July 22, 1997
SARNIA AVOIDS TAKING SIDES IN DEBATE
CITY COUNCIL TOOK NO ACTION ON CHATHAM'S MOTION THAT BARE-CHESTED
FEMALES BE PROHIBITED OR RESTRICTED IN PUBLIC AREAS.
By Julie Carl
Free Press Sarnia Bureau
SARNIA -- A women's group and a nudist group here are heralding city council's
decision to avoid dealing with the topless issue now as the right way to go.
"It's a mistake to make it a big issue," said Pat Brooks, president
of the board of the Sexual Assault Survivors' Centre of Sarnia-Lambton. "This
has already had a lot of press."
It's had more press, she said, than more important issues that affect women
routinely receive.
Susan Oesterreich , a spokesperson for Ontario Roaming Bares Bluewater, said
if the issue is left alone, it will be resolved on its own.
Council quietly accepted and filed at its meeting Monday a request from the
City of Chatham to endorse its call for action from the federal government. Specifically,
Chatham's resolution asks the government to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to
prohibit or limit female toplessness in public places.
Before the meeting, acting mayor Jim Foubister said he was hoping council
would recognize "it's a touchy issue" and leave it alone.
That's exactly what council did. No aldermen commented on Chatham's request.
Earlier, Mayor Mike Bradley had said there have been two or three incidents
of women choosing to go topless on Sarnia's beach at Canatara Park. City staff informed
the women the city has a bylaw forbidding women from going topless and the women
chose to cover up.
The bylaw reads: No person shall bathe in any public park unless attired
in a bathing suit.
Bradley said city legal staff advise the bylaw would hold up in court but
then, "that's what Guelph thought, too."
It was a Guelph woman who fought -- and beat -- a charge of indecent exposure
for walking topless down a city street on a hot day.
MINOR ISSUE:
The mayor called female toplessness "a minor issue in the greater scheme
of things."
He'd prefer to see officials dealing with the huge gap between men's and
women's wages and breast cancer research, among other issues.
Brooks said she too would rather see energy going into those issues than
into debating female toplessness. Particularly, she said, as North American society
is years away from reacting to the female breast with the same calm as European
society.
"We are the pornography consumers of the world," she said. "The
pornographers are never going to let breasts become just another part of the body.
There's too much money involved to not keep them sexual."
If toplessness becomes an issue in Sarnia, she suggested either council designate
an area of the beach as topless or make a bylaw which states neither men nor women
can go topless in public.
"If society wants people clothed in public, then everybody's clothed,
everybody, men and women," Brooks said.