Ontario Superior Court of Justice Markus Koehnen issued his much anticipated ruling involving the encampment at the University of Toronto late yesterday, granting the University its requested order that can be used to remove the encampment. Under the order, protesters have until 6:00 pm today to clear the encampment. If they fail to do so, the court ruled that the University can levy the full range of sanctions, including “physical enforcement of the order, prosecution for trespass, liability for contempt of court and the full range of disciplinary sanctions at the University.” The basis of the order lies in trespass with the court concluding that “there is ample judicial authority that says protesters have no right to set up camp on or otherwise occupy property that does not belong to them, no matter how much more effective their protest would be if they were able to do so.”
Trespass combined with evidence of irreparable harm if the order was not granted provided the legal foundation for the decision, but the court did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that the encampment was violent or antisemitic. The court’s conclusion on antisemitism has been seized up on encampment supporters, but the reality is that it did find hate speech at the exterior of the encampment, which from the perspective of Jewish students and faculty surely requires University action. In fact, the court finds that “that there have been incidents of hate speech and physical harassment of people, predominantly but not exclusively directed at people wearing kippahs or some other indicator of Jewish identity in the general vicinity of the encampment” and that “the possibility of further escalation based on past physical altercations and past use of actual hate speech outside the encampment amounts to some level irreparable harm but not significantly so.”
