Your Ward News is dead.

Toes up. Six feet under. Bit the dust. Ding-donged.

The giveaway rag will no longer darken the doorstep of some 300,000 non-subscribers in southern Ontario — but primarily east-end Toronto — most of whom never wanted the damn thing, many of whom were horrified by its content and some of whom will just have to find their Jew-hating, women-slagging bile elsewhere.

So it doesn’t matter, except in the denunciation and deterrence details, what sentence publisher LeRoy St. Germaine eventually receives — which didn’t happen on Monday at the College Park court, as had been widely anticipated.

St. Germaine has already vowed to kill the thing, has “no further intention of publishing again,” as stated in a presentencing report entered as an exhibit, and plans to sever his association with his co-accused, James Sears.

Nor is it germane that gonzo editor Sears — a.k.a. “Dimitri the Lover, formerly a doctor until he had his medical licence revoked over sexual impropriety with female patients — might have his case reopened, representing himself after firing his lawyer. That was the most startling development in court, when Judge Richard Blouin agreed to allow Sears a shot at making his case for a retrial or mistrial.

Which is all that Sears will be permitted to argue when the matter returns before Blouin in early August: That his reasons for judgment were inadequate because the cashiered lawyer, Dean Embry, failed to mount a proper defence and refused to call any witnesses, as Sears has alleged.

“My overarching obligation is to ensure a fair trial,” said Blouin. “I’m allowing Mr. Sears an opportunity to satisfy me that this is an exceptional case and I should re-open this trial or declare a mistrial at his late date.”

Blouin rejected five other grounds Sears had posited in a 79-page submission (plus 29-page addendum), all related to Charter matters which he found had no merit.

“You’ve made the argument that Mr. Embry basically threw the case,” the judge told Sears. “That’s an issue I’m going to have to decide.’’

What won’t be under consideration are any “tactical’’ decisions Embry made at trial, which the court is in no position to second guess.

It’s highly unusual to re-open a trial after conviction — both Sears and St. Germaine were found guilty in the judge-alone trial six months ago on two counts of wilfully promoting hatred against women and Jews in their toe rag of a tabloid. Usually such arguments are heard in appeal court.

But Sears, who didn’t testify at trial and on Monday waived his right to solicitor-client privilege, maintains Embry botched the defence. (Embry has previously denied this to the Canadian Press, and did not return the Star’s phone and email messages.)

Sears will apparently call Embry as a witness, though he sounded uncertain of what parameters would be acceptable for questioning and thus cross-examination by the Crown. “I’m not going to give carte blanche for him to reveal everything. You have to understand that I don’t trust him,” he said, adding: “I’m learning as I go. So we come back in two weeks and I give you my game plan.”

That will include, Sears told court, calling “expert witnesses” on satire — he and St. Germaine have claimed throughout that Your Ward News was meant as ha-ha, never to be taken seriously — and an “Ethiopian Jew who was a former writer” at YWN.

As humour, the publication and its online version were hardly a barrel of laughs, routinely referring to women as sluts and c---ts and chattel, mentally deficient manipulators of males, and explicitly advocated for a society where men could physically and sexually assault females with impunity. Jews, as per YWN, were accused of a global mass conspiracy to control world financial markets, Judaism likened to a Satanic religion and the Holocaust a hoax — “6 million lampshades,” as referenced in one edition, a reference to the rumours that the wife of a Nazi leader had a lampshade made of Jewish skin.

Conviction under Canada’s hate laws is hardly unprecedented. But Blouin, by leaving the door an itty-bit open for Sears — he’s swamped the prosecution with delaying gambit motions — is clearly trying to make his decision bulletproof against appeal.

With the Sears side of this gruesome twosome still pending, the court turned its attention to St. Germaine, a 77-year-old provocateur who’s said Your Ward News was intended to be anti-Marxist organ holding public officials accountable to the taxpayer when it launched. But, geez, he lost editorial control of the periodical when Sears came aboard in 2014. St. Germaine did not, however, interfere with the increasingly repellent content, so long as the rubbish could be, uh, fact-checked on the internet and had some basis in truth. And he certainly ignored the public hostility that ensued.

In any event, as St. Germaine told the probation officer who prepared the presentencing report, the content “was too comical to be taken seriously.”

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The senior citizen, who has a criminal record (break and enter, theft, assault causing bodily harm, assaulting a police officer, though nothing more recent than 1988), identifies as Métis. Hence he’s entitled to what are known as “Gladue” sentencing guidelines — cultural considerations the court can take into account in applying a restorative justice remedy for offenders of Indigenous background.

St. Germaine’s lawyer, Ian McCuaig, went on at some length about harm caused to his client’s Métis father, thus to the son, referencing the Truth and Reconciliation report released early this year that documented grave injustices in the residential school system which tore families apart.

“How does he get here?” McCuaig asked rhetorically of the man with a Grade 8 education. “I submit his early life, the genocide that was perpetrated against Indigenous people in North America, that’s how Mr. St. Germaine becomes the man that he is. You have to connect it to his past, his entire life experience.”

Not a novel premise, that anger begets anger, although injustice hardly excuses hate-mongering.

“It was obviously not expressed appropriately,” McCuaig acknowledged. “But in terms of moral culpability, that has to be factored into your understanding.”

Crown attorney Erica Whitford, with a clutch of victim impact statements submitted as exhibits, stressed that the harm perpetrated by Your Ward News targeted individuals and society at large, with many feeling “fear and anxiety, unsafe in the community, in their own homes.”

The prosecution urged Blouin to jail St. Germaine for three months on each of the two counts, to run consecutively. The defence argued for concurrent sentencing — a suspended sentence or four-month conditional sentence.

St Germaine, given an opportunity to address the court, rose to speak.

“I believe in free speech. And I think I’ve done my due diligence in checking Mr. Sears’s material.”

Besides, there were “only” some 200 complaints made against the paper over the years, during which 6 million plus editions of the Your Ward News were distributed.

“If it offends people ... (cough cough) ... for the number of people reading to the number being offended was a wide gap.”

One man’s gap is another man’s — or woman’s, or Jew’s — gorge of hatred.