‘Homophobic comments’ cost man $12,000Kenyon Wallace, National Post · Friday, Jan. 14, 2011
The Quebec Human Rights Tribunal has ordered a Montreal man to pay his gay neighbours $12,000 for allegedly subjecting them to “homophobic comments,” death threats and invitations to fight,
even though he was acquitted of the charges in a court of law nearly five years ago.
The tribunal ruled that Gordon Lusk, a married father of two, must pay the “moral and punitive” damages after his neighbours, Theo Wouters and Roger Thibault, accused him of addressing them as “faggots” during a June 2006, altercation.
...
“It makes no sense that Mr. Lusk could be acquitted in a Quebec court and then found liable for moral and punitive damages in front of a human rights tribunal,” Mr. Angers said. “These tribunals are just in another world.”
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“It sends a message to the rest of Canada that homophobia is not acceptable,” he said.Messrs. Wouters and Thibault, who were the first gay male couple in Quebec to formalize their union under the province’s civil union law, have a history of pursuing lawsuits and complaints against neighbours whom they believe harbour homophobic attitudes.
The couple moved into their Parkdale Avenue home in 1978 and lived in relative peace with their neighbours for more than two decades.
But in 2001, they began complaining of harassment from a neighbour, Bob Walker, resulting in criminal charges and a 4,000-person anti-homophobia march through their neighbourhood. Mr. Walker was acquitted a year and a half later after the judge in the case encountered difficulty with the credibility of the two men. Six years later, the couple signed a letter of apology to Mr. Walker in which they stated all the complaints made against him were “baseless.”
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Homophobic+comments+cost/4112393/story.html#ixzz1B7ZgeZIp--------------
First legally married gay couple in Quebec and they have their house CCTVed (to troll for evidence of homophopbia?), you have to wonder who their owners are.
