timeimmortal

What happens when an ex-employee of the human rights commission (HRC) attempts to sue someone for defamation, having previously only had experience with the legal fiction of the human rights kangaroo courts in Canada (where evidence is meaningless and where a person can be found guilty if it can be established that he has, or might one day, hurt the feelings of someone else)? Especially when the someone being sued is a defamation lawyer with a “take no prisoners” attitude?

See for yourself:

I’m a defamation lawyer myself, and if I had to sum up Canadian law in four words, it would be this: get your facts straight. If your facts are correct, you have the right to your opinions on those facts — even extreme or radical opinions. So [Richard Warman]’s complaint isn’t really a lawsuit. It’s a letter to the editor.

And that’s the problem here. Warman is so used to operating in kangaroo courts — so used to human rights commissions that are run by non-lawyers, with arbitrary procedures, no fixed rules of evidence, no meaningful standards of guilt, where truth is not a defence and fair comment doesn’t exist — that he thinks he can take his Orwellian thinking out from the cloister of these star chambers into the real world. That’s my earlier point: I don’t think Warman even knows how ridiculous he looks.

The doctrine of fair comment

Warman may not share my opinion that he wastes taxpayers dollars, or acts as a censor, or that human rights commissions are a joke, etc. And his opinion might even be more reasonable than mine (it’s not). But it’s not unlawful for me to have my views. Not that my views are particularly radical — many of my exact words are echoed in the language used by PEN Canada, the CAJ, the head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Noam Chomsky(!) and a dozen newspaper editorial boards across the country. That might hurt Warman’s feelings, but hurt feelings aren’t the test of defamation law.

Most everything in those blog posts was my political opinion. I did assert a few facts: I wrote that Warman encouraged some young ruffians to assault a man with a pie. That’s not a matter of fair comment, it’s either factually accurate or not. Gentle reader, click here and tell me whether that fact is true or not. I’m just not sure how Warman can deny that, but it will be interesting to watch him try.

The other factual assertion I made is that Warman himself planted anonymous posts on the internet sites that he was stalking for a complaint. Again, it’s pretty tough for Warman to take issue with that, given that both he and commission staff admit under oath that’s how they operate.

Well, Warman has tried to deny it in the past. But that didn’t really work. Here is an interesting exchange before the tribunal: at first Warman denies that he posted anonymous, provocative comments to a website he took to the commission; then, when confronted with the fact of it, he sheepishly admits to that practice. If you’re bored, you can read this lengthy affidavit by the webmaster proving that the bigoted remarks about Sen. Anne Cools were made by Warman himself. Here’s a timeline of facts related to the Anne Cools remarks.

Give ‘im hell, Ezra.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

~ by Kenneth on February 25, 2008.