Restaurateur's Heroism Tale Smells Fishy

The things one finds on the web! It's shocking; disgusting; frightening; scarifying; creepy-making.

I recently came across a story of how I, Uriel, after botching a computer network installation job for a client, nonetheless pursued the client in court for full payment, ultimately obtaining a judgment for half my claim — the very amount my sensible opponent had offered to begin with.

Most odiously, I allegedly strove to violate my opponent's right to a trial in his native French language — a right which, in Canada, is "at the heart of our collective will to live in a free and democratic society."

Fortunately for Canada, an appeals court derailed my bid to trample French rights. But an annual report by the Canadian Commissioner of Official Languages is said to have commented reprovingly on my efforts,

remind[ing] justice-minded citizens ... that "the courts have played a fundamental role in the implementation of linguistic duality.... [The Commissioner hopes] that these recent decisions will give governments the necessary incentive to more fully respect the language rights of Anglophone and Francophone minority communities and to more actively foster their growth and development. A language right becomes illusory in the absence of positive government action designed to facilitate its use."

This fairy tale, told in honeyed tones of reasonableness, comes from the pen of — you guessed it — that self-same client of yore, Fred Geisweiller, proprietor of the charming downtown Toronto restaurant, Le Sélect Bistro. And it does not omit the happy ending:

Vindicated by both the Superior and Small Claims Courts, Frédéric Geisweiller could only agree with [Canadian Commissioner of Official Languages] Dr Dyane Adam's conclusions.

All of this appears in an article at www.reform-aft.com, a website apparently established by Geisweiller to promote his cause in a wholly separate dispute he was involved in around 2002-2003. His opponents in that dispute included the government of France, although a photo accompanying Geisweiller's autobiographical note at the site (written in French) shows him beaming delightedly as he hobnobs with French President Jacques Chirac.

Briefly: At the time of that dispute, Geisweiller, in addition to running his restaurant, was president of the Alliance Française of Toronto (AFT), the Toronto chapter of the worldwide Alliance Française network of French language schools and cultural centres. As Geisweiller's website explains the quarrel:

The Alliance is riven by two fundamentally different philosophies. The official policy adopted by the Board of Directors expresses the Board's desire to modernize the institution and propel it forward into the 21st century with proper Governance rules that will finally prevent government and political interference. But a minority group remains attached to a long-standing status quo, whereby the government of France can exert an excessive degree of control over this Canadian organization, and influence its most critical decisions.

This debate on the nature and the future of our organization should have remained an internal matter. But the French government's supporters brought this conflict into the community, to the detriment of our staff, our clients, our volunteer board members, and the good name of our institution. We now have to face the challenge of a so-called "Committee for Reform" which intends to "dump the present executive".

This "Committee" is primarily made up of French expatriates and individuals who have some association with French officialdom. These persons, who pay lip service to "reform", are actually focused on the past, and intend to keep a status quo which is both confusing and destructive. As such, it is particularly disturbing to us that a respected member of this community, the Honourable Bob Kaplan - a complete newcomer to the Alliance who has already demonstrated the ardour of the neophyte - should be so misled as to spearhead this "Committee", thus showing that he opposes a Canadian institution's right to self-determination and would be prepared to prevent it from assuming its own destiny.

It is our duty, our mission, and our intention to defend our autonomy against any interference. Now is the time to fight for our principles. [Emphasis in original.]

[Excerpted from "The Alliance Française in crisis," at www.reform-aft.com/index.html.]

I confess to being a bit vague on what principles were involved in that fight, but Geisweiller does not appear to have emerged victorious. A news item at the Alliance Française of Toronto website reports the election in 2003 of a new executive which does not include Geisweiller, and which does include the "neophyte," Bob Kaplan.

So the dispute is history. But Geisweiller's www.reform-aft.com remains, with undated items describing himself as the current president and urging readers to join "the Committee for the Defence of the Alliance Française de Toronto" and add their names to "the growing list of citizens who are deeply disturbed by the attempts to destabilize the Alliance."

But let's return to Geisweiller's Geisweiller v. Wittenberg: The court case that consolidated the right to a bilingual hearing, the fairy tale we began with. The tale does indeed bear some discernible connection to events that occurred in our real world. I documented them at the time, as exhaustively as any reader is likely to wish, at The Le Sélect Bistro Trials. But since I've just recently discovered Geisweiller's own version of the story, I will note here a few discrepancies.

• First, it's somewhat audacious for Geisweiller to depict himself as a heroic defender of French rights or constitutional principles, since actually this was a simple matter of his welching on a debt and refusing to honor a plain contract with a consultant whose services he'd used for ten years. Even after the court ruled against him, Geisweiller resisted payment until I garnisheed his bank accounts.

  It's true that the invocation of French-language rights somewhat delayed the course of justice in this matter. After the Small Claims Court dismissed his vocal but implausible arguments and ordered him to satisfy his "clear and unequivocal" debt, the wealthy Geisweiller engaged one of Canada's most prominent law firms to appeal the verdict to a higher court, arguing that he'd wanted a French-language hearing. (Geisweiller is, incidentally, thoroughly fluent in English and conducts the bulk of his business in English.) The appeal was successful in the sense that the Small Claims Court result was thrown out and I was obliged to defeat Geisweiller a second time in a new Small Claims Court proceeding.

  This was hardly a shining triumph for French language rights. On the contrary, as I observed at the time in a letter published in The Lawyers Weekly, the public is not pleased when defendants evade justice through legal technicalities, and the effect of Geisweiller's abuse of linguistic rights, if any, might well be to reduce their political viability in future.

• The remarks by the Canadian Commissioner of Official Languages which Geisweiller's piece highlights, in which the good Commissioner expresses the hope that "these recent decisions will give governments the necessary incentive to more fully respect the language rights of Anglophone and Francophone minority communities," do not, of course, refer specifically to my legal conflict with Geisweiller. They are made in the foreword of Language Rights: 1999-2000, a 30,000-word report. The case between Geisweiller and myself is noted in a 300-word passage deep within the body of the report, in the course of a roundup of legal opinions involving language rights.

  [Note added July 25, 2005: After the appearance of this commentary at urielw.com last month, Geisweiller amended his article. The tricky wording, creating the impression that the Commissioner has commented directly on our case, has been left intact. But to show the world he has nothing to hide, Geisweiller has now added a note inviting his readers to "[s]ee the complete 2001 report by the Canadian Commissioner of Official Languages," and provided a link to the report. —UW.]

• Geisweiller never made a settlement offer equal to the payment I finally extracted from him via the courts.

• I never installed a computer network for Geisweiller (or for anyone). A network installation for Geisweiller was indeed botched, but as Geisweiller is well aware, the job was performed by other service providers. The role I played was to successfully restore Geisweiller's systems and data after the fiasco. (Details in trial transcripts at The Le Sélect Bistro Trials.)

Geisweiller has been paying money to both Google and Ask Jeeves (the web search engines) to advertise his Geisweiller v. Wittenberg... tale when web searchers search on his name. (That's how I belatedly discovered it. Google search results and Ask Jeeves search results both, as of this point in time, display a Sponsored Link leading to his fanciful account of our legal battle.) And he opens his autobiographical note with a celebration of his legal appeal's "reaffirmation of the inalienable rights" of Ontario francophones to use French before judges, as if the case were a major life accomplishment.

There is a marvellously brazen quality to the way this restaurant man, like an artist presenting a chef-d'oeuvre, lifts the lid with such a glow of pride from a stew wrung of such corrupt ingredients. The stew's bad odor comes not from French or English, but from the lies Geisweiller has incessantly concocted in both the languages. He lied about never having received my invoice in the first place. He lied about never having received the original lawsuit notice, sent to him by registered mail. He lied about not having grasped how my consulting fees were calculated throughout the ten years I served him. (The formula was quite complex: Fixed hourly rate times number of hours worked.) He lied about my being involved in that botched network job. And when called on that lie, he promptly conjured a new lie about how I'd recommended the people who did botch it.

And when he wasn't lying, he was being evasive, as is evident in the court transcripts at The Le Sélect Bistro Trials.

But that was years ago. Time has passed. Geisweiller must have felt a need to garnish vestigial memories of the affair. So with a fresh lie here and a stale one there (that network job), Monsieur Geisweiller presents for your degustation — Voila! — the legal "cause célèbre" in which he fought victoriously to defend minority rights and linguistic freedom.

At some point since I wrote the above, Geisweiller expanded his self-promotion budget. As of now, Google and Ask Jeeves users get the Sponsored Link to his Geisweiller v. Wittenberg... story not just when they search on "Frederic Geisweiller", but also when they search on ... "Uriel Wittenberg"!