Ezra Levant Wins Case at Alberta's Human Rights Commission

A Pyrrhic victory for free speech in Canada. The censor of Alberta found that Mr. Levant did not 'discriminate' against any group by publishing the Motoon. But he did find the cartoon to be 'stereotypical, negative and offensive'. So, after Mr. Levant spent $100000 on lawyers he was not charged by Alberta's Human Rights Commission. Perhaps only because of all the publicity this case generated.

The outcome of this case might seem fair but in fact, as Mr. Levant states "The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam". The complaint should have never went through.National Post

And if I had been a defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this spring.


Both managed to hijack a secular government agency to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me — the first blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them. The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.


The 11-page government report into my activities is a breathtakingly arrogant document. In it, Pardeep Gundara, a low-level bureaucrat, assumes the role of editor-in-chief for the entire province of Alberta. He went through our magazine article and gave his own thoughts on the cartoons, and pronounced on our magazine’s decision to publish them. The government’s wannabe journalist makes a spelling error, he gets facts wrong and he’s obviously not good with deadlines. We’d never have hired him at our magazine. But the laugh is on us — he’s apparently our boss, and the boss of all journalists in Alberta.

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That is not acceptable to me. I am not interested in Gundara’s views about the cartoons. I’m not interested in learning his personal rules of thumb for when I can or can’t express myself. This is Canada, not Saudi Arabia.