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Winnipeg Free Press

A case must be made before refusing a permit

Opinion Will new problems sent our way from the United States never cease? Trumps and tariffs and annexation and borders and fentanyl and complaints about us being nasty for not buying American products or vacationing in the United States is all bad enough. Now, enter Sean Feucht. JOSE LUIS MAGANA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Christian musician Sean Feucht The Christian musician has ruffled feathers across the country because — to quote Feucht himself — 'God called us to come to Canada.' After he requested permission to hold free concerts in a number of public spaces, a series of municipalities have cancelled or refused to issue permits for his performances. Winnipeg has denied him a permit to perform: so has Abbottsford, Halifax, Charlottetown, Moncton, Gatineau, Quebec City and Vaughn. West Kelowna is considering its options, and Saskatoon has granted a permit, but has said it is also monitoring security concerns. There are plenty of personal reasons you may not want Feucht to perform in your province: you may find parts of his hardline Christian message to be exclusionary and effectively promote discrimination against members of our community. You may question the ethics of his ministry: after all, in June, six former senior members of his groups issued a report saying he should be removed from 'all positions of leadership and financial stewardship,' and said 'Having witnessed first-hand what we have witnessed about Sean we can no longer encourage any financial contributions to him and his endeavours; we can no longer encourage anyone to work for him, paid or unpaid; and we can no longer encourage anyone to partner with him in any ministry capacity.' But you can't simply go to a laundry list of the most common reasons to refuse to issue a permit for a performance, and select the one most likely to apply. In Winnipeg's case, the reason given was that the chosen public location, Central Park on Ellice Avenue, was too small, at just under two hectares, for the 2,000 people Feucht's organizers are expecting — especially because the concert is free, and total numbers of attendees were hard to predict. As well, there are concerns from the city's emergency services about how they would access the area, given the numbers of pedestrians, concert-goers, vehicle volumes and parking issues related to a concert of that size. That's certainly a more cogent set of reasons than other municipalities have given. Wednesdays A weekly dispatch from the head of the Free Press newsroom. But perhaps it would have been simpler to request that the organizers find a better site. Holding something like a national Liberal Party Convention would have security and safety concerns — but the City of Winnipeg would not turn that away. Heck, a True North Whiteout street party has security and operational concerns, yet the city and the Winnipeg Police Service manage to address those. A city can certainly refuse to issue a permit for a performance, but that refusal has to be clearly articulated, transparent, and the refusal has to be made for good reasons. (Just to be clear — being hounded by outspoken citizens who don't like a performer's public positions doesn't constitute a good reason.) If those reasons aren't clear and cogent, the risk is that they will be interpreted as a means to quell free speech or the ability of people to assemble. Which, unfortunately, is what's happening now. One thing is for sure: denying Feucht permission to perform pretty much across the country has most likely been a far greater money and attention generator for the performer than just ignoring him — or, at the minimum, suggesting a venue better suited to the size of his proposed event — would ever have been.