Montreal's failed attempt to ban erotic signage

   Lea Cousineau was a sort of amateur semiotician, a former teacher, PQ aide, spinster, when she was elected at 44 for city council as a member of the Jean Dore-led MCM in November 1986. She was a big time feminist who railed against stuff like obscene sex signs on downtown streets, which were left little to the imagination in the mid 80.
  So Cousineau came
in promising allies like Charlotte Thibault of the Federation des
   Femmes de Quebec that she'd get those male chauvinist pigs to remove their sexist signage. The 45 pages of rules on signage dealt with issues such as lettering and lighting but no mention was made of content, which was within the domain of self-expression, not something to be approached lightly, even in a province famous for attempting to repressing signage.
   In March 1987 she promised to have a bylaw drawn up within one year. But when it came to drawing up a bylaw the lawyers nixed every proposal, as they knew that there was no federal definition for obscenity. She kept backpeddling and making excuses and after two and a half years her erstwhile allies were grumbling about her inability to smutty images cleared off the streets. And by 1990 someone named Louise Hebert organized and handed her a petition with 4,500 signatures begging her to do something. Some pointed out that cities like Vancouver had a bylaw against obscene signs that had never been challenged and as a result there were no naughty signs to be seen anywhere out there.
   However in Montreal things are different. In 1986, for example, an art gallery won the right to display a picture of a woman holding an erect penis.
   By 1991 when the Dore administration was ready to finally pass a bylaw restricting the use of erotic imagery, it didn't help that the Supreme Court had sided with the right of freedom of expression in the Ford v. Quebec case, in which Valerie Ford's wool shop, Brown's Shoes, Masson Cleaners and Tailors of Rosemount and National Cheese of Lasalle won against Bill 101's language restriction. This of course resulted in the evocation of the notwithstanding clause in Quebec and Bill 178 which currently forces English to be half the size of French on signs.
   So in March 1991 they passed the law but by June they were already backpeddling as the strip club owners had hired Julius Grey to fight for their right to put up naughty pictures. The city, fearing that it would get its ass flayed in court, softened the law. Cousineau told reporters:"We found that the complete prohibition against using the human body could be abusive," she said.
   Once again the idea of what is erotic came into play. Julius Grey was quoted by the Gazette's Elizabeth Thomson: "One of the definitions of what is erotic is `tending to arouse your sexual instinct. In my case Chopin does. Does that mean they plan to prohibit him too?"

In September 1992 Quebec Superior Court Justice Ginette Piche threw out the bylaw.