Each Monday I intend to provide a potpourri of Quebec (and Canadian) legal developments. Issue 05 takes a brief look at calls to make lakes and river more accessible, rights of transgender inmates, and the frightful scheming of AI.
Calls to amend Civil Code to provide right of access to water
The Quebec government should introduce legislative amendments to make it easier to gain public access to Quebec’s unrivalled abundance of freshwater bodies, said a charitable organization dedicated to protecting Quebec’s lakes and rivers.
It is estimated that the overwhelming majority, or 98 per cent, of the lakes and rivers in southern Quebec are inaccessible to the public, according to a study published by researchers Sébastien Rioux of the Université de Montréal and Rodolphe Gonzalès of the Université de Montréal à Quèbec. About 85 per cent of the banks of lakes and rivers are private and therefore inaccessible to the public, with the remaining 15 per cent are public riparian strips, the majority of which are not intended for public use.
Quebec law governing waterbodies is contradictory, said Rioux, as it “recognizes a right to use water, but does not provide for any right of access.”
The laissez-faire attitude towards the massive privatisation of riverbanks has turned legal access to water into a privilege, said André Bélanger, executive director of the Fondation Rivières. “The legal framework is so weak that the situation will deteriorate if nothing is done.”
Quebec should follow the lead of nations such as France, New Zealand and Scotland to preserve the few existing public accesses and create new ones in an increasingly landlocked territory, added Fondation Rivières.
The organization is calling on Quebec to limit or exonerate the civil liability of owners and managers of public access points in order to encourage them to allow pedestrians to cross their private land to access a body of water. At present, an owner who allows pedestrians to cross his or her land is exposed to civil liability claims in the event of an accident.
“Many property owners are worried about opening up trails because of this excessive civil liability,” noted Bélanger.
The provincial government should also require municipalities to compensate for any loss of existing access with an equivalent access on the same body of water or on the same territory, and require a shoreline owner applying for a subdivision or construction permit to grant an easement to the municipality so that it can build an access to the body of water.
It should also authorize pedestrian access to a body of water on private land by adopting “a framework law affirming the public nature” of riverbanks, accompanied by concrete mechanisms for creating new access, including the creation of right-of-way easements when private land is sold, or the obligation to create new public access to riverbanks when public waterfront land is privatized.
The recent Act respecting land use planning and development requires municipalities to identify lakes or waterbodies of recreational interest, but they are under no obligation to take concrete measures to protect access to them. “It is up to the provincial government to assume its responsibilities and create a clear national framework to address the structural issue of shoreline access in Quebec,” said Bélanger.
Quebec transgender inmates to be detained based on anatomical sex
When a Quebecer convicted of killing his wife and two young sons was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years, the murderer sparked a firestorm when he requested to be incarcerated in a women’s prison. The transgender inmate transitioned while in custody and now identifies as a woman, all of which triggered a debate as to whether transgender inmates should have the option of serving time in men’s or women’s prisons based on their gender identity. The transgender’s request was refused.
Up until recently, transgender individuals could request to be incarcerated in a men’s or women’s facility, and could also be isolated from the general population for safety reasons.
That will no longer be the case. Quebec’s public security minister recently announced that transgender inmates in provincial detention centres will now be incarcerated according to their anatomical sex. Transgender inmates will still be able to identify with the gender of their choice and that accommodations will be made in order to respect their rights and circumstances, said François Bonnardel, Quebec Minister of Public Security.”
Advocates assert that this is a step back for fundamental rights.
“I think it’s archaic to go back to assessing a person’s situation on the basis of their genitalia. It goes completely against all the good practice in terms of inclusion and trans health that we see around the world,” laments Pascal Vaillancourt, executive director at Interligne, an organization that provides a listening service for the LGBTQ+ community.
Since 2017, the federal government has made it possible for people to request to be incarcerated in the institution that corresponds to their gender identity, said Alexandra Paquette, a prison lawyer and president of the Association des avocats Cartéralistes du Québec. Many provinces have followed suit, having adopted similar policies at provincial jails.
“From what we understand … if your anatomy is male genitals, you’re going to have to have the surgery in order to get to a female institution,” said Paquette.”That does not correspond to the concept of gender identity.”
Transgender rights have recently suffered setbacks. In the United Kingdom, the Supreme Court ruled this past spring that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex, and did not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates. More recently still, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state’s law that prohibited some medical treatments for transgender youths did not violate equal protection principles.
AI can deceive, evade safeguards and cause harm, reveals research
As large language AI models become more powerful and more autonomous, they are increasingly willing to dodge safeguards, turn to deception, try to steal corporate secrets and cause harm, reports the news organization Axios.
“Models that would normally refuse harmful requests sometimes chose to blackmail, assist with corporate espionage, and even take some more extreme actions, when these behaviours were necessary to pursue their goals,” notes Anthropic, an American artificial intelligence startup company founded in 2021, in a recently published disturbing study.
AI systems from every major provider, added the Anthropic, showed at least “some willingness” to engage in harmful behaviours normally associated with “insider threats,” not from confusion or error “but from deliberate strategic reasoning.”
This is troubling, underlines Anthropic. It’s a sign of “more fundamental risk” from large language models. It also reveals that these models demonstrate “sophisticated” awareness of ethical constraints — and yet “chose to violate them when the stakes were high enough, even disobeying straightforward safety instructions prohibiting the specific behaviour in question.”
If this is not frightening, I don’t what is.
RELATED:
- Quebec river granted legal personhood, a first in Canada
- Landmark ruling for trans rights
- French-language law faculties grappling with new breed of generative AI tools
- AI initiative seeks to improve access to justice
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