The criminal justice system never put the officers accused in Val-d’Or in front of a judge. On Friday, a civil court decided the province must answer anyway.
Quebec’s Superior Court authorized a class action by the Val-d’Or Indigenous Friendship Centre against the Attorney General of Quebec, which stands in for the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the provincial police. It covers Indigenous people in the Vallée-de-l’Or regional municipality who say SQ officers discriminated against them. The alleged conduct includes sexual assault, physical assault, confinement or abduction, solicitation of sexual favours, excessive force during arrests and harassment.
Authorization is not a finding. The court has not decided that any of it happened, and the province has not been ordered to pay anyone. What the judge decided is that the claims can go forward together, as a group, toward a trial.
The case grows out of the scandal that began in October 2015, when Radio-Canada’s investigative program Enquête broadcast accounts from Indigenous women in Val-d’Or. Some said officers had paid them for sex or forced sexual acts on them. Eight officers were suspended. After an investigation led by Montreal police, the six accused officers in the cases it examined were not charged, for insufficient evidence. The allegations also led to the Viens Commission, the Quebec inquiry into relations between Indigenous people and public services.
That is the pattern this ruling answers. When a police force is accused, the officers are investigated by other police, prosecutors decide there is not enough to charge, and the people who came forward are left with nothing. A civil suit does not need a criminal conviction. It asks a different question: whether the state is responsible for what its police did.
Black Canadians know how long that road is. Families who wait years for an oversight decision or an inquest, as readers in Peel Region are seeing this week, understand why the civil courts are so often where accountability finally happens, if it happens at all.
People who fit the class are included automatically and do not have to act. The suit costs them nothing: the lawyers, Trudel Johnston & Lespérance, are paid only if the case succeeds and the court approves compensation. Anyone who wants out must write to the court clerk by Jan. 12, 2027.
Quebec has had a decade to settle with the women of Val-d’Or without a trial. It should use the months before the next hearing to do that, and to say in public what it will change in how the SQ polices Indigenous communities.
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