2017 December 13

Taseko Mines Ltd. v. Western Canada Wilderness Committee, 2017 BCCA 431

The British Columbia Court of Appeal varied the trial judgment which dismissed this action over five website articles, by setting aside the award of special costs to the defendants (2016 BCSC 109).   The court agreed with Taseko that “it was a legal error to rely on” the test set out in WIC Radio Ltd. v Simpson, 2008 SCC 40 at paras. 67-68 to determine whether the impugned publications were defamatory, but concluded that despite a “misstep” in one paragraph of his trial judgement, the trial judge “was alive to the test he needed to apply, and he applied the correct test when he made his findings.”  “At the end of the day, the basic test to apply when discerning whether an ‘inferential’ meaning is defamatory is based on the natural and ordinary meaning that a reasonable person would infer from the entirety of the publication.”