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An awful gang of bigots showed up, notably Marc Lemire and Paul Fromm. And while a library employee monitored the proceedings and apparently detected nothing untoward, the outrage came thick and fast. “It is truly shocking that individuals who spread hatred, deny the Holocaust and have ties to neo-Nazi groups are being provided a permit by the Toronto Public Library,” said Toronto City Councillor James Pasternak. “If (Fromm’s and Lemire’s histories are) not good enough for the Toronto Public Library to say ‘No thanks’ then what could be?” asked Ottawa human rights lawyer Richard Warman. Mayor John Tory asked the library to consider cancelling the event and, when it said it couldn’t, to reexamine its policies for future bookings.

Photo by Cole Burston / For The National Post

It is doing just that; a report is expected back in the fall. In the meantime, while affirming its ostensible commitment to free speech, the library workers’ union has thrown its weight behind the censorship effort. Union president Maureen O’Reilly made her pitch to the Library Board on Monday night. She didn’t respond to interview requests on Tuesday. But speaking to the labour magazine Our Times last month, she laid out her case. It rests on a very tenuous and almost certainly impracticable distinction: “Certainly there is free speech, but this is hate speech,” she told Haseena Manek, the article’s author, “and people have to stand up and call it for what it is.”

“Humouring the question of free speech when the real issue at hand is hate speech will only enable those with hateful agendas,” wrote Manek, paraphrasing O’Reilly. “The space was conceivably going to be used by those known to espouse hate speech, and definitely rented for the purposes of honouring someone who defended their alleged right to do so.”