instances of intimidation, harassment and even assault” toward patients. Urging the province to act were Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson and Catherine Macnab of Planned Parenthood Ottawa.
Perhaps there’s a real issue in Ottawa, though there has been little hard reporting of it. Some protesters there wear sandwich boards featuring photos of lurid and cut-up bodies, and yell at patients that they are killing their babies, clinic staff say.
Certainly, the Ottawa clinic isn’t covered by the aged Morgentaler injunction applicable to its Toronto equivalent. (Both clinics are named after the late Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who was an abortion provider and the leading advocate for women’s rights to the procedure.)
Like income tax, this injunction, which dates back to 1989, was at first a “temporary” measure and became permanent only about a decade later, when the individual protesters named in it, under threat of a whopping legal bill, agreed to settle the case.
Thereafter, the order began to be broadly interpreted by judges as applying to everyone, not just the named individuals who specifically consented to it, but to anyone who dared come within 500 feet of the clinic.
(Another old injunction, which dated back to 1994, was dismissed earlier this year due to a new rule of procedure governing ancient cases that have never been brought to trial. It means that since January, there has been no injunction on some Toronto clinics. Nor, despite the lack of injunction, have there been any incidents comparable to what the AG described in Ottawa.)
In Ottawa, the clinic relies on a city bylaw that is supposed to restrict demonstrators to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, and which the local police are allegedly reluctant or unable to enforce.
Still, the nature of antiabortion protest in this country has changed since the heated days of 1989, just a year after the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s abortion law.
Protests back then were often noisy, large, sometimes violent and undoubtedly alarming for staff and patients alike. In 1992, the original Morgentaler clinic on Harbord Street in Toronto was firebombed.
If that same situation existed today, the government would have a rationale for enacting a sweeping “safe zone” around all clinics. But that’s not the case. Access to abortion is still uneven across the country, but in most provinces the procedure is covered by provincial health plans. There’s no criminal law prohibiting abortion. According to the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada website, there are about 35 clinics — either free-standing clinics or inhospital women’s health clinics — in Canada, as well as between 90 to 100 hospitals, providing abortions.
The times have changed, and for those who are prochoice (I count myself among them), a good thing, too.
But there are those who profoundly disagree, mostly on religious grounds, and now, if anyone’s rights are under siege, I’d say it’s theirs.
In Toronto, a handful of peaceful protesters have spent an extraordinary length of time in jail, arrested for breaching one of those old injunctions.
I’ve written about one of them, Linda Gibbons, before.
In 2015, I watched as she was arrested for walking up and down the public sidewalk, in one hand a model of a 10-week-old fetus, in the other, her sign — one with a cartoonish picture of a baby that reads, “Why mom? When I have so much love to give.”
She didn’t sing, chant, pray or stop anyone. She just walked up and down the sidewalk. She was and is the embodiment of peaceful protest, and at the time I wrote about her, she had served a total of 10 years and seven months in jail.
About a week ago, I was in court for the appearance of another such protester, Mary Wagner, a slim, serene woman of 42 who looks a decade younger and spoke with enormous dignity whenever the judge addressed her.
She is facing eight charges of mischief and breaching probation orders to stay away from a Toronto clinic. Lawyers for the clinic owner and several workers are applying for an unusual publication ban upon their identities, so while Wagner’s trial began, it was adjourned to June 9 for argument on the ban. There was some suggestion the staff weren’t prepared to testify without it.
Wagner has been in custody since her arrest last December — she has been granted bail but it appears won’t agree to the conditions — and has served a total of more than four years behind bars.
I remarked to a woman beside me that Wagner looked so young. “She’s very holy,” she replied.
That is well beyond my ken and experience.
But if she and Gibbons were members of Black Lives Matter, or the Tamils who about eight years ago blocked a ramp to the Gardiner Expressway, or almost any other protest group in this country railing about almost any other issue, they wouldn’t be carted off to jail with such alarming frequency.