Protesters will be required to give at least three hours' notice of any demonstration at Mount Royal University
An Alberta arbitrator has ruled that a university had the power, and the duty, to limit anti-abortion protesters' efforts once their imagery began harming an employee's psychological health.
In a decision dated Aug. 4, 2026, arbitrator James Casey partly upheld a grievance brought by the Mount Royal Staff Association against Mount Royal University in Calgary, finding the school failed to adequately protect a longtime employee from psychological harm caused by graphic anti-abortion imagery that demonstrators regularly displayed on campus.
Casey ordered the university to require protesters to give at least three hours' advance notice of any demonstration, to stay to one side of the protest area, and to personally notify the employee by phone, email and text at least two and a half hours ahead of time.
However, he declined to award $10,000 in damages the union had sought.
A hazard the university once acknowledged
For years, a group of demonstrators periodically gathered inside and outside the university's main building to protest abortion, typically displaying large posters, including some showing photographs of fetuses at various stages of development and one showing what the decision describes as a bloodied, aborted fetus.
The employee, an academic co-ordinator in the university's English-language program, testified that she had suffered a traumatic miscarriage years earlier and that the imagery repeatedly triggered severe distress, including shaking, crying and difficulty breathing, whenever she encountered the demonstrations.
The employee raised her concerns with human resources as early as 2019, then with the union, a joint health and safety committee, and through an internal environmental health and safety complaint in 2022, according to the decision. She testified she was repeatedly told the demonstrators had a right to be on campus and that she should avoid the area or make use of the mental health supports available to staff.
The university's own internal communications described the imagery as a hazard it needed to control, even as it maintained it could not remove or restrict the demonstrators given their free expression rights.
Casey found the images did meet the legal definition of a hazard under Alberta's Occupational Health and Safety Act, given their documented effect on the employee's psychological health, and concluded the university had not done enough to control that hazard by the time the union filed its grievance in 2024.
Free speech doesn't rule out reasonable limits
The university maintained it had no authority to impose conditions on the demonstrators, pointing to a 2020 Alberta Court of Appeal decision involving a different pro-life group at the University of Alberta, and argued that requiring advance notice or restricting where protesters stood would improperly limit their Charter-protected expression.
Casey agreed the demonstrations were a protected form of expression but rejected the university's position that this left it powerless to act. As Casey put it, the university "has the authority to impose restrictions to protect the psychological safety" of an employee facing the hazard.
Applying the Supreme Court's Doré and Loyola framework for balancing competing rights, Casey found the university needed to weigh the demonstrators' expression rights against its statutory duty to keep the employee safe, and concluded that measures such as advance notice and requiring protesters to stay to one side would have little or no effect on the group's ability to convey its message.
Casey separately dismissed the union's claim that the university's response amounted to gender-based harassment or a breach of human rights legislation, finding no evidence the demonstrators had targeted the employee directly, and noting that courts have repeatedly found similar anti-abortion imagery, on its own, to be protected expression rather than discrimination.
New rules for the university going forward
Casey ordered the university to require the demonstrators to provide at least three hours' advance notice of any protest and to stay to one side of the demonstration area, rather than surrounding pedestrians with graphic imagery on both sides, and to take all reasonable steps to secure the group's compliance.
The university must also personally notify the employee at least two-and-a-half hours before a planned demonstration, by phone, email and text, Casey ruled. "The university has the authority to issue directives to the pro-life protestors," he wrote, rejecting the university's argument that it lacked the power to do so.
Casey declined to order the university to keep using its existing safety-app notifications or specific warning signage, to require that protests be held outdoors except in bad weather, and to award damages, concluding the combination of existing measures and the new directives would adequately protect the employee.
The directives remain in force for as long as she stays employed at the university.
