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Ontario is not sending its best
118 Plays3 years ago
Where did Kevin J. Johnston come from? Independent journalist Kevin Metcalf digs into the history of this infamous Ontario and relatively recent Calgary transplant who has recently been locked up for a series of increasingly dangerous and aggressive anti-lockdown stunts.
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:01
Speaker
The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, as Season 2 of Off-Court Pod is now available for Harbinger supporters. The first episode has A-Town Winters, Abdul Malik, and guest Steve Beal do a deep dive dismantling of everyone's least favorite racist hockey uncle, Don Cherry.
00:00:18
Speaker
And Off-court is just a fun podcast. It's on the history and political economy of sports. I really recommend it. I like it as a podcast. And it's some of the exclusive supporter-only content you get when you become a member and a supporter of Harbinger Media. So go to harbingermediainetwork.com, become a supporter, and I think you'll like it a lot. Now, on to the show.
Guest Introduction: Kevin Metcalf
00:00:54
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskwichiwa, Skaigen, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty Six territory on the banks of the Kasis-Kasawana Sippy, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today is Kevin Metcalf, an independent journalist based out of Toronto, and definitely, no matter what Kevin J. Johnson says, an antifa domestic terrorist. Kevin, welcome to The Progress Report. Hi. Thanks, Duncan. Good to be here.
00:01:22
Speaker
So Kevin, Ontario is, uh, is not sending Alberta their best. I think it's fair to say, uh, we're sorry about that really, uh, you know, our bad.
Who is Kevin J. Johnston?
00:01:38
Speaker
Yes, it's all of Ontario's fault that Kevin J. Johnston lives in Ontario now, and I thank you for accepting responsibility. You mean Alberta? Yeah, he left here. We kind of ran him out of town, I think is the bottom line. So he chose to cross the Great Divide as it were, and it settled in Calgary. So sorry to hear it.
00:01:59
Speaker
Kevin, you recently wrote a piece for us on Kevin J. Johnston's history, specifically his time in Ontario before coming out west to Calgary. Folks, if you're not familiar with Kevin J. Johnston or this piece, I mean, congratulations. This guy is incredibly toxic. He's had a ton of headlines and news around him.
00:02:21
Speaker
And so like you're just living in an incredible bubble that I wish I could not have that I could have around me as well. But he is like a very brief pracy. He's like a candidate for the mayoral seat in Calgary, but he's essentially made a career over the past like nine months.
00:02:37
Speaker
or I guess ever since the lockdown started, out of staging ever more provocative and dangerous and illegal and aggressive anti-lockdown stunts to the point where he is now in jail, and he's going to be in jail until his trial that is being held for violating a court order and some contempt stuff, and that's happening next month in July.
Legal Troubles and Infamy
00:02:58
Speaker
He's got a variety of both criminal and civil charges against him in three separate provinces. He's facing a hate crime charge in Ontario from 2017 that's finally going through the court system. He's lost a multimillion dollar defamation lawsuits. Again, this is all from his kind of time in Ontario.
00:03:19
Speaker
But this guy, he didn't pop out of nowhere. And that's why we had you write the piece that you write, Kevin. That's why we're having you on the pod today, because you are someone who is kind of deeply familiar with kind of Kevin J. Johnston's modus operandi, you know, how he works, how he interacts with the world. And I think that is kind of useful context. So why don't we start at the beginning? Where does Kevin come from? What's his background?
00:03:49
Speaker
So Kevin Johnson's background was shrouded in mystery. I think he did a pretty good job of distancing himself from his former self. When we encountered him as sort of an anti-Muslim bigot in Toronto, it was hard to unpack who this guy was, where he'd come from. There were lots of rumors, lots of dead web links, not a very good idea. But it boils down to, he was a crank suburban dad. This is somebody who lived in Meadowvale, Mississauga. He had, well, has,
00:04:19
Speaker
two children, a wife who is rumored to have divorced him now, and a home in Meadowvale where he did dad things like built a haunted house and railed at the municipal by-law officers when they came by, built skate parks in his yard.
00:04:43
Speaker
You know, did things that were weird and outlandish. He was before that a DJ. Originally out of the moniker DJ Asshole. It was actually another DJ who mispronounced that as DJ Jackal that gave him the name he'd go on to run for mayor as. So Kevin Jackal Johnson was originally Kevin Asshole Johnson. I think that makes more sense in context.
00:05:07
Speaker
But yeah, he was also a cartoonist sort of, you know, using this transgressive humor, a lot of shocking stuff that reminds me that, you know, a really 1990s shock style. I took a look at some of his old cartoons, at least that were available to the Wayback Machine. And I'd class him as like kind of a low rent Warren Ellis, but like maybe without the self-awareness sensitivity or artistic ability, like, uh, but he was trying, right? He just, he always had a different, a different shtick that's skateboarding for a while. Um, like really just.
00:05:36
Speaker
just an outlandish guy who was trying to make a name for himself but getting noticed and I think he succeeded, you know?
00:05:44
Speaker
Yes. I mean, I think he's definitely well-known now, but like this was a guy who was like before all of the, all of the like anti-Muslim stuff and the hate crimes and the moving to Calgary. This was a guy who was like quasi famous in Mississauga for throwing an incredibly elaborate Halloween haunted house. Hired extras and actors. So the one year, I mean, he spent thousands of dollars
Kevin J. Johnston's Early Years
00:06:05
Speaker
on that. And he goes, I was saying, I think he spent more on the haunted house than he did in his mayoral campaign. Right. And that was just in the one year they, they profiled the haunted house, but he was well known.
00:06:14
Speaker
Now, Kevin's somebody, in my perspective, who lives to create emotionally intense situations for people. The haunted house might actually be part of his broader shtick. He tries to create these intense situations and leverage them to his benefit. He's always somebody who's trying to shock, trying to upset, trying to rustle the jimmies of whoever he's
00:06:36
Speaker
he's chosen to focus on, whoever he's chosen to bully. He was a process server too, and that sort of is in keeping, right? Somebody who enjoys ambushing people and getting one up on them. He's got that personality trait, and I think that that's the primary skill set that he's carried into his punditry and late anti-government activism.
00:07:01
Speaker
his quote unquote media career. I've never been to Meadowvale, Mississauga, but what kind of neighborhood are we talking here? Meadowvale is middle class. Some of it's upper middle class, like the medium income is 112,000. It is a pretty good mix of people who own their homes and of people who own other people's homes.
00:07:23
Speaker
You know, there's renters, there's condo dwellers on the major corridors, and it's definitely been changing demographically. Meadowvale is an increasingly
00:07:31
Speaker
diverse neighborhood. It was pretty waspy, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant neighborhoods. I know some Scottish folks who moved out there when they came to Canada, but it's increasingly Muslim. Recently, there's actually been large pro-Palestine demonstrations in the neighborhood. It's not because the neighborhood has a political nexus, but it's where members of the community have settled. I think it's a changing community.
00:07:55
Speaker
And it is interesting to me that that's where he came from. This is sort of middle class, upper middle class Mississauga suburban neighborhood, single family homes mostly on the sort of residential streets, but it is changing. And that's one of the things that I think talked about in his show, maybe less politely and in a more racist sense. He had a problem with the change, I guess.
The Mayoral Campaign and Notoriety Shift
00:08:21
Speaker
And 2014 really kind of seemed to be where Johnston tipped over from kind of like neighborhood crank dad into like public figure and a public figure who would say and do incredibly fucked up things.
00:08:41
Speaker
Like what happened in 2014 that kind of like set him down the path that ended him in a Calgary, you know, in a Calgary prison cell seven years later. Well, I think he found out that controversy can pay. Kevin Johnson's revenue seems to have always been diversified. It's not like he's ever had one primary schtick. Yeah. He ran a printing business. He ran a sign making business. He ran an advertising business.
00:09:06
Speaker
And then he shifted over to online advertising. And it's my view that he saw there was some relationship between web traffic, even if it's outraged web traffic, and the willingness of advertisers to present their content on his website. He ran a website called Mississauga Gazette. The Mississauga Gazette had local advertisers. And he still has local advertisers from Streetsville and from Toronto on his webcasts to this day. And that's really indicative of a willingness to present
00:09:35
Speaker
an advertisement alongside this kind of high engagement, high outrage content that he's producing. It says something with the business owners, but also this has been his entire business model. So beginning with his mayoral campaign in 2014 and sort of like controversial activities around that, he started to build his status as
00:09:55
Speaker
Maybe not a credible local candidate for politics or elected office, but as a mover and shaker and influencer, if you will, in the community, a hateful influencer, but an influencer, someone who could present a brand or a, he was marketing hot sauce, he was marketing tires. He's been representing lots of brands.
00:10:14
Speaker
These are people who just thought that the traffic to his website was statistically going to benefit them by relation. So what happened in 2014? I mean, he decided to run for office and figured out that the controversy can pay. It's a controversy, something you also have to pay for, as he's found out recently.
00:10:34
Speaker
And yeah, so Hazel McCallion, the kind of 90 something, you know, semi famous mayor of Mississauga steps down and everyone and their dog kind of throws their hat in the ring for this open mayoral seat for a seat for a mayoral seat that like had been Hazel McCallion's to like her personal property for like 30 or 40 years or something. Right. And, uh, and in the course of this, uh, mayoral election.
00:10:59
Speaker
Kevin J. Johnston does a bunch of Kevin J. Johnston things. The thing that you dug up that's both in the story that was reported on by Toronto.com's John Stewart was somehow not even the lead in his own story.
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah, it should have been in the beginning. Yeah. Like what, for the audience out there, what did Kevin J. Johnson do during, in 2014, during this kind of campaign that was like somehow not even the lead of this, of this news report.
00:11:31
Speaker
I'm going to preface this by saying that earlier in 2014, prior to the incident, I'm going to discuss appeal, school board teacher was sanctioned for dressing as Mr. T in blackface. And this upset Kevin J. Johnston. He really, I think he thought that the Mr. T thing was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.
00:11:50
Speaker
And he equated in writing and in conversation the Peel School Board in Nazi Germany. He wound up sending a photograph of himself to Tony Pontes, at least, who is then the education director for the Peel School Board, but also some trustees.
00:12:06
Speaker
The gist of the photo is Kevin posed naked in blackface, doing a Nazi salute with a picture of Nelson Mandela taped to his genitals. And I just want to point out, this is not the only time he superimposed the face of a prominent person over his genitals. He's got a cartoon of himself doing the Queen's face over his genitals. It's a shtick with him. And I'm not quite sure about the symbolism here, but
00:12:32
Speaker
Mr. Pontes when i when i contacted him looking of course to see if he had retained this photo so i didn't retain any communication with kevin johnson like it was unequivocal this was just something totally at a left field or right field is it work that that caught him on where is it and really like. That should be the beginning and end of his political career i think. How can you run for public office with that kind of.
00:12:54
Speaker
compromising material floating around out there, especially in the context of the current year's political situation. It's just, it's bizarre. Also, he spent a lot of time criticizing Justin Trudeau over some blackface photos while this is floating around. So I don't know, I feel like there's a double standard here when it comes to Kevin J. Johnson's self presentation.
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah, and it wasn't just this insane thing that he did, but he also started down this long tactic, like this now long abused tactic by Kevin J. Johnson of kind of personal intimidation and using the kind of court process to go after his perceived enemies.
00:13:32
Speaker
You know, he was going to his political enemies' houses to serve lawsuits against them and like making these people feel very unsafe. And again, doing what you're talking about, creating these kind of intense emotional situations for, you know, the people that he doesn't like, right? Yeah. I think he just wants to.
00:13:58
Speaker
Get everyone he's focused on as uncomfortable as possible before he makes an ask of the meetup. It works really well for grassroots protesters, maybe not so well for someone who wants to be taken very seriously or fancies himself like a prominent figure in his community to be going around doing that because you burn bridges. You burn bridges, you upset people, and people never give
Pattern of Intimidation
00:14:18
Speaker
that grudge up. Yeah, he went to a rival
00:14:22
Speaker
She wasn't a candidate, she was a counselor. She went to the home of a city counselor whose husband was a rival for the mayoralty and served court documents at her home and verified this by posting a photograph of the front entrance of her building on Twitter. That's bizarre stuff. Behaving in that fashion makes people feel unsafe.
00:14:43
Speaker
Induces them to do things like get the police involved like it creates a pattern of behavior That's easy to point to so when we talk about like the more recent ahs stuff like this is where it came from He developed the stake he developed an approach To politics that was bombastic and confrontational and also like vaguely threatening or you know It may be directly threatening, but it's an attempt to intimidate certainly
00:15:07
Speaker
And so the mayoral election happens. He doesn't even beat neo-Nazi Paul Fromm. He comes in whatever 12th or 13th out of 15. But that does not seem to have phased him. He kept doing Kevin J. Johnston things. Going after, of all organizations, the Ontario Lacrosse Association, Kevin J. Johnston seems to be not a hockey dad, but a lacrosse dad. What the hell happened with them?
00:15:36
Speaker
So it's, again, it's a little esoteric to get into, but Kevin J. Johnston had some disagreements with how the lacrosse, I guess the Ontario Lacrosse Association was being run and administered and by who and whether or not it was by him, whether or not he was getting a cut. Like I'm not quite sure on it, but I do know that it culminated in him calling a full contact sporting event. He called a lacrosse tournament called the Kevin J. Johnston Cup, which the OLA then had to disavow.
00:16:04
Speaker
Say we know nothing about that and you know the teams he was he was involved in they've since changed their names the Mississauga Tomahawks and the Mississauga muskies both of which were presented with I'd say racist
00:16:22
Speaker
stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and cultures directly in their mascotry, directly in their copy, their advertising and iconography. So it's maybe not a surprise to me that those are the teams he was involved in. He didn't create the teams, just as far as I've been able to ascertain, was just somebody who was involved with those particular teams, but also would have been able to ascertain he ran them into the ground.
00:16:47
Speaker
He he just initiated this conflict I I think to settle very petty personal grievances against like the daughter of a Toronto City Councillor who was involved in Mississauga's lacrosse scene There was a back-and-forth on Twitter He wanted behaving again in his classic intimidating fashion and he was sanctioned. He was sanctioned He was reprimanded and then they ultimately disavowed his cup much the chagrin of parents who I think had been sucked in by him again, this is a
00:17:10
Speaker
And in the course of discussing the emotionally intense situations, maybe this is the first instance in which he's found people who almost by accident of position, the fact that they have children who are involved in the teams, they themselves have sunk costs in the teams that he was presiding over. These are people who wind up tacitly siding with him or like supporting him or retweeting his stuff. It's not that he found people who were as cranky as he was, it's that he
00:17:40
Speaker
victimize the community by holding at least a small portion of the Mississauga lacrosse scene hostage, if you will, and playing that back against the elites of lacrosse. I think he'd typify it. But yeah, it's a pattern that has continued as well. I mean, we see it now with the pandemic stuff. Yeah, I mean, it shows a pattern of behavior. And it's also, I mean, you could look in isolation. It's just, oh, harmless crank stuff. But then when you stack it up against,
00:18:10
Speaker
kind of a litany of kind of anti-Muslim bigotry and hate. I mean, it certainly is something, right? And like he started saying just absolutely vicious, untrue, defamatory things about the mayor of Mississauga, Bonnie Crombie, and that kind of really like kicked off a long line of just saying insanely racist, anti-Muslim things, right?
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think he's somebody who's picked up on the prevailing winds of politics, and he certainly knows which side of the political spectrum he's on. So with the changing circumstances in 2015, I mean, he ran in 2014 for mayor, the change of circumstances in 2015 around the federal election, the conservatives fall from power, the rise of figures like Kelly Leach and later Bernier, people who
Political Alignments and Dangerous Speech
00:19:10
Speaker
push a tacitly coded racist agenda wrapped up in barbaric cultural practices, wrapped up in things like Bill C-51 under the Harper government. I think it created a permissive culture and it was a dog whistle to people like Kevin J. Johnston that now is the time to pick our targets and bully them, and bully he did. I mean, this is somebody who posted
00:19:36
Speaker
a bounty for videos of children praying in Mississauga area schools. He did that because he'd heard that there was hate speech, anti-Jewish hate speech in the content of those prayers. And that was false. And he got, that was when he came to my attention first. I was working at a free speech organization and across my desk that there was this guy who posted a bounty for videos of minors praying. And we immediately washed our hands at Uber like, no, that's not free speech. That's something else. That's like, that's a bad idea, dude. You're going to get in trouble if you do that.
00:20:05
Speaker
It's unknown to me he had this history, but just just off the cuff posting a bounty for videos of children praying is
00:20:14
Speaker
not a winning strategy. You're not going to get people who want to help you unless they're people who are also hateful. And so he built very rapidly, I think, through this combination of federal factors and broader political context, and his own rhetoric, very strong, passionate, following very hateful people who were willing to bully pretty much anyone he targeted. And that included the Merritt, Mississauga. That included prominent business people. Yeah, he's been at this for a while.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's like people like Kevin J. Johnston and these kind of like figures that come up are opportunistic in nature. Right now, it's the pandemic and lockdowns. And, you know, seven years ago, it was anti-Muslim hate and Islamophobia and the bigotry around that. And it's not like this comes out of nowhere. You brought it up, right?
00:21:02
Speaker
The Conservative Party of Canada and their associated hangers-on and their whole infrastructure was essentially making a full-time job out of agitating against Muslims and demonizing Muslims. We had the barbaric cultural practices tip line in 2015. We had Jason Kenney from 2011 on, and then it would seem like there would be a lawsuit or something associated
00:21:26
Speaker
about the kneecap ban in citizenship ceremonies, which has just recently become a news item here in Alberta, where he's since denied ever having said anything mean about the kneecap. Kevin J. Johnson doesn't come out of nowhere. He's taking his cues from Stephen Harper. He's taking his cues from Jason Kenney. He's taking his cues from these very prominent political figures who essentially made Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate acceptable.
00:21:53
Speaker
And in the context of that family being murdered by a racist terrorist in London, Ontario, it is...
00:22:03
Speaker
incredible to see these figures like, you know, Michelle Rempel and Ken Boston Cool and Tim Upple like issue these half-hearted fucking apologies where they're like, yeah, you know, we probably shouldn't have said and done that shit. And it's like, well, yeah, it's seven years too late and now this family of four is dead. And we have people like Kevin J. Johnston running around who you helped create.
00:22:26
Speaker
And it is like the debate around the M107 motion. Again, just absolutely fucking shameful behavior by these conservative politicians. M103. Yeah, that's the one. M103, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was the moment really we started to confront him here in Toronto was when he was making comments about Dikr Khalid, when he was making comments about Omar Al-Gabra. I mean, these are federal politicians. And regardless of how you vote,
00:22:53
Speaker
We need to set aside the rhetoric and calling explicitly for people to be shot by patriots or expressing a deep hope that they will be. That creates a stochastic likelihood. There's a statistical likelihood when you make these kinds of calls
00:23:09
Speaker
irresponsible calls as a pundit who's been given free license by a mainstream politician. The mainstream politician says, this is the group we're picking on. The pundit says, this is how we pick on them. And then someone sitting at home who's bored or angry or has mental health problems or some confluence of the three is going to maybe act on that. And the statistical likelihood of somebody acting on it increases every time he says those words. She should be shot by Canadian patriot.
00:23:33
Speaker
Somebody hears those words and is like, I have nothing left to live for. Maybe it should be me. And that's why it needed to be so vociferously opposed. I think people started taking him seriously in and around Toronto and Mississauga right over the time. He started making very serious, incredible calls. He crossed that line between talk to ward action.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah, which is kind of very similar to what happened here in Alberta when he started threatening AHS employees. Uh, the, the powers that be in the authorities in question actually started to be like, Oh, well, like
00:24:07
Speaker
Maybe Kevin J. Johnson isn't going to pull out a gun and shoot these people. Maybe some unbalanced listener of his is going to, and this is actually crossing the line into dangerous territory.
Legal Consequences and Imprisonment
00:24:19
Speaker
The wheels were put in motion to the point where now Kevin J. Johnson is in prison.
00:24:29
Speaker
It's absolutely wild that you society let it get to this point. As a person, I don't think Kevin J. Johnson has ever been told no very often. I don't think he ever thought that he would ever face any serious consequences for all the shit that he's done.
00:24:46
Speaker
But I think on some level, he may also have thought that if the consequences arrived, I mean, the article that I wrote up does mention his comments to Ezra LaVant that if he were to go to jail, Canada would collapse. Obviously, that's not true. He's been in jail a couple times, and Canada is still, well, it's going. It's going. But I think he always counted on there being
00:25:11
Speaker
big adults in the room, people who would step in, who would catch his legal fees, who would stand up for him, campaigning organizations that would just organically create free speech outcry around his censorship. He's called himself Canada's most censored man for a reason. He wants to position himself as the victim. But when it becomes clear that the legal challenges against him mount, he's actually victimized a lot of people over the years. And yeah, I think he's
00:25:37
Speaker
got delusions of grandeur. That would be the term that comes to mind. He's just got this idea that powerful and important people will get his back when push comes to shove. And that, I think, is being proven false. Every day he languishes behind bars.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, like it's incredible to me that he's just able to skate away from a two and a half million dollar defamation judgment. We go into this in the story, but like Muhammad Fakia, a guy who runs Paramount Foods, they make incredible shawarmas, they have grocery stores and restaurants and stuff. This guy was defamed by Kevin J. Johnson. Muhammad Fakia takes him to court, wins a massive judgment. One of the largest defamation judgments in Canadian history, like in the top five, in the top 10, just from a monetary point of view.
00:26:16
Speaker
But it doesn't seem to have ever collected a dime. And Kevin Day Johnson essentially skips town and is living in Alberta now. And just to be able to skate away from something like that, I think he's honestly quite surprised.
00:26:30
Speaker
that he's facing consequences now. It's incredible to me that you can ignore a two and a half million dollar defamation judgment, I guess you can, if you're willing to accept certain things in your life. But it is really hard to just hand wave away and skate away from jail time, which is where Kevin J. Johnston finds himself now. And right before we recorded this, I was watching a civil contempt hearing that Kevin J. Johnston, that was about Kevin J. Johnston.
00:26:55
Speaker
And he has to wear a mask. I mean, he still has it down below his nose, but in prison, I guess they make you wear a mask. He's complaining about not being able to speak to his lawyer on the phone. These are real consequences. I think prison should be abolished. I'm not a fan of the carceral system.
00:27:19
Speaker
as a construct, but it's incredible to me to see Kevin J. Johnson in it and have to finally deal with seven years of consequences.
00:27:33
Speaker
I think that is where he is right now. His time in the sun is at an end, and the moment one consequence caught up with him, the rest got a chance. And he doesn't like jail. He's expressed on a number of his live streams, his webcasts, that he doesn't like jail. It's not fun inside. It's no party, he said.
00:27:55
Speaker
The last time he was imprisoned in Ontario, when he got out, he vowed he wasn't going to go back. So I don't think that this is some big plan of his. There's no game afoot. I don't think his credibility is high enough to radicalize his fellow inmates or win any converts over to support him. I think he's found himself in a situation, in the ship, if you will. He's found himself in a situation that he didn't quite think would catch up with him the way it has.
00:28:24
Speaker
I mean, any outside observer could see the sort of walls forming around him in real time. Yeah. And so we also get into this story. You have had personal unpleasant experiences with KJJ. Why don't you kind of run us through a very, you know, as brief as you can kind of recounting that story as well as kind of the steps you're taking to remedy what's been done to you.
Personal Encounters and Defamation
00:28:52
Speaker
So Kevin Johnston, uh, wasn't really known to me. Uh, in again, 20, 2018, uh, I was working at a free speech organization and we were working on a campaign to combat the co-optation of, uh, free speech or free expression as a means of defending far right extremism, defending hate speech, hateful speech, uh, anti-Muslim bigotry specifically that year. And.
00:29:17
Speaker
He just sort of popped up on my radar because of his call to action with respect to the filming of Muslim students praying. Shortly after that call to action and the surrounding controversy,
00:29:28
Speaker
I went to Ottawa with a colleague. We were attending a million Canadian March. It was a protest at Parliament Hill. It was woefully poorly attended. A million Canadians were not there. About 3,000 Canadians were there. But it was one of the bigger far right rallies I've seen in Ontario. And it's because they brought in people from Quebec as well. It was more of a, the locus in Ottawa was such that many people could get to it. There was also a biker convention in town that week and they had some extra joiners. It was,
00:29:56
Speaker
It was an interesting moment, but I bumped into Kevin J. Johnston actually eating breakfast. That's the very first time I ever set eyes on the man. I was sitting there eating breakfast, and we noticed that at an adjacent table, just toward the back of the room, there were people who were wearing t-shirts for the Million Acadia March. Maple Leaf t-shirts with MCM on it.
00:30:15
Speaker
And I got up and I said, hey, you folks in town for the march? They all said, sure. Yeah. Hey. And I didn't know any of those people were, I did. I think I recognized Faith Goldie at the time. Uh, I just, I pulled up my phone and I just panned a video down, uh, the row and said, Hey, well, see you later racists. And I walked out. Um, you know, that, that was me sort of letting them know they'd been noticed and they weren't going to go unopposed, uh, with respect to their, their, their ability to just rally freely. I think.
00:30:44
Speaker
Part of challenging the co-optation of hate speech, in theory, is also challenging the speech itself. That's a line that free speech organizations don't cross. That's something I feel pretty strongly needs to be done if we're going to take free expression back. Free speech for me, but not for thee. Well, free speech for both of us, but I have the right to tell you, you're an idiot.
00:31:03
Speaker
You are definitely in the wrong and I'm gonna prove you wrong and I'm gonna say what I want about you. So Kevin Johnson said what he wanted about me, of course. He wound up leaving that restaurant, going to a park where he got into it with a bunch of anti-fascists. I was not there. I was on Parliament Hill filming a doubleheader with the CDC doing the interview about a politically motivated assault I'd actually been subjected to at a rally three weeks prior in Toronto.
00:31:27
Speaker
while reporting the far right and so we're doing this interview with cbc on the hill kennedy johnson's down at centennial park in in ottawa and
00:31:37
Speaker
He got his butt kicked. It's not that he picked a fight, but he definitely picked a fight. He spent the preceding two days walking around Ottawa, tweeting to some organization called Antifa and its supporters to come out and fight him, telling him which hotels he was at, which restaurants he was at, just like constantly tweeting. And I don't think he actually tweeted that he was at that breakfast restaurant, interestingly enough. That was just the closest breakfast place to the venue for the rally.
00:32:08
Speaker
He'd been inviting them out the whole time, and I guess he went to the park, and he found the shit. He found problems. And in the ensuing fight, he claims like 46, Antifa beat him up. His ear was bloodied a little bit. He later smeared some of that blood on his face. His cameraman, Michael McCormick, was allegedly assaulted, and their camera was allegedly stolen.
00:32:30
Speaker
Now, he found a police report. He told the police that the Antifa tried to stab him, that it was a knife attack. He saw one of them had a gun. And the police responded pretty heavily. This is not the last time I've seen Kevin J. Johnston give false information to the police in the heat of the moment that they then acted on. But we all wound up waiting around the police romance center in Ottawa.
00:32:55
Speaker
just waiting to interview people as they were released. I like to try to get the story of what happened because I think ultimately like five or six folks were arrested. It was a big deal for Ottawa's anti-fascist scene that day. And the rally proceeded as plans. I got all the footage I needed at the rally. I did find the anti-fascist march and was briefly like for about half an hour following them taking photos of their march.
00:33:18
Speaker
And then I went back to my, uh, my hostel for the night and we're sitting there in the hostel, we're editing our footage, we're, we're tweeting, we're sort of running through what's going on.
00:33:26
Speaker
Here it is, Kevin J. Johnson has posted a video, and in the video he alleges that myself and my colleague filmed his assault, that I was a dangerous Antifa domestic terrorist, and as an opponent of his, and as someone who was trying to push back against the co-optation of free expression by hateful groups, yeah, I'll admit, I am an anti-fascist, I oppose fascism. What?
00:33:48
Speaker
Right. I think that that's like a safe thing to say these days and it's not a controversial position. And even in 2018 wasn't a controversial position. It was just one he was trying to controversialize. So he called me a domestic antifa terrorist and said a whole bunch of other stuff that wasn't true, at least of which that I was a loser.
00:34:07
Speaker
You know, when later I sued him for defamation, as a result of these videos, he made several of them. He called me PeePeePooPooMan and read out my office address on his show with David Mendy. It's like just a piece of work, right? Like really, I didn't pick the fight with him. I did catch his attention. And as soon as he got my name, it was like a dog without a bone. He wasn't giving it up. We sued him and he still wouldn't give it up.
00:34:33
Speaker
Yeah, that was a special moment. And I think in hindsight, I wouldn't have done anything differently.
00:34:44
Speaker
I think it was the right thing to do to confront him. I think it was the right thing to do to tell him that I thought he was a racist because he is a racist. He might deny that. I think it was the right thing to sue him. I know it was the right thing to sue him because we won. A judge found ultimately in 2020 in favor of myself and lawyer Stephen Ellis who represented me in that case.
00:35:04
Speaker
It was a default judgment. Kevin didn't show up. He had sour grapes and he sat home and said he'd never lost in court and he wasn't about to start. So he got in a live stream and live streamed through the court, which it was only found by a supporter while we were sitting there waiting for him to show up. The judge is like, oh, can we read this into the record? Okay. So we'd bring the phone up and put it in front of the judge and Kevin's direct admission of having to faint made.
00:35:28
Speaker
contributed to the default findings. So the judge found that 25,000 in damages against him, which is the maximum in Ontario for damages in small claims court. That was a real vindicating, I think, given the things he accused me of. And so what's happening to collect that money? Because you haven't managed to get a dime out of Kevin J. Johnston yet. So yeah, he skipped town. And before that, he swore up and down. He'd never pay. I could never make a pay.
00:35:58
Speaker
And it's probably true. I understand that there are reasons we can't force people to pay. I'm not a big fan of the American repo system, show up and take someone's boat or car. I think that we have a respectful relationship between the law and private property and personal property in Canada. That's all well and good, but he's someone who's learned to exploit that. And as you pointed out with the Mohammed Fakid,
00:36:21
Speaker
Defamation finding like has 2.5 million dollars. He should have to pay that back or rather he should have to pay that if it takes in the rest of his life That is a judgment for which he's on the hook, you know similarly the $25,000 he owes me slightly smaller amount perhaps a slightly more realistic amount for somebody who's whose mayoral campaign in Mississauga in what 20 2018 cost him $8,000 or $8,700 like that's
00:36:49
Speaker
It's an amount of money I think can be obtained from Kevin J. Johnson. $25,000 could wipe him out, frankly, with respect to running an effective campaign in Calgary. So I've reached out to some folks out your way, yourself included, and trying to collect as quickly as possible, obviously, by having a lawyer register the debt in Alberta. I've heard this is the way it is done.
00:37:13
Speaker
It has to be recognized as an Ontario debt in Alberta, and then it can be collected on, which then requires a bailiff, who I'm told is not cheap. I've never contracted the services of a bailiff before, and I'm really clear on what they do, but when it comes to garnishment, when it comes to the actual mechanics of collection, post discovery, post that sort of debtor's examination, it is the bailiff who has the power.
00:37:40
Speaker
I asked the question, but I know what's going on. We've got a GoFundMe set up to help you collect a few shekels so that we can hire a bailiff and do the necessary legal stuff that needs to happen to register the judgment. Again, this is money that is owed to you. A judge in Ontario decided that you had been defamed and that judgment was made in your favor for $25,000.
00:38:06
Speaker
It is you are literally only doing what needs to happen to collect that money. And if it happens to Kevin J. Johnston, if the rest of his life he has to, you know, I don't know, garnish his wages or however it works, like, again, actions have consequences.
00:38:24
Speaker
Um, but the link to that GoFundMe is going to be in the show notes. And, uh, if you could throw in a few bucks so that Kevin Metcalf can collect, uh, I think he'd be very grateful. I think I'd love to see it happen. And I've contributed already and I, I just want to say it, it warms my heart to know that people really actually care about these things, that it's not just, Oh, I won. And to pat myself in the back is winning isn't everything it's, it is making the consequences stick. And.
00:38:52
Speaker
we live for whatever reason under a system where making the consequences stick takes more resources and time often than it takes to actually sue somebody. So thank you for the contributions. And yeah, I look forward to making this guy. So yeah. So the Kevin J. Johnson story is not over, you know, and unfortunately I do not think we are going to get a redemptive story arc out of this guy.
Ongoing Legal Battles and Societal Impact
00:39:15
Speaker
He is currently embroiled in multiple court cases across three provinces.
00:39:22
Speaker
as I said off the top, he's got, in June, he's got, you know, contempt hearings, his hate crime stuff comes up in August in Ontario. He's got a pretrial conference at the end of June for his, God, for assaulting a no frills manager in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, which was all caught on tape, which is like, that's really the first time that I kind of sat down and watched Kevin J. Johnson in action.
00:39:50
Speaker
was the soap slash trying to buy a bar of soap and then stealing the bar of soap and then trying to citizens arrest the manager of no frills and then punching the manager of no frills all again on to be captured in your glorious vertical iPhone vision for the prosecutors and the cops to eventually go over. It is astonishing that they've not understood that holding your phone horizontally gives you a completely different perspective.
00:40:24
Speaker
He's still on the ballot for the mayoral race in Calgary. I do not think we are going to get a Bobby Sands situation where an imprisoned man somehow miraculously wins an election.
00:40:40
Speaker
But I mean, there's a very real shot he could be in jail, still be in jail in November. Like I was listening in on his bail appeal hearing earlier this week and his trial comes up July 12th and the judge was like, oh yeah, he could very well serve more than 72 days in prison.
00:40:59
Speaker
And so it's not that much more than 72 days to get to the middle of October, which is when the Calgary municipal election is. So who knows what is actually going to happen with him in regards to the law. But those wheels are in motion. AHS has filed a $1.3 million defamation lawsuit against Kevin J. Johnston.
00:41:27
Speaker
Again, there's no, unfortunately there's no redemptive arc here. I don't know if Kevin Johnson is the kind of person who can just turn it off, which is why he finds himself in prison, right? Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Bobby Sands.
00:41:49
Speaker
You know at burying the obvious comparisons here I'm just gonna go in the limits of Kevin Johnson isn't selfish and I saw selfless enough to go on a hunger strike like I He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who can give anything of himself for anyone else It's it's really a self-interested position that's brought him to this point. So yeah, I I think I
00:42:12
Speaker
I personally don't see him being released anytime soon, if only because what he's facing hearings on now is contempt. If there's one thing he's guilty of, it's being a contemptuous person.
00:42:25
Speaker
And I think he's a uniquely fascinating character to me. Like we spent 45 minutes talking about him. We commissioned that piece on him. And it's not just because he's an infamous asshole. Like I think that there is something in Kevin T. Johnson that is incredibly kind of like emblematic of the society that we live in, right? Like this incredibly toxic person who has gotten away with just simply awful behavior for like years and years and years.
00:42:51
Speaker
And I think he's legitimately surprised that it ever caught up with him. I honestly think that he is shocked that he finds himself in the predicament that he finds himself in, even though, again, he is the architect of it. Watching the tragic pantomime that is his consorts and holding their nightly vigils on the live stream, that's
00:43:17
Speaker
That's telling too. I don't think they expect the consequences to catch up with him either. I think the people in his immediate environment thought that he was in some way untouchable or greater than the law and that together they could prevail. But I think that those consequences are being reinforced to them collectively right now. And every day he's not on that live stream as a day he's losing fans and supporters.
00:43:37
Speaker
Yeah. And like how to, how as a society do you deal with, with like an incredibly toxic figure like this, like someone who knows how, how to serve, like he was a, he was a process server. He knows all of the kind of like tips and tricks of the courts. He's like very kind of like surface level, clever, like absolutely no compunction about putting other people in danger. You know, as we can see with regards to the,
00:44:01
Speaker
to when he just like shows up to businesses without a mask and like starts yelling at teenagers at Aldo because they won't let him into the store and it's like
00:44:12
Speaker
are you doing? What went wrong with you where you got to the point where you thought it was acceptable? Yeah. The point you raise about yelling at teenagers at all, though, I think is telling. This didn't, I think, make the final cut in the article, but it's worth noting that the term Karen has been bandied about for
00:44:33
Speaker
A certain type of social media user who's who's quick to pull out their phone and in film maybe or to complain to the police about Perceived infractions perceived injustices people who just want to raise hell really for hell's sake not not for the broader social benefit and often to satisfy a very base Urge infantile urge and Kevin J. Johnston is that and then you know the male the male equivalent of a Karen You can look this up on urban dictionary. I know because it's my name is is a Kevin so I I think
00:45:02
Speaker
I think that is who he is. I think he is just a Kevin. I think he's just a person who's in it for himself and thinks he's in it to win it and thinks the fastest path to win is by making himself the victim in every interaction, while making everyone around him extremely uncomfortable. It's like a shock and awe, but mostly just shock.
00:45:24
Speaker
I think that's a great place to leave it. He is the ultimate Kevin. Uh, speaking of that, Kevin, what's the best place for changing? What's the best place for people to find you on the internet and follow along with the work that you do and, and, um, and, uh, where can people kind of keep tracking.
00:45:43
Speaker
I mean, the easiest place to find me is Twitter, KB Metcalf on Twitter. I run a Toronto-based smear blog. That's a joke, but it's a semi-serious, semi satirical blog focused on local controversies. That's called Scaffold. Media. Other than that, Twitter is the best place. I'm always posting bad opinions there when I'm not hiding from people who take issue with them.
00:46:07
Speaker
Well, again, thank you for writing the piece. Thank you for coming on the pod. Folks, if you like this podcast, you want to hear more like it. There's a few things you can do. You know, please rate, review, share, subscribe all of the like usual verbs that you hear on your favorite podcasts. Leaving a review actually really does help. And sometimes there are jerks kind of leave bad reviews because we are obviously our politics are very obvious.
00:46:31
Speaker
People who are just like, oh yeah, this podcast is not for me. They typically don't leave like two and a half star ratings. You usually get the like one star, like this guy is a communist dick star or four or five star ratings where it's like, yeah, I like the podcast. So if you do like it, leave a review. The other big thing that helps us out is you can join the nearly 500 other folks who help keep this little independent media project going. You can become a patron. There's a link in the show description. You can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons. There's a big donate button on the website.
00:47:00
Speaker
Put in your credit card, $5, $10, $15 a month, whatever you can afford. We really appreciate it. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, I'm very easy to reach. I am also on Twitter, too much as well, at Duncan Kinney. And you can reach me by email at DuncanKAtProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme. Thanks again to Kevin Metcalf for coming on. Thank you for listening and goodbye.