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Ontario will have a law limiting protests outside abortion clinics this fall, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi promised Monday.
The Ottawa Centre MPP’s riding includes Ottawa’s Morgentaler Clinic downtown, where protesters carrying placards regularly confront staff and patients. Demonstrators say they’re using their democratic rights to resist a procedure they believe is evil; the clinic workers and women who go there say they’re harassed and sometimes even assaulted.
Some abortion clinics in Ontario have anti-protest “bubble zones” around them set by court injunctions in the 1990s, when Toronto’s Morgentaler Clinic in particular was targeted. Ottawa’s clinic wasn’t open then and isn’t covered. Recently the protests outside the Ottawa clinic have gotten more public attention, and last week Mayor Jim Watson and Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney wrote to Naqvi asking for a provincial law that would expand the Toronto restrictions to other clinics.
Naqvi agreed.
A woman seeking to have a pregnancy ended is entitled to get that service “without fear of being judged or publicly humiliated because of her choice,” Naqvi said in a news conference at the Centretown Community Health Centre, a few blocks down Bank Street from the Morgentaler Clinic.
This is the last week before the legislature at Queen’s Park takes a summer break, so there’s no chance of getting a law passed quickly. Naqvi said he and his ministry will spend the summer crafting a bill and holding public consultations on it. In general, he said, it’s likely to be modelled on a bubble zone law in British Columbia that’s been found constitutional by the courts, even though it restricts some people’s freedoms of speech and assembly.
The B.C. law requires the government to spell out — with land-survey maps and diagrams — precisely where protests are permitted around abortion clinics and where they aren’t. Its no-protest zones are small, typically not even covering the sidewalk across the street from a clinic, but that’s enough to let women entering and leaving mix with other people on the block.
More to come.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The Ottawa Centre MPP’s riding includes Ottawa’s Morgentaler Clinic downtown, where protesters carrying placards regularly confront staff and patients. Demonstrators say they’re using their democratic rights to resist a procedure they believe is evil; the clinic workers and women who go there say they’re harassed and sometimes even assaulted.
Some abortion clinics in Ontario have anti-protest “bubble zones” around them set by court injunctions in the 1990s, when Toronto’s Morgentaler Clinic in particular was targeted. Ottawa’s clinic wasn’t open then and isn’t covered. Recently the protests outside the Ottawa clinic have gotten more public attention, and last week Mayor Jim Watson and Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney wrote to Naqvi asking for a provincial law that would expand the Toronto restrictions to other clinics.
Naqvi agreed.
A woman seeking to have a pregnancy ended is entitled to get that service “without fear of being judged or publicly humiliated because of her choice,” Naqvi said in a news conference at the Centretown Community Health Centre, a few blocks down Bank Street from the Morgentaler Clinic.
This is the last week before the legislature at Queen’s Park takes a summer break, so there’s no chance of getting a law passed quickly. Naqvi said he and his ministry will spend the summer crafting a bill and holding public consultations on it. In general, he said, it’s likely to be modelled on a bubble zone law in British Columbia that’s been found constitutional by the courts, even though it restricts some people’s freedoms of speech and assembly.
The B.C. law requires the government to spell out — with land-survey maps and diagrams — precisely where protests are permitted around abortion clinics and where they aren’t. Its no-protest zones are small, typically not even covering the sidewalk across the street from a clinic, but that’s enough to let women entering and leaving mix with other people on the block.
More to come.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
