Front Burner - Bubble trouble: Do protest bylaws silence dissent?

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has just launched a constitutional challenge against legislation in the city of Vaughan known as a “bubble zone” bylaw. It restricts protest within 100 metres of a place of worship, school, daycare, hospital or care facility. Advocates say that in a time of rising extremism and hate crimes, the bylaws are necessary to protect vulnerable groups’ access to these spaces.Toronto and the nearby town of Oakville also passed bubble zone bylaws last month, and several other Ontario municipalities, including Ottawa, are considering similar legislation of their own.But the CCLA argues the bylaws are unnecessary and infringe on free expression rights, while other critics have argued they’re being used to silence dissent — in particular pro-Palestinian protest. Today, producer Allie Jaynes looks at the surprising history of bubble zones, the cases for and against them, and whether they’re being used to chill peaceful protest.This episode references another Front Burner episode, from May 2024, on protests outside a synagogue in Vaughan, Ontario. You can find that episode here: Apple / SpotifyFor transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Ten years ago, I asked my partner Kelsey if she would marry me. I did that, despite the fact that every living member of my family who had ever been married had also gotten divorced. Forever is a Long Time is a five-part series in which I talk to those relatives about why they got divorced and why they got married. You can listen to it now on CBC's Personally. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Ali Janes and I'm a producer on Frontbrenner. So if you're a long-time listener, you might have heard an episode from March 2024 when Jamie and our producer Derek Van Der Waak went to cover this protest in Vaughan, north of Toronto.

So, we're going to go into the protest now. The event that was being protested was a real estate show inside the Beth Abraham Yosef of Toronto Synagogue, better known as the Bayet. The event wasn't selling properties, but they were showcasing them, and Derek and Jamie were able to go inside, undercover, and verify that some of the properties being shown were in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which makes them illegal under international law. Thus, the protesters. People like Rabbi David Mivisar.

So I'm here because this synagogue is hosting a real estate sales promotion event, selling properties built on stolen Palestinian land. And I want to shut it down. I want to expose it so people know about it. And Basil Abdelkader. We are going to be painted with a broad brush as anti-Semites simply because we're protesting outside of a house of worship. We're protesting the event that's taking place inside there.

Whether it took place in a gym or a basement or any structure, we would be out here protesting as we are. There were also counter protesters. Targeting synagogue, attacking churches. This is really disgusting. And we hold the line here for freedom of religion. The Toronto Star reported some coarse and at times derogatory language

used by a few individuals on both sides that day. A pro-Palestinian protester who said quote, F these Jews. A counter protester who said quote, you're not Canadian, you don't belong here. Jamie and Derek didn't witness the pro-Palestinian protesters being violent. There is some reporting that some protesters snatched Israeli flags and stomped on them. But police arrested three people that day for attacking pro-Palestinian protesters. At a protest outside a similar event at another synagogue a few days earlier, a man was charged for firing a nail gun

at pro-Palestinian protesters. More broadly, though, the protesters did have a number of chants and signs that many in Bait's congregation found objectionable or offensive. The synagogue senior rabbi, Daniel Korobkin, described the protests as violent when I spoke to him recently. So the fact that perhaps 2% of the realtors who were present on that day were showcasing

property that was just across the green line, it's a pretext to be able to protest violently against the Jewish institution, to intimidate and to dominate. That's all it is, plain and simple. If the protesters had been pro- if that was their argument, then there was no place for accusing Jews of being genociders, and there was no place to accuse Jews of stealing land in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv, which is what From the River to the Sea means. From the River to the Sea means that all of Israel is confiscated property from the Palestinians and not a single inch is rightfully owned by any Jew that lives in Israel today. And this is very disruptive because we have

a school in our building, we have a school right next door, and to have people chanting on the very, very loud speakers and billowing smoke into the streets and banging on drums and disrupting traffic on Clark Avenue, which is a major artery here in Thornhill, and yelling things like genociders and baby killers and colonialists and an old manner of accusation to the entire Jewish community just because we're Jews is extremely potentially intimidating to the community. If you speak to protesters, they will very emphatically say their protests are aimed at the Israeli government and military, not at the Jewish community.

In fact, many of the protesters are Jewish. We'll be spending time later on in this episode talking about how a lot of the core slogans, from the River to the Sea or Antifada Revolution mean different things to different people. But for now the point is that those protests outside the Biot synagogue were one of the key incidents that last year led the city of Vaughan to unanimously pass a controversial piece of legislation known as a bubble zone bylaw. That would prohibit demonstrations that intimidate or incite hatred, intolerance or violence within 100 meters of the vulnerable social infrastructure that we have here in our city.

And the maximum penalty, the maximum permissible penalty for anybody who violates this bylaw would be up to $100,000 in fines. The original resolution was introduced by Vaughan Mayor Stephen Del Duca. He cited the synagogue protests, along with a bomb threat at a local mosque and anti-Semitic graffiti at a Jewish community center, as some of the rationale for the bylaw. Every single person here in the city of Vaughan, regardless of their faith or their background, has the right to be safe and to feel safe, especially in vulnerable areas within our community. Last month, Toronto passed a similar bylaw, although it is less restrictive.

The bubble is 50 meters, not 100. The maximum fine is $5,000, not $100,000. And an institution has to apply for a bubble zone. It's not automatic. The nearby town of Oakvale passed one in May as well. And similar bylaws are now being considered in Ottawa, Hamilton and Mississauga. During the federal election campaign, now Prime Minister Mark Carney also pledged something akin to a bubble law at the federal level. We will make it a criminal offense to intentionally and willfully obstruct access to any place of worship, to any school, any community center. And we will make it a criminal offense to intimidate or threaten those attending services at these locations.

While these bylaws have been celebrated by some, they have also been the subject of intense criticism. Charges that they're restricting freedom of speech, particularly pro-Palestinian speech, and that they fly in the face of Canadians' charter rights. speech and that they fly in the face of Canadians' Charter Rights. Yesterday, on June 24th, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association launched a legal challenge to the Vaughan By-law. Here is Anaïs Boussière-McNichol, Director of the CCLA's Fundamental Freedoms Program. Vaughan's By-law is a prime example of everything that's wrong with these bubble zone by-laws. So while we are committed to working towards

a more inclusive and equal society, the way to achieve this objective is not through rights infringing and punitive legislation. In other words, people should not risk being charged with $100,000 fine for having uttered speech that is non-violent, non-threatening, but simply offensive, or for having participated in a protest where someone else uttered offensive speech.

Today, we're gonna dig into the surprising history of these bubble bylaws, the cases for and against, and whether they're being used to silence dissent. This episode is gonna take us across the country and span three decades. Let's start by talking about the Toronto bylaw with someone opposed to it, Danya Majeed. She's a Toronto lawyer and the head of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association. She's also Palestinian Canadian and she's been to many of these protests herself. Yeah, our concern with the Toronto bubble bylaw is that it is entrenching the Palestine

exception to free expression. Under the charter, we have a very high bar around free expression. And what we're seeing this bubble bylaw do is curbing Palestinian protesters specifically from engaging in speech and engaging in protest to stop a genocide that is happening in Palestine. The last 20 months, Palestinians have been out on the streets in Toronto quite regularly protesting the genocide in Palestine. And it was only then that we hear this talk about the bubble bylaws. Majeed says these bylaws need to be viewed within the context of a series of other moves over the past year and a half that advocates argue are increasingly criminalizing and suppressing pro-Palestinian protest.

During this time over the last three months within the City of Toronto alone, there's been over 100 arrests of Palestinian protesters, resulting in zero convictions. There is exceptional police force. The video shows a man pinned to the ground face down. He's surrounded by officers, including one who appears to push his knee into the side of the man's head, squishing it against the pavement. But we've also seen workers' rights being infringed because someone being arrested often is either suspended or terminated without pay from their employers. So it has a really huge impact on a person's life. I think it just gives policing and politicians even more tools to come after Palestinian protesters.

The objections to the Toronto By-law didn't just come from pro-Palestinian advocates. Environmental groups, labour groups, youth groups, disability rights groups, and groups, youth groups, disability rights groups, and also just housing advocates, tenant advocates, LGBTQ rights. Saman Tabassinajad is the executive director of the non-profit Progress Toronto. They were active in organizing opposition to the bylaw. We know that all of our rights and freedoms really have come out from the ability

to protest. The city did engage in quite extensive public consultation as this bylaw was being drafted. Close to 43,000 people filled out an online survey on the legislation. 63% opposed it. The city also ran two online public consultation sessions. In both, more than 90% of participants strongly opposed the bylaw. The city did note the possibility of self-selection bias, and that participants, quote,

may not reflect the full diversity of perspectives across Toronto. But either way, that opposition didn't stop the bylaw. It passed by a vote of 16 to 9. Here's city councilor Brad Bradford speaking to reporters after the vote. I don't want to see a city where, you know, a family trying to go to a faith-based school or people who are trying to go and practice their faith,

access their places of worship, that they are subjected, that they have to push through hateful moms that are trying to intimidate harassment. Many proponents of these bylaws argue that they're subjected, that they have to push through hateful moms that are trying to intimidate harassem. Many proponents of these bylaws argue that they're a reasonable compromise, that they protect people's freedom of speech while also protecting people trying to worship or go to school in peace. Bubble legislation doesn't prevent anyone from protesting anything. Mark Sandler is a Toronto lawyer and the chair of the Alliance of Canadians

combating anti-Semitism. He spoke at Toronto City Council in favour of the by-law and he's made written submissions in several other cities. All it does is it says that recognizing the vulnerability of certain infrastructure that now exists given the climate in our country, we're going to limit close proximity of that protest activity to these vulnerable places. So the idea that freedom of speech is unduly impaired or undermined because someone has to be 51 meters away from a synagogue instead of right up in the faces of the people who wish to attend synagogue in peace and security and not feel intimidated. You know, one has to think about

it in those terms. Sandler says that it's important to look at the environment in which these bylaws are being brought in. One where Jewish institutions across Canada have faced an increasing number of violent incidents and threats over the past year and a half. A synagogue on Montreal's West Island was hit with an incendiary object that's being referred to as a firebomb early Wednesday morning. Six bullets fired at this Jewish girl's school for the third time this year. Police say a person allegedly threw rocks through the front windows of the synagogue

and then took off on a motorcycle. If we were living in an environment where hate activities against the Jewish community were few and far between, if we're living in an environment where the Canadian Jewish community are not being held collectively responsible for what happens in the Middle East, If we're living in an environment where we didn't have extremism, then the case for bubble legislation would be less compelling. The community has a reasonably based fear that's grounded in the events that are occurring in this country that prompt members of the community to feel apprehensive about attending their places of worship, to feel apprehensive about taking their kids to school.

And that's what we're trying to address. Advocates for freedom of expression argue that they're unnecessary, that there are already criminal and civil legal tools in place against hate speech, against blocking entrance ways, against assault. Here's Anaïs Boussier-McNicoll again from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. What's also disappointing is that we heard from Toronto police services themselves saying that a bubble zone bylaw was very low on their list of priority and that they already had

the powers that they needed to protect physical safety. So this really stems the question of whether or not this type of bylaw was necessary, which we think it wasn't. Mark Sandler, the lawyer from the Alliance of Canadians Combating Antisemitism, says that for him, this argument doesn't fully capture the problem. Bubble legislation is intended to be a preventative measure. You're trying to enable people to feel safe, to feel free from an intimidation, rather than wait till the victims before intervention can take place.

And I think that in Toronto, for example, if the police were more robustly utilizing existing criminal law provisions, then the community could feel more secure and the need for bubble legislation might be reduced. Many critics have argued that the real risk is that these bylaws create a chilling effect. How can you be sure that you're 50 meters away from the institution in a bubble? What if you are 51 meters from the synagogue or church, but that puts you close to a school or a daycare?

And if you're facing a $5,000 fine, or in the case of Vaughn, a $100,000 fine. Can you afford to take that risk? Here's Danyam Majeed from the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association. Especially if you've seen a Palestinian protest, they are exceptionally large. We're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of people. So where's the protest? Is it at the start of the line or is it at the end of the line? You know, when you have thousands of people on the street, at some point you're going to run into one of these buildings or one of these infrastructures.

And then how do we manage it? And the ultimate intent is to discourage people from going out to the street, from exercising their charter rights around expression and association, and from publicly calling out for the end of the genocide or calling out Canada's complicity in illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide. Mark Sandler again. I've been pretty unimpressed with the arguments about chilling effect. If you are protesting an activity in a space that happens to be close to a school, but the protest isn't directed against the school or towards the school in any way. It's not covered by the legislation. That's clear. I mean...

Danielle Majeed argues that we simply don't have enough clarity yet on how the Toronto bylaw will be applied to know if that'll be the case or not. The other issue with these Toronto and Vaughan bylaws, some critics argue, is that they don't just provide a bubble for certain activities at a house of worship or a school, but to the whole building no matter what's going on inside. I think that most people would agree that kids should not be necessarily exposed to angry protesters at the entryway of their school. Richard Moon is professor emeritus in the law department at the University of Windsor. He thinks these bylaws are too broad.

I'm not sure the same necessarily applies to a very controversial meeting that we could only describe as political that involves, say, support for Israel's war effort, for example, or, and more clearly and more obviously, some meeting concerning the purchase and sale of land. I put this point to Mark Sandler. What if a church is hosting a virulently homophobic speaker, for example? Should people not be able to protest? There is no right answer to the issue he raised. It's a valid issue to raise. But the other problem that you have with this

is you don't want to create an environment where police have a great deal of difficulty trying to figure out when the bubble legislation applies and when it doesn't apply. And if one is then going to get into kind of this pitch battle about whether the activities involved are political or not political or fall within the conventional uses of the facility, then you may very well undermine any effectiveness of the bubble legislation. Okay, we're going to take a short break and when we come back, the surprising history of these bylaws

brought our concerns about what constitutes free speech and where these bylaws may be headed next. World of Secrets, The Killing Call, a BBC World Service investigation into the murder of Punjabi singer and rapper Sidhu Musseala. The facts, they aren't out in the open. Why Sidhu Musseala, you know? Uncovering a global criminal underworld that reaches far beyond India's borders. There are so many rumors. No one wants to talk. There might be repercussions.

World of Secrets. The Killing Call. Listen on the BBC app or wherever you get your podcasts. Tonight, a Vancouver doctor who performs abortions is fighting for his life after being severely wounded by gunfire. In 1994, Dr. Garson Ramales was eating breakfast when a sniper with an AK-47 fired three bullets through his kitchen window. One of the bullets hit Dr. Ramales in the upper thigh, severing a major artery. He was able to dial 911 himself but lost a lot of blood before arriving at hospital.

There's every indication that Dr. Ramales was one of I would say 28 to 30 abortion service providers in British Columbia that live regularly under this kind of threat. Ramales survived but it was one of the incidents along with the aggressive and at times violent protests happening outside abortion clinics that led BC to pass the Access to Abortion Services Act in 1995. It creates a buffer zone within up to 50 meters of an abortion facility, or 160 meters from a doctor or service provider's home, where people can't engage in protest, sidewalk interference or intimidation of a patient, doctor or service provider.

Some groups did challenge the constitutionality of the law. But ultimately, both the BC Supreme Court and the BC Court of Appeal have found that while the law does infringe on freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, that in this very specific context, those infringements were reasonable. And we're talking here about an established impact of those protests on women's ability to access health care.

This is Anaïs Boussier-McNichol again from the CCLA. She says the key thing to understand is that there was a mountain of evidence to support those limits in this specific situation. The B.C. court's findings were based on a well-documented history of threats to the dignity and privacy rights of women seeking abortion care. And the two judgments that I know of were grounded in an extensive evidentiary record supported by photos, videos, eyewitness testimony, demonstrating tangible harm to patients

and a systematic reduction in health care services due to the protests. Mark Sandler, the lawyer from the Alliance of Canadians Combating Antisemitism, says that to him, those BC court decisions represent a prototype of how you balance freedom of expression with the right to access a service or a space without fear of intimidation. That decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal is really important in its reasoning because it talks about the fact that the legislation is minimally intrusive of people's speech rights. And they also said something really interesting and that is that if you're in such close proximity to an abortion center that the people who are attending the abortion center can't tune it out. They said you have to remember that freedom of speech, the

reason we are so zealous in protecting freedom of speech is because others have the right to turn it off. They don't have to be captive to the speech. This is what's known as the legal concept of captive audiences. Keep that in mind, because we'll be coming back to it later. 7 other provinces now have buffer zone laws for abortion clinics. And that same legal tool is being used as a template for other issues. Some provinces put in buffer zones around hospitals and vaccine centers during the pandemic. When, in some cases, anti-vax protests were so big that they were actually blocking ambulances. As crowds protested outside two Vancouver hospitals, a paramedic says she feared for

the bleeding patient in the back of her ambulance. Protesters who mauled hospitals over vaccinations and BC's vaccination pass are planning to do it again. Most of those were temporary though and have since been repealed. Then in 2023, the city of Calgary passed a bylaw that creates a 100 meter access zone around city owned libraries and rec centers.

The main reason was a series of escalating protests that drag story time events for families. I'm Shane On You. My pronouns in drag, of course, are he, him. Out of pronouns, a little more complex. Shane reads at these events and says it was after the pandemic that protests really started to build outside the libraries and sometimes inside. We had someone break in to one of the rooms and yell homophobic and transphobic slurs at the kids and parents, right? And calling them nasty names for even attending the event. Mostly calling us pedophiles and groomers,

saying that we're sexualizing children and brainwashing and all that kind of stuff. To have a pervert dress up like that is wrong and evil. So children, don't believe this. Parents, don't let your children be involved with this. I mean, walking into a library and outside seeing a poster with a child and a rainbow gun to its head, like that is not a protest. That is hateful imagery that is talking about violence.

Prior to the bylaw coming in, at least one protester was arrested and eventually convicted for criminal harassment. But Shane says the bylaw has helped turn down the temperature more broadly. It did start to peter off, like as people started to get charged or as they realized that they didn't have

the effect that they did from so far away because people could just choose to walk a different way. The bylaw though is currently facing two legal challenges, arguing that it violates charter rights. So that brings us back to Toronto and Vaughan and these new bubble zone bylaws. Free expression advocates like Anaïs Boussier-McNichol from the CCLA worry about what it means for this concept to be expanded out further and further. That is a very, very dangerous and slippery slope to engage on. Because in a free and democratic society, people need to be able to speak up and use

their civic and public space to express their opinions, including in an unpleasant way, without fear of reprisal from the state. So here's where that idea of captive audiences comes back in. Free expression advocates argue we can't just expand that concept out to mean you're protected from hearing any speech, particularly political speech, that you find offensive. It's really, really important that we not embrace this idea

that individuals have a right not to hear things they don't want to hear. Richard Moon from the University of Windsor again. And that's what concerns me about this use of the captive audience generally, but in this particular context. Because it really does seem to rest the idea that if somebody does want to hear a certain message, even when they're moving in public space, they should not have to hear that message. And that just can't be so.

He says that especially in an era when so much of our time is spent in online echo chambers, public space is the one environment where we can really be confronted with messages we might dislike or find offensive, and that that is something worth protecting. In particular, in this case, if we're talking about protests that relate to political positions that are being expressed or taken in gatherings in these particular locations, then that has

to be the stuff of free speech. I asked Moon what he believes makes the abortion case different from these bylaws that protect people entering a place of worship or a school. When we're talking about someone entering into an abortion clinic, and we're obviously may have concerns about safety based on history of physical interference, but we also can understand why individuals who have made a very personal and difficult decision in our attending a clinic to undergo a procedure that is deeply personal in character and can have a very strong emotional dimension to it, the experience. So we can understand why it might be legitimate to protect individuals in that circumstance from abuse of comment as they enter. On the other hand, if we're talking about

adults attending a meeting in a particular location, whether that be a school or whether that be a synagogue, but a meeting that is concerned with a deeply controversial and political issue that is dealing with something that has a major impact on others in the world, particularly in the Middle East. And those others who are impacted by the actions of the state of Israel, it's entirely understandable, entirely legitimate for them to express their views. Something that stood out to me when I read the Vaughan and Toronto bylaws is that they both say they are not intended to prohibit peaceful protest. The Vaughan legislation says it only bans nuisance demonstrations, those that would cause a

reasonable person to be intimidated. Here's how Vaughan Mayor Stephen Del Duca described it last year. My goal is to prevent those protests that clearly cross the line. Protests that are no longer peaceful. Protests that intimidate our residents. Protests that are designed to incite hatred or violence. Protests that, in my opinion, our charter was never designed to protect. The CCLA and others think defining what crosses the line is tough. There is a glaring contradiction within many bubble zone bylaws in that they purport not to limit peaceful protests, but when you look at the actual content of what is prohibited, they definitely infringe

freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly and they definitely target more than violent or threatening expression. Richard Moon. It's certainly been said by our courts that a protest doesn't cease to be peaceful if it involves these sorts of disruptions, a degree of noise, a degree of confrontation, and the taking up space to a certain extent. So it's an odd inclusion. Mark Sandler again from the Alliance of Canadians Combating Antisemitism. When one starts getting into language of whether something's a peaceful assembly or not, that

may not apply simply to the distinction between actual acts of violence that are taking place because hate speech, in my view, if taking place in the context of a protest, probably disqualifies the protest from being characterized as peaceful. We're now in the realm of hate speech when people are chanting by any means necessary, when people are chanting for global intifada, when people are chanting death to the Jews, which we see in a number of instances. so there are lots of examples where we have seen speech that has degenerated into hate speech and has not been appropriately acted upon. When it comes to explicit examples of hate speech, Richard Moon argues that, again, there

are already legal tools in place to deal with those individuals. It's like somebody in the convoy protests flying a Nazi flag. Do you, not that I was a big fan of the convoy protest, do you consider the whole protest to be tainted by that and responsible for it? Or do you say, no, there's some here and if they're engaging in hate speech or whatever, they can be arrested for that or they can be excluded. And that's a kind of difficult call as to what point do you think the whole enterprise, the whole protest, is itself tainted, is itself responsible for that. And the first and ordinary response

is not to shut down the whole thing, but is to try to address more specifically where these racist or other messages are coming from. AMT – The bigger, stickier question is, are the core slogans of these protests hateful or discriminatory or violent, and thus intimidating people from entering a space? Messages like, from the river to the sea, intifada. Most pro-Palestinian protesters will tell you those are calls for the liberation and equality of all Palestinians, not for violence. Whereas many Jewish people, though certainly not all of them, interpret them as calls to violently cleanse all Jews from that land, or the destruction of the State of Israel. Courts and legal scholars haven't made a clear judgment on that either. For example, in a separate protest case, Ontario's Superior Court Justice

Marcus Conan determined that, given that these terms mean such different things to different people, they can't automatically be deemed anti-Semitic. While he acknowledged that many Jews may perceive them as hurtful or threatening, He said, quote, the issue may well be the product of a misunderstanding between two cultural divides. And that, quote, the genuine pain that some feel when seeing or hearing these phrases may be the result of attributing malevolent intentions to the speakers when there is no such intention. Plenty of commentators have taken issue with Justice Conan's

decision, but the question is if the meaning of the speech at the heart of many of these protests is so ambiguous, how do you define which demonstrations aren't peaceful and who should be hit with these fines? I'm very concerned about this rise in white supremacy and homophobic and transphobic and anti-Semitic and Islamophobic action. So I think in a new age of increased extremism, we might need new rules of engagement, but it's something I'm very cautious about. Aurel Troster is a city councillor in Ottawa. She recently voted in favour of a motion giving city staff nine months to come up with a draft for a bubble bylaw.

But she says she did so with extreme reservations. So I'm queer, I came out 25 years ago. I've been part of many activist communities. Most of the rights that I enjoy now were secured because of protest and not necessarily because of neatly packaged protests, because of messy protests, whether it's the right to get married,

to have pension rights. The queer and trans community in Toronto were involved in riots after bathhouses were raided. You know, APTUP in New York and in other cities is really famous for doing direct actions. So I believe really strongly in the value of public protest. I also represent the ward in downtown Ottawa where the convoy took shape and occupied our city for three weeks. During the convoy, we had people with pretty profound disabilities whose care workers couldn't get to them, which means they couldn't use the toilet or eat, right? Like that is absolutely unacceptable.

I've also been on the front lines in Westboro in Ottawa, near Broadview Public School in Nepean High School, where there have been repeated, quote unquote, protests by anti-trans protesters targeting kids and teachers. And I've been part of the counter demonstration where we literally had to protect those schools with our bodies. There's all of these right wing streamers and they were putting phones right in high school kids' faces as they were leaving the school. Like, stuff that's really upsetting,

but I do think creating some sort of buffer is valuable, because otherwise it's people like me when I go to a counter-protest that are physically creating that buffer. Troster says she went into that city council debate thinking, there is no way I'm going to support this. And I listened to 42 delegations, people from schools, from religious institutions, from retirement homes,

parents, and it became really clear to me that the issue to me is not about making sure that protesters aren't seen or heard. I don't think you have the right to comfort. I don't think you have the right to not hear things that you disagree with. But I think you should have the right to access those institutions. She says she may well not vote for the proposal city staff come back with, the devil's in the details. But she's hoping for a made in Ottawa solution, one that's far less restrictive than say the bylaw in Vaughan.

First of all, if the so-called bubble is really as tight as possible where the goal is to make sure that people can safely access the front doors and also if it's sort of site specific and application based because I represent a downtown ward where everything is very close to each other. If all of those institutions, daycare schools, religious institutions that they all automatically had a bubble around them, you functionally could not protest in downtown Ottawa, which would be absolutely absurd. So we'll have to see what's down the line. But I definitely lost sleep over over this debate because it's probably one of the toughest ones I've had to deal with. The Ottawa bylaw is expected to be voted on in early 2026. Alright, that's all for today. I'm Allie Jaynes. This episode was produced by me with support from Katie Teeling.

Sound design by Mackenzie Cameron. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Lokos. You can find a link to Jamie and Derek's talk about the Byatt synagogue protests in our show notes Thanks for listening to frontrunner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow For more CBC podcasts go to cbc.ca slash podcasts