Ottawa Stops Hate Together — or, “Women Learning to Be More Empathetic”
- Katherine Jameson Digby
- 19 minutes ago
- 13 min read
By Katherine Jameson Digby
In the early morning hours of June 16, 2026, I found myself pedalling across Ottawa to the Ron Kolbus Lakeside Centre, a city facility ten kilometres east of downtown. I was searching for the remains of the City of Ottawa’s “Women and Gender Equity Strategy,” an entity that had slowly slipped from public view during the preceding eleven months.
The June 16th event was entitled “Ottawa Stops Hate Together,” and I learned of it through my subscription to the city’s Engage Ottawa newsletter. I would not normally sacrifice a perfectly good Tuesday morning to something as nebulous as “fighting hate,” but I had reason to believe that at this session I might locate some of the characters with whom I had completely lost touch, following my disastrous attempt to engage with the “Women and Gender Equity Strategy (WGES)” in July of 2025.
Followers of Gender Dissent may have read the articles published last summer on Ottawa’s policy of including men in women’s change rooms and bathrooms across the city. I was very much looking forward to further pursuing this topic at Women and Gender Equity consultation sessions that the city had promised to hold in December 2025 and spring 2026. In spite of my repeated reminders and requests for information over the last year, neither of the two follow-up WGES public consultations took place.
So, it was in the hopes of spotting some of the lead players from the ill-fated WGES strategy, that I resolved to attend the Ottawa Stops Hate Together session eleven months later.
What reason did I have to expect that I’d be able to engage some of the WGES figures in person at a hate-stopping seminar? I was asking myself this very question as I pedalled west on June 16th.
The City of Ottawa Women and Gender Equity Strategy came into being in 2018, with Councillor Theresa Kavanaugh as its Council Liaison.
Councillor Kavanagh celebrating Capital Pride Month on Facebook, June 2022
By December of 2024, the city General Manager for Community and Social Services, submitted a report to the Finance and Corporate Services Committee, recommending that the Corporate Diversity and Inclusion Plan (CDIP), the Women and Gender Equity Strategy, and the Anti-Racism Strategy (ARS), all be rolled into an “overarching Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Framework, to streamline equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging work at the City in collaboration with the community.”
The people responsible for this framework are a branch of the city’s Community and Social Services Department. They are now known as EDIIR, which stands for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Indigenous Relations.
One of the reasons listed in the December 2024 report, for the streamlining of the three equity initiatives, is that members of the “diversity community” who were pre-approved to be consulted by the city on these topics, were apparently growing tired of getting consulted by the WGES, the ARS and the CDIP:
Staff shared that separate progress tracking and reporting across three different strategies created both duplication and gaps. The current approach also created barriers for the community, with consultation fatigue being noted, particularly by community members from equity denied groups.
pg. 3 of the CEDIB Framework report
Another reason given for the streamlining was for the potential of “synergies” promised by the intersectionality of rolling all these groups into one:
The EDIB Framework will capture greater efficiencies and synergies, consider intersectionality between race and gender and adopt cross-cutting guiding principles aligning the three strategies. In this way, the City can take an intentional and proactive approach to increasing responsiveness to resident concerns and improving the alignment and success of equity-focused initiatives across all departments.
pg. 3 of the CEDIB Framework report
The EDIIR is supposed to report annually to the Community and Social Services Committee, City Council, and the public:
GREIIRSD [the former acronym] staff will monitor, evaluate and report annually to Committee and Council as well as the public on the progress made towards achieving the goals and objectives of the strategies under this framework. The report will also identify and recommend, as appropriate, any corrective action to the strategies and tactics.
pg. 29 of the CEDIB Framework report
Thus, it seemed appropriate on June 16th that, after eleven months of silence from the Women and Gender Equity Strategy, I should come and pay my respects to this branch of the city bureaucracy that had streamlined women’s rights into so many other causes.
Upon my arrival at the main hall at Ron Kolbus Lakeside Centre, I observed that the room had been set up with ten circular tables, for four people apiece. The back of the hall had been fitted with four tables, each meant to seat eight people, and, as I was to learn, this was for the small group discussions. The start time had been announced for 9:30 a.m., so I promptly took my seat at that time, very much looking forward to sharing my opinion on what the city could do to reduce opportunities for hate crimes against women. Only eleven people were present at 9:30, and they all seemed to know one another already.
There was an agenda on the table, and some handouts outlining the goals of the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging framework. I was on the lookout for names and titles, as there is virtually no information online about who actually runs the city’s Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Indigenous Relations branch.
The literature sitting on the table informed participants that the “Ottawa Stops Hate Together campaign began in 2025 to build awareness, strengthen community networks and empower residents to prevent and respond to hate.”
I learned from the handouts that one of the events that the city had held in 2025 in their hate-stopping endeavors was a talk by Monia Mazigh, listed simply as the author of “Gendered Islamaphobia: My Journey with a Scar(f).”
The name Monia Mazigh meant nothing to me at the time, but thanks to Wikipedia I now know her to be the wife of Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian who was deported to Syria in 2002 by the US and held without charges for over a year before being returned to Canada.
Monia Mazigh appeared frequently in the media at the time that her husband was being held in Syria, and she was eventually courted by both the Liberals and the New Democratic Party to stand for office. Mazigh chose to run for the NDP, but her candidacy was unusual, in that she declared at the time to be unsupportive of same-sex marriage. Perhaps Mazigh has changed her position in the ensuing years, but it remains nonetheless interesting that her past position has not rendered her ineligible to advise the city of Ottawa on “stopping hate.”
During this half hour of waiting for things to get started at Ron Kolbus, a tall young woman approached my table. After introducing herself, Jennifer Paul informed me that she worked for the “Equity Team” at the city, and that she was the one that had been receiving my frequent messages over the past year about the lack of follow-up for the Women and Gender Equity Strategy. She politely suggested that the Ottawa Stops Hate Together session might not be the ideal forum for me to attempt to follow up on my outstanding issues from the WGES. She suggested that during the small group discussion, she could meet with me in a separate room and take note of my input.
I was so surprised to hear an acknowledgement of my previous eleven months’ worth of communication, that I agreed that a separate meeting would be a good idea. I was subsequently to change my mind, as I decided that I wanted as many witnesses as possible to hear my input.
By 10:00 a.m., there were 21 people present in the room, five of them male and the rest female. The person who introduced the proceedings was named Marion, a tall lady with short black curly hair and perhaps a native Spanish speaker. I did not catch her last name or her title.
Next to speak was Thivjan Tharmaratnam, recently appointed Director of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Indigenous Relations with the City of Ottawa. Mr. Tharmaratnam spoke about his recent participation in an event with indigenous leaders from around the world, and that participants at that event had noted that relations between indigenous and non-indigenous populations were becoming more adversarial. He highlighted the value of conversation over conflict.
After that we heard from Ariel Troster, City Councillor for Somerset Ward. Councillor Troster is the Council Liaison for Women, Gender Equity and 2SLGBTQ+ Affairs, although I couldn’t help but notice that she dropped the reference to the “plus” when introducing herself that day. Some people might say that the plus is starting to become a problem for the rainbow cause, and perhaps Councillor Troster had been quietly advised to drop it.
Councillor Ariel Troster poses with a supporter in front of City Hall, in August 2025.
In any case, Council Troster illustrated her lived experience of hate in Ottawa with a lurid description of her participation in the June 2023 counter-protest against "Billboard Chris" Elston at Broadview Public School.
Here Councillor Troster recounted how she had to “physically use [her] own body to protect children from hateful messages” delivered by “bigots attacking people.”
[See Editor’s end notes for a refresher on the fallout of that event.]
Councillor Troster concluded her remarks by committing to enforcing inclusion, but “not through hate crime laws* and police enforcement.” She claimed she was “here to listen.”
*This just in!
To continue
Nicole Redford was the next speaker, one of the few whose name actually appeared on the written agenda. According to her Linkedin profile, Ms. Redford is a “Specialist, Anti-Racism, Women and Gender Equity” with the City of Ottawa.
Ms. Redford’s main concern in her role seemed to be that police statistics** in Canada are showing a decline in hate crimes.
This cannot be an indication that hate crimes are declining, indeed it must mean the reverse, that victims of hate crimes are too afraid to report crimes to the police.
The solution is that the city “Equity Team” is in the process of setting up their own hate crime reporting mechanism, separate from that of the police. Ms. Redford concluded her talk by saying, rather worryingly, that “We’re really excited and want to get those numbers up.”
From the City of Ottawa Website, accessed on July 26, 2026
** Speaking of statistics, Alexa Lavoie of Rebel News recently reported about a Quebec child sex-crime case that exposes how Canadian authorities now record the “gender” of accused criminals and how it raises serious questions about whether Canadians are getting an accurate picture of who is actually committing certain crimes. “Stop blindly trusting Statistics Canada,” says Alexa
Continued
Ms. Redford was followed by Don Kwan, a multidisciplinary artist who started the Chinatown mixed art festival. Mr. Kwan said he had just arrived back in Ottawa from a trip to Newfoundland and hadn’t had time to prepare any remarks specific to the Ottawa Stops Hate Together event. Nonetheless he managed to speak long enough to cut into the forty-five minutes that had been allocated to small group discussions.
After Mr. Kwan’s speech, participants were invited to join one of the four tables at the back of the room, each set up for about eight people. I lurked around, angling for a seat at the table with Councillor Troster, and I suspect she was aware of this because she suddenly left the event with no explanation.
My first question during the group discussion was, “Is the content of this discussion going to be relayed to Councillor Troster so that she can hear a variety of voices on Stopping Hate?”
The facilitator at my table was Rameesha Qazi, who is described on the City of Ottawa’s Women and Gender Equity Strategy Phase 2 website as “Specialist, Women and Gender Equity.” Ms Qazi assured me that the contents of the discussion would be relayed and that she could even copy me on the correspondence when she communicated with Councillor Troster.
Also at my table were two women who work with Ottawa Victim Services, and no fewer than three other young women who were there purportedly to take notes.
The two women from Victim Services made some inquiries into how the proposed non-police hate crime reporting mechanism would work. The term “gender-based violence” was used, and here I took the opportunity to remark that this term does not seem as useful to me as its predecessor, “violence against women and girls.” If everyone has a “gender,” then “gender-based violence” is a bit like having a term for “human-on-human-violence.”
If everyone has a “gender,” then “gender-based violence” is a bit like having a term for “human-on-human-violence.” —KJD
There was also reference to “Islamophobia,” so here I raised a point that I learned about from Douglas Murray: the validity of discrimination based on immutable or mutable characteristics.
There is widespread agreement throughout the world today that discrimination based on immutable characteristics is wrong. To judge someone on their height, hair colour, skin colour, disability or other factor beyond their control is not legitimate grounds of discrimination.
However, we all carry with us a lot of mutable characteristics, one of the most notable is our belief systems.
While we should all be granted the right to believe in things that are far-fetched, untrue, or even harmful, we should also expect to be judged by others for voluntarily holding these beliefs. If someone devises a belief system that is harmful to women, I maintain the right to discriminate against that person for holding harmful beliefs. And yet in our scramble to turn everything into a “human right” we have begun to demand that mutable beliefs, such as religion, deserve protection as grounds for non-discrimination.
If someone devises a belief system that is harmful to women, I maintain the right to discriminate against that person for holding harmful beliefs. —KJD
Here one of the city staff at the table showed some understanding of what I was getting at, when she noted that we needed to learn how to sit in difference, how to disagree without wishing harm to the other party.
I pushed the point that, with religious belief systems in particular, such as Gender Ideology, we should be able to tolerate believers in our midst without agreeing to convert ourselves. Dismissing this type of disagreement as “hate” is childish and unproductive.
I told my small discussion group that many women in Ottawa are unwilling to share bathrooms and change rooms with men. The city’s policy of welcoming men into women’s spaces in the name of “inclusion” risks driving women out of civic life.
I told the staff that if they had never heard this point raised, it is maybe due to living in a DEI bubble, where they are permitted to speak only with people who have already agreed to express pre-approved views.
I then nearly fell off my chair when one of the city staff women at my table nodded and said, “Yeah, maybe we are in a DEI bubble” - !!
The final point that I was able to land came from my exposure to Helen Pluckrose. I submitted that the demands of Postmodern Intersectionality had done a lot to destroy civil discourse in the human rights world.
Intersectionality demands that every group be divided neatly into oppressor/oppressed classes, based on identity factors such as male/female, black/white, heterosexual/homosexual, able-bodied/disabled, settler/indigenous.
The job of the committed intersectionalist is to establish, in every interaction, which party carries the greatest number of oppressed identities, and then that person’s views should prevail. Watch this in action at the 2026 Leadership Convention of the Canadian Federal New Democratic Party:
Screen shot from: “Canada NDP Leadership Convention ‘Points of Privilege’ and ‘Equity Cards,’ posted by Political Stuff
A world where arguments are weighed not on their merit, but on the number of markers of oppression claimed by the speaker, has incentivized victimhood over reasoning, and has made it impossible to discuss conflicting human rights claims.
One of the final points made at my small group discussion table was that we need to have “empathy.”
Much as I would have liked to have ended on a positive note, I had to make a nuisance of myself one last time and point out that the call for empathy often turns women against their own interests. Sometimes to protect the interests of an actual oppressed group, one must resist the temptation to empathize with the oppressor. Some situations call for judgement, not empathy.
Sometimes to protect the interests of an actual oppressed group, one must resist the temptation to empathize with the oppressor. Some situations call for judgement, not empathy. —KJD
As things wrapped up, I scanned the room and realized that, of the five men who had attended the session, only two had bothered to remain for the group discussion.
And thus the Ottawa Stops Hate Together session concluded as a women-only event, with general agreement that we all needed to be more empathetic.
Katherine Jameson Digby is an Ottawa-based journalist and advocate for women's sex-based rights and child safeguarding.
Editor’s end notes
Three interesting things to know about Ottawa City Councillor Ariel Troster
Councillor Ariel Troster participated — and LIED — about her experience as a counter protestor (while serving as an elected official) at an “Education over Indoctrination” demonstration organized by “Billboard Chris” Elston and student activist Josh Alexanxder in June 2023.
The Ottawa Citizen published an excellent photo documentary on the clash of values and rights that played out in this quiet Ottawa neighbourhood:
Ottawa City Councillor Ariel Troster (right) and former City Councillor and current Member of Provincial Parliament Catherine McKenney (left) fighting bigotry on Broadview Avenue in Nepean June 9, 2023.
A funny thing happened when the MPP for Ottawa Centre, Joel Harden, faked a punch to his own face, claiming it was delivered by an anti-“gender ideology” activist. Councillor Troster declared hours later on her social media that she had actually witnessed the hit:
A resulting petition calling for Harden’s and Troster’s resignations likened the situation to the self-staged-and-paid-for hate-crime hoax attack of American television actor, Jussie Smollet:
“Joel Harden, MPP for Ottawa Centre, is being branded as Canada's Jussie Smollett after falsely claiming he was punched in the face during a protest against gender ideology in Ottawa… City councillor Ariel Troster is also facing backlash for falsely claiming that she witnessed the attack.”
Another interesting thing to know about Ottawa City Councillor Ariel Troster’s activism
A couple of weeks after the Ottawa Stops Hate Together session, Councillor Troster argued for the right of Ottawa school children to march in the Capital Pride Parade. Troster asserted that to take away the students’ right to march in the streets with Queers for Palestine, the Communst Party of Canada and representatives from the furry contingent (link NSFW) was “abandoning queer and trans kids when they need them the most.”
As a result of Councillor Troster’s interventions, as well as those of school board trustee Donna Blackburn, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board reversed its decision and has once again registered its participation in the Capital Pride Parade.
Now Ottawa’s youth will again be readily accessible to Daddy Therapy club members and masked puppy players (rather like the ones seen below in “Karla Marx’s — or “Victoria” Bucholtz’s — boudoir photos).
Well played, Councillor Troster and Trustee Blackburn!
Mount Royal University “gender studies” professor and LGBTQIA+ activist “Victoria” Bucholtz holds the leash on masked friends-on-all-fours in this previously accessible Instagram post which became “unavailable” after Gender Dissent published this article about the man last fall.
More recently, Councillor Troster clarified that it is okay to discriminate against some people because of their religion — even if it means some communities may not get the help they need during a natural disaster.
Following the devastating flooding that hit some Ottawa neighbourhoods during an extreme weather event in July, Councillor Troster thought it reasonable to condemn the City’s use of the evangelical Christian organization, Samaritan’s Purse, to assist in the emergency response.
"I understand we need to have all hands on deck, but I'm very, very uncomfortable with this organization being welcomed into our city," [Councillor Ariel Troster] said. "I don't believe that disaster response should be managed by religious organizations that have a very clear political perspective."
Goodness, no.
We wouldn’t want any of that “clear political perspective” muddying the waters during an emergency, would we, Councillor?
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