Alberta woman faces eight-day tribunal hearing over rainbow crosswalk flyer as campaign targets censorship law
Benita Pedersen is facing eight days before Alberta’s Human Rights Tribunal over a flyer opposing a rainbow crosswalk. Now a campaign is underway to repeal the law that brought her there.
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Article by Rebel News staff.
Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: twenty years after Alberta used its human rights censorship law against a magazine that published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, the same law has a woman on trial over a flyer. Now, we’re running a campaign to repeal it.
In June 2023, Benita Pedersen of Westlock handed neighbours a flyer opposing a rainbow crosswalk her town council wanted painted. She listed the town office phone number and urged people to call. For that, she is facing an eight-day hearing before the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, not a court, with fifteen witnesses and duelling expert psychiatrists. The hearing began Monday, and Sheila Gunn Reid has been covering it live. The case is an embarrassment to Alberta and to a human rights commission that already disgraced itself in the Danish cartoon case, where Ezra Levant was the publisher targeted by the complaint. That same censorship system has no business putting another Albertan through a similar process.
Day 3 of the Alberta Human Rights Commission hearing of Benita Pedersen. A complaint was filed against her because she distributed flyers in Westlock, Alberta, as part of a campaign against a rainbow sidewalk in town organized by the local GSA club. pic.twitter.com/ULyx5x7FzI
— Sheila Gunn Reid (@SheilaGunnReid) September 16, 2026
The charge rests on section 3(1) of the Alberta Human Rights Act, which bars publishing anything "likely to expose a person or a class of persons to hatred or contempt." The offence is not that a publication actually exposes anyone to hatred or contempt, but that it is likely to do so, and the target is not necessarily a named individual but a class. A government appointee at a tribunal with no ordinary rules of evidence decides what is "likely," and truth is not a defence. The harm does not have to have occurred. The possibility of future harm can be enough.
That is the same provision used twenty years ago against the Western Standard for publishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, with Ezra Levant at the centre of the case. The proceedings lasted about nine hundred days, cost roughly $100,000 in defence expenses and involved approximately half a million dollars in public prosecution costs before the complaint was dropped. The process is the punishment. Pedersen is not a national publisher with a legal war chest. She is a DJ who does children's birthday parties. She had a flyer.
In the twenty years since that cartoons case, the record shows only one other completed hearing under the same clause: Pastor Stephen Boissoin of Red Deer, who was fined $5,000 and ordered never to say anything "disparaging" about gay people after writing a letter to the editor. Two Alberta courts overturned the order, and the Court of Appeal warned that the law would "cast a chill" on free speech. Politicians left the statute on the books anyway.
Even the commission's annual reporting treats section 3 censorship complaints as less than one per cent of its caseload, rounded to zero last year. The clause can sit unused for years, then land on one person and consume a year and six figures. This year, that person is Pedersen.
The director who decides which complaints go to hearing is Nicholas Milliken, a lawyer and former UCP cabinet minister appointed by Danielle Smith's government in 2024. A conservative appointee applying the law as written still sent a flyer to trial. Change the people and the statute produces the same result. The fix is to change the law.
Smith has already said as much. At a Rebel News event on Oct. 8, 2024, she said the Criminal Code already draws the lines and that tribunals are "very subjective." Her 2012 Wildrose platform proposed repealing section 3 outright. The task now is helping her finish the job.
Federally, the Harper Conservatives repealed the parallel clause, section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, in 2013. Westlock Conservative MP Brian Storseth introduced a private member's bill, which the justice minister backed and Parliament passed. Later attempts to restore a federal version failed, and this spring the Carney Liberals said they would not try again. Ottawa now has less of this tool than Alberta, one of only three provinces and one territory that still retain the clause. The federal fight was won once already, including with help from the same Western Standard publisher targeted over the Danish cartoons. This round is in right-wing Alberta.
The campaign at ScrapTheCensorshipLaw.com aims to repeal section 3(1) and stay until it is gone. We’re working on several fronts: ranking a UCP resolution written by Pedersen to secure the widest possible free-expression interpretation; a Highway 2 billboard between Calgary and Edmonton reading "Repeal 3(1). Alberta's censorship law"; a presence at the UCP convention in Calgary from Nov. 27 to 29; and day-by-day coverage of Pedersen's hearing.
GUEST: William Diaz-Berthiaume, The Democracy Fund's National campus coordinator.
COMMENTS
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Bruce Atchison commented 2026-09-16 20:42:33 -0400Compelled speech nulifies free speech. And we already have libel and slander laws on the books. This Human Rights bureaucracy is a tool which leftists have set up to crush opposition.
