The provincial government has introduced an act which, if passed, will modernize current defamation laws.

The existing Libel and Slander Act includes outdated terms and ideas, such as referring to newspapers as the only form of media. The new act, the Defamation Act, will eliminates the distinction between libel and slander and refers instead to ‘defamation,’ which encompasses both written and spoken statements that harm an individual’s reputation.

The legislation will also authorize the courts to make take-down and de-indexing orders against third parties when harmful online content continues to circulate after initial publication and establish a single cause of action for a publication and any later re-publications of the same material by the same publisher.