You’ll remember Yaniv: he made national headlines as the male-to-female transgender “woman” who demanded that female aestheticians wax his male genitals, and when they refused, he took them to the human rights tribunal.
He’s gross. But the human rights tribunal is worse — they helped him abuse those women. They agreed to take those nuisance suits. And now the same tribunal has agreed to take his complaint against us.
Yaniv and his friends at the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal are calling our news reports about him "hate speech" and threatening us with huge fines. They even told me on the phone that they might issue a binding legal order to us to stop reporting on him!
The complaint was written by Yaniv himself and it looks like it was written by a crazy person — it’s in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. It’s so obviously a nuisance suit, it’s shocking that the tribunal would actually run with it.
But this has happened to me before. In a famous case almost 20 years ago, I was prosecuted by Alberta's human rights commission for republishing the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in a magazine I ran back then. They pursued me for 900 days before finally dropping the matter — leaving me with a huge legal bill.
Well, it's happening again.
And by the way, this sort of shakedown is going to happen a lot more when Justin Trudeau passes his new censorship bill, called C-63, that’s before Parliament right now.
Right now this “hate speech” provision is just in a few provincial laws. But Trudeau wants to make it national and his version will launch a flood of these complaints, because it pays up to $20,000 to any crank, any bully, any left-wing activist for making complaints like this. It will be a giant cancel culture machine and it rewards nuisance complaints.
To be precise, I’m being prosecuted under section 7 of the B.C. Human Rights Code, which says it’s illegal to publish anything that’s “likely to expose a person... to hatred or contempt”. It’s not even a thought crime, it’s a feelings crime — if anything you say might cause someone to feel the emotion of hate or contempt, you lose. Of course, just showing Jonathan Yaniv’s vicious conduct is going to make a lot of people feel contempt for him. He’s a vicious bully and a terrible racist, too. It’s so weird that the human rights tribunal has teamed up with him.
Obviously we have to hire lawyers, which is part of the abuse here: Yaniv doesn’t have to hire a lawyer. He just typed out his crazy manifesto, gave it to the government, and they’re prosecuting us with government lawyers. We, on the other hand, have to hire lawyers by ourselves — and even if we win, we don’t get our legal fees back. This is the template that Trudeau is going to replicate nationally and he’s going to make it worse, by actually paying people up to $20,000 to make complaints.
You heard the human rights cop in my phone call with him: he says he has power to legally order us to stop reporting on Jonathan Yaniv — plus make us pay a fine. This is clearly unconstitutional, but they obviously don’t care about such details.
We’ve got to fight back. Can I please ask for your help?
I’m afraid I need it. Yaniv is a kook, a total nut, a criminal, a predator, a racist, all of that. But he somehow manages to convince the B.C. government’s human rights tribunal to go after his enemies, again and again. Those poor aestheticians — mainly immigrant women — were crushed by him. I refuse to be crushed by him. We’ve got to stand up to this bully.