Ezra Levant’s lawsuit against Stephen Gilbo and Canada’s federal government over Twitter blacklisting—ongoing since June 13, 2021—hit a major blow when Gilbo’s account received an official government verification badge, disproving his claim it was personal. Justice Zinn admitted the evidence, rescheduling the full trial for September after the government spent $100K resisting. Levant warns this sets a dangerous precedent, risking ideological censorship of rights like free speech and business licenses, while criticizing civil liberties groups’ silence due to perceived financial ties to Trudeau’s agenda. The case could redefine government accountability on social media platforms. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, we're in Toronto outside the federal court.
We're suing Stephen Gilbo because he thinks he can have an enemy's blacklist.
It's June 13th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Behind me is the federal court building here in downtown Toronto.
The federal court is an interesting creature.
It's the court of choice when you want to sue national or federal institutions.
For example, we were in this very building back in 2019 when Justin Trudeau and his new election debates commission run by the dishonorable David Johnson banned rebel news and several other media from attending the leaders' debates.
We rushed to this court with an emergency application asking the judges to order us to be certified to order Trudeau to allow us in.
And in a miracle, at least it felt like a miracle, we won.
The judge presiding back then was named Justice Zinn.
We were back at the federal court in 2021 with our lawyer Chad Williamson fighting the same fight again.
David Johnston, again, blocking us on behalf of Trudeau.
We won again in federal court.
In that case, the judge was actually sitting by remote on Zoom, I think it was, from Newfoundland.
That's the interesting thing about the federal court is it's a national jurisdiction.
You never know where your judge is going to be from.
Well, we were back in court today because we have been attacked, in a manner of speaking, by the federal government again.
And the attack might seem small.
It might even seem petty to you, but I put it to you that it's actually a very important battle to fight.
Stephen Gilbo, who was the heritage minister in charge of drafting all of Trudeau's censorship provisions and is now the environment minister, he has blocked me on Twitter.
And Catherine McKenna, who was a environment minister, sorry, cabinet minister as well, she blocked my colleague Sheila Gonreid.
Now, this lawsuit has taken so long to move through the courts that we have dropped Catherine McKenna from the lawsuit because she's no longer in government, but we were proceeding against Stephen Gilbo because he is still a government person.
And that's the important part here.
I don't care about Stephen Gilbeau's personal Twitter account or his family Facebook account or anything like that.
The only thing I care about is his official government account that has dozens of civil servants paid for by my tax dollars and yours putting out official government pronouncements.
His Twitter account is not his family photos or anything personal.
It is all government business.
And yet he thinks he has the power to block me just because he ideologically disagrees with me.
But that denies my rights to get government information.
It denies my access to the same service that other Canadians have.
And those services are actually quite relevant to me as a journalist.
And especially when he was Minister of Heritage, he was making an announcement that directly impacted rebel news.
But it's the precedent that scares me.
Because if Justin Trudeau and his cabinet can ban people they don't like from getting government services, it might be something minor like a Twitter account today, although that's not very minor when you think about the Charter of Rights and its freedom of speech and the right to hear and to speak.
But what if they ban you from getting a government business license?
That's actually what happened a couple of generations ago.
There was a premier in Quebec named Maurice Duplessis who banned Jehovah's Witness, a support of the Jehovah's Witnesses from getting a liquor license.
He did so because he hated the politics of that restaurant owner that went all this way to the Supreme Court and they ruled against him.
What if Trudeau started to apply his enemies list to other things too?
We've already seen a little bit of that.
So we're in court today and we've been fighting this fight for two years.
Stephen Gilbo has done his best not to participate.
In fact, he personally refuses to testify or give any information.
He sends junior staffers instead who don't know anything.
The government has stonewalled.
And in fact, there are no fewer than seven government lawyers or articling students as a junior lawyer on the case.
So you may not think this is an important battle, but the government certainly does.
They sent seven lawyers to fight us, which is exactly how many they sent last time in 2021 when we beat them in the election debates case.
So I'm outside the court.
I'll have a report for you a little bit later.
If you want to learn more, if you want to see our lawsuit itself, go to twitterlawsuit.ca.
Who are these immaculately dressed barristers?
This is our legal dream team who was just in the court, the Federal Court of Canada.
I'm talking about Chad Williamson and his colleague, Scott Nicol.
Chad, it was an interesting battle today.
I would say it was a victory, but the main war is still to come.
Why don't you tell us what happened?
This has been kind of peculiar.
And what's so funny about this Sega, Ezra, is that it's not just this case.
It's almost every case in which we're up against the government, be it for the whistle-stop, for rebel, for constitutional rights, for charter rights.
We're constantly finding that there's information that the government just wants to keep out of the court.
And we've got to fight like crazy to try to get it admitted.
So what happened today is we won a victory.
They sure fought hard against us.
There was seven folks from the governments in the courtroom.
And there's just Scott and I who flew all the way out here from Calgary.
And wow, what a beautiful, beautiful city.
Some good weather and some interesting court proceedings, I suppose.
Long and the short of it is we had been fighting this battle for about two years to essentially try to have Ezra unblocked on Twitter by Minister Stephen Gilbo.
And of course, it's not just a matter of, you know, it's just Twitter and we're just trying to get somebody unblocked.
This goes to the fundamental charter right of freedom of association and freedom of the press.
And can government officials block members of their constituency from receiving government information through social media?
This is kind of a new sphere.
There's not much jurisprudence in this area.
So it's a tremendously interesting case.
We've been fighting the sucker for two years.
This morning, as Scott and I are boarding the plane to come out here with a whole bunch of work ahead of us to prepare for further submissions, we're going to argue the main trial today on a whim.
And I don't know if this is like something coming down from above.
I check my phone and go to Gilbo's Twitter account.
He's now an officially government verified account on Twitter.
So again, like in the leadership debates of 2021 and so many other proceedings, Scott and I had to basically fumble and get some sort of a cogent emergency application together to admit this new evidence to the court and get this information before the court.
And it's cardinal to our case.
This whole time, Minister Gilbeau has been arguing that this isn't a government account.
It's his personal account, which is a little ridiculous.
I think that this is pretty obvious now that it's an ordained gray checkmark Twitter account.
It's pretty obvious.
Suffice to say the government wanted to keep it out.
We made emergency submissions thanks to the incredible proficient work of Scott Nicol and also folks back in Calgary.
Eric Thompson really helped us out and that was absolutely critical.
Some more folks in Scott's office.
We did this on a dime and we got a victory.
The affidavit got admitted.
This is huge for putting this information before the court as it should have been in the first place.
Yeah, and that's the thing is Stephen Gilbo has refused to participate in this trial.
He's refused to swear an affidavit to be cross-examined.
And the government has been taking a, we are above this.
We don't have to participate.
You found the nail in the coffin, which should be to their case.
And they had seven people there to fight it.
I estimate that based on what we've spent and based on the fact that they have seven lawyers, I estimate they've spent half a million dollars fighting us so far.
So even if some viewers are saying, what are you fighting about being blocked on Twitter?
Who cares?
To the government, it's obviously extremely important because if they lose the power to blacklist their enemies, they can't do this in other spheres.
Conversely, if they have the power affirmed that they can blacklist their enemies, imagine what they'll do with this.
Scott, you're here particularly on the constitutional stuff.
What do you think?
The judge made particular reference to the importance of this case because of the charter rights at stake, didn't he?
Well, these are very significant rights.
And the charter protects the ability for the citizens of Canada and for the media to be able to engage with politicians, but really to be able to receive information from them and to be able to make fair comments the same way anybody else in society might.
So it's fine that Minister Guibot might not like your tweets, but you should still be able to get access to his pronouncements, his announcements, his statements, and be able to comment on them the same way anybody else might.
And I find it really interesting that we were arguing this morning.
We've got this new check mark on Guibot's account saying that he's now a government-related account, an official government-associated account.
And they don't want this information and they don't want it before the court the same way that anybody blocked by Minister Guibot might say, I guess they don't want me to have the information that's being posted to Twitter on a timely basis and the ability to interact with it.
These are significant rights because they define the boundary of where government can and cannot allow its citizens to interact on an equal basis or whether it's preferred based on some kind of status.
The government to date has essentially said that Minister Guibot should be able to block whoever he wants without any justification, stating that it's a personal account.
We have a number of pieces of evidence that suggest this is not a personal account other than the obvious, beyond simply the obvious element that any Canadian might look at this account and see that he's quite obviously Minister Guibot.
They want to say that Minister Guibot needs zero justification or very little or any justification to block anybody, that he doesn't even need to respond because he should just be allowed to block whoever he wants from seeing and interacting.
Well, maybe, now that you put it that way, I didn't think about that.
Basically, Gilbeau is saying, we don't have to answer the Levant.
We don't have to engage with them.
This lawsuit is BS.
In a way, that's what his seven lawyers were arguing today about the judge.
The judge shouldn't be able to see this.
The judge shouldn't be able to consider this.
He may think this is useful, but we don't want him to see it.
And so the judge took a 15 or 20-minute break.
He canvassed the leading case law, and he came back, and it was very exciting.
It was a victory, no doubt about it.
Why don't you summarize what the judge said when he came back in from his 20-minute break?
Well, the judge basically said that, yes, the information that we received came in late.
There was a reasonable excuse, obviously, for it coming in late.
Now, what's really interesting about this, and I don't want to derail this too much, but from our investigations, and again, they've been preliminary.
We just found out about this yesterday morning.
It looks, all signs point to the fact that in order to get this accreditation and the seal of a government account, you have to apply for it.
So all signs point to either Minister Gilbo or someone in the government of Canada or somebody making this application for him.
Now, it hasn't been there that long, but it's been there longer than yes, just yesterday morning.
So somewhere, somebody knew about this.
Now, I'd also point out that Minister Gilbo used his Twitter account, I think, even a couple hours before the hearing.
So how could you not use that account or someone used it for him and not have seen that check mark?
So the judge basically said, hey, look, this has probative value.
It may or may not have probative value, but I'm not here to say that it has no value whatsoever, much to the chagrin of the respondents' lawyers.
And basically said, you know what, you guys can put this in.
Obviously, it throws two years of litigation up in complete turmoil.
We're going to have to reevaluate briefs and probably maybe hash out more cross-examinations.
We're actually interested to see if Minister Gilbo is going to put some meaningful evidence before the court and allow us to cross-examine some affiants.
And I really look forward to that.
Everyone knows that I cherish a good cross-examination.
Well, and Gilbo has done his best to avoid that.
Scott, last word to you.
Sounds like we all got to come back to this same courthouse in, he suggested it might be September.
You know, the weather today is actually gorgeous in Toronto, so I'm glad this is when you guys came out here.
September, it's still lovely out here.
This is where the court is.
But I've got to say, I like this judge.
This is the same judge that ruled in favor of Rebel News' freedom of the press in 2019.
I wonder if he remembers that.
He probably does.
Here we are four years later, and I think he's open-minded.
I feel like we have the real chance of getting a fair hearing.
So I hope you guys don't mind coming back to Toronto in a few months to finish this thing out.
It sounds like it's going to be a two-day trial also.
Yeah, the judge also had some remarks asking counsel whether it would really be limited to one day after he saw the materials.
There are significant materials.
The government of Canada alone filed something like 2,500 pages of case materials.
It's a lot of things to go through.
It's a lot of things for the court to go through, for us to go through.
Sometimes Proof Is Denied00:03:50
There's still a fight to have.
You know, it's interesting.
We were talking just a moment ago about who might run Minister Gilbo's account.
So far, they've not wanted to answer that question, whether the minister or government, or say who's funded it.
Obviously, the seven legal personnel that were attending at court today are funded by the public service.
Minister Gilbo is not paying out of pocket for this.
But private citizens challenging and protecting their rights under the charter are.
So we're looking forward to coming back.
There is still some fight to have, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in September.
It was, Ezra, just the amount of materials that I saw on the desk of the other side.
I was almost making a joke that there's almost enough there that if you were in combat, you could have taken cover behind those documents to avoid incoming fire, which is basically what happened today.
Well, there you have it.
Chad Williamson and Scott Nicol, our lawyers.
They'll be back out here in September.
If you want to help me pay the bills for this fight for freedom, please do.
Go to twitterlawsuit.ca.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
I'm back on the street.
The hearing was not as long as I thought it would be.
We thought it would take several hours, maybe even the whole day today.
Here's why we're done before noon.
Last night, as our lawyers were coming to town from Calgary, they just by chance visited Stephen Gilbo's Twitter site, just, I don't know why, on a whim.
And they discovered something new.
It had that little gray check mark on it that is Twitter's new verification badge for government Twitter accounts.
See, in the past, there was only one kind of verification for Twitter.
Bear with me on this.
Even if you're not on Twitter, this is actually important.
So to distinguish celebrities or sports stars or politicians from other people who might have the same name or who might be impersonators, Twitter might give you a little blue check mark called a verified check mark.
And it really didn't verify anything other than you were really this politician or that sports hero.
It didn't say anything about if you were good or bad at that.
It just said you are who you say you are.
And that's useful in a world where there's a lot of parody accounts or even some malicious hoaxers.
But recently under Elon Musk, there have been new verifications for different kinds of accounts.
There's a media badge.
There's a government badge.
And some of these have to be applied for and you have to meet certain standards.
In the past, that blue verified check mark was rather whimsically given out.
Sometimes you didn't even ask for it.
Sometimes if you asked for it, it was denied.
Now under Elon Musk, you have to apply for certain badges.
You have to even pay for them.
And you have to provide some proof that you are, say, a government account.
So it was only in the last few weeks that Stephen Gilbo must have positively applied for that Twitter verification saying, I am a government account.
Well, that goes straight to the heart of this case because for two years, Stephen Gilbo has said, no, this is not an official government account.
Sure, it's run by government staff, but it's my personal account.
Well, here we are on the eve of trial, literally the eve of trial, and we discover that it's actually a verified government account that Gilbo must have applied to Twitter to grant him.
So the very first thing our lawyers, Chad Williamson and Scott Nichols, said was, Your Honor, we have a new piece of evidence and we would like to present it to the court as part of the trial.
New Piece of Evidence00:02:50
The government's seven lawyers were apoplectic.
They said, you can't, Your Honor.
We don't know what this gray check mark means.
We don't know if Minister Gilbo asked for it.
We don't know anything about it.
Who knows what it means?
Don't let it in the court.
So the judge went back and forth and then he took a break and he consulted the law and he came back and he said, no, I don't think that admitting this gray check mark unduly prejudices Mr. Gilbo and I think it could be quite useful in determining key matters here.
I'm going to allow it in.
And now you guys figure out what to do with that.
So it was a victory today, and I should tell you that the judge today was actually the same judge we had back in 2019, Justice Zinn, who gave us our accreditation in the 2019 leaders' debate.
So I'm hopeful that he's open to arguments about freedom of speech and about not letting the government ride roughshod over our charter rights.
So we had a victory in court today.
We were allowed to admit that evidence.
In return, the government now is given some weeks to respond to it, to try and explain it away.
And we've been given some more time too.
It's likely that the full trial of this matter won't be heard until September.
It has to be scheduled.
But I think we'll be in a much stronger position then because we have this key piece of evidence.
Now you might be laughing, well, of course this was a government account.
It's all government pronouncements done by civil servants.
Well, that's true.
And I thought we had a strong case anyways.
But the government fought like hell to keep out this fact.
And I think they know that it flattens their arguments.
I'm a little bit hopeful, but I also know that it's a little bit sad that there are no other civil liberties groups here.
Penn Canada, Amnesty International, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, you name it.
No one else is fighting against the liberals because they've been colonized financially, politically.
They simply don't criticize Justin Trudeau anymore, let alone show up in court to fight him.
I think that's an important part of Rebel News.
We do journalism every day.
As you know, our motto is telling the other side of the story.
And I think that's probably 90% of what we do.
Just shining a light of scrutiny on things, following the facts wherever they lead, telling the other side.
That's very important.
But every once in a while, it's not enough just to talk about things.
You actually have to step in and fight to make a difference.
That's what we're doing in court with our great lawyers.
I think we've spent over $100,000 on this battle so far, and it'll probably be another $50,000 before we're done.
If you're in a position to help us, please go to twitterlawsuit.ca.
You can see the lawsuit there for yourself, and you can also chip in.