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The company you keep:
http://ezralevant.com/2009/02/ignatieff-campaign-files-5mill.html
http://ezralevant.com/2009/02/ignatieff-campaign-files-5mill.html
Ignatieff campaign files $5-million lawsuit to cover up Adscam involvement
By Ezra Levant on February 23, 2009 2:52 AM
A senior aide to Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has filed a $5,000,000 defamation lawsuit against me for discussing his involvement with Adscam, the corruption scandal that brought down the Liberal Party.
The suit was filed by Warren Kinsella, a Liberal lobbyist and the head of Ignatieff’s war-room. It’s clearly a nuisance suit, designed with two goals in mind:
1. Cost me time, money and hassle; and
2. Scare other journalists away from writing about the Adscam connections in Ignatieff’s team. It’s called libel chill, and it’s a warning to other political reporters that if they ask the wrong questions about the Liberal Party, they’ll be hit with a lawsuit, too.
You can see the lawsuit here.
It's going to fail spectacularly, and hurt the Liberal Party.
It’s just the latest erratic move by Kinsella, who has had an awful month as the Liberal war room boss. From having to issue a groveling apology for his anti-Chinese slur that Chinese restaurants serve cat meat, to his failed attempt to bully TVO into cancelling an on-air guest, it’s been a gong show over there.
Filing a $5-million lawsuit to try to silence questions about his Adscam involvement probably isn’t Kinsella’s smartest move. I’m not sure why someone who wants to stop people talking about Adscam would create a conversation-starter like a massive lawsuit. And then there’s the prickly matter of Kinsella subjecting himself (and his private documents) to unlimited cross-examination by me – I mean days or weeks, not the brief appearance he made before Justice John Gomery’s Inquiry.
I think that, like Kinsella’s awful judgment calls on Catscam and TVOscam, he is clouded by his own emotions. He’s not acting professionally – if he were advising a client other than himself, I’m sure he’d tell them just to ignore my little blog, rather than draw attention to it. But he’s giving himself advice – and, as the old adage goes, he’s got a fool for a client. He’s acting out of pride and vengeance. And it’s hurting Ignatieff.
One should always take a lawsuit seriously, but I can’t help chuckling at this one. It’s just so over-the-top, so legally baseless and so exaggerated it’s laughable.
First: the largest defamation judgment ever given by a Canadian court was less than a third as big, $1.6 million, to Casey Hill.
Hill was a top prosecutor in Toronto, with a sterling national and international reputation. He was defamed by the Church of Scientology, whose lawyer stood on the steps of a Toronto courthouse, in a lawyer’s gown, and accused Hill of illegal conduct – a stunning accusation that received massive coverage on TV and the newspapers. Literally hundreds of thousands of people heard the defamation. It was part of an ongoing vendetta by the Scientologists against Hill – they actually had a file on him marked “Enemy Canada”.
Compare Hill’s reputation to Kinsella’s. Kinsella is a professional mudslinger whose career highlight – by his own admission – was going on national TV to mock those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. He’s so foul-mouthed that he even calls his own punk band Sh*t From Hell (I can testify first-hand that is an accurate appellation). I suppose like Casey Hill, Kinsella has an international reputation – Kinsella made huge headlines in China for his cat meat remarks, and then again for his equally embarrassing “ironic apology” that blamed everyone else for getting so upset about it.
Kinsella thinks his reputation is worth more than the biggest defamation award in history, and that my blog has hurt him more than anyone has ever been defamed in Canadian history.
Does he not see how this suit makes him look? It’s a combination of bad judgment, thin-skin, and a brazen abuse of legal process.
And all for a blog entry in which I accurately quote Justice John Gomery’s judicial findings that Kinsella had conducted himself in a “highly inappropriate” manner.
The suit is legal suicide – especially after the Supreme Court’s revolutionary ruling on “fair comment” in the WIC Radio case.
We know Kinsella hates it when people mention his involvement in Adscam. He threatened to sue the National Post’s Andrew Coyne over it. He threatened to sue the Globe’s Normal Spector over it. He once called Justice Gomery’s inquiry a “pile of judicial garbage” – classy, coming from a lawyer. But for some reason Kinsella never did the one thing you’d expect someone to do who actually believed that Justice Gomery was wrong: he never appealed his findings. So they stand: Kinsella’s conduct was “highly inappropriate”. Kinsella had sent a memo telling public servants to channel advertising and polling money through Chuck Guite – who was later convicted of fraud.
Warren Kinsella ain’t Casey Hill. And I’m not a Scientologist making things up. Kinsella has a poor reputation – one that he has earned.
So why would Kinsella sue me for $5 million? As loyal readers know, Kinsella already sued me last year because I criticized his meeting with the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress. That was laughable, too, because he did in fact meet with the CIC and gave them advice and assistance. How do I know about this? Because Kinsella boasted about it on his own website.
That lawsuit was bizarre, but it was only for $50,000 – clearly designed to be a nuisance suit, probably unlikely to make it to trial, just enough to cause me to have to spend time and money to lawyer up.
But by adding two more zeroes to his claim, Kinsella does a few things that will come back to bite him – and Ignatieff – in the tush.
First and most obviously, he attracts attention to something Ignatieff doesn’t want to talk about: Adscam, and the Liberal reputation for corruption. Ignatieff was living in the U.S. until 2006, so he probably doesn’t know that Kinsella actually publicly declared his belief in the character of Chuck Guite – the man at the centre of the Adscam scandal -- before Guite was convicted of defrauding Canadian taxpayers. How much of this did Ignatieff know when he asked Kinsella to join his campaign?
Second, by suing me for more than $50,000, Kinsella takes his action out of “simplified procedure”, and into regular rules of court – so he is now subject to examinations for discovery. That means he must answer potentially endless questions about his role in Adscam, under oath. And the answer “that’s confidential” just doesn’t hold up. All of his documents, notes, e-mails and other memos must be disclosed to me.
Third, Kinsella opens himself up to real cost consequences when he loses, which he will. Judges don’t like nuisance suits at the best of times – they’re not interested in being a prop for Kinsella’s war-room. A $5-million nuisance suit opens Kinsella up to paying much more of my own legal costs.
Kinsella and I have been trading political barbs for ten years. We have appeared opposite each other on radio and TV, even on Lloyd Robertson’s CTV election night desk in 2000. Political sparring is what we do – I always assumed it was in good humour.
But about a year ago, something snapped with Kinsella – he just couldn’t countenance my battle against the censorship of Canada’s human rights commissions. He particularly hated my criticisms of Richard Warman, the former Canadian Human Rights Commission staffer who has been the complainant in the majority of censorship hearings prosecuted by the CHRC. Kinsella lost his cool over the subject. Instead of acting like a professional pundit or party activist, he started fighting personally.
I have to admit, I’m still half-expecting him to say “just kidding!” at any moment, because what he’s doing is just so spectacularly bizarre and ineffective. Far from marginalizing me and other free speech advocates over the past year, he has brought attention to our campaign for free speech. And far from grinding me into submission, as he has done with other people he has targeted with libel chill in the past, he has galvanized my convictions. That, along with the generous support of my website’s readers, has allowed me to parry the two dozen human rights complaints, defamation suits and law society complaints filed by Kinsella, Warman and their allies.
I haven’t asked for any help with my legal funds in two months, but I regret that Kinsella’s new lawsuit does require me to incur more expenses – a statement of defence right away, likely some preliminary motions, and then the meticulous work of discoveries. Discoveries themselves could top $20,000 and a trial – which could take the better part of a week – could add $50,000 more.
I’ve got one of Toronto’s best lawyers working on this case – Chris Ashby, who won one of the largest defamation cases in the past decade. I’m sure Mr. Ashby will see me through to victory, as he did for Dr. Myers. I just need to pay his bills until the court orders Kinsella to pay them for me, as they ordered the CBC to do for Dr. Myers.
Would you please help me out?
I think it’s important to beat Kinsella’s suit for four reasons:
1. It’s the right thing to do, to stand up to bullies who would try to silence political debate through libel chill.
2. If Kinsella sues over his involvement with the Canadian Islamic Congress, and Adscam, then it’s an important opportunity to properly grill him on his conduct, for the public record.
3. If I don’t fight him, Ignatieff’s Liberal campaign will be one step closer to silencing other journalists’ questions out of fear, just like Kinsella has threatened bloggers into silence before.
4. Kinsella jumped into this fight because of his opposition to our campaign for freedom of expression, and his disagreements with me over everything from radical Islam to Adscam. He is using this lawsuit to pre-empt and foreclose on those substantive debates, by trying to gag me instead. That’s just not the Canadian way.
We’ve already beaten Kinsella in the court of public opinion. Now let’s beat him in the court of law. If you can help me, please do.
If you can chip in by PayPal, please click on the button below. If you’d prefer to send in a cheque by snail mail, that’s fine. Please make cheques payable to:
“Christopher Ashby in Trust”
Attn: Ezra Levant defence fund
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Toronto ON M5C 1B5
Thank you very much. With your help, I promise to fight this battle all the way to the end.
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