Help me fight back against cancel culture.

In August 2020 I filed a 7.65 Million defamation claim against the following defendants:

•Karim A. Jivraj (noted in default)

•The Broadbent Institute (Press Progress)

•The New Democratic Party

•Progress Alberta

•Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

•Toronto Star Newspapers

•Rakhi Pancholi (NDP Member of Legislative Assembly)

•Duncan Kinney (Progress Alberta)

•Luke Lebrun (Press Progress)

•Stephen Magusiak (Press Progress)

•David Khan (Liberal Party of Alberta)

•Jeremy Nolais (Chief of Staff to NDP leader Rachel Notley)

•Avnish Nanda

•Emma McIntosh (formerly with Toronto Star Newspapers)


The instances of defamation span from March 2018 to September 2020. They include insinuations that I committed fraud and that I won my nomination race through corruption; a claim that I falsely accused another political contestant of sexual harassment; that I was investigated by police for assault; as well as the attribution of fabricated quotations to me. All of these statements were made by the defendant Jivraj, most often using anonymous electronic accounts or proxies. Each is demonstrably false, and utterly baffling.

By January 2019, Jivraj was approaching media outlets to make further allegations that I had expressed sympathy for white supremacist terrorists in a private Facebook Messenger conversation years earlier. These allegations were repeated in various forms by each of the remaining defendants. On the basis of Jivraj’s claims, the defendants published statements that I made “white supremacist comments” (CBC); that I “promoted racist white supremacist talking points” (The Star); that I am an “unapologetic white supremacist” (McIntosh); that I believe in “white genocide” conspiracy theories (Kinney); that I “promot[ed] hateful and extremist views” (Press Progress); that I believe ethnic minorities are inferior (Nanda); that I made “odious Islamophobic, white supremacist” remarks (Khan), and much more. All of these statements are false. Many were made with express malice, with a willful or reckless disregard for their truth, and with knowledge that the effect of those statements would be to cause significant and lasting reputational, professional, and psychological harm.

I further allege in the statement of claim that the defendants Jivraj, the NDP, Press Progress, and agents thereof, were acting in a coordinated and pre-meditated fashion to force my resignation as an election candidate through the publication and promotion of the defamatory statements. Finally, I allege that some of the defendants (McIntosh and Progress Alberta) sought to intimidate and deter media producers and journalists who wished to report honestly on this story.

In addition to defamation, this statement of claim also invokes the torts of “intrusion against seclusion” (a violation of privacy rights), and deliberate infliction of mental suffering. Cumulative damages requested totals $7.65 million plus costs.

Discovery of the defendants began in 2021 and is expected to be complete in the Spring of 2024.

Karim Jivraj, the lead defendant on whose information each of the other defendants relied, was twice cited in contempt for refusing to answer questions about his role in the defamation. As a penalty, his defence was struck and he has now been noted in default.

One of the parties to the action, The New Democrats of Canada Association, sought summary dismissal of the claim against it on the grounds that it is not liable for the actions of its provincial section, the Alberta NDP. That application was dismissed in March 2024, resulting in a cost award in my favour. The Alberta NDP, meanwhile, was ordered to name and properly indemnify a litigation representative, as it has no legal standing on its own.

All of the defamatory statements contained in the defamation claim have Karim A. Jivraj as their originating source. When Press Progress, CBC, and the Star reported on Jivraj’s accusations against me, they concealed his identity and misrepresented his motives, making him appear as a credible accuser.

He is not a credible accuser.

I met Jivraj in February 2017 at a conservative political event. He connected with me on Facebook, and for several months we had regular text conversations on a variety of political, social, and philosophical topics. Jivraj aspired to run for public office, but was shut out by the federal and provincial conservative parties. I ended our friendship in March 2018, after learning that he was trying to sabotage my nascent political career.

Following is a summary of the aspect of Mr. Jivraj’s history that are known to me:

• Jivraj ran an academic essay mill called Weston Ivy Consulting in New York state from approximately 2010 - 2015. In exchange for thousands of dollars paid up-front, he offered ghost-writing services to clients looking to gain admission to elite U.S. law schools. He ran this operation using pseudonyms and a shell address in Manhattan. Several former clients complained that he took their money and never delivered the promised services. 


• In 2017, Jivraj operated a pseudonymous Twitter account, @TeamBlue2018, which he used to make defamatory allegations against a number of conservative political candidates, including accusations of fraud, corruption, and sexual innuendo against female candidates. Jivraj also used an anonymous email to defame and humiliate a young Muslim woman, and he provided assistance in the political nomination campaign of Ke Wenbin, whom I had identified to as a probable agent of influence of the Chinese Communist Party. 
Jivraj was told he would never have a political career in Ontario, and so he moved to Alberta to seek elected office.

• In or about January 2018, Jivraj learned that I had been invited to run for a nomination for the United Conservative Party in Alberta. He informed me that he was intensely jealous, as he felt his own ambitions and potential were not being acknowledged.

• In early March 2018, Jivraj told another political contestant that I made false accusations of sexual harassment against that person. I had not done this, as Jivraj himself later admitted. I told Jivraj to leave me alone and not involve me in his political machinations.

• On 15 March 2018, Jivraj asked me to accompany him to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I declined and wished him well in his recovery. He then sent me a torrent of abusive text messages, and demanded that I delete our message history. I did.

• In May 2018, Jivraj purchased the internet domain name caylanford.ca a few days after I refused to get drinks with him at a political event. When I sought to recover the domain name from him, he threatened to take me to court, and then tried to make me sign a non-disclosure agreement as a condition of returning it to me.

• In July 2018, Jivraj sought election as the president of my party’s constituency association in the district where I was registered as a nomination contestant. I was told that his purpose was to gain leverage over me and attempt to interfere in my nomination campaign.

• In September 2018, Jivraj sent me a cryptic email indicating that he had knowledge of a private gathering at my mother’s home the previous evening.

• In October 2018, Jivraj wrote a letter accusing me of committing “residency fraud,” and claiming that I was ineligible to stand as a candidate for election. He asked nine other people on my constituency association board to sign the letter, but did not sign it himself. Then he sent it to the media, and invited journalists to report on his allegations. (Jivraj later conceded that he had no grounds for the accusation of fraud).

• In November 2018, Jivraj purchased multiple Google attack ads on searches of my name. These ads included a fabricated quotation, which Jivraj attributed to me.

• Also in November 2018, Jivraj used a pseudonymous email account to send defamatory statements about me to ~1300 of my electors. The emails included another fabricated quotation which he attributed to me. He was removed from his role as president of my board of directors.

• Sometime after newspaper columnist Licia Corbella published a favourable profile of me in the Calgary Herald in October 2018, Jivraj purchased her internet domain name, LiciaCorbella.com (or .ca).

• In January 2019, Jivraj sent alleged screenshots of my past private correspondences to members of the media, as well as to anti-conservative activists on social media. He later said that he did not know whether the screenshots he disseminated were authentic.

• From approximately July 2018 - January 2019, Jivraj publicly claimed to be a nomination contestant for the Conservative Party of Canada in the riding of Calgary-Centre. He apparently fundraised extensively on the basis of this claim. He was never a registered contestant.

• Jivraj also frequently sought to convey that he is a lawyer, and was described as a lawyer in at least one media profile. He had never been a lawyer.

• In February 2019, Jivraj filed a vexatious police report against me, claiming that I had assaulted him a month earlier in my neighbourhood cafe. He later acknowledged that the alleged “assault” constituted a tap on the back (as I remember it, he was sitting at the entrance of my local café. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him I would be filing a defamation claim against him. Then I walked away). Police never investigated, presumably because it was a transparently frivolous claim. Jivraj nonetheless told members of the media that I had been investigated for assaulting him.

• In March 2019, Jivraj was the anonymous source behind widely publicized accusations that I expressed sympathy for white supremacist terrorists in a private Facebook messenger conversations years before. He then deleted the records of that conversation, possibly to ensure that it could not be independently scrutinized (I deleted the records even earlier, in March 2018, at Jivraj’s request).

• In March 2019, Jivraj created multiple pseudonymous Twitter accounts to monitor, harass, and defame me on social media. In at least one case, he pretended to be a liberal woman with children.

• Jivraj used one of his pseudonymous social media accounts, @AlbertaPatriot5, to make racially charged accusations against himself, which he later attempted to blame on me. (This is admitted under oath).

• In the fall of 2019, Jivraj sent unsolicited, 13-page letters about me to my friends, former colleagues, and media producers. He later acknowledged that the content of these letters was defamatory and false. His stated goal was to prevent me or others from speaking about what he had done to me.

• In September 2019, Jivraj learned that I had done an interview with a Florida-based podcast producer to discuss “cancel culture.” He emailed a series of veiled threats to the producer, and sought out his former associates to collect incriminating personal information against him. Jivraj’s stated purpose was to use that information to prevent the podcast interview from being published.

• In January 2020, Jivraj allegedly offered a witness $10,000 to swear a false affidavit against me. After the witness refused, Jivraj sent excerpts of that person’s private correspondences to members of the media.

• In July 2020, I was granted a restraining order against Jivraj.

• In October 2020, Jivraj violated the terms of his restraining order by sending further pseudonymous emails defaming me to members of the national media and others.

• In February 2023, following a five-day trial, the restraining order against Jivraj was upheld and he was found in contempt for breaching the previous order.

A portion of this background (specifically, several of the events occurring prior to March 2019) was known to Press Progress and CBC. Nonetheless, they gave Jivraj a national platform to carry out his campaign of defamation and harassment against me. They concealed his identity and, in the case of Press Progress, falsified his motives to make him appear credible and beyond reproach.

Press Progress was aware that Jivraj wanted to destroy my career. They knew he was acting out of a personal vendetta, and not in the public interest. They knew (or should have known) that Jivraj had been effectively blacklisted by federal and provincial conservative parties, and that he was behind false allegations about me in the past. They worked with him anyway.

CBC was aware that Jivraj had purchased my internet domain name, that he had a history of fabricating quotations and attributing them to me, that he had been sanctioned by the UCP for his conduct, and that I had filed a complaint of criminal harassment against him. They disclosed none of this context to their readers, and instead cooperated with Jivraj and protected his identity. The Toronto Star also had information about Jivraj’s history, and chose to conceal it from readers.

The most severe of the defamatory allegations against me were based on edited portions of a private conversation between myself and Jivraj from 2017.

This conversation did actually take place, but it was not as Press Progress or other news outlets described. It was a dialogue about about how best to combat far-right radicalization and preserve social cohesion in pluralistic, multi-ethnic societies. Far from endorsing white nationalism or white supremacy, I denounced these as perverse ideologies that should be resisted. The question was how to do that effectively.

The full conversation spanned thousands of words. Press Progress (and later, CBC) took a few disjointed lines from that exchange, edited them deceptively, and then put them into a new and misleading context to attribute to me views that I have never held. They ignoring or redacted statements that conflicted with their narrative.

Unfortunately, when their stories were published in 2019, I did not have records of the original, unedited messenger conversations in question. I had deleted them at the request of Jivraj one year before they were publicized (I am guileless like that: I’m not cunning, and so I don’t expect cunning or mendacity in other people). I spent several years attempting to recover the full transcripts directly from Facebook, and Jivraj opposed that application. Jivraj deleted his own records of those conversations after they were publicized by the media, but before legal proceedings against him commenced.

For that reason, I couldn’t simply show people how Press Progress fabricated or edited aspects of that conversation. I could only try to explain it retrospectively. In early 2023, however, after Jivraj was noted in default on the defamation action, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) was finally able to disclose his record of the conversation. This disclosure confirmed that the conversations had been deceptively presented and edited.

~~~

The conversation involved a discussion about how far-right radicalization was being addressed in the aftermath of the Charlottesville attack in 2017. Among a vocal minority of commentators, I had noticed a tendency to wrongly conflate any support for national borders or controlled immigration with “white supremacy.” In the same way, any person who discusses the reality of demographic shifts in Europe, or the declining birthrates in the industrialized world, may be unfairly accused of being a white nationalist, an extremist, or a proponent of far-right conspiracy theories, even when they clearly reject those positions.

The assumption here is that, if there is any overlap in the beliefs of group A with group B, then all beliefs of group B can be attributed to group A. This is a specious form of associative reasoning. It is the same flawed reasoning that can lead people to treat all Muslims with hostility and suspicion following Islamist terror attacks. It should be obvious that a person can believe that the Qur’an is the word of God, and at the same time reject the violence that is sometimes carried out in the name is Islam. It should be just as obvious that a person can support the legitimacy of national borders or observe objective social facts about demographic trends, without being motivated by xenophobia, racism, or white supremacy.

Moreover, promiscuous accusations of white supremacy and racism are simply counter-productive. Accusing broad segments of the electorate of harbouring white supremacist sympathies or racial animus, and attempting to suppress any discussions of objective social facts, is not an effective way to combat radicalization. Far from changing minds or producing more open attitudes, those approaches fuel resentment, mutual suspicion and enmity, and lead to a hardening of positions. It also makes it more difficult to identify actual white supremacy, encourages preference falsification, and risks driving conversations underground into echo chambers that can breed extremism.

Effective counter-terrorism and de-radicalization requires understanding the social conditions that give rise to extremist ideologies, and recognizing the grievances that drive people toward them. To that end, I argued that it is possible to repudiate the value judgements and actions of white nationalists and other extremists, while recognizing that they are responding to real social phenomena, which reasonable people may also be concerned with. It is true, for instance, that birthrates across the industrialized world are well below replacement levels, that many Western countries practice "replacement migration” to supplement declining populations, and that high levels of international migration are transforming the ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural makeup of these countries. As a consequence, “white" people (as currently understood; racial categories are socially constructed, and therefore porous and subject to redefinition) are projected to become a minority in most Western European nations by the end of the century.

One can acknowledge the truth of these statements—the facts themselves are morally neutral—without being motivated by xenophobia or racial hatred, and without endorsing the ideology or the prescriptions of white nationalism. For policymakers, in particular, it is imperative that these trends, and the trade-offs they produce, can be discussed candidly. If instead we suppress reasonable discussion on matters of legitimate public concern, we risk turning these topics into a kind of “forbidden knowledge,” which can increase the appeal of conspiracy theorists and empower demagogues.

(By way of background, I studied counter-terrorism as part of my first Master’s degree in international security studies. At the time of this conversation, I was at Oxford studying refugee and asylum law. I previously worked at the Canadian foreign ministry on international security files. These are topics that were relevant to me, academically and professionally. I think it’s important to critically examine our own assumptions and try to inhabit different perspectives before reaching conclusions about complex issues, and that’s what I was doing).

Having acknowledged that demographic change and the decline of “white” majorities is a real phenomenon, Jivraj asked what I personally felt about these trends. A journalist at another news outlet sent me a photo of the text provided by Jivraj, where my reply read “I reject that appellation, FYI. But yea, I am somehow saddened by the demographic replacement of white peoples in their homelands—more in Europe than in America—partly because it’s clear that it will not be a peaceful transition, and partly because a loss of demographic diversity in the human race is sad.”

Press Progress removed the part where I indicated that I rejected the terms being used. The meaning also would have been clearer with the inclusion of scare quotes around the “demographic replacement of white peoples,” to emphasize that this is not the language I would personally endorse. However, I believe the context was clear to the two people in the conversation.

Prompted by Press Progress, some people read this comment as an endorsement of white nationalism (in other words, they engaged in the lazy associative reasoning that I had spent much of the conversation warning against). Unaware of the full context, some people assumed I was lamenting the loss of ethnic homogeneity. I was not. What I was lamenting was some of the possible second-order consequences of low fertility rates and mass immigration: namely, the prospect of instability and inter-ethnic strife (including anti-immigrant backlash), and possible loss in the diversity of local and regional peoples and cultures (the latter being a consequence of many convergent trends, including low fertility, migration, urbanization, and globalization generally, which tends to have a flattening and homogenizing effect on local cultures). I then indicated that I was equally saddened by the loss of any kind of ethic, cultural, linguistic, or racial diversity. At no point did I suggest the demographic trends in Europe need to be arrested or reversed, and I certainly never denigrated anyone or posited the superiority of any particular ethnic group. I expressly stated that I would oppose any form of discrimination or exclusion on the basis of race or ethnicity; that I disagreed with racial identitarian politics; and that the demographic trends noted above are not tantamount to a “genocide,” as they lack both the actus reus and the mens rea required by the genocide convention.

Jivraj and I then proceeded to have a lengthy debate about whether or not globalization and immigration necessarily militates against the preservation of local cultures and customs, and the degree to which immigrants should reasonably be expected to assimilate. Jivraj had almost unlimited faith in the ability of civic nationalism to provide a sense of shared identity in multi-faith and multi-ethnic societies. He expected immigrants to assimilate completely into their host cultures, casting off their religion, language, dress, cuisine, customs, and any sense of affinity with their cultures and places of origin. I agreed with him about the importance of promoting civic, rather than ethnic, nationalism, but was not convinced that civic nationalism is sufficient to unite people from such disparate cultures, each with their own traditions, creeds, and histories. I also noted that it may be unreasonable and undesirable to expect all immigrants to assimilate to the degree he prescribed. Asking people to repudiate important sources of identity and ancestral connections can produce an unhealthy sense of deracination (see also: residential schools), and there are aspects of these cultural inheritances that really ought to be preserved and that could enrich the receiving country.

In other parts of this conversation with Jivraj, I had explained at great length why race essentialism is both empirically and morally false. I decried the identity politics of both left and right, and argued that it is completely incompatible with the values of liberal democracy. I very explicitly repudiated white nationalist or white supremacist sentiments, labelling the latter "odious" and a "perverse" form of reasoning. And I expressed my belief that all people are imbued with inviolable dignity and a spiritual equality. My accusers included none of this in their reporting, presumably because it conflicted with the narrative they sought to advance.

I hope this also explains why I had to resign. It was not an admission of culpability. It was because I understood that in the middle of an election campaign, there would be no time or opportunity to set the record straight, and I was unlikely to get a fair hearing in the press if I tried.

In November 2019, I applied for and after obtained a restraining order against Karim A. Jivraj. Following years of protracted litigation, the Alberta Court of King’s Bench Justice upheld the restraining order against Jivraj and found him in contempt of court for violating the order. The case also led to the recognition of a new tort of civil harassment in Alberta.

In the decision dated February 21 2023, Hon. Justice Robert A. Graesser wrote:

“I fail to see that if a deliberate course of harassment is a criminal offence why it is also not a civil wrong. In my view, it is time for the civil law to catch up to the Criminal law and recognize harassment as a tort.”

Following a five-day trial, Justice Graesser found that the “the elements of harassment and intentional infliction of mental suffering have been made out.”

I initially sought the restraining order to stop Jivraj from continuing his years-long campaign of defamation and harassment. That included: anonymously purchasing my internet domain name; making false allegations about me related to sexual harassment; purchasing Google attack ads on searches of my name; fabricating quotations and falsely attributing them to me; making anonymous claims to the media that I had engaged in fraud; communicating to members of the media that I was being investigated for assault; and claiming that I had expressed sympathy for white supremacist terrorists in a private conversation. Media organizations, including NDP-aligned Press Progress, as well as the CBC, Toronto Star and others, repeated the latter accusation while protecting his identity. His allegations were false.

As noted in court’s decision:

o Mr. Jivraj’s sanctimonious testimony about the public having a right to know about Ms. Ford’s beliefs when you put that in the context of his bitterness and jealousy over the success of Ms. Ford’s political career and the decline of his own.

[312] Mr. Jivraj did not stop at simply sending Press Progress some of the messages they had exchanged. The communications between him and Mr. LeBrun demonstrate that he wanted to help Press Progress create the most damaging article possible to harm Ms. Ford and force the UPC to get rid of her.

[313] This is demonstrated by his encouragement to Press Progress to delay publication of their article until the eve of the election, when it would do the most harm, his offer to obtain comments from prominent people including an imam, and his offer to provide anonymous quotes against Ms. Ford as being from a “prominent UPC insider”.

[315] Mr. Jivraj’s actions were clearly not motivated by loyalty to the political party to which he had spent many years supporting. He was at best uncaring as to the harm this would do to the political party he had worked for during his entire adulthood.

[316] Mr. Jivraj’s actions were also not motivated by public interest. Rather, these were all malicious attempts by Mr. Jivraj to harm Ms. Ford on a number of levels. Having failed to prevent her nomination, he was determined to make sure Ms. Ford could not be elected. He was also intent on doing as much damage to her reputation as he could. He was also intent on harming her financially.

[…]

[337] Mr. Jivraj’s motives were based on jealousy and spite. His wish to harm Ms. Ford had nothing to do with the politics other than to destroy the political aspirations of a former friend who was finding success in contrast to Mr. Jivraj’s own failures. His motive was actual malice towards Ms. Ford.”

Following the termination of my political candidacy, Jivraj continued to engage in harassing behaviour, including by creating pseudonymous social media accounts to target me, contacting my friends to circulate defamatory material about me, offering an individual payment to swear a false affidavit against me, and attempting to thwart my efforts to defend myself publicly. Justice Graesser’s decision notes that “Mr. Jivraj appears to have been successful in stopping what I would describe as the mainstream media from taking up Ms. Ford’s side of the story.”

I was first granted a restraining order against Jivraj in July 2020. Following a breach of that order in October 2020, I brought an application for contempt of court. Jivraj applied to vacate the restraining order. Both applications were before Justice Graesser.

The Court found in my favour on both applications. On the restraining order, Justice Graesser wrote:

“I am satisfied that Mr. Jivraj is untrustworthy. I do not believe that he is over his grievance with Ms. Ford. Left unrestrained, I believe that it is more likely than not that he will continue to try to cause Ms. Ford emotional and financial harm. […] “Ms. Ford has persuaded me on a balance of probabilities that she should be granted a permanent restraining order against Mr. Jivraj.”

Read the full decision here.

Jivraj was ordered to pay a $10,000 penalty to the courts for the contempt. He was also ordered to pay costs to me in the amount of $38,577. I have not received a cent.