Blacklock's Reporter

Lawyers opposing Blacklock’s Reporter in the Federal Court of Appeal abruptly deleted social media posts on the case. The Law Society of Ontario advises lawyers to avoid being “petty” or “intemperate” on social media platforms.

James Plotkin, counsel for a pro-government intervenor against Blacklock’s, deleted a LinkedIn post stating: “‘Riddled with mistakes’ is a risky stone to throw from a glass house ;).” Plotkin is a partner with Gowling WLG of Ottawa that last year received $723,824 in federal contracts.

Alexander Gay, senior counsel for the Department of Justice, also deleted a LinkedIn post stating: “Nothing like an appeal to sort it all out. Happy to meet any daring soul in a courtroom.”

Blacklock’s on Friday filed an appeal in the case. The Law Society of Ontario in a guideline Public Appearances And Statements recommends that lawyers avoid making snide remarks on social media.

“Licensees should avoid any criticism that is petty, intemperate or without merit,” says Public Appearances. “Licensees should always bear in mind their position in society can lend their opinions greater weight in the eye of the public and that they will ordinarily have no control over the context in which statements they make are used by the media.”

Blacklock’s is challenging a May 31 lower court ruling that federal managers could lawfully share passwords to paywalled stories without payment or permission. The decision came in the case of a Parks Canada manager Genevieve Patenaude caught sharing her Blacklock’s password with any co-worker who asked, at least nine people, “if you ever need to access any Blacklock’s article.”

Counsel Gay, the senior federal lawyer in the case, slandered Blacklock’s as a copyright troll following the May 31 ruling. “That’s the business model,” Gay was quoted in an interview with the periodical lawyer Canadian Lawyer.

Federal Court Justice Yvan Roy specifically dismissed the slander. “The Attorney General forcefully suggested Blacklock’s modus operandi is akin to copyright tolling which is described as copyright holders using the threat of litigation to generate revenue,” wrote Justice Roy.

“I was not inclined to consider further any allegation of copyright trolling perhaps with a view to implying an abuse of copyright,” wrote Justice Roy. “Having considered again the evidence before the Court I continue to disregard such assertions.”

Hugh Stephens, former assistant deputy trade minister, said in a commentary that remarks by the Department of Justice against Blacklock’s were an obvious tactic. “Not only has the Attorney General taken a hard line on this case it has also tried to blacken Blacklock’s reputation by accusing it of entrapment and being a copyright troll,” wrote Stephens.

“Blacklock’s had to resort to Access To Information requests to learn how many government employees had accessed the single subscription they had authorized,” wrote Stephens. “The judge in the case explicitly expressed dismissed these allegations, noting Blacklock’s had no intent to deceive.”

By Staff

The radio

brings the news

about the resignation

of the Honourable Premier.

Across the kitchen floor,

a fly tries to find its way out

through the window’s glass.

One of these events

captivates the attention

of my cat.

By Shai Ben-Shalom

Nations at war, glorify war. Otherwise war would be untenable. Remembrance Day observances have seen the Royal B.C. Museum hand out helmets to 7-year olds and have them sit in a jeep. The Calgary Sun assigned a reporter to walk city streets shaming 9 in 10 passersby who failed to wear a poppy. Grade 10 students in Tillsonburg, Ont. were asked to jog through a ditch in a farmer’s field. CTV News Channel called it “a realistic experience about war.”

Canada in recent years was at war in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. At the same time officialdom and media celebrated wartime exploit as a central fixture of the Canadian experience. This is factually dubious but worthy of thoughtful analysis. Professor Sherrill Grace, a professor of literature at the University of British Columbia, examines the phenomenon. The result is striking and poignant.

Take Vimy, a largely pointless 1917 battle that’s become the centerpiece of historical pageantry. Vimy did not win the war. Most soldiers who fought there were not Canadian-born but British expatriates. It was not even the most significant event of 1917. The year saw revolution in Russia, mutiny in the French army, U.S. entry into the war and unrestricted U-boat warfare that claimed shipping casualties at the rate of 10 vessels a day. Historian Leon Wolff in an account of 1917 dispensed with Vimy in two paragraphs.

“Vimy marked our coming of age because our troops fought together as Canadians, albeit under the command of the British Lieutenant-General Sir J.H.G. Byng,” Sherrill writes. “We won, or so the official story goes, although who exactly we were and precisely what was won were not widely scrutinized.”

Landscapes Of War & Memory documents a disturbing trend in Canada’s rituals of remembrance with symbolic observances of ancient battles that have grown proportionately as the number of eyewitnesses declined. Real veterans with real anecdotes make a poor backdrop for propaganda. When 17 Canadian veterans of the First War held their last reunion in France in 1998 not a single TV network ran live coverage. The Globe & Mail buried the story on page 12. When they held a remembrance ceremony at the Vimy Memorial in France in 1956 only two people showed up, a caretaker and an MP who happened to be passing through town.

By 2007, when all Vimy eyewitnesses were safely dead, CBC-TV produced a docudrama The Great War that saw Justin Trudeau play an officer with Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry, and assigned re-enactors to scramble up a Vimy landscape shouting, “Vive le Canada!” Sherrill expresses unease with such “pandering.” Whe writes: “I remain unconvinced that one battle can or should be given such status and become the time and place that our nation came of age or, indeed, that Canada’s myth of origins lies in the blood and loss – even the courage – of soldiers in war.”

Then-Prime Minister Robert Borden never thought so. “Canada got nothing out of the war except recognition,” he wrote. “The war is the suicide of civilization.”

Professor Sherrill examines this ritual of remembrance over a 30-year period, citing hundreds of Canadian poems and films, novels, memoirs and documentaries. “I am invited to legitimate the making of a myth that, as these kinds of narratives always do, leaves huge blanks in the landscape of memory,” she writes.

“If Canadians hope to understand who and where they are in this century, then an honest debate about the past is essential,” she writes. “If the works of art about either war tell us anything, it is this: we must work at remembering so we can create – and continue to create – a landscape of memory that sustains us, that is as alive, as complete, as powerfully informing, and as ongoing as possible.”

By Holly Doan

Landscapes of War & Memory: The Two World Wars in Canadian Literature and the Arts, 1977-2007, by Sherrill Grace; University of Alberta Press; 600 pages; ISBN 13978-17721-20004; $49.95

Our counsel today will file notice of appeal in Blacklock’s Reporter v. Attorney General. We challenge a May 31 ruling by a federal judge. The outcome will determine the viability of independent media in our country.

In a first for any G7 nation, the Federal Court upheld a claim by lawyers representing Attorney General Arif Virani that federal managers may share passwords to Blacklock’s content without payment or permission, regardless of terms or conditions. Legal experts called the decision a “license for piracy” that will “create precedents” undermining an entire industry.

The Attorney General argued federal managers have a “public interest” in reading Blacklock’s without having to pay for it. We argue this is electronic shoplifting, unethical and wrong in law, a plain breach of property rights and the Copyright Act that has catastrophic consequences for digital media producers.

There will be a hearing. There will be intervenors. We will fight this to the finish – The Editor.