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Getting to trial is rarely a speedy business in Canada’s courts, but a libel case that starts Tuesday in Toronto is exceptional for how much has changed since it was launched nearly five years ago, in the heat of Canada’s first online culture war.

Pitting a Regina lawyer against a nationally known television personality who describes himself as “one of Canada’s premier advocates of free expression,” Khurrum Awan v. Ezra Levant is one of several defamation suits that arose from the fight over hate speech bans in human rights law.

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Court documents indicate this week’s trial will turn on Mr. Awan’s claim that Mr. Levant, on his blog in 2009, “variously described [him] as “Khurrum Awan the liar,” “stupid, a “fool,” a “serial, malicious, money-grubbing liar,” and “unequivocally implied that he was an anti-Semite and perjurer.”

Back then, Mr. Awan was a law student, and the public face of a hate speech complaint againstMaclean’s magazine, citing columnist Mark Steyn and Barbara Amiel among others, and backed by the Canadian Islamic Congress. Now he is a lawyer in Saskatchewan who has recently acted for plaintiffs against drug companies.