Canadian universities should let the encampments be

Open this photo in gallery:

With police moving against protest encampments in the United States, Canadian universities from Vancouver to Toronto to Montreal are under pressure to crack down on their own encampments. They should resist.

The right to protest is precious, especially on university campuses. Authorities should not stand in the way unless the protesters become violent, cause serious property damage or significantly disrupt the learning process for others. None of the Canadian protests has reached that point, at least not yet.

If the protesters are noisy and often idiotic, if the collections of tents are messy and perhaps outside the law, well, that is hardly something new under the sun. Campus demonstrators have been infuriating university administrators and offending others for generations.

In the Vietnam War era, they yelled, “Hey, Hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.” American patriots wanted them charged with treason. During the Occupy movement against global economic inequality in 2011, demonstrators set up a tent city in a beautiful downtown Toronto park, along with dozens of other places around the world. Business owners and park users hated it.

Today, many critics of the protesters want the encampments removed because of the violence of their rhetoric. Shouting slogans like “There is only one solution: intifada, revolution!” – and worse – understandably makes many Jewish students feel unwelcome and unsafe. Universities say they don’t want anyone to be intimidated. They are warning of sanctions against hateful speech and threatening behaviour.

But protesters should not be ejected for rhetorical excess. What gathering of passionate radicals does not feature wild rants and obnoxious hotheads? In a democracy, maximum tolerance should be the rule. No one should ever be arrested for words they say, as opposed to things they do.

A Quebec judge, Chantal Masse, said this week that she would not grant an injunction against a McGill encampment because to turf the protesters would undermine their freedom of expression and right to gather peacefully. Though their language might sometimes be “troubling,” she said, there was no evidence it amounted to direct threats against other students. No evidence, either, that the protesters were trying to block students from getting to classes or causing irreparable harm. Her ruling was sound.

That the tent camps are a nuisance is beyond doubt. Protesters put up yet another one at the University of Toronto on Thursday, erecting tents in the big open space at the university’s core, King’s College Circle. Their leaders said they were trying to make the university dump any investments in Israel.

The U of T administration reacted cautiously, saying it respected the right of peaceful protest but warning it would take action and even call in the police if the demonstrators interfered with the orderly operation of the university. Mayor Olivia Chow, meanwhile, said that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives Canadians the right to assemble and protest, “as long as they’re doing it respectfully, without hate and peacefully and lawfully.”

There may come a time, perhaps quite shortly, when the universities must act. Toronto cleared Occupy protesters from St. James Park on the grounds that they had made their point and that their encampment was damaging the park. The city has removed homeless encampments from some parks because, with fires sometimes breaking out and drug use common, they were putting their occupants in danger, while also making it harder for other Torontonians to make full use of the park spaces.

South of the border, police recently moved in when students at New York’s Columbia University occupied a university building. In Los Angeles, they stormed an unruly tent city at the University of California after a clash between the pro-Palestinian occupants and a crowd of counterprotesters.

Nothing that serious has happened here. If it does, the universities will be within their rights to call in the cops. In the meantime, they should remember that promoting and safeguarding the free exchange of views, however objectionable, is the very core of their mission.