OSHAWA, Ontario, February 1, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has counter-attacked with all guns blazing at an Ontario university student association denying a campus pro-life club the right to meet, greet and educate on campus.
Only last month it was the turn of University of Toronto-Mississauga’s student association to feel JCCF’s legal muscle and now it is Durham College/the Ontario Institute of Technology’s student government that has refused to grant club status to pro-life students.
“It’s a free speech issue,” said Christian Naggar, president of Speak for the Weak, which he helped start only last August and has a dozen members. “We’ve had students and professors, who are pro-choice themselves, tell us they are horrified that we have been denied our right to speak out,” he told LifeSiteNews.
The Durham College student association insists it is merely upholding its “mandate to embrace the freedom of women and uphold the legal right of women to reproductive freedom.” Since there was no stated policy last fall specifying institutional support abortion “rights,” however, the student government cited a bylaw committing the association to “work towards building an environment free of systemic societal oppression and decolonization.”
As for Speak for the Weak, says Naggar, its mandate is to speak for the unborn and the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, to educate students about life issues and to help women with unwanted pregnancies get help.
In practice the dispute is over access to university facilities such as classrooms for public meetings and bulletin boards to announce them, to busy public areas where clubs set up display tables and generate discussions, and to the term-opening club event where all organizations staff yet more tables to recruit members and give out flyers.
When it applied for status for the first time last year, Naggar reports in his affidavit, the student association’s board invited the club to “sit down and review the package.” But, at the meeting there was no “review.” The board simply announced its rejection, with several members of the executive offering their personal beliefs about abortion in justification.
The club’s request for an appeal was denied. When the club got the JCCF to intervene, the student board passed a motion belatedly inserting into its policy a blanket rejection of any organizations taking an “anti-choice” position or even associated with any organization taking such a position.
Speak for the Weak and the JCCF assert in their court papers that “the Student Association violates its own policies and rules, fails to follow the principles of natural justice, bases its decision on irrelevant considerations, and fails to respect students’ freedoms of expression and association.”
In particular, they claim, the student society promises in its own founding documents “to provide a common framework within which students can communicate, exchange information and share experience, skills and ideas.”
JCCF lawyer Marty Moore told LifeSiteNews that the student association is also breaching freedom of expression as well as common law principles of natural justice. “Let’s remember the college is requiring 20,000 students at Durham and UOIT to pay to belong to the student society,” Moore said. As such he argues, their right to freedom of expression and speech cannot be disregarded by the student government.
Moore says courts routinely intervene when even purely private organizations violate natural justice and disregard their own obligations and their members’ rights.
In this case, he said, the association rejected the club’s application without a hearing, violated its own policies of inclusion, based its decision on its board members’ personal biases, and violated club members’ freedom of speech as well as the right to use university facilities given every other club. “The courts will definitely take into consideration the fact that freedom of expression is critical in higher educational institutions,” he said.
The JCCF is also acting for the student pro-life club at University of Toronto-Mississauga in an identical dispute with its student government. “There certainly is evidence from these and other cases we are involved,” said Moore, “that there is systemic failure by student government in Canada to respect freedom of expression.”
In 2008 the Canadian Federation of Students voted to support any member student associations in denying pro-life clubs status.