If you are on twitter and you accuse someone of criminal conduct, and you do it repeatedly, and you do it even after you know your statements to be inaccurate, well then, you probably cannot say you’re just exercising your constitutionally-protected ‘freedom of expression.’
This phrase: ‘freedom of expression’ has become for a significant number of people, a thinly veiled justification to make extreme, personally defamatory statements about others.
Making shocking defamatory statements toward others is not new. It has always gone on and Canadian courts have correctly, been aggressive in protecting reputation. Reputation, for honesty, fair-dealing, quality, competence as examples, is the raw material of modern GDP and, until now, Ontario courts still protect it.
In Hill v Church of Scientology, two prominent Toronto defence lawyers: Clayton Ruby and Morris Manning said to the media, that an Ontario prosecutor was in criminal contempt. The Supreme Court awarded $300k against the lawyers, $500k against the client (Church of Scientology) and $800k in punitive damages. The lawyers ‘freedom of expression’ did not protect making statements implying criminal conduct.
In Levant v. Day, the victim (Ezra Levant) was, himself, the bad guy in 2014 when he called a law student a number of colourful names, because that law student decided to use the go-to tool of modern censorship: the human rights commission to shut down Macleans magazine (because Macleans ran an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s book).
How very typical for an Ontario law student to use the human rights commission to clean up all the ‘hate’. It’s always just a certain kind of ‘hate’ though that these commissions prosecute. In any event, Ezra Levant had to pay that victim $80,000 for Ezra’s exercising his 2014 ‘freedom of expression’.
What goes around, comes around: In 2019, Ezra gets to insist that he wasn’t actually a ‘criminal’, that the other guy had his accusations wrong. The other guy has to pay Ezra appeal costs of $25,000 and his motion costs. We don’t yet know what will happen at trial.
I say that to bring home the fact that getting your ‘freedom of expression’ on, on Twitter might not be as costless as the ‘freedom of expression’ zealots would have you believe.
