Nearly every flat surface on this campus, from bulletin boards to construction hoardings to garbage cans, is covered in posters. They advertise political meetings, SAC candidates, bands, essay writing services, and other campus events. A bylaw currently being considered by the City of Toronto would essentially eliminate this free advertising venue all over the city, including at U of T.
The Toronto City Council held public consultations this week to discuss a bylaw which would effectively eliminate postering on utility poles. The Transportation and Planning Committee met last Monday to listen to a largely oppositional crowd. In 2002, there was a similar effort to ban posters in Toronto, which failed to pass. This new proposed bylaw would limit posters to about 4,000 poles in the city, fine people for postering anywhere else, and require posters to be removed on a regular basis.
The Varsity spoke with Dave Meslin of the Toronto Public Space Committee in a telephone interview about the by-law and its impact on the city.
“Postering is a great tool that is used for all sorts of different things: musicians who are just starting out often use to advertise performances and many use posters to advertise political meetings,” Meslin said. “Keep in mind that most commercial advertising on billboards is in English, whereas postering serves different ethnic groups. Take the Russian posters in the Bathurst and Sheppard area, for example.
“At the committee meeting [on Monday], we put forward a proposal to regulate posters which would require them to be paper, no larger than 11 by 17 inches, and there can only be one per pole,” Meslin continued. “We are in favour of sensible limits on posters and we want to see existing laws enforced against commercial signage which is known to violate our laws.
“It tends to be the more suburban councilors, those from North York and Etobicoke, who tend to be in favour of these sorts of bans,” Meslin continued.
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled (Peterborough v. Ramsden, 1998) that while a complete ban on postering is unconstitutional, regulating postering is permissible.
“The kind of fines being discussed would cripple organizations that function on small budgets,” Meslin said.
During the Monday meeting, the chairman of the committee, Councillor Howard Moscoe (Eglinton-Lawrence), said of his own committee: “We are totally in disarray.” At the last minute, Moscoe made a motion to drop the anti-poster law but he was voted down by the rest of the committee.
Dylan Penner of the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War (TCSW) discussed the bylaw with The Varsity through e-mail.
“The anti-postering bylaw is a blatant attack on human rights and it is unconstitutional,” Penner wrote. “Postering is critical to TCSW’s efforts to end the illegal occupation of Iraq; we are using posters to organize an upcoming demonstration on March 19, for example.” Penner noted that Councillor Frances Nunziata (York South-Weston), though not a member of Transportation and Planning Committee, spoke in favour of the bylaw. Nunziata was also in favor of requiring posterers to acquire permits.
City council will vote on the postering bylaw on April 12.
“If this bylaw were to come into force and the Coalition continued postering for future demonstrations, we would be faced with fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars per demonstration,” Penner said. “If that isn’t an attack on free speech, what is?”
