The Quebec Press Council (CPQ) has won its showdown with Quebecor media. A judgment of the Superior Court of Quebec published Friday indicates that the CPQ did not violate their right not to associate by continuing to handle complaints against them.
“Nothing compels MédiaQMI and TVA to join the Council”, indicates the Superior Court. But “the complaints handling process [réalisé par le CPQ] do not violate […] their right not to associate,” the judgment reads.
The request of Montreal Journal and Groupe TVA, who were claiming $428,000 from the CPQ for damage to their reputation, were also dismissed. “In dealing with complaints against MédiaQMI and TVA, the Council seeks only the fulfillment of its mission which consists in protecting freedom of the press and defending the public’s right to quality information”, is it written in the document forty pages.
According to Judge Bernard Poulin, the “Council enjoys the freedom of expression protected by the Charter” and “was not at fault in that it did not deviate from the behavior that a reasonable person would have adopted placed in the same circumstances.
A long-running debate
The judgment of the Superior Court puts an end to a legal contest between the two bodies that has lasted for more than ten years. Several experts also feared that a victory for Quebecor would sign the death warrant of the Press Council, a target for years of criticism from the community.
Groupe TVA and MédiaQMI (Montreal Journal, Quebec newspaper, 24 hoursamong others) left the court of honor of the media world in 2008 and 2010, believing that its ethical decisions are “weakly motivated, arbitrary, lacking in rigor, based on a biased assessment of the facts and without a practical vision to the point of restrict freedom of the press,” the judgment reads.
Despite the departure of the two media bodies, the CPQ considered itself “entitled to express itself on the subject of complaints against non-member media”, and continued to process complaints against them, while trying, repeatedly, to “convince MédiaQMI and TVA to rejoin its ranks, without success”.
For their part, no longer considering themselves subject to the jurisdiction of the CPQ, the two subsidiaries of Quebecor, in 2018, asked the Board to stop processing complaints against them, judging that this infringes their right not to s associate, which is protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“Each time the CPQ takes up a complaint, it imposes on us its process, its guide and the subjective and arbitrary interpretation that it makes of it, it imposes on us its values and its opinion of what constitutes good journalism. We do not accept that, ”argued during the hearings last September, Me François Fontaine, who represents the media of Quebecor.