The recent appeal ruling on the Ahenakew hate case in Canada may have far reaching implications.
In that case, the appeal judge, Chief Justice Laing, ruled that conversations with a reporter can not be considered to be ‘private’. He upheld the original trial judge, who wrote:
The same subsection 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that protects your freedom of thought, belief and opinion and expression also protects the freedom of the press and other media of communication. You may not like what the media says about you nor how your comments were reported by Mr. Parker and the consequences of your statements but you did state them to Mr. Parker, a reporter, who had every right and indeed possibly a professional responsibility to accurately record them and to communicate them by way of print and audio publication. In your testimony both on examination in chief and in cross-examination you attempted to portray yourself as the wronged party and that Mr. Parker was responsible for communicating your remarks and the consequences flowing from them. Your counsel, Mr. Christie, in his closing arguments argued that you were the victim of a [sic] insensitive self-promoting reporter. As a Provincial Court trial judge who spends 95% of judicial time in criminal court, the analogy that instantly came to mind was that of a man charged with spousal assault who argues that his spouse made him do it and that he was simply defending himself by putting up his fists which his spouse insisted on running her face into which unfortunately resulted in her nose being broken and her two front teeth being fractured.
Who is a reporter?
Couple this ruling with Michael Geist’s views on the California appellate court ruling that expands US First Amendment protections to bloggers and I wonder if we have the potential to remove conversations from ‘private domain’.