CHRC lawyer threatens me with another lawsuit. (I'm still "serene")
See update below.
An employee of the Canadian Human Rights Commission has threatened me with another lawsuit, because I criticized his conduct at the CHRC.
So now the government is suing its political critics. Sorry – are we in Russia or Canada?
The CHRC staffer is Giacomo Vigna, one of the CHRC lawyers who prosecutes section 13 "hate speech" cases. And he’s also a bit of a buffoon. One day last year, he stopped an entire tribunal hearing because he said he wasn’t feeling “serene”.
Nobody could understand what he was talking about, but they stopped the trial anyways, at enormous cost to the taxpayer – the government had to pay for all of the other lawyers' costs for travelling across the country to be there. The tribunal chairman demanded a doctor’s note, which Vigna gave his solemn professional undertaking to provide. It’s been more than a year, and Vigna hasn’t complied with his promise. The CHRC had to drop him from the case and hire a new lawyer at great expense, because the trial couldn’t continue until Vigna kept his promise. How embarrassing.
I learned all of the above from reading a transcript of the trial. You can see the details here, for yourself, starting at page 4867. I’m not quite sure what Vigna's legal argument is. Is he disputing the facts, as captured by the court stenographer?
Just to keep track, this is the second lawsuit threatened by Vigna. And it's on top of the lawsuit already filed by Richard Warman, the former CHRC employee who remains the heaviest user of the CHRC's section 13 "hate speech" law. Out of 13 Internet cases to have gone to a full hearing, 12 of them have been Warman's. Vigna and Warman were a team at the CHRC, in fact -- Vigna was the CHRC's lawyer prosecuting Warman's complaint against Marc Lemire.
And then there's the defamation threat against me by Warren Kinsella. Kinsella has been the CHRC's lonely defender in the public square. He's friends with Warman -- they even share the same defamation lawyer against me. Kinsella is also part of the "human rights" industry himself, if marginally, having written a loving book about it. And he once gave a keynote speech to the "human rights" industry's luxurious annual convention in Banff. Nice gig.
So that's four defamation suits, all filed or threatened by members of the "human rights" industry. And then there's the two "human rights" complaints themselves (one of which was abandoned, one of which continues against me). And then there are other legal assaults (twelve of them, actually) that have been thrown at me, which I’ll describe another day.
And then there’s the odd death threat.
If that sounds excessive, you're getting the picture. It's a strategy. It's called "lawfare", and it's an attempt to smother me under so many hassles and costs that I abandon my criticism of Canada's HRCs and their abuse of real human rights, like freedom of speech.
They're not even subtle about it. Warman calls his strategy "maximum disruption". He boasts he files legal actions against his enemies just to cause them a hassle. Kinsella calls it “Kicking Ass”. Now you'll understand why I'm putting "human rights" in quotation marks when talking about them.
Instead of rebutting my criticisms, these folks think that if they just throw enough nuisance suits at me I'll pack up and leave.
Not bloody likely.
And not as long as I have the support of the blogosphere to cover my legal fees. I know that support frustrates my antagonists. See, this is the part in their fantasy where I'm supposed to crumple under the weight of their lawsuits, and beg for their forgiveness -- like so many of their previous targets have done. This isn't where I'm supposed to say "not bloody likely.”
Enough preamble. Let me show you Vigna's new legal threat. You can find it here. It was served on one of my lawyers in Toronto.
You will see that it is written entirely in French. My translation of it is here.
Vigna speaks perfect English. My lawyer is unilingually English. The words I wrote that he complained about are in English. The fact that Vigna chose to write his demand to my lawyer in French tells you that he is trying to do a little "maximum disruption" of his own. I don't dispute that Vigna technically has the legal right to file a lawsuit in Ontario in French -- though that will add some cost and hassle to my defence, which is clearly his intended effect.
But he is going much beyond that. He is writing his general correspondence – not his court pleadings, but his day-to-day communications with my lawyers – in French. He's using bilingualism as a weapon. He probably thinks he's pretty tricky. I'd say it proves my point -- he's a little off balance and a lot unprofessional, the very things he's denying in his suits. And it shows a larger sickness in the CHRC: instead of using laws like “human rights” legislation and “bilingualism” as shields to protect people, they’re being used as weapons, to battle people. They’re being abused – especially by activist-bureaucrats.
I’m not going to fisk the whole demand. I think it’s pretty clear that Vigna ought to get himself a lawyer other than himself. He’s not particularly experienced at civil litigation – he’s more used to the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel practice of prosecuting hate speech cases, where a 100% conviction rate suggests that the work isn’t particularly challenging. I’m not sure how he’ll do in a real court – where, unlike section 13 hate speech cases, truth and fair comment are defences. But even if Vigna had experience and expertise in defamation law, it’s clear that he’s -- uh, how can I phrase this – not serene enough to use good judgment in his own case.
I don’t propose to go through all of Vigna’s minutiae. But there are a few points I’d like to address.
Vigna – like so many people in the “human rights” industry – characterizes people who disagree with him as law-breakers. Either you agree with him, or you're an outlaw. In particular, he’s mad about this blog entry I made about the harassment that Vigna’s private investigator subjected my parents to. It takes an extra helping of chutzpah to harass my parents, and then threaten to sue me for complaining about that harassment, and even call my complaint itself harassment.
(I note that his private investigator, one Gaby Saliba, has sworn a false affidavit. Saliba swears that my father told him that I still live at my parents’ house. It’s hilarious in a way; I haven’t lived there since I was a teenager, and my parents kept telling the trespassing Saliba this. Saliba’s perjury makes it a little less funny. But the CHRC isn’t exactly known for its ethics.)
Vigna also complains that his antics – first his antics in the courtroom, and then his ham-fisted antics on my parents’ property – were reported elsewhere on the Internet. He says I’m acting in concert with other websites to intimidate him. Apparently, he thinks there should be some sort of publication ban when he wants to sue people. (I note that Kinsella, too, demanded that I not publicize his legal threats against me. Sorry -- I'm not interested in being threatened in secret.)
I note that one of the websites cited by Vigna is the white supremacist site, VNN. I’m a Jew. I’m not a member of white supremacist Internet communities. I don’t have any dealings with them.
But Vigna can’t say the same, can he? Vigna was one of the CHRC staffers who knew about their secret memberships in neo-Nazi groups. Vigna even knew the passwords and account details for such neo-Nazi memberships, including one called Jadewarr.
You’d think that a man who had access to membership privileges on neo-Nazi websites wouldn’t exactly be bringing that up in court, especially when the suit is about his reputation. I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear about some shocking “news” on Stormfront or VNN that just happens to justify the latest CHRC tyranny, my first thoughts are “the CHRC planted it themselves.” That’s because the secret accounts that Vigna, Warman and others at the CHRC had access to were in fact used to plant hundreds of hateful messages online, and were used to entrap the CHRC’s targets. I’ve never had the access codes to a neo-Nazi website. Vigna has. It’s just creepy that he’d try to tag that on me.
I’m not going to dignify Vigna’s response with any more time. I’m going to put a top defamation lawyer on the case, and tell him to fight Vigna hard.
I'm going to make sure we subpoena all the CHRC's own records that touch on the case. Vigna is Jennifer Lynch's man. Let's get her on the record about his conduct. Let's get their internal files about why Vigna was sacked from the case. And what the whole "serenity" nonsense was really about. Vigna's direct boss, the great Ian Fine, was part of the whole "serenity now" business, too. I've debated against him. Prediction: not a strong witness.
I'm going to fight hard. Not just because it’s so obviously a nuisance suit from Vigna (two, now). Not just because it’s my right as a Canadian to criticize the government, and the on-the-job conduct of government employees like Vigna (and when they harass my parents in retaliation).
But because Vigna is part of a larger pathology: an out-of-control “human rights” industry that feels it can squash criticism, rather than have to answer to it.
Dear reader, I know you’re probably growing tired of helping me out. I’m a little tired of spending my time fighting back against such suits, too. But I know that I can’t back down. I have to fight these fights all the way to the end.
Not just to win them for my own sake, but to send a message to the HRCs that the way they bully their opponents is not acceptable. That message will be sent by the trial judge to Vigna. But I want that message to go to Vigna’s boss, Jennifer Lynch, the Chief Commissioner of the CHRC, too. She presides over a corrupt, ethically-challenged swamp, that is under investigation by the RCMP, the Privacy Commissioner, Parliament, and even an internal review. Lynch smiles for the media, and pretends she’s fine with it all – but the fact is, her own staff and former staff are her attack dogs, suing and harassing her political critics. I blame Lynch as much as I blame Vigna and Warman, for Lynch has created a corrupt corporate culture where abuse of process and vindictive lawsuits against political critics are just a normal day at the office.
My legal fights are about beating Vigna, Kinsella, Warman, etc. But they’re also about standing up to the poetically named Ms. Lynch and her petty tyranny.
If you agree with me, please click on my PayPal button. If you can help me bear my legal costs, as God is my witness I’ll keep fighting these antagonists as hard and as smart as I can
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