Mayor hit by Twitter charter challenge
When Mayor Jim Watson blocks people on Twitter he’s violating their constitutional rights, a trio of Ottawa activists says, and they’re going to court to try to make him stop.
The case is the first of its kind in Canada, says human-rights lawyer Paul Champ, who’s representing them. The group is Emilie Taman, a law professor and sometime candidate for the NDP and a regular critic of the mayor’s; James Hutt, a Canadian Union of Postal Workers campaigner maybe better known for helping with last year’s pop-up supervised injection site in Lowertown; and Dylan Penner, who works for the Council of Canadians.
They all say Watson has cut them off from his Twitter feed after they’ve annoyed him. Which is not OK, they argue, because the mayor is a public official who uses his Twitter account for public purposes, to communicate public information and explain things he’s doing as Ottawa’s top civic politician.
(A Twitter “block” works both ways: if you block someone from following you, you can’t see anything they tweet and they can’t see anything you tweet. You all but disappear from each other’s Twitter worlds, though traces might remain if other people, whose tweets you follow, write about the person on the other side of the block.
(Another option Twitter offers is to “mute” people. If someone is muted, they can see your tweets and even respond to them, but you never see anything they write unless you specifically go looking for it. A person who’s blocked can tell that they’ve been blocked; if you mute someone, the only clue the other person gets is your persistent lack of engagement with them.)
“Each applicant had their Twitter account blocked by (Watson) shortly after making inquiries about, challenging, criticizing, or attempting to engage (Watson) regarding an issue of public concern,” says their joint court filing.
The right to free expression, protected in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “includes the derivative right to access government information where it is necessary for meaningful expression on the functioning of government and other matters of public concern,” they say, in an application Champ filed in court Tuesday morning.
“In our view, he could mute people rather than blocking them and it would be acceptable,” Champ said Tuesday afternoon. “The mayor is not constitutionally required to listen to your concerns.”
Watson has argued that his Twitter account, @jimwatsonottawa, belongs to him personally so he can do what he wants with it. The city government has multiple accounts that it uses to share official information, he’s said, but his Twitter account is his alone.
You don’t have to give a reason for blocking someone on Twitter, so they’re all guessing about why Watson has blocked them, but Penner, Hutt and Taman have all given Watson many possible reasons.
Penner’s sworn affidavit, filed to support the case, says he needled Watson on Sept. 19 about whether he’d be at mayoral debates sponsored by Ecology Ottawa and Now What Ottawa. When he went to see whether Watson replied, Penner found Watson had blocked him, the affidavit says.
Hutt’s affidavit says that on Sept. 21 he criticized Watson for skipping the Ecology Ottawa debate, and tweeted “a number of examples of actions Mayor Watson had taken that I thought were unsupportive to gender equality.”
Taman’s affidavit says she thinks Watson blocked her when she joined in a Twitter argument to defend Shawn Menard’s candidacy for city council in Capital ward, where she lives. Watson’s criticized him for allegedly running an angry, negative campaign.
“I joined this conversation by sending a tweet that disputed the characterization of Shawn’s campaign as negative. I sent a second tweet stating that I believed Mayor Watson was being hypocritical,” Taman’s affidavit says.
None of these was a one-off, to be clear. Taman got on the mayor’s bad side when she got involved with “Bookmark the Core,” opposing the Watson-led plan to put a new central library near LeBreton Flats instead of in Centretown. He’s needled her for running for the NDP in OttawaVanier, then saying she’d run for council in Capital, then changing her mind and supporting Menard. (On Twitter, like a lot of people, Watson can be much nastier than he is in person.) Penner criticized Watson for how he handled the death of Abdirahman Abdi in police custody.
They try to get under Watson’s skin and they succeed.
But Watson is still their mayor. Penner’s affidavit points out that a couple of days after Watson blocked him, tornadoes hit the city and Watson used Twitter to share important information about public safety and the widespread power outages that wasn’t coming from anywhere else.
And there’s the broader question of whether a political leader, who tweets on company time about his public work, can stop some people from reading what he says. In the United States, the current case law says no: A federal judge ruled in May that President Donald Trump can’t block Twitter followers, for much the same reasons the Ottawa group says Watson can’t.
There’s no such precedent in Canada, Champ the lawyer says, but he hopes this case creates one.
“Today, there is hardly a politician or elected public official in Canada who doesn’t have a Twitter account for communicating views and opinions to the public,” he says. “Twitter is an open digital forum for political debate and discussion, and Canadian politicians cannot block people simply because they dislike their opinions.”
The application is set to be heard at the Ottawa courthouse on Jan. 31.