The Quebec government is on a disheartening roll.
A series of legislative proposals introduced this year by the unpopular provincial government have dismayed First Nations, human rights advocates, labour organizations, legal actors and public figures over the dilution of long-standing rights, many of whom intend to mount legal challenges.
In fact, it has already begun.
The Montreal family law firm Goldwater Droit has filed a constitutional challenge against Quebec’s Act establishing the Unified Family Tribunal within the Court of Quebec, a law assented in mid-April that has been unanimously castigated by family law experts as being poorly conceived and imbued with shortcomings.
The law, the latest effort to revamp family law in the province, seeks to establish a unified family court in a bid to to curb delays, simplify proceedings, and handle the majority of family legal proceedings. But that’s not going to happen, maintain family law pundits.
“This reform solves nothing. It sacrifices access to quality justice in the name of illusory efficiency, while imposing an additional burden on litigants and on the justice system, which is already stretched to its limits,” said Anne-France Goldwater, senior partner of Goldwater Droit. Far from simplifying the legal process for families, as. the Quebec government contends, it will “in reality, impose a two-tier justice on Quebec families,” added Goldwater.
That is a standpoint shared by other family lawyers. “It’s a bill where not all the strings are attached — that’s the least that can be said about it,” remarked Michel Tétrault, author of several books on Quebec’s family law regime. Marie Annik Walsh, a Montreal family lawyer with Dunton Rainville and former president of the Quebec Association of Family Lawyers, also is disappointed by the legislative proposal, asserting that the Quebec government “did not think through all of the ramifications.” Law professor Valérie Costanzo, a big proponent of unified family law courts, is left wanting as the “unified family court at the moment is in name only.”
Another legislative proposal, An Act mainly to modernize the forest regime, has drawn the ire of First Nations who have taken to the streets and mounted blockades. Bill 97, introduced in April and now before the Quebec National Assembly, would divide the province’s public forest land into three zones: conservation zones, multi-purpose zones and forest development zones where the forestry industry is prioritized. Besides First Nations, Bill 97 has been severely criticized by environmentalists, scientists, workers’ unions and elected representatives that rely on forest exploitation.
But the Quebec Minister of Natural Resources asserts that the legislative proposal is an effort to protect the jobs of forestry workers who are threatened by the tariff war with the U.S.
But First Nations’ leaders don’t see it that way. They are urging the Quebec government to go back to the drawing board as the reform fails to respect First Nations’ ancestral rights.
“Rather than fully recognizing our ancestral rights on the territory, the bill simply grants us the possibility of pursuing activities for “domestic, ritual and social purposes”. It’s reductive, folkloristic, and doesn’t meet Quebec’s legal and constitutional obligations to First Nations,” denounced Lucien Wabanonik, Chief of the Lac-Simon community and member of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador (AFNQL) Chiefs’ Committee on Forests.
Jérôme Bacon St-Onge, Vice-Chief of the Innu Council of Pessamit warned that “at some point, the diplomatic approach has its limits. We’re representatives of the First Nations. If there’s indignation, if there’s an uprising, if there’s mobilization, that’s going to affect everyone, and (the government) is responsible for that indignation.”
Labour in the meantime are promising to fight Bill 89, a law that was adopted at the end of May that gives the Quebec government sweeping new powers to curb and limit strikes or lockouts. An Act to give greater consideration to the needs of the population in the event of a strike or a lock-out also grants the labour minister the power to refer labour disputes to an arbitrator. Critics have lambasted the bill as a direct frontal attack on the constitutional protected right to collective bargaining. Expect a legal challenge.
“It seems clear to us that the restrictions on the right to strike in this legislation will not stand up in court,” asserted union leaders. “Both the Canadian and Quebec constitutions, as well as the Saskatchewan ruling, are unequivocal on this point. Union rights are human rights.”
Other legal challenges are likely in the offing. Bill 94, the Quebec government’s latest effort to bolster secularism rules by extending the province’s ban on the wearing of religious symbols to support staff, including volunteers, in schools, is a likely target, in spite of its use of the notwithstanding clause.
“Bill 94 is a logical continuation in some respects of this government’s program and part of a broader effort to lock down this extreme form of secularism,” told me Pearl Eliadis, a McGill law professor specializing in human rights. “This is an attempt to exploit a sort of nationalist trend in Quebec, and an attempt to further increase the essentially discriminatory provisions with regard to religious minorities, especially Muslim women.”
According to Julius Grey, a Montreal human rights lawyer, “this government has been passing very right-wing legislation, and it’s lucky that it’s got (U.S. President Donald) Trump worrying people because people are not looking for internal battles so much because they think we have to be ready for the confrontation with Trump.”
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