05/02/2020 2016 ONCJ 35 (CanLII) | CanLII After July 28, the two were operating on the entirely different premises I have referred to. Ms. Guthrie’s was that Mr. Elliott had nothing worth saying about anything and that his opinions were spurious and not worth reading or responding to. This included his view, opposite to hers, that he did not harass women. Ms. Guthrie asked in testimony, “What did it matter that he had a valid point? Who cares?” I interpret this evidence, with the help of her explanation, as meaning that even if he had a valid point it did not permit him to stalk and harass her. In that sense, she is correct: you are not permitted to repeatedly communicate a valid point to someone when you know that they are harassed if it would cause them to reasonably fear for their safety in all of the circumstances. But in another sense, important to the determination of this charge, Ms. Guthrie is not correct. If he had a valid point, he was entitled to use the hashtags that she had created and mention her, as he would not know that she was harassed by his expressing views in opposition to hers or her friends’. This is particularly the case regarding any issue about which Ms. Guthrie had herself engaged. It goes further. He did not have to have a valid opinion in her view or even an opinion that was not spurious in her view. He could, in the tradition of Canadian freedom of expression that I discussed above, have a controversial or even offensive opinion. He could use extreme, hyperbolic, provocative language such as “fascist feminists.” He could be, and unfortunately was, homophobic and insulting. Mr. Elliott’s view, as emerges from the content of his proven tweets, is that he could write what he wanted. His view conforms to the Twitter rules and the Canadian value of freedom of expression. If that was his state of mind, then he would not know that Ms. Guthrie was harassed by his doing what was lawful and what the platform they were both using permitted. What was lawful remained lawful; it does not amount to a crime unless the person communicating knows that the other person is harassed. From Mr. Elliott’s side, the whole exchange in relation to Ms. Guthrie was about what people talk about, whether he would do the poster, whether he could drive her around when she was injured or bring her alcohol, whether it was a good idea to campaign against Bendilin Spurr and notify Mr. Spurr’s employer, whether he “creeped her out” at dinner, whether he was a misogynist, whether the charges of harassing women online were fair, whether he was trying to proposition an underage girl or an adult woman, and even at the end whether he was harassing her and her friends or he was being harassed under the guise of being accused of harassment. He was accused of being sexist, misogynist and tweeting inappropriately, but he denied all the accusations. Ms. Guthrie’s opinion of Mr. Elliott’s tweets is relevant to the crucial issue of whether Mr. Elliott knew that she was harassed. For instance, she commented on this tweet: “Blaming the majority of normal #men for #rape is wrong. Rapists are not normal men. They’re crazy. Why not blame the mentally ill? #TBTB”. Ms. Guthrie testified that she had no idea why the validity of this tweet’s point was relevant to the trial, but in any case it was “garbage”. She knew lots of normal men who have raped and women who had been raped by men whom counsel would call normal. She said she had no idea what defence counsel was talking about when he suggested that Mr. Elliott’s tweet made a pretty good point, and she concluded with “Who cares?” Much in this exchange is relevant to this case. Mr. Elliott was using the #TBTB hashtag that Ms. Guthrie created for “take back the block”, to make streets safe for women. She said she was harassed by Mr. Elliott using it among all the other communications, and the prosecution cites it as one of his many indirect communications. The language of Mr. Elliott’s tweet is neutral and benign. The content is far-reaching, invoking complex concepts of nothing less than right and wrong, blame, the reasons men rape women, mental illness, what is normal and the criminal responsibility of the mentally ill. Some would say it is presumptuous to attempt this in no more than 140 characters; epigrams and maxims have their place in great writing but also their limit. Not all of us are writers such as La Rochefoucauld or Oscar Wilde. Others would and are allowed to say that tweeting about such topics advances understanding. I agree with Crown counsel that you cannot use hashtags and ostensible rational comment as a pretence for harassing someone who you know is following the hashtag and does not want to hear from you. However, Ms. Guthrie’s positions on the irrelevance of Mr. Elliott’s views to her allegation about his use of #TBTB, with respect and recognizing that she genuinely holds it and is entitled to, are not obvious or common, even if they could be shown to be correct in a way that I am unable to perceive. Her view does not distinguish between valid debate and the right to express wrong views on the one hand, and file:///Users/nerissa/Downloads/Columbia CSV/R v Gregory Allan Elliott.htm 33/43