CFE Blog

On July 30, 2018, the newly elected Ford government introduced legislation reducing the size of Toronto City Council from 47 to 25 councillors. Bill 5 was enacted in haste on August 14, 2018, about two weeks later.

Your Ward News (YWN) is a publication of unremitting offensiveness – in truth it is little more than a senseless and grotesque cartoon. Yet that is largely beside the point under the Charter. Though it took time and a concerted campaign by those offended by YWN’s existence, the law’s force was eventually brought to bear on its publishers.

Even as technology transforms the world of communication – as it has over the course of history – defamation law remains strangely impervious to change. True enough, the law has evolved over time – indeed centuries – but nonetheless seems as beholden as ever to an archaic muddle of backwater rules and concepts.

On March 8th and June 6th, 2017, the Minister of Justice introduced bills to amend the Criminal Code. The purpose of Bills C-39 and C-51 is to repeal a number of criminal offences. Blasphemous libel is on the list, but seditious libel and defamatory libel are not.

Last fall the news broke that Quebec police forces had been spying on journalists, over a period of time and almost as a matter of routine. Not only did Montreal police obtain warrants to tap into the phone and electronics of Patrick Lagacé (La Presse), close to a dozen reporters and journalists have been monitored by municipal and provincial forces, acting with and without warrants. The ensuing outrage focused on the alarming invasion of privacy and revelation that some violations took place with the law’s blessing, under warrants issued by justices of the peace.

Prime Minister Trudeau received plaudits when, on a recent state visit to China, he boasted of Canada’s commitment to free expression, which he presented as a “true Canadian value”. The prime minister exalted “a diversity of ideas, and the free ability to express them” because freedom, he said, is what drives positive change. Perhaps he and others had forgotten that as leader of the Opposition he prohibited anyone opposed to abortion from running for federal office for the Liberal Party. If that was 2014 and this is 2016, there is more.