City cru­sad­ing against anti-immig­rant con­fer­ence

JOHN CARPAY John Carpay is pres­id­ent of the Justice Centre for Con­sti­tu­tional Freedoms.

8 Sep 2026Rewind 15 secondsListenForward 15 secondsSwitch to focused listening

The mayor and police in Hamilton have decided that some Cana­dians have the wrong kind of opin­ions and should not be allowed to rent pub­lic facil­it­ies.

Last week, Hamilton Mayor Andrea Hor­wath declared the Domin­ion Soci­ety is not entitled to rent city-owned prop­erty to hold a con­fer­ence. The pre­dict­able res­ult was to force the group to seek a private venue in which to hold its meet­ing.

The Hamilton Police Ser­vice then diver­ted some of its stretched resources to imped­ing the efforts of the Domin­ion Soci­ety, issu­ing a polit­ical state­ment denoun­cing it as “divis­ive and exclu­sion­ary,” and as neg­at­ively impact­ing “the sense of safety and belong­ing within our com­munity.” The police even asked the pub­lic to con­tact them with inform­a­tion about any efforts the group might make to secure a venue.

Hamilton’s police and mayor are behav­ing much like Que­bec’s former tour­ism min­is­ter, Car­oline Proulx. In 2023, she ordered the Centre des congrès de Québec, which is owned by a Crown cor­por­a­tion, to can­cel its con­tract with Har­vest Min­is­tries to hold a Chris­tian con­fer­ence. The sole reason for can­cel­ling the con­tract was that Proulx vehe­mently dis­agreed with the Chris­tian group’s beliefs about abor­tion.

The Super­ior Court of Que­bec recently ruled Proulx had abused her author­ity and viol­ated the Charter-pro­tec­ted free­dom of expres­sion of Har­vest Min­is­tries. The court awar­ded gen­eral and pun­it­ive dam­ages to Har­vest Min­is­tries.

The Domin­ion Soci­ety describes itself as “ded­ic­ated to pro­mot­ing Cana­dian iden­tity, her­it­age and nation­al­ism.”

It advoc­ates for remig­ra­tion: send­ing immig­rants back to their coun­tries of ori­gin. Neither Hamilton’s mayor nor its police force have accused it of being viol­ent, crim­inal or ter­ror­ist. It there­fore has the same right as every other non-profit in Canada to oper­ate peace­fully within the law, and to advoc­ate for its beliefs.

Polls have shown roughly half of Cana­dians believe immig­ra­tion levels are too high. Let’s say for argu­ment’s sake only eight per cent of Cana­dians sup­port remig­ra­tion, and 92 per cent oppose it. Should hav­ing only eight per cent sup­port for your opin­ion mean los­ing your right to rent gov­ern­ment-owned facil­it­ies, and to use pub­lic spaces like parks and side­walks?

If yes, then no gov­ern­ment facil­it­ies should be avail­able for rental by the NDP, which garnered only 6.3 per cent of the pop­u­lar vote in Canada’s most recent fed­eral elec­tion. Almost 94 per cent of Cana­dians rejec­ted the NDP in 2025. Yet the NDP is not dis­qual­i­fied from being able to exer­cise its Charter freedoms of expres­sion, asso­ci­ation and peace­ful assembly.

Politi­cians and police officers have every right to express their polit­ical opin­ions for or against vari­ous groups and causes. At the same time, Canada’s may­ors, cab­inet min­is­ters and police forces have no right to treat gov­ern­ment prop­erty as though it were their own private prop­erty, avail­able only to “good” people who have the “cor­rect” polit­ical beliefs.

The Hamilton Police Ser­vice has a sol­emn duty to fight crime. Its decision to waste its scarce resources on polit­ics is a betrayal of tax­pay­ers and free cit­izens alike. Indeed, unlike other pro­fes­sions, police have a legal duty to enforce the Crim­inal Code, as well as numer­ous non-crim­inal laws (such as traffic safety).

The politi­ciz­a­tion of the Brit­ish police should serve as a stark warn­ing to Cana­dians. What began with the mon­it­or­ing and record­ing of “non-crime hate incid­ents” quickly led to Brit­ish cit­izens being crim­in­ally charged for what essen­tially amoun­ted to thought crimes.

Their crimes included shar­ing opin­ions about top­ics like immig­ra­tion and trans­gen­der­ism. David Woot­ton was sen­tenced to two years in prison for an “offens­ive” Hal­loween cos­tume. This is why police should be 100 per cent focused on fight­ing crime and zero per cent focused on polit­ics.

If Canada is to remain a free soci­ety, the gov­ern­ment should uphold the law equally for all Cana­dians, includ­ing those who hold unpop­u­lar beliefs. Oth­er­wise, there will be little to sep­ar­ate us from Fas­cist, theo­cratic, Com­mun­ist or national social­ist regimes, under which the gov­ern­ment decides which views are cor­rect.

This is why tax­payer-fun­ded facil­it­ies like con­ven­tion centres, and pub­lic spaces like side­walks and city parks, are — and must always be — avail­able to all cit­izens, regard­less of their polit­ical beliefs.