A city bylaw proposal responding to demonstrations in Toronto—including incorporating “bubble zones” that would keep protests away from schools, community centres and places of worship—has been delayed indefinitely.
City manager Paul Johnson was charged to lead staff in drafting the proposed rules and reporting back to council in the first quarter of 2025. That timeframe is now on hold, indefinitely, which Johnson confirmed in an email to The CJN.
“City Council’s directive regarding the development of a bylaw to protect vulnerable institutions, support keeping Torontonians safe from hate and protect Charter rights is an undertaking that requires appropriate time and attention, especially in relation to the inclusion of the public’s voice,” wrote Johnson in a statement on March 10.
“City staff have been advancing the work since the December 2024 Council meeting. To ensure open, inclusive, transparent and unbiased community engagement that informs the proposed bylaw, more time will be required to implement public consultation,” wrote Johnson.
Staff will report “in a timely manner” to council following the public consultation, wrote Johnson. No timeline has been given.
Mayor Olivia Chow and a majority of councillors voted in favour of the motion 17-5 to approve a staff report on the city’s response to demonstrations, following intense debates at council meetings Dec.17 and 18. They also approved four additional recommendations council including a one-time $2.5 million allocation for security grants to protect buildings from car attacks with physical barriers such as bollards.
The city manager’s office was directed to consult with Toronto Police Services and the community, as well as incorporate analysis of Charter rights protections, and present a bubble zone bylaw to the city’s executive committee in the first quarter of 2025.
The measure has been under consideration in some form since protests in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, when Councillor Brad Bradford moved the original council motion for the safety zone bylaw.
That motion to create the bylaw followed protests at Nathan Phillips Square, outside City Hall, by those who outwardly supported Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist entity by the federal government. When the proposal made it to council, in May 2024, it was narrowly defeated, and the matter was instead referred to the city manager to develop an action plan.
Johnson’s previous report called for a review of policies related to “demonstrations on publicly accessible City property,” which currently do not require a permit, and staff had said they would review relevant municipal bylaws recently passed in nearby Vaughan, Ont., and in Calgary. Ottawa has also been developing a similar municipal bylaw.
Councillor James Pasternak, who has been active in urging staff to develop the bylaw, said Johnson’s office contacted him about the delay. The councillor for York Centre called it “deeply frustrating” that the draft bylaw wasn’t coming to council by the end of March.
“Our patience is not limitless. They don’t seem to understand the crisis in our city. They don’t seem to understand the threats against faith-based organizations, particularly the Jewish community… they seem to be walking blind. They don’t really understand what’s going on in their own city.
“We originally put this on the radar screen of [city] legal [staff] back in October of 2023, so they knew long ago that we would be interested in bubble zone bylaws,” he said.
“I really wish staff would finally get this done and let council decide whether they want to adopt them or not. These delay tactics are deeply frustrating.”
Pasternak pointed out that consultations can include town halls, or surveys, which could have been launched already.
“To put an online survey on the City of Toronto website takes 15 minutes, and it could have been done three months ago,” he said.
“We passed these motions in December and there’s just been so many so many excuses, and the arguments against it are really flimsy.”
He denies that such bylaws would infringe on legitimate Charter rights to protest, as groups such as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have cautioned.
“We’re moving the protests back from the doors by… 50 metres, maybe 100 metres, so that people can enter their place of worship or their faith-based school or take their child to a kindergarten without harassment by these hateful mobs,” he said.
“To say that they violate the Charter because you can’t protest is nonsense.”
If city staff aren’t going to bring the bylaw proposal back to council soon (such as in the second quarter), Pasternak says he wants to bring the item to Council as a members’ motion.
“Why do we have to have a situation over 18 months that we have to beg for a couple of bylaws that are probably no more than about 400 or 500 words each, and every other city that wants them, gets them… and in Toronto it’s this litany of excuses and delay tactics and really a lack of understanding of the danger we’re in.”
Among the various attacks and threats to Jewish communal spaces over the past year, one Jewish school in Toronto was shot at overnight three times in less than a year since May 2024, and a synagogue was vandalized or damaged eight times between April and December 2024.
Some protests such as those held outside Beth Avraham Yosef of Toronto, an Orthodox synagogue in Thornhill, took place when the building hosted Israeli real estate expos.
In late July, a protest targeted an event at Pride of Israel, where the synagogue had been damaged by an antisemitic attack a month earlier. Demonstrators attended the community solidarity rally to draw attention to the “hate that has happened over the past 10 months to the pro-Palestinian community” which they attributed to “a lot of the politicians” in attendance, and Toronto Police Services. (Mayor Chow and other elected politicians spoke from the podium.)
The debate over the bylaw proposal in December saw the issue discussed over two evenings, with numerous activists who opposed the bylaw proposal present in the council chamber.
Councillor Dianne Saxe, who represents the downtown ward where the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre is located, addressed council Dec. 18, before the vote, sharing experiences from her own family’s reckoning with protests.
“I have two grandsons who attend preschool or school in my ward and in an area that was easily targeted by protesters just screaming … protests about the government in Israel, which remember nobody in Toronto controls,” she told council.
“My three-year-old grandson was afraid to go to school,” she said, describing the children leaving the school through the back door, with a police escort, during a protest near the school.
“The teachers were terrified. The kids still have nightmares. How are we expected to explain to them that, ‘yes, Jews are safe in Toronto?’
“Whenever they go to school, there’s a swastika on their way to school [that’s been] painted, scratched… every week, if not every day, those swastikas appear, over and over and over again, around Jewish institutions. We have my synagogue near the daycare. There is no justification for this this public acceptance and it’s okay to harass Jews because of a foreign war that Hamas started is completely contrary to Toronto values. And [it] should have been denounced by this Council and never has been,” she said in December, calling to support the motion to direct the city manager to develop the bylaw proposal.
“Is it enough? No, it’s not enough. But we have not done anything effective to deal with the harassment of the Jewish community.”
Saxe called for an “acceptable level of treatment and protection for historically, marginalized community minority in Toronto who are being harassed month after month.
“There are some spaces that are not open for little kids to be screamed at… 99 percent of the city, I’m sure will still be available for those kind of screamings, but it shouldn’t be any immediate vicinity of a school, a daycare, a synagogue, a Jewish institution.”
Saxe’s final plea on December 18 at council to support the bylaw proposal urged timely action by the city.
“We have not done our job, we have not done enough. This gives us a chance to do something in its time,” said Saxe in December.
Chow, according to her press secretary, was scheduled to meet with city staff on Tuesday morning, March 11.
