Vincent Ke sued the news outlet after it reported claims he was part of election interference group
An Ontario MPP who stepped down from his role after Global News reports linked him to a Chinese election interference network can proceed with his libel lawsuit against the news outlet, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled last week.
The court dismissed Global News’ anti-SLAPP motion, which asked the court to throw out Vincent Ke’s lawsuit on the grounds that allowing it to proceed would cast a chill over the news outlet’s right to keep the electorate informed. Under Ontario’s Protection of Public Participation Act, defendants can file motions to dismiss abusive lawsuits that are designed to intimidate and silence critics.
However, the court concluded in its Oct. 17 decision that Ke’s libel suit does not qualify as a SLAPP action, reasoning it “is not an attempt to strong-arm a media outlet to bury a story or to prevent future stories.
“If [Ke] wins at trial, he will likely issue a press release or hold a press conference outside the courthouse,” the court added. “Until the court issues an injunction after an adjudication of the merits, this proceeding and the public trial are more likely to promote interest in the Global News article than to cause the defendants to delete it from their website.”
The court traced the dispute back to 2020, when Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents began reaching out to Sam Cooper, an investigative reporter with Global News, telling him they were “frustrated with what they saw as a lack of appropriate action by the government in response to clearly documented and ongoing attempts at foreign interference by China.” The agents’ contact with Cooper occurred in the wake of the “Two Michaels” incident, in which China detained two Canadians days after Vancouver RCMP officers arrested Meng Wanzhou, an executive with Chinese technology company Huawei.
The court noted that another one of Cooper’s sources, a CSIS officer, later told him that CSIS had investigated Markham deputy mayor Michael Chan and people associated with him, including Ke, Brampton mayor Patrick Brown, and Senator Victor Oh. The officer told Cooper CSIS believed that Ke and one of his staffers were involved in transmitting funds from Toronto’s Chinse Consulate to a Toronto businessman and a pro-Beijing advocacy group. The agent also told Cooper CSIS had listened to a telephone call between a Chinese consulate official and former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien over the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive.
Based on years of reporting, including interviews with multiple sources at CSIS and reviews of draft intelligence reports and memoranda regarding the federal agency’s ongoing investigations, Global News published stories by Cooper in March 2023, citing sources who alleged Ke was a financial intermediary in a Chinese election interference network.
Global News also broadcast a video featuring a graphic of Ke. A caption under the graphic read, “Ontario legislature member is part of alleged Beijing 2019 election interference network.”
Ke stepped down from the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus following the allegations.
Laying out what could potentially happen at trial, the court said in its decision that Global News did not actually provide proof in its reports that Ke was collaborating with the Chinese government and reported allegations about Ke’s involvement instead. However, the court concluded that the published stories and video did “not appear to take significant efforts to qualify the identification of Mr. Ke as a foreign operative as an allegation” but “reflect more of an attempt at an exposé based on Mr. Cooper’s investigative reporting.”
Cooper’s stories, the headlines, and the accompanying video “could be interpreted to mean that Mr. Cooper had uncovered Mr. Ke’s involvement and that the CSIS agents had confirmed it.” The court noted this latter situation was not likely to occur at trial, since CSIS personnel would not be compellable witnesses in the case.
“In this case, the public interest in permitting the proceeding to continue outweighs the public interest in protecting the publishers’ right to name Mr. Ke as a collaborator in the election interference scheme based on the information leaked to them,” the court said.
Jonathan Lisus of Lax O'Sullivan Lisus Gottlieb LLP, who represents Ke, told Law Times on Monday that he thinks the court’s decision will prompt journalists and other media workers to “deal with incendiary allegations from anonymous sources with a lot more discipline than in this case.
“I think that they’re going to also have to take a very serious look at the way they evaluate [the] reliability and credibility of anonymous sources,” Lisus says.
The lawyer noted that he told the court it was problematic that the CSIS agents told Cooper “very damning things about Patrick Brown and Jean Chrétien,” but Global News’ reporting only mentioned people of Chinese ethnic origin.
The court said in its decision that it would not make a determination on Ke’s allegations that anti-Chinese racism motivated the CSIS informants or Global News, but noted that “it is open to Mr. Ke at trial to bring evidence to undermine Global News’ responsible communication defence by establishing that he was a casualty of selective reporting based on his dual nationality.”
A Global News spokesperson declined to comment on the decision because the matter is still before the courts.
