Ezra Levant celebrates Rebel News’ $20K legal victory against Canada’s Stephen Gilbo, who ordered Twitter blocks of government accounts targeting critics like Rebel News and Sheila Gunreed, violating constitutional free speech. The September 13th court order forces unblocking while experts—Michael Geist (UOttawa) and Kara Zwebel (CCLA)—acknowledge the government’s likely retreat to avoid worse exposure. Levant calls out Catherine McKenna’s hypocrisy, despite her past legal defeats, and launches putpoliticiansintheirplace.com to document broader censorship by Ford’s PCs, Bloc Québécois, and NDP, urging submissions for future lawsuits. This win signals a shift: courts may now hold politicians accountable for silencing dissent, not just citizens. [Automatically generated summary]
I want to talk to you about a victory I had in court in Canada while I'm over here in Dubai.
I want to show you some of the documents, and I want to tell you the political ripple effect it's had.
But I want you to see it, not just here.
And I want you to get what we call Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, eight bucks a month.
That may not be a lot of money to you, but it really adds up for us.
And that's how we pay our bills.
So please go to rebelnewsplus.com.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, Rebel News strikes a big blow for freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and for putting politicians in their place.
It's September 13th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Ezra Lovett here.
I'm still in the city of Dubai.
Behind me, a mosque.
It's an incredible city in an incredible country, and we're here as part of a trip with our most enthusiastic rebel viewers.
We're calling it the Abraham Accords trip, named after the Donald Trump-led mission to bring peace to the Middle East.
Israel and a bunch of Arab countries signed it, and the United Arab Emirates is one of the warmest places in that peace agreement.
We are here to see what that's like on the ground.
Incredibly, for example, today we went to a Holocaust museum here in the United Arab Emirates.
Who would ever imagine such a thing?
But I want to talk to you about something that happened back in Canada that actually caught me by surprise, even though I was involved with it.
As you may know, I sued the government of Canada, in particular, Stephen Gilbeau, who at the time was the Heritage Minister, for blocking me on Twitter.
And my co-plaintiff at the time was Sheila Gunreed, who sued Catherine McKenna for blocking her on Twitter.
You might say, why are you suing over being blocked on Twitter?
I mean, who cares?
Well, I'm not talking about their personal Twitter pages or personal Facebook pages.
I'm talking about the government ministries that they ran.
These are not normal Twitter accounts that you and I might have.
It's not a normal Facebook account like you and I might have.
These are accounts where the government has dozens of workers pumping out official government announcements.
And you need to have access to that announcement like you would any other sort of government information.
And for them to ban us from receiving it by blocking us just because they don't like our politics.
Well, what other services would they try and ban?
I made a video yesterday.
I didn't include it in the Ezra Levant show last night, but let me show you this six-minute video that announces a success that actually sort of caught me by surprise out here in Dubai because I wasn't expecting it when it came and the way it came.
Here's a six-minute video I recorded from my hotel room yesterday.
Breaking news.
We just crushed Justin Trudeau's cabinet minister, Stephen Gilbo, in the federal court of Canada.
And in doing so, Rebel News has struck a blow for freedom of speech and freedom of the press for everyone.
Go to twitterlawsuit.ca to see the court order signed today by Justice Russell Zinn.
Here's some background.
Like his boss, Justin Trudeau, Stephen Gilbo hates Rebel News because he can't control us.
We're one of the few media companies that doesn't take government money, so we don't toe the government line.
So the liberals always look for ways to punish us.
Like Trudeau, Gilbo doesn't care about freedom of the press or other constitutional rights.
They both admire China's dictatorship, and they think they can act like little dictators themselves by censoring us.
And they're both thin-skinned and petty.
So here's what Gilbo did: he ordered his government department to block us on Twitter.
So we couldn't receive any government news updates from his department's Twitter account.
We couldn't read anything.
We couldn't reply.
And of course, we couldn't ask him journalistic questions on Twitter.
We were effectively kicked out of the public square, which is what Twitter has become.
We were banned from a government service just because we disagreed with a politician.
So we sued.
We went to the Federal Court of Canada and argued that we had a right to see those tweets, that it was a government service like any other.
Remember, this isn't Gilbo's personal account.
It's his government account.
He has more than 20 government staff running his Twitter account.
It might sound like a small thing, but if Gilbo can cut us off from receiving news and other information from the government, what else can he cut off?
We've already seen Trudeau ban companies who don't agree with them from receiving summer jobs grants.
What's next?
Gilbo fought us for more than two years.
We had a court hearing in Toronto this summer, and the government sent seven lawyers to the court, all just to stop us from reading his tweets.
What a shocking waste of money.
Well, today, Gilbo 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 with us now or be humiliated at trial.
I should tell you, Gilbo's government lawyers tried to get me to sign a confidentiality clause banning me from disclosing the details of this 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.
Go to twitterlawsuit.ca to read the order signed today by the court.
Gilbo has been ordered by the court to unblock me and to never ban me again as long as he's an MP.
It's glorious to see.
And Gilbo has been ordered to pay Rebel News $20,000 for making us waste two years and enormous legal fees to assert our constitutional rights.
Of course, he'll probably make taxpayers pay that for him, even though it was he who broke the law.
$20,000 sounds like a lot of money, and it is.
But unfortunately, it's just a fraction of what we had to spend to finally get this little thug to back down.
I can only imagine how much it costs taxpayers for Gilbo to have seven government lawyers defending him.
He'll probably try to keep that amount secret too.
Now, in some ways, today's victory is a small thing.
But having the federal court smack down government censorship is never a small thing.
And it sets a precedent for all other bullies in Trudeau's government, reminding them that they cannot use public resources to carry out a vendetta against their political critics.
This is a win for all journalists because the precedent will apply to politicians of every political party.
We've 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 any of them.
Not a single so-called civil liberties group intervened on our behalf because they've all been colonized by Trudeau.
They all support censorship.
Well, Rebel News won anyway.
Stephen Gilbo lost, and every Canadian is just a little bit freer.
It's a great day.
I'm glad that the court ordered Gilbo to pay us $20,000 in costs, but in reality, we spent over $95,000.
If you believe this is an important victory, please help us pay our legal bill by going to Twitterlawsuit.ca.
I thought it was incredible.
Here's what caught me by surprise.
Look, I knew we were going to settle because they had said they wanted to settle.
They had bought us for two and a half years in court.
We actually had a hearing in Toronto and two of our lawyers slept in from Calgary and I went down to the court and it was adjourned for this reason, that reason.
For two and a half years, they battled us and then they came to us and said, fine, we'll unblock you.
And we actually, this is the part that caught me by surprise.
It was issued in what's called a consent order, which as you saw is the actual court judge issuing an order.
The only difference between that and a judgment on his own is that both sides agreed to it and he just gave his imprimatur.
But it looks so official and it really was a court order and it really is binding and he really will be paying us $20,000 in costs.
And so I think it became sort of the perfect storm for a media story because you had Stephen Gilbo, who's a controversial cabinet minister always in trouble.
You had me in Rebel News, who are some people would say controversial.
You had Twitter, which all journalists are obsessed with.
You had blocking, which all journalists know about.
You had a court order and a $20,000 cost award.
This was like catnip to the media.
And it had an enormous amount of media coverage today.
You just take a look.
You could see the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the National Post, and most importantly, the Canadian Press, which, as you may know, is a newswire service.
They write one story, and almost every newspaper in Canada subscribes to the Canadian press.
So they all ran that story.
I think it must have run in a hundred different newspapers and news websites.
And by the way, I have to say that most of the reporting was neutral or even positive.
I mean, I don't know how you could spin a story.
Stephen Gilbo capitulated.
He agreed to unblock me.
He agreed to pay $20,000.
I don't really know how you spin that as bad news for me.
I like the fact that the media party generally didn't say far right or controversial.
They just said rebel news.
It was actually pretty fun.
I think one of the most interesting things, I just want to show you this in the consent order, is that Stephen Gilbo, for the rest of his political career as an MP, has to keep me unblocked, which is sort of interesting because we sued him because he was with the government.
But for the rest of his life, if he's an MP, he must unblock me.
I thought that was quite a muscular order.
Anyways, not only did we get a lot of general media coverage, but a few civil liberties law experts weighed in too.
Here's Professor Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa, who's a well-known, very moderate, very learned scholar in issues just like this.
And he covered the issue in great detail and said that he believed that it was pretty obvious that the government settled with us and agreed to the consent order because they knew they were going to lose.
And so they sort of made the decision lose in a consent order rather than lose at the end of a trial where it would be a much more painful loss.
Here's Kara Zwebel of the pretty much defunct or slumbering, shall we say, Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
I don't know where they've been for the past five years, by the way.
Apparently they still exist.
And she weighed in, I guess you could say mildly supportive, saying she wish it had been at the end of a trial as opposed to a consent order so it could be binding.
Okay, thanks very much for your nice wishes.
You want to actually get off the couch and do something for civil liberties in Canada.
I mean, civil liberties is your middle name.
But alas, they've been doing other things.
They've been busy doing other things.
Anyways, that's rebel news for you.
We do the civil liberties work that the Civil Liberties Association won't do.
But my point is, not only did this get widespread media coverage, it got coverage from people I would call legal experts.
And not just that, but the independent media obviously loved it.
The Western Standard, Epoch Times, all sorts of independent journalists wrote about this because they hate the fact that the government is so censorship oriented.
My main tweet announcing this victory, last I checked, it had 2 million views and impressions.
That's a lot.
2 million, as I later joked, that's the most successful thing Stephen Gilbo has ever done in his political career.
He's never done anything more resonant than losing a lawsuit to Rebel News.
It was pretty delightful.
But as, I mean, I'm here in Dubai.
I didn't expect this to happen right now.
I didn't expect it to happen on court letterhead, not just letterhead.
It's a court order.
Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention when my lawyer told me about it.
But watching the massive media coverage from afar, I felt something going on.
I felt like the winds were changing direction.
I felt, and I think it was when, you know, moderate neutral scholars like Michael Geist were weighing in.
I thought, you know, we're not the quote fringe here.
Everyone sort of hates the fact that politicians block citizens, but no one really did anything about it.
Winds Changing Direction00:06:22
I should say a few years ago, a citizen of Ottawa sued the mayor, Jim Watson, for blocking him, but that never really went anywhere, sort of petered out.
Maybe what happened there is what Gilbo tried to do with me.
I think I mentioned it in that video I recorded yesterday.
They agreed to unblock me.
They agreed to pay $20,000 in costs, but they wanted me to sign a confidentiality agreement to keep it all secret.
No thanks.
I'm not interested in a secret government making secret decisions.
The whole point here is the government should be shamed for being so censorious.
So I think that that's the difference.
And I guess what I'm saying is I sensed even from half a world away that the mood in Canada is changing.
And in fact, the only voice of any size, and I give her too much credit, who was sort of against this settlement was Catherine McKenna.
Do you remember her?
A footnote in history, I think you would say.
She used to be the environment minister until Trudeau got tired of her.
And then she sort of skulked off to the United Nations where I don't even know what she does there, but she got some, you know, fake job, patronage job.
But here's what she said on Twitter.
She was outraged.
She said, the idea that politicians can't block trolling people and organizations who harass them for profit is absurd and frankly dangerous.
There is no constitutional right to harass and spread lies and hate.
But let me tell you, it has real life consequences for politicians and their families.
What is she talking about?
I didn't harass Stephen Gilbo.
I barely mentioned him.
I think in my entire life, I tagged him in three criticisms.
And I, you know, of course I criticized him, but, you know, that's dangerous.
The real life consequences for politicians and their families.
You know, that reminds me of Justin Trudeau saying, oh, you don't know how hard it is being a politician these days.
Yeah, mate, it's a little bit easier being a politician making, you know, a cabinet minister makes almost $300,000.
It's a little bit easier for cabinet ministers these days than for severely normal people who are one paycheck away from not making rent.
Here's Catherine McGill.
You have no idea how hard it is.
Yeah, it just outrages.
Let me read one more tweet.
She said, and what normal person, especially women, indigenous peoples, minorities, members of LGBTQ2 plus community, would want to go into politics.
Well, a lot, actually.
I should remind you that Catherine McKenna herself was a defendant in this same lawsuit.
She had blocked Sheila Gunread.
We would have crushed her in court too, other than the fact that she bowed out of politics and we weren't interested in suing her as a private person.
So I think that's one reason she was squawking so much.
I want to read one more tweet.
Forgive me.
I just, Catherine McKenna is just, I think she's so instructive with the problem here.
She said, there is no constitutional right to harass and spread lies and hate, but let me tell you, it has real life consequences for politicians and their families.
Now, obviously, she was talking about rebel news, but we don't harass anyone.
We've never harassed anyone in our life.
If she means to chirp at someone on Twitter, that's not harassment.
That's called freedom of speech.
You're allowed to heckle politicians.
In fact, I think you should to express yourself and to keep politicians in their place.
When she says to spread lies and hate is illegal, no, it's not actually, because it's a matter of opinion if someone is lying or not.
Here's Catherine McKenna drunk in a bar in Newfoundland, laughing on camera about how she regularly lies.
This is Catherine McKenna boasting about lying for a living.
Remember this video?
No, I actually gave him some real advice.
I said that if you actually say it louder, we've learned in the House of Commons.
If you repeat it, if you say it louder, if that is your stopping point, people will totally believe it.
Yeah, you know, I hate that.
And I think it's deeply unethical.
And I think Catherine McKenna is a deeply unethical person.
You know a lot about her by the fact that she eats dog of meats.
I don't mean to emphasize that, but I think how someone treats animals and dogs gives you a window into their soul.
I think Catherine McKenna is an odious person, but I'm not saying that should be illegal.
It shouldn't be illegal for her to lie and it shouldn't be illegal for her to eat dogs.
She does both, and I'm not saying to ban it.
She, on the other hand, says that she wants to ban people who lie and what else does she call it?
Spread hate.
Well, the amount of hatred that the Liberal Party has spread against Canadians who they don't like is shocking.
Not just hatred, but deploying police, seizing bank accounts, throwing the country under martial law.
It's just absurd.
But the point is, we haven't done any of that.
If we had, Twitter's terms of service would have knocked us out.
Which brings me to my point.
I think what we managed to accomplish against Stephen Gilbo was surprisingly successful.
Not that I'm surprised that we won in court.
I sort of thought we might.
But it was surprisingly resonant with not only normal people, but with the most powerful lobby group in Canada, the Media Party.
Other than Catherine McKenna, I haven't seen anyone say they're upset with this.
Some people say, well, I don't really like rebel news, but this is a good thing.
Of course it's a good thing.
Because that attitude Catherine McKenna has that she's the only one who's allowed to lie, she's the only one who's allowed to hate you.
Who the heck is she?
And who the heck is she to censor you from getting access to a government Twitter account?
Again, I'm not talking about her personal account, her personal family Facebook page.
I'm not interested in that.
I'm saying, who the heck is she to say that someone that she hates, someone that she lies about, should be banned from receiving a government service?
And it was actually Catherine McKenna's self-pitying, vicious ramble that got me thinking, why would I stop now?
Tell Us: Cancel Politicians00:04:48
Why should we end this now?
It was an enormous success.
We don't have a legally binding precedent because it wasn't the result of a full trial and a judgment.
But as Michael Geist and Karis Webel both said, it's pretty clear that we were going to win in court and we do have a constitutional right to equal access to government services.
So given that's that's obviously what happened because the government settled.
And so my point is, why should we stop now?
We've already incurred the legal fees to develop the lawsuit and do all the research and draft the pleadings.
So to sue more politicians who block people is easy or easier.
We spent $95,000 altogether suing Stephen Gilbo and Catherine McKenna.
We got $20,000 back from the government.
We're still out $75,000.
That's a lot of money.
But we built up legal documents that we can change the name of the plaintiffs and change the name of the cabinet ministers we're going after.
I say we expand this.
We should expand this to other government Twitter accounts.
I mean, why should another cabinet minister be able to ban any citizen?
And forget about just the Ottawa federal liberals.
What about other political parties too?
I'm sure that Doug Ford's thin-skinned MPPs and cabinet ministers have blocked plenty of people.
And I'm sure that even mayors have blocked people.
And I guess what I'm saying is the zeitgeist, the feeling that I've felt over the last 24, 36 hours is that people are sort of sick of it.
And so I have bought a new website.
You know, I do that from time to time.
It's called putpoliticiansintheirplace.com.
It's a bit of a mouthful, but don't you like it?
Putpoliticiansintheirplace.com.
And right now, there's not a lot going on in that website other than asking people for examples of where other government officials have blocked them on Twitter.
But the point is, politicians are elected to serve us.
We are their bosses.
They don't tell us to shut up.
They don't tell us we're blocked.
If anything, we tell them to shut up.
We block them.
And this attitude that Catherine McKenna has, that she's the victim here, making $287,000 as a cabinet minister or whatever it was, and that she can excoriate you, but how dare you heckle her?
We've got to flip that around.
I think that instead of being hunted by politicians, instead of being canceled and deplatformed by politicians, we should cancel and de-platform them.
Now, I'm not talking about having them banned on Twitter, but I'm talking about making them our servants again.
So I want to take whatever precedent we've established on Stephen Gilbo, and I want to expand it.
And I want to go on the offensive.
And if you know of any other government Twitter account or Facebook account or Instagram account or other social media account that is banning people for reasons of personal vendettas or political vendettas, let me know.
Go to putpoliticiansintheirplace.com and tell us the info.
And by the way, while you're there, sign our petition on this to tell politicians that it's not their place to cancel us.
What I want to do is I want to crowdfund more litigation and crowdsource the names and proof that politicians around this country are blackballing people like Stephen Gilbo did.
Because I sense that people are sick of it.
They're sick of the chutzpah, of the gall, of the audacity, of the arrogance of some mucky cabinet minister saying that you and I cannot get government services because they don't like us.
And if Stephen Gilbo and his Justice Department lawyers, and there were seven of them fighting us, if they're afraid enough that they wanted to settle and pay us to get out of this, that tells me that we're going to win.
So go to putpoliticiansintheirplace.com.
Sign our petition.
And if you know of a politician who has a government Twitter account, I'm not talking about a personal Twitter account, a government account that they're blocking people, let us know because you know what?
I want to keep hunting these deplatformers, these cancelers, these censors.
We had a great victory over Stephen Gilbo.
Let's go get 10 more.
Better Block Quebecois00:00:27
And by the way, if you're a new Democrat, if you're a Block Quebecois, and if you are a conservative in this country, you better start unblocking people right now because we're going to come for you too.