Red Coalition calls police random check guidelines “Nothing new”

The Suburban Joel Ceausu, Dec 27, 2023

Days after Quebec Public Safety Minister François Bonnardel issued his government’s long-awaited directives for police checks, the Red Coalition anti-racism group says Quebec is continuing to give police carte blanche to illegally stop drivers and pedestrians in violation of their Charter rights.
After the CAQ government announced its appeal of Quebec Superior Court Judge Michel Yergeau’s decision in the Luamba case, which deemed traffic stops discriminatory against Black drivers, Quebec City pledged to issue guidelines for their use. The harm of police stops was also highlighted by two independent expert reports commissioned by the SPVM, which produced one major recommendation — to do away with the checks altogether, which the SPVM immediately rejected.
“No one was consulted on this,” says RC racial profiling director Alain Babineau. “The directives were issued earlier this month, quietly, with no fanfare, no press conference, just slipped onto their website.” Indeed, quietly publishing guidelines for controversial police tactics that are illegal or very strictly controlled elsewhere in Canada, days before the holiday period amid massive labour strife, smacks of cynicism for anti-racism advocates.
In effect, the guidelines don’t stop the activities, just clarify that they cannot be carried out with discriminatory or unclear motives. That applies to both random checks of pedestrians as well as traffic stops using section 636 of the CSR to stop motor vehicles, which is used frequently to stop motorists for Highway Code issues which often end up becoming an investigation into other matters, as noted in the Yergeau ruling.
The directives are purposely confusing, said Babineau, defining what a street check is, and “admitting that the person is not obliged to give their identification and that it is in fact not detention or a police interaction.” But for someone who doesn’t know better it’s a “psychological detention,” he says. “And the courts agree. It’s the unspoken words, especially for a racialized individual approached by police and asked for their ID. If they’re not told that they don’t have to, and can just walk away, they automatically feel detained. And if they are detained then their Charter rights to counsel kicks in.” That consideration is missing from the directives, he says. “There’s nothing new there. This is the second iteration of these directives, the government issued something almost identical in 2020.”
What is new though, is the call for data collection as of April 1, 2024, for street checks, and January 1, 2025, for traffic stops. The data must include information about the context of the stop, as well as the person’s gender and presumed ethnic origin. “The proof is in the pudding if they will adhere to this,” says Babineau, noting “I don’t see anything about sanctions for non-respect of the conditions laid out in the guidelines.” Rather, they speak of “corrections”: “…The minister can notably formulate recommendations to the police department and request the director to bring corrections within a fixed delay in order to conform with the guidelines.”
As for information collected by officers, the RC is concerned about the unspecified use of this data collection, which in the past has purportedly been collected by police to build an intelligence database.
In a November letter to Bonnardel, the Red Coalition and 36 community, advocacy, union and legal clinic groups led by the Ligue des droits et libertées, asked Quebec City to include charter-compliant provisions within its new directives. The suggestions by civil society groups were ignored, says RC executive director Joel DeBellefeuille. “The fact that ‘interpellations’ flout the rights and freedoms of the entire population and are a known and legally documented source of systemic racial profiling does not mean anything to Mr. Bonnardel.”
The RC says the guidelines have “no standing in law, and presently there is no applicable statute that authorizes ‘interpellations’ in Quebec” and all stops raise privacy concerns because the information obtained is recorded in a database for general intelligence purposes, “unrelated to a specific service request, offence, or investigation.”