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ARTICLE · 11 DECEMBER 2020

Who Is That Guy? A Lesson In The Law Of Defamation

Gardiner Roberts LLP
Gardiner Roberts LLP
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The law of defamation is about protecting a person's reputation. Accordingly, as determined by the Supreme Court of Canada in the seminal case of Grant v. Torstar Corp., 2009 SCC 61.

CanadaLitigation, Mediation & Arbitration
Stephen Thiele
Stephen Thiele
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The law of defamation is about protecting a person's reputation. Accordingly, as determined by the Supreme Court of Canada in the seminal case of Grant v. Torstar Corp., 2009 SCC 61, in order to establish defamation a plaintiff must show that the impugned words:

a) were defamatory in the sense that they would tend to lower the plaintiff's reputation in the eyes of the reasonable person;

b) were in fact referring to the plaintiff; and

c) were published by communication to at least one person other than the plaintiff.

In L.R. v. Saskatoon Star Phoenix, 2020 SKQB 310 (currently unavailable on CanLII), the plaintiff learned this lesson in an action he brought against the defendant newspaper over a story about the removal of posters in an area of Saskatoon.

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