Far-right extremists converge at memorial
Despite a co- ordinated effort by antiracist activists to stop it, the Toronto Public Library is standing by its decision to rent space for a memorial Wednesday night for Barbara Kulaszka, a controversial lawyer who defended some of Canada’s most notorious accused hatemongers, propagandists, and anti- Semitic conspiracy theorists.
Kulaszka, who died last month at age 64 but whose death was not publicized until Tuesday, i s famous among the Canadian far right for winning acquittals under the law for people charged with hate crimes, or even undoing the laws used to charge them.
She was largely responsible, for example, for the fact that Canada has no law against false news and no human- rights ban on internet hate speech, and for the fact that no Nazi has been convicted in Canada of war crimes.
A notice from Henry Makow, a prominent anti- Semitic conspiracy theorist in Winnipeg, said the cause of death was lung cancer, and that her funeral has already taken place, last month. She lived in Brighton, Ont.
“She literally gave her life for her passionate belief in freedom of speech,” said Paul Fromm, a former Kulaszka client who has become a leader of sorts of Canada’s racist right.
Bernie Farber, executive director of the Mosaic Institute and a former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, called the memorial in a public library the first comparable event since the late 1980s in the age of the neoNazi Heritage Front.
Ana-Maria Critchley, manager of stakeholder relations for the Toronto Public Library, said, as with any thirdparty rental, the library does not endorse the event.
The Toronto Public Library dispatched two extra security guards to Richview Library ahead of the memorial on Wednesday. “Given all the concerns that were raised today,” Critchley said, “we wanted to take extra precaution.” But as the memorial began in a secondfloor room around 6:15 p.m., there were only news crews milling outside the library, perplexing the parents and children who walked past.
Before the memorial started, a Library staff member reiterated terms of use for the meeting room to everyone present, as well as the library’s code of conduct and the Canadian Human Rights Act. The staff member stayed in the room to monitor the memorial, said Linda Hazzan, the library’s director of communications.
One of the attendees, who refused to give her name, said it was “very, very sad” that the library placed “a spy” in the memorial.
“What kind of country are we living in?” she said.
As the meeting went on inside, three people dressed in black shirts with dark masks partially covering their faces stood at the far end of the parking lot, staring at the entrance to the library. Asked if they were attendees to the memorial or protesters, they would only say, “We don’t talk to media.”
Two police cruisers arrived on scene around 7 p.m., and two uniformed officers walked into the library and had a closed- door meeting with staff. Critchley said she notified police about the three people in masks on the property because she “thought they looked kind of suspicious.” As the officers left the library, one said they were there for a “routine call for service.” The masked group lingered at a picnic table at an adjacent park, with police observing them from a cruiser nearby. The group eventually left, without interacting with anyone on scene.
Richard Warman, the Ottawa human rights lawyer who pursued nearly every hate speech case under the Canadian Human Rights Act, including Marc Lemire’s, and who was in recent years Kulaszka’s greatest adversary, noted that Fromm has been barred from Parliament and Lemire is the last known leader of the Heritage Front.
“If that’s not good enough for the Toronto Public Library to say ‘ No, thanks’ then what could be?” he said.
Wednesday afternoon, Toronto Mayor John Tory released a statement expressing concern about the memorial.
“Following a request I made to consider the cancellation of this event, I was informed that the library has received legal advice that it cannot reject this room booking request,” Tory’s statement said. “My office will be asking the library board to review its room rental policies in the wake of this event.”
It is a fittingly controversial end to a professional life working in the highest courts on behalf of people from the fringes of civil society.
After the 2013 death of Douglas Christie, Kulaszka took over his mantle as the go-to lawyer for Canada’s far right.
But she had always been his equal. For example, when Nazi rocket engineer Arthur Rudolph was seeking to reenter Canada in 1990, it was Kulaszka he hired for the high- profile immigration case, though she lost it.
That was not the norm. She acted as co-counsel with Christie for Imre Finta, a Canadian citizen who ran a restaurant in Toronto and in 1987 became the first person prosecuted for war crimes in Canada.
Years earlier, he had commanded a Hungarian military unit that rounded up Jews and deported them to Nazi death camps. The pair won him a jury acquittal that stood up through appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, and led to a wholesale change in how Canada deals with war criminals — deporting, rather than charging.
In the early 1990s, Kulaszka and Christie also represented Ernst Zundel, a publisher of Holocaust denial literature, in a series of cases that transfixed Canada. His prosecution coincided with growing street- level violence between racists and anti- fascists, and ultimately led to the collapse of the crime of “false news.”
When Christie died, Kulaszka recalled how bothered he was by the widespread assumption that he made common cause with his clients, a suspicion that was also frequently directed at her.
“I think the criticisms and attacks made on him over the years hurt him deeply,” she told the National Post at the time.
But he kept on defending his clients according to the principles of law, she said, “which in the end protect all of us from the power of the state. That type of courage is very rare.”
Kulaszka never had Christie’s knack for grandstanding or oratory. He was politically minded, even once seeking to run for office on a western separatist ticket.
Kulaszka was more private, but engaged with the substantive questions about Holocaust revisionism far more than he ever did. In her many cases that involved freedom of speech, she sometimes defended the speech as much as the freedom.
For example, she edited Did Six Million Really Die?, a report on t he Zundel prosecution that takes its title from an earlier notorious work of Holocaust denial, spread by Zundel. She claimed the book “ensures that both sides of this ethnic dispute are at least available to the general reader.”
She also wrote an essay in defence of Holocaust revisionism, and described Zundel’s departure from Canada to the U. S. as part of a “brain drain.”
POLICE ON SCENE AS CONTROVERSIAL LAWYER REMEMBERED
Farber, who had plenty of experience with Kulaszka’s clients, countered that as a lawyer she had many successes “to the detriment of Canadian society.”
“Any contact I had with her was always negative. there was no humour in it. There was nothing. It was clear to me that she embraced the philosophy of the people she represented, and she did this for a very long time,” he said.