Canada's director of public prosecutions threatens to discipline employees, including students, who signed pro-Palestine letters
Canada's director of public prosecutions threatens to discipline employees, including students, who signed pro-Palestine letters
Legal experts say a May 7 email to Public Prosecution Service of Canada employees in Ontario represents escalating state repression against lawyers who advocate for Palestine.
Tl;dr
Director of Public Prosecutions Kathleen Roussel sent two emails on May 7 to employees at Public Prosecution Service of Canada’s (PPSC) Ontario office—obtained exclusively by The Orchard—threatening investigation and possible disciplinary action against employees who signed two pro-Palestine letters from law students and the broader legal community.
Roussel’s email referred to the letters, published in October and November 2023, as “a matter of particularly immediate concern.”
The first letter, written by law students at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), expressed support for Palestinian armed resistance within the confines of international law, which according to Roussel, “expressed views that are anti-Semitic and espouse support for acts of terrorism,” without quoting any specific objectionable content in the letter.
The second letter, from Canadian legal professionals, criticized repression of pro-Palestine speech, which Roussel said could be regarded as “being supportive of the views expressed in the TMU letter.”
The warning to PPSC employees has sparked concerns about growing state repression against critics of Israel, with implications for freedom of expression and potential bias in the Canadian justice system. Critics argue that the PPSC’s stance could deter dissent and affect fair prosecution decisions.
Employees at Canada’s public prosecution service, including summer and articling students, have been threatened with unspecified disciplinary action if they signed either of two pro-Palestine letters published last year, which the director of public prosecutions characterized as antisemitic and supportive of terrorism in emails exclusively obtained by The Orchard.
In the morning of May 7, Director of Public Prosecutions Kathleen Roussel sent an email addressed to all employees at the Public Prosecution Service of Canada’s (PPSC) Ontario Regional Office (ORO), calling the two letters “a matter of particular concern.”
By the time Roussel sent out another email with what she called the “correct version” at 2:05 p.m., the letters—written in October and November—were upgraded to “a matter of particularly immediate concern.”
“You will see that we wanted to give further information about how management would proceed in respect of persons who may or may not have signed the TMU letter [emphasis added],” Roussel explained at the beginning of the second email, referring to an Oct. 20 letter signed by about 70 students, many anonymously, at Toronto Metropolitan University’s (TMU) Lincoln Alexander Law School.
The TMU letter argued the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel are “a direct result of Israel’s 75-year-long systemic campaign to eradicate Palestinians, and that Israel is therefore responsible for all loss of life in Palestine.”
It called Israel “not a country, [but] the brand of a settler colony,” and declared support for “all forms of Palestinian resistance” while at the same time acknowledging that Hamas and other Palestinian factions committed “war crimes” on Oct. 7.
Roussel, in both versions of her email to PPSC employees, said this letter “expressed views that are anti-Semitic and espouse support for acts of terrorism.”
According to Roussel’s email, if PPSC-ORO management learns that any employee, “including a summer or articling student,” signed this letter, the employer will “undertake a fact-finding exercise to determine whether any disciplinary measure is appropriate.”
The second letter in question, published Nov. 7, is an open letter from the Canadian legal community, denouncing the “pervasive repression of speech and scholarship on Palestinian liberation.”
The letter specifically references lawyers who have expressed a desire to blacklist pro-Palestine law students and lawyers, efforts to get pro-Palestine lawyers fired and have like-minded law students expelled and denied job interviews, and “bullying and defaming” those who speak out through spurious charges of antisemitism and supporting terrorism.
“Some perceive the Open Letter [sic] as being supportive of the views expressed in the TMU letter,” Roussel wrote.
If anyone signed this letter, management “has and will make such enquiries as it determines appropriate to investigate the issue,” the email reads.
Since many signatories of the TMU letter were anonymous, in her second email Roussel urged “all concerned [to] act with integrity, which includes a duty of candour.”
Roussel’s warning to employees comes amid ongoing state repression against critics of Israel’s war on Gaza in the legal profession.
In December, The Breach reported that Ontario’s Ministry of Attorney General (MAG) forced TMU law students to sign an attestation that they didn’t sign the Oct. 20 letter in order to work there.
Roussel’s email represents a significant escalation, according to Dania Majid, president of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, with whom The Orchard shared a copy of both May 7 emails.
PPSC isn’t just targetting incoming students who signed the TMU letter, Majid noted; it also threatens established legal professionals who expressed support for the students’ right to free expression.
“I don't believe [MAG] asked colleagues to snitch on other colleagues, and report anybody who might have supported both the students’ letter and any of those lawyers … who signed the open letter in support of the students,” said Majid, who is Palestinian-Canadian. “That seems to be an extra level [of repression].”
In the second email, Roussel explained that PPSC-ORO management had been approached with “concerns” over the two letters, which have “escalated to a point that some of you have indicated that you don’t feel like you are being provided with a safe working environment.”
“We unequivocally condemn anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and all other forms of discrimination, harassment, bullying, or violence,” Roussel wrote in the original draft.
“While working in a diverse workplace, we are sometimes called upon to recognize and respect opinions that are different from ours. This does not include ideologies rooted in hatred, division and extremism that have no place in the PPSC.”
In the final version, the first sentence generically condemning antisemitism and Islamophobia is identical. The second sentence about respecting opinions that aren’t one's own, however, is removed, with the subsequent sentence reading: “Ideologies of hate, division and extremism have no place in the PPSC.”
“As public servants, we all have the right to exercise our Charter rights, including those related to expression,” both versions note. “Of course, this becomes a concern in the event we become aware of criminal conduct, a breach in the Code of Conduct or anything that can impact the confidence in the administration of justice [emphasis added].”
Both emails conclude with a call for PPSC employees to refrain from “taking it upon themselves to punish or ostracize any persons.”
“Management has a continuing role to act in the event it becomes aware of actions or speech that may constitute harassment or render the environment unsafe,” wrote Roussel.
Reached for comment, PPSC spokesperson Alessia Bongiovanni told The Orchard that Roussel’s email was intended “to follow up on concerns recently brought forward by employees about the contents of the letters.”
She didn’t explain which parts of the TMU letter PPSC management considered antisemitic or supportive of terrorism, nor would she say whether PPSC employees who publicly expressed support for Israeli actions would be subject to similar managerial scrutiny.
Asked why Roussel’s email explicitly condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia but not anti-Palestinian discrimination, Bongiovanni said that “we condemned anti-Semitism and Islamophobia to illustrate the very real impact of current events on our employees.”
“The PPSC does not take positions on geopolitical issues,” she added.
This isn’t accurate, says Heidi Matthews, an expert in international law at York University’s Osgoode Hall. “Canada absolutely has jurisdiction over international crimes,” she told The Orchard.
The PPSC has prosecuted Canadians who have gone to the Middle East to fight for Daesh under anti-terrorism legislation.
The Criminal Code of Canada prohibits advocating genocide, a crime which Israel stands accused of at the ICJ.
The 2000 Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, moreover, incorporates the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) jurisdiction into Canadian law.
ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan has applied for arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant, as well as senior Hamas figures Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismael Haniyeh.
As a signatory to the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, Canada has an obligation to “broadly cooperate” with the court, Matthews explained.
Threatening to discipline employees for taking positions that will be argued in front of the ICC is exceptionally “bizarre and problematic,” she added.
Roussel’s email itself, Majid noted, is proof of the PPSC taking an “indirect position” on a geopolitical issue.
“They might not have taken a position on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but they've taken a position on what their employees can say about that conflict,” said Majid.
Joshua Sealy-Harrington, a Lincoln Alexander law professor who has been an outspoken defender of the students who signed the Oct. 20 letter, delivered a presentation four years ago to Roussel and other PPSC employees on how anti-Black racism manifests itself in the prosecution system.
The Orchard showed Sealy-Harrington Roussel’s emails and the PPSC spokesperson’s response to inquiries about its contents.
He said the prosecution service’s “omission of anti-Black racism extends to omission of anti-Palestinian racism from its supposed commitment to ‘condemn[ing] … discrimination.’”
Sealy-Harrington argued that the PPSC’s refusal to even acknowledge anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism as concepts, even when The Orchard gave its spokesperson an opportunity to do so, is itself reflective of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian animus:
This is not an email about casual Fridays; it’s an email about condemning racism in the public service in the specific context of an ongoing genocide against Arabs and Palestinians. To name neither is an outrageous omission, and is obviously related to the Canadian government’s tolerance for anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism.
Roussel’s email, he said, represents an “astonishing contradiction [of] racist anti-racism—that is, it is claiming the mantle of racial justice, while perpetuating racial injustice.”
The PPSC’s use of Islamophobia as a stand-in for anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, Sealy-Harrington noted, transforms Israel’s racist practices, which have been characterized as a form of apartheid by Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups, into a “supposedly primordial religious conflict.”
What Roussel tries to characterize as “hatred, division and extremism,” Sealy-Harrington added, is simply dissent.
“The PPSC would be a much healthier institution with more such dissent, not less,” he said.
Roussel raises the possibility that some PPSC employees may have engaged in “criminal activities” or violated the Code of Conduct by signing the TMU letter, which she maintains expresses antisemitism and “support for acts of terrorism,” yet she doesn’t explain how the letter does any of these things.
“No passages from the letter are quoted or discussed. And no legal authorities about the test for hate speech are cited,” Sealy-Harrington noted, adding:
If the purpose of this email to the entire PPSC is to regulate conduct, one would have thought some specificity might be provided for meaningful guidance. But that is, clearly, not the purpose of this email. Its purpose, rather, is to discipline ideological conformity within the PPSC, a dangerous precedent in general, but especially so in the context of an ongoing genocide abroad and during which the PPSC is actively suppressing activism against that genocide in Canada.
In her email, Roussel raises the prospect of vague investigations and disciplinary measures if “appropriate” for PPSC employees who signed either the Oct. 20 TMU letter—which she insinuated could be a criminal act—or the Nov. 7 letter from members of the legal community.
This “strategic ambiguity,” Sealy-Harrington said, suggests Roussel’s goal is “intimidation which, by falling short of a tangible conclusion, seeks to evade ever being subject to meaningful legal or analytical scrutiny.”
Majid of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association notes that while supporters of Palestine are the target in this instance, the implications of rooting out dissent from PPSC are far-reaching.
“This doesn't stop with Palestine,” said Majid. “Is the PPSC going to then go after people who signed open letters around climate justice or Indigenous Land Back or anti-Black racism or [police and prison] abolition. Where does it stop in terms of criticizing employees for signing open letters?”
Either the PPSC is cracking down on dissent writ large, or it’s singling out supporters of Palestine, Majid noted. Neither is a good look for the federal prosecution service, which directly employs 1,242 prosecutors, paralegals, support staff, functional specialists and managers.
“They're essentially signalling to people to monitor their colleagues and their political positions, and bring any to their attention,” Majid said.
This raises profound questions about the extent to which employers exercise control over their employees outside working hours, she added.
That the employer in this case is the public prosecution service, however, brings the entire fairness of the Canadian justice system into question, Majid noted.
Roussel’s email, Majid said, causes one to question whether Crown prosecutors will face undue pressure to proceed with cases that they “might have pushed back against otherwise” when police lay charges against Palestinians and their allies for their activism, as they have in Toronto, Calgary and elsewhere.
“Is there that fear to speak your mind on a strategy on a case internally? Because every case will have some sort of discussion of whether or not the charges can be upheld, how to proceed, so on and so forth,” she said.
Majid cited the clear “police overreach” in the case of 11 people who were arrested in armed pre-dawn raids on their homes normally reserved for drug and gun arrests for allegedly vandalizing Indigo’s downtown Toronto location. Posters and paint they allegedly placed on the store’s windows called out founder Heather Reisman’s financial support for a charity that provides grants to people from abroad who serve in the Israeli military.
These activists were accused repeatedly in media of targetting Indigo solely based on Reisman’s Jewish heritage, and several were fired from their jobs as a result.
While charges against four of the 11 were dropped on May 22, this leaves seven people to face the weight of a prosecution service whose federal counterpart is actively engaged in efforts to suppress sympathy with their perspective on the situation in Gaza.
Edited by Dave Gray-Donald