Circa 2010, when I was a literature grad student, I would sometimes blog about fashion and beauty. When I would mention my preference for brightly coloured nail polish, I’d get commenters who were lawyers, who desperately needed me to know that blue nail polish or whatever was outside their corporate or courtroom dress code. They would say this not in the spirit of ‘your thing made me think about my thing’ but more as in, that I was somehow getting it wrong by not doing what would be done in a legal setting. As though that was the only setting that counted. I found it mildly annoying how they assumed I would in any way alter my own grooming choices based on what would be permissible in some context I was not in.

What I’m getting at, in a roundabout way, is that there is the legal system, and then there’s everything else. Rule of law matters wherever you are. But one cannot simply funnel the whole of human experience into what would go how in a courtroom. Life has other dimensions.

Longtime journalist Neil Herland made headlines late last month for reportedly getting disciplined by the CBC, his employer, for an X thread he’d done, with video documentation, about encountering pro-Palestine protesters outside his Yom Kippur services in Toronto. It’s a moving thread, this part especially:

“Jewish Canadians are living in a parallel world. Where police stand guard with guns outside synagogues. And Jewish schools, religious sites and businesses are targeted with bullets. And most Canadians have no awareness or understanding.”

Unlike me, holding forth as I do to a readership with awareness and understanding of the situation, Herland can potentially reach a broader Canadian public. Good on him, I thought, for posting this.

Evidently the CBC thought otherwise. If these reports from the National Post and Toronto Sun are to be believed, he got taken off the air and reprimanded for offering only one side of a controversial story. Journalists there and generally aren’t meant to do that, however the CBC (and journalism these days, generally) has a lived-experience loophole, according to which you are free, as a journalist, to speak your identity-based truth.

Various questions emerged, all pertaining to technicalities, as though technicalities cancelled out the bigger picture.

Much was made of the fact that the services in question were via the Song Shul, a congregation that held them at the Meridian Arts Centre. The legal applicability of bubble legislation rests on how a space is classified. And the Meridian Arts Centre is not a synagogue. So in principle, legally, best as my non-lawyer self understands it, someone might wish to protest an arts building hosting a particular speaker. Assuming a matryoshka doll, we have one layer that’s arts building,........

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