Source: http://legaldb.freemedia.at/legal-database/canada/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 08:25:38+00:00

Document:
Defamation remains a criminal offence in Canada.
Defamatory libel: Criminal Code Art. 297 defines “defamatory libel” as “matter published, without lawful justification or excuse, that is likely to injure the reputation of any person by exposing him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that is designed to insult the person of or concerning whom it is published”.
Persons found guilty of publishing defamatory libel are liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years (Art. 301). In the case that a person publishes a defamatory libel that the person knows to be false, the person is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years (Art. 300).
According to Art. 299, a person “publishes” a libel when he exhibits it in public, causes it to be read or seen, or shows or delivers it, or causes it to be shown or delivered, with intent that it should be read or seen by the person whom it defames or by any other person.
Under Art. 302, a person, who, with intent to extort money from any person, or to induce a person to confer on or procure for another person an appointment or office of profit or trust, publishes or threatens to publish or offers to abstain from publishing or to prevent the publication of a defamatory libel is guilty of extortion by libel. The offender is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.
Seditious libel is an offence of the Criminal Code of Canada. According to Art. 61, any person who speaks seditious words, publishes a seditious libel, or is a party to a seditious conspiracy, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.
See, however, the offence of seditious libel under “Criminal defamation of the head of state”.
Blasphemous libel (Criminal Code Art. 296): Persons who publish a blasphemous libel are liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.
“No person shall be convicted of an offence under this section for expressing in good faith and in decent language, or attempting to establish by argument used in good faith and conveyed in decent language, an opinion on a religious subject” (Art. 296 (3)).
The vast majority of libel cases in Canada are brought in civil court and prosecutions for criminal defamation are rare, although not unheard of. Recent research, however, has suggested that the number of convictions for criminal defamation are on the rise and being used “with increasing frequency to shut down political dissent and criticism of police officers, judges and powerful institutions, relatively speaking. Reports have highlighted, for example, the prosecution of a woman in Alberta for calling a local politician and a prosecutor “repulsive, corrupted, lying, thieving, deviant bastards both”.
In 2012, a restaurant owner in Ottawa was sentenced to 90 days in jail for libelling a woman who posted bad reviews of the restaurant online. The restaurant owner retaliated through various measures including “sending lewd emails” to the woman’s boss and setting up a face account under name on an “adult dating site”. The court reportedly also ordered the restaurant owner to take an anger management course, undergo counselling and perform 200 hours of community service .
There are very few examples of criminal defamation cases brought against the media. As noted by the Committee to Protect Journalists, in 2011 Canadian fashion designer Peter Nygard filed criminal defamation charges against the Canadian Broadcasting Company over a documentary on Nygard aired in April 2010. A judge in Manitoba allowed the case to proceed in July 2015. The current status of proceedings is not known .
It should be noted, however, that the Supreme Court has not yet considered the constitutionality of Art. 301, which punishes defamatory libel, even in cases in which the allegedly libellous content may be true. However, a number of provincial courts (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador) have ruled that Art. 301 is unconstitutional. The government did not appeal the rulings in those cases.
Information for Canada was originally collected by IPI as part of a study commissioned by the Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It is reprinted here with the permission of the OSCE.

References: Art. 297
 Art. 299
 Art. 302
 Art. 61
 Art. 296
 Art. 301
 Art. 301