This Lawyer Paid for Spying on a Judge. Charges Stayed, He’s Defiant

At a law society hearing in August, John Carpay, the controversial president of Alberta's far-right Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, expressed abject contrition for hiring a private investigator to spy on a senior Manitoba judge.

But in an abrupt about-face last week, Carpay downplayed the judicial surveillance and claimed Manitoba Justice officials attempted to silence and intimidate him by filing bogus politically motivated criminal charges against him.

Carpay levelled that accusation last Friday after Manitoba Justice stayed criminal charges of attempted obstruction of justice and intimidation of a justice system participant against him, and fellow JCCF lawyer Jay Cameron.

In return for the stay, the two Alberta lawyers agreed to a peace bond that bars them from contacting Manitoba Court of King’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal and a three-year ban from practising law in Canada.

“It appears that these charges were brought against Mr. Carpay for political reasons, in an attempt to intimidate,” stated a news release posted on the charity’s website within hours of the charges being stayed.

In the news release, Carpay references a video he posted shortly after he was initially charged in which he said, “I am not going to be intimidated, and I’m going to keep on speaking out against... all the violations of our rights and freedoms.”

Carpay thanks those who have financially supported him as “he defended himself against these criminal charges” and then makes a pitch for more donations.

“Those wishing to donate to Mr. Carpay personally, to help pay off $20,000 in outstanding legal bills, are welcome to donate at Give-Send-Go.”

A JCCF spokesperson said Carpay is at an out-of-country conference and can’t respond to media inquiries.

The Tyee made a detailed interview request to Manitoba Justice relating to Carpay's allegation that it subjected him to an unwarranted, politically motivated prosecution. In an emailed statement two full days after receiving the request, the ministry said:

"Crown has nothing to add at this time."

The JCCF is a federally registered charity that has mounted pro bono legal challenges to pandemic restrictions on behalf of churches and individuals.

It has also challenged school board sexual orientation and gender identity policies. Speaking at a Rebel Media event in 2018, Carpay contended that protecting LGBTQ rights was the same as totalitarianism, and he compared the Pride flag to the hammer and sickle of communism or the swastika of Nazi Germany.

Danielle Smith, when she was campaigning to become Alberta premier, last year claimed to have given some $60,000 to Carpay’s JCCF. The money was from GoFundMe donations she’d raised to fund a lawsuit against COVID vaccine requirements, which she never pursued.

‘He shows two very different faces’

In a case that shocked Canada’s legal community, Carpay admitted he had hired a Winnipeg private investigator in 2021 to conduct surveillance on Joyal. The senior judge was in the midst of presiding over a case in which the JCCF was acting for several churches who were challenging pandemic restrictions. Carpay had hoped to catch Joyal breaching the pandemic restrictions.

The judge continued to hear the case and ruled the restrictions were constitutionally valid. In late December 2022, Winnipeg police criminally charged Carpay and Cameron.

Carpay’s defiant denunciation of Manitoba Justice contrasts starkly with the contrition he expressed during a previous Law Society of Manitoba hearing, said Arthur Schafer, founding director of the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics.

“He shows two very different faces,” said Schafer, who, at The Tyee’s request, reviewed the ruling issued by a law society disciplinary committee and Carpay’s news release.

“When he is appealing for mercy to the law society disciplinary committee, he is apologetic and acknowledges that he is guilty of breach of integrity.”

“And then he adopts a kind of arrogant rejection that he had done anything wrong when he is pleading with his followers to send him money,” he said.

Carpay pleaded guilty to breach of integrity while Cameron admitted to unprofessional conduct. They were banned for life from practising law in Manitoba.

"I fully acknowledge that my instructing surveillance of Chief Justice [Glenn] Joyal was in violation of my professional obligations as a lawyer to the court and to society," Carpay told the committee in August.

In his recent news release, however, Carpay minimizes the seriousness of surveilling a judge and then ticks off a list of what he says was unfair treatment he was forced to endure.

Carpay referred to the tailing of the judge, and other government officials, as “passive surveillance.” It was merely intended, he said, to determine the “veracity of rumours” that the officials enforcing pandemic restrictions were not abiding by them.

“Lawyers in Manitoba and across Canada routinely hire private investigators, particularly in the practice of family law and insurance law,” Carpay’s statement said.

Noticeably absent is any recognition by Carpay that it is a serious breach of conduct for a lawyer to hire a private investigator to surveil a judge presiding over one of their cases.

“Crown prosecutors know that there is nothing criminal about operating a private investigation business, or retaining a private investigator, or conducting passive surveillance,” the news release states. “It is worth noting that no criminal charges were filed against the private investigators who conducted surveillance on the judge and on other government officials.”

Surveillance was ‘passive,’ claims Carpay

Carpay said that more than 17 months after this “passive surveillance” occurred, he was “unexpectedly” arrested on Dec. 30, 2022, and “spent 23 hours in jail during his Christmas holidays.”

“Depriving a man of his liberty and of the company of his family and friends, particularly during his short Christmas vacation, was extremely stressful for Mr. Carpay and his family,” said Carpay, who then claims the charges were brought against him for political reasons in an attempt to intimidate him.

But Carpay’s statement that he was “unexpectedly" arrested is misleading. In a Jan. 1, 2023, JCCF news release, Carpay says he learned the Winnipeg police had issued a warrant for his arrest and he “immediately” turned himself in to Calgary police.

The news release states that the Crown’s decision to stay the charges “reflects the fact that there was never any criminal wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Carpay. There was nothing criminal about Mr. Carpay’s error in judgment. There was never any intent to interfere with the course of justice or with the judicial process.”

Carpay’s claim that the surveillance of the judge was “passive” conflicts with the details of the surveillance contained in the ruling of the law society committee, which gained access to the emails between Carpay and the private investigator.

“In an email to the PI (private investigator) dated June 16, 2021, Carpay wrote: 'I suggest you commence surveillance of Premier Pallister to catch him breaking rules, and further watch Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench.'" The ruling also reveals Manitoba’s chief medical officer of health was targeted for surveillance.

A couple of weeks later, the investigator reported he had seen Joyal riding in a car with an “unidentified adult female,” and neither was wearing a mask.

Carpay directed the investigator to find out if the woman was part of Joyal’s family and later exhorted him to identify her.

“No point in turning this over to the media if this judge has a good, compelling, persuasive justification for traveling in the car with her,” Carpay wrote in an email. “We need to have our ducks lined up ahead of time, so to speak."

“Please make it a top priority to find out the identity of the woman he was with... this could be extremely valuable if he broke the rules," Carpay wrote in an email to the investigator.

The panel’s ruling said it was later found that the investigator had made direct contact with a female member of Joyal’s family.

‘Delete everything’

The surveillance of the judge ended when he noticed he was being tailed and Winnipeg police were called in to investigate.

After the investigator told Cameron that police knew he had conducted surveillance on the judge, the two lawyers deleted every email with the investigator, and Carpay directed Cameron to tell the investigator to “delete everything” and not tell the police who had hired him.

The pair claimed the email deletion from their official justice centre accounts was part of a routine purge to thwart potential hackers. The panel rejected that explanation.

“It cannot reasonably be seen as anything other than a deliberate attempt to conceal the misconduct from the police, the courts, and the regulators.

“If the intention of the surveillance had been simply to secure evidence that ‘public figures,’ such as the premier and the chief medical officer, were violating health orders, one would think that there would be no need to instruct the PI to ‘delete everything.’

“If that were really the case, there would be no concern about disclosing to the police that the JCCF was involved as part of its mandate of keeping watch on the public behaviour of ‘public figures.’”

Ethics expert Schafer said Carpay’s claim in his news release that he was a victim of a politically motivated prosecution is not supported by the evidence from the law society ruling.

Schafer noted that at no time during the law society hearing did Carpay or his lawyer question the validity of the charges, which Schafer said are especially serious because they involve lawyers, who should clearly understand how such behaviour could serve to undermine the justice system.

Carpay’s lawyer, Schafer said, even cited the serious charges his client still faced as a mitigating factor that the panel should weigh when considering the penalty to be levied against him.

“The whole tenor of the presentation by his lawyers to the disciplinary committee of the Manitoba law society was apologetic, acknowledging that his actions were not simply a misjudgment, not even simply stupid, but that they were inappropriate,” Schafer said.

“Now it’s clear his apology and contrition were insincere,” Schafer said, and that may be an issue in future for the Law Society of Alberta to consider.

When Alberta’s law society ceded authority to its counterpart in Manitoba, it reserved the right, as is the law, to possibly conduct a disciplinary hearing for Carpay and Cameron.

In Alberta, as is the case in all provinces, the society’s code of conduct prohibits lawyers from bringing the administration of justice into disrepute.

Schafer stressed he is not an expert in the regulation of lawyers, but he said Carpay’s public allegation of a politically motivated prosecution and his rejection of his earlier apologies and contrition tied in with a fundraising request should at least warrant a law society review.

A spokesperson for Alberta’s law society acknowledged that if an “Alberta lawyer is sanctioned by another Canadian law society, there is nothing in the Legal Profession Act or Rules of the Law Society of Alberta that restricts us from investigating that lawyer’s conduct.” But the spokesperson said the law society is barred by the provincial Legal Profession Act from commenting on potential investigations, which become public only when citations are issued and a public hearing is ordered.

If you have any information for this story, or information for another story, please contact Charles Rusnell in confidence via email.