Canada: Why I filed an ethics complaint against an ‘Antifa government lawyer’

Few would agree that the state of speech rights and civil liberties in Canada is in good shape.

On top of the ongoing over-prosecution of anti-lockdown protesters and the empowering of federal bureaucrats to regulate social media, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party gave away millions of taxpayer dollars to third-party ideologues to attack groups they don’t like, cordoning off huge sections of our debate space in the process.  

The federally funded Canadian Anti-Hate Network (Canada’s version of the SPLC), for instance, initiated Trudeau’s smear campaign to label lockdown-skeptics as ‘white supremacists’ and bragged internally to their Heritage Department-funders that one of its top grant-funded achievements was doxxing a young man who threw pebbles at Trudeau during one of the latter’s many mixed post-COVID receptions.  

Staggeringly, CAHN is now applying to obtain a giant $5 million (Canadian) grant to become an official internet watchdog, which, despite an Ontario court recently declaring them and their notorious board member Richard Warman to be ‘a part of’ and ‘provider of assistance to’ the ultra-violent Antifa movement, they will likely receive if the Liberals’ totalitarian trajectory is anything to go by.  

Warman is almost a household name in Canada. On his weaponization of a since-repealed law allowing private citizens to sue individuals for allegedly uttering “contemptuous speech”, one outlet writes:  

Section 13 was thrust into the public eye in 2002 with the arrival of Warman’s novel strategy to proactively use the legislation to shut down voices he disapproved of. While the law was intended for the protection of minority groups, Warman – a white male − was responsible for an impressive 16 complaints, the most of any individual.       

…     

In some instances, Warman obtained his evidence by provoking extremist statements from obscure online message boards. Sometimes he even posed as a neo-Nazi poster himself, which one tribunal adjudicator later said “diminish[ed] his credibility” and “could have precipitated further hate messages.” Partly because his targets were mostly poor and couldn’t afford legal help, Warman was successful in every case but one. He was awarded tens of thousands of dollars in monetary compensation for the damages he purportedly suffered. As one Huffington Post contributor wryly described Warman: “He’s sacked more peewee quarterbacks than any other NFL linebacker.”  

Since then, on top of advising CAHN and launching a failed defamation suit against mother-and-son conservative journalists Barbara and Jon Kay (the one where he got the Antifa label), he’s also filed numerous questionable ethics complaints against lawyers whose politics he doesn’t like. Although it seems none of them have ever been successful, Warman no doubt knows he has an army of likeminded journalist-activists at his disposal (like those who form the “network” in CAHN’s name, listed here) willing to treat such complaints as newsworthy developments, thereby signaling to the public that opinions not shared by our Laurentian elite will not be tolerated.  

Recently, I did the same thing against him. Warman, apart from being a CAHN legal advisor, works as a lawyer for the Defense Department and is a Judge Advocate-General reservist. Never mind it seems outrageous that an ‘Antifa affiliate’ could occupy such posts, being part of a group declared a domestic-terror threat most certainly goes against numerous provisions of Ontario’s legal practitioners’ code of ethics. It should go without that saying that being part of a group which, in the words of Biden administration prosecutors, uses “force, fear, and violence to further their own interests and to suppress the interests of others”, should undermine both the ‘public confidence in the integrity of the profession’ or contravene Ontario lawyers’ responsibility to “encourage public respect for [] the administration of justice.”  

In my complaint, I remind the Law Society of Ontario just what type of group Warman and CAHN have been found to be “promoting” and “endorsing.” In Canada, Antifa members have been convicted for numerous acts of extreme violence (including physical assaults on journalists), while the Canadian Security Intelligence Service even lists them (that is, “Anarchist Violence”) as a serious domestic threat. In 2021 alone, it was estimated that in the United Stated there were “31 anarchist, antifascist, and like-minded terrorist attacks and plots…19 were melee attacks using weapons such as knives or bludgeoning objects, 3 primarily used explosives or incendiaries, 2 used firearms, and 1 was a vehicular attack.”  

Previous to this, Antifa members have been convicted of attempting to derail a train, blow up a law enforcement building, and have committed cold-blooded murder against individuals simply because of their perceived conservative views (the murderer was later killed himself following a shoot-out with police). 

Figures like Warman make one think of leftists who understand the crucial importance open debate has in free societies; people like Canada’s Alan Bovoroy, late-sixties campus activist Mario Savio, the ACLU’s David Goldberger, or contemporary progressives like Nadine Strassen, Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald. I shudder to think what our society will look like if the Canadian left sheds the wiser and more principled advocates among them. Although the “Antifa left” can advocate for any laws or policies they like, they can’t be allowed to use violence and intimidation to shut down speech they hate. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can to ensure that they, at the very least, don’t get an official stamp of approval from our professional regulatory boards or our Canadian federal government.  

Image: Ivan Radic, via Flickr // CC BY 2.0 DEED