Regina mosque resumes Friday call to prayer after threats, survey and permit renewal

A downtown Regina mosque is resuming its call to prayer after a brief pause in July.

The pause followed a series of threats and public backlash over the mosque’s prayer broadcast.

Read more:

• Downtown Regina mosque to resume call to prayer broadcast with English translation
• Regina police chief says law will guide decision on future permits for amplified call to prayer
• Saskatoon police investigate vandalism after eggs thrown at synagogue during service

During that time, the mosque’s director conducted a survey to gather residents’ thoughts and concerns. Of the responses received, 290 came from Regina residents.

Thirty respondents said they lived within one kilometre of the mosque, and 22 said they opposed the prayer broadcast.

Following the survey and the renewal of its noise permit by the Regina Police Service, the call to prayer will resume every Friday at noon.

Recently, Dwight Newman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, joined The Evan Bray Show to discuss the backlash and whether complaints that the broadcast is too loud or infringes on residents’ freedoms have any legal merit.

Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below:

The following questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Evan Bray: In this case, there are people who say the mosque’s public call to prayer, amplified over a loudspeaker outside the mosque, infringes on their constitutional right to freedom and to be free to practice as they see fit. Can you give us some insight into how you see the rights balancing here?

Dwight Newman: Well, I mean, there’d be freedom of religion claims being put in some ways by both sides. I guess those connected with the mosque would be saying that they have a freedom of religion claim to manifest their religion, and thus a bit of a claim to have the exemption or the amplification permit in order to manifest their religion a little bit into the public space as other religions do. And then others are claiming that they have a right not to have religion imposed upon them and that’s a trickier claim to make in some ways, because there’s not a constitutional right against other people. There’s a constitutional right against the government, and then you’d have to argue that the granting of the amplification permit is imposing religion. And if it’s being granted on the same basis as other amplification permits, that may well not be the case. But that’s the argument a bit on both sides, that some are saying that they want to practice and manifest their religion, including with a bit of public awareness of that, and others are saying that they don’t want any religion in the public space.

There’s a few different streams on this topic that people have weighed in on, and one of them is, churches will ring bells, so we know that is essentially a call to church or a call to prayer. Is there a difference between the two under the eyes of the law and the Constitution?

Newman: This would be an example of other religions that are putting a little bit of religion into the public space with the sound of the bells. In terms of whether there is a legal difference, I’ve never gone and measured the decibel level of different bells versus the decibel level of this call to prayer. I guess that’s where there could conceivably be a legal difference, depending on the sound levels and how those fit with bylaws. But at a certain level, those are both claims to, for a limited time period, have some sound in a way that is showing a religious presence within public space, and on constitutional grounds, they’d be quite similar, I think. But whether they run into issues with the bylaw, I couldn’t speak to. They may not have to apply under the bylaw, depending on the decibel level.

What are the limits or the common contexts in which you could see a community say, even though this doesn’t meet the definition of hate speech, we are going to limit this for a certain reason? Are there reasons why it could be limited?

Newman: Well, there’s questions about that right now. The province of Quebec has done some things limiting the presence of religion in various contexts that largely haven’t been seeing agreement from the rest of the country. But they’re the kind of claims that maybe some people are making here, that they want to either have a religion-free public space altogether or that they want to maintain a certain identity. And those matters are up at the Supreme Court of Canada right now over Quebec’s use of the notwithstanding clause to do that. We’ll see what comes of that and what the court says more broadly on issues of religion in different kinds of public spaces. Although that particular issue might be with some of the newer laws in Quebec prohibiting public prayer and so on. These are highly contested issues right now for a variety of different reasons because of shifting views among some people around religion generally, as well as complex questions about identity. So, it’s no surprise that there are debates going on, but at one level, I think people should step back and say, “Well, look at the simplicity of what’s happening here, and it’s very time-limited.” And as I say, I don’t know the decibel level. If it’s not at an extremely high decibel level, it’s not a major thing that this happens in the middle of the day.

Could city council make a determination that an amplification of this sort would not be allowed in the city, and would that fly in the face of the Constitution, or is it within the rights of a city to be able to make that sort of bylaw?

Newman: A city could pass such bylaws. The question would then be whether they meet the test for a reasonable limit on any religious freedom right asserted by the mosque, for example. And it would depend on different factors about the reasons they said they were adopting the law and what they could show about whether the law needed to be the way it was for the achievement of those reasons, and whether they could have done it other ways. There’s a test that the courts conceivably would go through if it came to that. I guess before city councils rush into passing laws and so on, there might be other discussions. But in the case where there’s a conflict on a tough issue, sometimes a city or another government just passes a law, and then you’ve got the question of whether it meets constitutional standards. You’d go through those tests.

Are you aware of that sort of test against the Constitution anywhere on a topic similar or parallel to this?

Newman: So I’m not aware of this exact topic. In fact, it’s been a new thing in the last six or eight years that a number of cities have seen the call to prayer start to be permitted, and so that’s been something that Muslim communities have been seeking in different cities across the country and, I gather, have been allowed to do in a number of places now. There would be parallel kinds of issues, but we’re stretching a little bit, and I don’t know if they’re all in Canada. There are certainly a number of European countries that have put in different kinds of restrictions on expressions of Islam, but they’re under a different legal regime there and in a different context. But these are the tough questions that people are thinking about, and so there would be different kinds of restrictions on religion in Canada that are analogous to instances where cities have zoned in a way that made it impossible to build certain kinds of religious facilities. I think the Jehovah’s Witnesses had a case along those lines in a Quebec community a number of years back that made its way up to the Supreme Court of Canada. So there have been various kinds of analogous controversies, but not exactly this one.

Is there a cultural aspect or recognition through the Constitution? Is there an acceptance under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of the kind of cultural entity that we have in this country? Does that play into this at all, Dwight?

Newman: So you wouldn’t see it exactly directly in the Charter. You do see freedom of religion, and freedom of religion naturally is freedom of religion for all religions. There may be implicit assumptions in the Charter, and there is a clause in the Charter that refers to the supremacy of God as part of the foundation of Canada. I mean, it is phrased in a way that might be read by those of other religions as having broader reference. But there’s not an explicit Christian reference in the Charter in a way that’s clear. There may have been assumptions about the cultural identity of Canada. I mean, some of those assumptions probably shift today, just as the balance of the population shifts. These are the complex questions that arise and that people are asking questions about.