He is accusing the police of breaching his Charter rights and refusing to protect him
Political commentator Ezra Levant says he intends to sue the Toronto police service for arresting him as he was filming an anti-Israel protest in Toronto on Sunday.
Levant wasn’t charged but he is accusing the police of breaching his Charter rights and refusing to protect him.
Levant is widely known as a political activist, commentator and the CEO and founder of Rebel News. On the media outlet’s website, Levant, who is Jewish, wrote about the experience, saying he “was trying to report on a pro-Hamas terrorist rally.”
Then another officer who appears to be in charge tells Levant to go to the other side of the street where Israel supporters can be seen. After refusing to leave that officer arrests Levant and says he is “breaching the peace.”
A cheer rose in response from the protesters, who carried Palestinian flags and posters with anti-Israel slogans.
Prior to his arrest, one of the protesters can be heard in the video of the interaction, shouting: “Stop terrorizing a peaceful protest.”
Another shouts: “Get him out.”
“What was so appalling was that the police explicitly said that my mere presence on the sidewalk was intolerable to the Hamas thugs, so they would arrest me for it,” Levant said in a Nov. 25 email to the National Post. “They’re acting like concierges to terrorists now.”
Part of the protest involved someone pretending to be slain Hamas terrorist leader, Yahya Sinwar, sitting in a chair that matches the chair he was sitting in during his final moments.
The Sinwar stunt was captured in a video Levant reposted on X.
Upon his release, Levant said he had been arrested for causing a disturbance.
On the Rebel News site, Levant wrote: “One cop kept pushing me away, which I told him was inappropriate and illegal. But then the boss of the whole police operation — named Officer Macduff — told me that my mere presence there was a ‘disturbance’, because the Hamas people didn’t like me.”
The officer “was giving them a veto over my Charter rights,” Levant alleged. “In my earlier analogy, it would be like police telling the folks inside the Black church not to antagonize the KKK outside, because they could get violent.”
As a result of his arrest and brief stint in a jail cell, Levant says he has decided to sue Toronto police for violating his Charter rights and being “errand-boys of the Hamas thugs, and for not enforcing the actual laws to protect Canadian citizens.”
A statement of claim hasn’t been drafted yet, Levant told the National Post in his email, but his lawyer is considering the argument put forward in a case “where the court unanimously rejected the power (of) police to arrest someone acting lawfully in order to prevent apprehended breach of peace by others.”
His aim for the lawsuit is to have “a judge correct…police abuses.”
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