[DIV id=headline] [H2]MP ordered to pay $220,000 for racist comments[/H2]
[DIV id=author] [P class=byline]PIERRE SAINT-ARNAUD AND PATRICE BERGERON
[P class=source]Canadian Press
[UL class=columnistInfo][/UL]
[DIV id=article style="FONT-SIZE: 100%"] [!-- dateline --]Montreal [!-- /dateline --]— Independent MP Andre Arthur, no stranger to controversy in his long radio career, and a former employer have been ordered to pay $220,000 plus costs for comments judged to have insulted Arab and Haitian cabbies.
Justice Jean Guilbault of Quebec Superior Court said remarks by Mr. Arthur in November 1998 when he was working for now-defunct radio station CKVL were racist and defamatory.
Mr. Arthur and Metromedia CMR, which owned CKVL at the time, will have to pay more than $300,000 including interest and costs after a taxi association launched legal proceedings on behalf of 1,100 Arab and Haitian taxi drivers.
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The host said the Montreal taxi drivers only speak Creole and Arabic, in a city that is French and English.
He added that he couldn't understand them because he doesn't speak "n***er."
"If you don't speak Arabic or Creole in Montreal, you can't drive a taxi," he said. "The taxi has really become a Third World form of public transit in Montreal."
Mr. Arthur deplored their driving skills, insinuating they obtained their permits through bribes.
He also said all the garbage on the street ends up in taxis driven by Arabs and Haitians, making the vehicles dirty and foul smelling.
The Superior Court originally rejected a request from Fares Bou Malhab, president of the Quebec Association of Professional Taxi Drivers, for permission to launch a class-action lawsuit. The judge ruled defamation is, by definition, a personal attack.
But the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned that ruling.
Arthur, who won the Quebec City-area riding of Portneuf last Jan. 23, has never been shy about skewering various segments of the population, most notably politicians.
The 62-year-old's comments over the years have landed him in water with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
In his 33-page ruling, Judge Guilbault said Mr. Arthur's comments were defamatory and racist.
He said that associating the taxi drivers with corruption "was particularly insulting and hurtful."
The judge added that freedom of expression and freedom of the press must be used in a respectful way. Discussing problems with the taxi industry were in the "public interest," but there should be no reference to the origins of the drivers, Judge Guilbault wrote.
"Must one target Arab and Haitian taxi drivers to assert a point of view? The court doesn't believe so."
Bou Malhab was delighted with the ruling.
"The judge condemned the unacceptable ideas," he told NTR, the French-language broadcast service of The Canadian Press.
"I understand that he wants to denounce industry problems, but he can't blame two communities for all ills. You can't target people and incite hatred against a group or an industry."
The court ordered Mr. Arthur and his former boss to pay $200 to each of the 1,100 taxi drivers whose mother tongue was Creole or Arabic in 1998.
The CRTC stripped Quebec City radio station CHOI-FM of its licence in 2004 in part because of Mr. Arthur's comments that African students at Laval University were the children of dictators and cannibals.
Mr. Arthur, who was known as King Arthur by his fans, has faced lawsuits from former Quebec premiers Lucien Bouchard and Daniel Johnson. Mr. Johnson's wife sued for $500,000 after Mr. Arthur alleged that she benefited inappropriately from government grants.
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