A Canadian billboard company cancelled a contract with a Manitoba pro-life group, saying that the requested image “creates too much controversy” and that the company received “a lot of backlash” for similar designs in the past.
Susan Penner, the executive of Life Culture, a pro-life organization in Steinbach, Man., told True North that her organization intended to use the same image it used in a campaign with Pattison Outdoor Advertisements the previous year but was shot down this time.
The image featured a pregnant woman cradling her belly. The caption read, “Celebrate the gift of life!” and included Life Culture’s website address. Penner told True North in an interview that the billboard was meant to remind people, in a time of widely accessible euthanasia and abortions, that “life and pregnancy is a gift.”
Emails from November between Pattison Outdoor and Life Culture provided to True North show that the billboard advertiser initially agreed to provide advertising space for Life Culture in December for Christmas at two Winnipeg locations and one in Steinbach.
Within less than a week, Penner received an email informing her that Pattison would no longer provide the service to the pro-life group.
“Susan, I regret to inform you that my compliance department will not allow your creative to post on our inventory,” the email said. “The category of the content is pro-life/pro-choice, and it simply creates too much controversy for us.”
When Penner asked what had changed, as the group had used billboard space last year in Steinbach, Pattison Outdoor replied that it had “encountered a lot of backlash for similar designs” posted throughout Canada in 2024.
“Our compliance department has had to expand our restrictions,” a Pattison Outdoor representative said in the email. “We cannot take the risk of public complaints.”
Penner made a point of not wanting to “go on a witch hunt” against the company, asserting that she just wanted to raise awareness that companies in Canada are refusing service due to the so-called “controversy” of calling a woman’s pregnancy a gift.
“How have we gotten so far in our country that life has become so offensive that a billboard designed to highlight the beauty and excitement of pregnancy is deemed controversial,” she told True North in an interview.
She said she’s concerned about a culture of fear in Canada that a “pro-abortion activist government” has cultivated that she credits as a leading cause of the incident.
“Our government creates fear by pitting life and women’s rights against each other. Businesses fear the legal and economic consequences if there’s any indication they support life. Churches fear losing a charitable probation status…Individuals fear losing friends or acceptance,” Penner said.
John Carpay, the president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a civil liberties group in Canada, said that Life Culture may have grounds for a human rights complaint in Manitoba.
Carpay said Life Culture could argue that it was discriminated against based on protected grounds of creed, and religious belief under human rights codes. The Human Rights Code of Manitoba states that organizations cannot discriminate based on “political belief, political association or political activity.”
He said that defending a group’s right to say unpopular things is the bedrock of progress in society. He noted an example of a man who changed the way people understood science but was mocked for saying doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies, as many mothers were dying from infections.
“You could come up with hundreds of examples of progress that would not have happened without people feeling upset. Comfortable majorities get upset when their cherished notions are challenged,” Carpay said. “If we want to move forward towards better scientific understanding, economy, laws, and civilization, We have to put up with comfortable majorities feeling upset.”
Penner did not indicate whether she planned to seek legal redress.
Pattison Outdoor did not respond to True North’s requests for comment.