By Rohana Rezel
I tweeted recently about how a candidate for the Liberal Party of Canada in the upcoming election was engaged in property flipping. This morning, less than a week after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a snap election, someone reported my tweets to Twitter and got my account locked.
The candidate who’s been doing a bit of flipping on the side is Taleeb Noormohamed. Noormohamed is running to be the next Member of Parliament for Vancouver-Granville, where the incumbent independent Jody Wilson-Raybould is not running this time. Noormohamed’s main opponents are Kailin Che, a lawyer who’s running for the Conservatives, and climate change activist Anjali Appadurai, who’s running on the NDP ticket.
In a series of tweets last May, I show how Noormohamed has been engaged in a series of real estate transactions that are consistent with quick flips.
In one tweet, I showed how Noormohamed bought 501-1616 W 13th Avenue, Vancouver for $880,000 in March 2020, and then flipped it for $949,000 in under three months. That tweet was reported to Twitter, and Twitter deemed that my tweet violated “rules against posting private information.”
That’s not Noormohamed’s only rodeo. Noormohamed bought 205-189 National Avenue, Vancouver for $755,000 in July 2020, and sold it seven months later for $870,000. Noormohamed has also been involved in numerous other real estate transactions.
Information about properties Noormohamed flipped are not private information by any stretch of the imagination. As well, there’s a clear public interest in revealing this information.
This is a chilling vision of what’s to come under Liberal’s proposed internet censorship laws. Under the proposed law, platforms like Twitter and Facebook will be forced to implement measures to identify harmful content and to respond to any content flagged by any user within 24 hours[1]https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful-online-content/technical-paper.html.
The public have a right to know that ruling politicians are profiting off real estate flipping in the midst of a housing crisis. But a false report is all that it takes currently to Twitter to censor such vital information of public interest about a ruling party politician. With the new laws Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has proposed, we cannot expect any platform to fight back against government mandated censorship.
I have reached out to both Noormohamed and Twitter for comment, but neither party has yet to get back to me.
Contact the Author
You can reach Rohana Rezel at rohana@rezel.ca. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook and Github.
References [ + ]
| 1. | ↑ | https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/harmful-online-content/technical-paper.html |