Why an Okanagan pro-choice activist couldn’t get billboard and had to get a bus ad

You might see the words “abortion is safe, normal, common” rolling around on a bus in the Okanagan, but the story of how they got there is more convoluted than you might expect.

Activist Sophie Harms wanted a pro-choice billboard to counter a pro-life billboard, but when every company and landowner didn’t want to run the message, she had to put it on a transit bus instead.

“I tried to find people who would let me put my own billboard on their land. It was a lot of dead ends, so I tried to find the next most impactful way to show our message and that was transit ads,” Harms told iNFOnews.ca.

It began more than a year ago when Harms decided that if the Kelowna Right to Life Society can have a pro-life billboard along the highway in West Kelowna then there should be a pro-choice billboard to be fair.

The goal was to have a billboard with the words that are now on an Okanagan bus, “abortion is safe, normal, common.” So, Harms started an online fundraiser that raised more than $3,000. But billboard companies, including BC Billboards which ran the anti-abortion ad, didn’t want to put up Harms’ message.

Then the BC Humanist Association helped Harms with a team of pro-bono lawyers who contacted the billboard companies including BC Billboards and said it was against the Human Rights Code to have an anti-abortion message while denying a pro-abortion message.

The Kelowna Right to Life Society ended up having to take down its billboard because of the legal threat to the advertiser, but it was able to replace it with a different message, one that focused on adoption.

The BC Humanist Association’s executive director Ian Bushfield said public transit ads can’t restrict advertising the way that private companies like BC Billboards can.

“Ads on the public buses are a little bit more of a protected space from a constitutional point of view, past precedent has said that they can only apply limited restrictions on what kind of ads they run,” he said.

Now, there’s a large ad on the outside of the bus as well as a smaller ad on the inside.

Bushfield said it’s great to see an activist like Harms do what she set out to.

“It’s inspiring in our view that a young activist could see something she wanted to do, put the work in and make some effect and actually get that message out there,” he said.

Harms said she feels like she “can turn the page now.”

However, not everyone is thrilled with the bus ad and the change to the pro-life billboard.

“We’d prefer a stronger message,” Right to Life Society executive director Marlon Bartram said. “We’ve never wanted to silence or censor messages we don’t like but we’ve been on the opposite end of those efforts for years now many times over.”

When the society put up its adoption billboard it explained BC Billboards did not want to put up a pro-choice billboard so it had to take it down to avoid legal action from the BC Humanist Association.

Harms said it wasn’t about getting the society’s billboard taken down, it was about fair practices from people who control the kinds of messages that are put on public display.

“It was more like an issue of media gatekeeping. So there’s a handful of companies in the Okanagan that are dictating what can or cannot be published, which is a different issue,” she said.

Harms said she feels like she can close this particular chapter, but she isn’t finished yet.

“I will say that the bus ads have inspired a lot of other people in neighbouring communities who want to try and do similar things. So it’s not the end, for sure,” she said.