Tuesday, May 07, 2019
In his blogging about Canada’s hate speech laws, right-wing pundit Levant defamed a young law student as a serial liar, a bigot and a Jew-hater, a judge has found
Matthew Sherwood for National Post
Joseph Brean
November 27, 2014
In his blogging about Canada’s hate speech laws, right-wing personality Ezra Levant defamed a young law student as a serial liar, a bigot and a Jew-hating “illiberal Islamic fascist,” bent on destroying Canada’s tradition of free expression, a judge has found.
For these unfair, false and “extremely serious” written comments, which were motivated by “ill will,” and showed a “reckless disregard for the truth,” Mr. Levant must pay Khurrum Awan $80,000, Judge Wendy Matheson of Ontario Superior Court ruled Thursday.
Mr. Awan is now a lawyer in Saskatchewan, but in 2007 he was the public face of a campaign to protest the representation of Muslims in
Maclean’s magazine. This led to three failed human rights complaints and spurred Canada’s first online culture war over the hate speech section of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
That law has since been repealed by the Harper government and this case was one of the last loose ends in the broader conflict. As a total victory for Mr. Awan, it represents the revenge of the “sock puppet.”
This was the condescending nickname Mr. Levant and others used for him on the theory the law student was being manipulated in his anti-Islamophobia advocacy by Mohamed Elmasry, former head of the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), who had earlier torpedoed his own credibility with inflammatory comments about the Mideast conflict on a television talk show.
But Mr. Awan did not have as close a relationship with Mr. Elmasry as Mr. Levant repeatedly claimed, nor did he share his controversial views, Judge Matheson found.
As she put it, “Much of what [Mr. Levant] wanted to talk about at trial related more to Dr. Elmasry than to [Mr. Awan].”
She ruled there is “ample evidence before me demonstrating express malice on the part of [Mr. Levant],” especially the fact he “did little or no fact-checking regarding the posts complained of, either before or after their publication.”
“I find that [Mr. Levant’s] dominant motive in these blog posts was ill will, and that his repeated failure to take even basic steps to check his facts showed a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Mr. Levant “ought to have been aware of the serious ramifications of his words on the reputation of this law student. Yet, at trial, he repeatedly tried to minimize his mistakes and his lack of diligence.”
The judge rejected the argument of Iain MacKinnon, Mr. Levant’s lawyer, readers of his blog would not take his comments “at face value” because they would be “well aware of Mr. Levant’s penchant to stir controversy and make outlandish comments.”
She ordered Mr. Levant to remove the posts from his website within 15 days — they have been posted there for years — and pay Mr. Awan $50,000 in general damages plus $30,000 in aggravated damages.
“Mr. Awan is very pleased with the decision and is grateful that at long last he has been vindicated,” said his lawyer, Brian Shiller.
‘I find that [Mr. Levant’s] dominant motive in these blog posts was ill will, and that his repeated failure to take even basic steps to check his facts showed a reckless disregard for the truth’
Responding to the ruling, Mr. Levant called it “very troubling” and said he felt compelled to appeal.
“This is a shocking case of libel chill that should concern any Canadian who is worried about radical Islam, and the right to call out anti-Semitism in the public square,” he said in an email.
“If this ruling is allowed to stand, it will be open season on anyone who campaigns against anti-Semitism. It is a national gag order, which has the effect of silencing and punishing critics of anti-Semitism.”
The roots of Mr. Awan’s case go back to the early days of the vicious debate over Section 13, the hate speech clause of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
That debate began in 2007, when Maclean’s magazine published an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone, entitled “The Future Belongs To Islam.”
Offended by the article, Mr. Awan and three fellow law students complained to the magazine about its depiction of Muslims as a threat to the West and cited several other articles in Maclean’s on the same theme.
‘If this ruling is allowed to stand, it will be open season on anyone who campaigns against anti-Semitism. It is a national gag order’
Initially, they sought space for a rebuttal, but when that failed, they filed a human rights hate speech complaint in Ontario. Others followed federally and in British Columbia, brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress.
Judge Matheson describes the law students as “naive,” and said their meeting with Maclean’s executives represented a “significant failure of communication.”
“Ironically, while their original objective was in furtherance of freedom of expression, their perceived attack on the article and the venerated Maclean’s magazine resulted in their portrayal as attacking that very freedom,” Judge Matheson wrote.
The failure of the hate speech complaint became the primary example for the argument human rights tribunals had run amok as would-be censors. The fiasco was a key motivation for the government’s repeal of Section 13, the federal Internet hate law.
This massive national pivot on hate laws, which leaves criminal prosecution as the only legal response to hate speech, was in response to a blog-based campaign led by Mr. Levant, and marked a flip-flop for the federal Conservatives, who had supported Section 13.
National Post
dissent, gagged scientists, denied climate change, lowered taxes on corporate interests promising this would boost the economy, destroyed valuable archives on waterway studies, and closed institutional libraries on the subject.
This article by Jim Stanford and Jordan Brennan provides a window to that government's economic record in their closing days. Useful to remember as we contemplate what that party is offering in this next election.
* * *
"Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have always portrayed themselves as the most capable managers of Canada’s economy. And since pocketbook issues usually dominate any election campaign, that reputation — deserved or not — served them well in the past.
"This time around, however, the economic terrain is proving less friendly. The closer we got to the fixed election date, the worse the economy became, undermining the 'stay the course' message at the heart of Conservative strategy. Indeed, Canada slipped into outright recession in the first half of 2015. Undaunted, the prime minister shrugged this off as 'a couple of weak months,' and promises better times around the corner — but only if Canadians re-elect his party.
"Economists can debate whether this year’s recession — the second on Harper’s watch — is already over, or whether falling business investment and rising consumer debt will delay a rebound. But the most damning aspect of the Conservative legacy is not a short-term cyclical downturn. It is a longer-run failure to stimulate growth, job-creation, innovation, and investment.
"After all, the only reason the oil price slump could tip the whole country into recession is because the economy had so little momentum in the first place. We’ve endured years of subpar growth ('serial disappointment,' in Stephen Poloz’s words), long before the present downturn arrived.
"Yes, the 2008-09 financial crisis was part of the problem: but it’s not the only recession Canada has experienced, nor was it the worst. More important, the slow and inconsistent recovery from that downturn ranks as the weakest in postwar history. Then, before the damage was really repaired, Canada slipped into recession again.
"We have developed a comprehensive portrait of economic performance under every Canadian government from 1946 through 2014, based on official data on 16 conventional indicators (everything from employment and labour force participation, to growth, productivity and indebtedness). Our results refute the self-congratulatory rhetoric of Conservative speechwriters.
"Far from unleashing a business-led boom, Harper has in fact presided over the weakest economic era in Canada’s postwar history. For example, from 2006 through 2014 (not even counting the current downturn), Canada experienced the slowest average economic growth since the Great Depression (measured by the expansion of GDP after inflation and population growth). Harper wasn’t even close to the next-worst prime minister: another Conservative, Brian Mulroney.
"Across other indicators, too (including job-creation, productivity, personal incomes, business investment, household debt, and inequality), the Harper government ranked last or second-last among all postwar governments. Its overall ranking was the worst of any prime minister since 1946.
"The Conservative failure to elicit more business investment and exports has been especially damaging. Those are the two most strategic components of spending in a market economy. Conservatives promised that expensive corporate tax cuts (costing $15 billion per year) would boost investment, and that signing more free trade deals would do the same for exports. But neither worked. Exports hardly grew at all under Harper (the slowest in postwar history), and business investment was stagnant, now declining. Government spending cuts, enforced in earnest after the Conservatives won their majority in 2011, only exacerbated the macroeconomic funk."
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