Canada’s conservative Rebel News won a lawsuit Monday against Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault for blocking Rebel News founder Ezra Levant on Twitter.
Guilbeault blocked Levant, which not only prevented Levant from sending messages to him, but also prevented Levant — a journalist — from reading Guilbeault’s messages, meaning he could not access information published by a public official.
A federal court in Ottawa, Ontario, approved a settlement between the parties and ordered Guilbeault never to block Levant again, and to pay him 20,000 Canadian dollars to cover his legal costs.
BREAKING: We just crushed Trudeau’s minister Steven Guilbeault in court.
He illegally blocked us on Twitter. Today he was ordered to unblock us & pay $20,000 to Rebel News.
His lawyers tried to get me to keep the details secret.
Read the facts here: https://t.co/do3KQzDseW pic.twitter.com/3fkZzo71B4
— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) September 11, 2023
Levant was exultant (via Rebel News):
Guilbeault finally caved — he agreed to a “consent order” against him. His lawyers must have told him that he had no case and the choice was either to settle now, or be humiliated at trial.
I should tell you, Guilbeault’s government lawyers tried to get me to sign a confidentiality clause, banning me from disclosing the details of his settlement. Even as he was admitting he had violated our rights, he wanted to keep it a secret.
What a crooked, corrupt government this is.
…
This is a win for all journalists. Because the precedent will apply to politicians of every political party. We have made Canada freer for everyone.
That’s something that the “official” civil liberties groups used to do. But we were in court alone — not a peep from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, or Canadian Journalists for Free Expression or the Canadian Association of Journalists or PEN Canada or Amnesty International. Not a single so-called civil liberties group intervened on our behalf, because they have all been colonized by Trudeau. They all support censorship.
Well, Rebel News won. Steven Guilbeault lost. And every Canadian is just a little bit freer.
It’s a great day.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation added:
A federal filing in the case points out that in various Twitter posts while Guilbeault was Canadian heritage minister, Levant called him a “kook,” a “thug” and possibly “the stupidest cabinet minister in Ottawa.”
Levant noted in his submission that Guilbeault chose to block him rather than use the social media platform’s less intrusive muting function, which allows a user to remove another user’s posts from their timeline without unfollowing or blocking that account.
One of the issues at stake was whether Guilbeault’s account was official or personal. The court decided that since he used his personal account to communicate about public affairs, the public had the right to have access to it.
A similar lawsuit in the U.S. determined in 2019 that then-President Donald Trump could not block critics on Twitter, because doing so violated the First Amendment.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.