Is it illegal to promote an email petition to state officials? Does it become “harassment” if successful? Or is it only a crime if the emails go to the police?
Nearly 50 people joined me in court Friday as I faced charges for promoting an email petition campaign. The Action Network campaign called on supporters to petition the police to drop an illegal release condition and charges that were eventually abandoned.
The day-long trial was Kafkaesque. The prosecution claimed the police investigator was blocked from working for a full day because of the volume of emails sent to her account though they also said the police’s IT department had filtered the template email in her account by 9:15 am on the morning she saw the first message. The prosecution also claimed that sharing an email petition beginning with “dear” and ending with “sincerely” constituted “violence”.
The full petition I promoted read:
“Dear Officer [],
“The arrest of author Yves Engler for social media posts opposing Israel’s genocide is an abuse of state power. The charges against the father of two young children should be immediately withdrawn. It’s an outrageous attack against freedom of expression that you would consider placing conditions on Engler blocking him from publicly discussing the case against him.
“Advocates of apartheid and genocide have been seeking to mobilize police and court resources against critics of Israel’s crimes. It’s imperative that police not abuse their authority by assisting these efforts.
Sincerely,”
The petition was instigated after an investigator with the Montreal police’s hate crimes unit said she was charging me for “harassing” anti-Palestinian media personality Dahlia Kurtz. (I’ve never met Kurtz, messaged her or threatened her in any way. All I’ve ever done was respond to her pro-genocide bile on X and the supposedly aggrieved Kurtz never even blocked me on that platform. In July the Kurtz charges were dropped.)
On February 18 of this year the investigator called to tell me to come to the police station the next day where she would charge and release me on condition that (among other things) I not discuss the charges. After I wrote about the charges and asked people to email the police to abandon them, they charged me with harassing the police and interfering with their work. I spent five days in jail in a successful bid to defeat the release condition blocking me from mentioning the Kurtz charges.
The condition muzzling me violated my rights. The December 2024 Cour du Quebec ruling – R. v. Banville rejected a release condition restricting an individual’s right to discuss their charges on social media (and the condition in that assault case would have been more justified since it was not a political dispute between two social media influencers.) At court Friday the investigator admitted the condition was imposed at her discretion. She also mentioned that a crown lawyer gave her jurisprudence suggesting the “harassment” charges leveled against me were unlikely to stand up in court.
In effect, a police officer who abused her authority in imposing a release condition on odious charges then felt targeted when people complained by email. So, the police further abused their authority.
Obviously, the police would like to have greater power to act with impunity and to define emails targeting them as “harassment” and “interference”. Like everyone, they would prefer not to have their misdeeds exposed and challenged.
The authoritarian attitude driving the case oozed in the prosecution’s concluding remarks. The crown claimed the email petition campaign “crossed a red line” and was an “exaggerated use of liberty of expression”. He claimed it was “violent” because it named the investigating officer. But, to repeat, it was an email petition that began with “dear” and ended with “sincerely”.
I was in court Friday, but it wasn’t just me, it was everyone who might disagree with a decision by the government or its representative. What is on trial is the public’s right to petition state officials.
The judge will render her decision on January 23, 2026.
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