And here I am! 
Let’s be clear – he didn’t threaten to sue The Gauntlet; he DID sue The Gauntlet… unsuccessfully. Way back in the early-mid 90s, I was a writer for the student newspaper, mostly covering the men’s basketball beat, but also doing some cartoons and I eventually worked my way up to sports editor and finally up to managing editor. When I started writing there, Ezra was the editor of the classified ads page, know as Three Lines Free (or TLFs). I’d say I met him a number of times while he was TLF editor when I popped up to the office to drop off a story, but I don’t honestly recall him ever deigning to actually speak to me – the volunteer staff was unworthy of being directly addressed by him while he was in the midst of one of his many lectures on the state of the universe. Something I very rapidly discovered about Ezra: he doesn’t have conversations, so much as dissertations on his world view with people occasionally interrupting his flow with questions and debate points that he would generally ignore unless they gave him an opening to go on another long monologue. Yes, the guy pulling down a whopping $40/week stipend to select a couple dozen posts to drop in his space in the paper was entirely too important to acknowledge the rabble with even so much as a nod – he was a pompous egomaniac even then.
Fast forward a couple years. Ezra has long since been removed from his editor’s position and has moved on to University politics and I am now the sports editor. In mid-February, 1993, we published a letter to the editor discussing an event that had occurred earlier that particular month where Ezra and a couple of his buddies had a public “debate” on whether homosexual rights should be entrenched in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The three of them enthusiastically insisted that homosexuality is a choice, not a predisposition and that matters of choice should not have any special rights attached to them. The letter was run under the title, “Levant, Anders and McKinsley spread hate, claims reader.” * Anyway, realizing that such a racy title might come back to harm their future dreams of political careers, the three of them filed a $10,000 libel suit against The Gauntlet in the hopes of forcing us into a public retraction. As luck would have it, we had at our disposal one of the top libel lawyers in Western Canada and the suit was eventually dropped.
So getting back to the OP, Ezra has been a bigoted, arrogant ass for as far back as I can remember. He has been unapologetically so and projects this persona whenever he can splash his stupid face and stupid glasses across a newspaper article or, better yet, a TV program. The reactionary right adore him, naturally – he’s fiscally conservative, hates on every race, religion and creed, and he loves to talk over anyone who makes the mistake of trying to have a discussion with him. The image he projects in public, so far as I can tell, is completely genuine – he is an utter tool.
Is he apologetic for printing that cartoon? No, absolutely not. Should he be publicly shamed by being forced to make an apology anyway? I say hell yes, he should. It’s bad enough that he has more than a decade of hate mongering under his belt without him being able to continue to do so without any consequences. While I generally agree with the perspectives of the parents in this thread, I do believe there is a time and a place for forcing adults to make apologies that we all know to be insincere. I do believe that a little public humiliation for the jerks of the world is a good thing in some situations. And I do believe that Ezra Levant fully deserves this slap on the pee-pee, even if it might also serve to give him one more opportunity for self-aggrandizement on a national stage. YMMV. 
- Yes, the Anders mentioned there is Rob Anders, now a Calgary MP (I sincerely apologize to the rest of Canada for that)