Rebel News wins battle in lawsuit against Trudeau's Twitter blacklisting

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I just got out of the Federal Court of Canada building in Toronto.

Inside, two Rebel News lawyers were going head-to-head with SEVEN lawyers sent by Justin Trudeau to stop us.

We’ve been fighting them for two years — ever since the Liberals banned me from receiving government updates via the Twitter accounts of Steven Guilbeault, Trudeau’s environment minister.

I’m not talking about his personal account — I’m not interested in his family photos or anything like that. I’m talking about his government account, run by dozens of civil servants, paid for by taxpayers, where he publishes important government information, makes announcements and interacts with citizens.

As a citizen, a taxpayer and a journalist I have every right to see that. And if you think it’s a petty thing to sue over, let me ask you this: if Trudeau and Guilbeault (each of whom had their own team of lawyers in court today) can keep the power to blacklist people they don’t like from receiving government announcements on Twitter, what other, more important services will they apply their blacklist to?

Business licences? EI or CPP payments? Getting a passport? Or even having a bank account?

It’s not a hypothetical question: Trudeau revealed his authoritarian nature when he invoked martial law against the trucker convoy, jailing peaceful protesters and seizing hundreds of bank accounts without a trial.

That’s what this lawsuit is about.It’s about setting the precedent that Trudeau and Guilbeault cannot discriminate against citizens they don’t like, when it comes to civil rights and government services.

And they want to set exactly the opposite precedent.

But here’s the good news: today we had a win. Incredibly, Guilbeault has argued that his Twitter account is actually not a government account — even though it is operated by two dozen civil servants. So today, we sought to introduce proof that Guilbeault had his Twitter account officially certified as a government account by Twitter itself, as shown by a little grey “government verification” checkmark next to his name.

You would have thought that such a fact would be unremarkable — but both Trudeau’s and Guilbeault’s lawyers vociferously opposed that evidence being used in the trial. It was really quite bizarre. His Twitter account literally says it’s a government account right on it. All we wanted to do was show a picture of it as evidence. And they panicked, and tried everything they could to stop it.

Well, the judge took a 20-minute break and did some legal research. When he came back, he ruled that the grey Twitter checkmark was indeed admissible — in fact, it could be very important to the case to prove that the Twitter account was a government service, and thus couldn’t be used to punish citizens like me.

It might not sound like a big win, but watching the government lawyers desperately try to stop it, tells me that it was a big win, indeed.(Those lawyers immediately said that they needed a lot more time to prepare their case, so the main trial has been delayed a few months.)So the war continues — but we won an important battle today.

I promise we’ll keep on fighting against Trudeau and Guilbeault, not just in the court of public opinion, but also in the court of law.

Someone’s got to. Because if they’re going after Rebel News today, odds are they’re going after you tomorrow.

GUEST: Chad Williamson, Litigation specialist along with Scott Nicol, lawyers hired for TwitterLawsuit.ca