Ontario’s top court approves defamation suit by Ford campaign chief against evangelical leader

Kory Teneycke, Ontario Premier’s campaign chief, is suing Christian leader Charles McVety over claims of profiteering and prejudice

Published Jan 09, 2025  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

Kory Teneycke, seen here in 2015, has been told by Ontario's top court that his defamation suit can proceed. Photo by Jack Boland /Postmedia

Ontario’s top court has green-lit a defamation lawsuit brought by Kory Teneycke, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s campaign chief, against Charles McVety, a prominent Christian evangelical leader, over claims of pandemic profiteering and anti-Christian prejudice.

The decision by three judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal not to interfere with a lower court’s dismissal of an anti-SLAPP motion brought by McVety means Teneycke can go to trial on his claims that McVety defamed him on a specially targeted website and at a press conference.

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An anti-SLAPP motion, short for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation,” is a legal way to get a libel case tossed out early on if it seems to be an effort to deter the target from expressing an opinion on public affairs.

First introduced in Ontario in 2015, and later in British Columbia, these laws aimed to prevent powerful figures from burying political opponents in legal troubles and lawyer bills.

An academic review has found them the strongest such laws in the world, so daunting to plaintiffs that it often seems better to sue elsewhere if possible.

But anti-SLAPPs have become so popular as a first defence to libel, even when they are long shots, that they are failing at alarming rates, then turning up at the Court of Appeal, prompting one justice to introduce a ruling last year with this lament: “This is yet another anti-SLAPP appeal.”

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Few are as high profile as this one. Kory Teneycke is the CEO of Rubicon Strategy, which is also a plaintiff in the libel suit, and has run two winning election campaigns for Ford’s Progressive Conservatives.

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Charles McVety is a big name in the Canadian evangelical world who runs Canada Christian College in Whitby, Ont.

When the college applied to become a university in 2020, it attracted unfavourable media coverage. The new ruling notes the Toronto Star reported McVety and his son Ryan borrowed heavily from the school to buy vehicles and jet skis.

The push to become a university ultimately failed in 2021 after a quality assessment, several months after the Legislative Assembly of Ontario passed a motion condemning McVety’s long history of “extreme and hateful invective” about Muslims and gays, and urging the Ford government not to make the college a university.

Not long after, McVety published the website realreason.ca/kory, as part of the college’s response to the university status denial.

It included a video of McVety in which he claims Teneycke corruptly and illegally influenced the Ford government to implement a vaccine passport system that would benefit himself and Rubicon.

Teneycke’s statement of claim says Rubicon did separate work for pharmaceutical companies, but unrelated to the pandemic, which McVety knew.

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“It is spectacular that someone who represents these pharmaceuticals can be in the caucus, leading the caucus, influencing the caucus, and then benefitting to untold amounts,” McVety said in a press conference. Teneycke says this is false and defamatory.

McVety also said at this press conference that Teneycke “is on a campaign to drive Christians out” of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. Teneycke also says this was false and defamatory.

This loss at the Ontario Court of Appeal adds $25,000 in Teneycke’s legal costs to McVety’s bill, which was already at $50,000 from when the lower court motion failed last year.

A decision against McVety at trial could take that much higher.

“What is really going on here is not a strategic lawsuit brought to prevent Mr. McVety from expressing himself on a matter of public importance, but rather a legitimate claim in defamation brought to protect the respondents’ reputations. The respondents (Teneycke and Rubicon Strategies) may not ultimately succeed at trial, but they should be allowed to pursue the action,” wrote Justice Lise Favreau on behalf of the court.

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Anti-SLAPP motions are not meant to be motions for summary judgment, by which a judge can decide a case at an early stage without hearing a full trial but still weighing some contested issues of fact or credibility.

Anti-SLAPP laws are just meant to be a “screening mechanism,” Favreau wrote in the judgment. There are some hallmarks to a real “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” such as a major power imbalance between the parties, or a history of using lawsuits to silence political opponents.

But neither of those is the case here, the appeal court found. Nor is it fatal to Teneycke’s claim that other people made similar statements about him, but he has only sued McVety. On the original motion, the lower court judge found McVety was not simply repeating other people’s allegations, but was “conscious of what he was saying and writing” and wanted to spread it.

The lower court judge also found, and the appeal court agreed, that there was a plausible case to be made that McVety’s statements about Teneycke were motivated by malice, which can defeat the possible defences of fair comment or responsible communication, and lead to higher damage awards.

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As the lower court Judge Edward Morgan wrote: “Some of McVety’s assertions — in particular his linkage of the Plaintiffs’ lobbying on behalf of pharmaceutical companies with supposedly anti-Christian positions — are so far-fetched and defiant of logic that they suggest recklessness, or possibly outright fabrication, with respect to the truth, and seem to indicate an ulterior motive for the entire conflict-of-interest allegation.”

“Mr. McVety was not just speaking on a matter of public interest; the evidence suggests that he was engaged in a campaign to impugn Mr. Teneycke’s reputation,” the appeal court ruled, endorsing Morgan’s decision. “There is no evidence that Mr. McVety took any steps to verify the accuracy of any of his allegations…. In the circumstances, there is a relatively low public interest in protecting the appellants’ (McVety and the college) expression.”

No trial date is set.

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