Brain Fox, the man accused of waving a Nazi flag at the Freedom Convoy, has filed a $1.5 million defamation lawsuit against his accuser. Ontario law restricts libel claims if allegations, even if untrue, “relate to a matter of public interest.”.“Every legal avenue will be pursued,” Fox, a Toronto publicist, said in a statement. Fox and his employer Enterprise Canada filed the claim in Ontario Superior Court, according to Blacklock's Reporter..Brendan Miller, a Freedom Convoy lawyer, named Fox as the Nazi flag bearer at a November 21 hearing of the Public Order Emergency Commission. “It was all over the news, the gentleman who was carrying the Nazi flag,” said Miller..A lone man waving the swastika was photographed on Saturday, January 29 among 15,000 demonstrators on Parliament Hill. The person was never identified..Convoy organizers disavowed any connection to the Nazi. Fox in Court filings denied he was the flag bearer, said he opposed Nazism and “was 500 kilometres away in Toronto on January 29.”.Plaintiffs who sue for defamation in Ontario are subject to challenge under a 2015 Protection Of Public Participation Act, the so-called SLAPP Act (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”). It allows defendants in a defamation suit to ask that a judge dismiss the case with costs if the alleged libel involved “an expression made by the person that relates to a matter of public interest.”.SLAPP judgments against accusers have run to six figures. Joe Volpe, a former federal Liberal cabinet minister, on May 26 was ordered to pay $383,878 in costs after he sued Toronto city councillors and Catholic school trustees for defamation. “Parties are not free to abuse the judicial system without the threat of costs,” Superior Court Justice Benjamin Glustein wrote in the case..In 2021 a Vaughan, ON. window manufacturer Thermo Windows Inc. that sued customers for defamation over negative reviews posted on the internet had the case dismissed with an order to pay $166,687 in costs. “In my view the plaintiffs brought this lawsuit to bully the defendants into removing their reviews from the internet,” wrote Justice Fred Myers of Ontario Superior Court..“This is a SLAPP suit,” wrote Justice Myers. “Accordingly the defendants should be fully indemnified for their costs.”.The Nazi flag incident on Parliament Hill was repeatedly cited by critics as evidence the Freedom Convoy was racist. “Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the House of Commons February 16..The incident also prompted Liberal and New Democrat MPs to convene an April 27 hearing of the House of Commons heritage committee to discuss a federal ban on swastika flags. “This cannot continue,” said New Democrat MP Peter Julian (New Westminster-Burnaby, B.C.). “We have these appalling symbols that are openly displayed even on Parliament Hill.”
