An Ontario Superior Court judge has thrown out a $30-million defamation suit accusing several local Toronto politicians, journalists and media outlets of labelling the owner and publisher of an Italian-language newspaper homophobic, transphobic and anti-LGBTQ+.
The suit was filed in April of 2021 by Joseph Volpe, the publisher of Corriere Canadese, and M.T.E.C. Consultants, which owns the newspaper. Volpe was a Liberal MP for the Toronto riding of Eglinton-Lawrence from 1988 to 2011 and served in two cabinet posts in the government of Paul Martin.
The suit named two Toronto city councillors, Kristyn Wong-Tam and Paul Ainslie. Four Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) trustees, journalists Elizabeth Di Filippo and Enzo DiMatteo, as well as Yahoo Media Group, Freshdaily and Media Central Corporation, were also named.
Justice Benjamin Glustein found that some statements made by the politicians were defamatory and that they did lower the reputation of the plaintiffs. But he said there was "no evidence that either the councillors or the trustees were motivated by malice."
The lawsuit was "an attempt by the plaintiffs to chill the speech of elected officials who choose to speak up," Glustein wrote in his decision.
The lawyer for the plaintiffs said Glustein erred in his ruling and his clients will appeal it.
Councillor's motion sparked suit
The plaintiffs brought the suit against Wong-Tam after she filed a motion at city council in early 2021 labelling several articles in Corriere Canadese "homophobic and transphobic," and spoke about it at a news conference. The motion directed staff to tell the plaintiffs to sign and comply with the Toronto's Human Rights and Anti-Harassment/Discrimination policies or the city wouldn't buy ads in the newspaper.
Ainslie was named in the suit because he seconded the motion and TCDSB trustees Maria Rizzo, Norm Di Pasquale, Markus de Domenico and Ida li Preti were named because they wrote a letter supporting it.
They were reacting to Corriere Canadese articles with headlines such as: "Time to put sexualized virtue-signalling thugs in their place" and "TCDSB website hosts pornographic site defended by trustees," which mentioned the inclusion of a link to LGBT YouthLine, a website offering resources for LGBTQ youth and peer support, on the TCDSB's website.
"Somehow [Volpe] has turned around and said that he's the victim, when the only one that has consistently thrown out attacks has been him through his newspaper," Wong-Tam, now an MPP, told CBC News.
TCDSB Trustee Maria Rizzo says if the judge had not ruled in favour of the defendants, 'it would have in fact silenced many of us.'(Christopher Katsarov/Canadian Press)
In his written decision, Glustein said "qualified privilege" protects statements of public officials on "matters of public interest." The councillors and trustees believed the plaintiffs' written words to be homophobic and the media outlet regularly received public money through the placement of ads by the city, he wrote.
Glustein said the plaintiffs "used language which they knew would attract criticism of them as homophobic, transphobic, and anti-LGBTQ2S+." The judge also found the media outlets and journalists named in the suit were reporting on matters in the public interest and the journalists exercised diligence.
Glustein dismissed the case by granting what's known as an anti-SLAPP motion, meaning he agreed with the defendants that the plaintiffs had filed what's referred to as a "strategic lawsuit against public participation." The Ontario government passed anti-SLAPP legislation in 2015 to prevent plaintiffs from silencing critics by filing expensive and time-consuming lawsuits against them that are without merit.
'It would have been chilling'
CBC News spoke to three of the defendants in the case, who said they feel vindicated.
"It was my job to specifically stand up and rise up when I needed to, to speak on behalf of the community that we represent, and in this case, I represent one of the largest LGBTQ communities in Canada," said Wong-Tam.
Rizzo said she had felt stress and anxiety related to the case for the past two years. She said she doesn't like to think what would have happened if the judge had not ruled in favour of the defendants.
"It would have been chilling … I would have to second guess, third guess and fourth guess myself in a public boardroom about what I said ... If [Glustein] had gone the other way, it would have in fact silenced many of us."
TCDSB Trustee Markus de Domenico says he believes paying particular attention to protecting marginalized students is important to his work.(Dalia Ashry/CBC)
De Domenico said he would not change anything he did.
"We simply sent a letter of support to a city councillor for a motion. So that's not a very radical thing to do, frankly," he said.
De Domenico said he believes paying particular attention to protecting marginalized students is within the message of Christ and an important part of his job as a TCDSB trustee.
'A whole bunch of problems' with judgment, lawyer says
But Paul Slankey, the lawyer for Volpe and the company that owns Corriere Canadese, told CBC News his clients are appealing the decision.
"There are a whole bunch of problems with this judgment. And we're hoping that the Court of Appeal will fix this," he said.
He maintained his clients are not homophobic and the articles were instead "critical of the decisions and positions of some of the Toronto Catholic District School Board Trustees for their positions" that according to his clients, "did not protect or support Roman Catholic doctrine on certain issues."
He also said constitutional arguments were largely ignored by the judge.
Slankey said anti-SLAPP legislation is now being "turned on its head". He said in this case it is being used "as a main means of silencing the press, as opposed to what it's designed to do, which is to prevent lawsuits from being used to silence expression."
A fire-insurance map from 1924 shows what the Annex, Harbord Village and Palmerston neighbourhoods looked like a decade after city bylaws banned apartment buildings in many parts of the city. Single-family homes still dominate much of these neighbourhoods today.MAP: CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES • ARCHIVAL RESEARCH FOR THIS STORY: PAULA WILSON/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
One hundred years ago, Toronto was in the midst of an acute housing shortage.
Although 6,000 new homes were expected to be added that year, the “immense contribution to the city’s bulk of homes” was simply not going to be enough, decried an article published in The GlobeonJune 16, 1922. All through the spring, the article stated, “the supply of moderate-sized homes available for rent filled only a small percentage of the demand.”
The lack of housing wasn’t a new phenomenon. By the turn of the century, Toronto had become Canada’s second-largest urban centre, after Montreal, putting a strain on its existing stock of homes. Military manufacturing boomed during the First World War, and when it was done the city bulged with returning soldiers, immigrants and rural folks, drawn by the promise of work in the city’s new harbour and financial districts.
The problem then, as now: For Torontonians without significant wealth, finding housing was a challenge. But at a time when affordable rental properties were needed most, of the 3,000 new dwellings that had been built since the beginning of the year, just five – less than 0.17 per cent – were apartment buildings.
That’s because, for the most part, they were banned outright.
Apartment blocks in various stages of construction on Kendal Avenue in 1922, when new apartment projects were heavily restricted in Toronto.CONTRACT RECORD, 1922
On May 14, 1912, motivated by moral concerns, the City of Toronto passed By-Law No. 6061, which meant no apartment buildings could be built on the majority of the city’s residential streets.
While it’s certainly not the only factor that has led to Toronto’s dearth of low-rise, affordable rental properties – indeed, many buildings were erected despite the law – experts say the city is still grappling with the bylaw’s effects on its urban fabric and zoning, not to mention the NIMBYism toward multiunit housing generally.
Unlike many European cities and even Montreal, Toronto lacks elegant low-rise density, which provides a spectrum of sizes and affordability in smaller-scale neighbourhoods. These housing options, particularly beneficial for people who are often left out of the market – renters, people living alone, young families, the elderly – offer a sense of community and contribute to the character that makes cities pleasant to live in.
While Toronto became largely a city of single-family homes, Dr. Fischler said, Montreal developed as a city of duplexes and triplexes. As a result, he said, the latter now offers a wider range of housing options. “It’s fair to say that Montreal displayed a greater tolerance for density and for the mixing of uses than many North American cities,” he said.
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The Roslyn Apartments at Glen Road, north from Howard Street, in 1913 and 2022. The first tenants of the three-storey red brick buildings included realtors, merchants and manufacturers.
Osgoode Mansions at Palmerston Avenue and Harbord Street, as seen during construction in 1914 and in 2022. Today, neighbourhoods like Palmerston lack many ‘missing middle’ properties, denser than single-family homes but not as dense as low-rise apartments.
La Verne Apartments, built beside Allan Gardens in 1927, was allowed under the bylaw bans because Carlton Street, deemed a commercial road, was exempt. The tower behind La Verne was built after the city passed the Condominium Act in 1967 in an attempt to regulate affordable housing.CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES; FRED LUM/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Turn-of-the-century Torontonians had a complicated relationship with apartment buildings.
On the one hand, early developments typically upheld the gentility demanded by the city’s elite. Unlike today’s towering condo buildings, the “apartment-houses” of the early 19th century were often no more than four floors high and blended in nicely with the surrounding neighbourhood.
Residents of the city’s first apartment buildings – the St. George Mansions, completed in 1904 near the current site of Robarts Library – included professors, barristers and two bank managers, according to Richard Dennis, a University College London geographer considered the authority on Toronto’s early apartment history.
But despite that pedigree, the predominantly Protestant city found the negative moral associations hard to shake. Apartment-dwelling families were expected to have fewer children, and this was considered an unethical constraint on the natural order. Meanwhile, dwellings that offered in-house kitchen and cleaning services were seen as degrading the traditional role of a wife.
“Unsurprisingly, there was negative reaction from both wealthy neighbours and city administrators who were reviewing building permits and were not familiar with this new building type,” said Emma Abramowicz, a planner at ERA Architects who has researched Toronto’s early planning history.
Yet by the end the century’s first decade, Dr. Dennis wrote in his landmark 1989 research paper, Toronto’s First Housing Boom, the city’s directory listed almost 50 such buildings creeping into single-family home neighbourhoods. This raised concerns about property values and privacy, as well as the loss of home ownership as a priority (apartments were typically rented)
St. George Mansions on Harbord Street, photographed in 1944 and shown in its architectural drawings, was Toronto’s first apartment building. After it was finished in 1904, the six-storey complex had 34 apartments and about 99 occupants.CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES; TRINITY COLLEGE ARCHIVES
The Spruce Court Apartments in Cabbagetown were built from 1913 to 1925 for working-class residents. But with rents of $25 a month – half of an ordinary worker's monthly wages – it wasn't quite as affordable as advertised.CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES
Experts have often noted that the turning point was set in 1911 by physician Charles Hastings with the publication of his report exposing the unsanitary conditions of those living in the Ward, the inner-city slum located next to City Hall.
Fearing that Toronto might fall victim to the scourge of these “human packing cases,” so rife in New York, Dr. Dennis wrote, the report reinforced the belief that shared dwellings were immoral and not fit for Toronto.
“If Toronto becomes a city of closely-packed tenements,” one Globe journalist wrote on April 27, 1912, “it will become a city of stunted children and of unhappy adults. Its morals will suffer as well as its health.”
In response to these mounting concerns, and after a slate of lesser measures were deemed inadequate, in 1912 city council passed the apartment ban by 18 votes to nil.
By-Law No. 6061 limited the construction of apartment buildings to a few arterial roads.
Developers found breaking the law could be fined $50 – about a month’s salary at the time – or jailed for as much as six months.
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Apartment houses listed in Toronto directories
Number, 1903-1918
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: DATA COLLECTED BY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON GEOGRAPHER RICHARD DENNIS, PUBLISHED IN TORONTO'S FIRST APARTMENT-HOUSE BOOM: AN HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY(1989)
According to Richard White, an author and Toronto historian, public response was favourable. Nonetheless, there were dissenters.
Builders who had purchased land for the purpose of apartment development were angry. Two weeks after the bylaw had been passed, architect John Alexander Mackenzie wrote in The Globe: “It surely is not British fair play that the objections of a few property-owners should be allowed to bar hundreds of our best families from a share in the fresh air and pleasant outlooks of our hill and Rosedale districts.”
Others rejected equating Toronto’s mostly upper-class apartments with New York’s tenements. Builder Alfred Coleman argued that planned multifamily dwellings were actually better than the crammed single-family houses that would result from the ban.
Almost immediately, developers found workarounds. They could usually get special approval from city council or run a long apartment block behind a narrow commercial street frontage.
As a result, several hundred apartment buildings were constructed in areas where they had initially been banned. Dr. White said that of the 12 applications for exemptions in the Beaches neighbourhood, all were approved.
According to data from the City of Toronto Archive, between 1921 and 1931, the number of units in apartment houses increased tenfold, from 2,000 to 20,000. Yet for a city with a population of 630,000, that number was tiny compared with cities such as New York and Chicago.
“It’s the core reason why Toronto doesn’t have a historic character of medium density throughout its historic core, like the four-storey buildings seen in American cities,” Ms. Abramowicz said.
The policy was generally quite effective, she said; for decades, much of the city saw very little apartment development.
A 1920 report from the Toronto Housing Commission includes these specifications for a semi-detached home of Type C, one of the permitted types of housing at the time.TORONTO HOUSING COMMISSION
Type A and C houses on Gilmour Avenue, as seen in the 1920 report, and a block plan of other properties in the neighbourhood.TORONTO HOUSING COMMISSION
One of the apartment complexes built in the post-ban era was Claridge Apartments at Avenue Road and Clarendon Avenue, built in 1927-28. Architectural firm Lawrence Baldwin & Gerald Greene designed it in a Venetian palazzo style.CITY OF TORONTO ARCHIVES
While many areas did get more low-scale apartments and condo towers later in the century, few of those developments broached tree-lined, residential streets.
“We haven’t really shifted from the planning approach the City of Toronto took in 1912,” Ms. Abramowicz said. “I think it’s to our detriment.”
While experts agree that By-Law No. 6061 has left a mark on the city’s building story, many argue its more significant legacy is the attitude it initiated. According to Richard Harris, an urban historical geographer at McMaster University, Toronto’s early 20th-century policies led to its ingrained resistance to development in residential neighbourhoods.
“That’s where the ‘not-in-my-backyard’ consideration comes in,” Dr. Harris said. “Once the built environment has been built in a particular way, property owners resist any kind of density.”
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Apartment buildings under construction at Moss Park in 1963.BORIS SPREMO/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Mr. White said this mentality was truly entrenched in the 1960s, amid numerous attempts to rezone the apartment-free areas to add density. This was met with strong opposition from homeowners, and in 1966 the planning department marked most of those neighbourhoods “inviolate” – protected from widespread development.
“The urban reform movement stopped neighbourhood destruction, but it then entrenched an anti-development mindset,” he said. “To me, that is the root of present-day opposition to the missing middle.”
A hundred and 10 years on from the passage of By-Law No. 6061, it is impossible to know how the city would have evolved without it. Indeed, Toronto never got the “wealth of attractive, medium-density character apartments” it could have had, Ms. Abramowicz writes in the housing anthologyHouse Divided.
Such apartments offer a spectrum of quality, architectural style and affordability, she argues. Amid a housing crisis comparable with that of a previous century, she asks: “Why shouldn’t there be room down the street?”
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