B.C. Court of Appeal rules against pro-life club

Group has been denied funding, club status, and booking privileges
By Agnieszka Krawczynski
The B.C. Catholic

Caption: Cameron Cote

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms still does not apply to a group of students at the University of Victoria.

For the second time, members of the pro-life club Youth Protecting Youth have been handed a ruling against what they say is their right to free speech.

"I am disappointed," Cameron Cote, who was the president of YPY when he took the university to court in 2013, told The B.C. Catholic April 21. "I really expected the court to recognize that universities are a place that need to be protected by the Charter."

Cote, who has since graduated but still fights for the group, said discrimination against YPY's efforts have been going on at least since he began his studies in 2008.

In the past few years, the club has been denied funding, club status, and booking privileges. It has also experienced vandalism, theft, and disruption of its events with yelling matches and stink bombs.

In 2013 the club was given permission to book some outdoor space and host a display against abortion. One day before the scheduled event, the university suddenly revoked that permission.

The club held it anyway. The university took away its booking privileges for one year. That's when Cote filed a petition with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, who saw the ongoing struggle as a free-speech issue and took the university to court.

In January 2015, Judge Christopher Hinkson ruled that the Charter did not apply: "If the activity or decision falls within the university's sphere of autonomous operational decision-making, the Charter will not apply to such a decision."

Cote took the decision to the B.C. Court of Appeal which, April 18, sided with Judge Hinkson. "The Charter does not apply to the university's regulation of its outdoor space. The university is not government and was not implementing a government program."

Cote argues that universities should be "encouraging people to have respectful conversation about even the most controversial views, so that polar-opposite ideas can be debated in public."

"I don't think it's the role of the university to pick and choose which issues are important or benign enough."

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, an intervener for YPY, said it is also disappointed with the Court of Appeal's ruling.

"It erred in stating that public, taxpayer-funded universities are not government entities and are not implementing government programs," the organization opined April 20.

"Even if the Charter does not apply to universities, universities as public institutions must nevertheless respect freedom of expression on campus, under the principles of administrative law."

While freedom of speech is important to Cote, so are the lives of the unborn.

"We literally have human lives in the balance of whether we can share our message or not," he said. "The urgency of securing our rights on campus is very high."

He said it is likely they will take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada.