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Far-right extremists converge at memorial for Toronto lawyer

One of the attendees, who refused to give her name, said it was ‘very, very sad’ that the library placed ‘a spy’ in the memorial. ‘What kind of country are we living in?’

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Despite a co-ordinated effort by anti-racist activists to stop it, the Toronto Public Library is standing by its decision to rent out space for a memorial Wednesday night for Barbara Kulaszka, a controversial lawyer who defended some of Canada’s most notorious accused hatemongers, propagandists, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

Kulaszka, who died last month aged 64 but whose death was not publicized until Tuesday, is famous among the Canadian far right for winning acquittals under the law for people charged with hate crimes, or even undoing the laws used to charge them.

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She was largely responsible, for example, for the fact that Canada has no law against false news and no human-rights ban on internet hate speech, and for the fact that no Nazi has been convicted in Canada of war crimes.

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Barbara Kulaszka with, left to right, Douglas Christie, Marc Lemire and Paul Fromm in March 2008.
Barbara Kulaszka with, left to right, Douglas Christie, Marc Lemire and Paul Fromm in March 2008. Photo by Handout

Her licensing information with the Law Society of Upper Canada indicated she was not practising law in Ontario at the time of her death. A notice from Henry Makow, a prominent anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist in Winnipeg, said the cause was lung cancer, and that her funeral has already taken place, last month. She lived in Brighton, Ont.

A staff member at Richview Library in Toronto confirmed a third party rented space there for a memorial for Kulaszka Wednesday. (Kulaszka studied to be a librarian before going into law.)

Paul Fromm, a former Kulaszka client who has become a sort of leader of Canada’s racist right, was expected to speak at the memorial, along with Marc Lemire, who was found to have violated Canada’s old law against internet hate speech in the last case before its repeal, and others dating back to Kulaszka’s legal work for Holocaust denial propagandist Ernst Zundel.

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“She literally gave her life for her passionate belief in freedom of speech,” Fromm said.

Bernie Farber, executive director of the Mosaic Institute and a former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said there is a co-ordinated push of advocacy groups to prevent this memorial from taking place in a public library, calling it the first comparable event since the late 1980s in the age of the neo-Nazi Heritage Front. So far, the push has failed.

Paul Fromm speaking at a Council of Conservative Citizens event in spring 2011 in Winston Salem, North Carolina.
Paul Fromm speaking at a Council of Conservative Citizens event in spring 2011 in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Photo by Handout

Ana-Maria Critchley, manager of stakeholder relations for the Toronto Public Library, said that, as with any third-party rental, the library does not endorse the event. She said groups who rent space must agree to comply with all laws and regulations.

The Toronto Public Library dispatched two extra security guards to Richview Library ahead of the memorial on Wednesday. “Given all the concerns that were raised today,” Critchley said, “we wanted to take extra precaution.” But as the memorial began in a second-floor room around 6:15 p.m., there were only news crews milling outside the library, perplexing the parents and children who walked past.

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Before the memorial started, a Library staff member reiterated terms of use for the meeting room to everyone present, as well as the library’s code of conduct and the Canadian Human Rights Act. The staff member stayed in the room to monitor the memorial, said Linda Hazzan, the library’s director of communications.

One of the attendees, who refused to give her name, said it was “very, very sad” that the library placed “a spy” in the memorial.

“What kind of country are we living in?” she said.

As the meeting went on inside, three people dressed in black shirts with dark masks partially covering their faces stood staring at the entrance to the library. Asked if they were attendees to the memorial or protesters, they would only say, “We don’t talk to media.”

Two police cruisers arrived on scene around 7 p.m., and two uniformed officers walked into the library and had a closed-door meeting with staff. Critchley said she notified police about the three people in masks on the property because she “thought they looked kind of suspicious.” As the officers left the library, one said they were there for a “routine call for service.” The masked group lingered at a picnic table at an adjacent park, with police observing them from a cruiser nearby. The group eventually left, without interacting with anyone on scene.

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A Library staff member reiterated terms of use for the meeting room to all gathered for the memorial, as well as the library’s code of conduct and the Canadian Human Rights Act. The staff member stayed in the room to monitor the memorial, said Linda Hazzan, the library’s director of communications.

Richard Warman, one of Canada’s most prominent human rights lawyers.
Richard Warman, one of Canada’s most prominent human rights lawyers. Photo by Darren Calabrese/National Post

Richard Warman, the Ottawa human rights lawyer who pursued nearly every hate speech case under the Canadian Human Rights Act, including Lemire’s, and who was in recent years Kulaszka’s greatest adversary, noted that Fromm has been barred from Parliament and Lemire is the last known leader of the Heritage Front.

“If that’s not good enough for the Toronto Public Library to say ‘No thanks’ then what could be?” he said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Toronto mayor John Tory released a statement expressing concern about the memorial.

“Following a request I made to consider the cancellation of this event, I was informed that the library has received legal advice that it cannot reject this room booking request,” Tory’s statement said. “My office will be asking the library board to review its room rental policies in the wake of this event.”

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It is a fittingly controversial end to a professional life working in the highest courts on behalf of people from the fringes of civil society.

After the 2013 death of Douglas Christie, the so-called Battling Barrister, Kulaszka took over his mantle as the go-to lawyer for Canada’s far right. But she had always been his equal. For example, when the Nazi rocket engineer Arthur Rudolph was seeking to re-enter Canada in 1990, it was Kulaszka he hired for the high profile immigration case, though she lost it.

That was not the norm. She acted as co-counsel with Christie for Imre Finta, a Canadian citizen who ran a restaurant in Toronto and in 1987 became the first person prosecuted for war crimes in Canada. Years earlier, he had commanded a Hungarian military unit that rounded up Jews and deported them to Nazi death camps. The pair won him a jury acquittal that stood up through appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, and led to a wholesale change in how Canada deals with war criminals — deporting, rather than charging.

Ernst Zundel pictured in 2005.
Ernst Zundel pictured in 2005. Photo by THOMAS LOHNES/AFP/Getty Images

In the early 1990s, Kulaszka and Christie also represented Ernst Zundel, a publisher of Holocaust denial literature, in a series of cases that transfixed Canada. His prosecution coincided with growing street-level violence between racists and anti-fascists, and ultimately led to the collapse of the crime of “false news.”

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When Christie died, Kulaszka recalled how bothered he was by the widespread assumption that he made common cause with his clients, a suspicion that was also frequently directed at her.

“I think the criticisms and attacks made on him over the years hurt him deeply,” she told the National Post at the time. But he kept on defending his clients according to the principles of law, she said, “which in the end protect all of us from the power of the state. That type of courage is very rare.”

With Kulaszka, the question was more clear. She never had Christie’s knack for grandstanding or oratory. He was politically minded, even once seeking to run for office on a western separatist ticket. Kulaszka was more private, but she engaged with the substantive questions about Holocaust revisionism far more than he ever did. In her many cases that involved freedom of speech, she sometimes defended the speech as much as the freedom.

Published on January 1, 2017, was Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian False News Trial of Ernst Zundel – 1988.
Published on January 1, 2017, was Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian False News Trial of Ernst Zundel – 1988. Photo by FIle image

For example, she edited Did Six Million Really Die?, a report on the Zundel prosecution that takes its title from an earlier notorious work of Holocaust denial, spread by Zundel. She claimed the book “ensures that both sides of this ethnic dispute are at least available to the general reader.”

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She also wrote an essay in defence of Holocaust revisionism, and described Zundel’s departure from Canada to the U.S. as part of a “brain drain.”

Lemire, the former Heritage Front leader and webmaster of freedomsite.org, whom Kulaszka represented through to a sort of qualified victory that inspired the legislative repeal of the hate speech section of the Canadian Human Rights Act, said Kulaszka was “a fantastic lawyer whose dedication to freedom of speech‎ is unsurpassed.”

“Her work caused an earthquake to the censorship provisions of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which is now into the dustbin of history,” he said. “The law, which was abused badly, is now so tarnished that even the Liberal government hasn’t dared to resurrect it … That is quite an accomplishment for any lawyer.”

Bernie Farber, former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress
Bernie Farber, former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress Photo by Tyler Anderson/National Post

Farber, who had much experience with Kulaszka’s clients, countered that as a lawyer she had many successes “to the detriment of Canadian society.” 

“Any contact I had with her was always negative. there was no humour in it. There was nothing. It was clear to me that she embraced the philosophy of the people she represented, and she did this for a very long time,” he said.

— With files from Jake Edmiston

• Email: jbrean@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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