On October 28, 2026, an event was held in the University of Waterloo’s Arts Quad that was sponsored by a student organization and sanctioned by WUSA, the Waterloo Undergraduate Student Association. This event was set up as a debate between two pastors from Trinity Bible Church and the university public, with microphones, amplifying speakers, and a recording device. While an official statement regarding the event’s credentials and sanctioning was made prior to its start, a lack of signage made it unclear to both passersby and attendees as to what the event was, if it was sanctioned, and who it was being hosted by. Over the course of the 1.5-hour “debate,” a series of inflammatory and discriminatory statements were made by the pastors that targeted 2SLGBTQ+ communities, women, and non-Christian communities. We place debate in quotations here as we do not see declarations about people’s ability to live their lives freely to be a debate but rather an ideological attack on people’s access to their fundamental human rights.
We want to offer an official statement that begins with a very clear position: SIGNAL unequivocally condemns the discrimination, bigotry, and expression of remarks that demean, marginalize, or target individuals and communities on the basis of who they are or what they believe. Our commitment to dignity, equity, and respect extends to all people, without exception. As a network rooted in community, we recognize our responsibility to foster an environment where everyone feels safe, valued, and respected. We will not remain silent when these principles are challenged, whether within our own community or beyond it.
This statement asks that, as a campus, we look beyond legal frames that determine the lines of hate speech and move toward thinking about the ways in which speech delivered publicly, on campus and beyond, can enact harms that cannot be captured by legislative measures. Based on our research on radicalization, extremism, and gender-based violence, we believe this event directly reflects emergent and harmful public practices present in our contemporary toxic media ecosystem that merit attention for how they impact offline spaces including our spaces of learning. Our forthcoming report on gendered hostilities in higher education to be released in the winter term will offer a comprehensive overview of these connections and their impacts on students. The event this week reinforces some of the concerns surrounding increasing polarization between online and offline environments that the report will address.
We do not believe it is productive for members of Trinity Bible Church to have access to public campus spaces to spread discriminatory messages to students who did not intend on encountering the event. Troublingly, Trinity Bible Church has been linked to a much larger movement of extreme Christian nationalism that has taken root in the United States and seeking footholds within Canada. Specifically, Trinity Bible Church has ties with the Canadian Liberation Coalition, which has an explicitly stated mandate to ensure that Biblical law is enshrined in Canadian Law. We are deeply concerned with how this organization is engaging in practices that are directly aligned with forms of religious, political and ideological radicalization. The normalization of these discriminatory beliefs is increasingly divisive both locally and nationally and undermines the fabric of our democracy.
We want to be clear, we feel the event demonstrated an exertion of power (through domination of a public space) that is inappropriate in higher education. In effect, any campus community member walking by was exposed to a conversation that they may not have freely chosen to engage with. This is particularly troubling for students who identify as queer and who may have been walking by and encountered a homophobic statement. This is also troubling for women students who may have been walking by and encountered statements consistent with victim-blaming discourse. While neither qualifies as hate speech, they do contravene Policy 33 that expects all members of the university community to act with respect, integrity, and fairness, and Policy 42 which aims to prevent and respond to gender-based violence or harm, including acts targeting a person's sexuality, gender identity, or gender expression.
Institutions of higher learning are spaces where anybody who has been admitted to attend should be able to learn freely and safely within the space. Allowing groups like Trinity Bible Church onto our campuses, even when such events may not cross hate speech lines, enacts symbolic violence and can spread gendered disinformation which normalizes extremist positions that promote hate. This event’s spread of anti-gender and homophobic values create the conditions for gendered stochastic terrorism to circulate at UW. Gendered stochastic terrorism arises when the spread of false beliefs about gender leads to acts of terrorist violence and is an increasing concern among researchers and public safety organizations in Canada. The normalization of discriminatory beliefs opens people on our campus up to hostility. This is particularly alarming in the aftermath of the 2023 Hagey Hall attack on a gender studies classroom, described by the judge as a “particularly grave hate crime.” The University of Waterloo, of all places, should take the spread of gender-related disinformation very seriously.
We end with three recommendations:
- Public notification: We recommend that if such events occur in the future, ample public notice is provided, so that potentially vulnerable groups can ensure their own comfort and safety on campus.
- Campus-wide dialogue: We recommend that University of Waterloo and WUSA review and strengthen their policies and procedures for approving, sanctioning, and overseeing public events on campus, particularly those involving potentially discriminatory messaging. This review should establish clear expectations for event transparency, signage, institutional accountability, and a duty of care for students and communities who may be targeted by such messaging.
- Institutional accountability: We recommend that more substantive conversations take place at all levels of the campus around how best to engage with discriminatory public speech events, protect targeted populations, and stop the spread of gendered disinformation and the consequential hostilities it can encourage at University of Waterloo.
This statement is made with the intention of calling in dialogue rather than calling out any members of our campus community. We offer these reflections with care and a commitment to productive discussions around how to ensure the spaces of learning on campus uphold respect for all.