My own tiny role in Canada's biggest free speech case ever

If you haven't heard, my article here might have caused a bit of legal trouble for myself and the Tribune. I was inspired (and outraged) after I read Mark Steyn's article that was reprinted in the Gazette. At the same time, I had been doing research for a sidebar about Bill C-10 funding restrictions and the history of media censorship in Canada. What I found was a disturbing pattern -- an illiberal crusade on the part of minorities to shut out unpleasant ideas using Canadian law. I wrote this up in the aforementioned op-ed, and waited. I purposely didn't feature lawyer and activist Richard Warman very prominently -- knowing that others have had trouble with him.

Luckily, Mr. Warman is competent with Google and found the article anyway, calling up the Tribune, and sending a threatening e-mail, saying my article potentially libeled and defamed him.

The following elements of the article are libelous of
me:
i) the article falsely describes my human rights work
and then links it to “crypto-fascism”;
ii) the article wrongly asserts that I filed a human
rights complaint against David Icke;
iii) the article wrongly asserts that I am the
complainant in almost 50% of all Canadian human rights
cases; and,
iv) the article wrongly asserts that my concerns about
David Icke’s connections with the dissemination of
anti-semitic material are false and based upon his
theories about extra-terrestrials.

In his defense, two of those are true. I did accidently mistranslate Mark Steyn's words about being a plaintiff in 50% of all section 13 federal cases to "50% of all human rights cases." Also, he did not file a human rights complaint against Icke, just petitioned to have his books removed from libraries across the West. That was sloppy of me.

At the same time, he requested "that the McGill Tribune remove this article immediately from your website. Further, that a full retraction and apology in language to be agreed from Mr. Tau and the Tribune appear in the next hard-copy edition of the Tribune with the same prominence and location of the original article. Also, that this same retraction and apology be placed in perpetuity on the Tribune's website in place of the original article. Lastly, that the Tribune issue DMCA notices to all others reposting the article in order to prevent further dissemination of the libel."

Luckily, the Trib editors have a bit of sense. The accidental mis-information will be corrected; the article itself will not be taken down. But there's a larger fight here. The Globe and Mail has a pretty good editorial about the matter, and Rick Mercer has a pretty good rant. Ezra Levant is still being sued (but not by Richard Warman) in a human rights court, and Canadians still don't have any meaningful right to express controversial ideas, because of an illiberal censorship regime of political correctness.

Few Americans even know this is going on. Canada is not an autocratic country by any means -- but at the same time, its got a long way to go to be the truly liberal oasis that it often proclaims itself to be. Tolerance breeds tolerance, responsibility breeds responsibility and censorship breeds seething discontent. Canada has state-imposed censorship with it comes to such things. Its time for anti-liberal shenanigans like this to end.