Lawyer wins $10K in defamation damages
Former senior Conservative staffer posted ‘untrue’ article to website
A former senior Conservative staffer in the Senate has been ordered to pay damages of $10,000 for defaming Ottawa human rights lawyer Richard Warman.
Michael Veck was ordered to pay the money by Ontario Superior Court Judge David Corbett, who said Veck had no legal defence for posting an untrue and defamatory article about Warman on an Internet site in 2009.
Until recently, Veck was parliamentary affairs adviser in the office of the leader of the government in the Senate.
His LinkedIn account still lists him in that capacity. He previously worked as a senior policy adviser in the office of then-environment minister Peter Kent.
In an email Friday, Veck said he did not wish to comment on the decision. He said he no longer works for the Senate or has any involvement in politics, and denied that his departure was related to Warman’s libel action.
Warman became a target for free-speech advocates and rightwing extremists after filing and litigating 15 successful complaints about online hatred by neo-Nazis and white supremacists under provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act later repealed by the Conservative government.
In his July 30 decision, Corbett outlines the facts that led to Warman’s lawsuit against Veck.
In 2008 he wrote, Jonathan Kay (then a National Post columnist) published an article that repeated allegations that Warman was the author of an article posted to a right-wing website that contained “misogynist” and “racist” comments about Anne Cools, the first black Canadian appointed to the Senate.
Warman served a libel notice on Kay and the National Post, which was later settled after Kay and the Post retracted the article.
But Kay’s article was republished by others, including Veck, who posted it to a website knows as WAIS (the World Association for International Studies) as part of a longer article that characterized Warman as a “radical anti-racist” who had tried to manufacture “phoney-racism,” Corbett writes.
The National Post had retracted Kay’s article and apologized for it long before Veck posted his article to the WAIS website, the decision states, though Veck testified that he was unaware of the retraction.
After receiving Warman’s libel notice, Veck took steps to have his article removed from the website and posted an apology, saying Warman “states that these allegations were false, and so I wish to retract them and apologize.”
Warman argued that Veck’s apology and retraction were inadequate, and Corbett agreed.
“The substance of Mr. Veck’s retraction is that, because Mr. Warman disagrees with the article, Mr. Veck is withdrawing it,” the judge wrote.
“This substance falls short of acknowledging that the article was without foundation.”
In an interview from France, where he is vacationing, Warman welcomed the judgment.
“I’m very pleased,” he said. “The goal has always been to get the attacks to stop and also to ensure that this lie doesn’t go unchallenged.
“It has unfortunately taken a number of years and a number of libel actions, but the result has been finally satisfactory.”
Warman said several others who republished the allegations in Kay’s column, including conservative writer Ezra Levant, have recently retracted them and apologized.
There’s still an outstanding libel action against two operators of an Internet forum. “They’re the only defendants who haven’t settled out now,” Warman said.