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“I don’t think any of the letter carriers delivering this garbage were happy about it,” union president Mike Palecek said. “It really shouldn’t have taken the minister’s intervention. Canada Post should have done this a long time ago.”

The minister’s order effectively stops Canada Post from delivering mail from by Your Ward News editor-in-chief James Sears, or two of his associates.

“Canada Post will not deliver this disturbing publication as long as the interim order remains in effect,” Minister Foote said in a terse statement Tuesday. The newspaper was given 10 days to request a review of the decision before the interim order became final.

Sears, the editor-in-chief, called the move an “Orwellian order” and wrote to the minister to request a review.

“I was not aware that Canada is now under Napoleonic law,” Sears wrote in an email, which he provided to the National Post.

I was not aware that Canada is now under Napoleonic law.

Canada Post refunded $40,000 paid to send copies of the Your Ward News Summer 2016 edition this week, he said. But Sears warned that the thousands of copiers would soon be “stale-dated” and threatened to seek an court injunction against the order if a review wasn’t conducted fast enough.

Minister Foote told Sears she believed he was sending “hate propaganda” in contravention of subsection 319(2) of the Canadian criminal code, which prohibits the wilful promotion of hate — a serious and rarely prosecuted crime. For its part, the Toronto police said in April that an investigation into Your Ward News found no evidence of a hate crime.