(Ottawa Citizen) The Ottawa Public Library was within its rights to cancel a private screening of the anti-immigration film Killing Europe in 2017, an Ontario court has ruled.
The Ontario Court of Justice ruling, released this week, said the library wasn’t acting as a public body when it rented its auditorium to retired public servant Madeline Weld on behalf of a group called ACT! for Canada. Weld was intending to sell tickets to the November 2017 screening of the documentary, which purports to warn of the dangers of the “Islamification” of Europe. The filmmaker, Michael Hansen, was scheduled to give a talk afterward.
The library cancelled Weld’s reservation after public complaints that the film was Islamophobic and, in the words of human rights lawyer Richard Warman, who was one of the complainants, “in clear violation of the library’s own rental policy prohibiting the use of space for discriminatory purposes.”
(Text updated)
