The Federal Court of Canada has set a new precedent by ruling a book critical of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau published during the 2019 election “illegal.” Never before in Canada has an author been prosecuted for publishing and promoting a politically critical book. Rebel News commander and lawyer Ezra Levant was ordered to pay $13,000 for publishing The Librano$: What the Media Won’t Tell You About Justin Trudeau’s Corruption, and narrowly avoided criminal prosecution. He was further put on “notice” that if he “publishes and promotes” another book during the next election, he “could be prosecuted criminally and be jailed. “Several times in the Court ruling the judge says I'm lucky I wasn't prosecuted with criminal charges,” Levant said. Levant released The Librano$ while Trudeau, who became prime minister in 2015 and held a majority government at a time, was running for re-election. He maintained leadership, but had to settle for a minority government. .The book became a best seller and Levant said it “enraged Trudeau” to such an extent Elections Canada “assigned more than a dozen staff” to investigate and attempt to prosecute him. In the last four years, he has been fined “thousands of dollars” and has “spent $100,000 in legal fees” defending his right to publish the book. “I just lost in court,” Levant said in a video released Thursday morning. “Justin Trudeau has been prosecuting me for more than four years over that book, and I'm shocked to say he won. The Federal Court of Canada just ordered me to pay the Trudeau government $13,000 because I published and promoted that book during the 2019 Canadian federal election.”Levant plans to appeal the court ruling with the representation of Calgary lawyer Sarah Miller. “We need to appeal this court ruling,” he said. “If not, a terrible precedent will be set.”“Not just for me. for the sake of freedom in Canada, for everyone. This has never happened before in Canadian history. No other author that I’ve heard of has ever been prosecuted by Elections Canada for publishing and promoting a book that is critical of a politician.”“And there's a reason for that. The Elections Act specifically exempts books and the promotion of books from prosecution,” Levant pointed out, citing section 2B of the act. It specifically “exempts newspaper editorials, speeches, letters, news, things like that. And it exempts books and the promotion of books.”.The judge said Elections Canada didn’t punish him for the “content of the book” and that being investigated by the RCMP and having to disclose his editorial plans to the federal government were “not chilling effects” on political speech. Levant quoted paragraph 96 from the court ruling, which said he and Rebel News have “not put forward any evidence of the alleged chilling effects.”“I agree with the Attorney General of Canada that the spectre raised (by the defendant) of censorship, prohibitions on book publication, and government scrutiny of political writing is not supported by the Legislative text of the subject provision,” the judge wrote. A notice from the Manager of the Compliance Unit of Elections Canada’s censorship branch describes the book as a reference to the popular mob television series The Sopranos. “The book title’s reference to Librano$ which was clearly designed to create an association between the name of a registered party and The Sopranos, a mafia-themed television show, and to link the party to corruption,” the official note reads, “drawings of the show’s characters were replaced with drawings of the leader and other public figures of the party.
