Commissioned Paper: Freedom of Expression

The paper also discusses a number of the freedom of expression issues raised by the convoy protests, such as the right to access government owned property in order to communicate with others, the regulation of hate speech, the restriction of insults and harassment in public spaces, the right to protest, the right to erect fixed structures as part of a protest, the protection of captive audiences f. [...] The different accounts of the value of freedom of expression (democratic, truth, and self-realization-based accounts) highlight the many roles that expression plays in the life of the individual and the community -- that different relationships and different forms of communication contribute to the realization of human agency and the formation of individual identity. [...] The purpose of the ban, according to the court, is to prohibit speech that negatively affects the dignity or status of the members of an identifiable group and is tied to the code’s larger purpose of “prevent[ing] the spread of prejudice and … foster[ing] tolerance and equality in the community” (Taylor 1990, 37). [...] 18 committee members challenged the restriction on their activity, arguing that under the Charter they had a right to express themselves in the public areas of the airport and that this right had been violated by the airport authorities.13 The court agreed that the airport authority's interference with the committee members’ communication of political views in the public areas of the terminal amou. [...] The classification of properties as either public or private then rests not, as the majority claimed, on an assessment of the contribution of communicative access to the values that underlie the freedom (a vague standard in any event) but instead on a judgment about the general compatibility of expression with the state’s use of the property.