Researchers say the difference probably has more to do with the political climate in the two countries and the specifics of individual campus protests.
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As police in the United States continue to dismantle pro-Palestinian encampments at universities and arrest protesters, police in Montreal and across Canada have taken a more hands-off approach.
Researchers who study policing and freedom of expression say the different response by police in Canada and the U.S. probably has more to do with the political climate in the two countries and the specifics of individual campus protests than legal differences between Canada and the U.S.
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“I think it’s principally about politics, rather than about law or a perception of free speech,” said Richard Moon, a law professor at the University of Windsor.
Free speech rights in the U.S. appear to be more robust, he said in an interview. For example, hate speech laws have been upheld as constitutional in Canada, unlike in the U.S. But many universities have felt under siege from conservative Republicans, he added.
In Montreal, an encampment protest began April 27 at McGill University’s downtown campus, following similar protests in the U.S.
While the university has asked Montreal police to dismantle the camp, police have said they don’t plan to move in as long as the protest remains peaceful, though they have intercepted supplies being brought in by supporters on at least one occasion. Protesters are calling for the university to stop investing in companies linked to Israel and its military, as well as for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions.
It’s a similar situation at other Canadian universities, where police have tolerated the protests so far, unlike the U.S., where around 2,800 people have been arrested on 50 campuses, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
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Jeffrey Sachs, who teaches politics at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said many of the high-profile arrests in the U.S. have taken place at private universities, such as Columbia — where the encampment protests began — Emory University and the University of Chicago.
“These are places where the property is privately owned,” he said in an interview. “There’s no First Amendment right that any protester has to protest on, speak on, camp out on private property. The bar, in other words, is much lower for the university to call in police.”
At public universities in the U.S., freedom of speech protections do apply, he said, though police have dispersed protests at some of those schools. In some of those cases, police action has followed violence or property destruction, he added, while elsewhere, like in Texas, police moved in after the state’s governor gave the order.
“We’re not seeing the same degree of political interference or influence in Canada that we see in some U.S. states. In the U.S., we have presidents of universities being hauled before congress to deliver testimony about these protests. We see nothing similar going on here in Canada,” he said. “The absence of that kind of pressure might go a long way towards explaining why administrators are less confrontational.”
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Canadian administrators may also be more hesitant to demand police intervention because it’s not clear exactly how the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies on campuses, he said. A 1990 Supreme Court decision, about mandatory retirement at the University of Guelph, found that the charter didn’t apply to universities because they weren’t part of the government, but over the past decade lower court rulings have increasingly extended charter rights on university campuses.
In Montreal, the legacy of the 2011-2012 Maple Spring student protests may also be a factor.
Francis Dupuis-Deri, a political science professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal who studies political profiling by police, said in an email that in recent years, Montreal police have more or less abandoned the practice of encircling protesters and arresting them en masse.
Legal challenges to a municipal bylaw — known as P-6 — that was adopted to limit those student protests resulted in thousands of charges being dropped, he said.
In 2023, the city of Montreal agreed to pay student protesters who had been arrested a total of $6 million to settle class-action lawsuits.
“Since then (Montreal police) have been in ‘de-escalation’ mode, even with unruly protests,” he wrote, adding that includes anti-capitalist protests where windows have been broken at downtown banks. He added that in 2011, police did tolerate an Occupy encampment for several weeks before moving in.
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