BACKGROUND
Joanna Berry is a Canadian immigration and refugee lawyer in Ontario, Canada. On October 2, two Niagara Police Officers, one of them a sergeant detective, paid her a visit to her home. They told her they were there on behalf of the Ottawa Police Department because of her “personal social media.” They begin to tell her that “10 lawyers who are of the Jewish faith” have filed a complaint with the police about her social media. As you can tell from the video, Joanna Berry, is outraged by the visit and clearly distraught. I reached out to the Niagara Regional Police for comment but they did not respond to my inquiry. I spoke with Joanna Berry also and she gave OTL Media permission to publish the video. She told us that she wants Canadians to see it and for the video to be a warning.
“This is very Orwellian”
On The Line Media is run by Samira Mohyeddin, a multi-award-winning journalist, documentary maker, and producer at CBC Radio One’s The Current.
The video opens with the claim that police visited her because of her social media posts that were critical of Israel.
When you finally get to the point where she lets the officers speak, they reveal that they are there on complaints of “unwanted messages to specific lawyers,” to which she responds, “Nobody told me not to message them.”
So clearly the issue was that she was sending problematic messages directly to people, and those messages were concerning enough to warrant a visit from the police. They would not waste their time showing up at someone’s house like this unless there was sufficient cause to open an investigation.