2023 March 28

A.B. c. Google LLC, 2023 QCCS 1167 

The Quebec Superior Court awarded the plaintiff “$500,000  in compensatory damages for moral injury” plus an injunction requiring Google to ensure that its search results not list any webpages from four specified domains containing the words “A.B.”.  The injunction was restricted in geographical scope to all users of the search service offered by Google located in the province of Quebec.  The plaintiff had been falsely accused of having been convicted of a crime he did not commit.  The accusation was made in a post made by one individual to a website operated by someone else and was spread by a search engine operated by “Google” which would provide a hyperlink to the defamatory post. “The Plaintiff found himself helpless in a surreal and excruciating contemporary online ecosystem as he lived through a dark odyssey to have the Defamatory Post removed from public circulation.”  In this ruling, the Quebec Superior Court concluded that “by virtue of its erroneous interpretation of the 2011 Supreme Court of Canada judgment* in relation to the law of another province Google unilaterally decide (sic) to restore the hyperlink to the Defamatory Post to the anguish of the Plaintiff” [*Crookes v Newton, 2011 SCC 47].