Canada isn't known as even a lukewarm defender of free speech, using sweeping emergency powers to crack down on nonviolent Freedom Convoy protests against COVID-19 restrictions and investigating a nurse for praising gender-critical Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, before suspending her license for saying men are men.

The former government of Justin Trudeau, now better known as pop singer Katy Perry's boyfriend, set aside $200 million on a new speech-policing office. Just last month, U.S. House committee leaders warned his successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, against legislation that would mandate surveillance backdoors on American-made tech without judicial oversight.

Yet one of the Great North's courts just rebuked its version of the U.S. Capitol Police for censoring pro-life activists who sought to "convey the reality of abortion in Canada," finding the ban violated Canada's version of the Bill of Rights and dismissing the relevance of whether the gruesome abortion images were misleading, as the government argued.

The Ontario Superior Court's ruling stands in contrast to Madrid police arresting the Canadian anti-gender transition activist Chris Elston for engaging passers-by – Spain is a haven within Europe for medicalized transition for teens, without parental consent – and a U.S. appeals court immunizing Louisiana police for censoring a "Christian vegetarian" leafleteer.

"Billboard Chris," known for his globe-trotting street conversations while wearing sandwich boards and support from the U.S. State Department, said Monday he'll take legal action against Madrid police for allegedly violating local laws in his arrest. He was in Spain to receive an award from a pro-family group.

Lawyers for Richard Hershey petitioned the Supreme Court last week to review a ruling that granted qualified immunity to Bossier City, Louisiana, police officers who violated "clearly established First Amendment law" by threatening to arrest Hershey for handing out religious leaflets on the sidewalk, while ignoring a "commercial leafleteer" nearby.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals uniquely and "inexplicably" limits a SCOTUS precedent against qualified immunity for "obvious" constitutional violations to the Eighth Amendment, leaving censorship victims no recourse in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, the petition says.

The pro-life activism protected by the Ontario Superior Court is still routinely prohibited by U.S. municipalities through so-called buffer zones around abortion clinics, under a 26-year-old "zombie precedent" that SCOTUS has abandoned but not disavowed.

'A bit of a leap' to say signs are promoting 'hate'

The "graphic, bloody and disturbing" images of aborted fetuses, as Ontario Superior Court Justice Calum MacLeod described them, were set to be displayed by the Campaign Life Coalition at a press conference the day before the 2023 National March for Life in Ottawa and at the march itself, which starts and ends at Parliament Hill.

Sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church and other Catholic organizations, CLC has organized the annual event "for decades," MacLeod said. (While gruesome images also tend to appear at the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., organizers don't use them.)

Parliamentary Protective Service officers told organizers the signs "were too graphic" under the General Rules for the Use of Parliament Hill, devised by a committee composed of Senate and House of Commons members and representatives from PPS, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other public bodies.

The rules prohibit signs that are "obscene," "promote hatred or violence," or "display explicit graphic violence or blood," the latter taking effect the day of the presser, long after CLC got the march permit. CLC agreed not to display them at all, then sued.

While taking no position on abortion, PPS "led expert evidence and spent much time in argument in relation to the accuracy and truthfulness" of the signs, calling them "misleading, exaggerated and [used] out of context, misrepresenting the reality of abortions conducted in Canada and of doctoring images for maximum impact," the ruling said.

MacLeod dismissed "the scientific or medical accuracy of what the pictures display" as "not germane" to the legal issue of whether the restrictions are "reasonable" in this context. "A point of view need not be truthful or accurate to be protected speech" under Supreme Court of Canada precedent striking down a law against "spreading false news."

"Conceivably" the justice could consider whether the images are "deep fake[s]" if the rules were narrowly tailored, but they are in reality "a blanket ban," MacLeod said.

While PPS didn't bother invoking the brand-new, unpublished "graphic violence" provision, and MacLeod concluded it couldn't have enforced that rule on the organizers, it's "problematic" that PPS claimed the signs violated the obscene and hate provisions, he said.

They aren't criminally obscene, and letting an officer divine noncriminal obscenity is "both vague and arbitrary," according to MacLeod. "It is a bit of a leap" as well to say that the message linked from the sign's QR code, which "describes abortion as murder and those involved in abortion as murderers," promotes hate or violence "by that reason alone."

The prohibition violated CLC's Charter rights, the justice concluded. 

"Some might say" that exposure to such unpleasant protest images is "one of the risks, perhaps a feature, of a visit to Parliament Hill," he said, calling it "very difficult if not impossible" to show the censorship was a "reasonable and proportionate infringement of freedom of expression."

MacLeod rejected CLC's request to strike down the rules and the new graphic violence provision, however, because the rules committee isn't a party and CLC didn't ask its permission to display the graphic signs. He dismissed the idea that "there is some mythical status to Parliament Hill where no limits should apply."

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which is funding CLC's representation, said lawyers are "considering next steps in light of the issues left unresolved."

As 'egregiously wrong' as judge-made federal abortion rights

Elston, the anti-gender ideology activist, said he'll upload video of his encounter with Madrid police after blurring out their faces, as Spanish law requires, which is "proving to be very difficult." Because police "kept illegally turning my [video] recording off," he must download the "uninterrupted audio and do some editing to give the complete picture."

He announced his arrest Sunday morning from the back of a police car, from a second phone officers hadn't yet seized, claiming he had been talking to people in the public square for just five minutes. About three hours later, Elston said he left the police station with lawyers from the group who gave him the award and that they were headed back to the square.

Elston posted the hand-written ticket police gave him, which he noted had no fine on it. "Their excuse is that I had a tripod," set up on a pole, with "50 yards of open space on either side of me, AND I OFFERED TO JUST HOLD IT IN MY HANDS."

Critics closely scrutinized the ticket. Spanish-language Mystery World News said he was "told he couldn't set up the tripod to record," "refused to identify himself" and went to the station "for identification purposes, not detained."

The SCOTUS petition by Christian vegetarian activist Hershey, submitted by First Liberty Institute, asked the high court to resolve whether its Hope precedent, a prisoner-restraint case, is limited to cruel-and-unusual-punishment claims or also covers free speech and free exercise claims so Hershey can overcome qualified immunity.

He called the 5th Circuit ruling "egregiously wrong," the language used by SCOTUS in Dobbs to overturn federal abortion rights and in an unsuccessful petition to get SCOTUS to repeal its Hill precedent upholding eight-foot abortion buffer zones.

"The right to evangelize in public, free of viewpoint-based government suppression, is as clearly established as any right in the firmament," the petition says. "No government official should need an on-point circuit precedent to illustrate what the Constitution itself and this Court’s cases make clear beyond cavil."

It emphasizes the deciding vote, Judge James Ho, voted to uphold qualified immunity "reluctantly" because of the 5th Circuit's "mistaken" precedent, as Ho called it, despite admitting the officers' actions “should have been amply sufficient" to defeat immunity.

Only the high court can confirm Hope "safeguards all our fundamental rights, not an anomalous Eighth Amendment rule that makes it easier for prisoners to sue than law-abiding, peaceful religious leafleteers," Hershey said.