Thursday, September 14, 2023

Ezra Levant: Lying again?

I am not a lawyer but perhaps someone can clarify the following oddity. Recently, Rebel News' Ezra Levant was yanking himself raw in public, bragging about how the court "ordered" Steven Guilbeault to pay Der Rebel $20,000:



However, I am reading the actual ruling, which is a consent order:



which, as I understand it, represents simply the government offering to pay $20,000 for Ezra and Der Rebel to fuck off and go away, and Ezra and Der Rebel accepting the offer. So it seems to me that this in no way represents the court "ordering" anything; rather, it is nothing more than the court formalizing a settlement offer which (again, as I understand it) has no legal value whatever as it was settled.

Am I understanding all this correctly?

P.S. If I am understanding this correctly, then there is more misrepresentation in that idiotic Rebel article. While Ezra claims that it was the court that "ordered" the $20,000 in legal fees, it seems like Ezra is getting that fraction of what he claims is his own legal fees because he agreed to that amount. Isn't that what that consent order means?

If so, then what happened would appear to be that Ezra voluntarily settled for a pittance compared to his own legal fees, and is now playing the martyr, clearly for the purposes of fundraising.

Colour me shocked.

AND ONE MORE THING ... Here's Ezra, insisting that that settlement represents a clear and unequivocal "precedent" that is a boon for journalists nationwide:



Even the National Post points out that that claim is total bullshit:


Are we done here? Yeah, I think we're done here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you're missing an important point here, and that is "proportionality." Normally, when you win in court, you're entitled to costs, but you rarely get your full legal costs. You will normally get anything from partial indemnity to full indemnity, typically something between 50% and 100%. But on top of that, the court factors in something called "proportionality," I can quote from an article:

"The time and expense devoted to a proceeding ought to be proportionate to what is at stake. Therefore, the amount of costs awarded against a party should be proportionate to the damages at issue."

If you look at this case, it was based on something pretty trivial -- being blocked on Twitter. And sure, you can sue over that, but given that it's simple to get around a Twitter block by just creating a burner account, the court would probably take the position that this action should not have run up a huge legal bill. Sure as hell, there is no way a court would think that a legal bill of $90,000 is proportionate to the action here. No fucking way.

I think Ezra knew that, which is why he had no choice but to take the $20,000; he knew that the court would laugh at a legal bill of $90,000 for a case involving being blocked on Twitter. I think Ezra deliberately ran up a massive and unjustified legal bill just so he could whine about it after and fundraise on it.

Anonymous said...

Ezra as a 'journalist'.

Hilarious.

Anonymous said...

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.
- Keyser Soze
The greatest trick Ezra Levant ever pulled was convincing his readership there's no such thing as "journalism".
- Balbulican