The Hard Lesson of Al Quds Day: Free Speech Protects the Repugnant

There is an important lesson to be taken from this past weekend’s grotesque Al Quds Day protest in downtown Toronto: governments should not attempt to shut down speech and public demonstrations, even ones that are repulsive.

Al Quds Day was the initiative of Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, designed to mobilize global support for the destruction of Israel and used by the Iranian regime to project influence and their ideological goals globally. For years, Toronto has hosted this annual march, where protesters, including supporters of the Iranian regime, parade through the city. Jewish organizations have warned that Al Quds demonstrations have featured antisemitic rhetoric and included the display of symbols associated with terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah.

This year, Ontario Premier Doug Ford attempted to stop it. Just hours before the event was scheduled to begin on March 14, the provincial government rushed into court seeking an injunction to block the march.

The effort failed. The protest went ahead. And the government was left looking both ineffective and unserious.

An injunction is an extraordinary legal instrument. It allows a court to order someone to refrain from doing  something they would otherwise be legally entitled to do. Because it interferes with lawful conduct, the legal threshold for obtaining an injunction is rightly high.

To succeed, the government must establish three things: that there is a serious legal issue to be tried, that allowing the conduct would cause irreparable harm, and that the balance of convenience (ie: who will be more inconvenienced by the court stepping in) favours the order.

Injunctions are legitimate tools, and in some circumstances they are necessary. They can be used to stop persistent conduct that interferes with the rights of others. For example, the City of Mississauga recently obtained an injunction against weekly gatherings of youths racing cars and setting off fireworks at a shopping plaza. In that case, the activity was ongoing, disruptive, and clearly unlawful.

But the Ford government was seeking something different: a pre-emptive injunction against a political demonstration based on the anticipated speech of its participants.

The Al Quds march has taken place in Toronto for over a decade. The government argued that past demonstrations had included hateful rhetoric and the glorification of terrorism. It also pointed to heightened tensions in the Middle East, a recent shooting at the U.S. Consulate along the protest route, and shootings targeting two Toronto synagogues as reasons to fear the possibility of violence.

As a civil libertarian, I believe injunctions against protests may sometimes be warranted. I was open to the possibility that the government might possess credible intelligence indicating a specific threat of violence that justified intervention. Courts should not ignore genuine dangers.

But that is not what the government presented.

The Saturday afternoon hearing, held barely an hour before the march was set to begin, produced little more than speculation and moral condemnation of the protest itself.

The government raised concerns that unsavoury individuals might attend. But that is true of almost any large demonstration. If specific individuals commit crimes, existing laws already allow police to respond.

The government also pointed to the fact that the terrorist-designated group Samidoun had encouraged people to attend the march. But Samidoun was not an organizer of the event, and its call for participation was global, not specifically limited to Toronto.

Perhaps the most strained argument concerned an online promotional image showing a burning building. The government suggested that this implied that demonstrators intended to burn buildings in Toronto. In context, the image depicted destruction in Lebanon or Iran, which the demonstration was protesting, and was not a call for local violence.

At 2:05 p.m., less than an hour before the march’s scheduled start, Justice Centa of the Ontario Superior Court delivered oral reasons denying the injunction. The evidence, he concluded, was insufficient. If the government wants to stop a protest before it occurs, it must present real evidence of a specific and credible threat. Vague fears and the offensive nature of the message are not enough.

The right to protest is protected by the Charter – even for people whose views we find hateful or repugnant. Protecting free expression is part of what makes Canada better than Islamist regimes.

The failed injunction is an embarrassment for the Ford government. Indeed, many observers suspect that success was never the real objective. The last-minute nature of the application suggests a performative gesture: an attempt to appear tough on antisemitism while knowing the court would say no.

The result was predictable. The protesters claimed victory and the moral high ground, boasting that a judge had affirmed their right to march.

But Canadians are focusing on the wrong problem. The real issue is not that a march took place. It is that our society contains people who openly rally in support of a brutal theocratic regime that represses women, persecutes minorities, and sponsors terrorism. It is that designated terrorist organizations encourage participation in such demonstrations. And it is that antisemitism has become disturbingly visible in our cities.

Stopping protests does  not solve those problems. It merely hides them.

Free societies protect the right to speak, even when the speech is vile, because the alternative is far worse. Once governments gain the power to silence speech they consider dangerous or offensive, that power will inevitably expand.

The answer to hateful ideas is not censorship. It is exposure, criticism, and moral clarity. Let the marchers show Canadians exactly what they believe. Then let Canadians reject it. That is how a free society defeats bad ideas.