Hmm...$camitology loses court case in Canada and its BIG LOSE is spammed nationwide by the CBC...

I'm just a-cackling up here in the frozen North today.

In Canada, you can sue someone for defamation if they say something untrue and not nice about you in public. You don't have to prove, as you do in the US, that you've suffered in any measurable way because of the defamation. Also, the person saying that un-nice untrue stuff could have thought it was true, and could have been saying it in a non-malicious way, and you could still get him/her. That last bit is a bit broken, IMHO, but ARS is not the place to debate Canadian tort law....

Some time ago, a lawyer for the "Church" of Scam^H^Hientology held a press conference on the steps of a Canadian courthouse, in which he lied about the actions of a Crown Attorney (=American DA, approx.), saying that he (the Crown, named Hill) was being investigated because Hill was seriously in contempt of court for allegedly looking at docs which he was allegedly not allowed to see (sounds familiar -- the Crown calls Xenu, your Honour).

Hmm. Lies, lies, dead-agenting lies. Unfortunately for the "Church" Lawyer, both he and the "Church" got sued by Hill. Dead-agenting doesn't work up here, I guess. Hill didn't suffer too much because of that transparent lie, because he's now a judge (see, if I were like Milne, I'd hide that), but the Supreme Court of Canada has just (last few days) awarded now-Justice Hill general damages, aggravated damages, and punitive damages, to be payed by the lying parties, totalling 1.6 million dollars.

Civil damages don't get as high here as they do in the States, so that's big enough to be noticed. The CBC had a short blurb about the loss on their hourly radio news a few days ago, and just now Radio Noon had its usual legal talking-head on to chat about the case. Big Win for the "Church"! Guess this one won't be written up in "Freedom", eh?

--Eric Smith (Of course, those were CANADIAN dollars....)