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The day before, he tweeted about visits to two schools, a daycare (for another mayoral proclamation, this one of a civic day in honour of child-care workers and early-childhood educators) and a city hall fundraiser for victims of natural disasters in Indonesia. He’s not invited to these places for his swell company.

The way a politician uses a purportedly personal social-media account has been important in similar cases in the United States, including one President Donald Trump lost last summer.

The Trump case involves American law and not Canadian, obviously, but both traditions draw on similar liberal-democratic ideas and the cases involve practically identical facts: some lefties bugged the president on Twitter and he, or someone commanding his account, blocked them.

The judge who ruled against Trump delivered a 75-page decision explaining that Twitter’ a public forum, that the origin of Trump’s Twitter account (which he had long before entering politics) is neither here nor there if he’s now using it for presidenty purposes, and how the First Amendment that guarantees free speech in the United States includes the right to hear what public officials say in public and to talk about it yourself.

Trump doesn’t have to listen to people who get on his nerves, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote, but he’s not allowed to stop them from listening to him. He can mute them, in other words, but not block them. Also, various workarounds — if you log out of Twitter you can read public tweets you’d otherwise be blocked from seeing — aren’t adequate alternatives because they don’t let you respond publicly to Trump’s tweets as yourself, she ruled.