(LifeSiteNews) — A Canadian court ruled that Canada’s Parliamentary Protective Service (PPS) “violated the Charter rights” of Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) as well as one of its members because it banned them from showing pro-life signs during the 2023 March for Life.

On Thursday, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) announced that the Ontario Superior Court ruled that a decision to ban pro-life signs on Parliament Hill “infringed” upon CLC’s “freedom of expression under section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and was not justified under section 1 of the Charter.”

“Parliament Hill has long been a place where Canadians gather to communicate political messages directly to lawmakers and to the public,” constitutional lawyer Hatim Kheir said. “We are pleased that the Court recognized that constitutional freedoms cannot be restricted through subjective and unpredictable censorship.”

CLC praised the court ruling and said it was a significant “victory.”

“This is an important victory not only for Campaign Life Coalition but for every Canadian who believes Parliament Hill must remain a place where one can speak freely on the issues that matter most — in this case, the right to life,” CLC national president Jeff Gunnarson said in comments to LifeSiteNews.

On May 10, 2023, the day before the March for Life in Ottawa, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s PPS banned CLC from showing images of aborted babies because they were too “graphic.”

CLC director of political operations Jack Fonseca told LifeSiteNews then that “they were literally photographs of children killed by abortion, which we planned to show … towards the end of our press conference in order to put a human face to the acts of violence that the Trudeau Liberals euphemistically refer to as ‘choice.’” 

As a result, CLC launched a “constitutional challenge” lawsuit funded through the JCCF.

According to the JCCF, the court emphasized that “freedom of expression occupies a central place in Canadian democracy and concluded that the PPS acted unreasonably in relying on broad and subjective prohibitions against signs considered ‘obscene’ or promoting ‘hate or violence.’”

The court ruled that while Canada’s Parliament Hill is subject to rules and reasonable limits, “constitutional protections still apply to political expression taking place there.”

“Importantly, the Court rejected arguments that the protection of expression depended on whether the signs were accurate, persuasive, or acceptable to the public,” the JCCF noted.

Overall, the court declared that CLC’s Charter rights were breached, but it did not “strike down Parliament Hill’s General Rules or the later-added prohibition on signs displaying explicit graphic violence or blood.”

“The Court held that those broader constitutional questions could not properly be decided because the entities responsible for creating and administering the rules were not parties to the case.”

The March for Life is growing in size each year as more Canadians boldly speak out for the unborn and call for protection of all human life at all stages.

However, abortion has become more common in Canada. There were 368,928 babies born in Canada from 2024 to 2025, a number that would be much greater if not for abortion. In 2022, 97,211 Canadian babies were killed by abortion.

Late-term abortions often result in live births, as the baby is not completely killed during the abortion procedure. LifeSiteNews recently reported that 150 babies were born after botched abortions in 2023-2024 in Canada, but it’s not known how many survived.

Similarly, reports from 2018 indicated that 766 babies were born alive after late-term abortions in Canada between 2013 and 2018 and presumably left to die.