Editor acquitted of death threats

With a “Thank you, Your Honour and Merry Christmas,” alleged hate-monger James Sears walked out of a Toronto courtroom a free man on Monday.

The 55-year-old Sears was acquitted of threatening death against political operative Warren Kinsella and Kinsella’s wife Lisa.

Sears is the editor-inchief of Your Ward News, an odious Toronto newspaper available in print and online. The paper’s owner and publisher, LeRoy St. Germaine, also was charged but Ontario Court Judge Dan Moore had dismissed the charge against him.

Kinsella alleged that in the summer of 2017 edition, Sears, in a lengthy rant about the Children’s Aid Society, with which he had had a frightening brush, also had threatened him and his wife.

In the offending passage, Sears wrote that he blamed the Kinsellas or someone close to them with siccing the CAS on him, but said he kept silent until the agency investigation was over and his supporters for fear “some hothead” who cared about him “would lose it and do something illegal, like bludgeon the Kinsellas to death.”

Instead, Sears said, he chose to “let enough time pass” for people to react with cool heads.

The judge said while he “completely” accepted the Kinsellas’ testimony that they took the threat as a real danger “to their personal safety,” it wasn’t.

“A threat must thus be forward-looking, not a comment on something that could have or even should have happened in the past … For this reason, coupled with the stated desire in the passage that Mr. Sears timed the article to avoid the risk of someone bludgeoning the Kinsellas to death, I cannot find … that a threat is made out.”

An added difficulty, Moore said, is that when it comes to Sears and Your Ward News, the Kinsellas “are the opposite of dispassionate and unbiased. They perceive everything in the worst possible light.”

The judge noted the Kinsellas, deeply offended by the personal attacks on them in the paper and its content generally, “participated in, organized, and/or commenced a variety of legal and political actions aimed at exposing, opposing, and/or shutting down Your Ward News.

“They wrote articles, held press conferences, lobbied politicians and commenced this proceeding by laying a private information, among other things.”

(The provincial Crown attorney eventually took over carriage of that case.)

STAMP (Standing Together Against Mailing Prejudice), a group Lisa Kinsella helped found and which later successfully saw Canada Post stop delivering the paper for free, immediately denounced the decision as “appalling.” Warren Kinsella tweeted the group’s news release.

Sears and St. Germaine are currently on trial for promoting hatred against two identifiable groups, Jews and women, in the pages of Your Ward News.

Closing arguments in that case are expected soon.