Montreal insult bylaw faces injunction bid in court

Lawyers asked Quebec Superior Court on Thursday to suspend Montreal’s new bylaw banning insults against city employees, including police officers, arguing it violates Charter rights, while the city said the rule protects workers and all Montrealers.

The bylaw prohibits insults, harassment, threats, abuse and intimidation, as well as offensive and aggressive behaviour, toward City of Montreal employees. A first offence carries a fine of $300 to $1,000, and repeat offences can bring fines of up to $2,000, The Canadian Press reported.

Justice Eleni Yiannakis heard the request for an injunction from lawyers for an association of progressive jurists and the Saint-Michel legal clinic. She said before arguments began that she would rule only on whether to suspend the bylaw, not on whether it is constitutional. A separate constitutional challenge, which claims the bylaw breaches freedom of expression and the right to protection against cruel and unusual punishment, will be heard later.

Lawyer Sibel Ataogul argued the bylaw is too broad and that terms such as “offensive behaviour” and “insults” are too vague. Because the rule is penal rather than administrative, she said, people can face arrest, detention and a public record even if they are acquitted.

“The city went very far,” Ataogul told the judge. “Do we really want to live in a society where incivility … is penalized with an infraction?”

She said laws against violence, harassment and threats already exist, and that judges across Quebec have disagreed on what counts as an insult when individual fines were contested, including whether the word “racist” qualifies.

Lawyer Dardia Garcelle Joseph argued the bylaw will mainly apply to dealings with police and will fall hardest on racialized residents, noting the city has publicly recognized that its police force has a racial profiling problem.

Michelle Picard, a lawyer for the city, said the bylaw is in the public interest and that several other Quebec municipalities have similar rules that have not been challenged. She said people “continue to express themselves like they always have, we just ask that they be respectful,” and pointed to a marked “deterioration of public debate.”

Yiannakis told both sides they lacked proof for their arguments, saying they had treated claims of racial profiling and rising incivility as given without submitting evidence, according to CP’s account of the hearing, which was also published by CBC News.

The city drafted the bylaw after a video of a young man shouting misogynistic insults at a police officer spread widely online. No date was given for a ruling on the injunction.

Police conduct has been under scrutiny in Quebec this month, after a tribunal found SQ officers racially profiled a Black driver. Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada has led the city since she was sworn in last November.

Sources: Quebec Superior Court hearing, via The Canadian Press and CBC News.

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