The ability and right for citizens and media alike to record and share what they see with the public is an essential one. With the advent of video and photo capabilities being equipped on every phone and with social media platforms able to share the videos and pictures with millions of people, the public information landscape has been transformed. Now, though, there is a push being made by activists to illegalize taking pictures and videos of people in public and publishing them. This would be a terrible road to go down.A petition sponsored by Deputy Government House Leader Arielle Kayabaga was presented to the House of Commons calling for the criminalization of posting pictures of homeless people or addicts. To be fair, sponsorship of a petition by an MP doesn’t mean the MP represents the goal of the petition. They are obligated in principle to bring constituent petitions before the House of Commons, and Kayabaga did present the petition without comment. They can refuse to sponsor the petition too, though.The likelihood of this petition leading to legislation is low at this time. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be vigilant, though. The petition offers an indication of where some activists want things to go in Canada and could lead to serious and binding legislation down the road. That’s why this dangerous notion of banning photography in some situations must be nipped in the bud and shut down right now.The role of media, whether in formal institutions or with individuals, is to bring information to people who wouldn’t normally get it otherwise. For the public to be informed on events or legislative actions outside of their local sphere, they must garner the information through one form of media or another. Photographs and videos can bring the importance of an issue to people in ways words will never be able to convey.Some of the most impactful and important photographs have often been the toughest ones to see. They depicted people in states of misery or suffering and shared them with the world. While some may view the depictions of people in bad condition as a form of exploitation or humiliation, the intent of publishing such images is usually to bring awareness to an issue..Some photographs literally changed the world.The awful image of terrified and naked children fleeing down a road from napalm while American soldiers walked alongside them spawned a turning point in public support for the Vietnam War. The depth of suffering and horror was brought into people’s living rooms and forced citizens to reconsider what their nation was doing.The image of a vulture standing and waiting while a clearly starving child sat hunched over in Sudan made the world aware of the extent of the famine in 1993. No column or article could have transmitted that message as effectively.Likewise, and more recently, the picture of the body of a small child washed up on a beach made awareness of the Syrian refugee crisis unavoidable.Those pictures showed people at the worst or final periods of their lives. But they had to be shared..Today, an addiction crisis is wracking the world as abundant and cheap fentanyl and meth have addicted millions of people and created an associated wave of homelessness like none we have seen before. That said, not everybody is in a position to see directly just how bad that crisis has become.Many people live in small centres or suburbs where the crisis isn’t as visibly acute as it is in inner city zones where the volume of addicts is more visible and acute. They may not have a reason to visit city centres or ride public transit where it can be seen just how massive the problem is. It isn’t willful ignorance on the part of people. They just don’t get exposed to the issue in their everyday lives, and naturally that means they may not understand how bad it is. Pictures and videos bring the importance of the issue to people who don’t see it directly. Seeing young people in various states of impairment or even dying from overdoses in images or videos makes the issue real. Looking at clusters of desperate addicts hunched over bizarrely in doorways and alleys in what has become a common dystopian scenario in most downtowns drives home the need to change how we are addressing the crisis.The videos and photographs illustrate and expose the utter failure of the enablement movement that felt the best way to deal with addiction was to provide “safe” supplies of drugs and consumption sites for addicts rather than intervention or treatment. Rather than admit the human cost of this failed experiment, many activists want to hide the failure by banning the documentation of it through photos and videos..Likewise, people invested in the status quo within Canada’s Indian reserves don’t want the public to understand how badly these racial enclaves are failing. Reserves are wracked with poverty, addiction, and social disorder, and most people never set foot upon one to understand just how terribly the system is failing. I shot a video from public roads on the Siksika reserve in spring of 2025 to show how people were living in third-world conditions on a reserve that had just been given $1.3 billion by the prime minister in 2022. I was charged with trespassing for doing so, and the fight is still before the courts. The reason I was charged wasn’t because I trespassed. I didn’t. I was charged because the band wants to hide the dysfunction and doesn’t want to face questions about where all the money went. My video of the conditions reached tens of thousands of people who had no idea how badly things were going on reserves.There is no right or expectation of privacy when in public spaces. This has been legally established. We may take images and video of people in public all we please and publish them how we like. Even if the images may show people in sad conditions. Especially so, actually.Those pushing to ban citizen journalism and photography are trying to cover failures rather than help their fellow citizens.With an increasingly authoritarian federal government obsessed with regulating the internet and the media, we can’t take the threat to the right to public photography lightly. Such a petition should be dismissed out of hand, and it probably will be for now. But it may be considered tomorrow. Stay vigilant.
