Patrick Allard condemns ruling in failed defamation lawsuit vs Manitoba NDP

A Manitoba provincial candidate who failed in his lawsuit against the Manitoba NDP says the ruling against him suggests people can defame others so long as they believe it.Patrick Allard, a Fort Whyte by-election candidate in 2022, sued the Manitoba NDP after their candidate Trudy Schroeder refused to participate in a debate that included Allard."Trudy is happy to have a debate but the Liberal proposal to give Patrick Allard a platform to spout his anti-vaccination and racist rhetoric is wrong," read an NDP press release entitled, “Manitoba Liberals try to give anti-vaxxer a platform.”The release was written by Mark Rosner, who is now Premier Wab Kinew’s chief of staff. In testimony, Rosner referred to a Facebook post by Allard that chided Manitoba public health officials to rat on neighbours for having too many people at their house, even at Christmas. Allard wrote, “turn in any attic hiding jews while you’re at it.”Rosner also testified that Allard was a vocal supporter of the trucker convoy and that it had included a Nazi flag..In an Oct. 16 ruling, Associate Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench Shane Perlmutter said Allard’s language was objectionable. He also found it significant that the release mentioned “racist rhetoric” instead of explicitly calling Allard a racist.Perlmutter conceded that neither Holocaust denial nor trivialization were racist in a dictionary definition. However, he wrote, “There is a very subjective component to use of the term” of racist as well, which left it impossible to say with certainty whether such comments were racist or not.However, Perlmutter did believe that Rosner and two others who helped draft the news release had “sincerely held beliefs” regarding Allard and racism that gave them “qualified privilege” to make their comments. In the ruling, the judge said he would have only awarded $1 in damages had he sided with Allard, not the $50,000 he asked for, nor the $500 suggested by lawyers for the NDP. He also ruled Allard had breached a court rule by taking NDP text messages he had obtained through the court proceeding and sharing them with the Winnipeg Sun.In an interview with Western Standard, Allard said the purpose of his lawsuit was to stop unfounded characterizations of conservatives. .“The way things have been going… for the last little while is, conservatives tend to get punished while liberals and leftists get a free pass,” Allard said. “Even though I am a free speech absolutist, I don't think you should just go around lying about people like they did to me.”The lawsuit was a short-term success, according to Allard, because he was not smeared when he ran in the 2023 general election. Going forward, he believes the ruling sets a bad precedent.“As long as you believe something, you could say whatever you want about anybody, and that’s a shame,” Allard said.The ruling issued Oct. 16 said people did not have a “licence to publish, with impunity, remarks which may be defamatory and untrue” in an election campaign, but can do so if they are “relevant, necessary, and appropriate, as I found them to be in this case.”Allard was fined $35,000 for violations of public health orders during the pandemic and a separate charter challenge against those restrictions failed. He said the decisions left him “let down and disappointed over the last six years,” but he’d thought his latest effort was a “slam dunk.”In May, Sun columnist Marty Gold wrote, “There’s no winning for the NDP in Patrick Allard’s court case.”.The Winnipeg contractor says none of his Jewish friends disagree with his comparisons of Germany’s rat-on-your-neighbour culture of the 1930s and the approach of Canadian authorities during the pandemic. Such comparisons were made by New York-based Holocaust survivor Vera Sherav in the five-part documentary entitled “Never Again is Now Global.”Allard’s lawyers called Sherav to the stand and she was prepared to testify. However, according to Allard, the judge blocked the request because Sherav was not deemed to have qualifications as an expert witness.Allard also disagreed with the judge’s finding that the NDP had no malice against him. He said the point of the press release in an election campaign was clearly to sling mud against the Liberals and him with a view of decreasing their support and winning the election. Liberal candidate Willard Reaves lost the election by 197 votes to Progressive Conservative Obby Khan, with Schroeder gaining 1,112 votes and Allard 101.The judgment saddled Allard with the NDP’s legal costs on top of his own expenses of roughly $75,000. His GiveSendGo page has raised less than $5,000 and has not received any donations in the past three weeks. Regardless, he said he will sue for defamation again if he is unduly slandered in the future.

Patrick Allard condemns ruling in failed defamation lawsuit vs Manitoba NDP

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