Quebec inquiry recommends removing two Gatineau judges over illegal jailings
Tashi Farmilo
Two Gatineau municipal court judges could be forced from the bench after a Quebec Judicial Council inquiry committee recommended on August 10 that they be dismissed for jailing hundreds of people who failed to pay their traffic fines, a punishment the committee found they had no legal right to impose.
The recommendation against judges Martin Gosselin and Joanne Cousineau is a rare and severe outcome, and the committee's roughly 40-page report does not soften its language. It says the two did not merely misread the law but ignored it entirely, acting through gross negligence and behaving, in the committee's words, servilely, like rubber stamps rather than judges. The report describes their conduct as grossly negligent four separate times.
At the heart of the case are 1,669 imprisonment warrants the judges authorized between June 2020 and December 2022 against people who had not paid municipal fines. The warrants swept up 1,126 people, close to 400 of them homeless or otherwise vulnerable. Quebec's Code of Penal Procedure has barred this practice since 2020, recognizing that a person without housing has a reasonable excuse for leaving a fine unpaid. The province's Justice Department had also reminded court clerks that vulnerable people could not be locked up over unpaid fines.
According to the report, the judges approved the warrants verbally and in bulk, never opening the individual files. They issued the orders with nothing before them, no written reasons, no submissions from the prosecutor or the fine collector, no evidence, and no case file, and the length of each jail term was generated automatically by software already built into the court's system. The judges, the committee concluded, effectively surrendered their judicial role, and people went to jail unlawfully as a result. The decision, signed by Court of Quebec Chief Justice Henri Richard, holds that their failure to grasp basic legal principles inflicted lasting damage on public trust in the courts.
The complaint originated with Christian Tanguay, the City of Gatineau's Deputy Director General of Administrative Services. The City's exposure does not end there: in September 2024, the Superior Court cleared a class action to proceed on behalf of those the warrants may have harmed.
Gosselin joined the Gatineau court in November 2018 and has led it since 2020. Cousineau sat in Gatineau from January 2020 until June 2024 and now serves on the MRC Vaudreuil-Soulanges municipal court. Both maintained they broke no ethical rules and had acted in good faith, following a routine already entrenched at the court, though each conceded during the hearings that they had gotten the law wrong. Gosselin told the committee he had felt sick over the matter for two years. Their lawyers, Giuseppe Battista for Gosselin and Isabel J. Schurman for Cousineau, argued that ordinary mistakes should not be recast as ethical misconduct, and that many other municipal judges had handled these warrants the same way. The council's own lawyer, Emmanuelle Roland, countered that the breach was too grave for public confidence to recover.
Removing a judge is a slow and layered process that usually plays out over years. With the committee's report now in hand, the Judicial Council must decide whether to ask Quebec's justice minister to pursue the judges' removal through the Court of Appeal. Only the government can ultimately order it.
Two Gatineau municipal court judges could lose their positions after a Quebec Judicial Council inquiry committee recommended their dismissal for illegally jailing more than 1,100 people, many of them homeless, over unpaid fines. Photo: Courtesy of the Government of Quebec