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Freedom Convoy lawyers ask for dismissal of Ottawa citizens’ $290 million class-action suit

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Lawyers representing Freedom Convoy leaders filed an application to dismiss the lawsuit as a ‘Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) – a lawsuit designed to silence the expression of peaceful protesters.’

A $290 million class-action lawsuit filed by disgruntled Ottawa residents against the Freedom Convoy leaders is designed to “silence” the leaders’ right to free “expression,” say their lawyers, adding that they have applied to have the case dismissed.

According to a Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) press release from yesterday, lawyers representing Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich, Chris Barber and others, have filed an application to dismiss the lawsuit as a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP)–a lawsuit designed to silence the expression of peaceful protesters.” The lawyers are expected to be in court on Thursday, December 14, to argue their case.

“The fundamental Charter freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly must be vigorously protected and defended, whether they are attacked directly by government or indirectly through a misguided civil action,” noted JCCF President John Carpay regarding the application to dismiss the lawsuit.  

In February 2022, the Freedom Convoy leaders were hit with the lawsuit, which originally started at $9.8 million but then ballooned to $290 million. The class-action lawsuit was filed by Ottawa civil servant Zexi Li on February 4, 2022, along with Geoffrey Delaney, Happy Goat Coffee Company, and a local union. It names plaintiffs who have businesses or were working in the city’s downtown core during the Freedom Convoy.  

According to the February 17, 2022, filing, all the plaintiffs are being represented by Ottawa litigation lawyers Champ & Associates. 

Included in the defendants lists besides Barber and Lich are Benjamin Dichter, as well as dozens of others. The lawsuit seeks damages against the peaceful protestors for “allegedly causing a nuisance. This lawsuit also seeks damages from citizens who donated to the peaceful protest,” noted the JCCF. 

Li was instrumental in having a horn-honking injunction placed against the Freedom Convoy during the protest.

According to the JCCF, anti-SLAPP legislation serves “to protect defendants against ‘Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation’ (SLAPP)–lawsuits designed to silence a defendant’s freedom of expression through threats of damages or costs.” 

“Anti-SLAPP motions are designed to end such lawsuits and are available to a defendant in any proceeding against them. Once an anti-SLAPP motion has been filed, the defendant must demonstrate that the proceeding against them arises from their expression that ‘relates to a matter of public interest’,” noted the JCCF. 

Should the defendant demonstrate that their expression does relate to a “matter of public interest,” then the plaintiff “must then demonstrate that their lawsuit has ‘substantial merit,’ and that the defendant has no valid defense.” 

At this point, the JCCF notes that a judge must then “weigh the importance of the expression at stake against the importance of the plaintiff’s allegations of harm.” 

‘Factual and legal weaknesses’  

JCCF lawyers will be in court tomorrow at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice regarding their Anti-SLAPP motion and say they will argue that the proceedings against “Tamara Lich, Chris Barber and others” do, in fact, “arise from their expression.” 

“Donating to and participating in the Freedom Convoy amounted to an expression of support for the protest, and of disagreement with the Government of Canada’s response to COVID–matters of public interest,” noted the JCCF. 

“Further, lawyers argue that Zexi Li’s class-action lawsuit contains factual and legal weaknesses; it is not obvious that the proceeding against the defendants has ‘substantial merit.’ Finally, lawyers argue that the defendants do have valid defenses and that the value of the expression at issue outweighs the allegations of nuisance against them.” 

According to lawyer James Manson, Li’s lawsuit engages the “very purpose that ‘anti-SLAPP’ legislation was designed to address: an attempt to silence peaceful expression, and the right of defendants to participate in public debate.” 

Lawyers will argue that the “plaintiffs’ entire class-action lawsuit is, in fact, a SLAPP action disguised as a nuisance claim and that the lawsuit is merely intended to punish the defendants for participating in the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest.” 

The JCCF said that if they are successful, all or part of Li’s class action lawsuit will be dismissed.  

Lawsuit comes amidst Freedom Convoy leaders’ trial  

Currently, Lich and Barber are on trial in an Ottawa court to argue against Crown charges relating to their involvement with the Freedom Convoy. The trial is now on pause until the new year.  

The Crown has been trying to prove that Lich and Barber had somehow influenced the protesters’ actions through their words as part of a co-conspiracy. Lich and Barber’s lawyers however reject this notion.  

It got to the point where Justice Heather Perkins-McVey warned Li she must stop using the term “occupation” as a descriptor for the protest or face disciplinary action.  

Li, in February of 2022, had commended Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s refusal to meet the truckers, telling CTV News at the time that the truckers “cannot be negotiated with” and that Ottawa downtown residents “have trauma” and deserve “reparations” for having been disturbed.  

In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Trudeau’s government enacted the Emergencies Act on February 14. 

During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister. 

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Censorship Industrial Complex

UNESCO launches course aimed at ‘training’ social media influencers to ‘report hate speech’

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By Tim Hinchliffe

UNESCO’s bills its new ‘training’ initiative as empowering participants to be more credible and resilient while simply turning independent content creators into talking heads for the establishment.

UNESCO and the Knight Center for Journalism launch training courses, e-books, and surveys on disinformation and hate speech for influencers and content creators, big and small.

Last month, UNESCO published the results of a survey called “Behind the Screens: Insights from Digital Content Creators” that concluded that among 500 content creators in 45 countries that had a minimum of 1,000 followers, 62 percent said they did “not carry out rigorous and systematic fact-checking of information prior to sharing it,” while 73 percent expressed “the wish to be trained to do so.”

And lo and behold! UNESCO and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas have launched a re-education course to brainwash independent creators into thinking like unelected globalists and the legacy media, whose credibility are at an all-time low:

The journalism industry is on high alert as news audiences continue to migrate away from legacy media to social media, and many young people place more trust in TikTokers than journalists working at storied news outlets

“Respondents to the survey expressed interest in taking UNESCO’s free online course designed to equip participants with media and information literacy skills and knowledge,” the report states.

To get an idea of the make-up of those 500 content creators that were surveyed in the UNESCO study:

  • 68 percent were nano-influencers – those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers
  • 25 percent were micro-influencers – those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers
  • 4 percent were macro-influencers – those with 100,000 to 1,000,000 followers
  • 6 percent were mega-influencers – those with over 1,000,000 followers

Only 12.2 percent of the 500 people surveyed produced content under the category of “current affairs/politics and economy” while the majority covered “fashion/lifestyle” (39.3 percent), “beauty” (34 percent), “travel and food” (30 percent), and “gaming” (29 percent).

Equip yourself to combat online misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and harmful AI content. Collaborate with fellow journalists and content creators to promote transparency and accountability on digital platforms, empowering your audience with the media and information literacy skills they need to navigate today’s information landscape.

In addition to the survey and the online course called Digital Content Creators and Journalists: How to Be a Trusted Voice Online,” UNESCO and the Knight Center also published an e-book in October called “Content Creators and Journalists: Redefining News and Credibility in the Digital Age.”

This pyramid of propaganda is billed as empowering influencers to be more credible and resilient, but these efforts are also aimed at turning independent content creators into talking heads for the establishment.

 

Despite their expanding outreach, many digital content creators who work independently face significant challenges including the lack of institutional support, guidance, and recognition. — UNESCO, Behind the Screens: Insights from Digital Content Creators, November 2024

How can an independent content creator remain independent if he or she needs institutional support, guidance, and recognition?

This is an attempt by the United Nations to take independence away from the equation, so that its messaging becomes indistinguishable from mainstream, establishment narratives.

And between the survey and the e-book, there is not one, single, solitary example of disinformation or hate speech – save perhaps the claim that denying official climate change narratives is considered disinformation, but that’s highly debatable.

Threats to collective climate action are often perpetuated not only by individual creators but by industries, like fossil fuels, that actively shape public discourse to their advantage.

Speaking of climate change, the e-book contains a lengthy chapter called “Content Creators and Climate Change” that is entirely dedicated to pushing climate activism while claiming climate change disinformation is often perpetuated by coordinated campaigns from fossil fuel industries.

The UNESCO documents place heavy emphasis on disclosing who’s funding content creators while ignoring its partner, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP), and its alleged influence over UNESCO:

The Chinese Communist Party uses UNESCO to “rewrite history” and to “legitimize the party’s rule over regions with large ethnic minorities.”

When held to a mirror, UNESCO comes off as little more than hypocritical with massive conflicts of interests of its own:

One of the biggest ethical questions is knowing from where content creators derive their income.

 

At the same time, UNESCO points readers towards organizations like factcheck.org, which itself is funded by the likes of the U.S. State Department and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the latter of which holds approximately $2 billion of stock in COVID vaccine manufacturer J&J, according to U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie.

In January 2021, UNESCO, the WHO, UNDP, EU, and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas ran a similar type of propaganda campaign for so-called COVID vaccine disinformation training for journalists as they are now doing for so-called climate change disinformation for content creators.

Another goal of UNESCO and the Knight Center is to create an environment where content creators snitch on one another under the guise of “hate speech”:

Among those targeted by hate speech, most chose to ignore it (31.5%). Only one-fifth (20.4%) reported it to social media platforms. This indicates an area where UNESCO and its partners could provide valuable training for digital content creators on how to effectively address and report hate speech.

In other words, the U.N. is partnering with journalists to teach influencers how to become victims that need protection.

Hey! Content creators. Were you aware that any criticism against the propaganda that we’ve planted within you means that you were a victim of hate speech? No? Well, climb on board and let’s “effectively address and report hate speech!”

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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COVID-19

Health Canada received over a million reports of COVID vaccine adverse events: records

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

As reported first by True North, according to Access to Information correspondence, from December 2020 to December 2022 Health Canada got over a million serious adverse event reports regarding the COVID vaccines.

Newly uncovered records have revealed that during the so-called pandemic thousands of serious adverse event reports related to the mRNA COVID jabs were reported to Health Canada each day, at the same time public health officials and the media claimed the experimental vaccines were safe. 

As reported first by True North, according to Access to Information (ATIP) correspondence, from December 2020 to December 2022 Health Canada got over a million serious adverse events (SAE) reports regarding the COVID vaccines from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Janssen. Broken down, some 600,000 of the reports related to the Pfizer jab, 220,000 to AstraZeneca, 160,000 to Moderna and 22,000 to Janssen. Of note is that the Pfizer jab was the most widely distributed in Canada.  

As per regulations, pharmaceutical companies must report SAE that happen anywhere in the world to Canada’s public health minister within “15 days after receiving or becoming aware of the information.” 

The access to information coordinator noted that a “broader interpretation (of your request) could encompass millions of records,” adding that as they had a “processing capacity of about 500 pages per month,” handling such a large volume would “require a significant amount of time to complete.”   

Broken down, if one serious adverse event report totals just a page each, at the given processing speed, it would take 167 years before all the SAEs would be processed. 

The first COVID jab to be approved for use in Canada was Pfizer’s BioNTech mRNA injection, which became available on December 9, 2020. Moderna’s mRNA jab soon followed a couple of weeks later. Of important note is the launch of the jabs came after the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave vaccine makers a shield from liability regarding jab-related injuries. 

Health minister would have seen SAE submissions  

By June of 2021, the SAE submissions just for the Pfizer shot totaled over 100,000 reports worldwide, with some 820 in Canada alone. Canada’s then-Minister of Health Patty Hadju would have had information at this time from the various drug jab makers showing how many SAEs there were both domestically and worldwide. 

It is estimated that overall Health Canada was getting about 10,000 SAE reports from worldwide sources every week.  

All levels of Canadian government heavily promoted the COVID shots, regularly touting them as both “safe and effective.” 

The mRNA shots have also been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children and all have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies.

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