Defamation suit against Liberal leader tossed
Realtor objected to Wilkinson's on-air criticisms of business proposal
Andrew Wilkinson and several other defendants in a defamation lawsuit have succeeded in having the case thrown out of court.
The suit largely related to comments Wilkinson, currently the B.C. Liberal leader, and others made on a radio talk show before the 2017 provincial election when Wilkinson was a cabinet minister running for re-election. The show on CKNW focused on an ad related to the foreign-buyers tax that was posted on an online Chinese-language forum by a realtor named Zheng Zhao.
Zhao, who also had flyers describing his proposal distributed at a Burnaby shopping mall, thought he had found a loophole in the legislation that he could exploit to help foreign residents buy real estate in B.C. without having to pay the 15 per cent tax.
Under his plan, a foreign buyer would form a partnership with him to buy real estate in Vancouver with the property being bought and registered in the name of the partnership, not Zhao's own name, and the foreign buyer would pay him three per cent of the purchase price of the property, not three per cent of the ownership.
At the time he believed his scheme was workable, but now acknowledges that such a partnership would not result in a tax exemption and was really no loophole at all.
His ad attracted the interest of a group known as Housing Action for Local Taxpayers (HALT), one of whose members took the ad's claims at face value, seeing them as more proof that the provincial government had enacted a law that could be easily circumvented.
Gary Liu, a member of HALT, was invited to discuss the matter on the CKNW show hosted by Lynda Steele and Drex on April 26, 2017. During the show, Wilkinson, who was listening in on the broadcast and becoming concerned about what he was hearing, called in and expressed the opinion that Zhao's scheme, as it was being described, would not be permitted by the legislation.
Several Chinese language media, including the newspapers Ming Pao and Sing Tao, picked up on the story and published articles describing or purporting to describe what was said on the show.
Zhao commenced his lawsuit in February 2018, claiming that the defendants had defamed him by misrepresenting the terms of his proposal in various ways, falsely suggesting that he had already acted on the plan when he had not, and unfairly branding him as a fraudster and tax evader.
The Real Estate Council of B.C. took notice and investigated the matter, but imposed no disciplinary action against Zhao.
In his decision on the case, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Warren Milman said he was not satisfied that Wilkinson's actual remarks conveyed the defamatory messages attributed to him. The judge concluded that defamation had not been proven against the other defendants either and dismissed the case against them.
Contacted on Tuesday, Zhao said he had no comment on the ruling itself for the time being as he was still in the process of fully understanding it.
“I have a clean conscience — I didn't do what the defendants accused me of doing or saying,” he said in an email.