In December of 2020 we filed a complaint with the Quebec Press Council (QPC) about a discriminatory and defamatory article that was published about us by CTV. Twenty-nine months later, following discussions with a mediator, back and forth submissions with CTV, an initial decision, an appeal, and a final decision, the process is finally over. Their decision, mostly in French, can be found here. They rejected all of our grievances. Below is our initial analysis of the QPC’s final decision in the case.
In Summary:
1. In this post, we explain that the QPC appears to hold journalists to a standard which is lower than, and inconsistent with, normal Canadian defamation law.
2. We point out the contradictions and inconsistencies of the QPC’s decision.
3. We point out that the QPC has a very conveniently narrow and novel definition of “discrimination”, and that they did not engage with our concerns regarding the discriminatory nature of the article.
4. We argue that, if white Canadians are defamed or discriminated against by news media in the future, they should not bother going through our news media councils, they should simply sue in the applicable court venue.
Moving forward, the immediate question on our minds now is if the QPC’s response so prejudicial that we might be able to bring them before the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal, on the grounds of anti-white discrimination?
An update regarding these options will be provided soon.
The QPC appears to have journalistic standards regarding defamation which are inconsistent with the law itself
In our complaint, we argued that CTV had defamed us by repeating the comments of a journalist for the Atlantic, Daniel Lombroso. Despite the defamatory nature of Mr. Lombroso’s comments, the QPC took the position and that it was not defamatory or inappropriate for CTV to repeat them, on the grounds that they had already been published in the Atlantic. But the QPC’s position is inconsistent with Canadian defamation law, according to which, a claim remains defamatory upon every new repetition. Under Canadian law, what is required to have defamed someone is merely that you “publish” the defamatory statement, not that you originate it. This point is supported by the decision of the Supreme Court in Crookes v Newton, [2011] SCC 47, 2011 CarswellBC 2627, which held that, while it does not violate the law to link to the original statement, it does violates the law to “repeat[] defamatory content from a secondary source”. The principle in that decision was that, while you can’t control what someone else publishes at the other end of a link, you can control what you publish yourself, and you are, therefore, liable for it.
Furthermore, at para. 31 of their decision, the QPC’s standards are also inconsistent with the law when it comes to the question of whether or not subjects should be allowed to respond to potentially defamatory claims made through the outlet in question. Canadian law holds that subjects must be given the opportunity to respond to defamatory claims. This is concept is called “responsible communication” and it was affirmed in the case of Grant v. Torstar Corp. (2009). What it means is that, when a journalist wants to publish potentially defamatory claims about you, they must seek your perspective on those claims. But the position of the QPC appears to be that, because SWC was quoted in the article at all, we were therefore given the opportunity to “respond”—despite the fact that we weren’t even made aware of what the defamatory claims were, or who was making them. How can one say that you’ve been given the opportunity to respond to a defamatory claim if you were never even informed what the defamatory claim was, or who was making it? The QPC’s standard is absurd.
The QPC applies its own standards inconsistently
Not only does it appear that the QPC’s standard of defamation is inconsistent with the law, but they appear to apply their standard inconsistently. For example, in accordance with the principle of “responsible communication”, we argued that if CTV was going to cite Lombroso’s critiques of us, then we should be able to respond by providing the audience with the full context of who Lombroso is. Lombroso was asked to comment on SWC because he had met with our director, George Hutcheson, during the filming of a documentary, and if given the opportunity to comment, SWC would have made sure the audience aware of the fact that Lombroso was accused, by the principal subject of that documentary, in an article on her website, of a number of unscrupulous and unprofessional behaviours. Knowing that fact would enable CTV’s audience to better assess the trustworthiness of Lombroso’s claims. However, the QPC took the position that it would have been inappropriate for the CTV to have made its audience aware of that information, even if expressed through SWC’s voice, because it might have exposed CTV to defamation claims. So the QPC permitted a defamatory claim against SWC on the grounds that those claims had been previously published, but then rejected our right to respond to those claims with information that might also be potentially defamatory, despite the fact that it had been previously published.
The QPC’s inconsistent standards are found elsewhere. In raising the substantive allegations against Lombroso, the QPC responded that only potentially defamatory statements which have actually been proven in court are fit to be published; without such a judicial ruling, an outlet is free not to publish them. But not only is such a standard impossible and not practiced—if it was, journalists would not be able to report on much of anything—but CTV’s article repeats multiple defamatory comments about SWC, none of which have been proven in court.
Elsewhere, the QPC demonstrated a particularly high degree of unfairness, when it struck our claim that the CTV demonstrated a “lack of balance” in its treatment of SWC by stating what we were really alleging was “bias” and that this was a different and, therefore, brand new claim. Not only did the QPC fail to separate the two, closely similar concepts, it failed to state exactly how our “lack of balance”-claim had actually been mislabelled from the start. Clearly, this was a way for the QPC to ignore a particularly strong claim on our part.
The QPC refused to engage with our grievances about discrimination
In our complaint, we took issues, both with the conduct of the journalist herself, as well as with the comments of Daniel Lombroso, which, we argued, incite contempt and hatred towards white Canadians. The QPC, however, insisted that a showing of discrimination requires the speaker to use certain ‘discriminatory terms’ (examples of which, they did not provide), thereby avoiding having to deal with the journalist’s prejudicial behaviour and the discriminatory ideas Mr. Lombroso was allowed to express.
Based on that novel definition of discrimination, the QPC made the assertion that we did not “specify what prejudices against whites are fostered by Daniel Lombroso’s quotations, or how these comments feed prejudice.” To the contrary, in our request for appeal, we provided the QPC with a very thorough education in racial discrimination and Canadian hate speech-law, which included describing the Hallmarks of Hate, how they are used to detect hate speech, and how they applied to this particular article. In fact, we dedicated 13 paragraphs to the task. We explained how Lomborso’s comments “attempt to negate the legitimacy and existence of white identity” and we explained how that objective is inconsistent both with the Multiculturalism Act and Canadian human rights law generally. We further explained how the article portrays white people as a threat to other people, and suggests that we pray on the vulnerable; that we are “scary”, “dangerous” and “militia-like”, that we are “oppressive of other peoples, […] malicious, violent and deceptive.” In addition, we explained how Lombroso’s comments suggest that people who identify as white seek to establish “white power” and we pointed out how “Mr. Lombroso’s arbitrary pairing of white identity with violence serves to reinforce a discriminatory racial stereotype which holds that white identity necessarily expresses itself in violent or other anti-social forms.”
But the QPC simply ignored these points and failed to acknowledge or engage with them at all.
The QPC is a waste of time
Part of the purpose of media councils (we have two in Canada: the QPC for Quebec and the NationalMedia Newsmedia Council for the remainder) is to provide an alternative means of resolving conflicts with news media organizations. The incentive for both parties is that it is cheaper than suing in an actual court. However, it appears that the QPC holds journalists to a lower technical standard than the law itself does, which makes the whole process useless. Furthermore, because the process of the QPC takes so long, as it did in our case, you’ll miss your opportunity to sue, because defamation cases must be filed within one year in Quebec (and two years in Ontario). And while the QPC process is on-going, you can’t launch a case with a separate body.
Indeed, it is almost as if our media councils function more like shields for journalists, which intercept and neutralize the public’s grievances by rerouting them into a forum which gives journalists the advantage by holding them to a lower standard than the law itself would.
Therefore, if a news media organization has defamed you, and you want retribution, it makes more sense for you to go directly to the courts, rather than wasting your time with a media council.
SWC