Ever since Ezra Levant came to the attention of Samizdata readers, thanks to a posting by Perry just over a year ago, I have had his blog on my personal blogroll and have occasionally visited there. But I do not read all of it. Sometimes the sheer detail of Canadian politics becomes too much to endure. But this recent posting I did read, right through, with great pleasure. Some political hack called Warren Kinsella, who sounds like a cross between Alastair Campbell and Derek Draper, has sued Levant for defamation, demanding five million dollars. The idea was presumably to make people scared of Kinsella, and maybe it has. But not Levant.
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.
What is Adscam, I wonder? Something that makes Kinsella look bad, presumably. I ask this to show how right Levant is about how this bizarre and way-over-the-top lawsuit causes faraway people like me with no direct interest in any of this to get drawn into the story. Levant is asking for donations. Defending against lawsuits like this, thanks to the internet, can now be paid for by sympathisers.
The bigger picture here, or part of it, is that the political left is losing its grip on the means of political communication, and it does not like it. Time was when people like Kinsella could get up to all kinds of mischief and nobody would say a word. If anyone did complain, the story would be told from Kinsella’s point of view and then forgotten. Thanks to people like Ezra Levant, those days are passing. But Kinsella seems to be having a problem adjusting to this new media reality. It looks to me like Kinsella is really suing Levant for the more elemental crime, if that’s the right phrase, of not grovelling. Levant doesn’t know his place. But Levant does know his place. It is Kinsella who no longer seems to understand his.
The bigger party political picture is that Kinsella risks damaging his political master. This is a certain Michael Ignatieff, known to Brits only as a talking head on late night culture shows on the telly, but now a Big Cheese politician in Canada.
For more on Adscam, here’s a start:
(Link)
Ed Morrissey has moved on to Hot Air, but this was great work by him at CQ
No one can top the overview that Ed Morrissey provided throughout the Adscam affair. The reason that he was the contact person for the source [who heard the entire hearing] was that the Liberal government, through Gomery, threatened all Canadian media, specifically including blogs with prosecution if they aided any news of the evidence leaking out to the public. Canadian blogs did stand up to their government, but they did it by linking to Morrissey’s American blog. And as a result, a lot of Canadian blogs are no longer officially based in Canada, and have mu.nu hosts. That way they cannot be seized or censored by the Canadian government.
While I have no trust in governments of the Right; I have to note that today it is governments of the Left, be they called Liberal, Labour, or Democrat that are willing and eager to openly push for tyranny; usually with the voluntary cooperation of the media. They depend on the disbelief of the public that it could really be happening in what was once a free country. The people depend on the protections of laws and Constitutions. When regimes take power who believe that laws and Constitutions are mere scraps of paper, then they become so in reality; absent armed resistance. We are seeing it now in our poor country.
Subotai Bahadur
Time for yet another fifty buck donation for Ezra.
I wonder if Ezra can counter-sue for abuse of process.
The merits of the counter-suit would be based on the merits of Kinsella’s original suit–which means that even if Kinsella wants to drop his lawsuit, Ezra could compel him to attend a deposition and answer the questions (or face discovery sanctions, which can include being held indefinitely in jail in contempt of court, at least in the USA).
I wonder if Ezra can sue the Liberal Party for abuse of process? Are they funding Kinsella’s suit?
Brian,
Thank you for confirming that I am not the only one enthralled by the long running soap which is Ezra Levants life.
>Some political hack called Warren Kinsella, who sounds
>like a cross between Alastair Campbell and Derek
>Draper,
Perhaps a cross between Alastair Campbell, Derek
Draper, and Johnny Rotten?
Ezra Levant needs to thank his lucky stars that he doesn’t live within the jurisdiction of the UK’s libel laws.
Warren Kinsella is both supremely arrogant and supremely stupid. He belongs to the useless idiots who haven’t yet noticed that the balance of political power in Canada has shifted to the west. For years the Liberal Party of Canada has tried to destroy the oil sands project in Alberta because as Marc Lalonde a former Liberal finance minister put it we couldn’t tolerate all that wealth accruing to Alberta. Now the Liberals have only Metro Toronto as a sure power base but they haven’t yet caught on to the fact that there’s a big, populous country outside their cozy little bolt hole.
For years the Liberal Party of Canada has tried to destroy the oil sands project in Alberta because as Marc Lalonde a former Liberal finance minister put it we couldn’t tolerate all that wealth accruing to Alberta.
He really said that?
`some political hack…’
Careful, ol’ Warren Catmeat might sue you too Brian.
Adscam, in a nutshell, was essentially a kickback scheme: the Liberal government would give millions to ad agencies to `promote Canada’; the agencies did very little, but pocket a commission, and then the rest would be given back to the Liberal party of Canada as a donation!
So in other words, AdScam is Canadian for Stimulus, Eh?
Levant and Kinsella are two sides of the same coin. Both have worked for and brought shame to their respective parties and neither are interested in doing anything more than feeding their inflated ego. They are Canada’s version of Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala.
So then Levant goes around filing baseless lawsuits to silence his political opponents? Maybe you don’t like the man, but that’s no excuse for dishonesty. And who cares what his motivation is? The man has done yeoman’s work in defending free speech in Canada.
So then Levant goes around filing baseless lawsuits to silence his political opponents?
Yes, he does.
Maybe you don’t like the man
I don’t like either of them but I do find them highly entertaining in a three stooges kind of way.
Then surely you can provide an example.
Hot off the press, so to speak.
I will have some new news soon regarding my lawsuit with Ezra Levant and his use of defamation law to libel chill me into silence.
Then of course there was the ridiculous lawsuit against the Western Standard, the very magazine he started. Levant is just as litigious as Kinsella.
Robert,
Do we know precisely what libel he is being sued for, and do we have any independent confirmation? I can see lots of comments scattered around the blogosphere where Merle complains he is being sued, but unlike Ezra, he doesn’t go into any details. All he says is “libel”, which is uninformative. It seems distinctly out of character, and strategically most unwise for Ezra to do something like this. And he appeals for money to support his case.
There’s something distinctly odd about it. And I’d be interested to know if Ezra has made any comment.
It’s worth noting that even assuming everything here is as stated, there is a difference between an actual libel and mere political incorrectness. I wouldn’t make too much of that, but the two cases, and the procedures of the courts in which they are examined, are distinctly different.
And I’d be interested to know if Ezra has made any comment.
Ezra doesn’t talk about the libel suits he files. That’s how he keeps the fact that he’s as litigious as Kinsella from his readers who might not be so willing to pay for his legal bills if they knew he was raking in money from his own lawsuits.
Re Terleski…
Robert, one of Canada’s more notorious left-wing bloggers, isn’t giving you the full scoop…
Terleski wrote a letter to the editor of FFWD magazine, a free weekly paper in Calgary. Said letter said some questionable stuff. Ezra sued both the weekly and Terleski. The weekly, If I understand it correctly, settled because Terleski was unable to factually back his accusations at that time. Terleski himself had been given the opportunity to settle. All he’d have to do is write a formal letter of apology and kick a small sum ($1,000.00?) towards Ezra’s legal costs. That would have ended it but, no, Terleski decided to have a chat with Kinsella and after that chat, decided to file a statement of defense and move through to discoveries.
How do I know that Merle talked to Kinsella? Because Merle told me that he talked to Kinsella… And I think it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever done…
Merle Terleski is a friend of mine and though I may not totally agree with the suit filed by Ezra, it isn’t a freedom of speech issue. He’s being given due process under the law. He’s not being hauled before the kangaroo courts of our HRCs or censored by the state. He’s not being hit/threatened with multiple suits at the same time.
More to the point of Robert’s original comment; Terleski and Ezra are two peas in a pod politically speaking. Both are patriotic freedom loving conservatives. For Robert to assert that Ezra is suing Terleski to silence a political opponent, it’s a flat out lie…
Kinsella has no particular talent or intelligence, in fact he’s kind of stupid.
What made him valuable to the liberal party was his utter lack of ethics and morals.
He’d crawl into the gutter and pull any and every dirty trick for them.
He’s basically a shithouse rat, he’ll do anything to survive or get ahead.
Yes, Michael indeed Marc Lalonde did say that. He was my MP – Montreal/Outremont and we used to call him the wicked witch of Outremont because of his separated at birth resemblance to the witch (I’m melting ! I’m melting!) in the Wizard of Oz. It was typical of the Liberals’ contempt for the great unwashed of the western provinces and they like silly Warren never foresaw a payback time.
And as usual, as soon as McClelland is confronted with the actual facts, he does his best Monty Python improv of “Run away Run away”….
Well the oil sands story is not over since, on top of the decreased price of oil, there is a huge story and pics in the current issue of National Geographic which will turn the oil sands projects into an international cause célèbre on the order of the seal hunt and the seal puppies which Brigitte Bardot and Paul McCartney and ex-wife care so much about.
This will not help the economy of the West nor of Canada. Luckily they didn’t find any ancient Indian burial grounds in the area (it is really land that was useless up to now). Just reading in today’s National Post (Gradek may have solution to Syncrude tailing ponds) in section FP6 – Financial Post section that a small firm has come up with a unique technology that involves proprietary polymer, which look like Corn Pops, that attract tar-like bitumen while repelling water. “If all goes well, not only will developers be able to use them to stop the spread of contaminated (with oilsands tailings) ponds, but recover oil that goes to waste.”
In the meantime there will be that photo of 500 ducks who landed in a pond of the waste at Syncrude Canada’s Alberta site last spring shown over and over again, like that infamous photo that environmentalists love of a so-called stranded polar bear on a melting iceberg (he eventually just swam off to safety).
“And as usual, as soon as McClelland is confronted with the actual facts, he does his best Monty Python improv of “Run away Run away”….”
Damn, Platty beat me to it. You should be honoured – Robert usually only drops one slightly tangential comment and leaves.
Well, for sufficiently large values of ‘honoured’.